ISSUE 01
JUNE 2020 HOLDING THE CRISIS
Contents.
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Working Against Type J ack M urray ( with V ivian M itsogianni )
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Working Towards Type J effrey X u + S am T orre ( with NH A rch .)
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The End of the Escape J ack M urray
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Portrait of Madame X Y uchen G ao ( with L eanne Z ilka )
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Breaking the Fifth Wall J ack M urray
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Patent for an Exceptional City A imee H oward ( with S imone K och )
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Degrees of Truth J ack M urray
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reviews
L anglands
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B ell
The Last Studio M eagan B rooks ( with M ichael S pooner )
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Managing the Idea J ack M urray
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interviews
H Êlène F richot
Ideos That Don't Make Gram H annah Z hu
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Everything is in Transition J ean V iljoen + B ertholt B recht
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Salvage I sobel M oy
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Architecture after the Rain J ack M urray
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This work was produced on the traditional lands of the Wurundjeri Woi-wurrung and Boon Wurrung peoples of the Kulin Nation - I pay my respects to their Elders, past, present, and emerging, as well as any First Nations people reading. Sovereignty was never ceded.
I would like to thank the following individuals for their contributions, assistance and support:
Tope Adesina
Aimee Howard
Michael Spooner
Meagan Brooks
Arthur Knight
Sam Torre
Nicola Cortese
Reis Low
Jean Viljoen
Lauren Crockett
Isobel Moy
Jeffrey Xu
Senesios Frangos
Michael Murray
Hannah Zhu
Hélène Frichot
Stephanie Pahnis
Rose Gamble
Jack Stirling
Yuchen Gao
Diane Stubbings
And though they don’t know it
Tacita Dean Pia Ednie-Brown Hal Foster Gareth Gardner Leon van Schaik Neil Spiller
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Editorial In his 2015 work, ‘Bad New Days’, art critic Hal Foster is looking for terms. Seeking to trace existing practices of art and ascribe some grouping to their work – he describes five classifications of contemporary art. One of these, Archival Art describes an approach to combinatorial forms, appropriated imagery, and obscure sources ‘retrieved in a gesture of alternative knowledge or counter memory’. Foster describes these ‘archives’ as developing through ‘mutations of connection and disconnection’, referencing Thomas Hirschhorn’s desire to ‘make spaces for the movement and endlessness of thinking’. The archival artist projects new forms of affective association – displaying a kind of paranoid activity. This raiding of a historical archive is not necessarily as an ethnographic or curatorial exercise but as a way of drawing threads of connection.
It is an attempt at knotting ideas together to suggest alternate ways of thinking, or alternate modes of being in the world. The object of thought was a key agenda for this publication – how a publication might choreograph associative thinking, or archival practice through drawing together tangentially related projects. It is at once a collection of ways of thinking, a therapeutic unravelling of thoughts, or as Prof. Hélène Frichot describes it, the development of ‘thinking-tools’. The first entry, Working Against Type is a project that tries to think around a project that is far too large to be held all at once. It explores how procedural practice might carry a portion of the weight of the ideas in the projects. In the first associative leap, the following piece, Working Towards Type combines writing by Samuel Torre and project images from Jeffrey Xu. Drawing on a theoretical connection between Torre’s exhortation to ‘Be Speedy’, the project leans into what theorist Mark Fisher called the ‘capitalist real’. Though saying this, the banality of Xu’s technical college still displays enough unreality to pull against the bit. This connection between the quasi-accelerationist speed evident in Torre’s writing and the viscous realism of Xu’s project lead into The End of the Escape – a polemic essay that pulls apart the capitalist real – describing the essential crisis of capitalisms’ monopoly on the future. This essay is combined with cybercolonist Neil Spiller’s drawing, ‘The Chapel of the Twisted Christ’. The association attempts to display the energy of the text, and the unreality that might be realized through the virtual. This almost phantasmagoric unreality is continued in Yuchen Gao’s awardwinning Portrait of Madame X. This project is an unreal colonization of that centre of capitalist realism in Melbourne, Collins St. Organic and sensual in equal measure, the smooth and striated spaces of Gao’s project burst forth from the unexceptional concrete block of the building next door. The following piece is an even more ham-fisted explication of a Spillerian nightmare. Breaking the Fifth Wall is an exercise in projective fiction - aiming for evocation in association with the Spiller-esque drawing on the opposite page. Again working as an associative exercise, the drawing and the text is not necessarily of the same project, but there is a productive collaboration between the two.
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This productive collaboration between image and text is continued with Aimee Howard’s complex, evocative project Patent for an Exceptional City. The writing of Howard’s project never quite meshes neatly with the images of the project. Howard possesses a unique ability to muddy the waters of the real. A fundamentally real idea of Melbourne (the exceptional trees register), is associatively combined with documentation of Melbourne, and then reconstructed in part, in whole, on Mars. Fidelity is not Howard’s concern, mystique and misreadings are. Howard’s unfaithful readings of history are followed with a more faithful evocation of history in Langlands and Bell’s exhibition Degrees of Truth at the Soane Museum. Drawing on Leon Van Schaik’s essays on Sir John Soane as a method of review, there is an example of association within the exhibition, the works of Langlands and Bell sits productively alongside the historical milieu of the Soane Museum. A third approach to history is developed through Meagan Brooks work in The Last Studio, an archeological exploration of Melbourne and it’s sites of construction, this long-term project perhaps unintentionally engaged with many the tenants of Foster’s archival art, like obsessive documentation of existing conditions and the associated readings and misreadings of historical artefact. To requote Foster: ‘archival art[‘s move] to turn ‘excavation sites’ into ‘construction sites’ is welcome in another way too: it suggests a shift away from a melancholic culture that views the historical as little more than the traumatic’.
As we live through the current traumatic history that is COVID-19, the work of thinking this crisis was explored in conversation with Prof. Hélène Frichot. Managing the Idea is a long conversation touching on architectural education, the role of theory in architectural practice, the work of Graham Harman and his ontological ‘plague’, Frichot’s new book, the work of Isabelle Stengers, Donna Haraway, and Zoe Sofia, and the work of managing crisis and crisis-ideas. If, as Frichot suggests, writing is one way of thinking, then the sketched ideograms of Hannah Zhu are another, two ideograms, one thinking through Deleuze, and the other through Robin Evans display one way of managing ideas. Zhu accompanies these drawings with a short text describing their process. Archival art has a commitment to expanding history from something that is exclusively traumatic. In the next submission, this is evident in the combination of a Bertholt Brecht poem, My Young Son Asks Me with the post-coal history of Carreran marble in Jean Viljoen’s work Everything is in Transition. An associative exercise in crisis-thinking, Brecht’s plaintive cry to his son that ‘this State is collapsing’ is shown alongside a world in which the archetypal state, Greece continues to retain aesthetic and historical relevance. The redeployment of history and the raiding of our cultural archives to create new responses is the essence of archival art.
A new world isn’t to be found in this project, but perhaps we can trace the cracks in the old one?
