Variations of a Building 9819968011, 9789819968015

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Variations of a Building Brett Mommersteeg

Variations of a Building

Brett Mommersteeg

Variations of a Building

Brett Mommersteeg Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin Berlin, Germany

ISBN 978-981-99-6801-5    ISBN 978-981-99-6802-2 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-6802-2 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2023 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. The registered company address is: 152 Beach Road, #21-01/04 Gateway East, Singapore 189721, Singapore Paper in this product is recyclable.

Acknowledgements

This book has travelled from Manchester to Edinburgh and now to Berlin where I am putting the final touches on it just as the building has finally opened in Manchester. It seemed that neither of them would ever finish—if works “to be made” are ever, indeed, complete. Nevertheless, this book would not have been possible without the support, guidance, and assistance from various people. First, and foremost, I would like to thank the many people involved in the Factory project who had taken their time, generously shared their expertise, had welcomed me into their offices, met me in cafés, and responded to my naïve questions about what they do. Thank you very much. I hope the discussions below have some resonance with you. As I have promised to keep them anonymous, I will not mention them by name here; however, I am very grateful to each of them. The book draws from my PhD research and thesis at the University of Manchester where it had the benefit of a very supportive context, and where many of its sentences and ideas had taken shape in discussion with others. I would like to thank Albena Yaneva for her generosity, intellectual engagement, and all the time that she had spent working on drafts of the dissertation from which this book emerged. This book is also indebted to my colleagues and friends from the University of Manchester, the Manchester Architecture Research Group, and SEED. A thank you, in particular, to Stelios Zavos, Fadi Shayya, David Johnson, Sabine v

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Hansmann, David Mountain, Simon Mitchell, Andrew Snow, Kate Stokes, Benjamin Blackwell, Adam Przywara, Ezana Weldeghebrael, and Samir Harb. I would also like to thank Ignacio Farías and my new colleagues at the Institute for European Ethnology at Humboldt University in Berlin, and in particular, those in the Urban Anthropology group and in the “Wave Matters” project; there are undoubtedly wavy ideas that leaked their way into this manuscript. Thank you also for the time to “finish” this thing. Lastly, I would like to thank my family in Canada, the UK, and now in Berlin. Thank you to my Mom and Dad for your continuous support and belief. And thank you to Ksenia not only for your support but your patience, guidance, help, joy, words, encouragement, books, laughter, belief—everything.

Contents

1 A  Building “in the Making”  1 1.1 Ground-Breaking   1 1.2 “The Guggenheim of the North”   5 1.3 A Possible Method for Following a Building “in the Making”  9 1.4 Projects  15 1.5 Practices  20 1.6 Ontologies  25 1.7 Is That Politics?  30 1.8 Variations  40 References 42 2 C  oordinations 51 2.1 Varieties of Building  51 2.2 Implication 1: Assembling a Truss  61 2.3 Implication 2: Assembling a Common Referent  73 2.4 Explication: A Design Team Meeting  80 2.5 A Building Hangs Together  91 References 94

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3 A  pproximations 97 3.1 Unknown Unknowns  97 3.2 A Mock-Up in a Lab 101 3.3 Guesswork and a Noise Simulation 113 3.4 Epistemic Noise: Sound Effects and “Grey Things” 119 3.5 Listening to a Building, grosso modo128 References131 4 F  ormations135 4.1 A Missing Public 135 4.2 A Fictional Public 138 4.3 Scrutiny Publics 144 4.4 Presentational Publics 152 4.5 Experimental Publics 160 4.6 One or Several Publics? 166 References170 5 V  ariations173 5.1 “It Could Iterate Forever...” 173 5.2 Three Types of Variation 179 5.3 Making Politics Explicit 187 5.4 Fugitive Knowledge, Unfinished Things 189 References195 I ndex199

About the Author

Brett Mommersteeg  is currently a postdoc at the Institut für Europäische Ethnologie at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. He holds a PhD in Architecture from the University of Manchester and a MA in Theory and Criticism from the University of Western Ontario. Previously, he was a teaching fellow at the Edinburgh School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture at the University of Edinburgh. His research draws on Actor-Network Theory and Science and Technology Studies with a focus on architecture, environmental issues, and sound studies.

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List of Figures

Fig. 2.1 Equilateral Project Management Triangle. (Redrawn by Author) 54 Fig. 2.2 “Wonky” Project Management Triangle. (Redrawn by Author) 55 Fig. 2.3 Joanna maintains a digital file of dilatation lines. (Source: Author) 58 Fig. 2.4 An example of a mark-up. (Source: Author) 62 Fig. 2.5 James tracing a truss overtop a print-out. (Source: Author) 64 Fig. 2.6 Three variations of the north box truss traced. (Source: Author) 68 Fig. 2.7 Factory in Robot. (Source: Author) 69 Fig. 2.8 Simon calculating a building. (Source: Author) 70 Fig. 2.9 Jonas and the 3D model of Factory. (Source: Author) 75 Fig. 3.1 The office of the acousticians. (Source: Author) 102 Fig. 3.2 A floor-to-ceiling arrangement. (Source: Author) 103 Fig. 3.3 An arrangement in laboratory. (Source: Author) 104 Fig. 3.4 Construction materials in the office. (Source: Author) 105 Fig. 3.5 Joanna conducts a measurement. (Source: Author) 106 Fig. 3.6 Close-up of television screen during the measurement. (Source: Author) 107 Fig. 3.7 The speakers and the wooden reflectors for the measurement. Together, they mimic the future conditions of the building. (Source: Author) 108 Fig. 3.8 A simulation of Factory leaking noise. (Source: Author) 116

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Fig. 4.1 A blurry scene of an experimental public formation in action. (Source: Author) Fig. 5.1 The not quite complete Factory in spring 2023. (Source: David Johnson)

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1 A Building “in the Making”

1.1 Ground-Breaking Eerie screeching sounds echo down a cobblestone road in Manchester’s city centre. A group of people walk through the old Granada Studios site, past old industrial warehouses that had been converted into television studios, and now, are transforming again into an “enterprise hub” for the regeneration of the neighbourhood. A site typical of the Manchester cityscape with its dark red bricks, but also one with traces of its historical transformations, from its industrial heritage to its post-industrial “regeneration.” Catching glances from one another, we check to see if anyone knows what is happening. Closing in on the site, turning around a corner, a squeaky, muffled noise fills the air. There is already a small group of people gathered in a semi-circle around a musician embracing a violin with a speaker in her mouth. The source of the eerie sounds. The group slowly grows over a couple of minutes; clicks from cameras become increasingly rapid. Click. Click. Click. Eventually, the musician finishes and introduces herself. It is Laurie Anderson. Without a pause or an introduction, or any indication about what is happening, she launches into a speech © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2023 B. Mommersteeg, Variations of a Building, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-6802-2_1

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about the importance of spaces for art and for the production of art, referring to Andy Warhol’s Factory in New York City, in which she participated, and the long heritage of the music scene in Manchester, referring, in particular, to the Hacienda. She tells us stories of how specific settings generated conditions for experimentation in art and also for its exhibition. However, during her performance and speech, there stands, a stake, between us. The reason why we have all gathered here. Upon it are engraved the words: “GROUND-BREAKING.” Perhaps, we can assume, a reference to what is happening here, this small ritual, and to what will come, the new building—Factory.1 Haphazardly, politicians, stakeholders, and a couple architects come up to the stake with a sledgehammer, striking down upon it. Clank. And after each clank, applause, shouts, the clicks of camera shutters. Everyone seems to know everyone, excitedly shouting encouragements. Once they had all had a chance to strike, they then lined up behind the now well-­ beaten stake for a photograph. Each of them smiling on the ground where the building will be constructed. With this symbolic act, they have inaugurated a beginning for the construction of Factory—the subject of this book. The ground has officially been broken, symbolically transformed, and perhaps, prepared for the building to come. It is almost like they have prepared the site—and the city—as a tabula rasa for what is to come. The once profaned ground takes on another life, a site of promise, of a future. While, on the one hand, the ground-breaking ceremony signals and heralds the “inevitability” of the building-to-be, to demonstrate that it is happening, to reassure the “stakeholders” that it is indeed really happening; it is also, on the other hand, the celebration of a projection, of a political and cultural vision for the future of Manchester and the North of England that now, once the ground is broken, can begin. But the broken ground also signals that another ground, another common world is needed.

 The name of the building has changed over time. At the time of fieldwork and writing, the name of the building was Factory. It had then changed to “Factory International” and finally “Aviva Studios” following the sale of its naming rights to the insurance company, Aviva. This was not without critical reaction in Manchester. In this book, the building will retain the name “Factory” as it was named such during fieldwork and in the conversations that the book is based on. 1

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As a ritual for large-scale architectural and infrastructural projects, ground-breaking ceremonies are rites of passage. Public displays through which the building project and its promise, which is otherwise hidden, happening in private, in the offices of the practitioners, momentarily becomes visible and has a public existence. It is happening. Like religious rituals where dramas are not just forms of entertainment, but “enactments, materializations, realizations of [a religious belief ]  – not only models of what they believe, but also modes for the believing of it. In these plastic dramas men attain their faith as they portray it” (Geertz 1973: 114). Something comes together here in the act. Caught up in the performance, in this plastic drama, it seems like we are all believers of this project and its promise. And yet, there is no building yet. At least, in any sense of being complete, settled, or stable. It exists elsewhere. In bits and pieces, it is distributed across various sites: in the offices of the architects, structural and mechanical engineers, and acousticians, but also within the client’s ambitions, the vision of the city council, and in the many publics that coalesce around it. It takes form in reports, schedules, meeting minutes, official and unofficial documents, emails, and phone calls, in a myriad of sketches, crumpled papers, layers of digital files, plans, elevations, drawings, and 3D models. Amongst all of this, it is difficult to say if it is any one thing, but it does at moments hang together, not in any one special place, but in diverse fragile relations and interdependencies that, as they work together, bring it tentatively and slowly into being. The building is still just a penumbra of existence, gossamer. Less a heavy structure, clad in concrete slabs, fixed in foundations, it is closer to Peter Sloterdijk’s description of foam: “Almost nothing, yet not nothing. A something, if only a delicate web of cavities and subtle walls. An actual thing, but a construct fearful of contact that yields and bursts at the slightest touch” (2016: 27). A fragile foam, precarious, delicately held in the different types of practices involved in its making. But it is also many things at once: a coming-together of conjoint and parallel trajectories. Held together not by any internal essence, substance, or within the minds or perspectives of its makers, but following William James, within its “streams of experience [that] are full of continuities and discontinuities, conjunctions and disjunctions. An open, fluctuating

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whole, a landscape of disparate parts that hang together and separate at their edges, that grow at their edges” (1912: 95). This is the second image that guides the understanding of the building “in the making” in this book. If the first is foam—a delicate web—the second is the plane of experience, the flow of an open and fluctuating whole, of disparate parts that sometimes come together at their edges. It is therefore difficult to understand the building project from any one site, perspective, or world, or as any one self-same thing. At least, not yet. Instead, following the process of its making, we are led into multiple sites, perspectives, and worlds. This book is an attempt to capture this process, the shared act of creation that happens across overlapping practices and realities. It follows how a building is drawn together from the point of view of its practices. But more than the “making of a building,” the stories within this book seek to address a building “in the making”.2 This is not only an account of the design and construction of a building, but how a common world is made within which that construction is possible. The book is thus not about a singular building in the process of its making, but about how the making of a building is simultaneously an experiment with, and reshaping of, a common field of possibility, through collaborative practices and technologies in design. More than the building, it is also just as much about a city and its publics, its history and its future, and the nexus of realities that are brought together to, in the words of Bruno Latour, “compose a common world” (2010: 484; 2004a). In order to take an account of this, Variations of a Building is organised through segments of the processes of design and other practices involved in a building project. It follows designers as they shape and negotiate the making of a building through their everyday practices. Foregrounding  The turn from studying things “made” to “in the making” comes primarily from the philosophy of pragmatism and in particular the thought of William James who wrote, “What really exists is not things made but things in the making” (1909: 263). There was a particular moment in the history of architectural thought where pragmatism held a prominent place—this refers to a period of theory called “post-critical.” See the edited collection, The Pragmatist Imagination: Thinking about ‘Things in the Making’ (2000), edited by Joan Ockman, and for a historical account by Pauline Lefebvre (2017). The philosophy of pragmatism is also influential for a particular field of Science and Technology Studies (STS) called “Actor-Network Theory” (ANT). This book is heavily influenced by ANT and how pragmatist thought is translated through it. It also borrows the concept of a building “in the making” from the work of Albena Yaneva. See her book, The Making of a Building: A Pragmatist Approach to Architecture (2009a). 2

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practices has a double effect. On the one hand, it is to show that sharing in the act of design and creation involves a larger variety of actors— human and nonhuman. There is a diversity of professions, expertise, entities, and concerns that each play a role in the making of a building. On the other hand, it draws attention to how these overlapping realities of the building are forged and assembled within practices. As a result, rather than focus on the subjects and objects of design, the book strives to adopt the point of view of the practices themselves, the events that happen in practice. In other words, it puts especial emphasis on the how of a building—what are the ways in which a building is done. Rather than granting “reality” a taken for granted status, the focus is turned onto how the varieties of realities of the building are made within the different practices that a building project draws together. The book thus asks how the variations of realities of the putatively same building in ordinary moments of design overlap, what allows them to relate to one another through variations—and: is that politics?

1.2 “The Guggenheim of the North” Not every building is welcomed with a ground-breaking ceremony. As an attendee at the ground-breaking ceremony expressed, jubilantly: what is thrilling about this building – this is a building that does not exist in this country. And this is the sort of building that not only puts Manchester but actually the UK back on the map internationally. You can make work here that no other building in this country can make. And congratulations to Manchester. And I think it is very important also not to call this a theatre. It is called Factory. And that is also about Manchester, and it is about innovation.

Factory is not imagined to be an “ordinary” building. For some, it is more than just a building. It is about a city, a country, and the future. It is about innovation. It is about “global cities” and the “global economy.” It is about re-making Manchester and the North of England.

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Much earlier than the ground-breaking ceremony, it began as a vision and a political promise for Manchester and the North of England. In December 2014, in the Autumn Statement presented to the UK Parliament by then Chancellor of the Exchequer, George Osborne, the building project of Factory was initiated. Or, at least, this is one possible beginning. A central aspect of the Statement was the introduction of a scheme called the Northern Powerhouse. At the time, and still today, this was a vague proposal for the redistribution of governance powers in the North of England— “devolution”—and to “rebalance” the UK Economy: “For decades our economy has been too unbalanced, so we do more now to build the Northern Powerhouse.”3 Factory was situated at the “heart” of it as part of the promise to develop an economic and cultural counterweight to London. A building then that carries enough weight to partially shift the scales of power in the UK. With this scheme, UK’s Central Government, through the Arts Council of England, has provided £78 million of the original £110 million budget for Factory (although, like everything else in a building project, the budget shifts, and the budget has increased in different moments in the project’s life—in 2019, 2021, and again in 2022. In 2022, the budget reached £210.8 million, and in 2023, £240 million). Factory, in part, is a project tied into a political imagination and vision for the future of the UK and Manchester. This is one scale of the promise that a building can make.4 Shifting down. In Manchester, Factory is situated in a specific site that is part of a promise for the regeneration of Manchester’s city centre. This is another possible beginning. Around the city centre, skyscrapers are growing, and its composition is changing dramatically, becoming denser.5 In the discourse of the city council, Factory is figured as a significant actor in this changing cityscape, the ongoing restructuring of the city and its identity. As part of its long recovery from industrial decline, the city has invested itself into the so-called post-industrial economy, and has  If you are interested, you can find this speech here: https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/ chancellor-george-osbornes-autumn-statement-2014-speech 4  And of course, this is only one promise that a building can make. There are other political imaginations and visions. For a critique of this vision, see this reflection on the politics of urban development in Manchester by Jonathan Silver, Isaac Rose, and Tom Gillespie: https://www.versobooks. com/en-gb/blogs/news/5110-the-housing-crisis-in-manchester-capital-of-the-long-90s 5  The city centre has even been called “Manc-hattan” in an article in The Guardian (Wainwright 2019). 3

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been undergoing “de-industrialisation,” a major part of which is a turn to the “creative economy,” and attracting so-called “creative sector jobs” and attention as a cultural or creative city (Peck and Ward 2002).6 Factory is part of this insofar as it will be the future home of the Manchester International Festival (MIF), an important biannual cultural event in Manchester, and thus plays a central role within the city’s identification as a cultural city, and in the regeneration of the city centre. It has been called the “cultural anchor” for a £1  billion regeneration project of a neighbourhood in Manchester’s city centre called St. John’s where it is entangled with another set of stakeholders.7 Not only is it an investment, a vehicle for developing a cultural counterweight to London, to rebalance the scales of the UK, it is also seen as a “cultural place-maker” that will transform a neighbourhood in Manchester, adding economic value to land and social value, improving job growth, and developing a cultural economy in post-industrial Manchester. Factory, in this light, and within these relations, is a political and economic investment across global, national, and regional scales. It is expected to “symbolise” part of the Northern Powerhouse and to be an image for a new Mancunian future. As the so-called “Guggenheim of the North,” in reference to the Bilbao Effect (Williams 2017)—the phenomenon, associated with the architect Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, whereby iconic buildings by “starchitects”, have the power to regenerate cities in economic, cultural, and social terms—Factory is situated within various political and economic visions for Manchester and the UK. There is hope that it will become an architectural icon for the North of England.8  This is also an economic strategy nationally in the UK. See a report from the Creative Industries Council set up by the Central Government. Accessible here: https://www.a-n.co.uk/research/ creative-­nation-creative-industries-powering-uks-nations-regions/. This report describes Manchester as having the second fastest growing “creative industry” in the UK (next to London). One of the major important “social values” for Factory, as argued by the city council, is its contribution to the job market in Manchester. This returns again and again as one of its justifications—in every city council report, in the planning application, and in city council meetings. 7  Stakeholders that have often altered the direction of the building project itself, to the frustration of those closer to the building (the design team) than the neighbourhood (the developers). 8  There has been a considerable amount of attention paid to the role of architectural icons and starchitects in contemporary global capitalism and the ambitions of cities to attract capital investment (Kaika 2011; Sklair and Gherardi 2012). Factory fits within these categories—especially in the discourse of the architects, city councillors in support of it, the developers, and the client in their justification for its costs. 6

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But it is also not just an economic and cultural project for a city, region, and country, but also, in the end, a building project. Here is another beginning. Another way to frame a building like this. In September 2015, the Manchester City Council opened an OJEU competition to which 47 architectural firms were asked to complete a pre-qualifying questionnaire to be the design team leader for the project. The OJEU (the Official Journal of the European Union) procurement procedures are necessary for any public projects above defined thresholds within the European Union, to ensure “fair” and “competitive” conditions for the contracting and tendering of services and goods.9 The 47 firms were eventually narrowed down to nine firms who were invited to give presentations to the city council. On November 25, 2015, the Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA) had won the competition to become the lead design team member.10 OMA was later joined by BuroHappold (structural and façade engineers), BDP (MEP engineers), Charcoal Blue (theatre design consultants), AURP (acoustic engineers)—which later became Level Acoustics and Vibration in 2017. Alongside the design team, the “client team,” or the  once called “many-headed monster,” consisted of the Manchester City Council and MIF.11 These are some of the central perspectives of the book.12

 Since 2021 and “Brexit,” UK projects no longer follow the OJEU procurement process, but the UK Government’s “Find a Tender” process. 10  Their entry beat out other shortlisted firms: Rafael Vinoly Architects, Diller Scofidio + Renfro, Bennetts Associates, Zaha Hadid Architecture, SimpsonHaugh and Partners, Grimshaw Architects, Mecanoo International and Haworth Tompkins. This competition, however, was not without controversy as there were no architects on the jury (Marrs 2015) and there were accusations that the process was not completely fair. 11  An important element for understanding project or design-team relations is the form of the contract. It sets out the relations, the scope, and the nature through which a building is designed. For instance, for Factory, they used a “management contract form.” In this case, the contractor is part of the process early on and this has an impact on what the design of the building will ultimately be as their costs has a much earlier impact on what is possible. The contract has thus a central role in how a building project functions, how a building is made, and the relations within it. 12  The voices of the design team change over the time of the project. People come and go. Confidence and trust are eroded. Interest is lost. Funding and cost become too overbearing, or time runs out. For the book, however, these are the central voices heard throughout. And when not in situations where they adopt a public persona—for example, in public presentations—all the names in this book are given a pseudonym. 9

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Another way in which a story of a building could begin: the building itself. It has been described as a “flexible” and “versatile” arts and cultural centre, able to host concerts, operas, art performances and exhibitions, and to be a place to produce art. It is considered to be an “innovative” design, unique. One of a kind. It was given its name “Factory” in reference to both Factory Records—an important cultural reference in Manchester—and to Andy Warhol’s Factory in New York City. The footprint of the building is 13,500 sq. metres—to give an idea of its scale— and has a capacity for 7500 people—although these are flexible criteria that have changed overtime. As a concept, the building is split into three. First, a large box called the Warehouse. Second, the Theatre, a classic space with a fixed stage, orchestra pit, and seating. Lastly, there will be foyers, back-of-house support spaces, technical spaces, and offices for MIF, the future operator. Or we could begin with its image. The renderings of what it would be: a sculptural shape in white in front of a concrete, grey box—somehow— underneath a blue sky in Manchester; a flat plan, a view from above, to see how all the elements fit together; or an elevation from the side, to imagine its height, how it all  works together, and from which you can begin to see how it is situated within and responds to its surrounding site. These are classic architectural means of representation. But they are also projections of what will appear on site, the promise that is made to the city and its publics.13

1.3 A Possible Method for Following a Building “in the Making” Where does one begin to tell the story of a building project? Contextual fragments can work as possible beginnings; they help to situate it within larger social, political, and economic realities of Manchester, the North of England, or the UK. It could be told from the perspective of the renderings, the aesthetics of the building, or the philosophy of the architects. It  Image right permissions were not granted in time for the publication of the book. You can search for its renderings online, of course, if you are interested. They may help. 13

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could also be narrated after the fact: in a retrospective account that begins from a completed artefact and pieces together how it has been put together like a puzzle, where the “whole” of the narrative is already given and where everything has its place. There are also many other kinds of contexts, visions, and images that could be invoked to help contextualise, situate, and describe what the building is: post-industrial architecture, global capitalism, gentrification, financialisation of the city, and so on. But this book aims to do something else. It tells another kind of story. It is neither framed through a chronological narrative that follows the building project step-by-step, nor through a contextual frame as both types of frames risk organising the making of a building from standpoints outside of the course of its making. They risk “freeze-framing” the process (Latour 2005c; Latour and Yaneva 2017), cutting up the continuous movements of a building’s making. This could either suggest that a building is nothing but its context or the visions of different actors, or that a building is somehow designed ex nihilo, autonomous from its context. Instead, to follow a building in the making, a method is needed to capture these continuous movements, the series of transformations that happen in practice. Something, perhaps, as Bruno Latour and Albena Yaneva suggest, that is like Étienne-Jules Marey’s photographic gun that could capture segments of a bird’s flight to then be able to stitch them back together with a cinematic effect to “document the continuous flow that a building always is” (2017: 104). Or, to put it in other words, it seeks a method that allows it to adopt a perspective “from the inside,” from the point of view of the practices themselves. To do so, it draws from an Actor-Network Theory (ANT) inspired ethnographic approach. From which another question arises: where exactly is the “inside” of a project? Projects are, for instance, not situated within any single site. They rarely exist as singular things that you can locate “out there.” There is no optimal location to travel to encounter it. Instead, building projects are processes that happen within a diversity of practices across a variety of sites. They exist in and as disparate things, concerns, and with a variety of realities. It is in bits and pieces, in and across sets of relations, but nowhere in particular. Where to begin? An ANT-inflected ethnographic approach is useful because it allows the complexity and messiness of the realities of design practices and the

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project to remain; as a method, it does not seek to tidy up the worlds encountered and described; and as a form of social inquiry, it asks the ethnographer to not come to the field with ontological assumptions about what sorts of entities inhabit it or to privilege any point of view.14 This relates to the central methodological principle of ANT, what Latour has called the principle of symmetry, which is central to his understanding of ANT as a “symmetric anthropology” (1993, 2005b).15 This can be read in several ways. An ANT approach asks us to forego the many “bifurcations” or “binaries” of modern thought that tend to organise experience into two separate spheres: nature and culture, subject and object, primary and secondary qualities, matter and meaning, mind and world, and so on. There is no privileging of one or the other. ANT thus foregrounds an agnostic metaphysical attitude—a suspension of a priori ontological assumptions about the “furniture of the world”; to wait and see what is there to determine what matters; it encourages one to remain inside experience—of what is happening without privileging either matter or ideas, subjects, or objects, nature, or culture, and so on, but to treat them all on an equal plane. This likewise means that what can be considered an element of experience (in a building project, for instance) opens to anything that  could possibly matter in a situation: models, images, technologies, sound and noise, the practitioners, or the actors’ own theories of what is going on. Sharing in an act of design expands to a broader collective of actors beyond just the human practitioners.16 This also generates another notion of agency that does not limit experience to a phenomenological experience or to brute sensible matter. In ANT, each actor is deployed as a network; and agency is dislocated across diverse  See John Law (2004) for a discussion on method and mess that takes an ANT approach.  Latour’s notion of symmetry is an adaptation of a concept of symmetry within earlier sociological studies of science that has been called the “strong programme” of sociology of science. Symmetry in this context, as David Bloor describes it, is to provide the same kinds of explanations for both successful and unsuccessful knowledge-claims in scientific practices. It is to treat both the successful and unsuccessful scientific theories in the same way. 16  Design is a very broad term that can encapsulate a variety of professions, practices, and refer to different kinds of artefacts—from typography to websites, from architecture to engineering, from very mundane objects like washing machines or the sounds of devices to soundscapes and cities. See Latour (2008), for an exploration of design, which, for him, is a specific practice of drawing things together. 14 15

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associations or relations, whereby each entity, being, or reality is relationally constituted within these associations, but only insofar as something happens, that is, within a course of action. A third consequence of a symmetric approach, moreover, requires one to give up a priori delimitations of the “field.” In an ANT inquiry, the field is not bounded in advance, but changes shape according to the movements, practices, and the concerns of the actors themselves. What is “outside” or “contextual” is also therefore configured from an inside point of view. Each of these aspects of a symmetric ANT approach can be summed up in the central ANT dictum: to “follow the actors.” As Latour writes, ANT is a “very crude method to learn from the actors without imposing on them an a priori definition of their world building capabilities” (1999a: 20). An ANT account is a way of telling stories by following and describing how actors deploy their own worlds. In this book, I too try to tell a story of a building “in the making” by attending to the specificity of the actors’ practices, the various compositions of their acts and worlds, and their own ways of building and understanding them in design practices. Here’s another way to consider what it means to study from the “inside.” ANT is a form of inquiry that is inspired by Science and Technology Studies (STS), which has a habit of “turning transcendences into empirical questions” (Gomart and Hajer 2003: 33). It approaches abstractions concretely and empirically in terms of how they play out in reality and in often mundane and ordinary ways: how they are performed within practices. Another inspiration for ANT is also the philosophy of pragmatism, which has a particular focus placed on understanding things—not as objects “out there,” finished and complete—but “in the making.” This has been further developed in William James’s later notion of “radical empiricism.” For James, “to be radical, an empiricism must neither admit into its constructions any element that is not directly experienced, nor exclude from them any element that is directly experienced” (1912: 42). In other words, a radical empiricism adopts a point of view from the inside of experience. Analysis happens at and from a plane of experience, in moments before experiences are solidified into forms of subjectivity or reduced to pure matters of fact, or abstracted beyond what is happening; it is in those fugitive and fleeting mundane moments when something comes together, where minds and matter are interwoven in “a

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vague sort of monism” (Lapoujade 1997), when realities are at the moments of their making. It is when everything is in flux—from the point of view of this flux itself, the plane of experience. As a result, this book is inspired by and builds off the increasingly growing body of ANT-inspired ethnographies of architectural practice (Callon 1996; Cardoso Llach 2015; Doucet 2016; Hansmann 2021; Houdart and Minato 2009; Farías and Wilkie 2016; Lefebvre 2018; Loukissas 2012; Yaneva 2009a, b, 2017; Yarrow 2019) and STS studies of engineering and design practices (Bucciarelli 1994; Henderson 1998; Law 2002; Vinck 2003). Like them, it follows the practices, the courses of action, of making a designed artefact from the point of view of the practices themselves. However, it departs from them in a significant way. It does not remain within a single site over an extended duration or within the point of view of a specific practice (e.g., architects or engineers), but follows different practices as they overlap and relate; it is “multi-sited.” Like the building project, the narrative is not just there, but there, and there, and there (Hannerz 2003); and like the building itself, the frame of reference emerges from multiple sites, cuts across different practices, which, following George E. Marcus (1995), allows for the possibility to take into account “formations” that are stretched and dislocated across different worlds, through which multiple sites provide various vantage points to capture diverse experiences that overlap in different places. The book is not a comparison of sites: it is not a study of the architects’ office, of the acoustician’s Laboratorium voor Akoestiek, of the Manchester City Council or the offices of the user group, and their relationships. The locations and offices are not the objects of study. The worlds of the practices are anyway not restricted to their own specific sites; for instance, the acoustic world often irrupts into architect’s office as does the budget of the client; the building and its many shared problems forces these worlds and their realities to overlap. As Clifford Geertz famously states, in ethnography “the locus of study is not the object of study. Anthropologists don’t study villages […]; they study in villages” (1973: 22). The various sites to which Factory travels are merely loci, points at which to capture the processes of making a building and are not that which needs to be

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captured in themselves (although the sites and settings of practice are important). This book also follows in the spirit of what Annemarie Mol has called empirical philosophy (2002). In empirical philosophy, philosophical concepts are not tested within empirical situations; the empirical is not the place to apply ready-made concepts. Instead, concepts are drawn from and modified through the empirical; they are given form and life through it: the empirical does not “illustrate the concept as much as gives it flesh – endows it with life” (Das 2018: 10). Empirical philosophy thus collapses the distinction between the conceptual and the empirical onto a shared plane of experience (Gad and Jensen 2016). It is about working-with and thinking-with the practices, concepts, theories, and knowledges that are part of the experiences of the actors. An empirical philosophy, in short, is an attempt to do philosophy through ethnographic techniques. In this book, each of the concepts considered are mixtures of the conceptual and the empirical; and it attempts to ensure that each of those concepts are developed immanently within the stories told, along the plane of experiences unfolded. Through this, the book also seeks to explore how concepts from STS studies of scientific and engineering practices can be translated, modified, and “enlivened” within the experiences of a building project. The stories that follow are drawn from a multi-sited ethnography from 2017 to 2018, and in short moments in 2019. They involve participant observations within the offices of the structural engineers, the mechanical engineers, the acousticians, architects, in the city council of Manchester, and in moments of public engagement; it builds from interviews with a variety of practitioners and experts involved in the making of Factory. The stories are specific to a particular moment in a building project: the design development or technical design stage. This is when the technical design process, procurement of materials, and the pressures of construction happen. As a result, these are moments in the making of a building and are not definitive or complete. The stories told here are too “in the making”—partial, variable and without closure. That is, what we can call project-stories.

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1.4 Projects But what is a building project? Projects have become ubiquitous, suffusing seemingly all aspects of life. We are constantly invested in projects. It has been argued that we have moved into a “project society” where there has been a “projectification of everything” (Jensen et al. 2016): from government, urban development, economy and organisations to technological innovation, the arts, education, research, and the “self,” the project has become one of the central organisational forms through which a diversity of activities are structured.17 Cities are now less administrative units for planning than sites for the implementation and experimentation of projects and the building industry has been one of the models for the emergence of this organisational form that has now traversed various domains (Grabher 2004) due to its complex, temporary, and goal-oriented nature. Moreover, the anthropologist Andrew Graan (2022) has noted that the “project” is a relatively recent, versatile, and empty “social form” that is characterised by two intertwined logics. On the one hand, it is a way of organising activities, time, space, people, and resources toward some end; on the other hand, it is transformative and promissory (Färber 2020). For Graan, “this conjuncture between the logistical and the visionary, between ‘rational’ planning and implementation and the promise of transformative action, lies at the core of the project form as we recognize it today” (2022: 4).  While there have always been ways of organising labour, resources, and tasks towards the completion of large-scale complex objects—for example, in engineering and construction—it has been argued (Graan 2022; Jensen et  al. 2016) that the “project-form” is historically specific to ‘high modernism.’ Jensen, Thuesen and Geraldi (2016), for instance, outline how the “project society” is “post-disciplinary”—one oriented towards flexibility and versatility and associated with neoliberal capitalist modes of (re)production (see also, Boltanski and Chiapello 2007). Graan (2022) has likewise argued that the “project form” as a way of organising social environments is specific to high modernism as a form of governmentality. It could also be argued that the high-modern form of the project has reconfigured architectural practice, the architectural firm, and its labour relations. While not a central focus of this book, throughout my fieldwork I encountered architects who were planning on leaving the “project,” to work on other projects, to move onto something else, who were dissatisfied with the uncertainty associated with the working conditions of the project, or engineers who were required to learn new techniques (e.g., Revit and BIM software) in order to remain relevant to a changing building industry landscape. The project is thus not just the form of organising social relations at the larger scale of the building industry but also at an individual, personal, and affective level.

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As a “social form,” the building project could be understood as a large-­ scale apparatus that draws together a variety of kinds of expertise, firms, organisations and institutions, resources, materials and technologies, tasks and activities, spaces, and times, according to a pre-determined and temporary achievement (a building). Moreover, in project management terms, it is a “temporary organisation” or system, a “set of diversely skilled people working together on a complex task over a limited period of time” (Goodman and Goodman 1976: 494). It is an organisation that comes together and apart within a limited timespan without the normative and institutional “safeguards” of a traditional organisation (Grabher 2002). And while we often associate the making of buildings with the “project,” it is important to note that this is also a historical form through which the ways in which buildings, and the work, expertise and technologies required to make them, has also changed over time.18 More than an organisational and social form, the project is also a useful tool used by practitioners to understand the process through which buildings are made. The idea of the project is useful insofar as it “scaffolds” the often messy, complex, and contingent process of design (Allen 2000). Decisions in the practices of a building project are often constrained by the “project-form,” for the sake of achieving the goal, of making a building. In professional guides, the project is defined for instance as a continuous process divided into distinct stages (Chappell and Willis 2005), where each stage is specific to a moment in the design and building process, providing an outline for what needs to be done, who needs to do it, and what resources are needed. The “project” is thus a diagrammatic aid that allows for planning, organising time, resources, tasks, and people. This sequential design process, as Peter Rowe underlined in 1987, is the paradigm for contemporary planning procedures in design. This can take on different material forms and implements in practice, in schedules, budgets, work plans, periodical reviews and meetings; each of which seeks to order the movement of the project, to outline and bring everything back into the pre-determined path to follow. In the United  In the “project-form,” a variety of new kinds of expertise and knowledges has emerged, from project management and consulting firms to speciality organisations that offer specific kinds of expertise to the development of new kinds of digital technologies that promote efficiency and better planning practices (e.g., BIM) as well as new national guidelines, standards, and contract types. 18

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Kingdom, the central project tool comes from the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA). This is called the Plan of Work. It outlines the process through eight stages with clear step-by-step directions, from “strategic definition” to “use.” By following each step, the assumption is that there will be a linear realisation of a building—from A to B to C to D. Thus, the project is not only an organisational form, but also a tool through which practitioners are able to scaffold and organise their work. And while the project-form is often associated with uncertainty, flexibility, and change, where project management is the “de-projectification” of the project (Jensen et  al. 2016), here the “project” is also a device for turning the complex, messy, circumstantial nature of design, the building “in the making,” into a manageable, technical object.19 While the notion of the project continuously appears in practice, in various forms, as a useful way to deal with the experiences of the making of a building, using it in place of these experiences risks occluding them. To take the making of a building as a project is thus to risk falling into what Alfred North Whitehead (1938) has called the “fallacy of misplaced concreteness”, of confusing the abstract with the concrete. In other words, calling the making of a building a project is perhaps a little too hasty. It assumes there is a linear projection (the making of a building happens through linear steps), and that the “project” itself is already given, settled. That the building is realised in the movement from A to D, from “Strategic Definition” to “Use,” from the imagination of the architect to its finalised built form. That if you follow the dotted line set out in advance, follow each step, you can characterise what the making of a building consists, all the experiences involved. But this, obviously, is not what happens. As a result, this book would like to draw a distinction between the project and the building “in the making.” If the making of a  Latour has shown how the empirical study of technical projects can offer a privileged way to understand the fragile and complex ways in which reality is fabricated. By regarding objects as projects, he argues, can help us consider the relative, processural, and collective existence of objects; that objects hang together through a loose configuration of actors, and that reality requires our participation in its constitution. Architecture and the making of buildings can serve as an excellent point of view to show how the seemingly obdurate “real,” the reality of our cities and built environment, is fragile, requiring maintenance and collective action. See his Aramis: or The Love of Technology (1996), his chapter “The Historicity of Things” in Pandora’s Hope (1999b), and a later account in his An Inquiry into Modes of Existence (2013). 19

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building can be shaped into a project-form or make use of the project as an abstraction to organise and manage itself, the building “in the making” undoes all of this. If a project has a defined start and end, with a goal that pre-defines the path to achieve it, a building “in the making” has no beginning and no end but happens in the middle of things. It is in the “process of being made” without closure. It is in a state of continuous variation. Or, at least,  that is one of the book’s arguments. In a lecture from 1956, Étienne Souriau had also questioned the use of the idea of the project to characterise the creative act “in the making,” of something in the process of being made. In his lecture on the mode of existence of the “work to-be-made,” Souriau dismisses the concept of the project: which is to say, that which in ourselves sketches the work in a sort of thrust and throws it ahead of us, so to speak, in order to find it once more at the moment of its accomplishment. For in speaking thus, we eliminate, in a different way, every experience felt in the course of the making from among the givens of the question [the question that the “work to-be-made” poses to the maker in the act of making]. We fail to recognize the very important experience of the work’s progressive advancement toward its concrete existence over the course of the journey that leads there (2015 [2009]: 231).

For Souriau, the “work to-be-made” is not the same as a project. There is something more. The project seems to put the cart before the horse insofar as it carries the sentiment of a projection, a throwing-forward of a sketch, or an image, of what is to be made, which is then found in the moment of its accomplishment unchanged. The accomplished work waits in potentia and the completed work is the realisation of this potential that had already existed. Nothing really happens. The effect can be found in the cause. Everything is thus marked out in advance, and we “eliminate” the experiences of the course of the making—which is precisely the mode of existence of a “work to-be-made.” We do not pay attention to the little decisions, the affective and concrete experiences, the challenges and risks of making. Instead of the project, Souriau offers the concept of an instaurative journey, a process, where instead of a dotted line laid out in advance, the lines are marked out in the process of the

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journey according to the trajectories taken in the act of making, where “there occur many absolutely innovative acts, many concrete proposals, suddenly improvised in response to the momentary problematic of each stage” (2015 [2009]: 231). In other words, he points us towards the painstaking and worrisome experience of bringing something into existence, to the twists and turns of making, without any guarantee of success: this is at the heart of the mode of existence of a work to-be-made and of a building “in the making.” By foregrounding the trajectories of the journey—or the process— Souriau emphasises three aspects of making that this book attempts to foreground as well insofar as it takes us away from characterising the building “in the making” in the project-form. First, while the notion of project involves a projection, the instaurative journey involves a “gradual metamorphosis” (2015 [2009]: 225), whereby a virtual and sometimes fictional existence is piecemeal given concrete existence. This does not happen by leaps but in a muddled and piecemeal way. There is continuity, but a continuity called “anaphoric variation.” A repetition that involves reprises and others to take the thread again to continue it. In other words, it has a “solicitudinary existence”: it relies on others and their realities through which it can exist and gain reality (2015 [2009]: 153). The anaphoric variations of a building highlights that a building exists both collectively and in degree: that it gains in reality as it is intensified by others that continue it in existence  differently. Secondly, this points to what he calls an “existential reference” that characterises this incremental passage of making. It is not a reference between a pre-­existing form or concept and the made artefact or completed building that it is reflect within, but a reference between what is “to-be-made” and the “made,” between two different modes of existence. This other form of reference characterises the affective experiences of making, a feeling of risk, anxiety, and jeopardy. Will this work? Will this enable continuity? Or will this put the work at risk? Will it all fail? And lastly, this experience draws us into a quasi-spiritual experience that Souriau associates with the process of making and the existence of something in the process of being made, which cannot be reduced to the scaffold of the form of the

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project.20 He calls it the Angel of the work, or the Sphinx that continuously asks questions of its maker. This experience of being called into the work, implicated into its existence, to respond to the problems that it poses with the risk of failure, of not responding properly, of adding or subtracting the wrong thing, of not ensuring that it gains in reality. At each “problematic stage,” how do you respond? And how do you respond in a way that others can continue it in existence? Souriau’s discussion of the mode of existence of the work to-be-made asks us to pay attention to these concrete experiences of the process of making as this provides access to types of experience, a mode of existence, otherwise missing. In each moment of design, this book is interested in what it means to share in this act of creation without any guarantee that it will continue to exist across its variations. While Souriau relies on the classic example of the sculptor facing a lump of clay, feeling the anxiety of creation that the lump of clay constitutes, the pressure of possibility that the work “to-be-made” implicates the sculptor within, a building “in the making” is much more complicated. It involves a larger variety of actors in its instaurative journey. How do the various trajectories intertwine and overlap? What does it mean to reprise and continue others’ work and realities? What kind of Sphinx is this?

