MILLIØNS —
New Massings for New Masses Collectivity After Orthography MIT Keller Gallery & MIT Architecture On View 05/15 — 08/31 Opening Reception, 05/15 Thursday, 6:30pm
New Massings for New Masses Collectivity After Orthography — There once was an architectural dream
We expend our energy pushing things
any architect who dared wander into its
a kind of technical substrate for our in-
called Housing, which demanded from
dream-shadow a complete rejection of
existing culture. Housing was, during its early and most radical period, the first
legitimate architectural counterculture. It was also a possible path towards career suicide.
Housing is no longer possible—in
part because all of the historical and
socio-political conditions that made it a sensible concept have been swept away: Socialism and Liberalism have given
way to Neoliberalism; the State has been swallowed by the Market; sociality has
dissolved into interactivity; the city has
been erased by urbanism; etc. This much we know.
More importantly, however, for our pur-
poses: the architectural spirit of experimen-
across surfaces. Those surfaces constitute tuition—for how we think about our objects and their relation to our world. We
once imagined architectural possibilities by pushing ink and graphite across me-
chanical surfaces. We called that process “orthographic drawing.” We now push
buttons and keys on electronic surfaces to produce “models.” These models do
not contain drawings, but rather simulations of all possible drawings, because
“cutting” through an electro-topological model—“making 2D”— bears no relation to the task of hand-mechanically drawing an orthographic plan. The
pushing of buttons is neither better nor worse than orthographic drawing, but
despite all visual similarities the two are separated by a techno-epistemic chasm that cannot be crossed.
tation that motivated Housing has ceased to
Just like writing, architectural orthogra-
surface from which it emerged—the or-
system of geometric marks that made
exist because the technical-representational thographic architectural drawing—has disappeared. Architecture has not yet
discovered ways of experimenting with collective forms of life within its new technical regimes.
phy was a hand-mechanical, rule-bound possible certain historical ways of think-
ing. History and orthography are inseparable not merely because texts and lines allowed for the recording and archiving of events, but more profoundly because
the capacity for orthographic recording
“instantaneously” relates an electrical
repetitious organizations were even more
talized around the concept of collective
sensibility in which ideas and dreams
possible futures (or at least as many as
logic thinks that efficient repetition is
available to formal experimentation
and archiving gave birth to an entire
about the future were bound to a graphic description of the past (
: -graphia:
scratch, carve, draw, write). Orthography constantly subjected the present
to the past, exposing it to lost ways of
living and thinking. It also presented the present with an open choice between continuity or revolution.
The technical substrate of orthographic
reasoning has now disappeared from the world, and cannot be brought back as
anything other than historical reenact-
representation of the present (data) to all can be counted and computed). Ortho-
graphic time was historical; it enmeshed architectural reasoning in a technics of
historical precedent. Real time is statisti-
The “Real Time” analysis of all possible future states is a very different imaginative
framework than orthography, for which
“thinking” meant using the past to make sense of the future.
It would be senseless to consider one
boring that most schools of architecture
of the collective, the first and most
legitimize architectural objects, architectural culture now uses the imagery and language of Real Time data to justify its activities: performance, efficiency, fidelity, etc.
our working surfaces are, at pres-
concerns—“managerial” concerns—that canalize and smooth-over architectural experimentation in favor of prediction
and control. Management is efficient and effective, but we should wonder whether those twinned principles constitute a sufficient platform for imagining the
possible resonances between architecture and lived life.
simulating housing has become so
have dropped it from their instructional curriculum. +++ Lost in the yawning academic gap
between affective fabrications and territorial ambitions, the lonely architec-
tural object has lost all appeal. No one believes any longer in the idea that
architecture might be enough; that it
might contain within itself the capac-
was concerned to always relate pres-
ent and future to the past, Real Time
aggregation were laborious and timely operations; step-wise deviations from
ity. From that stage forward, all efforts
grind towards the articulation of those
initial carvings and divisions, which are, in a sense, proto-architectural gestures,
containing and constraining architec-
tural possibilities without determining specificities.
cultural speculations on possible forms
word.
moment—before diagrams or “discipli-
Orthographic repetition and spatial
themselves on an imagined multiplic-
found in the reductive precision of the
nonetheless contains a potency not
stacking, distribution, superimposi-
time. Unlike Historical Time, which
formal metastrategies begin to impose
What emerged at the outset of the
language and thought by describing
tion, and difference-within-repetition.
the technics of massing, where spatial and
its “agency,” the architectural object
We would like to express a somber
differences between two regimes of
decisive architectural gestures involve
+++
despite its inability to discursively justify
Housing was a delicate dream of
novel techniques concerning circulation,
“architectural collectivity.” At the scale
ity to stimulate experimental lives; that,
kind of time “better” than another:
the aim is always to orient one’s own
ferently, together.
logic of historical precedent was used to
in the technics of data. If previously the
ent, coalescing around a narrow set of
costs, energy consumption metrics, etc.
