the event, the spectacle + the lost square

A dissertation presented to the Department of Architecture, Oxford Brookes University in part fulfilment of the regulations for BA (Hons) in Architecture

Statement of Originality This dissertation is an original piece of work which is made available for copying with permission of the Head of the Department of Architecture Signed

Dedication To the tenth muse – who might as well have the name of one of the known nine – Euterpe

Acknowledgements I should like to thank Colin Priest, instructor tutor for this dissertation and design tutor for three years in the School of Architecture of Oxford Brookes University, for his wise and steady advice, as well as his ability to provide valuable ideas and information when they were mostly needed. Without Colin, the result would not have been the same.

I do not have the slightest idea where this is going, but I am pretty sure where it started; Meropi and Stelios – mother and father – thank you for just about everything, but mostly for your endless love and support.

_contents//

&

introduction

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““

prologue

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intermission

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spectacular time

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X

interval

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2

ev-end?

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+

entr’ acte

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3

the lost square

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[o]

illustration sources

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{...} bibliography + references

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introduction|009

Can the semiotics of an Event affect the appearance of its Spectacle? Is there a connection between the incident and its image? Most importantly, is there the possibility to reverse the roles that the two notions have taken in the last two questions? Formal theory and philosophy have often discussed the dwelling within the Event alone and the Spectacle alone, but in either case the first was conceived as the enemy of the latter; and vice versa.

Hard-core political declarations from the one end, and form manipulation for the sake of it and only from the other, have managed to create an unofficial rivalry and to broaden the distance between them. The abstract threshold which was fatefully created comprises a habitat for a series of fresh theories and practices that aim to bring the “sides” together again, or at least create a communal ground within which a new era might start.

The role of the Event and the Spectacle in the contemporary architectural field, as well as their mutual and individual contribution to the discipline are the main ideas that will run through the whole body of this interrogation.

Their reformation as a composite element will be its conclusion.

Theoretical texts will be investigated and their results will be negotiated with historic and

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contemporary paradigms in order for the situation to be evaluated in the best possible way. In addition, various ways of media and aspects of life will march from the beginning till the end of the body of the text such as literature, music, video, sports etc.

& “.”

The writings of Guy Debord -the main catalyst for the uprising of the events of Paris in May 1968, and the most articulated disquisition on the society of the spectacle- will be the path where the theoretical rationalization regarding the movement of the Situationists will be deployed.

Due to the theorist’s abhorrence to philosophy, particularly the notions which were developed late in the nineteenth century, references to Friedrich Nietzsche will be put under the spotlight to clarify concepts like “God’s death”, as well as to provide a description for the acts of Dionysus; the character that plays the most drastic role in event mythology. Charles Pierre Baudelaire will be the agent who will represent the realm of the contemporary city and its decadence.

“The Anesthetics of Architecture” by Neil Leach will provide a critical speculation on the theory and practice of the discipline. Sir Peter Cook’s valid views on the route which Architecture will follow in the next steps will be outlined and expanded. Essays by practitioners and theorists relevant to the profession will march through

introduction|011

the text to enrich it with expressions and paradigms. There could be no reference to event and architecture in the same entity without the contribution of Bernard Tschumi’s studies and the applications of those.

To plot the complex status of the contemporary realm two multi-collective references are used.

Philip Ball’s “Critical Mass” is informed by classic science, and informs social science with careful considerations of theoretical and practical applications. Innovative ideas and useful observations run through “In the Bubble”

by John Thackara and are used on more than enough circumstances within the text.

Main inspirational element and a vast supply of conceptual and written material is “Invisible Cities” by Italo Calvino, a book which covers a severe amount of interesting topics an the most accurate and simple way.

Because the bibliography is rarely, not always, critical when it comes to the presentation of the Event and the Spectacle and the discussion evolved is often unilateral, this dissertation will attempt to provide an altera pars to each of the bibliographic or other references for the sake of discussion and in order to bring the two “sides” on a confrontational level. As a result, each side will finally confront itself in order for the most propitious extracts to be

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derived. The essence of each “part” will then be placed next to the essence of the other “part” to create an amalgam which will claim compositional contribution into the Architectural gear of the day after tomorrow.

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prologue|015 “It is not nearly as bad to explain a phenomenon with a little bit of mechanics and a strong dose of the incomprehensible as to try to explain it by mechanics alone.”1

_terminology succedaneum// Cecile and Gerard walked out of the house and down the street, together for the first time, and looked at each other’s face happily. At last, they could be side by side without having to explain their actions. It was a beautiful, although misty, early 1950s Paris morning and people had already been drinking the first coffee of the day, along with croissants and pastries. Those who have not been sitting at the coffee shops were heading towards their work or just enjoying the chilly morning. Outside the Hotel de Ville, they had to split. Cecile had to go through the heavy door and into the hotel’s kitchen to her position next to the chef, and Gerard had to go help his mother in the family delicatessen. The air smelled like coffee and butter, the gentle noise of the car engines gave the pace to the pedestrians, who moved slouchy, but steadily, on the sidewalk – he stopped and stared her in the eyes, gently put his arm around her shoulder and –just like nobody was watching them- kissed her.

It was their first kiss in public and they did not bother the tourist in the hotel taking the picture of them.

1

Lichtenberg G.C. In Ball P. (2005, p.145). Critical Mass: How One Thing Leads to Another. London: Arrow.

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What is commendable about the kiss of this imaginary story is that it could be described, outlined, stated, or represented with various ways or methods. A biologist would justify it as a result of the humor of pheromones, a poet would blame the appropriateness of the moment, the hopelessly romantic would appeal love and Gerard’s old girlfriend would consider the display merely exaggerated and without any emotional articulation. Nevertheless, if the event of this kiss is isolated from any exogenous parameters, and, thus, any factors which could contain political or personal deliberateness, and is presented as a segregated happening, few are the modes which can be used in order for its outline to be precise. Science, with its representatives’ extraordinary sufficiency in descriptions, poses as the credential agent for the job. According to WordNet2, Princeton’s online lexical database, the Event is considered the fundamental observational entity in Relativity Theory, and equals to a phenomenon located at a single point in space and time. The dimensionless “point” sets the Cartesian placement of the event and it will remain dimensionless until CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) restarts the procedure which will unveil “God’s Particle”3, and, thus, provide the “point” with one or more

2

WordNet (2006). Princeton University Cognitive Science Laboratory [on line].

Available at: http://wordnet.princeton.edu/ [Accessed in 12th January 2009]

3

CERN (2008). LHC to Restart in 2009. [On line]. Retrieved in 12th January 2009 from: http://press.web.cern.ch/PressReleases/Releases2008/PR17.08E.html

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dimensions.

Should space be “the common framework for all activities”4, and time their chronological reference, the viewing angle of the spectator of the activity concludes to the unavoidable coexistence of the event and the spectacle. “You take delight not in a city’s seven or seventy wonders, but in the answer it gives to a question of yours”5, says Marco Polo to Kublai Khan in Italo Calvino’s “Invisible Cities”, and, in that fashion, the individual’s intellectual position against time and space acquires a name, and a form: the Spectacle. Albeit the common sense requires the spectacle to be a somehow remarkable elaborate display on a somewhat lavish scale, it is not an image, or a collection of such.

Guy Debord, in his “Society of the Spectacle” identifies it as a “social relation between people that is mediated by images”6, and finds its origins in the world’s loss of unity. “Spectators are linked solely by their one-way relationship to the very centre that keeps them isolated from each other. The spectacle thus reunites them only in their separateness”7, he continues. What derives from Debord’s statement is that the “centre” is static, rather than time-depended, and, thus, only needs a moment to fulfil its role.

4

Tschumi B. (1996, p. 22). Architecture and Disjunction. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press.

5 6 7

Calvino I. (1997, p. 38). Invisible Cities. London: Vintage Books.

Debord G. (n.d., p. 7). Society of the Spectacle. London: Rebel Press Debord G. (n.d., p. 16)

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In a less deterministic evaluation, guided by Bernard Tschumi’s examination of Architecture through a film editing machine, each one’s visual perspective to a certain object –their individual spectacle- could be considered as framed moments of a particular sequence8. The sequence was defined by Roland Barthes as “a logical succession of nuclei bound together by a relation of solidarity”9 which has its initial point where one of its terms has no antecedent, and its final point when another of its terms has no consequences. Succession implies a dimensional increase which, along with the chronological dimension, creates the topology where the sequence lies. This “hidden” or “lost” dimension might be spatial but it might as well consist of a collection of contextual data related with whatever the participants, or spectators, can sense. The combination is what makes the occurrence unique, unprecedented, and unable to be represented or repeated. “Even if you capture the smells, sounds, tastes, and feel of a place, digitize them, and send them down a wire, you’d still never get near the sensation of “being there”. Why? [Because] Our minds and our bodies are one intelligence”10. As for the segregation of the spectacle from the event, in the cases that it happens, it leaves the first

8 9

Tschumi B. (1996, p. 166) Barthes R. (1977). Structural Analysis of Narratives. In Tschumi B. (1996, p.

155)

10

Thackara J. (2005, p. 62). In the Bubble: Designing in a Complex World.

London: The MIT Press.

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unidentified on the chronological spectrum and the latter with the lack of a specific designation. _so much for the clarifying discussion// By separating the two terms –event and spectacleand placing them amongst the ingredients that constitute the discipline of Architecture one finds two different versions of the discipline: “One, a maximalist version, aims at overall social, cultural, political, programmatic concerns while the other, minimalist, concentrates on sectors called style, technique, and so forth”11. In the search for any form of truth related on which of the two should the individual prefer, “someone’s critical or ironic proof using absurdist gestures could always become someone else’s sincere proposal”12. Tschumi’s interrogation might have concluded to the Space/ Event/ Movement relation as the “meaning of any architectural situation”13, but in order to reach to that, it started from the paradigm of a simple cube14 within which there is no way to see (and, consequently feel) the whole of it.

What is definite is that Architecture is strongly related with, and strongly divided by, the relationship between the Event and the

11 12 13 14

Tschumi B. (1996, p. 103) Tschumi B. (1996, p. 14) Tschumi B. (1996, p. 162) Tschumi B. (1996, p. 40)

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Spectacle. Henry Lefebvre framed the architect as an accomplice to the process of what he stated as the “disconnection” of design of all its healthy constrains: “As for the eye of the architect, it is no more innocent than the lot he is given to build on or the blank sheet of paper on which he makes his first sketch”15.

