LLiminal Landscapes
Liminal Landscapes Post-Humanist Heterotopian Urbanism
Richard Cotter Master’s Degree Project Completed in Partial Fulfilment of the Master of Architecture Degree in the Faculty of Environmental Design at the University of Calgary
Supervisor: Joshua M. Taron [Assistant Professor, Faculty of Environmental Design] External Advisor: Thomas Debicki [Principal, Debicki Speta Design]
For Cattive, MoMo, and Luna. We can always meet again in dreams.
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[Acknowledgements]
Thank you Adam, Alison, Anna, Chris, Kyle, Mike, Shalisha, and Tyler for joining me on the journey of a lifetime. Thank you to all of my ‘civilian’ friends and family for your understanding. Sorry for disappearing for the past four years. Thank you Craig and Chris for all of your help and sage advice.
[Acknowledgements]
Thank you Mom, Dad, and Aylish for loving me unconditionally.
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Thank you Josh and Thomas for your guidance and support over the last twelve months and throughout this degree.
Thank you (again) Adam for putting up with me on all of our joint projects over the years. Sincerely,
Richard Cotter B.A., M.Arch.
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Abstract
SCENE: 00.000 DATE: 1999.01.01 CAMERA: 01 FPS: 29.97
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TAKE: 01 [Scene from Fight Club]
Abstract ‘Only Connect…’1 In the context of an increasingly autocratic society of control, architecture’s apocryphal claims to the emancipation of life through the mechanism of public space must be challenged if the discipline is to survive as a critically and politically relevant cultural apparatus.
is a narrative that tells no story.
[Abstract]
Post-Humanist Heterotopian Urbanism
cinema as a means of cultivating ambiguity and ambivalence. Like a Francis Bacon portrait, it
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Liminal Landscapes
linear approach, but the work in this document consistently chases the temporal fluidity of
Through a series of digitally-enabled investigations into the synaesthetically affective capacity of horrific form (and its imaging), this Master’s Degree Project argues for a radical reordering of architectural thought and practice, a reordering that would emancipate architecture from the artificial strictures of reason and deliver it to a liminal space where it might work to redistribute power through populations in order to resist the suppression and subjugation of life itself. In order to achieve such a shift, the project seeks to weaken the fallacious notion that the individual human subject constitutes the most effective unit for navigating and intervening in an incomprehensibly complex world. The work is organized into a prologue, five ‘acts’, an epilogue, and a series of appendices that
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‘flesh out’ the project proper. The limitations of documenting the project demand a somewhat
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[Abstract]
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Keywords Bare Life, Biopolitics, Heterotopia, Identity, Post-Humanism, Liminality, Speculative Realism, Subjectivity, Sovereign Power, Vital Weakness
‘Only Connect…’ is the epigraph of E.M. Forster’s novel Howards End.
[Abstract]
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Endnotes
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[Contents]
001...........................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................Prologue 009.................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................Act 01: Contextual Introduction 023....................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................Act 02: Situating Heterotopia 031.........................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................Act 03: Precedents 041............................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................Act 04: Technique 067..........................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................Act 05: Case Study 087............................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................Epilogue
[Contents]
Post-Humanist Heterotopian Urbanism
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Liminal Landscapes
093......................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................Appendix A: Orthographic Drawings 105......................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................Appendix B: Site Evolution Diagrams 111......................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................AppendixC: Construction Techniques 117............................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................Appendix D: ARP Critique 121....................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................AppendixE: Outtakes 151..................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................Appendix F: Physical Modeling 153..................................................................................................................................................................................................................................Appendix G: 2012 MDP Show Gallery Exhibition 155....................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................Bibliography 159...............................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................Image Citations
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Prologue
001
SCENE: 00.001 DATE: 1979.01.01 CAMERA: 01 FPS: 29.97 TAKE: 01 [Scene from Alien]
a terrifying hybrid that engages implicitly and explicitly with many of the same aspects of the grotesque touched upon by Ruskin.
‘…It is this last cause of the grotesque which we have to finally consider; namely, the error and wildness of mental impressions, caused by fear operating upon strong powers of imagination, or by the failure of human faculties in the endeavor to grasp the highest truths… The grotesque which comes to all men in a disturbed dream is the most intelligible example of this kind, but also the most ignoble; the imagination, in this instance, being deprived of all aid from reason, and incapable of self-government. I believe, however, that the noblest forms of imaginative power are also in some sort ungovernable, and have in them something
In the film, the crew of a deep space mining vessel touches down on an unidentified planet to investigate a mysterious distress signal. During the investigation, an alien life form attaches itself to the face of one of the crew members, only to fall off of its own accord once the team returns to the landing craft. Later, the crew member convulses violently during a meal with his colleagues and a small creature erupts violently from his chest and then disappears into the labyrinthine bowels of the ship. The rest of the film is a terrifying game of cat and mouse wherein all but one of the crew is annihilated by the alien.
of the character of dreams; so that the vision, of whatever kind, comes uncalled, and will not
The film is successful because it cultivates suspense and a sense of dread by rarely showing
submit itself to the seer, but conquers him, and forces him to speak as a prophet, having no
the titular alien in full view (a time honoured tactic in the horror genre). When the creature
power over his words and thoughts. Only, if the whole man can be trained perfectly, and his
does make appearances, it is rendered almost illegible by the dark lighting and ornately
mind calm, consistent, and powerful, the vision which comes to him is seen in a perfect mirror,
biomechanical claustrophobic passageways and chambers of the mining vessel. The film’s
serenely, and in consistence with the rational powers; but if the mind be imperfect and ill
affective quality is heightened by the fact that the crew is removed by both time and distance
trained, the vision is seen as a broken mirror, with strange distortions and discrepancies, all
from any conceivable source of assistance. The story unfolds deep in space, where, according
the passions of the heart breathing upon it in cross ripples, till hardly a trace of it remains
to the film’s byline, ‘no one can hear you scream’.3
unbroken.’
[Prologue]
Post-Humanist Heterotopian Urbanism
movies of its time.2 Alien synthesizes elements of both science fiction and horror, producing
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Liminal Landscapes
Ridley Scott’s 1979 film Alien is often cited as one of the most innovative, genre-defying
Alien pits conventional notions of humanity against the limit condition of human knowledge. In the film, the crew’s science officer (himself a ‘synthetic human’) expresses admiration for
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– John Ruskin1
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[Prologue]
003
SCENE: 00.002 DATE: 1979.01.01 CAMERA: 01 FPS: 29.97 TAKE: 01 [Bodily violation in Alien]
and the crew all but impossible.4 The alien’s impetus for destroying the crew is quite literally
is simultaneously the mechanism by which those bodies are subjugated, and, paradoxically,
beyond reason, and therefore, horrific.
the potential means of their emancipation.
