Pliable plan(e)s: thesis program by Ariana Zilliacus

bøjelige planer* *pliable planes, but also, pliable plans

title page: translation of Annie Albers’ essay Pliable Planes into Bøgelige Planer borrowed from Bodil Krogh Andersen

Ariana Zilliacus 150378 thesis supervisor/co-sense-maker: Niels Grønbæk Political Architecture: Critical Sustainability, 2020-22 The Royal Danish Academy, Copenhagen

Callum Symmons1 and Amalie Smith2. Its physical manifestation is made up of three parts, negotiating with each other. Its digital 1

considering neutrality, or something banal

like that (2020) 2

Thread Ripper (2020)

version, seen here, is more traditionally formatted as a booklet, albeit with untraditional page numbering. In the tuning practice, the right-hand column introduces situations in Lynetteholm’s composition as places of investigation and

the left-hand column includes references

explores potential architectural intentions;

and friends supporting my thinking, along with my comments; the third part takes shape in the second half of the booklet, the listening archive, where I elaborate on the thematic framework influencing my thoughts, including aethestic curiosities and political motivations driving my work.

I have treated this mapping as an

experiment (expedition) of discovery, allowing the unexpected and curious connections and dissidences encountered along the way to remain. (...) This book should be read as an experiment with Deleuze and Guattari’s spatial philosophy and as an experiment in writing the rhizomic landscape that is the Everglades. Ogden (2011, p.31, 35)

Together, the three parts allow for a kind of mapping3, as Laura Ogden would call it; both of the research objects, but essentially also for my own process, as a tool for thinking. The two booklets support each other, following an interwoven thinking pattern and giving rise to a project strung in-between.

0.0_reading guide

This program is a hybrid borrowed from

Niel Brenner (Implosions/

explosions)

urban: the wide- ranging operations and impacts of urbanization processes beyond the large centers of agglomeration, including in zones of resource extraction, which often traverse peripheral, remote and apparently “rural” or “natural” locations1

Allemannsrätten är en rätt för alla

människor att färdas över privat mark

nature / landscape: in our traditional definition,

i naturen, att tillfälligt uppbehålla

anything not made by humans. I intend to

sig där och till eksempel plocka bär

challenge this paradigm

och svamp. Med rätten följer krav på hensyn och varsamhet mot natur och

“terra nullius”: a Latin expression meaning

djurliv, mot markägare och mot andra

“nobody’s land”; a principle sometimes used in

människor.

international law to justify claims that

[own translation] ↓

territory may be acquired by a (state’s)

Allemannsrätten is a right for all

occupation of it

humans to move through private land in nature, to spontaneously

allborgarrätten: a translation of “allemannsrätten”2

remain there and for example

(loosely: the right of public access to nature) into

pick berries and mushrooms. With

an urban environment

the right follows an obligation of consideration and care-ful-ness

intimacy: a close friendship3 including

towards nature and animal life,

vulnerability, interdependence, situational

towards land-owners and towards

knowledge

other humans.

language: the ways in which we interpret and share 3

continuing caring relationships

our narratives of existence

without a desired end-goal paraphrasing Grønbæk (2021)

operational concepts: what material and spatial compositions can do, rather than how they look

0.1_definitions

recognition that we find ourselves in-between languages, not knowing how to speak. It is a Political Architecture project, drawing from co-evolutionary project-work, that threads design and writing as a methodology for co-menting with myself and others. This thesis is hence unfolding in-between two hands, one exploring the potential in theoretical, philosophical questions on architectural language, (how we consolidate and relate our thoughts) drawing from writings of Bonislaw Szersynski, Laura Ogden and Jane Rendell, amongst others; the other digging into the translation of such theory into architectural intentions, drawing from examples of Jill Stoner, Assemble Studio and Hiroshi Sambuichi, amongst others. These two hands weave across a rather complex loom that cannot be seen in its entirety, but is undeniably pulling at all the threads. This loom is Copenhagen and the starting point at which I assemble these threads is Lynetteholm. Lynetteholm is a symptom of patterns of growth, isolation from and control over nature, but also a materialisation of our fear of its power; it’s at once a barrier against climate change, a poetically rendered coastal-park-landscape, a money-maker for Copenhagen Municipality, and a manifestation of existential denial. It is projected into a world that we continue to move in hopes of reaching stable, controllable states; yet at the same time, we’ve begun a process of accepting that despite our hard work, everything around us resists, refuses control and solidification. Matter vibrates and moves, even if our numbers and letters claim otherwise. Lines we draw to categorise us and them; human, plant and animal; sense and non-sense; are unwravelling in our own hands.

0.2_poilitical driver: lynetteholm

Pliable plan(e)s is a (re)searching project, stemming from a

#1_Storm-surge protection for

Copenhagen

a series of architectures searching for what Bronislaw Szersynski calls the grammar of

→ consequences of climate change

action in the critical zone; what I interpret as a

→ dockport

situational, time-based, embodied architectural

#2_Space for urban development

praxis.

