Reflective essay

Centre for Alternative Technology: Architecture AEES Prof. Dip.

CE7100.2a: Reflective Essay Exploring three possible avenues for future study: the forensic, the mythic and the automated

Arjun Chopra 19-11-2017

Arjun Chopra, 1630285

Reflective Essay CE7100.2a

CONTENTS Abstract

2

Thesis 1: Forensic

3-6

Introduction

3

Body

4-5

Purport

6

Thesis 2: The Mythic

7-9

Introduction

7

Body

7-8

Purport

9

Thesis 3: The Automated

10-12

Introduction

10

Body

11-12

Purport

12

Appendix Notes

13-20

Overall

13-15

Architecture and Fantasy

15-16

The Everyday

16-18

A Postmodern Ecology

18

Automated Architecture

18-20

References

21 1

Centre for Alternative Technology, Architecture AEES Prof. Dip.

Arjun Chopra, 1630285

Reflective Essay CE7100.2a

ABSTRACT This essay attempts to outline my current position as I approach the end of my course at CAT, and three areas of possible future study: the forensic, the mythic and the automated. These are outlined almost as three separate essays. The extent to which they may relate may be latent within the text, but left open to be explored as I continue my studies.

2

Centre for Alternative Technology, Architecture AEES Prof. Dip.

Arjun Chopra, 1630285

Reflective Essay CE7100.2a

Centre for Alternative Technology, Architecture AEES Prof. Dip.

consider ourselves as citizens of the world. An important avenue

THESIS 1: FORENSIC ARCHITECTURE

opened for me between sustainability and geopolitical discussion.

INTRODUCTION

Thus, giving birth to my first thesis.

I began this course at CAT with a specific aim to integrate elements I had learned in Permaculture – principles, patterns and design tools – and a find a way of transposing them into the architectural design process; I have emerged at the other end of this course with more humanitarian, social and political goals. In other words, I have moved from a land-based to a people-based locus of care. A major turning point came during a master-planning project for the local town of Machynlleth, where we were to compose a vision of its more sustainable future. My main focus was to prepare the town for an influx of refugees and economic migrants – I argued that this was crucial to a sustainable future: while it is enough for us to localise our money streams, devolve government power, localise our energy production, food resources and sources of labour for resilience, we need to globally expand our consciousness and accept responsibility of developed Western societies to nations in need, if we are to 3

Arjun Chopra, 1630285

Reflective Essay CE7100.2a

Centre for Alternative Technology, Architecture AEES Prof. Dip.

helicopters are able to identify them from overhead and refrain from

THESIS 1: BODY

bombing them, and they are situated on highways to allow for their

Forensic Architecture is an emerging field that explores the

faster travel, whilst Palestinians have to be led, like cattle, through

intersection of architecture and violence, concerning, firstly, how a

checkpoints from one place to the next. The violence takes on an

slow, political violence can be encoded into the everyday built

even more insidious dimension when Weizman considers the Israeli

environment, and secondly, using emerging architectural tools such

settlements that appear to be made of stone, but upon closer

as three-dimensional modelling, rendering and visualisation

inspection are a veneer upon concrete – a false architecture whose

programmes to reconstruct particular instances of urban conflict – to

goal is to perpetuate the idea of holy Jerusalem even far from its

then be used as judicial evidence to support victims (Weizman, 2007,

centre, subconsciously justifying their cause and “chosen” right to the

p. 22).

land.

Architect Eyal Weizman, in his book Hollow Land (2007), explores the Weizman reports upon raids by the Israeli military upon Palestinian

infrastructure of the Israeli-occupied West Bank, a place of

refugee settlements, where Israeli troops do not travel through the

generations-long humanitarian conflict, where an apotheosis of such

streets, laced with mines and planted with expectant Palestinian

slow violence can be observed: Israeli-occupied settlements form

shooters, moving through the urban fabric in a manner that the

long wedged shapes that effectively break Palestinians up from each

morphology dictates, but through the densely-packed houses

other, Israeli homes sit up on hills which face out over Palestinian land

themselves, blasting through party walls, carving new routes through

almost in a manner of panoptic gaze so that they are able to

the settlement that can stretch for over a hundred metres at a time,

anticipate attack, their roofs are of a striking red tile so that 4

Arjun Chopra, 1630285

Reflective Essay CE7100.2a

holding occupants hostage by locking them in their own homes.

Weizman remarks how their practice actually draws from proponents of postmodern architectural theory such as Bernard Tschumi and sociologists such as Henri Lefebvre, whereupon they understand their practice as a deconstruction of the binary of positive and negative space, and that of public and private. Such an attack is understood as powerfully psychological, violence as violation.

5

Centre for Alternative Technology, Architecture AEES Prof. Dip.

Arjun Chopra, 1630285

Reflective Essay CE7100.2a

THESIS 1: PURPORT This is an example of architecture not as an end in itself, but as a window to support a larger case for human rights. It investigates how we might be able to use architecture as a mediating tool within immediate, geopolitical issues which must be considered in tandem to our vision for a sustainable future. It uses the “slowness” of the architectural profession to look in greater detail at such conflicts, otherwise brushed over in the stream of western news-reporting, attempts to understand, through minute details, Western relationships with the Arabic world, and exposes the injustice of those in power. As the American government continues to fund arms to Israel, such treatment of Palestinians is unspokenly supported by public money.

Forensic Architecture’s reconstructions are built from the stories of witnesses and victims and forces us to represent such people as individuals rather than just material collateral; it is a tool for increasing global empathy which necessarily precludes our claim to global citizenship.