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These cracks in the world are explicitly colonized in Isobel Moy’s project Salvage, an exercise in thinking with radical psycho-geographer and zine maker Laura Grace Ford, and her incredible work Savage Messiah. In Ford’s work, she aggressively embodies the voices of those left behind in the aftermath of neoliberalism. In the words of Mark Fisher in his introduction to the book, ‘Savage Messiah deploys anachronism as a weapon’. The collages of Ford are associative exercises in disrupting time, the ‘seamless, already-established capitalist reality of London dissolves into a riot of potentials’ – there is a sense of mourning in Ford’s work. This feeling of grief and loss doesn’t directly appear in Moy’s hyper-saturated imagery, but the idea-object of Salvage choreographs the architectural response. In Moy’s work architects are ‘curators of the obsolete’. Moy dives into the cracks in an old order, populating it with a smoothing kind of architecture. Architecture that is not a neo-liberal project of restoration, but one of steadfast resistance to crisis. The managing of the idea is done in blockwork and tinted concrete, a limpet-growth against a modernization of London, or Berlin, or Melbourne. The steady-handed realism of Salvage is abandoned in Architecture after the Rain, a single projective image showing a divested wasteland populated with scraps of half-finished projects, histories, and the spectre of robotic futures. Like Max Ernst’s 1942 painting ‘Europe after the Rain II’, this image is a therapeutic act of associative imagery. It conveys an emotional exhaustion and a complete break with a totalizing capitalist reality. This work leans into the trauma of history being made current. It is becoming another one of Hal Foster’s new categories. Abject art. Abject art is a shift from the real understood as an effect of representation to the real seen as an event of trauma. Unlike Xu’s capitalist realist imagery earlier, this publication ends on a note of capitalist realism as an event of trauma. We have trouble holding the idea of crisis. It weighs so much that it is exhausting to bear for even a moment, but perhaps through the threading together of ideas, perhaps through a gritted-teeth grin, perhaps through a collective trauma as sharp as glass, we might find ways of holding the crisis.
Together.
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Working Against Type
JACK MURRAY
Three Parallel Aims This project had three parallel aims: 1. First was a conceptual critique of procedural architecture through the process of developing this building. 2. Second was a set of ideas about student’s agency in learning, and the ability of a large warehouse-style educational building (i.e. Here East) to offer some opportunity that is unavailable anywhere else in the tertiary education sector in Melbourne. 3. Third is a kind of compositional understanding of the assemblage of the building. An understanding that not only are the the rooms and workshops understood as being in relationship with each other, so too are the elements that make up the building, the structure and the perforation. All of them are in relationship with each other specifically because they’ve been drawn out from the site or drawn out from the process. The two are wound so tightly together that the initial process starts to fade into the background as more and more layers are placed on top of each other. This essay must begin with an acknowledgement. This building and this project was uninterested in formal gymnastics, or with a rigorous parametricism of rationality. Architecturally this project was interested in the assemblage of parts as a compositional whole, the exhaustion of process, and the understanding that the systems inherent in the site remain vitally important to the architecture. One of the key questions of the project was this. If I take the output of one elastic natural process (dune formation) to create a striated space across the site, can I draw out from that same procedural output understandings of roofscape, structure, exterior, interior, carving and courtyards. At one point I used the metaphor of oil painting to describe how the elements of the project would interact. My contention was that a project of layered conditions like this, effecting elements in a relational field rather than a holistically designed object, can be described through elasticity. That is, each layer has a certain ability to stretch to accommodate program, form, or briefing. The elasticity of each layer, like
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in the layers of oil painting, should build up. Inelastic layers, such as briefing, site conditions, and volumes should exist at the initial layer, and more elastic layers – circulation, empty space, social space – can expand, flex, and encircle the less elastic layers. Initially I spoke about image and how it might be distorted by process. This is just another way of conceptualising that link. The ‘image’ of recognisable forms is strong, we have an ingrained understanding of how they should read, so affecting the language of that form is far more interesting in this context than effecting the form itself. Developing new forms from process seems to me to miss the opportunity inherent in the project. The sheds that are already on site are a great starting image purely because they suggest an organisational system already, they have a grid, a repeating ‘field’ of form, that can then be tied into a wider system operating across the site, and by extension, the distortion of that field by processual interventions and emergent understandings and readings of the opportunities that that processual field implies. The question I was asked most often was; ‘why dunes and why like this?’. I began to question why this kept coming up. Why a project like this might have value in a wider field of procedural architectural practice. This wider field had for me included the experiments of Greg Lynn. Experiments which, like mine, often used animated simulation as the primary tool – looking at a ‘frozen moment’ for emergent architectural properties and ways of applying that emergence to new understandings of program. The question this raised for me was not a unique one. I had been asking myself continuously, what is that moment of cessation.
When do we stop, and why do we stop when we do?
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A xonometric
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without roof , J ack murray ,
2019
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Often it is arbitrary, you say that the simulation will run for 460 frames and then cease. The ‘object’ of that process is then questioned, and the experiment repeated. The issue I find is that the simulation and the process is necessarily one that relates to increments of time, and the ‘hunch’ you begin a procedural experiment with is often is related to a process occurring across time. For example, in my own project, my hunch with the dunes was that it would create a variable grain across a two-dimensional plane and introduce striation to what in the beginning was a featureless plane. It would move and disturb a volume, and out of that, some analysis of changing density across a site could be brought forward. To a greater or lesser degree it did that, a simulated sand pile was disrupted, moved, and striated. But when I froze it and took it into Rhino and began peeling it apart, it lost the potency of that initial hunch. It lost any feeling of being made up of sand particles and became overly topographical. It lost the behavioural nature of movement over time and became static and stilted, and since it operated in a non-fractal way, it became like scaling an image, not scaling a behaviour. Now I admit that part of this may be technical limitations on my own part, I’m sure many people would and have found ways to manage these processes in such a way so that it produces scalar behaviour. This suggested a possible way forward, I knew to some degree what these processes produced, I knew what I could get out of them, and I could have very feasibly spent the rest of that semester developing a series of procedural algorithms or manoeuvres that shuffled this building around and produced novel forms and relationships out of that process. But I also questioned what might be produced if I accepted the frozen moment as an image of a process, not the process itself. This was the beginning of an idea of an exhausted process, one in which every element of the object/image was drawn out and applied – any question was answered by staring back at the one image and trying to understand it in a new way. The initial process, a striation of space through dune simulation acted as an autonomous gestural beginning, it provided the figural tool by which the rest of the project was designed and understood.
This project in many ways was about finding ways of having agency within process. Agency for me meant not just falling back on form generation and instead trying to reconceptualise procedural architecture against questions I had about the project – investigating new ways of using language rather than new languages in themselves. The vision I have for new education precincts is also about student’s agency in the world. For a long time and even to some extent currently, students at university are often seen as a homogeneous mass, they are described as ‘the student body’, and that’s rather apt. We diagnose and treat the illnesses of the whole student body, rather the recognising that each student is an individual actor with agency in the world, and agency in how they interact with the world.
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As a project that is ostensibly and primarily a STEM campus, the question of how science specifically rewards agency in its students is vital. Tutors in STEM fields can often see students who cannot carve out a path in excess of the research given to them by the tutor stumble and not progress to doctoral or post-doctoral positions, as they lack some independent agency or aptitude for the scientific process. Now some philosophers of science suggest that a vital aspect of science is a particular kind of creative practice, of a transfer of information from one field to another through ‘invention-discovery’ as Pia Ednie-Brown might put it. Physicist James Clerk Maxwell applying ideas from one branch of science to solve problems in another is a perfect example. This creativity, I would argue, also comes from agency – and the encouragement and teaching of self-driven, independent learning that treats the student as an agent and an actor in their own tutelage. This is supported by much of the contemporary research which suggests targeted and individualised learning is far more effective and useful than a standard one-size-fits-all approach. Roland Snooks, speaking about his Major Project, said that for him it became a process of ‘sensing a whole within the simulation and trying to draw out surfaces faithful to that simulation’ and I think there was something useful about that for my project. We spoke about process as something that develops a diagram for action, and I thought that that idea can be extended.
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To name drop a nineties favourite, Deleuze described the diagram as a way of describing ‘the distribution of the power to affect and the power to be affected’, and there is in some way a truth about this, especially for this project.
If we treat the outcome of the initial process as a diagram of relationships of affective power, there is a model where the image is treated as holding emergent effect. Out of the diagram image produced by process and hunch, an emergent design order might develop through conceptualisation and application.
