#02 Grutto - Bilderatlas Mnemosyme [with honors]

GRUTTO (

#03

) Bilderatlas Mnemosyne

Grutto

Grupo 3

Madrid Miguel Sumpsi Sánchez Iván Rando Campos Matteo Caro Sánchez Mendoza Juan Ignacio Araya

UD Federico Soriano

Semestre de otoño, curso 2020-2021

Grutto

Unidad docente compuesta por: Profesores Federico Soriano Pedro Urzaiz Silvia Colmenares Eva Gil Pedro Pitarch Apoyo a la docencia Eduardo Castillo Vinuesa Asistentes Marta Vaquero Wladimir Pulupa Camila Chamorro Cayetana Maldonado Marcos Romero Marta JimĂŠnez Manuela Sancho Pelayo Encinas

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El curso va a proponer un nuevo cambio de paradigma. Cuando aún seguimos planteando que la dualidad modeloprototipo sustituya al conjunto de herramientas proyectuales heredadas del clasicismo y la modernidad, vamos a añadir un paso más. Durante este curso queremos comenzar a ensayar la desaparición del proyecto arquitectónico tal y como lo conocemos, ese documento grueso, completo, largo temporalmente, que proyecta al futuro una realidad arquitectónica desde el aislamiento de los equipos creativos. Éste será sustituido, siguiendo a las vanguardias de los procesos participativos entre las que destaca la posición de Stanford, por el término prototyping, para describir el conjunto de prototipos aprobados sucesivos.

El proyecto arquitectónico necesita tiempo y recursos para generar una documentación completa de un objeto arquitectónico, desde una posición de partida alejada del final y sin mecanismos para controlar que el desarrollo vaya por caminos aceptados por el cliente y usuarios. Durante ese tiempo de trabajo surgen dos problemáticas que nunca han sido tenidas en cuenta: por un lado, las condiciones que lo generaron cambian, pero el proyecto no puede recogerlas en tiempo real, y, por otro lado, no existen interacciones con los agentes externos y futuros usuarios que hagan ajustar el proyecto con una efectividad real.

El proyecto como conjunto cerrado es sustituido por la sucesión de prototipos que van aprobando, en fases sucesivas, las condiciones programáticas, materiales y perceptivas del objeto arquitectónico. Los prototipos son reales, físicos, definidos por complejidades sucesivas. Cada uno de ellos tiene un público específico adecuado a cada etapa. Los costes se reducen adecuándose también a cada momento de enfoque.

El curso trabaja desde el inicio en prototipos, incluso en prototipos de ideas. Los protagonistas se mantienen: cliente y modelos, pero ahora el prototipo es la herramienta comunicativa.

1.1 - El Cliente: Trabajar con un cliente real.

El cliente es un desconocido con poder y, si no lo es, deberemos convertirlo en un desconocido con poder. Hay que informarse, trazar, intuir, especificar, alejarse y luego dejarse mandar a lo largo de un proceso, cada vez más largo, donde él ha tomado el mando del movimiento colectivo.

El cliente es la figura básica de este proceso, sea público o privado; ambos se están comportando igual. Organiza completamente el proceso, definiendo los tiempos, los medios, los recursos, los fines, las localizaciones... es decir, los materiales con los que los arquitectos vamos a trabajar. Son gestores de arquitectura con unos objetivos muy claros y precisos, que no se limitan solamente a darnos el programa, ni las funcionalidades concretas, ni tan siquiera puede que los planes económicos. Hay que entrar a averiguar o imaginar en ese designio encubierto, porque ese, y no otro, es el verdadero problema o programa arquitectónico que debemos resolver.

El cliente decide cuestiones que van más allá de lo que los manuales de arquitectura, ya viejos, les asignaban. Nada. Hoy impregnan cada parte del proyecto y la totalidad del mismo. Y no sabemos tratarlos.Programa es economía, gestión es economía, construcción y economía, imagen, estilo es economía, marca es economía, espacio es economía, acción es economía...

En ese sentido no es de extrañar que haya cobrado la importancia del director del proyecto.

UD SORIANO · Programa Docente

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1.2 - El Modelo: trabajar en un solo documento complejo.

En el inicio de la historia, la arquitectura eran sólo las obras de arquitectura realmente construidas. Las trazas eran las instrucciones de montaje, de la construcción de esas obras. Cuando el grabado y la imprenta popularizaron el dibujo como texto interpretable se empezó a entender también lo dibujado como parte intrínseca de la arquitectura. Entró en su historia. No solo eran instrucciones gráficas de la construcción de la arquitectura real, sino que llegaron a considerarse como obras de arquitectura de pleno derecho. Planos, plantas, secciones, perspectivas planas, axonometrías, tienen el mismo grado de influencia o de reconocimiento que edificios, fábricas, inmuebles o construcciones. En los últimos momentos el dibujo se convirtió en la forma del pensamiento arquitectónico.

1.3 - El prototipo: fabricar, hacer, tocar con las manos.

Un prototipo es un instrumento para materializar una idea y explorar o comprobar su relación con la realidad. Se trata de crear algo, de confeccionar un artefacto físico, para testear, explorar o comunicar las ideas de diseño de una cosa, u objeto arquitectónico, que va a ser proyectado. Un prototipo genera empatía, ya que profundiza la comprensión del objeto arquitectónico por usuarios, clientes, y también por los que van a construirlo o fabricarlo, antes de que el propio proyecto esté concluido. Explora e inspira, al desarrollar múltiples conceptos para probar en paralelo. Y para probar y refinar soluciones. (Design Thinking Booklet Stanford Resources). Prototipar es el proceso que generamos para concretar ese objeto real de testeo. Para tocar y hacer con las manos. Prototipar es la cuarta fase de los procesos de Design Thinking (designthinkingespaña.com), con la cual salimos fuera de los procesos internos, aislados, de diseño y hacemos converger el proyecto con los clientes, usuarios y servicios.

Los prototipos complementan e informan al modelo que es el sistema gráfico de pensamiento, control y dibujo contemporáneo. El modelo no puede solucionar completamente todos los contactos posibles con la realidad, y en todos los niveles. Ni tampoco la inserción en los procesos productivos y constructivos empresariales. Debe ser combinado y complementado durante todo su proceso con prototipos y “mock-ups”.

Los prototipos ponen en carga de realidad el modelo. Los prototipos no se deben desarrollar al final de los procesos de diseño proyectual, como una materialización final, sino que deben implementarse muchos, desde los mismos inicios, en distintas etapas y con objetivos y chequeos distintos. No son documentos. No son muestras de obra. No son modelados parciales. Es una herramienta de verificación completa y una herramienta de orientación asociada al modelo. Los prototipos plantean una pregunta a unas empresas, a unos técnicos, a unos sistemas de producción industrializados, o a unos usuarios o clientes para completar y definir un proceso tectónico, material y conceptual, y realizar tanto una verificación tanto perceptiva y fenomenológica como técnica y presupuestaria. Finalmente debe introducirlos en el modelo, en todas sus capas y condiciones, para completarlo.

Los prototipos no son otras representaciones más y por ello no pueden trabajar a escala. Son secciones de proyecto. No se evalúan proporciones, ni simetrías, sino que se comprueban empatías, sistemas y viabilidades. Son desechables. Los prototipos exploran condiciones híbridas de construcción o materiales, investigan compatibilidades entre sistemas aparentemente incompatibles, asumen lo artesano de los procesos e integran impresiones 3D en los inicios del proyecto.

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UD SORIANO · Programa Docente

2.1 - Docencia: Tenemos varios encargos por cuenta de la Universidad de Arquitectura y Urbanismo de Mendoza. Éste será nuestro cliente, el que nos va a acompañar de nuevo durante todo el curso. Proponiendo, corrigiendo y evaluando. Nos va a presentar varias condiciones de trabajo diferentes, correspondientes a varios entornos, sobre los cuales los estudiantes desarrollarán inicialmente una propuesta individual y posteriormente agrupados en equipos una respuesta completa para uno de ellos.

Llamamos entornos no sólo a los lugares sobre los que desarrollaremos las propuestas, sino al conjunto de condiciones que los conforman. Todo lo que ‘rodea’ el encargo.

El cliente aporta varios entornos concretos y una línea de trabajo específica para cada uno de ellos. Son situaciones reales, que necesitan el trabajo y sobre todo las respuestas de un equipo de arquitectos y especialistas. Pero también aportan la necesidad política, pragmática y sobre todo real, que debe conjugar lo funcional, lo simbólico, lo monumental, lo económico y lo social, con lo imposible. Una utopía concreta.

2.2 - Entornos: El transcurso del proyecto tendrá como lugar tres posibles localizaciones dentro de la provincia de Mendoza propuestas por el cliente. Los tres lugares en los que nos encontramos responderán a tipologías diferentes y requieren de una lectura específica y concienciada de la zona que responda a unas necesidades proyectuales.

Entrará en juego el proceso de comunicación con las partes que colaboran durante el curso, cliente, modelo y prototipo.

3.1 - Ciudad de Mendoza 3.2 - Departamento Godoy Cruz 3.3 - Departamento Luján de Cuyo

UD Soriano

Programa Docente de Curso 2020 - 2021, ETSAM, Madrid

UD SORIANO · Programa Docente

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Content 10

Frangmentos Textos y Referencias 12 Referencias grรกficas 38 Capturas de pantallav 54

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Frangmentos Textos y Referencias

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PIGS... In There?

“PIGS... In There? is a speculative tool about future bodies, dissolving the limits of ethology from the point of view of an AI that uses information stolen from video cameras in real time. Bodies are classified by species and confined in a reduced volume. A security bug in video surveillance cameras that never updated their firmware is used as a starting point to recognise all these public access bodies, while their cultural meaning and relationship with space are examined.

The production of images constantly emitted by the IP addresses of security cameras generates TBs of contents that are processable only by machines. AI consciousness is sensitive to this information and looks for patterns that generate new bodies through a trained GAN pix2pix with a database of species classification, biometric markers and geolocations. A continuous landscape is outlined, where the transitional fossil materialized between government super-vigilance and biological catastrophe is found. A simulation of intermediate bodies that plays with the vacuum in the neural network creating a cosmology of images on the perverted biological fiction of re-synthesisation.

Whereas the biotope shows itself in the Anthropocene (a process in which humans had exceeded their ability to decide and control), its fragility and belonging to primeval nature has been revealed. PIGS... In There? allows us to conceive a new dimension of nature in the post-pandemic time: a reboot in which the natural forms of the territory have been deprivatised, swapped and de-hierarchised.”

Mon & Matteo

Pigs... in There?, The Morphosis of Nature, Madrid, 2020

An/Na

“Il progetto acquista un posizionamento radicalmente teorico e personale. piuttosto come una ricerca nella quale uno si fa una serie di domande per capire che cos’è e cosa significa fare landscape oggi, e come dovrebbe essere affrontato in una società complessa, composta da una molteplicità di agenti umani e non umani naturali, artificiali e tecnologici Che vanno per definire alla fine una una prima natura una seconda natura una terza natura e forse anche una quarta natura.

