In face of facelessness,
by Sheer GritzersteinThe face is a high density region of sensors in the body, allowing through sensation and expression, to relate and to belong. It is one’s most tangible address — it is the gateway of the self to reach out and soak in, and also a site where all inputs and outputs are obscured by attempts of comprehension. The face discloses one’s alignment towards another, presumably in a manner of an instinctive gesture. It is used and read as a signifier, presumably of the movements occurring in one’s soul1. This does not mean, however, that a face could not be deliberately worn or masked by its bearer; nor deliberately and indeliberately programmed from without. In order to read a face and pick up what is communicated, one can only try to decipher between the message and the noise. Above all, as repeatedly stressed by Mark Cousins — the face is fundamentally ambivalent.2
The faceless , therefore, is an entity unwilling or incapable of extending itself or reaching out to another through expression. It does not animate any appearance of a soul. If the face is a bearer of meanings — then the faceless bear none. And, while the face is ambivalent, the faceless is not. It does not leave room for (mis)reading.
Although the face is a human issue, it very much concerns non-human entities — be them flora, fauna or inanimate objects, as well as sets of environments. As the face discloses the alignment of one object towards another, it is the essence of the manner in which humans relate to their perceived externalities, respond to them, and consequently (re)form them in return. It is not a matter of anthropomorphism, but one of legibility, relation and exchange.
The faceless has no interest in mutual exchange nor relation. It prescribes scarce, flat, and non-negotiable protocols of addressing. It refuses to be reformed in response to being addressed. It is non-interpretative, non-compromising, stingy even; and, as part of a greater phenomenon — it imposes on its addressers a radical state of incapability to (re-)orient
Walking in our cities one can detect too many faceless buildings and landscapes. They perform no gesture3, and instead give explicit directions. Somehow, although they keep spreading through ceaseless repetition — they still maintain an unmistakeable clarity, and leave no room for mis-navigation anywhere within or around them. The reproduction of faceless buildings and landscape constitutes the expanding sea of urbanisation4; weaving vast networks completely divorced from the locale ; leaving us with no distinct, physical points of grip; pushing us to become more and more invested in virtual mechanisms to position ourselves, and feel that we belong.
Given the definition of a face as surface morphed by perforations, carrying meanings and extending to others through symbols and expressions, one could mistakenly think that all buildings necessarily bear a face. It is only intuitive to appoint all facades as faces — to read the exterior of a building as the concealer and indicator of internal voids (which are consequently appointed as ‘carried meanings’), and to appoint windows and doors as the expressive openings. Here, I claim that the obvious distinction between exterior and interior is deceiving. Instead, I suggest that the skin of a building is not only the component separating enclosed environments from non-enclosed ones — but includes also a building’s internal partitions and introflections. Every surface that confines an volume becomes a front. The concealed, the truly internal — is what is kept in the non-palpable realms, those out of reach spaces inside the walls, in the floating ceilings, in the refuse chambers, in the pipes and cables, in the plants, machines and control rooms; in the building’s social, legal and economic frameworks; and, if such a thing exists, in the building’s character. In the case where none of such in-palpabilities is expressed through the partitions defining a space, a building could be determined as faceless . It does not suggest a thing. It leaves no room for confusion or contemplation as for how to engage with it or inhabit it. It becomes an unnoticeable vessel for prosaic human flows. It offers no moments of doubt, discovery or spontaneous appropriation, and therefore does not allow those who experience it — from within or without, briefly or extendedly — to relate to it. Architecture, however, needs to relate — to belong. It needs to allow individuals to relate to each other, to themselves and to objects, through the creation of a locale — to allow individuals to feel that they belong.
In face of facelessness, the most conspicuous remaining route nowadays for addressing and relating is in the form of instant messages, quick images, 15-seconds stories and short reels, through placeless-sites, anchored in the virtual. Manuel Castells characterises society in the Information Age as network based,5 where the distances between nodes in the same network is necessarily shorter than their physical proximity: ‘…distance (physical, social, economic, political, cultural) for a given point or position varies between zero (for any node in the same network) and infinite (for any point external to the network)’.6 Our trajectory determines that movement and navigation in the physical sphere would remain wandering-free, quick, frictionless and elementary, while virtual roaming would become pre-eminent for its nodes’ ease of transmission and access. As a complete project, a network society is to reduce all individuals to end users, moulding all forms of communication
and relation into predetermined protocols,7 serving to the optimum the basis for the network’s formation and expansion. As end users rather than political subjects, our up-and-coming public spheres (becoming placeless-sites) operate to maintain formats rather than produce and advocate contents, while the construct of inhabitable spaces becomes means without intelligible ends.8 This process frees our streets from reliance on distinct and diverse (major or minor) landmarks, surprising entanglements and rich multiplicities. Our cityscapes and social fabrics currently evolve to disconnect individuals, and deprive them from the effort of dis- and re-orientation — replacing faces with alphanumerical addresses, making faces redundant. As our communication mode tends more and more towards the mutual tossing of declarations and further away from the handling of conversations, the demand for interpretable signifiers drops, and so does the supply.
