Gardens of Compost - Frightening Fables and Fabulous Futures by Anton Lindström

FABULOUS / FUTURES

FRIGHTENING / FABLES

GARDENS of COMPOST

GARDENS of COMPOST; FRIGHTENING FABLES and FABULOUS FUTURES Working from GILLES DELEUZE & FELIX GUATTARI’S RHIZOMES and MINOR/ MAJOR and SMOOTH/STRIATED and NOMAD THOUGHT, from DONNA HARAWAY’S STAYING WITH THE TROUBLE and STRING FIGURES and MAKING KIN and CYBORG WRITING, from PUIG DE LA BELLACASA’S MATTERS OF CARE, from MICHEL SERRES’ and LUCE IRAGURAY’S MAKING SPACE/LETTING BE and GRACE, from HENRIK GEORG VON WRIGHT’S MYTH OF PROGRESS.

DIPLOMA THESIS by ANTON LINDSTRÖM tutored by ELIZABETH HATZ during SPRING 2020 at THE ROYAL INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY in STOCKHOLM.

“It matters what matters we use to think other matters with; it matters what stories we tell to tell other stories with; it matters what knots knot knots, what thoughts think thoughts, what descriptions describe descriptions, what ties tie ties. It matters what stories make worlds, what worlds make stories.” —Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble

Gardens of Compost; Frightening Fables and Fabulous Futures Diploma Project in Architecture Spring semester 2020 Tutored by Elizabeth Hatz By Anton Lindstrรถm anton-lindstrom@hotmail.com The Royal Institute of Technology Stockholm, Sweden May 2020

Contents

Introduction; 623 BC

Rational heritage and the sky-gazing man - String figures and speculative fabulation - Bulbs, tubers and potatoes - Joyful care of adjacent sites - Those that came before Sitting on the floor with unruly feathers The Crow and the Politician 27 Survey Fabulation - Evocative site analysis - Counterfeit police reports - Planning laws - Property laws - Animal rights & laws Juridical Persons

ii.

A Fowler and a Crow

The history of the birdhouse and the animal reserve - Patricia MacCormack’s Ahuman Manifesto - Michel Serres’ and Luce Iraguray’s grace/letting be - Henrik Georg von Wrights’ Myth of Progress - Knowledge is violence - Minor and Major, making gaps

iii. A Playground Review by Rustan Lejon Ankarhult

Life cycles - Eggs, larva and butterflies - The circles of cognitive dissonance hell - Incompetence - The terror of lawns - A monument to the 6th mass extinction - Childrens inert understanding of and empathy for nature - Brainwashing Politicians and architects - Adolph Eichmann - Doom and gloom iv. The Thorny Town

Practical doves - Opportunist inventor Some poor townsfolk - Bird poop- Rhymes And spikes - Spikes - Spikes - Spikes v. Anti-roosting spikes

Sharp projections or sharp ammunition Is everything researched - The safe and humane way - US Air Force Manuals Biotechnical section vi. An Incomplete Lexicon

101

Architectural by-products - Noiseless construction sites - Workplace healing Habitat support - CO2 capture - sleep deprivation - Forgotten student works vii. The Gardener The amateurish as dissent - The slow violence of quantifiability - Biosynthetical possessions - Biosynthetical possession Mythical to power, familiar to affect

111

viii. Everything But Architecture

193

So what is an architect to do? - I love to you - A coffee with architecture - This is my territory - Every house is a hole - Compost architecture and wormy architects - Sabotage - Becoming imperceptible - Creating fertile grounds for fabulous futures - Falling out of love with power and in love with affect

Bibliography 201

Design Elements

209

Introduction; 623BC 1

INTRODUCTION: 623 BC

“It is the story that makes the difference. It is the story that hid my humanity from me, the story the mammoth hunters told about bashing, thrusting, raping, killing, about the Hero. The wonderful, poisonous story of Botulism. The killer story.”1 —Ursula K. Le Guin, The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction

RATIONAL HERITAGE AND THE SKY-GAZING MAN

t matters what matters we use to think other matters with; it matters what stories we tell to tell other stories with; it matters what knots knot knots, what thoughts think thoughts, what descriptions describe descriptions, what ties tie ties. It matters what stories make worlds, what worlds make stories.”2 It matters which architectures architect architecture. It matters which lines line lines. But what is an architect to do when the mere act of drawing a single line, not to mention a whole group of them, seems so rigidly fused with mechanics of pollution, domination, colonization and extinction? We can’t even put the pen to the paper without activating these mechanics. When we draw a straight line, we draw in the tradition of drawing borders in Africa, in the tradition of severing communities, in the tradition of drawing a line as to which species deserve to live and which deserve to die, in the tradition of drawing a line between me and not-me. This is not to say that the ones who do not dare to draw a line is without sin, not at all, impossibly so. The nature of western academia is at the core of the lines’ violence. As Hito Steyerl so succinctly puts it “Why would one need a discipline if it wasn’t to discipline somebody or something?”3 The epos of the political animal seems only to breed control, gridded worlds, gridded cities, gridded plots, plans and people, easily digested, reduced, and controlled en masse. The ostensibly rational project of the last 2500 years doesn’t even stay intact upon any closer inspection. Lust for power and petty squabbles defined which philosophy has survived and which was made, just ask Plato what he thinks of the heretic Democritus – he’s not even worth to mention.4 And if those reasons weren’t enough, logos, this self defined rational endeavour, hasn’t even managed to scrub itself clean from mythos’ black pitch.5 By its own rule of clinical rational

1. Le Guin, The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction, p. 6 2. Haraway, Staying with the Trouble, p. 12 3. Steyerl, Aesthetics of Resistance, p. 30

INTRODUCTION: 623 BC

purity it should by now abandon itself, something it of course will not. It seems the only thing left for an architect to do is to stop doing anything at all. If only it was that easy. It appears as though even refusing to take part in anything at all falls apart as well because of this pesky little thing called time, and its big brother, space. If our active participation was to stop, and we magically managed to stop everyone else from designing as well, everything else would still continually redraw all those things that on the surface appear static and safe. A high school becomes an university, becomes a occupied stronghold, becomes a fascist police station, becomes a pile of rubble, becomes a home to rats, cockroaches and fungi, becomes forgotten, rediscovered, becomes a monument to a new order, hailed as a symbol of lost greatness and rationality. If only it was as easy as to stop drawing, to stop thinking. Go on, say I, wandering off towards the wild oats, with Oo Oo in the sling and little Oom carrying the basket. You just go on telling how the mammoth fell on Boob and how Cain fell on Abel and how the bomb fell on Nagasaki and how the burning jelly fell on the villagers and how the missiles will fall on the Evil Empire, and all the other steps in the Ascent of Man.6

But this is not the story I want to tell. Not the Killer Story, not the stories of impotence and hopelessness when confronted with a harsh reality, nor the stories of unrivaled greatness of technofixes and Heroes towards the inevitable ascent of a sky-gazing man [sic]. They all end with Thales falling down the well,7 with tragedy, with apocalypse. The old philosopher that failed to see the ground, the earth, the humus, or rather the lack of ground, just because he was so preoccupied with 4. Democritus strayed a bit too far from the Greek religion and while contemporary to Plato, and by all other accounts very a popular writer, he was never brought up. Itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s debated why this is, but probably due to Democritus unconventional atomist ideas which eliminated Gods from his material ontology. 5. Most, From Myth to Reason, p. 30f. 6. Le Guin, The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction, p. 5 7. Diogenes, BerĂśmda filosofers liv och lĂ¤ror, p. 38

RATIONAL HERITAGE AND THE SKY-GAZING MAN

the sky. Falling despite the care of the female slave, despite him owning her and despite her owing him nothing.8 Thales eliminated female agency from Theogonin, from the rich collaborative oral mythos that came before it,9 and in one swift move made a fool of himself and everyone else since. A first crucial step in losing our connection to the ground and to living and dying well. One small step for [a] man, one giant leap for mankind. One might think falling head-first into the ground would perhaps awaken Thales from his ignorant slumber, but as the last few years have shown humans don’t know a sign even if it them in the face. Facts don’t change our minds.10, 11 It’s terribly ironic how rich the old myths become after just a slight queering touch, a slight shift in orientations, a gentle nudge – dusty old stories that become born again with more power than ever. Perhaps the primitive hut needs a new queer GMO-infused child?

8. There are other versions of the story, for example where the slave is an old lady who taunts the philosopher 9. Songe-Møller, Tanker om Upprinnelsen, p. 34 10. Cipriano & Gruca, The Power of Priors 11. Pinker, Language, Cognition and Human Nature

INTRODUCTION: 623 BC

Eisen, Frontispiece of Essai sur lâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;architecture 2nd ed., 1755

“What happens when human exceptionalism and bounded individualism, those old saws of western philosophy and political economics, become unthinkable in the best sciences, whether natural or social? Seriously unthinkable: not able to think with.”12 —Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble

INTRODUCTION: 623 BC

So what is an architect to do? We can’t detach from our legacy, start from scratch, as the great movements of modernism tried in vain. These stories are with us whether we want it or not, and the practice of shedding the old paradigm only succeeds in hiding our prejudice from plain sight.13 Donna Haraway suggest we should instead be staying with the trouble. Her book named after that practice is an eclectic collection of stories and anecdotes, thick with both science fiction and science fact. It’s filled with esoteric slogans and polymorphic echoes. Make kin, not babies! We must think! It matters what ideas we use to think other ideas (with). (borrowed from Marilyn Strathern). It matters which stories tell other stories. (One of Haraways own variation of Stratherns original term.) Not post-human(ism), but compost. Sprinkled in between these lines of joyful and abstract rallying cries are hard facts and real stories, they share none of her philosophical vagueness and stand out like glades in a thick forest. She retells stories about racing-pigeons’ problematic relationship with humans and its intersection with politics and colonization, about the complicated migration patterns of the North-American Monarch butterfly, about hormonal growth molecules for cattle, and many more. They are not speculation and are thus presented with utmost clarity. That’s the beauty of the word “story”, they can be fiction or not. “You can make up stories but you can also tell true stories.”14 The game of SF (string figures, speculative fabulation, speculative feminism, science fiction, etc) is where she urge and inspire us to think – it’s here that the reader has to take charge and forge their own understanding. They have to construct their own string figures, collecting stories, theories, facts and ideas, about places and critters and play the game of string figures with them as to make time and space for a caring future. This is the game we all should be playing, this

12. Haraway, Staying with the Trouble, p. 30 13. This is also partly why Thales matter. The other part is that we should never consider any philosophy as too old to use. Archaic? Often! Too old? Never! 14. Waime, Gilles Deleuze and Donna Haraway on Fabulating the Earth, p. 526

STRING FIGURES AND SPECULATIVE FABULATION

is the game I will play in this thesis. The unfinished Chthulucene must collect up the trash of the Anthropocene, the exterminism of the Capitolocene, and chipping and shredding and layering like a mad gardener, make a much hotter compost pile for still possible pasts, presents, and futures.15

I will be a mad gardener. Collecting, arranging, remixing, refracting and reassembling of sites/situations/stories. It’s about resisting the temptation to make a story about the Hero and the Conflict, and instead tell a story about gathering and gardening. It’s not an easy story to tell. It is hard to tell a really gripping tale of how I wrested a wild-oat seed from its husk, and then another, and then another, and then another, and then another, and then I scratched my gnat bites, and Ool said something funny, and we went to the creek and got a drink and watched newts for a while, and then I found another patch of oats.... No, it does not compare, it cannot compete with how I thrust my spear deep into the titanic hairy flank while Oob, impaled on one huge sweeping tusk, writhed screaming, and blood spouted everywhere in crimson torrents, and Boob was crushed to jelly when the mammoth fell on him as I shot my unerring arrow straight through eye to brain.16

But it is never the less stories of gathering we must tell if we are to learn how to live and die well in the Anthropocene.17, 18 The killer stories have been told, over and over again. The Anthropocene epoch came into being by a multiplicity of factors, there is no Great Enemy, there is no this one simple 15. Haraway, Staying with the Trouble, p. 57 16. Le Guin, The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction, p. 2 17. It’s worth spending a short moment specifying why I use the name ‘Anthropocene’ amidst the plurality of other more appropriate names given to it, most notably the Capitolocene, the Plantationocene and the Chthulucene. It was most likely coined in 1980s by ecologist Eugene Stoermer, but started to gather attention in 2000 when Nobel prize-winner Paul Crutzen joined Stoermer in suggesting that our era of climate destruction warrants the definition of a new geological epoch.18 The term has some unfortunate baggage, mainly through putting anthropos themselves center stage in this ecological catastrophe, a macabre sort of grandiose power statement that we

INTRODUCTION: 623 BC

Tommy Sveningsson, Trädgårdsstaten, 2019

For me, the Swedish artist Tommy Sveningsson show an amazing care towards the everyday interactions between nature and built. How these small elements of construction literally glow amidst a magical lawn. An aesthetic of the magical realism possible in these very ordinary spaces.