Yet Alien does not merely confront the limits of what constitutes humanity; it purposefully
If resistance to asymmetric power structures has historically sided with an aspiration
violates them. It is this violation of the distinction between the human and the non-human
centered on a desire to achieve a ‘perfect reflection’ of the individual subject in Ruskin’s
that speaks to Ruskin’s understanding of the power of the grotesque. In transgressing
‘perfect mirror’, then perhaps the future of resistance lies in embracing Ruskin’s ‘broken
the boundaries of the human body through the ‘face hugger’, the ‘chest burster’, and the
mirror’ and abandoning all claims to self governance. To return to the Alien vignette, perhaps
gruesome dismemberment of the bodies themselves, Alien calls into question the notion
it is less about ‘the human’ conquering ‘the other’ and more about embracing the horrific
of an essentialized humanity (see 00.002). Indeed, it is no coincidence that the alien in the
possibility that there is no essence of humanity, and that life itself is the basic category of
film is a bipedal creature that bears some resemblance to a human body, yet simultaneously
existence, or, more appropriately, of becoming.6 As paradoxical as it might seem, it is, perhaps,
functions as the grossly disfigured inversion of that body (see 00.003) that one might find in
only through the dissolution of our own identities through immersion in the unknown and
the reflection of Ruskin’s ‘broken mirror’.
the horrific that we can ever make ourselves ungovernable.
While Alien ultimately sides with ‘the human’ (the film’s protagonist blasts the creature out
But how does one embrace the grotesque reflection in the ‘broken mirror’ and remove
of the ship’s escape shuttle and into the vacuum of space), it leaves lingering doubts about
oneself from the political order altogether, so as to hasten its collapse?
the validity of ‘the human’ as a category at all.
This Master’s Degree Project (MDP) will examine the myriad of ways in which life7 itself
Alien does not make any explicit reference to contemporary forms of power or governance,
functions as the primary object of power, and by extension, of architecture. It is this struggle
but it does pose some pertinent questions about the position of life in relation to Ruskin’s
over the control of life that underpins the governance of our entire species and it is only in
concept of the ‘ungovernable’. In the context of increasingly autocratic societies of
the tumult of this struggle that we have any hope of finding alternatives to hegemonic forms
control, nostalgic visions of democracy are being eroded by insidious and diverse forms of
of power. In what follows, we will investigate the fundamental (paradoxical) problematic of attempting
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sovereignty , namely those wherein power is redistributed from central sovereign bodies
[Prologue]
and into broader populations. This diffusion of power through populations and into bodies
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the ‘purity’ of the alien, whose complete lack of empathy makes any sort of relation between it
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[Prologue]
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SCENE: 00.003 DATE: 1979.01.01 CAMERA: 01 FPS: 29.97 TAKE: 01 [Confronting the unhuman in Alien]
using the logics that created them’, this project seeks to reposition the logics that imprison life in the name of power (and through architecture) in order to open the planet (and all life) up to potential futures beyond those that are inscribed in the current global political order.
[Prologue]
instruments of oppression themselves. Following the axiom that ‘problems cannot be solved
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to subtract oneself from positions of oppression through ‘soft’ engagement with the
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[Prologue]
007
SCENE: 00.004 DATE: 1979.01.01 CAMERA: 01 FPS: 29.97 TAKE: 01 [Bodily violation in Alien]
Ruskin 1860, 165
2
Alien is ranked no. 7 on the American Film Institute’s ’Top 10 Sci-Fi Films’ and no. 33 on Empire Magazine’s ‘500 Greatest Movies of All Time’.
3
Scott 1979
4
Ibid.
5
In Political Theology Carl Schmitt defines sovereignty as the ability to decide on the exception. This form of power is no longer necessarily vested in a single body, but rather distributed
through populations. 6
[Prologue]
1
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Endnotes
Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari write extensively about ‘becoming’ in relation to ‘being’ in their work Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. They argue for an understanding
of life that is rooted not in the illusion of stability, but rather in the embrace of its volatile, transitory character. 7
In this project, the term ‘life’ should be understood in terms of the concept of ‘whatever life’ articulated by Eugene Thacker in ‘Biological Sovereignty’.
‘Whatever life’ suggests that reductionist, biological ‘life itself’ or ‘specific life’ is, paradoxically, the mechanism that conditions and proliferates socially
constructed ‘general life’. Thacker suggests that the biological is more than biological because it is reductively biological.
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Act 01
Contextual Introduction + Theoretical Framework
009
SCENE: 01.001 DATE: 2005.03.14 CAMERA: 01 FPS: 29.97 TAKE: 02 [Guantanamo Bay Detention Center]
environment. In projecting a future that does not yet exist (and might never exist), the
Post-Humanist Heterotopian Urbanism
project seeks an end to causal reasoning as the basis for architectural intervention and speculation. Working from a theoretical framework rooted in Speculative Realism, the project
Preamble
understands that ‘the present is never pregnant with the future’.4
‘... social sciences, sociology, urban studies, and architecture today are trying to conceive and organize the public space of the world’s cities without any clear awareness that at their very center lies the same bare life that defined the biopolitics of great totalitarian states of the twentieth century’
To some extent, this approach is not new. Archigram, Superstudio, Archizoom, Constant Nieuwenhuys, and a host of other radical practitioners in the 1960’s and 1970’s offered fantastical and highly critical perspectives on the role of architecture in a tumultuous world. While their influence remains, the tradition of radical speculative projects has all but evaporated in the contemporary context. True, speculative theoretical approaches remain,
-Giorgio Agamben1
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Liminal Landscapes
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project as a legitimate technique for shaping the discourse around the ‘actual’ built
but they are marginalized at the architectural periphery by an increasingly homogenous and At the ‘crepuscular dawn’2 of the twenty-first century architecture is faced with a decisive
reactionary profession terrified by anything outside of its arbitrary institutional boundaries.
3
ultimatum: evolve or die. The ‘twin fantasies of order and omnipotence’ upon which architectural practice has been predicated for at least the last five hundred years are no
Throughout this project I challenge some of the fundamental assumptions that we, as
longer (and never really were) viable models for engaging a world so deeply inscribed in
designers and as citizens, make on a daily basis about architecture and about its role in
a fundamentally undemocratic regime of control. Architecture continues to shape the
shaping our cities and our lives, and even of shaping life itself. I do not level these challenges
communal spaces of our cities in the name of ‘the public’, but are its actions ever really in
because I hate architecture: far from it, in fact. At their core, the critiques and proposals
the best interests of that public, or of those publics? Moreover, can we, as humans, continue
offered in this document stem from a deeply seated belief in architecture’s ability to allow
to assume hegemony over a planet whose complexity is so far beyond our own capacity for
life some measure of sanctuary from the forces that would contain and stifle it. I do not
understanding?
intend the contents of this document to be interpreted as my own personal vision of what arrogant approach that this project attempts to subtract from the design process. Instead,
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the future should look like. In fact, it is precisely that sort of myopic, subject-centric, and Facing the aforementioned ultimatum, this MDP proposes a revitalization of the speculative
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[Act 01]
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SCENE: 01.002 DATE: 1959.02.14 CAMERA: 01 FPS: 29.97 TAKE: 05 [Constant Nieuwenhuys New Babylon]
the production of immanence.
limit conditions of (apparently) stable or static phenomena. It is a state of becoming that
Liminality
possesses qualities of both its initial state and its terminal condition, but is itself neither of these things. Instead, it is characterized by instability and indeterminacy; in fact, liminality
The world is a complex place. It is, in fact, unthinkably complex.5 While this complexity is
itself challenges the notion that the limit conditions it straddles are themselves concrete or
in itself nothing new, global scale meta-emergencies ranging from climate change to the
fixed.
collapse of financial markets have, arguably for the first time, begun to reveal cracks in the façade of the notion that the world exists for us as human beings, and that we can will the astounding complexity that constitutes the planet into submission for our own ends.
