Architecture / Theory

architecture / theory

michael cradock

architecture / theory michael cradock

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ORIGIN GENDER

Losing Sight of the Bare and Naked Man

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Woven Wall

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HERMENEUTICS

Into the Labyrinth Without

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BODY

Museum Protocol:

by Right, Reason, and God

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CRITIQUE OBJECT

Castles in the Air

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Dadism: Not for Profit

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TIME BIOPOLITICS

After Anxious Proximities

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The Organic Order of the Capitalist Factory

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Bibliography

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Bedouin Tent, The Sahara Michael Cradock 2012

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origins / gender

Goldenes Zeitalter (The Golden Age) Lucas Cranach the Elder 1530

6/

losing sight of the bare and naked man The final question is how men group themselves, and why / Le Corbusier

Questioning society is intrinsically referencing the origins

‘heterogeneity and to confirm and enrich its own

of architecture . On a large scale, the coming together

identity’VI. Rykwert advocates that one may look to the

of people around a fire – advocated by Vitruvius –

primitive to reform corruptionVII. Is he perhaps referring

signified the emergence of a discipline for the creation

to Ovid’s Golden Age, that eternal spring in which man

of community living. According to Joseph Rykwert, this

lived (politically) serenely of his own volition? If so, he

is synonymous with the primitive hut, a symbol of the

corroborates with Giedion’s pessimism. Society at that

original and essential in the development of society:

time had lost its community. The ‘megapolis’ provided

architecture’s very rationale . At the CIAM Conferences

no trace of natural or spontaneous interactionVIII. In

of the 1950s, Geidion, Le Corbusier, et al., were vitally

preceding centuries one may observe a similar trend in

concerned with what had come before them, the initial

the emergence of the flaneur on Haussmann’s Grand

achievement of architecture to generate community.

BoulevardsIX or, later, Alvar Aalto comparing the steps

Remnants of the primitive, for example shantytowns

of Seinajoki Town Centre to an amphitheatre where one

contemporary to Le Corbusier’s work, ‘contain . . . the

may observe the repetitions of life, disconnected from

last civilisation in which man was in equipoise’ . Thus,

societyX.

I

II

III

IV

when Laugier urged us ‘not to lose sight of our little rustic hut’V, he was urging us to not forget the simple

Giedion’s reference to contemporary art as the proposer

accomplishments of the primitive man to establish

of the ‘bare and naked man’ drew on the primitive as a

community.

means of establishing a direct expression to resolve the ills of modern society, ‘a general humanising process’XI.

Yet, Spivak’s suggestion that the West looks to the primitive with selfish reasons: to reconcile its

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8 / Walking the Weft, Chicago Ann Wilson 2008 Ann Wilson is a feminist artist interesting in the female relationship to weaving expressed through cyclical rhythms and mechanical movement.

woven wall

If women were not the weavers and water carriers, who would they be? These labours themselves had been woven into the appearance of woman; weaving was more than an occupation and, like other patriarchal assignments, functioned as one of the components of womanhood / SADIE PLANT

‘The connection between women and weaving runs

the ‘intercrossing of sensations [in/of the brain], just as

deep’ : it is a thread adopted by Freud who suggests an

the threads are crossed in weaving’XVII.

XII

‘onanistic’ plaiting and weaving of the female pubic hair to compensate for the (absent) female penisXIII. Through

According to Semper, initially textiles ‘undoubtedly

this comparison, he alludes to a not uncommon criticism

take precedence because they can be seen . . . as

of the female and of the feminine art of weaving; that

the primeval art form from which all other arts . . .

