AArchitecture 37

AArchitecture 37 Recognition presupposes a subject – the recogniser; and its corresponding object – the recognised. Freud noted in Civilization and its Discontents that once an object is formed in the imagination of a subject, it never perishes, but instead remains preserved in memory until it can ‘once more be brought back to light.’ At the individual level, a moment of recognition can be defined as the conciliation of object and subject in the form of a memory drawn up.

This conciliation relies firstly on the degree of complexity of the subject and the object’s internal organisation, or their ability to be affected in many ways at once; secondly on their disposition towards registering variations, and thirdly, on the situation or context in which this process takes place.

Recognition is an associative process premised on individual experience and perception, and at the same time subjected to an everchanging set of conditions. At an interpersonal level it is part and parcel of daily social processes within particular milieus. It implies the acknowledgement of the existence, validity, or legality of an entity or group, and further informs principles of mutual identification and reciprocal trust. In many ways, recognition as an inherent human need or anthropological constant has become the locus of personal, social and political struggle. Recognition can be acceptance, fame or celebrity – it can even be misunderstood or begrudged.

RECOGNITION AArchitecture 37 1

On 23 January, Issue 37 began with an experiment that was done as a collaboration with the publication Quotidien, to approach the theme of recognition as a cultural condition that is embedded within architectural education and practice. A set of students from across the AA came together in order to dissect and diagnose the multiple forms of recognition within their methodologies, and the potential of their work to continually adapt and evolve within contemporary grounds. Rather than reaching a consensus, the conversation evolved as a collection of voices, anecdotes and perspectives; from which parallel strands of thought emerged, providing the interwoven threads for this issue.

The multiple facets of recognition are addressed in different ways by the various authors in these pages. A few articles responded to the theme’s potential for political and civic emancipation, while others had a markedly different tone through adopting a more personal and intimate approach, premised in the themes of familiarity, identity, or perception.

The authors navigate a landscape both specific to them, but also universal in the ways they deal with loss, acknowledgement, respect, esteem; and at times love and friendship.

This instalment of AArchitecture proposes an idea that our ability to recognise is being compromised – that is even more pertinent in our present context. Issue 37 frames recognition as process of perpetual transformation, and strives to question the parameters of our daily lives and the way we approach design as architects.

23 January 2019. First session of COLLABS, organised and moderated by AArchitecture and Quotidien.

AArchitecture is a magazine edited by students of the Architectural Association, published three times a year.

AArchitecture 37 Term 3, 2018– 19 www.aaschool.ac.uk

Student Editorial Team: Lola Conte, Diploma 3 Avery Chen (Jiehui), Diploma 14 Eva Ibáñez, Diploma 4 Georgia HablÜtzel, Diploma 14 Amy Glover

Editorial Board: Eva Franch i Gilabert, Director Alex Lorente, Membership Design: AA Print Studio, Oliver Long Illustration: Daria Moussavi, Waiting for The Author, AA Student

Printed by Blackmore, England Published by the Architectural Association 36 Bedford Square, London WC1B 3ES

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© 2019 All rights reserved

CHAGOS ^ THE COMMONS: Elena Pascolo

Elena is increasingly concerned about the state we’re in. She is part of Housing and Urbanism at the Architectural Association.

SOVEREIGNTY ^ STEWARDSHIP AT SEA AArchitecture 37 4

Recognition as a word was assimilated into the English language in the 1840s to denote an acknowledgement of a State’s sovereignty and, by extension, its citizens’ right to self-determination.

Through this lens of recognition, how do we then process and reflect on the ongoing legal dispute between Mauritius, the Chagossians and the United Kingdom over the Chagos Archipelago, regarding issues such as the intersection of biodiversity, big-power environmentalism, and post-colonial politics. As an instance of geopolitical agendas folding into biopolitical strategies of control, does this site serve as an example that illustrates how (ecological) stewardship operates as an extension of sovereignty?

Does the unveiling of certain aspects reveal unexpected domains, scalar and systemic registers, for us to engage in as spatial practitioners?

By deploying Kathryn Milun’s insights on terra nullius, the conceptual framework of Giorgio Agamben’s States of Exception, and Mick Smith’s provocations Against Ecological Sovereignty, this short reflection on the status of the Chagos Archipelago presents an analysis of the complex transversal conflicts of interest that extend beyond the territorial claims of the islands and the human rights abuses of the islanders. In so doing, it suggests that Chagos challenges orthodox notions of sovereignty, stewardship and the global commons. The archipelago therefore becomes a staging point from which we can revisit the commons and by implication, models of governance and forms of agency (and hence practice), no longer premised on dominion and enclosure.

From the (geopolitical) turbulence of international law governing the open seas, we might start to recalibrate our spatial practices to demonstrate what clients, briefs, and indeed projects might be as a common which is not described as a pool of resources but as a web of life, embedded in all its fullness, in our more-than-human world.

INTERSECTION: BIODIVERSITY, BIG-POWER ENVIRONMENTALISM, AND POSTCOLONIAL POLITICS The Chagos Archipelago is literally in the middle of the Indian Ocean, and because of this strategic military position, it was identified by the US in the 1960s as the preferred site for a naval base. At the height of the Cold War and the ‘winds of change’, heralding what was to be the demise of British colonial rule in Africa, it was nevertheless detached from Mauritius,

a former colony of the United Kingdom (UK). on the eve of decolonisation in 1965 it was renamed as the British Indian Ocean Territories (BIOT). The unlawful separation contravened UN Resolution 1514 on 14 December 1960 titled: Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples.

By affirming that all peoples have the right to selfdetermination, the declaration essentially protected the integrity of territories that were in the process of gaining independence from previous colonisers.

Nevertheless, what ensued in the late 60s was a shameful series of secretive agreements between the UK and the United States (US) that culminated in the archipelago being sold to the UK by Mauritius and forcibly depopulated (between 1967 and 1973) of its indigenous people. The sole purpose of this expulsion was to clear the way for the UK to lease the larger of the atolls, Diego Garcia, to the US military so that it could establish one of the most secretive and expensive military naval logistics bases ever built.

The atoll has in effect operated as a ‘logistical lilly,’ ‘listening post’ and a ‘black-site’ in a distant sea: mooring nuclear submarines; staging the handling of materiel routes into US theatres of war; hosting rendition flights; and accommodating one of the world’s best sites for geosynchronous deep-space tracking systems (spying) used by the UK’s Government Communications Headquarters and the National Security Agency of the US. The project led by James Bridle, on algorithm citizenship called Citizen Ex, reveals yet another (digital) dimension of on-going colonial domination.

Recently it has emerged that the BIOT is the owner of a .io – one of the most expensive top-level domain names. This country-code top-level domain, or ccTLD, is obscured and occluded from oversight. Citizen Ex states that ‘Diego Garcia is a case study in the ways in which secret regimes of surveillance and rendition distort geographical space. Its history is one of secret agreements and secret abuses, where the deliberate obscuration of information leads directly to the obscuration of people and the violence done to them.

The undersea cables and satellite dishes which carry today’s bits and bytes still trace the old ship routes of national empires… By following the network it is possible to illuminate other narratives of history and politics, ones which have not been seen and told so clearly before and may point the way to other futures… As we build new worlds with our technologies, knitted from fiber-optic light and lines of code, it is incumbent on us to ensure it does not reproduce the erasures and abuses of the old but properly accounts

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for the rights and liberties of every one of us’ (citizen-ex.com/stories/io). This salutary tale does much to remind spatial practitioners of the pervasive webs that ensnare us, and in so doing, reveals new domains of interception and intervention.

All of these activities occurred beyond our purview, in a nested ring of highly protected zones and international jurisdictions, including a series of Economic Exclusion Zones and the world’s largest no-take Marine Protection Area (MPA), turning the archipelago into an emblematic series of what Agamben would refer to as States of Exception.

This ‘green enclosure’ of ocean space with its ‘creeping jurisdictions’, delineates the de facto colonial expansion of territory under the guise of international security and environmental protection. The curtailment of navigational and fishing rights around naval military bases translates into what is effectively a ‘fortress conservation’ logic, and clearly illustrates the uses and abuses of conservation protocols to deploy ulterior motives. Ulterior motives, under examination, are aimed at compromising the ability to sustain an economic livelihood by Chagossians and their claim to the right to self-determination. This ostensibly collapses the geopolitical into the biopolitical as it aimed to preclude the possibility of supporting a livelihood from local resources to any Chagossians returning to settle in the atoll. It also exposes the complete failure of the UK to safeguard and protect the rights of its citizens and subjects. A succession of Conservative and Labour-led UK governments have either ignored or overturned; the UK High Court (2000), the UN Permanent Court of Arbitration (2010–15), the UN ICJ Court (2019) rulings; by deploying archaic UK law-making protocols (i.e. a nineteenth century imperial law, the Colonial Laws Validity Act, or the executive ordersin-council under Royal Prerogative Powers) or just by ignoring the UN rulings as merely advisory. Might, in this sense, is right, and sovereignty clearly works to endorse power by declaring states of emergency (be they geopolitically or environmentally driven) to overwrite democratic norms and procedures. The UK and US are still getting away with their illegal land grab and the human rights abuses of a population they evicted unlawfully and although the ICJ has recently ruled (25 February 2019) against the UK, nobody is being held to account. Abuses of sovereignty and stewardship are at sea, unmoored and unsanctioned.

Intersections between postcolonial politics and environmentalism start to striate the surface of the waters around the islands. What other undercurrents

are affecting the judicial frameworks of exclusion and the incorporation of these territories into wider webs of accumulation? Why is it that the cost of establishing the MPA was funded by the Bertarelli Foundation, which has extensive industrial links in biotechnology and life sciences? How is it that the Pew Charitable Trust, which was recently embroiled in funding the Texas Public Policy Foundation’s Fueling Freedom Programme that seeks to ‘explain the forgotten moral case for fossil fuels’ and who also express scepticism towards the scientific consensus on climate change, is such a large benefactor supporting ocean reserves and consequently wields such leverage in the International Seabed Authority (ISA)? The link between big-pharma, philanthropic institutions and international institutions like the ISA and the United Nations Convention of the Law of the Seas (UNCLOS III), tasked with the so-called stewardship of the ‘common heritage’ of our oceans, needs to be more transparent. Influential lobbyists appear to be granted privileged access to leverage revisions of juridical protocols and contractual arrangements opening up our oceans’ genetic material and minerals to be exploited by a limited few.

The evolution of Chagos from ‘logistics lillypad’ to ‘black–site’ and now ‘green fortress,’ alludes to the intersection of statist agendas, corporate interests and ambiguous environmental claims. It forces us to acknowledge the contradictory processes at play in our oceans, which in turn trigger a larger discussion about what the global commons are, and who or what they ultimately serve.

CROSSOVER: CUSTOMARY LAW AND POLYCENTRIC GOVERNANCE In The Political Uncommons: The Cross-Cultural Logic of the Global Commons (Routledge 2011) Millun reveals the paucity of territorial, spatial and legal imagination that could inspire the construction of a model of stewardship to govern our collective biodiversity. Her work clarifies that the basis of the UNCLOS III, although referencing the work of Arvid Pardo and his definition of the Common Heritage Principle (CHP) which was a departure from the mare liberum concept dating back to the seventeenth century, is still premised on a colonial understanding of territory based on registers of emptiness, i.e. terra nullius, and therefore, up for grabs. This reframing exposes the shortcomings underpinning current international law governing our common heritage.

