AArchitecture 39

AArchitecture 39

A charger for a non-rechargeable battery

This issue of AArchitecture takes an object for a starting point. An object is at once more solid and more open-ended than a word. We fear the tendency of architects to hide behind the intangible. An object has a unique ability to be palpable/palatable/touchable/holdable and at the same time instantaneously powerful. So we will start with a small, material object, forged from the familiar and yet charged with the rupture of a society.

It is taken from the archive of Ernesto Oroza. Objects of ‘technological disobedience’ were gathered from Havana during Cuba’s 30 years of isolation from global market trade.

Oroza refers to an ‘internal embargo’ where the economic freedoms and political agency of a population were removed. The government were forced to produce and supply households with basic objects and appliances and the result was a shortage of basic amenities. Oroza documents the emergence of objects designed through urgency. Materials were extracted from the little available and grafted, spliced and disfigured to meet a necessity. Rarities were hacked in order to prolong their life cycle. This evolved into a blackmarket of domestic objects. Aluminium trays became TV antennae, washing machine motors would be harnessed for fans or shoe polishers.

One such improvised solution was the charger for a non-rechargeable battery. It is a substitute which enables reuse, interrupting the life of an object and reviving it. It breaks rules of aesthetics and economy in a context of dwindling state support. The household realm was reclaimed through these acts of mutilation, the most mundane (but urgent) need becoming an object of protest. Its maker is its user. It is a technology of disobedience.

The gathering of objects creates a network of interconnected parts, which explore pre-existing conditions specific to a country. However, the hacking of these objects explodes this context and creates opportunities for redefinition of boarders, territories, geographies and landscapes. We can learn from these objects. The immediacy of their design is a product of an urgent situation and results in the tracing of a particular material economic which has a strong connection to place, economy and politics. Each object collected by Oroza is a node extracted from a wider network. They are fragments of a whole, inextricably tied to infrastructure, economics, politics and ecology.

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

AArchitecture 39 Term 2, 2019– 20 www.aaschool.ac.uk

Student Editorial Team: Georgia HablÜtzel Amy Glover

Editorial Board: Eva Franch i Gilabert, Director Alex Lorente, Membership

External Editors: Nour Hamade Avery Jiehui Chen, ↑ (previous AArch Editor)

Design: AA Print Studio

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Repair as Rupture Ernesto Oroza

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There are places where people must repair their objects so much that they decide to leave them open, disassembled; their guts splayed out on tables, couches, floors. Cables remain exposed, electronic parts liberated, chassis unscrewed. Destruction, paradoxically, accelerates repair work. They take these shortcuts through junk piles to prevent the television from changing channels without warning – just when the novela is getting good –, or to make it change channels even when the selector is broken; for the radio to hold – without turning off – a handful of batteries strapped to it with tape, like to the body of a suicide-bomber about to go off. The stream of white, black, red, green, blue, yellow, brown, grey cables floods the table, bifurcates in order to flow between transistors, Bakelite buttons, thermostats, winding motors, pierced plastic housings, screws, antennas, magnets. If we pay attention, we can recognise, almost everywhere, small printed letters and numbers, sometimes isolated, sometimes in sequences, as if there were a reader in the world for those signs and symbols. As the skein grows, the signs accumulate and seem to form words, sentences and even paragraphs, regardless of their intelligibility. In any case, reading them wouldn’t explain much. The parts of one object overlap with those of another, they interweave, entangle and become confused. It would be impossible to locate where the blender begins and the iron ends, which switch turns on what machine, which nut catches the flagellum of what screw, which cracks let out what heat, which antennas catch what signals.

The landscape over the tables, the armchairs, the living room floor is no different than if we threw, all at once, all of our appliances from a balcony into the street. The force of gravity that would break them into fragments is no stronger than the force of need that, at home, disassembles them to maintain the rite of domestic life.

But perhaps this image can only offer an idea of the whole, sacrificing that which makes it most powerful: the fragment. Fragments that no longer belong to a totality. I am speaking to the idea that on those tables and those couches, in a sense upholstered in detritus, we would also find strange, alien bodies, come from other systems. Among the mechanical parts of a lamp we might find the screwed-in fragment of a deodorant container whose cap, when manipulated, turns on the bulb; the end of a melted toothbrush – amorphous, tumorous – covers a velocity regulator whose metal axis can’t be caught and spun with our own fingers, but that we can now adjust thanks to that melted-plastic mold. I should be able to write a sentence just as hybrid, with words and letters that come from elsewhere, but appearing without warning – fruits – or crossing

through the cen-darkness-ter of another word. But if I have restricted this description to the living room, to a jumble on the table and the couch, it has been done so as to not scare – with more exposed guts – the reader who, now trained, won’t be bothered at imag­ ining that the same thing occurs in the kitchen, in the rooms, in the yard, on the balcony. Parts jump from one area of the house to another. The circular grate designed to hide the blades of a fan now serves as a hanging potholder to a few ferns by the window; in the yard, a dog sleeps in the plastic housing of an old Japanese tv.

The slaughter described above undoubtedly points to a disinterest in wholes, a disaffection for the closed, exclusive thing. But at the same time, this disassembly appears to be the only possible way to meet certain needs and to protect the permanence of certain rites that sustain the drama of human life. How could these people, otherwise, continue reading under the lamp light; or listening to the sweet voice coming daily from the radio, or from wherever, for there is nothing resem­ bling a radio on the table anymore. Isn’t digging through the chaos of the world the only way – and hasn’t it been – to sustain our existence? “The rite of architecture is performed in order to make real a space that before the rite was not,” wrote the Italian radical architect Ettore Sottsass.1

1

Ettore Sottsass: There Is a Planet, exh. cat. (Milan: Electa, 2017), 105.

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Hello Orwell, my dear old friend Michael Ho

Technology has become more ubiquitous than ever, and has had a drastic impact in recent years on how we perceive spaces. As Hito Steyerl notes, “one of the symptoms of this transformation is the growing impor­ tance of the aerial view – overviews, Google Map views, satellite views” 1 – which is alternatively referred to as the ‘God’s-eye view’. As our daily lives and activities become more and more intertwined and assimilated with our virtual activities, new methods of censorship have been introduced, such as the ‘Right to erasure (right to be forgotten)’ in 2006. To protect the privacy and anonymity of individuals, Google selectively blurs photographs containing car license number plates and people’s faces in Google Street View with the aid of algorithms. The website also provides the option for users to request further blurring – in other words, public censorship – of themselves, their homes, their family and even their car. This is one of the few safety measures that have been put in place by tech corporations in response to the growing urge for greater protection of our privacy. It would follow logically that our contemporary cities, as they are becoming ‘smarter’ every day, should have the corresponding increase in censorship measures to protect public users, however, the reality is that a high degree of censorship is lacking.

Whether privately or publicly owned, cc tv cameras are proliferating in our urban spaces, fragmenting the city into broken, digital, ‘situational’ realities – evidence that we are currently in “the epoch of simultaneity, the epoch of the near and far”.2 Being connected through technology means being vulnerable and subjected to constant forms of digital surveillance. Within the domain of the city, it is the cc tv system in particular that threatens our rights and privacy within public space. For example, most cc tv footage across the city of London is governed by a variety of codes of practice and data protection laws. Recordings are usually stored for 30 days, after which time they are automatically deleted. Members of the public are able to gain access to information and recordings that might concern them through the Freedom of Information Act, which gives the public the right of access to information held by public authorities. Yet, despite the existing framework of laws, gaining access to information presents itself as a very tedious process that often leads to negative results. It should be noted that London sets an extreme example – it is well known for its extensive surveillance system and has gained a reputation for being the surveillance capital of the world.

