What if poets, philosophers and storytellers wrote our building and planning regulations? Loren Adams

What if poets, philosophers, and storytellers wrote our building and planning regulations?

Words by Loren Adams

What do you do when your world starts to fall apart? The anthropologist Anna Tsing goes for a walk – and if she’s really lucky, she finds mushrooms. For Anna, mushrooms in unexpected places are a reminder that hope can sprout from even the most ruinous landscapes: they are little fungal “pleasures amidst the terrors of indeterminacy”1 – at once ambivalent about the circumstances of their existence and determined to exist anyway. Like Anna, I also go for a walk when my world is falling apart. But since I trained as an architect and not an anthropologist, I do not look for mushrooms: I look for regulatory anomalies in the built environment. My mushrooms are the architectural remnants that make visible the authority of invisible overlays. They are the out-of-place insertions, the uncomfortable adjacencies between objects and spaces and programs that do not ordinarily coexist. My mushrooms are the planning scheme violations – inadvertent, opportunistic, or vindictive – and their counterparts: the glorious acts of so-called malicious compliance, where an architecture hamstrung by bureaucracy becomes dissident through meticulous obedience. Volumes contort around restrictive covenants; an unpermitted rooftop terrace is cloaked by a parapet-turned-balustrade; clusters of gleaming towers pull back from ramshackle holdout dwellings in uneasy compliance with overshadowing regulations. These anomalies are a reminder that hope can sprout from even the most monotonous cityscapes: they are little architectural “pleasures amidst the terrors of indeterminacy,” at once brilliant and strange. They are determined to exist – to flourish – in the cracks that form between the competing demands of finance, regulatory compliance, and whatever is left of design intent. Sometimes, Anna accompanies me on these walks. In my Speechify textto-speech app, a robotic Gwyneth Paltrow reads me The Mushroom at the End of the World while I wander the streets of Melbourne’s inner-north and beyond, foraging for traces of regulatory anomaly. The cyberneticist Donna Haraway is with us too, making trouble and kin in the voice of a cartoon wizard (“Narrator, British Male”).2 To be clear, though: I have never met Anna Tsing or Donna Haraway. I know them only through their writing, but – perhaps because I am enamoured by their prose – I consider us conceptual friends. And, because we spend so much time together, walking, they have prompted in me a question: what might the world be like if Anna Tsing and Donna Haraway co-authored our building and planning regulations? What if regulations were written by other non-technical writers, too: poets, philosophers, storytellers, choreographers, artists – all my closest conceptual friends? It was from these questions that my Regulatory Nonsense project first emerged.

Regulatory Nonsense

In Regulatory Nonsense, I rewrite building and planning codes, standards, legislation, and regulations using a suite of bespoke natural language bots that I have trained on carefully curated datasets of poetry, fiction, and descriptive prose.3 I can, for example, create an artificial amalgam of Anna Tsing, Donna Haraway, and other ecofeminist conceptual friends – and then use this to rewrite Victorian building waste and landfill regulations, WasteNotWantBot. I can also create a synthetic cacophony of classic Los Angeles-based writing – throwing together works by Joan Didion, Eve Babitz, Mike Davis, and Helen Hunt Jackson, with screenplay transcripts like Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, Chinatown, and the Thom Anderson documentary, Los Angeles Plays Itself – and then use this to rewrite the Los Angeles Zoning Code (LaLaBot). I can even use the playful, anti-ergonomic writings of Madeline Gins and Arakawa to perform a kind of algorithmic séance that resurrects two dead spatial practitioners, so that I can ask them about stairs (BloopBot). Through an alchemic mix of fine-tuning text, prompt strings, and a handful of other numeric levers, my bots gift us regulatory clauses that are poetic, ambiguous, nonsensical, and always gloriously self-assured.4 Sometimes, the bots mandate that architects must drive a “great acceleration machine” that gets “fully airborne.” Once, they named “some early modernist architects such as Carlotta Baba, Antonio Banderas, Jean Paul Sartre and others.” To WasteNotWantBot, the city is “a milky sponge, a milky sponge, a milky sponge,” while LaLaBot insists that “movement through the cityscape must be a process of unfolding events.” There are also stairways with “a trajectory like a boat, or something,” doors “leading to other worlds,” and an inclusive zoning system “where at least two people can stand in front of the public at a given time and know precisely where they're standing and what they're doing.” In this speculative environment-world where regulatory decision guidelines are (re)invented by a clumsy, poetic artificial intelligence, we can no longer rely on counts and measurements to inscribe clean thresholds between compliance and noncompliance. Instead, I imagine an architect acting out a compliance dance for a stair that is “a sort of lowering-down-intonothingness,” her black turtleneck muddied after “travel(ling) on webbed feet across open terrain at night.” And I wonder: what did she learn – about the world, about architecture, about herself – during this mandated muddy jaunt? I also wonder: what if our building materials were “merely extensions of thought”? What if formbased zoning produced “urban form (that) encourages users to gaze skyward, then move higher, higher up, higher still, until they reach a point where they can see the entire city”? What if there were no maximum planning envelopes anymore, only a requirement to prove that “the city ends as if the luminous scaffold had once taken form, in a subtle envelope”? Lately, these are the (impossible) questions I bring with me on my walks and to my classes, so that my students and I can forage for traces of regulatory anomaly and opportunity, with all our conceptual friends. Together, we do our best to operate – and to flourish – in the cracks that form between the competing demands of finance, regulatory compliance, and whatever is left of design intent. After all, the bots are here to remind us that: “The people who live in the ruins are the ones who have to face the consequences of what we have done.”

Loren Adams RAIA Grad. is a disciplinary promiscuous spatial practitioner. Trained in architecture and public policy, she is currently a Doctoral Fellow with the University of Melbourne Centre for Cities and teaches at RMIT.

Acknowledgements Noon van der Silk contributed vital technical assistance (and enthusiasm) during the early stages of Regulatory Nonsense. WasteNotWantBot was commissioned by Dreamer Architects for “A New Normal” exhibition at Melbourne Design Week in 2021. See: Loren Adams, Regulatory Nonsense: WasteNotWantBot, video artwork, 1920x1080px, 2021, https://vimeo.com/528606166. LaLaBot was commissioned by Anthony Carfello, Wendy Gilmartin and Nina Briggs for the Los Angeles Forum for Architecture & Urban Design “Every. Thing. Changes.” summer exhibition in 2020. See: Loren Adams, Regulatory Nonsense: LaLaBot, video artwork, 1920x1080px, 2020, https://everythingchanges2020.org/Loren-Adams.

Notes

1 Tsing, Anna., 2015. The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins Cary, NC: Princeton University Press.

2 Haraway, Donna J., 2016. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene Cary, NC: Duke University Press: https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/unimelb/ detail.action?docID=4649739.

3 For an expanded technical explanation of this work, see: Loren Adams, “Poetry, Ambiguity and Nonsense in Regulations: A Triptych of Natural Language Bots for the Built Environment,” in The Routledge Handbook of Architecture, Urban Space, and Politics, ed. Nikolina Bobic and Farzaneh Haghighi, vol. 2: Ecology, Social Participation, and Marginalities, Routledge, Forthcoming.

4 For more information about this trptych of bots see: https://www.lorenadams.me