In so doing she unmoors the dominance of sovereignty

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Fig 1

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Fig 2

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in qualifying who or what stewardship serves and, shows that the sea is still open for exploitation, albeit ratified and checked by international oversight.

Her counterargument posits that we should look at a cross-cultural register of tenure and decision-making procedures enshrined in customary law that have dealt with concepts of stewardship and the commons from a non-statist starting point – or indeed the endgame of dominion and domination. A totally unorthodox spatial imaginary referencing practices from customary law would, she contends, enable us to formulate tenure and governance models which would challenge both sovereignty, stewardship and hence, international law.

Would this signal a Grotian Moment that would define a new international code of commons conduct, be it in the terrestrial, digital, or biological spectrum?

To this end, Millun’s work aligns itself with Elinor Ostrom’s polycentric governance model as a protocol for managing the commons → 6. This disentanglement of stewardship from statist sovereignty opens up the ability to frame the fiduciary duties of our ‘common heritage’ along models of customary law that oppose Western notions of dominion and dominance.

Therefore, in presenting the intersection of various power asymmetries, Chagos alludes not to an impasse between conflicting interests, but to a rupture that invites us to introduce insights from the fields of anthropology and ecology in addressing the failures of international law in protecting the commons.

SOVEREIGNTY AND STEWARDSHIP LAID BARE Agamben was instrumental in exposing the antipolitical dimension of sovereignty through the concept of the State of Exception. This he elucidated through the figure of the camp: a literal and juridical domain of exception decreed by the state through its right to suspend the normal rule of law and political activities under a perceived emergency or threat. This allows the state to usurp itself into the governance of every aspect of our lives as a means to secure peace, security and stability. By overwriting established legal norms and principles, exceptionalism suspends and hollows out existence to bare life. Politics is replaced by biopolitics, the governmental management and control of the biological life of populations. This state of subjugation and the inability to contest power is not an exception but the rule because it becomes normalised and diffused. Sovereignty then, is profoundly antipolitical as by definition; it erases collective and individual agency.

Smith’s work Against Ecological Sovereignty: Ethics, Biopolitics, and Saving the Natural World (Minnesota Press 2011), builds on Agamben’s definition of sovereignty as not only the power to proclaim the exception, but to show how, ‘ecologically speaking, …(it is) about which state gets to decide how and when ...natural resources are exploited.’ → 12 By extension, Smith clarifies how ecological sovereignty and biopolitics have reduced nature to resource or ‘standing reserve’ and how human exceptionalism prevents us from embedding ourselves in complex more-than-human webs of life. Sovereignty is not only anti-political; it is also anti-nature.

But what of stewardship? Is this not a benign, altruistic form of governance? Smith, together with Neil Ascherson, argues that stewardship is a remnant of paternalist and pastoral tendencies that re-inscribes human domination over nature. In this sense stewardship is a more ‘pastoral model of metaphysical or political power’ → 12, and as an apparatus of sovereignty it can be mobilised under the (dis)guise of environmental disasters and impending biodiversity crises, to substantiate the enclosure of vast tracts of nature and the commons. Ecological crises will, in the future, become the rationale to implement States of Emergency and he predicts that ‘we might find that the global war on terror will segue seamlessly into the crisis of global warming’ → 12. These paradoxical tensions pivot around the Chagos archipelago, unmooring (casting off ) our assumptions about sovereignty and stewardship’s ability to secure peace, stability and indeed ex/subsistence. Sovereignty and stewardship are left literally and metaphorically at sea.

‘The state of exception is thus not so much a spatiotemporal suspension as a complex topological figure in which, not only the exception and the rule, but also the state of nature and law (outside and inside) pass through one another.’ → 5 If Agamben gave us the figure of the camp to understand the dark arts of sovereignty and power, then could Chagos give us the spatial figure of the archipelago, not as an island state of exception but as a distributed surface of polycentric decision-making, a res communia of mutual benefits embedded in a web of more-than-human life, as opposed to a delimited zone of economic or geopolitical enterprise?

However paralysing these accounts may appear, both Millun and Smith, in unravelling the political principle of both political and ecological sovereignty, leverage an opportunity for us to change the basis of ecological relations. They both recognise that to decolonise physical and canonical territories would require us to reject sovereignty (and stewardship)

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and to reclaim ecology. Smith argues that sustaining a place for ecological politics and saving the natural world both depend on ‘rejecting the anti political and anti ecological principle of sovereignty’. → 12 What stems from this are models of governance that require us to envisage ecological communities in very different ways. Ecological ethics then serve to recast governance, dominion and indeed how we delimit domains in an embedded set of relations. Radical ecology is proposed as a radical form of politics because it offers the most fundamental challenge to the established metaphysical and political orders of things and allows us to push back against an all-encompassing biopolitical future.

FROM SOVEREIGNTY AND STEWARDSHIP TO EMBEDDEDNESS Cultural anthropology, political philosophy and radical ecology offer insights into how we might situate ourselves in a more-than-human world.

They offer epistemologies that do not subscribe to orthodox narratives of sovereignty and stewardship and, in so doing, induces a recognition of their inability to respond to a world that is increasingly volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous (VUCA).

This VUCA world presents a ‘problem for national sovereignty (which) seems to be the inescapable

1 Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception, (The University of Chicago Press, translated by Kevin Attell, 2005) 2 Pierre Bélanger and Alexander Scott Arroyo, Logistics Islands: The Global Supply Archipelago and the Topologics of Defense, (Prism: A Journal of the Centre for Complex Operations 3, 2012) p 54–75 3 Richard Falk, The Grotian Quest, (‘International Law: A Contemporary Perspective’, Richard Falk, Friedrich Kratochwil, & Saul H. Mendlovitz, 1985), p 36, 37–38

4 Boutrous Boutrous-Ghali, A Grotian Moment, (Fordham International Law Journal Volume 18, Issue 5, Article 3, 1994), p 1609–1616 5 Kathryn Millun, The Political Uncommons: The Cross-Cultural Logic of the Global Commons, (Routledge, 2011) 6 Elinor Ostrom, Beyond markets and states: polycentric governance of complex economic systems,(American Economic Review, Volume 100, 2010), p 641–72.

7 Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for

territorial permeability of causes and effects in an ecologically interconnected world. Ecological modernisers regard globalisation and its ecological effects as ushering in more or less novel forms of governance’.→ 12 Could a polycentric and distributed form of alliance and association offer us a way beyond States of Exception, and allow us to enter into webs of embeddedness?

This reframing is about formulating new subjectivities that are not premised on human exceptionalism and in so doing, anticipates formulations of reciprocity, trust, consequence and agency. Ethics will no doubt be fundamental in charting the outlines of this domain and in informing the juridical and ethical codes of conduct within (spatial) practices whose unintended consequences affect our well-being let alone existence. And yes, the unveiling of sovereignty and stewardship does reveal unexpected domains, scalar and systemic registers, for us to engage in as spatial practitioners in a commons that is not described as a pool of resources, but as a web of life, in all its (embedded) fullness, in our more-than-human world. I conclude by claiming that spatial practice is also facing its own Grotian Moment, in which the ethical codes that govern our making, shaping and being in the (more-than-human) world, need revising and reimagining. Climate changes everything.

Collective Action, (Cambridge University Press, 1990) 8 John Pilger, Stealing a Nation, (Granada Television, 2004) 9 Peter H Sand, The Chagos Archipelago Cases: Nature Conservation Between Human Rights and Power Politics, (The Global CommunityYearbook of International Law & Jurisprudence, 2013), p 125­–150 10 Ibid.

11 Peter H. Sand, Stephen Allen (book review), The Chagos Islanders and

International Law, (European Journal of International Law, Volume 26, Issue 2, 2015), p 573–578 12 Mick Smith, Against Ecological Sovereignty: Ethics, Biopolitics, and Saving the Natural World, (Minnesota Press, 2011) 13 David Vine, Island of Shame: The Secret History of the U.S. Military Base on Diego Garcia, (Princeton University Press, 2009)

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Fig 3

Fig 1 Turtle Cove and T-Site, 2006 Fig 2 Tent City Airfield with Camp Justice in the Foreground

Fig 3 B1 (USA Airforce) takeoff during Operation Enduring Freedom. Photo by SrA Rebeca M.Luquin.

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Flowing Dream Sequence

Timothy Tan

Timothy Tan (AADipl ARB/RIBA Part ll) is a 2017 graduate based in Oslo. Along with his academic peers, he conducts workshops across several countries focusing his research on the impact of material culture and its immediacy on urban continuity. He has also worked in Singapore, London, Dubai and Shanghai with development projects, private houses and sub-rural conversions.

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Tarkovsky’s final Soviet film Stalker (1979), depicts an expedition of three men: a writer, professor and the eponymous stalker, leaving the confines of a foul, indeterminate Eastern European city and venturing into a tranquil rural setting. The writer and professor are guided by the stalker who leads them into the core of the Zone, a mysteriously confidential site haunted by a late disaster. Travelling through unnerving areas filled with debris created by modern society, they eventually reach the Room,

a space that allegedly possesses the ability to fulfil one’s inner-most desire.

The expedition is a metaphysical one, one that traverses an uncannily post-apocalyptic landscape that composes a highly elevated cinematic experience packed with layers of aural patterns and visual motifs.

A moment where this is particularly evident is during the tracking scene over the stream – both a literal one and a figurative one of consciousness – during the stalker’s dream (01:24:52 – 01:28:18).

The chapter begins with the Stalker lying down with his torso flat against the grass, almost as if he is listening to the heartbeat of the earth, with his eyes peeled open.

A voice is heard reciting a passage from the biblical Book of Revelations (6:12–17), chronicling the impending end of humanity as if narrating a childhood fairytale.

The following sequence shifts to a sepia-tone, prompting the stalker’s subjective and subconscious viewpoint. This acts as a signifier for the transition to dream-time; into a subjective state of perception, that assists in framing the estrangement of nature and abandoned objects. The motion of panning momentarily pauses during this sequence, in order to establish and emphasise the proximity of the camera in respect to the subject as it focuses in on him; symbolic of the mind, the expanse of his head is made monumental with his eyelids shut.

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The following sequence is a gradual and calm ascent from the subject’s head – a visual allusion to a metaphysical out-of-body experience. The fluid sonic environment; rich with aural motifs, primes the viewer for the ensuing glide along the water bed. Everything seems to drift slowly among the detritus. The first discernible object apparent to the viewer is a syringe; a representation of a man’s addiction. He is addicted to the Zone and, despite a recent release from prison as well as a great deal of fatherly love for his disabled daughter, he remains a slave to his passion. A metal bowl glistens from the reflection of the sun, displacing the sky and clouds underwater. An image of the landscape is shown upside down – all these are signs of nature that we are not part of, yet we recognise. A fish bowl stays buoyant above a mirror. The fishes appear to live freely in the river, and yet they remain confined within the circular glass wall – freedom is an illusion. A tin box containing a steriliser and coins…

More objects continue to slide past, in and out of the dreamscape – an extractor, an old picture of a saint, more coins, a spring, a gun – all of these items collectively alluding to the war and violence that took place during the Soviet years. The number 28 from a wall calendar, rusty machinery parts, barb wires and various other obscure objects appear – remnants and vestiges of an industrial age gone wrong; almost ominous of an age to come. Each visual is carefully curated to evoke certain themes and issues, and yet offers no specificity in its meaning, leaving it to the viewer’s own interpretation.