With approximately 500,000 cameras dotted around

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the city, it is estimated that the average Londoner is captured around 300 times a day. One should keep in mind that “the digital image is not as ephemeral as one might think, because just as a photograph is lodged in paper, the digital image is lodged in a circulatory system of desire and exchange”.3 The virtual world, perceived through the digital eye, operates by its own laws and physics; (↘ fig. 2) attempts to delineate this.

The diagram bases its logic on the Minkowski diagram (also known as a space-time diagram) which was developed in 1908 by Hermann Minkowski. It graphically illustrates the relationship between the properties of space (represented on the x-axis) and time (represented on the y-axis) in the special theory of relativity. The spiral superimposed above represents the digital reality in which time can be reversed, fast forwarded, stopped and archived.

Initially, the emphasis of cct v policy was on crime prevention and detection on a local scale, however this policy gradually shifted towards the prevention of anti-social behaviour, which manifested physically in the expansion of cctv from town and city centres into residential and public spaces. Fear-inducing terrorist attacks such as 9/11 fuelled public demand for more surveillance, shifting policy even further. At present, cct v operates on a national scale, providing national security with the aim to prevent terrorism. Occurring simultaneously with the evolution of its policy was the broadening of the cc t v camera’s technical capabilities, brought about by an advancement in artificial intelligence and machine learning.

Nowadays, the diversity of tasks that a cc t v camera can undertake ranges from recognising number plates and tracking movement to analysing the biometric data of thousands of people at the same time. The latter,

in particular, has been the subject of a globally controversial debate, as this technology is being deployed widely without oversight or policing. In other words, it exists within a legal vacuum. There has been no mention within uk law of the phrase ‘facial recognition’, neither is there any legal basis for the police to employ it. Summed up simply, there are no legal limitations on how facial recognition can be used and conversely abused. “Facial recognition cameras are far more intru­ sive than regular cc tv . They scan distinct facial features such as face shape to create a detailed biometric map – which means that being captured by these cameras is like being fingerprinted, without knowledge or consent”.4 In March 2018, the police deployed facial recognition technology at a protest for the first time. This raised concerns among people involved in the protest, with some individuals stating that they would have avoided demonstrating if they had known that facial recognition was being used in the area. This example clearly shows that surveillance indirectly restricts the right of the public to assemble, as well as the right to express themselves. Far more shocking are recent results from m i t ’s Media Lab research, which revealed a built-in racial bias within facial recognition software for identifying black faces. This could be attributed to the fact that the software’s algorithms are usually written by white engineers, resulting in a higher error rate for people with darker skin, but also for women and those from minority ethnic backgrounds. Thus, even with the advancement of technology and the increasing accuracy of facial recognition, the widespread application of cc tv systems in public areas should be reconsidered. Ultimately, such techology provides the government with the power to track people’s everyday

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lives, and build a comprehensive data network of public movements that is searchable at the click of a button.

The use of facial recognition software stands, by default, in contradiction to a healthy democratic society.

Rather ironically, it brings us one step closer to Orwell’s dystopian vision described in his book 1984, and has fundamental repercussions for our relationship with the government and the public spaces we inhabit. We are now in an era when our fate is no longer in the hands of the gods, but algorithms instead. Many cities are aware of the political and ethical problems posed by new surveillance technologies, and have started to take countermeasures to protect their citizens’ privacy. San Francisco banned the use of facial recognition technology by the city’s police and other agencies in May 2019 for the dangers mentioned above. Indi­ viduals that want to take their privacy into their own hands have developed anti-surveillance gadgets, such as Refractle, spectacles that use micro-prismatic, retro-reflective materials to bounce light back from where it comes from, causing their faces to appear blurred. Others use infrared-light to dazzle cc tv cameras.

Another approach to trick cctv cameras is camouflage. Berlin based artist Adam Harvey, who investigates computer vision, privacy and surveillance in his research and artwork has developed a unique pattern called Hyperface (↗ fig. 3). The design overloads the recognition software with activated false faces that are based on ideal algorithmic representations of a human face.

It essentially reduces the confidence score of the true face by redirecting it.

My final year project and thesis at the Architectural Association endeavours to respond to vital issues regarding cc t v systems. The issue unfolds itself as a spatial one due to its ineluctable entanglement with

the urban infrastructure of our global cities. The project, titled ‘A new reality in the heap of broken images’, questions whether architecture could be used as a means of censorship within the public realm, providing moments of ‘shade’ from cctv-saturated environments.

This is rendered through regarding architecture as a form of a glitch in which a new kind of space is devel­ oped – “the third space” 5 – one that sits between our built environment and the recorded virtual reality.

Initial experiments with open-source cc tv footage of myself and video installations tested the boundaries and properties of the medium in order to gain insight into cctv’s legal operations and physical properties. The research led to my chosen site, Trafalgar Square, in which the very first public cc t v camera had been placed in 1960, during a visit by the royal family of Thailand to London, as a means of monitoring the large attending crowd. The historic landmark in the heart of London is widely regarded as a meeting place between the east and west and, as a result, has become a vital public space for community gatherings, political demonstrations and public celebrations. Within the centre of the square sit the two iconic fountains that were installed in 1841 to counteract the effect of reflected heat and glare from the asphalt surface, but also, allegedly, to reduce the amount of space in the square for public gatherings. Thus, the first stage of my project proposes to remove the fountains from the square. The architecture itself manifests as a form of ‘glitch’, intervening and interrupting the current surveillance system in place. The proposed structures are very simple, thin and lightweight, and support a transparent roof surface that incorporates the Hyperface pattern. This would cast a corresponding patterned shadow onto

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its immediate environment during the day, and create moments of camouflage. The actual space is therefore unravelled and distorted by the shadows, which are, to some degree, ‘invisible’ to the public eye, though visible to the digital eye. As the day shifts towards night time, infrared lights positioned along the metal frame structures turn on in order to prolong the new public spaces in which privacy is restored. At an urban scale, the project envisions a public strategy such that these structures are not confined in terms of size and shape, but form a network spreading out from Trafalgar Square into other parts of London and providing the public with spaces in which one is able to disappear from the camera; a kind of “Heteropia”, in which one finds themselves on the other side of the mirror.6 The thesis is ultimately a work of fiction, existing as a commentary on the current surveillance systems that prevail within the public space of our contemporary cities.

Despite all the apparent dangers and flaws of new surveillance technologies, the vast majority of public support for the use of cct v is based on the belief that it reduces crime. “The view that crime reduction follows cc t v provision has been successfully disseminated across society and has filtered down into the general consciousness of the population”.7 While there is no doubt that these new surveillance infrastructures have reduces crimes in public spaces, it is essential that we continue questioning and checking what personal and collective civil liberties are sacrificed at the expense of security.

1 Hito Steyerl, the wretched screen, 2012 2 Foucault Michel, Of Other Spaces, Heterotopias, 1984 3 Hito Steyerl, the wretched screen, 2012 4 www.privacyinternational.org/advocacy/2835/our-response-westminster-halldebate-facial-recognition 5 Jordan, Brigitte. “Blurring Boundaries: The ‘Real’ and the ‘Virtual’ in Hybrid Spaces.” Human Organization, vol. 68, no. 2, 2009 6 Foucault Michel, Of Other Spaces, Heterotopias, 1984 7 William Webster , cctv policy in the uk: reconsidering the evidence base.