In A Thousand Plateaus , Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari explore the Facility Machine — a process of subjectification lead by the face, which disciplines the body while drawing it from the realm of the organism or the object, and placing it in the realm of signifiance 9 In other words, the face is a result of a process of domestication, moulding the organism that bears it to comply with a social order, and express merely pre-agreed meanings through a limited set of common signifiers. By pre-setting and allocating meanings to prescribed sets of signifiers (a common grammar ), the faciality machine works to classify all entities through their gestures and expression, to subsequently deny or grant them modes of access and behaviour, to maintain a social order, essentialy through segregation. A nice example well portrays the effect of facialisation :
What is a tic? It is precisely the continually refought battle between a faciality trait that tries to escape the sovereign organisation of the face and the face itself, which clamps back down on the trait, takes hold of it again, blocks its line of flight, and reimposes its organisation upon it.10
Although the machine is constructed to formalise and subjectify, it is also acknowledged that ‘(f)aciality is always a multiplicity’11. Perhaps, this is the cue signifying to us that the age of facialisation is over, giving way to the era of post-facialisation . In this era ticks and faciality traits are eradicated altogether — either not enabled to surface or not being generated in the first place — making fronts opaque, removing the black (bottomless) holes from the white (reflective) surfaces . The flatness of these reflective, non-penetrable surfaces perfectly reflects the flatness of our contemporary lacking relations: where signals are reduced and reproduced; where communication is being based on brief messages and fleeting images; where the value of the visual dominates once again all other senses, only more severely and explicitly than before; where things seems obvious and not much is ambiguous.
Here, it could be useful to briefly review the reliance of Western canonical architecture on signifiance , and faciality. When roughly abstracted, one could detect a cyclical negotiating between the use of explicit symbols and experiential simulacra — somehow resulting in the condemnation of the signifiance
at later stages of Modernism. Classical architecture was concerned for instance with eurythmic harmony as an experience, and recited rigorous sets of symbols when alluding to the orders. Later, the Gothic ‘introduced the magic into art’12 — it reflected a character, and favoured non-strictly prescribed sets of expressions over formal restraint. The focus of Renaissance and Baroque architecture resembled the Classical. In that they heavily referenced Classical forms and orders — but also articulated their buildings’ experiential qualities, emphasising the human body as their centre and measure. Then, from the late 18th century, the post-baroque currents brought with them individualistic tendencies as an expressive reaction, and functionalist notions influenced by the Enlightenment. These attitudes led to Architecture Parlante , where character was accentuated, attempted to carry a narrative, and indicated explicitly its prescribed use; then to romanticism, which appealed to natural and national symbols as well as to the evocation of emotion; as well as to the Arts and Crafts movement, Art Nouveau and so forth; and, eventually to Expressionist architecture.
To try and identify when architecture began losing its face, one could single out the stage where Modernism went wrong. Emil Kaufmann in his piece Three Revolutionary Architects , explains how Architecture Parlante established the use of elementary geometry as the basis for expressiveness and individualism in architecture.13 Kaufmann’s explanation suggests that the distinctiveness of each form increased the buildings’ legibility, and their ability to reach out through gestures — projecting a character outwards. Kaufmann argues that the designs of the three ‘revolutionary’ architects — Étienne-Louis Boullée, Claude Nicolas Ledoux, and Jean-Jacques Lequeu — influenced in their designs the plainness, monumentality, functionality and structural and material integrity that Modern architects later embraced. Modernism also carried expressionist features into the 1930s, either in an attempt to equip buildings with a character, or to accentuate their structural and material properties. Yet, the loss of face could be attributed to several projects attached to Modernism, which were promoted throughout the 20th century, with some rooted in the 19th century: the acceleration of industrial production and its divorce from the locale ; Le Corbusier’s conception of the Dom-ino House , the publication of his Five Points of Architecture , and in particular the emancipation of the facade and the floor plan; the rise of the International Style ; the rise of calculations (which evolved with computerisation in later stages), scientific management and thrive for standardisation and efficiency (of unclear and inflexible parameters other than financial viability) — removing architecture from the realm of art and design and into the practice of technocracy; and, the diffusion of authorship in the profession. All of these projects, accompanied by the ongoing projects of colonialism and imperialism, which were and are well served by theses emerging means of (A)rchitecting — continually accelerate the divorce of life and form from the locale , eradicate areas of multiplicity and complexity, and strip the built of the face.