Liminality appears in various forms in the writings of many prominent post-stucturalist philosophers, notably in Gilles Deleuze’s ruminations on ‘becoming’, but it is perhaps Elizabeth Grosz’s definition of the ‘in-between’ that resonates most deeply with the notion
Since the Enlightenment, architecture has been deeply embedded in a humanist worldview
of liminality explored in this MDP. The in-between ‘lacks a fundamental identity, lacks a form,
(underwritten by a biopolitical paradigm) that has allowed our species to operate under the
a givenness, a nature’.6 It is, by virtue of its ability to facilitate becoming, that which ‘makes
erroneous assumption that we are in control, both of ourselves as individual subjects, and of
identity both possible and impossible’.7
the planet as a collective whole. In so doing, architecture has assumed responsibilities that it never really had any right to assume and for which it has never really had any means of ever actually realizing.
To confront the notion of an uncontrollable and unknowable future is to confront the limit conditions of human knowledge. It is something of a paradox to attempt to reconcile the unknowable through the very means of knowing that the unknowable itself sits outside of.
In that it permeates our daily lives, architecture is one of the chief mechanisms through
We encounter the in-between at the point at which it ‘takes on, receives itself, its form, from
which populations are governed and conditioned to accept the fallacy of hegemony over the
the outside, which is not its outside… but whose form is outside of the identity’.8
planet. This process is perhaps nowhere more evident than in the insidious erosion of the nostalgic notion of public space as a forum for democratic participation. It is the aim of discipline from the oblivion of irrelevance.
As a precedent for dealing with this condition, we turn to horror as a lens through which to frame the problem of the asymptotic limit of human knowledge. The horror genre, both in literature and film, has long dealt explicitly with this very problem through a very deliberate
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this project to pry architecture from its position of imagined control in order to save the
[Act 01]
The term ‘liminality’ refers to the state that exists ‘in-between’ (and just beyond) the
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I hope that you will read this project as an experiment in the weakening of subjectivity and
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SCENE: 01.003 DATE: 1969.03.14 CAMERA: 01 FPS: 29.97 TAKE: 04 [Superstudio The Continuous Monument]
to define or account for any of these things; instead opting to use them as mechanisms
aforementioned un-communicable processes of production that constitute ‘reality’.12
for inducing unease and even terror. Throughout this MDP, horror, in conjunction with the overarching metanarrative of projecting a science fictive future, functions as a conceptual
Biopower, Biopolitics + Control Societies
framework and as an operative technique for dealing with formal and programmatic
If we peer deeper into the mechanisms that produce and enable identity, however, an even
recombinance in pursuit of liminal conditions.
more insidious set of processes emerges. Michel Foucault argues that the juridical forms of
Identity
power on which contemporary ‘democratic’ states are founded actively produce the subjects that they subsequently represent and control.13 Foucault cites an ‘explosion of numerous
Identity, in the conventional sense of the term, is understood as a set of traits inherent to a
and diverse techniques for achieving the subjugations of bodies and the control of
given body that are indicative of essentialized qualities of that body. For the most part, we
populations’, specifically through the formal institutional structures of the state: the school,
believe ourselves to be human, members of a particular gender, ethnicity, socio-economic
the prison, and the clinic.14 Later, these implements of disciplinary societies are sublimated
class, etc. Deleuze is, unsurprisingly, highly critical of this facile understanding of identity
into the diffuse and constantly operating mechanisms of surveillance and management that
and the mechanisms that produce it and perpetuate it. For Deleuze, identity as described
characterize ‘societies of control’.15 This historical trajectory forms the basis of Foucault’s
above obfuscates the pure differences that underpin life (all life, not just human life) as a
understanding of ‘biopower’: literally the power over bodies for a particular productive end,
potentially productive force.10 Deleuze is especially critical of the conflation of the perception
namely, control over life itself.16
and representation of identity with the inherently unidentifiable forces that are always at work beneath the superficial veil of conventional performances of identity.11
[Act 01]
to a ‘self-destructive dependence’ on identity as a sort of crutch for coping with the
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engagement with the enigmatic, the otherworldly, and the unknown.9 Horror rarely seeks
Giorgio Agamben’s body of work expands on Foucault’s discourse on biopower and biopolitics (biopower’s corresponding political manifestation). For Agamben, sovereign power (a model of power wherein a single sovereign is vested with the power to decide to whom and when the
to Deleuze’s approach to the topic of identity. In Gender Trouble, she writes that ‘identity
law applies) and biopower meet and (paradoxically) fuse in the model of the camp (exemplified
is performatively constituted by the very ‘expressions’ that are said to be its ‘results,’’ To
in its most extreme state by the Nazi concentration camps during World War II).17 According
paraphrase, we are, effectively, what we do. But why do we do what we do? Deleuze points
to Agamben, the camp exemplifies the state of exception, an event wherein bare life (life
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Judith Butler’s writings on feminism and gender politics offer an instructive complement
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[Act 01]
015
SCENE: 01.004 DATE: 1964.03.14 CAMERA: 01 FPS: 29.97 TAKE: 03 [Archigram The Walking City]
law) is separated from politically meaningful life.18 Agamben goes on to suggest that the
engagement and design intervention. The design problem then, is one of moving past the
state of exception exemplified by the camp is in fact no longer the exception at all, but rather
‘vestigial remains’ of humanism in pursuit of ‘the deterritorialization of the human animal,
an indication of the ‘hidden matrix’ of modern politics. In fact ‘... social sciences, sociology,
and the specific diagram of the Human as a format that has been shuttled forward from the
urban studies, and architecture today are trying to conceive and organize the public space
Enlightenment’.20
of the world’s cities without any clear awareness that at their very center lies the same bare life that defined the biopolitics of great totalitarian states of the twentieth century.’19 This alarming ignorance is the territory that this MDP seeks to remediate.
