t h r e s h o l d s x lv
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j o u r n a l o f t h e m i t d e pa r t m e n t o f a r c h i t e c t u r e
THRESHOLDS X LV MYTH E DI TOR Zachary Angles A DV I SORY BOARD Timothy Hyde, Chair Mark Jarzombek, Chair Dennis Adams Martin Bressani Arindam Dutta Diane Ghirardo Rodolphe el-Khoury Vikram Prakash Kazys Varnelis Gwendolyn Wright J. Meejin Yoon PAT RONS Mark and Elaine Beck Robert F. Drum Gail Fenske Jorge Otero-Pailos Nancy Stieber Nader Tehrani
SPE CI A L TH A NKS Kathaleen Brearley Irina Chernyakova Anne Deveau Anne Graziano Melissa Vaughn Daniel Abramson Matthew Allen Nisa Ari Brad Bolman Christianna Bonin Marco Canciani Caronlina Dayer Hélène Frichot Piero Garofalo Federica Goffi Michael Hill Timothy Hyde Albert José-Antonio López Eliyahu Keller Joss Kiely Joy Knoblauch Michael Kubo John McMurrough Markaki Metaxia Ana Miljački Miodrag Mitrasinovic Barbara Mundy Mathijs Pelkmans Rafi Segal Kristel Smentek Naomi Stead Milica Topalovic Emily Watlington James Wescoat Rixt Woudstra Claire Zimmerman
C ON T E N T S
Introduction Zachary Angles
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Deviant Beasts of Post-Truth Lydia Kallipoliti
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Apart We Are Together Rania Ghosn & El Hadi Jazairy
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Leto’s Curse 40 Will Davis Some Domes At The Middles Clark Thenhaus
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At the Talaab Alpa Nawre
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A History Galo Canizares
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Architecture’s Everything Aaron Tobey
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Enclaves of Inclusion McLain Clutter 'Nostalgic Desire': The Restoration of Dar ul-Aman Palace in Kabul, Afghanistan Huma Gupta
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Europe Started Here Suzanne Harris-Brandts
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The Great Imposter Shane Reiner-Roth
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The Fragment 146 Javier Galindo
The Brutal Myth Stephen Parnell
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The Archeology of Myth Olivier Jacques
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Americana Daria Ricchi
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Enchanted Catastrophe Paul Haacke
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Radio Activities Alfredo Thiermann
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Computation and Spatial Myth Curtis Roth
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Future Myths Michael Young & Kutan Ayata
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Multiplicities David Bird
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Ghost in the Garden Hans Tursack
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The Shadow of an Invisible Cathedral 254 Keith Mitnick Violence of the Sun
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INTRODUCTION “The study of mythology is a necessity for painters, sculptors, and particularly poets, and in general for all those who strive to embellish nature and to appeal to the imagination. Mythology is the wellspring of their works, and they draw their principal ornaments from it. It decorates our palaces, our galleries, our ceilings, and our gardens. Myth is the patrimony of the arts, it is an inexhaustible source of unusual ideas, agreeable images, interesting subjects, allegories, and emblems. How effectively these are used depends on the taste and genius of the artist. Everything is animated, everything breathes in this enchanted world. There, intellectual beings have bodies, material bodies have souls, and fields, forests, rivers, even the elements have their own divinities. I know well that these are fanciful figures, but the part that they play in the works of the poets of antiquity and the frequent allusions of modern poets have almost given them a real existence for us. They have become so familiar to our eyes that we find it difficult to look on them as imaginary beings. We believe that their history constitutes the distorted representation of events in earliest times. We attempt to discover in these events a consistency, continuity, and verisimilitude which they do not possess.� 1
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“The Greeks, says Strabo, were in the habit of presenting in the disguise of fiction not only their ideas on physics and other natural subjects, but also their ideas about their earliest history. This passage points to a basic difference between the various kinds of fiction that made up the body of mythology: some referred to general physics, others expressed metaphysical ideas through images, and a number of them preserved traces of the earliest traditions.” 2
“Thus writers have fallen into a thousand different errors because they wished to give a consistent explanation for all mythology. Each one discovered what his particular genius and his plan of study led him to seek. I might go so far as to say that the physicist finds here by analogy the mysteries of nature, the statesman the subtleties of governments, the philosopher the finest morality, even the chemist the secrets of his art. In short, each one has looked on myth as a country open to conquest which he felt he had the right to raid as it suited his taste and his interests.” 3
1. Louis Jaucourt, "Mythology," The Encyclopedia of Diderot & d'Alembert Collaborative Translation Project, trans. Nelly S. Hoyt and Thomas Cassirer (Ann Arbor: Michigan Publishing, University of Michigan Library, 2003). http://hdl.handle. net/2027/spo.did2222.0000.162 (accessed January 18, 2017). Originally published as "Mythologie," Encyclopédie ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers, 10:924–927 (Paris, 1765). 2. Ibid. 3. Ibid.