E precisamente anche lo scopo di questo lavoro investigare che cos’è questa quarta natura dove sembra sparire la presenza dell’uomo (2ªnatura). Un luogo dove scattano tutta una serie di processi non umani attivati da una presenza tecnologica/virtuale.

Il progetto cerca di immaginare come funzionerebbe un luogo escluso dalla presenza umana. Quindi un’approssimazione è un tentativo di capire come agirebbe su questo luogo la presenza di una prima natura e allo stesso tempo una quarta natura, due mondi che apparentemente sembrano opposti.

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Storia ci ha rivelato tutta una serie di casi dove una porzione di natura rimasta senza rimasta esclusa da dall’uomo, Dove alla fine questi processi di esclusione sono stati scattati dal proprio essere umano.

Altri invece sono stati semplicemente luoghi irraggiungibili, posti ostili, posti dove la sopravvivenza dell’uomo non era possibile, ma questi alla fine non sono veramente quelli che ci interessano. I posti che ci interessano molte volte sono stati corrotti dalla stessa mano dell’uomo e precisamente per questo motivo sono diventati luoghi inaccessibili (esempio Chernobyl). Luoghi Dove la natura si ha riappropriato di case, edifici pubblici, di industrie...

Rispondendo alla fine A un ridefinizione, di quello che significa romanticamente parlando, una rovina (Archeologia Del Futuro). Altri luoghi invece rimangono esclusi semplicemente per questioni culturali (esempio il bosco dei suicidi in Giappone). Sono invece porzioni di paesaggio che per tutta una storia, una serie di aspetti legati ad una cultura una serie di credenze rimangono imperturbate (non c’è condizionamento fisico naturale che lo impedisca).

Alla fine tutti questi ingredienti allena nel mondo attuale odierna mente si traducono in aspetti tecnologici/virtuali. Quindi il progetto anche prendere la la condizione di hacking tecnologico.

Ossia, come alterare tutto questo database, precisamente con la propria tecnologia che abbiamo, per renderlo inaccessibile.

Questo sarebbe precisamente l’ultimo manifesto umano sul luogo, quello tecnologico/virtuale.”

Matteo Caro

AnNa, J. Nunes & J.Gomes da Silva, Mendrisio, 2019

Material Gesture site, Robert Smithson interview

“O.K. we’ll begin with entropy. That’s a subject that’s preoccupied me for some time. On the whole I would say entropy contradicts the usual notion of a mechanistic world view. In other words it’s a condition that’s irreversible, it’s condition that’s moving towards a gradual equilibrium and it’s suggested in many ways. Perhaps a nice succinct definition of entropy would be Humpty Dumpty. Like Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall, Humpty Dumpty had a great fall, all the king’s horses and all the king’s men couldn’t put Humpty Dumpty back together again. There is a tendency to treat closed systems in such a way. One might even say that the current Watergate situation is an example of entropy. You have a closed system which eventually deteriorates and starts to break apart and there’s no way that you can really piece it back together again. Another example might be the shattering of Marcel Duchamp Glass, and his attempt to put all the pieces back together again attempting to overcome entropy.

Buckminister Fuller also has a notion of entropy as a kind of devil that he must fight against and recycle. ... Now, I would like to get into an area of, let’s say, the problems of waste. It seems that when one is talking about preserving the environment or conserving energy or recycling one inevitably gets to the question of waste and I would postulate actually that waste and enjoyment are in a sense

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coupled. There’s a certain kind of pleasure principle that comes out of preoccupation with waste. Like if we want a bigger and better car we are going to have bigger and better waster productions. So there’s a kind of equation there between the enjoyment of life and waste.

Probably the opposite of waste is luxury. Both waste and luxury tend to be useless. Then other’s kind of middle class notion of luxury which is often called “quality.” And quality is sort of based on taste and sensibility. Sartre says Genet produces neither spit or diamonds. I guess that’s what I’m talking about.

ALISON SKY: Isn’t entropy actually metamorphosis, or a continual process in which elements are undergoing change, but in an evolutionary sense?

SMITHSON: Yes and no. In other words, if we consider the earth in terms of geologic time we end up with what we call fluvial entropy. Geology has its entropy too, where everything is gradually wearing down. Now there may be a point where the earth’s surface will collapse and break apart, so that the irreversible process will be in a sense metamorphosized, it is evolutionary, but it’s not evolutionary in terms of any idealism. There is still the heat death of the sun. It may be that human beings are just different from dinosaurs rather than better.

In other words there just might be a different situation. There’s this need to try to transcend one’s condition. I’m not a transcendentalist, so I just see things going towards a... well it’s very hard to predict anything; anyway all predictions tend to be wrong. I mean even planning. I mean planning and chance almost seem to be the same thing.

SKY: I with the architectural profession would recognize that. In their grand masterplan schemes for the world, architects seem to find the “final solution” to all possible situations.

SMITHSON: They don’t’ take those things into account. Architects tend to be idealists, and not dialecticians. I propose a dialectics of entrophic change. ... I’d like to mention another mistake which is essentially an engineering mistake and that’s the Salton Sea in southern California, which happens to be California’s largest lake. It happened back during Teddy Roosevelt’s administration. There was a desperate attempt to try to reroute the Colorado River. The Colorado River was always flooding and destroying the area. There was an attempt to keep the Colorado River from flooding by building a canal, in Mexico, and this was illegally done. This canal was started in the delta of the Colorado and then it was rerouted back toward Mexicali, but what happened was that the river flooded into this canal and the canal overflowed, and fed back into the Imperial Valley which is below sea level. So that this thirty mile lake was created by this engineering mistake, and whole cities were inundated, the railroad also was submerged, and there were great attempts to try to fight back this deluge, but to no avail. Since then, people have come to live with this lake, and recently I was out there I spent some time in Salton City which is a city of about 400 people. And another example of blind planning is this maze of wide boulevards that snake through the desert. Now it was the idea that they would turn this into a huge retirement village or whatever, maybe a new Palm Springs, but the bottom fell out of that so that if you go there now you just see all these boulevards going all through the desert, very wide concrete boulevards and just sign posts naming the different roads and maybe a few trailer encampments near this city. It’s impossible to swim in the Salton

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Sea because barnacles have grown all over the rocks. There is some water skiing and fishing.

There’s also a plan to try to desalinate the whole Salton Sea. And there’s all kinds of strange schemes for doing that. One was to bring down slag from the Kaiser Steel Company, and build a dike system. So that here we have an example of a kind of domino effect where one mistake begets another mistake, yet these mistakes are all curiously exciting to me on a certain kind of level - I don’t find them depressing. ...

It’s like the Anchorage earthquake that was responsible for creating a park. After the earthquake they set aside a portion of earthquake damage and turned that into a park, which strikes me as an interesting way of dealing with the unexpected, and incorporating that into the community. That area’s fascinated me quite a bit. Also, the recent eruptions outside of Iceland. At Vestmann Islands an entire community was submerged in black ashes. It created a kind of buried house system. It was quite interesting for a while.

You might say that provided a temporary kind of buried architecture which reminds me of my own Partially Buried Woodshed out in Kent State, Ohio where I took 20 cartloads of earth and piled them on this woodshed until the central beam cracked. There was a problem from one of the local papers. They didn’t really see that as a very positive gesture, and there was a rather disparaging article that went under the heading “It’s a Mud Mud Mud World.”

But basically I think that those preoccupations do escape architects and I’m thinking of another problem that also exists, that of mining reclamation. It seems that when they made up the laws for mining reclamation they wanted to put back the mines the way they were before they mined them. Now that’s a real Humpty Dumpty way of doing things.

You can imagine the result when they try to deal with the Bingham pit in Utah which is a pit one mile deep and three miles across. Now the idea of the law being so general and not really dealing with a specific site like that seems unfortunate. One person at Kennecott Mining Company told me that they were supposed to fill that pit in; now of course one would wonder where they were going to get the material to fill that pit in. SKY: Did you ask them?

SMITHSON: Yes, I mean they said it would take something like 30 years and they’d have to get the dirt from another mountain. It seems that the reclamation laws really don’t deal with specific sites, they deal with a general dream or an ideal world long gone. It’s an attempt to recover a frontier or a wilderness that no longer exists. Here we have to accept the entropic situation and more or less learn how to reincorporate these things that seem ugly. Actually there’s the conflict of interests. On one side you have the idealistic ecologist and on the other side you have the profit desiring miner and you get all kinds of strange twists of landscape consciousness from such people. In fact there’s a book that the Sierra Club put out called Stripping. Strip mining actually does sort of suggest lewd sex acts and everything, so it seems immoral from that standpoint. It’s like a kind of sexual assault on mother earth which brings in the aspect of incest projections as well as illicit behavior and I would say that psychologically

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there’s problem there. There’s a discussion of aesthetics in this book Stripping from the point of view of the miner and from the point of view of the ecologist. The ecologist says flatly that strip mines are just ugly and the miners says that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. So you have this stalemate and would say that’s part of the clashing aspect of the entropic tendency, in other words two irreconcilable situations hopelessly going over the same waterfall. It seems that one would have to recognize this entropic condition rather than try to reverse it. And there’s no stopping it; consider the image that Norbert Weiner gives us - Niagara Falls. In fact they even shored up Niagara, speaking of Niagara. They stopped Niagara for a while because it was wearing away. And then they put these steel rods into the rock so that it would maintain its mutual appearance.

SKY: Have they been able to stop it?

SMITHSON: They did stop it.

SKY: From wearing away?

SMITHSON: Well, it’s still there. It didn’t fall spare yet. Niagara looks like a giant open pit quarry.

In other words it has high walls which offend people greatly in the strip mining regions. There are defects called “high walls” that exist in the strip mining areas and there’s a desire on the part of ecologists to slope these down. The cliffs all around Niagara suggest excavation and mining, but it’s just the work of nature. So there’s constant confusion between man and nature. Is man a part of nature? Is man not a part of nature? So this causes problems.

SKY: There is definitely some sort of perverse fascination attached to the process of inevitable and impending destruction that will occur either in your own environment or be observed vicariously because people persist in living at the bases of volcanos, on earthquake zones such as the fault line which is supposed to destroy all of California, on top of sinking landscapes such as Venice which is a city built entirely on rotting wooden pilings and will eventually fall into the sea.

SMITHSON: Well, that may be something that’s human - that’s human need. It seems that there’s almost a hope for disaster you might say. There’s that desire for spectacle. I know when I was a kid I used to love to watch the hurricanes come and blow the trees down and rip up the sidewalks. I mean it fascinated me. There’s kind of pleasure that one receives on that level. Yet there is this for something more tranquil - like babbling toward mining regions and volcanic conditions - wastelands rather than the usual notion of scenery or quietude, tranquility - though they somehow interact.”