‘nature herself would seem to have given the model

borrowed their types and symbols’ making it an essential

which the achievement imitates’ . Further to purporting

component of style, and architecture. Woven textile

the derivative nature of women’s creativity, he reduces it

has the ability ‘to cover, to protect, and to enclose’XVIII.

to ‘little more than sexual perversion’. One finds in Freud

Could it be argued that the roots of architecture lie in

a enactment of the oppressive nature of society.

the feminine? It is only when man generates a need for

XIV

more permanent forms that the use of textile becomes However, Bloomer points out a paradox in the

secondary in building. With the mechanisation of textile

established, phallocentic arguments on female weaving .

production came destruction of inwoven feminine

Through oppression, no clearer illustrated than in the

identityXIX. Freud’s assessment of ‘Civilisation and its

story of Philomela, women have engendered thread with

Discontents’ identifies that the oppressed in society

an intelligent method of symbolism, weaving meaning

‘cannot see why institutions that [they] have created

from inarticulate matter: ‘It is, like the Muses’ speech,

should not protect and benefit [ ] all’XX.

XV

ambiguously true speech and an imitation of true speech’XVI. Additionally, Neith is the Egyptian divinity of weaving and intelligence; feminist criticism emphasises

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10 /

Losing Sight of the Bare and Naked Man I II III IV V VI VII VIII IX X XI

Rykwert, J., On Adam’s House in Paradise, MIT Press (Cambridge, MA, 1981), p. 192.

Vitruvius, J., 10 Books on Architecture, MIT Press (Cambridge, MA, 1981), p. 192.

Cairns, S., ‘Notes for an Alternative History of the Primitive Hut’, in Primitive, Original matters in Architecture, ed. Odgers, J., Samuel, F., & Sharr, A., Routledge (London, 2006), p. 90.

Geidion, S., Architecture, You and Me: The Diary of a Development, Harvard University Press (Cambridge, MA, 1958), p. 96.

Laugier, An Essay on Architecture, trans. Herrmann, W., & Herrmann, A., Hennessey and Ingalls (LA, 1977), p. 91.

Spivak, G. C., The Post Colonial Critic, Routledge (London, 1990), p. 8.

Cairns, Primitive, p. 90.

Geidion, Architecture, You and Me, p. 126.

Herbert, R. L., Impressionism: Art, Leisure, and Parisian Society, Yale University Press (New Haven, 1991), pp. 1021077.

Aalto, A., Fleig, K., Alvar Aalto, University of Michigan Press (Michigan, 1975), p. 26-28.

Geidion, Architecture, You and Me, p. 126.

Woven Wall XII XIII XIV XV XVI XVII XVIII XIX XX

Plant, S., ‘The Future Looms: Weaving Women and Cybernetic’, in Cyberspace/Cyberbodies/Cyberpunk: Cultures of Technological Embodiment, ed. Featherstone, M., & Burrows, R., Sage (London, 1995), p. 55.

Presto, J., Beyond the Flesh: Alexander Blok, Zinaida Gippius, and the Symbolist, University of Wisconsin Press (Madison, 2008), p. 141.

Freud, S., Civilisation and its Discontents, Penguin (London, 2004), p. 9.

Bloomer, J., Architecture and the Text: The (S)crypts of Joyce and Piranesi, Yale University Press (New Haven, 1995), p. 173.

Bergren, A., ‘Language and the Female in Early Greek Thought’, in Arethusa, Vol. 16, No. 1 (1983), pp. 71-73.

Plant, Cyberspace/Cyberbodies/Cyberpunk, p. 55.

Semper, G., Style, trans. Mallgrave, H. F., & Robin, M., Getty (LA, 2004), p. 113.

Plant, Cyberspace/Cyberbodies/Cyberpunk, p. 56.

Freud, S., Civilisation and its Discontents, Penguin (London, 2004), p. 9.

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Visitors to the Prince of Wales Museum, Bombay Michael Cradock 2013

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HERMENEUTICS / BODY

Historically, medicine isolates the body in physical terms and neglects the sensitive nature of the soul.