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Myth; Noun 1. a traditional story, esp. one concerning the early history of a people or explaining some natural or social phenomenon, and typically involving supernatural beings or events. 2. a widely held but false belief or idea. a misrepresentation of the truth. a fictitious or imaginary person or thing. an exaggerated or idealized conception of a person or thing.
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Two hundred and fifty years ago, before myth would emerge in the English language, it graced the lips of ladies and gentlemen of the French court and passed in hushed exchanges among the dark corners of Montmartre.5 Without question these two populations uttered the word for differing purposes: to connect the crown to antiquity, to engage in ritual, and to delight in pleasant distraction; or to contemplate the fall of Jupiter, to speak of the essential beauty of Venus, or the fall of the bourgeois from Olympos.6 When I first proposed that the forty-fifth issue of thresholds follow the theme of myth, I asked myself: what would happen if we had a conversation about how architecture makes myths and myths make architecture? There has been an increasing amount of interest into stories in architecture as demonstrated by publications of true stories,7 fairy tales,8 comics9 or fiction.10 But the growth of scholarship and creative projects has not been matched by increasing thoughtfulness or sophistication. By examining myth, thresholds 45 will provide a degree of nuance to the broader conversations architecture’s fictions, narratives, and speculations. Three contributions will illustrate how myth has multifariously appeared throughout the last half century of cultural, creative, and literary history. Bringing these voices into conversation anachronistically, we can begin to discern the messy and misty relationship between myth and architecture. An comprehensive historical explication of mythology can be found in Louis de Jaucourt’s entry on the subject in Diderot and d’Alembert’s Encyclopédie (originally published in 1765 and reproduced in part in the epigraph). For the creative practitioner, Jacourt waxes poetic on the potentials, mysteries, and inescapable nature of myth. He remarks 4. New Oxford American Dictionary, s.v. “myth.” 5. For further discussion of the eighteenth-century French preoccupation with myth see: Frank Edward Manuel, The Eighteenth Century Confronts the Gods. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1959). 6. Somewhat arbitrarily the proletariat only references Roman gods and mythology. I have no explanation for this. 7. Ana Miljački, Praxis: True Stories (Boston, MA: Praxis, Inc., 2013). 8. Fairy Tales: When Architecture Tells a Story (New York, NY: Blank Space Publishing, 2014). 9. Jimenez Lai, Citizens of No Place: An Architectural Graphic Novel (New York, NY: Princeton Architectural Press, 2012). And Mélanie Van der Hoorn, Bricks and Balloons: Architecture in Comic-strip Form (Rotterdam: 010 Publishers, 2012). 10. Julia Chapman, ed., Pidgin Magazine Issue 16: Fiction (Princeton, NJ: Princeton School of Architecture, 2013).