Surveillance & Society, 2009

A NEW REALITY IN THE HEAP OF BROKEN IMAGES

Pa rt I Eating, kissing, pissing, fucking Within the city lies a foreign gaze Perpetually scanning for the unexpected An indefinite search for the irregular, for the anomalies It is within this city in which privacy has become a memory Once in a while the Dionysian nature reveals itself Overseers are elsewhere, observing from a distance The world is consumed through the screen, creating a digital mirror image Social conformity that began as a habit has now become an instinct If you have nothing to hide You have nothing to fear.

Pa rt I I Between the idea and the reality Between the motion and the act falls the Void It consists of ones and zeros Fluctuating, pulsing; it is Shape without form Shade without colour, gesture without motion Paralysed force Traces left unexploited dissolve criteria of measurability Physical and virtual continue to shift and fade Forming new boundaries from which meaning is constructed An act of appearing and disappearing In the heap of broken images, a new reality was conceived A space of lost desires that grows under this white haze Come in under the shadow of this white haze and it will show something different from either the morning shadow striding behind you Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you It will show you freedom in a sea of light

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Recognition Follows Dor Schindler

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note: Without dwelling too long on Barthes’ idea of the other, the description below is to a degree fictional, basing its line of reasoning on an architectural survey that took place in 2016.

A corridor of metal tracks cuts a small town in half.

An old lady lives right next to the railway. The gate to her home can only be accessed from one path. The alley leading over the tracks is not aligned with her doorstep. Turning her back to the passing trains is not an option. A diagonal is inevitable.

A process of careful addition took place, to allow comfortable crossing. Old timber sleepers are slotted between the modern metal tracks to make flush the surface. The sleepers, held in place with steel ties, are arrayed along an imaginary diagonal, the shortest way from A to B. Their positioning is meticulous; a few centimetres from each track, allowing just the right tolerance for a train to pass over. The edges of the path are two small tarmac ramps, which soften the hard stepping towards the ground. It is fair to assume that the ramps allow the rolling of a grocery cart or any wheeled object.

The Easement’s ad-hoc language is misleading.

Despite the re-use of timber members disposed of by the railway company, the quality of this moment is extreme. The impression of a hasty patchwork is replaced with the awe of precision. It judges just what is needed based on intimate experience with a place.

Not prescribed, just operational.

Almost as an aftermath, recognition arrives. A small traffic light and red corner stones are installed on either side of the path. It is a sign of embrace; the personal easement is officially recognised.

Since it works just fine, a legitimate status is granted. A potted plant (the cherry on top) is placed immediately after the crossing, just before the old lady’s doorstep. An indication of domesticity. A household bleeds into infrastructure, co-existing with the railway.

Such instances are the byproduct of a loose town planning strategy and municipal freedom, where the subdivision of plots allows a house to be accessed only through a void created by a railway, while local individuals act in response to what they might deem worthy of change.

Sometimes, in peripheral areas, a delicate balance between legislation and private capitalisation is achieved. As municipal maintenance services are either cumbersome or non-existent, private initiatives adjust the local urbanus to address spatial needs. If done with consideration, recognition follows.

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Reclaiming Agency Omar Kassab

Taken in Cairo, Egypt, these images illustrate acts of reclamation. They showcase how a street pole, often exclusively supplied in formal neighbourhoods of the city or on main streets, is hacked, transplanted to a different location and assigned a new use. These objects reclaim the agency of Cairo’s citizens; hacking is an act of protest against the uneven distribution of resources.

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Intercepting Content With Colour Rosalind Wilson

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An Ode to the Industrial Robot Yoav Caspi

Fig. 1 Robotic hand painting following an arbitrary canvas pattern. Aleator777 (2016). Robotic Painting.

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Fig. 1 and 2 showcase an opportunity for technological disobedience. The images depict two industrial robots during a fabrication process. One is drawing a portrait, the other is painting a canvas. Although the mode of performance seems similar, the core generation of the process is disparate and their differences are important.

The first recognises digital information through a camera or 3d scanner and draws it on a piece of paper. The second follows a framework, an algorithmic database that allows it to generate a painting.

In his lecture entitled Hinging, Edouard Cabay articulates the first procedure: “here the use of the tool, in this case, the robot is linear, there is an image that serves as the information for the robot to move and draw the image that it already received.” While the first utilises a linear process, the second allows the robot to fabricate creatively. It produces a potential painting under a certain framework, performing a pattern based on a series of parameters and constraints. One may argue that both procedures function under a prescribed formula, however, the margin for independence in the second is imperative. This margin offers the industrial robot a degree of freedom, which, under certain circumstances, can become technological disobedience.

To highlight this argument on the potential of creative fabrication, the relevance to hand-drawings and paintings is prominent. It becomes clear that in drawing, our hand and mind operate under certain frameworks that influence the process of creative thinking: the memory of the hand, the size of the canvas, the pen or pencil in-between our fingers or even the environment that surrounds us. Comparing the possibilities of a human and a robotic hand may seem arbitrary, but its acknowledgement can facilitate opportunities of technological disobedience.

The works of Jackson Pollock provide a good comparison. While using hardened brushes, sticks and syringes to pour and drip paint, Pollock claimed he had a clear idea of what he envisioned the final piece to be. However, it seems evident that the system he designed shared a great deal of the authorship. Similar to a painting by an industrial robot, Pollock’s production is regulated by the size of the canvas, the heaviness of the paint, its density and the tools he used. In many ways, this method of working resembles an algorithmic database. Another aspect shared between Pollock and the industrial robot’s methods of painting is a measure of physical distance. Despite using his entire body when painting, Pollock often expressed the aim of becoming closer to the canvas: “On the floor I am more at ease.

I feel nearer, more part of the painting, since this way I can walk around it, work from the four sides and literally be in the painting”. 1

Fig.2

Robotic hand reproducing information in the form of a drawing. Wired (2017).

Robotic Drawing. Available at: https://www.wired.co.uk/.

Pollock always remained at a distance from the canvas, throwing paint against a hard surface, wall or floor. Both the analogue and the robotic have their own language. With analogue tools, this language is accessible and easy to comprehend due to its physicality and its linearity. A hammer or a drawing pencil are extensions of our body, whereas the industrial robot creates a barrier. Operating under a prescribed framework, the language of the robot becomes unfamiliar; the distance hinders our ability to recognise opportunities of disobedience.

If we would like to facilitate this recognition, we need to minimise the unavoidable distance. We should embrace a more collective approach, one that recognises more human qualities in the language of robots. Despite the distance, the industrial robot can also become a direct extension of our brain and body: “When I have the chance I often like to watch your orange-coloured industrial robot, which stands like a lonely, beautifully caged alien animal. I always feel he is rather melancholy. As though he didn’t know where to direct his power, as though he intended to do something, but wasn’t clear exactly what. And questions often flit through my mind, which I would like to ask you now: How much does one robot hour cost?

How many breaks does he have?

What is his lifespan?

Do they tell him off ?

Does he make mistakes?

Could he catch a mouse?

Could he function in the wild?

Are there more of his species?” 2 1 Wikipedia (2018). Jackson Pollock. Available at: en.wikipedia.org/ wiki/Jackson_Pollock.

2 Gramazio & Kohler (2008). Digital Materiality in Architecture.

Baden: Lars Muller.

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26

LAWuN

Eleven notes on Obsolescence and the absurd urge to save humanity?

1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

8.

9.

10.

11.

The bottled water market globally is rapidly growing with approximate 600 million households consuming bottled water in 2018. That’s more than 100 billion gallons (391 billion litres) of water per year or 1 million bottles per minute, how many obsolete bottles are yours?