Though the relationship of the two terms has been thoroughly elaborated with the theory that followed events and philosophic quests during the twentieth century, there has not been a clear conclusion about the nature of it. It is constantly informed by many of the theoretical extracts but it remains untouched, akin to one of Calvino’s cities, Marozia, which “consists of two cities, the rat’s and the swallows; both change with time, but their relationship does not change; the second is about to free itself from the first”16.

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The dawn of the twenty first century found Architecture searching for a possible emerging interrogatory practice which might have more to do with the real of contemporaneity. In his essay “Spectacle Architecture Before and After the Aftermath”, Terry Smith questions the nature of that emerging practice: “will its key terms be “spectacle” and “use”, and will it subsist between them or go beyond one or both of them?”17

15

Lefebvre H. The Space of Architects. In Leach N. (1999, p.10). The Anaesthetics of Architecture. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press.

16 17

Calvino I. (1997, p. 140) Vidler A. (editor) (2008, p. 7). Architecture: Between Spectacle and Use. Wil-

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he asks. Well before the conference which brought these ideas in public, Guy Debord had less an interrogation within himself, and more of a de facto guideline: “This “historic mission of establishing truth in the world” can be carried out neither by the isolated individual nor by atomised and manipulated masses, but only and always by the class that is able to dissolve all classes by reducing all power to the de-alienating form of realised democracy – to councils in which practical theory verifies itself and surveys its own actions”18. Unfortunately, the 1960s could not and did not do what was prescribed in Debord’s words. _historiography// The origins of the Spectacle were also investigated

by Debord who found their prototypical virus in religion, and its “imaginary compensation for the poverty of a concrete social activity that was still generally experienced as a unitary condition”19. As if it was a living organism, the modern Spectacle is described to have evolved into a rigid separation between the possible and the permitted. But Debord went even deeper. He underlined the role of the gradual transformation of “being” into “appearing” (with “having” as the middle step). “All “having” must now derive its immediate prestige and its ultimate purpose liamstown, Massachusetts: The Clark.

18 19

Debord G. (n.d., p. 119) Debord G. (n.d., p. 14)

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from appearances”20, he stated. Appearances imply exposure in the public, and the latter needs a great amount of people next to the one who will attempt exposure. Cities are the only habitat which can accommodate this algorithm of phases.

The venue within which the bourgeoisie unreeled was the kind of economy for which Debord coined the term “static”21. “The bourgeoisie originally developed its independent economic power during the medieval period when the state had been weakening and feudalism was breaking up the stable equilibrium between different powers”, Debord continues. But what about the cases which “having” is not enough to support “appearing”?

Anastasia, once more one of Calvino’s Invisible Cities, could be any of the contemporary cities which are considered vast financial centres; “if for eight hours a day you work as a cutter of agate, onyx, chrysoprase, your labour which gives form to desire takes from desire its form, and you believe you are enjoying Anastasia wholly when you are only its slave”22.

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As soon as the medieval society was shocked by the change of state in the economic sector of life, more changes were observed, based primarily on the lack of principles and agreed behavioural norms23. The middle ages gave their place to

20 21 22

Debord G. (n.d., p. 11)

23

Ball P. (2005, p.24). Critical Mass: How One Thing Leads to Another. London:

Debord G. (n.d., p. 44)

Debord G. (n.d., p. 44) Calvino I. (1997, p. 140)

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Renaissance and Humanism, and by the end of those Baroque art took place in the society’s life. Albeit “the material reconstruction of the religious illusion” and the “total denial of earthly life [was] no longer projected into the heavens, [but was] embedded in earthly life itself”24, Guy Debord shows respect for that time, mainly because of the dynamic disorder placed on the society’s equilibrium through theatre and festival.

The appreciation of Dionysian acts is also dominant in Friedrich Nietzsche’s work and reaches its zenith in “Dithyrambs of Dionysus”25, although the German existentialist philosopher and his notion for the “will to power” does not find many supporters amongst the devotees of Debord’s ideas, or other rebellious formations. According to Neil Leach it was Nietzsche’s paramount notion that aided the deliberation for the manipulation of the form26 which subsequently led to the mastership of the spectacle. An apologetic Tschumi linked Debord, Nietzsche, Dionysus and Apollo (who, in an abstract consideration represents God) and repositioned architecture, as a thing of the mind, which derives both from “Apollo’s ethical and spiritual mindscapes [and] Dionysius Arrow.

24 25

Debord G. (n.d., p. 12)

Nietzsche F. (1970). On the Genealogy of Morality & Dithyrambs of Dionysus (in Greek). Athens: Gkovostis.

26

Leach N. (1999, p.18). The Anaesthetics of Architecture. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press

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erotic and sensual impulses”27. Should Debord want to praise baroque’s “dynamic disorder”, he should also have acknowledged that any violence is deeply Dionysian28, and, thus, conformal with Nietzsche’s ideas. Besides theoretical texts, Tschumi also uses the, literally, spectacular Terragni’s Danteum, as a means to prove that parallels with narrative can be drawn to Architecture as well29. The Danteum’s fascist origins did not restrain Tschumi to consider it a fascinating project, and, thus, separate it from any unflattering connections regarding its time of conception.

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There have been more than enough revelations of spectacular moments in war, or in violent actions in the twentieth century. War itself has provided the people with images which were breathtaking, as well as highly stylized, making its public image easily digested and forgotten.

Driven by Baudrillard’s point, that “The Gulf War did not take place”, Neil Leach has concluded that where there is war but no armed conflict (due to electronic gadgets and systems), the war may be reduced to a mere image30. And what spectacular image might that be. _scripta manent

27 28 29 30

Tschumi B. (1996, p. 83) Tschumi B. (1996, p. 132) Tschumi B. (1996, p. 164) Leach N. (1999, p.18)

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It was the writings of Guy Debord that initiated the discussion for the society of the spectacle, but it was the writings which followed that provided his theoretical piece of writing substantial value in the sphere of practice. The theory which supervened had observed and evaluated data which Debord was not familiar with, because they were not present at his time. Nevertheless, the emphasis on the visual as a narcotic for all five senses31 was evident, before, and after. The Greek term aesthesis was used, often enough to act like a bridge between abstract theories, and sensory perceptions32. Seduction was frequently posed as a contrastive parameter to “healthy” practice: “Seduction, Baudrillard argues, is that which extracts meanings from discourse and detracts it from its truth. […] Seduction can therefore be contrasted to “interpretation””33.

The female body, being the very principal of seductive production, had also been appointed a role; “While men are clearly involved in advertising, it is women who are particularly at risk”34.

Narcotic to seduction, and subsequently seduction to production was a procedure which occupied the theory of Debord’s aftermath, and it was

31 32 33 34

Leach N. (1999, p.44) Leach N. (1999, p.44) Leach N. (1999, p.71) Leach N. (1999, p.64)

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strongly enhanced by the practice. The use of the power of the deceptive image has been guilty for the delusions it has created for ages. But it had not been always a matter of abuse. “It makes no sense to divide cities into these two species, but rather into another two: those that through the years and the changes continue to give their form to desires, and those in which desires either erase the city or are erased by it”35. Zenobia of Italo Calvino showed the path on which the debate lies. And Tschumi understood that path.

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In his essay “The Architectural Paradox” lays not only the conclusive essence for the production of space, but also an aberrational equilibrium parallelism. “Like eroticism, architecture needs both system and excess. Just as eroticism is the pleasure of excess rather than the excess of pleasure, so the solution of the paradox is the imaginary blending of the architecture rule and the experience of pleasure”36. Some steps, and a lot of theory ahead, found Tschumi negotiating the importance of photographs, which he introduced as the means to connect the event and the spectacle within the architectural discipline. In a lecture given at London based Architectural Association in June 198237, he championed the allegorical importance of photographs of events, and argued

35 36 37

Calvino I. (1997, p. 30) Tschumi B. (1996, p. 164) Tschumi B. (1994, p. xxvii). The Manhattan Transcripts. London: Academy.

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for the importance of the disturbance to the neutral logic which they carry. The suggestion that a subjective reading might also be possible for both events and spectacles set an end to fundamental matters regarding the unofficial rivalry between the two terms, and succeeded to put them under the same magnifying glass.

Most importantly, Bernard Tschumi went through a platitudinal discussion and noted “strategy, form and sophisticated reference [which was given] to a general public out for the day”38.

The path had already been wider. _hybri[d]ay// “A kaleidoscope equipped with consciousness”39 is Charles Pierre Baudelaire’s definition for the contemporary man. Neal Leach hosts this term in “The Anaesthetics of Architecture” to circumscribe the concept of blasé outlook as a form of defensive mechanism against the bombardment of stimuli in the contemporary metropolis. No matter how precise the term, or how unattractive the concept of the rapid glittering of the individual’s habitat might be, it is there to stay. Marco Polo in “Invisible Cities” puts it brilliantly: “The inferno of the living is not something that will be; if there is one, it is what is already here, the inferno where we live every day, which we form by being together. There

38

Cook P. (2008, p. 40). Drawing: the Motive Force of Architecture. West Es-

sex: Wiley.

39

Baudelaire C. (1954). Oeuvres. In Leach N. (1999, p.37)

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are two ways to escape suffering it. The first is easy for many: accept the inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it. The second is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension: seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of the inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space”40. Indeed, the easy way is to baptize anything, either good, or bad, and continue with whichever of the two is preferable. But in the quest for solutions amongst controversial issues there is no black or white. In fact, the only colours missing from the spectrum are usually those. The amount that should be used from both to create the ideal range of hues derives from careful considerations of the given context.

That context involves ambiguous sectors which should be considered simultaneously is not a new attribute for Architecture.

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After thirty-four short paragraphs Guy Debord was ready to deploy the book’s (“Society of the Spectacle”) most accurate and elegant aphorism – “The spectacle is capital accumulated to the point that it becomes images”41. Some three and half decades later his prelude to the spectacle’s relation with economy was reversed without losing its importance – Spectacle is “an image accumulated to the point that it becomes

40 41

Calvino I. (1997, p. 148) Debord G. (n.d., p. 17)

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capital”42. What is unavoidable today is not only the truth behind both versions of the phrase, but the phrase’s very ability to transform itself.