6

Centre for Alternative Technology, Architecture AEES Prof. Dip.

Arjun Chopra, 1630285

Reflective Essay CE7100.2a

Centre for Alternative Technology, Architecture AEES Prof. Dip.

century architecture, incidentally, being almost indecipherable in its

THESIS 2: THE MYTHIC

lexical density. Note the phenomenon of such huge fanbases of JRR

INTRODUCTION

Tolkien’s “Lord of the Rings”, JK Rowling’s “Harry Potter” and Philip I have had growing interest in how architecture can find means of

Pullman’s “His Dark Materials”, the Marvel comic universe, “Star

becoming larger than itself, a phenomenon that could be observed in

Wars” and anime creations of “Studio Ghibli”. In certain cases, entire

works of literature and motion picture which have attained a “cult”

languages have been composed, maps drawn of character journeys

status, a manner by which such works are not an end-in-themselves,

etc. material that extends beyond the text, the expenditure of mental

but provide a window into an alternative world. How architecture may

energy far beyond the scope of the work, in Walter Benjamin’s terms,

achieve similar ends, not just on paper, but in the arena of the lived

that invisible capital which gives the product an “aura” or “cult”

world? Thus, I draw a second thesis.

status. (Benjamin, 1935, pp. 217-253).

THESIS 2: BODY

These projects are all tied by the idea of “excess”, a level of detail

The idea of a mythic approach to architecture draws from a number

and attention that make these works, phenomenally speaking, greater

of inspirations. Ayn Rand, following the publication of her book “The

than themselves. The reader is immersed in their texts, which feel,

Fountainhead” stated that that she believed producing a work of

rather than improvised, carved from the substrate of an already-

literature has potentially greater artistic complexity than a building.

formulated mythopoeia. JK Rowling comments that she had already

Bernard Tschumi famously declared that that James Joyce’s final

created the narrative arc for every single character, and knew her

work “Finnegan’s Wake” was one of the greatest works of twentieth 7

Arjun Chopra, 1630285

Reflective Essay CE7100.2a

magical world down to every last detail, before even embarking upon the saga that came to be Harry Potter itself.

This link between the literary and the architectural has been longexplored, mostly through “paper� architecture: from the etchings of imaginary mental prisons of Piranesi through to the Constructionist utopias, later projects by Superstudio and Archigram, the violent visions of Lebbeus Woods and the current maximalist outputs from schools such as the Bartlett. But the fundamental problem is that none of these projects are built, and we lose that critical dimension of how it actually frames the life of people in the lived world.

8

Centre for Alternative Technology, Architecture AEES Prof. Dip.

Arjun Chopra, 1630285

Reflective Essay CE7100.2a

Centre for Alternative Technology, Architecture AEES Prof. Dip.

absorbed themselves into the life of the centre and becoming actors

THESIS 2: PURPORT

that shaped and changed such it around them. Note how the health

An interesting correlate would be to take, instead, the example of the

centre-as-building persists as the setting for all these stories, though

Pioneer Health Centre, built in 1930s Peckham. The building, with its

is of perfunctory importance, engendering – yet transparent to – lived

central swimming pool, various health and social areas, was merely a

experience. Maybe it is that programme of which the building is a

frame for a community-wide experiment that sought to redefine

part, and the life of occupants it engenders through its existence

society’s perceptions of Health– “The Peckham Experiment”,

which constitute that invisible capital which gives it such auratic

instigated by doctors Innes Pearse and Scott Williams, came to be an

quality.

unprecedented piece of sociological research and arguably a prototype for contemporary relational art (Bourriaud, 1998). The project itself, rules for how the building was to be used, constituted that “invisible capital” for the design: members within a mile (walking) radius could use the centre on the condition that their whole family was involved, agreed to a health overhaul every year, and to the silent observation of the doctors on their progress within the community.

Innes and Pearse compiled stories of many individual families who, upon entering the programme, were overwhelmed at first by the sheer wealth of interaction and activity around them, though quickly 9

Arjun Chopra, 1630285

Reflective Essay CE7100.2a

THESIS 3: THE AUTOMATED INTRODUCTION I tend to like thinking programmatically about architecture. I favour activities such as space planning and faรงade design, and have developed a greater interest in detailing. I have thought about how divides in architecture could be requited through such: bringing together the dry, but wholly necessary aspects of the profession, such as building codes and regulations, together with the more exciting and aspirational parts of its research, such as pattern language. Could they not be said to share the same goal? For are they not both a series of rules that ensure safe, healthy and liveable spaces? This has led me to think how, through the medium of programming, we can seek to bring all such rules together in one place, use our already-developed BIM capabilities to aid in generating solutions, and possibly a vision, for better or worse, of a completely automated future for architecture. Thus, providing a third thesis.

10

Centre for Alternative Technology, Architecture AEES Prof. Dip.