Obsolesence once seemed to be a good idea in the world of things, recently it has become a bad word, an undesirable reality, a new swear word of the climate cult.

But think about it.

Without this kind of death or disuse of things then?

Perhaps we should apply Darwin’s theory of evolution to things and objects, to see things and objects as another species? Another life form?

We must also remember that new technology does not replace or make obsolete the technology it replaces, it releases it into another life form (sometimes to be art?).

Obsolescence releases things to be Junk which is an intermediary state with the possibility of rebirth, reuse, new use.

Which is more than we can say for our own bodies which as they become obsolete have little capacity for re-use and in fact are a major polluting process on the planet. Greenhouse gases produced by our de-composing bodies are significant, and mainly include Carbon Dioxide, Methane and Nitrus Oxide.

In Darwinian terms are we humans the obsolete species?

Kurt Cobain said.. “it is better to burn than fade away” … sorry Kurt the cremation industry in the USA releases about 250,000 tons of CO 2 each year, (not to mention all the chemicals involved).

Just because your body has become obsolete it does not give you the right to die and pollute the planet!

The obsolescence of dead things is simply nature’s way of mining old materials for new uses, your obsolete car is available for new projects!

Your obsolete body?

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In Common Parlance AArchitecture 39 28

On the temporal, natural and constructed common ground Karl Herdersch and Noriyuki Ishii

This project began as a series of walks and observations after protesting in London, where the Big Ben is being maintained while its lawns are routinely dying as a result of the volume of footfall in Parliament Square. What is presented here is part of a larger set of drawings, research and investigations.

When a group of people use language in common to actively achieve a goal, it is referred to as common parlance. The particular (parlance) is what makes the construction of such infrastructures in dialectics incredibly problematic. As with dialectics, the city is peppered with the devious intentions of its various authors. This seems obvious but may be taken for granted. Our critique suggests the active reprogramming of systems in place towards alternative devious intentions.

The purpose of this project was to begin the process of hacking London’s programmed maintenance through the same systems of planning used by authorities in the public arena.

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A LAWN / THE PLAN The lawn that occupies most of Parliament Square is enclosed by a fence during protests or occupations.

Routine and procedural maintenance is used as a way of managing acts of political demonstration. We should aim to revise the practice of maintenance and disrupt its protocols, enabling the application of a platform for protest.

NATURE AND ARTIFICE In the 19th century, English cities were likened to dense wildernesses, ungoverned places lacking order amongst the individual. With the employment of garden design, strategies to reconfigure urban space resulted in the capitalist development of cities. If the latter is so, it is because the means of production, first established in the English rural economy, was characteristic of capitalism. The landscape was re-ordered and privatised, production increased and inhabitants were displaced.

This narrative may have progressed out of the image of landscape in the picturesque paintings of the 17th century, an aesthetic of pleasure and eroticism enclosed within its interior wilderness.

The appearance of developments across London in the last 10 years is evidence of an increased obsession with security. Many of these developments are enclosed and private, they are gated communities with fences, locked entrance gates and exclusive residential zones.

Video surveillance has become the norm. Increasingly secure luxury apartments with concierges, and private security offer safer living conditions, which are then aimed at an individual’s investment portfolio rather than the housing of communities.

The boundaries between ‘public’ and ‘private’ space have become invisible, with new developments wanting to appear open and integrated into urban space. These conditions are particularly evident in commercial and mixed-use redevelopments, where open, publicly accessible space is a requirement under Section 106, forcing developments to return something to the local community, often in the form of ‘public space’. These spaces are fundamentally private, secure and monitored, but ultimately they are our new city garden.

DEVIOUS SYSTEMS (FLEXIBILITY) In the relatively recent redesign of ‘privatised public spaces’, grass, hedges and trees are embedded between

paving and lunchtime ledges for office workers.

Awkwardly-scaled water features occupy central spaces and tiny plants in giant pots stand guarding the borders.

These insertions into the cityscape are rapidly deploy­ able and flexible hardware that allow the subdivision of the common ground to restrict the formation of a crowd and its movement.

Interestingly, it is not the implementation of city furniture that controls the occupation of Parliament Square, instead it is planning regulations. The routine of watering and fertilising the green space in front of parliament restricts regular use. Rapidly common, deployable systems, may be advantageous to allow both maintenance and use simultaneously through the construction of a platform.

PLATFORMS A platform is a horizontal space of exemption minus division. It is essential in achieving differentiation from earth and yet it allows a closeness to the ground.

To be grounded in a reality where we struggle to define our politics. To provide a closeness to earth may be one of architecture’s hardest tasks and yet it is one of the oldest tools for establishing settlement.

It may create the beginnings of domesticity, yet equally if we want to redefine and organise our environments to suit new forms of living, the platform is critical in understanding how we begin to undo outdated modes of ownership and power. In theatre, the platform is used to stage power differentials, those with more power being higher. It is clearly defined and a lot less murky than the development of subdivided interior spaces. Nature is murky, uneven and harsh. The platform is human, understandable and usable, its topography flattened to only a few datums. The platform seeks to question inhabitation and the use of place.

TOWARDS A COMMON GROUND (PLANNING, HACKING, PLANNING) Ultimately, the project aims to reconsider what is public and common within the contemporary condition.

This is enabled through the creation of a platform in common parlance, that technically enables Parliament Square to remain a place of protest and demonstration, giving form to angst and what is left of democracy.

In common parlance moves beyond an image of nature, towards earth and its understanding as a constructed, artificial territory.

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Danh Vo and the Two Panel Comic Book Interview with a chair after cutting but pre-assemblage: Alice Baseian

Danh Vo’s work is characterised by his use of objects in relation to one another to create a question; or a series of questions. It is this question that becomes the subject of his work. In the case of Cathedral Block Prayer Stage Gun Stock (Marian Goodman, 2019), the question is simply “What to do with all this wood? What can this wood be and how?” It can be thought of as a comic strip with only two panels: what comes before and what comes after. The proposition of these two images urges us to think about what could sit in the white gutter in-between.

The first panel is the ground floor (wood); the natural resource. The second panel is the first floor (the product). The product begins with the conclusive decision made by the carpenter of which question to choose and which question to answer.

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Physically this entails picking up a piece of wood from the first panel and walking through the white gutter into the second panel. Through this decision the fate of the piece, or rather the chair, table, flag has already been made. The gutter becomes a conversation between the two states, an interrogative conversation, as all conversations are, after all, about asking questions and forming answers…

and heavy. But first They would have to cut us and separate us but in the end we would be together again under the warm and heavy bottom sky. l e g 2: Warm and heavy bottom l e g 3: Warm bottom l e g 4: Bottom.

i ntervie wer: So how long have you been here? l eg 1: Hello, I’ve been here since the last time that door closed, then it became dark. l eg 2: Hello, I’ve been since that door closed, then it became dark. l eg 3: Hello, that door closed, then it became dark. l eg 4:

i n te r v i e w e r: So then above us right now is a warm, heavy bottom? l e g 1: No, no, no, you see we aren’t ready yet, it’s not them its us, see it’s an important job, the legs and the seat have to hold the sky bottom away from the roots and we aren’t good enough yet. They said They would come back and that was … well ‘hello, then it became dark’

Hello, then it became dark.

l eg 1: Those three are always copying me, they are like me but different. With one of them we were one piece, but then the machine over there cut us into two.

