Louis Moreno Interview Rachel Serfling AA HCT — Marina Lathouri Dis-Locutions: Architecture and the Politcal
THE “LAW OF ARCHITECTURAL UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES”: AN INTERVIEW WITH LOUIS MORENO Louis Moreno is an urban theorist and researcher at the Urban Laboratory at University College London. He also conducts research at the Center for Research Architecture at Goldsmiths, University of London, where his research illuminates how the built environment relates to the political economy and the growth of financial services. Also at Goldsmiths, he has a self-described “proper day job” as a Lecturer, where he examines architecture as the cultural form of social and political processes. Louis is enthusiastic and easy to talk to, and was kind enough to engage in a dialogue with me at the Architectural Association on 26 March 2015. Through our talk, Louis proposed claiming many contemporary issues under the “Law of Architectural Unintended Consequences”, as he traced the exchange value of data collection, unintended consequences from making buildings smarter, and how real estate developers capitalise on this phenomenon. Louis questions what is the cost of making cities smarter, why the interior and pre-visualisation is becoming so important in architecture and developments, and closes by challenging architectural students to pre-figure change right now. -Rachel Serfling // March 2015
RS: Let’s start off with a topical buzzword: Big data. Data collection, with or without our permission, seems to be happening in an ever-increasing scope in countless aspects of our lives. Do you perceive data collection, perhaps the visualisation of this data, to be changing architecture — either in terms of aesthetics or in the manner by which it is produced? What are the cultural artefacts of this escalating data collection? LM: So, I think I try to think about architecture as this word that captures a number of different levels and dimensions of abstraction and concretisation. Thinking about architecture in the practical sense of architecture — buildings, envelopes, urban spaces, the structuring of urban space — but at the same time just making a really simple point that this architecture, the programmes for buildings, is bound up with institutional architectures and also information processing. Increasingly so. And I think you just had a lecture with the “big man”, Rem Koolhaas, right? RS: [laughs] Yes. Just shy of three weeks ago. He told us he felt like he had nothing left to say on cities. LM: And he was talking about components of architecture? I wasn’t there. But this is what I heard- that he was talking about components of architecture and the one thing he left out was information sensors or something. Now, this is the point where the architecture of the building is about absorbing non-architectural dynamics, and in a way, curating them, or interpreting them, and culturing them. How does that affect the form of the building? Well, I think the way in which Rem is talking about it is at a really simple level, about the fact that the
components of the building are not just mundane pieces just simply managing basic functions. They have actually become quite important, particularly when that information is collected and gathered. It has a very interesting exchange value. The aggregation of urban information has an interesting exchange value because it can be used to culture the dynamics of an urban process. Now, how this relates to aesthetics? I’m not sure, actually. But what I think is interesting is that the question of architectural aesthetics has been turned around. It is not us looking at the building, the form of the building, in order for us to understand, oh, how culture is changing. We look at architecture to give us the sense of what an urban society
is — because what the building is doing is aesthetically analysing our relationships and then doing its own interpretation of that. And then in some way, shape, or form, that is helping to organise decisions about how a city should change over time. Does that make sense? RS: Yeah, and it does relate to Rem’s lecture a bit. His take seemed to be something closer to a warning of how invasive certain technologies either have already been or are encroaching on our lives. They are on the horizon, at the very least. It is not technophobia, but someone pointed out it had a little bit of the whole mixture of Brave New World meets 1984 feeling about it. LM: Well, we could say, is there some new architectural law… of unintended consequences? You know? The Law of Architectural Unintended Consequences, which comes out of making buildings “smarter”. And we can comment on some of the political implications of these declares. But I would say aesthetically and culturally, rather than maybe individual buildings looked at as giving rise to a “style” of architecture — because that would be one way of going at it. I do not think it is going to give you insight into the warning, or at what level you need to heed this warning. Because how do we understand the warning then, of the aggregation of information, because it is not an old modernist architecture typology? It is of a patrol by a state using some sort of police apparatus, some kind of penalty system. It is not like that. Because it is not necessarily… a