Pia Ednie-Brown describes it like this: ‘All too often, the discursive account, which is also both invented and discovered, involves pretending that what we realised at the end was what we intended all along, as if the process taught us nothing because we were, very professionally, ‘in control’ or that the process was nothing but a means to an end. Somewhere between the mystery and the pretence is the undeniable: the process of invention-discovery. We are not passive vessels for the passage of some divine creative will, nor were we entirely or autonomously in control. We participate in the world at every turn’.
This process of ‘invention-discovery’ allows for reading of image and an emergent discovery of practice out of process, rather than necessarily a discussion of process as a totality of means to an end. This is a compositional understanding of behaviour and process, whereby the mode of practice is one of understanding the possibility inherent in process outcomes and acting as a creative practitioner to draw-out or indicate the whole from that inherent possibility.
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R oofscape (D etail ), J ack
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Working Toward Type
tullamarine technical college , jeffrey xu ,
JEFFREY XU SAMUEL TORRE
2019
don’t be bored work more update update update look over here don’t look over there don’t reflect focus externalise don’t overthink think less update more scroll scroll scroll
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be speedy
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End Of The Escape.
JACK MURRAY
‘It is now easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.’ - SLAVOJ ZIZEK + FREDERICK JAMESON, Capitalist Realism
Nowhere is this more true than in this current moment of global panic, immediately post-fires, and pre-mass quarantine.
T he C hapel of S piller , 2006
the
The evidence provided by this current crisis is clear. The structures that neoliberal capitalism have put in place since the deregulation of the eighties are woefully ill equipped to deal with the effects of COVID-19. Mass casualisation, the creation of a new class of precariat, and the disintegration of the social safety nets designed to deal with these kind of crises are all evident, as they have been for years.
T wisted C hrist , N eil
In this kind of situation the presence of the abyss is constant. Like Pascal, we carry our abyss with us wherever we go1. The younger we are, the more casual our employment, or the more precarious our employment, the more we recognise the abyss that threatens us should we fall.
To analyze the modern situation of production, or to speculate on future propositions and avoid the material fact of labour is an abject deriliction of our duty as commentators. It is why the idea that perpetual growth is both good and possible is so egregious. In ‘Automated Landscapes and the Human Dream of Relentlessness’, Strelka Mag proffers such questionable phrases as human ‘uptime’, while talking positively of eliminating ‘risks, unions, and failure’ all in service of some questionably defined ‘human dream of relentlessness’. The article describes a situation of modern production, predicated on 24/7 cycles of constant ‘uptime’, without ever delving into what this production’s psychological and material effect is.
1. The mathematician Blaise Pascal supposedly had what we think was a form of agoraphobia (fear of open spaces). After being struck by a carraige in his youth, he constantly saw a yawning abyss to his left side.
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They uncritically discuss the possibility of technology to ‘rapidly scale up operations and business’ maintaining ‘growth as the only constant’. They speak of the ‘delicate labour’ required by agriculture as performed most often by ‘migrant workers’ monitored in ‘real time by RFID scanners’. With performance evaluation occurring constantly, and almost certainly no ongoing guarantee of employment, the psychological impact of this precarious, surveilled work, is almost certainly negative. The way that Strelka Mag seems to avoid this is a matter of concern. The almost romantic way in which Strelka seem to discuss the ‘beauty and crudeness’ of these automated landscapes gives rise to the question of inhabitation. For a journal of an institute of design, the uncritical acceptance of inhabitation with a kind
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of ‘what can we do’ shoulder shrug means this article, instead of providing lucid analysis, seems instead to be a kind of vacant portrait of a condition. It is just depicting in aestheticized ways real issues with modern modes of production. It is not only Strelka that avoid the psychological impact of modern production on the precarious labour of marginalised human beings. The essay on Perspecta, written by Marcus Carter and Christopher Macinkoski displays a similar kind of ethical disregard for the labour of design, the labour of those involved in executing it, and the modern condition of precarization. While it was written several years ago now (2011), I wonder how much of their diagnosis would remain the same. It spends page upon page hitting theory with a stick, while retaining much of the strange crutch of ‘objective research’ that their view of contemporary architectural production demands. It evacuates the object of architecture to be the technical demands of ‘innovative solutions’ and ‘objective testing’, rather than engaging with critical theory as something to integrate with the wider body of architecture in a subject-oriented way. Architecture is inhabited and it is through that inhabitation it is defined. There is no circumstance in which architecture is an isolated object in the world, perfect in form and reason - and it can certainly never be an ‘objective’ construction. Either as a materialist object (the timescales involved in architecture do not lend themselves to panacea-like fixes for social problems), or as an aesthetic one (there is no world in which an aesthetic object can predict all responses to it objectively).
The crises evident in the world do not have architectural solutions, architecture is a solution come too late to a problem already past solving. The crises evident in architecture are not based on, or having to choose between a ‘critical theory’ based approach, a ‘technology’ based approach, and a ‘reality’ based approach as these essays might suggest. Capital, through it’s trading of ‘futures’ has a manifestly realised future. The philosopher and occasional meth-addled racist Nick Land went so far as to suggest that in capitalism, the ‘non-actual has effective currency’ . Capital self-reinforces it’s future, and every element of capital conspires towards a position whereby it’s non-actual is increasingly subsidised into the wider and increasingly virtual body of capital. The technology of architecture is not what causes it to be in crises. A revolution in digital technology will not materially change the modes of economy that cause the processes of architecture to begin. The crisis of architecture is only a subsidary of the crisis of the world. Capital’s monopoly on the future is only sure as long as the foundations of what we consider to be real are maintained. The actions taken by state bodies in the wake of the pandemic are beginning to demonstrate that the mythology of capitalism is flawed. A trillion dollars can be poured into the American stock market without a single cry of ‘but how might we pay for it’, health insurance copays can be suspended, ghost flights continue to take place only because capitalism has created its own engine of perpetual motion, obliterating the idea that the market is the most efficient way to respond to demand. The conspiracy architecture, and creative production, must engage in is that of demonstrating the ‘non-durability of the real’. What does an architecture that demonstrates the unreality of the future look like. It is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism, so before we consider the end of capitalism, we must first consider the end of the world. That is our conspiracy.
‘Escape is never more exciting than when it spills out into the street’
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The Portrait Of Madame X
YUCHEN GAO
When we think of Melbourne’s CBD we would often describe it as a space where different cultures intertwine and have the freedom to celebrate their uniqueness. We pride ourselves on having a city that embraces all. However, there are some parts of the city that don’t seem to follow the same pluralist thinking as the rest. These parts of the city believe in the singular utopia and single solution for all, which results in heavy repetition. Artists like John Brack have captured these moments of repetition amidst the loss of beauty in a metropolis. His painting Collins Street, 5PM explored the language of singularity that can be translated between architecture and people. Collins Street has one of the most acknowledged business districts, it has always had a trend towards exclusivity and elitism, which has resulted in a singularity of architecture, program and demographics traversing the street. My proposition aims to curate spaces that infiltrate Collins Street to break down the façade of intimidation and offer programs of pleasure as a dose of excitement. The proposed series of spaces act as an extension of an existing commercial tower located on the corner of Queens and Collins Streets. It recognises the existing structure and glazing as an architectural framework, then begins inflating spaces within the tower creating new conditions that challenge and manipulate that existing framework. The mesh drapes on the building, mediating between the old and the new. It creates a third condition that exaggerates the emerging forms and offer opportunities for opening and enclosure. In developing this project, I looked to garment making and designers like Issey Miyake and Ann Demeulenmesster as precedents in parallel to my project. They understand that different strategies must be employed when treating the waist, arms and the neck. There is a consciousness and care navigating the body as the framework, even when they are curating elaborate forms. I want to utilise that philosophy in my project by creating architecture that responds to different existing conditions but is simultaneously able to reject surrounding buildings that share the same aesthetic expression.