Arjun Chopra, 1630285

Reflective Essay CE7100.2a

Centre for Alternative Technology, Architecture AEES Prof. Dip.

world. Think of the advances made in ocular technologies, and how

THESIS 3: BODY

this affected the visual arts. In the face of the invention of the camera,

Consider a future where all architectural decisions can be made by a

painting reimagined its role to become, not anymore, an absolute

computer. Statistics indicate that this future may not be as far as we

record of reality, for there was now an instrument which could do

think: It is projected that by 2023 we may be able to create a

such more efficiently, but now a means of capturing and translating

computer with the same processing power as the human brain

the immaterial – movement, emotional states and abstract forms –

(McPartland, 2017). The complexity of demands on a building which

becoming arguably more deeply in touch with the human condition.

include site, programme, client wants, accessibility, safety and fire

Architecture enters its new modernism, not one of linearly ascending

regulations budget, passive solar principles, heat loss coefficients

progress, but one knitting our various expert fields of knowledge into

and energy efficiency, and patterns for successful space planning

a holistic practice.

could be thought of all at once and the most fitting architectural form is thus produced from these parameters. It predicts exactly how much

As the computer automates that traditional process of drafting,

the project is going to cost, projects expected patterns of use and

dispensing also with that need to memorise rules and regulations,

future bills. Imagine, if then it can be sequenced further into a

architects can divest energy to the more meaningful task of

construction manual for a community self-build!

formulating the brief itself, facilitating and orchestrating a democratic process whereby a community has full agency to voice its wants and

If this was to happen, would architects be out of a job? I argue the

desires and see them immediately simulated in built form, in a

contrary, that the architect would become even more significant, and

dynamic process which is iterative and ever-changing.

their role would be an even purer manifestation of their role in the 11

Arjun Chopra, 1630285

Reflective Essay CE7100.2a

Centre for Alternative Technology, Architecture AEES Prof. Dip.

We can observe with current emergence of BIM technology, how we

Designing Buildings Wiki, 2017) Indeed, the inclusion of such rules

are moving towards such an automated future. The government have

based upon the lines of Alexander’s Pattern Language, using latest

already specified for all public-sector projects from 2016 for practices

sociological research, may help inject this element of the human and

to be designing at BIM level 2, dispensing for most of the RIBA stages

poetic, to at least regulate the forms from the inside, and avoid an

1-4 with traditional CAD drafting. NBS projects that we will soon see

architecture of robotic cacophony.

the ubiquity of BIM level 3, where multiple disciplines will be able to

THESIS 3: PURPORT

work on a single model in real-time (McPartland, 2017). 1 Maybe it is the architect’s job to decode whether a building is even Buildings have also successfully been designed already using

the appropriate solution in the first place? It is that capability of lateral

parametric technology, producing highly bespoke forms tailored to

thought, so inimitable of our brains, that allow us to gain sparks of

demands. Patrik Schumacher of Zaha Hadid Architects has

insight into softer solutions, one hundred times more sustainable –

composed a manifesto for such architecture, “Parametricism”, whose

socially, economically and ecologically than resorting to built form. As

ultimate goal is “…that a computer could calculate every factor

the fine artist shifts from renderer to curator, the producer to DJ, the

imaginable and derive a building that reflects and responds to all of

instrumentalist to silent conductor, the architect moves from drawing

them, thereby achieving architecture based on rational scientific data

to translating, to adjusting, to appropriating, to designating solutions.

as opposed to intuitive artistic judgements.” (Parametricism -

Further dimensions can be added to BIM, a 4D BIM where construction sequencing is outlined, 5D, where the whole project is cost, 6D to include

sustainability heuristics, and 7D consisting analysis of lifecycle performance.

(McPartland, 2017)

1

12

Arjun Chopra, 1630285

Reflective Essay CE7100.2a

APPENDIX NOTES:

Centre for Alternative Technology, Architecture AEES Prof. Dip.

I have come to appreciate architecture as an activity in-itself, not merely as a diving board into other discourses, it has fundamental, unique qualities, ways of thinking with its own specific history.

OVERALL

Upon embarking the course my primary interest was the intersection between architecture and landscape design. Notably how through the remit of sustainable thinking, these would have a newly-realised, profound connection. For instance, sun facing walls would reflect or store light, and block wind to create an opportune microclimate for a particular forest garden; deciduous vines would creep over a glazed greenhouse, growing excessive foliage in the summer preventing excessive solar gain, and shedding this in the winter to allow it through when needed; or even the strategic excavation of earth on site to shelter a home in a comfortable environment of thermal mass, and turn the remaining void into a reedbed filtration system. There were also symbioses in their methodology – architecture could do well to draw from Permaculture’s attempt to break that esoteric “black box” of designing into a structured process, making it mandatory to include tools such as McHarg’s Exclusion Principle, Planning for Real, Random Assembly, and zone/sector diagrams to ensure a holistic, thorough, appropriate and democratic end product. It could draw from acronyms that would help mark one’s progress, such as SADIMET or O’BREDIMET, that would remind the designer that there indeed is no end to it all: once decisions are made, it need to be implemented, and even when that is completed, if it ever does, it needs to be maintained and tweaked ad infinitum. The relationships between elements in a system are not nuclear, but web-like and complex, it may stand in stark contrast to an architecture insofar as it has no underlying aesthetic-conceptual arrangement but rather the most opportune relationships that suit the users and the land.

Over time I have myself drifting from an earth-centric vision of sustainability to a people-centred one. I do not feel like I have progressed in a line, like the course of a river, but rather like that of a web. I have had started a certain mastery of disparate elements, but learning to integrate them. This is analogous to what is happening in the world today – the current paradigm, typified by the sustainability discourse is of that drawing-together disparate, currently expert-driven fields of knowledge. What is interesting, is that consensus about this state of times can be reached on seemingly different camps – the postmodern, deconstruction, critical theory, literary driven discourse that surrounds architecture seems to feel the same way.

I still do not understand what is successful architecture, what separates a naïve from a mature design. Maybe one needs to be a person of the world before they are an architect, and thus life experience is integral to the process: architects supposedly creating their best work in their 60s. I still feel like the locus needs to be shifted from the literary to the scientific, a real need for evidence and data to support the time, expense, energy and faith invested in a design.