1.5 Practices To get close to the experiences of the building “in the making” that resonates within the building project like a Sphinx, this book tells stories of the everyday practices of the making of a building. The courses of action of design, the myriad phone calls and zoom chats, the meetings and meetings, the emails, the piles of documents and printouts, traces over plans and sections, working with the 3D model, but also the experiments, the public presentations, and engagements. This is where the book is situated: in the everyday movements, discussions and frustrations,  See Yaneva (2009a, 2021) on this in relation to architecture and architectural archives. David Lapoujade’s The Lesser Existences (2021 [2017]) as well as Latour’s and Isabelle Stenger’s introduction (“The Sphinx of the Work”) to the recent edition of Souriau’s The Different Modes of Existence (2015 [2009]) are excellent entry points into Souriau’s thought. 20

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negotiations, in meeting rooms and in conversations around a computer. That is where the Sphinx calls out from. It is interested in how architecture is embedded in practice (Jacobs and Merriman 2011)—how these practices know the world in a particular way, and to understand the making of a building from the point of view of them. Since the late 1970s and 1980s, there has been a growing body of work that has turned attention to the practice of architecture. This work has tended to replace the “products” of architecture—its buildings, its contexts, and its theories—and its “author”—that solitary architect—for the social relations, cultures, and socio-material practices of architecture. This study of architectural practice can be traced back to the sociology of architectural firms (Blau 1987; Gutman 1988), primarily accounts of the status of the profession, interested in the social, organisational, and economic “conditions of practice” (Gutman 1988: 1). Through quantitative means—primarily, surveys and economic data—they were interested in how the contexts within which architectural practices are situated shape how buildings are made. The early ethnographic accounts of architectural practice (relying on more qualitative methods) are similarly interested in the “conditions of practice,” but turn inward to the practices themselves and the situatedness of knowledge and meaning within the “milieu” of architectural offices and design studios. A move, that is, from the firm to the office and studio. In The Reflective Practitioner, Donald Schön, for instance, uses observations from a design studio to illustrate how design is a specific way of knowing, a practical mode of knowledge, that he calls “reflection-in-action,” and thus is interested in an “epistemology of practice” (1983: 16); the way in which practices (including design practices) are in themselves specific ways of producing knowledge. Zooming out a little further, Dana Cuff, in her Architecture: The Story of Practice (1992), develops a story of how architecture is made within a larger constellation of professionals; her work describes the everyday practices of several architectural firms in the United States in the 1980s. Cuff’s study details how architectural practice is a kind of socio-cultural practice that happens in a relationship between the profession, academic institutions, the design studio, and within socio-economic conditions. Rather than focusing on the epistemology of practice, she develops a study of the culture of practice, how buildings emerge within collective processes of social

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negotiation and are socially constructed in relationships between architects, clients, bankers, engineers, civic groups, and corporative executives. Architectural practice is, she argues, a “social process” that “is significant to the form-giving task of architecture for it is from this human constellation that the building’s final form emerges” (1992: 248). In this sense, she highlights the importance of understanding the ritual behaviour of architects as they go about their daily professional lives and the culture of practice to better understand how the built environment takes shape. This sentiment has been picked up within more recent accounts of architectural practice—what Albena Yaneva (2017) has coined the “new ethnographies” of architecture (Callon 1996; Cardoso Llach 2015; Farías and Wilkies 2016; Hansmann 2021; Houdart and Minato 2009; Lefebvre 2018; Loukissas 2012; Murphy 2004, 2005; Yaneva 2009a, b, 2017; Yarrow 2019)—albeit with a different focus. These “new ethnographies” follow in the empirical tradition of STS, and, specifically, its laboratory studies insofar as it foregrounds the situatedness of knowledge production and the ways in which questions of reality are constituted within them. In the laboratory studies, epistemology is not an abstract domain of philosophy, but happens in situated practices, concrete settings, and with a variety equipment, devices, and other material implements that provide affordances to see and know and to construct scientific realities (Latour and Woolgar 1986; Knorr-Cetina 1981). One way in which this is told is through the notion of “distributed cognition.” These studies have shown the importance of “inscriptive activity” (Latour and Woolgar 1986) and representational practices (Coopmans et al. 2014; Lynch and Woolgar 1990), the role of texts, visuals, graphics, and other types of representations within scientific practices, for knowing “natural phenomena,” and not only for making sense of them, but for making them available to be known. In that sense, there is no “object” that is known, on one side of an epistemological gap, and a “subject” that knows on the other, but a socio-material practice of knowing, and a series of mediations that give the “knower” the capacity to know, and the “known” the capacity to be known. Both knowledge and reality are constituted at once. Rather than a “correspondence theory of truth,” knowledge  (echoing William James) is considered as a function, a course of action, that happens through

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a series of transitional experiences, relational, shared and distributed across a variety of things. These ethnographic accounts of architecture—and design more broadly—similarly highlight how design knowledge is shared with various devices, technologies, tools, equipment, and within equipped settings that afford various competencies of knowing and ways of doing design. They describe how design knowledge (and the artefacts or realities known) is situated within studios, shared with models, images, sketches, and digital tools. But they also stress that design and architecture are different ways of knowing in contrast to scientific practices, and thus know and construct the world in a different way. Katheryn Henderson notes, in her ethnography of engineering practices, for instance, that, in design, inscriptions have a different directionality: they are used to “hold pieces of information in the absence of the thing itself […]. Design engineering is going in the other direction: visual representations, here, must capture the process of building up an artifact, requiring visual articulation of a minutely detailed nature to reveal the object’s inner structure and workings” (1998: 33). Or, as Ignacio Farías and Alex Wilkies point out, rather than the obligation to produce new knowledge, in design, the “fundamental studio challenge is […] the production of necessity” to “close down the infinite span of possibilities, discard alternatives and make decisions” (2016: 9–10), according to questions of “invention, intimacy, and attachment” (2016: 2). In contrast to the knowing that happens in laboratories with a focus on ensuring that statements refer to facts, in design practices there is the challenge of ensuring that representations and statements increasingly approximate a future artefact and seek, not to find ways to ensure that this fact is able to remain invariant through other forms, but to find ways to support an artefact’s eventual making or construction. In other words, objects, instruments, and tools are understood as devices that architects and designers use to negotiate between the actual and the possible. Albena Yaneva’s ethnographic accounts of the architectural firm OMA, and in particular, the practice of model-making (2005a, b), show how the process of creation happens in the act of manipulating the building through tools and materials—and foam models. Models, she argues, help architects render visible and accountable options,

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scenarios, or other ways of assembling the building that go beyond what is “given;” they are “conduit[s] for assembling and reconciling bits of reality in a whole,” to assemble the “multiverse” of a building (2005b: 530). Others have also shown how interactions between drawings, gestures, and talk in a design team meeting allows designers to “augment” reality in a “hypothetical mode,” where some things help imagining other things differently (Murphy 2004: 269); or how sketching affords architects the capacity to loosen site constraints into “possibilities in disguise” (Yarrow 2019: 102), or create an “activation of a disparate group of connections” (Houdart and Minato 2009: 55). If the challenge of scientific knowledge is to hold the inscription and what it represents together through its variations, to allow for something “invariant” to pass through a cascade of inscriptions and transformations (Latour 1999b), in architecture and design, one of the challenges is to know and create artefacts that are not yet existing, to utilise inscriptions that do not “refer” to a previous something, but constructs something new that can nevertheless fit back into what already exists. It is at this intersection between the possible and the actual that design is, in one way, concerned. In the same way that the laboratory studies of STS had dissolved the abstractions of epistemology into the concrete acts of scientific practice, each of these ethnographies of design practice dissolve the abstractions of design and creation into the concrete and collective practices that happens between a variety of actors within design. This could be understood as a switch in focus from the “epistemology of practice” or “culture of practice,” to  focus on what Isabelle Stengers has called an “ecology of practices” (2005). Following Gilles Deleuze’s notion of thinking par le milieu, an ecology of practices considers design from the middle, to not detach practices from their “ethos” and the surroundings (settings) through which they happen. As Yaneva explains, “[t]o view architecture as an ‘ecology of practice’ means to redefine the complicated forms of association between all of its beings: habits, skills, buildings, sites, city regulations, designer’s equipment, clients, institutions, models, images, urban visions and landscapes” (2017: 33). Design as an ecology of practice happens in relational and constrained webs. These “new ethnographies” of architectural practice can be said to follow the movements of design, of doing and knowing in design practices, not through appeals to

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external factors outside of practice, or through the perspectives of the practitioners, but from the point of view of “studio events.” The interest is not in revealing the conditions of practice from the “outside,” but exploring the realities of design from the “inside”: how they hold together (or fall apart) within sets of relations between the actors, their concerns, equipment, and materials that the moments of design happen across. Variations of a Building adopts a similar perspective from the point of view of the events of practice, of the many “ways of doing” a building. It tells stories of how realities of design take shape within ordinary moments of design practices that approaches what Kathleen Stewart has called the “sentience of a situation” (2011: 449). And while these previous ethnographies of architectural practice have mainly described practice from the point of view of studio events of one type of practice, this book travels to various sites where a building “in the making” is performed in different ways. It tells stories of the building from the worlds of structural and mechanical engineers, acousticians, and the client, and of architects in their roles of project managers, and in public engagement. But more than exploring how a building varies in different kinds of practices, the stories in the book describe moments in which the practices meet, where the building makes them overlap. And in that case, the book foregrounds stories centred around these overlaps, and how a building hangs together— or not—within them.

1.6 Ontologies Something happens when you observe a building from different sites. You rarely encounter the same thing. There are different kinds of practices, full of a variety of stuff, equipment, devices, concerns, and languages spoken and discourses referred to. There are nR levels  for its acoustics, simulations, noises, and a laboratory in one setting; in another, you find rows of computers, digital models, sketches, and drawings; and in another, there is just a group of people around a table, talking. In a way, it is difficult to continue to see one building as it takes on different forms and is “done” differently  in different sites. And yet, in a certain sense, the building is necessarily one (especially as the concerns of

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construction fold back onto design). More strangely, these are not just differences of perspective, or worldview, or of professional expertise. In some moments, the building is a composition of soundwaves; it moves, bends, and shifts with the wind; it is a conduit of hot or cold air; but it is also just a venue for concert goers, ballet dancers to perform, and a business to generate income, while also being an icon that promises to transform a post-industrial city. Each “is” is a different composition within different sets of relations, alongside other inscriptions, documents, and devices, and kinds of concerns. These are variations of a building that repeat it differently. But: how can a building be one and many at once? How do the variations overlap? Or, more specifically, how do the practitioners deal with this in practice? If a challenge of design is negotiating between the possible and the actual, it is equally a challenge of working with the tension of the many and the one. This book is partly an attempt to understand what it means for a building to be many at once. To do so, it is in conversation with the “turn to ontology” in STS (Law 2002; Law and Lien 2012; Mol 2002; Woolgar and Lezaun 2013, 2015), which has turned attention to realities and objects that may appear ready-made, settled, and singular to show that, in practice, they are indeterminate, uncertain, and multiple. Extending ANT’s turning of epistemological questions into ontological ones—that knowledge is not referential or representational but occurs through movements in the world as ways of assembling objects through associations— they explore how putatively “singular” objects or realities vary in practice by following the everyday practices and techniques that seek to hold them together. What this work challenges is the notion that reality is “out there” and singular. To adopt John Law’s depiction (2004: 31–2), they show that reality is neither “independent” from, nor necessarily “anterior” (caveat: some bits of reality are taken for granted and unquestioned in practice) to engagements with it; it is neither necessarily “definite” (sometimes reality can be indefinite and obscure), nor “singular” (except when a form of “closure” is achieved or imposed). In other words, realities do not precede practices but are manipulated within them. They are crafted in practices where they are “performed” alongside the tools, settings, devices, and inherited histories or background of already existing and stabilised realities that it works with and against. These accounts of

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ontology in practice do not assume that there is a substantial reality always there to rely on, to refer to, a standard through which to base and adjudicate particular claims. Instead, a “substantial reality” is substituted by events and practices all the way down. By following practices, objects and realities are shown to be realised during a practical activity. But also, that there is no guarantee that it remains definite, anterior, or singular; the “order of things” is something done again and again in practice. It is also a work “to be made,” something that is equally fragile. This “turn to ontology” is not geared towards asking “what exists” in general. In the same way that laboratory studies turned epistemology into an empirical inquiry in practice, they have turned ontological questions into empirical inquiries in practice. Through various examples—aircraft design (Law 2002), disease and bodies (Mol 2002), salmon and nature (Law and Lien 2012), everyday objects (Woolgar and Lezaun 2013) and architecture (Yaneva 2017)—they have shown how the realities of each and the ways in which they exist are not somehow “out there” waiting to be discovered and known, or as essences beyond, but are manipulated and performed within practices. As Mol explains: “the new ‘is’ is one that is situated. It doesn’t say what [an object, a reality] is by nature, everywhere. It doesn’t say what it is in and of itself, for nothing ever ‘is’ alone. To be is to be related. The new talk about what is, does not bracket the practicalities involved in enacting reality. It keeps them present” (2002: 53–4). What “is” cannot be assumed in advance: it must be followed as it is dealt with in practice. To see how this works, a quick look at one of the paradigmatic ontological stories: Mol’s ethnography of an object, a disease, and her empirical study of the ontology of medical practices (2002). In this account, she follows an object—lower-limb atherosclerosis—as it is differently manipulated in different locations and practices in a hospital. A paradox: while the practitioners talk about a single object— “atherosclerosis”—in each of the practices, a different object, a different disease is played out in varying realities: “if atherosclerosis is a thick vessel wall here (under the microscope), it is pain when walking there (in the consulting room), and an important cause of death in the Dutch population a litter further along (in the computers of the department of epidemiology). Reality is varied” (Mol 2002: 164). For Mol, what is interesting is that rather than coming

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across the same disease there were multiple versions of atherosclerosis: what was self-evident in one site and practice, becomes something else elsewhere due to the conditions, context, and socio-material practices within which it is manipulated. The point is to shift attention from the representations of an object—or the perspectives of the practitioners—to the object itself as it is practiced; it is in its performance or enactment within concrete settings that it takes on a different reality.21 The upshot of all of this is that there is no longer one reality, but multiple. There is an “ontological difference,” not a difference of perspective, or of knowledges, but there is variability in reality. Back to the paradox that interests Mol. If there are multiple realities, Mol asks, how are they able to speak about the same thing at all? If multiplicity “remains in every site and on every scale” (2002: 50), if there is nothing that a priori unifies them, no “common world,” totality or substance that, in advance, contains or supports the multiplicity, or provides a way to resolve questions of difference, of different bodies, how can medical practice happen at all? How do they make decisions about what to do? How do they deal with this variegated reality (that there are multiple bodies and diseases of the supposedly same body and disease) in practice? This is what she calls coordination—or practices of co-ordering. She describes how multiple realities of disease co-exist; sometimes they overlap and relate through conjunctive relations, but they can also be kept apart in disjunctive relations. They can be mutually exclusive, but also mutually inclusive. While they can conflict with one another, they may also rely or depend on one another as they overlap. Realities may be ordered in sequences that follow one and another, collaborate, or be found within one another. The same disease, she notes, can be more than  It is important to point out that in this “turn to ontology” in STS that there is a shift in the use of metaphor. Rather than the metaphor of “construction,” they opt for a discussion of enactment or performance, which puts an emphasis on practice. This is also a way for them to differentiate themselves from both the emphasis placed on social constructivism in STS and the idiom of constructivism in more ANT-inflected STS studies. In contrast, it is not just that “reality” is constructed in a historical process once and for all, that differences are only a matter of perspective on the self-same singular reality, or that reality is constructed by the formation of allies that reaches some form of closure, but that reality is a continuous enactment or performance in practice. It must be done again and again. See Mol (2002: 41) for a discussion of this change in metaphor and Latour (2010) for limitations on the metaphor of construction. 21

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one, but less than many (Mol 2002: 81–2),22 and this is not just a philosophical reflection. But dealing with ontological multiplicity is an everyday concern in medical practice. A “singular” reality of the disease is not a given, but an achievement within practices of coordination; and this is necessary to treat the patient and the disease. Empirical accounts of ontology are, therefore, not only interested in deploying multiplicity, but in following the ways in which it is dealt with in practice. What are the techniques and devices used for relating and differing? How do multiple realities overlap and coincide productively, or cause “friction” and “tension”? How do they interfere in the world?23 This book, too, places attention on how variations of a building are performed in practices. It, too, is interested in how ontological variability, or the many realities that are somehow squeezed into a building is dealt with in practice. Again, it is interested in how the practitioners can speak about a singular building—called “Factory”—without a common world, ground, or referent that everything would fit neatly inside of in advance. And yet, it is not entirely clear if this “turn to ontology” has the same analytic purchase in a building project; in contrast to “natural” objects like bodies that are presumed to exist “out there” – independent, anterior, definite, and singular—building projects are not presumed to do so, where it is evident that they are made within practices. The turn to ontology in this book therefore does something else. On the one hand, the interest is in how the building’s conditions of possibility are worked out in practice in “overlaps” between various practices where what is possible is not given, but “worked-with,” drawn out and shaped together; it is interested in how a common world is shaped together (the “co-ordering” of things means something different in a building project than in a hospital). On the other hand, it is interested in how these “realities” for the practitioners never fully reach closure and are in continuous variation. 22  This phrase is borrowed form Marilyn Strathern’s (2004) concept of “partial connections,” that is, how the relations that something is constituted with does not exhaust its “being”. It can exceed them. It can be many things at once. 23  This is an empirical question. The difference between an epistemologically relativist and ontologically pluralist position is important because while the former relies on something steady the latter suggests that there is no need for a singular reality to unify accounts a priori. Instead, how “wholes,” “totalities,” or “singularity” happens need to be taken account of empirically; it is not something that precedes or is beyond experience.

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And so, what is attempted here? To explore how a building project is also a fragile process of composing a common world—one where there can be a coexistence between things, a continuity, a cosmicity, that is neither somehow already in the world, nor is squeezed together through a totality that holds everything together a priori, but as a commonality that requires composition (Latour 2004a, d, 2010). The making of a building is then not just the crafting of a new artefact, but equally, and perhaps more challengingly, the shaping and ordering of a common world within which this artefact fits and remains possible. At the same time, then, the book asks: is that politics?

1.7 Is That Politics? That architecture has politics is no secret: “whether they [architects] like it or not, they are in the thick of political space. Architecture is political. Full Stop” (Till 2009: 124). We are continuously reminded that every act of architecture is a political act (Dutton and Mann 2000). As a result, one would, it seems, be remiss to speak of architecture without invoking politics. But it is unclear what exactly is meant by politics in these discussions? Politics in architecture (as elsewhere) can stand in for a lot of other things: power, capitalism, ideology, resistance, domination, participation, disagreement, consensus, democracy, identity, race, gender, even post-­ politics. It operates as a sort of floating signifier. Most of the time, to be somewhat reductive, talking of politics in architecture has three meanings: it is to emphasise that there is a “social” dimension in architecture, that architecture can play a critical role, or that architecture is a vehicle that reproduces social and economic inequalities (Borden and Rendell 2000; Heynen 2000; Lahiji 2014). These three inflections of architecture’s politics are useful insofar as they pinpoint uneven relations, and the

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structures that contribute to them.24 Typically, they go in two ways: either architecture is a means for engineering social, cultural, or economic effects; or it is an instrument through which forms of domination and power act silently (Domīnguez Rubio and Fogué 2015). Political analyses of this sort, however useful, tend to rely on an analytic framework that separates politics and architecture from one another in an asymmetric relation (Yaneva 2017) and can be understood as being done in a “major key” (Stengers 2005; Deleuze and Guattari 1987). They operate, in part, by generalising beyond the specificity of the practices that make up a building, and as such they often overlook the dimensions by which architecture can be said to have politics in its own way. They jump too quickly to abstractions that act as substitutions for what happens in experience. But what would happen if we stayed with the experiences to see how a politics happens, and thus, whether it is possible to tell the politics of a building project and architecture in another way? An implicit line of analysis in this book is to attempt this, to see what a politics of architecture that is heard and written in a “minor key” could be. One way to do this, to return to this quote from Émilie Gomart and Maarten Hajer (2003: 33), is to learn from some STS stories of politics that have a habit of “turning transcendences into empirical questions.” An important aspect of this is that we do not yet know what politics is in advance, what forms it takes, where it happens, or what it turns around. Politics can happen in different forms with different contents. It can happen in other types of settings. In this spirit, this book does not offer a general theory of politics  for architecture. Instead, the question, taken from Gomart and Hajer (2003), “Is That Politics?” implicitly lines each  There are many studies of this. Here is a sample of some important accounts of the politics of architecture done in a “major key”: buildings are loci for hegemonic struggles, expressions of civic, political, and national identity (Delanty and Jones 2002; Jones 2006; Kusno 2012; Vale 1992) that can also express ideological frameworks through their form and materiality (Coleman 2014; Picon 2013); buildings are economic vehicles for generating economic growth (Jessop and Oosterlynck 2008), reproducing socio-economic relations (Grubbauer 2013; Kaika 2011; Sklair 2006; Sklair and Gherardi 2012); the built environment is a powerful instrument for regulating and maintaining regimes of power silently (Dovey 1999), and building typologies reproduce and maintain social hierarchies and power asymmetries (King 2016; Markus 1987, 1993; Weiseman 1994); for similar reasons, architecture has also been shown to be “post-political,” an industry overtaken and run through expert knowledge, managerial, and thus, depoliticised (Boano and Kelling 2013; Lahiji 2014; Swyngedouw 2011; Wilson and Swyngedouw 2014). 24

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of the stories of practice throughout the book. Can we talk about politics here in these specific practices? What would that imply? If nothing else, if politics has been used to talk about everything, it at the very least can help us slow down in our stories. As politics has often been argued to be silent in design, implicit in its practices, artefacts, and effects, this is one way to loosen up what otherwise seems fixed. STS stories of politics, indeed, are especially useful for thinking about how politics happens implicitly in everyday practices. This can be done in two ways. They approach politics in an empirical and experimental way. They are not surprised to see politics happen in different sites or in different forms. And, they also describe how politics happens within what is often taken for granted; the ways in which solid and stable realities take shape, or how they wither away or multiply. They are stories that tell how politics happens in the thick of things, and ultimately, describe how things are political through their interreferences and interventions in socio-material relations, how they force realities to shift, constitute disturbances, and cause people to re-align, gather, and/or disagree. In what follows, three of these stories will be retold with an interest in exploring how they can help us make explicit the—if not secret—implicit politics of architecture, design, and in the making of a building. One way that this story of politics has been told is by returning to the dialogue between pragmatist philosopher John Dewey and the journalist Walter Lippmann from the early twentieth century.25 Both of them were concerned by the influence of technological developments on democratic processes, and the role of public involvement within them and their unexpected consequences. While Lippmann described the public as a problem, Dewey looks to the experiences of politics as a locus for experimentation in political representation (via other public forms). From this debate, an empirical and constructivist approach to politics has been developed in STS accounts, where the political forms or publics and the unstable objects (or “issues”) that the political forms or publics turn

 The debate between Dewey and Lippmann has gained a lot of traction in STS discussions of “object-oriented politics” primarily through the influence of Noortje Marres and Latour (DiSalvo 2009; Girard and Stark 2007; Latour 2005a; Marres 2007, 2012; Yaneva 2017). 25

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around are simultaneously brought into existence together. This is what Noortje Marres has called “material politics” (2007). Both Dewey (2012 [1927]) and Lippmann (1993 [1927]) foreground the problematic condition of the public.26 For both, the notion of the liberal democratic Public is a ghostly, ready-made abstraction.27 Instead, problems, concerns, and events—the consequences of socio-technical controversies—are the organising conditions for public formations. Problems are the conditions for publics and publics do not come ready-­ made. In The Phantom Public, Lippmann notes that the public is not always already there as a pre-defined entity but is convoked into being around controversies that existing institutions cannot handle: the public’s problems (1993 [1927]: 121). Dewey similarly describes how publics take shape around problems, but goes one step further than Lippmann as he places these problems on a relational and ontological level (Marres, 2007). Everything happens and is made through what he calls “associated activity” (2012 [1927]: 123). Publics take shape around the “indirect consequences of conjoint action”—interferences—that “modify the consequences of pre-existing associations to such an extent that new agencies and functions are necessitated” (2012 [1927] 52, 65). It is, in other words, the consequences of associated activities that require new forms of associated activity—publics—to emerge. Publics are called into being insofar as they are implicated into and by problems that shift the consequences of previously existing associations, that, in other words, alter the fabric of reality. But this is also what constitutes an emphasis on experimentalism in politics: “to form itself, the public has to break existing forms” (Dewey 2012 [1927]: 31). The problems of the public are also situations for collective experiments. There is an ontologically disturbing situation that  Other STS accounts of politics tends to revolve around the question of public involvement (Collins and Evans 2002; Jasanof 2003; Wynne 1996) in socio-technical controversies. A discussion that maps onto questions of participation in architecture and in planning (Doucet 2016; Krivý and Kaminer 2013). There have also been discussions in STS of how different forms of public deliberation can take that incorporate nonhumans and their representatives (Latour 1993, 2004a; Callon et al. 2011 [2001]). 27  As Dewey writes, “The democratic ideal has never defined the function of the public. It has treated the public as an immature, shadowy executive of all things. The confusion is deep-seated in a mystical notion of society” (2012 [1927]: 137). 26

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forces new public formations to develop. But there is also no a priori recipe or form for this to happen: as Marres notes, public formation is instead a “particular modality of being implicated in inherently dynamic formations” (2012: 44). It is one mode of drawing things together, but one that does not prescribe what shape it should take. For Marres, what an STS sensibility adds to this pragmatist account of politics is attention to the fact that the problems that constitute publics are also not given but require articulation in order to take on reality: “before a problematic entanglement counts as a matter of public concern, it must be actively articulated” (2007: 768). In this sense, “the process of specification of issues and the organisation of actors into issue assemblages go hand in hand. Here, the composition of the public – which entities and relations it is made up of – must be understood as partly the outcome of, and as something that is at stake in, the process of issue articulation” (Marres 2012: 53). In other words, both the object of concern and the socio-­ technical arrangements, the publics, within which it circulates, are simultaneously brought into being. One way to do an empirical study of politics is to study this process of re-composition. What are the socio-technical arrangements, settings, and actors involved in an issue articulation? How do issues become articulated and visible? One needs to go there to see this happening: “examining participation in situ enables us to understand how material participation is performatively accomplished through the deployment of specific technologies, settings, and things” (Marres 2012: 22). A focus is therefore shifted to the materiality and diversity of ways that politics can happen and take form through issue articulation. As a result, there is an expansion of what occasions can be called political, and a turn to the experimental settings, affordances and practices that enable various forms and practices of politics. We are also led into other experiences of politics that can happen in everyday situations that may otherwise seem apolitical. For instance, how public formations happen within architectural presentations (Yaneva 2017), or in public demonstrations of architectural competitions (Stark and Paravel 2008), or in the ways in which an “ecoshowhome,” as a domestic setting equipped with various devices, enable the articulation of environmental issues (Marres 2012). Can we speak of design practices as situations where there is issue articulation? Is the making of a building a re-composition of a reality, does it constitute

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problematic situations? Are there moments where publics take on new formations? Is that politics? Another STS story of politics explores how politics is silently inscribed into the material form of artefacts, hardwired into them. The politics of designed artefacts has been widely discussed in STS. Langdon Winner’s (1980) influential article, “Do Artifacts Have Politics?” has been central to these discussions.28 In his article, Winner argues that artefacts have an implicit politics; they are neither innocent nor neutral but are deviously political insofar as the objectivity of artefacts—that they seem to be “out there” and neutral—hides the political intentions embodied within (1980: 121). For Winner, there are two ways in which artefacts have politics: (1) as embodiments of power relations and political intentions; and (2) the way artefacts and sociotechnical systems reflect or mimic the social structures they emerge from. In other words, social relationships, conditions, or biases are built into artefacts that make them endure and thus have political effects. One way in which Winner illustrates his argument is through the example of New York City’s urban planner, Robert Moses, whose “low” bridges, whether explicitly or implicitly, had political consequences insofar as they have a “social bias” that discriminates against the poor and black population of New York by not allowing public buses to pass through. In discussions of Winner’s article, others have shown that this bridge story is not as self-evident. Bernward Joerges (1999a) argues that, rather than power relations that “can literally be built into and perpetuated through stone” (413), the politics of artefacts are not contained in themselves, but in terms of how they are used by others, in their “expressive values” (423). In Steve Woolgar and Geoff Cooper’s rejoinder to Joerges,29 they stress the “essentially ambivalent quality” (1999: 438) of artefacts, highlighting that it is this indeterminate nature that opens them to an “interpretative flexibility” and gives them a  It has been called both the “parable” (Joerges 1999a, b) and the “urban legend” (Woolgar and Cooper 1999) of technology and politics stories in STS. It has also been discussed in relation to architecture: see Latour (2004c), Mihandoust (2016), and Yaneva (2017) for discussions of this “bridge-debate”. 29  Joerges article was already a response to an earlier article of Woolgar’s that was in response to Winner’s argument. There is a series of other articles that take up these arguments (in a way, illustrating Woolgar and Cooper’s argument). 28

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form of politics. The question is not whether the bridges actually had political intentions inscribed into them, but how the bridges perform particular arguments at a discursive level, and continually shifts in meaning. It is in the plurality of perspectives and interpretations, then, in the “play” of meaning, that it has a political force and not in the artefacts themselves. Latour—and ANT—proposes another way to re-tell the story of these bridges and the politics of artefacts that remains within what is given in experience (Latour 2004c). Neither locating politics in causes, intentions, or conditions embedded in the artefact, nor in an endless disagreement between perspectives, it is the agency of technological artefacts themselves that has political dimensions: how they make a difference and have consequences in the world. In relation to Winner’s bridges, then, politics happens through and around the bridge as it shifts assemblages of things and people, and not in the intentions of Moses’s or in the varying ways it takes form in discourse. This is what Latour calls an “object-­ oriented politics,” or Dingpolitik (2005a). This theory of politics is based on a distinction about what constitutes an “object,” or rather how an object is constituted. A distinction that Latour draws between what he calls “matters of fact” and “matters of concern,” and which he finds intrinsic in the way in which design operates (Latour 2008). Objects as “matters of fact,” he argues, is based on a poor understanding of what is given in experience: For too long, objects have been wrongly portrayed as matters-of-fact. This is unfair to them, unfair to science, unfair to objectivity, unfair to experience. They are much more interesting, variegated, uncertain, complicated, far reaching, heterogeneous, risky, historical, local, material and network than the pathetic version offered for too long by philosophers. Rocks are not simply there to be kicked at, desks to be thumped at. “Facts are facts are facts”? Yes, but they are also a lot of other things in addition. (2005a: 9–11)

Objects are complicated. They do not exist out there like rocks to be kicked at. They are not merely “matters of fact”—or at least not always. This distinction is partly drawn from an operation that the philosopher

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Alfred North Whitehead (1920) has called the “bifurcation of nature”. This is a radical cut that sorts experience into two spheres: on the one hand, brute sensible matter, res extensa, or “primary qualities”—matters of fact; and on the other hand, perceptions, appearances, or “secondary qualities.” The notion of “matters of concern” seeks to avoid this cut. Things are both matters and concerns. For Latour, when objects become “matters of concern” they become Things: disputed and contested gatherings. “A thing,” Latour writes, “is, in one sense, an object out there and, in another sense, an issue very much in there, at any rate, a gathering” (2004b: 233). Politics, in this sense, is a process through which stakeholders, practices, and different forms of representation gather around an ontologically uncertain entity; this problematic Thing gathers them around it as a “matter of concern”. As Latour notes elsewhere, this understanding of objects-qua-Things entails a “shift from a nature always already there to an assemblage to be slowly composed” (2010: 477). It is the slow composition of an assemblage, the ways in which Things become objects, or objects become Things, and in how it gathers diverse participants into its composition that Dingpolitik takes place. Politics happens—it is a happening—implicitly then in the ways in which reality is (re)composed within practice—and is not design, as Latour asks (2008), not a process through which “matters of fact” are treated as “matters of concern,” where the ways in which the world is organised and arranged, its conditions of possibility, are rendered explicit? Is, Latour intimates, design (and architecture) always already (Ding)political? In this book, attention is thus drawn to the ways in which the making of a building is the process where a common world is slowly put together in practice. Can a politics of architecture happen through the practices of drawing, meeting, coordinating, experimenting and in engaging with publics? In the ways in which ontological consistency is achieved within design practice? In the slow composition of an assemblage, in the turning of a divergent Thing into an object, or in the act of inserting something new within pre-existing relations, an “ecology,” of a city? Is that politics? A final story of STS politics. This one follows the STS accounts of ontology discussed in the previous section. It goes by the name “ontological politics” (Mol 1999). This story of politics is also concerned with the ways in which politics takes place within practice: not just in how things

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come apart, but also how they manage to stay together. It reverses political attention from moments of rupture to the processes through which ontological consistency is achieved. But it is a politics that ultimately turns around the indeterminacy, contingency, and multiplicity of reality: how ontological differences are dealt with, disputed, and managed. For Mol, putting “politics” alongside “ontology” has a consequence: it suggests that “the conditions of possibility are not given” (1999: 75). They are made and remade within practices. Practices that are constrained and inherit histories, stable bits of reality, technologies and devices that afford some things and not others. However, in practices, the conditions and that which is conditioned emerge together, at once: in the act, the performance, within which a reality is configured. “So the term politics,” she points out, “works to underline this active mode, this process of shaping, and the fact that its [a reality’s] character is both open and contested” (1999: 75). Not only does it indicate that “the real is implicated in the political (and vice versa)” (1999: 74), but also that the word “politics” holds practical activities, the taken-forgranted goings-on of ordinary practice, and how they practically deal with ontological difference, indeterminate: “it helps to underline the question ‘what to do’ can be closed neither by facts nor arguments. That it will forever come with tensions – or doubt” (Mol 2002: 177). The solutions to practical problems are not found in the given order of things as the order of things is itself what is at stake in politics.30 It is what is in dispute. Reality cannot be relied upon to ground politics, to provide the answer to political discussion, and neither can politics be used to explain what is happening in a situation. “Ontological politics” speaks of politics from the point of view of an evolving and disputed experience in practice. To tell a story of the politics of a building project, ontological politics foregrounds thus not only the ways in which design practices perform and interfere, and in the field of possibility, but also the question of how the different realities of the building in different practices, relate, overlap,  This notion of ontological politics thus has resonances with Latour (2004d) and Stengers’s concept of cosmopolitics. This is Latour’s re-description of Stengers’s definition: “For her, the strength of one element checks any dulling in the strength of the other. The presence of cosmos in cosmopolitics resists the tendency of politics to mean the give-and-take in an exclusive human club. The presence of politics in cosmopolitics resists the tendency of cosmos to mean a finite list of entities that must be taken into account. Cosmos protects against the premature closure of politics, and politics against the premature closure of cosmos” (2004d: 454). 30

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and interfere with one another. It puts an emphasis on exploring the “differences […] between various enactments of a particular [object, e.g., the building]. Different ways of being, ways of doing the good” (Mol 2002: 175), and how these differences are managed and dealt within and across practices. It draws up a series of political questions that this book, in a way, encounters: how is the multiplicity and variability of the building dealt with in practice? What visions of “good” and “bad” architecture are enacted in practice? In the act of constituting one building, reaching “singularity,” what realities are pushed out and how does this happen in practice? In moments where differences in kind become differences in degree? When ontological differences are converted into differences of perspective, of perception, or appearance? Is it when political questions are translated into technical or designerly ones? How do the other ways of doing the building, or the realities of the building become invisible? This way of understanding politics is helpful for grasping the often-­ implicit politics of design as it seeks to describe politics within practices that are not expressly political in themselves. In her book, Five Ways to Make Architecture Political (2017), Yaneva has already provided a path to think through this. Through descriptions of different kinds of architectural practices, she outlines how, these practices have implicit political dimensions in their effects: politics “emerges and can be witnessed as we trace the transformation of objects, sites, urban publics and the multiple realities of a city” (2017: 6). Echoing Latour’s object-oriented politics, it is therefore neither embodied in buildings nor in the intentions of various professionals, but in the way in which architecture makes “a difference in how sociomaterial relations are forged” (2017: 166). This book also takes up this ambition by following how one building enters different practices as an object that exists in multiple ways, and as a building that is an entanglement of overlapping trajectories and realities that interfere with one another, drawing various actors together, constituting differences in their own sociomaterial relations. It is the existential incompleteness and ontological multiplicity that constitutes a locus of politics for the building. In the same way, then, that Mol argues that by putting politics and ontology together loosens the fixed ways in which realities seem, asking “is that politics” challenges the idea that there is only one way that a building can be done. There are variations of a building.

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This book builds upon these three ways of considering politics in a minor key, not to provide an answer, but to continue to ask the question “Is that politics?” It is interested in how a problematic assemblage and its common world simultaneously take shape within practices—and that it is important to continue to put questions of politics to these processes, to loosen them up and not take them for granted. In each chapter, “politics,” as an analytic, seeks to turn seemingly apolitical situations into situations that have politics, to give them a political tonality, and to highlight that design is not merely technical or neutral (while they may actively be made to seem that way) but has consequences for how a common world is drawn together. As both Cuff (1992) and Yaneva (2017) have noted, by exploring the ways in which a building’s conditions of existence are negotiated in practice through an empirical account can—perhaps—enable a better understanding of the ways in which architecture intervenes in the world.

1.8 Variations This book is an ethnographic study of a building project. It is about a building “in the making” and the practices through which a building is made. It is also about what it means to share in the act of creation across differences and the variations that a building takes within different practices. Finally, it asks whether these mundane practices have effects that could be called political. Yet, the book does not tell a complete or finished story. It does not have the ambition to tell the whole story of the life of the building—if that at all would be possible. Variations of a Building remains in the middle of the building’s making, in the middle of its practices and as they relate to one another and to others. Each chapter is organised as three different modes of drawing-together realities of the building across and through variations. While each of the practices are connected insofar as they are about the “same” building, a central thread through the book is not one of sameness but of variation. Chapter 2 begins in the middle of things. It is concerned with the complications of working-together—not just between different practices, but across a distribution of entities, devices, and contexts. The chapter

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begins with an “anaphoric list” of varieties of experience to flesh out some of the possible variations of the building. Through the practices of the structural engineers, and in a design team meeting, and alongside drawings and models, this chapter then follows the practices of folding and unfolding, of implication and explicitation, as modes of coordination in design. In this iterative, provisional, and collective task, we follow how the building is increasingly articulated, and through which its conditions of possibility are shaped, defined, and refined. At stake is to explore how a “common world” is drawn together through practices of design. What is included? Excluded? How is closure ever achieved in design? In Chap. 3, the focus shifts from a question of working-together to one of knowing uncertain objects in design, to design practices as epistemic practices of approximation. This is explored within the world of the acousticians and around the issues of sound and noise; it follows acousticians as they measure, simulate, and “realise” the future lived realities of sound and noise within the building and its soundscape. In three moments of design, approximations hold the future lived realities of the building as thinglike—with the hope that they will be there in the end. The chapter is also interested in how the design team can remain in proximity with one another, and their own realities, without overdetermination. If the previous chapter is interested in how the building is an issue not only in knowing something in common, but shaping a common world within which the building holds together, this chapter unpacks what it means not only to not know something yet, but the tensions of predicting and foreseeing a future lived reality of the building through sound and noise. Chapter 4 turns attention to those who will have to live with the building yet remain outside of the design process: publics. What are the public relations, the processes through which the building becomes relevant to a public, and what are architecture’s publics? This chapter is written as a detective’s investigation of Factory’s missing Public. It is interested in what it means for a public to appear and take shape and how this happens around a building project? What are the mediations, implements and settings needed for a public to form? At the same time, it traces how publics become ingredients in the building, and how a building becomes public without disturbance: what are the reciprocal entanglements between

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buildings and publics? While important in the previous chapters, the notion of solicitude—an important concept in the book—comes to the fore in this chapter: to explore how a building in the making holds together, less as a project, and more like a delicate foam. Chapter 5 functions as a conclusion to the book by reflecting on the concept of variation. It does not aim to provide a conclusive summary of the building project, of how it was built, or provide a general theory of architecture. Instead, it reflects on what it means for something to be incomplete, unfinished,  multiple, and in variation. This chapter highlights the importance of the concept of variation for architectureIn three ways: first, to highlight the ontological differences at stake in architecture—how the making of a building draws together variations of worlds, and the challenge of composing a common world within which it all fits together; second, the continuous variations of the building within the doings of architecture in practice; and third, the anaphoric variations through which a building “in the making” is able to maintain continuity through others that continue it (or not). Finally, rather than outline a definitive theory of what a building project is, or a theory of architecture from the point of view of a building “in the making,” it offers a reflection on how there is a way of composing a common world within the making of a building, one that is not guided by “truth” or by “creation,” but by “solicitude”: its success or failure—its conditions of felicity—turns around whether others continue it in existence, on whether there are variations of a building.

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Dutton, Thomas, and Lian Hurst Mann. 2000. Problems in Theorizing “The Political” in Architectural Discourse. Rethinking Marxism 12: 117–129. Färber, Alexa. 2020. Does ANT Help Us to Rethink the City and Its Promises? In The Routledge Companion to Actor-Network Theory, ed. Anders Blok, Ignacio Farías, and Celia Roberts, 264–272. London: Routledge. Farías, Ignacio, and Alex Wilkie, eds. 2016. Studio Studies: Operations, Topologies & Displacements. New York: Routledge. Gad, Christopher, and Casper Bruun Jensen. 2016. Lateral Concepts. Engaging Science, Technology, and Society 2: 3–12. Geertz, Clifford. 1973. The Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic Books. Gillespie, Tom, Isaac Rose, and Jonathan Silver. 2021. The Housing Crisis in Manchester, Capital of the ‘long 90s’. Verso. 24 June 2021. https://www.versobooks.com/en-­gb/blogs/news/5110-­the-­housing-­crisis-­in-­manchester-­ capital-­of-­the-­long-­90s. Accessed 15 June 2022. Girard, Monique, and David Stark. 2007. Socio-Technologies of Assembly: Sense-Making and Demonstration in Rebuilding Lower Manhattan. In Governance and Information: The Rewiring of Governing and Deliberation in the 21st Century, ed. D. Lazer and V. Mayer-Schoenberger, 145–176. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gomart, Émilie, and Maarten Hajer. 2003. Is That Politics? In Social Studies of Science and Technology: Looking Back, Ahead, ed. Bernard Joerges and Helga Nowotny, 33–61. Dordrecht: Springer. Goodman, Richard Alan, and Lawrence Peter Goodman. 1976. Some Management Issues in Temporary Systems: A Study of Professional Development and Manpower  – The Theatre Case. Administrative Science Quarterly 21 (3): 494–501. Graan, Andrew. 2022. What Was the Project? Thoughts on Genre and the Project Form. Journal of Cultural Economy 15 (6): 735–752. Grabher, Gernot. 2002. Cool Projects, Boring Institutions: Temporary Collaboration in Social Context. Regional Studies 36 (3): 205–214. ———. 2004. Temporary Architectures of Learning: Knowledge Governance in Project Ecologies. Organization Studies 25 (9): 1491–1514. Grubbauer, Monika. 2013. Architecture, Economic Imaginaries and Urban Politics: The Office Tower as Socially Classifying Device. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 38: 336–359. Gutman, Robert. 1988. Architectural Practice: A Critical View. New  York: Princeton Architectural Press.

