Literature Review Chapter 02

Figure 05: Ohio, Indiana, Michigan lines. by William Edwards Peters, 1918. Image accessed November 05th 2021 via Ohio Lands and Their Subdivision by William Edwards Peters, Harvard University pp.169.

CHAPTER 02 Literature Review

This chapter examines the history of alternative representations of the human while establishing the need to take control of our excess data through architecture in an age where data has motivated the de-privatization of domestic spaces.

Introduction

In order to understand how architecture can use data to reprogram space and allow us to take control of the data we create; we need to examine the history of alternative representations of the human. Today, as analyzed in the following review, data is seen as a medium of alternative representations inheriting structures of control from the Yeoman and the Gilbreths. Examining history helps one understand our current situation, which is a decrease of available private domestic space due to the saturation of technology in the home. These representations have been used by private corporations and governments to control space and people. This transforms what it means to be at home. Reviewing land surveyor William E. Peter’s Land Division maps, architectural historian Siegfried Gideon, anthropologist Arjun Appadurai, and political scientist and anthropologist James C. Scott juxtaposed to Mark Jarzombek, Max Kuo, and Tatiana Knoroz allows us to conceive of a way to use architecture to reprogram space. The review of these authors and precedents establishes a need to take control of our data and reframe what it means to be at home.

What is data?

At the heart of architectural historian

Mark Jarzombek’s 2014 book Digital Stockholm Syndrome in the Post Ontological Age is that the world would malfunction without data.1 The data Jarzombek is referring to is the information we create when we use the internet, our phones, GPS, or any object that produces it.2 Jarzombek evidences the large-scale production of data through a timeline. The timeline records the chronological proximity of social media platforms with the passing of legislation concerned with smart technologies. The use of digital things, and the creation of data tied to humans is considered digital exhaust, or rather, ontic exhaust.3 Exhaust classifies the data as a byproduct or surplus of a practice or system. Jarzombek takes this a step further to say that it’s not only digital but ontological in that it recreates humans and objects. How this works is the high resolution and large amount of data created and collected is, according to Jarzombek, enough to stand in for a human’s existence.

Jarzombek’s discussion of data and humans suggests two entities: identifying the subject as the human and the actor as the algorithm. These two entities can also be seen through the political scientist and anthropologist James C. Scott’s perspective, with the subject as identity and the state as the actor. In Scott’s 1998 book Seeing Like A State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed, he addresses the same action as Jarzombek; the duplication of a human through data. However, Scott sees this through the perspective of the state. Scott’s argument comes from seeing mass “sedentarization” as a method used by the state or a governing body to forcefully abstract the human.4 The major difference between Jarzombek and Scott’s representations are that Jarzombek’s representation is true to the identity of its subject and Scott’s heavily abstracts its subject into a political outline.5 Ontic exhaust is able to create and collect massive amounts of specific data that go on to accurately reflect the person creating it. What this means is that the digital trace of a person can be considered almost equal to the person while the political outline is a representation of the person according to an abstracted set of characteristics. These two are different examples of alternative representations of the human. Because of Jarzombek’s Digital Stockholm Syndrome, we can see a connection between pre-digital representations and data.

Thomas Jefferson’s Yeoman and Urban Planning

An extreme political outline is Thomas Jefferson’s late 18th century Yeoman. As briefly described by Harvey M. Jacobs, the chair of Urban and Regional Planning at the University of Wisconsin, in Site Matters: Strategies for Uncertainty through Planning and Design, the Yeoman was an agrarian “family man” who owned private land.6 Jacobs uses the Yeoman as evidence that our methods of land ownership have greatly changed and will continue to change. These changes have large implications in how we think about the urban planning of cities.7 The Yeoman was turned into an alternative representation by Jefferson and the State through land survey maps dividing the land into square miles. This gridded geographic subdivision was used to control not just the land but the planning of townships down to the scale of neighborhoods. Alternative representations of the human, similar to the maps drawn by land surveyor William E. Peters in 1918 for his book Ohio Lands and Their Subdivision, are now not only thought of as the control of the land but as the control of the human (see Figure 01). Because of Jarzombek’s Digital Stockholm Syndrome, we can see the connection between these maps and data. The maps and data while similar in intent are used differently. The Yeoman and their maps were created to mobilize Jefferson’s political agenda. As described by economist Lisa Krall in her essay, “Jefferson’s Agrarian Vision and the Changing Nature of Property,” Jefferson’s political agenda was to steal land from indigenous people and erase their histories. Jefferson’s alternative representation was created with harmful intent and Jarzombek’s alternative representation, data, has inherited a silhouette of this. Corporations and social platforms mine the data we create, the very same data that, as argued by Jarzombek, is equal to the human. What this means is that our data

