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3.1.2 An object oriented approach to architecture and its city Peter Trummer
An object oriented approach to architecture and its city In today’s architectural production of the City of New York, a new kind of building appeared within recent years. It is a thin, pencil like tower, with a massive bottom that fills up the whole plot size. Sometimes the build mass is stepped back towards the top. The buildings can neither be described as just simple primitive extruded volumes, nor are these buildings compositions of a plinth with a tower or just stacked prisms. The buildings can formally be described as a continuous contour outlining a unified mass and wrapped with a planar façade. These characterless towers do not have any particular name. They are just called according to their location: 432 Park, 117 West 57th Street, One57, and 111 West 57th Street. These very slim architectural entities mainly host luxury apartments and hotels. Some of the apartments have reached a market value up to 90 million dollar. While many of these apartments were sold soon after the building was finished, a third of the apartments have not found any buyer until today. Most of these building are not occupied with inhabitants. They are mainly empty. It seems that within contemporary capitalism the architecture of cities has become an autonomous object 1, an object that has withdrawn from us as humans. At the 102nd ACSA Annual Meeting in Miami, Matthew Soules from the University of British Columbia, presented an astonishing paper under the title Asset Urbanism: Ghosts, Zombies, and the Simultaneity of Amplified Growth and Decay.2 Between the years 2002 to 2011 the global asset capital increased from $ 37 trillion to $ 80 trillion, as a result of the rapid growth of China’s, India’s and the Middle East’s economies. In less then 10 years, the world’s total capital, accumulated over the last 200 years, just doubled. What Soules demonstrates, is that the growing magnitude of global capital is the basis for the emergence of a new form of asset urbanism. This new junk of money was in need to find, in relation to the territorialization of urban, suburban and especially through re-territorialization of urban densification, new correlations between finance and physical form. The thin, skinny, super tall towers with their massive bottom are the physical expression of such new forms of correlation. The buildings function as the storage of capital. Not only can the apartments hardly be sold, they are representing the tendency of which Sam Roberts reported in 2011 in The New York Times: the number of housing units by absentee owners and renters in Manhattan increased by 70% within the years 2000 to 2011. 3 Cover - “The pile City-Object”, Project by Peter Trummer Architects; Peter Trummer with Sven Winkler, Simoen Brugger, Florian Smutny Figure 1 - New York City, IaaC Archive 2
For Matthew Soules the conclusion is clear: ‘While the physical components of urbanization – units, buildings and parcels of land – have long functioned, at least in part, as investment assets, the degree to which this role has increased has not been met with a corresponding conceptual or operational framework on the part of architects and planners’. (4) ‘How architects respond critically and productively to this new terrain remains to be seen. What opportunities lurk within built form operating more and more like stock market shares? (...), architecture runs the risk of feudal servitude to the financial operations that it facilitates.’ 5. Matthew Soules clearly sees the architect and planners in demand to respond critically to the emergent subject. I rather would like to take an object oriented approach of the role of architecture within the phenomenon of a zombie urbansim. The description of an economical regime that indicates the mode of existence of these new super tall high-rise towers would mean that we believe to get access to the understanding of the architecture and its cities, by researching all circumstances that hinds to the appearance of our build environment.