Should economy be completely interwoven with contemporary living, technology creates the thread next to it, sometimes in a more declaratory manner. The scepticism behind technology shares common ground with the scepticism for economy; both sectors involve significant moral issues which often bring them on a confrontational level with society. “For one thing, we don’t have an either/or choice: Terra Firma and terabits are both here to stay”43, remarks John Thackara in his book “In the bubble”. In respect to how the discipline of architecture deals with the matters of technology, Sir Peter Cook claimed its contemporary chronological position as the “heyday of “High Tech” architecture, which has matured into a form of international vernacular for the upmarket corporate building”44.

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Once economy and technology are adjusted to the point which will provide the optimum result for any given case, access to social issues is facilitated. Thackara speculates approaches to innovation inspired by social fiction, approaches within which people are designed back into

42 43 44

Foster H. (2002). Master Builder. In Vidler A. (editor) (2008, p. vii) Thackara J. (2005, p. 4) Cook P. (2008, p. 135)

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situations45. Through his research and practice experience stands out that there is a rising interest for events instead of objects throughout different cultures46.

Alex Wall finds a renewed interest in the enabling function of design as well, as opposed to its mere stylization47. In his essay “Programming the Urban Landscape”, an elaboration with infra structure is dominant, and the ability of that “connective tissue” to organize objects, spaces, dynamic processes and events is praised. There is no doubt that the existence of events in a space is a form of motivation and an invitation to participate. Participation is what will create a dynamic audience for any kind of event or discipline. And the audience will post feedback, and the feedback will alter space, or transform it. As Bernard Tschumi places it, “architecture is inhabited: sequences of events, use, activities, and incidents are always superimposed on those fixed spatial sequences”48. The twist which would bring event, occurrence or happening in the driving position of Architecture seemed impossible to happen but it did. And it happened in peace.

As for Cecile and Gerard, their relationship

45 46 47

Thackara J. (2005, p. 4)

48

Tschumi B. (1996, p. 157)

Thackara J. (2005, p. 6)

Corner J. (editor) (1999, p. 233). Recovering Landscape: Essays in Contemporary Landscape Architecture. New York: Princeton Architectural Press

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did not evolve as they had planned it to. Some years later, they realized that they were not made for each other. Although they had been spending most of their spare time together, and their affair was considered ideal by others, something unidentified made them be apart. The psychologist assumed that the events in Paris in 1968 alienated two unlike souls; the astrologer claimed that an Aquarius can only have a temporary –yet, intense- relationship with a Capricorn; the realist declared that she was much more capable of him to find somebody else, and the woman from the grocery shop down the corner said that every second night the chef spent awfully a long time explaining to Cecile how to perfect-boil the asparagus.

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intermission

1 spectacular time

spectacular time|049 “Reality emerges within the spectacle, and the spectacle is real.”1 “Looked at from a distance, randomness becomes total uniformity. […] Those phenomena that often strike us as the most complex are, in contrast, not random.”2 “The love of violence, after all, is an ancient pleasure.”3

_-ism// The assemblage of situations driven by the psychic measuring of environments4 was the primary concept behind the Situationist movement, and consequently the riots in Paris in May 1968. Random and incident-based happenings were supported by the writings of Guy Debord and, since they had acquired a theoretical justification, rage was unleashed in the streets of the French metropolis.

The participants in this tradition maintained that the dominant model of life was represented by the spectacle and that the latter’s constant presence monopolized the majority of time spent outside the production process5. Rapt by their ideas, they neglected the possibility of the existence of alternative “life models”, assumed a priori social unification, and established a position according to which unification was

1 2 3 4 5

Debord G. (n.d., p. 9) Ball P. (2005, p. 95) Tschumi B. (1994, p. 125) Vidler A. (editor) (2008, p. ix) Debord G. (n.d., p. 8)

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“nothing but an official language of universal separation”6.

Albeit their understanding of the nature of the spectacle as the media and not the description of a message7, they thumped that because through the media different receivers understood different things, the issued image obtains “metaphysical subtleties”8, and, thus, becomes a commodity. This quantitative equivalence of desire and pleasure was then blended with seduction and illusion, as the proclaimed catalysts, and stabilized the reality of the spectacle as an object9.

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“There is rarely pleasure without seduction, or seduction without illusion. […Architecture] disguises are numerous: facades, arcades, squares, even architectural concepts become the artifacts of seduction”10, agrees Tschumi, by interpreting the spectacle’s nature in architectural terms.

But he also exposes Debord’s tradition through the means of justification. “The ultimate pleasure of architecture is that impossible moment when an architectural act, brought to excess, reveals both the traces of reason and the immediate experience of space”11. This could provide an

6 7 8 9 10 11

Debord G. (n.d., p. 7) Debord G. (n.d., p. 7) Debord G. (n.d., p. 19) Debord G. (n.d., p. 19) Tschumi B. (1996, p. 90) Tschumi B. (1996, p. 89)

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integrated reply to Debord, yet the ideas of the co-founder of the Situationist International were aiming even deeper. In the “Society of the Spectacle”, appearances are considered to be the evolution of the spectacle, and that the commodity is translated to those through a visible negation of life12. Their passive acceptance becomes accomplishable via the dogmatic reality which emerges from the nature of the spectacle and gives no chances for questions: “What appears is good; what is good appears”13. _theoretical consignment// The tendency for appearances is considered to be deeply rooted in the Western philosophical project which sourced its understanding of activity “by means of the categories of vision”14.

The nineteenth century philosophy is thus accused to have raised the seeds for a universe of speculation. Philosophy led the society to the understanding of History, and that knowledge conduced to self-knowledge, and, in that fashion, to the destruction of God. Debord notes God’s destruction15 and blames it to have concluded into both the autonomy of philosophy, and the society’s lack of rationality. Does Debord become the victimizer of his own ideas against religion

12 13 14 15

Debord G. (n.d., p. 9) Debord G. (n.d., p. 10) Debord G. (n.d., p. 11) Debord G. (n.d., p. 101)

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and philosophy in that way? Friedrich Nietzsche prompts Man not to forget pleasure’s borrowed nature16, for He is who represents anything material, or immaterial. In that mannerism, the German philosopher maintains a proximity to “God’s death” and builds his rationale on it, whereas the French –as ironic as it might occurcreates in situ rivalries which at sequential circumstances invalidate prior positions. As for Debord’s aphoristic dogmatism according to which “every discipline that becomes autonomous is bound to collapse”17, Nietzsche’s “so far as there are laws in history, laws are worth nothing and history is worth nothing”18 posts a strong reply and compromises it, proposing a much more dynamic relationship between the individuals and their environment.

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The paradox receives greater importance when examined in the architectural praxis. Projects that derived from the Situationists’ ideals, like Constant’s New Babylon, pursued themes such as “disorientation”, concepts such as “dynamic labyrinth”, and interpretations of space as one ontological experience19. Although the site of living experiences promotes an undermining of the plan, it also implies actions which are deeply Dionysian –random, and related with the

16 17 18

Nietzsche F. (1970, p. 187)

19

Leach N. (1999, p. 59)

Debord G. (n.d., p. 102)

Nietzsche F. (1874). Untimely Meditation. Second Part: Of the Use and Disadvantage of History for Life. In Ball P. (2004, p. 83)

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pleasure of taking part into situations enhanced, or caused by the terrain, and its encounters.

Whether philosophy’s Dionysian acts have less importance than those of the situationists has minimal importance outside theory. What poses to have a dual nature is that by referencing Dionysus, both sides share common ground and, possibly, common ideas. That Debord persists on naming the Western Philosophy as the fundamental aspect of the spectacle and puts it in a context within which it becomes a “mere fashion accessory”20 is definitely part of the situationists’ polemic against autonomy, and, thus, authority.

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The polemic is also evident when Debord refers to art. Its independence is also criticized, along with its imagery. Its emergence in the “dusk of life” is the only expression of it that can evoke memory21, Debord maintains. As a result, “Society of the Spectacle” contains a series of aphorisms based on the simultaneous existence of abolition and realization, in a manner that appoints them as inseparable. “Dadaism sought to abolish art without realizing it; surrealism sought to realize art without abolishing it”22.

Based on an index which could be considered a mere wordplay, the situationists’ position against art resembles the bourgeois’ blasé point of view. But the strategy of detournement,

20 21 22

Leach N. (1999, p. 88) Debord G. (n.d., p. 104) Debord G. (n.d., p. 106)

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consistent with the plagiarism and subversion of perspectives in order to undermine the initial meaning23, effectively projects the movement’s logic. The re-appropriation of artistic works, advertisements and comic strips transcends the initial motives behind the original piece by giving them the opposite meaning. In that way Debord claimed transformation of lies into truths24, in the same way which they were transformed at the primitive representation. A crucial parameter, though, is the authority which makes decisions on which message is true or not.

That authority should have extremely incisive criteria for the evaluation in order for the favorable result. In any other case, it would only pose a repetitive negation for each, and every, innovative mannerism, eventually acquire tardiness, and when mostly heavy and exhausted, fall; most probably, in a spectacular way. _mechanics of spectacular realization//

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The root for any authoritative formation bears on its specialization on the application of power.

Should it need to overrule all other configurations, it has to devise a method which will ensure dominance, and gradual strengthening. Guy Debord circumnavigates the nature of the spectacle, and locates the oldest of specializations in its role of speaking in the name of all other activities.

23 24

Leach N. (1999, p. 58) Debord G. (n.d., p. 113)

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According to this characteristic, its ascension at the top of the hierarchy was achieved because all of its messages were delivered “at a court where no one else is allowed to speak” 25. Having obtained the leadership amongst its rivals, the spectacle applies estrangement and separation between people through deceptive images, and causes the negation of real life26. The individuals are then subject to a pseudo-world constituted by “fragmented views of reality”27.