state that is behind… RS: There is no sort of “agenda” written out. LM: Yeah, yeah. You know, there is something open, actually, about the way in which information can be interpreted. I think the point would be, just very simply, I think the aesthetic dimension now has been switched, and this might be something that is new, and the buildings now are interrogating. And I suppose you could link this to a certain debate and discourse about robotics, and the way in which the intellectual side of cognition is migrating to institutions, machines, or whatever. And you would think that architects would love all this… because it’s, it is futurism. It is futurology. So they may be excited about it. And perhaps this is where the danger is. The problem is though, it is difficult at the moment to think and conceive about how we talk about the social politics of this, we talked about the polis [at an earlier discussion]. That would seem to me to be a really interesting area of architectural research. Thinking about if cities have become smarter, and the buildings, the organ, in a
way, is getting more intelligent — at what cost? And how does this process get programmed into the form of the buildings, particularly public institutions? RS: I also liked in Rem’s lecture when he was pointing out how these new developments, specifically these new technologies that are encroaching into our lives, are presented to us in a very innocent manner. As in, “This is going to help you, just trust us”. Yet they give very trivial examples of life changes or benefits in most of these “smart city” diagrams. Stuff like, I don’t know, monitoring parking space availability in a city. But most of these technologies seem closely linked to ideas of surveillance but with the rhetoric of being “open”. And a lot of the marketing of this stuff is with cute little cartoon drawings. They have an air of being almost childish. We feel no sense of rebellion about them… no sense of mobilisation. And you can easily read how, well, this technology may do whatever it is promising and we may thank them later, but perhaps — and maybe this is edging into paranoid territory — down the line, it has the potential to be manipulated in a different way. LM: I think it comes back to this thing about unintended consequences, because the way in which real estate works is that it is deliberately about setting up a situation of instability about what the future might be. And you can kind of capitalise on what the outcomes are because you are already thinking ahead, about the unintended consequences. So yeah, these simple drawings... There is a concrete example, if you look at what is happening between Euston Station and King’s Cross St. Pancras. There is a place there called Somers Town, which is an area which most people don’t actually know about, but it is a thick, deep, residential block, and historically, that area of north London was social housing. And it was a ghetto, right? There’s a lot of social housing there. But, because this area has now been activated into this proposal of a strip — which runs from Google Campus, to The Guardian, through the realisation of the office schemes at St. Pancras, St. Pancras International, and then you get to HS2 [High Speed 2” is a planned high-speed railway] at Euston. Right in the middle you have this enormous block of social housing. And if you look, you’ve got emerging developers moving in there now. RS: Because they are thinking, “Wow, this is a prime location”. LM: Exactly. This is virgin territory. Just right for exploitation, you know? And what they do, they have drawings, and none of this has got planning, but they will say, “Well, you guys need a school, and you can’t get it because of the government austerity cuts. But the land value here is really interesting for us, and so, if we just put in one… If we just put in one private residential scheme, just one. And, it has got to be big, because we are chasing density, right? But we will make sure that the footprint of it is open and your green space for the kids is still intact. So, we aren’t going to interfere, because we care about the history of social housing. And actually, we will write that into our documents. This is what it’s about: the new type of housing here in London mixing into the fabric. And it’s an index of change but it’s sympathetic.” And they say all that. Then they have a rendering, a drawing. And the drawing
doesn’t look that big. But when they tell you it’s, like, twenty stories, and then you think about it… And then when they actually get the model, actually the instant when they put the model on the table, people look at it and go… [mouths “oh shit”] and then people start getting interested. So, actually, let me go back to that question about the aesthetics of all this, not necessarily to do with data collection, but maybe it is data collection to do with the information that developers are interested in, in order to shape the unintended consequences of a development process. And how imagery has a real function. And the thing that I am really fascinated by, and I haven’t done any work on it yet, is pre-visualisation and 3D rendering techniques. RS: [laughs] That’s actually what I am starting to write my thesis on. I’m not sure exactly where I am taking it yet. But that is funny you brought