Once, we were all a tree, that’s what They told me. And the tree was next to other trees, and above was the sky and below were the roots. Tree, sky and roots.

i n te r v i e w e r: How would you feel if they never came back and if you never felt what it was like to be the leggy leg that separates the sky bottom from the root ground? How would you feel if They didn’t deliver what they promised? If it was a mistake, if this is it and you will be in this ‘it became dark’ forever. l e g 1: Feel? Is feel something like when someone moves you?

l eg 2: Tree, sky l eg 3: oots l eg 4: Teeskyoot seat: Who told you that? What is tree and sky and roots? i ntervie wer: Yes I would be interested to hear you explain the tree and sky and roots. l eg 1: A tree was many legs all attached together. The sky is the stuff above the tree and the roots are what is below.

l e g 2: Yes, it’s when someone moves you, sometimes it hurts when someone moves you and you fall onto the floor, but sometimes someone moves you and they move you closer to another leg. l e g 3: Yes, that’s nice when They move you closer to another leg. l e g 1: If it will be ‘it became dark’ forever, I guess one day I will have to become a piece of wood. l e g 2: A piece of wood l e g 3:

Piece of wood

l eg 2: Yes, legs and legs and legs l e g 4: Wood. l eg 3:

Yes, and above and below

l eg 1: Then They removed the leglegleg – the tree – and told me that instead of roots there would be a floor, and instead of sky there would be a seat and on that seat would sit a bottom. It would be the bottom of the They that told us, and it would be great and warm

… Forming a truth. In this exhibition, the truth of the objects produced is not formed by the maker. The whole scenario is orchestrated, there is no truth in the chair. It is just a placeholder for an idea and will never fulfill its purpose.

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Gaming For Food, Not For Fun When A Day of Gaming Is More Lucrative Than an Entire Month of Employment Renée Die-Girbau

↑ A government supplied laptop which was given as part of an educational program in schools in 2009. Once received, the government computers are hacked and are now sold on the blackmarket. They are used to run the gaming software Tibia. The image shows it being run alongside a monitor.

AArchitecture 39 36

Venezuela, once the richest nation in South America, has been steeped in political, social and economic turmoil for the past six years. The resulting food and medicine shortages, power outages and surging crime rates, (to list a few of the dire consequences), have led to the exodus of around four million people. As a result of this instability, Venezuela now has the highest inflation rate in the world, estimated at 300,000% in April and predicted to reach 10,000,000% by the end of this year. 1

Behind these inconceivable figures are real stories – stories that provide an insight into the devastating effects of hyperinflation not only on the job market but perhaps, more importantly, on people’s daily lives. These stories reflect the seemingly idiosyncratic practices that arise from necessity, when the shortest distance between two points is no longer a straight line, but rather a complex, cyclical network of goods exchanged, sold, purchased, lost and acquired.

As a result of daily dramatic fluctuations in the national currency’s exchange rate – the black-market’s exchange value is even considered more stable and reliable than the state’s – Johan, a 28 year old computer science graduate, uses the online game Tibia for his main source of income to survive in La Guaira, Venezuela.

I had the opportunity to interview Johan in order to gain an insight into how he uses gaming in order to meet the basic needs that even stable and qualified employment no longer can.

Renée

What did you work on before you started Tibia?

Johan I worked for a year and a half at an institution called the “Academia Técnica de Militares de la Armada” (at mar) where I was in charge of computer equipment. My contract provided a salary of approximately $15 per month, which, converted to Bolívares Fuertes, only slightly exceeded the minimum wage.

Wages in Venezuela are ridiculously low compared to any other country. For that reason, at the end of the contract, I decided not to renew it.

R

J I already knew about the game Tibia. It was a necessity, the lack of income, that pushed me to try it however. The game’s advantage, if any, is that it can run on any computer because it does not require much from the operating system. So, little by little, when I realised its viability, I gathered a group of four friends and now we work together to produce more income.

R

R

Who is part of this Tibia coin sale / purchase network?

J This business started through a Facebook page called “Tibia Venezuela Coins”, which kickstarted much of the mining taking place now. Today, I estimate that approximately 80% of users on the North American server are Venezuelan. From this, a very large network was formed. In essence, the process begins with me farming the gold, which I then use to buy Tibia coins.

I then sell these coins for $7 to a Venezuelan buyer, who in turn resells them for $10 to an American player (who saves $2 for buying the coins from them instead of from the official website). The American player can then exchange the Tibia coins for gold in the in-game marketplace, which he might then use to buy various add-ons or improvements to his in-game character.

The cycle then repeats itself as I buy those same Tibia coins back with the gold I acquired by farming.

When / how did you come to the realisation that you were better off mining in Tibia rather than attending your normal job?

J I basically did a profit comparison. In Tibia, I can mine the equivalent of 250 coins, with a value of $10, in about six to eight hours. In my previous employment, it would take me a month to make $15, the equivalent of 12 hours of gaming. This noticeable economic improvement was too difficult to ignore. Not to mention that with Tibia I have complete freedom to decide my work hours.

Can you explain how Tibia coins are obtained?

J Technically there are many ways to acquire gold within the game, but normally gold is farmed in the following way: you locate a cave that has a high number of creatures and, armed with a group of people, you fight and kill these creatures. Once killed, the creatures drop the gold that I then use to purchase the Tibia coins in the marketplace.

R R

Who introduced you to mining Tibia coins?

How many hours a day do you spend mining – do you have a goal of what you need to acquire in a certain amount of time?

J I dedicate eight hours a day to mining, divided into two 4-hour periods. My goal is to make $40 per week.

The game’s graphics make it very uncomfortable to do any more than that without getting a headache.

R

What do you think are the difficulties, specifically in Venezuela, of relying on gaming currency for your main income?

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J The number one difficulty is the Internet. The faults are constant: not only its slow speed, but the system often fails, mainly during the day. That’s why I decided to do my job at night so as not to have as many connection problems. But there is also a constant problem of lack of electricity; blackouts happen often and without any warning. Around five months ago there was a country-wide blackout, and since then there are electrical faults once a week, usually on Tuesdays.

So I had to change my lifestyle. I changed my work schedule to the nighttime and I sleep during the day.

Even so, the service is not guaranteed, but the interrup­ tions are less frequent.

R

How do you manage when you can’t work on account of electrical failures?

J I have a friend abroad who once sent me a Subway gift card which I used in-game to buy the Tibia coins directly. There are other methods of transferring money, but this was one of the rare ones that did not require a six month waiting period to be able to use the coins.

The gift card cost $12 and in return I received 250 coins which is the equivalent of $10. I then sold these coins to a Venezuelan buyer who transferred $7 to my PayPal account in Bolívares Fuertes.

R

In case your equipment becomes damaged, how do you go about replacing the items needed?

R

Do you consider Tibia coins to be more stable than Bolívares Fuertes?

J Well, the Tibia coins depend on the price of the dollar which is quite stable. Normally, the value of the dollar in Bolívares Fuertes changes weekly, daily in fact, but it’s more noticeable week by week. Today, 17 of November 2019, the dollar is at 26,000 Bs.F. By next week, the value of the dollar will increase exponentially, and prices on products will increase with it.3 For reference, the minimum wage in Venezuela is approximately 230,000 Bs.F. which is almost $7 – the same as you get with 250 coins. It seems incomprehensible that the virtual currency of a game is worth more than the national currency of the country, but that is the reality.

Johan will move to Madrid this coming January, courtesy of a joint effort amongst his friends (many of whom he met through gaming) to get him out of Venezuela. When asked if he would continue to rely on gaming currency once he arrived in Spain, his response was: I will likely arrive as an undocumented immigrant. The most I can aspire to is a trabajo en negro 4 like delivery or waiting tables. Still, any of those jobs would be much more profitable than farming Tibia coins.