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The extension celebrates desire and interrupts the seriousness of Collins Street. There is a strong juxtaposition between the existing tower and the extension as they explore their relationship between the old and new, public and private, rigid and organic. The extension offers opportunity of pleasure and desire especially in the sense of voyeurism and exhibitionism. An office worker might be working at their desks and there may be a strip club in the other room. They could be completely oblivious until a single moment where the architecture reveals itself to them, giving them a taste of what happens beyond their office typology. The boxing ring elevates itself from the viewing platforms forcing the audiences to physically move around to navigate the constraints and boundaries. More viewing opportunities are hidden above the ceiling spaces where voids within walls are aligned to expose the activity below. A strip club and a gathering space overlap with each other on a higher level. The poles of the strip club penetrate through the floor slab. They are used as the structural columns for the platform above in the gathering space, blurring the line between the two and eradicating the shame that some people feel when attending either of them. Other spatial conditions can be experienced in the views as they curate a narrative of one traversing the building. The ramps wrap around the extension connecting the programs together. The mesh drapes and stretches on parts of the ramp, shifting its opaqueness, offering tension and relief. It also offers new viewing opportunities of Southbank and the CBD. Showing off buildings like the cornered Gothic buildings swallowed up by skyscrapers. MADAME X challenges Collins Street’s typical office programs by offering a new typology of pleasure. The form as a civic gesture generates curiosity and attracts people across Melbourne to experience Collins Street in a new perspective. The extension of desire and pleasure emerges from an existing commercial tower creates a new dialogue of voyeurism and exhibitionism between the traditional office intervention and the extension, enabling opportunities of free expression.
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P ortrait of M adame X, Y uchen G ao , 2019
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Breaking the Fifth Wall
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JACK MURRAY
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You submerge yourself. Your body’s dirt turns the water as grey as the walls. As your head slips under the water and your eyelids shut, you remember. You remember bringing your ghost white hands to bear on it. Wrapping your fingers around the glass, soft edges, the seductive glare off its curves. Stroke your thumb on it. Down the street above you a heaviness with a bin bag blackness inside, you recognise its presence. Its cyborg edges clicking on the pavement. And then, before the key hits the lock, your hands all thumbs and with a click. The door falls away to black. The edges sharpen to nothingness. Knife edge beckoning, all geometries, no form. Turning to the street, windows fall away into the black, streetlights start emitting. Waves of garbled neo-babylonian jargon. The edges of the street a slipway to infinity. As the world around you distorts and shifts, the one certainty is the heaviness above, its rain-cloud curve and wires like a naturalists laboratory caress you. Holding you back from the threatening-to-fall of it all. It doesn’t matter whether or not you’re inside your house anymore – you already are, and were, and won’t be. The world is an endless matrix of could’ve-beens and never-was’s, all looked over with a machinic glare. Neo-Babylon arrives from the future without a sound, louder than bells. Flicking an augmented switch to turn off one set of lights and turn on another. A different light that blows open the home. Blows open the self. Leaves us all floating like rain held in stasis. Walking home from the shops feels different now. The air is static and you don’t pass anyone. The lights are dimmer, you can’t hear the same background white noise as before. You feel the rain before you’re allowed to see it, and the icicle pin-pricks on your skin don’t bother you so much anymore. The haze on the glass is vaporized instantly as you walk forward. The coat is starting to stick to your skin now as you smell the first drops of second-hand water, dripped through the blackness.
They smell like petrol and compressed air.
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Patent for an Exceptional City
AIMEE HOWARD
Exceptional Locations - 0.1 In his reconceptualizing of ancient Rome, Desgodetz’s taxonomy of documents were failed by the overbearing speculation from the imagination of the author; published to scale, received as fact and distributed as such they set our understanding of the ancient city and informed those who failed to question. If deconstruction denotes a mode of analytical inquiry, we don’t want to ‘undo’. Rather, a process of isolation and reform has been employed by locating the exceptional. Rather, a process of isolation and reform has been employed. Like Tschumi’s follies, we’ve contained the very logic of displacement and de-structuring, but rather than a matrix of marks, we’ve located the exceptional. Learning from the mistakes in the recorded, we sought to discover that which has existed beyond the ancient temples; the water systems. The aqueducts of old and sewer systems that drove cities into the modern age, clean drinking water in the wake of the black death. Understanding that, we’ve taken the documented exceptional trees as our starting point. These places are exceptional examples of Melbourne and therefore the premise for our utopic civilisation to be transferred on Mars. We have relied on the images and information taken from the exceptional tree document only. This information we have transferred literally into the re-imagining of an exceptional city.
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Objects (architectural elements) do not exist independently of human perception and are inexhaustible by their relations with humans or other objects. All relations and individual objects have the ability to distort their related object in the same manner as human consciousness and exist on equal footing with one another. Classical elements in architecture are iconographically and universally accepted as architecture. When these elements are fragmented (whether physically or as a mental glitch) as isolated objects and distorted by human consciousness our memory can manifest in a failure of what is supposed to be known. Failure relies on the preconceived realization of an intended objective or outcome, only existing because of expectation. For failure is contingent to time and place, what was once a ‘success’ can be shortly deemed a ‘failure’ and vice versa. Ruins are implicit as failed objects in time and memory. Ruins (as fragments of truth (whole)), can be remembered as a preconceived notion of what it once was. The ‘un-ruined’ building here being tangentially related to the truth and whole. If, for example, an architecture existed only in the implication and the fragment (ruin) of something else would it remain un-ruined and therefore true ?
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Gas Holder Explosion Port Melbourne Gas Holder explosion premonition as delivered by anonymous. A probable sequence of events: 1. Breakage of the cup in the middle of the lift, simultaneously at 4 places. 2. The breakage of the cup in the middle allowed the water to run out and the gas to escape. Hissing and bubbling described by Balford and Ellis. 3. An obstruction placed willfully or accidentally. 4. On March 31 1921 a letter was sent to The Secretary of the Metropolitan Gas Company which read exactly as follows: Sir, I am a student of the Occult Science and it as come to my knowledge that during or about the 25th of April there will be an attempt to blow up this company’s Gasometer at South Melbourne. (perhaps more). The trouble is outside, not in. Feeling the responsibility heavy upon me I am writing to warn you so that means may be taken to prevent if possible this awful thing. It is purely and simple through the divine will this came to me. Other knowledge which came to me through the same channel as proved correct. (such as the war.) on June 14 June before thewar was declared. Scappa flow incident which took place 6 weeks later. Also Sydney railway strike. These things I proved to be true. Hence my anxiety for our city and people. Trusting you will go into the silence and ask your soul is it true and then let the search light of intelligence sweep the heavens.
Public Bath House Public Bath House, located in a portion of the Exceptional Gas Holder at North Melbourne. 1. A public bath house provides the best circumstances for consistency in retaining recycled water quality. The water used here for public bathing is continuously recycled through a Urea Bioreactor. 2. This water can also be recycled for drinking and re-hydrating food on Mars. 3. The foretold, the jug falls over and spills itself, the distinction between the thing. 4. An idea made of between the thing.
E xceptional G as H older , E xceptional B ath H ouse , 2019, A imee H oward
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The site of Melbourne has been laid over with the landscape of Mars. The idea of Melbourne is transferred here as a memory recorded through documented history with the civilians of Mars hoping to remember this history through it’s reconstruction.
History here is taken as fact with misinterpretation being highly likely.