→ migration to Copenhagen → minimum 2.5-3 million square meters (in levels)

The two-part research is thought through under the working-titles of:

→ ca.35,000 new residents → ca.35,000 new jobs

a) tuning minor architectures: investigating

#3_Using excess earth from metro

the potential of inhabiting the ‘permanent’

construction

(relative to a human life-span) temporary-ness of

#4_Space for “Eastern highway”

Lynetteholm’s building process ~or what might

#5_Space for new metro-line

be called, energeia~, in relation to points #1, #2, #31; my approach to this is through a framework of operational strategies related to part b;

Listening Practice: a study of

disappearing buildings in Finland

b) a listening archive2, a kind of mapping

from the architecture of the 1960s and

of Copenhagen’s thresholds, between

1970s

indeterminacy and definition, in continuous conversation with Lynetteholm. This thesis also includes references to and builds on previous PA:CS thesis studies3, in hopes of continuing their research themes.

Hannah Wood: politicising the act of

building Beata Hemer: landscapic thresholds Ila Coley: radical reuse

0.3_project

This project is not a projection, but rather 1

a tuning practice for minor architectures

Ariana Zilliacus 150378 thesis supervisor/co-sense-maker: Niels Grønbæk Political Architecture: Critical Sustainability 2020-22 The Royal Danish Academy, Copenhagen

What if…precarity is the condition of our time - or, to put it another way, what if our time is ripe for sensing precarity? What if precarity, indeterminacy, and what we imagine as trivial are the center of the systematicity we seek? Precarity is the condition of being vulnerable to others. Unpredictable encounters transforms us; we are not in control, even of ourselves. (…) A precarious world is a world without teleology. Indeterminacy, the unplanned nature of time, is frightening, but thinking through precarity makes it evident that indeterminacy also makes life possible.

(Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, Mushroom at the end of the world: life beyond capitalist ruins)

left: projecting a map of Copenhagen using an overhead projector (group collaboration, Overhead Archive) right: one of the first visualisation of Lynetteholm presented to the public

that metaphorically emphasises vision again, beause we need to reclaim that sense to find our way through all the visualising tricks and pwoers of modern sciences and technologies that have transformed the objectivity debates. We need to learn in our bodies, endowed with primate colour and stereoscopic vision, how to attach the objective to our theoretical and political scanners in order to name where we are and are not, in dimensions of mental and physical space we hardly know how to name. So, not so perversely, objectivity turns out to be about particular and specific embodiment and definitely not about the false vision promising transcendence of all limits and responsibility...Understanding how these

Lynetteholm is, in part, a symptom of our political and architectural making, thinking and perceiving tools of projection. Reflecting

0.0_preface

I want a feminist writing of the body

on this with Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing’s writing on indeterminacy, included as an epigraph, I cannot justify proposing a thesis as an alternative project resulting from the same tools and ways of thinking architecture. In the core of this thesis therefore lies a search for alternative, or as Donna Haraway puts it, reclaimed methods of and relationships to projection1, that are fundamentally situated and idio-tic2 rather than asbtracted overviews. A reading guide to this program, as well as an introduction to my political drivers and thoughts on project can be read by unfolding the sleeve around this booklet.*

visual systems work, technically, socially, and physically, ought to be a way of embodying feminist objectivity. (Donna Haraway, Situated knowledges:

*the digital program will simply have a ‘prologue’ with this information

the science question in feminism and the privilege of partial perspective)

idio-

word-forming element meaning “one’s own, personal, distinct,” from Greek idios “own, personal, private, one’s own”.

listening

1.0_lynetteholm analysis

1.5_political drivers

nature / landscape paradigm

ethical meetings

42 9

earthly compositions_a storm surge barrier

economic compositions_land-value capture

2.0_tuning architectures

contents

political and architectural projection tools

2.5_listening to

intentions: situating knowledge

thresholds and traces

intimacy and interdepence

non-scalability and minority

shared perceptions: allborgarrätten

changing and unplanned: potential of temporality

program: kin(o)_listening architectures

3.0_methodology and representation architectural tools

ongoing production

praxis: listening tools

site writing

project(ion), publicly presented at a press 1Problems solved by Lynetteholm: #1_Storm-surge protection for Copenhagen → consequences of climate change → dockport #2_Space for urban development → migration to Copenhagen → minimum 2.5-3 million square meters (in levels) → ca.35,000 new residents → ca.35,000 new jobs #3_Using excess earth from metro and other construction

Additional proposals: #4_Space for “Eastern highway” #5_Space for new metro-line

By&Havn is an urban development

company owned by Copenhagen Municipality (95%) and the Danish State (5%)

release in Copenhagen on 05/08/2018. Politicians at the time shared aerial visualisations of an artificial peninsula using the metaphor of a “kinder-egg”1, solving three problems for the city. It is projected to be completed in 2070, providing housing for 35,000 people and 35,000 new jobs. Lynetteholm is also one part in a greater economic puzzle, intended to alleviate By&Havn’s2 12billion kroner debt amounted through past urban development projects, using a method of land-value capture: selling land for urban development and using the

1.0_lynetteholm analysis: political and architectural projection tools

Lynetteholm is an urban expansion

profit to invest in infrastructure projects aiming to further increase the value of these new neighbourhoods. Analysing Lynetteholm through this perspective, the economic motivations are more clearly projected than the humanistic (and non- human-istic) values that I argue should be the primary drivers behind Copenhagen’s city development. In the following sub-chapters, I analyse both what I call the ‘earthly’ and ‘economic’ compositions of Lynetteholm, which could also be seen through the lenses of situated and abstract narratives of Copenhagen’s urban development.