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But what if the production of architecture of the city is inaccessible to us? What if the architectural object of the city unfolds a formal evolution, independently from us as humans? In this essay I would like to speculate on a formal history of the high-rise building as autonomous object. In order to do that I will base my argument on Gilbert Simondons thesis On the mode of existence of technical objects 6 in which he explains the process of individuation of technical objects, like machines, or in our case a building, from an abstract form towards becoming a concrete one. If we look to the emergence of the high-rise tower in New York something unique happened. While the 14th floor part of the Singer building was realized in 1899 by Ernest Flagg, a campanile like tower got suddenly stacked into the existing mass. Something similar happened to the Metropolitan Life Building by by Napoleon LeBrun & Sons. A 10th story high building was finished in 1893 and in 1909 a clock tower was added. The in 1913 realized Woolworth building was probably the first projects were individual architectural objects, a tower and two corridor type buildings became assemblaged together to form a new high-rise building. In order to unify the different volumes Gilbert Cass added another object onto it, namely a gothic faรงade. It seems that the search for a new physical architectural form for the correlation of capital and inhabitable spaces, began by kitbashing unrelated architectural entities together in order to form a new whole. Probably the best book that demonstrates the kitbashing of objects in search for a new vertical architectural form at the beginning of the early 20th century capitalism, is the collection of projects for the Chicago tribune tower competition in Chicago. If you leaf through the collection of projects presented in the book from 1922 7, an enormous pile of projects unfolds in front of our eyes that tried to grasp the aesthetic appearance for a high-rise tower by joining, stacking, assembling, melting, unifying and fusing existing architectural objects together. We see gothic churches melting together with ziggurats, roman circular temples fused with gigantic scaled Italian palazzos, Ledouxs pyramid building was stacked onto classicist villas or Greek temples and imitation of the tower of Pisa got pasted with Chicago School towers. The whole book is a guide of assembling historical architectural buildings like Greek or Roman temples, Gothic or Baroque churches and classicist villas with architectural objects like obelisks, doric columns, cupolas, arches, pitch roofs and statues with non architectural objects like globes, watches, animals, suns, light balls and human heads. This approach of junking objects together can even be seen in Ludwig Hilberseimers project for the Chicago Tribune Tower. The tower is generally understood within the discipline of architecture as the articulation of the true aesthetic of high-rise buildings within capitalism. Rather than designing an icon of pure abstraction, I would argue that Hilberseimers design for a tower is the unification of three objects into a new whole. Figure 2 - Chicago Tribune Competition
The first object used for the Chicago Tribune Tower is the existing Plant Building on the site of the competition. Hilberseimer not only uses the plant building as a reference for empty floor plans, but also expresses the image of the plant literally for its design. The front façade of the high-rise tower is equally subdivided, as the existing factory and the proportion between the open space for windows and the solid space of the walls equal exactly the existing façade of the plant. Therefore we might understand the project not as a formal abstraction of pure rational means of construction principles, but rather as the representation of the tower through the real image of the factory. This is even reinforced if we think that the 4 story factory, through its massive façade walls, rather represents a brick or a concrete wall, or at least if it is a steel frame construction it is camouflaged by a gigantic brick wall. The second object incorporated into the Chicago tower is the Boarding House. In his article on “Das Hochhaus” 8, as well as in his Book “Grossstadtbauten”, Hilberseimer presents the Boarding House in the case of The New Pennsylvania Hotel in New York or the Surf Apartment Hotel in Chicago, as real objects for his design of the tower. For Hilberseimer, these Hotels represent the idea of the future urban dweller. He takes their H-like plans and uses their layouts as the organization of the upper part of the Chicago Tribune Tower. The Boarding house is visually expressed through the subdivision of the windows on the side elevation representing two cellar units of a hotel on each side divided by a middle corridor. As a third object, Hilberseimer uses for his design a grid. He unifies his building by wrapping the building with a grid objects. He uses the grid to reinforce the surface character of the facade. As he describes in his essay on “Das Hochhaus” 9, he declares that with the design of the high-rise tower, the window vanishes as a punctuated contrasting hole within a wall. The façade is no longer a wall of massive solid parts for construction with figurative void volumes for windows, but rather a planar surface enveloping the whole building. From the viewpoint of a human subject, all above described assemblages of objects, can be seen as a collage expressing a conscience aesthetics articulation of a new vertical form in early capitalist metropolitan cities. But from the viewpoint of the object itself we could argue that like in the case of Chicago tribune tower of Hilberseimer all three objects, the factory, the boarding house and the grid convert into a new whole. The tower is not a new collage of three objects. Rather the objects are loosing their recognizable signifier of their form as well as their signified function or meaning of their content in order and fuse into, what Gilbert Simondon calls, a new concrete form of a high-rise building, an object previously unknown. Figure 3 -”The Pile City”, Scifi Program spring 2104 at SCIArc thaught be Peter Trummer. Project by Joao Velazquez, Jae Hong Lee 6