STRING FIGURES AND SPECULATIVE FABULATION

trick to undo the slow collapse of civilization. This is not the story I want to tell, at least not right now. This is not to say that there aren’t great enemies (small ‘g’) - Capitalism, Imperialism, Modernity and Progress, to name a few, all play leading roles in this world touring show. Make no mistake, this thesis is anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist, and to some degree anti-rationalist. But to care for the situations at hand, all threads must be untangled, both the big and the small ones. To take one real example - fish are dying because of global warming. Hence, the fishing industry is loosing money, the easiest way to save money is paying the fishermen less and make them work in dangerous conditions, its hard to control at sea. But if the crew tell anyone, the fisheries will have a lawsuit on their hands. So they hire undocumented migrants who can’t complain or unionise because they will be deported if they do. So here, climate change, border control and labour rights aren’t three separate issues, but a dense interconnected one.19, 20 All is tangled in this great big mess we call the Anthropocene, from architecture and biology to pre-socratic philosophy and immigration rules. The Anthropocene was made by a multiplicity of factors, “thus, it can only be relationally unmade, and must be thought through in a more ongoing and relational way.”21 “Myriad tentacles will be needed to tell the story of the Chthulucene.”22 One crucial detail, that is worth repeating, glade-like, is that it is not about disassembling the world as so to understand precisely which role each part plays. Systematic understanding has a role to play, but it is not the main character. The main character is care. For the here and now, Bruno Latour set this shift in motion (excuse my great-maning)23 with his seminal 2004 text Why has Critical Theory Run out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern which

do not deserve. Still, it is the most recognizable term we have at the moment. The Capitolocene, the Plantationocene and the Chthulucene, and many others will have to take supporting roles for now. 18. Haraway, Staying with the Trouble, p. 44 19. Thorn, Climate Grief, 0:50 20. Tickler et al., Modern slavery and the race to fish 21. Butler, Review: Not that Cthulhu, p. 369 22. Haraway, Staying with the Trouble, p. 31

INTRODUCTION: 623 BC

Cedric Price Architects, Ducklands, Hamburg, 1989–1991

When published in Building Design in 1991, the “Ducklands Experiment” was described as repurposing the docklands not through housing, offices, and other functions typical of post-industrial regeneration projects, but instead proposed the creation of a large nature reserve, a river marshland in the center of Hamburg, to become a resting place for migratory birds. The entire site was to be gradually submerged by water. Existing buildings and structures were to be demolished, with the exception of key railway links and listed buildings of the historic city. The riverbed was to be cleansed from rubbish and river silt down to its sandbanks. Collages included in the article, and many more also in the Cedric Price fonds, show the scale of this operation; gradually all structures would disappear from the harbor skyline. A key design invention was the adjustable gantry. Initially they would remove soil from the riverbed. Subsequently they would be used for planting and husbandry, and eventually they would serve as adjustable walkways for visitors.

-Isabelle Doucet, ‘Anticipating Fabulous Futures’, e-flux, 2018

STRING FIGURES AND SPECULATIVE FABULATION

Maria Puig de la Bellacasa then built upon, fusing it further with Haraways thinking, morphing it into Matters of Care. Latour get to the heart of the ethos. My question is thus: Can we devise another powerful descriptive tool that deals this time with matters of concern and whose import then will no longer be to debunk but to protect and to care, as Donna Haraway would put it? Is it really possible to transform the critical urge in the ethos of someone who adds reality to matters of fact and not subtract reality?24

This is not a thesis about disassembly, deconstruction, or raw understanding, but about response-ability (“praxis of care and response… in ongoing multispecies worlding on a wounded Terra” as Haraway puts it).25 Response-ability because facts matter, but it matters which facts tell other facts, which thoughts think thoughts, which lines line lines.

23. It is not like the question hasn’t been around before. The Frankfurt school was formed based on applied Marxism, but many of its figures was famously afraid of praxis, maybe most notably Theodor Adorno, as he had seen up close the failure of the Communist project in Soviet and around the world. Noting could be done before the theory was perfect, impotence and hopelessness, he became a bitter old man. Herbert Marcuse and Angela Davis resisted the temptation and stayed with the trouble, praxis alongside theory, hand in hand, informing each other and hindering each other. Especially Angela Davis dedicated herself to praxis and activism, to the degree that she has even fallen out of the official philosophy canon, at least until recently. 24. Latour, Has Critical Theory Run out of Steam?, p. 232 25. Haraway, Staying with the trouble, p. 105

INTRODUCTION: 623 BC

F. Jayne, String figures and how to make them, 1962

“Since each of us was several, there was already quite a crowd.”26 —Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus

“We’re tired of trees. We should stop believing in trees, roots, and radicles. They’ve made us suffer too much. All of arborescent culture is founded on them, from biology to linguistics. Nothing is beautiful or loving or political aside from underground stems and aerial roots, adventitious growths and rhizomes.”27 —Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus

INTRODUCTION: 623 BC

I have still not fully presented my core cast of this project. Though, as I will now delve further into, and to which I’ve already alluded, the very idea of a core is problematic. The Killer Story is still persevering, the Hero and the Conflict. Philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari propose something radically different in A Thousand Plateaus, the Rhizome. They draw on the metaphor of root systems, rejecting the classical tree-like models, the pure taproot and the pure fascicular, “thought is not arborescent, and the brain is not a rooted or ramified matter,”28 and thus neither should our theories be. It’s the bulbs and the tubers we should look towards. Layered multiplicities of circular systems of ramification, rather than a dichotomous one. A wild heterogeneity of situations (nodes), everything is always at play with semiotic chains, organizations of power, arts, sciences and social struggles. There are no fixed points, Archimedes will never move the Earth, as a matter of fact there are no points at all, only lines of flight (creative acts), actions of differing viscosities, a move from one power to the next. The Rhizome is descriptive not constructive. “It is a map not a tracing.”29 It has multiple entry point, no beginning or end. Not x = x = not y (I = I = not-you), but an open equation, …+ y + z + a + …30 It is Nomad thought. Wandering from one situation to the next. In the Rhizome the lines are not what divides but what connects, and lines are all there is. The Puppeteer has no will, only another dimension of strings, and so on and so on and so on. Put simply (and a fair bit reductive), the Rhizome can be thought of as a multiplicity of nodes (situations). One can think of it as the subterranean part of a potato-plant. It is a fascicular system with tubers, adventurous roots reaching out and dense congregations, the potatoes themselves. The rhizomatic is what sets the organizational parameters for this thesis.

26. Deleuze & Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 3 27. Ibid., p. 15 28. Ibid., p. 15 29. Ibid., p. 12 30. Ibid., p. xiii

BULBS, TUBERS AND POTATOES

Nomad Storytelling is what this thesis will be. A fusing of Haraway’s caring ethos (staying with the trouble, string figures, speculative fabulation, speculative feminism, science fiction, science fact, etc) with Deleuze’s and Guattari’s rhizomatic thinking. Haraway gives me directions for how to care for the multiplicity of sites/situations/nodes I will encounter. Deleuze and Guattari supplies the overarching (anti-) structure. How I should be moving and how I should analyse my movement in hindsight. Adjacency is the key word in this movement, it can mean adjacent in physical proximity, in transportation routes, in folk tales, in thought, adjacent in every sense of the word. What matters is that the site I moved from is adjacent to the next one. The path I take will unavoidably have linear qualities, but the sites genealogy will not, and can not be. This work is anti-genealogy, but always with genealogy in mind, not because its true, but because it inevitably guides me. It’s part of getting my hands dirty, when dealing with earth and compost, a reminder that fabulation is not an innocent practice. Just as the Bower birds love coffee lids for their intricate mating displays, so will I love the trash I encounter, and so will I care for the situations. Care by writing a story about what has happened. Care by building a house or by tearing one down. Philosophical and physical care and rehabilitation, for architects through architecture, always in relation to a real place or critter, always away from the apocalyptic, but always staying with the trouble. Learning to live and die well in the Anthropocene as an architect. The first entry point (not beginning), the first story, is about some of our precious urban aviary critters here in Stockholm. More specifically, about a loving couple, and a particularly stingy local Facebook group and community. As the couple (mistakenly labelled as one crow by the humans (the single mother myth is persuasive)) defended their young ones with force, the human parents defended their young ones, playing in the adjacent playground, with bureaucracy. The group posted a fault report from the municipality and urged all to sign. Quick and harsh action was required. “We can’t let the crow terrorize the playground!” And thus these two parents were, without their knowledge, dragged into the messy and convoluted world of municipality bureaucracy, re17

INTRODUCTION: 623 BC

JOYFUL CARE OF ADJACENT SITES

duced to objects, objectified in the harshest sense of the word, alongside squeaky doors and broken windows – a world all too familiar for architects. What is an architect to do? Is this even our domain? We must have some response-ability. We built these cities, did we not? Cities full of anti-roosting spikes, hostile architecture, for non-humans and humans. Which stories can I carve out as to facilitate a joyful connection of parents and children, instead of the tired old trope of family feuds. Perhaps its time a crow’s castle (kråkslottet) lived up to its name. From this story new peripheral agents appeared through the string figures mesh and I ended up with 9 adjacent situations/sites/nodes/intimacies. There was no central guiding principle for how I decided to care for these situations, that would have defeated the whole purpose of my method of caring in a situation-appropriate way, a researched way, a thought out way. But I made some suggestions, pointed towards some projects that had done similar things, name d some parameters that guided me. Firstly, in the most abbreviated way, it is a project of joyful architectural representation and speculation. “Representation” to make visible ways in which architecture interacts with the Anthropocene, and “speculation” in how architects can care for the earth and all it’s critters in these troubled times. Secondly, all material, from technical section drawings to texts, followed Haraway’s oscillations between speculative fabulation and science fact, between the evocative/mystical/ fantastical and the hard empiric facts. Oscillations which of course can change in length and speed, the oscillations does not have a constant rhythm. Thirdly, the mayor parameters (not structure), was set in stone, but plastic in nature. I focused on a new site/situation/node roughly every week, and then moved on to an adjacent one. A sort of architectural dairy if you will. Each node received architectural care in some sense - an mystical short story, a dry fact-telling, a cute poem, a sad song lyric,31 an abstract map, a wild diagram, a technical section, a small architectural fabulation, a crisp rendering, a evocative photometric scan, or anything else that might feel appropriate. Always with one foot in contact with the real and one foot in a fabulous future. Architects possess a vast set of tools, I intend to use as many as 19

INTRODUCTION: 623 BC

Barry Hatton, Satin Bower Birds Bower, 2008

possible. It was also my intention to read during the majority of the project, gaining new theoretical vantage points. Finally, speaking plainly, I wish to clarify some positions of my own regarding architecture. It is a discipline in crisis. The global construction industry contributes massively to environmental degradation, and architecture is a direct extension of that industry. This means that the discipline have an immense response-ability - and the changes suggested so far barely scratches the surface of this position. On top of this, there is an immanent technological paradigm shift, comparable in scale to the changes in the beginning of the last century. Large scale 3D-printing and AI-assisted automation of design is just around the corner. They will change the practice of architecture for good, automating much, if not all, of architects conventional practice.32 Just as the Bauhaus school, and many others, tried to carve out a place for aesthetics and human sensibilities in mass production, architecture today have to carve out a possible future among these two complex and pressing issues. Many of the old ideals will fast become obsolete and architects will have to think long and hard about which new possibilities will appear and which old qualities are worth keeping. All can’t be saved. We must think! Think as to save the planet. Think so as to save architecture. And think as to learn how to think - for a time where we will do even more thinking and even less designing. This thesis will be a collection of speculations about how to think as an architect in the Anthropocene.