As Descartes separated the res extensa from the res

cogitans, the mind is disembodied and psychology appropriated an ‘internalised view of the self’I. Marx suggests, even, that the body was left behind by an expanding world; ‘artefacts . . . lost all trace of their original connection [to the human]’II. Phenomenologically, identity arises though exchange between the body and the world, the world and the word. Man must comprehend the reciprocal relationship between symbols and the world, in which falls understanding of all parts to signify the wholeIII. Further to this, hermeneutical reflection applies the initial mental collection of imagery to situations where the reader (of texts, of architecture etc) encounters ‘strangeness or otherness’ to inform understanding; ‘a conjoined familiarity and foreignness . . . gives rise to hermeneutical enquiry’IV. Giambattista Vico, in his text On

Ancient Wisdom, presages hermeneutics as ‘ingenuity:

14 /

into the labyrinth without

The newborn child does not at first separate his ego from his outside world that is the source of the feelings flowing towards him . . . In this way the ego is for the first time confronted with an object, something that exists out there and can be forced to manifest itself only through a particular action / FREUD

. . . the power of connecting separate and diverse

indirectly suggests the method of clarity through spatial

elements’.

referenceVIII.

In Latin it is described as acutum (acute) or obtusum (obtuse), terms which belong to geometry, because when it is acute it penetrates [things] more quickly and links different elements more closely, analogous to the connection of two lines at a point with less than a right angel [between them], whereas when it is obtuse it approaches things more slowly and leaves different elements more remote from their foundation, analogous to the connection of two lines at a point with more than a right angle [between them]V. Something we regard as having a fixed meaning can

Jackendoff proposes that language exploits the threedimensional visual mechanism of the mindIX. Spatial relations clarify asymmetrical visual references, adding lexical distinctions to ‘encode object-internal information about the figurative’. He gives the example: ‘The book [figure] is on the table [reference] / ‘The table is under the book.

‘The book is standing/lying/leaning/resting on the table’

merely be ‘sedimented or stabilised structures’ that are recurring referencesVI. Likened to a labyrinth by

Adopting notions of space – the domain of the architect

Frescari, a network of associations can potentially link

– the hermeneut, in its reduced abstraction, is the

one point with any other. Labyrinthine thought illustrates

signified in the onthological realm, ‘independent of

the complex array of multiple associations that lead

individual consciousness’X.

to variation in inference. Whilst he advocates the creativity engendered by ‘indirection, disorientation, and serendipity’VII, Lindsay Jones suggests that the hermeneut needs hypotheses confirmed, the ‘better view’, and

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16 / Touching Exhibits, Prince of Wales Museum, Bombay Michael Cradock 2013

museum protocol: by right, reason, and god It is a terrible arrogance to affirm that, to be happy, everyone should be European / VOLTAIRE

On a visit to the Prince of Wales Museum in Bombay, a

architectural representations relies on where/when one

colonial institution, I observed that native Mumbaikars

isXIX. This physical pseudo-speciation, to see the foreign

behave differently in the museum context to Western

figure as ‘threatening . . . the theatre of society’XX, stems

visitors. Heimsath identifies an historical precedent

from their instantly identifiable unfamiliarity with unwritten

for architectural influence on corporeal behaviour .

societal paroxysms inscribed in the surroundings which a

Architecture facilitates a role-defined society where

native will subconsciously detect and react toXXI.

XI

interactions are reduced to repetitionsXII, something Lefeubvre conflates with a constitution of the selfXIII.

The body’s relation to space is dependant on a ‘practico-

This derives from our inclination to move freely, which

sensory’ engagement with its environment; ‘each living

is only possible if we know the roles and perform them,

body both is space and has its space’. Early museums

enforced on a larger scale by ceremony

encouraged sensual interaction with artefacts, contrary

XIV

that enacts

quotidian interaction in ‘dramatic relief’XV. Corporeal

to modern, popular notions of a museum culture:

custom is influenced by ‘sensorial perception’ and

‘inviolable and untouchable’. This ‘sensory restraint’ is

‘contextualisation’. The body requires architectural signs

not our natural manner of interaction with artefactsXXII.

to communicate to individuals where they are not just

On witnessing uninitiated visitors to the newly opened

physically, but psychologically, informing them how to

Ashmolean Museum, Von Uffenbach notes ‘they run here

behave . Mischel suggests, ‘a person’s reactions to any

and there, grabbing at everything and taking no rebuff

novel situation are influenced by his prior experiences’XVII.