The transition to the world which cannot be directly felt elevates nothing but the sense of sight, and, thus, nulls all other senses related with the negotiation with reality – a phase “opposite to dialogue”28. The spectators are thus prisoners of an illusionary world of their own, bound in a one-way relationship with an abstract prompter who is the only mediator between them and the looking glass29. Calvino’s Valrada is a city defined by the existence of a mirror: “At times the mirror increases a thing’s value, at times denies it. […] The twin cities are not equal, because nothing that exists or happens in Valrada is symmetrical: every face and gesture is answered, from the mirror, by a face and gesture inverted, point by point”30.

25 26 27 28 29 30

Debord G. (n.d., p.12) Debord G. (n.d., p. 117) Debord G. (n.d., p. 2) Debord G. (n.d., p. 11) Debord G. (n.d., p. 118) Calvino I. (1997, p. 45)

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The voice of the prompter, either that of a speaker like in Debord’s description, or a delusionary agent akin to Calvino’s twin city, is the legislator in the service of the Spectacle, and its job is to control the variables in order for people to be forced into a commodity acquisition rally31. Hence, the situation is transformed into an epic poem of the struggle of the individual commodity which fights for itself, a struggle which “no fall of Troy can bring it to an end”32.

Along comes the globalization of the commodity with all of its paraphernalia: manifestation, scope, target group, and strategy. Perhaps the Trojan horse would not be an appropriate enough solution, given that there is no definite boundary for the marking of the “city” which has to fall. Each individual spectacle could be considered to be a consumer’s product –similar to widely sold carbonated soft drinks-, because it can be experienced by everybody through the same procedure. Yet, the spectacle comes free of any preliminary financial charges and can be understood differently by each one; it transfers the power of having an individual opinion. _products and by-products// The commodity as such is the catalyst for the final idiomorphic state of the society. Enriched by the

31 32

Debord G. (n.d., p. 22) Debord G. (n.d., p. 32)

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ambiguous power of fetishism, it has managed to be regarded as “the epitome of reality”33. Each aspect of the real world is fragmentized, and images are placed where reality used to be. As a result, human labor is measured in commodities, and the individual’s survival is solely depended on the close absorption of their regeneration34.

The spectacle “becomes fully visible as a power that [is] colonizing all social life”35, and, as soon as it conquers society, it applies its own logic on its ideology – a logic which has no other aim than to materialize any social reality and re-mould it so that it resembles the preferable image36. “Materialized ideology has no name, just as it has no formulatable historical agenda; which is another way of saying that the history of different ideologies is over”37.

There is no accurate method to define whether the Situationists underestimated the potentials of the rising ideologies of their time, or even the opportunity created by the elimination of the ones which were considered history. The movement saw street “revolution” as the only way to dismiss the society of the spectacle and to apply their own norm. “While one should be wary of ascribing too much influence to the Situationists

33 34 35 36 37

Debord G. (n.d., p. 19) Debord G. (n.d., p. 20) Debord G. (n.d., p. 21) Debord G. (n.d., p. 116) Debord G. (n.d., p. 116)

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in this extraordinary series of events [the uprising of May 1968], their contribution to raising consciousness and fostering a spirit of resistance – notably through the Situationistinspired enrages movement – should not be underestimated”38. Violence is something which can easily be extracted from the photographs of those events. An agony in their faces, and a desire to change the dominant circumstances, together with a study in sexual liberation is documented in feature movie “The Dreamers”39, which was initially named “Paris 1968”, and “The innocents”40. The polemic developed is evident in the relevant writings, as well as the visual representations. The most important contribution of the movement – and the riots, if one chooses to separate the two – was probably the creation of the precedent of possible discourses through the detournement strategy and the manipulation of programmatic attributes, which were considered unnegotiable at the time.

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The Situationists’ concerns for random events influenced the architectural discipline to consider imaginary programmatic modes into its own events41, and, in that way, function was reviewed in order to acquire alternative meanings. Based on the

38 39

Leach N. (1999, p. 60)

The Dreamers (2004). Film. Directed by Bernardo Bertolucci. United Kingdom: Recorded Picture Company

40

International Movie Database (n.d.) The Dreamers: imdb. Available from: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0309987 [Accessed 17 January 2009]

41

Tschumi B. (1994, p. 118)

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interpretation of violence as “the intensity of the relationship between individuals and their surrounding spaces”42, Bernard Tschumi suggested that actions qualify spaces as much as spaces qualify actions. Consecutive statements of terms such as “bodies violating space”, “presence”, “intrusion”, “carve”, “fluid and erratic motions”, lead him to conclude to the fact that even if violence is not always present, it is, at least, implied43. And its implicit role is not to be neglected.

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42 43

Tschumi B. (1994, p. 122) Tschumi B. (1994, p. 123)

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2 ev-end?

ev-end?|071 “The most complete exposition of a social myth often comes when the myth itself is waning.”1 “But the price paid for this liberation from all historical reality is the loss of the rational frame of reference that is indispensable to capitalism as a historical social system.”2 “There is no document of civilization, which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.”3 “Just as graffiti or a pornographic image bears an obscenity that the real thing ignores, the architectural drawing can support specific meanings that the everyday experience of the actual building prevents.”4 “I believe that a desirable future depends on our deliberately choosing a life of action over a life of consumption.”5

_aftermath: rationalized// A paramount figure in event-based architecture is Bernard Tschumi. The Swiss, “who always retains an intellectual control over the situation through guile and wisdom”6, developing a series of essays, all published under the title “Architecture and Disjunction”, attempts a thorough elaboration of the matters of Space and Programme, and maintains

1 2 3

MacIver R. M. (1947). The Web of Government. In Ball P. (2005, p. 7)

4 5 6

Tschumi B. (1994, p. 12)

Debord G. (n.d., p. 60)

Baudrillard J. (1997). The End of the Millennium or the Countdown. In Leach N. (1999, p. 38)

Illich I. (1973). Tools for Conviviality. In Thackara J. (2005, p. 75) Cook P. (2008, p. 40)

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a distance from hard-core political declarations.

Whatever operational frame was absent from the Event theory found its main representative in Tschumi’s writings.

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The seed for what followed was “the extraordinary power of incidents, of small actions amplified a thousand times by the media so as to assume the role of the revolutionary myth”7; a violent myth, one might add. Should the incidents causing violence be programmed in a structured form, they become a spectacle. A great effort for control is demanded, but, with that accomplished, the original event will be disordered and will eventually constitute a new order8. A loop of the latter manipulation, let the action be called reciprocity, will appoint subtlety onto the entity, and the relationship “moves beyond the question of power, beyond the question of whether architecture dominates events, or vice versa”9. Akin to the Kuleshov’s experiment – where the same still of an expressionless face is juxtaposed onto a selection of backgrounds –, the event is modified in each new space10. For Tschumi, this was translated in the existence of two tendencies in the architectural practice: one which was deeply contextual, and one which had more stylistic than other concerns. “[T]

7 8 9 10

Tschumi B. (1994, p. 8) Tschumi B. (1994, p. 125) Tschumi B. (1994, p. 127) Tschumi B. (1994, p. 130)

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hroughout the 1970’s there was an exacerbation of stylistic concerns at the expense of programmatic ones and a reduction of architecture as a form of knowledge to architecture as knowledge of form”11.

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Form, or geometry, or style cannot guarantee the pleasure of space on their own12. “The concept of space is not space”13, and Architecture alone cannot provide accommodation for both reality and concept. On top of that, the experience of space does not necessarily define the space as such, leaving it with either an intensely pleasurable or violent feel14, or with a lack of function15.

The potential absence of necessity makes the discipline workable in its own domain, and, therefore, lonely in a quest for autonomy and commitment16. Architecture’s sensualism keeps it away from utility, and the occurring uselessness alienates it from any practical justification.

The latter is then sought in the territories of “other disciplines such as economy and politics (but also, art, literary criticism, film theory)”17. Whether it should be celebrated as an enhancement, or condemned as a reduction, the

11 12 13 14 15 16 17

Tschumi B. (1994, p. 140) Tschumi B. (1994, p. 85) Tschumi B. (1994, p. 48) Tschumi B. (1994, p. 16) Tschumi B. (1994, p. 46) Tschumi B. (1994, p. 47) Tschumi B. (1994, p. 17)

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impurity of Architecture is de facto and not to be neglected.

In that mannerism, technical representations of the discipline, once interpreted as illustrated translations “of the intentions of the holders of financial power”18 into architectural language, might be able to host discourses with the aid of alternative contributions. “The architectural avant-garde has fought often enough over alternatives that appeared as opposites – structure and chaos, ornament and purity, permanence and change, reason and intuition”. There was minimal chance, though, for this elaboration to maintain a low profile critical attitude. Alternatives and opposites brought a delicate balance between polemic, and critique. Even the actual terms had been placed into consideration with the results being, the least, ambiguous. _chase of the haunt// A faint detour in the attempt for productive discourse might lead to seductive extracts.

“Although critique may be seductive, seduction can never be critical”19, according to Neil Leach’s comment on practices which undertake criticism on equivocal matters. In the case of production of spatially defined solids, the tendency to privilege the image, and adopt an outlook which

18 19

Tschumi B. (1994, p. 12) Leach N. (1999, p. 80)

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passes as highly aestheticized20, the solid is downgraded to an object. The object, then, needs to be assessed differently in order to reach a higher level, and the assessment takes time and hard work. Alternatively: “If, in the case of the sublime, the object becomes unbounded – and therefore less and more than an object – with the ideological imaginary of the spectacular countersublime, the object reaches an extreme degree of definition, closure and intensity”21.

Its importance is paramount, because it is capable of edging into every possible unity and become dominant; and vice versa. “Object before the subject, it dominated senses and bodies by containing them”22. It is, therefore, reasonable why the object has been the programmatic touchstone for the polemic of the architectural avant-garde, which followed Guy Debord’s initial discussion.

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The excessive manipulation of the form for the sake of visual aesthetics, and only, led to reviews according to which production was linked to pornography, as an orgy of realism, and the cultural output was that of a premature ejaculation23. Exactly because seduction was considered to have been connected to production, it was claimed to have been degenerated. Leach

20 21 22 23

Leach N. (1999, p. 11) Vidler A. (editor) (2008, p. 45) Tschumi B. (1994, p. 29) Leach N. (1999, p. 74)

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maintains that as soon as reason gave its place to technique and performance24, the entrance to the world of the instantaneous was unavoidable.

