Implementing Advanced Knowledge
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2 .1.1 Imagining Jelly-space Neo-Metabolism Thomas Mical
Imagining Jelly-Space Neo-Metabolism The Bosch-like revelation of micro-landscapes revealed inside a nearly invisible drop of water [Fig. 1] call attention to some of the most fascinating and pressing conditions of knowledge processes which can augment architectural theory (at a strategic level), and also direct design-research methods (at a tactical level). The baroque literary vision of a scalar nesting of worlds-within-worlds is a recurring state in the realm of architecture considered operating within one or more ecologies (adding to Felix Guattari’s well considered original Three Ecologies of mind, society, and environment - to which we have proliferating sub-disciplines including media ecologies, urban ecologies, even libidinal ecologies). 1 Thus the architectural imagination (concentrated upon attributes or relationships not yet activated, but desired) and architectural imperatives (signals and forward commands, using any reproducible architectural means necessary) may even operate in parallel due to the range of scales of multiple ecologies involved. The autonomy of the architectural object is displaced across this scale of efforts (from strategic to tactical to micro-political), whereby architectural thought becomes architectural intelligence necessary to initiate an architectural vision - the design project as the arena of these dynamic systems - as well as the design project as emergent factual situation of desire/s. The present conditions of architectural emergence and formation are increasingly inflected by ambitions which animate the previously autonomous architectural object-machine into a dynamic conversion of discrete models and processes, imagined in the dynamic unfolding rhythms appropriate to their scales and ecologies - feeding across urbanism, architecture, threshold, and surface. The machine freed of its skin becomes machinic processes that infiltrate and adhere to both literal spaces and imaginary relationships. And so we propose that one direction for the production of architectural thought is to carve a trajectory for developing forms of architectural intelligence that operates between methodology and methods, between strategic design (channelling or redirecting urban or epochal forces) and tactics (modulating stimulus-response relations in a process). Considering the nested ecologies model of spaces, architectural theory when taken into this form of applied architectural theory (transformations through testing diverse models and processes) connects some timely and untimely
Cover - Jellyfish, Archive 2
membranes of thought. As such, we would not need the modernist value distinctions of novel or autonomous structures, but could include adaptive or imperfect structures that codify architectural theory developing these deviant models and processes (thinking expansively for example, typology as well as functionalism could be considered models, and reflexive and recursive operations would be processes). The mixture of timely and untimely membranes of thought that nested ecologies could provide would also direct greater attention to new attention and intellectual investment into the nearly-invisible spaces, even the undesigned para-spaces of the everyday, and also address the hidden timeline of autonomous spaces and objects so as to direct attention to their nearlyinvisible life-cycle support systems (from HVAC to facilities management, as Henri Achten, Czech Technical University in Prague, commented online to me recently). The mechanisms of visibility and the mechanisms of invisibility form a complex tissue or interface that is interwoven or distributed through the spatial experience of everyday life and mobility as it unfolds through legible depth-of-volume of given spaces. This hidden-ness is neither transcendent nor immanent but more like a covert reciprocity, systemswithin-systems, amplifying and displacing spatial attributes. Within the nested model of spatial-optical ecologies, the im/material or medium of space is no longer a solid blocks of meanings or singular objective blocks of sensations, but in this age of omni-transparency, the emergence and transformation of life imprinting those fugitive spaces. In the multiecology model, occupiable and visible spaces become less framed events and increasingly gelatinous territories, including their hidden support mechanisms, arising between given and fixed performative building surfaces and the laminated ecologies of the apparently singular “skin” of the world. The space between is also apparently singular, but as we have seen, there may be intruders [see Fig. 1]. In my recent essay “Blur-Urbanism” I claim “epochal singular modernity, coupled with the parallel myth of transparency almost accomplished the goal of a purely rational distribution of events within a transparent homogenous spatial field. Yet even within the totalization of abstraction across the spectrum of modernist practices, the search for material causes and formal causes always seems to encountered some resistance, some irreducible other, lingering within the fine grain reality of construction.” 2 This is the premise of an alternative consideration of modernist space, perhaps is resonance with Zygmunt Bauman’s Liquid Modernity, whereby we see these fine particles not only as interference patterns of some utopian optic, but also as the beginning of a space becoming congealed, infiltrated by nearly invisible impurities, thickened with emerging ecologies, emerging spaces becoming-gelatinous.