Figure 06: Gridded land subdivision meets a river and existing township. Map of land subdivisions between Wood and Lucas counties, Ohio by William Edwards Peters, 1918. is used by corporations and social platforms to curate the information we interact with and predict our behaviors.8

Information, people, and control

There have been many attempts at large scale control similar to the Yeoman. Architectural Historian Siegfried Gideon argues in Mechanization Takes Command that mechanization has made us lose touch with ourselves. While Gideon covers many scales of mechanization, he focuses on its relationship with the human.9 One example Gideon provides are management consultants Frank and Lilian Gilbreth’s early 20th century Space Efficiency Studies. The result of the Gilbreths’ studies was a large increase in productivity, which lead to an increase in income over a shorter period of time. These studies are a series of photographs of a person performing a task which is then mapped in physical space by sinuous metal lines (see Figure 02 and Figure 03). Gideon describes these studies as the rationalization of space which stands in support of Jefferson’s gridded land division.10 The Gilbreth’s studies shifted the concern of the early 20th century architectural movement ‘Scientific Management’ to form.11 The sinuous form unitized the worker, allowing people in power to take control of space.12 However, according to architect Max Kuo in The Advance of the Digital Frenemy, the over rationalization of space creates more problems than it is attempting to solve.13 Kuo goes further to claim that data’s “unruliness sabotages human control.”14 (100) Moving Gideon and Kuo further from each other are their perspectives on the influence that alternative representations have on aesthetic. Gideon draws connections between the Gilbreth’s motion study images and cubist painter Paul Klee. What Gideon does is create a relationship between analytical representations of the human and aesthetic expression. Kuo takes issue with the results of this relationship standing against the production of an image being directly tied to its use and expression. What Kuo does argue is that the two produce a whole new aesthetic, one where the identity of a human comes into question

Another example of control of the human and space is with contemporary global architecture, which are those who geographically relocate. Whether forced or voluntary, people bring with them the stories, identities, and practices of the place they left. When someone arrives at another place, they are put through what Scott calls “sedentarization.”16 Anthropologist Arjun Appadurai’s argument in Modernity at Large stands at odds to Scott’s arguments in Seeing Like A State. Appadurai argues that we can fracture abstracted representations, or control of space, by turning towards technology and media.17 Appadurai and Scott are speaking about the same communities however, their arguments come from different perspectives. Scott argues they are forced to become citizens through geopolitical abstraction. Appadurai argues they are able to break free of geopolitical abstraction through media. In Modernity at Large, Appadurai goes on to describe these communities that have spread across the globe as diasporic. Although the people apart of these communities deal with geopolitical abstraction, they resist being controlled through the use of media such as film, television, music, and advertisements.18 Appadurai calls the spaces in which these media exist mediascapes.19 The architectural typologies in which these mediascapes exist are mainly domestic spaces, where people have the most control.20 Media allows space to be more flexible changing the surfaces of domestic interiors into whatever is projected onto them. This, in turn, reprograms an existing space within a fixed volume. Opposite to Appadurai, Lacaton and Vassal and Herzog de Mueron have made attempts at reprogramming space.

Doubling Space

Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s phrase “Less is more” became an aphorism for modernist architecture.21 While these words are still used today and are applicable to this discourse, the most recent Pritzker prize winning architects suggest an alternative. Anne Lacaton and Jean-Philippe

Figure 07 (Top): Rendering the invisible visible of American industry. Motion Efficiency Study photograph taken by Frank and Lillian Gilbreth 1920’s. Figure 08 (above): Foreman using Drill Press. Motion Efficiency Study photograph of a foreman using a drill press taken by Frank and Lillian Gilbreth, 1915.