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on the Greek predilection for using myths to communicate scientific, philosophic, or historic information, or positions otherwise controversial, uninteresting, or difficult to understand. Lastly, he warns his reader against falling, as myriad scholars have before, into the rabbit hole of myth by attempting to find truth in the shifting fictions of myths. Jaucourt’s text explores how myth contains essential information about the author’s culture and how myth can weave scientific, philosophical, and historical information to stitch together larger intellectual arguments in narrative form. One-hundred-and-ninety years after Jaucourt, semiotician and cultural theorist Roland Barthes (1915-1980) penned a series of examinations of everyday myths in the pages of Les Lettres Nouvelles. Extending the theorization of myth beyond Hercules, Nike, and Thor, Barthes transformed perceptions of the world around him into a garden of mythic production, by revealing that disparate ideas and entities such as Lucha Libre, Nike, and Citroën are grown from intricately woven cultural myths. Barthes defines myth as a metalanguage that congeals around objects and weaves itself among ideological positions to objects, all while evading immediate observation. Mobilizing myth as a tool of semiotic and literary analysis, Barthes provides a structure for understanding myths and how symbols and signification play into mythologizing. If Jaucourt summarized a myth that was a priori and immutable, then Barthes made myth a flexible structure found or deployed in cultural narratives and innocuous objects all around us. As there is likely no object more innocuous and enveloping than architecture, Barthes provides us a structure with which to examine our own presuppositions and the narratives threaded through the glass, stone, and steel all around us. There has been a third use of myth appearing more recently in cultural, political, and creative conversations, which position myth, and fiction more generally, as a generative device. Those heralding this position propose recovering myth from its long hiding throughout the reign of empiricism to build, in a Barthesian sense, a narrative by which alternative understandings may emerge for issues that are beyond immediate conception or management. Throughout the last twenty years, philosopher and sociologist of science Bruno Latour has employed myth in an operative sense by calling for the recovery of Gaïa as an organizing myth to understand and discuss mechanisms at a global scale.11 In 2011, urban theorist and geographer Andrew Merrifield explored the intellectual, societal, and cultural exercises required to engage in Magical Marxism and called for an exploration of speculative, magical, and dreaming realities.12 Merrifield and Latour vocalize the power of narratives to join people together or drive them apart,
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to accelerate or decelerate contemporary challenges, or to find new heroes, sagas, and utopias. Ursula Le Guin, raconteur par excellence, has similarly provided a clarion call to narrate and mythologize: The spaceships faster than light, the weird worlds and alien beings, the intolerable or utopian societies, the dooms envisaged, the glories imagined they are the medium to describe what in fact is going on, what people actually do and feel, how people relate to everything else in this vast sack, this belly of the universe, this womb of things to be, and tomb of things that were, this unending story.
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An increasing awareness of economic, ecological, and political challenges reveals a menagerie of challenges. thresholds 45 explores these three faces of myth. Some authors in this issue explore how myths allow for an examination of scientific, historical, and ideological positions swirling through cultural narratives. Others analyze the myths latent in the individuals, nations, and cities all around us. A few provide us with myths of their own, speculating on issues ranging from psychology to philosophy, and pedagogy to politics. The conversations that emerge from these contributions help us make sense of how myth are, have been, and could be used in architecture, including various ruminations on myths of territory and geopolitics, myths of nation-building, myths of identity and character, myths of technology, and myths speculative and intangible products. Indeed, myth has recently taken on new meaning for contemporary society in the surprise result of the 2016 election in the United States that installed the forty-fifth president, ushering in an era of half-truths, non-truths, and post-truths aiming to destabilize the very core of American democracy under the aegis of a mythic return to a “Great America.”14 I certainly could not have narrated the events that came to pass in my wildest speculations, but it does seem, at least from the involved perspective of editor, the issues raised by myth are evermore pressing and pertinent. To this end, we begin with an essay by lydia kallipoliti which reflects on the malaise 2016 incited for many and concludes; “Myths have resurged as unforeseeably powerful tools of civic battle.” She illustrates this with a series of myths looking through the keyhole at, and through, design culture. 11. Bruno Latour, "Sensitizing," in Experience, ed. Caroline A. Jones et al. (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2016), 314-23. See also “Facing Gaia: A New Enquiry Into Natural Religion," Gifford Lectures, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, 2013. 12. Andy Merrifield, Magical Marxism: Subversive Politics and the Imagination (London: Pluto Press, 2011). 13. Ursula Le Guin, Dancing at the Edge of the World: Thoughts on Words, Women, Places (New York, NY: Grove Press, 2006), 170. 14. "Word of the Year 2016 is..." Oxford Dictionaries | English. Accessed January 30, 2017. https://en.oxforddictionaries. com/word-of-the-year/word-of-the-year-2016. See also Joseph E. Stiglitz, Swiss International Finance Forum, June 28, 2016, Bern, Switzerland. Keynote Address.