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The camera arrives at the cessation of its tracking sequence. The final image reached is a hand lying motionless by the water’s edge. The viewer is led to believe that this is the Stalker’s hand, though this in itself is spatially conflicting. In spite of the dissonance that he or she feels, there is an awareness of the Zone’s spatial trickery and the dreamlike qualities of the mise-enscène. Tarkovsky employs the subjective logic residing in the viewer’s perception, memory, dream, instead of the logic of the subject which might not necessarily be linked logically. Rather, it is the flow of thought and subliminal content that connects these disparate, incongruent objects together inwardly.

The next still transports the viewer to a colour image of the totemic black dog standing in front of a large dark man- made cavern; the zoom technique beckons the gaze of the viewer. The Stalker wakes up in the next scene, as a 3:13 minutes monologue commences. The narration tells a brief story but abruptly takes a philosophical turn abruptly, ruminating on the meaning of life. Once again, the stalker’s head occupies the frame, but in this particular instance he turns away from the camera and stares into the distance. The film sequence switches to a close up of a miniaturised landscape, hovering along a rocky surface until it reaches a grey gradient. In just this specific moment, the viewer loses their perception of depth.

The framing of the still chooses to remain ambiguous as to whether the camera is on the edge a cliff capturing a spatial abyss, or just pensively close to the surface. The natural scale of the subject of gaze is distorted and physical space becomes indecipherable. In such a bewildering position, it is left up to the audience’s imagination to conjure and guess for themselves.

Eventually, the view rotates and a distant landscape emerges; the serenity of the entire vista is revealed, and the location where the entire sequence was filmed is finally disclosed to the viewer.

The realisation dawns that all this while, the stalker has been narrating his appeal and his reasoning for the importance of art to us.

Shortly after, the film sequence reverts back to the writer and professor and gradually softens to black as the scene ends.

The use of the elements wind, fire, water and earth is consistent throughout the film. Water in particular is emphasised in this dream sequence; its stillness in the form of a stream gives the viewer a certain sense of suspension in time; and it is present in subsequent parts of the narrative as a neutralising force. Unwanted objects are dumped into the water, and thereby lose their functions, evidenced in scenes where the stalker drops the writer’s gun into the water, and another with the professor throwing components of his bomb into the water – which renders them harmless. The neutralising effect of water is fully realised when a round of bullets is fired at the trio.

At this point the water swallows the ballistics, absolving them from danger. These objects have been voided of their purpose, joining the accumulation of other now-redundant objects along the river bed; the viewer adjusts to perceiving them as just another artefact of humanity.

Tarkovsky takes full command over our perception of time, reducing the speed of movement of the camera, so that the audience has synchrony with the characters’ stasis and low activity, and experiences a tempo that is comfortably unfamiliar.

This alters our perceptual framework, rendering a new way of absorbing the cinematic visuals that convey surreal themes such as that of dreams, supernatural occurrences and science-fiction tendencies – all of which are ambiguous and not quite yet unrecognisable.

1 Donato Totaro Andrei, Time and the Film Aesthetics of Andrei Tarkovsky

2 Thomas Redwood, Tarkovsky’s Poetics of Cinema

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3 Andrei Tarkovsky, Sculpting in Time

Jack Isles

Jack Isles (Part 1 Architect and Research Fellow at the Vertical Geopolitics Lab), holds a BArch from RMIT University and is currently undertaking the AA Diploma at the AA. While previously working for Urban-Think Tank ETH Zürich and Rogers Stirk Habour + Partners, Jack has also worked across a wide range of large scale infrastructure developments. Published in periodicals such as Kerb Journal and JOA, Jack’s work interrogates the political and economic systems that define architecture at a local and territorial scale.

Perception of Depth At its highest point, Mount Meharry (1,249m) surveys the low slung mining fields of Western Australia’s Pilbara, an area more than 500,000 km2, (roughly the size of Spain). Embedded within what is thought to be the world’s oldest geological member, vast mineral deposits bend and curb beneath the adjacent earth. These fertile soils rich in gold, copper, zinc and iron have become home to a network of rails, roads and cities that in 2015 generated a 50 per cent share of the global steel market. Dotted across the land, each city and its associated parts form an intricate mechanism of logistical distribution, instrumental in its own territorial division. However, its spatial configuration is not only determined ‘by new industrial forms based on global supply chains’ → 1, but also by the means of imaging through which we scan and visualise what lies beneath. In an economy dependent on the extraction of its own geological deposits, the optics of mineral recognition have unwittingly become tools of architectural design.

The unquenchable lust for the extraction of resources has both driven and been a driver of urban expansion since its initial conception, with the spatial organisation of our resource dependant urban models being historically explored through the tools and cartographic lexicon of geography. The earth’s hidden secrets and commodities throughout history

has therefore been read through the undulation of its surface. Driven by two dimensional techniques in cartographic representation, towns and cities were swept across the map into vast dunes of urbanity, resting in the cradle of a resource abundant ecology. However, today the physical markers in space to which geographic cartographies clung, charting the flow and course of resources and the urban alike, have been rapidly replaced in favour of digitalised representations, often imperceptible to the human eye. At the same time, our insatiable thirst for resource-based growth continues driving the eyes of the city deeper and deeper, beyond the earth’s surface.

Magnetotullurics (MT) has come to be the optic through which much of our understanding of the earth’s deep crust is rendered visible. It operates as a passive technology, measuring the earth’s electromagnetic field – a naturally occurring sphere created by the striking of lightning unto the earth’s surface. The acoustic measurement of its echo through MT allows us to infer the location, density and resistivity of the earth’s geological substructures and mineral deposits.

Through the coordination of this technology and other remote sensing tools, such as satellite imagery analysis, mineral compositions can be visualised in the form of complex three-dimensional point cloud models. To borrow from Douglas

Kahn, ‘Magnetotullurics acts as an anthropic traducer, transduction being the movement of one state of energy to another. In this case rendering the earth’s oblique properties perceptible to the human eye’ . → 2 In 2013, the Australian Federal Government announced what will come to be the largest Magnetotulluric study in history. Conducted by Geoscience, Australia’s state geological department, the study will aim to scan the entire continent to a depth of 10 km, since mineral identification beyond such depth is largely considered useless by economic definition. The remarkable desire to image such an expanse of earth to such depth underpins an ever-growing binary link between systems for mineral recognition and Australia’s remote urban landscapes.

The identification of prospective profit buried beneath the earth dictates regional modes of governance, environmental welfare and the architectural composition of Australia’s remote mining landscapes.

Australia’s urban networks surrounding resource extraction have grown to an unprecedented scale, in accordance with an expediential growth in both population numbers and global resource demands. Cities, infrastructures for mobility, and networks of access and egress have both witnessed and characterised the rise of a new frontier in urban design, cast in the shadow of our optics of

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Fig 1 and Fig 2: Charting the eyes of Australia’s mining landscapes.

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geological measurement. These new urban models trace the fabric of our digital projections often without any form of conscious reflection, with architectural criticality instead automated into the construction of geological representations, a notion often neglected in architectural discourse. Christophe Girot, Chair of Landscape Architecture at Swiss institute ETH, highlights the prevalence of geological Point Cloud technology in the fabrication of our contemporary architecture as, ‘In a field of work where 2D layering, projection, and zoning were the rule in the twentieth century, we have now entered an age where geo-referenced 3D visualising has become the state of art and an absolute necessity of the dynamic modelling of large-scale projects.’→ 3 The urgency for an integration of point cloud modelling and the Magnetotulluric sensor is nowhere more apparent than across the vast mining landscapes of Australia’s Pilbara.

Large privatised mining outposts dominate the region and punctuate the landscape, mining ever deeper, continuously driven by the seemingly unending appetite of the global economy. These nodes of extraction form the nuclei of a complex network dedicated to its own service and continued maintenance. Cities such as Port Headland and Karratha (meaning good earth in the native language of the region), accommodate the service industry dedicated to the production of the mines. The domestic infrastructure, which used to house some 15,000 workers in Karratha alone, along with the logistical networks linking the workers to the mines and the recreational outlets provided by the municipality scattered across this system, cast an image of modern urbanity inescapably in demand of critical reflection. The spatial logic of these arrangements is conceived precisely in the reflection of the digital models of mineral

recognition. These models serve the logics of speculation, through which mines are placed in relation to prospective geological structures and the towns which service them positioned for optimum efficiency in their service of geological exploration.

Unlike other contemporary models of the city, the urban fabric of these networks of extraction is often temporary in nature, contingent on the flux and flow of the mines’ production.

Within this void of permanence, architectural discourse has little input on the quality of these spaces or their domestic nature. Each temporary camp or city, which houses the miners, reflects the technological dynamism of the digital flows that characterise it.

Shifts in market value based on readings of the earth dictate the volume of these temporal dwellings, determining the definition of Pilbara’s population, and the overall form of this emergent urbanity. However, as cities of the region grow in both scale and size, their capacity for the consolidation of new architectural potentialities is rarely discussed.

Throughout urban histories, localised resource discoveries have widely become catalysts for the consolidation of contemporary cities, most notably the gold rush of California and the development of its urban fabric during its poignant era.

The new-found role of little known digitalised technologies within this process has come to engender a different condition. Discussions on the potential future growth and investment of these outcrops are largely mitigated through the current tools of observation and the institutions which maintain them, a process in which the role of the architect is seldom present. The institutionalised nature of contemporary forms of measurement and recognition has thus succeeded in the alienation of architectural discourse from the practice of modern city making, begging a question of

agency within the discipline at large in a future driven by the resource fixated eyes of our own digitalised imagination.

Australia’s Pilbara is a unique yet not unprecedented example of a spatial practice driven by the didactic influence of observational technologies. As mineral recognition and resource extraction become ever more central to the growth of urbanity at large, it is imperative that architectural practice reflects on the capacity of these conditions to consolidate and expand our urban fabric. Could a new agency for architecture be reclaimed in the interrogation of the operational tools and systems of measurement which drive urban processes and their expansion?

Throughout history architectural practice has been carved by its own representational techniques and their counterparts in measurement and observation. Today spatial design is no longer liberated through its capacity to visualise and image but instead subservient to technological methodologies, of which very little is being critically discussed. Digitalised forms of observation have come to dictate the architecture of our imagination, one that defines that of our cities. In order to reclaim agency within the operative processes of spatial practice at all scales, the contemporary practice of architecture should not adhere to the dogma of its traditional strictures or to the marginalised remnants of irrelevant disciplines. Embracing the final frontiers of visibility as a fertile field of speculation will broaden the horizons of spatial practice’s ever-shifting expanses.

1 Christophe Girot, Scales of Topology in Landscape Architecture, (New Geographies: Scales of the Earth, Vol. 04, 2011), p 156 2 Douglas Kahn, Earth Sound Earth Signal: Energies and Earth Magnitude in the Arts, (New Geographies: Scales of the Earth, University of California Press, 2013) 3 Charles Waldheim and Alan Berger, Logistical Landscapes, (Landscape Journal vol. 7, University of Wisconsin Press, 2008), p 1

Recognition 19

Recognising the Empty Global City:

Karl Herdersch

Karl is currently a Third Year student at the AA. He has an interest in industrial fabrication, automation and material ecology and is currently working on numerous collaborative projects including furniture and industrial design. He has previously worked producing independent films, fashion and technology startups.