top: fictional print of sand used for reclaimed land in Singapore, Robert Zhao Renhui middle: temporary sculpture at Dante’s Plads, Copenhagen, where a parking cellar is to be built, Mathias Skov bottom: the construction site for parking garages at Postgrunden

Copenhagen → consequences of climate change → dockport #3_Using excess earth from metro construction

1“Soil reception: there are no known alternatives in Copenhagen’s surroundings that can recieve excess soil in larger amounts. Excess soil from construction sites must be transported over greater distances.” (By&Havn) 2

Based on the construction of parking

under Posthusgrunden, ca.267 tonnes of earth are generated per parking-space: in total ”there was ca.407,000 tonnes of earth driven away from the gounds.” 3

Here is a picture that shows the

placement of 1,520 parking spaces that are required by Copenhagen Municipality. They are placed in a cellar on Postgrunden - for car commuters, amongst others - a stone-throw away away from the Central Trainstation. This conflicts with all wishes to invest in the environment, the climate, and sustainable transportation. (translated from a document by the Council of Sustainable Traffic)

What is the political ecology of 80million tonnes of soil? One of the two founding arguments for the storm-surge barrier is making use of excess earth deposited on Nordhavn from recent metro-construction projects1, in such a way that allows the soil to stay within Copenhagen city-proper, minimising monetary costs and CO2 emissions from greater transportation distances. Somewhere in the process, the need for a storm-surge barrier grew into an idea for

1.1_earthly compositions_a storm surge barrier

#1_Storm-surge protection for

a peninsula, expanding the amount of required landmass, and therefore, soil. By&Havn expects to recieve 56million tonnes from Copenhagen and Frederiksberg, and 34million tonnes from surrounding municipalities, over the duration of the project. 6million tonnes are planned into the project itself, displaced for a harbour(highway)-tunnel and metro-line. Most Copenhagen-soil is expected to come from constructing parking cellars. According to calculations by the Council of Sustainable Traffic, around 196 underground parking garages2, for up to 297,000 cars, are required to supply the projected amount of soil for Lynetteholm. They argue that this conflicts with aims for a carbon-neutral city by 20253, as well as that parking garages increase the cost of housing by over 10%, in conflict with the need for housing affordability.

top: Copenhagen’s mayor, Minister of Teknik og Miljø (Technology and Environment), and director of By&Havn breaking ground for Lynetteholm, 17.02.2022 bottom: Lynetteholm’s machinery in the water, photographed on a site visit on the 27.02.2022

→ migration to Copenhagen → minimum 2.5-3 million square meters (in levels) → ca.35,000 new residents → ca.35,000 new jobs #4_Space for “Eastern highway”

#5_Space for new metro-line

Lynetteholm was initially expected to be selffunded, presented as “costing approximately zero kroners,” by Ole Birk Olesen, the Housing-minister at the time: “We receive money to receive the soil, which finances the metal plates around the island. We therefore get a free island that we can sell plots off of afterwards. Plot-sales will particularly finance the harbour-tunnel.” This is a short description of By&Havn’s land-value capture strategy, also used in Copenhagen’s Ørestad

1.2_economic compositions_land-value capture

#2_Space for urban development

neighbourhood to finance the Copenhagen metro-line. By&Havn has a 12billion kroner debt, compared to a 13.9billion kroner debt in 20093, which plot-sales on Lynetteholm are also intended to alleviate. By&Havn is, by their own definition, an urban development company, with clear economic ambitions. Their published business strategy for 2020-20234 includes increasing their value by 3billion kroners and alleviating their debt through: land development; parking; rental; port -operations and -land (listed in that order). The budgeted cost for Lynetteholm is at 2.5billion kroner, which By&Havn expects to exceed, as the cost of “Phase 1”of the project is already 66% higher than planned, at the time of writing this program.

We have a responsibility to direct the

role of the architect. [Lynetteholm and Stejlepladsen] are all symptoms of practicing on economic rather than human premises... the winning proposal mimics the visual aesthetic of Stejlepladesen, but “there is no way it operates like [Stejlepladsen].” (paraphrasing and quoting Gitte Juul, during a lecture at PA:CS)

Rules of play: #1_design from and maintaining existing buildings, materials, infrastructures, relationships

#2_design on the background of situationed, operational requirements

#3_design with time as a collaborator, celebrating the project as a process

#4_maintain potential for agonistic space This means maintaining the potential for the negation or contradiction of whatever primary purpose the space was designed for.