‘The innovation of the diagram is much more interesting than the innovation of humans, and much more so than any particular individual, but not as interesting in turn than the innovation of forces which form the diagram. In fact, let me be blunt, the focus of post-
Viewed from this perspective, the performance of identity becomes even more intrinsically
humanism on the innovation of a particular individual is a sad diversion. You are not the
linked to the hegemony of state and economic power. If we are always already bound by the
100th monkey, they are a dying mammal with a narcissistic personality disorder.’21
strictures of identity and subjectivity, and subjugated by the mechanisms of the state and capitalism, by what means can we ever really be free of them?
Post-Humanism Before attempting to answer such a loaded question, we must first more firmly establish the design contexts in which this project operates. If architecture is ignorant of the foundational basis of political modernity, then it is equally unaware of the degree to which ‘the human’ is no longer a relevant basis for the creation or evaluation of politically meaningful space. If we return briefly to Agamben’s thesis that ‘Western politics is a biopolitics from the very beginning’, then ‘every attempt to found political liberties in the rights of the citizen is in
In place of ‘the human’, as most relevant constituent of societies of control, this project turns to the concept of ‘the multitude’, which, as with liminality, presents itself (with slight variations) in the work of many contemporary theorists. Hardt and Negri articulate the multitude as a ‘set of singularities’ (which we might liken to Deleuze’s ‘dividuals’)22 that together form a plurality that ‘stand[s] in contrast to the undifferentiated unity of the people’.23
Ethics + Aesthetics Challenges to normative assumptions about the validity of subject categories and moral absolutes bring into focus a debate about the tension between ethics and aesthetics in relation to the governance of social behaviour. While we may operate under a belief in the possibility of sacrosanct ethical frameworks, our ‘lives are lived aesthetically before anything
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vain’. The stable, coherent subject (or at least the illusion of that entity) is, in the context of
[Act 01]
a biopolitical landscape, subsumed by the population at large as the relevant unit of political
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exposed to death through a process of abandonment from the protective measures of the
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SCENE: 01.005 DATE: 1989.03.14 CAMERA: 01 FPS: 29.97 TAKE: 02 [Lebbeus Woods Walls of Change]
subjective harmony where imagination and understanding are exercised spontaneously, each on its own account. Consequently aesthetic common sense does not complete the two others (reason and imagination); it provides them with a basis and makes them possible... But is it sufficient to assume this free accord, to suppose it a priori? Must it not be, on the contrary, produced in us?... The sublime thus confronts us with a direct subjective relationship between imagination and reason...’25
image without (wholly) subordinating it to the demands of physical built form.
Lines of Flight The philosophical positions explored above problematize conventional approaches to design and raise a number of critically important questions about the implications of these positions on the practice of architecture in a post-human world. Perhaps chief among these questions is how do we, as human artifacts,27 remove ourselves from the design decision making
If we adopt such a radically different understanding of the role of aesthetics in design,
processes where we have no claim to the authority to decide? Similarly, what things must be
what are the implications for design itself? This project posits that aesthetic engagement,
fixed in order to deliver architecture to a space of liminality? How might the weakening of
mediated through form, has the capacity to subvert the political and ethical strictures that
identity and the hegemony of the individual subject alter the socio-political landscapes of the
produce and reproduce normative identities and in so doing to produce new bodies and new
planet? How might such things come about?
species of space.
[Act 01]
‘Aesthetic common sense does not represent an objective accord of the faculties, but a pure
project. Accordingly, this project embraces the speculative potential of the architectural
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else… whatever we do, we do for aesthetic reasons’.24 Put another way:
This MDP rejects the notion that architecture projects as they are currently conceived of and executed have the capacity to achieve the kinds of change that they claim to effect.
representation, but of production. Writing about the distinction between art and architecture,
This project makes no claims to offering a coherent ‘solution’ (or even a singular designed
Walter Benjamin observes that in the case of architectural images, ‘one cannot say that they
entity) as a panacea for the biopolitical prison that is the contemporary city. Instead, the
re-produce architecture. They produce it in the first place...’26 Buildings are not pieces of
work takes the form of a series of investigations that attempt to manifest an alternative
architecture. They are the residue of an architectural process, but buildings themselves
theoretical framework for answering the aforementioned questions (and others) through
do not constitute architecture. It is the performative architectural image that, following
the development of techniques of disfigurement and effacement of multiple ‘bodies’ at
Benjamin’s observation, must be considered as the central component of the architectural
multiple scales.
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Accordingly, this project understands the process of imaging not as an issue of
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[Act 01]
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SCENE: 01.006 DATE: 1969.07.14 CAMERA: 01 FPS: 29.97 TAKE: 01 [Archizoom Walls]
philosophical tradition of Speculative Realism. Speculative Realism holds that reason and Agamben 1998, 181
centering on the inability of the Principle of Sufficient Reason28 to explain or even mediate
2
Virilio 2002. Paul Virilio’s invocation of a paradoxical ‘crepuscular dawn’
the way in which we inhabit the planet. Instead, Speculative Realism argues for a new sort of
resonates with the many apparently contradictory philosophical conceits explored
in this project
3
Koolhaas 1998, 969
4
Meillessoux 2011, 232
5
Thacker 2011, 8
6
Grosz, 2001, 91
7
Ibid.
8
Ibid.
9
Thacker 2011, 8
10
Williams 2005, 124
11
Ibid. at 125
12
Ibid.
rationality, one that understands that an entirely rational world would be ‘entirely chaotic’.
29
Accordingly, the project assumes an ethical stance that refuses to accept that the world as it is determines the world as it might be in the future and pursues design accordingly.
020
1
rationality must be abandoned (as they currently exist) as part of a larger ontological problem
[Act 01]
Endnotes
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This investigation is guided, in large part, by an approach rooted in the emerging
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021
13
Foucault 1981, 135
14
Ibid. at 140
15
Deleuze 1990, 7
16
Ibid.
17
Agamben 1998, 171
18
Ibid. at 88
19
Ibid. at 181
20
Bratton 2011
21
Ibid.
22
Deleuze 1990, 6
23
Hardt and Negri 2004, 99
24
Spuybroek 2008, 168
25
Deleuze 1984, 92
26
Benjamin 1988, 89
28
Meillessoux 2011, 226. The Principle of Sufficient Reason holds that everything that happens does so for a particular reason.
29
Ibid.