Some Thoughts on London 20,000+ LONDON HOMES REPORTED EMPTY IN 2018 (Source: Empty Homes)

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YOU WA LK AND ST UF F HAP P E NS

Richard Wentworth is interested in things that are not entirely visible.

He finds connections between textures, objects, materials and subjects whilst walking through the city of London and photographing its ambiguities.

He explains ‘you walk and stuff happens.’ So, in needing to write this text for AArchitecture amongst other deadlines – I went for a walk, not knowing what would follow.

I leave the AA studios.

GHOST TOWERS = E M P T Y T O W ER S

The Masters of Architecture make towers. They are usually the most impressive examples of technology and ‘progress’ – incredibly tall, increasingly light and if uninterrupted, completed at great speed.

The majority of these remain empty.

With the passing of time, capitalism encourages blurred global economics and political evasion. These ensure a series of planning protocols such as land grabs, demolition and speculative building. This reality enables the city to remain available to the market; allowing corporate and private modes of ownership to encounter one another.

This condition is hard to recognise.

An incomplete, slippery system where the rules of engagement are not set.

These behaviours are best described in relation to the tactical game Go. This game is played on the intersections of a grid with unlimited pieces – each player uses their pebble to form territories, vacating the interior when the perimeter is closed. The players of speculative building magnify these tactics, taking dense portions of the city and creating a territory that is left vacant.

I look up from Tottenham Court Road station and see Centre Point.

In the last six months Mike Hussey, the CEO of property developer Almacantar, has taken Centre Point’s 82 luxury flats off the market. This is a result of offers well below market value, ranging from £1.8m pounds for an entry level one-bedroom flat to £55m for a five-bedroom penthouse. Similarly, all 10 of the £30m to £50m apartments at the top of the Shard have failed to sell. But it is important to understand that the popular perception of these as ‘ghost towers’ is inaccurate. These buildings were never inhabited – and in the case of Centre Point it is the second failed occupation; London’s empty skyscraper, empty for over a decade as a result of not being attractive enough for high-paying office tenants. It is revealing to see that its reprogramming, from offices to speculative high-cost housing, has not been successful.

Back to the game of Go. Its scoring system can compare to the corporate actors and the accumulation of capital in speculative building. Area, empty slots, and quantity of pieces are all used to determine the winner. Increasing the area, decreasing square footage of a unit and developing in multiple areas on the various scales from the city to the globe add value to property portfolios. This does not involve selling the units immediately, as they accumulate value over time. (This is overly simplified as I am not an economist – seemingly whether the property sells becomes hardly the point. Money is made elsewhere, a place less recognisable).

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TH E PROJEC T OF L O ND O N: S PECULATIVE BUIL D I NG / C O NST RU C T I O N C I T Y

William Morgan’s map of London made after the Great Fire of 1676 is one of the clearest examples of how cartography and quasi-scientific mapping became the fundamental driving force behind speculative building. The project depicts an image of London that did not account for the persistent social problems, such as poverty and disease, resulting from the immense pressure of city expansion, as well as the demands of its off-shore colonial activity in the United Provinces of the East India Company. The map performs more as a rendering of the patron’s vision and mindset in the seventeenth century. William Morgan’s master, John Ogilby, had been appointed sworn viewer, making the surveyors dutiful through their employment to map the boundaries of property ownership prior to the fire.

London would subsequently struggle to build and remodel itself for the following 200 years as a result of the tactical ignorance of planners, whose authorities focused on the continued expansion of British colonies.

Cut to 2019: The project of London as an Alpha ++ global city of innovation and business is constantly in motion. When walking through the city, I am continuously hit by the noise and interruptions of construction. As I move towards Soho, I am stopped to allow a succession of liquid concrete pours, filling large pits for the intended Crossrail development. I look up to my left to a towering steel megastructure, ignored by tourists and workers on their way to lunch, marching to the soundtrack of drills and reversing trucks. These scenes are not uncommon.

Since 2015, the UK has beaten Germany in construction volume, making the rate of building the highest in Europe. The construction boom has been aided by higher definition surveying, geolocation tools, BIM, advanced analytics and algorithmically organised construction planning. Yet, I want to focus more specifically on another (bi)product of construction – dust.

Nine Elms, the Dubai-on-Thames. The mega-development sent levels of airborne particles souring way above the legal limits. Vauxhall’s monitoring stations recorded spikes in the levels of PM10 particles that were the result of dust and soot from building activity – the product of diesel emissions from generators on site and concrete pours. Concrete particles are linked to respiratory and musculoskeletal problems – especially silicosis, a condition with similar symptoms as emphysema. Silica dust, present in concrete, is the prime cause and it hangs in the air around building sites. The more incomplete, complex and toxic the city becomes, the more value there is to be extracted.

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S TAGING VACANC Y Cut back to summer 2018: whilst resisting sleep at the back of the dark auditorium at the Serpentine Pavilion’s Work Marathon, I was slapped awake by Saskia Sassen lecturing on the role of the algorithm and invisible property ownership. Algorithms, in reconstituting our material world, make building ownership and vacancy ‘invisible to the eye. So that the actual operational element is in an invisible zone’, despite the object that feeds that algorithm being a huge building. She exposes the invisible history-in-making that I am trying to write about – a process where emptiness has value. So, what does this look like?

There is a staging involving the use of domestic plants and lighting to emulate vacancy. It is a response to cover up, conceal and create a sense of community, keeping property values up and investment incoming. It is common practice especially in the disturbingly artificial development of ‘place making’, where dense areas of streets and history are eradicated and replaced with a patchwork of structures designed by Master Architects. Nine Elms advertising reads: ‘We believe (…) MASSIVE ICON, INTIMATE SPACE (…) the good life.’

My cynicism is not an opposition towards progress. However, the staging of inhabitation that is packaged as lifestyle urbanism in the form of cut and paste market stalls and awkward music events does not equate to the culture that was erased. This facade covers up the reality of Nine Elms: that no-one lives there.

The new owners of the incomplete global city are usually only temporarily existing within it. Pressure from the current Conservative Party in the House of Lords has led to Theresa May promising the draft legislation of a register of beneficial owners by this summer, to be exposed publicly by 2021. This breaks the secrecy surrounding the foreign ownership of British property in a vague attempt to prevent the corrupt use of the UK property market to ultimately hide wealth (in the wake of the Panama Papers leak in 2016).

OP TIM ISM A ND R EC O G NI T I O N As I am sat drinking my half at the French House on Dean Street (the end of my short walk), I write down the following in my sketchbook: Can we design with the empty city in mind? Can these buildings be adapted?

Can we design understanding the implications of construction, material ecology and reuse whilst reducing health risks?

Can we propose a city vision that is inclusive to all that exists within the city?

I don’t have the answers to any of the questions I wrote in my notebook – but they seemingly provoke a series of responses – historic, theoretical and practical.

I’ll leave the above questions as an act of recognition.

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CURATED BY

QUOTIDIEN A

7 days, 7 curators, 7 images.

QUOTIDIEN is a newsletter broadcasting the work from current and past students and members of the Architectural World. Subscribe at www.quotidien.uk

B AArchitecture 37 24

C

D

Recognition 25

E

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A B C D E F G

Michael Ho Summer Islam Alexandra Shatalova Sofiia Astrina Alison Cheng Ryan Cook Chiyan Ho

F

G

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Dear

Unknown

I was in the hospital on the night of 2 January 2019. I did not know it at that moment, but I unintentionally committed myself to a new year’s resolution. That night, I was given a bracelet to identify me during my stay. I felt myself constantly staring at the ‘F’ on this bracelet. This bracelet did not correctly identify me. I was never identified correctly, not for a single one of those 24 years also on the bracelet. I didn’t realise it at that moment, but my new year’s resolution was not to have a twenty-fifth one like this. A month later, I came out as a non-binary transgender individual.

I told people who I felt safe around not to use her/she pronouns anymore, and to start calling me by they/them pronouns. The first week, I didn’t hear a single they/them or she/her, I think I wasn’t in any conversations that talked about me. The second week, I would get a few misgenders and a lot of awkward reshuffling of grammar. By the third week, I think most people forgot and returned to addressing me with female pronouns.

Should I have reminded people? Should I have been actively correcting them?

But then, I would be interrupting every single conversation while simultaneously outing myself to people who didn’t know about my gender identity.

The fact is that language simply doesn’t accommodate for me and most people – it is difficult to restructure language around one person. I have even received complaints that it is too hard to do and that I shouldn’t get my hopes up. I know no one is trying to hurt me with their words but I really need people to do their part to chip away at the hyper-gendered society we live in. I need this effort to be made in order to exist.

Anonymous

Anonymous is a student at the AA.

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A few weeks after coming out, my wallet was stolen. I filed a police report online and was pleased to find that they had the option: ‘prefer not to say’, which is the option closest to other. With most forms, I absolutely resent ticking the gender box. With this particular one, there was also an option to write your own title instead of the usual drop-down menu usually found in online forms. I wrote Mx, which is a gender-neutral title that was developed in the UK around the 1980s.

A couple of days later I got a reply from the Metropolitan police:

Update on your Metropolitan Police Crime Reference number – From: CMS@met.police.uk

Dear Unknown, We are sorry to hear that you have been the victim of crime. An investigator from the Metropolitan Police has looked carefully at your case and we are sorry to say that, with the evidence and leads available, it is unlikely that it will be possible to identify those responsible. We have therefore closed this case.

I was disappointed, not for the missing wallet, as I knew, it was unlikely that they would be able to recover it, but for how they addressed me. I told them specifically how I didn’t understand, even with an automated email generator, they could exchange ‘Mx’ with ‘unknown’. I thought they had made a system to accommodate me, but it seemed that whatever I told them didn’t mean a thing.

I felt that I had misinterpreted the drop-down menu; ‘Prefer not to say’ actually suggested anonymity, not an ‘other’ gender.

Now that I have lost my wallet: I have lost almost all forms of identification.

I will have to reapply for all these forms of identification again. I will have to present myself to someone and ask them to give me my identity again. Most likely I will be assigned female again and experience that moment in the hospital again and again and again. My twenty-fifth year isn’t off to a great start.

Looking back, my whole life has been an endless cycle of proclamation and denial. As a child, I severely wanted to be a boy, but I never became one because I wasn’t allowed to. I just didn’t want to be a girl. I didn’t know what else to be.

As I got older, I accepted the fact that I didn’t want to be a boy. I made myself as comfortable as I could being a girl because I knew there was no alternative. Later on, I felt as if I was nothing. I didn’t trust my own feelings.

A few years ago, I started to try to ‘come out’. I told people that I had learnt about something called gender dysphoria. I think I came out about 10 times across five years, sometimes multiple times to the same people. None of these attempts worked. No one knew what it was and how to react to it. I mean, I didn’t even know what I was – I only found out what non-binary was about two years ago and that I am considered transgender about two months ago – I could only describe what I felt.

No one took it seriously and nothing changed. Can you imagine? I told people I am not a girl, and then they would address me as part of a collective group of ladies. I told people I am not a girl, and then they offered me lipstick before going to a club. I told people so many times, and then they would tell me off for not being lady-like. It is not even about semantics; I want to be viewed as who I am and for people to accept my identity.