it up. LM: Well, okay, let’s do this then. [opens his laptop computer] The thing that I’m fascinated by is people like Candy & Candy. But I just want to show you this one image, I hope I’ve got it here. Okay, so there’s this image — sorry, my screen is filthy — it is the interior of some kind of jet, some kind of Learjet, that is developed by interior designers, who are also big, glossy, residential, super elite, property developers, Candy & Candy. And what they started off doing, which I suppose they perfected in One Hyde Park, was that they are “interested in architecture”, but really what they are interested in is the interior of the building. They are interested in images of buildings that are about pushing a marginal idea about what luxury is, because they are pushing this marginal value of upscale residential. But the thing that I love the most was this is a photograph of an actual interior [shows first image] This, though, is a rendering [shows second image], and it has got this thick… gloss, this almost liquid gloss, to do with a particular type of CGI rendering of space, and the fact that it’s a Learjet, so it’s… wow, something about the way in which they added in silvers, there’s something about the sort of Photoshop filters, there’s something… Anyway. What I really want to do, and maybe you should do this actually, I really want to do interviews with people who now work as producing, you know, churning out these images. Because they are usually for speculative developments, therefore speculative investments, in, you know, this kind of… it is not the plane they are building. So it is not the architecture of the plane. They’re not doing engineering. RS: Right. The plane is already there. LM: Yeah! They’re doing this sort of emotional engineering piece on the interior, and the idea that you can have this high-end hotel real estate… you know, obviously, this happens all the time. But it is the way in which the practical architectural imaginary which is used to develop renderings of buildings, visualisations of interiors, has become this sort of software-based approach. It is about the aesthetic seducing you, even before the thing has been built. And I think this is all extremely interesting. I think this is where it is at in relation to the aesthetic dimensions.
RS: Like I said, I do not know exactly where I am taking my thesis yet, but I started looking at how, with renderings now, it is all about making us feel something. Buildings have to have this affective quality. You are never seeing technical drawings in presentations, it is all about this “instant understanding”, so to speak. And we agree about this emotional element, about trying to make us feel something about it. Which I think is… also interesting, in a word. LM: [laughs] Yeah, come on, it is grooming. It’s grooming, right? And obviously, this is advertising. RS: Yeah, it is clearly marketing. LM: This is marketing, it has always been there, but the marketing is becoming more intense and more sophisticated in the way it uses… it is not just aesthetics. Because it is not advertising companies doing this either. What is important is that these were people who probably trained as architects, and they have opened up a very lucrative, useful, and practical bit of architectural services within this emerging new way of thinking about different uses of real estate. But I think it is just the way in which the technology now is giving us a new kind of landscape art, an architectural landscape art, so I think understanding what these techniques are, and why they elicit — here is a psychological thing — why they elicit certain emotions, what that ensemble of emotions might be linked to, like a bundle of practical ideas of anticipated rental returns or interest returns or something else? Linking these things together would be quite fascinating, as a project. RS: I was wondering if you could elaborate on something. In one of your recent talks you spoke about the “stagnation in architectural imagination” which I think is hitting the nail on the head, both in terms of the formalistic qualities of buildings and then the global stagnation in envisioning alternative economic systems. So, in addition to elaborating on that, do you have any inclinations about why this is happening in contemporary society? LM: I think when I said “stagnation” I had something particular in mind, which was to do with theoretical debates in architectural history reaching that moment of stagnation in an economic moment of stagflation, say, in the 1970s. And so thinking about the position that somebody like Manfredo Tafuri puts us in — which is really remarkable – the idea that the architectural imagination is embedded in this problem of how you could use capitalism because it is becoming “the metropolis” now. Finding new ways to imagine how the metropolis transforms requires architecture, in its practical way. Therefore, just thinking about the building itself as being a means to emancipation or a means to realising an alternative is not enough. We need to start with the whole problem and then work through to the unit, the building. So when I was thinking about “stagnation”, I was thinking about, well,
that was diagnosed. Stagnation was diagnosed in the 1970s. And then, it always seemed to