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Hannerz, Ulf. 2003. Being There…and There…and There!: Reflections on Multi-Site Ethnography. Ethnography 40 (2): 201–216. Hansmann, Sabine. 2021. Monospace and Multiverse: Exploring Space with Actor-­ Network-­Theory. Bielefeld: Transcript. Henderson, Kathryn. 1998. Online and on Paper: Visual Representations, Visual Culture, and Computer Graphics in Design Engineering. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Heynen, Hilde. 2000. Architecture and Modernity: A Critique. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Houdart, Sophie, and Chihiro Minato. 2009. Kuma Kengo: An Unconventional Monograph. Paris: Editions Donner Lieu. Jacobs, Jane, and Peter Merriman. 2011. Practising Architectures. Social & Cultural Geography 12: 211–222. James, William. 1909. A Pluralistic Universe: Hibbert Lectures at Manchester College on the Present Situation in Philosophy. New  York: Longmans, Green, and Co. ———. 1912. Essays in Radical Empiricism. New  York: Longmans, Green, and Co. Jasanof, Sheila. 2003. Breaking the Waves in Science Studies. Comment on H.M. Collins and Robert Evans, ‘The Third Wave of Science Studies’. Social Studies of Science 33: 389–400. Jensen, Anders, Christian Thuesen, and Joana Geraldi. 2016. The Projectification of Everything: Projects as a Human Condition. Project Management Journal 47 (2): 21–34. Jessop, Bob, and Stijn Oosterlynck. 2008. Cultural Political Economy: On Making the Cultural Turn Without Falling into Soft Economic Sociology. Geoforum 39: 1155–1169. Joerges, Bernward. 1999a. Do Politics Have Artefacts? Social Studies of Science 29: 411–431. ———. 1999b. Scams Cannot Be Busted: Reply to Woolgar & Cooper. Social Studies of Science 29: 450–457. Jones, Paul R. 2006. The Sociology of Architecture and the Politics of Building: The Discursive Construction of Ground Zero. Sociology 40: 549–565. Kaika, Maria. 2011. Autistic Architecture: The Fall of the Icon and the Rise of the Serial Object of Architecture. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 29: 968–992. King, Anthony D. 2016. Notes Towards a Global Historical Sociology of Building Types. In Re-Shaping Cities: How Global Mobility Transforms

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Architecture and Urban Form, ed. M.  Guggenheim and O.  Söderström, 21–42. London: Routledge. Knorr-Cetina, K.D. 1981. The Manufacture of Knowledge: An Essay on the Constructivist and Contextual Nature of Science. Oxford: Pergamon Press. Krivý, Maroš, and Tahl Kaminer. 2013. Introduction: The Participatory Turn in Urbanism. Footprint 7 (2): 1–6. Kusno, Abidin. 2012. Rethinking the Nation. In The SAGE Handbook of Architectural Theory, ed. C.G. Crysler, S. Cairns, and H. Heynen, 213–230. London: Sage. Lahiji, Nadir. 2014. Architecture Against the Post-Political: Essays in Reclaiming the Critical Project. London: Routledge. Lapoujade, David. 1997. William James. Empirisme et pragmatism. Paris: PUF. ———. 2021 [2017]. The Lesser Existences. Étienne Souriau, an Aesthetics for the Virtual. Trans. Erik Beranek. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Latour, Bruno. 1993. We Have Never Been Modern. Trans. Catherine Porter. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. ———. 1996. Aramis, or The Love of Technology. Trans. Catherine Porter. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. ———. 1999a. On Recalling ANT. In Actor Network Theory and After, ed. John Law and John Hassard, 15–26. Oxford: Blackwell. ———. 1999b. Pandora’s Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. ———. 2004a. Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy. Trans. Catherine Porter. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. ———. 2004b. Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern. Critical Inquiry 30: 225–248. ———. 2004c. Which Politics for Which Artifacts? Domus 87: 51. ———. 2004d. Whose Cosmos, Which Cosmopolitics? Comments on the Peace Terms of Ulrich Beck. Common Knowledge 10: 450–462. ———. 2005a. From Realpolitik to Dingpolitik, or How to Make Things Public. In Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy, ed. Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel, 14–43. Cambridge MA: MIT Press. ———. 2005b. Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-­ Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. 2005c. “Thou Shall Not Freeze-Frame,” or How Not to Misunderstand the Science and Religion Debate. In Science, Religion, and the Human Experience, ed. J.D. Proctor, 27–48. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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———. 2008. A Cautious Prometheus? A Few Steps Toward a Philosophy of Design (with Special Attention to Peter Sloterdijk). http://www.bruno-­latour. fr/node/69. Accessed 7 Jan 2023. ———. 2010. An Attempt at a “Compositionist Manifesto”. New Literary History 41: 471–490. ———. 2013. An Inquiry into Modes of Existence: An Anthropology of the Moderns. Trans. Catherine Porter. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Latour, Bruno, and Steve Woolgar. 1986. Laboratory Life: The Construction of Scientific Facts. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Latour, Bruno, and Albena Yaneva. 2017. “Give Me a Gun and I will Make All Buildings Move”: An ANT’s View of Architecture. Ardeth 1: 103–111. Law, John. 2002. Aircraft Stories: Decentering the Object in Technoscience. Durham: Duke University Press. ———. 2004. After Method: Mess in Social Science Research. London: Routledge. Law, John, and Elisabeth Lien. 2012. Slippery: Field notes in Empirical Ontology. Social Studies of Science 43: 363–378. Lefebvre, Pauline. 2017. What Difference Could Pragmatism Have Made? From Architectural Effects to Architecture’s Consequences. Footprint 20: 23–36. ———. 2018. “What the Wood wants to do”: Pragmatist Speculations on a Response-able Architectural Practice. Architectural Theory Review 22 (1): 24–41. Lippmann, Walter. 1993 [1927]. The Phantom Public. New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers. Loukissas, Yanni. 2012. Co-designers: Cultures of Computer Simulation in Architecture. London: Routledge. Lynch, Michael, and Steve Woolgar. 1990. Representation in Scientific Practice. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Marcus, George E. 1995. Ethnography in/of the World System: The Emergence of Multi-Sited Ethnography. Annual Review of Anthropology 24: 95–117. Markus, T.A. 1987. Buildings as Classifying Devices. Environment and Planning B: Planning and Design 14: 467–484. ———. 1993. Buildings & Power: Freedom and Control in the Origin of Modern Building Types. London: Routledge. Marres, Noortje. 2007. The Issues Deserve More Credit: Pragmatist Contributions to the Study of Public Involvement in Controversy. Social Studies of Science 37: 759–780. ———. 2012. Material Participation: Technology, the Environment and Everyday Publics. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

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Marrs, Colin. 2015. No Architects on Manchester’s Factory Competition. Architects Journal. October 1. ttps://www.architectsjournal.co.uk/home/no-­ architects-­o n-­m anchesters-­f actory-­c ompetition-­j ury/8689762.article. Accessed 6 Aug 2020. Mihandoust, S. 2016. Misleading Innocence – Tracing What a Bridge Can Do. Video. Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montréal. Mol, Annemarie. 1999. Ontological Politics. A Word and Some Questions. The Sociological Review 47: 74–89. ———. 2002. The Body Multiple: Ontology in Medical Practice. Durham: Duke University Press. Murphy, Keith. 2004. Imagination as Joint Activity: The Case of Architectural Interaction. Mind, Culture and Activity 11: 267–278. ———. 2005. Collaborative Imagining: The Interactive Use of Gestures, Talk, and Graphic Representation in Architectural Practice. Semiotica 156: 113–145. Ockman, Joan, ed. 2000. The Pragmatist Imagination: Thinking About “Things in the Making”. New York: Princeton Architectural Press. Peck, Jamie, and Kevin Ward. 2002. City of Revolution: Restructuring Manchester. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Picon, Antoine. 2013. Ornament: The Politics of Architecture and Subjectivity. West Sussex: Wiley. Schön, Donald. 1983. The Reflective Practitioner: How Professionals Think in Action. London: Routledge. Sklair, Leslie. 2006. Iconic Architecture and Capitalist Globalization. City 10: 21–47. Sklair, Leslie, and Laura Gherardi. 2012. Iconic Architecture as a Hegemonic Project of the Transnational Class. City 16: 57–73. Sloterdijk, Peter. 2016. Spheres. Volume 3: Foams. Plural Spherology. South Pasadena: Semiotext(e). Souriau, Étienne. 2015 [2009]. The Different Modes of Existence. Trans. Erik Beranek and Tim Howles. Minneapolis: Univocal Publishing. Stark, David, and Verena Paravel. 2008. PowerPoint in Public: Digital Technologies and the New Morphology of Demonstration. Theory, Culture & Society 25 (2): 30–55. Stengers, Isabelle. 2005. Introductory Notes on an Ecology of Practices. Cultural Studies Review 11: 183–196. Stewart, Kathleen. 2011. Atmospheric Attunements. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 29: 445–453.

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Strathern, Marilyn. 2004. Partial Connections. Updated Edition. Oxford: Altamira Press. Swyngedouw, Eric. 2011. Designing the Post-Political City and the Insurgent Polis. London: Bedford. Till, Jeremy. 2009. Architecture Depends. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Vale, Lawrence. 1992. Architecture, Power and National Identity. New Haven: Yale University Press. Vinck, Dominique, ed. 2003. Everyday Engineering: An Ethnography of Design and Innovation. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Wainwright, Oliver. 2019. Welcome to Manc-hattan: How the City Sold Its Soul for Luxury Skyscrapers. The Guardian. October 21. Weiseman, Leslie. 1994. Discrimination by Design: A Feminist Critique of the Man-Made Environment. Chicago: University of Illinois Press. Whitehead, Alfred North. 1920. The Concept of Nature. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press. ———. 1938. Science and the Modern World. London: Pelican Books. Williams, Jennifer. 2017. A £110m Arts Centre Dubbed ‘Guggenheim of the North’ Will Be Built. Manchester Evening News. January 12. https://www. manchestereveningnews.co.uk/news/greater-­manchester-­news/110m-­arts-­ centre-­dubbed-­guggenheim-­12445605. Accessed 6 Aug 2020. Wilson, Japhy, and Eric Swyngedouw. 2014. The Post-Political and Its Discontents: Spaces of Depoliticization, Spectres of Radical Politics. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Winner, Langdon. 1980. Do Artifacts Have Politics? Daedalus 109: 121–236. Woolgar, Steve, and Geoff Cooper. 1999. Do Artefacts Have Ambivalence? Moses’ Bridges, Winner’s Bridge and Other Urban Legends in S&TS. Social Studies of Science 29: 433–449. Woolgar, Steve, and Javier Lezaun. 2013. The Wrong Bin Bag: A Turn to Ontology in Science and Technology Studies? Science, Technology & Human Values 32: 619–626. ———. 2015. Missing the (Question) Mark? What Is a Turn to Ontology? Social Studies of Science 45: 462–467. Wynne, Brian. 1996. May the Sheep Safely Graze? A Reflexive View on the Expert-Lay Knowledge Divide. In Risk, Environment and Modernity: Towards a New Ecology, ed. S.  Lash, B.  Szersyznski, and B.  Wynne, 44–82. London: Sage. Yaneva, Albena. 2005a. Scaling Up and Down: Extraction Trials in Architectural Design. Social Studies of Science 38: 867–894.

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2 Coordinations

2.1 Varieties of Building Imagine the rendering of Factory. Under a blue Mancunian sky, there stands a static building, completed, resting seamlessly in its site. Everything is in place. There are people standing outside, gazing upwards, probably admiring it. What does this image do? When this image was released (in 2018), construction was just beginning. There was nothing there yet but the previous site—Granada Studios. Empty warehouses. Derelict streets. Is the image a representation? But of what? Not the building—perhaps an idea, a hope, a promise, or a future? In the absence of the building, the image as a rendering is also a projection. A projection, perhaps, of a completely defined conception of the building. One that leaps over and detaches itself from the messiness of design—an image that precedes but also, simultaneously, comes after design and construction (Evans 1996); it argues for a composition of the building that fits within Manchester. While there is a lot of work involved in the making of such renderings (Houdart 2008), it has a rhetorical status: it aims to convince. This building will appear there. It circulates through the media, on blogs and online forums, in public presentations and in planning © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2023 B. Mommersteeg, Variations of a Building, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-6802-2_2

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documentation. However, in the design team it rarely appears. Instead, the building takes on other forms. There are other ways in which the building exists and is rendered visible, experienceable, knowable, and manipulable. There are variations of a building.

What ifs? It has been raining in Manchester for weeks now. That’s not unbelievable. It’s perfectly believable. Actually, it is a possibility. The rain erodes the surface soil and rock. Day after day rain, and day after day more rock and surface material continues to wash away. Erode. Eventually, the layers of the surface collapse into a void, a cavity underground. A cavity that was not visible before—a cavity that they did not imagine could be there; it was not possible, not believable that this could happen. As this cavity opens up, the building’s foundations and structure buckles. Part of it falls into the now large sinkhole. Eventually, it collapses entirely. The concrete façade, the steel and concrete structure, the walls, the floor, nothing holds. They all buckle towards that sinkhole, weight collapsing on weight, loads upon loads. Thankfully, nobody was in the building when this happened. Luckily, nobody was hurt. Because this did not really happen. Standing in front of a whiteboard in the office of the structural engineers, an engineer continues: what if a lorry is driving along Water Street, and it loses control and crashes into one of the load-bearing columns that comes down on the side of the street. What happens, then? Or, what if there is a gas-pipe explosion on the ground floor and fire spreads down a corridor. Do the steel frames and trusses melt? How do you get everybody out in time? What are the consequences of this? These also did not really happen. But they could happen, he explains. Or rather, they have only happened digitally in a stick-and-node model. We can watch each event: sticks that mimic the behaviour of the structure of the building—its bare bones—collapse. Carlos, the engineer whose task is to model these risk scenarios, tells me he is “drawing pictures of what could happen.” Possible scenarios. Risks. “What ifs.” These are all risk scenarios that are modelled, calculated, played out. Carlos

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needs to see whether these possibilities, these risks, are proportionate or disproportionate. Are they risks that can exist within the future building, or are they something that need to be designed away? Are the consequences worth it or not? Is this particular “what if ” scenario a residual risk, something that they can accept within the building? And if so, what are the steps needed in the event that it happens in order to mitigate it? If this column goes, does the concrete slab also fall? How do you calculate the “goods” and the “bads” of specific risks? How much of the “bads” can you accept? You are never going to have a risk-free building after all. Like ethnologists, in front of these models, risk scenarios, calculations, the engineers study the behaviour of the building. Its loads, tensions, torsions, deflections. The way it behaves if this “what if ” scenario would happen. “We have to avoid,” he says, “the idea that the Factory is a house of cards.”

Triangles How do you make decisions in a building project? How do you have some assurance that you will be making the right decision? You need to set up constraints, I am told. You need to have some sort of grounding to do that—to assess decisions that are made. For instance, seating in a theatre. You may be given options. You want to have seats that can be removed quite quickly from a theatre—to transform a seating arrangement to a standing arrangement. There are options: there is one bespoke, well-designed, but requires a lot of trucks to  be taken away; or you can have “bleachers” but they give the impression of being wobbly, noisy, squeaky—they are big, impractical; or, there are temporary seating systems from “Europe”—they are more expensive, but they come with a warranty; they can be tested and experienced already. You can see how absorptive they are, their comfort, their durability, and so on. The theatre consultants argue for the first option, the architects are unsure. And the client? How do you decide? There is a triangle that helps organise the process, it seems.

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A representative from the client of Factory draws a triangle overtop of a napkin (Fig. 2.1). It is an equilateral triangle with a T, C, and Q at each of the points. T = Time; C = Costs; Q = Quality. You measure each decision against these three points. Later, I learn that it is called a Project Management Triangle. She tells me that this is a “universal” truth for making decisions in projects. Albeit, qualified: it only really works in ideal situations. Ideally, it works if each of the three points are equally weighted: that’s a good decision. Factory, she explains, though, is different. She draws another “triangle” for Factory. One that she notes is closer to its “see-saw of uncertainty,” one that she refers to as “wonky” (Fig. 2.2). There is a myriad of other things to consider: reputation, business impact, buildability, market pressure, inflation, politics, local councillors, the redevelopment of a neighbourhood, and so on. There are many other risks and consequences behind each decision. She draws another triangle that seeks to manage decisions that are a little more complicated: one that approaches the zigzag-­like character of this terrain of uncertainty. What I find peculiar about this triangle is the gap at the top. It is open-­ ended as if decisions rarely reach “closure.” As if each decision hangs open; they do not come back full circle. What is this loose-thread at the top—a wandering line? A thread for others to grasp and continue the decision elsewhere? Or a risk that it will all come apart?

Fig. 2.1  Equilateral Project Management Triangle. (Redrawn by Author)

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Fig. 2.2  “Wonky” Project Management Triangle. (Redrawn by Author)

How to Time a Building I was told that “timing is everything.” When I first met Anne, an architect from OMA on the project, she explained to me that the project was on pause. There was a “hiatus.” A disruption to the continuity of project. Why? In 2017, decisions could not be made about the costs of the design, and everything had to be re-­ evaluated: a substantial change in the design that also required them to go through the planning process in Manchester once more. Everything was, in a way, out of joint. A major challenge for this building—but also for all large-scale, complex kinds of building projects—is the challenge of “parallel and sequential design.” Design happens in parallel, but also in a sequence. How do you know that you are designing the same building at the same time? The mechanical engineers, for instance, may be designing with an older version of the building—a version of the building that has not been updated—while structure is being designed alongside an updated version of the architectural design. In other words, there may be multiple buildings being designed at once. How do you avoid this? How do you ensure everyone works on the same building? On the one hand, it is unavoidable. On the other hand, to periodically ensure that things are on time

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and that everyone gets onto the same timeline they  often “freeze” the building in the 3D Revit model; it is frozen, cut out of the movement of the project, so that everyone can update their own models, or at least, take stock of the changes. Another tactic is to get a “view from above,” a “view from the moon,” or what Donna Haraway calls the “the God trick” (1988). But this is not easy. “From the moon,” one of the acousticians told me, “all building projects seem more or less similar,” but “if you look from the earth, then they are all really different.” One way that they get this moon-vision of the project is through the Royal Institute of British Architect’s or RIBA’s Plan of Work. It provides a framework used in the UK: it literally frames the work that needs to be done. Everything is parcelled into little packages of labour, time, and cost. A way to provide “temporal consistency,” to order everything into a linear timeline. It parcels time out. As an engineer said, “it helps them work backwards from a milestone.” They can begin to parcel out time. Every office has an Excel sheet too where the scheduling takes place. You can see the temporality of the project divvied. It provides a “descriptive ordering” to what should happen in the future. The project is maintained here. Time’s arrow gains a direction. At the same time, these “milestones” provide opportunities for reflection. At the end of each “stage” of the Plan of Work, they submit and exchange reports. The reports allow them to “capture a roadmap” of what they have done, to put into narrative form what decisions they made, to map and make sense of what happened: “Made decisions are in the report along with the traces of the process of reaching that made decision.” These reports too perform the continuity of the project, its linearity. It helps them to sync back up, to get back on time with one another. Like the RIBA Plan of Work, which provides a moon-view of the future of the project, to see its horizon, reports allow them to accumulate and archive the past. Every fortnight the model and design process are “frozen.” The past and the future meet here in the present where everything can be re-­ assessed, and everyone can get back on track. Time begins again. This is important for them: to make sure that the project continues in and on time. That everything moves on.

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“We have to be careful,” an engineer says, “otherwise we’re always chasing our tail.” A quick theory for timing a building: ( 1) it is either out of joint (2) or frozen; (3) linear (4) or turning in a circle, a spiral.

A Thermal Vision of a Building One morning I am shown another model of the building. The building is transformed into intensive globs of colour, green, blue, red, yellow. It is a computational fluid dynamics model that allows them to visualise how the building-qua-fluid flows. In this case it tells them something about how the future building will be sensed according to temperature: each colour indicates the temperature of the air, hot or cold, in various intensive variations according to the hue of the colours. It gives them what Nicole Starosielski (2019) calls “thermal vision,” a way to see how particular temperatures would feel like in the building by a (generic) body. In other words, it becomes a means to perceive the future building, or rather, to perceive how other bodies would sense the building as either hot or cold. From vision to a bodily experience of temperature to hearing and sound, what happens to the building as it crosses each of these modalities of sensing and experiencing a future building? How do they cross the gap between the perceptions of colours qua temperature on the model to those experiences in the future building? What happens in between? How do you cross that gap between now and then?

A Building is a Knot of (Dilatation) Lines In Eindhoven, a trained architect but a working acoustician is re-drawing coloured lines  (Fig. 2.3). These lines are important. They index—in a

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circuitous manner—the way in which the building will sound. They are called “dilatation lines” or “dilation” lines. Traced over the 2D plans of the Factory, each line has a specific colour that indicates different acoustic performance specifications for a particular material. Red = 200  mm acoustic absorption rate; or yellow = 50 mm. The lines are traced over the walls, partitions, doors, windows, structural elements, connections, and facades of the building, almost acoustically sealing each room, volume, and void. Joanna spends a lot of her time taking care and maintaining these lines. After studying them for a few minutes one morning, she sighs: “It’s difficult to keep up. The Revit model is always a week ahead of the DWG files.” DWG files are her AutoCAD drawings. The Revit model is the centralised digital model that the design team contributes to. The DWG files are those that she is tracing overtop. The building she explains has “shifted a few metres” over the past week since the last time she re-drew

Fig. 2.3  Joanna maintains a digital file of dilatation lines. (Source: Author)

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the lines. It has moved. She has to correct the dilatation lines that have shifted with the building  and make sure that everything still “makes sense.” That everything is still in place. But this “everything” is more than just the lines themselves. On the one hand, the building behaves strangely through the digital files. It is deceptive. It is difficult to read the building through them, to imagine the 3D building from the 2D drawings. Is this a wall or a floor? Is it a structural element? Is it a door or a window? It is hard she explains to look through the floors, the doors and walls on a 2D plan. In one instance, it seems like a door has gone missing. There used to be a short perpendicular line crossing through another line to indicate a door, but now it is gone. It seems to have gone missing in the shift from week to week. But the simple lines are in themselves quite “complicated.” There is a lot implicated or implied by them. While on the plan themselves, they are simplifications of a complex acoustic calculation (as Joanna tells me), simplified into a “single number” and “colours” to help communicate the information, there is a lot more behind them. Bits and pieces of other realities merged together. For instance, on one of the plans there is a green line that passes over a black line to indicate that the façade of the building is supposed to perform at a higher level than those elements represented by blue lines. This façade faces a street and a nearby railway line, whereas those in blue face elsewhere less acoustically sensitive. In order to establish the performance specification needed for that green façade, however, they did measurements. They measured motorcycles and trucks passing below a bridge, and trains passing along a railway line. And yet, they did this all in Eindhoven. They did not need to travel all the way to Manchester. They only need to find a similar “acoustic” situation: to find a context with the same types of noise and infrastructure. A context that approximates those in Manchester. But these lines are also materialised in another way that needs to be taken into account. They will become different kinds of products: wool, moss, gypsum board. Different kinds of doors, with variable thicknesses, rubber flaps to cover holes, ceiling tiles, cross-laminated timber walls, and so on. Each of these materials are tested if they have not already been tested with their performance specifications already stored  in their database.

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Deceptively simple, these lines are indeed dilated. They assemble even more: a collective of noise samples, software, paperwork, measurements, simulations, traffic noise, materials and products, specifications, data. There are also the principles of physics, mathematical formulae, the coefficients of the absorptive materials, nR curves, the physiology of the human ear, ISO standards that outline experimental methodologies. Yet these, in themselves, do not define the specificity of the line (hidden behind the simplicity of the colour and the number). There are also the client’s aspirations, architect’s aesthetic criteria and desires, city council regulations, assumptions of what a “good” soundscape is like, land value of the neighbourhood. Every fortnight, Jonna’s task is to hold all this together. To make sure that everything continues to make sense together. To make sure that the “boundary conditions,” as the acousticians call them, are there and that the building will continue to sound the same despite its variations. Every fortnight, Joanna comes into the office in the morning and adds another layer to her Illustrator file. She corrects and maintains the dilatation lines, holding the building together, holding the way it sounds together, through a knot of dilatation lines. *** Travelling from site to site, following the building in the process of being made, there is more to encounter than the rendering. There are other images, models, sketches, drawings, and documents. “What if ” scenarios, triangles, colourful globs of heat and cold, reports and plans, and knots of lines. Discarded sketches, piles of “mark-ups” that contain traces of the design work, notations over drawings expressing negotiations, folders of emails, overstuffed notebooks, whiteboards full of diagrams, snippets of a 3D model, infinite chains of emails, schedules and timelines that evoke that wandering line. There are lines drawn in Illustrator, meetings in small rooms, tracings over printouts, drawings tidied and shared. These are all variations of the building. In the rest of this chapter, I am interested in the question of how all these bits and pieces of reality are sometimes held together with the help of drawings, reports, models, and talk.

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Is there something that holds them all together? How do the different practices work together? How are the various professional worlds calibrated within the shared project? How is a “common world” established at all? This chapter follows the design team as they work on what they call “issues of coordination.” In the first section, we follow a truss as it is sketched, gathers traces, and begins to take shape within the practices of the structural engineers; and then, we see how a building element is added to the 3D model, and in the process, loses these traces. We will then visit a design team meeting as a containment tray is multiplied in the process of a collective articulation of an issue of coordination. Ever-present, the Revit model is a main character in this chapter. It seems to be an avatar of a common world or referent that holds the building together, provisionally. As sometimes it is frozen, unquestioned, and extracted from, while at other times it is questioned, clashing, out of joint.

2.2 Implication 1: Assembling a Truss On an early morning in Bath, I’ve travelled to the structural engineers’ office to see how Factory takes shape there.1 It is already well-lit. Everyone is at their computers, clicking, speaking softly through their headsets. I meet Jonas, the Revit technician; he is navigating through the 3D model of Factory on one of his computer screens as if it were Google Maps. He introduces me to the world of the structural engineer through this 3D model, clicking and dragging dotted lines, cutting into the model, narrowing into specific views with a speed that is difficult to keep up with. While this happens, my attention is also captured and distracted by the 2D plans that are scattered around him, piled upon one another. They are  For Factory, there is a distribution of labour for the structural engineers in this office: five engineers and two Revit technicians. The tasks are divvied up between them. There is also another office of structural engineers working on Factory in Leeds. The Bath team works on the Theatre element of the building while the Leeds office has another team that works on the Warehouse element They are often in communication as the two elements are not structurally distinct—to their dismay. This often causes issues of coordination: how do you move one aspect of the Theatre without causing issues in the Warehouse when they are not structurally distinct?

1

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Fig. 2.4  An example of a mark-up. (Source: Author)

covered with colourful annotations. The one on top is covered in red, blue, and green marks (Fig. 2.4). Jonas tells me that these are his instructions, given to him by the engineers. “Can we extend view to show slab edge.” “Label ground beam.” “Don’t Show Small Nib. Make Push.” They are “mark-ups.” Piles and piles stack up on each desk throughout the office, and he goes through hundreds—or thereabouts—each week. During my time here, everything passes through these mark-ups on their way to the 3D Revit model. It is an important process through which the building takes shape. There are two different “mark-up” processes. One is for “grading” or “reviewing” existing designs. It is to make sure that all the information— the health and safety regulations, the sizes, loads, dimensions, material properties, construction sequencing—is there. The other is their own design development—analysis, changing sizes, specifying what goes where, the connection forces. This is increasingly intense in the later

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stages of the design process. As the design is more detailed in Stage 4 of the Plan of Work, the information on the drawings and exchanged changes, the 3D model exchanges occur more frequently, and changes become increasingly difficult to make as aspects of the design become “fixed” and “immovable.” As the building becomes more complicated, there is more and more coordination: we’re kind of trying to fit in our steel work and work harder than we normally would to work out where we can put it without making a change for BDP [MEP] and OMA [architecture]. So, we were having to be very cognisant of what they were doing, and not just what is in their 3D model, but also to know what they were about to do, or what they talked about in 2D drawings.

Talking through drawings is important: it is how information is exchanged, possibilities explored, where drawings act as portals into the other realities of the building and the other worlds gathered in the design team. One way they do this is to work off the existing 3D model. They print out screenshots and draw on tracing paper overtop to “interrogate” as they say the architectural and mechanical alongside their own model. They want to figure out “where [they] can put [their] stuff in a way that does not clash with the others,” as one of the engineers told me. Let’s follow one mark-up process to see how a structural element reaches the 3D model (and thus the rest of the design team), paying specific attention to the ways in which the visuals talk.2 James begins to work on a mark-up of what he calls the North Box Truss (NBT). A box truss is a piece of the structure composed of beams that cut across horizontal beams diagonally. This one sits atop the Truck Lift on the Theatre side of Factory and has been made a priority by the architects. We learn this from James in a small internal meeting around a round table in the centre of the office. The steel package will be tendered in a few weeks, and it still must be sent to external reviewers for review; time is therefore very  This process, for the sake of clarity, will be simplified into a narrative account that follows steps. But the process itself is messier—with feedback loops, meetings, and more meetings, modelling, and re-modelling, in a nonlinear manner. While we do not witness the entire formation of the truss, this partial account provides a segment of its articulative process and growth. 2

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Fig. 2.5  James tracing a truss overtop a print-out. (Source: Author)

constrained. But before that can happen, before it is modelled in an analysis model, it needs to be sketched, developed, and marked up. Here is James at his desk (Fig. 2.5). He navigates through the Revit model and mentions that his favourite tool is the “snippet tool,” which he can use to create snapshots of the model. He does this for the NBT and prints off three copies. They have already gone over this issue on the NBT several times with the acousticians and architects; he reviews his notes from phone calls and a diagram he sketched during the conversation. He explains that the complex sculptural form of the theatre causes a lot of problems for coordination: the geometry of the structure is confusing, acoustics is leaking all over the place, and needs to be contained without disturbing the architects’ desired form. Hunched over the three copies,

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with his markers, he reviews the existing design alongside the other models in the Revit model. This process, as he points out, is not an isolated one, but is ultimately a “result of coordination with other people,” meaning that he draws alongside the others, seeing how they have articulated the problem around the NBT through their own drawings—but also to determine how they approached it, what are their concerns, what is important for them? This is the problem. Originally the truss spanned from one point, ‘A,’ to a second point, ‘B,’ but now had to span much further, from ‘B’ to ‘C,’ and this had not been developed earlier on in the design process. It had been left in an incomplete state, however, on purpose. This is common in the design process. On the one hand, it is just a result of the design process: the level of detail in the model grows as the design develops through time, and as a result, the building inevitably changes. The NBT had for a period of time remained in the model as a placeholder: set until further notice. On the other hand, the building itself had changed over time. The previous summer there was a value engineering exercise, and a series of workshops with other theatre directors in the UK, and it was decided, to save on costs and to improve the “experience” of the theatre, to shrink it. It went from 1500 seats to 1200, for instance. This had several “knock-on effects”: constraining the ductwork in the “soffit,” challenging the limits of the business plan for MIF, the aesthetic vision of the architects, and also, the structure of the theatre. This is not uncommon during the design development stage as conceptual drawings are increasingly actualised and tested in another set of relations according to other constraints, as the building, itself, is increasingly defined within other practices. However, spanning it is challenging, he explains, as it must be coordinated with acoustics and the architectural model. They need a beam that travels from the truss to join up and rest on a concrete slab, but since these elements cannot be connected for acoustic reasons, there needs to be a rubber mat for acoustic separation, and a bracket, that consists of strong springs, to stop vibrations from travelling from the panels on the side of the building to the steel frame. Thinking aloud, he says that he could remove the bracket, but this would upset the architectural design and the bracket design that the architects have finalised and belaboured over. Or, he could not have the column sitting on the truck lift, but have

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the column go all the way to the ground. Again, out loud: but does this affect the architectural model? He opens it up on Revit. “There is a door on the floor below,” he grimaces. He could ask the architect to change it, but that may take more time. There are also other floors and doors in the way. Conversing with a colleague, they agree that not loading the structure on the truck lift and finding a column that goes down to the ground, might be the “lesser of two evils” for distributing the load.3 He takes his print outs of the 3D model to begin marking them up. Unpacking his coloured markers, he begins to trace over the 3D model. This, in his words, is “drawing without calculations.” Or, again, as he explains: “the tracing paper over, that was a 3D sketch, a hand sketch. We had a screenshot, printed out on A3 paper, A3 tracing paper and then doodling and sketching over it, scrunching it up, throwing it, getting another one, getting the next one done, you go through a dozen sheets of paper with different ideas and kind of whittle it down to our favourite one that is the solution.” He does not have his calculator out as analysis will be done later in Rhino. Instead, in a strange kind of sketching, he slowly and precisely draws lines. Carefully, he follows the existing markings on the print-out, tracing what is there, and then, pausing, he searches for another way to continue the truss. The “sketch” is informed by the conditions on the print-out; he is drawing-with the constraints and conditions that overlaps with the truss. He opens emails, looks at other sketches drawn during meetings, diagrams sent by the acousticians. It overlaps with the architectural form, the truck lift, the dilatation lines, building materials with specific acoustic properties, and the realities that these also draw together. He tells me that he can read from it the relatively fixed elements that have settled in the 3D model. Through the tracing paper, the snippet is a means of making present the existing constraints, which, here, enable the exploratory sketching: sketching as a way to stretch, undo, and provisionally move beyond what has already been articulated and settled in the design.4 Sketches, in other words, help to  Loads are pressures placed on the structure that may cause displacement of the structure. There are dead loads and live loads. The former is relevant in this case as it refers to the structure’s own weight. 4  See Horst Bredekamp (2004) for a discussion on Frank Gehry’s drawings as they relate to conditions and constraints. See also Yarrow (2019: 120–122) for a reflection on the sketches of architects as practices that loosen up these conditions and constraints to explore possibilities. 3

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loosen up the fixed conditions and constraints, previous stabilities, to stretch these realities into a provisional space of possibility. There is also a process of layering in this sketching—an accumulation of the design. The tracing paper literally allows the two buildings (the architectural and the structural) to overlap. We can see that the truss does not happen on a tabula rasa, but in relation to a multitude of other drawings, models, diagrams, meetings, and emails—it happens amongst crumpled sketches that accumulate around him on the desk, various false starts, negotiations in meeting rooms, the previously designed truss, and the other models sitting in the 3D model. His concern is to have it, as he says, connect with the architect’s model and avoid clashes. Ideally, they want to find a solution that remains invisible to the other members of the design team. That it does not clash.5 Therefore, sketching or tracing here is not a free-hand drawing; or a “representation” of an idea. What is more important is whether it is coordinated with the other ways in which the building exists as the truss takes shape in relation to the other elements of the building and its realities. Sketching is an important first step as it is a way to explore different possibilities without the fixed nature of other ways of modelling the building.6 One aspect that he tests through the sketch is different arrangements of beams and kinds of load distribution. Does this work? No. What about this? No. How about this one? Yes, that works. But it clashes with the floor. Okay. Begin again. He sketches three versions of the NBT. One: the truss goes up and sits on a “fold;” he discards it. Two: “there is one big plane.”. “But the verticals and compression are too far, and the large truss is too tall.” Not right. Three: he decides to move onto another scenario: up to level 05 of the Theatre, where he can change the truss to align with the core, a truss that cuts across some of the “ribs” of the theatre,  But sometimes they want to be visible. They flag up elements of the design to the others with dotted lines and notations. They provide references: “Refer to architect’s drawing.” Or: “Refer to D5-Stage 3.” They find means of including elements that are not visible in the drawing to avoid things from going missing amongst all the layers. Before they finalise it, they need to consult and coordinate it with the architects. One way is through the model and drawings themselves. 6  See Alder (1998) for discussions of sketching in engineering and how they relate to other ways of drawing. The sketch, mark-up, scribble are methods of exploring the possible in a world “in the making.” See Jullien (2012), Rheinberger (2010), Souriau (2015 [2009]), and Yarrow (2019) for discussions of the ontology of sketches and scribbles in practice. 5

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Fig. 2.6  Three variations of the north box truss traced. (Source: Author)

horizontal beams that support the vertical beams (the “structure”). He is testing the behaviours of the trusses, following the lines of the beams on the drawing, seeing where they lead, what they connect to. As James later says, the process of sketching and tracing is “experimenting, trying lots of different problem-solving. Eventually we get somewhere that works fine, and the problem’s always a bit of a compromise.” That last word—com-­ pro-­mise—he stretches it out, as if in emphasis, or, perhaps, in frustration (Fig. 2.6). In the end, the third variation wins: a beam that provides continuity through the inner truss, misses a door in the architectural model, and continues to another truss. They rest on a single rib for support and provides compression between the floors. But with what is it a compromise? As James explains, the process of designing the truss takes you “down all these alleyways where you work out how you get towards a solution to make your truss span further,” you’re also “having to investigate a lot of things in parallel”—it is never simply the single element, the NBT, in isolation. There are “so many other facts that are influencing every decision that are not necessarily driven by analysis.” On the one hand, there are the other concerns from the design team. The truss must reach the “outer framework,” but the pre-cast stairs, in the architectural model, get in the way; and, if they try another way, the truck lift is in the way. The truck lift and the truss, moreover, must be acoustically separated. But the acoustic separator, a rubber mat, needs uniform pressure, and a pin—it cannot be bolted to the rubber as this weakens the acoustic separation, but this, in turn, restricts the stability of the truss itself. It overlaps with various other aspects of the building that

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Fig. 2.7  Factory in Robot. (Source: Author)

makes it complicated to change—a fragile web of relations, a series of alleyways that open to other possibilities. It also, on the other hand, passes through other arrangements within the office itself; another engineer, Oliver, tests the stability of the truss in a finite-element analysis model, a stick-node diagram, in Robot (Fig. 2.7). This, as Oliver says, is to see what happens structurally—how it stands up and connects with other structural elements. Does it hold? But “this model is like a fiction.” It is “an idealised, simplified example” that requires interpretation to read other aspects out of it: what about the wind? How many people will stand on this floor at one point in time? What about other weight that comes from materials that this truss will support? What about the structural and material properties of the steel,

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the torsions, and loads that impress upon it? Interpreting the stick-and-­ node model is a way to add reality to it by imagining how it would behave in real possible scenarios. While this model does not show the truss’s actual behaviour in concreto, it puts it within another context through which it takes on another life. After Oliver, it continues to travel where it takes shape within another context. Here, it visits Simon (Fig. 2.8), who also tests the performance of the truss. He applies what he calls a principle—more or less, how it should behave—by using an excel spreadsheet that simplifies the calculations that are based on a set of EuroCodes;7 the equations are already embedded into the spreadsheet. He then prepares a technical report that ensures a level of “accountability,” as he says, in case something goes

Fig. 2.8  Simon calculating a building. (Source: Author)

 EuroCodes are a set of building codes that provide a common approach for the design of buildings in Europe. Here, the reference is EN 1993, which applies to the design of steel structures. 7

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wrong. This report is sent to an external review by other engineers and accompanies the NBT throughout the rest of its travels into the “End of Stage report,” to an external reviewer, and saved in a folder on their company’s cloud.8 Eventually, it returns to James to draft it in AutoCad with precise measurements, annotations, and mark-ups, to gather all of the notes together, for Jonas to add to the Revit model. The truss is not isolated because it exists as a composition full of references, reviews, reports, supporting arguments, conditions, constraints, parameters—these “other facts,” as he says—to ensure that it holds up, remains stable, and gathers support. Following the truss, we can see how it comes into existence within an “ecology of constraints” (Bucciarelli 1994). It is shaped within different demands, values and concerns that are given by the rest of the design team, the client, but also other facts that come from elsewhere. There are social realities that are embedded in the EuroCodes, standards of safety, a “social responsibility” that will be judged through the external review and by the Building Control in Manchester to which they must prove that the building is structurally sound under certain hypothetical situations—“what if” scenarios. But it also needs to fit within the client’s budget and in the fluctuations of the steel market. It carries with it all these different bits and pieces—traces of these realities that overlap through the truss. The truss overflows. It comes to exist within a long trajectory of concerns, constraints, materials, structural forces, and regulations that are “worked-with” rather than simply abided by. It is a compromise, in other words, between other facts and other realities, that are implicated into its existence. Through this process of tracing, reviewing, sketching, modelling, layering, and making sure that everything overlaps and is coordinated, the truss holds together and exists—or not, and requires another series of sketches. Yet, neither James with his sketches over tracing paper, nor Oliver in the Robot model are translating an idea from the “mind’s eye”  There are three kinds of external reviews. First, they simply check the commentaries and review the process, the methods, philosophy, to ensure that everything was done correctly. They do not need to double check the calculations. Second, they do calculation checks. Third, there is an independent team that will take the reports, the client’s brief, the architectural model, 2D drawings, and build a completely separate model to check the loading, design the elements, compare the models, and see if they get the same answer. They check its replicability. For Factory, they have only done the first two checks so far. He assumes there will be a “category three” check. 8

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or analysing the structure abstractly. Rather than a kind of “register” of perception, the truss in its various forms is something else: it exists within an act of composition, an assembling of bits and pieces of different realities that overlap and fit together. It is one variation of the building that implicates varied entities, contexts and constraints that overlap with one another, but also a coalition of concerned actors and professionals that, together, hold the truss in place. Following it as it moves in and out of different contexts, taking on different forms, it is continuously redefined and co-ordinated. Within these seemingly prosaic moments of design, the conditions of possibility of the building are not simply given but are open and negotiable—actively shaped. It “holds together” immanently as they work-with one another. A reciprocal process: the conditions of its possibility (context, concerns, demands, standards, physical properties of steel, budget) emerge at the same time as what is conditioned (the truss). This process thereby adds something to what was already there. (To get a more complete picture, we would not only need to travel upstream but also downstream to follow how it was imagined and conceptualised, and how the truss continued to change, or how it was able to be held in place, as the design of the building is modified; at the same time, we would need to travel into other practices to see how the truss constrained their own designs, how it took on a different life in their practices.) This assembling of the truss differentiates the fibre of the building’s composition; while they try to minimise the effects, there are inevitably knock-on effects that re-shape everything that was already assembled. As the truss travels from the sketches into models, analyses, and reviews, and then eventually added to the 3D model from an AutoCad draft, it is assembled into an “object,” something thinglike, that exists insofar as it remains coordinated across a network of concerned actors and professionals that it brings together. However, each of the practices of the design team assemble varying realities. For instance, in the acousticians’ office and the engineers’ office, the dilatation line and the NBT each articulate a different assemblage of Factory, different ways of contextualising the building from within practice. There are different trajectories of sound and structure, full of

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materials, technologies, devices, and realities that are intertwined at different places, overlapping. These differently configured realities with their own variables also have different functions: one produces sound, the other holds the building up. But the dilatation line and the NBT are not only that. This also points us to a problem: there are variations of a building that nevertheless overlap. How do they relate to one another without a common referent? How is continuity achieved across the design team?

2.3 Implication 2: Assembling a Common Referent Still within the office of the structural engineers, there is an important step in the mark-up process: adding the truss into the digital 3D model. And, if there is something that is continuous within each design team it is the 3D model. Amidst the variables, varying entities, instruments, devices, and concerns, it is one constant. Colourful with lines, volumes, walls, specific details like doors, chairs, an orchestra pit, a truck lift, the material properties of elements, the programme and construction drawings, the 3D model is a composite: everything is there, intertwined, implicated, interdependent. One change here, reverberates elsewhere. All their design work ends up there, shared and communicated; each design team (except the acousticians) have their own way of adding to it. As a centralised site through which everything passes, is held, and contained (a kind of “database” for the project), it is another place where Factory takes form. As George, one of the structural engineers, notes the “3D model is like the manifestation of all the work into one crystallised form.” It is a crystallisation of all the relations and traces accumulated in each practice into a single visible form. It acts as an avatar through which the building manifests and is embodied. As Tom, an architect from OMA, explains, it allows them to see a 3D building that comes together without relying on the skill of imagining it from 2D plans. In other words, it becomes, as Tom says, “physically readable” in a “universal form”

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in software that convenes everything together.9 It is there, visible, and simulated as if it were already constructed. This allows them to experience the design of the building in another way. It is almost as if the building gathers itself into an objective reference, physically readable, thinglike. It is a singular thing that they can all see together.10 But one that is always in the process of being made. Here is Jonas again in front of his computer (Fig. 2.9). He is working on translating the information on the mark-ups into the model. He searches for the specific place in the Revit model that he needs to work on and clicks on it. It is now highlighted in blue, and on another screen, the 2D drawing of the existing truss appears. He can now see the same element in multiple views: both the 2D plans as well as in 3D. In the 2D, he tells me, it is useful to see the element in isolation, whereas in 3D it is much easier to navigate and see how it relates to the rest of the elements. Each view puts it into another set of relations from which it is useful to see how it exists in different ways within different sets of constraints. He moves back and forth between the annotated mark-up, the 2D and the 3D. He applies these instructions in the 3D model—he does not need to know why, he explains, as he is not an engineer by training: all the work beforehand, partially traced in the previous section, is now settled—he follows the instructions on the mark-up. Blue lines on the plan tell him how to proceed; they make the truss legible for him. Nothing is equivocal either—the mark-ups contain definite instructions, references, annotations, and articulations of the element. This is the process through which  Revit is a software developed by AutoDesk that is central to Building Information Modelling (BIM), a process for the management of building information and visuals. It enables those who use it to design and draft in 3D, to annotate the model with 2D drawings and notes, to schedule elements, and to share building information across the design team within a common environment. It is ultimately a database, as one mechanical engineer told me, for the standardisation of information, and for the design-construction process in general. BIM and Revit are also central to the standardisation and development of the construction industry in the UK.  The most recent Construction Strategy is accessible here: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/ government-construction-strategy-2016-2020. 10  There is an element of “magical thinking” here; the 3D model grants them the capacity to see the building as if it were already constructed. The “as if ” that the 3D model embodies makes the constructed, thing like building possible; in other words, the 3D model could be said to belong to what Michel Foucault has  termed the “analogical cosmography” of sixteenth-century thought (2005: 25). See Hagen (2017) for a discussion of the role of magic and magical thinking in design and architecture. 9

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Fig. 2.9  Jonas and the 3D model of Factory. (Source: Author)

the mark-ups are translated into 2D drawings in Revit and as 3D objects in the model. It is an important process for how the truss travels out of the office and into other offices across the design team—how they develop a common referent together. After clicking on objects, stretching dotted lines to zoom into a specific region of the building, Jonas turns to me and explains the challenge: figuring out “how to fit everything in drawings,” to “tidy them up” and make them “readable.” The drawing needs to look right. He clarifies, to “strip out the nonessential things.” The information is tidied through a sorting process: the majority is added to the 2D drawings, while the 3D model renders all this information into a simplified form. This “tidying,” of removing all the traces of their work, and of separating the information into the drawings and standardising it, is not for aesthetic reasons, but practical: to coordinate. It also orders the information of the building into scales. A certain amount of the local information is organised into

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the 2D drawings, which can be accessed by clicking on the objects in the 3D model, while also being lost within the “global” order of the 3D model. It is a way of hiding the various “localities” of the building into a simplified and unified form. This act of tidying is one way of translating the traces of the work in the mark-up into, what the architect called, a “physically readable” and “universal form.” All that work that James had done that found its way as traces and annotations on the mark-up is removed. The 3D model is thus continuously built, managed, and held together in specific and coordinated practices, whose traces are tidied, simplified, and hidden in order to give the 3D model a thinglike, physical existence—as if it were already an object “out there”. This, in a way, echoes the practices of visualisation in scientific practices. While there has been a plurality of studies on visualisation and representation in science, in particular  in ethnographic and STS accounts,11 an important aspect of visualisation in the sciences is its use in communicating their findings. As Michael Lynch writes, “A characteristic feature of scientific activity is the production of visual displays of objects, processes, relationships and theoretical constructs […]; they are irreplaceable as documents which enable objects of study to be initially perceived and analysed” (1985: 37). But for also transforming a set of associations, a series of traces, into facts and objects. In their ethnography of scientific practices, Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar, for instance, highlight the importance of “literary inscriptions” (1986). These inscriptions (diagrams, graphs, photographs), like the 2D drawings and the 3D Revit model, are the result of an “intervening material activity” (1986: 51) (the various bits and pieces of reality, constraints, contexts, standards, data, and other models), and yet at the same time, this material activity is bracketed off, and the non-linear messy process is tidied to attain a readable form. In Latour and Woolgar’s account, the “loss of modalities” is an  See Representation in Scientific Practice (Lynch and Woolgar 1990), and the more recent collection, Representation in Scientific Practice Revisited (Coopmans et al. 2014). Various visuals and representations, or literary inscriptions (Latour 1987; Latour and Woolgar 1986), have been studied in STS literature from graphs and photographs, to X-rays and digital brain scans, to diagrams, economic models, and field manuals. There have also been STS-influenced accounts in architecture, looking at sketches, drawings, and physical models as means of communication, negotiation, and gaining knowledge about the building (Bucciarelli 1994; Callon 1996; Henderson 1998; Houdart and Minato 2009; Yaneva, 2009a). 11

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important aspect of the process through which a scientific “fact” becomes a “fact,” can travel outside of the laboratory, and, here, it is a way in which the structural engineers are able to communicate their designs and particular facets of the building as quasi-stable entities (thinglike), or as they say, “fixed” and “physically readable” entities—by removing or tidying all of the messy traces of the preceding design work. This loss of modalities, the tidying of the traces, is, as in scientific practices, an important element of the coordination work through which the 3D model comes to be a common referent across the design team. However, these inscriptions differ from scientific inscriptions because there is no claim to have a “direct relationship to the ‘original substance’” (Latour and Woolgar 1986: 51). There is no singular and “self-same” referent or reality produced in the practices of the acousticians, the structural engineers, or the architects that is held invariant. When utilised in particular practices, it is situated in different trajectories, and refers to different arrangements of constraints, entities, technologies, and concerns. A dilatation line for the acousticians may assemble noisy traffic, ISOs, residential buildings, types of activities and performances, materials, as well as noise criteria, aesthetic and structural demands, ductwork, containment trays and diffusers from the mechanical engineer. The NBT has its own assemblage, requirements, concerns, materials as well as relations to other elements of the building, demands from Building Control, standards, and codes. At the same time, when they travel to another site and practice, they refer to other realities. The 3D model therefore refers to multiple realities and contexts, but also brings them together into a seemingly coordinated whole; this is also partially due to its digital nature.12 It renders visible the multiple ways in which the building exists, but at the same time acts to coordinate them, to render it visible in one way. It is therefore made and revised from multiple local sites of its composition. It is, as the structural engineer has said, the “crystallisation” of a process of 12  See Yaneva (2005: 530) on how model-making at OMA is similar. As she notes, “[the model] is a conduit for reconciling bits of reality into a whole.” The Revit model, however, is different than the table of architectural models in her article. In the Revit model there are different models from different types of practice (structure, architecture, mechanical, and the contractor) as well as different drawings and information from these other practices that relate, overlay, and sit side-by-side. The table of models becomes complicated in the 3D Revit model.