31. ‘Lyckliga Gatan’, the song on page 20, is a wonderful example of how architecture critique can sound, one of the many shapes it can take, and how it can move generations like no dry theory ever could. Incredibly rich lyrics and performance about the woes of the mass demolitions that took place during the Million Programme in Sweden. It is also an acknowledgment of the fact that the new modernist blocks one day will have the same life as the old ones had, sadly a dimension of the song that is often lost, reducing it to bitter reminisce of the past. ‘Trettifyran’ (1964) by Per Myrberg is another example. What it lacks in depth, it makes up for in joy. It is less of a sad reminiscence , and more of an Irish funeral, celebrating the good times that was had and laughing about its many flaws, but how they loved it anyway. Both are perfect examples of architectural storytelling and care. 32. Lokrantz & Lindström, The Unmitigated Calamity of Autogeneration

INTRODUCTION: 623 BC

Ja, allt är borta och det är bara så Ändå så vill jag nog inte förstå Att min idyll, som alla vill glömma Nu är en dröm som jag en gång fått drömma Allting är borta, huset och linden Och mina vänner skingrats för vinden Lyckliga gatan, det är tiden som här dragit fram Du fått ge vika nu för asfalt och för macadam Lyckliga gatan, du finns inte mer Du har försvunnit med hela kvarter Tystnat har leken, tystnat har sången Högt över marken svävar betongen När jag kom åter var allt så förändrat Trampat och skövlat, fördärvat och skändat Skall mellan dessa höga hus en dag, stiga en sång Lika förunderlig och skön som den vi hört en gång

Yes, all is gone and that’s how it is Still don’t accept it for what it is That my idyll, that all want to leave Now is a dream I once got to dream Everything’s gone, the house and the limetree And all of my friends spread in the breezy Blissfully lane, it is the time that has cruised by You have surrendered now to asphalt and to macadam Blissfully lane, you are now lost You’ve disappeared and whole block’s been tossed Silent’s the play, silent’s the singing High in the air the concrete is lingering When I came back, all ours was vanished Trampled and ruined, blighted and ravished One day between these tall houses, there’ll rise a song Equally marvellous and fair as one we sang along Anna-Lena Löfgren, Lyckliga Gatan, 1967 (my translation)

“Finally, it’s clear that the Hero does not look well in this bag. He needs a stage or a pedestal or a pinnacle. You put him in a bag and he looks like a rabbit, like a potato. That is why I like novels: instead of heroes they have people in them.”33 —Ursula K. Le Guin, The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction

INTRODUCTION: 623 BC

I am now sitting at the floor with strings left and right in an unruly beautiful mess of a pattern. To my left Donna is sitting with a focused smile. To her left, Felix and Gilles (their four hands inconceivably weaved in-between inseparable from each other, a weave over/under/adjacent to the string figure itself). And to my right, a crow, visibly annoyed by the unruly feathers caused by the tensioned string, strung between her beak and left wing. These are my actors so far. By the end I hope to have invited many more human and non-human critters to my floor for this game, and for other games, worldspanningly huge and mindbogglingly tiny, just big and small enough to tell a good story.

33. Le Guin, The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction, p. 7

SITTING ON THE FLOOR WITH UNRULY FEATHERS

Intermission 25

INTERMISSION

On Graphic Design

It’s worth talking some about the graphic design of this book. I hope it’s obvious that it is very intentional, and just as the things I’ve filled it with it is dirty, messy and contradictory. It takes inspiration from medieval books, Jugend-style, and more contemporary designers like Leah Maldonado who have made the gorgeous, and free, typeface family ‘GlyphWorld’ used for the chapter titles and more. From this I’ve tried to avoid an aesthetics of ostensible clarity, a language of rationality that obscures its mythical foundations, as well as the contemporary design tropes of legibility fit for a social media feed, of instant capture. That is not to say I’ve tried to avoid making it striking, just that it demands just a little bit more of the reader than most graphics do. It’s also, as I’ll talk more about in node number 6, an effort to really involve architecture in the graphical design we use. The letters and colours we use says a lot about which kind of architecture we want to create, and still most firms opt for very subdued aesthetics – even the most eccentric offices have very streamlined, almost always, black and white websites. Is our main goal really to be that inoffensive? To that degree? Though, I would argue one could make a case for white pages when it comes to printed media. White is, for good and bad, the default colour we have for sheets of paper, which of course means that more colour means more ink-usage and printer usage. Perhaps a truly sustainable graphic design should use as little as possible, few lines and thin typefaces on a white background? Then again, the true problem really isn’t coloured sheets, but that the convention of whiteness makes sure everything other than white sheets are hard to come by. For a culture that claims to value multiplicity of choices, we sure seem to have very few. A handful of straight typefaces, colours and styles dominate our language and this is a humble effort to move away from those.

The Crow and the Politician 27

THE CROW AND THE POLITICIAN

alf past five in the morning, a municipality politician who lives in Bergshamra, Stockholm, write in the local Facebook group that she has been attacked by a crow. The post splits the local online community. The situation escalates further when the politician prompts the other members to file fault reports on the municipality website as to have the crow removed. A few days later it is also picked up in the local newspaper.

THE CROW AND THE POLITICIAN

COUNTERFEIT POLICE REPORT

THE CROW AND THE POLITICIAN

COUNTERFEIT PLAN AND BUILDING LAWS

THE CROW AND THE POLITICIAN

The situation highlights the many contradictions of being a neighbour in the Anthropocene. The incident and ethology described is true, but the artifacts themselves are fabricated counterfeits, describing an alternative timeline following the incident.

COUNTERFEIT PENAL CODE

Survey Fabulation, S.F. â&#x20AC;&#x201D; Site analysis of the situation. Incidents superimposed together with actors, nest location and typical crow defensive territory.

THE CROW AND THE POLITICIAN

100(m)

THE CROW AND THE POLITICIAN

PAINTING DETAILS

Uwe Henneken, Visoneer Jacob, 2017

Uwe Henneken paints magical places and beings within regular worlds. A lot of his works feature tired wandering figures without shadows, spectres. His colourful and eclectic style has been a major influence for the aesthetic of my painting for this book.

THE CROW AND THE POLITICIAN

Forensic Architecture, Living Death Camp, 2013

Staro Sajmište, once the site of a ‘world’s fair’, became a Nazi concentration camp.The Roma community that later lived there—including descendents of the camp’s victims—is threatened by plans to build a Holocaust memorial at the site. We surveyed the site to support their efforts to remain.

-Forensic Architecture

There is also a great deal of influence from Forensic Architecture in my methodology. Architectural tools not just as prescriptive but also as investigative. Though, I think for what I’m trying to achieve their language is a bit too serious, hence the fusing of their methodology with the visual language of other artists and researchers.

REFERENCES

Intermission 41

INTERMISSION

{Cro(w)p, Circle}

Planted reeds in a radius around a crows nest. It springs from the earth in time for brooding and wither as the chicks leave their nest.

r = 50 meters

July till March Come visit!

March till June Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;d prefer not to. Take a detour! 42

A Fowler and a Crow 43

A FOWLER AND A CROW

II.

A fowler was placing his nets, and putting his tackle in order by the side of a copse, when a Crow, who saw him, had the curiosity to enquire what he was doing. Says, he, I am building a city for you birds to live in; and providing it with meat, and all manner of conveniences for you. Having said this, he departed and hid himself; and the Crow, believing the words, came into the nets, and was taken. But when the Fowler came up to take hold of her, If this, says she, be your faith and honesty, and these the cities you build, I am of opinion, you will have but few inhabitants. â&#x20AC;&#x201D;Samuel Croxall Aesopâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Fables, Perry Index 193

A FOWLER AND A CROW

thought about building a birdhouse. The conventional birdhouse, or nest box, we know today was patented in the early 19th century by British conservationist Charles Waterton.1,2 Mr. Waterton was born in Yorkshire, 1782, into a moderately wealthy landed gentry family, landowners, semi-aristrocratic. He was educated at Stonyhurst collage, where one can see the first traces of his violent interest in wildlife. He recalls in his autobiography, “by a mutual understanding, I was considered rat-catcher to the establishment, and also fox-taker, foumart-killer, and cross-bow charger at the time when the young rooks were fledged. ... I followed up my calling with great success. The vermin disappeared by the dozen.”3 In 1820, after travelling to Guyana, he returned to Yorkshire and started the worlds first modern nature reserve and the worlds first enclosed area for wildfowl, an interesting combination to say the least. The complex was surrounded by a 3 meter tall and 5 km long wall. By all accounts an eccentric pioneer of environmentalism, he is said to have climbed trees in storms to return fallen chicks to their nests and to have raised “taxidermy from a sorry handicraft to an art” - partly by dressing up reptiles as famous English protestants (Mr. Waterton was a devout Catholic) and re-rearranging the face of a howler monkey to resemble that of a human face.4 A ‘preservation’ suddenly acquires slightly more morbid connotations. The history of the birdhouse, and the nature reserve, is not really a fairy-tale romance between the nonhuman and human. Mr. Waterton designed the nest box to encourage 1. Birdhouse Planet, ‘Charles Waterton (1782–1865)’, https:// birdhouseplanet.com, accessed 2018-08-29. 2. It’s worth to mention that other variants of bird housing has existed at least since antiquity and probably earlier, human-made housing for birds in itself was not new in any way. 3. Waterton, ‘Autobiography of Charles Waterton’, Essays on Natural History, Chiefly Ornithology, 1837 4. Wikipedia, ‘Charles Waterton’, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_ Waterton, accessed 2020-02-14

A FOWLER AND A CROW

Wakefield Museum, Photo of ‘The Nondescript’, 2014

more birdlife to “live” at his estate. His taxidermy skills no doubt required a lot of practice, his estate must have had many permanent guests, but few inhabitants I imagine. The idea of a benevolent human stewardship of the planet we have today is very far from it’s original orientation, but how much have it actually changed since then? I’m not too interested in building a birdhouse anymore, and certainly not a nest box. It is not hard to attach this idea to what Henrik Georg von Wright’s terms the Modern Myth of Progress. What von Wright is suggesting is that we have wholly lost track of what progress means, the idea has been obscured and transformed into a synonym for unbridled growth, to the modernist project of social health, and to movement for platonic progress instead of movement through genuine progress. Progress has become almost a categorical imperative,5 factualized and quantified through GDP or public health, and then made synonym to those terms - progress is reified as rule of nature, no longer a value judgement, but an irrefutable fact. As an effect, any critique of economic growth or other “positive” quantifiable change, is met with disdain, “How dare you be opposed to progress? How dare you critique feeding starving children in Africa? How dare you critique survival? Don’t you believe in evolution?”. The obfuscation of progress hides it’s own origin of obfuscation and produces a double bind. As Von Wright sets out to disentangle progress from its modern myth and in the process also poses some quite striking questions. “Is survival then not a good thing in itself? From the point of view of the survivor it is. [...] It is not clear that the answer to this question must be affirmative. Nor that it must be negative.”6 “Is the accumulation of knowledge progress? Is it a good thing to get to know more? [...] What is certain [...] is that (the growth of) knowledge in general and scientific knowledge in particular may have instrumental [value for humans.]”7 As Jacques Bouveresse comments in his article on the myth of progress, “As von Wright states: ‘the industrial form of production is grounded in technology, which is grounded in turn in the scientific

5. Bouveresse, Wittgenstein and the Myth of Progress, p. 308 6. Von Wright, The Myth of Progress, p. 217

A FOWLER AND A CROW

Lacaton & Vassal, Place LĂŠon Aucoc, 1996

knowledge of nature. In the final analysis, it thus emanates from man’s rational disposition. If we are inclined to believe that reason has an intrinsic capacity to respect the biological conditions of man’s existence on earth, we can then hope that an in-depth knowledge of these conditions will also have a regulatory effect on the forces that have final control over the management of industrial production’ (MP, 163). However, it just so happens we have reached a stage where we must seriously question whether the exigencies of reason and the exigencies of the apparatuses it has created, the apparatus of production in particular, have not already begun to contradict the exigencies of the biology of our species.”8