I have come to view architecture as a job, and a duty, rather than a more esoteric calling, whether this be for better or worse. As this major design project has made me think about my building more intensely than ever before, finding new methodologies and parameters for designing, along environmental as well as functional, legible, aesthetic and social lines.

What remained latent, but began surfacing mid-way through the course, was an interest in a more social kind of sustainability, acknowledging the sustainability discourse’s shortcomings in confronting important, immediate geopolitical issues. One which argued that designing an urbanism to receive a growing number of environmental refugees was just as important as “localism”, of which our low-carbon future requires. One that looks to urban communities – with younger populations, larger numbers of ethnic minorities, and greater levels of crime, economic deprivation and homelessness, and figures out what sustainability can do for and communicate to them, which

Whereas before I would be adamant in designing myself, I have longed for the input of others, collaboration, pushing the iterative process faster, talking through problems, communication, which I feel is the heart of what it is all about. Is it possible to design a building without making any decisions?

I have noticed that dialectics and binaries come out strongly in my architecture as a means of organising space. This can be observed in the work of Herman Herzberger.

13

Arjun Chopra, 1630285

Reflective Essay CE7100.2a

unfortunately remains a bourgeois conversation. The diving board for this mission was Hip-Hop, a forty-year-old movement that was borne out of the Black and Latino ghettos of New York, as a symbol of that flower bursting out of the concrete – an art form that is politically engaged and outspoken, and with its tumultuous history, speaks directly of the African-American experience. It’s art adorned abandoned buildings and subway carriages rather than the white boxes of studios and art galleries, its music boomed from parks and streets that surrounded housing projects, stealing power from the streetlights, rather than the haute clubs of downtown, its unique style of dancing, “b-boying” on cardboard rather than parqueted surfaces.

Like its predecessor movement, jazz, it created a new means of expression within western canons; whereas jazz broke apart traditional major-minor scales and began to express every nuanced shade in between, and embraced a stream of consciousness, Hip-Hop poetry embraced the spoken word, half rhymes, double entrendres, internal rhymes, bending pronunciation and incorporating slang, things western poetry tended not to do. It also had a more fundamental and spiritual role to confront racism, liberate and uplift those communities for whom it was given.

Centre for Alternative Technology, Architecture AEES Prof. Dip.

my work to grow in richness over time. This viewing of architecture as a unit of “coupling” is synthesised from a dialectic between investigating architecture as end-in-itself – architecture-as-box, and architecture as merely a tool that connects other discourses – architecture-as-diving board. Maybe this way of viewing architecture that reflects my “immaturity”, a period of one’s early career where one filters through a series of discourse relationships until finding one that settles into a life-project.

These discourse-combinations can be expressed as portmanteaus: 1) 2) 3) 4) 5) 6) 7)

Artitecture Philosophitecture Permatecture Hiphopitecture Polititecture Literatecture/ Mythitecture Artipliosophipermahiphopipolitiliteratecture

Through this course I have developed an interest in urban morphology. My buildings tend to stress just as much importance to the spaces carved inbetween, and I am drawn to creating walkways and streets. The arrangement of rooms and corridors within a building have a capacity to reflect this.

Aside from the divide between sustainability and current politics, there is one between the goals of sustainability and those of architecture, and within architecture a respective divide between the scientific and the literary, the technological and human, professional and academic, imaginary and the real.

I tend to relinquish control over the form of the building and let as many site, schedule and environmental factors shape it of its own volition. Then I merely rearrange the forms that seem to have been created, and emphasise them as an architecture. This takes a developed sense of pattern recognition and creative use of language.

I have become interested in the significance of writing to architecture, one is able to evoke a space using words rather than images.

Juhani Pallaasma draws from phenomenology to make the case that architecture needs to engage beyond the visual, a sense that has been overpoweringly precedented throughout the modern age, and find tactility inherent within ocular experience.

During this course I do not feel that I have grown upwards but outwards, feeding an emaciated, sketched, skeletal figure, which circumscribes my thoughts, feelings, and approach to architecture. I embarked upon the course with a framework, a general thesis about where I wanted to take architecture and this has been throughout ballasted and supported by all subsequent research. What I have learned to appreciate more-so is architecture-in-itself.

I have realised that I am not interested in architecture-as-itself, I always tend to couple it with another interest, whether, over the years, this has been Art, Psychoanalysis, Phenomenology, Permaculture, Hip-Hop, Geopolitics, Literature etc. This act of “coupling” architecture with a particular discourse and exploring their relationship in detail, imbuing previous researches allows

There is something performative about the way I approach a creative endeavour, whether this be writing or designing. Like a rehearsal.

14

Arjun Chopra, 1630285

Reflective Essay CE7100.2a

Though it is fashionable to dislike Ayn Rand’s novel “The Fountainhead”, significant lessons I have drawn from the book are as follows: -

Centre for Alternative Technology, Architecture AEES Prof. Dip.

discernible return; sketches made and observations recorded that never reach the drafting table, let alone the building itself.

In life there will come a time where you have to embrace being alone Fortune favours dedication and hard work Try and stick to your principles Do not place your value on others approval Life is a marathon – rewards do not come overnight – be stoic There is a valid attack on neo-classicist architecture as inherently pastiche Advocates a practice-based architecture – getting one’s hands dirty Keep a cool head under pressure

The built world is received through literature as framed and experienced via the stories of people. These settings are not understood in their completeness, but rather in a state of fragmentation. Hogwarts Castle, the ship of the Nebuchadnezzar, or Bilbo’s home at Bag End are revealed through the reader through a series of moments that serve function to the immediate narrative. It is closest to how we drift around the built environment in our everyday lives. What is significant, however, is the information withheld from the reader, as two characters in conversation travel from the window in the kitchen to the fireplace in the living room, we do not know whether they went left or right, traversed levels or thresholds - that is filled in by our imagination, itself borne from the repository of experience. The fictional narrative, in its sparsity, or within its gaps, reveal to us our own memories which we use to colour them, not even consciously.