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assembling bits and pieces into a patchwork object, one that is patched together from varying realities; the crystallisation that folds together not just the virtual and the actual within a single “view,” but also all of its many realities—a way of fixing everything together until “further notice.” The practitioners, when speaking with one another, all insist that they are making the same building in reference to the 3D model. Their ability to imagine the building together is shared with the 3D model. It stands in for the missing physical building; it is both “physical” and “universal” as Tom noted. It is physical in the sense that the building is convened together through the model into a visible form that is present and manipulable (Callon 1996), and universal as it circulates through different relations without changing shape, while also existing in multiple settings at once without contradiction. It transforms Factory into a configuration of digital objects that float within a Cartesian space where it can become res extensa. In other words, it also simulates the “a-perspectival objectivity” that scientific and mechanical representations are said to aspire to (Alder 1998; Daston 1992); the “tidying” of the mark-ups are a way of de-­ contextualising the building and “objectifying” it—to eliminate the idiosyncrasies of the individual imaginations of the practitioners and the contexts assembled around their designs. It, in other words, “upgrades” the visibility (Lynch 1985) of the building by holding all the realities together; through the 3D model, the building exists in another mode, a “virtual” existence, that stands in for an “objective” world, while at the same time, allowing them to explore other possibilities. In a way then, in the absence of ontological continuity between the different practices, the 3D model allows a building to cohere. This process of tidying and de-contextualising the building is, however, not to constitute a representation, but is an important practical step in rendering incommensurable realities commensurable—of constituting compatibility across the design team. It does this by inserting the building from various sets of relations into another set, that is, by re-­ contextualising it. De-contextualising is therefore not a reductive process, of losing modalities, but is also a way to gain other modalities—as Yarrow has written, in architecture, “[d]etachment from the real is facilitated by a process of abstraction that is integral to design” (2019: 102). And that

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this “detachment from the real” via abstraction is also a way to gain in reality and become more and more possible. In the Cartesian world of the 3D model, the various realities of the building are ordered according to a spatial logic within spatial relations; this is a way of maintaining a self-referential space, an internal referential system, where each element is intertwined with others and partially detaches it from any single site or context. It allows them to experience the building as particular facets of the building fit with one another spatially (seemingly universal). Through the 3D model, then, another order of things is constituted: another way of co-ordering its existence, of overlapping and fitting things together, to constitute an inside and an outside that is specific to the design team. As Yaneva (2009a: 38) writes in relation to physical models, a circuit of reference is established as designers make and learn about the building through models, but this is an internal circuit of meaning that produces something “new,” a “projected reality,” that does not refer to a reality out there, but to a new reality re-arranged in the relation between models themselves. Through it, a continuity is established between the various realities at stake; a continuity, or common world, within which the building takes shape. While it tends to cover over the collaborations and interactions that constitute it, its stability relies on how it is used and performed within specific practices.13 It is therefore not guaranteed. In fact, in a way, the purpose of the 3D model is to test the stability of the building; to assess the way in which it as thinglike pushes back. It is a tool, a working object, or epistemic object (Rheinberger 1997) that helps them learn about the building that is not necessarily identical to the 3D model, but co-­extensive to it, and not the final output of the building or its representation, but a means of accessing and modifying the building that exists through it. It is therefore the continuous result of constant revision (layering Illustrator files, tidying mark-ups, etc.)—a working object through which the building unfolds. It is also the primary means through which they can access the other ways in which the building exists to see the overlaps. Each  It is not the building—it is not even the designers’ final “outputs” (those are the 2D drawings). It is a practical tool that enables them to see the building in common, and always activated and understood within the practices themselves.

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model folded into the 3D model moreover constitutes a constraint that contours the conditions of possibility for others.14 They draw lines overtop of existing plans, or sketch on tracing paper laid over snippets from the 3D model, or constantly overlay other models within the 3D model. As they add to the 3D model, it sends knock-on or side effects that change how others work-with the model and the building. Slowly through this iterative process of implication, a fragile and shared context is eventually established; the common world of the building, while inchoate still, slowly takes shape. This common world is a provisional achievement made visible through the 3D model. This ability to “see the same thing” together, and to achieve ontological continuity, is a continuous process situated in practices (Goodwin 1995). There are inevitably clashes—what they call “issues of coordination”— detectable through the 3D model. While a facet of the building can exist differently at once as they overlap in different sites and practices, they cannot overlap in the 3D model. In the Cartesian space of the 3D model, different objects cannot occupy the same position. This also allows them to see issues of coordination more readily. In these cases, they are again implicated together. They send emails, have phone calls, or, if thorny enough, they meet. They come together in design team meetings to diagnose the issue. It is there that the friction between the multiplicity of the issue of coordination and the supposed universality of the 3D model plays out. As an architect from OMA points out, these are “integral – it is how it all comes together.”

2.4 Explication: A Design Team Meeting Coordination is a process of ordering things together. In a building project, it is largely a process of enfolding bits and pieces of realities into visualisations that render them commensurable. This can be called a  What this rendering does is denote a “closure,” a delimitation of the possible. This is what is possible—it is a way to mark a limit to the conditions of the possible momentarily. These conditions of the possible must be demarcated to coordinate—but as we will see they are also fragile, open to dissolution as they are explicated (we will encounter this in the next section). There can thus be two understandings of the possible here: one that is closed off, and another that opens up. 14

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process of implication. Not only for the design, for the realities that they evoke, but also for the design team themselves. They are all tied together. Implicated. In the 3D Revit model, they are set against one another, juxtaposed, but also rendered equivalent. However, these can also come apart; the building does not always hold together. These are issues of coordination. It is January 2019. The building has since developed quite a bit and they are now increasingly procuring materials for construction. We are sitting around a table in a glass meeting room in the offices of the MEP engineers. Everyone has their laptop open, but there are no models on the table, no mark-ups, or materials. The 3D model—in software called Navisworks—is projected on the television screen on the wall, floating in an empty white space. Around the table are two architects from OMA (Tom and Charlie), a MEP engineer (Craig), another MEP engineer (David) whose firm will be taking over for Stage 4b, Dave, a consultant for the client, and Chelsea, a representative from the contractor. They are all implicated, called to meet in this room, because there is an “issue of coordination” in the design. A clash: a containment tray on level 06 of the theatre is cutting through the door of the control room. These meetings happen more frequently now that the design is in Stage 4 of the RIBA Plan of Work. As the design becomes more granular, more detailed, more fixed, it also is more entangled, complicated. They are here to declash it—or as one of the architects declared at the beginning of the meeting: “to coordinate.”15 While the architects arrange the meeting, set the agenda, come prepared, they are not the centre of attention, or the most talkative in the room. Instead, we observe the 3D model floating on the screen. In fact, we are inside the building. The discussion is guided by it or compels it to diverge into other regions of the building. The design team meeting is like an operating theatre in a hospital. The building propped up on a  In pre-Revit times, there was someone in each office in charge of “sweeping through”—another “domestic chore” analogy—the 2D drawings, overlapping them, to search for clashes, this is now, primarily, the task of Revit. It has a function for “clash detection.” You add the parameters and a location, and it generates, sometimes, hundreds of clashes. For Factory, Tom explains, due to the complex geometry, the irregular connections, the strange voids and volumes, the challenge of the acoustics and the programme, there are more clashes than in a usual building project. 15

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table, and we navigate through the building embodied in the 3D model like an endoscope through intestines, visible from the inside. Different specialists sit around the table, pointing to issues, picking at the building, speaking from their own worlds and expertise. An important part of these meetings is to accept this: the 3D model is an avatar for the building that is discussed as if it were already there, already constructed.16 Charlie, one of the architects from OMA, begins the meeting by manipulating the building through the 3D model. He cuts out a lot— those “nonessential parts”—and zooms into a specific view of the Theatre with the precision of a surgeon. Level 06 around the control room behind the balcony. We do not just see the form, but also the building’s innards. Twisting trays and ducts are squeezed into a tight space of the soffit. They refer to them as “spaghetti.” We can see that one of the containment trays cuts through the top of the door  as  the walls are slightly transparent. Factory in the 3D model has this singular existence. It is as if it were already there; as the architect had mentioned earlier, “universal” and “physical.” Almost as if we were there in its built existence, gathered around the physical containment tray as it cuts through the physical door frame. But rather, what we are seeing is an inconsistency between different models. They do not cohere; they are not coordinated. As Souriau reminds us, reversing the perspective, when he speaks of the challenge for something to exist as a singular “thing”: “But to always be in just one place, how much more stringent a demand is that!” (2015 [2009]: 144). Here is how Charlie describes the clash: so we have reduced the door to 1.2 m, but we cannot reduce that [indicating to the containment tray in the model]. This still doesn’t work. Basically, my question is: it needs to go up here, go through the wall, bend it down, go through the wall again, and then make another couple of bends – can we have it coming from here [indicating in the model] because there is still some space here – on the backside of the control room it is all pretty free. If we can get some of the containment going this way, and then feeding back or feeding over that [the control room], I think this would relieve us from a lot of –  See footnote 10 above for a short discussion of the analogical cosmography of the 3D model.

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Before he can finish, the meeting is off. David intervenes immediately: “Is that space accessible?” He is concerned about installation and maintenance. “It’s got to be wireable and re-wireable,” he explains. But how often? David: “Well, presuming that 90 percent of that is CharcoalBlue, isn’t it?” Charcoalblue, the theatre design consultant, is a world of AV equipment and cables that would allow for the desired flexible use of the building. They are the representatives for the cables that are contained in the containment trays. The flexibility that the containment trays are constrained by. Implied in David’s question is that they will need to be changed quite frequently. This is a crucial question that they investigate. As Charlie remarks, “because I think it is this [re-routing the trays] or it is raising the roof slab of this thing [indicating on the model].” The first has the constraints of accessibility, installation, and maintenance; the second, raising the slab, drags us into another assemblage of the building, of the structural engineers—it will impact, as Charlie notes, the height where the steel is and change the type of structural connections. David again scrutinises: “My view is that there is no room to move the vent up – look at it. There is no room. You can barely fit the ducts and the vents as it is. I’ve got a separate query. How is that space accessible, the control room?” Now we are in another “shared zone” of the model, as they call it; another set of relations to unpack. Charlie, through the model, shows him how. You walk along the cross-laminated timber (CLT) wall. But again, another question. Related to acoustics. While it is an acoustic wall, how acoustic is it? Can they penetrate it? Can it be manipulated? They will have to consult with the acousticians. A note is recorded in the 3D model. Another problem. “Well, you [still] have to find a way to get from that, up.” With this, we follow—in our discussion and in the model—the containment trays through the model, upwards. There is a beam above the control room that may require penetration by the containment tray, and to be placed onto a truss. How much penetration is possible? Again, a structural issue. Following this, there is a stream of questions that meanders through different problems. Acoustics: does it pose a problem to the CLT? What about vibrations? Do we need acoustic separators? Accessibility: You cannot get into that void. Does that become classified as a “confined space”? How are we supposed to get to that? Structure: How much can we

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penetrate the concrete? The beam? Cabling: How thick are the cables? Can they bend? Aesthetics: Is that containment tray visible from the balcony? Can it be repositioned so that it is not in public space? Ductwork: Can those ducts be moved above the control room? Where do the ducts lead? Slowly, through this rhythm of the meeting, punctuated with questions and answers, moving back and forth from the 3D model that both provides some answers but also provokes questions, and asides that seemingly depart from the topic, and yet, resonate back, it seems like this intractable clash will never be resolved. Until, at last, Charlie interjects: “I think that’s a solvable issue! I think that’s worth the exercise to check.” What? How did this happen? Tom confirms: It does seem more clean like this. Going up, going left, going right, just to come up and go behind, we eliminate all the spaghetti in the control room, and what’s left in the control room, James [structural engineer] just puts a few holes in and everything else is taking a much simpler route, and we get access to the back of the control room.

Charlie continues by giving instructions to the MEP engineer: “First check on the slab – if you can move it up; if not, check about re-routing the cable, or adjusting the slab.” Strangely, though, we are back to the beginning. These same two scenarios have returned. But they have returned different, transformed: it is solvable now. What happened? How did it transform from an “issue of coordination” into a “solvable issue”? How does it turn from an intractable multiple object, to one where its singularity is possible again? Where it can finally—in the 3D model— achieve the demand to be in one place? While it may seem redundant that they have returned to where they began, for them, if there is one frustrating aspect of meetings, it is when they become “reporting sessions.” As Tom, the architect, notes, “there is a danger in design team meetings that they just become reporting sessions where you sit and you tell everyone what you’ve done and you don’t resolve anything.” They want to avoid this. Instead, something happens. They are productive. They get somewhere else. They move on. Moreover, as another architect mentioned, in design team meetings “there is a lot of

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negotiation. Everyone has kind of their own M.O. […]. You have to manage that and hold onto the designs as much as you can without a loss of integrity.” The building is under negotiation. But what are they negotiating? Who or what is mediating? Why do they need to do it “through face-to-face meetings, where we would bring drawings and sketches, and have the 3D model on the screen with a number of people around the room [to] talk through the issues”? Why cannot they do it from their offices through Skype, email, phone calls, and the Revit model? Let’s begin with the 3D model. As we have seen, it has an important role in the meeting. Here is another moment in the DTM. Tom puts forward a possibility of passing the containment tray through the control room, and in this way, avoid penetrations through concrete and installation/maintenance problems by putting an “access panel” below the table in the control room, a “crawl hatch” to access the containment tray. However, this creates a problem. David points it out: “you end up with a confined space,” which is a specific classification of space within the UK health and safety regulations.17 This is something they want to avoid as it puts further constraints onto that space. But Charlie is also unsure: “when is it classified as a confined space?” What makes it a confined space? If so, is this triangle, he asks, indicating on the model, a confined space? Is it not just an opening? What if it is accessible without being a crawl hatch? In this interaction, it is the 3D model that initiates Tom’s proposal. He notices on the model that it is a possibility and asks Charlie to manipulate the model to get a better view of this part of the control room. It also provides the conditions for David’s response. And yet, it is not visible in the model yet. Nor is the information about “confined spaces” or health and safety regulations there. It is neither the model that shows it, nor is it just a conversation between the participants in the room. It emerges between them—an interaction between the actors including the 3D model. The participants translate into the model their concerns, but also the model translates their concerns back to them in a reverberation of “back-talk” (Schön 1983; Yaneva 2009b). The model renders visible these  “Confined space” is a classification of space as defined by the Health and Safety Executive in the UK, a UK governmental body that oversees the regulation of health and safety in the workplace. It is defined as a “place that which is substantially enclosed (though not always entirely), and where serious injury can occur.” 17

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different realities of the building, which becomes “legible” through it (Yarrow 2017). It puts them in relation with one another, enabling them to negotiate, to question, and respond to one another. We can also see this if we look at the kinds of statements they use in the meeting. “We cannot reduce that.” “We have it coming from here.” “Look at it.” These are deictic expressions that have meaning through what they reference, and, in this case, the building made visible in the 3D model. It completes what they are saying. They indicate towards it, which provides their statements with meaning, and makes them communicable and understandable for the others. To become compatible with each other, the 3D model makes the variations of the building visible to one another within a single space (where it becomes “physically readable”). The 3D model helps them communicate, articulate, and express the ways in which the containment tray exists for them. It provides a competence to see the “same thing” together. It is akin to what Klaus Amann and Karin Knorr Cetina refer to as “optical induction,” whereby visuals, and in their case film, “prompt” or induce “object identifications” (1988). The images allow them to see the object through visual clues. For them, this is a way in which scientists reach agreement about a particular object that is made visible through these images. While, similarly, in the DTM, they gain knowledge about the building, and coordinate together, through the 3D model, “to locate a way out of the maze,” as Amann and Knorr Cetina say (1988: 102), it is not a process of induction, of going from specifics to the general, of establishing “facts.” But they go downstream. They learn about the “knock-on effects” of possible changes to the containment tray and building. What would happen if we raised the slab? Or if we add an access hatch in the control room? What would happen if we punctured the CLT or the concrete? These statements are not assessed according to how faithfully they correspond to a reality of the building or assess the validity of the design. It is not a question of true or false. It is an assessment of effects. What would it do to my variation, my composition of Factory? How would it complicate, shift,  or align, all the relations and pieces, assembled around the containment tray? What would it disturb? But they also go upstream. While they explore the building via the model, they are prompted by the model to ask questions and to

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problematise the design. These expressions are ‘deictic’ in another sense. They point to another time and place, another assemblage, outside of the room. What the architects see as a problem of spatial coordination and aesthetics, the MEP engineer sees as questions of accessibility for installation and maintenance. What the client construes as cost and time, or contractual obligations, the structural engineers, while absent from this meeting, would see as structural stability. They may talk about the “same” building, the “same” containment tray in the 3D model, but it exists for them in a different way. These different understandings of the containment tray emerge and exist in different relations. For the MEP engineer, the containment tray exists in terms of health and safety regulations, whether it is accessible for maintenance and installation purposes—can they be reached? Is it safe for the construction workers? While for the architect, the containment tray, in this instance, is a question of spatial coordination—how can they fit it without a “clash”? Or a question of aesthetic values—in places, they will be publicly visible, and hence need to appear where they should appear. For the MEP engineer, who knows what containment tray is for what, the containment tray is something else entirely: it corresponds to a specific product on the market, different types of cables (specified by CharcoalBlue), where each one needs to go, what each one does. The containment tray is not one thing here, in one place, but a series of connected conditions, parameters, and problems that arise and are explicated in the DTM as they assess the knock-on effects (hence the challenge of turning issues of coordination into solvable issues).18 It is through this explication—“unfolding”—of the containment tray that they can negotiate and establish the conditions of possibility for what it could be. They explicate what it would do in their models or in other variations of Factory. Does moving the slab up require the structural engineers to re-do their entire structural system? Can it be 18  See Yarrow (2019: 182) for a similar argument in the context of a design team meeting: “The building is constituted as a different kind of object through these different kinds of practice.” But where his argument remains in an epistemological register—questions of “knowledge” meeting one another—here, the ontological consequences are stressed. They not only know the building differently, but it exists differently in different practices and compositions, and in the DTM we can see the ways in which it gains in reality.

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accommodated in their model? If it is placed in between the gypsum wall of the balcony, does it have an effect on construction sequencing? Is it accessible for installation? This explication of the containment tray is a way of learning about the building and its possibilities. In contrast to the previous process of coordination, of translating, tidying, and implicating, here, in the DTM, it is a process of explicating, of coordinating through addition. That is, of unfolding the various realities in which the Factory— or in this case, the containment tray—exists, rather than searching for the correct interpretation of it. In DTMs, whether with mechanical engineers, the acousticians, or structural engineers, in the de-clashing of the design there is a return of the matters of concern, the modalities and traces tidied from the 2D drawings as they made their way into the 3D model and into the specification information. This materiality that cannot fit into the Cartesian spatiality as res extensa is articulated again. The labour of the construction and maintenance workers, the aesthetics of the visible containment trays, the budget and balance sheets of the client, the thickness of cables, the demands of MIF in regards to performance flexibility, or the structural stability and loads of structural beams—all of this, and more, which is not visualised in the spatiality of the 3D model and 2D drawings is explicated here in order to condition the possibility of re-routing the containment trays. This process of explication, of turning the trajectories caught around the containment tray inside out to diagnose the next steps, is moreover a process through which there is a negotiation of its conditions. The questions, digressions, explorations turn what was invisible, implicated in the model and drawings, visible, by unfolding them, making them explicit.19 In order to be able to coordinate through the discussion, it is also a way of dealing with how they each relate to the ‘issue of coordination’ differently, how it exists in their realities of the building. Here, by making the issue of the containment tray explicit, they are articulating  See Sloterdijk (2016) for a discussion on explication, of bringing forward what was in the background, as a way of producing knowledge in modernity. Sloterdijk also relates this “making explicit” as a form of knowledge production with a shift in medical knowledge towards turning the body inside out (not unlike what they do in the design team meeting): “from the start of the Modern Age onwards, this meant taking part in overturning the corporeal world through the operative skill of the anatomists and constituting oneself as a virtual self-operator from a radically altered angle of dealing with oneself ” (2016: 69). 19

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how they are each entangled around this issue of coordination. To paraphrase Noortje Marres (2012), we see how as an issue is articulated there is the simultaneous gathering of different actors—human and nonhuman—around the issue.20 This is a process of unpacking the attachments that the containment tray gathers around it to see what is necessary for it to exist, and what it cannot be disrupted elsewhere. However, as the meeting moves quickly, in an irregular rhythm, seemingly unimportant elements are pulled out, forgotten, returned to later, or there are jumps to other worlds, regulations invoked, long silences and then rapid, intense conversations, it is difficult to trace the continuity in the discussion. Are they still talking about the same thing? How did they end up talking about the stairs on level 05? Or the CLT? Or the difference between European and British regulations? One way to keep track, it seems, is the 3D model (or 2D drawings in other meetings), which they return to frequently. Zooming in and out, cutting unimportant sections, typing in notes, minutes, and instructions, the visual devices in the meeting provide consistency. They point to them, talk through them, and manipulate the building through them. In the DTM, the 3D model is “frozen”; it provides an anchor, some stability. While the 3D model, as I saw in the offices, holds the Factory together, sets the possibilities, or fixes the Factory until further notice, here, in the design team meeting, it also holds those who manipulate it. In other words, as in Latour’s notion of “beings of framing,” they are both “above” it—they design, compose, and bring it all together—but are also “below” it—they follow it as a scenario that they impose on themselves. It provides consistency and continuity.21 The 3D model is how the designers organise action, and where they become characters of their own narrative—both of framing the Factory, of its possibilities, but also of being framed, of their own abilities to design. While, the 3D model does not get rid of the differences of the  This resonates with the ANT concept of translation: the formation of knowledge goes hand-in-­ hand with the formation of worlds that they articulate. 21  Latour reflects on these “beings of framings” and its relation to what he calls a “script” in terms of organisations: “…the beings of framing that only come into view, curiously, if we abandon the idea that above the scripts there exists a frame within which we could place them […]. The frames are what achieve the effects of continuity, stability, essence, inertia, conatus […], of making something last, something that finally has borders, frontiers, limits, walls, ends” (2013: 397). 20

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reality of the building, it allows them to turn “differences in kind” into “differences of degree” (Deleuze 1988), that is, to be able to reconcile particular differences. To coordinate. There is no absolute consensus achieved, but an unfolding of its multiple existences that enables them to move on. A “practical closure” that indicates the next steps and points in the next direction. If they had begun with a situation of multiplicity, perhaps, by the end, the “rarefied” singularity returns, or at least its possibility—at last, again, the building, has the possibility to become a “thing” out there. While the building in the 3D model is tidied of the traces of the local production of the design for coordination, here it is messy again. There are two contradictory yet complementary processes. On the one hand, coordination is a process of implication, of enfolding and rarefying; and, on the other hand, it is a process of explication, of unfolding and multiplying the building within the frames of visual devices. It is a cyclical movement that is constantly looping back and forth. The MEP engineers will have to add another layer to the model as it adds the new containment tray; and they may have to return to a DTM to unfold it again. As a structural engineer points out, “the very nature of a design process is that it could actually go on forever […]. It could remain iterative for the life of the project.” Through these iterations, the building is increasingly articulated and shaped; it grows, ingredients are added; various practitioners, professionals, and their concerns gather around it to work-­with one another, to negotiate its conditions. In its expansions and contractions, as they come together, its ontological constitution—an agreement about what it is—is also achieved, unfolds. The establishment of a common world, whether through drawing, sketching, modelling, or meeting, is a provisional and continuous achievement, of fitting together variations of the building without guarantee. These are some of the ways in which the building can emerge and hold together in its process of being made across a diversity of practitioners and professional worlds.

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2.5 A Building Hangs Together This chapter was about coordination in the design team. This is a common story in discussions of design. Often it is told as one of developing a “culture of building” (Davis 2006), of developing a “shared understanding” conditioned by social rules, ideologies, routines, norms, and historical processes within architecture (Cuff 1992). This is also prevalent in the professional literature in architecture (Chappell and Willis 2005). The use of visuals, models, sketches, and drawings have been highlighted as important mechanisms for coordination between different professional groups; they facilitate negotiating and developing a shared understanding across the different ways of representing or knowing in design as “social glue” (Henderson 1999), “graphic talk” (Cuff 1992), or as discursive devices (Bucciarelli 1994). This chapter has told a different story of coordination. It was not just interested in how they coordinate different knowledges or perspectives of the building, but also of the different realities that are assembled, and folded into the building, within varying practices. It is more than just a process of making things common across the design team, but of making explicit the common world of the future building, of making details of this future world common. By travelling into different sites, we find variations of the building, existing within different sets of relations between various contexts, constraints, objects, and practices. If there are many practices, there are many buildings. And this constitutes the importance of coordination in a building project as these many buildings necessarily overlap; they are all implicated with one another. As Mol writes in the context of a body that is multiple, although it “comes in different versions, these somehow hang together” (2002: 84). While there may be different variations of a building, they nevertheless hang together. This chapter was interested in this. That is, how the building as a singular object is not given but is a contingent achievement of and within coordination practices. The ability to speak of the building—Factory—with a single name is a provisional result of iterative coordination practices that loop back and forth continuously (implication and explication).

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The first way in which coordination happens is the process of implication, of enfolding bits and pieces of contexts and realities into visual media. This was a way of translating different variables into a common language within the design team, but also, in a way, of folding one’s world into others, of mixing them together, and of entangling others’ worlds within one’s own. Everything is implicated. At the same time of folding-in, there is a “tidying,” a “loss of modalities” or residues of one’s world to mix everything into a common object (the building) that is visible, for instance, through the 3D model that makes it readable and legible as a physical and universal form. It is in the 3D model that the building can, for a moment, be seen as if it were thinglike. Through the 3D model, they can enter the interiority of the world that they are drawing together as they coordinate the design of the building; and they can take an account of the many realities implicated there. Coordination also happens through the reverse process: explication. This often happens when there is an “issue of coordination,” whereby what has been implicated requires being unfolded. This is a process of reversing the way in which an element has been turned into an entity (Latour 2016). In common STS parlance, “opening the black box.” It is drawing out something to draw them together, of making realities explicit for the rest of the design team. In this process, not only the assemblages caught together within the building, but also the common world that brings the practitioners together is brought into the open, to be discussed, probed, and negotiated. The various components of its composition are brought to the foreground. In contrast to the movement of coordination that implicates, in explication there is a series of exclusive disjunctions, a proliferation of possibilities of that which is being unfolded, a multiplication of the building. If implication is guided by a process of translation and simplification, explication is a process of equivocation and multiplication.22 Through this process, we can see both variable ways in which the building exists, but also how it gains in reality as it is added to and unfolded. These two ways of coordination are iterative in the making of a building. Coordination is a practice that both relies upon simplifications and  See Sloterdijk (2016: 70–74) for a discussion of the relationship between the implicit, the non-­ unfolded, and the explicit, that which is unfolded as the process by which things are known. 22

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multiplications, of certainty and stability as well as uncertainty and unreconciled diversity. They both play a role in moving on. In each site and practice, around each element, there are connections between different social, material, and economic realities that are entangled into various partial wholes that turn around the truss, the 3D model, and the containment tray. By foregrounding the practices within which the building is brought into being, coordination is shown to be more than reaching a “shared understanding” between various perspectives around a singular, definite object, but the painstaking process of relating, testing, and exploring the different ways in which it exists and finding means to fit it all together. In other words, an issue of coordination is not only about social glue but is an “ontological adhesive,” of seeking cohesion and continuity between realities, to ensure that the building sticks and holds together within a common world. It is within these complications, of implicating and explicating, of simplifying and multiplying, that a building hangs together or not. It is therefore not a matter of fitting a building within pre-existing wholes—a context or reality out there. But it is a process of fitting varying contexts, bits, and pieces of reality into a provisional common world that is collectively and iteratively unfolded in practice. It is the collective work of putting the building together, of bringing different conditions together into a loosely shaped collective. These coordinated wholes, or common referents, do not pre-exist, but take shape within the texture of experience, within practices, and make sense there. This is provisionally held together through drawings, models, reports, and devices, and in practices of tracing, sketching, modelling, and meeting. While the various actors of the design come together, and are implicated around facets of the building, they are also assembling another way of “being together,” which holds together insofar as they continue their coordinated practices. There is the emergence of a localised “collective empiricism” (Daston and Lunbeck 2011: 369) within the design team, which is both a way of working-with and knowing-together across varied professional worlds, and the gathering, recontextualization and re-composition of the world that they come to know together.23  Design teams also develop their own language and idiom to discuss with one another aspects of the building that are specific to the projects they are working on. 23

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But this has consequences too, outside of the design team. Rather than a neutral technical design process, coordination within the design team has effects in reality; they operate at the level of the real insofar as they test, re-arrange, and assemble a world within which the multiple building achieves coherence. In moments of design, realities are explicated or made explicit, the “envelopes” that make particular realities possible are exposed (Sloterdijk 2016). In this process, there is slowly a reconstitution of what exists in the world, another ordering of things. Following them at work, a new common world is organised, coordinated across a variety of people, concerns, devices, and materials. The design of a building is thus simultaneously the forging of a world within which it fits. In this process, as its conditions are negotiated, a set of possibilities, a world, is hardwired into the building, a stabilisation of some realities over others. Coordination is also, then, a process through which the building’s (and its common world’s) conditions of possibility—what it can be—are negotiated and redefined. It is the incremental (and iterative) act of making the “singularity” of the building (and its common world) possible. Design practices thereby  actively participate in questions about what should be included within a shared world that they bring together through their practices. And thus, it begs the question: what is missing or excluded; and how do these practices foreclose other possibilities. What else could be included within the folds of the building? What other common worlds could the building have generated? This is one possible place where we can see the politics of design practice: in the unassuming practices of working-together and coordination.

References Alder, Ken. 1998. Making Things the Same: Representation, Tolerance and the End of the Ancien Régime in France. Social Studies of Science 28: 499–545. Amann, Klaus, and Karin Knorr-Cetina. 1988. The Fixation of (Visual) Evidence. Human Studies 11: 133–169. Bredekamp, Horst. 2004. Frank Gehry and the Art of Drawing. In Gehry Draws, ed. M. Rappolt and R. Violette, 11–28. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Bucciarelli, Louis L. 1994. Designing Engineers. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

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Callon, Michel. 1996. Le Travail de la Conception en Architecture. Situations. Les Cahiers de la Recherche Architecturale. 37: np. Chappell, David, and Andrew Willis. 2005. The Architect in Practice. Chichester: Wiley. Coopmans, Catelijne, Janet Vertesi, Michael Lynch, and Steve Woolgar. 2014. Representation in Scientific Practice Revisited. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Cuff, Dana. 1992. Architecture: The Story of Practice. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Daston, Lorraine. 1992. Objectivity and the Escape from Perspective. Social Studies of Science 22: 597–618. Daston, Lorraine, and Elizabeth Lunbeck. 2011. Histories of Scientific Observation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Davis, Howard. 2006. The Culture of Building. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Evans, Robin. 1996. Translations from Drawing to Building and Other Essays. London: Architectural Association Publications. Foucault, Michel. 2005. The Order of Things. An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. London/New York: Routledge. Goodwin, Charles. 1995. Seeing in Depth. Social Studies of Science 25: 237–274. Hagen, Aina Landsverk. 2017. Sketching with Knives: Architects and the Confidence Theory of Magic. Anthropology Today 33 (2): 24–27. Haraway, Donna. 1988. Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective. Feminist Studies 14: 575–599. Henderson, Kathryn. 1998. Online and on Paper: Visual Representations, Visual Culture, and Computer Graphics in Design Engineering. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Houdart, Sophie. 2008. Copying, Cutting and Pasting Social Spheres: Computer Designers’ Participation in Architectural Projects. Science & Technology Studies 21: 47–63. Houdart, Sophie, and Chihiro Minato. 2009. Kuma Kengo: An Unconventional Monograph. Paris: Editions Donner Lieu. Jullien, François. 2012. The Great Image Has No Form, or On the Nonobject Through Painting. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Latour, Bruno. 1987. Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers Through Society. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. ———. 2013. An Inquiry into Modes of Existence: An Anthropology of the Moderns. Trans. Catherine Porter. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

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———. 2016. How to Better Register the Agency of Things. In The Tanner Lectures on Human Values, ed. Mark Matheson, 79–117. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press. Latour, Bruno, and Steve Woolgar. 1986. Laboratory Life: The Construction of Scientific Facts. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Lynch, Michael. 1985. Discipline and the Material Form of Images: An Analysis of Scientific Visibility. Social Studies of Science 15: 37–66. Lynch, Michael, and Steve Woolgar. 1990. Representation in Scientific Practice. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Marres, Noortje. 2012. Material Participation: Technology, the Environment and Everyday Publics. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Mol, Annemarie. 2002. The Body Multiple: Ontology in Medical Practice. Durham: Duke University Press. Rheinberger, Hans-Jörg. 1997. Toward a History of Epistemic Things: Synthesizing Proteins in the Test Tube. Stanford: Stanford University Press. ———. 2010. An Epistemology of the Concrete: Twentieth-Century Histories of Life. Durham: Duke University Press. Schön, Donald. 1983. The Reflective Practitioner: How Professionals Think in Action. London: Routledge. Sloterdijk, Peter. 2016. Spheres. Volume 3: Foams. Plural Spherology. South Pasadena: Semiotext(e). Souriau, Étienne. 2015 [2009]. The Different Modes of Existence. Trans. Erik Beranek and Tim Howles. Minneapolis: Univocal Publishing. Starosielski, Nicole. 2019. Thermal Vision. Journal of Visual Culture 18 (2): 147–168. Yaneva, Albena. 2005. A Building is a Multiverse. In Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy, ed. Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel, 530–535. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. ———. 2009a. The Making of a Building: A Pragmatist Approach to Architecture. Oxford: Peter Lang. ———. 2009b. Made by the Office for Metropolitan Architecture: An Ethnography of Design. Rotterdam: 101 Publishers. Yarrow, Thomas. 2017. Where Knowledge Meets: Heritage Expertise at the Intersection of People, Perspective, and Place. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 23: 95–109. ———. 2019. Architects: Portraits of a Practice. New  York: Cornell University Press.

3 Approximations

3.1 Unknown Unknowns A building project however is inevitably always somehow “out of joint” and in need of coordination. It happens not only across worlds within different design teams, in negotiations between the possible and the actual, but also in time. Something in between what will be and what would be. A negotiation of contingency and necessity, of uncertainty and precision, of exactness and approximation. Knowing in a building project is, as William James would say, an ambulatory process: “until established by the end of the process, its quality of knowing that, or indeed of knowing anything could still be doubted; and yet the knowing really was there, as the reality now shows. We were virtual knowers […] long before we were certified to have been its actual knowers” (1912: 36). But what does it mean to be “virtual knowers” before being actual knowers? What is the process, the transformation, undergone? Moreover, what happens to what is known—that virtuality—as it, as Souriau describes, undergoes its gradual metamorphosis or intensification (2015 [2009]), bit by bit, into concrete existence?

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It is the autumn of 2018 and I find myself sitting in a chamber in Manchester’s Town Hall extension. City councillors, members of the Resources and Governance Scrutiny Committee of the City Hall, are sitting around a large oval table; I am several rows back from the front. In chairs facing them, the representatives of the Factory board for the building, are on, what seems like, a trial.1 They have come to “regretfully”—in their words—make a case for more money: the budget has been overspent; the building now exceeds their initial forecasted budget. They are requesting another £30 million. Addressing the Resources and Governance Scrutiny Committee, which oversees the city’s projects, one of them speaks artfully of the “bespoke” nature of the building: there are no precedents to compare, no models to follow. They simply could not know in advance. The central cost, he continues, comes from a specific source: the “very high acoustic standard” expected for a “cutting edge” theatre and performance space. The “acoustics,” he bemoans, was not foreseeable as the building is “too complex with too many unknowns”.2 Acoustics, it seems, is, an “unknown unknown.” Or, at least, that is how they classify it. Unconvinced, a councillor interjects: the “bespoke” nature of the design holds, but how could acoustics be a problem? There is already a “track record of acoustically insulated buildings in Manchester, and yet, there are new costs?” Is acoustics not, she seems to be saying, a modern science? Are sound and noise not, fundamentally, predictable “matters of fact”? How could they be “unknown unknowns”? Implicit in the councillor’s disbelief is an assumption that acoustics can be technocratically managed and technically known; something governed and calculated. Can they not know, in a precise scientific and technical manner, what “acoustics” will be, and deduce the costs? Is it not a predictable and calculable object? While design can be “bespoke,” acoustics, as a science, it seems, is straightforward. Its objects are physical, brute matter,  We will return to this scene again in Chap. 4 to discuss the committee meeting and the relationship between the city council as a political body or interface of a public and Factory. 2  In the report submitted for this meeting, the report claims that “At the time the original budget was set the detailed acoustic solution was not in place. The detailed design and construction sequencing necessary to satisfy these requirements has added a further £4.5 M[illion] to the cost of the project.” This is in addition to the £2.7 million and £975,000 needed for more acoustic design work. You can access the full report here: https://democracy.manchester.gov.uk/documents/s2316/ Factory%20Project%20report%20-%20final%20version.pdf. 1

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grounded in singular objective definitions. Acoustics is seemingly a well-­ established field. How can it be an “unknown unknown”? In other words, there is an assumption that acousticians, and the design team, can peak behind the veil of Pythagoras to witness and control the source of sound and noise. It is out there: graspable, measurable, and calculable. It is standardised: the same in every building. It is one thing. If you can control, measure, and foresee the cause, then the effect, without deviation, is knowable at the outset. The councillor in her comments, however, indicates an important problem. How do you govern, order, contain, and legislate a leaky object like sound and noise? Here, in the city council chamber, they witness only one way in which it exists and, in turn, leaks—with financial and budgetary consequences. Yet “acoustics” is irreducibly variable. There is a proliferation of methods, guides, and criteria for designing “good acoustics” and historical studies of theatres and concert halls detailing the successes and failures (Beraneck 1996; Jordon 1980); the emergence of “noise” in the city has been an impetus for the growth of committees, governmental bodies and reports, and citizen-led organisations; it has been redefined through time, relative to culture and episteme (Bijsterveld 2008; Clarke 2021; Jaspers 2019; Peterson 2021; Thompson 2008; Tkaczyk and Weinzierl 2019). On the one hand, it is an “objective” science with formulae, measures, models, and standards; and on the other hand, it is “subjective” relative to culture, historical change, perception, and taste. It is pulled in two directions at once: either factual or value-­ laden, either technical or political, either natural or cultural, either objective or subjective. Stuck in the modernist double-bind, it is difficult to say what it is in itself. This chapter will follow sound and noise as one of the central concerns in the design of Factory. As a particularly important concern, due to the building’s complex geometry, flexible programme, its mixed use as a theatre and art space, and its unusually stringent constraints, the manifestations of sound gather different practices, demands, objects, and parameters around it. While the councillor’s concerns were, more or less, settled, or at least bypassed, by the end of the committee meeting, they continued to reappear in different acoustic trajectories in the Factory project. Rather than predicting sound as a “docile object,” (Lynch 1985) it often

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manifests recalcitrant. It is not static, but leaks—throughout the building, into the urban environment, in the development of the design, and in attempts to fix it as something, as an object, or, at least, thinglike. To see how sound and its lived realities are approximated, and in the process, manifest as an “object,” we need to follow it within practices. I begin in the noisy office of the acousticians. Here, I follow them as they measure the future lived experience of sound through a mock-up in their laboratory where sound is a difficult object to elicit and measure. Next, I come across another recalcitrant acoustic object: low frequency noise. This leads us into the surrounding urban environment of the building as it takes shape within an incomplete simulation that helps them visualise noise (as a sensory experience) that leaks out of the building. Finally, following two short trajectories of sound, that gathers the design team together, I get lost in their translations as they steer back to the “build-up” of the building causing shared uncertainties—an epistemic noise or “grey thing”—within the design team. From the conditions of the lab, the city, and design development, sound and noise manifest and leak out of ways to capture it—in different ways. This chapter is both interested in the challenges of listening to a future building, and the ways in which sound and noise materialise. The chapter suggests that acousticians listen to the future building through “approximations,” both by addressing the inscriptions that give traces of reality to future lived experiences that they hope would be there, and by reflecting on the problem of fixing sound and noise as something Thinglike – that is, in the ambulatory movements between virtual and actual knowing. However, more than a concern for acousticians solely, sound and noise also bring together structural and mechanical engineers, architects, and the client during design development where coordination is essential as they work with one another. All these actors force each other to adjust their own approximations of what the building’s performance will be, to make sure that not just the design, but the lived realities they indicate, align. Latent within these approximations are also the expectations of publics, the lived realities approximated act as political promises, as possible experiences—whether as sound or noise—for them. The approximation of lived realities of sound and noise is a process of drawing together, of attempting to see what the future experiences that the

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building will afford, but also of bringing different possible experiences together. More than a technical, governance, or aesthetic concern, acoustics is also related to how the building is lived and experienced—and how the design of a building intervenes in a future lived experience of a city— and thus, perhaps, the political consequences of such. Acoustics links us to another way in which buildings and cities are experienced: through the ways in which they sound, are heard, and felt.