‘I’d prefer not to say.’

This is what I had been doing for 24 years.

And now I am saying it, it seems more like this: ‘We would prefer you not to say, because we don’t know how to respond otherwise.’

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Why does it seem impossible to understand something so simple? I found that people would only listen when I had a panic attack or expressed my fear.

It seemed they didn’t understand my dysphoria until they saw it manifest itself in front of them. Perhaps they simply didn’t get it because I always made it sound like it wasn’t a big deal. Reflecting upon all these attempts to come out, I tried to tell people this casually in order to protect them from knowing how much I was suffering internally. I didn’t want to burden people with my issues because I felt that navigating my gender dysphoria was solely my responsibility. I wasn’t ready to admit that I was in pain those years. I didn’t want to say I was suffering out loud because saying it out loud made it real. And if I kept quiet long enough, it might not be real. It might be imaginary. It might just go away. Since coming out, I have said so many things I would have never said out loud before. I didn’t want them to be real but now that they are out, they are real, and I need to do something about it.

When I finally came out this year, many people told me I was brave. It wasn’t on purpose. I was going to casually slide in ‘I’m non-binary. It’s not a big deal’ but this time, something snapped. I just couldn’t be that relaxed person anymore.

I didn’t choose to show my pain; it was too much pressure and it just came out.

My biggest fear now is that this coming out attempt, which seems to have worked, for once, will be forgotten once again. I have never been so scared before but I have to be even braver now. I have no choice – I need to assert myself in order to socially transition. This the sole reason why I am writing this.

Currently, I am an unknown. I only know what feels wrong and not what feels right. I don’t have the references. I don’t know what to do to grow up. I don’t feel that I have authority to assert my identity. I have never known what to do in regards to physical appearance and as a result I have never done anything my whole life; I was too scared to make the wrong decision. Since I came out, I mustered enough courage to align my physical appearance to match my identity. I didn’t really know how to do this, but I continue to experiment to find a place that I am comfortable with. The difference it has made is enormous – I really did not foresee this.

Looking at old pictures of myself, I find myself thinking: ‘Who is that person?’

‘They look so uncomfortable. Why did they wait so long?’

‘Why does this person seem dead to me?’

I need help. Please do not let this new person die again. I need to know that my existence is not a political statement, fad or phase. I need to know that my suffering is real and not imaginary. I know I should not feel this way, but right now I feel so much guilt. I am the weird one, not you. I am the one who panics when fairly normal, mundane things happen. I am the one asking people to change the way they should speak. I have been told not to expect everyone to understand. I have been told to be patient and that things will be better in the future. But what is being done while I wait? What is being done to help people understand? What are we doing that allows me to exist outside of a liberal bubble?

From my experience, even the liberal bubble is struggling to understand. These few months have been rough. I feel trapped. I do not know what to do. Right now, I don’t feel the pride that everyone speaks of.

Please, I don’t want to feel guilty anymore. I want to be living instead of surviving. Please, help me to be braver: I have never been so scared in my life.

Please, end the 24 years of silence. I need to be recognised in order to move on.

If you know who I am, please respect my decision to remain anonymous.

Yours Sincerely, A Current Unknown

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Henry Shah

Henry Shah works in Chicago at the Sargent Shriver National Center on Poverty Law and in Saint-Denis as a coorganiser of the Vivier de Recherche-Action Collaboratif. (hsushah@gmail.com)

Towards Speculative Recognition In South-Side-onthe-Seine I. One night in the late summer of last year, Alex and his cousins asked me to play some music. We were sitting on a patch of street-light glow, drinking beers and listening to artist Booba’s song Turfu, or Future, in the flipped wordplay slang of the French suburbs. We have always exchanged songs.

Alex and his cousins are Roma Gypsy, to use the pejorative term, and many family members play manele music in the metro to make money.

Alex knew I was moving in a few weeks to Chicago, and asked me to play some real classics from the city. He loves rap. He was born in a village in Romania and he’s grown up in a slum in the Paris periphery, but he has a list of American artists he calls his ‘brothers from the heart’ – rappers known to trumpet their dark and dangerous origins, rapid ascent to power, familiarity with violence, and taste for the finer things. We start walking and I tell Alex and his cousins about drill music, a product of the city’s South Side that bores into its listener through a manic tempo and a minute obsession with gun makes and gang markings. Drill insists that Chicago is faster, crueller and more beautiful than anywhere else. We start talking about Chiraq, a portmanteau made popular by teen drill artist Chief Keef that blends the grit of Chicago with the geographically distant front lines of the global war on terror. We’ve all had a lot to drink, and Alex takes out a can of spray paint from his backpack. He usually uses the paint to cover up dings and dents on cars he fixes up for resale. He takes a few steps, he’s imbibed sonic confidence, he throws his hood up and he crouches down next to a municipal building just out of view of a security camera. He writes: Chirak-sur-Seine. He’s remixed the naming convention of Pierrefitte-sur-Seine, the poor Parisian suburb where he lives.

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II. At 71st and Jeffery, on Chicago’s South Side in December, a group of young Black men sell loose squares (loose cigarettes), on the street corner. We’re more than 6000 kilometres away from Alex’s graffiti. The Chicago Police Department circles in bruise-blue trucks. When officers hop out, their guns are drawn. The men are either gone or against the wall waiting to be searched. A spotter sits nearby in an idling car to alert the salesmen. Before they show up, he shouts, ‘Eiffel, Eiffel.’ The code comes from the particular architecture of the local police station, whose radio antenna is a latticed triangle, shimmering in the distance. It looks, if you squint hard enough, like the Eiffel Tower. The blinking at the top is not a tourist’s flashbulb, but the pulse of data, arrests being sent downtown.

III. The South Side and suburban department of Seine-Saint-Denis are two of the most projected and fantasised spaces in their respective societies. To many, the South Side is the home of Donald Trump’s socalled ‘American carnage,’ a vast expanse of poverty and violence. To many, Seine-Saint-Denis harbours little more than terrorism and recalcitrant immigrant populations scraping to get by. These spaces haunt the majority, they stand in for, conjure fear of the periphery. They, and their inhabitants, are the fearful periphery.

As Alex and his cousins smoke on a subway platform, an announcement rings out through the station. ‘Pickpockets are operating in the station. Please be aware of your belongings.’ Other travellers start backing away from the group. Late one night in December, a bulky white man walks up to a group of bus stop drummers downtown in Chicago, pretends to tip them, and then arrests them for not having a permit. These young men do not have signs marking their home zip codes. Here, racial marking meshes with territorial stigma. Seine-Saint-Denis, site of arrival for former immigrants from France’s Arab and African colonies, brown Roma Romanians like Alex, now even Chinese and Indians. The South Side, former heart of the Black Metropolis, landing strip for Black refugees fleeing north on the Illinois Central Railroad from the Deep South.

It takes about 15 minutes on suburban trains to get from either zone to the urban centre, and if you sit on the top deck of either a Metra or a RER train, you rumble by a parallel landscape: empty expanses punctuated with half-lived tower blocks, groups of men at corners whisked by a mud-spattered window, perhaps a humble neighbourhood mosque on the horizon, distant cranes. In 1974, French writer Georges Perec wrote An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris, an avantgarde chronicle of everything the author saw from the terrace of a café at the heart of the bourgeois city. The piece builds momentum through repetition. The author exhausts himself and the reader, the 68 bus passes every 15 or so minutes, and the city’s rhythms become at once banal and exciting – we notice when the first man with a red hat walks through Perec’s field of vision. To exhaust a place on the South Side or in Seine-Saint-Denis would be to chronicle an endless march of police, a dystopian exhaustion: gang unit, anti-terrorism task force, plainclothes, municipal, national, vice squad, on and on as they sweep and stop. A man with no shoes flutters to a rest like a pigeon at the café in Saint-Denis. He’s hurried along by a waiter and then has his papers checked by an officer. Surveillance cameras watch impassively above.

A group of rotating technicians monitor their footage, and they’re never exhausted.

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IV. Direct connections between these cities typically move through elite circuits.

Daily nonstop flights, rotating retrospectives at the Art Institute and the Pompidou, the opening of a new French boutique in Chicago’s Gold Coast, university research partnerships, the Gehry starchitecture of the Fondation Louis Vuitton and Jay Pritzker Pavilion, the spread of a new corporate headquarters or private law practice from a Paris to Chicago skyscraper, the drying ink on an international cooperation agreement. These connections are global. They allow capital to more effortlessly flow while reducing the costs of direct (between types of currency, built form, geography) and symbolic (cultural meaning, ideology) conversion. In this case, the global runs counter to the local. Power reproduces itself across distance. Difference is subsumed. Recognition becomes a commodity as distance is collapsed.

V. We might think of Alex’s tag and the ‘Eiffel’ code as an alternate means to recognition. What would it mean to displace the South Side to SeineSaint-Denis and vice-versa? More critically, what might it mean to suggest that the South Side and Seine-Saint-Denis are part of the very same geography of denial, domination, and daring resilience?

Recognition, in this case, calls attention to the social fracture.

I characterise this as speculative recognition, under three dominant dimensions. First, speculative recognition is transgressive. In the common sense, as a quality of breaking with convention or code. And in the etymological sense, as an act of stepping over or across boundaries. Young men on the South Side and in Seine-Saint-Denis confront the strategic division of space on an everyday basis as they seek respect: to assert visibility requires navigation of webs of both surveillance and carceral attachment, and to flout boundaries that legitimate certain populations only within certain geographies. Second, speculative recognition takes root in the projection of embodied and affective ties. Alex’s connection with drill music derives from the uncanny sense that he and men on the South Side experience the world in a converging fashion that the sensation and structure of meaning around being harassed by the police on the Rue de la République in Saint-Denis might not be different from being stopped-and-frisked on Stony Island Avenue on the South Side.

The transgressive element of speculative recognition is thus both tentatively projected and intimately grounded. Lastly, speculative recognition situates itself in unstable presence and further destabilises dominant visions of the future. These territories are dangerous for young black and Roma men, and speculative recognition requires risk: to evade police contact, to pursue informal and illegal economic activity, to assert one’s identity when its essential attributes are frequently criminalised and simply stigmatised. To imagine these geographies together is to envision improbable solidarity where it cannot currently exist.

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A Pact Between a Tutor & a Student: E.g. ReLAWuN?

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(lawun.blogspot.co.uk)

It would help if I knew why this title was chosen; the unit a factory of recognition.

I will recognise you if you recognise me?

A kind of search for attention?

Is it a question of what you want to be recognised for?

Celebrity... The search for FAME...

The recognition (fame) of an architect is only the surface, it hides an invisible world of artisans, engineers, labourers, credit for a vast army is taken by one person, interesting?

Whose recognition do you seek?

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MEMORY

Amy Douglas Morris

Amy Douglas-Morris is a mixed-medium artist studying Moving Image at Central Saint Martins, working with archival materials and analog methods of documentation.

Amy creates resins and films which include an amalgamation of found materials appearing alongside personal prints, drawings and objects. Her recent work for the Institute of Contemporary Arts has focused on her familial roots in Venezuela, against a backdrop of sociopolitical chaos. (amydmb.com, @amydougiemo)

DOMESTIC

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‘Remedios, la bella, habia subido al cielo en cuerpo y alma, y ya la desconsiderada. Fernanda andaba refunfuñando en los rincones porque se habia llevado las sabanas.’