J It is almost impossible to find computer equipment in Venezuela. One time my motherboard was damaged because of the blackouts, and I bought the replacement one from a neighbor for $70. I also had to replace my mouse and had to have one sent from the United States through a company called Liberty Express. They use a mailbox in Miami from where they ship goods to several branches in Venezuela. It was quite cheap – it cost me about $12, but it took 20 to 35 days to arrive.

R

What do you normally buy with the money acquired?

J Normally, my priority is to do my weekly shopping for basic necessities. Making a monthly purchase in Venezuela is extremely difficult because it requires at least about $200–$250. Therefore, I use the money raised that same week to buy my daily input; food, “cesta básica”, personal grooming products and medicine (if and when required). To give you an estimate of the cost of basic goods, a c la p box for example is worth approximately 80,000 Bs.F., which is around $3.2

1 IMF World Economic Outlook (October 2019) 2 “Comités Locales de Abastecimiento y Producción” (clap) are a strategy implemented by Nicolás Maduro in April 2016 to sell food bags containing rice, flour, sugar, milk, etc. at subsidised prices to combat shortages. Today, these clap boxes are sold in the black market for 10 times the original intended price.

3 One week after the interview with Johan, the black-market value of the dollar increased to 33.752,92 Bs. F. 4 “Trabajo en negro” refers to the jobs undocumented Venezuelans are forced to take when arriving in Spain, which sometimes rely on an account holder, (of a certain delivery app) who then allows them to work through his delivery account in exchange for significant monthly payments.

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Transportation in Marrakech Alexandra McGlynn

Transportation in Marrakech involves donkeys, mules, horses, camels, bicycles, buses, cars and scooters. The first two are used by traders to haul carts. Caléche horses pull carriages outside the Medina, camels carry tourists. Local men use bikes. During the summer, temperatures can reach 40 °c. In order to protect the saddles from overheating and the resulting discomfort, disassembled cardboard boxes are utilised to cover bike stands. It is a technology of acquiescence – to the sun.

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Ten AArchitecture 39 40

plot a s h o r t b r i e f c o m b i n i n g pa i r s o f o b j e c t s

“The survey of a given context and the identification of its key drivers and influences are essential components in how the unit operates. Above all, however, the process of addition and subtraction to and from an existing context will form a key mantra throughout the year – not only as a tool of design, but also as a way of producing evidence…”

The same logic was carried through in the responses to the task of spliting a fragment of an object from its whole.

This allowed us to re-examine the nature of said fragment, in some cases through its performance, often through its tactility and commonly through its form. The combination of one’s chosen fragment with that of another introduced the interface. We began to explore the latent potential of the two parts with respect to one another, challenging the natural performance or function of each individual object in order to create a joint that either highlighted an existing feature we had previously identified, or brought forward an unforeseen way of reading it.

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l o gan pain e + armaan ba ns a l Using performance as a way to combine a discarded mattress with a questionable history, and a radio, the chair provides a new interpretation and experience of the two objects. The notion of contact was maintained through the concept – as the moment of performance (sound output) occurs once the speaker wires connect to form a complete circuit. This process is reliant on the user sitting on the mattress in order to activate the mechanism that triggers the connection, therefore inherently linking not only mattress to radio but also user to object. The chair adopts a new role in this instance, as a seat for an involuntary listener.

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she e r g r it z e r s t e in + ju di dia b Initially testing contact, the two fragments to be joined are both products of a slice.The masking tape is sliced perpendicularly into fragments while the keyboard is cut once. Both actions alter the performance of the object. The interface between the roll of tape and the keyboard is a test of tactility and use – or rather an enhancement of their performative natures. The pendulum-like mechanism utilises the masking tape as a swinging mass, designed to meet the two halves of the keyboard (the ground) with every swing. The keyboard’s output, generated on dual screens, portrays the unpredictable nature of interaction between dual entities. It results in an illegible conversation, not unlike the automated responses we are bombarded with on a daily basis.

h ir o a k i ya m a n e + a l i c e b a s e i a n The object functions as a response to the task of creating a hinge between a split pair of binoculars and a ray of light. In a carefully orchestrated sequence, the binocular rolls down the rails via gravity, powering the rotation of the prism. The end of the slope is marked by a joining of the two binoculars, which coincides with a consequent stoppage of the prism and the light rays it was splitting. The time taken between the two objects being separate and the two objects being joined defines the period during which they both are able to function. Once joined, the prism no longer splits light and the binoculars are no longer able to be picked up.

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l a eti ti a chauveau + yoav ca r m o n The product of an eccentric obsession with paper airplanes makes its landing on a plate; the user presses down on the shift buttons, resulting in the creation of a fold. The design of this device complements the original objects; a piece of paper and a typewriter. The performance of this machine has to be read linearly. It works in different planes and is made from recycling certain elements; external as well as internal mechanisms. The lever mechanism has been appropriated in order to achieve a fold. In the interest of creating a junction between the paper and the typewriter, a plate is plugged into the typewriter core to hold the paper.

Thereupon, the paper is clipped in place, only to be taken away and stored on the paper shelf.

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vale n t ina b acc i + a le s s ia b r o g g ini A fragment of a chicken and of a wheel of cheese engage in a quarrel, and the conclusion is not served on a platter. Rather, the device brings together a wishbone and a piece of parmesan cheese. This allows a direct comparison between these two fundamentally different objects, which start to complement each other. Although both are consumable and meant to be cut, one is geometrical and crafted through an evolutionary process allowing birds to fly, while the other’s extremely irregular surface is cut from a very particular whole; the smooth wheel. By allowing this comparison, commonalities arise, with the cheese ultimately attaining the same width as the distance between the two arms of the wishbone, and five times its height (1:5). The device puts emphasis on the wishbone becoming a viewport through which the cheese is observed and measured at different distances.

ri yad yassin e + seo n wo o k im The strip of carpet (4 × 84 cm) is extracted to mark the threshold between the Unit 10 studio space and the corridor. The strip is suspended in mid-air on a block of reclaimed wood, quite a distance from its original position; a landing belt to many grubby shoe-soles.

The metal tube that stored the pigments of the printer hangs upright from the metal arm of the interface. As the heavier pendulum on the bottom swings, the metal tube sways, clashes and deposits the black pigments. The pigments travel through the filter of the exploded layers of the carpet and finally lands on the ground, drawing a new threshold (44.5 × 156 cm).

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Technological Disobedience and the Value of Limits Peter Olshavsky

AArchitecture 39 46

The “technological disobedience” project by Ernesto Oroza reveals a multitude of artefacts and relationships such as ingeniously made fans, mousetraps and rechargeable batteries. They reveal moments of cunning human intervention into the immediate environment that are rooted in “necessity” during times of crisis. But these technologies offer more than a historical curiosity and functional concerns. They provide a compelling point of departure to discuss creative production and its limits. This is approached through two connected stories. The first deals with the limited force of technologies in history and the second with the conjectural roots of these technologies.

What if modern technologies (← fig. 1) misbehaved and simply disappeared one night? “If you woke some morning and found that by some odd magic,” W. Brian Arthur speculates in The Nature of Technology, “the technologies that have appeared in the last six hundred years suddenly vanished: if you found that your toilet and stove and computer and automobile had disappeared, and along with these, steel and concrete buildings, mass production, public hygiene, the steam engine, modern agriculture, the joint stock company and the printing press, you would find that our modern world had also disappeared.” 1 He punctuates his point with the provocative claim, “Technology is what separates us from the Middle Ages.” 2

Let’s go along with this scenario and claim for the moment. After the mass-casualties, horrifying chaos and urgency wrought by these disobedient technologies, it is likely that the world would settle into a détente.