#5_design in collaboration with others

#6_make your work and research relatable to the public (people not directly involved)

I’m inspired by the writings of Donna Haraway, Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing and Heidi Svenningsen Kajita. I expand on this in the listening archive of this program, but as an umbrella-term, all three researchers consider the potentials of situated knowledge (what Haraway calls feminist objectivity), as a framework for action that is in immediate dialogue with the reality it is acting within - rather than a projection, abstraction, or, as Lynetteholm has also been called, a fatamorgana of reality. Situating architectural investigations in a projected mirage would be a somewhat paradoxical attempt at translating Haraway’s, Tsing’s and Kajita’s research, which rather point towards the existing situations

2.0_architectural intentions: situating knowledge

Viewing Lynetteholm as a consequence of projection -tools and -ideals,

that do and will faciltate the ‘becoming’ of Lynetteholm, as well as consequences of its processes. These active, ‘temporary’ processes are and will be the vibrating, morphing realities of Copenhagen-city over the next 50 years ~ almost half a human lifetime. In this context, I’m interested in the more complex potentials of listening to and tuning our existing, situated, material environments, with a focus on recognising and relating to situations that are intimately, existentially affecting our realities, while bring out of the human scope of understanding - what Timothy Morton calls ‘hyperobjects’. Another driving motivation for this thesis is to test the potential of an architecture practice that isn’t governed by neoliberal logics (money, competition, scalability), and instead testing the potential of a listening architect; the potential of a situated architect; the potential of an architect who is also a ‘citizen sense-maker’. Situations of interest include the transitory peripheral city zones: Lynetten / Refshaleøen and Nordhavn, and the construction processes of Lynetteholm happening between them. 15

another Copenhagen-reality, from the early 1900s Kbhbilleder

film-still from OhFences Brandenburg, field-work documentation done in collaboration with Leoni Fischer around brown-coal industries in Brandenburg, Saxen and Saxen-Anhalt, October 2021

1_a strip of wood, stone forming the bottom of a doorway. Crossed in entering a house or room → a point of entry or beginning 2_the magnitude or intensity that must be exceeded for a certain reaction, phenomenon, result, or condition to occur or be manifested → the level at which one starts to feel, react to X → a level, rate, amount where X comes into effect

trace (verb) [with object] 1_find or discover by investigation → find, describe the origin or development of X → follow or mark the course or position of X with one’s eye, mind, or finger → take (a particular path or route) 2_copy (a drawing, map, or design) by drawing over its lines on a superimposed piece of transparent paper → draw (a pattern), with one’s finger or toe (noun) 1_a mark, object, or other indication of the existence or passing of X → instrument displaying line, pattern to show the existence, nature of X being recorded, measured → a physical change in the brain presumed to be caused by a process of learning or memory 2_a very small quantity, especially one too small to be accurately measured → a barely discernible indication of something

Thresholds are meetings in-between things. They are the spatialisation of boundaries, simultaneously ending and beginning, but also spaces in their own right.

2.1_thresholds and traces

threshold (noun)

Traces are remnants of events. Both the creation of the trace as the event turning event-into-trace, as well as the event that is traced. Traces are layers. The transitory city spaces between Lynetten/Refshaleøen and Nordhavn, and the city “centre” are extended thresholds of both entry and exit. Both neighbourhoods have one primary transportation artery, so to speak. Once there, the transition between land and water marks another threshold of entry and exit. The program(s) of this thesis, programs of perception, most recognisable in a cinema, are also thresholds and traces of multiple realities. All thresholds are opportunities for embodied learning. Through spatial analyses of traces and thresholds, I intend to test methods for modeling and drawing with forms of tracing, aiming to express the influences of time and friction / dissensus.

photograph of a public toiled on Vinbenshus Runddel, captioned “one of the Copenhagen culturehouses (Vibenshus Runddel)”, (date unknown)

avgör hur nära ett hus du kan uppehålla dig. Det finns inga regler om minsta avstånd. Inte heller finns någon regel för hur länge du får ligga för ankar på samma plats. Man brukar tillämpa samma princip som för tältning - något enstaka dygn. Det som avgör är risken för att störa markägare eller boende. (Allemannsrätten)

Jan Rydén explores the translation of the (now legal) concept of allemannsrätten into an urban context, renaming it allborgarrätten. Allemannsrätten is the right to move through and temporarily reside in privately owned nature, operating in Sweden, Finland and Norway. Rydén comments on the law being characterised by interpretations of what you are allowed to do by navigating a handful of rules outlining what you are not allowed to do (disturb residents, harm others) rather than being a set of rules that must be followed. This interpretation allows for more freedom and variety, which he speculates on

2.2_shared perceptions: allborgarrätten

Det är risken att störa som

in a city environment: One example brought up by Rydén is geveltuin, a practice in Amsterdam that allows residents to remove the paving stones outside their house and replace them with soil for planting. The city stands for practicalities and the practice is understood to help with stormwater management, as well as varying the streetscape. In addition, he proposes free access to toilets and water from all commercial cafes, bars, restaurants, etc., subsidised by the state, and freedom to move in and reside in all spaces, on the condition that one doesn’t disturb landowners or residents. How would Rydén’s propositions stimulate engagement with processes in Lynetten (and Nordhavn)? Actions that involve cycles, phases, interdependencies between humans, machines, minerals and weather, that could be alikened to what we would call “natural” ecologies. Would allborgarrätten spawn nomadic architectures? Or seasonal use? How would the earth used for Lynetteholm be perceived as a common resource that everyone had rights to?

top: bird watchers on Nordhavnstippen where Lynetteholm’s “past” is laying in piles bottom: March 28th to April 15th 1814 summed up through daily illustrations or dots to mark a lack of events. Anonymous author/illustrator, included in the book ‘The Traveller’s Guide to Madeira and the West Indies’, 1815, Haddington, G. Miller and sons.