[Act 01]
Bratton 2011
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27
022
Act 02
Situating Heterotopia: Towards a New Communal Realm
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Heterotopia Architecture’s assumed ability to foster democratic participation though the mechanism of ‘open’ public space is always already undone by the foundations of biopolitical modernity and the social superstructures that characterize contemporary control societies.
but pit these same populations against themselves, simultaneously advancing life as ‘threat, threatened, and response’, though the response is always the same.2 This asymmetrical balance of power speaks to the looming presence of a different kind of ‘camp’ than the ones created by ‘Occupy’ protestors. Giorgio Agamben identifies the Nazi concentration camp as the paradoxical point at which two opposite forms of governance (sovereign power and biopower) meet and fuse.3 He
This incapacity for action is expressed quite dramatically in the spectacle of the ‘Occupy’
suggests that the camp (and the state of exception it embodies) is no longer an exception
movement currently sweeping the cities of the global north. ‘Occupy’ assumes the veracity of
at all, but rather the paradigmatic model of all modern politics.4 In such a model, ‘public’
the nostalgic (and apocryphal) notion that public space is indeed that: ‘free’ territory where
spaces become territories where the threat of potential exceptional violence is omnipresent.
the expression of opposition to the hegemonic order of Empire1 has some force in terms of
In a sense, the polis itself is the spatial manifestation of this state of exception; a menacing
effecting change. In fact, the opposite is true; public spaces are programmed to foster very
biopolitical prison wherein we are all virtually homines sacri.5
specific uses, uses that tend to condition and discipline populations towards docility.
If architectural program is ill equipped to produce ‘open’ conditions because of its deep
In the context of an increasingly securitized public realm, the public plaza has all but lost
structural ties to the mechanisms and instruments of biopolitical power, what are the
its intended utopian performativity and has instead been subsumed by the operative
possibilities of pursuing architecture not with a utopian impulse, but with a heterotopian
techniques of martial security program. Public plazas are now little more than sites for the
one?
performance and social reproduction of normative (i.e. predictable and controllable) values. The fact that ‘Occupy’ camps can be disbanded by a simple court order, or that police can public space is intended for use only by very specific members of a very specific ‘public’ and
Michel Foucault introduced the term ‘Heterotopia’ to the architectural lexicon in his 1967 lecture, ‘Of Other Spaces’. ‘Heterotopia’, which literally means ‘other places’, comprises those elements that must be evacuated or cleared away to make utopia possible.6 Heterotopia is
024
legally pepper spray peaceful protestors on a university campus (see 02.002), reaffirms that
[Act 02]
Post-Humanist Heterotopian Urbanism
already a lost cause. Still, even as it secures populations, stratified public space cannot help
[MASTER’S DEGREE PROJECT DOCUMENT]
Liminal Landscapes
that outright resistance to the forms and means of power that order public space is always
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[Act 02]
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suspended. Heterotopian space exists in the contemporary city in the form of shopping
‘sphere of a pure mediality without end intended as the field of human action and of human
malls, parking lots, leisure centers, and the myriad of terrains vagues that populate the
thought’9 wherein bare life and political life collapse into one another to the extent that it
urban realm.7
becomes impossible to separate the two, effectively negating the possibility of the state of exception upon which the current biopolitical system of control is founded.
If the failed utopianism of contemporary public space is best characterized by the camp, then heterotopian space is best described by the model of the sanctuary. The sanctuary is the
This approach acknowledges the historical integration of violence and architectural design
camp’s opposite: a site of refuge for Agamben’s homines sacri from the unmediated violence
and discourse, but seeks to shift the focus of this violence away from repression and order
of sovereign power.
and towards emancipation and multiplicity. After all, ‘there is no architecture without violence’.10
Despite their polar conceptual differences, the camp and the sanctuary are not so easily disentangled in the context of the contemporary city. Generally, though, it is the influence
If architecture is to have any relevance or productive force in the contemporary world (and
of the camp that permeates and pollutes the conceptual model of the sanctuary and not
particularly the contemporary polis), it must reposition itself relative to the unknowable
vice versa. Indeed, the shopping arcade, famously advanced by Walter Benjamin as a liminal
and the horrific; it must embrace the heterotopian project and discard its utopian impulses.
space between the public and private spheres8 is simultaneously one of the most visible
It is only through heterotopian program that architecture can ever ‘aspire to revel in the
instances of the influences of the camp as paradigm of the modern.
sheer thrill of the unknown’ and in so doing reposition itself in relative to prevailing power
[Act 02]
insidious infiltration of the camp into all spaces. Heterotopia can thus be understood as the
[MASTER’S DEGREE PROJECT DOCUMENT]
the space of otherness, a territory in which the distinction between public and private is
relations and structures of governance.11 The intent of this project is not to propagate heterotopian spaces as discrete sanctuaries that On the surface, this position might seem itself to be just another utopian vision, but for one
public realm. Rather, the impulse driving the project is to merge and recombine the camp
crucial distinction: utopian projects tend to assume an idealized end state that stretches
and the sanctuary in pursuit of a new species of space, one that defies programmatic
on ad infinitum. Moreover, utopian visionaries tend to assume that they themselves are
concretization (paradoxically) through the introduction of programmatic elements that foster
qualified to prognosticate about the value sets required to achieve such an end. That is not
liminality through their own mutability and in so doing provide alternatives to the perpetual
the case here. Instead, we might reconsider the aspirations that drive the utopian impulse
026
function as binary opposites to the myriad of camp spaces that comprise the contemporary
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[Act 02]
027
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facilitate not one specific future, but rather induce a set of possible futures to which no value can be assigned a priori. In the following act we will consider a few precedents that have guided the development of the project, both conceptually and formally, before delving more explicitly into the means and methods by which the project seeks to develop novel forms of (immanent) (bio)political governance in later acts.
[Act 02]
complexity of the planet and embracing this fact not as a limitation, but as an ability to
[MASTER’S DEGREE PROJECT DOCUMENT]
and redirect them to more ambivalent ends, recognizing our own inability to reconcile the
028
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[Act 02]
029
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Hardt and Negri 2000, xii. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri suggest that ‘sovereignty has taken a new form, composed of a series of national and supranational organisms united under
a single logic of rule. This new global form of sovereignty is what we call Empire.’ 2
Thacker 2006, 20
3
Agamben 1998 171.
4
Ibid.
5
Ibid. Agamben uses the figure of Homo Sacer (a figure in Roman Law who could be killed but not sacrificed) to elucidate his concept of bare life, or life exposed to death through a
process of abandonment by the law.
6
Dehaene and De Cauter, 2008, 3
7
Ibid.
8
Benjamin 2002, 4
9
Agamben 2000, 117
10
Tschumi, 1996, 44
11
Grosz, 2001, 105
[Act 02]
1
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Endnotes
030
Act 03 Precedent Survey
031
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Art Nouveau (also known as Jugendstil in Germany, The Viennese Secession in Austria, and
Preamble
at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th centuries, before being subsumed by
Precedent studies are a time-honored component of architectural projects. Recently, however, the use of precedent has shifted fundamentally away from direct engagement with architecture’s own history and has begun to engage more avant garde fare. While architecture must continue to reach outside of itself in order to ensure its own relevance in
Modernismo in Spain) was active as a critical architectural practice for only a short time Art Deco and receding into obscurity as a mere style. Still, Art Nouveau’s impact on art and architectural-historical discourses is significant. For Walter Benjamin it marked a decisive break: a caesura between the ‘new and the always the same’.1 In fact, Benjamin claimed that the entire idea of Modernity should be understood as commencing with Jugendstil.2
an increasingly complex world, it must also resist the temptation to fall into the trap of using
Benjamin’s claim can be traced to Art Nouveau’s attempt to rid art and architecture of the
gimmicks to justify its own existence. The use of ever more absurd ‘precedents’ in projects
baggage of the historical quotation that characterized much of the late 19th Century. Art
both academic and professional is lamentable.