Figure 09: Duplications and units of inheritance. Photograph of FRAC Nord-Pas de Calais by Lacaton and Vassal in Dunkerque, France. Vassal repeatedly try to make more space with more architecture. Their building the FRAC NordPas de Calais in Dunkerque is an extreme example. This contemporary art museum doubles the available space through literally building a copy of the original building using highly efficient ephemeral greenhouse building materials.22 (see figure 03) In a 2015 lecture at Harvard GSD by Anne Lacaton and Jean-Philippe Vassal called Freedom of Use, Vassal speaks towards the act of doubling space:23

Here inside [the existing building] was the energy, here inside was the work of the people, … so instead [of working] inside [the existing building] we make a double building, we install exactly the same building just on the side of the first one and we put the program [in] the new one in order to keep the first one totally empty…

What Vassal means by this is that by doubling the amount of available space we can act on an increased number of programmatic possibilities. They are creating a direct relationship between the volume of space and the number of possibilities in the space. They are also specific when they say the doubling of space is nost nostalgic, however, the duplication of a building calls attention to what it is reproducing just as data calls attention to the human creating it. Despite the radically different architectonic articulation of the new building containing program, it is the same form.24 Jean Baudrillard, a sociologist, philosopher, and cultural theorist concerned with simulacrum and representation, would possibly disagree with Lacaton and Vassal’s positions about a disconnect from nostalgia and duplication. As Baudrillard writes in his 1983 text Simulations, the duplication is possibly more authentic than the original. For the FRAC this means that the act of doubling allows us to examine more what the characteristics of the original. Lacaton and Vassal state earlier in the lecture that they insist on evaluating the amount of architecture necessary. They jokingly discuss a park where after months of analysis they decided to do nothing. While Lacaton and Vassal place emphasis on the process of evaluating architecture it seems

as if they are inclined to create more space with more architecture.25

Another firm that doubles space is Herzog De Meuron. The Caixaforum Madrid built in 2008 and the Elbphilharmonie built in 2016 are their most extreme examples. While both are relevant to this discussion the Caixaforum predates the Elbphilharmonie.26 The form of the Caixaforum is a skewed rusted metal extrusion taking influence from the form of the surrounding context (see figure 04). The new building extrudes through the brick shell of a former power station subtracting out the former stations base for an extensive plaza.27 The Caixaforum doubles the amount of available space vertically with more architecture. The building like the FRAC engages the memory of what used to be there.28 While both of these buildings attempt to be flexible not only with their program but their engagement with the history of their site, they do so with an assumption that there are no available methods of creating more programmatic possibilities in the same volume of space. What this means is that the buildings suggest that there is a direct relationship between the volume of space and the number of programmatic possibilities. However according to architect Tatiana Knoroz in Devicology the use of a space can be greatly expanded and evolve over time. Knoroz’s analysis of a person’s home, in a “Japanese multistory mass housing estate built from the 1950’s into the late 1970’s” (37), examines the retrofitted furniture of an efficient housing unit. Knoroz argues that people who live in such fixed conditions will find a way to make space more flexible, or rather, reprogrammable. Knoroz goes on to describe the series of multifunctional furniture as the “collective unconsciousness of people living in the same conditions with the same set of rules.” (50) This contests Lacaton and Vassal and Herzog De Mueron’s philosophy that more space equals more program. Knoroz analysis is a diagrammatic expression of Appadurai’s diasporic communities in that people are able to reprogram a fixed volume of space.

Figure 10: Extruding what used to be. Photograph of Caixaforum Madrid by Herzog de Meuron in Madrid, Spain. Accessed November 11, 2021.

The texts and images examined provide examples of alternative representations of the human being used to control and of the need to take control of our excess data today. Thomas Jefferson’s Yeoman and the Gilbreth’s Space Efficiency studies are pre-digital representations making evident the importance of the image and it’s medium. As discussed by Giedion, the photograph or rather the image is tied to a spatial regime whose medium dictates how space and humans will be controlled.29 These former spatial regimes were indirectly concerned with program such as the space planning of a factory or the zoning of a township. Following the rapid increase of technological advancement since the Gilbreth’s studies, Arjun Appadurai deconstructs diasporic communities revealing that their power lies within media or in Appadurai’s terms Mediascapes and Ideoscapes.30 An important distinction is its relationship we the adaptive reuse of space today. Adaptive reuse is focused on reusing existing spaces and architecture. The reprogramming of space does deal with reusing existing spaces and architecture but could also be applied to designing new spaces and new architecture. The following design explorations explore how space can be doubled, how program can occupy a fixed volume, and the relationships between surface, volume, and domestic space.