It is significant that this gelatinous model, considered narrowly as aesthetic category, often falls outside formal analysis, except perhaps in some oblique readings of the formless. 3 In other registers of architectural thought, the gelatinous as a phenomenological condition recalls the slime dynamics of the origin of life. 4 With this gelatinous valence of modern space, is both conceived and perceived as part of the undifferentiated extensively of imagined universal space. From the emerging work on the translation of spatial codes of opacity into gelatinous phenomena, as a recurring trope, we can find a trajectory within late modern corporate architecture to minimize the ambiguity of translucency in the directed commodification of organizational space.5 Like the related optic of blurring, the sense of the gelatinous is a primitive default preceding more formal or legible spatial articulations, a code for emergence or disappearance in materiality, as well Figure 2 - creatures in a microscopic drop of water - source: http://image.aladin.co.kr/Community/mypaper/pimg_720286123618246.jpg 4
as a specialized sensual-optical ideal. In moving to the deployment of opacity as a special condition of emerging omni-transparency, that which is inbetween remains ambiguous, suspect. The gelatinous marks the processes of transformation between states, between binaries, and though it has clear sensuous-optic traits, the gelatinous is actually a complex range of situations: it operates as a recognizable category of matter pointing to an optimal state between solid and liquid; it operates as a special translucent condition we see in pop culture (sweets, packaging, toys); and it occurs as a specific attribute that is experienced as differentiated from surrounding context (to be legible). it is also simultaneously the indiscernible or generic condition that allows us to partially see and sense what is beyond, as spatial conduit or medium. The hybrid form of gelatinous space is thus a complexity disguised as simplicity, one activating a higher register of the tangency of sensation and optics, in the age of omni-transparency. This is also an age of Neo-Metabolism. In the biological, the gelatinous and the translucent offer distinct advantages. In the same postwar period there is at least one neo-avant-
garde movement 6 where we see the promise of this gelatinous moment. The parallel research on gelatinous spaces and on neo-Metabolism today (taken as re-interpreting the metabolic processes around visible and invisible structures from 1960’s Japanese architecture movement of Metabolism. This proposed neo-Metabolism principles of biomorphic architecture, the then emergent Asian computer/space age, infrastructural urbanism, and capsulated living are the precedent for contemporary principles of alternative ecologies, soft infrastructures, hybrid building technologies, and a whole range of new gizmos that form the neo-Metabolist tendency. The innovative oceanic ecologies and aquatic structures of thought in the postwar Japanese Metabolism 7 provoke new thinking about the shifting status of the production of transitive spaces, subtle mobilities and soft emergence, mass customization and the demands of the instantaneous, all migrating beyond the previous ideas of fixed hard infrastructure into new emergent and eventually mutable configurations.
Figure 4 - Theory workshopt at IaaC, 2013. 6
The possibility of a neo-Metabolism alternative to the terrain vague of globalization - replacing the generic global with the flexible and reactive situated-ness of interlaced ecologies - is taken here as an architectural promise, proposed through the tactical selections of new ecologies of thought propelling innovative strategies and agile technologies - ideally more soft and agile. The desire for soft infrastructures -including clean air, clean water, clean networks, even clean education or clean healthcare - are increasingly driving beyond the limits of prior concrete infrastructures. Now would be a good time to speculate, with precision, on the nature of some new forms of urbanism (soft and wet) 8considered as customizable mass prototypes, hybrid build-infrastructure devices, or urban provocations (urban acupuncture), all of which could come to fill the gab between the legacy of the hard and the future of the soft. This approach imagines an array of urban architectural structures (transformers) that could operate across the distinction of interiors + architecture + urbanism + infrastructure, each not only passively collect energy, but scrub soils and air, flex and transform, and terra-form urban landscapes. This imagined post-humanist neo-Metabolist city of recursive and reflexive soft infrastructures and dynamic systems of worlds-withinworlds, is perhaps implicated not by the dominant 20thC machine model of architecture and urbanism, but today perhaps moving towards the flexible translucent ecologies we see in the mesmerizing examples from the jellyfish phylum Cnidaria. In the figure of the jellyfish, so far obscure and marginal in architectural theory 9, we have an unlikely image of the agile and transformative one-amongst-many organisms, known for their collective behaviors. In re-imagining multiple architectural ecologies around these curious biological specimens, who change states multiple times in their lifecycles, we have a promising model of transformative active systems in an oceanic ecology. In taking this biological analogue into the urban, we also reconnect the neo-Metabolist future with the Metabolist past future.
Figure 2 - Atlantic sea nettle - Chrysaora quinquecirrha - image by Lalo Pangue, CC BY 2.0 licence, source: https://www.flickr.com/photos/lalo_pangue/8481197380/
Notes and References
1. see Felix Guattari, The Three Ecologies, London: Athlone, 2000. 2. see my T. Mical, “Blur-Urbanism” in Arhitectura 4, Bucarest, Romania, 2014, pp.102-4 -summary online at http://arhitectura-1906.ro/2014/12/blururbanism/ 3. See Yve-Alain Bois and Rosalind E. Krauss, Formless: A User’s Guide, NY: Zone Books, 1997. 4. see Ben Woodard, Slime Dynamics, UK: Zero Books, 2012 5. see organizational space, also clegg 6. see neo-avant-garde 7. see Koolhaas book 8. see U Greenwich research project 9. on jellyfish house and other citations
Figure 3 - “An optimist and purposeful visoin”, Archive. 8
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