Nouveau embodied an attempt to pursue a new sort of rationality and logical form enabled
This project is interested in the use of precedents from within art and architectural historical canons. It is not, however, as interested in quotation of historical form as it is in using history operatively, that is to say reactivating historical trajectories of thought and practice in order to effect change now and in the future. To that end, the aim here is an integrative synthesis of various approaches to (dis)figuration and subjectivity as they relate to the body and the city. The project engages three chief precedents: Art Nouveau, the portraiture of Francis Bacon, and Horror. In what follows we of how they influenced the development of a particular set of techniques in the following act.
and emboldened by emerging technologies and material systems that forever altered construction methods and practices. The introduction of glass and iron in particular enabled new means of spatial separation and codification. It was precisely this formal and material quality of Art Nouveau/Jugendstil that prompted Benjamin to label the movement ‘dangerous’.3 For Benjamin, the introduction of the cold, hard, transparency of glass and iron constituted a subversive threat to the plush, closed interior of the bourgeois Victorian domestic sphere. Whereas the Victorian interior had hitherto been characterized by its ‘cocoon-like’ opacity, Jugendstil sought to work through the surfaces that concealed the dwelling in order to open it up to connections with the
032
will examine each of these precedents in greater detail before moving on to an explanation
[Act 03]
Post-Humanist Heterotopian Urbanism
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Liminal Landscapes
Art Nouveau
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[Act 03]
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SCENE: 03.002 DATE: 1895.03.14 CAMERA: 01 FPS: 29.97 TAKE: 01 [Art Nouveau]
lines of wrought iron screens. The materials employed by Art Nouveau practitioners such as
merging ‘S’ curves intertwine to form railings in one instance and columns in the next.
Victor Horta, Hector Guimard, and Henry Van De Velde permitted no trace of occupation to
Similarly, Guimard’s versions bundle and bounce to articulate entranceways, windows, and
accrue in the dwelling. Art Nouveau, then, posited the possibility of an untraceable future, a
even light fixtures.
future not bound to the logics or conditions of the present. What relevance does a one hundred years dead architectural movement have in the context of Art Nouveau is also noteworthy for its embrace of the concept of Gesamtkunstwerk, or the
the contemporary polis? Surprisingly, a great deal. The political conditions that precipitated
‘total work of art’, which ‘rendered the work of art superfluous’ through the integration of
Art Nouveau are not so different from those of today. Haussmann’s Paris, whose monotonous,
4
art, architecture, and life down to the smallest detail. This obsessive tendency to design
militarized urban fabric Hector Guimard’s serpentine stonework subtly subverts, is not all
literally everything from structural members to jewelry collapsed the distinction between
that different than the securitized and closed circuit television-surveyed public realm of
art and life threatened the boundary between the anesthetic built environment and the
virtually any contemporary city today. As a corollary to the question of relevance, we must
exuberance of life itself.
also ask why Art Nouveau failed and simultaneously imagine what might have happened if
In rendering indistinct the division between interior and exterior, Jugendstil also threatened the division between observed and observer, casting the Bourgeoisie out from his privileged position of voyeuristic surveillance over the street and effectively folding the public realm
[Act 03]
agencies: they can slide along each other, or bounce, or even lock into each other’.5 Horta’s
[MASTER’S DEGREE PROJECT DOCUMENT]
(exterior) public realm. Plush, velvet-draped walls gave way to the undulating ‘whiplash’
it had not evaporated. It is into this alternate reality that we must place ourselves if we are to properly excise useful operative techniques for the reactivation of Nouveau’s zeitgeist in the name of reclaiming the public sphere from the paradigmatic model of Agamben’s camp.
Francis Bacon
Art Nouveau differs fundamentally from Modernism proper (and all subsequent architectural
The work of Irish painter Francis Bacon constitutes this project’s second chief precedent.
‘isms’, with the possible exception of emerging trends in digitally-enabled design) because
Bacon’s portraiture and figural paintings confound conventional notions of subjectivity and
its constitutive basis is not the grid, but the curvilinear figure. Unlike the grid, where ‘lines
identity and in so doing stake out a claim for the affective capacity of imagery to induce
are subordinated to higher order of the surface, where lines repeatedly find each other in
violent change in the self awareness of the observer; a central theme in this project. Through
the same manner, solely by crossing’, curvilinear figures deploy a multitude of connective
the lens of post-structural perspectives on schizophrenia as a ‘decentered existence’ or a
034
into the sanctity of the domestic sphere.
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[Act 03]
035
SCENE: 03.003 DATE: 1958.02.10 CAMERA: 01 FPS: 29.97 TAKE: 02 [Francis Bacon]
dissolution of human subjectivity in favour of more nomadic notions of identity in keeping
limit condition of the perception of reality and blur the figure’s position relative to life and
with Judith Butler’s understanding of the term (which we previously addressed in the first
death. In so doing, they induce doubt as to whether the subject and his or her body are really
act) as a mutable, unstable, and always socially constructed veil of coherence that masks
indivisible and moreover, whether that subject’s identity is really all that well tied to anything
the teeming complexity and contradiction that characterizes human social interaction.
6
Bacon’s figures are never in control of ‘their’ own perceptions, which are always mediated by external means. Thus, instead of perception leading representation, representation leads perception, reducing the role of the subject to a scene of action, ‘rendering senseless the modernist conflation of the subject with the eye’.7 The ‘mind’s eye’ is replaced by ‘the body’s spasm’.8 One does not so much look at a Bacon painting as devour it. His work is visceral and synaesthetically arresting.
inherent to that body. In that it falls outside of architectural history, Bacon’s portraiture raises even more questions than Art Nouveau as to its applicability as a mechanism of architectural subversion. How does art transgress its own disciplinary boundaries in order to corrupt (or augment) architecture? Is there that much of a difference between one of Bacon’s paintings and an architectural rendering? How does one disfigure architecture, and how much of the original figure must remain for disfiguration to achieve its full, nightmarish potential?
This emphasis on Bacon’s work as a more than visual experience is well documented. Gilles Deleuze’s Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation examines the quality of Bacon’s figures that
Horror
allows them to bypass figuration and yet remain as figures. Deleuze identifies this quality as
The third and final conceptual precedent that we will consider for the purposes of this
9
MDP is horror. Horror is, admittedly, an extremely broad term and one that carries with it a
For Deleuze, the figure is ‘not simply the isolated body, but the deformed body that escapes
significant amount of preordained meaning. Before proceeding with an explication of horror
‘sensation’, which must be understood as the opposite of both figuration and abstraction.