Settlement patterns and building practices would adjust.

Political life would resolve into systems that worked for portions of newly formed communities. Everyday life would become customary as people adjusted to their diminished will and new ways of making do in what would feel like an impoverished condition.

With time, people would wake up in an environment that might feel similar to the Middle Ages.

Narrowed social spheres, local economies, ruinous diseases, limited provisions, different sounds, true darkness and the pervasive and acrid smell of feces. Perhaps the sensorial realm would approximate the late-1300s. But for the great majority of the world, things would not be the same because no amount of disappearing technologies would return us to that period, tout court.

This is due to what Charles Taylor calls, “ratchet effects”. Like the pawl designed to catch a tooth of the advancing ratchet’s gear, as societies moved unevenly through the processes of modernisation certain fundamental characteristics of pre-modern conceptions were left irretrievably behind us. We moved and the ratchet clicked. Their historical recovery of the past as an

awake­ning in the post-pre-tech epoch is actually impossible. To say this differently, the processes of modernisation marked us all, even those people who chose to see only the foreground of our attention, like technologies.

Let me play out this limit through a more nuanced alternative to Arthur’s clever scene. With the breaking of dawn, I would die a slow and painful death due to no access to modern medicine. So, I’ll use my partner as an example. Assuming she survives the fall when our nineteenth-storey apartment disappears, she would wake on the bare earth. It would be in a very different “city” than the one in which she went to bed. But questioning the degree of difference encourages us to look past the depth of our historical, linguistic and embodied constitution that grants continuities. Foregrounding disparities is not a neutral choice. It forcefully renders technological impacts more visible thereby reinforcing hackneyed late-modern idealisations of modern change as a by-product of the artefacts and relationships we call technologies.

Perhaps a few pointed questions will serve to make my point about this bias. With this new dawn, would my partner’s fundamental social imagination or the broad understanding of the ways people imagine their collective social life be altered? Would the moral order that underpinned her life simply go away? What reason is there to believe that the disappearance of technologies would force transcendental goals of pre-modern moral order above everyday modern goals, needs and commitments? In other words, would the axial hierarchy of mutual service that once organised medieval society by linking the divine to sovereign to lower classes just re-appear? What reason do we have to believe that in this neo-medieval world she would pledge her allegiance to the nearest person dressed like nobility? Their attire, of course, taken from the pile of dusty textiles where the city’s museum once stood. Would a modern society where personal belief in the divine is one among many options return to being effectively impossible?

What about the spirits and myths of the non-immanent?

Would they fly back into her life? Would equality in citizenship or rights like privacy simply be revoked like our mischievous television?

If anything of the medieval world did arise after the new dawn, why are we to think it would occur, be integrated and be understood in the same way as it once was? Does this assumption not presume that history is an arc that can be traced back minus one aspect? Or more bluntly, would this return inevitably lead to a repeat performance? The answers to the last three questions are simple – no, they would not.

These questions, of course, are not all that can be asked. But they do raise limits about the view of

Charger 47

modernisation as co-extensive with technologies. A person hardly has to deliberate to realise that technologies did engender change, but not all the substantive transformation of secularisation, particularly in the everyday, political and moral realms. If the vigorous efforts that instituted and reified exploration, research and development of technologies over the course of 600 years did not shape the full scope of human life, then what are we to make of the limited endeavors of disobeying technologies like those identified by Oroza?

ROOTS OF CONJECTURE The tradition celebrated by Oroza (→ fig. 2) cares little about which disciplinary boundaries it crossed, categories it upset, or the practices and protocols in which it failed to conduct with decorum. So, how are we to characterise these artefacts from Cuba we call disobedient technologies? The idiosyncratic nature of these disobeying technologies offers an exegetical challenge to this question. Care should be taken with it because understanding and practices will be drawn from this work whether we like it or not.

Poor exegesis has several consequences. It can bestow artificial cultural currency that reduces the objects to gentrified expressions of a local diy movement as if they can be repackaged in corporate form by home improvement retailers. Even the implication of “hacker” culture, as Oroza claims, is dubious in this setting. Their shared cleverness and illicit actions might be similar to what hackers do but the deeply felt longing for dignity has less in common with the antics of the bourgeois elites that are computer scientists, engineers and makers. There is also the potential to functionalise and aestheticise these technologies, Oroza notes, which overlooks the broader background of Cuba and its “Período especial.” Along these lines, there is also the possibility of them being viewed as “honest” expressions.

This is as patronising as it is naïve. It tacitly re-articulates the trope of culture as degenerative and that those with limited resources are closer to Rousseau’s “noble savages,” thus their practices dwell nearer to truth. This fails to see sophistication as well as values or qualitative distinctions interlaced with their practices.

With these common concerns in mind, history offers an analog. These works are, in fact, closer in spirit to the stochastic characteristics of handicraft or art (techne). This is highly relevant in order to grasp disobedient technologies even in a contemporary context.

This claim is clarified through another story, this time much older. In Book 10 of Vitruvius’ De architectura (30–20 BCE), the Roman architect recounts the 305

b c e siege of Rhodes by Demetrius I of Macedon. He describes this episode to draw out specific capacities of the architect. In order to turn away the impending attack, the Rhodian architect Diognetus: “made a breach in the ramparts where the machine was to come, and ordered everyone publicly and in private to collect water, sewage and mud and, coming forth, to pour it along channels through the breach in front of the rampart. After a great amount of water, mud, sewage, had been poured down overnight, the next day the siege engine [of king Demetrius] came along; and before it drew up to the wall, it was engulfed in the wet ground and stuck, nor could it get on or get out.” 3 The crisis, Vitruvius suggests, was not overcome by better or larger contrivances. Instead, the architect’s cunning (sapientia) moored the approaching machine.

There are three relevant aspects that should be enumerated. The first was the counter-intuitive move of breaching their own ramparts. The second was the rallying of a community in a well-timed fecal response.

The third was producing a perfectly unsuitable foun­ dation from the townspeople’s dregs to undermine the proper behavior of the attacking architectural machine.

No doubt it would have been a shitty day had any part of Diognetus’s plan failed.

Vitruvius makes the case that the architect’s “cunning is of more avail than machines.” Cunning, as an innate quality that is developed with experience that goes beyond technical expertise, can triumph in an exceptional situation. Both the encroaching siege engine and the defecatory response involved various techniques that disrupted the normal course of defense, but the skill of the architect depended on a nimble stochastic practice to hit a target, like an archer. The word stochastic derives from the Greek word stokhazesthai meaning “aim at, guess,” from stokhos “aim.” Practices that were stochastic are conjectural. “The stochastic character of techne is then the result of its constant negotiation between general principles and individual situations.” 4 This is a less technical form of knowledge and closer to practical wisdom (phronesis). Jointed to techne is chance (tyche), their success was not a foregone conclusion. It depended on the architect taking advantage of a fleeting opportunity based on incomplete knowledge. A “critical moment” (kairos) was recognised with foresight and seized wherein the architect could act judiciously.

Like Vitruvius’ Diognetus, the practices involved in fixing a washing machine, powering a bike or making

AArchitecture 39 48

a paint brush from odds and ends are conjectural. They are rooted in chance, experiential wisdom and the foresight to seize a moment. Success is not guaranteed.