me that the generation of architects that came out of here [the AA School] in the ‘70s and ‘80s — you know, Zaha Hadid, Rem Koolhaas, and everyone else — they really understood this. RS: They understood architectural stagnation? LM: Yes, but they turned this into something very interesting, which was the impossibility of imagining but we are going to do it anyway. And so it is almost an Utopianism that could only be explored through the fact that architecture could not be realised. Differences in architectural imagination could never be actually brought to life because it is impossible to imagine an alternative, say, to capitalism. So it is always in a dialogue where they have got this problem. The question emerges then. When they do start building at scale. Also, when the forms that they were interested in, using new technologies and new geographical situations, in order to develop a quite remarkable, avant-garde type of architecture — which there is a huge demand for, actually, this type of solution — when that starts happening, nobody has really come to grips with the fact that, well, what happens when all of a sudden this problem, which was diagnosed as being the end of the ability of architects to engage with fundamental problems of inventing a future, of thinking a future, of aestheticising a future, when they actually have given this a programme, what happens next? How does that change these conditions of how we think about what a city can be, how it can develop? So when I was talking about stagnation, I was just thinking that we still have not come to grips with this point that these counter-intuitive architectural forms which were then normalised, into a standard set of patterns, for a new, almost “pattern-language”. So when it becomes a patternlanguage, for globalisation, where does that leave us? Is this the only alternative way of building an urban future? Where are the alternative models of thinking about forms of investment, forms of care, social care, forms of developing a city which, which does not do harm to the most vulnerable in society? Where is the architectural imagination that is confronting these issues, rather than just being beguiled by alien possibility of doing this kind of building? And just being blinded by the sheer scale and oddness of, and a weird fascination for this type of real estate type forms. So, when I was thinking about stagnation, I don’t see, even in architecture, much political economy, much engagement, which is at that same level of ambition that something like Tafuri presented in the ‘70s. RS: But do you think that is an issue of changes within architectural education, do you think that’s just the reaction to the state of contemporary… LM: I don’t know, I guess you’d be able to help me out with that because you are being trained here. Looking at it in another school of architecture, I did my Master’s in Architectural History at the Bartlett. And the Bartlett was, I think, a school that was set-up to have an integrated approach to the education of built environment professionals. So, you know, planners, architects… but also a range of social scientists, urban sociologists, I’d imagine behavioural psychologists in the ‘50s and ‘60s, who were engaged in all of this. Plus, the legacy of people like Cedric Price, and thinking of a different way of going at Modernism and
problems of modernisation. I think what has happened is today there is specialisation because you are a professional. And you are expected to be an expert. And what happens is that expertise just leads you to focus on constantly improving… a particular aspect of… RS: A tiny sliver? A sliver of the proverbial ‘big picture’. LM: Exactly. A sliver of the urban that is your domain. Or your colleagues’ domain. But the standard academic response to that is, “Well you just need an interdisciplinary approach”, right? So you have got these multi-disciplinary teams. But it is not that because — this is what comes back to the Tafuri point — it’s not about simply establishing a critique of the process that you are just locked into. It would be thinking, “Well, okay, if a Utopia is off the agenda then what has moved it off the agenda? Why am I being driven to just specialise, let’s say, in 3D visualisation of these luxury interiors? Why is the interior becoming so important?” And so an education that can begin to think about the housing question of London, rather than thinking about, “Well, how do we build so that we can develop a reform agenda?”. While you have got time within education, I think — and I know for architects it is very different, especially because the pressure is on cost of education as well — it is very difficult to think differently, to think laterally, to think in an expansive way. The education process should really be about investigating, not necessarily an alternative society that we can develop into, but how does this happen right now? How can you create projects that actually produce, or pre-figure, that change right now? Because you have got the time — this is studio, this is imagination. It is not imagining a Utopia… RS: But rather, how you get the future blossoming in the present? LM: Right. Blossoming right now. Rather than some expectation that you have that you are always disappointed about. I always thought that is what architecture was, and is, missing.