The full extent and manner of these processes’ influence on the face will not be reviewed here. Yet, it is worth lingering on the proposal of Dom-ino by our dear Le Corbusier in 1914 — as it encapsulates quite well many relevant
shifts in the production of architecture. In The Dom-ino Problem: Questioning the Architecture of Domestic Space , 14 Pier Vittorio Aureli unpacks Peter Eisenman’s view of ‘… Dom-ino as the manifestation of the possibility of architectural form as a “self-referential sign”, as something resolutely completed in itself’.15 Aureli proposes the following to ‘complete Eisenman’s observation’:
Architecture became form devoid of any reference outside itself at the moment it was fully conquered by the forces of industrialization. In other words, the autonomy of architecture as the possibility of a self-referential sign became evident only when the reification of architecture as a productive and economic apparatus was completed.16
The Dom-ino prototyped one of our most common building typologies: the generic concrete framework. The slab, column and stair system is not bounded to a floor plan layout; it is open to an infinity of possible infills; it invites and cements creativity and flexibility as the footing of our culture; separating our facades and interiors, it increases the agency of detached and reproduced, fashionable imagery to command and inspire our everyday; it expands rapidly and vastly, thanks to its ease-of-construction and do-it-yourself mechanism, which could be quickly transplanted anywhere without adaptation. Dom-ino allows buildings to depart from the architectural and settle down in the infrastructural . In the infrastructural , flows are smoothly directed and mitigated and experience rarely varies, while the architectural might only exist as ‘the experience of architecture’.17 In its self-referentiality — which is detached from a locale , and is in itself faceless — Dom-ino have promoted, to this day, no ends but only a mean, other than the end of establishing industrial capitalism as the prevailing form for our societies.
Considering architecture’s inclination towards the reproduction of means regardless of specified ends other than the reinforcement and expansion of a form, perhaps Friedrich Nietzsche’s content-independent and merely formal ideal balance between aesthetics and morality18 is already prevailing — where beauty and virtue are on par, rejecting the idea of common morality Only Nietzsche envisioned it as a dynamic process of re-orientation , where the moral standard is constantly challenged and therefore continuously elevated by imaginative and outstanding minds — while contemporary societies have reached some sort of a standstill. As evident from our current pre-eminent aesthetic praxis, we steadily diminish spaces of ambiguity, and with it any room to dis-orient ourselves. We operate to eradicate a critical mass of distinct, physical grip points, rarely establishing new ones, and in that diminish the means to re-orient ourselves. As the built becomes merely infrastructural , and as we require less and less effort in navigating in our everyday — our senses have become numb. We leave ourselves no escape routes nor aids to pull ourselves out of our currently established aesthetics-morality closed loop. This deficiency carries a threat: we may never again evolve truly fresh and unfamiliar contents nor forms, nor establish any value other than reproducing place-less, aura -less forms.19
A shift in our modes of thinking is urgently needed, and might only be effectively brought about by radical changes in our modes of architecting . Architecture has to be drawn away from the binding notion of infrastructures, urgently, to be rooted in the experiential. Our objectives for design should acknowledged the cost of efficiency as set today by networks and markets, redefine the valuable, and invent new forms to sustain and generate value. To significantly re-orient ourselves, and continuously summon reformations, architects will have to seed grip points and diverse forms, to be picked up unexpectedly, unintentionally converging with other diverse forms, inviting a (mis)reading, and outstanding invention. And, invention could only arise from moments of interpretation, which could only arise from moments of ambivalence.
Although we cannot expect architecture to exclusively generate friction and salvage culture by itself, we could at least, as architects, do our part and give re-orientation a chance to be evoked, volunteering our available and relevant skills. It is not absurd to call architecture to suggest content and allude to greater meanings — importantly different than pre-setting content and forcing a meaning. Rather than shy away from offering social focal points and promoting cultural shifts, it is time for architects, and architecture’s patrons, to employ the built to weave new forms, both local and tangible, and vast and intangible.
One path that architecture could pave to re-form itself would be through the embracing of its similarity to language, towards enrichment and articulation. Many in the past have drawn parallels between language and buildings: both use signs and allude to semiotics to generate meanings; both are influenced by and understood through context; syntax and grammar are compared with structure, enclosures and topography; sentences are weaved as much as spaces are; both are rhythmical; both are instruments, ranging in style from simple to excessive; both are influenced by their actors, and influence their actors in return. And, as means — the use of both language and architecture could be enhanced and articulated through rhetoric.