Robert Smithson

Interview with Alison Sky, ENTROPY MADE VISIBLE, On Site#4, 1973

Anne Holtrop, Material Gesture Site, Mendrisio, 2019

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Invisible Images, Your Pictures Are Looking at You “Our eyes are fleshy things, and for most of human history our visual culture has also been made of fleshy things. The history of images is a history of pigments and dyes, oils, acrylics, silver nitrate and gelatin – materials that one could use to paint a cave, a church or a canvas.

One could use them to make a photograph, or to print pictures on the pages of a magazine.

The advent of screen-based media in the latter half of the 20th century was not so different: cathode ray tubes and liquid crystal displays emitted light at frequencies our eyes perceive as colour, and densities we perceive as shape.

We have got pretty good at understanding the vagaries of human vision; the serpentine ways in which images infiltrate and influence culture, their tenuous relationships to everyday life and truth, the means by which they are harnessed to serve – and resist – power.The theoretical concepts we use to analyse classical visual culture are robust: representation, meaning, spectacle, semiosis, mimesis and all the rest. For centuries these concepts have helped us to navigate the workings of classical visual culture.

But over the last decade or so, something dramatic has happened. Visual culture has changed form. It has become detached from human eyes and has largely become invisible.

The overwhelming majority of images are now made by machines for other machines, with humans rarely in the loop.The advent of machine-to- machine seeing has been barely noticed, and poorly understood by those of us who have noticed, even as the landscape of invisible images and machine vision becomes ever more active. Its continued expansion is starting to have profound effects on human life. Invisible images are actively watching us, poking and prodding, guiding our movements, inflicting pain and inducing pleasure. This relationship between human viewers and images is a critical function to analyse – but it is exactly this assumption of a human subject that I want to question.

What is truly revolutionary about the advent of digital images is the fact that they are fundamentally machine-readable: they can only be seen by humans in special circumstances and for short periods of time. A photograph shot on a phone creates a machine-readable file that does not reflect light in such a way as to be perceptible to a human eye. A secondary application, like a software-based photo viewer paired with a liquid crystal display and backlight, may create something that a human can look at, but the image only appears to human eyes temporarily. However, the image does not need to be turned into humanreadable form in order for a machine to do something with it. This is fundamentally different from a film negative, which is unreadable by humans and machines alike.

The fact that digital images are fundamentally machine-readable regardless of a human subject has enormous implications. It allows for the widespread automation of vision, as well as the exercise of power on dramatically larger and smaller scales than previously possible.

Shifting Visual Culture Our built environments are filled with examples of machine- to-machine seeing apparatuses:

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automatic licence-plate readers (ALPRs) mounted on police cars, buildings, infrastructure and private vehicles snap photos of every car entering their frames. ALPR operators, like the company Vigilant Solutions, collect the locations of every car their cameras see, use optical character recognition (OCR) to store licence-plate numbers, and create databases used by police departments or insurance companies. In the consumer sphere, outfits like Euclid Analytics and Realeyes install cameras in malls and department stores to track the motion of people through space with software that identifies who is looking at what for how long, and to track facial expressions of mood and emotional state of shoppers.These systems are only possible because digital images are machine-readable and do not require a human in the analytic loop.

This invisible visual culture is not just confined to industrial operations, law enforcement and ‘smart’ cities, but extends into what we naively think of as human-to-human visual culture. I am referring here to the trillions of images that humans share on digital platforms – ones that seem to be made by humans for other humans.

On its surface, a platform like Facebook seems analogous to the musty glue-bound photo albums of postwar America. But this analogy is deeply misleading, because something completely different happens when you share a picture on Facebook. When you post, you are feeding an array of immensely powerful artificial-intelligence systems information on how to identify people and how to recognise Trevor Paglen, Venus Flytrap (Corpus: American Predators), ‘Adversarially Evolved Hallucination’ series, 2017 To create this image series, AIs were trained on thousands of images that were labelled and tagged in order to teach the AI what it was looking at. places, objects, habits, preferences, race, class, gender identifications, economic statuses and more.

Regardless of whether a human subject actually sees any of the 2 billion photographs uploaded daily to Facebook- controlled platforms, the photographs on social media are scrutinised by neural networks with a degree of attention that would make even the most steadfast art historian blush. Facebook’s DeepFace algorithm, developed in 2014 and deployed in 2015, produces facial models and uses a neural network that achieves over 97 per cent identification accuracy. These AI systems have appropriated human visual culture and transformed it into a massive, flexible training set. The more images Facebook and Google’s AI systems ingest, the more accurate they become, and the more influence they have on everyday life.

The Role of Abstractions If we take a peek into the internal workings of machine- vision systems, we find a menagerie of abstractions that seem completely alien to human perception.The machine- to-machine landscape is not one of representations so much as activations and operations. But this is not to say that there is no formal underpinning to how computer-vision systems work.

All computer-vision systems produce mathematical abstractions from the images they are

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analysing, and the qualities of those abstractions are guided by the kind of metadata the algorithm is trying to read. Facial recognition, for instance, typically involves any number of techniques, depending on the application, the desired efficiency and the available training sets. Convolutional neural networks (CNN) are built out of dozens or even hundreds of internal software layers that can pass information back and forth.The earliest layers of the software pick apart a given image into component shapes, gradients, luminosities and corners.

Those individual components are convolved into synthetic shapes. Deeper in the CNN, the synthetic images are compared to other images the network has been trained to recognise, activating software ‘neurons’ when the network finds similarities.

We might think of these synthetic activations as being analogous to a collective unconscious of artificial intelligence – a tempting, although misleading, metaphor. Neural networks cannot invent their own classes; they are only able to relate images they ingest to images that they have been trained on. And their training sets reveal the historical, geographical, racial and socio-economic positions of their trainers. Feed an image of Édouard Manet’s painting Olympia (1863) to a CNN trained on the industry-standard ‘Imagenet’ training set, and the CNN is quite sure that it is looking at a burrito, the ‘burrito’ object class being specific to a young developer diet in the San Francisco Bay Area. On a more serious level, engineers at Google deactivated the ‘gorilla’ class after it became clear that its algorithms trained on predominantly white faces and tended to classify African Americans as apes.

The point here is that if we want to understand the invisible world of machine-to-machine visual culture, we need to unlearn how to see like humans. We need to learn how to see Trevor Paglen, A Man (Corpus: The Humans), ‘Adversarially Evolved Hallucination’ series, 2017 Paglen’s A Man image shows us the inner machinations of what a neural network thinks a man looks like. a parallel universe composed of activations, keypoints, eigenfaces, feature transforms, classifiers and training sets. But it is not just as simple as learning a different vocabulary.

Formal concepts contain epistemological assumptions, which in turn have ethical consequences. The theoretical concepts we use to analyse human visual culture are profoundly misleading when applied to the machinic landscape.

To mediate against the optimisations and predations of a machinic landscape, one must create deliberate inefficiencies and spheres of life removed from market and political predations – ‘safe houses’ in the invisible digital sphere. It is in inefficiency, experimentation, self- expression and often law-breaking that freedom and political self-representation can be found.

We no longer look at images – images look at us. They no longer simply represent things, but actively intervene in everyday life. We must begin to understand these changes if we are to challenge the exceptional forms of power flowing through the invisible visual culture that we find ourselves enmeshed within.”

Invisible Images

Trevor Paglen, Shadow (Corpus: Things that Exist Negatively), Adversarially Evolved Hallucination Series, 2017

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Superscape, An Interview with Mark Smout & Laura Allen “GEOFF MANAUGH: I first became aware of your work in 2006, when the Augmented Landscapes pamphlet came out. Can we go back to that pamphlet briefly and discuss some of the broader themes it explored— including active landscapes, mechanical architectures, visual scenography, and so forth? What about those particular themes still propels your design work today?

MARK SMOUT: Broadly speaking, as the title suggests, the pamphlet is about augment- ing landscapes: pursuing more of a positive and symbiotic relationship between architec- ture and landscape, and looking at how that might generate a more proactive or productive form of architecture.

An example of that, I suppose, would be the “Ballistic Instruments” project. Had we not squeezed that into the Pamphlet when we did—had we not tied it off for publication at that point in time—we probably wouldn’t have finished it in the same way. We would have followed it through a bit more, and made a series of projectile devices, and we’d be launching instruments out in the middle of the Norfolk coast right now—I’d probably still be doing it! [laughs] It would have been a five-year project.

LAURA ALLEN: And it was about the horizon.

M.S. It was about the horizon and architecture— about the place of the horizon in architecture.

We were looking at the way that objects fit into or stand against the horizon, to see how architecture could function differently in that visual context.

That then became a springboard for the later “Retreating Village” project, in that we went on to examine how things like the facades of buildings might work to break up the hori- zon visually with a disruptive pattern or a disruptive material on the front, like dazzle ships from World War II. The façade patterns could be illuminated from certain angles, so the architecture would disturb the visual line of the horizon in a way that wasn’t purely spatial. I’m talking about perceptual illumination here— not just a series of lights on sticks or something like that. It was about perceptual shifts. We’re very interested in perception, landscape, architecture, and drawing—that sort of thing.

So “Ballistic Instruments” would be all about firing objects up into space to let you see where the sky meets the land. And that would have been in one of three ways: one would be with a line, one would be with a flash of chrome, and the other would use a chromed net that could fly onto an object—a house or a tree—to help you understand how three-dimensional a silhouette could really be.

L.A. The design process of understanding these projectiles—how they perform and what’s needed on site to make them into functioning tools—was all imagined, however. They weren’t ever fired. They were, in a sense, conceptual prototypes for a test. They were not necessarily instruments that were meant to be used, in other words; the design of the instruments was itself the test. We quite like working like that.

M.S. It’s rather akin to Mike Webb’s Temple Island project, which is sort of a conceptual device that may or may not exist and may or may not work.

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L.A. Both of those projects are devices in the sense that they’re supposed to be performative somehow. They’re meant to instigate a sensa- tion or to make you aware of something.

In a sense, they’re not supposed to be benign; they’re supposed to be very active, even though, in the majority of cases, they’re not really doing anything. They’re not twirling around or moving. It’s their perceptual effects that are very dynamic.

M.S. Devices are also very good ways of describing complex systems. Systems exist everywhere in the landscape—from regional ecologies to spatial systems within architecture—and a device is a more or less complex system. It’s a way of describing a situational relationship between known—or unknown— objects. That’s how we use them. it’s a very bland map with just the occasional little dot of sand in it. But, when you compare that to a map where I come from, in north Wales, that’s an incredibly rich depiction of coal seams, different forms of limestone, and loads and loads of stuff that you’d never know was going on under the soil. I like the idea that the vast majority of the stuff on that map you just can’t see—you don’t even know it’s there.

G.M. So you like maps of geologic strata that humans can’t normally see, and, Laura, you like temporary geographies of air that usually aren’t mapped at all.