In the village where Gabriel García Márquez’ lived, there had been a young woman who had been ‘made to disappear’ by her family on learning of her pregnancy. The explanation given by the family was that she had risen to heaven body and soul, ‘like the Virgin Mary’ Allende adds when

recounting Márquez’s anecdote. No villager asked questions because they understood none would be accepted. Márquez made several attempts to write it into 100 Years of Solitude, but it never worked, until he had her hanging the sheets to dry and was lifted with them when the wind blew through her garden. Allende reasons, ‘there is your explanation, a parachute that elevates her. With the sheets it’s magical realism, without the sheets, it’s fantasy.’

A ‘peace wall’ in Cupar Way, Belfast Image credit: Keith Ruffles, adapted and edited by the author under a Creative Commons license

Border-Bound: The Belfast Conundrum

Calvin Hin-Long Po Calvin is a Fourth Year student at the AA. He studied at Central Saint Martins and the Bartlett School of Architecture, where he completed his BSc in Architecture. Calvin grew up and lived in Hong Kong. Since moving to London, he has been keenly monitoring the political developments of the region remotely, as part of the Hong Kong diaspora. His interests revolve around politics and political economy, both from a historical and theoretical perspective, and as an active campaigner in electoral politics in the UK. (pocalvin@gmail.com, @calvinpo)

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In our mercurial and periodic relationship with freedom of mobility, we are in descent from yet another peak. From migrating nomads to fortressed tribes, continental empires to Westphalian sovereign states, and more recently, a global workforce and worldwide free trade; we are just at that tipping point, at the edge of a trough. The wall is back as the de rigueur spatial device for asserting territorial sovereignty, and trade wars are reviving old mercantilist obsessions. There is, however, one exception, where there is a drawn-out struggle to avoid having any such built manifestation of a border at all. The site of this peculiar situation is a location where the fate of an entire nation, possibly extending to a group of nations, rests almost entirely on something that does not physically exist, and should not ever come into existence. This refers to the border on the island of Ireland.

On 23 June 2016, the British electorate voted in a referendum, expressing their will for the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland to leave the European Union. When the UK leaves the EU, the only external land border between the EU and the UK would be between the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland. By some ironic, cosmic coincidence of history (or perhaps not so coincidental but due to similar political machinations in the past), this border happens to be precisely within a territory where there have been decades of violent sectarian conflict: the Troubles. Given the UK’s historic and present entanglement in prominent sectarian conflicts around the world, it appears that the one on its very own doorstep has been conveniently forgotten and set aside in the last decades of tentative, fragile ‘peace’.

Brexit, however, has abruptly reopened these old wounds which have barely been healed.

The Troubles’ euphemistic name does little to hide the fact that the conflict that took place in the area – the British Isles, was just short of a civil war; the extent of the violence extended to other parts of the Republic of Ireland, the United Kingdom, and beyond.

At its core, the conflict was a war for recognition of the constitutional status of Northern Ireland, running (not always neatly) along political, ethno-nationalist, and religious lines – a recurring aftermath of imperial policies of partition. The price of this war, one that provoked acts of terror from both sides and incited state brutality, was a death toll of over a thousand, not to mention tens of thousands others left wounded.

For predominantly Protestant unionist/loyalist communities, their struggle was in the name of defending the recognition of Northern Ireland as an inalienable part of the United Kingdom. For the predominantly Catholic nationalist/republican

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communities who composed the minority of Northern Ireland, their struggle was for the recognition of Northern Ireland as a part of a united Irish nation.

PAINTED KERBSTONES The battle of recognition takes literally to the streets, where even the pavements are politicised. Kerbstones and road markings are painted for passers-by to signal the community and their territory’s sectarian allegiance: red, white and blue to the Kingdom, and green, white and orange to the Republic. The Irish tricolour’s symbol of the truce (white) between Catholic (green) and Protestant (orange) is lost in poignant irony.

Unlocking these intractable opposing forces was the watershed moment achieved by the Good Friday/Belfast Agreement in 1998, and the key was compromise. Like the original 1920 compromise between unionists in the island’s northeast and nationalists in the south that lead to Ireland’s partition, the Belfast Agreement patches its aftermath over with another compromise: a sort of Schrödinger’s constitutional settlement, a ‘smudged sovereignty’.

Northern Ireland would still be de jure, a part of the United Kingdom and Ireland would modify its irredentist claim on the territory in its constitution.

However, through a series of measures such as entitlement to dual citizenship, cross-border governance structures and markets, and mandatory cross-community power-sharing, a finely-tuned balance of concessions was achieved; for nationalists who wanted unification and safeguards for loyalists who wanted the preservation of the union. This balance coaxed both sides into a form of compromise and cessation of violence, and established a fragile peace. In creating this balance, the sovereignty of the Republic of Ireland and the UK were inevitably entangled. Untangling and upsetting this balance because of Brexit, would put that peace back at risk.

While the movement of people across the Irish border has been enshrined by the open borders of the Common Travel Area since 1923, by virtue of EU membership of both Ireland and the UK with its common trade policy and Single Market regulations, there has been little need for border checks between Northern Ireland and the Republic, and between Northern Ireland and Great Britain (since 1922).

Crucially, this means that the Belfast Agreement could allow for the total removal of any physical infrastructure on the border, including old surveillance posts and military checkpoints, which were historically targets

for paramilitary attacks. With the UK intending to leave the EU, there is a possibility for the first time since the signing of the Belfast Agreement that trade policy and goods regulations might diverge, putting the need for physical checks of goods at risk, as the goods are moving across a border that is now supposed to be invisible. One chunk of the EU and its Single Market’s external border with a third country would also have to be invisible and virtually non-existent.

CHECKPOINTS ON A LINE IN THE SOIL The Irish border, inheriting old county borders, is highly irregular, bisecting farmland, rural lanes and open countryside. The act of partition, bisected the jurisdiction of the island of Ireland; consequentially, border-crossings were only sanctioned at ‘approved routes’, what were first customs posts eventually became fortified watchtowers and militarised checkpoints at the height of the conflict. All of the many other crossings, hereby ‘unapproved routes’, had bridges demolished and roads blocked or dug out, curbing the mobility of borderland communities.

Border-crossings, which were a daily necessity for many in these communities, became slow, unpredictable and bureaucratic. Yet at its core, the militarisation of the border was riddled with its own hypocrisies: the border was in reality highly porous to illicit crossings in the countryside on foot, and the physical military infrastructure served more as an architectonic symbol of the British state asserting and demarcating its sovereignty through exercising its control over mobility.

While the irreconcilability of Brexit and the Belfast Agreement was barely discussed as an issue during the referendum campaigns in 2016, it has since become a lynchpin around which the politics of the UK, Ireland and the EU have revolved since the vote.

With each of the three parties pursuing individual agendas and strategising in the shifting of political sands incited by Brexit, the people and the peace in Northern Ireland have become bargaining chips, and the resolution to the Belfast Agreement has become a proxy battleground for the wider geopolitical tussle between larger powers and the divided factions within them. While all parties are in agreement that preventing a re-ignition of conflict within the Troubles is important and that the Belfast Agreement should be sacrosanct, they fundamentally disagree on its future implementation post Brexit. Negotiations have reached a deadlock; a tangled web of the mutually

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exclusive positions held by all the parties involved.

The current quagmire revolves around one particular solution, which forms an inalienable part of the Withdrawal Agreement. This agreement was reached on 25 November 2018, at a summit in Brussels between the EU and the UK, and it is at present pending ratification but closed from further negotiation. The provision within it that protects the Belfast Agreement is the notorious so-called ‘backstop’. Initially proposed by the EU, the backstop was proposed as an insurance policy that is applicable in the absence of a negotiated agreement over the future relationship between the EU and the UK, Northern Ireland would remain in the EU’s VAT system, customs union and large parts of the Single Market, in order to prevent any divergence between the two sides of the Irish border and therefore eliminate the need for border infrastructure. In effect, the EU will exercise exclusive economic control over a part of the UK; namely Northern Ireland’s taxation, trade, and regulation. However, the fundamental issues are not so much solved in this manner, rather, they are displaced: a hard sea border would be created between Northern Ireland and Great Britain, dividing the United Kingdom and quite possibly inflaming tensions and inciting direct action in the unionist community.

In the final version of the backstop, the EU conceded to allow the rest of the UK to remain in a basic customs union, but regulatory and taxation borders will nevertheless be created: the result is an unprecedented voluntary carving and apportioning up of a unitary state in peacetime.

HOME RULE, DIRECT RULE The Irish struggle has been in part characterised by a need to establish democratic and self-governing institutions within Irish territory itself, with Irish revolutionaries establishing a Dublin-based revolutionary parliament as one of their first actions immediately after the 1916 Easter Rising. While Northern Ireland had a devolved government, or Home Rule, since partition, at the height of the Troubles from 1972 until the Belfast Agreement, these powers were rescinded and control was reverted back to Westminster under Direct Rule. The backstop may bring a new form of Direct Rule from Brussels as another change in the chequered history of self-governance in the province.

This internal border created within the UK by the backstop has become the defining issue in the Westminster parliamentary impasse: as a result of the

2017 early general election, the Democratic Unionist Party, a Northern Irish hardline unionist party, holds the balance of power and provides the Conservative government with its majority in Parliament required to govern, albeit just barely. While the British Prime Minister has agreed the deal, it also requires Parliament to ratify it. For Brexit to progress to the next stage, it requires the DUP to vote for something that is fundamentally antithetical to its identity (and vocally supported by their long-time staunch opponents, the nationalists Sinn Féin). Otherwise, complicating the parliamentary arithmetic is a divided opposition party, reluctant to be seen facilitating the government’s Brexit, and various intransigent groups whose primary tactic appears to be as simple as opposing everything in order to achieve their intended goal; either a second referendum or an exit without a deal. Unsurprisingly, this deadlock has produced three parliamentary defeats of the Withdrawal Agreement, including the largest government defeat in modern history. As of now, the Brexit deadline has already been pushed back twice to a later date, as the government tries to cobble together a way forward.

ABSTENTIONISM Elected Members of Parliament belonging to the hardline republican party Sinn Féin do not recognise the authority of the British House of Commons based in London over the people of the island of Ireland; they see the British Parliament as an imperialist, overseas institution. Their long-standing traditions blatantly display their lack of recognition for the Commons; one of which being that they literally do not take their seats in the benches of the Commons chambers. Churchill referred to the Commons when he said, ‘we shape our buildings and thereafter, our buildings shape us.’ The potent symbolism of taking a seat in this chamber and being ‘shaped’ by it is well understood by Sinn Féin MPs, and the likelihood of them taking their seats, and thereby swearing allegiance to the British monarch is next to nil.

All of this strife is perhaps due to the backstop itself being deeply problematic. It is a legally binding agreement, and there is as yet no unilateral, legal way of leaving without it. With Northern Ireland’s economy relying on manufacturing and agriculture, it hands over control over the most important parts of the Northern Irish economy to the European Commission, where the people of Northern Ireland will not be represented by members in the European Parliament

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or European commissioners, and Northern Ireland’s elected representatives both in Stormont and Westminster will have little ability to influence how they are to be governed. When its value-added tax rules are also to be controlled elsewhere, it leads to an uncomfortable potential for taxation without representation.