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Langlands & Bell: Degrees of Truth
JACK MURRAY
S ir J ohn S oane ’ s M useum , L ondon
Langlands and Bell are an artistic pair that’ve been working together since 1978. Just before the outbreak of the pandemic, they had installed an incredibly thoughtful exhibition of their work in the John Soane Museum in London. Much like the delightful ‘Out of Character’ by Studio MUTT in 2018, Langlands and Bell’s work overruns the spaces of Sir John Soane’s house. Carefully crafted new pieces merge with reoriented older works to speak not only to the particular interests of Langlands and Bell, but also to the architectural spaces of the museum. The exhibition begins with a glass table-cum-display case containing artefacts of London previously used by Langlands and Bell in their found object work - this includes ‘Wind Dried Whippet’ (previous page bottom right) which is a mummified dog found inside a wall after the demolition of a building in the East End of London. The embodied narrative of these objects brings a great depth to the almost museum-like presentation of this artwork. The design of the display cases and
above : right :
L anglands A nd B ell in T he D ome R oom B urnt I nterlocking C hairs , 1997
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top :
T races
of
L iving , 1986-2020
centre : ibid . bottom :
W ind D ried W hippet , 1982
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artworks, including and especially the chairs speaks to a delicate understanding of the history and place of the Soane Museum but also to the historical work of Langlands and Bell. This can be seen in the chair backs reflecting their flight path work. Each element of this exhibition could be individually examined and pulled apart but far more interesting is the Langlands and Bell’s use of found space installation art as a curatorial practice. The siting of these installed works is so specific to the Soane Museum, and relates so strongly to the architectural practice of Sir John Soane, that it acts as an object lesson in curatorial design. The placement of works is noticeable, they don’t fade into the eighteenth century backdrop of the immaculately preserved museum - but they don’t feel out of place in the scheme of Soane’s rabid collection. Many of the installations feel as if Soane himself were still collecting and had purchased the pieces to sit inside his home. In his seminal essay on Soane’s work, ‘Walls, Toys and the Ideal Room’, Leon Van Schaik identifies three elements that characterise the architecture of John Soane, namely - the layered structuring wall, toy-block articulation, and the insertion of the ‘ideal room’ into already existing spaces. All three of these gestural strategies are at play in the Soane House, especially in the Breakfast Room, with it’s insertion as a geometric volume into the existing houses that Soane had purchased. The point this review attempts to make is that these strategies can also be seen in the exhibition design executed by Langlands and Bell. The layered structuring wall is described by Van Schaik as a tool for ‘dissolving the wall surfaces of the room’ as in the Soane House, it’s ‘retained structure masked the enclosure beyond’ with the enclosed loggia. In the use of chairs on the ground floor (seen to the left) the vestigial archways above create a ‘thickened’ wall to the room, into which the large wall bookshelf sits. The chairs occupy this leftover space under the arches colonising this thickened wall - and relating directly to that arching room divider above them. The toy block spaces, individually crafted and fitted together - are described by Van Schaik as ‘block-to-block relationships’ between ‘free standing geometrical forms’. Langlands and Bell’s piece in the First Floor exhibition space, ‘Adjoining Rooms’ (seen to the right) does exactly this - much like the Library-Dining Room and the Dome-Colonnade, there are three ‘toy block’ table display case spaces that are adjoined end to end, as geometrically pure relationships they are in many ways a Soanean nod - and the inclusion of them towards the end of the exhibition, after experiencing this architectural technique through the exceptional dome and library spaces, shows a deep understanding of the relationships they are drawing upon between their own work and Soanes. The last item, the creation of the ‘ideal room’ - is seen in what Van Schaik considers the pinacle of the Lincons Inn Fields house, the Breakfast Room. The installation in this space is small but extremely clearly executed.
above :
G rand T our , 2020
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A globe in a circular table, positioned directly under the lantern, has its dimensions derived from those of Soane’s own breakfast table. It draws a relationship both to the circular space of the handkerchief dome, but also to the arched edges leading into the naturally-lit side vaults of the breakfast room. It is a distinct white insertion, that does not feel like it is a copy of the space, but retains the sense of being a respectful contemporary addition. The work also speaks to Langlands and Bells own artistic practice as the globe shows the air routes of the world, like the chair backs downstairs.
Langlands and Bell have executed an exhibition of great depth and quality, that manages to showcase not only their own inimitable talents as designers and artists - but also to recontextualise the immense architectural beauty of the Soane Museum.
top left :
M odel for I nterlocking C hairs , 1997 & centre : T he B urnt M adonna , 1985 front : A djoining R ooms , 1989 rear : A pple , C upertino , 2018
top right bottom bottom
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The Last Studio
MEAGAN BROOKS
Be convincing. The journey towards the banal is a loss of ones’ childhood. It is the loss of the pure and picturesque and instead becomes the tedious simplification of rules. We are boxed in. Post justification condemns us to the monotonous world of copy and paste.
‘Be clear, don’t be silly.’ There is merit in the abstruse. It is foolish, to believe that we must understand everything. Or rather, it is pure paranoia. It is a metaphysical world - a playground of the trivial and the intricate. Truth is, we are defined by the convoluted expression of mundanity and the obscure.
‘Grow up. Stop using colour. Don’t be silly.’ That isn’t to say that coming across a state of resolution is no longer the object of ambition. We don’t want to lose touch with reality. In fact, it is the intimate, the layering and eclipsing of familiarity that builds complexity and meaning. Through playful cooperation of what we know and what we want, elation is achieved.
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So, when you tell me that you’re nervous.
Be silly.
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It will never end, so grab a spoon, put your boots on, door bitch gives you permission.
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Managing the Idea: Thinking with Hélène Frichot
JACK MURRAY
Part One “First bushfires and then a pandemic.” These are the circumstances under which Hélène Frichot, architectural writer, critic, theorist, teacher, and the former Director of Critical Studies in Architecture at KTH Stockholm, has returned to Melbourne. Frichot is a radical and highly original thinker working in the gaps between architecture and philosophy. Her work has engaged with feminism, criticality, contemporary philosophy, and, notably, intersections between the humanities and architecture, where she demonstrates that architecture can be seen as a multiplicity of diverse concerns which mesh with local “environment-worlds”. Her recent book Creative Ecologies (2018) offers new ways of viewing the discipline of architecture, engaging with the climate crisis, modern technology, radical architectural practices, and “disasters of thought”1. It was during the height of Australia’s coronavirus crisis that I interviewed Frichot via video-call. Speaking from her home in Melbourne, she sports a hand-drawn chalk Zoom background. Asked how she’s found her return, Frichot instantly mentions the cultural familiarity of Melbourne. For her Melbourne is “pretty well as close to home as it gets”, having grown up in Perth but electing to move to Melbourne in 2000. After a period of years living in Sweden and pursuing “new adventures”, she has returned to Australia to take up the position of Director of the University of Melbourne’s Bachelor of Design program, a course she describes as “a very strange and lumpy creature, made up of quite a different array of disciplines”. Frichot’s goal to “slowly ease…into the position and get a feel for [it]” has been disrupted by the current upheaval, with its “emergency meetings and endless workshops about the pivot to online learning”. There has also been the “confusion and disorientation” involved in learning the language of a new institution. Frichot laughs at the speed with which she has had to incorporate new institutional acronyms into her vocabulary. It’s “almost as bad” as working in Stockholm, she candidly admits. “My Swedish is basically shit”.
1. Frichot, Hélène. Creative Ecologies: Theorising The Practice Of Architecture. Bloomsbury Visual Arts, 2018, p. 184 2. Carter, Marcus and Christopher Marcinkoski. “Perspecta.” From 20/20. Editorial Takes on Architectural Discourse, by Kirk Wooller, London, 2019, pp. 93-107.
A ll I mages
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When asked about shifts in architectural education, and the general angst about the mention of theory in architecture schools – in particular Marcus Carter and Christopher Marcinkoski’s acerbic description of the “vague and corrupt topics [of] criticality [and] critical theory” and the attempt to reorient architectural practice away from the “egregious insularity of the critical theory project” (as identified by the editors of Perspecta in Kirk Wooler’s Editorial Takes on Architectural Discourse2) – Frichot begins by noting that “we all look a little bit too closely towards discourse emerging out of the United States,” which for her has retained an “unfortunately dominant role.” The debate between the theoretical and the projective, she notes, has been rolling on without much new material since the turn of the century.