from the Sub-Custos’XXIII. Even in the eighteenth century,

XVI

with much value placed on the ‘intellectual cognition’ When one is presented with a foreign context, observed

of sight, touch was still considered ‘to have the best

social ‘scripts’ can seem arbitrary whilst our native

and final access to the world that sense reveals’XXIV.

rules we perceive to be defined by ‘Right, Reason, or

Nonetheless, modernity dictates we view; architecture

God’

responds (or dictates?) accordingly so that visitors

. How one responds to this manipulation through

XVIII

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can only expect a ‘clear, well-lit view of the objects on display’XXV. Thus, for society devoid of museum culture, this established script of comportment would be seen arbitrary; what native symbols are there to dictate how one adapts one’s body? The reverse is the also the case now, as Freidrich Schiller claimed that ‘use of touch for aesthetic appreciation [the uninformed viewer] was the mark of savagery’XXVI. Whilst I do not conflate the Mumbaiker’s engagement with the Prince of Wales museum with savagery, the imposed colonial architecture offers few bodily clues for the unaccustomed, clues a Western visitor finds in abundance.

18 / The Prince of Wales Museum, Bombay Michael Cradock 2013

Into the Labyrinth Without I II III IV V VI VII VIII IX X

Drake, S., ‘Monstrous Bodies: Architecture and the Play of Appearance’, in Architectural Theory Review, Vol. 6, No. 1 (2001), pp. 117-133.

Marx, C., Capital: Critique of Political Economy, Volume 1, Penguin (London, 1990), p.548.

Drake, Architectural Theory Review, p. 130.

Jones, L., ‘The Hermeneutics of Sacred Architecture: A Reassessment of the Similtude between Tula, Hidalgo and Chichen Itza, Yucatan, Part I’, in History of Religions, Vol. 32, No. 3 (1993), pp. 207-232.

Gianbattista Vico, On the Most Ancient Wisdom of the Italians, Trans. Palmer, L. M., Cornell University Press (Ithaca, 1988), p. 70.

Johnson, M., The Body in the Mind, University of Chicago Press (Chicago, 1990), p. 174.

Frascari, M., ‘A New Angel/Angle in Architectural Research: The Ideas of Demonstration’, in Journal of Architectural Education, No. 44 (1990), pp. 11-19 Jones, History of Religions, pp. 207-232.

Jackendoff, R., Meaning and the Lexicon: The Parallel Architecture, Oxford University Press (Oxford, 2010), p. 101.

Jackendoff, Meaning and the Lexicon, p. 102.

Museum Protocol: by Right, Reason, and God XI XII XIII XIV XV XVI XVII XVIII XIX XX XXI XXII XXIII XXIV XXV XXVI

Heimsath, C., Behavioural Architecture: Toward an Accountable Design Process, McGraw-Hill (New York, 1977), p. 45 Heimsath, Behavioural Architecture, p. 51 Simonsen, K., ‘Bodies, Sensations, Space and Time: The Contribution from Henri Lefebvre’, in Geografiska Annaler, Vol. 87, No. 1 (2005), pp. 1-14 Heimsath, Behavioural Architecture, p. 59 Sennett, R., ‘The Foreigner’, in Body and Building, Ed. Dodds, G., & Tavernor, R., MIT Press (Cambridge, MA, 2002), p. 199.

Heimsath, Behavioural Architecture, p. 60 Arango, S., Sensorial Architecture and Contextuality, Al-Sayed (New York, 1986), p. 117.

Sennett, Body and Building, p. 191.

Heimsath, Behavioural Architecture, p. 60 Sennett, Body and Building, p. 191.

Sennett, Body and Building, p. 198.

Classen, C., ‘Museum Manners: The Sensory Life of the Early Museum’, in Journal of Social History, Vol. 40, No. 4 (2007), p. 895.

Classen, Journal of Social History, p. 908.

Classen, Journal of Social History, p. 901.

Classen, Journal of Social History, p. 907.

Classen, Journal of Social History, p. 902.