In Rhetoric 20 the three means of persuasion defined by Aristotle are logos — the reason (of the argument), ethos — the character (of the speaker), and pathos — the evocation of emotion (among the listeners). These principles could become useful when borrowed from the art of speech to the art of building, and used to evaluate the value of architectural discourse. The logos of a building can relate to how much sense it makes: to its efficiency in performance, of both structure and use (by inhabitants, operators, owners, neighbours and passers-by); and to how successfully it capitalises on its social and environmental given and re-formed context. Today, commonly, the efficiency of buildings is measured through mathematical abstractions, and assessed through calculable speculation. Unfortunately and typically, the optimum efficiency is set to benefit the owners (profitably rather than sustainably), while supplying inhabitants, operators, neighbours and passers-by only the minimal level of performance to justify the building’s existence as overall (even if only slightly) positive; it favours market value over the value of use and experience. Then, the ethos in architecture relates to the character the building demonstrates towards its
inhabitants, operators, owners, neighbours and passers-by; to how a building suggests ways of physical or mental appropriation through propriety of form in accordance with desired function; to how it is assessed through ease and comfort of access and use; to what degree it is judged as an appealing space to spend time in or around; and, to how memorable and distinct it is in the urban fabric or topography. With the dissolving of authorship in the production of buildings — caused by the need to reach an equilibrium in complying with multiple codes, legalities and rationalities — buildings today tend to seem indistinct. Conceived by many interdisciplinary contributors, buildings rarely ever formalise around a legible, distinct motif. They are the restrained result of a quietly conceived compromise. Influenced by the logos — the equilibrium is usually achieved through abstractions and a strive for efficiency, often resulting in allocating buildings similar forms. That is because the parameters for efficiency rarely ever adapt to fit and benefit the locale — ‘successful’ models from different locations are being referenced, reproduced and transplanted in new-builts all around. The consensus over what is visually and sufficiently appealing is rarely ever challenged. Finally — the pathos of a building relates, similarly to the ethos , to the manner and intensity in which it appeals to those experiencing it (again — inhabitants, operators, owners, neighbours and passers-by). A building’s measure of pathos is assessed by the extent to which people personally relate to it: by the emotions it evokes in them, and the memories they attach to it. The pathos is very much useful in enhancing the ethos , and attracting attention to the logos . It even has the capacity to enhance the logos . That is, by generating and increasing an experiential value of a building, and of an urban site or landscape accordingly. Pathos does not seem to be much considered in today’s architectural discourse. With financial viability being the main determinant of buildings’ character and lifespan, it might be that architects, sensing their loss of agency, give up in advance on the attempt of (and the risk embedded in) equipping a building with any ambiguous feature. Yet, it is exactly the ambiguous that gives space and opportunity for individuals to deposit feelings and memories in objects and places. A room for doubt, contemplation or interpretation demands one to take a stance, and as position is relative, one would have to take note and allocate meanings to its surroundings in order to weigh them. Only then, can an object acquire significance, and a set of spaces solidify as a place to relate and belong to. Ambiguity and interpretation entails the risk of (mis)reading, but risks also carry promise. Outstanding beauty cannot be conceived without risk, and will not rise from the expected. Where one cannot detect beauty, one would struggle to develop a relation of sympathy and belonging, not to mention love.
Now, we can draw a similarity between the call to implement ambiguity in architecture, and the cry out for the return of faces and their intrinsic ambivalence. Also, we can recall that the face, too, has been extensively examined in parallel to language: as an agglomeration of signs; a bearer of meanings; a mean of expression and communication. Although a face could be mastered — trained or masked to express controlled degrees of logos , ethos and pathos — as an object meant to be read, it will always bear ambiguity. The greatest gift an architect (or a team of architects) could present to a city, would be the allocation of a face to a building. In such generous act, property owners and
designers would put their trust in the judgment and (mis)reading of inhabitants, operators, neighbours and passers-by, granting them the opportunity to interpret, relate and re-orient themselves according to the built. The problem of facelessness is a problem of trust. As Mark Cousins once declared, ‘tyranny is the enemy of complexity’.21 Unequivocal explicitness and predictability grant formal control over most realms of contemporary life, and threaten to bring the cycle of human re-orientation and re-formation to a plateau and standstill.
To the contrary, faciality and ambiguity are engines ensuring humanity will keep doing, un-doing, and re-doing itself — in an unattainable, yet healthy and ever-improving search for ideal values, aggregating along the journey a variety of forms to be continuously determined, un-determined and re-determined as beautiful, ugly or obscure; enriching, articulating and morphing our cultures. The only way forward is to keep morphing.