Neo is disconnected from the Matrix into the Real, where he is taught the truth about his existence. During this time, he enters a period of training, where he makes a series of controlled excursions back into the Matrix itself, or simulations thereof, where he is installed with a number of programmes such tach him Ju Jitsu and Kung Fu etc. He also has a period of sparring and fear evasion training in which he must emancipate himself from his old thought patterns, in order to subvert the rules inside the programme which he was formerly enslaved, now with the power to opt in and out as he pleases. Forgetting the latent near-biblical narrative and “heroism” – Neo as “The One”, this analogy could be seen as similar to my experience at CAT: my eighteen pilgrimages to a separated place in amidst the Welsh mountains I am systematically plugged-out from the world as I know it to learn how to analyse heat losses from buildings using thermal imaging cameras, work with spreadsheets to calculated beam loads, practice collaborating with other students to produce a collective design, the importance of community consultation, plus all the things I have picked up under my own agency through independent study, to use when going into practice to ultimately make the world a better place.

It can be profoundly disconcerting when the reader misses a detail of the setting in a story, and confronted with a description at some point in the narrative that counters their imagination. Say for instance, that that kitchen was mentioned only at the beginning of that book to have had black floor tiles, but in amidst all the other details this is forgotten and the reader fills this experience with that of the kitchen in their former family home, which had wooden floorboards. It becomes significant later in the book when the one of the loose floor tiles actually hides a trap door into a secret cellar, in a scene where the protagonist trips over it. In light of this new information, the reader feels they must revise all those previous experiences in the story so that their imagined perception of events can more closely approximate that of the author.

Architects are always reminded of the real. It has the power to veto the most glorious visions.

ARCHITECTURE AND FANTASY

PROFESSION Actor(s) Agon

Architecture is collaborative yet writing is often solitary.

Making a case for the invisible capital in the design process, there are considerations we make as architects, much similar to authors, that yield no

15

AUTHOR Individual Good and evil

ARCHITECT Collaborative NIMBYism and people just trying to do their intended job

Arjun Chopra, 1630285

Reflective Essay CE7100.2a

Protagonist

Hero

Genre Type Media

Fantasy Fiction Words

Succession

Drafting (Rehearsing?)

Prose Poem Didacticism or underlying political will - moral Philosophy and allegory Deconstruction Memory Relationship of reader and writer

Body Distillation Politicism Rhetoric Reflexion Repository Dialogue

Filters Veto Tool

Editors Publishers Pen, word processor

Product Rehearsal Changes Legacy Response

Book Notes Revisions/Drafts Fans Critical analysis

Creativity

Imagination

Professional providing a paid service Realism Non-fiction Drawings, Words, Bricks and Mortar Drafting

Centre for Alternative Technology, Architecture AEES Prof. Dip.

Architecture does not and cannot operate in a wold of complete fantasy.

One where, if we so choose, could suspend gravity and freeze time to suit a narrative. Architecture is irrevocably tied to its condition. The stories painted must have a kind of realism if it is to be successful, and ever have a chance of leaving the paper.

No matter how fantastic the story, it must maintain a certain level of relatability. Though witches and wizards are able to do many things we cannot do, they feel the pangs of envy, the swells of joy, and the depths of grief just like we all do. This paradox bears semblance to the idea that the endless possibility of one’s imagination is always confronted by the crippling physics of the real. The two are symbiotic, make each other stronger. It is those details of real experience that encroach on a fantastical story, the blowing of one’s nose, the scuff of their shoe, the tremble in their voices, that make them all the more believable. Take the performance of the New York skyline, where modernist architects of the day dressed as the skyscrapers they designed, and to the right of the stage stood Edna, with a sink around her neck. Her symbolic function was to remind us that no matter how high our structures of steel can soar; human function remains constant. That inhabitant in flat 243 still eats, shits, cleans and sleeps – water, energy and heat need to find a way up to them, against the will of gravity.

Plan Pavilion Subverting coding of everyday spaces i.e.

Lefebvre Symbolism and pathetic fallacy Critique of form Precedent Relationship of design to user/inhabitor, relationship of architect to client/user.

People don’t really care who designed it as long as it is a nice place to be that works Engineers and Client Planners Pencil, CAD, BIM, photoshop etc.

Building Sketches Revisions/amendments Users Critical analysis, environmental audit, post occupancy Problem solving

THE EVERYDAY We must learn to see architecture as inherent within the everyday, rather than the novel (pun intended), for that is where its true power lies. The less designed the better! As a thought experiment, concentrating on the most banal building one could find and analysing its subconscious messages, in the manner of how Hubble telescope concentrates on the blankest part of the sky to discover a phenomenal image. In this manner I intend to continue my studies in architecture looking at the “driest” parts of it I can, and attempt to find poetry there.