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CRITIQUE / OBJECT

Previous page: Tiller Girls Frankfurt 1933

Dammerstock Karlsruhe, Germany Otto Haesler 1928-1929

In his essay Ruf zum Bauen, Adolf Behne appeals, in a ‘heavily millennialist’ tone, for a visionary architecture to play a determining role in generating a new society rather than concerning itself with immediate practical problemsI. Building on the well-established distinction between

Kultur and Zivilisation in post-Napoleonic German societyII, the coexistent in early nineteenth-century German Modernism of Handwerk and Tecknik was intrinsic to modernisation. As Ferdinand Tonnies suggests, the Technik was criticised by proponents of the arts and crafts tradition who, in the pursuit of Gemeinschaft, rejected the superseding of the ‘personal and intuitive connection between . . . artist and . . . material’ by technologyIII. Gemeinschaft is, I consider, this new society (Wesenwille)IV of which Behne aspires; ‘a perfect unity of human wills’. However, it is to Gesellschaft – a society of ‘disorder, isolation, private interest and arbitrariness’) that modernity and the mechanic Kurwille are approachingV. In his critique of

22 /

castles in the air

What is small must derive from what is great, from the whole; otherwise it is trivial. The whole cannot be obtained through the parts; the whole embraces the parts. Our aim is the whole. Our castles in the air are built on firmer foundations than the hasty day-to-day work which seems so down-to-earth. In reality it is not rooted in the earth at all, but planted out in the little subdivided plots and parcels of land. Our castles in the air stand on the earth, on the stars, on the firmament, on the whole / Adolf Behne

Otto Haesler’s Dammerstock Karlsruhe, Behne criticises

many movements constituting an attempt to define

the monotony and ornamentation of this stark housing

modernism, historicism predicted a reconciliation of

scheme whilst proposing a necessary ‘transformation

antagonistically pragmatic industrialisation and romantic

of a passive system into one of consumer product and

individualismXII.

VI

demand’ , surely a consumerist, isolating Gesellshaft.

VII

Kracauer suggests that one may find new, striking This dichotomy forms a ‘metacommentary on the

art forms by engaging in the industrial at the expense

promises and despairs inherent in knowledge’ . Louis

of exhausted traditions; he gives the example of the

Wirth identifies an incompatibility between these

Tiller Girls whose synchronised movements imitate the

mutually contradictory norms that offers no homogenous

factory production lineXIII. He sought to unify ornament

solution . Contemporary architects, like Behren (at

and life, as Behne remarks, ‘even if by this process

times), offered essentially to ignore the debate between

a few precious stones are knocked off the crown of

technology and society by proposing an architecture

aesthetics’XIV. Banham dismisses this as a ‘false picture’

based solely on ‘proportionality and order’X. Does

of an industrial-cultural resolution; architecture should not

focussing purely on formation – Gesultung – fulfil

ape the aesthetic of the machine, or the visual styles of

Behne’s ideal of ‘castles in the air’ ?

its production; rather arrive at its own aesthetic through

VIII

IX

XI

active engagement with . . . technology’XV. Simultaneously, historicism offered a view of society more akin to Behne’s: ‘individuals . . . are parts of a much larger defining culture’. It encouraged ‘understanding indivualism within greater social forces’. Important to

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24 / Erste Internationale Dada-Mess (First International Dada Fair) Otto Burchard Gallery, Berlin 1922

dadaism: not for profit

For we want at one and the same time to be only of ourselves and to be from someone: to succeed the Father and to proceed from the Father. Perhaps man will never be able to choose between the Promethean ambition of reorganising the world and of taking the place of the Father, and that of descending by grace of filiation from an original being / JEAN BAUDRILLARD