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Picking up Latour’s call to contemplate Gaïa or William Cronon’s call for stories when discussing history, geography, and ecology,15 rania ghosn and el hadi jazairy’s “Apart We Are Together” proposes the use of a “geostory” as an active mechanism to respond to immeasurable challenges such as climate change, resource scarcity, and economic inequality in drought struck California. Looking towards Xanthos, will davis evidences how the Greek myth of Leto has fended off encroaching industrial tomato farming. Despite the site’s key artifacts being held in the British Museum, Ovid’s myth has defined the territorialization of the Xanthos, Delta has inspired the colonial extraction of cultural artifacts, and has muddied a situation where history, economy, and ecology flow together. Continuing an examination into the cloudy intersection of cultural meaning, geographies, and disciplinary knowledge, clark thenhaus’ domes experiment with novel monuments for “Middle America” remixing the formal type of the dome, and its rich history, with the sites produced by various geographical definitions of the United States’ center. The resulting speculations are nuanced enigmas that inspire moments of introspection and projection on the vacuity of what is the center of the United States. Unpacking the complicated role of the talaab, or “small lake,” in Raipur India, alpa nawre explores how in the talaab one can witness the entangled relationship of ecology, sacrality, and urbanism as manifest in these architectural and urban objects. These voices examine how mythologies are projected onto territories and the critical relationship among a culture’s defining mythologies and its interactions with abstract entities as ecology, economy, and colonization. Transporting readers to a Martian colony recently disconnected from Earth, galo canizares introduces a history of the fledgling colonial Martian enterprise hacked together from digital fragments recovered from corrupted data. In the abyssal freedom just on the other side of the vacuum of space, “A History” takes the form of both a speculative history as well as rumination on historiography, highlighting the herculean task of mythologizing involved in both speculating and historicizing worlds. In 2013, standing atop a desk in the studios of the Harvard Graduate School of Design, cultural demigod and architectural enthusiast Kanye West proclaimed to an enraptured audience, “everything needs to actually be architected [sic],” sending his apostles forward to architect and to spread the word. aaron tobey traces the historical lineage of West’s edict from Bauhaus curricular diagrams forward, posing the question: how did architects come to mythologize themselves as having domain over all matter and what 15. William Cronon, “A Place for Stories: Nature, History, and Narrative” The Journal of American History 78, no. 4 (1992): 1347-1376.
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ecological responsibilities does the discipline carry as a result? With an uncanny enclave for Mexico City, mclain clutter speculates on what a utopia as envisioned by Thomas More (1478-1535) may resemble as a contemporary urban proposition for a city historically fragmented into enclaves, or islands, exploring a tradition of grounding urban developments in historically facing mythologies and operating in isolation from larger urban worlds. “Enclaves of Inclusion” riffs on exclusionary urban patterns, sketching out an urban landscape of definable landmarks and regions that stitch together its disparate neighbors. Moving the focus from territory and ecology to branding, we can see how deliberately constructed myths were used to provide importance or legitimacy to buildings, cities, and products in order to support nationalism, tourism, or capitalism among other things. With “Counterfactual,” h uma gupta unpacks the various histories of the Afghan Palace and the roles it plays as site and symbol for shifting Afghani politics and identity, resolutely maintaining its status as a national icon—despite radically changing ideas of what this nationality may entail. Gupta’s analysis explicates how the palace has found itself as a synecdoche for the complex national mythology of Afghanistan. Moving to the Georgian coastal city Butumi, suzanne harrisbrandts continues to explore a crisis of national identity, evidenced in a city branding of itself as a site of European origination with elaborate architectural symbolism, and the slogan “Europe Started Here.” The witnessed exercise in Butami’s urban branding demonstrates eloquently how cities mythologize themselves, in this case with explicit reference to the Greek myth of Jason and the Argonauts, towards political as well as touristic ends. In “The Great Imposter,” shane reiner-roth examines the curious mascot fashioned to market Naugahyde, a synthetic leather invented in 1936 by the British corporation Uniroyal. Reiner-Roth explores the artificial character and adorable ethics of the small creature. The Nauga shows how characters can be used to contain political and ecological positions and, when this myth is attached to its product, sell products to consumers. Revisiting the fifteenth-century Hypnerotomachia Poliphili’s hallucinogenic sequences, javier gallindo’s The Fragment or the Myth of Completeness is a series of picturesque scenes of a romantic, yet playful, occupant exploring folly-filled landscapes. These fragmented scenes recall not only the limited perspectives of the Hypnerotomachia’s woodcuts but unavoidably eighteenth-century romanticism and the picturesque; the explorations then ask questions about the utility of generative narratives in architecture, the place of the romantic self in contemporary cultural production, and perhaps about the latent