While Von Wright himself gives few hard answers to these questions, it seems as if the anthropocene and the capitalocene have settled it for us, at least partly. To return to the birdhouse, I want to suggest an addition to the myth of progress, the Myth of Building. Intricately entangled with public health and growth, the idea that built structures are the architects most heroic tool for directed and real societal change is a pervasive myth, perhaps even our most entrenched one. While it’s true that the built always serves as a catalyst for change, the idea that it is controlled by the architect and positive for the inhabitants is naive at best, and at worst malicious. We have been perfecting our hammer for millennia, everything is a nail, and the myth of progress, of building, have us in blindfold. This is not to say that the built environment should be torn down, or that it is worthless, as Judith Butler writes, “performance studies and disability studies have offered the crucial insight that all action requires support, and that even the most punctual and seemingly spontaneous act implicitly depends upon an infrastructural condition that quite literally supports the acting body.”9 Architectures support, hold. They hold your hand, hold you up, but also hold you in place, hold you down. In times of build, build, build, build, build, maybe sometimes we should practice letting go, showing

7. Ibid, p. 219 8. Bouveresse, Wittgenstein and the Myth of Progress , p. 314 9. Butler, Rethinking Vulnerability and Resistance, pp. 8-9

A FOWLER AND A CROW

some grace and leaving be. Lacaton & Vassal’s fabled public square renovation in Bordeaux is a wonderful example of a step in the right direction. Quality, charm, life exist. The square is already beautiful. As a project we’ve proposed doing nothing apart from some simple and rapid maintenance works - replacing the gravel, cleaning the square more often, treating the lime trees, slightly modifying the traffic- of a kind to improve use of the square and to satisfy the locals.10

Lacaton & Vassal’s non-proposal for Place Léon Aucoc and von Wright’s myth of progress both map neatly onto Patricia MacCormack’s use of Grace (from Michel Serres), of stepping aside or letting be (from Luce Irigaray), though MacCormack takes it a few steps further than Lacaton & Vassal and von Wright, and gives a clear answer. In The Ahuman Manifesto she formulates an antinatalist, abolitionist, atheist veganism that suggest the slow extinction of humanity, of truly stepping aside. In our never ending quest for knowledge and power, she argues, we physically and metaphysically have imprisoned the nonhuman and human and severely misunderstood what our conception of nature is. All animal studies are inherently human studies, between humans and the other, since they are always on our terms, always written in our language, and never with consent.11 It is Jean Françoise Lyotard’s description of the victim who cannot be plaintiff because they cannot speak the masters tongue.12 The word nature is nature according to human knowledge, there is nothing natural about it. “Nature is reduced to human nature, which is reduced to either history or reason. The world has disappeared.”13 Recognition, which we usually hold up as a paragon of progress, is a dissymetrical form of violence, it forces the other, human or nonhuman, to evaluate and recognize themselves within the

10. Anne Lacaton & Jean-Philippe Vassal, Place Léon Aucoc, https://www. lacatonvassal.com/index.php?idp=37, accessed 2020-02-15 11. MacCormack, The Ahuman Manifesto, p. 14 12. Ibid., p. 14 13. Ibid., p. 26

A FOWLER AND A CROW

rules of the dominant system, or not exist at all.14 Knowledge is demarcation and violence. Real affirmation can only come through the dominant forsaking their privilege. Silence as cohabitation. [To] claim to know something is already to negate the unique expressivity of its force in favour of the power enforced by the structure of knowledge upon the self. Unknowing, or the death of knowledge, is affirmative.15 Affirmation of nonhuman life can only come through what lrigaray calls the ‘letting be’ and what Serres calls a ‘stepping aside’, or [grace.]16

It’s uncomfortable, frightening even, to leave be, to renounce knowledge. We see it in Alex Garlands Annihilation, this vast zone teeming with life and death, far more colourful then the “real” world outside, where rules don’t apply, where we don’t have knowledge. Still, for the protagonist, the lover, this zone of non-knowledge is her only hope, she walks out of it as a part of nature. Rearranged and reaffirmed. Mind you, it’s not just a matter of manners, of grace, but also of mortality, in this very moment. Habitat disruption of bats increase stress and make them shed even more virus in their saliva, urine and faeces that can infect other animals, and then us.17, 18, 19, 20 Letting be saves not only the nonhuman, but also the human. Stepping aside affirms not only the nonhuman, but also the human, stepping aside affirms not only metaphysically but also physically. To step aside means to create a gap, a lack, an absence, removing an anthropocentric conception of nature as to 14. Ibid., p. 20 15. Ibid., p. 29 16. Ibid., p. 33 17. Borremans et al., Cross-species pathogen spillover across ecosystem boundaries 18. Becker et al., Leukocyte Profiles Reflect Geographic Range Limits in a Widespread Neotropical Bat 19. Faust et al., Pathogen spillover during land conversion 20. Kessler et al., Changing resource landscapes and spillover of henipaviruses

Cedric Price Architects, Snowdon Aviary, London, 1965

reaffirm the world - it is minor architecture and a space for minor architecture to perpetuate a lack,21 to hold that space open. Intentionally impoverished, the minor, the absence, the gap, springs forth within the major and reframes the familiar territory, making the familiar strange.22 In response to these strange vacant spaces “powerful forces arise [...] not just in the form of empty rooms adapted for reuse, but through an encoding of these vacant spaces, and a subversion of major architecture’s prevailing myths.”23 Minor architectures are acts of clearing. Each act yields an emergent, revolutionary space, even as that space begins to close in behind. It is space displaced, a deterritorialization. It challenges authority and its management of time; it is political. It overrides heroic aspirations with an inclusive, collective voice.24

The minor is not without danger. They will likely leave wreckage in their wake, “even as they challenge the perceived wreckage that precedes them. They will have consequences of incompleteness and imperfection; but minor architects delight in imperfect, incomplete outcomes.”25 Isn’t a crows territorial protection, deterritorialization, squatting, precisely this minor architecture? In the gaps of the major urban planning it has carved out a space, and now speak back at anyone who tries to fill it. Aggressive cawing and menacing jumping as cohabitation. Isn’t this our cue? To now let be, step aside, and show some grace? Instead of more interventions, buildings, plannings - do nothing, do less than nothing, remove knowledge and mapping, make a true gap, deterritorialize. Let nature grow wild. Truly wild. Irreducible and unknowable. Patricia MacCormack sees the contradictions of what I am suggesting, of partly letting be - the inherent demarcation that arises when something is human territory and something is not, and she goes towards the only rational end to human

21. Stoner, Towards a Minor Architecture, p. 4 22. Ibid., p. 4 23. Ibid., p. 2 24. Ibid., p. 14 25. Ibid., p. 16

A FOWLER AND A CROW

The majoritarian produces major architecture. Major architecture encompass everything that fits within the dominant juridical, economical and cultural structure of society.

The major inevitably produces gaps, both physical and metaphysical.

The minor can spring forth. Constructing exteriority within the major.

The minor keeps the space open.

The major wants to close the gap. The majoritarian goal is to fill all spaces. Allowing only interiority. Controlled, maintained, productive.

A FOWLER AND A CROW

reason, anti-natalism, a slow extinction of humanity. While MacCormacks solution is alluring, I’m perhaps more inclined to stay with the trouble. MacCormacks equation ties up neatly, ironically by letting go of knowledge, of a sentient eye, all unknowns are known, x - x = 0 (we - we = everthing else), the world is saved. Mine, not so much, ...a - b + c... (...we - I + world...), nothing is saved so far, except for us, which is the entire problem. But I’m not willing to say we are a lost cause, I’m not willing to say we are the worst that could possibly happen to the planet, not just yet. This is undoubtedly one of the many baseless anthropocentric excuses MacCormack decries, nevertheless I stick to it. But if we wish to have some dignity left after refusing to go extinct we desperately need to rework our values not from the bottom up, but from the middle, tear down old myths and write new ones, formulate speculative futures of cohabitation, ongoingness and sympoesis that don’t hinge on our collective extinction or somebody else’s. None of the things I put forward are especially novel ideas, but ones that need a contemporary revival in our time of urgencies, whether they are climate, lack of housing, mass building of houses, or other. Whoever is nothing, whoever has nothing, passes and steps aside. From a bit of force, from any force, from any thing, from any decision, from any determination, the dancer, the dance step aside. The step is a step aside. Thus is movement born, thus !s grace born. Grace is nothing, it is nothing but stepping aside. Thus is movement born, thus, perhaps, is born time. Not to touch the ground with one’s force, not to leave any trace of one’s weight, to leave no mark, to leave nothing, to yield, to step aside. The dancer steps aside. Dance leaves the spot, it gives way to any other. Dance is Alba itself, it is its blank place. To dance is only to step aside and make room, to think is only to step aside and make room, give up one’s place.26

I would suggest something a bit more queer than Serres elegant dance. Make a exteriority, instead of a totalitarian interiority. It’s just a jump to the left! It’s so dreamy, oh 26. Serres, Genesis, p. 47

A FOWLER AND A CROW

Knowledge traps the non-human animal. Knowledge without dialogue is violence and demarcation of what one can and canâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t be. Charles Watertons traps are stilling running, more effective than ever. 56

fantasy free me. So you can’t see me, no, not at all. Queer has nothing to do with identity but everything to do with action. Queer moves. It moves over time, so identity is absent, but a staunch commitment to minoritarianism remains. It moves in space because it is tactical and will advocate the most needful minoritarianism in any given space. Queer resists all subjectification and stratification. Self-interest can come from an accidental collision, but queer adamantly refuses to speak its own position of being, per se, over speaking a position of activism and advocacy which may or may not correlate with personal benefit. Queer is motiveless, which makes it dangerous to the majoritarian who masquerades their own motives behind ‘logic’ and ‘neutral objectivity’. 27

But when the Fowler came up to take hold of her, If this, says she, be your faith and honesty, and these the cities you build, I am of opinion, you will have but few inhabitants. And the fowler thought for a minute, and then let her go.

27. MacCormack, The Ahuman Manifesto, p. 60

A FOWLER AND A CROW

GIS-data over Bergshamra. All this information, stacked, exploding, pushing. Geology, soil, nature, history, bureaucracy, infrastructure, and buildings. And a cut out â&#x20AC;&#x201D; to give the crows some rest.

A FOWLER AND A CROW

Intermission 61

INTERMISSION

â&#x2C6;&#x2026;

Don’t plan, don’t do another intervention. Planting something is just more development under the guise of “green”. Don’t maintain. Let go of your control.

r = 50 meters

The path is not needed anytime of the year. You can always take a detour. Show some grace and leave be. 62

A Playground Review

IiI.

by Rustan Lejon Ankarhult

A PLAYGROUND REVIEW

Rustan Lejon Ankarhult Rustan Lejon Ankarhult has been the editor of the Architectural Distress since 1998 and a staff writer since 1992. He has written many pieces for the magazine, including three anthologies on the pseudo-wittgensteinian nature of early brutalist architecture in the northern parts of Stockholm, and most recently has focused on the slow decay of civilization and architecturesâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; complicit role in our ongoing apocalypse.

by RUSTAN LEJON ANKARHULT

orth of central Stockholm, in Bergshamra, there is an at first sight fairly regular playground that I stumbled upon doing research for another article. A local politician for the Centre Party (Centerpartiet), out for a walk in the early morning hours together with her companion dog, had been chased away by a brooding crow and was now on the war path to have it removed. In an interview for the local newspaper, to strengthen the case for euthanizing a caring parent and one or many helpless chicks,1 the politician mentions some alleged prior “attacks” done by the crow at the adjacent playground, which she calls the Butterfly Park. The statement was of course mildly ironic. Firstly in regards to the fact that this overzealous and easily frightened public servant now perfectly mirrored the crow’s own behaviour on protecting their young ones – with the crucial difference that the crow wasn’t actively trying to kill, or even harm, the politician. And secondly, more relevant for this story, that you have a site, at face value, at least in name, erected for the glory of animal life, and then when some unlucky actual wildlife happens to find itself within its perimeter, you become determined to exterminate it. No life in the living room! Funny. Maybe an interesting theoretical parallel can be drawn here, a lesson in the contradictions of the Anthropocene epoch, a moral story or a short gag. And so, I set forth to find out more about the Butterfly Park. The information online was evasive, a bad omen, but in the end it is just one of hundreds of public playgrounds in Solna, not necessarily strange. After half an hour or so of trying to figure out the name and location - I still don’t know if

1. While the politician didn’t explicitly call for familicide, that is the only way to get rid of crows. Crows live at a place, not in a nest. If you capture them and release them somewhere else they’ll make their way back to the original site. If you destroy the nest the crow will just build a new one, often in the same tree. The only way to get rid of crows is euthanasia, and I’m not sure the politician is put in a more favourable light if she knew or didn’t knew this.