The developed polemic included written and visual comments which claimed to distance themselves from the spectacular decay of the time. Kevin Rhowbotham, practitioner, teacher, and author of “Form to Programme”, insisted on the use of surface as a weapon to overcome emptiness and contain new opportunities25. Within the academic environment he worked, a methodology which placed the formal project first, in order to invert the Modernist’s project cycle, was tested, with the study on notation and highly-worked artifacts being the only remains. In another case, Lebbeus Woods, in his study for Sarajevo, suggested “injection”, “scar”, and “scab”, as deeper levels of construction. In a glance, there is hardly any implication for any kind of events which might actually follow Woods’ study. Neil Leach is censorious: “Woods seemingly fails to acknowledge the aestheticization that lies at the heart of his project, a condition that is exacerbated by his proposed architectural solutions”26. But Peter Cook’s comment on Hernan Diaz Alonso’s project “PS1 MOMA Pavilion”, although in a different time and under other circumstances, restores the importance of imagery in architecture: “The

24 25

Leach N. (1999, p. 75) Rhowbotham K. (1995, p. 43). Form to Programme. London: Black Dog

Publishing

26

Leach N. (1999, p. 29)

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manipulation is edited and directed towards certain ends and inevitably contains physical and formal prejudices”27. _eve before end?// The published or drawn polemic on the society of the spectacle might have failed to confront its own internal issues, and might, ironically enough, have merely scratched the surface of its rival. The opportunity which derived from it, though, and the articulated precedent, are both responsible for contemporary representations which take the architectural discipline a step forward. A finest example is “The institute of Ideas” by Luke Chandresinghe, for which Peter Cook comments: “If you look at the drawing long enough you begin to question almost every characteristic by which you first assessed it.

We have been led to believe the unbelievable through drawing. Now we are tempted to set up in our minds a series of belief/ disbelief/ belief/ disbelief”28. The belief in opportunity is nevertheless not optional.

The limit for revolutionary organization was set by Guy Debord himself: “[…] each of its members must have recognized and appropriated the coherence of the organization’s critique”29.

27 28 29

Cook P. (2008, p. 84) Cook P. (2008, p. 132) Debord G. (n.d., p. 70)

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In addition, in the “Society of the Spectacle” he calls for practical forces to get into motion, after the acknowledgement that ideas cannot change the status quo on their own30. There are useful extracts within Debord’s theory. Should one leave aside the conflating of aesthetics with the political31, for a moment, and accept architectural practice as “a conceptual and dematerialized discipline”32, yet distinct radical political actions from radical aesthetics, then the one would succeed to circumscribe Architecture as the invitation, and not the determination, of spatial practices. _long distance to the target// Opportunity is a parameter which is easily spotted within a theoretical disquisition.

Miscalculation can be hardly anticipated though, especially when there is a long term relationship between statement and operation. Regarding form and programme, “beyond their diverging aesthetic means, both conceive of architecture as an object of contemplation, easily accessible to critical attention”33.

The representatives of form manipulation - the list of whom contains most of the each time

30 31 32 33

Debord G. (n.d., p. 111) Tschumi B. (1994, p. 69) Tschumi B. (1994, p. 66) Tschumi B. (1994, p. 117)

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contemporary, media-published practitioners – “seek to arrest the image flow, to tie it down to a place, a brand, and a purpose”34. The supply of the image economy is thus endlessly enriched by new members. Those who praise programme considerations – the list of whom changes according to the prior members’ personal needs, but the aspiring candidate numbers are nevertheless continuously rising – rarely keep in mind that “words and drawings can only produce paper space and not the experience of real space, [and that] by definition, paper space is imaginary: it is an image”35. By baptizing as seductive any peace of architectural work which does not fulfill any utilitarian function, the discipline does not get any benefit. Equally, by spotting aesthetic failings, and then generalizing their existence, architecture can only have minimal benefits. The critical question should be whether the architectural creation sets is motion the conceptual mechanisms which “cannot satisfy your wildest fantasies, but may exceed the limits set by them”36.

The fundamental error of the architectural avant-garde happened possibly when architectural exhibitions in galleries “encouraged “surface” practice and presented the architects work

34 35 36

Vidler A. (editor) (2008, p. 3) Tschumi B. (1994, p. 93) Tschumi B. (1994, p. 96

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as a form of decorative painting”37. Within those exhibitions the term “revolution” was aestheticized – it became political and claimed a certain authority38. The forces caused by authority can rarely be controlled, nor can the actions which derive be justified. “Perinthia’s astronomers are faced with a difficult choice.

Either they must admit that all their calculations were wrong and their figures are unable to describe the heavens, or else they must reveal that the order of the gods is reflected exactly in the city of monsters”39. There is also the third – unavoidable – choice. Time will eventually come when the situation will be completely different, and new actions will need to happen. Do they wait for time, or is it that the time is now? _”time”//

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A dweller of London, New York, Tokyo or any other contemporary metropolis would not have waited for Neil Leach and his statement to be convinced for the constant circumstances of their everyday life; “The metropolitan individual has to accommodate and register the rapid bombardment of stimuli within the city, where even the crossing of the road would fray the nerves”40. A series of political, economic,

37 38 39 40

Tschumi B. (1994, p. 141) Tschumi (1994, p. 68) Calvino I. (1997, p. 131) Leach N. (1999, p. 33)

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and social factors could be responsible, but any combination of those coincides to one single arithmetic parameter: “The planet’s population has doubled in [this] generation’s lifetime – something that never happened before”41.

Philosophers call it ontological alienation, but there is hardly the need of compositional terms to describe the saturation of complex systems and incomprehensible information42.

Clock time – that fierce four-digit numerical array – gradually moved from the disturbance of the event-time – point of hunger, hence, moment for food -, to its complete suppression. The interaction with those systems demands a huge amount of stimuli to be processed43, and as the world moves forward, there is the requirement of speed, for individuals to regain contact with event-time, and get closer to one another. Since there is not a progress which can be actually felt in literal speed – transport, walking – digital speed is what makes the difference in services, and communications. The mass spread of digitization fatefully “reduced all human knowledge and experience in symbolic form”44. In order to anticipate the transformation of cities into layers of symbolic forms, encounters and interactions have to be devised and injected;

41 42 43 44

Thackara J. (2005, p. 5) Thackara J. (2005, p. 101) Thackara J. (2005, p. 33) Thackara J. (2005, p. 63)

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events which will transform passive participation into post-spectacular practices.

Designers and users are going to have to work closer for the sequence of urban encounters to be altered, or improved. “The days of the celebrity solo designer are over”45, notes John Thackara, and invites designers to facilitate the change, and people to celebrate their contribution to a system which was not always reciprocal. Merely spectacular displays will hardly seize to exist.

Theoretically, and technically, though, the architectural discipline is now more ready than ever to go beyond the spectacle by adjusting each one of its formerly hidden parameters or conjunctions in the way which will unlock its beneficial expressions. Spectacular can be whatever stimulates the senses; a combination of the five – sight, hearing, smell, touch, taste -, or an intrusion into a subliminal reality. “We don’t receive anywhere near the quantity of data it takes to overload our neurons”46. The task is to provide the infrastructure to allocate it, and the provision to digest it.

45 46

Thackara J. (2005, p. 75) Thackara J. (2005, p. 162)

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3 the lost square

the lost square|099 “Some texts, like Italo Calvino’s metaphorical descriptions of “Invisible Cities”, were so “architectural” as to require going far beyond the mere illustration of the author’s already powerful descriptions.”1 “Whoever knows how to design a park well will have no difficulty in tracing the plan for the building of a city according to its given area and situation. There must be regularity and fantasy, relationships and oppositions, and casual, unexpected elements that vary the scene; great order in the details, confusion, uproar, and tumult in the whole.”2 “Film, together with the telephone and phonograph, extended our perception of events and locations beyond their physical and temporal bounds.”3 “Today’s limits of architecture: 1) things pertaining to the relationship between spaces and their use, between “type” and “program”, between objects and events; 2) things pertaining to the notation of architecture. (However precise and generative plans, sections, and axonometrics may be, each implies a logical reduction of architectural though to what can be shown, to the exclusion of other concerns).”4

_invisible cities// In the attempt to define the nature of the unity of overlapping networks and communities within the contemporary city, Alex Wall, in his essay “Programming the Urban Surface”, coined the term

1 2

Tschumi B. (1994, p. 145) Laugier A. (1765). Observations sur l’ Architecture. In Tschumi B. (1994, p.

85)

3 4

Thackara J. (2005, p. 26) Tschumi B. (1996, p. xx)

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“daily urban system”5. The elegant definition follows the observation of the transformation of the city from a “historical and institutional core surrounded by postwar suburbs and the open countryside”, into an organically developed multi-centered web, ruled by the efficiency of infrastructures. The critical contribution of the latter is decided upon their capacity to host a diversity of happenings and services, which stage and set up “new conditions for uncertain futures”6.

Should a methodology, which would determine the conditions of a continuous and self-sufficient unfolding of events within the urban sprawl, exist, it would have to assess a series of situations juxtaposed on the already there metropolitan space. Akin to the reading of historic ruins suggested by Tschumi7, the preexistent threedimensional index is to be conceived as the disassembled datum of order. Architecture would then be responsible less for the filling of the Cartesian gaps, and more for the statement of their conceptual and sensual surroundings. In that way, a dynamic selection of parameters would be injected in the metropolitan body, available for its dwellers to experience and use at will. Does this constrain architects in merely an administrative influence? Possible answers,

5 6 7

Corner J. (editor) (1999, p. 234) Corner J. (editor) (1999, p. 233) Tschumi B. (1994, p. 85)

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either monosyllabic, or based on the nature of the practice, are more than a few. The quality of the answer depends on how much the designer appreciates the discipline’s role to calibrate the mechanics of society in the optimum fashion.

Calvino’s Marco Polo comments on the nature of a map: “Your atlas preserves the differences intact: that assortment of qualities which are like the letters in a name”8. It is on the designer’s discretion to unveil the differences and appropriate them in spatial, and, at the same time, programmatic mode.