argues Sola-Morales, has led to the modern project, which he describes as an illusion...The illusion, he writes, is a process with an end in sight, but since there’s no longer a universal system to direct oneself towards, it is, according to Nietsche, about ‘the need for a grounding without a ground’. Aesthetics that play a critical role must as a consequence build on an empty space with an embedded obligation to define goal and ‘grounding’”. (Kajita Svenningsen, Fragile Potentialer i De Store Planer)

Lynetteholm is often talked about in relation to its projected “completion” date: 2070. When drawings of Lynetteholm are presented, they’re almost always diagrammatic representations of the entire peninsula, seen from above, strangely sanitised from the, what I presume will be, rather messy, muddy, noisy, but also beautifully alien, peripheral, morphing landscapes that will be our reality between now and 2070… and perhaps even beyond that. My interest is therefore in the potential of the site as it is and how it transforms, rather than in an idea of a “final”, projected result that can be numerically

2.3_changing and unplanned: potentials of temporality

Nihilism’s break with universal systems,

calculated as costing “zero kroners”. Drawing inspiration from the calendar, a tool we use to navigate time, to record the past and to plan the future, to relate to cultural, historical, human events, as well as the moon, the seasons, the lifecycles of plants in our gardens, this project situates itself in Lynetten through re-occuring cycles, fleeting events, transitions and translations. This provides me with an opportunity to practice changing architectures that don’t resist indeterminacy, but embed traces in physical spaces and common memories.

left: studio gross exhibition opening in Tokyo, 2020

potentials of collective (material) memory, the political agency of tracing other “possible possibles”, situated knowledge, and physical public engagement, I’ve been searching for a program

2.4_program: kin(o)_listening architectures

With my interests in limitations of language and perception,

that allows for the potential of listening, tuning and projecting, and resonates with ongoing programs and functions around Lynetten / Refshaleøen ~ an urban zone under transition from industry to a more “hipster” cultural neighbourhood. A cinema, or what I’m calling a kino, is in family with many of these thoughts, being a house of story-telling, of sight, of solitude as well as collectivity, of alternative realities, of thresholds - while also being a familiar typology in the city.

What Jane Rendell writes about the work of aaa: “‘what it takes to make a thing to make a relationship’,” may be more complex to outline and “fulfill”, but I believe can stimulate architectures that engage more situationally with place and time. My interest in listening architectures takes significant inspiration and guidance from Heidi Kajita Svenningsen’s PhD Fragile Potentials in the Big Plans, from where I share her curiosity for the complex potentials of materiality in motivating (individuals’) engagement with the common in a place and over time. In this reality, the role of the architect is at the very least not one of a project manager, or a master planner (these two terms should simply be phased out - they leave us with confused ideas of our roles and abilities). I see the role of the architect as being closer to a citizen who is tuned into observing and recognising spaces and their ecological and political implications, and, through proposals, enables the growth of intimate, unpredictable appropriation.

a pliable site model lynetten in soil 1:200 ...five different spatial configurations... [to investigate]... [#1] the transitional space of the setting, [#2] the frontier between conscious, preconscious and unconscious, [#3] the rearrangement of words and things, [#4] the folded memory of déjà vu, and [#5] the recentering and decentering devices of the Ptolemic and Copernican revolutions. The intention is not to ‘apply’ spatial concepts to psychoanalyze certain [situations], but to adapt certain

material meetings 1:1, 1:5 drawing studying thresholds:

3.3_architectural tools

modeling

spatial and programmatic meetings 1:20, 1:100 material meetings 1:1, 1:5 drawing time: axon-section 1:20, 1:100 maps (scale-less) studying traces: frottage material influences in weather

psychoanalytic ways of working – free association, conjectural interpretation and construction – to [architecture] criticism. (Jane Rendell, Site-Writing [my edits])

sewing Refshaleøen into a fabric map of Copenhagen

different temporality...things like parenting and friendship, which are not a merely a means to an end but themselves confer value on life: there is never an end- point when they come to a natural finish and become pointless...you can only ‘stop’, ‘end’, ‘halt’ or ‘terminate’ a period in which you are actively engaged in it. ...A kinesis – that is, an action that is a means to an end – is incomplete during the action itself, exactly because it is capable of being completed. But an energeia, something we do as an end in itself, is arguably complete and (accomplished) all the

filming weekly filmic documentation of lynetteholm (site) writing a series of texts: praxis_searching for new forms and

3.4_ongoing production

energeia is a kind of activity with a

tools of organisation material_intimacy between walls and weather design_transitional architecture: problems and opportunities ecologies_being a witness a listening archive a calendar and a walk that might make use of documented images, maps, writings, recordings, amongst other unforeseeable things

way through – and that is because it can never be fully completed or accomplished. We need to overturn our dominant hierarchy, and see energeia as the paradigm form of activity rather than having something lacking when contrasted with the means-ends, achievement-oriented activity of kinesis. In energeia, potentiality and actualization can – indeed must – coexist. (Bronislaw Szerszynski, The grammar of action in the critical zone)