M.S. And that would make a good project! [laughs] L.A. They’re also just super graphics—and they’re narratives. They’re little stories about a place at a particular moment, before it changed or became something else. At the moment that that map was made, that’s where those things were. And things also stick around: British maps, for instance, are absolutely full of old battle sites and remains of priories and Roman stuff. Even on a current map, you’re looking at 2,000 years’ worthof habitation.

G.M. Finally, this interview comes to an end a few weeks before you arrive in New York City for another super-workshop, featuring a different group of students from the Bartlett. I’m curious how this very different type of environment—architecturally dense and vertically layered with subways, sewers, and even Revolutionary War-era artifacts— might operate in a Smout Allen scheme.

In other words, we’ve spoken so much about remote landscapes, open airspace, hidden geologies, and so on, but I wonder if working in a place like Manhattan or Queens, where other human constructions are front and center, might challenge your idea of an “envirographic” architecture or if it might, in a sense, more accurately correspond to the promises of your design approach.

M.S. The unit this year is looking at “infrastruc- tural architectures and megaurban ecologies.”

Infrastructure is key.

L.A. What I think is really great about this trip is the liberty of an everything-goes environment like New York. Part of the challenge for the students so far is that we’ve been asking them to make a lot of assumptions, and to move forward on the strength of their own proposals rather than based on intensive research about the city.

M.S. The idea of urban infrastructure also feels a bit more tangible when you’re not actually in that city. It’s easier to think of it as an abstract system of pipes and conduits and roads and cables, and then to come up with your own scheme or proposal—to really frame an idea—

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before you test it out in the real situation. If you’re doing that while standing there, you can get maybe too wrapped up in the details and lose your best ideas.

L.A. And a lot of the students so far have been coming back to us with environmentally focused proposals, not in terms of climate but in terms of urban cycles, processes, logistics, and delivery—the landscape of Manhattan as one enormous bit of malfunction. That’s been really exciting.”

Superscape, M. Smout & L. Allen Landscape Futures, Geoff Manaugh, 2013

Terceras Naturalezas [...]

“A pesar de que venimos utilizando el término Terceras Naturalezas desde 2004, no hemos sido nosotros los inventores del mismo. Fue Jacobo Bonfadio, un sacerdote humanista e historiador quien a principios del siglo XVI acuñó el término para referirse a una nueva entidad, un nuevo entorno físico que veía La Luz en aquel entonces, situado a medio camino entre categorías existentes. El término adquirió cierta notoriedad y fue incorporado por otros escritores de la época, como Bartolomeo Taegio o Miguel de Cervantes, que lo difundieron rápidamente en los círculos humanistas. Terceras Naturalezas planteaba una comparación con la primera naturaleza, la que ocurre por sí misma, espontáneamente y sinintervención humana, y la segunda naturaleza concepto utilizado por Cicerón. para referirse a las manipulaciones humanas del mundo natural con fines prácticos, como la agricultura. En una carta a su colega Plinio Tomacello que describía el entorno del lago de Garda, Bonfadio acuñó el término para referirse alos nuevos jardines renacentistas, que no solamente presentaban una radical y nueva materialidad a medio camino entre lo natural y lo modificado por la mano del hombre, sino que contenían numerosas referencias al pasado. Estos primeros jardines renacentistas eran entornos construidos y percibidos culturalmente, en los que el placer físico e intelectual de su experiencia provenía no solo de la inmersión en un entorno producido por la artificialización de distintas especies naturales, sino también del entendimiento de las múltiples capas de conexiones con la mitología y el pasado. Estos espacios de conocimiento y placer sólo podían ser percibidos y transmitidos, a la vez física y culturalmente. [...]

Para nosotros, el concepto de Tercera Naturaleza es sinónimo de espacio —o, al menos, la noción del mismo que hemos tratado de explicar anteriormente—, el fenómeno de mediación e interacción entre diferentes agentes y materiales de diferentes orígenes que involucra toda clase de conexiones con personas, materiales, especies, y tecnologías, y que se percibe a la vez física e intelectualmente. Para nosotros, el campo de trabajo más excitante ahora mismo para la arquitectura es el del restablecimiento y redefinición de las complejas relaciones que unen humanos y no-humanos, tecnologías, objetos y entornos, más allá de las categorías usuales utilizadas en nuestra disciplina. La noción de entorno o edificio como Tercera Naturaleza explora la posibilidad de modificar artificialmente nuestros entornos para formar complejas asambleas (o ecologías) de materiales, en las que materiales vivos e inertes, diferentes grupos sociales, y objetos tecnológica y culturalmente cargados se reúnan en un estado de fricción e interacción constante.”

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[...]

“Hablar de forma diferente Este paisaje sin fin de información, sin jerarquía, constituye una situación paralela a la de la producción y consumo de bienes y productos en la postguerra de la Segunda Guerra Mundial. En los años siguientes al conflicto, los lenguajes del mundo del arte encontraron en las naciones más avanzadas un nuevo contexto productivo, social y económico al que referirse: el de una abundancia de objetos y bienes antes desconocida, acompañada de nuevas formas y medios de transmitir información. Aquella nueva era de la abundancia tenía su origen en un desarrollo productivo sin precedentes proveniente del desarrollo de la industria militar, la aparición de nuevos modelos y prácticas sociales —el consumo, como forma de apropiarse, utilizar y desechar todos esos bienes—, y de la universalización de los nuevos medios de comunicación, que serviría rápidamente como fuente de inspiración para multitud de prácticas culturales. El lenguaje de la publicidad y de los nuevos media —la cultura popular en definitiva— se convirtió en una fuente de actualización de los lenguajes, al que incorporarán la tendencia a la abstracción y experimentación radical proveniente de las vanguardias europeas, y temas de la vida cotidiana cargados de connotaciones identificables para cualquier espectador y que modularán la dificultad de lectura de la obra de arte y de los artefactos culturales. En aquel momento de transformación y abundancia surgió un nuevo lenguaje narrativo y perteneciente a una época que transformó por completo el paisaje y la cultura material: el pop, nacido de los media pero destinado a transformar los lenguajes de la alta cultura.

Aquella abundancia de objetos de consumo y de proliferación de los media parece tener hoy en día una resonancia amplificada en la abundancia de información a la que tenemos acceso. Si los objetos duraderos y cargados de valores tradicionales dieron paso a bienes de consumo cuyo valor residía en su papel performativo —limitado por su propia obsolescencia y modulado por un precio de producción reducido que unlversalizaba su acceso—, hoy en día, la información de momentos pasados, escasa y difícil de adquirir, organizada y seleccionada de forma ortodoxa, ha dejado paso a una época de hiperabundancia de información y de producción de bienes inmaterial a precio reducido o incluso nulo. Es posible un acceso universal a un caudal de información sin precedentes, sin jerarquizar, sin ordenar, en el que piezas de alto valor coexisten con basura sin valor que, sin embargo, puede alcanzar cotas de difusión inimaginables de forma instantánea.” [...]

Terceras Naturalezas

Efren G. Grinda, Cristina Díaz Moreno, El Croquis nº184, 2016

Using Interactive Evolution to Design Behaviors for Non-deterministic Self-organized Construction “Abstract Self-organizing construction is an emerging subdomain for on-site construction robots. This not only presents new chal- lenges for robotics, but due to the stochasticity involved in such systems, impacts the modeling and prediction of result- ing built structures. Self-organizing models have been ex- plored by architects for generative design and for optimiza- tion, but so far have infrequently been studied in the context of construction. Here we present a

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strategy for architects to design with non-deterministic self-organizing behaviors, us- ing interactive evolution to incorporate user judgment. We introduce our “Integrated Growth Projection” method, hav- ing implemented it into a software pipeline for early phase design.

We test the software with an initial user group of ar- chitects, to see whether the method and pipeline helps them design a non-deterministic self-organizing behavior. The user group creates several hybrid controllers that reliably solve their chosen design tasks.

Introduction On-site construction robotics is a broad field of increasing importance for AEC industries. A significant sub- domain of that field, presenting unique hardware and control challenges, is autonomous mobile robots for construction.

For mobile robots generally, a commonly investigated ap- proach to control is selforganization—e.g., in Swarm Engi- neering [17]. These systems usually incorporate stochasticity (i.e., non-determinism), to establish needed features like robustness in real-world setups [17]. As a type of on-site construction process, non-deterministic behaviors are quite antithesis to the way AEC projects are designed, communi- cated, and constructed. As the drive for automation of on-site construction strengthens, it is advantageous to look to swarm robotic systems of construction for certain types of tasks [16], in addition to robotic systems with centralized control. If swarm robotic construction systems are employed, it intro- duces new challenges to the process of early phase architec- tural design. Architectural design processes have usefully incorporated non-deterministic self-organizing behaviors as means of generative design [24] and performance optimiza- tion [8], but they are less explored when applied to construc- tion processes. In this paper, we look at how the design process of architects could be supported, if designing architec- ture that will be built by a non deterministic self-organizing construction process. Specifically, we introduce the method of Integrated Growth Projection, to facilitate architects’ use of interactive evolution in the design of behaviors for self- organized construction or artificial growth.” [...]

Using Interactive Evolution to Design Behaviors for Non-deterministic Self-organized Construction Centre for IT and Architecture, Royal Danish Academy, Copenhagen, Denmark, 2018

Material Agency in CAM of Undesignable Textural Effects “This paper presents intermediate results of an experimental research directed towards development of a method to use additive manufacturing technology as a generative agent in architectural design process. The primary technique is to variate speed of material deposition of a 3D printer in order to produce undetermined textural effects. These effects demonstrate local variation of material distribution, which is treated as a consequence of interaction between machining parameters and material properties. Current stage of inquiry is concerned with studying material agency by using two different materials as variables in the same experimental setup. The results suggest potential benefits for mass-customized fabrication and deeper understanding of how different materials can be employed in the same manufacturing system to achieve a range of effective behaviors.

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Introduction The paper presents series of experiments that are part of ongoing research directed towards devising methodology on using 3D printer as a generative component of design process. The overarching thesis is that manipulation of fabrication parameters leads to various architectural elements being informed. The objective is to understand interdependencies between geometry, materials and machining parameters so that they can be employed to produce diverse performative effects as tangible artifacts of the translation from pixel to matter.

In this stage of research, we are focusing on the role of material properties and behaviors in making of undesignable textural patterning. Several series of geometrically identical models were printed in two different materials: plastic and porcelain. We applied the same manipulation of speed of deposition in Gcode to fabrication of both material sets. Speed of deposition controls how much material is extruded at any given point of a toolpath. The faster printer moves the less matter it deposits. This simple principle allows to achieve surface heterogeneity by shedding and accumulating mass in various patterns. Resultant texturization is undesignable due to proliferation of minute deviation; it also embodies traces of digital making. Ceramic and plastic groups of models with matching digital geometry and same manufacturing instructions diverge not only in local geometry of ensuing patterns, but in the nature of overall effects that they demonstrate. Understanding of underlying structure of these differences may suggest novel ways of incorporating material agency in CAM, concurrently, it advances the discourse on digital manufacturing as a contingent and dynamic process.