The Situationists’ theoretical leader, Guy Debord, criticized architectural innovations to be designed either for the ruling classes, or to have been condemning the poor in their own fate9. The “either/ or” reality resulted in the spread of a ferocious urban fabric capable only to devour itself at the pace given by the decisive financial agent10. Hence, the spaces became uniformed, and their capacity restrained only for the cyclical nomadic wandering11, at best. On the other hand, Calvino’s metaphorical descriptions in his “Invisible Cities” waived the monotony of repetitive sequences, through a succession, which not only dealt with the event/ spectacle indication, but was also concentrated on

8 9 10 11

Calvino I. (1997, p. 125) Debord G. (n.d., p. 96) Debord G. (n.d., p. 97) Debord G. (n.d., p. 74)

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each dweller’s personal chase within the confined space. “Every inhabitant of Eudoxia compares the carpet’s immobile order with his own, and each can find, concealed among the arabesques, an answer, the story of his life, the twists of fate”12.

There have been many responsive occurrences into Calvino’s indications since then – and before.

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“Depicted in many Archigram’s ideas were individuals plugging into larger networks of interactive information, education, and entertainment”13. The “Instant City” project’s operational manifestation was analogous of that of an infrastructure. The flexibility, the ability to rearrange itself and accommodate various functions, and its infiltration to the existing urban tissue were nominal. A discreet intervention was also deployed by OMA in 1987 for the Melun-Senart town in France. The formulation proposed focalized on the creation of isolated programmatic voids, ready to express the tendency which would be evident in the future.

“By incorporating the character and potential of the urban plan in the designed characteristic of the voids, the designers leave the building sites open and undetermined”14. In the cases which the urban surface carries in its epidermis functions and services, like West 8’s work in Schouwburgplein, Rotterdam, the “emptiness”

12 13 14

Calvino I. (1997, p. 86) Corner J. (editor) (1999, p. 236) Corner J. (editor) (1999, p. 238)

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which occurs is operational, in the sense that it allows for the embedded attributes to enable divertive functions, and, thus, promote creativity. The opposite – spaces designed for single functions, usually evident in old-style cities – results in the fostering of innovative situations to be unlikely15.

Function specificity should give its position to situation specificity – be it a “dynamic, organizational, structural plan, using scenarios, diagrams, parameters, formulas, and themes, that encompasses the mapping of political, managerial, planning, community, and private relations”16 – through a system which can elaborate various characteristics, in order for the participants to regain contact with one another. A simple installation can provide the venue for unexpected social contact amongst people. In October 2008, for instance, a light environment called “Memory Cloud” was installed in Trafalgar Square in London, and transmitted, through smoke, text messages sent by the crowd,. The diversity of the projected messages represented the senders’ personal, political, or hilarious attitude of the moment; “Maria y Violeta en Trafalgar Square!”, “Act in Darfur now”, and “Will you marry me?” were some of the displays, available in the event’s webpage17.

15 16 17

Thackara J. (2005, p. 104) Thackara J. (2005, p. 108)

Minimaforms (2008) Memory Cloud [on line]. Available at: http://www.minimaforms.com/memorycloud [Accessed at 4 January 2009]

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_trans [-formation] scripts//

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In the hunt for a systematized analytics method, through which space would be possible to be resolved and stated, Bernard Tschumi appointed movements of dance, sport, and war as the intrusion of events into space. “At the limit, these events become scenarios or programs, void of moral or functional implications, independent but inseparable from the spaces that enclose them”18. Tschumi redefined program as the “descriptive notice of a formal series of proceedings”19; through a series of occupational shifts – “You can sleep in your kitchen. And fight. And love.”20 – prescribed the bond between movement and space; spotted the difference between accidental and designed events21; and, finally, introduced the latter into juxtaposed sequences of transformation informed by chronological order22. The “coup de grace” was delivered by an ambiguous statement: “By order of experience, one speaks of time, of chronology, of repetition. But some architects are suspicious of time and would wish their buildings to be read at a glance, like billboards”23.

18 19 20 21 22 23

Tschumi B. (1994, p. 111) Tschumi B. (1994, p. 127) Tschumi B. (1994, p. 128) Tschumi B. (1994, p. 134) Tschumi B. (1994, p. 154) Tschumi B. (1994, p. 161)

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In Tschumi’s influential theoretical succession of drawings “The Manhattan Transcripts”, it is the Event that is framed in a snapshot, and then encircled by the Space and Movement statements.

The “S/E/M” combination was used to narrate an imaginary story happening in the streets of Manhattan, New York, and along with the story, a provocative system of architectural language was manifested. The publication of the system enabled a series of practical translations, which kept it away of being considered constrained into the theoretical environment. “From one part to the other, the city seems to continue, in perspective, multiplying its repertory of images: but instead it has no thickness, it consists only of a face and an obverse, like a sheet of paper, with a figure on either side, which can neither be separated or look at each other”24. Differently to Calvino’s Moriana, “The Manhattan Transcripts” did not stay within the pages of a book. Its extracts were expressed into Bernard Tschumi’s winning entry for the competition of the Parc de la Villete in Paris.

The proposition consisted – that is, it consists, since the entry won the competition – of a set of deconstructed cubical solids applied on a programmatic Cartesian grid. The Follies, as they were named, were assigned functional meanings, but the surrounding environment was left untouched by any solids. Layers of functions had been placed over layers of operational voids, and the

24

Calvino I. (1997, p. 95)

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juxtaposition resulted in a robust design, which could host multiple happenings simultaneously.

What is commendable, in the sense that it leaves no questions for the timing of “The Manhattan Transcripts”, is that other entries of the competition considered program as “the engine of a project, driving the logic of form and organization while responding to the changing demands of society”25. Once again, OMA and Rem Koolhaas proposed a set of strips and grids, across surfaces, with point and areal services designed to be both adaptive and responsive26. In both entries, program was stated as a framework, and was informed by a grid, which, no matter how different it was between the two, was evident.

But what about the cases that the grid is not abstract, but manifested by the existence of transportation infrastructure, or what about the cases that the context is not so much a constant, as the park’s or Manhattan’s (in the pages of a book, or not)?

The cognitive sense of a place has to be stated in propositions first, in order to be transferred in actual space. Most architectural drawings are perfectly capable of describing the space as object, and the movement through notation.

By having a snapshot of the event, a sense of happening is also stated. Is that enough? Sir Peter Cook accepts that there is usefulness in

25 26

Corner J. (editor) (1999, p. 237) Corner J. (editor) (1999, p. 238)

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keeping the observer guessing27. In a comment on Marcos Cruz’s drawing “In-Wall Creatures, Hyperdermis Study”, he also admits that there can only be germs of the ideas of a creator in a drawing, that is, information which “the creator wants to “log” into the system via the drawing”28.

Albeit the drawing remains the most direct and expressive way of architectural intentions, the technological accomplishments should not leave the discipline rest. The cognitive is based on the sensual, and that is based on five discernible senses: touch, smell, hearing, taste, and vision.

Leaving the latter outside, because it is the most profoundly stimulated by representational techniques, there are four left without a statement of intent in most cases.

“People are more capable of acutely tracking the details of motion with the ear than with the eye”29. Three-dimensional sound surrounds are by now used in most feature films, why not in architectural films as well?

Either by the use of a model material, or, in the circumstances which is applicable, by the use of a devise, touch is the easiest of the senses to be transmitted30. Ken Goldberg’s and Richard Wallace’s Datamitt – two simple haptic

27 28 29 30

Cook P. (2008, p. 149) Cook P. (2008, p. 170) Thackara J. (2005, p. 177) Thackara J. (2005, p. 177)

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sensors and haptic actuators, according to John Thackara – could transmit a handshake through a low-bandwidth internet connection, anywhere reachable by the wide world web. Touch is also one of the latest applications in medical research. There have already been developmental steps in one-way adaptation of holographic images into external stimuli – the hand of a doctor, or the scalpel31. There is no reason why, in a few years, the technology will not be available for architectural applications. Hence, the representation of touch will be possible in a most responsive manner.

There would not be a better way to project the possible elaboration of an architectural space of which the olfactory agent is important – a park, a restaurant – than to release its spatial scent. “A number of companies, notably Digiscents and TriSenx, have announced plans to produce computer-controlled devices that output smell. The companies’ literature proposes scented websites and “smelltracks” for DVDs or games”32. Aromatic indications could also enrich the density of an actual space by summarizing an available event or condition.

Taste remains as the only sense which cannot be represented in a less literal way than the

31

Medscape Orthopaedics & Sports Medicine eJournal (1998). The Acquisition of Holographic Images. Medscape Orthopaedics & Sports Medicine eJournal. Available from: http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/431676_2 (Accessed in 20th January 2009)

32

Thackara J. (2005, p. 177)

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obvious. There have been scientific efforts to create devises which read taste and there have been made huge steps in that sector. The electronic tongue – or e-tongue – can tell the difference among a short list of wines, but it is still in an early stage33. Taste, if the taste of the air or the rest of the weather elements is excluded, is a choice of the individual, and there is hardly a necessity to be stated in the architectural programme.

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Where do these lead? The statement of the spectacle square in “S/E/M” system – the “Space” square – could be informed by a combination of the other senses as well. Since electronic statements of architectural representation are used more often nowadays, there is no reason why they should not be enriched with a proportion of the elements which will actually exist within their realities. In that way, the propositions will be available for a larger proportion of the general public to be digested, and, therefore, possible critiques will be facilitated. _circumstances// Moving on from the enrichment of Tschumi’s spatial –or, spectacular – square, which can potentially enhance the sensuality of architectural representation, and invite comments and feedback,

33

Connor S. (2008). The electronic tongue with a taste for fine wine. The Independent. Available at http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/food-and-drink/news/theelectronic-tongue-with-a-taste-for-fine-wine-886097.html [Accessed at 20 January 2009]

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it is very hard to neglect Sir Peter Cook’s notice on the previous decade. “The 1990s were in many ways a turning point in the discussion of drawing. The computer was beginning to establish a leading position, the discussion of “process” was rampant in the most fashionable schools of architecture, the gadget was a creative trigger, the absorption of photographics, multitudinous printing techniques and the inspiration of film and video led to the spirited discussion of architecture and its presence or non-presence.