One may look at Modernism in early twentieth-century

than made by the hand of the artist’XX. Does the adoption

Germany as a microcosm of the general problem of

of waste elements devoid of use and exchange value

ModernisationXVI. Object is a fundamental aspect of this

make the finished artwork valueless? The unprofitable

development in which society simultaneously excited by

Dadaist exhibition of 1922 seems to suggest that in

the possibilities presented by industry and technology in

monetary terms this is the caseXXI. The technique is

the production of every-day life, and resilient against the

further exhibited in Neue Sachlichkeit sculpture, for

loss of cultural significance and historic craft in the face

example Christian Schad’s Portrait of a Woman, where

of ‘inherent contradictions and uncertainties’ . These

his assemblage combines elements derived from

contradictions are expounded generally by Baudrillard

wood off cuts from machine production and materials

who juxtaposes ‘signs of our present majesty’ – the

associated with technological processes: heavy enamel

development of technology – with ‘mythological objects

commercial paints and mass-produced metal parts.

of as signs of an earlier domination’

However, the initial dichotomy discussed becomes clear

XVII

.

XVIII

in the ‘undeniable skill’ exhibited in the arrangement of In the creative industries at the time, artists challenged

these forms, and the choice of colourXXII. Michael Peppiat

the inherent exchange value in high art by drawing

highlights ‘the paradoxical truth of the matter . . . that

inspiration from mass culture, which had high use

artists themselves were the leaders in the aesthetic

valueXIX. For example, Berlin Dadaists utilised in their

about-face that sometimes supplanted abstract

efforts to transform the production and reception of

modernism with tradition-based, albeit often tradition-

works of art, whilst aiming to destroy the ‘cult of art’, the

baiting forms of modern art’XXIII.

technique of photomontage: the extraction of images, literally, from sources ‘industrially manufactured rather

Drawing from community-wide Naues Bauen ideals of

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inclusion within the whole through industrial process, the coming together of disparate images to form a new meaning simultaneously projects that meaning (and inherent value) onto the individual partsXXIV. Kracauer cites the Tiller Girls as an example of this phenomenon: ‘the hands of the factory correspond to the legs of [the dancers] . . . the mass ornament’XXVI. By ‘mass ornament’, he refers to the serial object, the ‘body machine’.

Individually, the dancers movements seem arbitrary. But to the spectator, the ‘self-objectivisation of the mass’ manifests itself in pattern and homogenyXXVII.

26 / Factory Production Line 1937

Castles in the Air I II III IV V VI VII VIII IX X XI XII XIII XIV XV

Colquhoun, A., Collected Essays in Architectural Criticism, Black Dog Publishing (London, 2009), p.306.

Colquhoun, Collected Essays in Architectural Criticism, p.302.

Colquhoun, Collected Essays in Architectural Criticism, p.303.

Schwarzer, M., German Architectural Theory and the Search for Modern Identity, Cambridge University Press (Cambridge, 1995), p. 9.

Schwarzer, German Architectural Theory and the Search for Modern Identity, p. 10.

Colquhoun, Collected Essays in Architectural Criticism, p.307.

Colquhoun, Collected Essays in Architectural Criticism, p.308.

Schwarzer, German Architectural Theory and the Search for Modern Identity, p. 9.

Wirth, L., Ideological Aspects of Social Disorganization: On Cities and Social Life, University of Chicago Press (Chicago, 1957), p. 47.

Colquhoun, Collected Essays in Architectural Criticism, p.303.

Behne, A., Ruf Zum Bauen, E. Wasmuth (Berlin, 1920), p. 5.

Schwarzer, German Architectural Theory and the Search for Modern Identity, p. 9.

Colquhoun, Collected Essays in Architectural Criticism, p.311.

Colquhoun, Collected Essays in Architectural Criticism, p.308.

Whiteley, N., Rayner Banham: Historian of the Immediate Future, MIT Press (Cambridge MA, 2002), p. 39.

Dadaism: Not for Profit XVI XVII XVIII XIX XX XXI XXII XXIII XXIV XXV XXVI XXVII

Colquhoun, Collected Essays in Architectural Criticism, p.302.

Strecker, J., The Mad Square: Modernity in German Art 1910-3, Art Gallery of New South Wales (Sydney, 2000), p. 27.

Baudrillard, J., Revenge of the Crystal, Ed. & Trans. Foss, P., and Pefanis, J., Pluto Press (London, 1990), p.42.