Inquiry’s conceptual base draws primarily from the discourse on digital craft. Overall framework of the research is formed by such principles as continuity between design and production through translation of algorithmic logic from stage to stage, integral involvement of maker/designer in all aspects of actualization and an element of risk, for the ability to modify production parameters converts space of making into space of discovery (Kolarevic 2008). Outcome is not predetermined yet falls within prespecified range based on certain criteria (Pye 1968). Value of indeterminacy, error, glitch and deviation resides in questioning the use of CAM as a linear process meant to engender continuous variation, a process that merely extends industrial mass production (Perez 2017). Other promising aspects of error include an opportunity to study the non-linear response of an object to manipulation of the system of relationships that defines it (Kolarevic 2008) and shift from ideal, intended state to constrained and limited reality, a chasm that distinguishes making of architecture from manufacturing commodities (Frampton 2010).� [...] “Results Presented experiments contribute to the work on treating material agency as an integral part of digital fabrication. Research is accumulating data on the interdependencies between specific material parameters, their manipulation and resulting textural deformations.

Translated to the scale of architecture, described techniques could be used in production of masscustomized panels in a range of materials. They could serve as a support system for green wall structures. Modifiable directionality, density and depth of effect could be used to facilitate drainage, assist in ventilation and insulation. This method could also integrate into currently developing process of 3D printing concrete walls. Making surfaces characterized by controlled overall distribution of textural formation and local, undetermined diversity ensures cheap and easy to make variation, so that no two surfaces are identical.

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At this stage, research is concerned with surface scale and variation emerging at that level without critically affecting structure or form. Focusing on one level of resolution as a space of discovery allows to limit the number of active variables and therefore control the process more effectively. A reinforcement of this seemingly reductive strategy is a firm stance of David Pye, a fervent proponent of the value of exercising disciplined command over unpredictable aspects of craft, on that creation and manipulation of texture is “chief reason for continuing the workmanship of risk as a productive undertaking” (Pye 1968). He saw texture as a manifestation of diversity, a system of progressive reveal of the object to observer on approach. Making texture has not been an important objective for architecture, often an afterthought, it used to lie on the margins of design process. However, it can be argued that short-range formal expressions are located in the space of convergence of material and digital logics, which makes texture into a suitable problem for digital craft. Nevertheless, it is not the strategy of this research to indefinitely engage with texture in isolation. Difference in overall distribution and arrangement of patterns begins to reveal ways in which texture acts structurally, indicating a path to broach the form/structure/material aggregate as a continuous whole.”

Material Agency in CAM of Undesignable Textural Effects Ashish Mohite, Mariia Kochneva, Toni Kotnik Aalto University School of Arts, Design and Architecture

Baubotanik “Creo que las grandes innovaciones del siglo XI tendrán lugar en la intersección de la biología con la tecnología. Una nueva era está empezando, como la era digital lo hizo cuando yo tenía 18 años”.’ Esta cita no es de un biólogo ná de un diseñador o arquitecto. sino de alguien que jugó un papal determinante en la revolución digital y que obviamente contaba con grandes dotes para intuir por dónde irían las tendencias futuras, como es el presidente de Apple, Steve Jobs. Y, de hacho, estamos asistiendo al nacimiento de una nueva disciplina a caballo entre la ciencia y el arte que está redefiniendo la relación entre tecnología y biología. El “biodiseño” es una aproximación, esencialmente especulativa, a las ciencias de la vida en la que, por ejemplo, cultivos de tejido son utillzados para hacer chaquetas de cuero o microbecterias se usan para hacer una tipografía de “letras vivas”.? En el ámbito de la arquitectura, el biodiseño no solo se basa en especulaciones a futuro, sino que cuenta ya con una tradición de edificios realizados.” [...]

Arquitectura vegetal, estrategias materiales

María Antonia Fernández Nieto

Form and labor: Toward a history of abstraction in architecture 1.

“In his essay, Abstraction and Culture, the American painter Peter Halley lamented the persistent belief that abstraction is a stylistic device or invention borne out of the artist’s formal concern.’ He was disappointed that abstraction unfortunately continues to be seen as

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a free play of form that is completely self-referential vis-a-vis social and political issues. “In thinking about this most rarefied of visual languages,” Halley writes, it seems we intellectually retreat into the cloister of high culture; we deny that abstraction is a reflection of larger historical and cultura! forces. We deny that the phenomenon of abstraction only gains meaning to the extent to which it does reflect larger forces and ts embedded with their history.

This understanding of abstraction as a retreat from the world is dominant within the discipline of architecture, where it is associated with modernist formal simplicity and the reduction of architecture to a platonic object. The term “abstraction” evokes an aesthetic of formal restraint, a reduction to essentials. Recent popular phrases such as “back to basics” and “hardcore archi-tecture” seem to resurrect abstract form against the exuberance of complex form-making that has characterized the last twenty years of mainstream architecture,” and abstraction is again appropriated as an aesthetic goal and as a way to affirm architecture’s autonomy with regard to what architecture is supposed to contain or confront. | would like to challenge this idea of abstraction in architecture and revisit the social and political dimension of this phenomenon within architectural form. In what follows I’ll argue that the rise of abstraction within architectural form is a direct consequence of the fundamental role that labor has played within industrial civilization.

2.

In order to redirect the understanding of abstraction away from style, it is useful to understand it as a process. To abstract comes from the Latin verb trahere, meaning to pull something essential out of the totality of which it is a part. Abstraction in architecture has been interpreted as the reduction to and prolif-eration of simple forms. But history tells us otherwise. Le Corbusier’s reduction of architecture to simple forms—one thinks of the platonic objects with which he reduced the complexity of the city into a language of basic geometries—was both an aesthetic goal and an attempt to finetune form for industrial processes of production. His Maison Dom-ino model for housing—a structural skeleton composed of horizontal slabs and pilotis where fagade and intemal partitions would be filled in incidentally—shows, in Adolf Max Vogt’s words, two appar-ently opposing conditions for architecture: the perfectly pure and the raw real. While the perfectly pure is the structure’s iconic simplicity, the raw real is its construction system through which the technology of industrial architecture isapplied. Architecture, we see here, is inexorably linked to industrial processes of production. “Abstraction” as not-style also suggests form devoid of symbolism.

A generic structure made of elements such as walls, columns, beams, slabs, windows, doors, stairs, ramps, toilets, etcetera whose function is to distribute occupancy within the building is purely functional. Modern architecture in this narrative is freed from unnecessary form and reduced to its function, i.e., to its use-value. Paradoxically, Robert Venturi’s and Denise Scott Brown’s theory of the “decorated shed” implied a functionalist, abstracted modern object—the shed—when the rhetorical, symbolic facade is torn away.* But this “functional” abstraction wears its industrial heritage not by being merely useful; it shows it by its generic. frictionless quality that lets occupation and labor happen seemingly invisibly, by its total lack of representational presence, and by the asymbolic forms that induce specific uses and specific modes of distribution. Here, the essence of modern architecture fully emerges as an assemblage of elements whose goal is no longer to represent power, but to effect power by framing, enabling, eliciting, making accessible, or excluding. When Walter Benjamin commented that architecture within modernity is viewed in a state of distraction.’ he did not want to diminish the importance of architecture, on the contrary, he wanted to stress the

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fact that precisely by influencing subjects in a state of distraction, architecture becomes a powerful means of forming subjectivity. The architectural plan, one of the fundamental abstractions of architecture present since the nse of modernity, enacts this frictionless function. Apart from its technical reliability, the plan ailows the architect to control and distribute the different parts and functions of the building. The plan thus reveals the economy of the building: its role as an apparatus whose goal is the correct management of uses and functions’ The activity of housekeeping is a spatial practice often described in ancient texts as the housewife’s ability to know the location of every object needed to maintain family life within the house. The form of the house manifests the most tangible “economy” of life translated into a typical spatial arrangement more than it does its spatial symbolism. The frictionless trumps the representational.”

The “asymbolic” nature of abstraction lies also in the cognitive apparatus through, and in which, architecture operates. Architecture as a discipline emerged within the realm of commodity exchange, itself inherently abstract. When a commodity is sold and bought, it must adhere to a system of equivalence, one privileging exchange over use value. As Alfred Sohn-Rethel noted in his seminal book, Intellectual and Manual Labor,’ this process required abstraction, since what is abstracted from the commodity is economic value.” It is for this reason that in the fourteenth century, the practice of exchange imposed a radically different way to experience the world through the lens of abstract knowledge. For Sohn-Rethel, the rise of abstract knowledge is the cause for the shift from artisanal to industrial labor. While artisanal workers mastered their production through practical know-how and by the expertise of their hands, the industrial worker relies on means of production wherein technology and calculus—abstractions—become crucial.

Commodity exchange foregrounded a new form of life in which abstraction was the basis of experiencing the world. On the one hand, this meant a new notion of the rational in which a set of conventions was based less on content than on abstract forms of equivalence. If before the fifteenth century there was no difference between ideation and the construction of an artifact, with the foundation of architecture as a discipline, practicing architecture meant to project. Already Vitruvius distinguished between fabrica and rationcinatio. While “fabrica” refers to the practice of building, “ratiocination” refers to reasoning, which is precisely the conception of the building before it is realized. With the centrality of reasoning—wherein geometry, calculus, economy, and the management of resources play an important role— abstraction becomes concrete within architectural form. Form is no longer the outcome of individual craft, but the result of a socialized knowledge made of abstract conventions—such as the use of orthogonal projections within architectural drawings—and systems of measure. It is in this context that we have to place the abstraction of architectural form.

On the other hand, abstraction also became embedded within daily routines, social conventions, and ways of looking at the quotidian world. Concepts such as value, wealth, exchange, or labor, which until Marx were considered simple logical categories of thought, are concrete abstractions because they are deeply rooted in the concrete workings of capitalistic society.

As Marx wrote: “As a rule, the most general abstractions arise only in the midst of the richest possible concrete development. where one thing appears as common to many, to all”. In an advanced capitalist society, reasoning—that is the re-composition of a multiplicity of things and events within a coherent “scientific” system of thought—is not a simple depiction of

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reality but what makes reality work. However the abstract essence of labor lies not only in the process through which labor becomes a commodity, but also in the very nature of human labor itself. This understanding of abstraction can be found in the way Marx in his Economic and Philosophical Manuscnipts of 1844 defines man as a species-being (Gattungswesen), as an animal devoid of specialized instincts and who has to constantly produce its own environment. Here we see the generic and abstract source of labor, which Marx in Capital theorizes as labor power. According to Marx, labor power is “the aggregate of those mental and physical capabilities existing in the physical form, the living personality, of a human being.