3.2 A Mock-Up in a Lab It’s early in the morning when I arrive at the office of the acousticians (Fig. 3.1). The small, nondescript building is hidden at a quiet edge of a university campus, shrouded in trees. It stands in stark contrast to the large bright offices of the other members of the design team, situated within the middle of urban cityscapes. This office, in contrast, is close to a physics department. Is this a sign that I am leaving one domain (design) and entering another (science)? Once I arrive, I meet Lucas. He introduces me to his colleagues as the “philosopher”—tongue-in-cheek—who has come to “observe them.” He shows me to a desk on the upper floor that I use during my time here. Almost as soon as I sit down, a strange sound rings out through the office—alien-like, eerie. It starts quiet and then reaches a louder and louder pitch—gradually, ominously. It sounds, perhaps, like this: rrrrrrrrrRRRRRRRRRRRzzzzzzzIIIIIIIIIiiiiiiii. Or like this: zzzzzzZZZZZZRrrrrrRRRRRIiiiiIIIIIIIII. Each time it rings out it lasts for 20 seconds. It begins again and again. And again. It’s a sound I hear almost continuously—a refrain, a sort of sonic object or acoustic model that nevertheless eludes linguistic and visual forms. The first thing that Lucas shows me is the laboratory, which takes up a large portion of the office. It consists of three separate rooms. Two of them are connected by a wall, and then the third connects to one of the others through a floor/ceiling. Each room can be used to test room acoustics, the quality of sound in a room, the reflective or absorptive qualities of materials. But they also add and remove the floors and the walls. They construct other kinds of walls and test the movement of sound through

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Fig. 3.1  The office of the acousticians. (Source: Author)

these partitions. As a result, there is often construction happening here. Builders come in and out of the building. On the first day that I am there, there are three separate experimental set-ups for different experiments—none are related to Factory. In the upstairs room, they are constructing and installing a floor-ceiling interface (Fig. 3.2); in the floor immediately below it, the room is set-up as a box-in-a-box (one of the concepts they work with for Factory albeit modified, as we will see); and in the adjacent room, there is a measurement for sound reflections in a simulation of a classroom (there are chairs, desks, and a microphone in the room, out of which that strange sound leaks) (Fig. 3.3). Constructing mock-ups of spaces of the building, assembling imitations of building materials, and measuring the movements of sound or noise is an activity that happens constantly here. Sometimes they spend weeks preparing, constructing materials, for a five-minute test and, as a result,

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Fig. 3.2  A floor-to-ceiling arrangement. (Source: Author)

construction materials, various pieces of wood, concrete, steel, lie all over the place (Fig. 3.4). The office is full of stuff, piled perilously. Materials, pieces of wood, concrete blocks, half-built equipment, old devices, piles of documents, binders, textbooks, plans with coloured dilatation lines, reports. But also, the clangs and shouts of construction workers, the breeaam breeaaaam of bass leaking out of offices, the hushes and sh-sh-shes of the workers and acousticians, that strange, sweeping sound. There are also a variety of devices, anechoic chambers, accelerometers, GeOfilms, auralisations, televisions screens, laptops, and a laboratory. A sort of messy mosaic of things—a bricolage. All of it to capture sound. To make it visible, graspable. An object. And yet, capturing sound is tricky. One of the acousticians working on the project told me that it is often described as “black magic.” Complex and invisible, but also for a future building, partially virtual. As Sara, the acoustician, explains, “How can you convince

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Fig. 3.3  An arrangement in laboratory. (Source: Author)

someone without being able to explain it?” This is why, perhaps, they rely on various means: video demonstrations, regulations and standards, models, images, precedents, memos and reports, nR ratings (simplified calculations) and experiments. Later in the week, as I enter the office in the morning, I encounter again that sonic object, acoustic model: rrrrrrrrrrrrrRRRRRRRzzzzzziiiiiiiiiiiii. Joanna sits in front of her laptop on a desk near the laboratory on the ground floor (Fig. 3.5). That strange sound rings out again and again. Above her, a television is mounted on the wall with a view into the laboratory. Through the television, I can see a worker inside the room, while around us, there is hammering, drilling, clangs of metal that fall on the floor. Unperturbed, Joanna writes in her notebook. She looks up and invites me over. She’s conducting a test, she explains. Some measurements.

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Fig. 3.4  Construction materials in the office. (Source: Author)

And yet, of what? I follow her into the room that was visible on the television (Fig. 3.6). Inside, the worker is re-assembling a black panel on the floor. A wooden rectangular frame with black sponge-y material over the top, and mineral wool stuffed inside. There was a discrepancy in the first test, Joanna tells me, due to a gap. While gaps tend to be disastrous as sounds have the tendency to escape through them, in this case, the problem is that there is not enough of a gap. Gaps can also be useful for “containment”: little spaces between walls that can hold soundwaves—especially those unruly low frequency waves. The gap in this panel is supposed to approximate future gaps in the walls of the actual building—and here, more specifically, as this is for a future office space in the building, the aim is to design the conditions for an absorptive space. Here, while the material—a specific type of ceiling tile—that they are testing is efficient at absorbing high frequencies, the gap is used to contain low frequencies. In this case,

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Fig. 3.5  Joanna conducts a measurement. (Source: Author)

the gap, which is supposed to contain noises, did not work. Something is amiss. It does not correspond to their expectations, and now they need to re-arrange the panel to accommodate for it. First, they take it apart. Putting on gloves (to protect from the scratchy wool), they pull off the duct tape that was used to keep the black “sponge” material over top of the wool and attached to the wooden frame, but also to minimize any other holes for the sound to travel through. With utility knives, the wool is cut into smaller pieces and stuffed within the wooden frame. Foam is then added to simulate the gap underneath the panel. Once the panel is put back together, Joanna ensures that the rotating microphone in the centre of the room and two speakers are put into their correct positions. She refers to a methodology that she has printed out and laid on the floor. Above them hang two curved wooden sheets from the ceiling. These wooden sheets are there to approximate the “reverberating” qualities of the room. The microphone, the speakers, and the wooden sheets are material representations of three central aspects of

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Fig. 3.6  Close-up of television screen during the measurement. (Source: Author)

room acoustics: sound production, propagation, and reception.3 The mock-up “room” within the laboratory is set up to replicate the room’s future acoustic conditions (Fig. 3.7). Even though it barely corresponds to the architectural drawings, and that the panel, which would be a ceiling panel in the building, lies on the floor, it does not matter. The aim is to get close to the future room’s acoustic behaviour, to “mock-up” how it would sound. Of course, there is always a challenge, Joanna reminds me, of moving from the ideal conditions of the laboratory test and the future “field” conditions of the building. The laboratory conditions are never exactly the same as how the room or the building will sound once built. Like the rest of the design team, there is always the difficulty of crossing the chasms  See the comprehensive history of acoustics, Sounds of Our Times: Two Hundred Years of Acoustics by Robert T. Beyer (1999). Sound propagation, Sound Production, and Sound Reception are three recurrent themes throughout the history of acoustics—the three points through which sound can be triangulated, pinned down, and perhaps, fixed.

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Fig. 3.7  The speakers and the wooden reflectors for the measurement. Together, they mimic the future conditions of the building. (Source: Author)

between the designs, their construction and use. There are assumptions to be considered, corrections implemented.4 The laboratory conditions, on the one hand, facilitate exactness, whereas its future field conditions require some approximations (Fig. 3.7).  For the acousticians, like the rest of the design team, precision and certainty in the design process is challenged in the gap between design and construction. Hence the need, as we saw in Chap. 2, of BIM and the 3D Revit model; one of its aims is to reduce this gap, to foresee issues of coordination in advance. For the acousticians, this emerges in the gap between laboratory tests and field tests. They always have corrections in mind as they do tests, knowing that the conditions on site will be different than those in the more ideal conditions in the lab. Therefore, they often suggest field tests for elements of the Factory, especially once it is built. One of these will be the large proscenium door. However, this gap, also constitutes a question of responsibility between the manufacturers, contractors, and the acousticians. How much information do they share? Who is responsible for ensuring that it meets the quality specified? Who is at risk? We will turn to this later in the chapter. 4

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In addition to her notebook, everything is saved on her laptop through the software called Dirac. Dirac is central to the experiment: it sends out the “sweep sound” (that strange sonic object, acoustic model) through the speakers, captures the sound as it goes through the microphone, and calculates what has been captured by “deconvolving” it; a process of simplification that detaches what has been recorded from the original sounds in order to arrive at the object measured. From this “measured object”—a deconvolved sound—it also produces a series of averages over the three microphone positions for each frequency in the sweep sound. As Joanna explains, they were measuring the “average value for the reverberation time,” that is, the amount of time it takes for a room’s sound level to decrease by 60  dB.  This is what is called “sound decay.”5 “From that time,” she continues, “you can, according to the dimensions of the room, define how absorptive the material is”. In other words, it is not a measurement of sound “in general” but a measurement of the absorption coefficient of the mineral wool in relation to the dimensions and the reflective quality of the proposed design of the room. They measure a specific arrangement of materials, a “mock-up” of the future building’s acoustic behaviour. Or as Joanna tells me the mock-up measurement aims to “create the same, more or less, situation that would be in reality.” But what is this “would be” situation? What did she see on her laptop that was not visible through the television screen? What is this reality that would be there, more or less? As a series of averages, it hardly refers to any distinct “object,” and yet possesses for them a “thinglike” quality. How does the sparse set-up of the mock-up correspond to the future room when it hardly resembles it? There are wooden reflectors, a mineral wool panel, a sweep sound, speakers, and a microphone. The measurement itself follows the ISO standard (ISO 354), which sets out the methodology, the correct dimensions of the panel, the ideal surface, the steps to follow. The ceiling panel on the floor is not the actual panel, but approximates the information provided by the manufacturer. Resemblance is not necessarily an epistemic condition, then. The sound is a standard sweep  This is the classic formula from pioneering acoustician Wallace Sabine: the coefficient of sound absorption. See Thompson (2008) for a historical account of Sabine. While Joanna’s measurement follows the principles of Sabine’s theory of reverberation, they are not testing it as a theory, they are testing the building itself. 5

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sound. The DIRAC software sends out the sound, deconvolutes, disambiguates, calculates, and averages the data. The laboratory room, itself, is standardized. Everything is pre-set. A whole “hinterland” (Law 2004) of standards, techniques, instruments, an ensemble of “hearing equipment” (Sterne 2015: 70), through which they can listen to the building. In the same way that the scientific “gaze” relies on a configuration of standardized instruments, equipment, and techniques to see and discipline the object under study (Lynch 1985), as a distributed way of seeing (Goodwin 1995), perhaps architectural acousticians rely on this set-up for a lived experience of sound to appear thinglike and for a “distributed ear” that can listen in to it. But something else manifests there. Something that was not visible through the television screen. Something that Joanna watches (it is a question of watching, with its audio-visual quality, and not just observing) from her laptop. There was another room within the room. If the first “room” was the mock-up in the laboratory, an approximation that “more or less” corresponded to the future room, the second “room” was what was being approximated: the future experience of the sound in the building, or the acoustic behaviour of a particular arrangement of materials that would be there. This is the room whose acoustic behaviour Joanna measured, which was only visible through her laptop as a simplified “deconvolution,” averages that DIRAC calculates. This is what the “mock-up” in the laboratory allows to manifest. It is not something that is visibly there, but is a sound “effect” of the mock-up, conjured through the laboratory, the mock-up and captured through the software. A future condition of the building, or what would be there. In the same way that foam models provide architects “partial views” (Yaneva 2005) onto a future building, or how molecular models enable a “phenomenological” and haptic experience of invisible molecules (Francœur 2000), the mock­up makes the future experience of sound measurable and knowable for the acoustician. Like the 3D model, it affords the chance to measure and listen to sounds in a room that would be there as if they were already there. And yet, this experience of sound does not quite exist. But is something in-between, a proximity. While precision is important in setting up the mock-up, in following the methodology and assembling the ceiling

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panel, the mock-up, in Joanna’s words, only “more or less” corresponds to the situation that would be there. It is not a representation of what “is,” but an approximation, a drawing near to a future experience of sound. An experience that hangs together in the vague mode or “tonality” of the future conditional; they measure it as if it “would be” there.6 Souriau has a felicitous term for this. What he calls “mock-existences” or “counterfeits” (2015 [2009]: 154). Something that is not quite “real” but has the status of a thing. Something that exists, barely. Something that is thinglike. This takes shape in the rough correspondence between the mock-up, the room that would be there, and the experience of sound within it. Within this approximation—something that “would be” there, more or less—the sound of the building begins to take on a tangible form that exists in proximity, as an approximation between the laboratory and the future building that allows them to say, yes, it works, at least, for the time being. What the measurement demonstrates is an important aspect of architectural acoustics. The leap from concepts, principles, and calculations in acoustics and physics to the design of the building and the materiality of the building. The challenge of roughly corresponding to or approximating a reality that would be there. This is how another acoustician describes the process: You’re playing with these physics concepts. You imagine how given the boundary conditions that are put down by the architect or structural engineer, what you can change, the amount of room you have, the amount of mass you can bring in, and then you come up with these principles from physics about how to block it, guide it away, or absorb it (change it to heat). When you think of a solution, you have to materialise it, and look for elements, preferably stuff you can buy somewhere, to materialise it. […] Your concept is pure physics, and that can be quite a distance from their world.

 Compare with François Jullien’s discussion of the mode of the “as if ” in Chinese thought and painting that exists between presence and absence: “the Song Dynasty master paints his landscape in the tonality of as if, in the mode of appearing-disappearing, at once ‘as if there were’ and ‘as if there were not’” (2012: 7–8). 6

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As a result, the “measured object” here, or the properties of sound and noise in the building, is not grounded solely in physics or on physical principles. It is not the same in every building, or in every space in the same building because it must be materialised, not just to communicate with the other members of the design team more commonly concerned with the “materiality” of the building (as if acoustics is concerned with immaterial things), but to measure and approximate what its reality would be. It is a matter of “boundary conditions,” the sound’s materialisation, and the distance between a concept and what would be there.7 For acousticians, the aim is to capture the performance of materials in relation to sound in specific configurations, connections, and volumes within Factory. These effects resonate throughout the design team. For them, sound is not hyle, a substance, like molecular air pressure or mechanical energy, that takes a general “shape” given by a concept. Sound – or noise—is irreducibly specific: to the building, the room, the materials, designs, requirements from the client, and building regulations. It is neither known nor exists on its own. While the object that emerges in Joanna’s measurement seemingly emerges in a sparse room with few materials, it is intertwined with matters that inform its emergence, an “informed matter.”8 Informed by the constraints, parameters, the regulations, standards, the demands of the client, the manufacturer’s materials, and the designs of the design team. In other words, these approximations are specific to the assemblages that form them. But they also “inform” the other designs. The measured sound travels back to the design team to say, yes or no. It can be compliant or recalcitrant. From this approximation of the reality of the building’s acoustic performance, other relations, behaviours, or aspects of the design are shaped as well. They all overlap and repeat this set of relations in other ways. Sound realities must be fitted with other approximations of realities of the building. They come together, interact, and shape one another.  Like Andrew Barry’s description of the metallurgist (drawing from Deleuze and Guattari), the acoustician too “is a good materialist, aware that materials will always, in some way, be resistant to external forces and will generate their own effects” (2010: 91). 8  For the notion of “informed matter,” see Bernadette Bensaude-Vincent and Isabell Stengers (1996: 206) and for other uses of the notion in different contexts, see Andrew Barry (2005) and Keith Hetherington (2014). 7

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Sound is thus not passive, but an actively binding agent.9 Acoustics adds constraints to the other realities of the building, while also being constrained by them. While approximations help them navigate the gap between the laboratory and the site, between design and construction, sometimes they need to also measure what is immeasurable. Sometimes, they need to work with information that is not settled yet, aspects of the building still “in the making” within other worlds of the design team. Sometimes, they do some guesswork.

3.3 Guesswork and a Noise Simulation “You have to imagine,” Lucas, another acoustician, tells me, “63 Hz is about 7 meters long. That’s two storeys of a building. That’s one wave. There is something of that size moving around.” 63 Hz is the noise limit criterion for low frequency noise, one of the thresholds at which sound becomes noise around the building. Lucas continues to explain: “It also means that if you have an obstruction, like a cup, this big wave of 7 meters just goes around the cup. While the small wave, at a high frequency, is easily bounced away or stopped by a 2 meters screen. The funny thing is that even this 7-meter wave can fit through a small hole. That’s the strange thing about sound.” These low frequency waves elude how we tend to think of objects—they touch us without being seen; they are shapeshifters that bend, twist, and squeeze. These strange things are also important, they tell me, because they speak in large part for the noise leaks of the building. They are tell-tales both for the “build-up” of the building, its material thickness, and for how well it would fit within the surrounding “soundscape.” How much it would affect the everyday lives of those who live nearby: “We need to be able to contain for instance 100 dB at 63 Hz. That’s like a Metallica bass player going mental and yet people in the next-door residential tower [being] able to sleep with their window open and not hear anything over 9  See Yaneva (2017) for a discussion of how sunlight and glare also bind together actors in a design practice.

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27 dB.” 63 Hz operates as an objective limit or baseline for the building: its purpose is to contain noise or sound levels at low frequencies from leaking out of the building.10 But noise is not easy to define. Textbooks, for instance, tell us that noise is typically understood as “unwanted sound.” It is not just a certain level of loudness or level of decibels,11 but a sound that is qualified as “annoying” by those who hear it (Parkin et al. 1979: 156). And this is the challenge for acousticians who want to measure it: “annoyance is a difficult property to measure objectively – it is related to but not identical with loudness. Two noises may be equally loud, but not equally annoying” (Lawrence 1970: 59). The same sound may be acceptable during the day but annoying at night. Sounds become noises in different circumstances. Noise is not any identifiable and determinate thing in itself (Peterson 2021), but a perceived property of sound, an incorporeal surface effect that resists completely becoming treated as a “thing.” In other words, noise is sound that has become “annoying”—and annoyance disturbs any claim to fix what noise is “objectively.” Marina Peterson (2021), for instance, writes about the difficulties that acoustic engineers face when measuring noise, demonstrating how annoyance, as an indeterminate affect, constitutes a “dynamic friction” between the inscriptions they rely on and the perceptions that they cannot quite represent—and contain—through metrics. “Metrics,” she notes, “meant to stabilize (or bracket) annoyance are often accompanied by discussion of its [noise’s annoyance] instability, its vagueness, its fuzziness […]. At once descriptive and prescriptive, their standardization is deemed necessary for regulation […], widening, rather than closing, a gap between perception and inscription” (2021: 52). And while acoustic engineers often side-step  This figure is not something determined within the design process but comes from Manchester City Council’s “Planning & Noise” technical guidance document (2022). It is a material planning requirement set by the city council for entertainment venues. As noise is a tricky thing to regulate objectively, the city council has set up this one limit, which is paying attention to the overall sound levels between the 63 Hz and 125 Hz octave band; this is where low frequency noises tend to be (anything below 63 Hz is “infra-sound”); and low frequency noises are somewhat at the limit of human perception, but can nevertheless still be heard and felt, and are especially difficult to regulate and contain. 11  It is also important to note that “loudness” is not measured by decibels. The decibel (dB) is a unit that measures sound intensity or the physicality of a sound, perhaps. Loudness already refers back to a hearer that qualifies that sound intensity. 10

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such challenges, annoyance nevertheless “hangs on the side of graphs; pushes into sentences, explanations, and definitions” (2021: 52). Noise is somewhere between perception and inscription: either an objective measurement undone by sensory experiences, or an elusive subjective impression that metrics try to generalize. But how are architectural acousticians to measure the noise of the future building? If noise is somewhere between perception and inscription, how do acousticians take an account of its perception, its sensory experience, when there is neither anyone to experience it nor any building to make noise? Sitting around a computer with Soraya, another acoustician, one morning, she shows me a simulation model she has run to do this. The model itself is generated through a software called Geomilieu. A software that calculates, analyses, and simulates the environmental impact of noise. In the simulation, the building is—visually—a nondescript rendering surrounded by other colourful volumes that indicate the future buildings in the neighbourhood (Fig. 3.8). There are only coloured planes and lines along the facades that indicate a specific sound level value. Visual exactness is not so important.12 The first step in measuring the noise the future building makes, she explains, is “to interpret the buildings that will surround the future building in order to see which are sensitive to noise.” It is important to consider the soundscape, the context of the building to grasp these levels of “sensitivity” of buildings. A sensitivity that is not an absolute but is tied to the type of building and its use: “there are always variations of buildings that you do or do not take into account”. Not every building is sensitive to noise to the same degree. Residential buildings, for instance, have a different level of sensitivity than office buildings. They are more sensitive as noise affects those who live there more, and there is a greater chance that, for those buildings, sound becomes noise. In the simulation, these buildings then become “sound receptors,” that which receives and is sensitive to sound. More specifically, to simulate the sensory experience  Scale is a crucial factor when measuring noise. Unlike the visual aspects of the building, which can be known by scaling up and down (2005), or changing scale, noise does not scale well. It is helpful to study it at scale. Hence the utility of a digital simulation that allows them to measure the noise of the building and surrounding environment at scale before the building is finished. 12

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Fig. 3.8  A simulation of Factory leaking noise. (Source: Author)

of noise these surrounding buildings become human ears in terms of allowable sound levels. This sensitivity is tied to what is perceivable by the standard human ear. The built environment, through the simulation, is given a “tympanic” function (Sterne 2003). Like the 3D model that served as a way to imagine the building itself as thinglike, the surrounding buildings in the simulation become proxies for the missing sensory experience of noise. The “sound source”—the future building—also needs to be calculated. This is the second step. These sources are the sound levels of the building in relation to the activities, the arrangements, the mechanical equipment, and the program of the building. Soraya adds up all the sound levels produced inside the building, which from room to room, from activity to activity, accumulates. She also adds up all the insulation values of the walls and façades, which is set against the sound levels of the activities.

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These are then generated into a table. This table shows the sound levels that leak into the surrounding buildings and is organized according to different categories: different parts of the façades of the buildings, at different heights, during the day and the evening, and across a range of different days and evenings (e.g., from Day 31 to Day 8000), and an average is given. Through this, the building slowly fills up with sound, reverberating, absorbing, reflecting, and leaking as noise into the built environment. To make these calculations she relies on data about the designs, materials, and equipment from the other design team members. For instance, to know how much noise will be emitted from the chillers on the roof, the MEP engineers need to supply data about the specifications of those chillers; to know how much sound will be generated by the sound system equipment, the theatre design consultants need to provide the specifications of the equipment. It is a challenge, however, to measure something that is in the process of being made. As Soraya notes, “you have to make decisions, you get information, but it’s not always complete. There are things you do not know about the building structure, about the façade, so you have to always make estimates.” There are always, she notes, “corrections,” “assumptions,” and “approximations” as the inputs for the simulation are always—to her frustration—incomplete. In general, as Mikaela Sundberg explains, “simulations employ a generative mechanism to imitate the dynamic behaviour of the underlying process that the simulations aim to represent” (2007: 4113). In this case, the simulation aims to represent the dynamic behaviour of the building making sound, to observe whether it is too noisy and when it becomes annoying. As with all simulations, Soraya points out, “what we do is a very simplified version of reality,” a modest attempt to “see if it is OK.” It is not supposed to be an accurate representation. Rather, as noted in different contexts (Loukissas 2012; Sismondo 1999; Sundberg 2007), simulations have a “pragmatic” task. In this case, to “distort” the system being represented by simplifying the complexities of noise and to translate the qualitative problem of noise into a quantitative solution represented by the colours in the simulation. It therefore also functions like a “virtual laboratory” (Sundberg 2007) that allows them to observe the behaviour of the building within an acoustic world. Simplified, then, in the sense that the simulation affords approximations of how the building

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acoustically behaves by allowing them to insert the building into a stabilized and standard acoustic “Galilean world view” (Lynch 1985)—an acoustic litmus test. And yet the simulation is also more than a laboratory and a worldview, as Sundberg (2007: 4114) notes, because simulations “can also themselves be studied the same way as natural systems are studied in empirical research.” The simulation is not functioning as a kind of window through which to witness noise out there but constitutes the object to be viewed. In other words, for the acousticians, the simulation collapses the distinction between an object and its representation. Akin to nanoimaging, as historian Lorraine Daston notes, “the image is the presentation, the working object of science,” they simultaneously “make and make visible, present and represent all at once” (2014: 321). And therefore, another “as if ”: like the 3D model and the mock-up, the simulation stands in for the noisemaking building as if it were already out there. If the simulation can be studied in the same way as physical systems, here, for Soraya, the physical system is not only dynamic, but also somewhat unknown. Both the non-acoustical factors that cannot fit into the worldview of the simulation, and the so-called physical system is incomplete. The sensory experience of noise in the simulation will not, as a result, be the same as those in the field. Hence her frustration, which stems less from the concern of how well the simulation corresponds to a reality, or of what goes missing in the simplifications of the simulation, but also that the physical system is incomplete and constantly changing. While the software, the parameters, the regulations, and physical theories of acoustics—the “worldview”—may be complete, that which is to be known through the simulation is incomplete. How to verify and simulate a physical system that is incomplete and in the making? Unlike the bodies of mediate auscultation (Lachmund 1999; Rice 2010), or car engines for mechanics (Bijsterveld 2018), or the noise of airplanes (Peterson 2021), the noise of the building remains “in the making,” provisional and incomplete. If others have pointed out that simulations function as approximations of a complex reality (Winsberg 1999), Soraya’s frustration points us to an aspect of simulation in design: it is not just a simplification of a complex system, but also involves guesswork, estimates that fill in what is missing. It is an inscription that works insofar as it is

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interpreted. There is so much that does not fit into the quantitative dimensions and metrical space of the simulation that are required to be read into the simulation by the acoustician and her judgements. Like noise itself, the simulation itself sits at the threshold of inscription and perception, a mixture of precision and “hopeful suggestions” (Peirce 1929; Clarke 2015) that operate at the edges of the certain. This (guess)work allows her to hold onto the ideals of impartiality and objectivity while also being partial (in both senses). In the same way that noise eludes attempts to fix it with quantitative certainty, noise in the simulation is approximated as a mixture of instincts, anticipations, and interpretations alongside the regulations, software, parameters and given data. While the mock-up allows them to approximate what “would be” there, the simulation is an approximation, not just because it is a simplification, but also because it involves guesswork, to take into account what cannot fit into the worldview of the simulation. In this way, noise is not calculated as an object, but is approximated as thinglike—and thus measurable, more or less. And yet, even as they come to grips with it, to get a hold on noise, it leaks in another way. The “objective criteria,” the parameters, and the soundscape approximated, however, cannot foresee what happens when it informs the building, “steers back to it,” and is materialised. In the next section, two trajectories of sound are materialised into the designs of the rest of the design team, where effects overflow effects, forcing more participants, more things, to participate in its existence.

3.4 Epistemic Noise: Sound Effects and “Grey Things” Acousticians imagine buildings in specific ways. As large musical instruments that tune the way in which sound behaves, as massive conduits for the propagation and reverberation of vibrations and noise in order to approximate what the experiences of sound will be. These imagined forms help to give shape to otherwise formless and invisible processes. One such concept, or “building principle,” is what they call a box-in-a-box. This is

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a typical construction technique. These concepts are akin to scientific theories that propose underlying principles or assumptions of the object. In their laboratory, Lucas shows how they have set-up one of the rooms to mimic it: it allows for there to be a space within a space, an inside box within an outside box, in order to insulate and contain noise and vibrations from either entering or leaking. For Factory, they initially had this idea. As Lucas recounts, standing inside of a box that is inside a box: “we have the inside box of the Warehouse, and then the steel structure is around that, and then there is the outside of the box.” There would be an insulated inside concrete box, and an insulated outside concrete box, a steel structure inside that holds it up, and an outside structure, a façade and a roof, that envelopes the entire building. In between each box, there is an air cushion, like the “gap” in the Joanna’s panel, that operates as a cushion for noise, as some of the low frequencies that pass through the first box is contained within this gap between the boxes, making what they call a “double sandwich”: noise is stuck within the middle. The point is to avoid any rigid connections with the structure as vibrations and sounds, particularly low frequencies, travel through them. Early in the project, it was decided that this would be an appropriate response to the acoustic requirements surrounding the Factory. The box-­in-­ a-box and the build-up of the façade would be an adequate delegate for the 63 Hz band limit. However, at a particular moment, the concept changed. There was a value engineering exercise in the summer of 2017, and the contractor had decided they could not afford the “months and months” that it would take out of their overhead profit. The concrete massing would take too long; a steel structure would be cheaper because of the speed and the steel prices are much more variable than concrete. As a result, the concept changed: it would be a steel frame with concrete slabs applied to it. Now, as Lucas puts it, there is a “box-in-a-box-with-a-difference.” This “difference” has a series of consequence. One thing: the acoustic insulation is compromised. It is no longer an adequate response. As another acoustician reflects on this moment, “there was a grey thing between us.” They had to find another way to mitigate the low frequency vibrations and noise from transferring through the façade while maintain the obduracy of the soundscape around the building.

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In this “grey thing,” like an opaque cloud, a fog of uncertainty, the design team gathers around previously unforeseeable issues. The acousticians are required to retouch their concept to adapt. The focus turned from the box-in-a-box to one of dilatation lines, where the focus is no longer on containing noises and vibrations within boxes, but through lines that pass through the building in various ways, often getting lost in the complexity of how the three structures overlap and interlink. Lucas explains the challenge: “the line goes something like this [his arms getting entangled], zigzagging, up and down,” putting his hands in the air: “and [then] where is it?” The concept changes as the acoustic behaviour of the building changes, but not in any way simpler. Overall, the acoustic requirements could not be ignored. The sensitive buildings and the soundscape surrounding the building still inform the façade; they are major constraints on the way in which the building and its materiality takes shape. And so, it became a question of finding another way to reach the acoustic requirements. Typically, I was told, there are two ways to do it: mass or space. But architects do not like losing space in the building; and structural engineers do not like more mass as it applies more loads onto the structure. As Lars, one of the acousticians, explains, “[since] both don’t work [in this case], you come with springs.” Acoustic springs, or bearings, become important materials as they help insulate between the outer box of the façade and the structure. They isolate the two parts of the structure, and allow them to be “flexibly connected,” as vibrations and sounds more easily pass through rigid connections. Where the box-in-a-box was not possible, they opted for acoustic springs to help meet the requirement. However, it is not just a question of adding acoustic springs or bearings. They had to be specified, which created another problem: the building was both heavy and light at the same time. For the acousticians, the building is too light for the acoustic springs and requires heavier concrete slabs to meet the acoustic requirements. For the structural engineers, the building is too heavy: the thicker the slabs, the heavier the load for the structure. There is thus what they called a “spin-off effect”: how to find a way to overcome this difference in weight, of a building that is both heavy and light at once.

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Another spin-off: the heavy concrete slabs could not be rigidly connected at the façade. The “problematic thing in the design is that the panels [slabs] are separate elements, and you have to imagine that they are hung on the building like tiles with a gap between.” If they would be together, they would break. As a result, there are lots of connections with gaps on the façade. The question, then: “how do you make sure that the gap is not reducing the sound insulation of the whole façade?” These “grey things” haunt the design as effects follow from effects, overflowing and redefining the concepts, requiring the design of other elements, testing different materials, and gathering various participants together around, in this instance, the façade. Convergences, meeting points, where sound leaks into other materials, informing them and provoking unforeseeable issues. Yet, it was not simply a redefinition of the concept, or a modification of the materiality of the façade, but also a question of responsibility and the relations and scopes of the design team. These unforeseen problems begin to emerge, and the design team members are unsure who takes on the risk and the responsibility. Whose responsibility is it to define, design and specify the acoustic spring? What about the concrete slab? How can these different versions of the building that acoustics complicate come together? What kind of adjustments of different approximations happen? One acoustician summed up the challenge of  these “grey things” in design: “how do you get everyone to share a problem?” How do they all share in the act of creation? In just a short trajectory of consequences, the change of the steel structure has resounding effects for acoustics. It requires a change of concept, the design of an acoustic spring, an increase in mass for the façade. But how is a solution reached with no common denominator to adjudicate from and against? How do they decide which spring to use when the building is both light and heavy? Who is required to do what? How do you leave space for others? Often, it returns to an experiment, a test, for the acousticians. They return to their laboratory, as they did for the façade, to get “clarification and validation”—to find a way through the fog of the grey thing. This is a place of tension—the grey things—where the virtualities of materials and uncertainties produce a “shared problem.” These are

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unforeseeable convergences that emerge during the design process, unaccounted for in the scopes stipulated in the contract and as gaps in the design of the building. While sound is in the making, it is also redistributing professional roles and contractual obligations, producing a kind of “epistemic noise” in a fog of uncertainty (to mix the visual with the sonic). Let’s travel to a design team meeting in Manchester to come across another “grey thing” that forms through a shared problem with acoustics: a diffuser. * * * Grey things are also (sometimes) slow events. They seem to stick. Surprises, different entities and/or uncertainties appear. They can last for months, even years. In a design team meeting in Manchester within a bright and long meeting room, I come across one of these. Tom, the project architect, turns to this “grey thing” at the end of the meeting and asks pointedly: “Alright. Diffusers and attenuators. nR levels on the diffusers in the Warehouse and Theatre. As far as I know, we still don’t have a complete understanding. This was the last topic that I discussed before [I left]. I was off the project for a year. I have been back on the project for 6 months. And it’s still not solved. Somebody, please, tell me what is the situation with the nR levels.”13 The room grows quiet. The MEP engineers, who oversee specifying the diffusers, turn to one another. One of them asks out loud: “what is the problem?” Tom explains that he is trying to understand why this has not been resolved. Why it has persisted as a problem. It has been an “ICAR” issue,14 unresolved for a year and a half. What has happened since he has last spoke? “What we need to know is what is the acceptable nR and dB level  The work from the acousticians tends to travel to the rest of the design team through nR levels, or Noise Ratings. These are single figure ratings standardised by an ISO to specify noise within buildings that take into account the maximum sound pressure level in dBs within different octave frequency bands. The nR levels moreover determine what is acceptable in different types of spaces with different uses. 14  ICAR is the bespoke system of reviewing issues of coordination within the design team. It facilitates communication within the design team, but also with the client who can take an account of what is happening within the design team and provide decisions where it is needed. Shared problems and grey things also force the creation of other channels and simplifications for working together. The obscurity of the design process often, in other words, requires a variety of routes for clarification. 13

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at each of the diffusers and what is the specification of the diffuser to achieve that. That is what we need.” Another MEP engineer intervenes, gingerly: “Yes, I think we’re at a sticking point now.” For him, this is a shared problem. The problem is that there are two operation scenarios—different ways in which the Factory will be configured, for example, the Theatre opens onto the Warehouse, or the two spaces closed off from one another, or Warehouse is split in two and Theatre closed, and so on—that do not agree with the noise criteria or nR set by the client and the acousticians. There is one scenario in the Warehouse and one in the Theatre during unamplified events. In these two scenarios, the nR goes up, but the dB remains the same. More specifically: the background noise from the air-­ conditioning system is too loud and is predicted to intervene in the performance. In other words, they are in “non-compliance,” a “clash.” To understand this, however, we need to travel back in time. Back to when it became a problem. Again, let’s rewind to the value engineering exercise in 2017 during Stage 3, when they redid this stage and, as a result, shrunk the Theatre. This was, at least, premised upon the desire to improve the audience experience: theatres with a capacity of 1200 are better than those with 1500. They also shrunk the space of the Theatre to save on costs. However, it also had other effects. For the MEP engineers, ventilation changed: how you heat and cool the space. Sitting in an airy office space, a year prior to the above design team meeting, a mechanical engineer describes this exact “sticking point.” Here, in the 3D model, he shows how there is typically a “displacement ventilation system,” or “ventilation from bottom-up [where] you leak air into the bottom of the theatre and extract it from the top.” However, now, due to the loss of space, they use a “bottom-down approach.” Air is blown down. But, to get the air down, “you actually have to do it at quite a high velocity, and when you push air at a high velocity, it makes noise and it affects acoustics, and because it is a performance space, you cannot have the air conditioner overriding the performance.” The noise source becomes the air velocity, which is pushed out of jet diffusers that sit in the “soffit” of the theatre. To be able to specify the jet diffusers, and sort out the air solution, they did a computational fluid dynamics (CFD) model, which “shows how the air travels down, where you get hot and cold, and

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the velocity” of the air. The air becomes globs of colour, red for hot, blue for cold. The sticking point, mentioned above in the meeting, emerges from this relation between temperature and noise. It can neither be too noisy, nor too cold. But this relation is also specific to the type of use of the space. For instance, a heavy metal concert: the air conditioning is increased because people are jumping around, but it does not matter because the music is loud; the air conditioning, the air velocity, the background hum, will not interfere with the quality of the sound. As a result, there is an nR rating for each kind of performance as well as the different operational scenarios.15 Hot air is more difficult than cold air to blow down into the space. It is less dense, so it rises. “You actually have to blow it quite hard in heating mode,” the MEP engineer explains. However, this causes issues: “if there was one of those more stricter performances going on [e.g., ballet], you can’t actually have the heating mode in full at that time because it is too noisy – that’s what [the acousticians] tell you – that’s not acceptable. It’s something like 65 dB(A). However, we cannot obviously have it too cold.” Excitedly, he continues, “we’ve come up with fantastic engineering ways of getting around that.” They have found a way of getting around the sticking point between temperature and noise: they have turned the building into “hats” and “jackets” by using the box-­in-­a-­box-­with-­a-­ difference concept developed by the acousticians. They use the void between the two inside box and the outside structure and pre-heat the space. They fill the void with hot air—creating a jacket. But also utilise the diffusers to “trickle heat into the space, and the heat stays at the top – creating a hat. This way the space is already warm; there is an added insulation layer: you’re stopping the heat from rising up and out.” Yet, there remain two operational scenarios where this does not meet the requirements. The point sticks still. They can meet the acoustic requirements, but not the client’s (vis-à-vis temperature, or types of performances); or they can meet the client’s requirements, but not the acoustic  As the MEP engineer notes, “We have to come up with the right criteria for each one; the temperature for each one that’s acceptable. That’s the nR rating for each one […]. Under those circumstances you need to achieve certain requirements to keep the noise level acceptable because the last thing you want is, if you’re watching a symphony, and you can hear the noise coming from the top of you.”

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requirements. We need to travel back to the design team meeting to see what happens. Back in the meeting, they highlight the difficulty: “At the moment, it is nR 60 in the pre-heat mode,” that is, with the jacket and hat on, “but the criteria in an unamplified rehearsal space is nR 30 – amplified it is nR 45. So that’s the risk.” In fact, there is no issue if there is nobody in the space. It can be pre-heated at a nR level of 60. Nobody is annoyed. That’s okay. Or, at least, for most of the operational scenarios, except for two (when the Theatre and the Warehouse are connected), especially when there is a temperature sensitive performance. In the pre-heat mode, there is a “slight” temperature drop. It drops from 21 degrees to 19 degrees over six hours, and as the mechanical engineer put it, for ballet, “if it isn’t 20 degrees their legs might snap off.” MIF, the client, are not okay with this. They want the flexibility for 24-hour naked performances, ballet over eight hours long, and more—where the bodies, the temperature, and the sounds are aligned. In the middle of this rupture between temperature and noise are the diffusers and attenuators in the ventilation ducts. Jet diffusers control the velocity of the air that is pushed into the space, and thus have an impact on the noise generated through the ventilation ducts. However, there is also something wrong here, a discrepancy in the data, which they took from the brochure of the manufacturer, Waterloo: “data that we get from Waterloo is outdated. It’s from 1985,” Lucas, the acoustician in the meeting, explains. The data cannot be trusted. In front of the screen during the meeting, Lucas describes the problem. In the 1985 report, there are sound power levels from three settings of the diffusers (250, 350, and 450 m/s). They can only assume that it is a 250 mm diameter diffuser. “And then,” he continues, “what they did was use this data from 250 diameters and extrapolated it to 380 diameters. [But] there is a big chance that this translation doesn’t work. That’s why the sound power is overestimated. Waterloo tells us that they don’t know who made this table or how it is calculated.” There is uncertainty. Perhaps this is why they cannot reach the requirements? They are not sure. They could use another manufacturer, but they already did the CFD model for this diffuser. It costs too much and takes too much time to do another.

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In the end, they decide to measure it. While there is an ISO (ISO 5125), a standard methodology for conducting the test, there is also the question of time and cost. It could take months to get a laboratory in the UK, and around £10,000 a day for the lab. But also, a question of who takes responsibility for the tests? Should Waterloo do it? It is their data, after all. But how do you convince them to spend money on tests. Should the acousticians do it? But then, it is another question of responsibility. What if there is mistake in those results? Is it their liability? On the other hand, they will be giving data to the manufacturer about their products. As one of the MEP engineers exclaims: “you would have to be appointed by Waterloo; it’s a separate thing!” Nevertheless, it, as the acoustician remarks in the meeting, “must be validated,” the data corrected, the diffuser’s performance more certain, better approximated. This way they will have a better idea what is possible in the entangled relations between temperature, noise, air velocity, and bodies. Experiments and tests are done to make sound strong, powerful, well grounded, supported by “facts” as the etymology of validate tells us. But to validate sound, to make it exist and hold together, to make it stand strong, is not to return to an object out there, to discover it, as if the missing data is all they need to find. It is a way to get beyond the sticking point, to resolve an issue, of getting around the ontologically variable entities that cannot quite fit together. In other words, validation is another aspect of approximation: not of drawing towards a reality of sound outside, but of bringing together different manifestations of sound as close as possible. Validate the missing data, the temperature, the noise, the air velocity, and diffusers, and the ballet dancer’s legs, sensations of hot and cold, of touch and hearing, by putting them into the same space, into a standardised set-up and methodology, to draw them together. The aim is to get them to fit together as close as possible, more or less, and to approximate a lived reality of the building. It is by following this process of materialising sound into design, informing materials, and the reciprocal redefinitions, that the variations of sound become evident. Sound manifests differently. There is hardly a stable object of sound; practitioners do not decide, represent, or slowly approach it “out there.” It is never there all together, fully, but is approximated within design practices. Therefore, neither a technical, scientific,

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nor governable object, but, in a different way, political, as a moment of disagreement, of epistemic noise, of uncertainties that gathers practitioners together who have to adjust their own approximations of how the building will perform, and of what the lived reality of the building will be like, but also as it re-assembles the way in which the building and its reality is ordered. The “common world” within which sounds and noises exist together with other materials, but also with the professional responsibilities and roles of the design team, and the soundscape of Manchester and those who will live with and experience the building, is at stake here. From the point of view of sound, and how it manifests in the building, another question of what it means to live collectively emerges in these approximations.

3.5 Listening to a Building, grosso modo Let’s return to the city councillor’s disbelief within Manchester’s City Hall. How is acoustics an “unknown unknown”? How could the sounds and the noises of the building not be known? Implicit within this disbelief is an understanding that acoustics is a modern science grounded in the ideals of exactitude, certainty, and precision (Wise 1995). There are precedents, rules of thumb, norms, standards, and methods—there is nothing new here. For the councillor, architectural acoustics, in the words of Alexandre Koyré, is a modern science that should have moved already from “the world of approximation to the universe of precision” (as cited in Schaffer 2015: 345). Acousticians can lift the veil of Pythagoras to locate, quantify, measure sounds and noises with a mathematical and geometrical precision. However, we have seen the contrary. As the acousticians repeatedly told me, in different ways, any certainty is only gained on “day one”: once the building is constructed and they have their first performances. In the design process, there are myriad modifications, re-­ dos, experiments, simulations, frustrations, and hopeful hypotheses, “grey things” and sticking points; it is closer to a world of approximation than a universe of precision. This is not simply due to the iterative and incomplete nature of a building “in the making,” but also due to the variability of sound and noise itself. They are recalcitrant. They speak back,

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change shape, and leak out of attempts to order it. Joanna must re-do a measurement; Soraya deals with gaps in information, retouching simulations again and again; the design team is drawn together by the “grey things” that sound constitutes, unleashing “knock-on effects,” forcing them to re-think their own responsibilities and obligations, testing both what this thing (particular arrangements of the building) could be, but also their trust of who can do it. This chapter has given the name approximation to both the form of knowing sound and noise, but also to way in which sound and noise exist in the design process, as something thinglike. They can almost be said to exist out there, as things, but not quite. And this is the aim of the designers: to give it some form of existence as a thing (prior to the building being constructed). This is a quality of knowing sounds and noises (recalcitrant, unruly, and elusive); they are difficult to grasp and fix as things. As is often noted, sound and noise are partially subjective perceptions and objective definitions; the subjective perception and objective delimitation of sound and noise inform and undo one another’s claims to know them with authority and certainty. As Peterson (2021) writes about noise: it exists in a zone of indeterminacy and a state of incompleteness. It leaks out of attempts to fix it—and yet it relies on these attempts in order to manifest. Sound and noise require stuff to be experienced; to be in the presence of an experience of sound and noise a lot more is needed; they do not exist on their own. This is what Stefan Helmreich has called “transduction” (2008): sensing and knowing sound happens through other mediations that transform it. It is for him the simultaneous structuring of matter and meaning. You hear—and know—sound and noise through other things. The tympanic part of the ear, simulations, experimental set-ups, but also walls, ceiling tiles, diffusers, and microphones. Sound and noise, on the one hand, relies on others to give it a form of existence, to give it some sort of material trace to exist and be known, and on the other hand, they leak out of them. This chapter wagered that this is part and parcel of design processes: designs are left unfinished, because they are in the process of being made, but also because you rely on others to partially inform the matter to be known. Design knowledge is an approximate knowledge.