While countries such as Norway may take EU rules without being able to make them, they reserve their sovereign right to withdraw from their economic cooperation. Whereas there are few democratic, legal mechanisms for Northern Ireland to be free of the backstop, with one option being a vote for a united Ireland. Enshrined in Article 1 of the Belfast Agreement is one of its central principles, the principle of consent, whereby the constitutional status of Northern Ireland would not change unless the choice is ‘freely exercised by a majority of the people of Northern Ireland’, and the right to self-determination ‘is for the people of the island of Ireland alone […] without external impediment’ to exercise. While the people of Northern Ireland voted solidly to remain in the EU, the backstop proposes a materially different, even constitutional change in the way in they are to be governed. It has been agreed above their heads by only the leaders of 28 countries and the EU Commission, and the fundamental changes entailed by the backstop have never been approved by a majority of the Northern Irish people. With Northern Ireland breaking the world record for not having an elected government due to a breakdown in relations between its powersharing parties, there is no way the people of Northern Ireland can be represented on this matter. It is on the basis of undermining the principle of consent which Lord Trimble, as the one of the Nobel Peace Prizewinning pioneers behind the Belfast Agreement, is seeking judicial review of the legality of the backstop. The mechanism claiming to protect the Belfast Agreement ironically may threaten the agreement itself.

At its heart, the backstop is a gross oversimplification of what makes the Belfast Agreement work. Its raison d’être has been reduced by the EU and the Republic of Ireland into the issue of the Irish border exclusively; as such, measures in the backstop all relate to cross-border issues. Regrettably, the UK government has been largely acquiescent to this narrative; after all, for many a time in Irish history the sensitivities of the unionist/nationalist conflict have been badly understood by governments in Westminster, with terrible consequences. This oversimplified narrative ignores the fact that the Belfast Agreement was not only about the Irish border,

but about enshrining measures in international law that are meant to preserve the fragile balance and compromise between unionist and nationalist concerns. Unionists are understandably aggrieved under the current proposals, which they predict would tip the balance towards the nationalist direction – this grievance and perceived imbalance alone is reason enough to upset the peace. Indeed, it has already in cases reignited tensions despite all parties claiming that their primary aim is to avoid conflict. The idea that a technocratic, ‘apolitical’ proposal can protect a peace process built on political reconciliation is fatally misguided.

Uncoincidentally, this oversimplified narrative is conveniently also aligned with trade and economic interests of the EU. In the absence of an agreed future relationship which would keep the UK close in terms of its future economic model, a risk that Brexit poses to the EU is that the UK would likely undercut tariff barriers and regulations in trade, and pose a competitive risk to the European economic model of trade protectionism and high regulations. In the event that the border is kept open, the UK’s access to the market seems like unfair competition to the other countries involved, while the UK would have little to lose from EU goods imported in through an open Irish border. Crucially, without the backstop, the EU would have to make the politically unpalatable decision to compel its member state Ireland to impose physical controls along the Irish border. Otherwise, it would have to tolerate an undermining back door into the market shared by 27 countries; this situation seems least likely considering the EU’s tight legal framework. The backstop absolves the EU from having to make that choice.

The backstop is constructed so that the burden of the dilemma shifts to the UK: a choice between its union or full sovereignty over how it is governed.

Although the UK-wide customs union is a concession to the UK, in exchange the EU requires the UK to commit to a ‘level playing field’, explicitly preventing any competitive advantage in key areas of legislation.

It is this which proponents of Brexit have claimed is the trap, knowing that Parliament would always choose the union above all else, keeping UK in a perpetual bind of uncompetitiveness. While these measures attempt to prevent advantageous access to EU markets, it is vital to consider that other parties have their own political calculi that has to be manoeuvred. The Irish government has been dependent on other nationalist parties for their majority in the Dáil, and since the resignation of Enda Kenny as their taoiseach, who favoured a more

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emollient bilateral approach to the border question, their new taoiseach Leo Varadkar has taken a harder line to bolster support from the nationalists.

All the while, the rest of the EU is trying to minimise the economic impacts and perceived advantages of Brexit as their priority, with Eurosceptic parties gaining ground all over Europe. In this light, it is not unexpected for them to be inclined towards interpretations and solutions to the Belfast Agreement problem that suit both their own agendas.

THE ECONOMIC WAR Cross-border trade on the island of Ireland has been a proxy for Anglo-Irish tensions. In the 1930s Economic War where the fledgling Irish Free State and the UK exchanged blows in retaliatory trade measures, the economic risk was then posed by protectionist restrictions on both sides of a closed border. History is today mirrored: now the risk is of liberal deregulation at one side of an open border undermining the other.

The irony is that the Hobson’s choice that the EU is pushing the UK to make; between the deeply unpalatable backstop or no-deal, is itself counterintuitively increasing the chance of a no-deal Brexit. The EU’s gamble is that the British parliament will do everything to avoid this; and indeed it has, already voting to extend the Brexit deadline twice.

However, the unpredictable political atmosphere means a no deal Brexit is still a possibility, and in that case, the EU ends up having the same unpalatable dilemma between border checks in Ireland or tolerating some porosity in the border, under the parameters it has set itself for protecting the Belfast Agreement. As we reach the endgame of the first stage of the UK’s withdrawal, the entire affair has become a perverse, international diplomatic game of chicken, as each party wait for the others to fold. It is only after this that the UK and EU can progress to the next stage of Brexit negotiations, to determine the future economic and political relationship. As the can is kicked down the road again and again, the more uncertain the fate of Northern Ireland becomes, and the more prolonged the dread. The delicate balance of peace has been upended by Brexit, and regaining it will not be easy.

CODA – THE PEACE LINES The streets of Belfast and other cities are scarred by fortified walls of reinforced concrete, corrugated steel, and barbed wire, dividing Protestant and Catholic communities in ‘interface’ neighbourhoods where they meet. Though not as iconic as its cousin in Berlin, the walls in Belfast are taller, more extensive and have stood for a longer duration – unlike the Berlin Wall, they still stand today. Known as ‘peace lines’ or ‘peace walls’, there is an ironic paradox inherent within the terminology – how can such militarised, defensive architecture ever be correlated to the preservation of a genuine peace? Unlike the Berlin wall which was overwhelmingly resented by communities on both sides, the situation in Belfast is more ambiguous, with a growing substantial minority wishing for the walls to remain, most of them being Protestant. Though intentions for segregation were originally to keep feuding communities safe from each other, there is also a subtext of containing the minority and obscuring the Other; they have served as architectural enablers of mutual suspicion, isolation and irreconciliation.

While the Northern Ireland Executive has a target of removing peace walls by 2023, there is little prospect of progress, when irreconcilable political parties cannot even negotiate a power-sharing government. With a substantial amount of peace walls actually built after the paramilitary ceasefire and the Belfast Agreement, they illustrate a complicated and incomplete ‘peace’ the province is just about holding together. The illusory territorial oxymoron on which Northern Irish peace is built, an absence of any wall on the border and sectarian urbanism in its mixed-community walled cities, may once again be shattered. Seeking substitute cognitive dissonance to appease all parties all over again could become the new struggle of a generation.

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Ioana Mann

Ioana is a designer working between architecture, set design and critical practice, and is studying in her final year at the AA. Through a form of practice that combines theatrical techniques with academic research and architectural design, she seeks to question the architecture, science and rituals that influence what futures we are heading towards. Currently, Ioana is working on a project that aims to bring architects closer to the microscopic scale, and the scientists that harness it.

THE ARCHITECTURAL EXPOSOME

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In the same way as the individual exposome changes with even the most subtle stimuli, the architectural exposome is also a detailed record of all that a construction gets exposed to. The exposome of a building includes microscopic exposures in the description of its spatial context. Every wall, window or beam is in constant exchange with bacteria, fungi, viruses and all other molecules they come in contact with. The fungus Serpula lacrymans → 3 comfortably colonises timber and brick, while at the same time, probiotics for buildings are being proposed as a solution to sick building symptom. → 4Architecture is inhabited by much more than just humans and creates environments for beings of many different sizes. As the measure of exposures H OW CO U L D T H E M E AS U R E expands the definition of a site to include volatile compounds, OF EXPOSURES CHANGE THE particles and microscopic life, they can all become active B U I LT E N V I RO N M E N T ? agents in the design of space. We now design in a time in In biology, as in architecture, our understanding of thewhich we can no longer afford to see architecture divorced world is tied to how we can perceive it. In turn, what we arefrom the natural world. In order to counter the fear that led to able to perceive is tied to the technologies we use to read,antibiotic resistance and the staleness that surrounds record and communicate. The exposome, first coined by theconversations on ‘green’ architecture, maybe we could start epidemiologist Dr Christopher Wild, is a relatively newengaging the exposome to push for a design that functions concept that stems from precision medicine and has beencross-scale, cross-time and cross-species. defined as the environmental equivalent of the genome. The study of an individual’s exposome is the cumulative measure of environmental influences and associated biological responses throughout that person’s lifespan. → 1 It includes exposures from the environment, diet, behaviour, and endogenous processes. In a way, the exposome feels like a cross between a personal inescapable cloud and an evergrowing microscopic archive, linking the individual to its context and behaviour through the quantification of stimuli across time and across scale. It recognises that each person is in a state of flux and in constant exchange with all that it comes in contact with. At the architectural scale, the exposome reveals that constructed things are part of the environment and inextricably linked to all that they are exposed to.

In the biomedical field, Wild’s idea was not able to gain much scientific traction or to seep into larger society until the Snyder lab at the Stanford University designed a device to quantify ones exposome. Their findings painted a comprehensive picture of the multitude of living beings, chemicals and particulates that swirl in, on and around us. → 2 The device takes small puffs of ‘breath’ and traps the matter that one might inhale, ingest or touch in a sub-micron filter.

With over 70 billion readouts that reflect changes in location, spikes in cleanliness or changes of lifestyle, the study shows the specificity and extreme variety in exposures at the individual level – no two exposome could ever be identical.

Once we start regarding the microscopic, context becomes hyper-specific and moves beyond the anthropocentric and the vitalist. Bacteria count as much as humans do and things don’t vanish when they die.

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C RO SS-S CA L E Architects work at scales that are always 1:something.

We design large, complex structure and then draw them small, abstract and neat. At 1:1000 a wall is a solid line; at 1:1 a wall is the line between one space and another. But at 10,000:1 a wall is no longer a line or a solid mass. It is a penetrable ecosystem that mediates exchanges and exposures. As we zoom in and slow down, the intangible becomes tangible, microbes count as much as humans do and walls become porous and elusive. Moving beyond our scalar bias that favours the simplification of the very large, we could uncover a world that is ecocentric and non-deterministic.

