A Story

SPLITTING MEDIUMS: the power of separation

I invite you to listen to a story. In a future that’s closer than we may imagine, the super-structure holding up a hopeful dream buckled under the weight of the world. It held for several centuries, but it was futile. Its only hope was in sameness, order, obedience to the dream, and disobedience to the spirit which dwells in man. The civil order, where the masses transferred their power to others in the name of piety and patriotism, couldn’t withstand the impact loads of deviancy, endless wars, crisis after crisis, and the democratization of information. Nature overtook our cities in unexpected ways. Trees didn’t break through the asphalt of our endless parking lots. Our shopping malls weren’t claimed by the beasts of the fields. Our cities were claimed by human nature, the desire to build and dwell, and the social production of space. Informal shelter overtook the planned, delineated, segregated, comprehensible space that served the powerful in their accumulation of capital. The zoned esplanades dividing the haves and the have-nots filled in with “slums.”

However, the powerful are powerful after all. They would exploit their power as they’ve always done. Throughout history economic and political structures allowed them to manipulate life through crisis, division, and reinvention. This time, for whatever reason, call it the dream’s corroded foundation, none of those mechanisms were available. Their only option was separation. They would maintain power through spatial division. The privileged few would enter under the supervision of one of the looming guard towers surrounding a great gulf. Then cross over the Drawbridge to the Fortress for processing. After being ferried to the Transit Station, they would have freedom to travel between the Suburbs, the Communications Tower, and the Central Planning Administration.

The glitzy architecture of the New City contrasts with the organic slums that overtook the Old City. What you will notice; however, is the slums cannot be contained. The “seething forces are rattling the lid of the cauldron of the state and its space.” Informality is quietly encroaching on the elite’s sanitized vision. central planning suburbs

fortress

drawbridge

guard tower transit station

This imaginary world is called Splitting Mediums. It is an architectural manifestation of paradigms and power. Thomas Kuhn (1996) defines “paradigm” as a theory that attracts adherents and allows the formation of a discursive ecosystem. Paradigms create two phenomena; 1) they allow practitioners within a field to build on existing theories based on shared knowledge and 2) the theories become so entrenched that advancing beyond requires revolution. Foucault (1972) describes how this entrenchment is instrumentalized by the powerful through three mechanisms; surfaces of emergence, authorities of delineation, and grids of specification. Surfaces of emergence are the settings for which truth is named and described, authorities of delimitation are the people codified through law or opinion who are qualified to name and describe, and grids of specification are the systems in which a range of discourse can take place about a phenomenon (p.41-42). The convergence of these conditions forms an object (p.44), or a paradigm. Through paradigms, the powerful can create acceptable narratives, means of methods of social interaction, and the systems of reward and punishment.

Architecture schools/offices are surfaces of emergence where the norms of education and practiced are established. Professors, principles, lawyers, associations, and governing boards are the authorities of delineation who determine rules for accreditation and what constitutes reasonable standard of care. Normative architectural theory and practice are the grids of specification that establish how the profession can be discussed. The architectural profession was not a concept or object waiting to be discovered so it could be discussed and knowledge of it could be disseminated. Instead, it formed out of “positive conditions of a complex group of relations” (Foucault, 1972, p.45) that directs scholarship, treatment, and policy dealing with the built environment. For example, Thomas Markus (1993) writes that much of the entire program of public architecture has been directed toward “confining those who.. introduce chaos into the social order,” which includes “physically or mentally ill, those suffering from the moral disease of crime or unable to work as a result of old age or infirmity, the poor, the physically and mentally handicapped, the homeless and vagrant, orphans and deviants of all kinds” (p.95). Each of these categories has an “archeology” whose major formation can be descried in Enlightenment rationalism. These categories gave birth to architecture that serves as mechanisms for social control (p.96). Using the enlightenment paradigm that architecture could save humanity from itself, planners and architects reconfigured entire cities to serve powerful interests (Karakayali, 2010).