A PLAYGROUND REVIEW

it is “The Butterfly Park” or “The Butterfly’s Playground” as even the official documents of the municipality seems to vary2 - I finally found my way to the blog of a current city council member of Solna municipality. The blog sports hyperlink blue and black text with a white background and the categories “Me and the municipality”, “Me and the county” and “About me”. In the autumn of 2013 he published the fresh plans for the then roughly sketched out Butterfly Park. He writes how some 5 million SEK had been allocated to parks and recreation in Solna, and how the architecture firm Tengbom have been commissioned for the project, which included an ostensibly ambitious analysis of the existing situation in Bergshamra, development strategies, and some design proposals. Tengbom had then identified southern Bergshamra as the area that most acutely lacks a close-at-hand public playground. (They seems to have missed the fact that there is a lush forest some 100 meters further down, the most public playground there is, but maybe I’m old fashioned, people generally seems to prefer the mockery of children’s intelligence and obsessive surveillance and that comes with spatially designated playzones and heavy handed “childish” equipment.) The city council member then goes through the actual playground proposal briefly. The theme is the lifecycle of the butterfly. At this point I feel like this could become a genuinely good case study. Coalescing here is not only the stages of life for crows and humans (parents protecting their younglings), but also for butterflies. Could I perhaps theorize around a site for a sort of interspecies becoming-adult-with? Perhaps this is already the idea for the playground! Learning through play, or observation as play, access to areas in which you can observe the butterflies’ different stages of life? I continue reading through the proposal. The playground plan have four amorphous egg-like zones, one for each stage of the butterflies’ lifecycle; “egg”, “larva”, “pupa” and “butterfly

2. When I sent an email to the municipality asking for project details I got the response that Solna wasn’t in charge of the playground and was referred to the Royal Djurgården management as the employee thought I meant the Butterfly house in Hagaparken. I have no idea how the name of a playground can be this hard.

by RUSTAN LEJON ANKARHULT

meadow”, as they put it. In hindsight, naïvely, I thought that perhaps the butterfly meadow is a butterfly restaurant3 since there seems to be an aura of embodied didactics involved in the design, but sadly the city council member don’t go into any detail. And for some reason, the zones, lifecycle stages, are not in correct order spatially. As I tire of the drab blog post, I feel like I’m ready to visit the physical site, to see what this very minor fuzz is about. The ambiguous naming once again poses a problem as I can’t find the location. I try all variants of the name I can think of, “the Butterfly Park”, “the Butterfly”, “Park Butterfly”, “the Park the Butterfly”, “butterfly”, none gives a hit in any of the map websites that I try. In the end I manage to cross-reference the washed out black and white site plan from the blog with Google Maps after tediously panning around southern Bergshamra. I find that Google have decided to name the playground completely on their own accord – here it’s called Bergshamra Allée Playpark. Just brilliant. I make my way from my apartment, down to the playground. Inconspicuous at first sight I go for the information placard and read: “The Butterfly’s Playground”. The one variant I didn’t think of to try. “This playground is owned and maintained by Solna City.”4 “Longitude: 18.0354 Latitude: 59.3775”. Yes. So now that I am staring down at the playground information board in person, they tell me its exact coordinates. Fantastic. I step away and look around. I realize that the playground is more or less entirely surrounded, in all directions, by neatly trimmed lawns in a radius of at least 80 meters. This is as you surely understand not a very friendly environment for a butterfly. They thrive in bushes and natural fields. It’s honestly not a very friendly environment for anything. Recalling Émile Zola’s scathing review of a 3. A butterfly restaurant is a garden bedding designed specifically with the needs of butterflies in mind. You more or less plant vegetation that butterflies like and watch as you help the local biodiversity and get a beautiful lively display in the garden. 4. For some reason Solna, and a bunch of other MUNICIPALITIES insist of calling themselves cities. I wonder what the idea is with that strategy. I bet that appeals to the me, me, me city council member. 5. Steinberg T, American Green-The obsessive quest for the perfect lawn, Posted: 2006, p.76

A PLAYGROUND REVIEW

Anton Lindstrรถm, Lawns Around the Playground, 2020

public square, “[The lawn] looks like a bit of nature that did something wrong and was put in prison.” Though, people are obviously very fond of this aristocratic bragging invention.5, 6 Sun drenched benches abound. Luckily though, there are some fields that appear to grow wilder, small patches, some promises that real life can coexist here with us. The playground itself is not much better than the area around it. The four zones they speak of seems to be here, and as I now desperately grasp for anything that is vaguely encouraging I see to my delight that the zones, the lifecycle, is rearranged in the correct order! The first zone is a patch of gravel, and in the middle of it, a slightly askew (no idea if that is by design) and tiny, vermillion red hollow half sphere resting 30 cm above ground on top of a metal pole. It looks kind of like a stubby toilet plunger. And it spins. This must be the egg phase. In the second zone there is a spring rider7 larva. Suspended in its very own pinel restraint table consisting of three pale yellow springs, placed along its body like taxidermy needles, its body is locked in a straightened position with three seats, its 6 legs hanging in the air to 6. Open expanses of low vegetation first became popular as a method to view people approaching from inside the castle or fortification. But it wasn’t until the 17th or 18th century that the English lawn became popular as a site for socializing and bragging. “Bragging” since it was (and I’d argue still is) a completely impractical feature that just showed you had the land and manpower to maintain vast swaths of land not used for buildings or farming. While probably not a proper simulacra, I guess that you today mostly show that you have enough spare time to spend it on what the 17th century gardeners at least got “paid” for. 7. While the name might be unfamiliar, you surely know of this classic playground equipment. It consists of a seat, usually in the shape of an animal or a vehicle, mounted on top of a spring. They are pretty small, to the degree that they are quite slim even for a child in the suitable age range. As I was a large child myself I more often than not found myself less swinging and more hanging. You carefully squeeze your equally small and large body in the seat between the two (usually) wooden sides. As soon as you realize that the space was tighter than you thought, and that you are slightly stuck, the spring rider starts to tilt backwards slowly and soon you feel the back of the colourful motorcycle or horse press down into the ground. You wring yourself out of it backwards, even crawling on the dirty playground sand feels more dignified, and just as you are about to get free the spring rider pops loose and levels you.

A PLAYGROUND REVIEW

Anton Lindstrรถm, Spring Rider Larva, 2020

be used as foot support. As a final humiliation of the poor larva, if one looks closer, there is obvious wear and tear on its excessively elongated and swollen snout, it serves as a fourth seat. To make matters slightly worse, this is by design, as the larva’s antenna obviously doubles as handles. Ingenious design. The third zone is a suspended rope tunnel, an abstraction of a pupa. It looks alright, and in this zone the ground is covered with bark, at least it’s a good ground cover for playgrounds and acceptably environmentally friendly in itself. This is without a doubt my favourite zone. The fourth zone, hosts a very regular swing in the middle and another ill-fated spring rider, this one in the shape of what looks like a slightly murderous hopped up butterfly. As for my earlier naïve imagination, The Butterfly Meadow with its signified promises of a lush field, or at least some vegetation, is ironically covered in the in recent years’ ever popular, and controversial for being potentially cancerogenic, playground soft plastic ground cover. The supposed “meadow”, is the deadest zone of them all, both for butterflies and humans. I am cast into the ghastly netherworld that this playground really is. In the first zone, the first circle of cognitive dissonance hell, ignorance limbo, the children are accompanied by the red broken eggs of unborn larva, they can occupy the empty shell and spin around, they step off and teeter around for a bit. In the second circle, you can ride the petrified larva. It can hear the children approaching, but locked in place, it can’t turn its head to see them. One jumps on its back. And then another, and another. A short pause. There are no more seats on its back, but there seems to be one more child, they chatter amongst themselves and then the fourth child enter into the larva’s view, towering over it, and then jumps on the larva’s snout covering its eyes. The abstracted critter is cast into a pitch black void. The children puts the stiff body into motion, slowly at first and then gradually more intense. The blind body is rocked while the children have a moderately good time. The movement grows more sluggish, the children tire, step off. As light returns to the dead eyes, I see what Harlan Ellsion saw when he wrote the final thoughts of Ted – “I have no mouth. And I must scream.” The children climb the abstracted branch and ride down the slide. 71

A PLAYGROUND REVIEW

In the third circle, they clamber their way through the abstracted pupa, this limp carcass that is supposed to represent transformation and the wonderful vicissitudes of nature. You too can change is the promise, you too can become a beautiful butterfly. But there is no movement in this frozen landscape apart from humanity, there is nothing to learn here apart from the fact that nature is dead and nature is your plaything. At last, we move down into the fourth circle, treachery and false promises, the butterfly meadow. On top of the dirty yellow plastic mound, in the middle of the zone, you too can fly as a butterfly. But there are no butterflies in the “meadow” or anywhere else in the park. The swing doesn’t flutter, but sway as a scythe. The metallic whining cutting rhythmically through the abstracted field. Everywhere are empty symbolic shells of this ecologically crucial critter, inhabited by humans. I’d argue there is a fifth circle as well, despite there being no fifth zone. The fields that surround the Butterfly’s Park. Death. Just as the butterfly, in the fifth circle, they’ve completed their transformation. Not the first time they run through the park, probably not the second or third of 10th time. But after 10 years of running through this park and many others like it they will have completed their transformation into full-blown humans, they can spread their wings with all our disregard for that which holds us in place. This is one of the saddest aspects of this whole ordeal. Children have an amazing innate empathy and understanding of nature. Just to reference one article on the subject, “Learning with Idea Station”, which retells conversations with children (6 to 10 years old) on the subject of improving their school yard. We sat on the grass, heads turning in all directions considering the space in rela-tion to our questions, “what would you do to improve the playground? What do we need to make it better?” These questions guided each interview of Idea Stat-ion. One eight-year old, Casey, spoke saying “We could keep the backstop around the home base and grow plants and vines. It could become a habitat for birds and bugs and stuff. And if we did that we could reuse it and not send all that metal to the dump. It would take all those machines and gas to pull it [fence] up and take it away and that’s just more badness for the environment.” Diz followed explain-ing that they had two different children talking about by RUSTAN LEJON ANKARHULT

Anton Lindstrรถm, Spring Rider Larva, 2020

Anton Lindstrรถm, Spring Rider Butterfly, 2020

the trees saying “We need more trees because they fix things we wreck”. Casey commented, “Why do trees have to clean up our mess?” “They don’t have to,” Diz replied “they just do.” Haniya chimed in enthusiastically sharing “we didn’t talk about the trees but we talked about the animals cause it’s their home not just my playground.”8 The question of “what would you do to improve the playground?” was innocently conceived. Upon reflection it is apparent that it did not include “for us” as part of the question. This complex difference was understood by the children. It allowed their thinking an opening and invitation to think beyond themselves to materials and non-human others.9

I doubt many adults would have gotten that nuance.10 One might think, hope, that it ends here. A hyperbolic description of what in reality is just a fairly normal playground, with all the horror that “normal” implies here. But no. Some weeks later it is brought to my attention through the infinite gift that is local Facebook groups, that all the small natural fields in the vicinity that was my only glimmer of hope, is routinely maintained for summer, cut, flattened and deadened. The wild nature I saw was just the result of a brief paus in spring before the municipality have time to deal with it. A sad miscommunication between the architects and the municipality, I thought. A short site visit in spring - “oh look at all these pretty butterflies! That will make a lovely theme for the playground!” And then, in their rampage for smooth surfaces and infinite renovation and neatness, the municipality decides to take that very inspiration away. But no. As I once again, more closely this time, reread the design proposal on the me-me-me blog, amongst the usual meaningless lingo of

8. Hennesy, Learning with Idea Station, p. 202 9. Ibid., p. 207 10. Instead of following a traditional view on childhood and education that emphasises “becoming”, everyone who cares for the future should shift their focus to the “being” child, an understanding of learning that “does not require that the children are ‘educated’ to become like the adults who educate them.” (Van Manen, M., Researching lived experience, 1997, Althouse Press, London, ON) It seems to me that we have very good reasons to fear a future where our children grow up to be like us.