They may or may not work. They may or may not be shareable. While they can make some people’s lives just a bit more preferable (and that is not nothing), they may not offer strategies to undermine the hegemony of a technologically textured life or wrestle political and economic power away from elites. History is full of improvised technologies with parts and pieces misappropriated, co-opted, hacked, or that are the ill-gotten bastards of human struggle. Yet, here we are.

But these limits are not a cause for defeatism. The conjectural nature of these artifacts and relationships have value because they are emergent. They are open to possibilities in which their capacities can reveal unknown, unseen and uncontrolled opportunities. This

means that disobedient technologies can expose new purposes and make new meanings and practices. They can weaken the grasp of routine ways of imagining life in the present. In doing so, they just might foster a fuller sense of human needs and ways in which practices can help enshrine a sense of meaning and dignity in people’s lives.

1 W. Brian Arthur, The Nature of Technology: What It Is and How It Evolves (New York, London, Toronto and Sydney: Free Press, 2009), 10.

2 Arthur, Nature of Technology, 10.

3 Vitruvius, On Architecture, trans. Frank Granger (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1970), 10.16.1–8.

4 S. Cuomo, Technology and Culture in Greek and Roman Antiquity (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 18.

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aarchitecture 39 – Biographies

TEN A 2nd and 3rd year unit at the Architectural Association, led by Valentin Bontjes van Beek and Winston Hampel. Students: Valentina Bacci, Alice Baseian, Armaan Bansal, Alessia Broggini, Yoav Carmon, Laetitia Chauveau, Judi Diab, Sheer Gritzerstein, Seonwoo Kim, Logan Paine, Hiroaki Yamane and Riyad Yassine.

ALICE BASEIAN Alice Baseian is a 3rd year student at the Architectural Association.

Currently studying in Experimental 10 (Tutors: Valentin Bontjes van Beek and Winston Hampel) she was previously with Experimental 5 (Tutors: Ryan Dillon and David Greene).

YOAV CASPI Yoav is undergoing his final year at the AA MArch course. Born in Israel, he has exhibited in Jerusalem, Budapest and at the RIBA in London. He has worked as an architectural assistant in Yashar, AHMM and Tonkin Liu. RENÉE DIE–GIRBAU Renée Die-Girbau is currently a 4th year student in Diploma 15 (Tutors: Sam Chermayeff and Lucy Styles) at the Architectural Association from Caracas, Venezuela.

KARL HERDERSCH AND NORIYUKI ISHII Karl Herdersch is an ongoing student at the AA and Noriyuki Ishiihas recently completed his Part I at the Bartlett. Both are currently working as architectural assistants in London and share an interest in ecology, planning and reuse of the city, working on a number of collaborative projects.

MICHAEL HO Michael Ho is a sculptor and interdisciplinary artist based in London. Since he graduated from the AA in the summer of 2019, he has co-founded Atelier 三 and is also currently teaching on the AA Foundation course.

ERNESTO OROZA Ernesto Oroza channels the tradition of Radical Architecture into his own analytical employment of contemporary object typologies and productive forces. He produces and distributes speculative models and research through various publication methods, exhibitions, collaborative practices, documentaries and unorthodox forays.

DOR SCHINDLER Dor Schindler is a designer based in London. He is currently a 5th year student in Diploma 14 (Tutors: Maria Shéhérazade Giudici and Pier Vittorio Aureli) as well as an academic board member at the Architectural Association.

ROSALIND WILSON Rosalind Wilson is a mixed media artist based in London. She is an associate lecturer at the CCW Foundation. Her work bridges the ordinary and the extraordinary, focussing on unwrapping the hidden potential of everyday occurrences and found objects.

ALEXANDRA MCGLYNN Alexandra McGlynn is interested in self determination and how this is contextualised through life experience. Her practice reflects on the sequence of actions governing cultural production.

OMAR KASSAB Omar Kassab is an architect and urbanist with a theoretical interest in the interconnections between architecture, urbanism and visual representation. He studied at the Architectural Association School of Architecture.

DR. PETER OLSHAVSKY Is an Associate Professor of Architecture at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. He holds a Ph.D. and M.Arch. II in history and theory from McGill University and B.Arch. from The Pennsylvania State University.

LOCALLY AVAILABLE WORLD UNSEEN NETWORKS blah blah blah. Not a solution.

But an attitude. Surfaced 1969 blah blah blah. Prowls the edges of the AA’s Academic regimes.

Questioning. A system demanding obedience in an environment of constant assessment. Not a series of events, it is an ongoing process.

Preferring doing and making do. blah blah blah

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Heart of the Angel

This issue will explore the use of time based media in capturing routines of maintenance; a single moment can communicate the repetition of behaviour happening day after day. Molly Dineen in the film Heart of the Angel, portrays routines of maintenance performed by a group of London Underground employees working in Angel station in 1989. Dineen personifies the station through a number of individuals and their daily rituals. In particular Dineen pays close attention to the role of the fluffer in maintaining a clean and operable railway track for daytime service. With the implementation of modern technology in transport networks, the fluffers have been replaced by vacuum trains which run through the tube lines sucking up all debris collected over the course of the week. Until recently, the automated task of “sucking up� the tubes in London was performed by individuals bending down, picking up and placing matter into large plastic bags. The Underground was lined with a team of fluffers who would brush, clean and remove all dust, litter and waste off the tracks. This repetitive act of maintenance was carried out by women in the early hours of the morning. The London Underground tunnels are prone to fire, sparks and explosions without the intervention of hands and bodies moving repeatedly, miming the surfaces of the hollowed out underground.

AArchitecture 40 wishes to pay close attention to the invisible communities operating within our urban and rural areas and their rituals of maintenance. The act of maintenance is often excluded from conversations around architecture and urbanisation, despite the practice being inherently spatial. The act of maintenance is performed through repetition, movement and gesture. It is often part of a larger routine. Maintenance can be explored through policy, association, organisation, community and the individual.

Submit visual and written content by Friday 20 March 2020 to aarchitecture@aaschool.ac.uk

In this issue Ernesto Oroza delves into the chaos of fragments in Repair as Rupture. Page 1 In Hello Orwell, my dear old friend, Michael Ho looks at surveillance technologies and their control over urban spaces. Page 4 Dor Schindler dwells on a corridor of metal tracks in Kamakura where Recognition Follows. Page 10 Omar Kassab’s piece Reclaiming Agency describes the retrofitting of a streetlamp. Page 13 Interrupting Content with Colour by Rosalind Wilson vandalizes found print media. Page 14 In An Ode to the Industrial Robot, Yoav Caspi compares methods of fabrication and their output in a technological age. Page 22 LAWuN leaves us with Eleven Notes on Obsolescence and the absurd urge to save humanity. Page 24 In Common Parlance, Karl Herdersch and Noriyuki Ishii propose adaptations to spaces of gathering. Page 26 Alice Baseian interviews a chair after visiting Danh Vo: Cathedral Block Prayer Stage Gun Block at Marian Goodman Gallery, in the form of a Two Panel Comic Book. Page 30 In conversation with Johan, Renée Die-Girbau reveals the necessity of Gaming For Food, Not For Fun, in Venezuela Page 34 Alexandra McGlynn captures a moment of Transportation in Marrakech. Page 37 In Ten, a short brief combines parts of objects to explore the repercussions of the architectural Plot. Page 38 Lastly, Dr. Peter Olshavsky explores the limits of Technological Disobedience and its value. Page 44

Edited by students at the Architectural Association