When people perform spoken word poetry they go into a different mode: they raise their voices and speak faster, they try and channel all their energy 16

Arjun Chopra, 1630285

Reflective Essay CE7100.2a

into their words to infuse them with as much emotional emphasis as possible, they force these words out of themselves and hit you with a barrage of sound, without respite. It feels like standing under a waterfall – an intense and unrelenting stream of consciousness. But their words do not seem to enter me. It frustrates me how they need to find a novel new way of communicating, what they have to shout at me for when I am standing right in front of them. Are they talking to me or the gods? It was when I came across a spoken word artist that did not change their tone as they began their poem, and just spoke through it as if was the normal thing in the world, made me listen. He had a way of making his poem seem conversational, almost improvised, as if he was just telling you a story about something that happened to him last week, though one couldn’t help notice the surfacing of double entrendres, minute details, iambs, wordplay, recurring symbolic themes and connections of an intricacy that would far surpass an off-the-cuff thinking mind. It was this sense of stealth that I found so exciting. Similarly, recently watching an all-star performance of “Waiting for Godot” left me with a bad taste in my mouth. I could feel it was as if the actors knew how “boring” the dialogue was, and would thus need to wake the audience from their stupor with every line. They tried too hard. For me it struck me as such a unique play in that the less “acting” they invested into their lines, the more convincing it would be. They tried to turn what was supposed to be an “antiplay” into a “play”. The real gem of a play such as Godot is allowing the audience to feel the silences, the nothingness, slip in and out of reverie and introspection, let them become sensitised within such a stark situation to nuances of body language, eyerolls and shrugging of shoulders, cracking of the voice and the tapping of the foot, realise how nothing is indeed not nothing at all, but fraught with information to a mind sharpened by boredom.

It takes a lot of courage for the actor to “anti-act”, they have to dispense with years of training to perform such a play effectively. Indeed, it may be the case that someone who was slightly nervous, with no formal training could have played the role better! Godot is a play not cast for actors, but for us, in our banal and boring existence. A play that encapsulates the “everyday”.

Centre for Alternative Technology, Architecture AEES Prof. Dip.

safety glass reinforced against shattering, standards for sizes of lifts and heights of handrails are all developed from tried-and-tested observation of human metrics and behaviour. These features speak about how buildings keep us safe. The building regulations should be seen as a body of our collective wisdom, rather than boxes merely to be ticked-off in order to pass a project through building control. The everyday is so transparent to us.

These regulations, along with certain rules of thumb (i.e. try to design a room to allow for light from two sides of the room for better ambience, putting a sink against a blank wall so that a mirror can be placed there, designing so that a bed’s headboard need not be placed in front of the window, lest the sound of rain against the panes would keep one awake at night) are not restrictions, weights tied to our feet that drag us from rising into that blue sky of imagination, but rather the very language that we use to speak. These are not Latinate words that we would only use on occasion, used only in the context of an English literature exam, or slipped into utterances to impress our elders, but Germanic ones, prepositions and connectors, “the”, “and”, “under” and “that” without which we are not able to string meaningful sentences. Or maybe the regulations are actually rules of grammar. The larger-scale space planning is considered as “syntax”, buildings themselves being prose, parts of a larger story that constitutes the site, fabric, people and wider settlement.

This thinking of the everyday, of language-as-tool could be equated to the later work of Wittgenstein.

It is significant that we must draw context onto our sketches, if only to remind ourselves that our building is to be placed within an existing fabric. We tend to see a distinction between building “anew” and working with one that already exists, when in fact all architecture deals with an existing fabric, just to differing degrees. Architecture does not exist independent of the world, in the way art has tried to achieve by the end of its modernist era.

Patrik Schumacher has described architecture as a “relational” art.

Designing to current regulations and standards constitute architectural expression – the corridor that is widened to 2m to allow for the passing of wheelchairs, broken in its length by sealed doors to prevent the spread of fire, with vision panels to prevent clashing pedestrians at doorways, with

The stairs are connected to the – lift shaft, the lift shaft’s connected to the – landing, the landing’s connected to the – balustrade, the balustrade’s connected to the - stud wall, the stud wall’s connected to the – architrave, 17

Arjun Chopra, 1630285

Reflective Essay CE7100.2a

Centre for Alternative Technology, Architecture AEES Prof. Dip.

the architrave’s connected to the – door frame, the door frame’s connected to the – toplight etc.

case of homosapiens, imposing their kind on others”

Writing as alternative to sketching i.e. site writing, such as in the case in the work of Jane Rendell.

AUTOMATED ARCHITECTURE An “autonomous” house has a political dimension. Think, that in areas of occupied Palestine where water supply, sewage disposal, food supplies are heavily controlled, what an act of dissidence it would be for a family to be able to rely completely on their own ingenuity. It is only in our fairlybourgeois, comfortable existence here in the UK, those who can afford to design a “sustainable” home is merely for the sake of aspiration, and have no real political need for it.

A POSTMODERN ECOLOGY Below table adapted and quoted from Postmodern Ecology by Daniel R. White (1998, pp. 33-35) POSTMODERNISM Metaphor Over Logic

“Rejection of fundamental dichotomies” Ideation – divergence from the Platonic notion of an idea – “Différance”

“Sceptical of metaphysics and master narratives” like the “ideas of progress and enlightenment” based upon them

ECOLOGY “Rejects that natural history may be adequately represented in terms of logical or digital systems and invokes the metaphor or analogic communication as the language of evolution” i.e.

Analogy Over Logic “Challenging of dichotomies”

We tend to see buildings as “speaking” to us through their aesthetics, i.e. that which separates a piece of architecture above and beyond the everyday fabric, but in generations time, when the society we see now as normal has changed irrevocably, the full dimension of how they speak will become apparent, through such bodies of knowledge that we take for granted i.e. building regulations, codes and practices.