3.2_praxis: listening tools

Listening here, can be read as metaphor and material phenomena. Listening means being receptive to what is presented to you and attempting to respond to precisely that, rather than a preconceived idea. Without listening there is no relationship. Without listening there is no trust, no intimacy. Listening happens when air moves as a result of a vibrating source, creating waves that are registered by our eardrums and translated into sound (or noise), by our brains. Listening is a material matter. How fast the sound reaches you depends on the proximity of the atoms in the medium; whether or not it echos depends on how smooth and bouncy or how soft and muffled the surfaces are.

analogue photographs captured inside a camera obscura I built by Lynetten

3.1_site-writing

Site-writing is a critical and ethical spatial practice that explores what happens when discussions concerning situatedness and sitespecificity enter the writing of criticism, history and theory, and writers reflect on their own subject positions in relation to their particular objects and fields of study, and on how their writing can engage materially with their sites of inquiry and audiences. Drawing out the spatial qualities of these interactions between writers and readers on the one hand, places, artefacts, and texts on the other, includes sites – material, political and conceptual – as well as those remembered, dreamed and imagined. (Jane Rendell, Site-Writing)

top: ‘how do 20,000m2 feel?’ poster in a local kiosk in Nørrebro bottom: ‘do you care?’ poster on the rooftop of a carpark in Nordhavn

2.5.2_non-scalability and minority

The point-cloud scanner is a tool for seeing that transparently reveals its point of view. It is, in some sense, a mechanism for situated perception. For starters, there is a perfect circular absence in the resulting point cloud scan as the scanner cannot scan itself; it doesn’t try to accommodate for this by filling in its blind spot, as human eyes do, it simply leaves the hole as a hole. The scanner works through the use of a laser that bounces off of surfaces and back into the sensor, giving the scanner an idea of the distance between it and first thing in its way. Opaque surfaces are thus translated onto other surfaces, almost like radial shadows, and three dimensional objects are only hinted at through a curving two dimensional surface. Its “pointy-ness” and visual limitations, comments on the non-scalability of perception, and as a registration tool it directs my way of searching for space: I look for threedimensionality, I look for obstacles that will distort the scan, I look for things in close proximity (it scans with a radius of 20m. Its cloudy, dissolved aesthetic visualises a meeting between barrier and porosity, transcience and solidification.

top-view of a point-cloud scan I did by Lynetten, across the street from where Lynetteholm is ‘breaking-ground’ (making ground)

2.5.1_intimacy and interdependence

Intimacy comes with close proximity; with knowing something so well, repeatedly, that it becomes familiar (with its roots in family). From a human perspective, intimacy is inhibited by our sensory mechanics. Something much larger than us in size, such as Lynetteholm or climate change, are difficult, if not impossible, to cultivate intimacy with. Doing so requires some kind of translation into one of our many languages, such as our language of time in relation to lifespan; our language of value in relation to love; our language of closeness in relation to our bodies. Juliana Spahr and Andri Snær Magnusson both make use of such translations in their writing, inspiring and touching me in ways I haven’t experienced before, and probing my curiosity for sensing architecture: the potential for a ‘Copenhagen sensitivity’ grown out of the material meeting between storm surge barrier and storm.

The Berlin Wall was first breached in November 1989 and in the early days of December those who could get their hands on a hammer and chisel converged to celebrate and participate in its physical destruction. Within days, vertical gaps (what Paul Virilio calls “anorthoscopic slits”) opened up around the iron reinforcing bars embedded in the concrete. As with Timerman’s peephole, these slots captured particular and fleeting views between an East and a West still separate enough to be powerfully joined. The slots were not only apertures for sight; hands reached through to make intimate contact between people...who could not see each other clearly, had never met before, and might never meet again...We can speculate, in retrospect, that the two Berlins had never been more intimately connected, even as their separate identities and interiors began to overlap, even as the separation between them began to dissolve.

(Jill Stoner, Toward a Minor Architecture)

I hold out my hand.

All day long, like a lion I lie where I will

I hand over

with not really me and I bestow

and I pass on.

upon not really me

I hold out my hand.

refractive index testing oils and wood

I hold out my hand.

preservatives.

I hand over

I lie with not really me all day long,

and I pass on.

and so I bequeath not really me a

Some call this mothering,

honeyed wine of flame

this way I begin each day by holding out

retardants and fire preventing

my hand and then all day long pass on. Some call this caretaking,

agents. I make a milk like nectar, a honeyed nectar of capacitor dielectrics,

this way all day and all night long, I

dyes, and electrical insulation

hold out my hand and take

and I pass it on every two hours

engine oil additive into me and

to not really me.

then I pass on this engine oil

Not really me is a ram perched on a cliff

additive to this other thing that once was me, this not really me.

above a stream, unable to be quenched by the flame

This soothing obligation

retardant in furniture.

This love.

Not really me comes near

This hand over

and takes a nectar of insulated pipes,

and this pass on.

and some industrial paints.

This part of me and this not really me.

Later I pass the breast cup to not really

This me and engine oil additive.

me,

This me and not really me and engine

a breast cup filled with sound insulation

oil additive. Back and forth.

panels and imitation wood with a little nectar and sweetness.

