#2 - Reorientations

#2 - Reorientations; mapping Literature: Reorientations, Slices through space, by Doreen Massey, in For Space (2005) Writing has nothing to do with signifying. It has to do with surveying, mapping, even realms that are yet to come (Deleuze & Guattari, 1980).

The acknowledgement that we ourselves - and everything around us - are in continuous and inevitable transformation, enforces our awareness of the transforming energies – energies unfolding along different trajectories in time and space - shaping complex spatial patterns that are intricately connected with the changes in the landscape. Our intention is to see architecture and planning as on-going processes that never reach completion, as life itself is never finished or concluded. If you really were to take a slice through time - says Doreen Massey in her book: For Space - it would be full of holes, of disconnections, of tentative halfformed first encounters. (…) Loose ends and on-going stories. (Massey, 2005) To develop a profound understanding of the landscape, we need to map and do research along lines and trajectories that have not necessarily been investigated before – to make connections and juxtapositions that are not obvious, and to find spatial connections and openness that are not prejudiced or closed. Make a map, not a tracing, say Deleuze and Guattari in their text about the rhizome: What distinguishes a map from a tracing is that the former is entirely oriented towards an experimentation in contact with the real (…) A map has multiple entryways, as opposed to a tracing, which always comes back to the same. A map has to do with performance, whereas a tracing always involves an alleged ‘competence’ (Deleuze & Guattari, 1980) Our mapping is not to be complete or conclusive, but follow tracks or lines of flight. According to Manuel De Landa, Deleuze and Guattari use lines of flight as something to follow that is expected to redeem new responses – as an operator which transcends the real and ascends to the virtual (Manuel De Landa, 2002). In her essay Losing Control, Keeping Desire, Doina Petrescu elaborates on the meaning of the concept to be an: abstract and complex enough metaphor to map the entire social field, to trace its shapes, its borders, its becomings.

(Petrescu, 2001).

Global warming, environmental disturbances and political pressures combine to create a completely new physical ‘ground’ which in turn places great demands on the response of architects and landscape architects. The need to develop a critical awareness and alternative forms of knowledge in connection with this development transcends the traditional design focus.

An open and progressive reading of landscape as both an objective and subjective experience gives validity to the multiplicity of practices connected to it – including natural processes and history – landscape can be seen as an assemblage of spatiality and interconnecting trajectories – a time/space derivation. What if [space] presents us with a heterogeneity of practices and processes? Doreen Massey asks. Then it will be not an already interconnected whole but an ongoing product of interconnections and not. Then it will be always unfinished and open. (Massey, 2005) What we are mapping is not only the extraordinary and peculiar but also the everyday normal – layers of everyday experience and everyday practices – as well as the hyper normal which eventually forms the landscape’s spatial performance. A hyper-mapping might be more subjective and focus on values related to the plan’s context than being strictly neutral and objective - investigations into layers of information that often reach beyond the immediate perception of the landscape.

MH/GL Assignment: Make a map not a tracing....

SLICES THROUGH SPACE – Azrieli School of Architecture & Urbanism, guest studio spring 2012 Magdalena Haggärde & Gisle Løkken – 70°N arkitektur