Fixation is a killer.
Endnotes
1 Cousins, Mark. 2018. “The Face and the Facade” Recorded at the Architectural Association, February 16, 2018. vimeo.com/624875311.
2 Ibid.
3 For further reading about the gesture and its ambiguity, refer to: Cousins, Mark. “The Gesture.” In Mark Cousins: Friday Lectures , edited by Parveen Adams, with Braden R. Engel, Theodosia Panagiotopoulou, and KB Izac Tsai. London: Architectural Association Publications, 2016.
4 Aureli, Pier Vittorio. 2011. The Possibility of an Absolute Architecture . Writing Architecture Series. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press.
5 Manuel Castells. 2010. The Rise of the Network Society. Vol. 2nd ed., with a new pref. The Information Age: Economy, Society, and Culture . Chichester, West Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell. https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=nlebk&AN=304270&site=ehost-live.
6 Ibid, 501.
7 Antonas, Aristide, and Thanos Zartaloudis. “Protocols.” AA Files, no. 76 (2019): 139–42. https://www.jstor.org/stable/27124592.
8 The issue of depoliticisation and de-subjectification will not be expanded here, and discussed in: Agamben, Giorgio, David Kishik, and Stefan Pedatella. 2020. ‘What Is an Apparatus?’ And Other Essays. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Lahiji, Nadir, ed. 2014. Architecture against the Post-Political: Essays in Reclaiming the Critical Project . London ; New York: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group. BAVO, and Jan van Eyck Akademie, eds. 2007. Urban Politics Now: Re-Imagining Democracy in the Neoliberal City . Reflect, #06. Rotterdam : New York, NY: NAi Publishers ; Available in North, South and Central America through D.A.P.
9 Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. 1987. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
10 Ibid, 188.
11 Ibid, 182.
12 As declared by Étienne-Louis Boullée and quoted in: Kaufmann, Emil. “Three Revolutionary Architects, Boullée, Ledoux, and Lequeu.” Transactions of the American Philosophical Society 42, no. 3 (1952): 431–564. https://doi.org/10.2307/1005689. 473.
13 Ibid.
14 Aureli, Pier Vittorio. “The Dom-Ino Problem: Questioning the Architecture of Domestic Space.” Log, no. 30 (2014): 153–68. http://www.jstor.org/stable/43631744.
15 Ibid. 153.
16 Ibid. 154.
17 Borrowed here is Mark Cousins’ understanding of a statement by Heinrich Wölfflin. Cousins, Mark. “The Gesture: Does Stone Suffer. February 6, 2015.” In Mark Cousins: Friday Lectures , edited by Parveen Adams, with Braden R. Engel, Theodosia Panagiotopoulou, and KB Izac Tsai. London: Architectural Association Publications, 2016. 149.
18 Came, Daniel, ed. 2014. Nietzsche on Art and Life. First edition. Oxford ; New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
19 This paragraph is anchored in a parallel unpublished essay I have written, called The Sixth Sense, Unplugged . In this essay, the human sixth sense — the neurological awareness of the position of one’s body, also known as proprioception — is explored as the bodily image , in relation to our sense and boundary of self, and to the manifestation of our built environment. There, I argue that our current social and spatial praxis deteriorate our sixth sense , in a nearly irreversible manner, as our instances of dis- and re- orientation diminish. Similarly to the current essay, The Sixth Sense, Unplugged stresses the importance of architecture in establishing new grip points for dis- and re- orientation , to shift the above mentioned alarming trajectory, and allow a continuous elevation and invention of moral, social and aesthetic standards.
20 Rapp, Christof. 2022. ‘Aristotle’s Rhetoric’. In The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, edited by Edward N. Zalta, Spring 2022. Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2022/entries/aristotle-rhetoric/..
21 Cousins, Mark. 2018. “The Face and the Facade” Recorded at the Architectural Association, February 16, 2018. vimeo.com/624875311.
Bibliography
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Manuel Castells. 2010. The Rise of the Network Society. Vol. 2nd ed., with a new pref. The Information Age: Economy, Society, and Culture. Chichester, West Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell. https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=nlebk&AN=304270&site=ehost-live.
Rapp, Christof. 2022. ‘Aristotle’s Rhetoric’. In The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy , edited by Edward N. Zalta, Spring 2022. Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University. https:// plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2022/entries/aristotle-rhetoric/.
With deep thanks to Eleni Axioti for her support and guidance, and for her 2022-23 HTS4 course: Architecture as an Apparatus of Governments