(Juliana Spahr, That Winter the Wolf Came)

1.5.2_ethical meetings

Tereza Vesela (a co-student) is investigating what she’s calling ‘architecture of anaesthesia’; architecture that numbs us. As this has been fermenting in my mind, it’s meeting the word inhabitation. Inhabitation contains the word habit, which in today’s definition means a settled tendency or practice that is automated and difficult to give up; practices that lack reflection and intention, that we have in some sense become numb to (as a side-note, etymologically, habit comes from the word dress, attire, evolving to mean appearance, and hence having a strange relationship to surface and sight). In ‘Offentlighedens Rum’, Dorte Mandrup writes about how, ‘it is perceived as one of the municipality’s most important tasks to ensure that we as citizens can get through the city painlessly and easily without meeting crowds, danger or obstacles. We regulate quite consistently by increasing the distances between human interactions. Wider bike paths, one-way roads, free lanes for municipal garbage trucks and the infrequent snow removal, all of which can optimise the chances of moving without resistance or unexpected contact.’ Comments on changing our perception of comfort, topics raised by Tereza, are exactly what Dorte Mandrup is touching on here. Our most accepted condition of comfort is one of ease and control, the exact opposite of a state of precarity. But without them we risk entirely losing unexpected meetings with others, where we are pushed out of our habituated practices and into active considerations and decisions; what I would call ethical meetings. ‘In the highly regulated city space one can observe…well, very little. It is not a place where you observe anything, because as a pedestrian, cyclist or motorist you can fall back into a semi-proven state of autopilot. And because you do not observe anything, you also do not take care. The unexpected encounter, the eye contact that ensures that both parties read each other’s intentions correctly, and the good will to - literally - share the space, are never put into

play in the over-regulated, painless urban space.’

a woman being removed from the soil, which she laid on to demonstrate againt Lynetteholm during the ground-breaking ceremony on 17.01.2022

1.5.1_nature / landscape paradigm

In Zero landscapes in a time of hyperobjects, Timothy Morton outlines our understanding of landscape as background, assuming a distance between layers of reality, like theatresets we know to be two-dimensional despite giving us a three-dimensional experience. In ‘Architecture without nature’ he describes how our differentiation between culture and nature conveniently provides us with an “away to which things are flushed” (quite literally). In the context of Lynetteholm, which is founded on these understandings of nature and landscape, our distance has left us with fear; with an illusion that we are able to escape nature; and with a lazy understanding of an idea that is far bigger than 80million tonnes of soil and 35,000 people. Situated knowledge, feminist objectivity, or as Niels Grønbæk calls “it”, ontological sensitivity (admittedly without knowing exactly what it means), are in dialogue with Morton’s hyperobjects: complex things that exist and act with or without us, with consequences that influence, often, everything we know. Instead of trying to grasp the entirety of such a concept however, situated knowledge aims for the opposite: it means localising a search, focusing one’s senses to reclaim an understanding of a situation that is less determined by our social conceptions of nature, landscape, waste, value, and power.

Across history, the most common uses of the middle voice seem to have been to describe emotions and moods, but also the weather - entities such as falling snowflakes or gusts of wind...cannot be separated from the event in which they participate. Some languages such as Finnish use a transitive ‘impersonelia’. .. with just a verb, ‘rains’; others like English use dummy subjects such as ‘it’ to half conceal the fact no separate agent is doing the raining. (Bronislaw Szerszinsky, Grammar of action in the critical zone)

top: 36 views of Mount Fuji, #33 The Coast of Noboto, Hokusai Katsushika bottom: view of Øresund from Nordhavn

0.5_listening

What is worth listening to? What can only be listened to, cannot be projected? In the epigraph to the other half of this program I quote Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing from her book ‘Mushroom at the end of the world: life beyond capitalist ruins’, commenting on precarity as being the condition of our time. Another word for precarity is indeterminacy, one I find easier to relate to. Indeterminacy - the unplanned, undecided, unknown, uncertain, undefined - cannot be projected into the world as enabled through our regular architectural tools. How do I draw the unknown? How do I pitch the uncertain? How do I title the undefined? In other words, familiarising myself with indeterminacy means searching for traces of it, means listening for it in existing things and objects. Whether or not my findings are able to be shared with the architectural hand, the one inclined to project, remains unknown. My hope is that the two will find each other in the process of peeling and unfolding this thesis. In this half of the program I will simply introduce my topics of interest, as the listening archive is the research itself, unravelling each strand over the course of the thesis period. These strands are listed under chapters: political drivers (my political motivations behind this thesis) and listening architectures, the architectural concepts of situated knowledge I am listening for.

top left: Architecture Reading Aid Ahmedabad, Fansela, Helten, and Martenson (2015) top right: Chloé Macary-Carney’s field work archive, 11.2021 bottom: listening practice webpage

political and architectural projection tools

listening 1.5_political drivers

4 42

1.0_lynetteholm analysis

ethical meetings

nature / landscape paradigm

earthly compositions_a storm surge barrier

economic compositions_land-value capture

2.5_listening

2.0_tuning architectures

intentions: situating knowledge

thresholds and traces

non-scalability and minority

intimacy and interdepence

shared perceptions: allborgarrätten

changing and unplanned: potential of temporality

program: kin(o)_listening architectures

contents

3.0_methodology and representation

architectural tools

ongoing production

site-writing

praxis: listening tools

Ariana Zilliacus 150378 thesis supervisor/co-sense-maker: Niels Grønbæk Political Architecture: Critical Sustainability 2020-22 The Royal Danish Academy, Copenhagen