End Notes

1 Mark Jarzombek, Digital Stockholm Syndrome in the Post Ontological Age (University of Minnesota Press, 2014), X

2 Objects that produce data could be computers, smart thermostats, smart homes, and smart watches

3 Mark Jarzombek, X. While Jarzombek prefers the term Ontic Exhaust, experts prefer the term digital exhaust referring to excess data.

4 James, C. Scott. Seeing Like A State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven, Yale University Press, 1998), 02. Sedentarization is not the focus of James C. Scotts Seeing Like A State however it is stated as the initial question leading to main content of the book.

5 An example of a political outline is a citizen. As defined by Merriam Webster’s Eleventh Edition is “a person who legally belongs to a country and has rights and protection of that country.” The data in the case of the citizen are their rights because rights are alternative representations of the person.

6 The essay referenced is from the second edition of Site Matters published in 2021.

7 Harvey M, Jacobs, Claiming the Site: Ever Evolving SocialLegal Conceptions of Ownership and Property (New York, Routledge, 2021), 15, 17. What Jacobs means when he connects the airport to changing conceptions of land ownership is that the airport is an international territory. This means that the space of an airport requires special laws and zoning.

8 Instagram’s data policy page on their Help Center website directly states the use of data: “to personalize features and context and to make suggestion for you on and off our products.” (help.instagram.com/519522125107875/?helpref=uf_ share). The reason Instagram is a good example is because of their large user base and they were recently acquired by Facebook.

9 Siegfried Giedion, Mechanization Takes Command (New York, Oxford University Press, 1948), 6. 10 Siegfried Giedion, Mechanization Takes Command, 101.

11 Giedion, Mechanization Takes Command, 100

12 As seen in figure 02 the form of the metal line allowed the human and space to be controlled. To break it down further the white grid in the background helped assign coordinates to the metal line. This was then put through a series of equations and design iterations to make the task the creates the metal line as efficient as possible.

13 Max Kuo, Advance of the Digital Frenemy (Anyone Corporation, 2021), 100.

14 Kuo, Advance of the Digital Frenemy, 99-100, 111.

15 Kuo, Advance of the Digital Frenemy, 111.

16 As described earlier in this text sedentarization is a method used by the state to make people citizens.

17 Arjun Appadurai, Modernity At Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1996) 03.

18 Arjun Appadurai, Modernity At Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization, 32-35.

19 Appadurai, Modernity At Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization, 35.

20 Appadurai, Modernity At Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization, 35-36. While Appadurai doesn’t directly attribute mediascapes to domestic spaces he heavily discusses state created media. The state created media is completely out of control of the citizen attributing control to the domestic space.

21 The term less is more was first printed in 1855 by Robert Browning in a Poem titled Andrea del Sarto and was then popularized by Mies van der Rohe in the early to mid-20th century.

22 Anne Lacaton, Jean-Philippe Vassal, FRAC Nord-Pas de Calais (https://www.lacatonvassal.com/index.php?idp=61, 2021), text description in English.

23 Anne Lacaton, Jean-Philippe Vassal, Freedom of Use (Guest Lecturer, Harvard Graduate School of Design, March 25 2015), 00:31:46 – 00:31:24.

24 Jean Baudrillard, Simulations (Columbia University, Semiotext[e], 1983), 12.

25 Lacaton and Vassal have many other projects that do this same thing such as 530 logements Grand Parc, Maison Latapie, and Les Grands ensembles de logements.

26 These two building not only have architectural and representational overlap, but the conceptual and project phases chronologically overlap revealing a strong connection between the two projects. Why the Caixaforum is discussed more here is because it came before the Elbphilharmonie.

27 Herzog De Meuron, 201 Caixaforum Madrid: Text. See the buildings description on their website: https://www. herzogdemeuron.com/index/projects/complete-works/201225/201-caixaforum-madrid.html

28 Meuron, 201 Caixaforum Madrid: Text. The building used to be a power plant. What remains is a shell of the brick façade.

29 Giedion, Mechanization Takes Command, 06, 99-103

30 Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization, 35-36.