CONSTRUCTIONS OF NATURE: REPRESENTATION AS PRODUCTION

Peter Galison and Caroline A. Jones interviewed by Diana Agrest

AGREST: In the introduction to your book Picturing Science, Producing Art you write: “What much of this focus on art and science as discrete products ignores are the commonalities in the practices that produce them. Both are regimes of knowledge, embedded in, but also constitutive of the broader cultures they inhabit.”1

The relationship you establish between art and science in terms of the development of scientific knowledge opens the discourse on representation as it relates to the study of natural phenomena. As we focus on nature as the object of study from the field of architecture, the question of representation is essential in the exploration of natural phenomena; an exploration based on scientific research. One could say, in relation to the opposition between art and science, that writing about architecture has historically been defined as the combination of art and science or art and technique—there is no opposition in qualifying the work as one or the other. In fact, we try to operate through representation on the overlap between both. Does this make any sense from your perspective?

GALISON: Sure—perhaps Caroline could comment first.

JONES: That’s an interesting framing, because to my knowledge the representations of architecture don’t traditionally include “nature” at all. This might be a way of bridging our introduction from the 1998 volume and the concerns of your current project. It may be that the very concept of nature is about representation, and this can be where architecture, or at least architecture’s representation of nature, enters. Perhaps, somehow, this thing we call “nature” is precisely that world external to our bodies, which we represent to ourselves. That can be some kind of segue between our concerns and yours.

Neither one of us is going to have strong opinions about architecture as an art and/or a science. In my visual memory, the closest architectural representation gets to nature is Laugier’s primitive hut, which is of course simply a representation. Did anyone build Laugier’s hut? This was an imaginary representation of the human in nature. Marie Antoinette built the Petite Hameau [Hameau de la Reine , 1783] with completely simulated rock “grottoes”—but for the most part, when the art of architecture meets nature as concept rather than “field condition,” its techne is in the realm of representation. Once form is built, as landscape, we designate it as a human construction, epistemically distinct from “nature.”

One would have to ask, is the human, for you, a part of nature? When Alberti writes about commodiousness and the open window that allows the air to come in, I always feel that this humanist man is quite distinct from nature. Albertian (or Vitruvian) man is a figure for god, which of course subsumes nature, includes nature in the body of man, but is subject to his dominion (and the gender is intentional).

So what’s interesting about the drawings produced in your studio is that there are no figures, there is no proportion indicated by the Vitruvian man, or the Corbusian “modulor,” for that matter. The measure of man is in the metrics: abstract, scienti fic indicators of units at the bottom of the drawings. My first observation would be that it is quite interesting in these drawings that the body, the humanist body, emerged from the big break that comes when you begin to distinguish a subjective from an objective account of the world and its representation. Subjectivity is an intrinsic part of the story. Objectivity required this new concept of the self as “subjective” before it could become possible in opposition.

For Kant, and the will-based psychology that followed him in the early 19th century, you see a self driven by will or controlled by will—together with the will to will-lessness— an ability to create a kind of quiet inner-self that allows nature to speak through us. This became a prerequisite for a new concept of what it meant to know the world. That was Schopenhauer’s great ambition in The World as Will and Representation (1818—19). 3 Schopenhauer’s aims were partly theological— we could only hear God speak if we willed the will to sufficient silence so that God could speak through us. But it is significant that nature, and an understanding of the natural world also required a kind of quieting of the will based on the will’s suppression of the will. So you had to learn to quiet the self from the opacity of the will-based center.

Of course the faculty of the will is not new in the 18th century. The will exists in 17th and even earlier centuries in Europe with their concepts of the self, but in those earlier epochs, will is just one of many faculties. In fact, in the 17th century the dominant faculty of the self is reason. Reason is the king serving to control other passions that stand as subjects, will among them. But in an unruly soul, reason could be overturned by rebellious passions and desires, their movements hauling the self this way and that.

A well-ordered self was like a well-ordered society and was based on the king, Reason, subordinating these other things and keeping them in just proportion. Nature was part of this well-ordered kingdom.

But during the end of the 18th and early 19th century you begin to have a different notion, an idea of a forceful will that was actually the center of the self. And as I said above, this was a will that had to be willed to quiet in order to hear the divine. Here, then, you had the beginning of the talk about a forceful subjectivity that had to be restrained in order to allow an object world to present itself, whether it’s theological or natural. And so, that separation between subjective and objective became crucial. On the one side you had the natural philosopher, who would become the scientist in the 19th century, who felt that in order to really know the world, we had to quiet this subjective will-based self. Yet on the other hand you had the artist, who saw in the imposition of will on the world actually the salient feature of art. So, what was interesting to me in this moment was that really for the first time you had this radical division between science and art.

To see how novel this division of objective and subjective (science and art) was, imagine this absurdly counter-factual scene: if we had asked Leonardo da Vinci about his drawings of turbulent water, and ask him if a specific drawing was art or natural philosophy, he surely would have found the question utterly uninterpretable. He wouldn’t have any idea what you were

Residual Surface

Mammoth Hot Springs, Yellowstone National Park, Wyoming, United States Betty F. Bluvshtein

Residual Surface explores the process through which an underground, masked condition can leave a mark upon the Earth’s surface. Yellowstone’s geothermal landscape is fueled by an active caldera that spreads heat throughout the landscape. Below the ground, fault lines transport heat and water through the terrain. One of these fault lines, the Norris-Mammoth, spans over 20 miles, linking the Yellowstone Caldera, the Norris Geyser Basin, and Mammoth Hot Springs, and creates a serendipitous relationship between heat, water, and air. As heat at an approximate depth of 1,500 feet warms groundwater, it combines with minerals at an intense pressure, eventually puncturing the Earth’s surface. Minerals, hot water, air, and thermophile bacteria interact in a combination of biotic and abiotic conditions resulting in the formation of travertine or hot spring limestone. These are now known as the Travertine Terraces, a complex spanning nearly one mile and comprised of more than 20 springs and the residue of this process, making the Mammoth Hot Springs an impressive representation of a temporal narrative on a grand scale. This project proposes a series of additional punctures following the natural Norris-Mammoth fault line. The new interventions would allow water to form new travertine terraces and springs. Through the enactment of a narrative over time, a representational investigation becomes a geological exploration.

Previous: Plan of the West Bay landscape and bird migration in spring and autumn in the proposal to reshape the land through the deposition of dredged material by manipulating a large volume of sand in conjunction with water flow speed and the trunks of dead, bald cypress trees, abundant in the adjacent freshwater marshland. Site located on an important North American bird migration route.

Top: Model of sand accumulation was obtained by replicating the accumulation of sediment with sand and a water pump.

Bottom: Models of new interventions generated by manipulating natural forces and materials, including water flow, sediment deposition, and plant growth, creating new animated landforms that will in turn deter erosion.