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This chapter thus foregrounded an epistemological challenge in design: of giving traces to a future lived experience—of sound and noise—that— hopefully—would be there in the end. It has shown how these practitioners have given what is missing—like the 3D model in the previous chapter—a thinglike existence through what could be referred to as the work of approximation—a form of measure and validation for what is elusive and in the making. Approximations in design thus indicate another logic of inscription. If, for instance, scientific inscriptions give traces to materials through other forms to hold some thing—an invariant—constant (Latour and Woolgar 1986), approximations—as inscriptions—give traces to an experience that is variable, to give it some thinglike form. The mock-up refers to an experience of sound that would be there; the simulation evokes a possible soundscape in what remains mutable. They are, in other words, rough drafts or sketches that give sound and noise a thinglike existence without overdetermining them; traces of reality that, however vague, inchoate, hypothetical, and approximate, afford acousticians a chance to listen to the future building. And, if scale models are devices for gaining new knowledge by scaling up and down, of seeing more and less at once (Yaneva 2005) and flexible sketches organize a variety of practitioners together (Henderson 1998), approximations can be thought of as inscriptions that help them know not more and less, but more or less, and as inscriptions that draw things near, but not quite “together” (Latour 1990). As forms of knowledge, approximations are somewhere in the middle, between an object known and a knower who knows; the acousticians here are “virtual” knowers—awaiting validation of what they are in the process of knowing—and sound and noise have a “virtual” existence, awaiting their concrete manifestation, in the process of its being made. While on the one hand this chapter set out the challenge of knowing something ontologically indeterminate and elusive, the sound and noise of a building “in the making,” it also outlines another aspect of what it means to know in design: that it is always with others, that knowledge is shared, and that which is known is collectively known (and unknown). From the point of view of sound and noise, the lived reality of the building is therefore never grasped in toto or a priori but is based—partially— on the fitting together of different approximations of the various ways it

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is enacted in different practices, or its various performances. They manifest in the half-existing and incomplete assemblages that binds the disparate practitioners, types of expertise, and entities together, who, in turn, must adjust their approximations of the building to make it work. But these approximations also highlight a certain “economy of design (knowledge)” within the collaborative nature of the building project, and the importance that approximate knowledge has insofar as it allows them to remain “upstream” from actualisation, to not reach closure too quickly. This has important implications across the design team. If they reach “closure” too quickly, it will constrain what the other members of the design team can do. It is thus a careful way to “share a problem” in design without disturbing others, a way to make verifications without closure. A way of knowing that is about something “in the making,” knowing that “only works from next to next so as to bridge [the epistemological gap between knower and known], fully or approximately” (James 1987: 916–917). But this also highlights that it can fail. That the sound may not be there in the end. That the building may not perform as they had planned. That there is a fundamental “errability” (Souriau 2015 [2009]) in knowledge and design, a question of trust and obligation—not only for one’s own approximations, but for the others who will continue and add to them.

References Barry, Andrew. 2005. Pharmaceutical Matters: The Invention of Informed Materials. Theory, Culture & Society 22: 51–69. ———. 2010. Materialist Politics: Metallurgy. In Political Matter: Technosience, Democracy and Public Life, ed. Bruce Braun and Sarah Whatmore, 89–118. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Bensaude-Vincent, Bernadette, and Isabelle Stengers. 1996. A History of Chemistry. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Beraneck, L. 1996. Concert and Opera Halls: How They Sound. Woodbury: Acoustical Society of America. Beyer, Robert T. 1999. Sounds of Our Times: Two Hundred Years of Acoustics. New York: Springer.

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Bijsterveld, Karin. 2008. Mechanical Sound. Technology, Culture and Public Problems of Noise in the Twentieth Century. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. ———. 2018. Sonic Skills. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Clarke, Adele E. 2015. Anticipation Work: Abduction, Simplification, Hope. In Boundary Objects and Beyond: Working with Leigh Star, ed. Geoffrey C. Bowker, Stefan Timmermans, Adele E. Clarke, and Ellen Balka, 82–120. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Clarke, Joseph L. 2021. Echo’s Chambers: Architecture and the Idea of Acoustic Space. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press. Daston, Lorraine. 2014. Beyond Representation. In Representation in Scientific Practice Revisited, ed. Catelijine Coopmans, Janet Vertesi, Michael Lynch, and Steve Woolgar, 319–322. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Francœur, Eric. 2000. Beyond Dematerialization and Inscription: Does the Materiality of Molecular Models Really Matter? HYLE – International Journal for Philosophy of Chemistry 6: 63–84. Goodwin, Charles. 1995. Seeing in Depth. Social Studies of Science 25: 237–274. Helmreich, Stefan. 2008. An Anthropologist Underwater: Immersive Soundscapes, Submarine cyborgs and Transductive Ethnography. American Ethnologist 34 (4): 621–641. Henderson, Kathryn. 1998. Online and on Paper: Visual Representations, Visual Culture, and Computer Graphics in Design Engineering. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Hetherington, Keith. 2014. Regular Soybeans: Translation and Framing in the Ontological Politics of a Coup. Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies 21: 55–78. James, William. 1912. Essays in Radical Empiricism. New  York: Longmans, Green, and Co. ———. 1987. Professor Pratt on Truth. In William James: Writings, 1902–1910, 909–917. New York: The Library of America. Jasper, Sandra. 2019. Acoustic Ecology: Hans Scharoun and Modernist Experimentation in West Berlin. In The Acoustic City, ed. Matthew Gandy and B.J. Nilsen, 145–155. Berlin: Jovis Verlag. Jordon, V.L. 1980. Acoustical Design of Concert Halls and Theatres. London: Applied Science Publishers. Jullien, François. 2012. The Great Image Has No Form, or On the Nonobject Through Painting. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Lachmund, Jens. 1999. Making Sense of Sound: Auscultation and Lung Sound Codification in the Nineteenth-Century French and German Medicine. Science, Technology & Human Values 24 (4): 419–450.

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Latour, Bruno. 1990. Drawing Things Together. In Representation in Scientific Practice, ed. Michael Lynch and Steve Woolgar, 19–68. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Latour, Bruno, and Steve Woolgar. 1986. Laboratory Life: The Construction of Scientific Facts. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Law, John. 2004. After Method: Mess in Social Science Research. London: Routledge. Lawrence, Anita. 1970. Architectural Acoustics. New  York: Elsevier Publications Co. Loukissas, Yanni. 2012. Co-designers: Cultures of Computer Simulation in Architecture. London: Routledge. Lynch, Michael. 1985. Discipline and the Material Form of Images: An Analysis of Scientific Visibility. Social Studies of Science 15: 37–66. Manchester City Council. 2022. Planning & Noise: Technical Guidance. Manchester: Manchester City Council. https://www.manchester.gov.uk/ download/downloads/id/23747/noise_and_planning_guidance.pdf. Accessed 12 June 2022. Parkin, Peter Hubert, Henry Robert Humphreys, and H.R. 1979. Acoustics, Noise and Buildings. London: Faber and Faber. Peirce, Charles Saunders. 1929. Guessing. The Hound and the Hare 2: 267–282. Peterson, Marina. 2021. Atmospheric Noise: The Indefinite Urbanism of Los Angeles. Durham: Duke University Press. Rice, Tom. 2010. Learning to Listen: Auscultation and the Transmission of Auditory Knowledge. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 16 (s1): S41–S61. Schaffer, Simon. 2015. Ceremonies of Measurement: Rethinking the World History of Science. Annales. Histoire, Sciences Sociales 70 (2): 409–435. Sismondo, Sergio. 1999. Models, Simulations and Their Objects. Science in Context 12: 247–260. Souriau, Étienne. 2015 [2009]. The Different Modes of Existence. Trans. Erik Beranek and Tim Howles. Minneapolis: Univocal Publishing. Sterne, Jonathan. 2003. The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction. Durham: Duke University Press. ———. 2015. Hearing. In Keywords in Sound, ed. David Novak and Matt Sakakeeny, 65–77. Durham: Duke University Press. Sundberg, Mikaela. 2007. Scientific Models and Simulations. In The Blackwell Encyclopaedia of Sociology, ed. George Ritzer, 4112–4114. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing.

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Thompson, Emily. 2008. The Soundscape of Modernity: Architectural Acoustics and the Culture of Listening in America, 1900–1933. Tkaczyk, Viktoria, and Stefan Weinzierl. 2019. Architectural Acoustics and the Trained Ear in the Arts: A Journey from 1780 to 1830. In The Oxford Handbook of Music Listening in the 19th and 20th Centuries, ed. Christian Thorau and Hansjakob Ziemer, 231–254. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Winsberg, Eric. 1999. Sanctioning Models: The Epistemology of Simulation. Science in Context 12 (2): 275–292. Wise, Norton. 1995. Introduction. In The Values of Precision, ed. Norton Wise, 3–13. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Yaneva, Albena. 2005. Scaling Up and Down: Extraction Trials in Architectural Design. Social Studies of Science 38: 867–894. ———. 2017. Five Ways to Make Architecture Political: An Introduction to the Politics of Design Practice. London: Bloomsbury Publishing.

4 Formations

4.1 A Missing Public A building project is shared and varies across a design team; it also moves and varies through approximations in design. These are some of the variations of a building. But a building project also requires others. It has other formations outside of its design and its built form—public formations. As Giancarlo de Carlo has written, “architecture has become too important to be left to architects” (2005: 11). On September 8, 2016, in the old buildings of Granada Studios, it is the public consultation event for Factory. Posters with colourful renderings of the design and texts are neatly arranged along the walls in a brightly lit room. Representatives from Factory, architects, the project director, and others, stand politely around the room, waiting for questions, drinking coffee. A few people stroll around, arms clasped behind their backs. They are waiting for something: the Public to appear. It is here, in this contemporary “agora,” that the Public is supposed to appear. I have read about this. I had received the notification to come to this space to be consulted as a member of the Public, to have my voice heard. This is where the Public makes an appearance. We would all be able to hear it speak. It could be © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2023 B. Mommersteeg, Variations of a Building, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-6802-2_4

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consulted. And yet, it was missing. As Anne, an architect from OMA at the event rcounted to me once, “there was a very low turnout. There wasn’t anyone for 24 hours, well for the day, 8 am to 8 pm.” Leaving the space myself, I felt a little disappointed; I wondered: Why did it not appear? Where is everyone? Is this not one of the explicit moments when architecture becomes political, when the building, its designs, its promises, and the Public encounter one another? Was it a moment of what has been called, “post-politics”? Or, perhaps, I did not know what to look for. Perhaps, it was there but I did not know it, that I did not actually know what to look for, or what the Public is? What are, actually, the traits of the Public? And what, more specifically, is architecture’s Public? It is during the “planning stage” when public consultation events often  occur,  and that, as Emily, a planning consultant on the project, explained to me, the “building passes into the public domain” and vice versa. But how does this passing into the public happen? How is the building and the Public represented? How exactly do they meet? In addition to these public consultation events, in Manchester, for instance, the Public has 21 days, by law, to add comments onto the Manchester City Council planning portal, and during the Planning and Highways committee meetings one member of the Public is allowed to speak. However, in addition to the empty room at the event, there have been no comments added to the online planning portal,1 and in the city council meetings, there was only one objector from the Public who spoke, as well as one “[o]ne objection [that] was received from a member of the public” mentioned in the 26 July 2018 Planning and Highways Committee report for the second planning application, and one “representation” from the Deansgate ward councillor. From the empty room, the lack of engagement, and the silence, I had a shocking thought: the Public is missing. But how could it be missing? How could the Public be missing? While, on the one hand, Factory is a large-scale and “important” building for  You can find the online comments—or lack of—through the Manchester City Council Planning Public Access System accessible here: https://www.manchester.gov.uk/site/custom_scripts/public_ access.php. The first application number is 114294/VO/2016 and the second application number is 119890/VO/2018. Here you can also have access to the planning and technical reports that are published during the consultation period, to be consulted, and accompany the planning application report into the city council committee meeting. 1

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Manchester, and, on the other hand, there are still some traces of it, there is still some thing called “Public” that is referred to around it? It is found in the planning documents and circulates throughout the discourse about the project. As Elle, a member of the client team, notes, “it [Factory] relies on people buying into the project, that proposition [that it embodies].”2 The success of Factory is thus dependent on it. But how is this possible, that there is and is not a P/public? Before explaining this in negative terms, that is, as something actively excluded or repressed  as in a post-political register, this chapter slows down to trace it as an empirical positivity. If it cannot be found immediately, that is perhaps because it has yet been drawn into existence. Or, perhaps, it is because we need other devices to detect it, to look for its traces in the world. To do this, following John Dewey (2012 [1927]), we must pay attention to the specificity of public formations: What it consists of, where and how it emerges, and through which concerns they form around. Or, what Noortje Marres (2012) has called a “material public.” We need to follow the building’s passage into the public domain, into relations with city councillors, statutory and non-statutory consultants, artists, other kinds of experts, and different types of concerns in the changing political and economic landscape of Manchester.3 What are its “matters of passage”, and its “public formations”? Whereas, in the previous chapters, we followed a common world drawn together through practices of coordination within the design team, and how the future acoustic reality of the building is approximated, here we turn to another ontologically uncertain thing, and follow practices through which publics take form. We will utilise two interlocking keys for detecting the formations of publics: In terms of the mediations and forms of representation that allow its passage, and the means by which publics can be fit  This notion of “buy into” can be understood through the classic concepts of “enrolment” and “interessement” from early ANT scholarship, where they seek to enrol allies—human and nonhuman—into the project by delimiting the set of possibilities and making actions predictable, and in the process, transform what it is. See Michel Callon (1984) and Bruno Latour (1987). 3  This idea of “passing” should be heard through Latour’s (2013) conceptualisation of “passage,” where it is important to empirically “understand through what series of small discontinuities it is appropriate to pass in order to obtain a certain continuity of action” (2013: 33). In other words, neither Factory nor the public “pass” into the public domain without mediations or representations through which they obtain a continuity, a subsistence, or persistence of being. 2

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into the common world of the building and ensure its stable continuity. That is, we need to look for the ways in which publics are made in concrete situations and how they become objects of design in their own right, as other ingredients in the making of a building and the composition of its common world. In this way, this chapter takes us from the Public as a fictional being to public formations as concrete processes through which a political body is fabricated and composed in practice. To avoid any confusion between the four concrete manifestations of publics encountered in this chapter, and the general and abstract Public, the latter will be capitalised and crowned with a “P” whereas the former formations will be without crown and retain lower case “p’s.”

4.2 A Fictional Public Perhaps there is a reason that the Public is missing? Perhaps, as I was told by some councillors, it can be explained contextually by looking at the transformation of Manchester’s city centre. On the one hand, the politics of the city centre has been undergoing changes due to variations in demographics and composition. In Manchester’s State of the City Report 2017, population growth is a recurring refrain, and is a central aspect of its supposed “regeneration.” According to the 2017 report, 54 000 residents live in the Manchester city centre, an increase of 2000 from 2016, and in comparison, to the population of 300 in 1987, a marked rate of growth that they seem to be proud of.4 Because of the recent growth, Jeffrey, a councillor that I met during a city council meeting related to the building, argues that the city centre lacks established community groups. He also points out that the city centre only became a “ward” (a political entity) with a representative at the city council in 2004, which, in 2018, was split into two, Deansgate and Piccadilly. As a result, he maintains that there is little established political engagement in the city centre. From this, to follow his logic, the city centre, where the building is situated, lacks the groundwork and institutional support for something like  A Guardian article about Manchester details this growth of the city and how it has changed demographically, but also socially, economically, and politically (Harris 2015). 4

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a public to take shape. On the other hand, the site of Factory is a specific area of the city centre that has been under-developed until recently. In other words, for a Public to exist conditions, institutional and demographically, need to be in place. And yet, despite this lack of a Public in the city centre, there is still something that goes by the name of “public,” accompanying the building through the planning process, and in situations of engagement. Appealed to and consulted by the developers, the city council, and also the architects; it is still an actor referred to in various reports in different guises; and I can still hear its voice invoked—like in a séance—in the discourse of those involved. But who, or what is this? How can I find this missing Mancunian Public? One of the main moments in which the appearance of the Public happens is during the planning stages of a building. The planning process is conventionally situated during the “pre-application” stage—commonly stage 2 of the RIBA Plan of Work—up until the moment a building receives “planning approval,” which could be read as Public Approval; the stamp of the Public is put onto the building. The planning process of Factory was elongated as it went back for a second round of planning approval in July 2018 due to the significant changes in the budget and design that we have come across in different situations; this was a “resubmission” with a new set of drawings, an updated design and access statement, and another round of consultation. For those involved in the project, it was necessary to go through this to ensure that “it is transparent in how a decision is being taken.” Thus, it seemed best to travel to the council chamber of the Town Hall to get a glimpse of this elusive Public, where “transparency” functions as an ultimate guiding principle—supposedly where the Public can be seen in full light. Before that though, let us compile some traits to know what to search for. Let us look if we can hear its voice within this “discourse.” The two Planning and Highways Committee reports, for each application submission (12 January 2017 and 26 July 2018),5 and the planning policy regulations, in particular the National Planning Policy Framework (NPPF) and Manchester’s Statement of Community Involvement, which are  Both of these reports are accessible here: https://democracy.manchester.gov.uk/ieListMeetings.asp x?Act=earlier&CId=151&D=201905301400&MD=ielistmeetings.

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referred to in the reports, are possible starting points to begin to see an outline of this elusive Public. The current regulations for public participation in the UK planning process are set out in regulation 18 of the Town and Country Planning (Local Planning) (England) Regulations 2012. It categorizes public participation into the “public in general” (as in public consultation), “statutory and non-statutory consultees,”6 and “interest groups.” This categorisation is also carried into the NPPF, expressed in the online planning practice guideline, the Statement of Community Involvement, and the other reports from the MCC. Yet in these latter documents, which are more present in the reports for Factory, the notion of a Public is almost completely effaced; in its place, there is “consultation” and “community.” Instead of a reference to public participation, there are different kinds of consultation. In the NPPF, it is stipulated that it is required to have a consultation period of 21 days, where each of the groups categorised can respond to a planning application, whether at the public consultation event, through the online portal or their Ward councillors; the statutory and non-statutory consultants provide consultation through meetings and letters of advice. In addition to this consultation, there is a requirement to send letters to residents near the development, to publicise the development in a local newspaper, and to put up site notices next to the site boundary. For Factory, in the Planning and Highways Committee report, under a section entitled “publicity,” consultation with the Public requires that the “occupiers of adjacent premises” were given “notice” of the application, that Factory was advertised in the Manchester Evening News, that site notices were placed next to the site, and that 323 neighbours were notified.7 As a result, the report shows that they complied with the NPPF  Statutory consultees are designated by law to be required to be part of the pre-application planning process, while non-statutory consultees are not designated by law, but whose expertise may be useful for planning the development. As stated in the NPPF, statutory consultees provide “advice” that “assists” the local planning authorities to make “timely decisions.” 7  In the July 2018 report, there was one “objection from a member of the public,” who remains anonymous. It comes in the form of a letter which considers the redesign of Factory a waste of public money and is worried that the building has become potentially less iconic—that the money could be used elsewhere. Who is this anonymous member of the public? Is anonymity an important trait of being part of a Public? There is no response from the applicant to this member in the report—the objection is a statement left on its own. The Public has spoken, apparently. 6

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and Statement of Community Involvement. Aside from the temporal and geographical demarcation, it seems that this Public is made up of residents near the future building and readers of the Manchester Evening News. Is that it? Is that what is meant by “Public”? For Bill, a member of the Manchester City Centre Regeneration team, and a member of the strategic board for Factory, while the general Public is one “stakeholder”’ amongst others (businesses, developers, visitors), it is indeed quite general: “Anyone who has got an interest.” For him, the Public consists of those who will use it. But this is too general: Is the Public those with interests and will use the building? Is it one of the many stakeholders? But could you be two stakeholders at once? At one point a “visitor,” or a developer, and, on the other hand, a member of the Public who will also “use” it? These traits also are not really helpful for finding the Public. But perhaps it is equally opaque for them as well? As Elle (a member of the client team) points out, consultation is not a “philosophical consultation. It is not: What could Factory be?” but a question of “how does that feel?” It, in other words, is a way to test the proposition. How does this affect you? Consultation with the Public is then perhaps twofold: A matter of information; publicity is used to provide the public qua residents and users with information about Factory; and a test. However, there is also a “management about how much the public is informed because it needs to move ahead without it being delayed by a comment.” It is not certain how the Public will react. The Public is both something to be informed, but also to be tested, and to draw information from. It is unclear who or what it is—what is it composed of, how does it feel, or what it wants? Alongside these traits of the General Public, community, neighbours, users, and residents, there are also the statutory and non-statutory consultants, and who are grouped as members of the Public with an “expertise.” Statutory consultees are required by law to be consulted by the applicant in planning; they provide advice letters to the applicant. This advice is like the “representations” given by the General Public and from the city councillors. They are not legally binding or, in planning terms, “material conditions.” They are only recommendations. For Factory, there were, in total, 25 statutory and non-statutory consultants involved

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in the planning application.8 One of the statutory consultants was Theatres Trust, a national advisory public body for theatres, which primarily look at design and operational issues: “Our advice note was looking into the architectural plans, and looking at the get-ins, the practical concerns and issues.” Their advice is based on an expertise of theatres, their operation, how they are used by the staff, performers, and the audience. Another prominent statutory consultant for architecture developments in England is Historic England. They attend to the heritage of place, concerned with the impacts, whether adverse or beneficial, that a new development will have on “place.” Historic England is concerned with the “character and appearance of the wider conservation area,” and, in this case, whether Factory would preserve and enhance this area, and not harm its significance. In addition to Theatres Trust and Historic England, there are a multitude of other consultants that, due to their expertise, represent different concerns that envelope particular “public issues.” Environmental Health is concerned with potential noise issues; Highway Services in terms of vehicle movements; Greater Manchester Police in terms of potential crime. Going through these documents attached to the planning submission, the Public increasingly becomes more heterogeneous. No longer just a General Public, but different kinds of actors with different types of concerns are gathered into the planning process. The Public seems to dissolve into a distributed entity, into specific actors with particular kinds of expertise, concerns, and information. It is already becoming increasingly hard to speak of the Public at all. The last group of consultants referred to in the reports is the “ward councillors,” whose wards the building is situated within. As mentioned above, there are two: Deansgate and Piccadilly. In both reports, there is a  The list of statutory and non-statutory consultees: Manchester Conservation Areas and Historic Buildings Panel, Places Matter, Highway Services, Environmental Health, MCC Flood Risk Management, Greater Manchester Police, Historic England (Northwest), Environment Agency. Transport for Greater Manchester, Greater Manchester Ecology Unit, Network Rail, United Utilities Water PLC, Canal & River Trust, Greater Manchester Archaeological Advisory Service, Theatres Trust, The Museum of Science and Industry, Corporate Property, City Centre Regeneration Team, Greater Manchester Pedestrians Society, Castlefield Forum, Salford City Council, Travel Change Team, Wildlife Trust, Greater Manchester Geological Unit, and the Cadent Plant Protection Team. 8

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“representation” from one of the councillors. In the first report, it requests that the coach drop-off and pick-up location be moved from Liverpool Road to the site itself. In the second report, it is noted that this first representation was satisfied, but raised another representation and concern about the potential disturbance that large numbers of people could cause is put forward. However, what is interesting and unclear about this representation is whether this is a concern of the councillor herself or from the residents she represents; it is not evident who is speaking. Is it a member of the Public, or its spokesperson? Is there a difference? As one of the councillors representing a ward in the city centre of Manchester, Jeffrey, explains, the role of the councillor is “essentially about negotiating the impact that it [Factory] has on residents in the city centre. You have good impacts […] then you will have some negative impacts […]. Therefore, you’ve got to balance.” Councillors are required to negotiate between the constituents that they represent and Factory—or the benefits it could provide to their constituents. This balancing act, of negotiating between the two, is a way in which a representation comes together. It is impossible to know who speaks (is it the councillor, or the “Public” on whose behalf the councillor speaks for?), but in-between them another public takes shape in the representation. In each of these cases, it seems that the Public, as a generality, has not become any more visible. It remains almost a fiction. It is assumed that it exists ready-made as a set or totality of individuals with wills, opinions, and needs, accessible in its immediacy as a political being. That speaks as One. Yet, we only encounter it inscribed in documents, invoked in discourse, and as an undergirding, yet invisible support of “representations.” Nevertheless, it remains missing. Not unlike the fiction of the homo economicus in modern economic practices, the fictional General Public plays an important role in the planning process in the sense that it also helps the project pass through planning. Strangely, despite being “missing,” it still exists as a fictional being insofar as it justifies the worth of the project in the city council, to the councillors, and to the planning authority. Its silence speaks. A councillor has usefully defined this paradox with the formula: Silence  =  Approval. In other words, the Public as general may be “missing,” but it is nevertheless one of the ways in which a public takes shape as a fictional being that has effects in reality. This is one of the ways in which it exists.

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Alongside the Public, this fictional being, there are also local residents, newspaper readers, potential users, councillors, and a variety of statutory and non-statutory consultants, each, potentially, with their own concerns. Following Walter Lippmann’s famous notion (1993 [1927]), the Public is somewhat like a phantom. It is not guaranteed to be always present. It appears and disappears through different mechanisms, a ghostly and shapeshifting voice that speaks through a series of mediations and representations. Instead of one Public, perhaps we need to look for multiple public formations. To detect these elusive publics, attention may also be paid to these how they form around particular problems or concerns that call them into being, and to the mediations that give them conditions to speak. Indeed, there may be as many possible publics as there are concerns. In the next sections, I travel to different sites to try to witness other formations of particular publics—to see how the General Public manifests in different, particular ways around a building project.

4.3 Scrutiny Publics The first site will be the Manchester Town Hall. Here, there are some of the components of publics unpacked in the previous section in action, and where the project is undergoing “scrutiny” from city councillors. Its validity is tested. Does it still follow the regulations, policies, and strategies of the city? Does it still generate more benefits than costs? Can it pass this “test” of scrutiny? On November 08, 2018, I travel to the Town Hall in Manchester for the Resources and Governance Scrutiny Committee meeting. At one end of a long oval table sits the councillor presiding over the scrutiny meeting, and at the other end, those under scrutiny: Dave Carty and Pat Bartoli, from the City Centre Regeneration team, Jared Allen, director of capital programmes from MCC, and Carol Culley, the City Treasure at MCC and the new Senior Responsible Owner (SRO) for Factory. Nobody from the design team or from MIF (one part of the “client team”) is present; it is strictly, one can assume, an internal council affair. I sit in a chair at the back of the room with other councillors or, perhaps, members of

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the “Public,” who did not sit at the table. While it is less procedural than other planning committee meetings that I have attended, it nevertheless follows a protocol. As the councillors have often pointed out to me, council meetings are “quasi-judicial” in nature, more reminiscent of a courtroom than an agora. This is because the councillors can only make their decision based on the evidence that is in front of them. In other words, they cannot speak to the developers or colleagues, or anyone outside of that room. They can only refer to the evidence that is presented to them in the report. As one councillor notes during the meeting (as if a reminder to the others), “there is no building here, only the report.” Drawing from the case presented to them in the report, the councillors act as both lawyer and jury, cross-examining the representatives from Factory, testing the validity of the case presented. The purpose of scrutiny committees, as stated on the Manchester City Council website, is to “represent the interests of local people about important issues that affect them,” but it is also to function as a check and balance on the decisions made by the executive committee, to ensure that council policy is followed. A member of the scrutiny committee has described it to me as “looking at decisions and to bring out flaws in the process or ways that we think things could go otherwise, or to ask for more information.” Effectively, in the name of residents (or the public?), it is to scrutinise whether the money, resources, and governance processes follow established council policies, specifically their strategies and relations to existing regulatory frameworks and planning policies at both the national and local level. In the committee, the members make formal, de jure, recommendations about its validity that will be taken to the executive committee, where the decisions will be de facto made and come into effect.9 As a result, these scrutiny meetings are not where decisions are  The structure of the city council in Manchester is idiosyncratic within the UK. Basically, there is an executive leader that is voted by the councillors after each election. Currently (in 2020), and for the last 20 years, it has been Sir Richard Leese. He has overseen the entirety of the Factory project. There are then two deputy leaders, and an executive committee that consists of ten members: the two deputy leaders and then eight other members made up of councillors. It is together for 4 years and is overseen by the leader. It is the executive committee that makes the decisions, while the rest of the council, 83 members, will sit on various scrutiny committees and do scrutiny: The executive members are not on scrutiny committees; the scrutiny committees will look at decisions made by the executive. 9

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made; however, their recommendations have weight to influence decisions made by the executive as they are supported again by the fiction of the general Public. At the same time, in this section, a brief glimpse of a particular public is seen through the representations of the councillors as they discuss the building. Factory found its way to the scrutiny meeting due to a budget increase. Its costs had exceeded the initial expectations. Where the original budget was set at £110 million, and later increased to £111.65 million, they were now asking for the budget to increase by £18.97 million for a total capital budget of £130.62 million; this additional £18.97 million is to come from the capital budget of the city council, increasing their capital commitment to Factory to £40.57 million from the previous £21.6 million. The report explains that following a “thorough review” it has “concluded that to deliver the vision and long-term benefits to Manchester and the wider cultural ecology, the project costs need to increase.” The scrutiny committee has assembled to test these conclusions.10 The meeting begins like any other planning committee meeting: The chair outlines the procedure to follow. First, we will hear from the defendant, representatives from the building project; second, they will be subject to questioning from the councillors on the committee. As part of the team of the defendants, but also oddly as the leader of the executive, Sir Richard Leese, introduces what he calls the “context” through which the decision under scrutiny was made: “[The] scheme has to be seen in light of the creative arts to the city in all sorts of ways—not just economic.” This is to establish the terms of the discussion to come. The budget increase must be understood, as he repeatedly argues, according to the scheme’s “social value” and “cultural offer” in terms of the creative economy and employment. It is not about the building as such. The decision to increase the budget ought to be scrutinised in “all sorts of ways,” economic, but also social and cultural value. After establishing the rationale and admitting his regret to the councillors—“We did not want to put this report forward”—he turns to the  Since I have finished the fieldwork, the budget has been increased by another £10 million in 2018 and then another £25.2 million in 2020, which will again be covered by the Manchester City Council. In 2023, the budget had been increased to £210.8 million and finally, £240 million. 10

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necessity of the decision. He notes that he will not go through each explanation of the cost increase as they can be found in the submitted report and are also grounds for questions later in the meeting. He begins by asking the committee a rhetorical question: “Why do major arts projects find themselves in similar positions?” To which he provides his own answer: They are difficult to predict, and unlike office buildings—now holding up a book of building codes and standards—which “[this book] will tell me how much [it] will cost—it doesn’t work for arts projects because they are bespoke.” The problem he maintains is that, as an arts project, the costs of the building could not be predicted with certainty until after the detailed design, and not when it was originally budgeted. Foreseeing his future explanation, he muses: “Was this the result of poor management and poor governance?” It is “a legitimate area of questioning,” he emphasises. Did they make a mistake due to mismanagement? In response again to his own question, he outlines the nested governance structure of the building project, from the strategic board to the Gateway Reviews of the central government. The decision, apparently, he seems to be saying, has already passed through its own internal level of scrutiny. He explains, in other words, that this decision to increase the budget was unforeseeable and regrettable, yet there were no other options. They even discussed other scenarios (value engineering; shrinking the scheme; scrapping it altogether), however none of these scenarios made sense in terms of their rationale: Whether the benefits (social, cultural, and economic) exceeded the costs. Once the leader of the executive finished, the chair opens the floor to questions from the councillors on the committee; the cross-examination commences. Strangely though, the rationale for the decision or the validity of the scheme is not questioned at all. Instead, they focus on two different issues that are important to focus on to understand the involvement of councillors as representatives of the public in building projects. The first question from a councillor turns out to be the thorniest and most pivotal, around which they will pick and pull throughout the vast majority of the meeting. One councillor poses it quite hastily, “Can I just ask the leader why we are doing this through the sales of assets and not

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through prudential borrowing?”11 Initially, as proposed in the report, the capital budget increase of £18.97 million would be funded by the capital receipts from the sale of assets, and in this case, land that the council owns.12 Another councillor agrees, maintaining that the sale of assets would result in an “opportunity cost,” losing future opportunities of these sales—and thus this type of “cost” also needs to be taken into account—and that it would be difficult to justify it to their constituents, members of the public. The bulk of the discussion revolves around this, whether simply in agreement or by unpicking the two terms. In the end, they resolve into an agreement, after nitpicking the specific wording, that a recommendation will be put forward to the executive to use “prudential borrowing” to fund this budgetary increase, that it is through “prudential borrowing” rather than the sales of assets that they can justify this project to their constituents—again, those they represent—whereby the benefits still exceed the costs.13 However, it is through this discussion that a more philosophical argument is put forward by one of the councillors that question the established practices of the councillors, their roles, and concerns. As a councillor from the meeting argues, “whether you dispose of a public asset or not is a political question; it is not a technical question.” He is reflecting on how decisions are made in the council; he argues that there is a distinction that needs to be made between technical and political

 Prudential borrowing is a way that local councils, by going into debt, can finance capital projects. There is a “Prudential Code” that governs this kind of borrowing set out by the UK government in the Local Government Act 2003 (Part 1, Chapter 1). The money is usually borrowed from what is called the Public Works Loan Board at favourable interest rates. This type of financing is used to fund infrastructural and large capital projects to develop revenue through real estate taxes to fund services (which cannot be financed through borrowing or the Capital Budget—only through Revenue). 12  This was qualified as “strategic assets,” namely, land that had already been decided by council to sell; and that this land would be sold as “leasehold,” and not “freehold,” meaning that the council would still own the land, but if, before the lease expires, they elect to use it, they would be required to buy out the lease agreement. 13  In the committee meeting, the distinction between capital and revenue budgets was repeated by different councillors. The point was that constituents often do not understand that the “sales of assets” cannot be used to fund services—only the revenue budget can. This was to argue against the idea of the “opportunity cost”—only capital projects, like Factory, can capitalise on the capital receipts of these sales. 11

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decisions.14 For him, a technical decision for the officer or the treasurer is to make things happen according to “a model that gives the best or the safest financial return,” whereas the political decisions regards “what to do in general.” If, he continues, you confuse political decisions as technical—almost in resonance with the “post-political argument”—“that’s an abrogation of your responsibility in your role as an elected representative.” This is a distinction in terms of types of expertise. The councillor’s argument is that in the scrutiny meeting it is not a technical question (whether this is the safest financial return on an investment), but a political one: Is it the best one for their constituents? Is the public you represent visible in the statements and decisions you are making, or not? The boundary between the technical and the political also arises in the scrutiny meeting in another sense. Perturbed about the lack of updates regarding Factory’s development, another councillor poses a question to the group, suggesting that there should be some “practical relationship” between the two governance layers of the project and the scrutiny committee so that “information cascades down.” He is questioning why they do not have the same access to information as the central government (the UK Government)? Why do they, and not them, have access to the project’s internal developments? Why must they rely on the publicly available information via the reports to make decisions? In response, the leader of the executive explains that reports were not released “in dribs and drabs” because they wanted to have “relative certainty about final costs” and that they have only “one chance to get it right.” In the same way that there is a “management of information” released to the public during the consultation period, there is a similar process with the councillors. Another boundary emerges between those who have access to information inside the project, and those outside, who only have access to publicly available information.  The question of the involvement of different types of expertise around scientific controversies has been a central question in STS, Public Understanding of Science (SUS), and Public Engagement with Science (PES) literature. The problem revolves around whether scientific and technical controversies should be purified from other kinds of expertise, or if they must be included, when and how much they should be appealed to in order to resolve scientific or technical controversies (Collins and Evans 2002; Irwin 2001; Jasanof 2003; Wynne 1996). But what is interesting here in this distinction is what constitutes a political rather than a technical decision. Is there a “public” that takes shape and is found within the decision, or not? 14

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This is a central problematic of publics around technical projects. In The Phantom Public, for instance, Lippmann sums up the problem of the public as one between those who intimately know about what is at issue, the insiders, and those who do not, the outsiders; for him, it is a question of whether outsiders can be asked to “deal as successfully with the substance of the question as the insider” (Lippmann 1993 [1927]: 137). Drawing from Lippmann’s distinction, Marres refers to this as the “problem of relevancy”: Publics are both inside—intimately affected by the issues—and outside—they lack a platform to become involved (2012: 139). This resonates with both the councillor’s distinction of the technical and the political as well as the question of the management of information, the “dribs and drabs.” What information is relevant for the public and for the experts, the members of the strategic board and the project team? Is it right to expect publics, including councillors, to inform themselves about the complex issues of designing, constructing, and funding a large-scale building project? When is the right moment for publicity? A kind of opacity grows between those who are “inside” and those “outside” (reminding us of one aspect of the private-public divide). But I was also interested in his statement that there is only “one chance to get it right.” Why is there this divide between an inside and an outside through which information cascades down only through the public reports? This concern for “relative certainty” is akin to the relationship between scientific experiments and publics.15 If publics had direct access to the messy process of scientific experiments, some sociologists of science argue, it could result in a lack of certainty and trust. In H.M. Collins’s account of public scientific experiments, he notes that “close proximity to experimental work […] makes visible the skilful, inexplicable and therefore potentially fallible aspects of experimentation” (1988: 726). This also corresponds to the design of a building: The closer you get to the design process, the more visible its trajectories and uncertainties become, the less matter of fact and certain they appear. “Relative certainty” requires some distance between the design and construction decisions and the public; it is, from the  There has been a lot of debate in science studies and STS regarding the relationship of scientific experiments, the public, and the legitimisation of knowledge claims, which is helpful for understanding how uncertain entities, like building projects, relate to publics (Collins 1988; Shapin 1988, 1990; Shapin and Schaffer 1985). 15

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viewpoint of the project team, needed prior to publicising information about the development to maintain an appearance of stability.16 However, this boundary is an abstraction. In practice, those knock-on effects of the design process inevitably betray it, implicating publics around the issues articulated. To look at one example, following the second submission of the planning application in July 2018, Theatres Trust wrote an advice letter advocating for better wheelchair access as the current design contravenes existing UK regulations. This was then taken up by other media sources. An article was published on the website thestage. co.uk, a news source related to the UK performing arts industry, which summarises the advice letter. A few weeks later, the concern that this advice letter conveyed, was taken up by the official opposition in Manchester, the Liberal Democrat party, who published a news release re-articulating the concern, yet politicising it explicitly. This news release was then taken up on other news-related websites in Manchester. This chain of publications, which conveyed the same concern, is an example of an incipient attempt to mise en politique the concern of wheelchair access; an attempt to constitute another public formation: Gathering Manchester residents, with councillors, the arts industry around Factory, wheelchair access, and building regulations. But nothing happened; it did not gain traction. While it illustrates the possible beginning of a public formation, a “proto-public,” because of design decisions leaking into the public domain, it ultimately failed to enrol any other actors, or to diffuse its arguments further.17  In addition to the reports, publicity of the project occurs in reports in the media. This trajectory of the publicization of Factory, for instance, alongside its development, corresponds to specific moments of “relative certainty”: when it was first announced, after the competition, after both planning meetings, and the groundbreaking ceremony. It is evident, in these moments of visibility, that an importance is placed on this mediation, in the form of publicity, between the messy realm of design and its presentation in public, as well as the importance of “relative certainty” before the scrutiny of publics. 17  Publicity has been a central component of discussions on the public. In Gabriel Tarde’s (2010) account of the public, he highlights how it is a crucial operator in transforming the crowd, an immediate aggregate of people, into a public, which is mediated—in his context, print media— through publicity. It allows an aggregate of people to come together from far distances, and a way to spread desires, beliefs, and ideas and consolidate them. Similarly, Dewey (2012 [1927]) emphasizes how publicity enables an aggregate of individuals to become a self-aware public. In both cases, the public is a particular modality of a heterogeneous collective, a particular mode of collecting an aggregate into a whole (Marres 2012). 16

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It is at this abstract boundary between the inside and the outside that a lot of “public relations” takes place. What it highlights—as we have seen in the scrutiny meeting and in the above example—is that the “stability” of the Factory project is not ensured; that it requires a continuous management of information, informing publics and their representatives in dribs and drabs. And this relies on sometimes turning potentially political questions into technical ones as something happens to the building the moment it is questioned in a political way, at which other possible formations could turn around it as an “issue,” and where other possible worlds can be articulated that do not fit within the common world that they are trying to compose and hold together. Thus the “stability” of the project is also often reliant upon the “stability” of its publics—to ensure that they remain associated and enrolled in the project. The public is not something that pre-exists its engagement but takes shape within these interactions—within the statements and decisions made by councillors, but also in specific public relations. In the next sections, we turn from this mode of formation (in the representations and mediations between the politicians and the building’s representatives) toward other ways in which the building project interfaces and is mediated within different publics. In both cases we will encounter different modalities of publicity and publics as well as question of relations and relevance, and at the same time we will see how publics increasingly become crucial components of the shared world of the building, as something that the building also relies upon for its existence to continue.