75 A PLAYGROUND REVIEW

“strengthening paths” and “sun drenched benches”, I realize that not only is clearing of the natural fields included in the design strategy by Tengbom for the larger area, but that some parts of natural vegetation were permanently removed and replaced with lawns.11 It is so spectacularly moronic. Mind-bogglingly incompetent and short sighted in a very hands-on way. There is no lesson to be learnt here about communication between architect and municipality. There is no “fabulous future” to suggest because the obvious and brilliant solution was there before it was built, just 3 years ago. No Fabulous Future, just Factual Former. A Formidable Fuckup. If you want a butterfly themed playground for aesthetics, design so there can be actual butterflies there, it would make everybody endlessly happier. And if, and I pray that this isn’t the case, but if, it was designed with some sort of idea of the children learning about butterflies, I feel confident without citing any source that they would have learnt infinitely more from actually observing real live butterflies and larva than from riding that poor tortured monstrosity. We are in the 6th mass extinction event, and reports are talking about a 75% loss in insect biomass over the last 30 years in Europe.12 Looking specifically at Butterflies, in Stockholm, according to the EU habitat protection directive, there are 8 especially critically endangered species of butterflies, all of which rely solely on large open fields with natural vegetation.13, 14, 15, 16, 17,

11. Apart from the obvious reason here to avoid lawns, there are many more. A study from Malmö in 2012 found that there were five times more biodiversity in a field than in a lawn. (Gamberg, M., Omföring från gräsmatta till äng – fördelaktigt i urban och semiurban miljö? 2013, Alnarp: Sveriges lantbruksuniversitet.) It drains the ground of nutrients and must be artificially fertilized and wa-tered to be maintained. As with the rest of our anthropocene ravings one might hope that it at least comes with a monetary gain, but no. To maintain this ecological disaster of flatness sprung from a comusian aristocracy, the Swedish municipalities spend 240mkr per year. (Skogar, M. Hög-vuxet gräs, 2008, Examensarbeten inom Landskapsingenjörsprogrammet) Everybody would be better off if we just stopped maintaining these biodiversity deserts completely. Or better yet, spent those 240mkr on maintaining them in a way that benefits the environment, along with the humans inside that environment. 12. Hallmann CA. et al., More than 75 percent decline over 27 years in total flying insect biomass in protected areas, 2017

by RUSTAN LEJON ANKARHULT

From 1990 to 2011, there was an estimated 50% loss of grassland butterflies in Europe.22 And in the midst of this, the Solna municipality and Tengbom have built a shrine to that life, only to then scorch the real habitat, the real shrine, that once was there. In my mind Sarumans’ Isengard and his ravaging of the earth around materialize,23 though even he had the good taste to not build his industry in the shape of a tree, and to not play in the allegorical corpses of his enemies. You’ve walked through the desert for 3 days now, and then in the distance you see a temple, and with large letters written “A Tribute to Water by Solna municipality and Tengbom Architects”. You have been saved! You use your last energy to rush for this sacred place. You enter its massive gates, relived that it isn’t a mirage. And find the central chamber, in the middle there is a bowl, you can see the reflections of water on the inside of it, you reach it and inside swirls this godly fluid, you drench yourself in the bowl. And recoil. What the fuck. The bowl is filled with disinfectant. You dry out and die. When Donna Haraway brings up Hannah Arendt’s writings on the Nazi war criminal Adolph Eichmann in Staying 18, 19, 20, 21

13. EUs Habitatdirektiv, https://www.dagfjarilar.lu.se/allt-om-fjarilar/ naturvard-och-fjarilar/eus-habitatdirektiv, accessed 2020-05-03 14. Brun gräsfjäril, https://artfakta.se/artbestamning/taxon/100679, accessed 2020-05-03 15. Väddnätfjäril, https://artfakta.se/artbestamning/taxon/100942, accessed 2020-05-03 16. Asknätfjäril, https://artfakta.se/artbestamning/taxon/100943, accessed 2020-05-03 17. Silversmygare, https://artfakta.se/artbestamning/taxon/101070, accessed 2020-05-03 18. Violett guldvinge, https://artfakta.se/artbestamning/taxon/101248, accessed 2020-05-03 19. Svartfläckig blåvinge, https://artfakta.se/artbestamning/taxon/101260, accessed 2020-05-03 20. Apollofjäril, https://artfakta.se/artbestamning/taxon/101509, accessed 2020-05-03 21. Mnemosynefjäril, https://artfakta.se/artbestamning/taxon/101510, accessed 2020-05-03 22. van Swaay C, et al. The European grassland butterfly indicator: 1990±2011, EEA Technical Reports, 2013

77 A PLAYGROUND REVIEW

A temple for the butterflies, supported by lawnmower blades, woven out of the same loom Charles Waterton used to weave his nets.

with the Trouble, I thought she was exaggerating. Arendt witnessed in Eichmann not an incomprehensible monster, but something much more terrifyingâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;she saw commonplace thoughtlessness. That is, here was a human being unable to make present to himself what was absent, what was not himself, what the world in its sheer not-one-selfness is and what claims-to-be inhere in not-oneself. Here was someone who could not be a wayfarer, could not entangle, could not track the lines of living and dying, could not cultivate response-ability, could not make present to itself what it is doing, could not live in consequences or with consequence, could not compost. Function mattered, duty mattered, but the world did not matter for Eichmann.24

I see now what she meant. We are all riding the petrified larva on its face, and on this playground, we are all doomed.

23. Theyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;re even taking their hobbits to it! 24. Haraway, Staying with the Trouble, p. 12

79 A PLAYGROUND REVIEW

by RUSTAN LEJON ANKARHULT

Site analysis of suitable habitat in Bergshamra and adjacent areas for endangered species of butterflies. The rest is some forest, but mainly lawn or asphalt â&#x20AC;&#x201D; all three are butterfly deserts.

81 A PLAYGROUND REVIEW

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83 A PLAYGROUND REVIEW

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Intermission 85

Waste Funds at Work

INTERMISSION

Waste funds at work It’s the best way to feel better about your job Never put down twitter or tinder or grindr Waste funds at work Coffee breaks, toilet breaks, smoke breaks, gossip Waste funds at work It’s the best way to feel better About your inevitable contribution to the imminent ecological collapse Draw a phallic plan - they’ll never notice Draw a glass railing Draw an abstracted trash can Why answer your emails? Why backup a file? Why feel loyalty to your employer or investors? Waste funds at work I made flame print balconies at the last place I worked The rents had to be lowered by 10% Make something so ugly that you lower the value of the other houses in the neighbourhood Waste funds at work It’s your duty as a mouthpiece of the ruling class to sabotage their investments Go to your building site and fire a gun It’s going to be an outstanding day Waste funds at work And goof off during your thesis I wrote this at school They’re paying me to write about how I’ll ruin their discipline Life is good

Inspired by the song Take Stuff from Work (1987) by King Missile

WASTE FUNDS AT WORK

The Thorny Town 87

THE THORNY TOWN

Iv.

A fable about a little town involving wise doves, a crafty inventor, some generally well-meaning townsfolk and a lot of spikes and a lot of bird poop.

THE THORNY TOWN

ome time ago, there was a prosperous town, with lots of buildings, heat, and food. What a waste, some doves thought one winter. So much unused space, warmth and bread. They decided to move into the town - and for a time, all was well. The doves always had a place to rest, never cold and always with a full stomach. But some people in the town became anxious of their new neighbours. The doves are bad for business, one exclaimed. Another, that pigeon poop on the window sill wasn’t very pleasing to the eye, or sanitary, a fair concern. Some time later, an inventor put up a stand on the town square. For just a little pay, I will keep your doves away, in a fair and humane way! And then, the inventor held up a set of small spikes. Most of the townsfolk were not interested, the spikes certainly didn’t look safe, and the doves were not much of a bother. But some, the most fearful, picked up a spike or two. The doves were obviously not very pleased - but for a time, all was well. One could see the spikes here and there throughout the town. Clean window sills and good business. Though, as some houses got rid of the squatters, the rest grew livelier. A few more, bought spikes. More dove-free houses, and the rest teeming with coo roo-c’too-coos and oh-oo-oors. Soon, even the friendliest of the townsfolk felt forced to buy the spikes. Some couldn’t stand a few doves, but none could stand them all. After some time, all had bought spikes for their houses. 89

THE THORNY TOWN

Anna Francis, Bird Spikes in Bristol (cropped), 2017

The doves were not happy, but, pragmatical as they are, just took residence in the trees. For a time, all was well. But then winter became spring became summer. No one could rest in the shade under the trees during the ever warmer summer days without being pooped on. The inventor sold more and soon all trees were covered in spikes. The doves, uneasy at first didnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t know what to do - where were they to sit now? But, pragmatical as they are, they calmed down and quickly found the next best thing - benches, railings and poles. Oh the horror! The doves were closer than ever! The townsfolk didnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t know what to do, but finally decided to put spikes on the benches, railings and poles. A price you have to pay, to keep the birds away, the inventor chanted merrily. At this point, the doves were prepared. The next morning, the townsfolk caught a rare sight, as the streets, bridges and squares, and really any flat surface, was filled to the brim with doves. The inventor laughed, spikes abound for your ground, as long as you have a pound. Later that day, every inch of the town was covered in spikes. A victory! The townsfolk had conquered nature! Nowhere on the streets, the bridges or the squares could any doves be found, they had left for greener pastures - the townsfolk however, were stuck, but nowhere on the thorny streets, bridges or squares were they to be found.

THE THORNY TOWN

Anna Francis, Bird Spikes in Bristol (cropped), 2017

Intermission 93

INTERMISSION

Drip Wall

Selena Savic said that â&#x20AC;&#x153;[if] we design for conflict we will have conflict.â&#x20AC;? (Giaimo, What Pigeon Spikes Can Teach Us About People, 2017) So instead of forcing the doves away, maybe design them a reason to stay, and get a beautiful patina on display.

Anti-Roosting Spikes 95

ANTI-ROOSTING SPIKES

â&#x20AC;&#x153;Bird-B-Gone is the worlds largest manufacturer and distributor of bird control products, providing effective and humane solutions to a bird-free environment.â&#x20AC;? - Bird-B-Gone How safe are anti-roosting spikes actually for birds?

ANTI-ROOSTING SPIKES

aving decided on the topic for node 4, The Thorny Town, I was trying to find information on how birds are damaged by anti-roosting spikes, as I was sure I’d heard somewhere that they are a big part of doves missing toes or entire feet. To my surprise when I used google the only results, really every single one, that appeared said that bird spikes are completely harmless to the birds. Though, after my initial surprise I realized that all the results came from bird control companies. Not really feeling a particularly strong trust towards their claims, I set of to find some actual research. After searching far and wide, trawling libris and google scholar, and trying desperately to find bird control manuals done by the us air force in the eighties (apparently these manuals are still some of the best material on the subject since jet engines and bird don’t go too well together, for both parties), and finally talking with two biologists, it seems as if there is no research on the matter. This is while there are countless of articles researching the effectiveness of different bird control methods, most claiming, without evidence that they are complete safe and humane. I found one fairly reputable scientific article that claimed that birds get impaled by the spikes, especially during strong winds, but sadly they included no reference or own research on the matter. There is also, one line in the US air force bird control manual that suggests that these spikes aren’t so safe and humane as they are claimed to be, which I think is the strongest argument. Under the category “Restrictions on use” for “Sharp projections” aka bird spikes, we find the following line: Because of the sharp spikes, these devices cannot be used in accessible areas where a safety hazard might result.