Lloyd, J., & Peppiatt, M., Christian Schad and the Neue Sachlichkeit, W. W. Norton & Co. (New York, 2003), p. 57.

Strecker, The Mad Square, p. 83.

Strecker, The Mad Square, p. 78.

Strecker, The Mad Square, p. 83.

Lloyd, Christian Schad and the Neue Sachlichkeit, p. 57.

Strecker, The Mad Square, p. 83.

Reeh, H., Ornaments of the Metropolis: Siegfried Kracauer and Modern Urban Culture, Trans. Irons, J., MIT Press (Cambridge MA, 2004), p. 95.

Krachauer, S., Das Ornament der Masse (The Mass Ornament), Trans. Levin, T. Y., Harvard University Press (Cambridge MA, 1995), p. 54.

Reeh, Ornaments of the Metropolis, p. 94.

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time / biopolitics

Previous page: Archizoom 1969

The Trial Orson Welles / Franz Kafka 1962 Alarming changes in scale and proximity of characters to one another and the viewer generate a disarming quality inkeeping with the themes of the original text.

After Galileo, our previously biblical concept of time and space has shiftedI. A thing’s place is no longer a location, but a point in its movementII. However, Massey argues that a more acute definition of space is necessary; surface ‘stasis’, for example, seems opposed to the concept of time. Space must be considered in four-dimensionalityIII. Thrift conflates time and space; ‘there is only timespace’IV. In his reflections on Bombay, Mehrotra’s city is constituted of a series of rhythms, less about materiality, rather the movement through time of kinetic parts, converging and diverging, ‘forming distinct concordances’V. Visually depicting these banalities generates descriptive images of rhythm and routine between society and the individual in the overlaying of linesVI. For example, in her novel Home of 1835, Sedgwick describes the synchronising of ‘the private sphere of the home and the so-called public activities of commerce and paid employment’ as providing ‘incalculable gains’VII.

30 /

AFTER anxious proximities

God created the earth on the 23rd of October, 4004 BC / James Ussher

In modernity, this synchronisation has intensified

contributed to a definition of status within society.

toward ‘hurtling straight lines’ that define a sci-fi city .

Queuing, it is considered, contributed to the collapse of

According to Probyn, connectedness rules our ‘post

the Soviet UnionXVI. It is, perhaps, the anxiety of undefined

traditional’ societyIX; a teleological story has generated

time space, these Foucauldean thematicsXVII, that the

contemporary ‘urban nightmares of simultaneity’ . Real-

powerful can impose on the weak. It brings to mind the

time connections undermine social hierarchies that

protagonist in Kafka’s The Trial who knows neither what

previously governed timeXI. Foucault identifies an anxiety

he is charged with or why his is there and what he is

generated through proximities of these connections

waiting for or how long he will be forced to wait for itXVIII.

VIII

X

between time and space . Yet these proximities link XII

many aspects of modern society – ‘governmentality, discipline, power, and processes of subjectification’ – and ethical relations are governed by a temporality and movement that threatens to undo static pillars of moralityXIII. This in turn proposes an issue of human siting. What levels of enforced proximities, circulations and classifications are necessary to achieve certain ends?XIV For example, cyclical time, associated with femininity (‘biorhythms’, repetitive nature of household tasks) has been replaced by a tendency toward ‘heroic, Western masculine narrative of time’s transcendence of place’XV. Previously, enforcing a wasting of time

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32 / No-Stop City Archizoom 1969

the organic order of the capitalist factory The organic order, in contrast to the geometric, recognises the interrelation between man and his environment of which he is biologically part / LUDWIG HILBERSEIMER

Giorgio Agamben’s ‘paradigma gestionale’ questions

upgrading human life and producing a fertile ground for

whether urbanisation presupposes the superseding

the continuation of the accumulating class echoed the

of politics by economyXIX to such an extent that ‘it is

writing of Tronti and MarxXXIV.

reasonable – almost banal – to ask not what kind of political power is governing us, but whether we are

The work of Hilberseimer fully accepted capitalist control

governed by politics at all’ . Marx’s Capital cites the

over urban reality. Despite his early writing, particularly

circulation of commodities is the basic unit within society:

in Contemporary Architecture: Its Roots and Trends, on

‘l’argent n’a pas de maitre’ .