...rethinking the role of theory, not to prove a hypothesis nor prescribe a particular methodology or solution to a problem, but rather as a mode of practice in its own right. If ‘critical spatial practice’ refers to self-reflective artistic and architectural practices which seek to question and transform the social conditions of the sites into which they intervene, as well as their own disciplinary procedures, what are the particular aspects that a feminist approach to critical spatial practice highlights? ...in my view, ‘what it takes to make a relationship to make a thing’, a phrase articulated by muf, becomes in the work of aaa ‘what it takes to make a thing to make a relationship’, that the making of architecture could be a subterfuge for the re-making of subject. (Jane Rendell, Feminist Architecture: from A to Z)

listening archive

professional experience: Studio Olafur Eliasson, Exhibition Team and Model Workshop, Berlin_______________________2018-2020 CoUrban Design Collective, Intern, Copenhagen_______________________________________2018 LUNARK, Construction team and assisting interior design, SAGA, Copenhagen________________2020 Research assistant for Natalie Koerner_______________________________________________2020 ArcSpace (Danish Architecture Centre), Freelance writer________________________________2016-2018 ArchDaily, Editorial intern__________________________________________________________2016-2018 teaching experience: Teaching assistant at Taking Place, Freedhand drawing_________________________________2018+2020 Workshop tutor at EASA Tourist, Villars-sur-Ollon______________________________________2019 Workshop tutor at RE:EASA, Rijeka_________________________________________________2018 other: Moderator at INCM JATO, Trpjeca___________________________________________________2019 “Documentarist” at INCM Continuity, Vitosha_________________________________________2018 MASS (Meeting of Architecture Students for Sustainability)**___________________________2019-2020 Walky-talky research collective____________________________________________________2019 – *EASA: European Architecture Students Assembly *INCM: Intermediate National Contact Meeting for EASA **cancelled due to covid19 languages (in order of proficiency): english, danish, swedish, spanish, (german)

I am an architecture student living and studying (in) Copenhagen. I am concerned with how we collectively and individually produce space with existing, situated relations - and how we share our knowledge and experiences in this process. I am concerned with collective praxis as an essential thread in a pattern of responsible, communicable, relatable architecture. It is a Critical Spatial Practice. It is making through friendships. It is an architecture I want to cultivate and practice. _ariana zilliacus

cv + sgd’s

education: Political Architecture: Critical Sustainability M.Arch (KADK), Copenhagen_________________2020-2022 Taking Place B.Arch (KADK), Copenhagen____________________________________________2015-2018 EASA Reality, Isosaari____________________________________________________________2021 United World College of South East Asia, Singapore___________________________________– 2015

Websites

_brenner, niel - implosions/explosions

_by&havn, https://byoghavn.dk/

(2014)

lynetteholm/udbud-og-entrepriser/,

_colley, ila - radical reaccomodeuse (2020)

accessed 02.2022

_hemer, beata - hybrid reflections (2015)

_danmarks almene boliger, https://bl.dk/

_rydén, jan - allborgarrätten (2017)

politik-og-analyser/temaer/her-er-listen-

_haraway, donna - situated knowledges:

over-parallelsamfund/, accessed 02.2022

the science question in feminism and the

_danmarks statistik, https://www.dst.dk,

privelage of partial perspective (1988)

accessed 02.2022

_offentlighedens rum - dorte mandrup,

_kbh billeder, https://kbhbilleder.dk/,

gadens fortælling (2019)

accessed 02.2022

_romme, anne - aspirations for an

_københavns kommunes hjemmeside,

architecture commons (2016)

https://www.kk.dk/, accessed 02.2022

_rådet for bærdeygtig trafik, hvor skal

_listening practice, https://lsnng.fi/, access

jorden til lynetteholm komme fra? (2021)

02.2022

_smith, amalie - thread ripper (2020)

_online etymology dictionary, https://

_spahr, julianna - the winter the wolf came

www.etymonline.com/word/idio-

(2015)

#:~:text=word%2Dforming%20element%20

_stoner, jill - towards a minor architecture

meaning%20%22one’s,own%22%20

(2012)

(see%20idiom)., accessed 02.2022

_svenningsen kajita, heidi - fragile

_reading design, jane rendell, feminist

potentialer i de store planer (2016)

architecture: from a to z, https://www.

_symmons, callum - considering neutrality,

readingdesign.org/feminist-architecture-

or something banal like that (2020)

a-z, accessed 01.2022

_szerszynski, bronislaw - the grammar of

_site-writing, https://site-writing.co.uk/,

action in the critical zone (2020)

accessed, 11.2021

_tsing, anna - mushroom at the end of the world: life beyond capitalist ruins (2015)

Other

_ogden, laura - swamplife (2011)

_juul, gitte, presentation at PA:CS, 12.2021

_wood, hannah - postcrisis reconstruction

_unknown demolition worker, conversation

agency (2016)

at jagtvej 171, 02.2022

bibliography

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