[Act 03]
that they induce fear or terror (though also that), but in the sense that they confront the
[MASTER’S DEGREE PROJECT DOCUMENT]
‘split subject’, we can begin to read Bacon’s paintings as hyper-reflexive mechanisms for the
10
from itself.’ Bacon’s paintings work through a process of disfiguration, of undermining
as it relates to this project, some disambiguation is in order. Horror, for the purposes of this
accepted norms of representation in order to open them up to new and explicitly unsettling
project, is best understood as product of confrontation with the unknown.11
ways of becoming. While Bacon’s works include qualities of narrative, they tell no story and allude to no transcendent higher order.
In In the Dust of This Planet, Eugene Thacker provides a framework for using horror as
Bacon’s figure’s ‘faces’ droop, sag, twist, and melt. They are horrific, not so much in the sense
anthropocentrically12. Thacker’s approach centers on an attempt to engage the unknown
036
a conceptual tool for navigating the paradoxical problematic of attempting to think non-
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[Act 03]
037
SCENE: 03.004 DATE: 1984.04.13 CAMERA: 01 FPS: 29.97 TAKE: 01 [Horror]
weakness’.
Conclusion
Rather than attempting to find reasoned connections between things, horror
exploits the sheer inexplicability of certain phenomena as a tactic for dealing with the fact that some things are simply beyond the realm of human comprehension and attempting to assign meaning to them usually does more harm than good.
The precedents presented here constitute the core bases of an aesthetic model centered on the notion of synaesthetic activation. All three case studies employ form and imagery in a manner that challenges conventional distinctions between different mechanisms of sensory perception, on the one hand, and sensation itself versus intellectual cognition on
In a way, horror provides a means of emancipating action and decision-making from the
the other. All three precedents exploit the liminal space produced through the erosion of
Principle of Sufficient Reason, thus aligning it (as an operative mechanism) with the ethos
these normative boundaries in order to produce new sensational hybrids. At the same time,
of Speculative Realism.
these precedents open up various lines of inquiry that problematize their integration with
The mechanisms by which horror operates (in film especially) advance some questions about how they might integrate with architecture in order to facilitate or induce unsettling negotiations with the unknown. What, for instance, are the implications for architectural imaging with respect to the cultivation of suspense (a technique common to virtually every horror film)? If architectural images typically strive for legibility and accuracy, how might
the architectural project. This MDP seeks to instrumentalize the approaches embedded in these precedents in the name of architecture in order to explore the questions raised
[Act 03]
13
[MASTER’S DEGREE PROJECT DOCUMENT]
not from a position of philosophical strength, but from one of what we might call ‘vital
by the precedents themselves. In the following act we will examine the means by which these approaches are sublimated into architectural techniques, before addressing their deployment as a case study in the final act.
horror pollute these tendencies and allow architectural imaging to become subtler and more suggestive? The project strives for the integration of the horrific as a means of liberating architecture from the biopolitical foundations of modernity through the weakening of liberal subjectivity. If Art Nouveau can be understood as ‘dreaming that one is awake’, then the folding in of horror makes the dream a sort of nightmare in which the world is always just beyond
038
comprehension, and therefore beyond the stifling oppression of the camp.14
[MASTER’S DEGREE PROJECT DOCUMENT]
[Act 03]
039
Endnotes 1
De Cauter 1996, 13
2
Ibid.
3
Spuybroek 2009, 37
4
De Cauter 1996, 22
5
Spuybroek 2009, 36
6
van Alphen 1992, 77
7
Ibid.
8
Ibid. at 81
9
Deleuze 2004, 27
10
Ibid. at 19
11
Thacker 2011, 8
12
Ibid.
13
Vattimo 1988, 85
[Act 03] [MASTER’S DEGREE PROJECT DOCUMENT]
De Cauter 1996, 24 14
040
Act 04 Technique
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041
TAKE: 02 [Aerial Rendering]
Preamble
‘public’ space in the contemporary city. Currently, the avant garde trajectory in architectural discourse centers on the role of dissolving authorship through techniques rooted in generative algorithm-driven software and other digitally ‘autonomous’ approaches. It is by
Technique and methodology are closely related in that they are both means of achieving
no means the intention of this MDP to discredit or even criticize this line of exploration.
particular ends, but they are not synonymous. Whereas ‘methodology’ tends to imply the
Nevertheless, this project, while in many respects enabled by digital techniques, has
application of external logics to a given problem, ‘technique’ implies a more complex
not employed explicitly parametric methods of realizing itself. Instead, it has flirted with
relationship. Logics and means developed as modes of investigation are (at least in the case
autonomy through an approach (paradoxically) integrated with what in some respects might
of this project) closely tied to the thematic content of the project itself. In keeping with the
be considered highly conventional means of architectural production.
project’s valuing of immanence over transcendence, the techniques developed here are indivisible from the work itself.
[Act 04]
Post-Humanist Heterotopian Urbanism
subjectivity in the formulation and execution of decisions concerning the production of
[MASTER’S DEGREE PROJECT DOCUMENT]
Liminal Landscapes
of the chief themes of this project is the extraction (or at least the dilution) of individual
With the exception of a few lines in the first prologue, ‘I’, has not appeared as a pronoun anywhere in this document. The reason being, of course, that the ‘author’ of the project does
Such an approach may appear as academic heresy to those who believe that architectural
not really consider himself to be its creator in the traditional sense of the term. Instead, he
research (or any research) ought to be ‘objective’ and dispassionate. Still, it is this project’s
prefers to think of himself as one of the facilitators of the project; it’s ‘mere supporter’.1
position that objectivity and the disembodied gaze it implies are absurd and, indeed,
The projections about the future presented on these pages are not his per se, but rather
undesirable aspirations of any research project. The techniques explained and explored in
the amalgamation of a lifetime worth of cultural consumption (of both the high and low
this act are wildly paradoxical, yet they are ultimately no less valid and no less provable than
variety) regurgitated and reassembled in the images you find on these pages. Childhood
any other mechanism of inquiry.
obsessions with science fictive ‘creature’ films are folded into the myriad of other aesthetic cues gleaned from literature, music, film, television, and other means of relating to the world
Designing [in] a Dissociative State
are thus less the result of precalculated intent executed with rigorous precision and more
042
How does one weaken one’s own (perception of) authorship over the design process? One
and then worked through a filter of digital polygon modeling. The resultant formal moves
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[Act 04]
SCENE: 04.002 DATE: 2084.03.14 CAMERA: 01 FPS: 29.97
043
TAKE: 02 [Curvilinear Conjunction]
a tool in the development of this project than Maya, Photoshop, Rhino, InDesign, Illustrator,
Landscape
ZPrint, or TrotecJobControl. His body (or is it really his?) is just part or a material network
We have thus far addressed notions of liminality, heterotopia, and post-humanism as they
whose integration made the work you see here possible.