‘the organic order’ emulating the interrelation of man and

XX

XXI

his environmentXXV, in its execution there is an ‘inhuman As an extension of this, architectural theorists propose

simplicity’XXVI. Perhaps this stems from his trying to find

a city where technological development is compatible

order within an architecture, politics, and economics

with human existence

‘in confusion’XXVII. His influence on Archizoom’s No-Stop

models were not

XXII

in a way existing bourgeois

. The previous urban centre as a

XXIII

City is clear through their proposition of a city ohne

place of financial accumulation and the periphery as a

Eigenschaften. Not taking precedent from traditional

place of production should be revolutionised in response

forms of consumption and production (the factory and

to the capitalist regime to engender the disappearance

the house), rather the supermarketXXVIII. However, the

of the proletariat as a separate entity from society.

combination of advanced technology and the ‘untamed

Rather ‘proletarianising’ society, so that it is society.

human nature growing within it’ produces an incoherence;

For example, Greppi’s Piana di Firenzi manifested as

‘an obscure intent of a foreign body within a rational

a ‘gigantic factory’, extending production beyond the

mechanism’ and ultimately a contradiction to their initial

factory floor and into society. To him, the importance of

intention of appropriation by the workersXXIX.

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34 /

After Anxious Proximities I II III IV V VI VII VIII IX X XI XII XIII XIV XV XVI XVII XVIII

Probyn, E., ‘Anxious Proximities’, in TimeSpace: Geographies of Temporality, Ed. May, J., & Thrift, N., Routledge (London, 2004), p. 179.

Foucault, M., Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias, Routledge (New York, 1986), p. 23.

Probyn, TimeSpace, p. 172.

May, J., & Thrift, N., TimeSpace: Geographies of Temporality, Routledge (London, 2004), p. 93.

Crang, M., ‘Rhythms of the City: Temporalised Space and Motion’, in TimeSpace: Geographies of Temporality, Ed. May, J., & Thrift, N., Routledge (London, 2004), p. 189.

Crang, TimeSpace, p. 193.

Allen, M., Republic in Time: Temporality and Social Imagination in Nineteenth-Century America, University of North Carolina Press (Chapel Hill, 2008), pp. 118-120.

Crang, TimeSpace, p. 188.

Probyn, TimeSpace, p. 173.

Crang, TimeSpace, p. 188.

Levine, R., A Geography Of Time: On Tempo, Culture, And The Pace Of Life, Basic Books (New York, 2008), p. 100.

Foucault, Of Other Spaces, p. 23.

Probyn, TimeSpace, p. 173.

Probyn, TimeSpace, p. 179.

Crang, TimeSpace, p. 189.

Levine, A Geography Of Time, p. 102.

Probyn, TimeSpace, p. 173.

Levine, A Geography Of Time, p. 104.

The Organic Order of the Capitalist Factory XIX XX XXI XXII XXIII XXIV XXV XXVI XXVII XXVIII XXIX

Aureli, P. V., The Possibility of an Absolute Architecture, MIT Press (Cambridge MA, 2011), p. 11.

Aureli, The Possibility of an Absolute Architecture, pp. 11-13.

Marx, C., Capital: Critique of Political Economy, Volume 1, Penguin (London, 1990), p. 247.

Aureli, P. V., The Project of Autonomy: Politics and Architecture Within and Against Capitalism, Princeton Architectural Press (New York, 2008), p. 72.

Aureli, The Possibility of an Absolute Architecture, pp. 11.

Aureli, The Project of Autonomy, p. 69.

Hilberseimer, P., Contemporary Architecture: Its Roots and Trends, P. Theobald (Chicago, 1964), p. 133.

Aureli, The Project of Autonomy, p. 74.

Hilberseimer, Contemporary Architecture, p. 203.

Aureli, The Project of Autonomy, p. 74.

Aureli, The Project of Autonomy, p. 72.

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