4.4 Presentational Publics Thus far the design team and the architects, as well as the publics, have been relatively missing in this account of public formations. They have only made brief appearances within representations in reports, in the political talk of the councillors and the representatives of the building project. In this section, we will focus on meetings between the architects and publics in five different public presentations during 2017 when the Factory project had just received planning approval and was ready with

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“relative certainty” to be publicly discussed.18 In order to take an account of the architects’s engagement with the publics they encounter in each of these presentations, it is interesting to focus on the way in which they speak to them, their modes of persuasion, that is, the “political talk” (Latour 2003) of the architects in presentations, and how, to return to the problem of relevance, it implicates different publics around the building through a narrative that makes it relevant for them. In other words, how the presentations of the architects speak in a political “tone” insofar as they begin to shape a loose aggregate—of people—into a more cohesive “totality”—a public formation. If, in the previous chapters, there was a professional and technical language used by the design team, often mediated by drawings and other visual devices, and through which they can understand one another, in their interactions with publics, the architects utilise other forms of presentation that departs from the professional and technical language of the design team.19 These other forms of presentation will show us how Factory begins to affect differently interested groups within Manchester. On July 08, 2017, I arrive to the old Granada Studio site, the future Factory site, for a presentation from Rem Koolhaas and Ellen van Loon, architects from OMA. The old television studio is dark as I enter, air conditioners hum loudly in the background, and the audience is excitedly talking amongst themselves. There are around 150 people sitting in black plastic chairs; I find one of the remaining chairs. In front of a large  In 2017, there were five public events where the architects from OMA held presentations, talks, and panels in regard to Factory in Manchester. Four of them were during the 2017 season of the Manchester International Festival; they were “We Need to Talk about Community” with Rem Koolhaas and Hans Ulrich Obrist on July 08, 2017, “The Factory Panel: Spaces for Artists” with Lucinda Childs (choreographer), Hans Ulrich Obrist (curator), Ellen van Loon (OMA architect), Walter Meierjohann (theatre director), and Haung Ruo (composer) on July 07, 2017, “The Factory Panel: Spaces for Culture” with Rem Koolhaas, Ellen van Loon, and Hans Ulrich Obrist on July 08, 2017 and the groundbreaking ceremony, which preceded “The Factory Panel: Spaces for Culture” with a variety of stakeholders, politicians, and the architects. Later in the year, Ellen van Loon gave a talk at the Design Manchester conference on October 13, 2017; and earlier in the year, Carol Patterson (OMA) gave a talk at the Manchester Architect’s Symposium on June 12, 2017. Interestingly, from the design team, it is only the architects who meet with its publics; the rest of the design team remain invisible. 19  There are existing studies on how architects use specific devices and technologies, like PowerPoint (Stark and Paravel 2008), models, and videos (Yaneva 2017), and even comic books (Hoorn 2012), to engage with and constitute the formation of publics in architecture. 18

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screen whereupon renderings of Factory are projected, the two architects, and Hans Ulrich Obrist, the moderator, sit under a spotlight. They are raised up on a platform, up above the audience, from which they speak and click through a PowerPoint presentation. The presentational set-up forces us to look up to them, separated from them, as we sit in the dark. They are in focus. The lecture, the moderator tells us, is split in two. Rem Koolhaas speaks first. He begins by correcting the moderator, “I think it is not really a lecture; actually, I am always reluctant at a ground-breaking to give a lecture because this is the moment, we should be mute. A lecture […] is something professional that gives an explanation […]. Anyway, I will give a very quick presentation of why we’re interested in doing theatres and how we think about building them.” Why is this not the moment for an explanation? Do explanations invoke problems that they do not want to admit? Why should they be mute, and who or what speaks, then? He continues by taking us through four previous theatre projects from OMA.20 In each of the precedents, he, without mentioning Factory, points us in its direction: Flexibility, hybridity, the use of a traditional theatre type and a warehouse-like box, the importance of technology, and a building’s relationship to its surroundings. These are all key points in the discourse about Factory. “Following up on Rem’s story,” Ellen van Loon’s presentation elaborates on these elements of theatres and “how they [OMA] think about theatres” through the Factory design scheme. As she speaks, its renderings flash behind her on the screen. In contrast to Rem Koolhaas’s presentation, she develops a narrative about Factory. She begins with the competition and moves towards its “flexible space” and its relationship to MIF’s “tradition of the found space” and then contextualises, bringing up “the time of Joy Division,” “the graphic design” of Factory Records, and the “enjoyable experiences of the Hacienda”: All important references in the cultural history of Manchester. Emphasizing this context, she highlights that, “in the site, there is a lot of residual [sic] of that history.” Pointing to  The four precedents were: Centre for Media and Technology (ZKM) in Karlsruhe, an unrealised project, the Dee and Charles Wyly Theatre in Dallas, the Fondazione Prada building in Milan, and the Taipei Performing Arts Center in Taipei. 20

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the screen behind her, “Here you can see it is a combination of all buildings [of the site], representing the industrial revolution in combination with the cultural [aspect] of this area.” Turning from the context, the narrative zooms into the building itself. From the Warehouse element and its flexible space to the traditional space of the theatre, she takes us into each element, indicating on the screen the specific features of both elements. In her conclusion, the entire building, both elements come together, up on the screen. It is the rendering that those of us who have been following the building recognise, the one that has been featured in every publication, the completed building shining in the Manchester night. Moving to another presentation at the Manchester Architect’s Symposium, I am sitting amongst a group of architects in a small venue in the brick archways underneath a railway line. In contrast to the previous presentations, the audience is much smaller, yet the presentational set-up remains similar: The audience sits in chairs facing the speaker who talks in front of a screen. Like Ellen’s presentation, it begins with a series of references to contextualise the project through the complicated site: “There were a lot of things that interweaved between our site, some of the cultural history, the music history here, and the future: the future of what will be the Factory project.” The architect from OMA outlines particular aspects of Manchester’s cultural history: Granada Studios, Coronation Street, The Beatles, Tony Wilson, the Sex Pistols, Factory Records, Joy Division, the Hacienda, and then Manchester International Festival. It is a brief account of Manchester’s cultural history that provides a cultural context to the Factory. After which, she turns to the context of the site itself: River Irwell, the Old Granada Studios, Liverpool Street Station, the Ordsall Chord, the Museum of Science and Industry. Here, there is the outlining of a context that functions like a narrative that leads to Factory. After this, she leads the audience through a detailed walkthrough of Factory, the elements of the project, the Warehouse and the Theatre, in detail: “I think it is about 38 metres wide, 70 metres long, 21 metres high; and the entirety is a fly tower…; and it is 21 metres clear. The Theatre, which is a fixed-seat theatre, which is 1200 seats just seated, but that actually opens up, the big proscenium opens up into the Warehouse…” She continues by discussing the “incredible acoustic challenge,” the orchestra pit complications above Water Street, various scenarios of the

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programme and what this means for the elements of the building; and ends with specific views of the building situated within the site. Throughout the whole presentation, she refers to the renderings and designs that flick through a PowerPoint presentation behind her, often going up to the screen to indicate with her finger specific aspects. This presentation is much more engaged with the architectural elements than the one recounted above, which focused exclusively on the design concept and the rationale behind the building and what it will offer to Manchester. In both cases, it is clear that the situation, the type of audience, influences the content of the presentations. In the first case, with a more “general” audience, which is associated with the groundbreaking ceremony, there is an emphasis placed on the design concept and what this design concept offers in terms of possibilities for performances and the production of art; this was part of the MIF programme and was related to arts-­ related concerns. In the second case, the audience was full of architects, and as a result, the content and the possibilities the building will offer is constructed through architectural concerns. This is also clear in the other presentations. A panel called “Spaces for Culture,” during the MIF festival, effectively was a presentation around specific concerns or issues related to the kinds of spaces that different types of art is performed and produced in. The content of these presentations is, in other words, concern-­oriented: Whether arts, architectural, or in relation to the urban context. They articulate a particular reality of the building within which various “publics” find themselves, develop identities that connects them, at least partially, to the project within specific sets of relations. This is obvious: Speakers orient the content of their presentations toward the specific audiences. It is a rhetorical strategy for setting the conditions for turning a group with specific concerns into “proto publics.” This is not guaranteed, of course. Its success depends on whether it is well or poorly articulated: Do the publics find the content “relevant”? Do they find themselves inside it? Can they recognise themselves through what is presented and articulated? This shown through specific concerns (of potential users (artists and audience), of arts-based groups, community members in Manchester, and architects). While, in both cases, the audience is known, structured according to its expectations and interests

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(artists, festivalgoers, and architects), the building itself is explored as intertwined with concerns in Manchester. There is a rhetorical intent: Who is the audience, what are their concerns, and how do we make them interested in the building? To get a better idea, let us compare the rhetorical techniques of the architectural presentation with public experiments or demonstrations in science and in the demos of marketing or economics.21 As in scientific experiments and technological projects, the messy nature of the experiment or of design in architecture is not showcased in front of public eyes. We saw this earlier in relation to the scrutiny committee meeting. Instead, the project is presented in front of a public with “displays of virtuosity” or with rhetorical flairs of epideixis (Collins 1988). However, the rhetorical “displays of virtuosity” in architectural presentations differ from those of scientific demonstrations. If, in the experimental sciences, the aim of public demonstrations is to gather witnesses to have a stable phenomenon collectively witnessed and legitimated as a “natural fact,” in architectural presentations there is no stable phenomenon to be witnessed. As Ellen openly declares in her presentation, “I think that part of it [designing Factory] is insecure, we’re just going on a path and we have an idea and we’re pushing it through. But of course, for the outside world we can never show that we are insecure because then nobody will take you on for a project. But in reality, that is a fact. You know: we experiment.” The design is still a fragile and uncertain object. In this sense, they attempt to find a means of being convincing without certainty about what they present. The aim is not to present a building as a fact, in terms of technical details, or in terms of the programme of the building, but it is thoroughly imbued with specific values of transparency, of egalitarianism, of the value of culture and art for the city. In the presentation, they explore what “good architecture” means in the specific terms of the publics they engage. The aim then is not to create publics that witness the demonstration of  See, for instance, Collins (1988), Latour (1999), Shapin (1988), Shapin and Schaffer (1985) for discussions on the role of public scientific experiments and demonstrations, and collective witnessing, for the legitimisation of experimental knowledge and the production of “natural” facts. These arguments emphasize the importance of the public, and public witnessing, specifically Shapin and Schaffer (1985), for the legitimation of the experimental method in the seventeenth century. See Rosental (2013) for a general discussion on the sociology of demonstrations, and Cochoy (1998, 2008) for a discussion in terms of economics and marketing

21

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the fabrication of a scientific fact, or a demonstration of the unstable design process, but rather to construct a narrative about the building-tobe through specific interests for publics to identify with the scheme—to enrol them into its common world.22 The kind of rhetoric is, therefore, not apodeixis, but epideixis (Cassin 2014). They do not represent the building or the programme as an object that exists as a given; it is not in the mode of a theory of truth based on adequation or correspondence. The aim is not to represent or point towards what already exists to convince – as if they could point to the building like a cat on a mat. It is a different form of persuasion. In the sense of epideixis, the presentations do not represent the building or the context as something that exists out there, in reality, detached from their speech; they present it, as the etymology of epideixis suggests, by “showing more.” This is clear in three senses. First, they articulate Factory by constructing a context through references to the historical nature of the site, the cultural history of Manchester, references to precedent buildings, but also in terms of the concerns and interests of different potential publics in Manchester.23 Second, they present Factory as a set of possibilities in terms of what Factory offers Manchester, in the sense of its future; it projects a future common world. But also, a future in the sense of its possibilities that it supposedly offers. In this case, these are closer to the rhetorical strategies in marketing or in technology demos. It is a way of presenting a new set of possibilities, however not just in the building, but also what it offers to Manchester (in terms of

 It also differs from scientific demonstrations in the sense that the aim is not to ensure that this building can be replicated. Every presentation and engagement with the public puts an emphasis on the unique character of the building. To take one example among many, Hans Ulrich Obrist states during one of the presentations, “not only does such a building not exist in the UK, but in many parts of the world. There is a missing institution in many places where different disciplines can come together.” 23  This “construction” of a context is especially evident in the planning documents, and in particular, the Design and Access Statement (DAS). The DAS is an important form of presentation that architects produce for the planning application, but also to present the development to the public. Design and Access statements outline the design principles and concepts that have been used and presents the development’s context. The legal requirements are outlined in The Town and Country Planning (Development Management Procedure) (England) (Amendment) Order 2013, provision 4. 22

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art, economy, employment).24 The aim of the presentation is then to lure publics into the Factory scheme through specific narrative techniques, and to show them the possibilities that it will offer, and not to simply de-monstrate what it is as a matter of fact. These presentations, in other words, deploys the “promissory assemblages” (Färber 2020) of the building as a way to constitute the particular assemblage for them to desire to be within; they present the context, the future relations, the possibilities, the entire landscape that will enfold them and through which an affective relation with what the building will offer can be constituted.25 Both bring us to the third sense. These presentations could be understood through what Latour names “political talk” (2003). Speech acts that aim to perform and compose a world of Factory and Manchester. The past, the historical nature of the site, the cultural and industrial history of Manchester, is aligned as a fabricated context that leads to Factory; and the future of Manchester is extrapolated from the possibilities that Factory will offer it. The question is how to “regroup” Mancunians in such a way that they can find their place in the newly constructed Manchester plus Factory and to have them to reprise the project. The presentations do not represent the existing context, the building, or the public as fixed elements, but present a new context that includes Factory and its publics: By doing things with words (Austin 1975) the presentation gives what could be a temporary and provisional existence. It redefines the aggregate of the site, of Manchester, of architects, of artists into a temporary and fragile totality—of what could be. Its success or failure is thus not whether they faithfully represent a pre-existing reality, but whether or not a narrative is constructed that convinces and lures publics into its scheme, to “buy into” it. This is what Latour calls the litmus test of political talk: “It aims  In terms of the presentation of Factory, it is a way to machine a desire for the people of Manchester, or to engage with and constitute “publics” that were “missing” by organising a context within which they can emerge. See Deleuze (1989) on the “missing people” or the “people-to-come” and Deleuze and Guattari (1987) for a discussion on how desire emerges from and for assemblages or what they also call landscapes. These presentations illustrate how the making of a “people” or a “public” is not an inherently “disruptive” process, and therefore, perhaps, betrays Deleuze’s concept. Nevertheless, they attempt to bring into being a collective form of subjectivity—a “public.” 25  In Proust and Signs (2000 [1964), Gilles Deleuze speaks of how one does not desire in the abstract, but that desire is constituted in the world, through the assemblages that are enveloped within the thing desired. This is one way in which these presentations perform public formations. You desire an object not just for the object, but for the world and the possibilities that it offers you. 24

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to allow to exist that which would not exist without it: the public as a temporarily defined totality. Either some means have been provided to trace a group into existence, and the talk has been truthful; or no group has been traced, and it is in vain that people have talked” (2003: 147–8). Each attempt to bring into being different publics that will fit within what Factory offers. This is a particular aspect of what presentations seek to do—they do not “represent” a public but attempt to draw them into being. As we have seen through these presentations, publics are treated as ingredients added to the Factory scheme; in the next section, we will encounter another type of public engagement, where publics play a more active role as they are involved in experiments—an entity to be elicited and to draw knowledge from.

4.5 Experimental Publics In the previous section, the audience and the publics were relatively known and structured, the performance of the presentation carefully and rhetorically orchestrated according to the specific concerns, interests, and possibilities that has implications for both types of publics. However, publics can also be groupings that require being tested. They are not known in advance but are experimental objects in themselves. As we will see, the design team and the client cannot rely on a priori understandings of the Public as they too are in search for the publics of Manchester. In order to acquire knowledge about the groupings that will be affected and drawn into Factory, there are also experiments and tests. As with experimental objects, these groupings were observed, fabricated, and temporarily stabilised—elicited and articulated to become known.26 As Elle from MIF, pointed out to me, they have had “a programme of consultation in a slightly different way.” They have not only held consultation events like the one we began with but have had series of conversations and workshops with industry and culture leaders, and meetings  There are a lot of parallels between these research activities and the economic experiments that Muniesa et al. (2007) describe. However, they do not quite fit within their three-part typology of laboratories, platforms, and in vivo experiments. 26

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with sector partners from across the UK. These have been with “existing arts organisations and that’s been about information sharing, a lot of feedback; we’ve asked them a lot of targeted questions about programming, building design, and so on and so forth.” Beyond the typical sector partners, there has also been engagement with “learning and engagement partners” and “skills partners,” commercial and technical operators, and existing cultural venues and stakeholders in Manchester. This is important, as Jane, the lead in Skills, Training and Education programme for the building, points out because “it is one of the ways in which Factory becomes a real part of the ecology and has a co-generosity with its partners—and becomes much more engaged with the work well before the building is made.” This series of consultations is thus an integral way of situating Factory into the existing cultural ecology of Manchester, the North of England, and the UK. This leads to a central problematic that the development of a large-­ scale arts building constitutes. Like finding a way to situate the soundscape of Factory into an existing urban soundscape, there is also a question of how to situate it within an existing—what they call—“artist and cultural ecology” in Manchester. This has also been a problem that has followed the development of Factory since it was first announced: Does Manchester need a new arts building? What will it do to the existing ecology of arts institutions within Manchester?27 Or, as Adam, the creative director for Factory, succinctly described the problem to me, an important aspect of engaging publics is that “so when the Factory opens it isn’t this alien cultural artefact that has landed on Manchester.” How do you prepare for “something new, and quite big, [that] is landing in a quite stable cultural ecology?” One method they tried was to hold workshops with theatre directors from across the UK, visiting existing theatres, and  This was also the tenor of the questions posed to Rem Koolhaas and Ellen van Loon at the Factory panel that was discussed above. What does the building do to the nature of the Manchester International Festival? What does it offer to artists in Manchester? This is one question by an audience member: “Did it occur to you at all that it is adding to a great superfluity of such spaces particularly in the Northwest? I mean, if we took an audit just along the Oxford Road heading North from say the Contact Theatre coming through two enormous universities that have literally, literally hundreds of auditoria, big or small, in all types of variety….” Hence the necessity to not only engage with the existing ecology, develop partnerships, or what they called “friends of the project,” but also to allay any anxieties about what Factory will do to it. 27

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with local artists in Manchester. The aim of these workshops, as Elle explains, is threefold: 1) to gain knowledge from them about the cultural ecology, about theatres, about specific equipment (to “benefit from their intelligence, we will get their advice about how to make a really good project”); 2) to learn about who they are and how they are affected (as Elle points out, these consultations are oriented around the question “how does that feel?’”); and 3) “reassuring them,” by informing them about the building (“we’re also reassuring them, talking about why this is important, why it will benefit them […] we’re not going to take your funding”). Thus, it is a matter of testing affects and attachments, gaining knowledge about them and the context, to have them articulate their worlds, but also forming a “proto-public”—learning how to “land” Factory into this existing set of relations. Let us turn to one of the workshops to witness such an experiment. On May 21, 2018, I am again within the brick archways underneath a railway line in Manchester for one of the artist workshops organised by MIF called “The Factory: Artists’ Discussion.” As I enter, there is already a group of artists and individuals from the cultural ecology of Manchester assembled, jostling about, chatting, with food in their hands (Fig. 4.1). The organisers give me a nametag with a specific colour, which indicates the group I would be part of for the group discussions that happen later in the evening. Mine is purple. I will also be a participant in this experiment; this is a surprise to me. However, before I could think about it, the presentation begins. There are around 50 of us. We are sitting in rows of chairs facing a screen where the rendering of Factory at night glows. This was an event solely run by MIF; there are no members of the design team or the city council present. But the presentation follows the same narrative as the architects’s presentations: A quick walkthrough of the building, the usual rhetoric about its design concept, and its “unique” status internationally. However, the rest of the presentation is oriented towards the concerns of these artists, this particular ecology. An emphasis is placed on how the building will not take away from the other venues; it will be part of this ecology, adding to it. We hear about what the building will do for artists; what it offers them in terms of possibilities; the state-of-the-art technological equipment; its impact in terms of jobs and skills; and how it will improve the cultural reputation of Manchester globally.

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Fig. 4.1  A blurry scene of an experimental public formation in action. (Source: Author)

Following the presentation, we move into smaller groups. I go with the purples. The organisers want to hear the “thoughts of the artist community in small groups, to share conversations and concerns according to ‘chat-in-house’ rules.” This is a way to put us at ease: We can say whatever we want. And yet, I cannot help but feel uncomfortable as a participant. Am I part of this artistic community? Do I have the same attachments and concerns about the artistic ecology of Manchester? Am I part of this public? But how does anyone know if they are part of a public formation or not? I meet everyone in the purple group, and they are all different kinds of artists from Manchester—we are instructed by the managing director of MIF to share comments, questions, and what “excites” us about Factory. With sticky notes, we add these onto three large pieces of paper that are laid out on the floor. These will then be given to members of MIF to sum up at the end of the event in front of everyone. After

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20 minutes, we reconvene in our group for another activity. This time we share our concerns with the group and are asked to boil it down to three main points. The discussion passes through several topics, mainly around how Factory should benefit artists: To develop a commission culture; to develop networks for curators and buyers; to enable local artists to mix with international artists; to include local communities. This problematic travels with us to our next discussion as we merge with another colour, where we whittle down our now 6 points to 2, now, supposedly more “general” concerns. Again, the concerns revolve around how Factory will be integrated into the cultural ecology. Once back in the presentation room, regrouped again. It is the time for the groups to make a presentation; each articulate how they envision Factory entering their ecologies. Representatives from each group present their two main concerns. We hear the refrain of the threat that the building poses. Sometimes in different terms: How do you get the building to enter diverse communities, but also have a building that allows diverse communities to enter it? What will Factory do for underrepresented groups in Manchester? What is “creative collaboration,” and how does Factory contribute to this? A representative of MIF provides a brief response to these concerns, and in conclusion, he states that there will be an emphasis placed on “keeping in touch with the cultural ecology in Manchester.” While it seems like nothing has happened, we can think of this workshop as a kind of experiment. It took place in a controlled environment, with an approved list of participants, and followed a set procedure. We were continuously regrouped to narrow down a set of statements that they had wanted to elicit from us. Eventually, a quasi-consensus was formed, more general statements extracted, which was presented back to the participants at the end. Through these activities, like a “focus group,” they were able to gain knowledge about their object (the cultural ecology), but also, potentially, about the building itself. In this case, since the design of the building is nearing completion, the feedback from the workshop will feed into the programme and at the operational level of the building. It is more about how to safely land it within the existing ecologies. In previous artist workshops, like one in 2017, with major theatre directors and producers in the UK, the feedback from them resulted in the reduction of the theatre size. This feedback is important

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for them because it comes from expertise that reassures them about their own decisions and designs. The aim was both to gather data about the cultural ecology and the building, but also to reassure the concerns of this cultural ecology in relation to the Factory. “They are important to get that feedback, to reassure people,” and as Elle continues, “it’s an ecology [and] you’re shifting it by making something this big and important.” Whereas in the previous sections we encountered a boundary between those “inside” and those “outside,” here we can see that the public and the building are co-constituted. They are both “in the making.” The artist public is provisionally made from within the experimental set-up of the workshop, constituted by the testing, the activities, the manipulation, and the quasi-public demonstration. However, it is important to note that this does not mean that they were not “free” to express themselves. As in scientific experiments, the aim is to set up an experimental situation through which the constraints of the set-up endow capacities on the participants to speak and act. As Émilie Gomart and Maarten Hajer note, in conversation with Stengers’s idea of the good experiment, “the good experimental setting then, and perhaps, by extrapolation, the political form is not one which is neutral but one which deforms, constrains, and enables in interesting ways” (2003: 39). While we could argue that this was not an ideal agora or political space where a public could come to “speak” or for them to be represented in a transparent way, this is also the point. In this workshop, statements were elicited, and knowledge was gathered about this ecology not in a situation of “transparency” but in a setting that deformed, constrained, and enabled the ecology, and its public, to speak (they had hoped) in a surprising way. And, in the process, a public began to take on some shape, to become subjectlike, and speak as “one.” Moreover, at the workshop, these artists came together around a specific ontological trouble that worried them: Not the building as such, but in terms of what it will do to the existing ecology. It has the possible consequence of disrupting their ways of being, of shifting their ecology. But it also has these consequences for MIF. Their aim was thus double: First, to gain information about the existing ecology (Who and what is part of the ecology? What are the concerns? How does it feel?); second, to constitute the formation of a “proto-public” that will be aligned with the project (What can Factory offer them? How can we “involve” them?). It

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is important to note that the anxiety is symmetrical. The artists are worried about their cultural ecology, but so is MIF because artists are crucial to ensure the success, the continuity, of the building. A public takes form around these concerns. In other words, for Factory to be successful, there is an uncertain and tentative process of making artist-publics interested, ontologically aligned, to “continue” and “support” the project. The building “in the making” does not exist without its publics that can continue it in existence. The workshop, in a way, attempts to bring a public into being through the experimental set-up, as something that takes shape not in a “double-click” representational manner, but in a deformed, mediated, and indirect way. In other words, this workshop—as a kind of public consultation—does not seek to encounter the public directly so as to be able to represent it in a transparent and direct manner, but it seeks to mobilise a public, to give shape and definition to an ecology that it seeks to know more about while also implicating it in the continuity of the building beyond its design and construction.

4.6 One or Several Publics? During the Q&A of a public presentation with Rem Koolhaas and Ellen van Loon about Factory, in response to a critical question from the audience, Koolhaas, almost taken aback, says, “wait, wait. Are you against the building? Because then… because then I think it is better to discuss it as a kind of political issue?” But before this discussion could happen, the moderator quickly moved on. It was not possible to discuss it as a political issue. But what does it mean to talk of architecture as a political issue in contrast to discussing it, for instance, as an issue of design? Why was this discussion not allowed to happen at all? What this short interaction possibly shows is the anxious and tentative relations that exist between publics and architecture. What would happen if the building was discussed as a political issue? And, if publics take shape through and around issues (Marres 2012), who is afraid of them? The story of the relationship between publics and architecture is often portrayed through the framework of “participation” (Blundell Jones et al. 2005). Participation of the public within the production of buildings,

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within the early stages of design, and in the planning process. Participation, it is said, can make architecture more social (as “social architecture”), it will give architecture some democracy, and can thus transform the conditions of how buildings are made, and give more voice to the “people,” the public, regarding how their city should look (Doucet 2016; Till 2009). To return to de Carlo’s now famous statement: “In reality, architecture has become too important to be left to architects” (2005: 11). This discussion, moreover, of participation and the inclusion of publics within design processes is akin to the discussion of public engagement within STS that has addressed the role of publics, laypeople, and other kinds of knowledge within decisions related to science and technology.28 In both cases, it has been shown to be a question of the relationship between experts and non-experts (publics), placing an emphasis on the need to incorporate other kinds of knowledge, and to add a little more debate, dissension and discussion within otherwise “private” practices that nevertheless have a broader impact on the “public.” It adds  some mess  and difference, but also a level of risk: Undoing ambitions for consensus and the architect’s desire for certainty, order, and creative autonomy (Till 2006), opening up space for other values, worlds, knowledges, and desires for the future of cities. However, as has also been often shown, participation and public engagement has been co-opted within the scripts of neoliberalism as “a politics of consensus and appeasement” (Doucet 2016: 111), a form of token democracy, a box-checking exercise, or managerialism. At the same time, it is not entirely clear who or what architecture’s public is or consists of: The building’s future users? The client? Neighbours? Tax-paying residents of the city? The architectural community? Or, more broadly, everyone who will encounter the future building? As Till notes, “users do not come in the ordered classifications of modernity; they are multiple, difficult and diverse” (2006: np). This chapter was interested in this challenge of finding out who or what is architecture’s publics.  This coincides with the emergence of what has been called “mode 2” knowledge production (Nowotny et al. 2001) which puts an emphasis on the necessity for the democratic production of scientific and technical knowledge, often within the framework of the “co-production” (Jasanof 2003). See Doucet (2016) on a discussion of this in relation to architectural production, which places an especial emphasis on publics as “users” and on their own “creativity” rather than knowledge. 28

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It began with a surprise: The Public is missing, and yet there are still publics. In the search for this missing Public of Factory that did not appear during public consultation, this chapter was interested in drawing out this tension between one General Public and several particular public formations. And in the search for the publics of Factory, rather than finding a General Public, there were specific moments with different kinds of people, mediations, representations, and concerns. There was no Public in itself, locatable, out there. Instead, there were councillors talking on their behalf, documents speaking in their name, empty consultation spaces and websites waiting for them, the architect’s presentations, audiences, and workshops. In each of the sections of the chapter, particular publics took shape in relation to particular concerns, settings, and through the means of representation and mediation. A grouping or aggregate (“cultural ecology”) is tested and experimented, drawn into the shape of a public to be engaged, knowledge is elicited; publics take on shape within documents, through the “political talk” of the councillors and in the presentations of the architects. Like the building itself, or sound and noise, publics are detectable through the mediations and representations that give them the capacity to take on form and speak. Another lesson on this search for the building’s publics: Publics themselves are not known in advance; there is no “essence” of the public that makes it universal and general. They are inchoate, “in the making,” approximate, and provisional. That the public is not known in advance also constitutes a risk: One does not know in advance what it can do. As a result, there are tests, probes, mediations, representations, and management techniques. Part of the argument of this chapter is thus when speaking of the relation between architecture and publics (or participation) if attention is turned to the things of politics, the issues spoken of, but also the concrete settings through which capacities are given to those to speak together (as a more or less cohesive collective), formations of publics can be detected. It is in these relations that the problem of the public is constituted. And from this vantage point, there is no General Public, but several. There are formations of publics. Mediations, settings, concrete issues, different expertise, discourses, types of people, documents, ecologies, and platforms that take shape together, that come together in

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formations—that are often heterogeneous and messy. Public formations appear and disappear with different temporalities and adhesion, and with different realities at stake. In other words, a public’s capacity to speak as one—to be a public—to be subjectlike is not guaranteed. Like the design of the building and its future lived reality, there is no guarantee that a particular public continues to exist, or that others may emerge or not. It, too, is a delicate being that must continue to be re-­ presented to persist through time; it can also be interrupted if its re-­ presentations ring false. As a result, what this series of public formations shows is that public relations in architecture is risky. As they are not sure what sorts of publics manifest in the making of a building, the public is also an object to be designed, tested, re-presented, rendered visible, and like the other realities gathered into the building, there is the same risk that publics too can produce “knock-on effects” that threaten the building’s continuity, its capacity to continue through time. The building project relies upon various publics “buying into” its proposition; this is one way in which the building is validated (Farías and Wilkies 2016). Without its publics and users, the project fails; its success requires others to succeed it. On the one hand, this is a situation of managerialism, of managing the public relations of the building. We could call it another instance of “post-politics” in architecture. But we could also call it a situation of “solicitude” (Souriau 2015). A relation of concern, and anxiety. The problem of the public in architecture is thus not only just of managing difference and boundary-marking but also of relevance: How to get others to “reprise” the building, to be concerned for it, and continue it in its existence; how to constitute techniques, develop settings, and fabricate re-presentations that trace a group into existence as a temporarily defined public. In these public formations, then, the risk and challenge lie with the lack of a pre-existing common world, one that, each time, in each moment, requires composition, to ensure continuity between publics, the various ways in which the building will be lived, and the building itself.

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References Austin, J.L. 1975. How to Do Things With Words. Cambridge, MA: University of Harvard Press. Blundell Jones, Peter, Doina Petrescu, and Jeremy Till. 2005. Architecture and Participation. London: Routledge. Callon, Michel. 1984. Some Elements of a Sociology of Translation: Domestication of the Scallops and the Fishermen of St Brieuc Bay. The Sociological Review 32: 196–233. Cassin, Barbara. 2014. Sophistical Practice: Toward a Consistent Relativism. New York: Fordham University Press. Cochoy, Franck. 1998. Another Discipline for the Market Economy: Marketing as a Performative Knowledge and Know-How for Capitalism. The Sociological Review 46: 194–221. ———. 2008. Calculation, Qualculation, Calqulation: Shopping Cart’s Arithmetic, Equipped Cognition and Clustered Consumers. Marketing Theory 8: 15–44. Collins, H.M. 1988. Public Experiments and Displays of Virtuosity: The Core-­ Set Revisited. Social Studies of Science 18: 725–748. Collins, H.M., and Robert Evans. 2002. The Third Wave of Science Studies: Studies of Expertise and Experience. Social Studies of Science 32: 235–296. De Carlo, Giancarlo. 2005. Architecture’s Public. In Architecture and Participation, ed. Peter Blundell Jones, Doina Petrescu, and Jeremy Till, 3–22. London: Routledge. Deleuze, Gilles. 1989. Cinema 2: The Time Image. London: Athlone Press. ———. 2000 [1964]. Proust and Signs. The Complete Text. Trans. Richard Howard. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. 1987. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Dewey, John. 2012 [1927]. The Public and Its Problems: an Essay in Political Inquiry. Pennsylvania: The Pennsylvania State University Press. Doucet, Isabelle. 2016. The Practice Turn in Architecture: Brussels After 1968. London: Routledge. Farías, Ignacio, and Alex Wilkie, eds. 2016. Studio Studies: Operations, Topologies & Displacements. New York: Routledge. Gomart, Emilie, and Martin Hajer. 2003. Is That Politics? In Social Studies of Science and Technology: Looking Back, Ahead, ed. Bernard Joerges and Helga Nowotny, 33–61. Dordrecht: Springer.

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Harris, John. 2015. The Great Reinvention of Manchester: “It’s far more pleasant than London”. The Guardian. November 03. Irwin, Alan. 2001. Constructing the Scientific Citizen: Science and Democracy in the Biosciences. Public Understanding of Science 10: 1–18. Jasanof, Sheila. 2003. Breaking the Waves in Science Studies. Comment on H.M. Collins and Robert Evans, ‘The Third Wave of Science Studies’. Social Studies of Science 33: 389–400. Latour, Bruno. 1987. Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers Through Society. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. ———. 1999. Pandora’s Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. ———. 2003. What if We Talked Politics a Little? Contemporary Political Theory 2: 143–164. ———. 2013. An Inquiry into Modes of Existence: An Anthropology of the Moderns. Trans. Catherine Porter. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Lippmann, Walter. 1993 [1927]. The Phantom Public. New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers. Manchester City Council. 2017. State of the City Report 2017. Manchester: Manchester City Council. Marres, Noortje. 2012. Material Participation: Technology, the Environment and Everyday Publics. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Muniesa, Fabian, Yuval Millo, and Michel Callon. 2007. An Introduction to Market Devices. The Sociological Review 55: 1–12. Nowotny, Helga, Peter B. Scott, and Michael T. Gibbons. 2001. Re-Thinking Science: Knowledge and the Public in an Age of Uncertainty. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. Rosental, Claude. 2013. Toward a Sociology of Public Demonstrations. Sociological Theory 31: 434–365. Shapin, Steven. 1988. The House of Experiment in Seventeenth-Century England. Isis 79: 373–404. ———. 1990. Science and the Public. In Companion to the History of Modern Science, ed. R.C.  Olby, G.N.  Cantor, J.R.R.  Christie, and M.J.S.  Hodge, 990–1007. London: Routledge. Shapin, Steven, and Simon Schaffer. 1985. Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle and the Experimental Life. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Souriau, Étienne. 2015 [2009]. The Different Modes of Existence. Trans. Erik Beranek and Tim Howles. Minneapolis: Univocal Publishing.

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Stark, David, and Verena Paravel. 2008. PowerPoint in Public: Digital Technologies and the New Morphology of Demonstration. Theory, Culture & Society 25 (2): 30–55. Tarde, Gabriel. 2010. On Communication and Social Influence: Selected Papers. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Till, Jeremy. 2006. The Architect and the Other. Opendemocracy.com. https:// www.opendemocracy.net/en/architecture_3680jsp/. Accessed 7 Feb 2020. ———. 2009. Architecture Depends. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. van der Hoorn, Mélanie. 2012. Bricks & Balloons: Architecture in Comic-Strip Form. Rotterdam: 010 Publishers. Wynne, Brian. 1996. May the Sheep Safely Graze? A Reflexive View on the Expert-Lay Knowledge Divide. In Risk, Environment and Modernity: Towards a New Ecology, ed. S.  Lash, B.  Szersyznski, and B.  Wynne, 44–82. London: Sage. Yaneva, Albena. 2017. Five Ways to Make Architecture Political: An Introduction to the Politics of Design Practice. London: Bloomsbury Publishing.

5 Variations

5.1 “It Could Iterate Forever...” I had heard this phrase several times. If they were not careful, if they did not put the proper mechanisms in place, then the making of Factory could iterate forever. They could continue to explore all the alleyways, all the possibilities, through each of the different variations, as they seek the best way to fit it together. They could get lost in the various realities at stake, the worlds that they invoked and that the building draws together but never quite together. And this is why they need to establish criteria, constraints, to convert the building and its contexts into something thinglike (and publics into something subjectlike); this is why they need to establish a common world where everything could cohere, at least, momentarily, provisionally. This allows them to move on—to ensure that it is still a project. But does a building ever come to an end? Is there a moment when it could be said to be complete? Taken in the spring of 2023, the above photo (Fig. 5.1) shows Factory as it nears “completion.” At least, from the outside, the finishing touches are being added to the façade. Originally expected to open in 2019, it is

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Fig. 5.1  The not quite complete Factory in spring 2023. (Source: David Johnson)

now prepared to open in June 2023, to be publicly unveiled with the 2023 edition of the Manchester International Festival. But a lot has happened between the publication of the first rendering, the first expectation, for the future building in 2016 and now. One of the aims of this book was to trouble the logic of the project in design. Less a straight line, the ways in which buildings emerge take much more circuitous, meandering, fragile, and uncertain trajectories. It does not quite follow along the dotted lines or predetermined sequences of stages. A more suitable description would perhaps be the shifting, zigzagging garden of forking paths of Jorge Luis Borges’s short story; paths that shift, twist, loop back, realign, and unfold in the process of their making. By following a building “in the making” from the inside, from the point of view of the practices, this book sought to describe and reanimate this piecemeal and meandering manner in which a building is made. It sought to grasp some of the range of its variations.

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If, at the start, the book sketched several possible ways of addressing the ways in which building projects begin, the same could be said of how they finish. When exactly does that happen? Is there a particular moment that could be pinpointed as that moment of closure? Does it happen on “Day One”—that worrying day of reckoning when their work is tested as it is used for the first time? Is it, perhaps, when the design and construction work is finished? Or, according to the RIBA Plan of Work, is it when the “circle” of design is complete, when it reaches Stage 7, “Use,” or perhaps, Stage 6—“Handover”? Is there a moment in design when that final touch is added, when a final technical detail is reached, when the model is finally complete? And even then, could one say that that is it? Does the building—even when built—not also change through its use and maintenance? Can its status as a coherent finished “object” ever be assumed? While this book had focused on those practices involved in its making, the constructed building itself could be considered an “event,” not a “black box,” a solid thing, but a continuous set of practices that holds it together, within which it is made and unmade and made again (Jacobs and Merriman 2011; Jenkins 2002; Kraftl 2010; Rose et  al. 2010). Buildings inhabited are themselves “living,” they wear and weather, and require the often-invisible maintenance work that holds it together, practices themselves that are part of what constitutes a building (Strebel 2011). Buildings—even when built then—are dynamic, shifting, and evolving things, held together within the practices and the assemblages of human and nonhuman actors that hold it together. They also rely on others to reprise it, to “work with” the building and its material affordances, in practices that continue it in its existence across a variety of nonhumans that again and again give the building a (at least, temporary) consistency (Hansmann 2021; Yaneva 2017). Even when “finished” in terms of design and construction, buildings continue to live other lives. The same could be said for Factory if we would continue to follow it: There would be still other variations. Variations of a Building thus did not seek to tell the life story of Factory. It does not “sum up” all the practices, actions, diversions, decisions, and forks-in-the-path that led to its construction and it does not aim to envelope the variations with an all-encompassing whole through which one could say, there, that is the essence of the building (or of “architecture”

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itself!). The narrative of the book too is incomplete: Another variation that adds to the building’s eventfulness. As a variation, it also produces new relations, brings together specific experiences in the building, draws out aspects of its making that “hangs together at its edges,” as William James would say of experience (1912). One way in which the book sought to tell the story of a building “in the making” was by following the making of Factory from the “inside,” from a point of view of events and practices along a plane of experience. In different sites, it describes how Factory exists, not as a self-same object, but as a network of drawings, models, reports, acousticians, engineers, a “two-headed” client team, a city and politicians, publics, artists, ballet dancers, soundwaves, and building materials. More than this, it sought to demonstrate how a building and its realities are assembled across different sets of associations and hold together—or not—across variable worlds. Or to put it another way: It sought to argue that the making of buildings is less the “creativity” of human actors upon a passive and settled world, like a sculptor over top a block of clay that it can master, but a fragile and provisional process of drawing together the varying realities that are at stake, while also, in the words of Latour (2004a, b, 2010, 2014b), composing a “common world” within which they would all fit together. That is one possible way to read it; one variation of the book. There are others. Perhaps it could have been read in this way: As a story of what it means to share in the act of creation, to collaborate and to work with one another on a series of shared problems. To complicate what “authorship” in architecture and construction constitutes (Till 2009). This book has shown, drawing from previous studies of architectural practice, that a building is not only the achievement of the architect, but is a shared process. It involves a whole series of other participants: Engineers, acousticians, the client, publics, and many others. Each chapter reflects on the cooperation between these different practices, and in how they meet according to overlapping and shared problems (“grey things”). At the same time, it described the ontological variability of the different practices; they are full of other kinds of entities through which the capacity to design, to represent, and to know something was afforded and distributed: The 3D model, the sketches and plans, mock-ups and simulations,

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settings, reports, sounds and noises, publics, cultural ecologies, etc. The making of a building relies on much more than the conceptual work of the architect but is shared across a broader ecology of actors, human, and nonhumans. As they work with one another, in overlaps of the building, they are also concerned about creating the conditions for others to be able to continue the building in their own way. Another way in which this book is organised and inspired is in conversation with the empirical studies of ontology in the field of Science and Technology Studies (STS). Taking the inspiration to open ontological questions in design and architecture up through an empirical approach, one that did not already arrange what a building could be in advance, it was interested in thinking through the similar questions that those studies had done on more “natural” entities. If a building is designed in different practices, with their own worlds, languages, concerns, materials, and contexts—does that not mean that there is ontological variability at the heart of a building? Could a building be many things at once? How are these ontological differences dealt with in practice? And ultimately, then, how does this change how design and architecture is not only conceived but also undertaken? If you put ontological questions at the foreground of a design process, what would change? This book tried to answer that latter question by saying that there is more at stake in the making of a building than a building project, of design and technical problems, but that there is also the continuous process of composing a common world within which the building is possible; it is a challenge of ensuring that a whole variety of entities, concerns, and practices hang alongside one another in a kind of cosmicity. There is the need to not simply design a building but ensure that this remains possible within the world in a stable way. Another way to consider the book, another variation, could be from the point of view of three concepts that it foregrounds: Three tests of the “conditions of felicity” of a building project. The first (1) is the test of “coordination”: Do each of the variations of the building overlap? Is there a clash? Continuity? Is everyone working on the same building? The second (2) test is related to knowledge practices of “approximation”: On Day One, do the designs, expectations, and assumptions correspond

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to way it is lived, its future lived realities? What are these mobile forms of knowing and how do they generate knowledge? If the first test crosses the “gaps” between the different practices, the second is the temporal “gap” from design to building. The third (3) test refers to how the building project relates to its context, broadly speaking. This could be called its test of formation and “validation”: Can it be added to the existing ecologies of city and its publics without disrupting them? Each of them tests the strength of the “common world” that is simultaneously composed in the making of a building. Each of them hangs together through a mode of relation of “solicitude”: Of being open to and relying on others to inherit and continue one’s own reality and concern—of sharing problems without solutions. Here is a fourth variation: There is an implicit politics in all of this. A politics that happens within practice and in the thick of things. It happens in indeterminate situations, where there is no foundation or guarantee, where the building’s conditions are negotiated and modified, where everything must be done again to a hold a reality, a building and its common world together. But that these seemingly technical or design-related decisions also have effects. In this composition of a common world, in the movement towards singularity, what happens to all the differences, the varieties of experience, the multiplicity of the building? What possibilities and visions of the city are inscribed into the design of the building? What future realities, users, and usages are foreseen, or scripted into it? What happens when potentially political issues are made technical? What about all the potential publics that were not invited to participate, whose worlds did not find a place in its “common world”? These decisions have effects that also intervene in the world, that unsettle what is given, and that produce problematic situations. Of course, there are other ways in which this book could have been written and can be read. There are other modes of interpretation or frameworks that would have provided other types of stories. There were other moments that could have been emphasised. Indeed, there are other variations of the building. The varieties of experience in design, architecture, and in building projects are too much to fit into this book; it, too, could iterate forever.

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5.2 Three Types of Variation Throughout, the book drew attention to the challenges of sharing in the act of creation in a building project, a challenge that turned around the variability of the realities of the building. It is shown within the practices of coordination, of approximation, and of (public) formation that each looked at the challenge of variability in different situations of making a building. But variability happens in different ways too. What are these variations of a building?