If they are dangerous to humans, I think it’s fair to assume they are dangerous to birds.

ANTI-ROOSTING SPIKES

J. B. Shaw et al., Bird Proofing Device, 1966

A Biotechnical Section, detailing not only the apparent rationality in construction and design, but also detailing the construction and design of itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s relationships.

ANTI-ROOSTING SPIKES

100

An incomplete Lexicon 101 AN INCOMPLETE LEXICON

vI.

What produces more effect? CO 2 emissions and dangerous labour â&#x20AC;&#x201D; or architectural values? This is a lexicon of what we always create when we do architecture. Before lofty ideals or planning improvements can materialize we create other products. Everyday by-products more consistently appearing. None of these products are invisible, we know of them, some are architectural favourites and some are perpetually ignored in the conversation. Some of these products are lethal pitfalls, while some are crucial values, and putting them together asks the question every architect should ask themselves when they draw, what will this building cost? Is it worth it?

AN INCOMPLETE LEXICON 102

Workplace Injury/Healing Construction workers are consistently injured or even killed working on Architecture. Why is the safety of the ones actually on site not a part of our curriculum? Could one formulate an architecture where building sites provide healing instead? Habitat disruption/support Buildings are to some degree always disruptive of existing habitats. Sometimes for ants, sometimes for pandas. Could buildings instead provide habitat support? Support/Suppression All actions require support. Even the most minute everyday act. Yet, support more often than not takes its form from the impossibly average. The same people who complain over elevator requirements undoubtedly need stairs to get to the second floor. Not to mention the non-existent discussions of auditory overstimulation, competing needs or a myriad of other ignored accessibility questions. Who are supported, and who are suppressed by omission? Is functional architecture communal or individual? Sleep deprivation/restoration Architecture school and work bleed into architects everyday live and sometimes swallow it. How would an architecture that produces healthy sleep schedules look? Worse architecture? Less architecture? More architects? Debt/Savings Architecture creates both debt and savings 103 AN INCOMPLETE LEXICON

as it is now. Could there be an architecture that only produces savings? Or one that exist outside that dualism? CO2 Emission/Capture All stages of architecture produce CO2 emissions. Electricity for computers, printed sketch drawings, used tools and moulds and material during construction. How would one construct an architecture that captures more CO2 than it emits? Noise/Stillness Architecture construction is noisy. Jackhammers, explosions and excavators. Both non-humans and humans are effected negatively. How would a quiet construction site work? Is it slower? Is it non-mechanic? Disease/Health Both disease and health are prominent products of architecture. Selfdisinfecting doorknobs and spatial separation of hygienic functions, but also metal handles which provide brilliant spread for infections and interiors/exteriors that make us sick, disabled, or even kills us. It is a well researched area. But which kind of health is it for? Whose health? Hostile/Friendly design Architecture is full of hostile design towards the unwanted, pigeons, the homeless or skaters. Build for conflict and you get conflict. Animals or people wonâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t disappear because of spikes, they will just be forced out of sight. Where are they pushed? What would be a friendly design that instead gives them places? In the

But you can’t be neutral on a moving train. The lexicon also propose alternatives to these products. In figuring out what it is we actually do, perhaps there are some openings in regards to what we should do. An architecture not only of ‘non-doing’ but actively of ‘undoing’ the damage that has already been done. The question can’t any longer be ‘how to stop destroying the world’, it must become ‘how can we repair it’.

AN INCOMPLETE LEXICON 104

end, it seems like the only sustainable alternative is to give them a home. Friends/Enemies Architecture creates both friends and enemies. And a lot of success often comes from having the right friends. How do you create architecture that makes you the right friends, and, the right enemies? Economic growth/degrowth Buildings contribute to massive amounts of economic growth, and is also an effect of if. As the business is set up, a building can barely be built without providing growth. Can architecture even be separated from growth? If degrowth is the only way to mitigate our environmental urgencies, will we have to let architecture go completely? Homes for non-humans Whether we want it or not, our homes will house individuals other than humans. Birds building nests under the roof or some ants making your wall their wall. The instinct is to drive them away since they often compromise our fragile spaces, but maybe we could build our homes so there is a place for other critters as well? Or maybe instead of evicting them, giving them another home they prefer? Maintenance All that is supposed to last require upkeep, and when lasting becomes more important by the day, upkeep grows as well. These everyday architectural acts are rarely recognized as such, despite probably weighing heavier than our transitory acts of 105 AN INCOMPLETE LEXICON

drawing and erecting. Should we invite maintenance to the discipline of architecture, or should architecture perhaps be subsumed under maintenance? Exclusive/Inclusive conversations Youâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ve probably at least once realized that you have bored your non-architect friend to death talking gibberish with your architect friends. And itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s fairly clear we have a problem with our general image - which is a shame because it is mostly the general that we build for. Get out once in a while and experience something other than architecture to talk about at the next party. Both your friends and your imagination will thank you. Authority/Anonymity While it seems to have fallen out of favour recently, architecture have always produced a lot of authorities, starchitects who get to dictate what is right, wrong, good or bad. What would an architecture with forced anonymity look like? Industrial waste/capture A building isnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t only the energy and material that was put into it, but also all that which was used to raise it. Plastic bags, worn out tools, pieces of wood that was trimmed off. Would it be possible to build a house that encompass almost everything that was needed to build it? A building with no waste or a building containing all its waste? Buried/valued student works The discipline produces immense amounts of student works that will forever rest in a

dusty archive. It’s important to realize that your “practice work” from school doesn’t exist in a vacuum. They contribute to the conversation at the school while you’re there and afterwards as an echo through teachers and other students. That doesn’t mean that every project have to have something pompous to say (like this one tries), but only that every minute thing you produce will have an influence beyond yourself. Neatness/Dirtiness Almost all architecture produces cleanliness, structure, order. Take a run down house or an open field and make it neat and tidy, introducing it into the grid. Striating it, as Deleuze and Guattari would put it. Architecture isn’t neat because it have to be, but because we have decided that. Is neatness always great? Or is there perhaps room for some dirty architecture?

AN INCOMPLETE LEXICON 106

The initials, or drop caps as they are also called, are used as graphical components throughout the text. Constant reminders of what we always create when we draw a line or type a sentence.

107 AN INCOMPLETE LEXICON

A for “authority”

I for “workplace injury”

N for “noise”

I for “industrial waste”

H for “habitat disruption”

S for “sleep deprivation”

Intermission

All growth end The question is for who, when and how

109 INTERMISSION

A bulb.

A dot. Branching thin lines. Denser and wider. Finally an ethereal threaded blob Wormlike pathfinding.

Branching out.

Some start under the surface. Fluidly dividing and the giving a spin. Uniting again, almost breaking the surface. And dividing again. Growing fluffy as well

Stretching, after a long night.

And swells.

Unfolding.

Moving like a wave of dense smoke. Only to a moment later redistribute itself backwards, breathing. Forming tiny buds. To spread.

Flattening. Covering.

Turning upwards.

Rising.

Branching. Covering. Forming a pupa. Covering one last time.

A blob.

When the food is gone, it flattens. Like a bugger with veins.

Sometimes it really looks like a lung. Pulsing.

Close up, it looks thick, like toy slime you can get from vending machines.

Blob out. It flops like its struggling to get higher. Really straining.

Spins. Flatten. One again. Just a bit larger.

110

The Gardener 111 THE GARDENER

vII.

s the north wind and the sun argued as to whom was the stronger of the two. Below a man passed covered in a long cloak. The one who makes him shed his weave, the most powerful of us will be, they said. And so the north wind blew and blew, ripped and jacked, but the man only wrapped his cape tighter cause he feared its lack. And then the sun, came out of the clouds, shone on him with a big smile. And under the ever warming sky, sweating, he tossed his cloak by the side Itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s a moral of persuasion over force, or of kindness over vileness depending on who you ask, but few, if any, go to such length as to acknowledge that both were toying with the man for their own petty squabbles of strength.

THE GARDENER 112

Dancing fairies of pepper spray. Rubber bullets, plastic bags and zip ties creeping in the slow wind over vast swaths of asphalt. And in the midst of this remnant of a violent past, unfamiliar structures of familiarity, barriers erected by dissidents, still standing, still resisting. Minor amateurish amalgamations of shopping carts, crates, tape, umbrellas, bamboo, forming complex and convoluted weaves, made up on the spot with what could be found. Unquantifiable. No rationality could disassemble them, disentangle them, only the brute force of a bulldozer. Carrying out the latent potential of the major, the pure physical power of the state machine. If they truly saw you as a threat, you could just be mowed out of the way.

113 THE GARDENER

It is the dense favelas and the stacked Kowloon as well. Unmappable, unknowable, only mowable. That is not to say the spectacular sections of Kowloon didnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t help in its demise. Hapless architects staring at the tree and failing to see the forest, failing to see the ground. Untangle the threads and watch as the cloth falls apart. Still, no knowledge, no slow violence could wish these out of existence with pure juridical will, no smoothing or striation could pave them, only explicit violence. And for a few short moments we all see what the state does, truly see, not obscured, not hidden, not with imperceptible creeping, but with formidable speed. And we can decide if we stand behind this or not. Sometimes we do, sometimes we donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t, but the key is that we for once have a clear view.

THE GARDENER 114

115 THE GARDENER

CNN, Hong Kong Unrest, 2014 116

Though, what the major can do, is pave the way. That is the wide boulevards of Paris, that is, smooth infrastructures, perfect machines of total interiority. Productive, maintained, controlled. There will not be another barricade, another interwoven stronghold, another revolution. And that is the future of the perfect strip of road in Hong Kong as well. A path that until now have provided so many powerful tools for dissent. A striking scenography, tricking everyone with a camera to spread their message. A sloped plane, showing not a line of people, but all lines of people, showing the world that all of them are pausing. A chokepoint. Take this site, and as long as you hold it, no one will be unaffected by your stand. And context, right next to the oppressive institution you wish to rid this city of. But no more. Totalitarian architecture pitched as infrastructural redundancy, one more road, and the one they had, now underground. No more scenery, no more sloped planes, no more chokepoints, no more context and â&#x20AC;&#x201C; no more air. Sharp projections instead of sharp ammunition.

117 THE GARDENER

Interventions, interventions, constant intervening. Overeager architects, blinded by the faith in their buildings. A birdhouse, a playground, a renovation, a disciplinary fixation, use any justification you want, as long as you keep up fabrication, churning towards our eternal damnation, annihilation, it is your obligation.

THE GARDENER 118

In this world she woke up one day with a letter in the hall. 50, 55, 60%. Steep, steeper, steeper, steeper, it didn’t matter, some would be locked in, others locked out. The slats on her blinds are all wonky and skewed, and her tears are just out of view. It can’t end like this, all tired people in the house said in unknown unison. And so they fought for months. One day, someone asked. Does it have to be this way? Oh so childishly naïve, what a pretty dream, the landlord and the architect a scoff together weaved. And then all could see, that no matter if ill meaning or not, the ones who were supposed to help them, had long ago forgot. Searching in the darkest corners of the world, she then found something quite absurd. Something so very naïve, that the landlord and the architect would have no choice but to dream. She planted the gardener in the corner of her room. Soon, all of it, would be on the move.

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The house wiggled, winced and wormed. What once had been static was now on the move. At first, barely present, wallpaper became wall, and the curtain grew longer. If one got close and traced the surfaces with light fingertips, one could still, for a short moment, find a ridge between what once had been still and what soon would be moving. It was not a matter of coming alive, but of springing to life. By all accounts, over the centuries it had been deadened, hidden from view and from mind. We had always held hands, they had always been there, but we had never danced like this before. Wall became window, and the curtain grew longer.