In order to deal with the microscopic, we normally have C RO SS-T I M E to operate across the entirety of the scalar gradient. The European Commission adopted in June 2017 a comprehensive The exposome works by slow accretion. It is not action plan in order to tackle the increased ability of momentary, but rather quantifies the many different microorganisms to resist antibiotics. The One Health Action elements one is exposed to through many data points over a Plan → 5 promises to tackle the 33,000 yearly deaths due to long period of time. According to Dr. Wild, the exposome is antimicrobial resistance, and perhaps the even more ‘from conception onwards’ and acknowledges the everimportant issue of the ‘1.5 billion Euros per year in healthcare changing nature of stimuli one might come in contact with. costs and productivity losses’. In order to design our Exposomes show that one cannot be neatly framed into a exposome and achieve meaningful change at the scale of a category or bubble and reminds us of the rhythms of the bacterium, the action plan has to be pan-European and crossnatural world. Architecture is not removed from these species. As such, borders between nation states and between rhythms; it is inextricably entangled in dynamic and species dissolve. The ontological line in the sand that unpredictable systems. separates the ‘micro’ and the ‘macro’, as well as the political The built environment does not remain as constructed, imaginary that presupposes nested scales (individual not to mention as designed, but rather constantly oozes and governed by community governed by nation), becomes fuzzy. absorbs matter. Exposures over time are usually something To understand the exposome is to understand that that clients demand resilience against, and so architecture is microscopic exposures are measures of cultural, legislative most often designed to resist them. However, buildings do and physical climates. It also argues that no entity is divorced indeed change – their exposome changes them and they from the ecological and political systems they inhabit. Even at change exposomes in turn. If we were to regard the built the most atomised, particles still neighbour many other types environment slower, closer and with lenses from different of particles, and can be broken down into many other disciplines, we could start seeing the many processes of particles that do the same. Phenomena are always entangled exchange, growth and decay that happen in, around and with across scale. architecture. Echoing Isabelle Stenger’s plea for ‘slow science’, architecture should engage with the slowness inherent in the development of a building’s exposome. As a result, designers will be better positioned to accept and engage in the messy, fragile and elastic nature of the built environment.

The exposome shows that architecture is an amalgam of ‘matters of concern’ → 6 ; it is not a set of ‘right answers’, but rather a constant negotiation of difficult choices, hesitation and scrutiny. This is despite the complaints of developers for whom time is money and space a profit equation. But, as the horizon of the future narrows in our increasing ability to predict change, we must slow down in order to see that nothing is ever static. Buildings or rather changes to the built environment can have consequences that long outlive their intended lifespan.

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C RO SS-S P EC I E S D E S I G N BY E X P O S OM E Modernism purified, outlined and constrained the environments we inhabit in order to optimise our exposomes.

By proposing a design methodology that functions The rational man was to live in a world that was clean, cross-scale, cross-species and cross-time, the exposome transparent and easy to monitor. Meanwhile, nature was makes trouble. → 9 It highlights the complexity and the mess labelled as a sublime and romantic space of anti-modernity. → 7 that makes up space, in order ‘to stir up potent response to The intrinsic messiness of ecology was allowed to keep devastating events, as well as to settle troubled waters and existing, but had no place in the built environment. In rebuild quiet places’. → 10 To see architecture as a space of Corbusier’s dream ‘there are no more dirty, dark corners. symbiosis complicates thought habits. Walls are no longer Everything is shown as it is. Then comes inner cleanliness…’. the solid boundaries we so trusted and we must reassess The previously irrational fear of microscopic life was formalised what new boundaries there are and how architects can design into a social value and desirable design language that ended them. The rigid enclosures our current societies rely on no up achieving the opposite goal; microbes learned to evade our longer safely contain the bubble of the nuclear family or the efforts and survive antimicrobial moves. border of the nation state. Suddenly we realise that the At the same time, the people inhabiting space are more teleological line-drawings architects conventionally work microbes than humans. Microbes are so prevalent in and with evade many aspects of how we actually perceive space. around the human body that they outnumber human cells At the same time, we see that nation state borders mean and have profound effects on how we function, feel and nothing to microbes and so we can no longer isolate think → 8. Animals, plants and humans have co-evolved in and environments with political demarcations. The Newtonian with environments that are rich with microbes. In many ways, separation between discrete entities comes undone which in a healthy microbiome is a quality of space that is more turn tears apart modernist determinism. important than any other element conventionally drawn by an architect. In Lowenhaupt Tsing’s words: ‘Making worlds is not limited to humans – all organisms make ecological living In order to understand the complexity of our places, altering earth, air and water. (...) Each organism surroundings and the many ways in which we put changes everyone’s world’. We sit alongside other critters in fragile balances at risk, architects could shift the focus ever-changing configurations or places, times, matters and from human and short term profit, to the microscopic meanings. The exposome pushes them to the foreground. and the entangled. As scientists like Margaret McFallAs microbiologists push for a shift away from ‘bad Ngai → 1 1 push for more collaboration between germs’ towards a reconceptualisaton of microbes as microbiologists, macrobiologists and ecologists, I invaluable partners in health and comfort, architects should argue for the importance of an architect at that table. start challenging the modernist myth of cleanliness. Just as In the same way that the exposome increases the reach bodies are not fortresses to be protected, but rather complex of the body or the building to its adjacent areas, so too symbiotic systems, space is also not something to be sanitised, can architects use these tools to design increase the but rather a collection of pulsating ecosystems. By continuing agency and responsibility of the profession. The to stick to an anthropocentric lens, we are not just losing alternative is architectures’ continued complacency individuals, species or macro-environments, such as coral and ignorance of its role in the extinction of animals, reefs, but we also forfeit the ability to generate and nurture plants and (crucially) microbes. complex multispecies partnerships.

‘In ignoring messiness, and dreaming of its eradication, we discover that we have messed up our world.’ → 1 2

1 Gary W Miller, The Exposome, (Burlington: Elsevier Science, 2013), p 1 2 Michael Snyder, et al.

Dynamic Human Environmental Exposome Revealed By Longitudinal Personal Monitoring, (Cell 175 (1): 277-291.e31. doi:10.1016/j. cell.2018.08.060, 2018) 3 Commonly known as dry rot.

4 Air, Surface, And Object

Purification Systems, (Better Air), 2019 (betterairus.com) 5 Antimicrobial Resistance, (Antimicrobial Resistance – European Commission), 2019. (ec.europa.eu/health/amr/ antimicrobial-resistance_en) 6 Bruno Latour, Why Has Critique Run Out Of Steam?

From Matters Of Fact To Matters Of Concern, (Critical Inquiry 30 (2): 225-248.doi:10.1086/421123, 2004)

7 Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, The Mushroom At The End Of The World, (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2015), p 5 8 J A Bravo, et al. Do Gut Bacteria Make A Second Home In Our Brains?, (Science | AAAS. www.sciencemag.org/ news/2018/11/do-gut-bacteriamake-second-home-our-brains.

‘Ingestion Of Lactobacillus Strain Regulates Emotional

Behavior And Central GABA Receptor Expression In A Mouse Via The Vagus Nerve’.

Proceedings Of The National Academy Of Sciences 108 (38): 16050-16055. doi:10.1073/ pnas.1102999108), 2019 9 I use the word trouble in the sense that was proposed by Donna Haraway.

10 Donna J. Haraway, Staying With The Trouble, (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016)

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11 Margaret McFall-Ngai, Noticing Microbial Worlds, (In Arts Of Living On A Damaged Planet, M51 - M67.

Minneapolis, London: University of Minnesota Press, 2017) 12 Isabelle Stengers, Another Science Is Possible (Cambridge: Polity press, 2018

BOOK R E V IE W Der Nomos der Erde, one of Carl Zartaloudis also reflects on Schmitt’s seminal works, how nomos has been used introduces the concept of nomos by contemporary philosophers, THE as the primordial ‘Law of laws’, including Schmitt, Agamben, BIRTH onto which all forms of political, Foucault, Heidegger and Deleuze, OF social and spatial orders are built. assessing their interpretations.

NOMOS He states that through the initial In relation to Schmitt’s argument, act of land appropriation and Zartaloudis demonstrates that division, nomos is established as the origin of nomos does not by the measure that defines all necessarily lie with the act of subsequent social and political division, and thus states that conditions. Nomos is therefore the nomos in itself is not inherently foundation and framework for all political or juridical in nature.

DR facets that define the life of a He asserts that it is therefore THANOS community, such as the misleading to defer to it as a ZARTALOUDIS distribution of resources, issues of philosophical ‘Law of laws’, as sovereignty and even justice.

Carl Schmitt insinuated.

This interpretation of the The book examines the usage ancient Greek nomos has extensively been borrowed, of the term nomos and its derivatives across a range reinterpreted and portrayed in architectural terms, of classical literature in order to illustrate the way in claiming that it is the initial act of architectural which its definition has transitioned while maintaining division, in the form of boundaries, walls and its centrality to Western culture. This is exemplified thresholds that lies at the root of societal norms for instance in the distinction between early Homeric and values. In his recent book, The Birth of Nomos, and later Hellenic uses of the word. In the Iliad and the Dr Zartaloudis calls for a re-examination of this Odyssey, nomos and its family of words were used with fundamental term in the history of Western culture, reference to distributive rituals of sacrificial festivities underlining a critical genealogy of its various forms and to indicate pasture or grazing grounds; which were and uses. The author’s background and knowledge in of paramount socio-economic importance in a society the fields of philosophy, law and architecture lend him that at the time relied heavily on herding. While in later a unique perspective to build upon this genealogy. times, as society moved from autocratic to democratic The Birth of Nomos is rooted in the premise forms of governance and socio-economic relations that words do not have a core meaning, but rather increased in complexity, nomos became a term to uses; thus their definitions are fluid and changing define written law by which the polis positioned its in accordance with the context in which they are authority in society through a legal system. used. Based on this assumption, Zartaloudis takes The Birth of the Nomos does not aim to settle us through the history of the word nomos and on a final overarching definition of nomos. Rather, the evolution of its use, while constantly linking it exposes that this fundamental term cannot truly etymology and philology to socio-economic changes. be grasped in any other way than as a genealogical The book includes sources from an expansive range of journey or its use. Zartaloudis not only shows the disciplines and fields of thought, including material persistent multi-layeredness of the term nomos, but from legal history, philosophy, linguistics, ancient also gives a comprehensive exposé of ancient Greek history, poetry, archaeology and anthropology. philosophy, tragedy and society.

Bozar Ben Zeev

Bozar Ben Zeev is an architect and researcher at OMA, and tutor of Diploma 8 at the AA. He has previously worked for several offices in London, Amsterdam and Beijing, and has lectured at the AA, University of Arts London and the TU Delft.

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In this issue Doodle by Daria Moussavi sets the tone for the issue; Page 1 Elena Pascolo’s Chagos & the Commons examines ecological stewardship as an extension of sovereignty at sea; Page 2 Timothy Tan’s Flowing Dream Sequence delineates Tarkovsky’s subtle manipulations in Stalker, of our perception of time; Page 10 Jack Isles reclaims in Perception of Depth the role of observational technologies in relocating the agency of spatial practice; Page 14 Karl Herdersch takes us across the slippery lines of speculative building in The Empty Global City; Page 18 seven days, curators and images are coordinated in A Space Curated by Quotidien; Page 22 An anonymous student at the AA addresses our community in Dear Unknown, a critical reflection on gender identity; Page 26 Henry Shah navigates the factional psyches and geographies of Speculative Recognition In South-Side-on-the-Seine; Page 29 AALAWuN formulates A Pact Between a Tutor & a Student; Page 32 Amy Douglas Morris composes a portrait of mysticism and contested individuality in Domestic Memory; Page 34 Calvin Po zooms into the current battle of recognition within the exceptional context of the Irish border in Border Bound: The Belfast Conundrum; Page 38 Ioana Mann invites us to zoom in and slow down in The Architectural Exposome; Page 44 and Bozar Ben Zeev reviews The Birth of Nomos by Dr Thanos Zartaloudis. Page 48

Edited by students at the Architectural Association