Ontological Variations This book followed the building into different practices that were full of different materials and concerns. In one practice, you encounter sounds and noises, a laboratory, construction materials and mock-ups, as well as an elusive thing that insinuates itself everywhere, through gaps, through walls, and into the future lived experiences of the users of the building. In the next, there are steel trusses imagined through plans and models, wind, loads, and tensions, a building that can shift and floors that can collapse. In another, there is heat and cold, globs of colour on models, diffusers, and ballet dancers’s legs, as well as a manufacturer’s brochure with dated information. Again, elsewhere, there is the question of cost, time, contracts, a city council, and citizens, but also the programme and the future of the Manchester International Festival, and ecologies of artists to reach out to and incorporate. Each has its own realities that are assembled in the different practices and added to the building. From the point of view of each practice, the building is both whole and partial at once. It is a knot of trajectories. What does it mean to speak of a building in all of this? The building does hold together in moments. It is possible at times to point to a model, a drawing, an image, and point at a building that could be Factory. It can happen as they draw equivalences in design team meetings, or through simplifications and substitutions—or when they “freeze” the building through the 3D model. These are only ever momentary. Inevitably—it seems—there are interventions that constitute “knock-on

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effects”; there are adjustments, meetings to explicate an “issue of coordination,” moments of engagement with publics, or mediation with the city council to ensure some continuity. The variations of a building are at stake at each moment: This is one of the challenges of sharing in an act of creation. Another way to consider this is the challenge of doing parallel and sequential design: They are working on the same thing at the same time through time. The building “in the making” is partial twice: From the point of view of each world, but also in time as it gains in reality, as the design is added to. This is one of the reasons why a building “in the making” is not quite the same thing as those addressed in the empirical studies of ontology in STS. A building is not a body (Mol 2002) or a fish (Law and Lien 2012). Nobody assumes it pre-exists its making. A building is made, designed, constructed; this is not controversial. There is nevertheless still the challenge of negotiating ontological differences to achieve a singular building, of being able to refer to the same thing across differences of reality, but it asks different questions. While when one can touch or cut into a body, and can catch a fish, there is the assumption that it exists prior to these acts, but in the design process, there is not yet a physical building to touch, to cut into. You cannot point to it or catch it. (In the process of being made, it is captured nevertheless in physical and digital models, in drawings, reports, budgets, meeting minutes, and in forms of talk; it does take on existence.) What a building “in the making” and design draws to the foreground in contrast to bodies and health or fish and nature is that they also partially exist (Latour 1999). It ontologically varies in time as it is continuously redefined, remade, and renegotiated. It gains (and can lose) reality. There is a historicity of a building (it is “in the making”) that is more obvious. Bruno Latour argues that things in themselves have a history, they too change through time, and not just as the objects of changing paradigms, or cultural traditions, or forms of knowledge. They have a “relative existence,” where existence is not an “all-or-nothing property” (1999: 158) but that they gain in reality as they are associated with others that collaborate with it.1 This is visible in the layers of files in Joanna’s  For Latour, in fact, technological projects (and thus building projects too) are a useful model for thinking about this: “Since there is no major metaphysical difficulty in granting in diesel engines 1

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Illustrator file, in the stack of markups in the office of the structural engineers, in the details accumulating in the 3D model, but also in the intricate and sometimes interminable shared problems unfolded in design team meetings. In the movements of coordination, the realities can be added and taken away from the building. In the process of being made, a building can exist more and less. But it can also be more or less. It can take shape grosso modo. This happens often. Aspects of the design are left ambiguous, uncertain, and vague. Sometimes this is done on purpose: To not be too detailed at the wrong time in a way that constrains others from being able to do their own work; the aim is to not be too articulate or too precise to allow others to be able to add to it, and not reach “closure” too soon. Things are left open, indistinct, and indefinite. One way to think of it is as having the ontological status of a sketch—as the “confused givens that sketch [the work to-be-made]” (Souriau 2015 [2009]: 225). The building “in the making” often exists in these provisional sketches, as rough drafts, markups, scribbles, notes, crumpled paper tossed in the bin, personal diaries, sticky notes on the side of the computer screen. It is full of these lesser forms of existence (Lapoujade 2021 [2017]). The building takes shape “in a sort of half-light, a penumbra in which only incompleteness can be made out” (Souriau 2015 [2009]: 220). In other words, these are the material artefacts of ways in which the building also has a virtual existence, as ephemeral fragments of other possible realities folded within something else. They are ways to open up reality to something else, and also (perhaps) to keep it open for others to add to it. These more or less realities vary within themselves and point to ways in which realities in a building “in the making” can be obscure, vague, and incomplete. The building ontologically varies then across practices, in time, and roughly.

Continuous Variations This book took up a particular perspective for grasping the ways in which a building is made, that is, from its inside. Rather than privileging the and subway systems a relative existence, the history of technology is very much more ‘relaxed’ than that of science as far as relative existence is concerned” (1999: 158).

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products of architecture, or the perspectives of the designers, this book took another approach that foregrounded the ways in which the realities of the building are assembled within design practices. Following Yaneva’s characterisation of an ethnography of architectural practices, it was not “profiling architects and their ‘tribes’ as professional groups,” but traces “the materialization of design operations and the socio-material complexity of design [by] outlining anthropologically the routines, actions and transactions of all participants in design in compound spatial settings” (2017: 44). It focuses on the building “in the making,” and on making in the very act of its happening. From the point of view of practices, of events that happen in practice, a plane of experience, everything moves. We have the possibility to capture the building “on the move” as Latour and Yaneva write (2017): Caught in mid-flight. There are no substances that endure, no singular reality “out there” as a common ground, and no totalities to hold everything together. But practices, events, experiences all the way down. To grasp buildings “in the making” is to move from an ontic world (populated with substances that endure whether within subjects or solid objects and where events are accidents that happen to them) to what Souriau calls a synaptic world, one populated by movements, acts, transformations, and metamorphoses (2015 [2009]; Lapoujade 2021 [2017]). Everything is defined by the trajectories and processes that they take. Something happens. A synapse. An event. The way in which a future lived reality of sound that “would be” takes shape within an experiment around a mock-up ceiling panel, or how a building takes on a reality as if it were really there in the discussion around a 3D model, or in the fleeting moments of engagement with a public that briefly appears. As the word “synapse” suggests, this is a zone of transition, of tendencies that for a moment brings things together, not “[r]ooted in fixed conditions of possibility but in the actual line of potential that a something coming together calls to mind and sets in motion” (Stewart 2007: 2). Everything is “in the making.” There is no Building behind the practices of coordination, no Sound beyond the approximations, no Public beyond its formations, no Subject behind the movements of design. Only variations. They are in continuous variation.

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However, where is Factory in all these variations? How should we consider the building that is in the process of being made? Is there a form of a building in the making that passes through all of this? It is not something outside of the variations. There is no original concept of the building that is iteratively copied in different ways. It is not yet a thing or an “essence” that subsists across as an invariant through many manifestations (Lapoujade 2021 [2017]: 15–6; Latour 2013). The building is not constructed yet. That is still to come. While the building may be thinglike at moments, in what Michel Foucault calls “analogical cosmography” (2005), where, for instance, the 3D model is taken as if it were a building built to be able to move on. And where there is still something called “Factory” that is there—that shared problem, the proposition, discussed in public events, around which they gather in design team meetings, that gains reality in the 3D model as a crystallisation of all the work, rather than call this an “invariant” that passes through everything, the building “in the making” is perhaps better understood as a form of a variant. A variation without a theme. A form in continuous transformation. One way to consider this mode of existence of the building “in the making” could be what Gilles Deleuze has called an “objectile” (1993 [1988]).2 An objectile is defined not according to an essence that gives it an identity, nor to a substance that holds it together, or an invariant form that is held through its different manifestations, but according to its movements, its manners of being, as it unfolds what is folded within it through time: “The new status of the object, the objectile, is inseparable from the different layers that are dilating, like so many occasions for meanders and detours” (Deleuze 1993 [1988]: 37). It is in this process of folding and unfolding (implication and explication) that the objectile is given its texture, its consistency. A building “in the making” takes shape and holds together “in a continuum of variation” (Deleuze 1993 [1988]: 38). This could be one way to grasp what a building “in the making” is: As texture that is given through the way it is handled in practice, how it is transformed, through its implications and explications, the manners in  This concept takes shape in his reading of the Baroque and Leibniz in a book called The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque (1993 [1988]). This book and the concept of the fold has had a long career in architectural thought but often explored in a more formal way. 2

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which its variations are folded together in the movements of its making. Rather than taking shape as a finished thing, a building “in the making” has a manner of being in continuous variation.

Anaphoric Variation Another way to consider this is to look at how it is reprised, in the way in which it draws together everything to be taken up again. Its iterations. How it moves on. This third type of variation could be understood through what Étienne Souriau (2015 [2009]) has called “anaphoric variation.” It is not only done again and again in each practice in different ways, but each of these iterations are also taken up, as in a series, by others. In fact, it relies on others to take it up, to add to it, to repeat or reprise it. This is what allows the building (in continuous variation) to persist through time. Otherwise, it fails. For Souriau, the process through which something is made is the journey of anaphoric variation. Re-appropriating the literary device of “anaphora,” that uses iteration and repetition to rhetorical effect, to create a sense of intensity that grows, he applies it to understand the journey through which a work “to-be-made” gradually progresses from a state of incompletion to something made. The anaphoric variation/progression thus draws attention to how something exists through others. But it is also a useful way of characterising the existence of the building project: That in order for it to gain in reality, to move progressively from its initial sketches, its virtual existence, it relies on assembling bits and pieces of reality, of relying on the affordances of other tools and devices, but also on others (other members of the design team, of its publics, those close and distant) to intensify its existence, to give it more reality, and make it more and more thinglike. This is an important experience of the building “in the making”: The piecemeal intensification of something into something else, and through others that can reprise it and repeat it differently. And yet, the realisation or anaphoric variation of the building is not a smooth journey. There is an existential challenge and affective experience: It is in jeopardy and can fail at every moment. The experience of the anaphor is thus a vertiginous one—a moment where decisions need to be

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made, aspects selected or discarded. The wrong move may be made. In which direction do you want to take this? The design of the truss may not find its way into the 3D model without disrupting the architectural design—drawing everyone to a design team meeting. Or worse, later on, the structure collapses. Or maybe a sinkhole grows under the building. The acoustic absorption materials may not be absorptive enough; or noise may leak out of the building vibrating the neighbouring residents awake at night. The diffusers may in the end be too loud to hear a performance, or rooms may be too cold for dancers’s bodies. The budget increases may reach a point where they no longer outweigh the “social benefits” of the building. Publics may not find themselves fitting within the promise of the building. Or perhaps, the entire proposition of the building fails at the outset. In other words, a building project is always at the risk of coming apart. The anaphoric variation may not be continued; there may not be others to take up its thread. Rather than a project, the notion of anaphoric variation makes this important aspect of making a building clearer. As Souriau writes, “I must insist upon the idea that as long as the work is under construction, it is in jeopardy. At each moment, with each of the artist’s actions, or rather as a result of each of the artist’s actions, it can live or die” (2015 [2009]: 229). There is something more than the contracts, plans, designs, meetings, and schedules that all make up the project: “The work isn’t a plan, an ideal, a project: it’s a monster that poses a question to the agent” (Stengers and Latour 2015 [2009]: 18). This is what Souriau calls the sphinx of the work. A monster that takes shape within the overlapping variations, in the moments where the realities do not meet up, in the clashes and issues of coordination, in the anxious approximations and incomplete designs, when facing the unknown publics and indeterminate realities. It is unclear how to proceed, to determine the consequences that one’s decisions has on other ways in which the building exists. Anaphoric variation thus brings to the foreground the challenges of sharing in an act of creation: The obligations and responsibilities to respond to one another as if they were all entangled in a fine web. Decisions are (sometimes) made with their “effects” in mind. As Stengers and Latour (2015 [2009]: 83) note, in anaphoric variation, there is another “correspondence theory of truth”: Not one that is tested according to how well a reference refers to some external reality but is tested

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according to how it is able to be taken up again and be succeeded by others. It happens in an “ecology of practices,” a situation of “reciprocal capture,” where one’s desires, decisions, realities can only be achieved with the help of another whose reality, in turn, can achieved (or not). This relates to a distinction that Isabelle Stengers (2005: 190) draws between “being part of something” and being attached or “belonging” to a set of relations without a common denominator that provides guidelines for how to respond to one another. How do you work together in an entangled web without disrupting another? This has two consequences for thinking about a building project qua a building “in the making.” On the one hand, there is an affect that gives these experiences, the practices of making a building, a particular tone, another way in which that the tenuous, fragile and provisional realities of the building “hangs together”: Solicitude. Before it can be said to have the consistency of a work-made, of a building “out there,” the making of a building relies on the anxiety and concern, the frustrations and belief of others that allow it to continue to exist as something that is in the making—that it is happening. Within the technical nature of design, and the strict frameworks of the project, there is concern and anxiety that it will not work out; there is an element of trust and belief (or distrust) that others will respond; there are feelings of frustration and fatigue, but also joy and desire. While it still exists in bits and pieces, in media reports, images and visuals, in public events and digital models, it relies on this solicitude to grant it a little, however evanescent, reality. But this also highlights another understanding of the “success” and “failure” of a building: Less its uniqueness, its formal experimentation, its singularity, or its ability to become an icon, but according to the extent that it incorporates others who can continue it in existence. This is an ideal that this book seeks to draw out—a lesson learned. That the building in the making invokes another idiom to understand how a common world is composed: Not by creation, mastery, or constructivism, but of “solicitude,” of care, concern, dependence, and attachment, but also of anxiety, worry, trust, and belief that it will be succeeded by others and not fail.

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5.3 Making Politics Explicit And yet, at the same time, there is politics. With all this variation, alongside the making of a building, there is still only one building and one world that somehow must come together within which it would all fit. At the same time that sound and noise are assembled, the future lived experiences of the building approximated, as the structure comes together, as the form is retouched, as the publics are engaged, and contexts merged, there is also the making of a “common world” that would give the building what could be called its “cosmicity” (Souriau 2015 [2009]); an arrangement of things in the world that grants it the status of a “thing,” wherein the future building would be inseparable from its context, a “system of connections guaranteeing [its] stability” (Lapoujade 2021 [2017]: 17). This progressive and piecemeal arrangement of a common world, of sorting and assembling, of designing every detail of a future reality, has a political dimension. This book had positioned politics as a question to be asked within moments of design—as a way to slow down, and loosen up what otherwise seems given (as, for example, technical or neutral design decisions). If the politics of architecture is not a secret, it is nevertheless sometimes implicit. And while the question of politics in this book often remained in the background, it is now time to make some aspects of it explicit. In this book, politics was not merely approached as a form of “techno-­ politics,” where political intentions or ideologies are hardwired within the building (Hommels 2020; Winner 1980)—although that could have been done—but neither was it approached as an artefact that triggers controversies (Yaneva and Heaphy 2012)—this was always an “empirical” possibility. Instead, it focussed on politics that happens within practices, through the realities that they enact, and in their attempts to draw a building together. Following Yaneva’s characterisation of the politics of architecture (2017), the politics of Factory was explored through the way that it assembles and recomposes realities and people in the making of a building. It was interested in the everyday politics of design that emerges within design experiences that draws attention to what otherwise seems uncontroversial or uneventful, but nevertheless has effects in the world. In

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contrast to other theories of politics in architecture that brackets out questions of ontology, of how a common world is established, Variations of a Building brought them to the foreground. But what does it mean to put ontology and politics together? By turning our attention to the role of objects in politics and in design practices—the question of what rather than who (Mol 2002)—we see that ontological uncertainties draw actors together and that a building in the making disturbs the order of things. The building is an intervention into the world. In the re-design of realities through the assembling of a truss, or the constant retouching of a dilatation line, in approximating a future lived experience of a soundscape, or in the coordination of design, there is also the “explicitation” of the world, an unfolding of the conditions of possibility for the building but also of the world that envelopes it and makes it possible (Latour 2008; Sloterdijk 2016). The building does not “fit” into a pre-existing, external common world, but is its recontextualization and re-composition. At the same time, this shows that the making of a building is a way of problematising reality, it transforms, in its focus on details—on the soundscape, on wind, on soil composition, on the bodies of performers, on users, on possible publics, etc.—reality from a status as a “matter of fact” to “matters of concern” (Latour 2004b, 2005a), into elements that need to be assessed, analysed, unpacked and, ultimately, redesigned. The making of a building is a way of drawing things together anew. Following it in the making is to follow the ways in which the world is redone. The process of making a building, this book argued, resonates with Bruno Latour’s definition of the “common world,” which “designates the provisional result of the progressive unification of external realities [...]; the world, in the singular, is precisely, not what is given, but what has to be obtained through due process” (2004a: 239). There is a progressive singularisation of the multiple realities in design too, a way of managing the many realities at stake to achieve a singular building and a common world. The making of a building may make explicit the many contradictory issues involved, but they are also resolved into a unified common world. These design decisions invariably have consequences for the daily practices of a city and buildings, and beyond. In the book, we saw some ways in which this happens. Differences in kind become differences in degree in a design

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team meeting for coordination; the multiple and contradictory issues associated with a particular element is increasingly tidied so that that element can fit within the res extensa space of the drawing and 3D model (a spatiality that simplifies the much more complex set of realities tied to the element); unruly objects are made into stable objects; publics are managed in public relations, or constituted as subjectlike in public experiments. It is this active shaping of multiple realities into one, this progressive development of a building into a unified and singular thing that also gives design practices, and the making of a building, a political dimension. In a way, then, the making of a building and its practices also make claims about what should be included and excluded within its common world. In design practices, there is a normative dimension, there are good and bad designs, good and bad ways in which things are held together, of establishing co-habitation. By foregrounding an empirical description of the making of a building, to offer a description of how buildings are made, this book also hopes to provide threads for rethinking how architecture and buildings could be made and to describe not only the concrete ways of sharing in the act of creation, but also that it can be done otherwise. It is to emphasize that architecture and the making of buildings are indeed political, and that designers could be, to invoke a character from Latour (2008), a cautious Prometheus, careful and concerned about their interventions in the world and how they will be taken up by others.

5.4 Fugitive Knowledge, Unfinished Things If buildings often seem to magically appear in cities, this book argues that it is important to describe the circuitous, delicate, and collective routes that they often take to arrive there. If the ambition is to find ways to design, plan, and build cities in different ways, an important task is to be able to first understand the ways in which that happens and to capture the ways in which the practitioners do it and the ways in which they know and make the world in their own ways (Cuff 1992; Yaneva 2017; Yarrow 2019). This book thus foregrounds these kinds of stories; it does not draw out conclusions, prescriptions, or explanations to explain what is happening but describes the mundane way that a building is done in

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design. In the same way that there is no “double click” (Latour 2013) from “idea” to “building,” there is no “double click” from an ethnographic moment to its description and analysis; and, in the same way that the building travels through transformations and metamorphoses, in various forms and shapes, this book too relies on ethnographic methods and descriptive techniques that seek to not de-animate the processes through which the building was made. It, in other words, sought to capture those moments within which realities of a building takes shape. Those fugitive moments before a practice or a process is solidified within forms of subjectivity or objectivity or through explanatory frameworks convoked from beyond the specificity of a situation. On the one hand, this is done by slowing down. As Stengers writes, slowing down is the “demanding operation that would reclaim the art of dealing with, and learning from, what scientists [practitioners] too often consider messy, that is, what escapes general, so-called objective categories” (2018 [2013]: 127); it involves suspending assumptions about what is under study within the inquiry, not knowing in advance, but opening oneself up to the demands and particularities of the situations confronted. On the other hand, it involves a “synaptic” form of storytelling, one that seeks to capture reality at the moment in which it is being made from an “inside” point of view, from the point of view of the event itself. As Latour writes, “storytelling is not just a property of human language, but one of the consequences of being thrown in a world that is, by itself, fully articulated and active” (2014a: 13). This book thus sought to describe the making of a building in a way that tells a story of an already active world without de-animating it. It redeploys the actors’s worlds, not as a something that aims to explain what has happened, as anything that searches for veracity, but as another variation—an addition to the practices and worlds described. This approach from the “inside” is one that pays attention to the fugitive moments of design, attuned to the multiplicity and the specificity of the practices themselves. It tries to keep the messiness, the unfinishedness, and the openness of a world that is always in the making. Here it follows in the steps of pragmatism, where, as William James wrote, “[w]hat really exists is not things made but things in the making” (1909: 263). It sought to write in a way that was adequate to the processual,

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provisional and mobile, ambulatory and fugitive modes of knowing encountered. While this is one way that the book was interested in how an ethnographic approach can help us understand building projects and design practices, the reverse is also important: How these “designerly” ways of producing knowledge, of describing worlds and telling stories can be used to rethink aspects of ethnographic methods (Murphy and Marcus 2013; Murphy 2016). How do their modes of representation, of sharing and generating knowledge, and their ways of describing and knowing the world, rebound back onto ethnographic research? Design practices are full of the ephemera of knowledge production. Mock-ups, sketches, drafts, scribbles, digital files, meeting minutes, experiments, and tests that serve as temporary intermediaries within the process of design and in the act of knowing something. At the same time, there are so many crumpled papers, deleted files, layers of drawings and of the model, forgotten arguments, detours, and lost traces of possibilities within the design process that do not find their way into the final product, but nevertheless serve as aspects that contour what is possible. What is their epistemic value? How do they impact knowledge production? And what would happen if they were also foregrounded within ethnographic knowledge production? These artefacts of knowing emphasise the unfinished, incomplete, provisional, messy, and iterative nature of knowledge production, but also of the realities that they seek to grasp; in the sketch, the mock-up, or in meeting minutes, there is an act of knowing something that is experimental and open to not knowing in a complete or definitive way, to revise and go through further iterations, but they also highlight the lack of solid foundations, that knowledge and what is being made can fail (see Murphy 2016). That is one aspect: These incomplete artefacts enable an opening for more, for redescription, re-­ dos, and revision. But they also evoke realities that are unfinished and incomplete. At a more fundamental level, they point to what Souriau calls the “the existential incompletion of every thing”: “Nothing, not even ourselves, is given to us other than in a sort of half-­ light, a penumbra in which only incompleteness can be made out, where nothing possesses either full presence or evident patuity, where there is neither total accomplishment, nor plenary existence”. (2015 [2009]: 220)

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Incomplete forms of knowledge draw attention to the realities that are “in the making,” not only to provisional knowledge, but also to things that are variable, assemblages that are halfway finished, to things partially existing and that call for more. In its incompletion it points to a more, to a vibrating and lively reality that is “to-be-made.” But here the “incomplete” should not be framed from the point of view of what is complete— as this has not been accomplished yet. These sketches point instead to the fact that the real is also in the making, it is not incomplete in terms of “lacking” being, as a deficit of reality, but the “power of the incomplete” is that it “reminds us that the work is always in advance of itself and does not coincide with its being” (Jullien 2012: 61); the incomplete is a reminder of the excess of the possible in the making of reality. The incomplete sketches and artefacts operate as traces of a something more, of something to come; as incomplete, they loosen the fixed givens and conditions of a particular reality and outline something, however vague and ambiguous, that is taking shape; they do not seek to fix something as objects or subjects but are generative and speculative: They open up the world—and thus show that it is what is “common” that is at stake in the composition of a common world. They are thus forms of knowledge not for a world complete, accomplished, already-there and singular, but one in ontological, continuous, and anaphoric variation. A fugitive knowledge for an incomplete world that is in the making. The ephemerality of design and knowledge production also indicates a certain economy of design knowledge.3 The incomplete and sometimes ambivalent quality of these forms of knowledge are sometimes purposely done so. Sometimes they are incomplete because they are waiting for others. Sometimes they are left that way to keep room available for others to contribute—for reprises. Often in design it is important to have the right level of detail at the right moment to not foreclose others’ possibilities. It is a form of knowledge that is collaborative, a sharing in the act of knowing. There is something that can be learned from collective design  This is akin to what, in his chapter “The economy of the scribble,” Hans-Jorg Rheinberger calls the “trail of rough notes, scripts and scribblings, and revised write-ups that offer insight into a concrete process of knowledge formation” (2010: 244). There is an “economy of the sketch” in design knowledge too. 3

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practices: It not only questions authorial claims to singularity, but also underlines an ethics of knowledge production that relies on “solicitude.” A form of knowledge-making in a situation of entanglement and overlap: To work with, to share in the act of creating the same thing but differently, where the test (as described above) is how well others can reprise it and repeat it differently. This is an important lesson to take into ethnographic methods. What would happen if these forms of grasping the fugitive and fugitive forms of knowledge were foregrounded in ethnographic practices of knowing and articulating the world? Others have already pointed in the right direction for thinking and adapting this in their practices. In her reflection on “not knowing,” Marisol de la Cadena, for instance, writes of the power of the “not only”: “allowing for divergence from modern epistemic knowledge, while also being with it, ‘not only’ positively asserts incompleteness” (2021: 254). The “not only” loosens boundaries, attempts at closure, and constitutes “onto-epistemic openings,” moments of the “not only” slow down how something is conventionally understood, but also make room for other “presences” (de la Cadena 2021: 253). Not knowing opens up to other ways of being. It is this but not only—without necessarily knowing how to grasp that “not only,” whatever it may be. It can be left there not known, as an expression of the excess of the world (of its incompletion), the way in which something itself has variability in itself: “even suggest our impossibility of knowing without such impossibility cancelling those presences, for ‘not only’ allows entities to both fold into and exceed each other” (de la Cadena 2021: 253). These sorts of “openings” are also performed through the ephemera of ethnographic description. In sketches, photographs and videos, audio recordings, and fieldnotes that are provisional, iterative, fleeting and fugitive. Alberto Corsín Jiménez, for instance, writes of drafts as kinds of inscriptions, as “anthropological descriptors that value the promises of a certain imponderability and not-knowing, the value of unanticipated effects” (2018); they too open up the world by loosening its fixtures. They do not seek to pin anything down with an authorial authority, with certainty of what matters, but are open to the uncertain, to seek out the limits of what is possible: “as drafts they inscribe the solicitousness of worlds” (2018). It is

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a knowledge that still has trust in an uncertain world. Drafts, like rough sketches, are indicative of a way of knowing in a world in the making, where nothing is certain and guaranteed, where it is the world and its realities that overflow in multiplicity, and where what is inscribed relies on being taken up again. Learning from the ways in which design practices know can perhaps help us attend better to the world as it is in the making, as both incomplete and in excess of any singular way of being. It can also point to furnishing a theory that Kathleen Stewart has called “weak theory,” which is “not to judge the value of analytic objects or to somehow get their representation ‘right’ but to wonder where they might go and what potential modes of knowing, relating, and attending to things are already somehow present in them as a potential or resonance” (2008: 73). It can also put more epistemic value on not knowing in a complete or precise way, of thinking of knowledge through “an exactitude,” as a grosso modo knowing, that is attuned to the uncertain trajectories and excess of the world itself. One that is an “art of noticing” (Tsing 2015) the specificity of an event from its own point of view, “the exact passage of that which is under way” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 2). Those moments in which something takes shape: The manoeuvres of the structural engineer exploring the alleyways of a truss that passes through different forms, the ways in which an experiment in a laboratory surprises an acoustician in the very moment of recognition, or how something is transformed by simply meeting in a room. Sometimes it all comes together and holds, and at other moments, if falls apart. Things can appear and disappear in a matter of hours. Or they are different in two different places at once. These are moments caught in the moment of their happening. A synapse. Variations of a Building sought to grasp the trajectories, the passages of the building in the making underway. It does not aim to be a substitute for the actual process but adds to the variations of the building. However, in the same way that there are orderings of realities within the design practices of the actors and a “common world” at stake in their overlapping practices, this book too, in the decisions made, the ways in which stories are told composes a particular world of Factory and Manchester.

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It draws things together in a particular way. As Donna Haraway famously said: “it matters what matters we use to think other matters with; it matters what stories we tell other stories with; it matters what knots knot knots, what thoughts think thoughts, what descriptions describe descriptions, what ties tie ties. It matters what stories make worlds, what worlds make stories” (2016: 12). It matters because it makes a difference. This book itself is not a neutral “overview” but configures a point of view of the building project—Factory—as a building “in the making.” It is interested in telling the story of a “project” from the point of view of the practices. Implicit in this is a rejection of imagining design in a “technically rational” way. At the same time, it does not reflect on the inequalities inherent in architectural labour practices, the ways in which architecture is complicit within reproducing structural inequalities, or the environmental consequences of making a building in our ongoing climate emergency. There are many other questions it could have asked. These are not answered in this book but left open for others. The ambition of this book is different. Its litmus test is neither its “veracity,” of whether it is a truthful representation of a building project. But like the practitioners in this book and in the accounts described, it is, perhaps, in the “knock-on effects,” the ways in which it travels and passes, the ways in which others may reprise it and continue it—in hopefully unexpected ways—that is the true test of the book. Veracity is not the point. It is solicitude. Its “success” or “failure” depends on how well it itself is open for others to continue it, to vary it, and add other variations.

References Cuff, Dana. 1992. Architecture: The Story of Practice. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. De la Cadena, Marisol. 2021. Not Knowing: In the Presence of …. In Experimenting with Ethnography: A Companion to Analysis, ed. Andrea Ballestero and Brit Ross Winthereik, 246–255. Durham: Duke University Press. Deleuze, Gilles. 1993 [1988]. The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque. Trans. Tom Conley. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

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Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. 1987. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Foucault, Michel. 2005. The Order of Things. An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. London/New York: Routledge. Hansmann, Sabine. 2021. Monospace and Multiverse: Exploring Space with Actor-­ Network-­Theory. Bielefeld: Transcript. Haraway, Donna J. 2016. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham: Duke University Press. Hommels, Anique. 2020. STS and the City: Techno-politics, Obduracy and Globalisation. Science as Culture 29 (3): 410–416. Jacobs, Jane, and Peter Merriman. 2011. Practising Architectures. Social & Cultural Geography 12: 211–222. James, William. 1909. A Pluralistic Universe: Hibbert Lectures at Manchester College on the Present Situation in Philosophy. New  York: Longmans, Green, and Co. ———. 1912. Essays in Radical Empiricism. New  York: Longmans, Green, and Co. Jenkins, Lloyd. 2002. Geography and Architecture: 11, Rue du Conservatoire and the Permeability of Buildings. Space and Culture 5 (3): 222–236. Jiménez, Alberto Corsín. 2018. Drafts. Culanth.org. March 29. https://culanth. org/fieldsights/drafts. Accessed 6 July 2021. Jullien, François. 2012. The Great Image Has No Form, or On the Nonobject Through Painting. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Kraftl, Peter. 2010. Geographies of Architecture: The Multiple Lives of Buildings. Geography Compass 4: 402–415. Lapoujade, David. 2021 [2017]. The Lesser Existences. Étienne Souriau, an Aesthetics for the Virtual. Trans. Erik Beranek. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Latour, Bruno. 1999. Pandora’s Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. ———. 2004a. Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy. Trans. Catherine Porter. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. ———. 2004b. Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern. Critical Inquiry 30: 225–248. ———. 2005a. From Realpolitik to Dingpolitik, or How to Make Things Public. In Making Things Publiceds, eds. Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel, Atmospheres of Democracy 14–43. Cambridge Mass: MIT Press.

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Index1

A

Acoustics, 58, 59, 64, 68, 81n15, 98–101, 98n2, 104, 107, 107n3, 109, 110, 112, 113, 117, 118, 120–125, 128 Actor Network Theory (ANT), 4n2, 10–12, 11n14, 26, 36, 89n20 Anaphoric variation, 19, 42, 184–186, 192 Anthropology, 11, 21–25, 191–195 Approximation, 41, 97–131, 135, 177, 179, 182, 185 Architecture, Architectural acoustics, 65, 111 design, 32, 55, 65, 185 ethnography, 13, 22–25, 182 icon, 7, 7n8

model, 63, 66, 68, 71n8, 77n12, 91 politics, 30, 31, 31n24, 187 social, 15n17, 21, 22, 30, 167 As if, 74, 74n10, 82, 92, 111n6, 118, 182, 183 Assemblage, assemblages, 34, 36, 37, 40, 72, 77, 83, 87, 92, 112, 131, 159, 159n24, 159n25, 175, 192 Authorship, 176 B

Bifurcation of Nature, 37 Bucciarelli, Louis, 13, 71, 76n11, 91 Building Information Modelling (BIM), 74n9, 108n4

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2023 B. Mommersteeg, Variations of a Building, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-6802-2

199

200 Index C

D

Calculation, 53, 59, 66, 70, 71n8, 104, 111, 117 Callon, Michel, 13, 22, 33n26, 76n11, 78, 137n2 Clash, clashes, 63, 67, 80–82, 81n15, 87, 124, 177, 185 Client, 7n8, 8, 25, 53–55, 71, 71n8, 81, 87, 100, 112, 123n14, 137, 141, 144, 167 Common world, 2, 4, 28–30, 37, 40–42, 61, 79, 80, 90–94, 128, 137, 138, 152, 158, 169, 173, 176–178, 186–189, 192, 194 Composition, compositions, 6, 12, 26, 30, 34, 37, 51, 71, 72, 77, 86, 87n18, 92, 138, 169, 178, 188, 192 Continuity, 3, 19, 30, 42, 55, 56, 68, 73, 78–80, 89, 89n21, 93, 137n3, 138, 166, 169, 177, 180 Continuous variation, 18, 29, 42, 181–184 Controversies, 33, 33n26, 149n14, 187 Coordination issues of, 61, 61n1, 80, 81, 108n4, 123n14, 185 practices of, 28, 29, 137, 179, 182 Cosmicity, 30, 177, 187 Cosmopolitics, 38n30 Creation, creativity, 4, 5, 20, 23, 24, 40, 42, 122, 123n14, 176, 179, 180, 185, 189 Crystallisation, 73, 77, 78, 183 Cuff, Dana, 21, 40, 91

Daston, Lorraine, 78, 93, 118 Deleuze, Gilles, 24, 31, 90, 112n7, 159n24, 159n25, 183, 194 Design, 10, 12, 13, 24, 191, 194 process, 119–128 team, 119–128 Design team meeting (DTM), 24, 80–90, 87n18, 123, 124, 126, 179, 181, 183, 185, 188 Dewey, John, 32, 32n25, 33, 33n27, 137, 151n17 E

Ecology, ecologies cultural, 146, 161, 162, 164–166, 168, 177 design, 24, 65, 72, 86, 87, 129, 151, 169, 179, 195 of practice, 24, 186 Effects knock-on, 65, 72, 80, 86, 87, 129, 151, 169, 179, 195 political, 35, 39 reality, 39, 86, 94, 169 sound, 119–128 Empirical philosophy, 14 Engineers, engineering acoustics, 8, 114 Mechanical, Electrical, and Plumbing (MEP), 8, 81, 87, 90, 117, 123–125, 125n15, 127 structural, 8, 25, 41, 61, 61n1, 73, 77, 83, 84, 87, 88, 90, 100, 121, 181, 194

 Index 

Epistemic, Epistemology, 21, 22, 24, 27, 41, 79, 100, 109, 119–128, 191, 193, 194 noise, 41, 100, 119–128 Errability, 131 Ethnography, 13, 14, 22–25, 27, 76, 182, 189–195 Event, events, 5, 25, 27, 123, 135, 153n18, 162, 175, 182, 183, 190, 194 Experience plane of, 4, 12–14, 176, 182 streams of, 3 Experiment, Experimental, 4, 20, 32–34, 60, 102, 104, 109, 122, 127–129, 150, 150n15, 157, 157n21, 160–166, 182, 189, 191, 194 public, 157, 189 Expert, Expertise, 5, 14, 16, 16n18, 26, 31n24, 82, 131, 137, 140n6, 141, 142, 149, 149n14, 150, 165, 167, 168 Explicitation, 41, 188

201

Foucault, Michel, 74n10, 183 Fragile, Fragility, 3, 17n19, 30, 69, 80, 80n14, 157, 159, 174, 176, 186 Fugitive, 12, 189–195 G

Grey things, 100, 119–128, 176 Grosso modo, 128–131, 181, 194 Guattari, Félix, 31, 112n7, 159n24, 194 Guesswork, 113–119 H

Haraway, Donna, 56, 195 Hearing, 57, 110 Henderson, Kathryn, 13, 23, 76n11, 91, 130 Houdart, Sophie, 13, 22, 24, 51, 76n11 I

F

Factory, 2, 2n1, 5–9, 7n6, 7n8, 8n11, 51, 61n1, 81n15, 91, 98n1, 99, 102, 120, 135, 137, 137n3, 139–144, 146, 173–176, 194 Fail, failure, 18–20, 42, 99, 131, 159, 169, 184–186, 191, 195 Felicity, conditions of, 42, 177 Fiction, fictional, 19, 69, 138–144 Foam, 3, 4, 23, 42, 106 Folding, 41, 92, 183

Implication, 41, 61–81, 90–92, 131, 183 Incomplete, incompleteness, 39, 42, 65, 100, 117, 118, 128, 129, 131, 176, 181, 185, 191–194 Inscription, inscriptive, 23, 24, 26, 76, 76n11, 77, 100, 114, 115, 118, 119, 130, 193 In the making, 1–42, 67n6, 92, 113, 118, 123, 128, 130, 131, 138, 165, 166, 168, 169, 174, 176–178, 180–184, 186–188, 190, 192, 194, 195

202 Index

Iteration, iterative, 41, 80, 90–92, 94, 128, 184, 191, 193 J

James, William, 3, 4n2, 12, 63, 64, 71, 97, 131, 176, 190 Jullien, François, 111n6, 192 K

Knowing, 21–24, 41, 91, 93, 97, 100, 108n4, 129–131, 178, 190–194 Koolhaas, Rem, 153, 153n18, 154, 161n27, 166 L

Lapoujade, David, 13, 20n20, 181–183, 187 Latour, Bruno, 4, 10–12, 11n15, 11n16, 17n19, 20n20, 22, 24, 28n21, 30, 32n25, 33n26, 36, 37, 38n30, 76, 76n11, 77, 89, 89n21, 92, 130, 137n3, 153, 157n21, 159, 176, 180, 180n1, 182, 183, 185, 188–190 Law, John, 13, 26, 27, 110, 180 Leak, leaks, 99, 100, 102, 113, 117, 119, 122, 124, 129 Lippmann, Walter, 32, 32n25, 33, 144, 150 Lived reality, 41, 57, 100, 127, 128, 130, 169, 178, 182 Lynch, Michael, 22, 76, 76n11, 78, 99, 110, 118

MFA

Magic, 74n10 Manchester, 1, 2, 2n1, 5–7, 6n4, 7n6, 9, 14, 51, 52, 55, 59, 98, 128, 136–138, 138n4, 145n9, 146, 151, 153–164, 159n24, 161n27, 194 Mark-up, mark-ups, 62, 63, 67n6, 71, 73–76, 78, 79, 81 Marres, Noortje, 32n25, 33, 34, 89, 137, 150, 151n17, 166 Materiality, Materials building, 66, 102, 176 informed, 112 Matters of concern, 36, 37, 88, 188 Messy, messiness, 10, 11n14, 16, 17, 51, 76, 77, 90, 103, 150, 151n16, 157, 169, 190, 191 Methodology, methodologies, 9–14 Minor key, 31, 40 Mock-up, 100–113, 119, 130, 176, 179, 182, 191 Model, models 3D, 3, 20, 60, 61, 63, 66, 67, 72–83, 74n10, 82n16, 85–90, 92, 93, 116, 124, 130, 176, 179, 182, 183, 189 foam, 23 Modern, 11, 98, 128, 193 Modernity, modernism, 15n17, 88n19, 167 Mol, Annemarie, 14, 26–29, 28n21, 37–39, 91, 180, 188 Multiple, 4, 13, 26, 28, 29, 39, 55, 77, 84, 90, 91, 94, 167, 188, 189 Murphy, Keith, 22, 24, 191

 Index  N

Noise, 41, 60, 77, 98–100, 112–130, 114n10, 115n12, 142, 177, 179 Nonhuman, nonhumans, 5, 33n26, 89, 137n2, 175, 177 O

Objectile, 183 Objectivity, objective, 35, 36, 78, 119, 190 a-perspectival, 78 Observation, observations, 14, 21 Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA), 8, 23, 73, 77n12, 81, 82, 136, 153–155, 153n18 Ontology, ontological adhesive, 93 differences, 28, 38, 42, 177, 180 indeterminacy, 38 multiplicity, 29, 38, 39 variations, 179–181 P

“Parallel and sequential design,” 55, 180 Passage, 3, 19, 137, 137n3, 194 Performance, 3, 9, 26, 28, 28n21, 38, 98, 100, 112, 131, 160 Performed, 26 Perspective, perspectives, 3, 4, 9, 10, 25, 26, 28, 28n21, 36, 39, 80, 91, 93, 118, 181, 182 Peterson, Marina, 99, 114, 118, 129 Planning, 15, 15n17, 16, 33n26, 114n10, 136, 136n1, 137, 137n2, 139–143, 140n6, 145, 146, 158n23

203

Politics, political dimension, 36, 39, 187, 189 effects, 32, 35, 39, 187 everyday, 187 object-oriented, 32n25, 36, 39 ontological, 37, 38, 38n30 talk, 152, 153, 159, 168 Possible, possibility, 4, 6, 20, 23, 24, 26, 29, 41, 52, 53, 63, 66n4, 67, 67n6, 69, 72, 78–80, 80n14, 84, 85, 87–90, 94, 97, 130, 137n2, 144, 151, 152, 162, 181, 182, 188–195 Post-politics, post-political, 30, 31n24, 136, 137, 149, 169 Practices architectural, 13, 15n17, 21, 22, 24, 25, 39, 176, 182 design, 21, 23–25, 34, 37, 38, 41, 94, 113n9, 127, 182, 188, 189, 191, 193, 194 epistemic, 41, 119–128 everyday, 4, 20, 21, 26, 32 knowledge, 11n15, 14, 21, 22, 26, 167, 177, 178, 193 ontological, 27, 29, 78, 176, 177 point of view of, 4, 10, 13, 25, 174, 176, 179, 182, 195 socio-material, 21, 22, 28 Pragmatism, 4n2, 12, 190 Precision, 82, 97, 108n4, 110, 119, 128 Problems, Problematise, 20, 32–34, 65, 68, 83, 87, 117, 121–128, 131, 144, 150 Process, 4, 19, 137n2, 174

204 Index

Project, projects form, 15–19, 15n17, 16n18 management, 16, 16n18, 17, 53–55 Projection, 2, 9, 17–19, 51 Promises, 2, 3, 6, 6n4, 9, 51, 100, 136, 185, 193 Public, publics formation, 33, 34, 135, 137, 138, 144, 151–153, 159n25, 163, 168, 169, 179 general, 141–144, 146, 168 material, 137 particular, 144, 146, 156, 168, 169 The Phantom, 33, 150 Pythagoras, veil of, 99, 128 R

Radical empiricism, 12 Recalcitrance, recalcitrant, 100, 112, 128, 129 Reference, referent, 7, 9, 13, 19, 29, 61, 67n5, 70n7, 73–80, 86, 93, 154, 155, 158, 185 Rendering, renderings, 9, 9n13, 51, 60, 78, 80n14, 115, 135, 154–156, 162, 174 Representation, representations, 9, 22, 23, 28, 32, 37, 51, 67, 76, 76n11, 78, 79, 106, 111, 117, 118, 137, 137n3, 141, 143, 144, 146, 152, 168, 191, 194, 195 Revit, 15n17, 56, 58, 61, 61n1, 62, 64–66, 71, 74–76, 74n9, 77n12, 81, 81n15, 85, 108n4

Rheinberger, Hans-Jörg, 79, 192n3 Rhetoric, 158, 162 RIBA Plan of Work, 56, 81, 139 S

Schön, Donald, 21, 85 Science and Technology Studies (STS), 4n2, 12–14, 22, 24, 26, 28n21, 31, 32, 32n25, 33n26, 34, 35, 35n28, 37, 76, 76n11, 92, 149n14, 150n15, 167, 177, 180 Shared problems, 13, 122–124, 123n14, 176, 181, 183 Simulation, simulations, 60, 100, 115–119, 115n12, 128–130, 176 Sketch, sketches, 3, 18, 23, 25, 66, 66n4, 67, 67n6, 71, 72, 76n11, 80, 85, 91, 130, 176, 181, 184, 191–194, 192n3 Sloterdijk, Peter, 3, 88n19, 94, 188 Slowing down, 190 Solicitude, solicitudinary, 19, 42, 169, 178, 186, 193, 195 Sound, 57–60, 98, 101–113, 119–128 Soundscapes, 11n16, 41, 60, 113, 115, 119–121, 128, 130, 161 Souriau, Étienne, 18–20, 20n20, 82, 111, 131, 181, 182, 184, 185, 187, 191 Sphinx, 20, 21, 185 Stengers, Isabelle, 24, 31, 38n30, 165, 185, 186, 190

 Index 

Stewart, Kathleen, 25, 182, 194 Subjectlike, 165, 169, 173, 189 Success, succession, 19, 42, 99, 137, 156, 159, 166, 169, 186, 195 Symmetric anthropology, 11 Synaptic, synapse, 182, 190, 194

V

T

W

Theatre, 5, 8, 9, 53, 61n1, 63–65, 67, 98, 99, 124, 142, 153n18, 154, 161, 162 Thing, things, 36–37, 74, 100, 119, 175 Thinglike, 41, 72, 74, 76, 77, 92, 100, 109–111, 116, 119, 129, 130, 173, 183, 184 Time, timing, 55–57 U Unfinished, 42, 129, 189–195 Unfolding, 41, 87, 88, 90, 183, 188 Unknown, unknowns, 118, 128, 130, 185

205

Validation, 122, 130, 178 Value, 7, 71, 115, 146, 147, 157, 167 Virtual, virtuality, 19, 78, 97, 100, 103, 122, 130, 181, 184 Visualisation, 76, 80

Whitehead, Alfred North, 17, 37 Winner, Langdon, 35, 35n29, 36, 187 Work to-be-made, 18–20 Work-with, 72, 80, 90, 175 Y

Yaneva, Albena, 10, 22–24, 31, 34, 35n28, 39, 40, 77n12, 79, 85, 110, 130, 153n19, 175, 182, 187, 189 Yarrow, Thomas, 13, 22, 24, 66n4, 67n6, 78, 86, 189