Think of a future where the end-users can design their own building by interacting with a simple programme, filling in a series of interactive forms.

Architects and planning officers are completely bypassed. Take, for example, an expecting couple that wish to extend their home for a future family. They specify their wants and needs: an extension that is easy to maintain and as spacious as possible within planning permission, incorporates two bedrooms, a larger kitchen, a playroom and conservatory.

Parameters for room sizes are calculated against local council SPD guidelines. They know whatever is produced at the other end of this process is already planning and building-control approved, as it has been synthesised using their data. They use their household drone to survey the existing property inside-and-out, and its surroundings. Information is transmitted to a software that reads fenestrations and materials of surrounding buildings as related to inventories of periodic styles, compiled by historians. The drone also proceeds to survey surrounding land to gain an up-to-date topography, detect watercourses as possibly unobservable by satellite, and recognises species of surrounding fauna from an ecological

“Evolution and interaction of ideas as “differences”, difference that makes a difference – diverging from the classical and modern notion of species or genus as a unitary type and so yield scepticism about the “genetic code” as the archetype for organisms or as the “units of survival” in evolution” Rejecting of master stories – “that natural and cultural history consist in species or peoples struggling for survival and, especially in the

18

Arjun Chopra, 1630285

Reflective Essay CE7100.2a

Centre for Alternative Technology, Architecture AEES Prof. Dip.

database. It may use a longer wavelength transmitter to scan the paths of tree roots in the ground. Local climate data is collected by a permanent household sensor. The users collect a series of soil samples in viles which are delivered by the drone to the lab for analysis.

required, and a bespoke construction manual produced. A new role is born, one is called upon to organise the community and oversee the construction process. Indeed, with the invention of 3D printing technologies to the building process, this may be an automated affair also!

Building regulations, being constantly changed and improved, are being added as rules to the design software by statutory bodies. Aside from this, latest sociological research for psychologically healthy spaces are converted into directive patterns and added, vetoed and controlled by the public using an online upvoting system 2. But also, passive solar principles, such as calculating the optimum area of glazing on the sun-facing side, principles for lifetime homes, controlling sizing of bathrooms and corridors for ease of manoeuvre for an elderly or possible disabled user, are included. The occupants are aided in creating a schedule of accommodation, then consider which rooms they want connected to each other. This data is used to fill an adjacency matrix, which thus generates a series of permutations – bubble diagrams, floorplan prototypes.

After the building is completed and inhabited, it remains to be audited in its patterns of use, occupancy and energy consumption against expectations, measuring the successes and failures of the design. Qualitative data from occupants is also collected. Abstract statements such as “I don’t like going through that corridor at night because it is scary” are interrogated to find concrete stimuli i.e. because it is dark, visibility is insufficient as it is illequipped with lighting; or it is isolated from main axes of the building, leading to a feeling of the lack of safety. This information can be broken into statements that are related through keywords to particular patterns and passages from regulations from whence this corridor was formulated, and flag up on the system as worthy of amendment. A solution can thus be generated for the building itself – i.e. ambient improvement by installing more LED lights, and an improvement to the global system by the moderating public, who may collectively write improved patterns. The system thus learns over time, and produces ever-improving design proposals.

Data also taken into account include an audit of the home’s existing energy use throughout the year and patterns of habitation. The design may take liberties to incorporate technologies such as solar PVs on favourable roof areas, and MVHR system or a wood boiler, with a breakdown of costagainst-return, extrapolating possible savings that can be made using current patterns of energy consumption.

Resistance to such a notion that the complete architectural design process can be automated may well come from architects themselves, and others, who assert that architecture is a uniquely human endeavour, which requires a level of complexity in thinking that far surpasses the traditionally linear capabilities a computer. Those who think so may also subscribe to the idea that “architecture” is separate from mere acts of “building”, that the hand of an orchestrator elevates the product above its banal and everyday surroundings. For instance, Joseph Rykwert, to such effect, asserted the difference between a bike shed, as a mere building, and Lincoln Cathedral, as a work of architecture. But this binary distinction may be seen to stem from a Modernist mindset, which through successive postmodern

What remains is the task not to draw the building, but to appropriate from a number of virtually-generated choices. A fully functional BIM model can be produced by the system, which then can be fine-tuned. Many iterations can be made, flitting ever faster between concept and end product.

The programme generates several possible designs almost instantly, which can be rendered three-dimensionally using hologram or VR for the user to test-experience. Those which are most favoured are taken into further detail and modelled again, until a single final design is reached. In the case of a self-build, a full costing is proposed, along with a list of materials and tools A prototype for such a system can be observed in Christopher Alexander’s “Pattern Language”, where principles such as “light to two sides of every

room” and “variation in roof heights for differing levels of formality within a room”

2

19

Arjun Chopra, 1630285

Reflective Essay CE7100.2a

movements such as deconstruction, have since sought to be challenged and subverted. 3

Centre for Alternative Technology, Architecture AEES Prof. Dip.

completely possible to scientise the design process itself, and emancipate it from the condition of a black box in an imaginary blue sky, weighed down by the vices of reality? Could that paradigm be challenged, if not broken?