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humanism in western historical understandings of myth insofar as they recall picturesque configurations of deities, heroes, and maidens. stephen parnell reminds us that a common architectural myth is the self-constructed identity of an architect or architectural office by way of publications and the press. Focusing on the British architects Alison and Peter Smithson’s self-promotion as the founders of the brutalist movement, the narrative includes the Smithson’s friendship with Californian designers Ray and Charles Eames and the transAtlantic competition between the Smithsons and English architectural critic Reyner Banham over who would have the last word on the narratives of the movement both sought to champion. Far beyond his labyrinthine home replete with arranged artifacts, Sir John Soane’s status as a paranoiac is shown to have stretched far beyond his personal museology by olivier jacques’ examination; Jacques documents how the many layers of Soane’s self narration produced elaborate myths surrounding himself, his work, and his larger aims to contribute to definitions of what it would mean to be an architect. daria ricchi highlights how New York City, and America more broadly, held the imagination of an Italian audience in the 1930s and 1940s as it was mythologized as the capital of capitalism and captured the imagination of anti-Fascist authors writing in Mussolini’s Italy; Ricchi’s examination reveals how authors were enamored with a myth of the American everyman, a working class provincial forming the heart of the literature they labored to translate and consumed alongside Frank Lloyd Wright’s designs for prairie architecture and his related theories of apprenticeship and the journeyman. French architects were not immune to the alluring myth of New York’s growth as a capital of global modernism and financial power; in “Enchanted Catastrophe,” paul haacke explains how architects and artists such as Le Corbusier and Fenand Léger made commentaries on, and had reactions to, New York’s crystalline spires central to their theorizations and practices. Technology has long utilized mythology to narrate its innovations and rationalize its conventions. Pliny gives Daedalus credit for the invention of carpentry, but he is perhaps most famous for the failure of his flight machine and the resulting death of his son Icarus.14 The tradition of fantastic inventions being rationalized as gifts from benevolent Gods in antiquity has continued into the present: to paraphrase British author Arthur C. Clark, advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic and require myths to rationalize itself.15 Parsing the material infrastructure behind the ethereal propaganda war of Cold War Berlin, alfredo thiermann explores the history of Das Haus des Rundfunks (The Broadcasting House) and the role architecture played in the gdr’s political and ideological siege of the
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hearts and minds of the East German population. Asking the question, “How did we come to mythologize the ethereal domain of computation as spatial?” curtis roth introduces four brief stories of early computation and highlights the peculiar ways they contributed to our entanglement of spatial metaphors with computation. With a fictocritical facsimile of an issue of Natura (the international journal of science), michael young and kutan ayata explore the possibilities for the techno-biological remediation of a forest in Dessau and such a projects potentials for creating a Temporary Economic Acceleration Zone (now commonly referred to as a teaz) driven by increased data transmission rates. As we approach the primarily literary (and perhaps secondarily, cultural) domain of myth, other disciplines’ wild dalliances in the subject become reminders of the enormous breadth of investigations into the subject. Orchestrating a composition for multi-tracked bass flute david bird makes audible the flautist’s Sisyphean endeavoring to perform a paradox of prescriptive vagueness. With the performer’s variance across the multiplicity of attempts, one can reflect on the mythic status of the ideal be it notational, formal, or otherwise. In a history focused on the curious intersection of formalism, analytical psychology, and mysticism, hans tursack crystallizes the hallucinogenic world of the Jungian Mandala. He juggles histories from multiple disciplines to probe into one answer to the omnipresent and vaporous question of architecture’s capacities to possess meaning. Moving the conversation from the drafting table, coffee table book, or conference room to the pages of prose fiction, keith mitnick gifts us a story of a young and disenchanted architecture professor teaching a course on “Spatial Narratives.” Surprising and mysterious results of the students foray into literature as architectural pedagogy abound. Evidence of an architectural speculation contemplated over twenty years; neil spiller shares a glance into his Communicating Vessels project; a sometimes surreal, often alluring, and always-impressive world. Spiller’s world of myths, magic, and possibility is in perpetual reconstruction by the Chicken Computer, a place where The Professor and The Boy dine within a Prytaneion, and a Minotaur flickers past the threshold.
16. Arthur Clarke, Profiles of the Future: An Inquiry into the Limits of the Possible (New York: Harper & Row, 1973).
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EDITORIAL POLICY thresholds, the Journal of the MIT Department of Architecture, is an annual, blind peer-reviewed publication produced by student editors at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Opinions in thresholds are those of the contributors and do not necessarily reflect those of the editors, the Department of Architecture, or MIT. CORRESPONDENCE thresholds—MIT Architecture 77 Massachusetts Avenue, Room 7-337 Cambridge, MA 02139 thresholds@mit.edu http://thresholds.mit.edu
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