The evolution of the high-rise building, from starting to join two architectural objects together until todays slim, thin, super tall towers in Manhattan is what happens, according to Gilbert Simondon, to all “technical objects”. For Simondon a technical object is any abstract form, which converges loosely aggregated parts, into a new concrete whole. In his book Gilbert Simondon argues that every technical object of inanimate mater passes through a genesis, similar to the evolution of animate matter. He tried to formulate a thesis of the process of individuation of all technical objects within our modes of standardized production. His argument for the autonomy of technical objects is based on the fact, ‘that if technical objects evolve towards a small number of specific types, it is by virtue of internal
necessity and not as a consequence of economic influences or requirements of a practical nature. [He stated:] It is not the production-line which produces standardization; rather it is intrinsic to standardization which makes the production line possible’. (10). For the cases describe above it would mean that the emergence of a high-rise tower is not the outcome of economical forces, but rather the effect of the intrinsic qualities of any objects capacity to merge together with other objects to form new kind of building type. Simondon argues that any inanimate objects, like machines or buildings produced by modes of industrial production, undergo a similar genesis as animated forms. In a series of examples, like the evolution of the engine of a motorbike or the evolution of the electronic tube, Simondon shows that every technical object individuates from an “abstract form” to a “concrete form”. An abstract form for Simondon defines a technical object consisting of various independent parts. Every part of an abstract from is defined by the function it performs. So for example is an early motor just a logical montage of elements. Through the process of convergence between the parts, the motor turns slowly into a concrete form, in which all the parts converge into a new inseparable whole. As in the case of a ‘modern engine, each critical piece is so connected with the rest by reciprocal exchanges of energy that it cannot be other than it is. (…) It could be said that the modern engine is a concrete engine and that the old engine was abstract. In the old engine each element comes into play at a certain moment in the cycle and, then, it is supposed to have no effect on the other elements; the different parts of the engine are like individuals who could be thought of as working each in his turn without their ever knowing each other.’ (11) Based on Gilbert Simondon we can argue that the early high-rise tower have been abstract forms of kitbashed architectural entities and the current pencil tower in midtown Manhattan is a more concrete form of converting of all parts over time into a new unified architectural object. To understand every building as a technical object with its own autonomous process of individuation could give rise to a speculative history of an object-oriented approach to architecture and its city. According to the fact that buildings, or more particular high-rise towers, have the capacity to fuse with other buildings and urban entities, we could understand the evolution of the high-rise building not only as a fusion of architectural exclusively objects, but as a process of unifying any urban object into becoming a concrete one. In that case we could read the evolution of the high-rise tower in the 20th century and particular in Manhattan for example as the absorption of the land it stands on with the high-rise tower. As shown in the famous cartoon of the theorem of the high-rise tower, the floors fuse with the property and turn the building into a vertical repetition of land. 8
Something similar could be said of Bunshafts W.R. Grace Building and Nine West 57th Street Building in New York. Both buildings are representative for the concretization of melting the ground of the city, and particular its urban boundary of the City block, with a modernist slab tower. The curved facade of nearly all Bunshafts towers are the result of the individuation process of merging an abstract form consisting out of two objects, the slab and the block, into a concrete one. Probably the most obvious form of the unification between a physical mass with an urban void, are Kevin Roches Ford Foundation Building and Portman’s Hotel. Both buildings can be seen as the kidbashing of a building with an urban object. In the case of the Ford Foundation it is a park and in Portman Hotel it is a public Italian piazza. Both projects are concrete new kinds of buildings. They represent the fact that buildings and their voids turned into new type of architecture that literally visualizes the individuation of two objects turning into new concrete one. If we allow to think that not only physical objects can be fused together, but even geometrical ones, than the history of Manhattan itself defines a process of individuation of unifying two objects, the topography of the island an the abstraction of a grid. Both fused together in a layout of subdivision of land which gave rise to all its architecture. To speculate on an object oriented approach on the architecture of our cities, we might have to open up a much larger field of investigation of how buildings constitute their appearance as a process of individuation of unrelated, separate objects, defines as abstract forms, turning into concrete ones, when we consider, as the object oriented philosophy suggest (12), that anything can be considered as an object. What I wanted to argue is that with the emergence of a zombie urbanism, an urbanism of empty buildings and empty cities are the pure examples that our build environment, within contemporary capitalism, has withdrawn from us as humans. According to Gilbert Simondons thesis, the city and its architecture, unfolds a parallel evolution in which environments are not the construction of required or practical reason but emerge through the pure virtue of internal capacity of objects converting with other objects. Which might leave the question what this means for the role of the architect? Within contemporary capitalism architects have become according to the production of the city for me, what Slavoj Zizek calls the superego (13): We do not do vertical slim high-rise towers without inhabitants because we should do them, nor do we do them because we have to do them, but we do them because we can. We construct empty towers, inhabitable buildings and zombie cities because objects force us to convergence them into new architectural urban wholes, starting by kidbashed architectural objects to allow them over time to convert into characterless new ones.