architectural reasoning?).
an intense political desire to live life dif-
We began with the vague notion of
scenarios; not just formal possibilities, tions, construction and maintenance
ton constitutes a fundamental rupture in
seemingly aligned, however briefly, with
At this point, the exercise of electro-
Under the new pressures of Real Time,
but increasingly also tectonic specifica-
Housing (can we say that the “copy” but-
life, and when the technical possibilities
cal; it enmeshes architectural reasoning
ment. Post-orthographic models contain an analysis of all possible future object-
painstaking undertakings. Managerial
nostalgia for a long-forgotten historical narity;” before autonomy or “criticality;” before the culture of popularity prizes
and Young Architect Parties—when a
small architectural counterculture crys-
twentieth century as protracted counterof life has devolved into a faux-architectural form of financial speculation
(condos, townhouses, apartments): ex-
truded spreadhseets for co-isolating the
Creative Class. Sincere dreams of living with and for one another have been de-
voured and regurgitated by an ongoing
project towards “spacious open-concept layouts,” with “plenty of storage,” and
“an array of modern, stylish, high-quality
The questions today: how can nonmodern
countertops.”
of Orthography? What would a post-
finishes for everything from flooring to
Living Together: Haven’t we already
tried that? Didn’t those naïve experi-
ments dissolve into either Stalinism or Psilocybin? Only by telling ourselves
different stories about modernity will we find release from its orbit. What if we
collectives be drawn together after the Age
orthographic material philosophy of collectivity even look like? And if one were able to somehow propose legitimately
new architectural collectives—even presently impossible ones—would anyone want to live in them?
were only able to dream of living togeth-
To the skeptics, for whom those ques-
What if Housing was once possible only
us another story, over which irony or
er because we had been drawn together? because architecture had gradually dis-
covered, within its own (non-discursive) orthographics, an immense platform
for drawing things together—materials, bodies, politics, concepts, friendships,
desires, reveries —as architectural objects? Not as “theses” or “arguments,” but as object manifestos.
Housing and Drawing: two long, mod-
ern shadows whose dark spaces conceals the fact that each no longer exists. Were they in fact the same shadowed surface, illuminated by a single dying light
that modernity had twisted back upon itself, so as to appear two-sided? If so, architectural reasoning must come to
terms with a reality in which technics
and politics are simply two names given to the very same primal impulse: to live together rather than merely survive on one’s own.
tions hold no weight, we say fine, tell
anachronism do not hang like a luminous haze…
The Keller Gallery —
The Keller Gallery was established in the
Located in MIT Building 7, Room 408,
materials and labor in kind from Shawn
through Saturday from 9 to 6. Exhibi-
fall of 2011 with a generous donation of Keller, principal with C.W. Keller &
Associates. At about 200 square feet, the gallery shows a steady stream of faculty, student and experimental work, including work from alumni and friends.
MILLIØNS —
it is free and open to the public Monday tions are coordinated by Irene Hwang. For more information on the current
exhibit or for general inquiries, send an email to kellergallery@mit.edu. Mailer design by Kyle Barker.
Events —
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05/05, 6:00
05/15, All Day
05/22, 1:30
Sumayah Al-Solaiman
Options Reviews
Final Review
MILLIØNS is a Los Angeles-based design practice with projects in
AKPIA Lecture
MIT Architecture
Arch 4.115
May and Zeina Koreitem.
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05/07, 6:30
05/16, All Day
05/23, 1:30
Team: Elliott Sturtevant, Ehran Holm, Victoria Walker, Luke Duross,
Hiroto Kobayashi
Thesis Presentations
Final Review
MIT Special Lecture
SMArchS, MArch, BSA
Thesis Prep (MArch)
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05/12, 12:30
05/19, All Day
Please visit www.sap.
Sinead C. MacNamara
Final Reviews
mit.edu/news_events
BT Special Lecture
ACT
for descriptions,
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05/13, All Day
05/20, 1:30
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Options Reviews
Final Review
www.millionsofmovingparts.org
MIT Architecture
Arch 4.111
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05/14, All Day
05/21, 1:30
Scan QR Code for more information
Core 2 Reviews
Final Review
about the work in this exhibtion.
MIT Architecture
Arch 4.113
California, New York and Beirut. MILLIØNS is directed by John
Peter Osborne and Venessa Heddle.
Thanks to Nader Tehrani and the MIT Department of Architecture. Special thanks to Irene Hwang, Michael Smith, Ultan Byrne, and
Nicholas Hoban. We remain grateful for the generous and continued support of Richard Sommer, and the John H. Daniels Faculty of
Architecture, Landscape, and Design at the University of Toronto
location, and details. Event information correct at time of printing.
77 Massachusetts Ave / Cambridge, MA 02139
The Keller Gallery / Building 7, Room 408
MIT Department of Architecture
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