The sense of resistance to an automated architecture may also come from a place of fear, it could imply a loss of poetic dimension to our discourse and a loss of human agency to our profession. But a leap forward in technology leads maybe not to a dissolution of the discourse and profession altogether, but merely a reformulation of the architect’s role? Take, for example, the invention of the camera, which could be seen as the automatization of painting. This did not jeopardise the art of painting as some thought it may; rather painting reformulated itself into a different paradigm. No more was the aim to perfectly render shapes and textures of reality and make the hand of the artist invisible – as can be observed from the Dutch still lives of the 16th century and the rigorous perspectives of the Italian Renaissance: artists moved toward considering how the act of painting could be expressed in its very being, and emotional states could be communicated, thus the birth of Expressionism. Artist began to paint non-representationally, birthing abstraction. 4 Fine art, during the modern era, arguably moved to a purer conception of its own role in the world and this may have been closely tied to advances in ocular technologies.

In this process, one must question how the role of the architect is reconfigured. With such technology that automates the realisation of the building, maybe the architect’s task is to convert the needs of a community into a brief, which is no mean feat in itself. Maybe this this a purer manifestation of what the architect does in that it is located not around the buildings themselves, but the people they are designed for. The process of realising directives, in a way that is democratic and inclusive, from abstract wants and needs is, in essence, designing a communication. Maybe the answer is not actually a building at all? 5 Aside from the binary that separates building and dwelling, as explored by thinkers such as Martin Heidegger in Building, Dwelling, Thinking (Heidegger and Krell, 2011, pp. 343-365), there is one between designing and building, and within design itself – one between analysis and decision-making, as mutually exclusive actions. It is a binary possibly so pervasive it fractalizes into its constituents. This, as explained earlier, is arguably a residual of modernist thinking that the postmodern tends to challenge. A former architecture tutor held the opinion that the best kind of site analysis is just to propose a building at the outset, and analyse how well it functions within its prescribed setting. One can then take apart the proposal, radically change it and try something else entirely, reconfigure or tweak it— analysis through the act of proposal.

Designing everything with a reason in mind, being able to substantiate every last detail, whether on functional, environmental or aesthetic terms (the former two being possibly more favourable) indicates that we strive towards a certain rationality in our designs – through a residual modernist lens this could be seen to equate to a kind of positivist objectivity. There is an arguably a latent desire to realise a design as a product of scientific methodology. Could we not break down a design into its substantive reasons into bits of information that could be programmed? Is it not Indeed, if one was a cycling atheist, that bike shelter would likely have a closer proximity to their lived experience than that albeit beautiful religious building at the top of a very steep hill.

4 Representing the real became translating the immaterial, and in the dissolution of “created” objects by the time of Duchamp, one saw, in his readymades, adjustment of the real itself, to appropriation, then designation, the dissolution of the art object and the rebirth of the art-tool.

We gain glimpses into this possible future paradigm today: the RIBA Sterling prize was recently awarded to dRMM architects for the design not of a building, but effectively an empty pier in Hastings. The fact that the architects chose not to design a building was consciously subversive, to install the template for the town to build its future developments, an architecture inherently facilitative – an “anti-act”, that served to divest agency from the architect to the members of the community themselves to realise a development that is truly organic and appropriate to their setting.

3

5

20

Arjun Chopra, 1630285

Reflective Essay CE7100.2a

Centre for Alternative Technology, Architecture AEES Prof. Dip.

Ĺ pela, H., 2003. Architecture and Communication. Urbani Izziv, Vol. 14, No. 2, Podoba mesta v popularni kulturi / The image of city in popular culture, 14(2), pp. 104-108.

REFERENCES

Thaler, H. R. & Sunstein, R. C., 2008. NUDGE: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth and Happiness. 2 ed. Clitheroe: Joosr.

Aravot, I., 1995. Narrative-Myth and Urban Design. Journal of Architectural Education, 49(2), pp. 79-91.

Upton, D., 2002. Architecture in Everyday Life. New Literary History, 33(4), pp. 707-723.

Benjamin, W., 1935. Illuminations: The Work of Art in the Mechanical Age of Reproduction. 4 ed. London: Pimlico.

Weizman, E., 2007. Hollow Land: Israel's Architecture of Occupation.

2nd ed. London: Verso.

Bhatt, R., 2010. Christopher Alexander's pattern language: an alternative exploration of space-making practices. The Journal of Architecture, 15(6), pp. 711-729.

White, R. D., 1998. Postmodern Ecology: Communication, Evolution, and Play. 1st ed. New York: State University of New York Press.

Heidegger, M. and Krell, D. (2011) Basic writings. London: Routledge Classics.

Bourriaud, N., 1998. Relational Aesthetics. 2 ed. Dijon: Les Presses du rĂŠel.

McPartland, R. (2017) Four things Mark Bew told us about the future of BIM and digital construction, NBS. Available at: https://www.thenbs.com/knowledge/four-things-mark-bew-told-usabout-the-future-of-bim-and-digital-construction (Accessed: 19 November 2017).

Designing Buildings, 2016. Fabric first - Designing Buildings Wiki, s.l.: s.n.

Imrie, R., 2007. The interrelationships between building regulations and architects' practices. Environment and Planning B: Planning and Design, Volume 34, pp. 925-943.

Parametricism - Designing Buildings Wiki (2017). Available at: https://www.designingbuildings.co.uk/wiki/Parametricism (Accessed: 19 November 2017).

NBS, 2014. BIM Levels explained: Definitions for levels of BIM maturity from Level 0, through Level 1, Level 2 and Level 3 and beyond.

[Online] Available at: https://www.thenbs.com/knowledge/bim-levelsexplained [Accessed 18 November 2017].

McPartland, R. (2017) BIM Levels explained, NBS. Available at: https://www.thenbs.com/knowledge/bim-levels-explained (Accessed: 19 November 2017).

Robinson, J. W., 1990. Incorporating Myth and Science. Journal of Architectural Education, 44(1), pp. 20-32.

21