Notes 1. With object I refer to the ideas of Graham Harman’s and his definition of an Object oriented ontology, where by he defines objects as being more than their relationships to other things. In the presented article I refer especially to his essay On vicarious Causation were he states: ‘To say that formal cause operates vicariously means that forms do not touch one another directly, but somehow melt, fuse, and decompose in a shared common space from which all are partly absent.’ Two objects never influence each other directly, but rather meet each other in what he calls the interior of a third.
Figure 4 - “The Pile City”, Scifi Program spring 2104 at SCIArc thaught be Peter Trummer. Project by David Marco Ciscar, Ziye Liu. 10
2. Asset Urbanism: Ghosts, Zombies, and the Simultaneity of Amplified Growth and Decay, by Matthew Soules, published online at the 102nd ACSA Annual Procedings. http://apps.acsa_arch.org/resources/proceedings/indexsearch. aspx?txtKeyword1=%22Soules%2C+Matthew%22&ddField1=1 3. Roberts, Sam, “Homes Dark and Lifeless, Kept by Out-of-Towners,” The New York Times, July 06, 2011. Online edition 4. Asset Urbanism: Ghosts, Zombies, and the Simultaneity of Amplified Growth and Decay, by Matthew Soules, published online at the 102nd ACSA Annual Procedings, p.686. 5. Ibid, p.693. 6. On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects, Gilbert Simondon, original published in Paris:Aubier, Editions Montaigne, 1958, translated from the French by Ninian Mellamphy with a Preface by John Hart, University of Western Ontarion, june 1980 7. Tribune Tower Competition, Volume 1, first Published in Great Britain by Academy edition, 7/8 Holland Street, London W8, England. (The Rizzoli Edition, published in 1980 in the United States is a slightly abridged reprint of The International Competition for a New Administration Building for the Chicago Tribune, MCMXXII: Containing All the Designs Submitted in Response to the Chicago Tribune’s $100,000 Offer Commemorating Its Seventy Fifth Anniversary, June 1922. Copyright 1923 The Tribune Company) 8. Das Hochhaus, Ludwig Hilberseimer, published in Das Kunstblatt, 1922, p.525.531 9. Ibid, p. 531 10. On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects, Gilbert Simondon, original published in Paris:Aubier, Editions Montaigne, 1958, translated from the French by Ninian Mellamphy with a Preface by John Hart, University of Western Ontarion, june 1980, p.17 11. Ibid, p.14 12. I refer here to further writings of Graham Harman, as for example, The Quadruple Object, (Winchester, UK, Washington, USA: Zero Books, 2011) 13. The superego and the act, lecture be Slavoj Zizek in August 1999 at the European Graduate School. (Quote from the online transcription: Superego is the reversal of the permissive “You May!” into the prescriptive “You Must!”, the point in which permitted enjoyment turns into ordained enjoyment. We all know the formula of Kants unconditional imperative: “Du canst, denn du sollst”. You can do your duty, because you must do it. Superego turns this around into “You must, because you can.”)
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