As such labor is an indeterminate basin of unforeseen capabilities which man objectifies into his own production. In capturing and organizing labor power, capital tears from man not just his own production, but the generic source of labor: man’s species-being. In order to put in motion this process, capital has to mobilize the power of abstraction as a social process to such a degree that the latter inevi-tably became a form of life. Within this condition. the form of architecture had to approximate the generic and indeterminate form of labor power, and to perform this task, it has had to build the necessary infrastructure to reproduce life: from housing to workplaces, from recreation to infrastructures to circulation. Again. in order to contain the generic essence of labor, architecture (and the city itself in its physical form) relied fess on its symbolic and representational power and more on composing the frames within which life occurs.

In what follows | would like to provide a series of examples that traces a history of how architecture has reached such degrees of abstraction. This rather fragmentary excursus provides, | believe, the best vantage point from which to analyze the relationship between architectural form and labor.

3.

Arguably one of the earliest manifestations of abstraction in architecture is the institution that for a long tine represented “transcendental” power in the Western world: the monastery.

Within Christianity, monasteries were buill not only as places for prayer and contemplation, but also as apparati aiming to regulate life in all its physical and mental aspects. Monastic life was an incessant opus dei, Within it, fife as such became the content of architecture.

Within the monastic building, each moment of the monk’s daily life is translated into a typical space: dormitory (sleeping), refectory (eating), library (studying), workshops (working). chapel (praying). It is at once a schedule and the embodiment of a form of life. In this, labor was of fundamental import since self-sustenance and the production of goods were essential to survival. Hence, Saint Benedict’s rule for his monastic order: ora et labora (pray and work). As highly efficient compounds where both individual and communitarian life followed detailed temporal and spatial regula-tions. monastic buildings—made of simple and generic forms whose only goal was to provide a rhythm for life—are far less symbolic than previous religious architecture, and the organization of discrete, specific incidents is abstracted into more generalizable and repeatable patterns.

It is within Benedictine and later Cistercian monastic architecture that themost abstract dimension of architecture—the plan—acquires a primary role in the formation of architectural space. Indeed, the first known drawing of architecture is the ideal plan of a monastery preserved in the library of Saint Gallen, Switzerland.’® Drawn on five parchments sewn together, the plan shows a complete monastic complex made of approximately forty buildings arranged in a grid, allowing maximum efficiency in organizing disparate programs:

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churches, houses, stables, kitchens, workshops, brewery, infirmary, storage. and a special house for bloodletting. The result is a plan where the management of life becomes more pressing then the liturgical dimension of the building.

Beyond indexing programmatic economy. the organization of medieval monasteries shows as well how the diagrammatic abstraction of architecture became the form of architecture itself.

“Diagrammatic” is here understood, in the mode of Michel Foucault. Gilles Deleuze, and Félix Guattari, as a machine that directly produces effects of power and not merely as a means of the synthetic representation of concept and form.’* The plans of Saint Gallen—in which the thick walls of the monastery are abstracted as thin lines, thereby shifting attention from the physical structure to functional and spatial organi-zation—are, in this way, not representations but diagrams: instances in which power is not simply legible but effective.

Within economic modernity, the ascetic life that took place in the monastery became a fundamental model for industrial civilization. By carefully chor graphing daily routines and thus ensuring the monks’ productive lives, the: monastery expanded the spatial condition of animal laborans from domestic to totalizing space. Within the monastery, labor was recognized as an essential aspecl of life (unlike in antiquity when it was considered an unworthy sphere of lite delegated to slaves), thus allowing it to become a mode! for institutions such as the hospital, the factory, and the school.

4, The domestic itself—the archetype of productive space—is the social scene of labor management. If labor is the reproduction and the maintenance of life, its reach is clearly seen in the house. While the noun “house” emphasizes the symbolic dimension of the domestic realm. the term “housing” focuses on the function of the house—the process of containing subjects by subtly defining their way of life. In this sense, Le Corbusier gave the most precise definition of housing when he said that the house is a machine a habiter.”This definition allows us to understand housing not only as shelter—the space of the “everyday”—but also as a multifarious apparatus which coalesces social. economic, juridical, and cultural issues.

In the fifteenth century the practice of rental housing started to become diffuse within the city. Houses were built not only to shelter the family or the clan, but also to be rented to people outside the boundaries of kinship. In the mid-sixteenth century, Sebastiano Serlio devoted the sixth of his Seven Books on Architecture to an unprecedented subject: housing for all social classes.“ Understood as the first architectural theory to mark anything other than a church, a public building, or a palazzo for a rich family as worthy of design. It represents the success of the bourgeoisie, whose wealth was made in commerce and manufacturing in wrestling property rights from the aristocracy whose economic power was largely based on land ownership. For this reason, Serlio’s models had a fundamental influence on the development of stand-ardized solutions for domestic architecture.

Serlio’s book not only includes house models for the rich bourgeoisie but also for what he defines as the “poor’—that is, poor peasants, poor merchants and poor artisans. Serlio makes clear that the lowest social level is the beggar whose habitat is a self-made hut, but he excludes the beggar from architec-tural consideration because they, like the clergy—an important and powerful segment of society at that time—were considered “unproductive,” and thus outside of the economic functioning of the city.% For Serlio, the poor peasant thus represents the lowest socially-productive stratum and his house is under-‘stood as the

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location of his production.” Serlio’s house for the poor peasant is a simple, two-room space’ one room is for Iving and the other is the stable for the oxen. If the peasant can afford it, he can build a small portico 1 front of the house. If he ts a bit wealthier, he can build an oven and a cellar (cantina) at the two ends of the portico. For the middle-ranking and rich peasant, the same model is expanded to include more spaces. Although Serlio does not provide a comprehensive example of city making. his careful and unprecedented engineering of domestic space implicitly acknowledges that the project of the city starts from the domestic unit, from the possibility of enacting the productivity of the house as both a space of production and reproduction.

The radicalness of Serlio’s architecture for housing was not only in its incor-poration of the “poor,” but its asymbolic nature. The architecture that emerges from these models—defined by the repetition of generic windows, doors, and pitched roofs in the house; and the house itself repeated in the rowhouse—has to be measured against the fact that until the eighteenth century these elements were symbols whose relevance was superior to their “function.” Within earlier Renaissance architecture a column was not only a means of support, but also the representation of the human body. the embodiment of the perfection of nature, and the image of God. Leon Battista Alberti went so far as to understand the column as an ornament whose function was to civilize bare structure and add to it a moral meaning.*? When confronted with labor in its most generic form of production and reproduction of life, this rhetorical dimension of architecture was lost, and, it can be argued, architectural form reaches its most generic essence: the framing of life through a series of spatial compounds.

5.

Since the nineteenth century, human labor has found its most explicit spatial embodiment in the architecture of the factory. Allhough as we have seen it is a mistake to confine labor to the “workplace.” the factory represents the form within which the abstraction of industrial labor becomes fully explicit. While we have already alluded to the abstract nature of labor as described by Marx, his implicit attachment of this concept to American advances in factory labor are indicated in this passage: On the other side, this abstraction of labour as such is not merely the mental product of a concrete totality of labours. Indifference towards specific labours corresponds to a form of society in which individuals can with ease transfer from one labour to another, and where the specific kind is a matter of chance for tnem, hence of indifference. Not only the category, labour. but labour in reality has here become the means of creating wealth in general, and has ceased to be organically linked with particular individuals in any specific form. Such a state of affairs is at its most developed in the most modern form of existence of bourgeois soc’ety—in the United States. Here. then, for the first time, the point of departure of modern economics, namely the abstraction of the category “labour,” “labour as such,” labour pure and simple, becomes true in practice. For Marx, labor as such, or what he called /abor sans phrase, was the product of a specific historical passage: advance industrial capitalism. It is precisely this abstraction—an abstraction that is both method and concrete ethos—that the factory materializes in zero-degree form: its architecture.

The most radical example of this factory architecture was Albert Kahn’s design for the Ford Motor Company Plant in Highland Park, Michigan built in 1909.” In this complex. Kahn reduced architecture to its barest form possible: a structure made of reinforced concrete

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and consisting of columns supporting horizontal slabs. The goal of this architecture was to create an unobstructed space where production could be organized smoothly under one roof. The Highland Park Plant became the first factory to host the assembly line the method of production where human labor was reduced to its most abstract form: a sequential organization of workers, tools, machines, and workstations within which the workers’ motion is reduced to one simple operation. It is labor without quality.

The Highland Park Plant represents the most radical archetype of the daylight factory, a space whose level of flexibility, uniform daylighting, and fireproof safety was unprecedented.

And yet as Francesco Marullo has demonstrated, the daylight factory was hardly the product of rational thought only. The relentless scientific abstraction of this space, where every minimal detail was bespoke towards the highest management of space, was the result of workers struggles against the alienating conditions of industrial labor. The more workers rebelled against work, the more capitalists were forced to improve the efficiency of workers exploitation. For this reason within the daylight factory amelioration of working conditions and further exploitation of workers were the two faces of the same coin. Above all, the open floor of the daylight factory creates an even, spatial condition in which men, machines. and goods all occupy the same horizontal datum. In the history of capitalism, the daylight factory translated into architectural terms a fundamental principle of a money economy: the equivalence of all things determined by the abstraction of exchange value. Inside this unobstructed space, it was possible to reduce humans and raw materials to measurable parameters in order to prevent congestion and, especially, worker insubordination.

The application of reinforced concrete in the daylight factory was a prelude to a general transformation of the city into an extended factory, in which all of the premises of the city are integrated with the same spatial logic. Indeed, the architecture of the “free plan” became the structural system of choice for different institutions, from offices. to universities, to exhibition spaces, just as the productive logic of the factory expanded to the whole of society, the logic of the “free plan” became the underlying principle of contemporary spatialily. The daylight factory renders this condition in the most essential terms by introducing a space that is no longer made of architecturally recognizable figures, but is the direct outcome of norms, standards, and quantities, the goal of which is the optimization of the production and circulation of people and goods.

6.

With the advent of mass education, universities were designed as factories whose goal was to produce not goods but subjects. The quasi-industrial nature of universities was made explicit by buildings such as the Maclaurin Buildings at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). designed by William W. Bosworth in the early 1910s. Bosworth conceived this group of buildings as an assembly line complex that would permit communication between schools and depart-ments while keeping them efficiently organized as defined compounds. Not by chance he built the complex using the same technology of reinforced concrete that was used for factories. The plan of the building itself was conceived as a typical factory plan, reflecting Bosworth’s interest in Taylorist techniques of management.” The neoclassicist grandeur of the elevation of the MIT complex merely mitigated the relentless necessity of managerial efficiency of generic and flexible space. Nor was this unique to MIT. After World War Il, with the dramatic increase of the student population. especiatly in Europe, universities were built as large-scale complexes using the same spatial logic as industrial buildings

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and the same factory construction techniques. One of the most notorious examples of this development was the new university campus of Nanterre near Paris. the birthplace of the May 1968 students’ revolt. Asked to explain why these revolts Started there, philosopher Henri Lefebvre, then a professor at Nanterre, invited the interviewer to have a look at the campus from the window of his faculty office. Built outside Paris and next to one of the poorest slums surrounding the city. the industrial architecture of the campus resembled a production plant, When confronted with such an alienating environment, Lefebvre commented, students became aware of their status as workers and revolted like the manufacture laborers at the nearby Renault factory. If during May 1968 students allied themselves with factory workers, it was because they perceived university training as preparation to enter the job market and become docile wage earners.