T acita D ean , F atigues (D etail ), 2013
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“What are you wasting your time debating? What’s the use of endlessly saying, ‘Oh yes it’s the death of theory... again’. ‘Oh yes, let’s bash theory round the head...again’.” Here, she refers to Michael Speaks, who made a critique not just of theory but, specifically, of critical theory, a mode of discourse most commonly associated with the traditions of the Frankfurt School. In Perspecta 38, for example, Speaks’ article attempts to “finally banish philosophy and critical theory from any discussion of contemporary practice”3. Frichot’s response: “it just seems such a waste of time to debate these things.” “If it turns out that critical theory is useful in discussing these other problems that we’re dealing with, from vast inequities to concatenating global climatic crises, then use critical theory! What’s the big problem? Why do we continue to agonise about theory, and specifically critical theory, when it continues to have an indispensable role in contemporary architectural discourse.” For Frichot, that role starts with rethinking what theory can do; reformulating it, especially in its encounters with architectural humanities. Frichot emphasises the importance of asking, “What do we mean by being critical?”, particularly given the standard assumption that critical theory in the milieu of architecture education “is about deconstructing, taking apart, or demolishing”. She suggests one option is to discard the term entirely, an option adopted by a colleague of Frichot’s in Stockholm, Brady Burroughs, who displaced critical theory with the idea of architectural flirtation. Burroughs “performative, queer feminism”4 uses the flirtation as a way of undermining the reproduction of power in “serious” subjects, criticality being one of these serious, more traditional subjects. For Frichot it’s important to redefine “what it is to be a critic, what it is to undertake critical work or entertain criticality”, and here she references the work of the Architectural Humanities Research Association, as well as the 2004 book Critical Architecture, edited by Jane Rendell, Jonathan Hill, Murray Fraser, and Mark Dorrian5.
“It’s reclaiming why it’s valuable to engage in an idea of critical architecture”.
3. Carter, Marcus, Christopher Marcinkoski, Forth Bagley, and Ceren Bingol. "After-Narrative: Editor's Preface." Perspecta 38 (2006): 8-11. 4. Burroughs, Brady et al. Architectural Flirtations. Arkitektur- Och Designcentrum, 2016. 5. Rendell, Jane, and Jonathan Hill. Critical Architecture. Routledge, 2007. 6. Frichot, Hélène. "A Creative Ecology Of Practice For Thinking Architecture". Ardeth, vol 01, no. 01, 2018, doi:10.17454/ ARDETH01.11. 7. Frichot, Hélène. Creative Ecologies: Theorising The Practice Of Architecture. Bloomsbury Visual Arts, 2018.
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For Frichot, Isabelle Stengers’ ‘ecologies of practice’ have offered a useful way to respond to questions of critical practice. In the abstract of her essay “Creative Ecology of Practice for Thinking Architecture”6 Frichot explains that Stenger’s ecologies of practice are a way of describing habitat. For creative practitioners, this is the context in which you work, as well as the habits that define your methods. Frichot notes Stengers’ argument that, “In operating within your ‘habitat’ your practice must feel out its borders, recognises its limits, and also push against them, in order to re-establish them again and again.” What we need, Frichot stresses, is “respect for the different approaches… an open dialogue. We need to enjoy each other’s company!” Similarly, we need to recognise that “a little bit of critical theory…affords the “thinking-tools” that allow you to fully engage with the discipline. Frichot engages with this “irritation” around theory – and in particular the work of philosopher Graham Harman and his “strategically branded philosophical project”7 – in Creative Ecologies. Frichot is aware of the agitation associated with discussing Harman’s theories of Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO), and often observes her colleagues “delicately dancing around their discomfort”. While the best option she suggests might just be to ignore Harman’s ideas, she says that it’s impossible to “avoid the fact that he is the very first professor of philosophy sitting in SCI_Arc”. For Frichot, Harman’s presence in the institution is a “worry”, something that links into her concerns about the dominance of American architectural discourse, and her apprehension that his work might “inaugurate a third wave of retrograde, reactionary architectural phenomenology”.
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For Frichot, OOO’s adherents “get very close to trying to turn OOO into an instruction guide for how to do aesthetically pleasing architecture”. Even more concerning for Frichot, is that Harman is “threatening to depoliticise architecture, when architecture needs to be political. Now more than ever.” When asked why OOO is proving so attractive to so many architectural institutions and theoretically minded architects, Frichot replies, “The reason why it’s so attractive is that it is a little bit like the way right-wing thinking and populism work.” Clarifying, Frichot says her sense is that, architects engaging with OOO are thinking, “Oh what a relief. We can finally go back to the aesthetic object that is architecture.” It’s not something they want to say themselves, she suggests, because they don’t want to sound anti-intellectual. If that’s the case, Frichot concludes, it’s a “dangerous” perspective to hold. It allows architects to ignore social responsibilities by arguing that it’s okay to attend exclusively to the aesthetics of the object. What then is the other side of that coin? If architecture is picking-and-choosing philosophies, Derrida in the eighties, Deleuze in the nineties, Harman now, what are the philosophies that are being overlooked? Frichot here chooses to “represent the feminist cause”, male thinkers, she asserts, being over-represented in both architecture and philosophy.
“Where are the women thinkers? We’re overlooking the contributions that they could be making to our disciplines”. In what she describes as a “splatter-gun” approach, Frichot begins listing writers: African-American thinker and writer bell hooks, whose work engages with new modes of critical, feminist pedagogies such as experimental writing practices; Sara Ahmed, who offers a queer phenomenological approach; and, Isabelle Stengers, Frichot’s personal favourite, though with the disclaimer that she wouldn’t usually recommend Stengers, because of the occasionally unnecessary difficulty of her writing. Despite that, Frichot comments, Stengers “just does something to me”. Discussion of Stengers’ work leads to the writing of cyborg-feminist thinker Donna Haraway, as well as that of Haraway’s student Zoe Sofia (Sofoulis) Closer to home, Frichot recommends Places journal, which focuses on public scholarship dealing with architecture, landscape, and urbanism. In particular, Frichot mentions Shannon Mattern and her work on care, repair, and maintenance infrastructure.
8. Frichot, Hélène. "Field Notes On Pandemic Teaching: 1". Places Journal, 2020, https:// placesjournal.org/article/fieldnotes-on-pandemic-teaching-1/.
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Asked about her own recent writing for Places – as a contributor to “Field Notes on Pandemic Teaching”8 , a “narrative survey” of architectural educators globally looking at the challenges and opportunities of the forced move to online learning – Frichot mentions the risk of exhaustion from the current pandemic. It’s an exhaustion exacerbated by a strange pressure to be productive, to be doing the next great project. Frichot’s essay closes with a description of “a reinvention of the world”, and I ask whether she thinks this current crisis will lead to just such a reinvention. “If it doesn’t,” she says, “we will have missed a massive opportunity.” This risk of exhaustion is a recurrent theme in Creative Ecologies, one Frichot shares with Michael Spooner, who writes in “A Clinic for the Exhausted”9 (his PhD thesis which Frichot supervised) of the exhaustion of concepts, and the “exhaustive excess of discursive production”10.