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Gooey, gluey and glutinous it ate and grew, replacing, remixing, refracting, but also, responding. The man upstairs who always tripped, one day realized he had stopped. And the tight household of 6 slowly felt like the family had gotten smaller. And then they noticed, the house wiggled, winced and wormed. They rubbed their eyes, the house wiggled, winced and wormed. It wasnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t fast, but not really slow, not hard or soft, but viscous, a seeping flexibility. A few left then and there and never came back. The rest met. Is it dangerous? It is not normal! Our apartment is bigger! Mine is smaller! Mine is neither bigger, nor smaller nor unchanged in size! Window became windowall, and the curtain grew longer.

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One week the house looked gloomy, the next gleaming, and the next just rather dull. An apartment could grow or shrink, or as in the case of an overly eager foreign investor, completely disappear. Once you gave something, anything, the house seemed to give something back. The house moving with you. Lamps in the ceiling grew branches and the stark white bulbs were replaced with bioluminescent tubers. Slowly, and not easily, the people in the house got used to their biosynthetical possessions, to this biosynthetical possession. Light shone only when it wished, though it seemed to have some connection to your drift. Forget to water your chair, and soon its cushions lost their flair. Maybe most difficult of it all, the house made no difference between animal, animal and human. So as it made room for a cat, it also carved out a hole in the wall for a rat. If the house decided to, you had to share that room with a slightly larger crew. Windowall became Winwadowall, and the curtain grew longer.

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Then word got out to the landlord and the architect. Baffled, they counted the square meters and measured the walls, only to get different values the next month. Impossible to track and quantify, how do you charge a fair rent when your apartment can multiply? How can you own a building when itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s grown into the plot beside? The landlord and the architect reached out and it slipped from their grasp. The ones living there never needed to quantify or rationally inspect. Mythical to power but familiar to affect. And so, only one choice was left, tear it all down and hope for the pest to once again be at rest. This constantly moving minor amateurish amalgamation of reinforcements, windowsills, furniture, and tenants, forming complex and convoluted weaves, made up on the spot with what already was there. Unquantifiable. No rationality could disassemble it, disentangle it, only the brute force of a bulldozer. Windowall became Window (wall), and the curtain grew longer.

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Now, the tenants refused. The house was in perfect shape, most of the time. No need for renovation, no need for rent. The landlord insisted with the architect at their side, the house needs to be torn down. But since you serve the state, shouldnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t the goal be to give us a living space? How can you say this with a straight face? Back and forth it went for some time, some weeks, some months, until at the highest court, it was ruled that the house was out of bounds. It brought the major language to a stutter. To be recognized you have to be quantified, and if you canâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t, you will, for good and for bad, be imperceptible, impossible to be tried. The house stuck in limbo, effectively became its own owner, and anyone who wanted to live there, had to accept to being its blood donor. Window (wall) became wallpaper, and the curtain grew longer.

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Intermission

Striated Fable

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This drawing that reoccurs throughout the book as decoration and illustration was intended to be a mapping of all the frightening fables, a Striated Fable, using Haraway’s SF-concept with Deleuze and Guattari’s idea of smooth and striated spaces. It is Charles Watertons trapping knowledge loom weaving the space we inhabit today. The butterfly park as a sunken cathedral supported by lawnmower blades, with the queens and princess at a safe distance in their tower made of the morphed playground slide. The Crow and the barricades in Hong Kong keeping space open. Theoretically it fell apart, but found a new use in it’s aesthetics. Almost everything is worth recycling.

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Everything but Architecture

viii.

193 EVERYTHING BUT ARCHITECTURE

A few final reflections on this thesis and where to go from here. Trying to make peace with my own myths.

EVERYTHING BUT ARCHITECTURE 194

o what is an architect to do? How can we live and die well in the Anthropocene? In the beginning of this thesis I found myself clinging to two mantras, “I really love architecture” and “What I’m doing right now is architecture. Who are you to say that this is not our territory?” But as the project proceeded both of these mantras felt less and less certain. Not as in that I started to despise architecture and started seeing my work as something else, but in questioning what these mantras really meant. The deathblow to loving architecture came when I by accident ran into Luce Irigaray’s rewriting of “I love you” to “I love to you” to emphasizing the reciprocity of love.1 My love for architecture will never be reciprocated, architecture will never love me back, it can’t. My ‘love’ for architecture is not love, it is a parasocial worship , it is idolization at a distance, and it is not fair to either me or architecture, we both deserve someone better. I have to let go of architecture and find someone who can love me back. When I have found those who can love me back, maybe then, after some time, me and architecture can see each other from time to time, grab a coffee and catch up, maybe even work on a project together. But I can never love architecture again. It ties back into what Joan Tronto writes about care and architecture. That the discipline generally isn’t uncaring, but that it cares wrongly, caring about the architectural thing.2 Caring about this artificial mereological sum that lacks any real essence, instead of caring for the multiplicity of relationships that hold this thing in place, the connections that together make up what mistakenly have been put inside the building, when it was always outside of it. It’s like when Alberto Giacometti said what he sculpted wasn’t the people, but the air around them. To get the building you can’t sculpt it as a lonely object, you can only carve it out of the mould that

1. Irigaray, I Love to You, p. 109ff. 2. Tronto, Caring Architecture, p. 27ff.

195 EVERYTHING BUT ARCHITECTURE

is the rest of the world. “Subtract the unique from the multiplicity to be constituted; write at n - 1 dimensions.”3 For each building we erect, there is a new hole in the ground, and what sustainability have been attempting since its institutionalization is transmutation, alchemy, posturing as technological optimism. Not that the occult is a method to avoid, but to be explicit when one chooses to use a little magic. In the end, all architecture require a certain suspension of disbelief to draw and imagine.4 The second mantra, my defence that this thesis truly is architecture met the beginning of its end when I read Patricia MacCormacks Ahuman Manifesto. The last sentences in the introduction goes, It is time for humans to stop being human. All of them.5 There are of course, within MacCormack’s world, two ways to interpret this. One is that we all should go extinct, which is her main thesis, and the second is that we let go of being human in the ways we have defined it until now, at least in certain aspects. In a way I think believing the second option is even more naïve than the first, but naivety is all I have for this project. MacCormack’s sentence stuck with me during the rest of the project. With the way the world is organized, we can’t do ethical work, and can’t do ethical research and also we can’t just stop. But with this line, MacCormack shows the path towards a fourth way. Now, I certainly don’t have a simple answer to what that would entail (a simple answer would probably mean that it isn’t really an answer), but that decree, that call, I think is the best response I will get to the question of living and dying well in the anthropocene. It is not anti-western or anti-architecture, not post-western or post-architecture, but compost architecture, following Rusten Hogness and Donna Haraway.6 In the introduction I wrote that I would be a mad gardener to “make a much hotter

3. Deleuze & Guattari, A thousand Plateaus, p. 6 4. Evans, Translations from Drawing to Building, p. 154 5. MacCormack, The Ahuman Manifesto, p. 65 6. Haraway, Staying with the Trouble, p. 32

EVERYTHING BUT ARCHITECTURE 196

compost pile for still possible pasts, presents, and futures.”,7 and to some extent I think I’ve been just that, but the gardener is still the authority, still the colonizer. In contrast with Thales, the gardener sees the ground but is still on top of it, not in it. Instead I would suggest being the not-sanenot-mad worm, suitable as it denotes an etymological past as reptiles and mythical dragons, as antagonists.8 The architect-as-worm/worm-as -architect is perpetually eating and decomposing its own body. An ouroboros of undermining yourself and the discipline and with that constructing the ground you crawl through. It doesn’t seek the destruction of the discipline but rather to infinitely sabotage it, decompose it. It is cyborg architecture, always treacherous to its creator. It is a minor architecture, making gaps in the discipline as to allow something else, exteriorities within the interiority of the discipline. Sites of remixing, refractions and decay that create fertile grounds for new fabulous futures. The plural is key as a single fabulous future is nothing but a killer story. It is about resisting that temptation to step up and be the Gardener, and instead step down, churn away, slowly eating your way through the compost pile without any illusion of one day consuming it all, you can’t eat yourself completely. It’s is becoming-imperceptible within this compost pile, but not rejecting it. We must not, [Deleuze and Guattari] warn, entirely reject our organising boundaries because to do so can result in the complete rejection of subjectivity. Recalling the slogan of schizoanalysis, they tell us not to turn our backs on our boundaries, but to keep them in sight so that we can dismantle them with systematic caution.9 It is a balancing act of refusing recognition within the dominant systems of signification, resisting demarcation of our disciplinary territories, while still keeping some of our borders as to be able to be seen within that interior world, to be just

7. Ibid., p. 57 8. ‘Wurm’ or ‘wyrm’ was the old English term for carnivorous reptiles and mythical dragons. 9. Kylie Message, The Deleuze Dictionary, p. 35

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enough recognizable as to bring the majoritarian language to a stutter time and time again, deterritorialisation so as to constantly leave gaps for someone else, creating a leaning tower, constantly challenging the structural integrity of architecture but never bringing it down, at least not with a crash. This doesn’t mean that the architect magically will be able to surrender their control, that power is inherent. But what I’ve tried to do in this project is to acknowledge that power as well as I can and then strain for affect instead. Not that the architectural drawing or text can ever shed its violence, but maybe in that its affect can outshine it. Our ostensible truth and rationality is at the core of the lines’ violence but the question was never: is it true? Truth took us to this place but doesn’t seem capable to take us away from here. Rather, the question was: “Does it work? What new thoughts does it make it possible to think? What new emotions does it make it possible to feel? What new sensations and perceptions does it open in the body?”10 Falling out of love with power and in love with affect. Because it matters which facts tell other facts, which thoughts think thoughts, which lines line lines.

10. Brian Massumi, Translators Foreword, A Thousand Plateaus, p. xv

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FRIGHTENING / FABLES

GARDENS of

GARDENS of FRIGHTENING FABLES a

Working from GILLES DELEUZE & FELIX MAJOR and SMOOTH/STRIATED and HARAWAY’S STAYING WITH THE TROU KIN and CYBORG WRITING, from PUIG CARE, from MICHEL SERRES’ and LUCE BE and GRACE, from HENRIK GEORG V

DIPLOMA THESIS by ANT ELIZABETH HATZ during SP INSTITUTE OF TECHNO

199

f COMPOST

FABULOUS / FUTURES

f COMPOST; and FABULOUS FUTURES

X GUATTARI’S RHIZOMES and MINOR/ d NOMAD THOUGHT, from DONNA UBLE and STRING FIGURES and MAKING G DE LA BELLACASA’S MATTERS OF IRAGURAY’S MAKING SPACE/LETTING VON WRIGHT’S MYTH OF PROGRESS.

TON LINDSTRÖM tutored by PRING 2020 at THE ROYAL

OLOGY in STOCKHOLM.

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Typefaces Maldonado, Leah, ‘Desert‘ (Desert), Glyphworld, 2019 ---, ‘Animal Soul‘ (Animal Soul), Glyphworld, 2019 ---, ‘Wasteland‘ (Wasteland), Glyphworld, 2019 Reyes, Miguel, ‘Canela’ (Canela), 2016 Le Bihan, Lucas, ‘Self Modern’ (Self Modern), 2020 Sharp, Lucas, et al., ‘Ogg’ (Ogg), 2019 Heune, Heinrich Heinz, ‘Edda MF’ (Edda MF), 1900 Wrobel, Nikolas, ‘Grand Slang’ (Grand Slang), 2019 Haas, Trennert, ‘Romana’ (Romana), early 20th century Schneider, Jérémy, ‘Voyage’ (Voyage), 2019

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Colors Deep Forest - r26, g36, b27

Forest - r102, g152, b115

Pale Lavender - r158, g145, b163

Lapis - r57, g69, b145

Blood - r155, g74, b74

Rose - r211, g63, b53

Hazmat - r240, g216, b32

Bone - r240, g235, b214

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Printed in 6 copies in Stockholm, August, 2020

It matters what matters we use to think other matters with; it matters what stories we tell to tell other stories with; it matters what knots knot knots, what thoughts think thoughts, what descriptions describe descriptions, what ties tie ties. It matters what stories make worlds, what worlds make stories. â&#x20AC;&#x201D;Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble It matters which architectures architect architecture. It matters which lines line lines. But what is an architect to do when the mere act of drawing a single line, not to mention a whole group of them, seems so rigidly fused with mechanics of pollution, domination, colonization and extinction?