The university, unlike the factory, produces not commodities but knowledge, Within the traditional university this knowledge aims to empower elites and to form good, obedient citizens. Since the 1980s and the rise of “immaterial production.” however, knowledge has increasingly become an economic asset.’ Higher education is no longer an ivory tower reserved for the ruling elite and dealing with esoteric knowledge but has become a mass phenomenon directly linked to economic production.*’ Today, when knowledge and information are bought and sold as commodities, universities are centers of production.

The vehicles for this exchange, however, are not the academics and their departments but the students themselves—subjects controlled through the manipulation of their desires, feelings, affections, and perspectives. Unlike material production, in which commodities are objects detachable from the subjects who produce them, knowledge production precludes detaching the commodity from life itself. Bios, dynamics, and experience are both means and ends; rather than absorbing specific forms of knowledge. university students learn how to live, network, and compete. In this way the university becomes an edufactory empowered by the mass production of subjects ready to be implanted into the increasingly precarious conditions of work. A radical example of this space is one of the most prominent universities in the field of applied science—the Rolex Learning Center at the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) designed by SANAA and opened in 2010. This facility was built to provide a meeting place for the departmen-tally segregated university population. The president of the EPFL describes the building as a place where traditional boundaries between disciplines are broken down. Indeed, the center is conceived as one indoor public space subtly articulated by slopes, terraces, and patios inhabited by a continuous flow of programs such as library, café, places for study and informal gatherings. While the slopes and the patios with no walls and minimal vertical articulation provide a minimum of separation, the Rolex Learning Center is a flowing space where there is no difference between programs, between studying and socializing, or between working and relaxing. By promoting “drift,” improvisation, and the possibility of meeting and networking, the “free space” of the lounge promotes both the student and the researcher as capitalist entrepreneurs rather than passive receivers of knowledge.

7. Conclusion The “free space” as exemplified by the Rolex Learning Center reflects the state of precariousness that affects not just the contemporary university but new organizational “campuses””—Google, Apple, Facebook, etcetera—that form the dislocated researcher whose self-promotion is the result of the lack of economic support and social security. The abstract

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spaces of these campuses promote seemingly “progressive” tendencies—openness and self-organization—but in fact enact capitalism’s total exploitation. While the rigid abstraction of the monastery and the factory confronted subjects with explicit forms of disci- pline and coercion, the soft abstraction of these spaces exploits subjects by withholding any difference between modes of life. and defines research not as a public good but as a personal investment.

And yet it is precisely the explicitness with which this process is made into a tangible spatial experience that offers a vantage point for a critical position within and against this mode of production. From the monastery to the factory. from the office space to the university, labor has always been based on social cooperation. Productive labor always implies, at its core. a public sphere. Contrary fo Hannah Arendt’s strict separation between the public sphere and the sphere of labor, within industrial civilization, labor is the place where we act {as Arendt would say of public space) under the eyes of others. It would be a mistake to view the space of labor as merety shaping docile subjects. Precisely because of its collective nature, the space of production has always been both a space of exploitation and a space for solidarity and struggle, Capital constantly updates its forms of exploitation precisely because it has always confronted potentially rebellious subalterns. In his seminal book Opera e Capitale (Workers and Capital), Mario Tronti wrote that “labor struggles are an irreplaceable instrument of self-consciousness for capital: without these struggles, capital would not be able to recognize its adversaries and thus it would not acknowledge itself.” In this sense the rise of abstraction within archi-tecture should not only be seen fatalistically as capital’s sovereignty over human life, but also as the most tangible traces of living labor and its political centrality within industrial civilization.”

Form and labor: Toward a history of abstraction in architecture Deamer, The Architect as Worker: Immaterial Labor, the Creative Class, and the Politics of Design London, Pier Vittorio Aureli New York: Bloomsbery Publishing, 2015

Form and labor: Toward a history of abstraction in architecture “Before working on large Corten structures in industrial mills, Richard Serra made ‘splashings’ and ‘castings’ in situ with molten lead. Wavy and fragile, but weighty, the very first of these early pieces was created at New York’s Castelli Warehouse. The residue of lead, hurled against a wall and cast at its juncture with the floor, bears in its form, its texture, the marks of the act of making. It was the late ’60s, Serra was at the beginning of his career, and ‘the lead went right back in the hopper’, he said.

In the Verblist he drafted in 1968, the sculptor compiles ‘actions to relate to oneself, material, place, and process’, making the process transparent while simultaneously giving it legitimacy.

The artist described the act of making his splashes as experimental and playful – and while the list shows his debt to action painting, he also insisted ‘the Pollock ethic is more a dance, this is more work’. Characterised by its site specificity, its materiality and its gestural expression, it is sculpture permanently embedded in its architecture. As the lead cools, it

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bonds to the site. Whether left in its spot or dragged across the floor in the middle of the room, the splashes retain their intimate connection with the place of casting.

The difference between lead and earth is that the latter can be moulded ad infinitum – hydrated, pressed, spread, rolled, compacted, thumped, torn, cracked, joined again, dried, ripped and hydrated again. Think of a bowl on a potter’s wheel slowly emerging out of a lump of clay, spinning into shape and hardening with heat. Or of the Ganges floodplains lying still below the high waters of the holy river during the monsoon, patiently waiting for the water to recede to reveal fertile mudflats, drying under the scorching sun, scarred with zigzagging crevices as the heat and drought persist. The cycle of the seasons imposes its rhythm and shapes the landscape. Because of its malleability, its endless morphing and moisturising, earth becomes a material of endless possibilities.

Unlike the hard surfaces Serra hurled molten lead against, mud can virtually disappear when washed off, returned to the ground. The installation Lo que me llevo (Taken Away) by Paraguayan Gabinete de Arquitectura and Argentinian Rovea Sargiotti Arquitectos is a wall of unbaked mud bricks joined by a thick layer of sand, cement and lime. Once the concrete has set, the bricks are removed. Over time, the erosion of the unfired earth would slowly erode but here high-pressure washers are used to accelerate the process. What is left is a sculptural concrete skeleton 30mm thick, perforated by an array of rectangular openings – a brick wall forever missing its bricks.

“The essence of an object has something to do with the way it turns into trash’, wrote Roland Barthes when analysing Cy Twombly’s degradation of graphic symbols. If kept raw, earth never turns into trash. In the 1976 essay on the work of Twombly, the French philosopher distinguishes between ‘action’ and ‘gesture’, defining the latter as a ‘surplus of action’.

The action is ‘transitive, it seeks only to provoke an object, a result’, he writes, while he understands gesture as the ‘indeterminate and inexhaustible total of reasons, pulsions, indolences which surround the action with an “atmosphere”.

Borrowing this term from Barthes, Dutch architect Anne Holtrop speaks of architecture as ‘material gesture’, whereby material properties and gestural expression are integral to the built output. Fingers and hands have traditionally left their mark on the lime plaster covering the walls of stacked coral stone rubble in the streets of Bahrain, where Holtrop is now based.

In his practice too the process is fully integrated in the outcome: the material dictates the gestures and the process becomes the outcome – the process is the outcome. The architect refuses predefined steps, arguing that his architecture is ‘never the execution of an idea’ and that knowing the outcome in advance would defeat the purpose. Instead, he is driven by ‘consequential steps’ and admits to finding himself building-in tricks to prevent advanced judgements, guaranteeing open-endedness and leaving room for the unexpected – some might opt for drugs or hypnosis, he prefers chance.

For the souq rehabilitation currently on site in Bahrain’s old district of Muharraq, Holtrop is not directly involved in any of the casts taking place on site. Here, the moulds for the walls’ large pieces are filled with sand at their edges, raggedly and inconstantly, before the concrete mix is poured in. Human intervention introduces limits and constraints, adding both focus and tension. From its colour and composition to its particle size and moisture content, the sand naturally and directly affects the cast result. And on the surface, there is a delicate but uneven coating: specks of sand seized and imprisoned when the viscous mix hardens. ‘It looks and feels as if you can still move them around’, says the architect.

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This misperception might sound trivial, but it renders the material less static, suggests that time will continue to alter it. There is an immediacy to the casting process, a rigorously orchestrated sequence of actions to be expressed in a list – drawing is a verb, casting is a verb – and executed within compressed time. Yet once the poured liquid has set and time supposedly stands still, it simultaneously starts to stretch, both backwards and forwards. Once cast, the piece, whether artwork or building component, no longer belongs to the present. The material sets, the timeline unbolts.

When cast against sand or soil, the rugged textures and earthy reliefs further blur the confines of time. Somewhere between geological remains and extraterrestrial artefacts, earthworks

by Ensamble are peppered around the 11,000 acres of wilderness of Tippet Rise Art Center, at the edge of Montana’s Yellowstone Park. They are ‘structures that stir existing matter and reinforce it, using highly engineered processes while welcoming unpredictable results’ and giving the impression they are the result of millennial processes of sedimentation and erosion.

Archaic and provocative, they appear unique and unfinished.

The Spanish practice now based in Boston tends to start with models, to construct structure, space and materiality simultaneously. Rather than mere beautiful objects, these models are ‘quick, rough, robust, structural, cheap, not afraid of the outdoors’. Descriptions and representations, measuring and engineering come later. The understanding of models as working tools and testing devices rather than pure representation seamlessly transitions into the ‘reality’ of the 1:1 construction on site.

Currently working on converting a former Marés stone quarry into a home on the island of Menorca, Ca’n Terra (the house of the earth), Ensamble Studio believe that living and being below ground or somehow inside the earth liberates us and ‘moves us away from what a “comfortable” life looks like’. This is an architecture that takes us back to the underworld of caverns and grottos, to the mysterious and still fascinating paintings of our Neolithic ancestors. As Georges Bataille has pointed out, the cave is immediately the site of an essential scene: the encounter between humanity and time. At Tippet Rise, the architects were at the mercy of the weather, adapting work plans and methods, while Ca’n Terra is the most extreme example of what it means to design on site: ‘It excites and celebrates the construction process, introducing a surprise factor that architecture usually lacks’, as Ensamble founders Débora Mesa and Antón Garcia-Abril believe.”