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As an academic, Frichot feels a particular connection to this state of exhaustion. “When you’re an academic, you’re meant to produce so many peer-reviewed papers a year and you have annual meetings that measure your productivity.” This constant imperative to be measurably productive – “publish or perish” – is caught up in performance reviews (despite these reviews being couched in terms of institutional care) and connected to promotions and pay rises. You need to meet the minimum expectation, Frichot states, or your career is in trouble. This culture of “rampant productivity” is something that troubles Frichot. She gives the example of the “proliferation of journal articles that one could not possibly read in their entirety”, and speculates about what might happen if we “just halved the pace?” “What if we seriously just took an approach of slowness to this?” she asks. And this idea of slowness is a theme that Frichot has found particularly productive. (She laughs at this unintentional choice of words.) Frichot mentions that she has found the same sense of slowness in some of Isabelle Stengers work, and notes her own predilection towards the work of Gilles Deleuze, who also works with this idea of slowness. “I don’t want us to return to normal. Let’s take this and rethink it. It’ll be the greatest missed opportunity if we do return to normal. But I think people are enormously resistant, and completely terrified [of change] and will hold on to what they’re familiar with”. Even so, Frichot has hopes that we will at least slow down and that we can embrace non-productivity, communicate a little bit less. When I mention I want to throw my constantly pinging phone in the ocean, she offers,
“We need to get rid of some this stuff if we’re going to survive”. Part Two 9. Spooner, Michael. A Clinic For The Exhausted. Spurbuchverlag, 2013. 10. Frichot, Hélène. Creative Ecologies: Theorising The Practice Of Architecture. Bloomsbury Visual Arts, 2018, p. 188. 11. Ibid. 12. Sofia, Zoe. "Container Technologies". Hypatia, vol 15, no. 2, 2000, pp. 181-201. Cambridge University Press (CUP), doi:10.1353/ hyp.2000.0029. 13. Frichot, Hélène. Creative Ecologies: Theorising The Practice Of Architecture. Bloomsbury Visual Arts, 2018. 14. Le Guin, Ursula K. The Carrier-Bag Theory Of Fiction. Ignota, 2019.
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One of the “thinking practices” that Frichot “thinks with”11 in Creative Ecologies is that of theorist Zoe Sofia (a pseudonym for Perth, now Western Sydney-based academic Zoe Sofoulis). Sofoulis’s work spans a wide range of cultural theory touchstones, and what I’m particularly interested in asking Frichot about is Soufolis’s ideas on human extinction, as well as her unique reading of the “container” in her essay Container Technologies (2000)12 , a reading that, for Frichot, is as relevant now as it was twenty years ago. Soufoulis describes the container as a vessel of both “containment and supply” , an idea Frichot draws on to describe architecture as a “body-holding technology”13 . Asked about parallels between that description of architecture and the “Carrier-Bag”14 theory of fiction developed by author Ursula LeGuin, Frichot refers to “fictocritical” projects, which leads to questions about the relationships between literary and cultural theory, and architecture.
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15. Haraway, Donna J. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Duke University Press. Durham, NC. 2016.
What Frichot identifies in response is the way these thinkers’ ideas work together. “There is this absolute dialogue between Zoe Sofia and Donna Haraway. When we look at Haraway’s work, and certainly in Staying With the Trouble15, Haraway cites LeGuin and uses a carrier-bag as one of these concept-things, so you can connect those three people together through those relationships of influence”. Frichot comments here that “often when I’ve gotten students to read Container Technologies, they bristle at first …because they just don’t like what Sofia’s doing with the feminine/masculine divide … But she’s not trying to essentialize [it], she’s just trying to set us up with a binary that has been embedded in our history and is still embedded in our assumptions about things.” Her advice here is to just “go with Sofia for a while”. Frichot summarises “Container Technologies” like this: “We have the projectile associated with the masculine on the one hand and then we have the container on the other hand associated with feminine. Students sometimes bristle again because they think it’s unfortunate that the feminine has to be constantly associated with the womb and reproduction. Yes, that’s true but let’s just acknowledge that our histories have given this to us. Maybe we can turn this all around!”
Frichot agrees that Soufolis’s binary can be frustrating, but thinks that her larger polemic purposes are enormously powerful. “This is a way of rethinking technologies. We have rather the bad habit of discussing technologies in architecture as only being relevant when they’re at-the-cutting-edge.” For Frichot, this completely overlooks how technologies actually work, their history, and how current technologies are embedded within the discoveries made by past technologies. Here, Frichot mentions conversations between Bruno Latour and Michel Serres, where they imagine the most advanced wheel in the world and note that it’s still going to have the central idea that was imagined when the wheel first emerged. “We reorient our assumptions of technologies in terms of the projectile being something hot and fast, towards thinking in terms of these much more humble technologies”. However, Frichot points out, without these container-technologies we would never have become sedentary and agricultural, we wouldn’t have been able to store our food, we wouldn’t have been able to form what we call, for better and worse, civilisation.
“Container technologies,” she insists, “are profound.” Returning to Sofia’s connections to Donna Haraway, Frichot expresses her love for these relationships of thinking, and in particular, her own affinity for Sofia. Like Frichot, Zoe Sofia comes from Perth, and Frichot credits the impact Sofia’s theories had on herself and her friends when she was younger. “She was doing stuff that was just radical. It was really exciting” For Frichot, including Sofia in Creative Ecologies was a positive way of acknowledging this influence and the debt she felt she owed her.
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One of the key ideas in Creative Ecologies, is that of “unthinkables”, the climate crisis offering a key example of an unthinkable situation. Given we have a scale model of the climate crises in COVID-19, I asked Frichot about extinction and these unthinkables that we’re reckoning with. “Extinction is a theme that’s running through a lot of post-humanities studies and has been for a while I would say. There is a scholar who has done a lot of work on Deleuze called Claire Colebrook”. Frichot describes Colebrook’s work, particularly her “extinct theory”, as belonging to the post-humanities. In Death of the PostHuman: Essays on Extinction, Colbrook “undertakes a series of critical encounters with the legacy of what had come to be known as ‘theory,’ and its contemporary supposedly post-human aftermath… argu[ing] for a twenty-first century deconstruction of ecological and seemingly post-human futures.”16 Frichot comments that, “Colebrook’s vision seems to be quite dark…when I read the piece it literally made me feel quite queasy”. 16. Colebrook, Claire. Death Of The Posthuman: Essays On Extinction. Open Humanities Press, 2015.
Frichot admits that on her more misanthropic days she thinks that “we’re just going to have to bid ourselves adieu because we’ve really fucked up and it serves us right. It’s a really hard thing to grapple with”. Of the current crisis she notes that “this is why the experience that we’re having now with COVID-19 should be an object lesson for us…This is what it feels like to be faced with the devastation of large portions of the global human population.” Frichot admits that there’s a lot to be fearful of, and while I note that the interview isn’t looking for answers to current and future crises, she makes the point that “we do have to manage the idea [of extinction] somehow …We can’t just allow it to dismantle us, so we’re rendered incapable of doing anything because we’re so full of anxiety and dread”. She laughingly admits that that’s not going to help. But notes at the same time that we have got to take the threat of extinction and environmental devastation extraordinarily seriously. She takes a moment to reflect on these mass-extinction events before asking rhetorically, “Wouldn’t it be amazing to see?” She begins to speak about cross-sections, how whether you’re cutting a “cross-section through a tree or taking a geological cut you get this effect in the strata that shows you this one line where for several months, the air is suddenly cleaner, something has shifted. For a few months there was less stuff happening and you’ll be able to see it in the material geography of the Earth. When we think of the Anthropocene as this massive geologic era and event, procured mostly through human industrial activity, it leaves behind a trace.
Amidst this dark smear there’ll be this little clearer patch before we finally extinguish ourselves.”
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I admit to Frichot that I’ve been thinking about how quickly we might get to out destruction, and in the process I’ve become morbidly fascinated with ‘accelerationism’, in particular the work of the Cybernetics Culture Research Unit (CCRU) at Warwick University, that draws on the work of Gilles Deleuze to identify and radicalise social forces that might lead to an intensification of capitalism's self-destructive forces and an acceleration of its eventual collapse. I note ironically that it’s not a productive way of thinking and admit to the difficulty I’ve felt maintaining optimism about architecture in these times. I ask her how she finds a way to continue through this exhaustion. What does she hold onto?
