ENTRY 05: COMPLEX LOCATION

“How many times have we heard: ‘it’s simple’. Nothing is simple. We live in a world where nothing is simple. Each day, just when we think we have a handle on things, suddenly some new element is introduced, and everything is complicated once again.” — Log Lady, Twin Peaks, Season 2: Dispute Between Brothers [[ ENTRY 05: COMPLEX LOCATION

W09: 22.03.21

After observing for 17 years, it took the year1 that was 2020 to alter Log’s course. Log No.49, The Return of Nature is a manifesto if ever there was one. A call to arms for a design industry which, since the end of the 20th Century, has been navel-gazing.

For Manning, to break with “Simple Location” is to embrace the opportunities presented when the western system of valuation (as A relates to A nature) are broken with. Writing in 2020, but working closely to Whiteheadian process philosophy, the question arises – are the philosophical ideas of nearly 100 years ago truly the best we have to re-invigorate architectural thinking in the 21st Century?

Manning certainly challenges the Western school of thought, but so does Diana Agrest in her projects and her theory (in that order) in her more recent projects at the end of the 20th century. Where Manning describes the total erasure of hierarchy and valuation, Agrest worked with the prevailing societal hierarchy to challenge them directly, and use them in her challenge by inverting the pyramid itself. One might say that the success of China Basin is both in its direct, unashamed challenge of convention, whilst exploiting the familiarity of existing power structures.

Is this familiarity essential in re-thinking architectural theory and its effects on practice? Theory – or lack thereof – was what spurred Davidson to start Log in 2003. But I would argue that it is not simply a case of theorising for theory’s sake; for architects shouldn’t it be more of a case of how theory can support practice and vice versa? We think therefore we build, we build therefore we think.2

Agrest’s theoretical approach, having stemmed from her practice, had real-

world complexities and played with our lived experience of the urban and of nature. Even adding tongue-incheek moves to highlight the inherently patriarchal (mechanical) context of the project. For Agrest: “I am not claiming to make feminine or feminist architecture, we’ve all been trained for years by a male brain, or many male brains…what is important to me is the exploration of the issues that appear. I have no problem with Euclidian geometry myself, I don’t think it is the cause of all evils, it is as much as any other geometries are. Any of these other mathematical orders of the universe are also the concoction of the male figure, so to me there is no difference if I use one or the other.”3

Agrest understands that she is working in and is a product of a male system, working with male tools. Human society has gender, racial, cultural hierarchies – societal constructs, yes – but to deny their existence is to deny human complexity. More importantly, it is to (continue to) turn a blind eye to the very problems our society continues to suffer from and that have made 2020 a historical one. We are, by our own (white, cis-gendered, male, privileged) design, an unequal society. Within our own ranks and within our relation to anything, anywhere, outside of our species.

Conversely, (and speaking of mathematical orders being the concoction of male figures) Manning builds on Whitehead that it is the extraction of experience from the field which makes matter ‘individual’, “to reduce experience to the individual, to say matter is “just there” is to posit an account devoid of relation, empty of ecology”…experience as ecology means concern for the field is never reducible to “my” concern. That would return us to nature overcoded by culture.”4 It is this “overcoding” which makes matter “simply located”.

One could argue that China Basin, as it had been conceived in its early development stages follows this resistance to be “simply located”, it removed the mechanistic/ urban encroachment, it prioritised the complex A nature fabric, challenging the capitalist valuation of the river-side location by having no object architecture.

3 AA School of Architecture, Diana Agrest - The Return of (The Repressed) Nature, 2015, https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=Pu0_SX65ixA. 4 Erin Manning, “Angular Perspective; Or, How Concern Shapes the Field”, Log, no. 49 (2020): 185. And yet to Agrest the project at that stage “…was too nice, it was hippy I thought… and so I started thinking about the questions of nature and this conflict with the machine…and so it became more perverse, I made this level of movement underlying this blanket of green…so I had this apparent nice nature, which was in fact an artificial plane…”. For China Basin it was, in fact, the addition of distorted cultural hierarchies, the “perverse”, which gave this project the opportunity to find interest and complexity within itself.

The truth of the matter is that science moved away from the deterministic model which Whitehead based his philosophies on, culturally and theoretically when it comes to gender and race theory we have also moved away from the simplistic and erasure narrative, which is frankly an ‘opt-out’. Manning’s resistance to simple location in theory actually manifests as truly simple location in practice, whereby the implied ‘complex’ location Manning calls for is, in fact, achieved in practice by embracing simple location’s complex cultural hierarchies and challenging them. Simple location is Complex location in the 21st Century.