Breaking the mould: soil as shuttering

Anne Holtrop, Mannon Mollard, 2019

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MOLE PEOPLE, -, - (4).JPEG

MOLE PEOPLE, -, - (5).JPEG

MOLE PEOPLE, -, - (6).JPEG

MOLE PEOPLE, -, - (7).JPEG

NAO MATSUNAGA, WALL DOORWAY, -.JPEG

NIETO SOBEJANO, AMPLIACIÓN DEL MUSEO SAN TELMO, 2011 .JPEG

NORMANDIA BOCAGE CUT THROUGHT DIAGRAM.JPEG

NORMANDIA BOCAGE.JPEG

PETER STRUYCKEN, COMPOSITION, - (2).JPEG

PETER STRUYCKEN, COMPOSITION, - (3).JPEG

PETER STRUYCKEN, COMPOSITION, - .JPEG

PLEUROTUS MYCELIUM, ELABORACIÓN PROPIA (1).JPG

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MINING OPAL, AUTRALIA, - (9).JPEG

MOLE PEOPLE, -, - (2).JPEG

MOLE PEOPLE, -, - (3).JPEG

MOLE PEOPLE, -, - (8).JPEG

MOLE PEOPLE, -, -.JPEG

MOLE PEOPLE, MOSCOW TUNNELS, -.JPEG

PAOLO SOERI, ARCOSANTI, ARIZONA, 1970 (1).JPEG

PAOLO SOERI, ARCOSANTI, ARIZONA, 1970 (2).JPEG

PEDRO MUGURUZA + DIEGO MÉNNDEZ, VALLE DE LOS CAÍDOS, 1940.JPEG

PLEUROTUS MYCELIUM, ELABORACIÓN PROPIA (3).JPG

PUBLICACIÓN EN INSTAGRAM, 2020.JPEG

RAEL SAN FRATELLO, MUDPRINT, 2019.JPEG

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ROBER HOOKE, ENGRAVING JOINT MOVEMENT INTRUMENTS, 1665.JPG

ROBERT HOOKE, THE MARK OF A FULL-SPOT MICROGRAPHIA, 1665.JPG

ROBERT HOOKE, THE POINT OF A NEEDLE MICROGRAPHIA, 1665.JPG

RYOJI IKEDA, CONTINUUM, 2018 (2).JPEG

RYOJI IKEDA, CONTINUUM, 2018 (6).JPEG

RYOJI IKEDA, CONTINUUM, 2018 (7).JPEG

RYOJI IKEDA, CONTINUUM, 2018 (8).JPEG

RYOJI IKEDA, CONTINUUM, 2018.JPEG

ST GALLEN MONASTERY, S. VIII.JPEG

STABILIZING DUNES, CHINA, -.JPEG

STABILIZING DUNES, CHINA, COLORS MAGAZINE 84.JPEG

STUDIO ANNE HOLTROP MENDRISIO, MATERIAL GESTUR

STUDIO ANNE HOLTROP MENDRISIO, MATERIAL GESTURES, 2017 (3).JPEG

STUDIO ANNE HOLTROP MENDRISIO, MATERIAL GESTURES, 2017 (4).JPEG

STUDIO ANNE HOLTROP MENDRISIO, MATERIAL GESTURES, 2017 (5).JPEG

STUDIO ANNE HOLTROP MENDRISIO, MATERIAL GESTUR

RYOJI IKEDA, CONTINUUM, 2018 (3).JPEG

RYOJI IKEDA, CONTINUUM, 2018 (4).JPEG

RYOJI IKEDA, CONTINUUM, 2018 (5).JPEG

SISMIC RAILWAY DISASTER, CANTERBURY, 2002.JPG

ST GALLEN MONASTERY, S. VIII (2).JPEG

ST GALLEN MONASTERY, S. VIII, (2).JPEG

RES, 2017 (10).JPEG

STUDIO ANNE HOLTROP MENDRISIO, MATERIAL GESTURES, 2017 (11).JPEG

STUDIO ANNE HOLTROP MENDRISIO, MATERIAL GESTURES, 2017 (12).JPEG

STUDIO ANNE HOLTROP MENDRISIO, MATERIAL GESTURES, 2017 (2).JPEG

RES, 2017 (6).JPEG

STUDIO ANNE HOLTROP MENDRISIO, MATERIAL GESTURES, 2017 (7).JPEG

STUDIO ANNE HOLTROP MENDRISIO, MATERIAL GESTURES, 2017 (8).JPEG

STUDIO ANNE HOLTROP MENDRISIO, MATERIAL GESTURES, 2017 (9).JPEG

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STUDIO ANNE HOLTROP MENDRISIO, MATERIAL GESTURES, 2017 (13).JPEG

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STUDIO ANNE HOLTROP MENDRISIO, MATERIAL GESTURES, 2017 (15).JPEG

STUDIO ANNE HOLTROP MENDRISIO, MATERIAL GESTUR

TA PROHM TEMPLE, SIEM RIEP,CAMBODIA, 2017.JPEG

TERMITES, CABO, SUDAFRICA,-.JPG

THEODORE KACZYNSKI, INDUSTRUAL SOCIETY AND ITS FUTURE, 1995.JPEG

TOYO ITO & ASSOCIATES . METROPOLITAN OPERA HOU

TUNNEL EXCAVATTION PROCESS (2).JPEG

TUNNEL EXCAVATTION PROCESS.JPEG

ULURU, AUSTRALIA, - (1).JPEG

ULURU, AUSTRALIA, -.JPEG

RES, 2017 (16).JPEG

OUSE . TAICHUNG (1).JPG

STUDIO ANNE HOLTROP MENDRISIO, MATERIAL GESTURES, 2017 (17).JPEG

STUDIO ANNE HOLTROP MENDRISIO, MATERIAL GESTURES, 2017 (18).JPEG

STUDIO ANNE HOLTROP MENDRISIO, MATERIAL GESTURES, 2017.JPEG

TOYO ITO & ASSOCIATES . METROPOLITAN OPERA HOUSE . TAICHUNG .JPG

TOYO ITO & ASSOCIATES . METROPOLITAN OPERA HOUSE . TAICHUNG. PROTOTIPO.JPG

TUNNEL EXCAVATTION PROCESS (1).JPEG

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WOODEN JOINERY, -, -.JPEG

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CAPTURA DE PANTALLA (13).JPG 22/11/20 139,3 KB

CAPTURA DE PANTALLA (14).JPG 5/12/20 144,7 KB

CAPTURA DE PANTALLA (17).JPG 6/12/20 160,7 KB

CAPTURA DE PANTALLA (18).JPG 7/12/20 133,1 KB

CAPTURA DE PANTALLA (15).JPG 5/12/20 148,6 KB

CAPTURA DE PANTALLA (16).JPG 5/12/20 131,8 KB

CAPTURA DE PANTALLA (19).JPG 7/12/20 143 KB

CAPTURA DE PANTALLA (2).JPG 28/10/20 123,2 KB

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CAPTURA DE PANTALLA (20).JPG 7/12/20 135,7 KB

CAPTURA DE PANTALLA (21).JPG 14/12/20 212,7 KB

CAPTURA DE PANTALLA (24).JPG 16/12/20 120,4 KB

CAPTURA DE PANTALLA (25).JPG 16/12/20 131 KB

CAPTURA DE PANTALLA (28).JPG 19/12/20 157 KB

CAPTURA DE PANTALLA (29).JPG 19/12/20 122,6 KB

CAPTURA DE PANTALLA (22).JPG 15/12/20 130,5 KB

CAPTURA DE PANTALLA (23).JPG 16/12/20 153,2 KB

CAPTURA DE PANTALLA (26).JPG 18/12/20 204,6 KB

CAPTURA DE PANTALLA (27).JPG 19/12/20 150,3 KB

CAPTURA DE PANTALLA (3).JPG 28/10/20 123,2 KB

CAPTURA DE PANTALLA (30).JPG 20/12/20 174,9 KB

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CAPTURA DE PANTALLA (38).JPG 16/9/20 121,9 KB

CAPTURA DE PANTALLA (39).JPG 16/9/20 136,2 KB

CAPTURA DE PANTALLA (41).JPG 16/9/20 138,3 KB

CAPTURA DE PANTALLA (5).JPG 2/11/20 135,3 KB

CAPTURA DE PANTALLA (6).JPG 2/11/20 113,9 KB

CAPTURA DE PANTALLA (60).JPG 27/9/20 177,3 KB

CAPTURA DE PANTALLA (4).JPG 31/10/20 181,2 KB

CAPTURA DE PANTALLA (40).JPG 16/9/20 137,8 KB

CAPTURA DE PANTALLA (54).JPG 22/9/20 101,5 KB

CAPTURA DE PANTALLA (55).JPG 22/9/20 101,5 KB

CAPTURA DE PANTALLA (61).JPG 27/9/20 183,8 KB

CAPTURA DE PANTALLA (64).JPG 30/9/20 116,9 KB

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CAPTURA DE PANTALLA (65).JPG 30/9/20 111 KB

CAPTURA DE PANTALLA (66).JPG 30/9/20 104,1 KB

CAPTURA DE PANTALLA (69).JPG 13/10/20 40,2 KB

CAPTURA DE PANTALLA (7).JPG 9/11/20 129,9 KB

CAPTURA DE PANTALLA (72).JPG 23/10/20 116,3 KB

CAPTURA DE PANTALLA (73).JPG 23/10/20 134,2 KB

CAPTURA DE PANTALLA (67).JPG 8/10/20 101,9 KB

CAPTURA DE PANTALLA (68).JPG 13/10/20 40,3 KB

CAPTURA DE PANTALLA (70).JPG 23/10/20 152,6 KB

CAPTURA DE PANTALLA (71).JPG 23/10/20 123,1 KB

CAPTURA DE PANTALLA (74).JPG 29/10/20 131,1 KB

CAPTURA DE PANTALLA (75).JPG 30/10/20 113,1 KB

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CAPTURA DE PANTALLA (77).JPG 4/11/20 123,7 KB

CAPTURA DE PANTALLA (8).JPG 10/11/20 101,7 KB

CAPTURA DE PANTALLA (80).JPG 4/11/20 125,2 KB

CAPTURA DE PANTALLA (9).JPG 10/11/20 134,2 KB

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CAPTURA DE PANTALLA (78).JPG 4/11/20 113,1 KB

CAPTURA DE PANTALLA (79).JPG 4/11/20 131,8 KB

CAPTURA DE PANTALLA (81).JPG 9/11/20 170,7 KB

CAPTURA DE PANTALLA (83).JPG 8/12/20 132,3 KB

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CAPTURA DE PANTALLA (10).JPG 10/11/20 135,7 KB

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SCREENSHOT 2020-12-08 AT 03.26.18.JPG 8/12/20 139,2 KB

CAPTURA DE PANTALLA (11).JPG 10/11/20 104,8 KB

CAPTURA DE PANTALLA (12).JPG 10/11/20 145,9 KB

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SCREENSHOT 2020-12-19 AT 20.12.04.JPG 19/12/20 114,3 KB

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