18. Frichot, Hélène, and Naomi Stead. Writing Architectures. Bloomsbury Visual Arts, 2020.
Frichot replies that the answer returns us to fictocriticality. She lets slip that along with the Head of Architecture at Monash University, Naomi Stead, she is co-editing a book called Writing Architectures: FictoCritical Approaches18. “It’s certainly helped me through this crisis…When I’m not just sinking into a funk, which I do from time to time, this thing that can happen through explorative modes of writing, whether it’s a form of diaristic self-coping, or whether it’s kind of quasi-fictional riffing, turning it into a fleeting vignette of a story, I do think fiction is incredibly powerful in the way we can mobilise it.” “Coping for me has been about this practice of writing … [Fiction] allows us to speculate and recompose and rethink relations between things.” She suggests that this is also what architecture lets us do, though offering the caveat that we need to “get away from the habit of focusing on that discrete objet d’architecture and look instead at architecture as more of a distributed phenomenon that supports built environments.”
“We certainly do need to find other ways of engaging in our assumptions around architecture and what it can do, but I think we can do that. I think there are examples out there, and I think pushing from amidst the exhaustion and the anxiety to be creative can be really powerful.”
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Ideos That Don’t Make Gram
HANNAH ZHU
My love for copying originated at a very young age. Simply appreciating something was not enough, I had to take possession - I had to recreate it in my own mind and hands. The first thing I remember copying was not my parents’ signature, but the characters of ancient Greek mythologies. I drew every goddess: Gaia, Hera, Demeter, Hestia, Tyche, Aphrodite, Athena, Artemis… their flawless face and lush wavy hair had all been re-created with the painstaking hands of an adolescent child. The stacks of A4 paper are still securely stored under her bed in cardboard boxes. The consequences of this love for copying, and attention for images in general, was the development of a pictorial mind. The world around this child was constructed like a panorama: new images overlaid, collaged and teared-apart. In contrast to other members of the family, I struggled with reading and writing. Ideograms were the next milestone in my pilgrimage of copying. I stole this method when I was sitting directly behind Leon van Schaik at a studio balloting presentation. Leon with his fine-tip pen on his passport-size notebook, made strokes as the presenter spoke. I had carefully examined Leon’s drawings for some time and attempted a few of my own, but how to overcome the descriptive nature of drawings remained with me till then. By watching an ideogram made before my eyes I came to a few realisations: I can’t make them out of thin air, in other words, stimuli is vital; two, it is much easier to make an ideogram about a lecture than the story of my life. The act of drawing becomes the reflex to a change in the state of the mind. I started doing these grams like I was arranging my own room: I put a massive Robin Evans over to the right, and then copy the fascinating glasses-figure from the passage; from there a series of curtains unravel with topics being pushed out and off the stage… It was the first time I tried to make sense of words: lines of text crawling over pages made into pictures speaking to each other. Masses of content collapse and consolidate into squigglies and are again retrieved with consideration.
They were simple figures with complex relations because they went through a human mind. This was yet again, the panorama, but I was no longer struggling with reading. Indeed, I ask myself when I will stop copying and develop ‘my own grams’… This practice came to a pause as my struggle with writing came to a rest. I am not writing well, but it is no longer painful and occasionally, it is joyful. It felt like writing a novel from a poem when I wrote essays from grams. I started to understand how people I considered eloquent had their own ‘gram’ or ‘poem’ in their head, that things twist and turn in their mind for a semester or for a year with new bits added every now and then. Mine was more like cuts of analogue film - the images gave me the intuition, but I had no rationale for my judgements. In some way, the gram was my own thinking container. It is the gestural mark made for a latent comprehension. It is the hand that moves ahead of the mind. It is words before they have been said. Lately, I have been making grams only in the mind. I ask myself, do the ideos no longer need the gram, or is it time to think out loud again?
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Everything is in Transition
JEAN VILJOEN
My Young Son Asks Me, Bertholt Brecht My young son asks me: Must I learn mathematics? What is the use, I feel like saying. That two pieces Of bread are more than one’s about all you’ll end up with. My young son asks me: Must I learn French? What is the use, I feel like saying. This State’s collapsing. And if you just rub your belly with your hand and Groan, you’ll be understood with little trouble. My young son asks me: Must I learn history? What is the use, I feel like saying. Learn to stick Your head in the earth, and maybe you’ll still survive.
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Yes, learn mathematics, I tell him. Learn your French, learn your history!
B eloved C oal , 2019,
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Salvage
ISOBEL MOY
With an apocalyptic backdrop, Savage Messiah, a collaged journal by Laura Grace Ford explores the idea of salvage and space reoccurring on itself in cities as they become increasingly more gentrified and industrial relics become dispossessed. The publication is presented deliberately as an informal and cluttered assemblage of print scraps, poster cuttings, images and text which sets out to capture the identity of the city within the non-spaces. Ford attempts to highlight the productive resistance to order that occurs when ruined spaces are inhabited and given back to communities in a movement of productivism in which nothing is physically produced. The publication examines the idea of city salvage, through its presentation and contents by capturing the renaissance of obsolete and decayed spaces in the city as they are salvaged over time by information occupation, squatting and programmatic chaos. This project completed in 2019 at the Aarhus School of Architecture transformed a mixed use residential/commercial block in Berlin, into a multi-cultural arts centre; a mixing chamber of art, music, cinema, performance, workshops and exhibition space. An adaptive re-use project that sought to capitalise on the existing space, built fabric available and establish a consistent spatial sequence across the site through the superimposition of a new programme onto or into existing space. It is a dialogue between new and old, demolition and salavge, waste and re-use. Seeing the existing not as an obstacle to be demolished, but rather ‘a foundation for continued action’.
STUDIO
CLASS
CLASS
CINEMA
LIBRARY AUDITORIUM
SHOP
WORKSHOP
CLOAK
EXIBITION
INFO
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L aura G race F ord , 2019
It is interesting to reflect on Savage Messiah’s concept of salvage in in relation to architecture and this completed project – especially in the current environmental, social and political climate. In a society that moves faster than its architecture and infrastructure can sustain, buildings designed to perform a unique function are becoming increasingly obsolete, outgrown, abandoned or demolished due to cultural shifts, advancements in technology and changing social values in a time where consumerism, capitalism, neo-liberalism and fast-paced productivity are at the forefront. COVID-19 has left our cities empty and un-used as society transgresses into the post-apocalyptic digital realm.
What happens to our cities if they become obsolete? Obsolescence and Apocalypse evoke a similar feeling – an indestructible mammoth structure (like a powerplant or soviet monument) un-used and left to ruin. It therefore seems fitting that Laura Grace Ford’s Savage Messiah is also set in a post-apocalyptic world as the ruined city is given back to the community left -behind. It reveals how community agency leads to the renaissance of informal obsolete space – however its disorganization and derelict nature is detrimental to its perceived value in society. Architects have the agency to be the curators of the obsolete. We have the design and technology to positively influence the discussion around salvage by encouraging a paradigm shift towards the adaptive re-use of our existing architecture. One that is not corrupted by the idea of collapse, neglect and dilapidation. We can transform an eye-sore into valuable public space.
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demolition of existing
S avage
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L aura G race F ord , 2019
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Salvaging what we have is extremely beneficial to lessen our impact on the environment. The building industry contributes disproportionally to the amount of waste each year due to demolition. However, it is still not enough. Our response to the COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted our ‘make-do’ afterthought approach to crisis and the urgency for a preventative strategy. Perhaps we should consider this analogous to architecture.
If architecture can learn to adapt as our society shifts, become flexible or designed for disassembly, then perhaps a utopia exists where the idea of salvage becomes an alien concept.
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A rchitecture A fter
the
R ain , J ack M urray , 2020