Contemplating (say) a rectangular surface in front of you did not necessarily mean that you would be offered a total, retainable or definite image”34. Right before the dawn of the 2010s, Architecture cannot be limited into its merely representative expression. It has been like that for thousands of years, while it had still been representing “something other than itself: the social structure, the power of the King, the idea of God, and so on”35, as Tschumi admits. Should it remain like that, it will not pose the faintest solution in any of society’s issues, when it could, and will be reduced in a supporting technical role. One of Italo Calvino’s cities represents the reality which can easily be found anywhere else: “The world is covered by a sole Trude which does not begin and does not end; only the name of the airport changes”36.

34 35 36

Cook P. (2008, p. 146) Tschumi B. (1994, p. 36) Calvino I. (1997, p. 116)

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Which will Architecture’s new face be, and how will the discipline be varied amongst the other disciplines, and, most importantly, its previous faces?

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Mark Wigley, in his essay “Toward a History of Quantity”, included in Anthony Vidler’s “Architecture: Between Spectacle and Use”, concludes that “Contemporary architecture has become a high bandwidth medium produced and monitored in new ways necessitating a recalculation of the field’s basic assumptions”37.

Earlier in the book, Anthony Vidler implies that the neo-liberal capital expansion may have led in a value-free iteration of computer generated forms, which consequently have a severe impact on the process of design38. The repetition of a form in a series of algorithmic variations is, now, more than ever, facilitated through parametric evaluation of its characteristics with the use of computer software. The complex patterns which are thus produced need to be carefully encrypted – in computer engineering language – in order for their reproduction to be conceived as innovative as possible39. By adding logos, imprints, trademarks, and so forth, the output of the form manipulation falls back to the morph of the object. Therefore, technology’s contribution should not be limited in the elaboration of the

37 38 39

Vidler A. (editor) (2008, p. 155) Vidler A. (editor) (2008, p. viii) Vidler A. (editor) (2008, p. 131)

the lost square|125

form, if Architecture must take a step forward.

Technology can provide the sense of shared space – installations like “Memory Cloud” manifest that fact – and the infrastructure which it needs does not require severe compromise of the surrounding space, with the use of wireless connections.

With the digitization of information – even of touch, smell, and sound – the decentralization of production is enabled, through the use of global knowledge in local situations. However, technology’s most meaningful contribution is probably its capability to analyze information, in any possible form, document it, and allocate it in databases which can be accessed again, and again. In addition, where the access to the information happens simultaneously with the occurrence of the event causing it, a most beneficial visual dialogue is casted, with its potentials being beyond the importance of the particles which constitute it, via the dynamic combinations of those particles.

In the sphere of imagination, the monitored information resembles the imagery used in brothers Andy and Larry Wachowski film “The Matrix”40, where anything involving the system was represented in binary code. In reality, the Regionmaker, software which was developed by MVRDV, synthesizes a variety of information sources and flows, supports maps, charts, can access databases,

40

The Matrix (1999). Film. Directed by Andy and Larry Wachowski. USA: Groucho II Film Partnership

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images, video feeds, the internet, and uses computer aided design drawings41. Optimization of the operation of such software, along with the addition of more data, such as movement, flows of people, goods, and information, would enable it to develop scenarios, and strategies, which in other cases would contain multiple calculations and assumptions. The benefits of a development like this for the Architectural discipline would be nominal in a contextual level. Juxtaposing the “live context” tool with Tschumi’s “S/E/M” consideration would compliment both the Event, and the Movement squares.

“Event”, in its programmatic, as well as its anticipatory expression, would be informed by data related with the nature and the diversity of the participants’ totality. “Movement” would acquire information regarding flows, their manifestation and reasoning. Economic, social, and cultural information could form a generative tool on their own, thus reforming the nature of the data into the fourth “square”; the “context square”, or else “C”. The unity of the “S/E/ M/C” consideration alters the Space parameter in the sense that it totally disconnects it from any typology, and links it with the situational topology of the Cartesian area.

Philip Ball maintains that “not even the most ardent supporter of individualism could reasonably claim

41

Thackara J. (2005, p. 82)

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that our choices are truly independent”42 and that the decisions of the individual are influenced by mass advertizing, and in situ conventions. In the same chapter of the same book – “Multitudes in the Valley of Decision” in “Critical Mass” – he notes: “One of the most remarkable discoveries of the physics of society is that behaviour which looks strangely “human” can emerge among agents which are in effect nothing but robotlike automata”43. It may be that the human factor will always find ways through which its presence is vividly manifested, and it will react against any application which constrains its right to make a choice. Nevertheless, Architecture, in the case the “S/E/M/C” consideration proves its usefulness, or in any other case, should champion the society’s privilege of choice. In any progress – four squares, or less, or more – the discipline has to devise a strategy with which it will maximize the benefits it can provide. _the next step// “Our networks and communities need the time, energy, presence, and participation of real people to flourish. Human systems need inputs of human energy to do well. Everything else […] is contingent”44. With these sentences, John Thackara circumscribes the supporting nature

42 43 44

Ball P. (2005, p. 371) Ball P. (2005, p. 420) Thackara J. (2005, p. 111)

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of anything else but humans, in the wellbeing of the society. Human presence is the decisive catalyst of each and every innovative change.

The presence has to be invited, celebrated, challenged, and caused. Thresholds between the designers, the producers, and the users have to be blurred, and the premises should overlap one another. Reciprocal approach is embedded in the live contextual data which can be collected, but people’s feedback should be further encouraged, and comforted. “The world already dreams of such a time. In order to actually live it, it only needs to become fully conscious of it”45.

Guy Debord agreed that with the reclamation of consciousness a dream might actually become reality. Dreams are generated by desire, and Italo Calvino celebrates the diversity of desires with Fedora. “Not because they are all equally real, but because all are only assumptions. The one contains what is accepted as necessary when it is not yet so; the others, what is imagined as possible and, a moment later, is possible no longer”46.

The generative system proposed as the “lost” square increases the number of features, parameters, characteristics, and data considered in the Architectural discipline in order to provide vigilance for the unforeseen. The latter is highly desirable, according to Sir

45 46

Debord G. (n.d., p. 92) Calvino I. (1997, p. 28)

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Peter Cook. “All the time we must be ready to interrogate the architecture of the unlikely in order to push further the architecture of the predictable”47. Architecture is bound to manifest social change via innovator prospects. Even if its expressions might occur as “follies”; benefits might occur amongst peculiar displays, even in the most infertile fields. “A voluptuous vibration constantly stirs Chloe, the most chaste of cities.

If men and women began to live their ephemeral dreams, every phantom would become a person with whom to begin a story of pursuits, pretenses, misunderstandings, clashes, oppressions, and the carousel of fantasies would stop”.

47

Cook P. (2008, p. 172)

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_prologue// 0_1/ the kiss [http://www.ackland.org/art/exhibitions/ seasonsofparis/lebaiserdutrattoir.jpg] 0_2/ event definition [author’s cad generated image for the needs of this dissertation] 0_3/ spectacle variations [author’s cad generated image for the needs of this dissertation] 0_4/ event + spectacle [author’s cad generated image for the needs of this dissertation] 0_5/ nazi’s spectacular display during ww2 [http://i80.photobucket.com/albums/j186/ DonaldDouglas/Americaneocon/munich-nazi-WWIIIN07-wide-horizont.jpg] 0_6/ israeli’s attacks in gaza in january 2009 [http://graphics8.nytimes.com/ images/2009/01/03/world/04mideast.1-600.jpg] 0_7/ bilbao effect [http://www.artknowledgenews.com/files2008/ TheGuggenheimMuseumBilbao.jpg] 0_8/ tschumi’s parc de la villette

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[http://ead.nb.admin.ch/web/biennale/bi06_A/ Bilder_Tschumi/Villette/03BernardTschumiArchite cts.jpg] _intermission// -_1/ 1968 in paris [http://cedarlounge.files.wordpress. com/2008/05/1968paris.jpg] -_2/ revolution [http://eldib.files.wordpress.com/2008/07/ revolution.jpg] -_3/ 2007 in paris [http://www.abc.net.au/reslib/200711/ r206523_787394.jpg] -_4/ 2008 in Athens [http://www.hurriyet.com.tr/_np/1651/6941651. jpg]

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_spectacular time// 1_1/ constant’s new Babylon [http://www.bombsite.com/images/ attachments/0000/6229/constant03_body.jpg] 1_2/ detournement [http://www.intelligentagent.com/archive/sant_ fig5.jpg]

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1_3/ still from the film “the dreamers” [http://www.premiere.fr/var/premiere/storage/ images/photos/diaporama/innocents/innocentsthe-dreamers-the-dreamers-2003__1/19904121-fre-FR/innocents_the_dreamers_the_ dreamers_2003_reference.jpg] _interval// x_1/ acropolis [http://www.smh.com.au/ffximage/2005/08/16/ acropolis_wideweb__430x303.jpg] x_2/ millennium dome [http://www.planetware.com/i/photo/greenwichmillennium-dome-london-gb001.jpg] x_3/ london eye [http://goanna.cs.rmit.edu.au/~zhzhang/photos/ huge/London%20-%20London%20Eye.JPG] x_4/ ground zero [http://www.bostonherald.com/blogs/news/city_ desk_wired/wp-content/uploads/2007/12/groundzero.jpg] _ev-end?// 2_1/ kuleshov’s experiment [http://blogs.suntimes.com/scanners/kuleshov. jpg]

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2_2/ surface in Rhowbotham [http://www.a.tu-berlin.de/Institute/0831/ rhowbotham/mitarbeiter/Images/037-2.gif] 2_3/ lebbeus woods injection parasite [http://ubiwar.files.wordpress.com/2008/06/ injection_parasite.jpg] 2_4/ hernan diaz alonso ps1 moma pavilion [http://www.metropolismag.com/webimages/1437/ aboverender.jpg] 2_5/ luke chandresinghe institute of ideas [http://mahalie.com/notebook/wp-content/ uploads/2006/04/lukechandresinghe_tower.jpg] 2_6/ herzog and de meuron prada store in Tokyo [http://manoloshoeblog.com/images/PradaTokyo. jpg]

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2_7/ london from above at night [http://weblog.sinteur.com/wp-content/ uploads/2008/08/london1.jpg] _entr’ acte// +_1/ medieval soccer [http://www.soccer-fans-info.com/image-fi les/ mob-soccer.jpg] +_2/ street soccer in the streets of mexico city in 1974

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[http://gallery.photo.net/photo/4459087-md.jpg] +_3/ bull charge [http://inlinethumb16.webshots.com/13071/293003 0100102347975S500x500Q85.jpg] +_4/ parkour [http://cekrules.es/album/albums///parkour_ jump.jpg] _the lost square// 3_1/ athens from above [http://static.panoramio.com/photos/ original/113526.jpg] 3_2/ tschumi’s new acropolis museum [http://www.parthenonuk.com/images/content/A. jpg] 3_3/ archigram’s instant city [http://parole.aporee.org/fi les/fabri/instant_ city_airship_3.jpg] 3_4/ oma’s melun-senart [http://urbanstrategies-networks.blogspot. com/2008/07/analysis-oma.html&usg=__ cXa1k2OwZrr-jfm8-dPsc4mBUy0=&h=283&w=400&sz=3 3&hl=en&start=8&um=1&tbnid=AhjUHnYmRufnxM:&tb nh=88&tbnw=124&prev=/images%3Fq%3Dmelun-sena rt%2Boma%26um%3D1%26hl%3Den%26rlz%3D1G1GGLQ_ ENUK248%26sa%3DG]

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3_5/ west 8’s Schouwburgplein [http://netzspannung.org/cat/servlet/ CatServlet/$files/217934/Schouwburgplein-2.jpg] 3_6/ memory cloud [http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3169/2926345763_ b80f1a3c29.jpg] 3_7/ s\e\m in the manhattan transcripts [http://www.arc1.uniroma1.it/saggio/ FoodforMinds/Phd/nurzia/nurzia-web_file/ image006.jpg] 3_8/ tschumi’s parc de la villette [http://www.imageandnarrative.be/uncanny/_ img/3tschumi.gif] 3_9/ parc de la villette follies [http://www.arch.mcgill.ca/prof/mellin/ arch671/winter2001/jmyers4/drm/precedents/ villettefollies.jpg]

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3_10/ oma’s parc de la villette [http://img.blog.yahoo.co.kr/ybi/1/d3/e3/ ejwwje/folder/214/img_214_1963_4?1206862608. jpg] 3_11/ marcos cruz’s in-wall creatures [http://de.img.seen.by/user/marcos-cruz/img/ h48/cruz-hyperdermis-2.jpg]

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3_12/ greg lynn’s algorithmic repetition of form in coffee pots [http://www.strangeharvest.com/greg_alessis. jpg] 3_13/ matrix, the [http://www.software-dungeon.co.uk/images/ matrix_fall_3d_4.jpg]

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_book references// _Ball Philip/ 2005/ Critical Mass: How One Thing Leads to Another /London: Arrow// Collective in its references, as well as its conclusions, Ball’s book is one informed by classic science, and informative of social science. From physics to philosophy, and from economy to traffic planning, the references within cover the majority of areas which concern the contemporary individual, and their manifestation is led by the most objective language available: the one of Mathematics. _Calvino Italo/ 1997/ Invisible Cities/ London: Vintage Books// A poetic and imaginative prose, chaotic and specific at the same time, this classic novel harbors the allusive verbal representations of the multiple faces which bear in one single city: Venice. Through the memorabilia of the trips of Marco Polo, Calvino creates an almost tangible collection of situations that occupy space and time in Kublai Khan’s empire. It is therefore a study of the event, as well as the spectacle, in an appropriate to architecture manner. In addition, ‘Invisible Cities’ allows a reading in the co-existence and/or overlapping of the happening and the image which is nevertheless fresh; free of hard-core political associations,

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thus specific to the contemporary gear. _Cook Peter/ 2008/ Drawing: The Motive Force of Architecture/ West Essex: Wiley//

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Through the whole aggregation of nine chapters dedicated to architectural drawing and representation, the author presents a series of drawings and their creators with the simultaneous explanation of their speculations and origins. Of special interest are the parts which contain Peter Cook’s view on the evolution of the drawing mannerisms in parallel with the theory which supports them. Drawing produces images; therefore spectacular portrayals are its unavoidable outputs. By dealing with the technological developments, which affect the idea of the contemporary architectural image, in a non-aphoristic way the former Archigram member compiles his predictions and aspirations on the emerging Architecture of the invisible fields; the kind of fields that derive directly from events that create spectacles that create events and so forth. _Corner James (editor)/ 1999/ Recovering Landscape: Essays in Contemporary Landscape Architecture/ New York: Princeton Architectural Press// This is a collection contemporary landscape

of essays examining architecture, which

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includes the essay “Programming the Urban Surface” by Alex Wall. The essay is specific on the rising interest for infrastructure, as well as the strategies which need to be followed in order for Architecture to fulfill its role as a social discipline. _Debord Guy/ n.d./ Society of the Spectacle/ London: Rebel Press// As the common sense reader might guess from its title only, this book is a manifestation against what the notion and the society of the spectacle has produced and how this affects the participants and the humanity as a whole.

Written and articulated primarily as a polemic, it includes terminology, historical references and (its, and ours) contemporary relations to a model of life which is stated by the author as dominant. Guy Debord constructs a fundamental text on the theory of the Situationists, which, albeit political and unilateral in its contents, is uniquely analytical in its narrative and disturbingly accurate on quite a lot of its statements. _Leach Neil/ 1999/ The Anaesthetics of Architecture/ Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press// A critique on the fetishization and the privileging of the image as the means with which

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the contemporary architectural culture pace may be constituted, Leach’s caravan of essays aims to reproach the “intoxicating world of the image”.

The visual narcotics of the image, as opposed to the lived experiences, are responsible for a corruption which leaves the architectural discipline exposed in front of –particularlythe eyes of the users, according to the author.

Spectacle and Event are, therefore, in a confrontational status in a dialectic which favors the latter, but prejudges the “victory” of the first. However, the book comprises paradigms which the author believes that constitute an architecture which might actually exist and can change the existing route. _Nietzsche Friedrich/ 1970/ On the Genealogy of Morality & Dithyrambs of Dionysus (in Greek)/ Athens: Gkovostis//

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A collection of two of the German existentialist philosopher most influential writings, the book deals with morality, gods’ judgment and the way “artists” have no control on their creation once released in front of the eyes of the general public, in the first part. The second part is the collection of Nietzsche’s poetic references on Dionysus. The demigod Dionysus, being the principal mythological existence of the random event theory, is presented in dialogues with a human existence, which is never clarified whether it is his alter ego or a second human

bibliography + references|147

as such. Through the dialogues run matters of self-criticism, resistance, and, of course, intoxication, whether the latter is because of wine, or due to power. _Rhowbotham Kevin/ 1995/ Form London: Black Dog Publishing

to

Programme/

Being the first book of the architect and teacher Kevin Rhowbotham, the author attempts to put forward a non-conventional way of practicing Architecture.

He is persuaded that all conventional analytical and synthetic methods in the field should be revisited and altered in order for a New Architecture, free from the constrains of its Modernist past, to rise. _Thackara John/ 2005/ In the Bubble: Designing in a Complex World/ London: The MIT Press// A study on the added value of the technology and its devices to the life of the contemporary individual, this book may as well balance on the threshold between the Design and the Business categorization, but it also reveals the junctions which describe the two. The author, based on the circumstances and the situations of today, delivers ways of innovation which can still transform what is not prosperous now to what will offer better living standards to the humanity tomorrow. Parts of the book which deal with situation-based design, as well as flows and

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invisible fields are relevant to the dissertation topic, especially because they are placed in the contemporary context. _Tschumi Bernard/ 1996/ Architecture and Disjunction/ Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press// Tschumi’s writings are considered among the most important prerequisites in the field of eventbased architecture, as well as in the property of alternative readings which may be done in order for the discipline of architecture to be understood. This book is a melting pot of ideas which deal with the incidents, the experiences and the images of architecture and throughout its collection of essays (dated from 1975 to 1990), it negotiates the possibility of disjunctions through its body. Furthermore, it is a clear statement of both the precedents and the aftermath of the “The Manhattan Transcripts” by the same theorist and practitioner – Bernard Tschumi.

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_Tschumi Bernard/ 1994/ The Manhattan Transcripts/ London: Academy// Probably the architectural book with the best proportion of thoughts/ words value, Bernard Tschumi’s theoretical project consists of stories narrated in a three-square form appropriate to architecture, but initiated by films. Influential in its topic and multi-collective about the

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discussions that set off, “The Manhattan Transcripts” suggests sequence, reciprocity and conflict, among others, in an allegorical mannerism which turns out to be less and less metaphorical as architecture evolutes to the discipline which is today, and will probably be tomorrow. _Vidler Anthony (ed.)/ 2008/ Architecture: Between Spectacle and Use/ Williamstown, Massachusetts: The Clark// Social idealism, technology, and the environmental impact are the main issues that the essays in this book deal with, along with the realm of the spectacle. All were presented in a conference held in 2005 and all are products of an era that has hopefully surpassed political and moral preoccupations and is focused on aspects which enhance the role of architecture today. Whether the role of it should be commercial or spectacular whatsoever is a question that finds many answers within.

_electronic references// _WordNet/ 2006/ Princeton University Cognitive Science Laboratory/ on line Available at: http://wordnet.princeton.edu [Accessed: 12 January 2009]

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_CERN/ 2008/ LHC to Restart in 2009/ on line Available at: http://press.web.cern.ch/PressReleases/ Releases2008/PR17.08E.html [Accessed: 17 January 2009] _International Movie Database/ n.d./ Dreamers/ on line Available at: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0309987 [Accessed: 17 January 2009]

The

_Medscape Orthopaedics & Sports Medicine eJournal/ 1998/ The Acquisition of Holographic Images/ on line Available at: http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/431676_2 [Accessed: 20 January 2009]

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_Connor S/ 2008/ The Electronic Tongue with a Taste for Fine Wine/ The Independent/ on line Available at: http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/foodand-drink/news/the-electronic-tongue-with-ataste-for-fine-wine-886097.html [Accessed: 20 January 2009]

_films// _The Dreamers/ 2004/ Film/ Directed by Bernardo

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_The Matrix/ 1999/ Film/ Directed by Andy and Larry Wachowski/ USA: Groucho II Film Partnership

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