relate to the project. We have not, however, discussed the concept of landscape. As a design
This perspective and approach owes greatly to the concept of positionality and situated knowledge found in canonical works of feminist theory.2 Still, such approaches do not go far enough in destabilizing the core of our ‘self destructive dependence on identity’, nor do they challenge the fundamental assumption that even in recognizing our own positionality or the situated nature of our knowledge, we remain ill equipped to ever really understand the full implications of such realizations.3
motif, landscape has lengthy history in the annals of art and architectural history. In a sense, much of the Romantic movement in art and literature concerned itself with landscape, often in reference to the concept of the picturesque, an aesthetic model founded on the integration of nature and culture through the rendering of idealized depictions of the former using the technical capacities of the latter.6 The resultant relationship helps to discredit the notion that nature and culture are somehow discrete categories. If we pursue this line of reasoning further, we find Slavoj Zizek’s claim that ‘nature is not a balanced totality which then we
Many of the design techniques explored in this MDP are rigorously unrigorous. Their success is judged not on some external performance metric, but on their own agreement within the topology of the technique itself. Things that have no meaning or identity of their own gradually begin to accrue both of these things, before eventually divesting themselves of all meaning through their mindless (but not thoughtless) multiplication and combination. This MDP can thus be read (in part) as an experiment in using the same faculties that
humans disturb. Nature is a big series of unimaginable catastrophes.’7 As a tactic, a landscape-oriented approach seeks out opportunities for integration across, between, and through existing boundaries. It exploits existing distinctions in order to cultivate new entities through cross breeding and recombination.
Curvilinearity If we take the grid as the paradigmatic organizing schema of the contemporary city, then the
ultimately, self destructively in the pursuit of a method of making that is divorced from all
curved line serves as its antithesis. Whereas lines in the grid invariably meet in the same
5
ends ; a technique that approaches the limit conditions of ‘pure mediality’ , by conceding
way – by crossing – the curved line presents a wealth of different options for conjunction.
044
supposedly afford dominion over the realm of inanimate material self reflexively and, 4
[Act 04]
late nights. The human male whose name is on the front of this document is thus no more of
from the outset that pure means do not really exist.
[MASTER’S DEGREE PROJECT DOCUMENT]
the manifestation of a million idiosyncratic tweaks performed compulsively over too many
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[Act 04]
SCENE: 04.003 DATE: 2084.03.14 CAMERA: 01 FPS: 29.97
045
TAKE: 02 [Subdivision]
predictable performance of orthogonal space.
virtually limitless possibilities of extrusion, elongation, reconnection, and division.
In many respects, Art Nouveau was an architecture of the curved line. Guimard, Horta, Van
This method of modeling resonates with the self-effacing intentions of the project
de Velde and others exploited the capacity of the curve to combine in a multitude of different
outlined in the introduction to this act. The modeling process does not necessarily rely on
ways and for a myriad of different ends. Guimard’s twisted metal serpentine lines stretch to
a predetermined volumetric manifold as a guide for developing formal territories. Instead,
become light fixtures, or interweave to become screens, all within the same topological family
the process is driven more by a series of small moves, which are more concerned with their
of curves.
relationships with their immediate predecessors and successors than with any sort of overall
Despite the decades that have elapsed since Art Nouveau first threatened the predictability of orthogonal space, not much has fundamentally changed in the way that buildings are conceived of or executed. Therefore, the extraction and redeployment of logics of connection from works of Art Nouveau art and architecture remain relevant to contemporary conditions.
compositional quality. Faces are pulled, scaled, rotated, pinched, extruded, offset, puckered, and otherwise deformed in a process that is more visceral than intellectual, fueled by that same accrued database of science fictive imagery imprinted on the ‘designer’s’ subconscious described earlier. The resultant forms are simultaneously recognizable and foreign. They cohere from certain vantages points, but become intelligible from others. This flickering
Whereas Nouveau appropriated new means of fabrication to realize its otherworldly forms,
from figure to oblivion reifies the project’s desire to defy reduction into a single, coherent
this project capitalizes on digital modeling and animation software to produce varieties of
reading.
involute connections that defy predictably uniform patterns of arrangement.
Subdivision Modeling
[Act 04]
sculptural treatment of iron and stone. The polygon models employed in this project allow for
[MASTER’S DEGREE PROJECT DOCUMENT]
It is in this capacity for variety that the curved line proves most useful in challenging the
Subtraction While the project operates in one sense in a proliferative manner, exploring new formal languages and their capacity for fostering new terms of social relation, it simultaneously
explicitly with the use of subdivision modeling techniques as a means of spatializing the
(and complementarily) works through subtractive means, removing those things that
curvilinear connective logics that define the project.
perpetuate the camp as the paradigm of public space in the contemporary city.
In many respects subdivision modeling is the digital equivalent of Guimard’s analog, intensely
Such an approach embraces Gianni Vattimo’s approach to a ‘weak ontology’ concerned with
046
Following from the connective logics enabled through the curve, the project engages
[MASTER’S DEGREE PROJECT DOCUMENT]
[Act 04]
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047
TAKE: 02 [Subtraction]
are continually co-evolving into new programmatic hybrids, ones which are difficult to name,
radically new mean of connection, and thus performance.
let alone control.
In the context of this project, these ‘entities’ tend to be synonymous with ‘programs’ (and
Conclusion
their attendant formal manifestations). These programmatic entities vary from the diffuse and general (circulation, for instance) to the specific and localized (performing arts center, civic building, hotel, etc.). Subtraction and erasure have long been taboo subjects in architectural discourse. A return to the tabula rasa of Modernism, which, perhaps naively, assumed that architecture could ‘make things better’ if only it could scrape away the messy complexity of the city, is not the aim of this MDP. Instead, the aim of subtraction in this case is precisely to avoid the kind of sterile monotony fetishized by (for instance) Le Corbusier in his Plan Voisin and Ville Radiuese. At the same time, the intention is not to take the opposite approach and get caught up in
Taken together, these techniques manage the formation and dissolution of bodily and subjective identity that is so central to the overarching ambitions of the project. They provide the means by which, in the spirit of Meillassoux’s call to arms, the Principle of Sufficient Reason may be abandoned without abandoning rational thought itself. The remainder of this act is devoted to a direct explanation of the formal manifestations of the techniques explored here.. In the final act, we will consider the exploration of the techniques
[Act 04]
8
[MASTER’S DEGREE PROJECT DOCUMENT]
blurring the boundaries between discrete entities in order to open those entities up to
introduced here in a case study focused on a site in Calgary whose particular characteristics are particularly symptomatic of the urban camp condition described previously.
the cult of collective memory which mindlessly dictates that every old building be treated as though it were hallowed ground. Instead, the project works from the middle outwards, weakening and subtracting from programs not to replace them with equally definite ones, but to induce them to perpetually unstable relationships with each other and with themselves. In such a system (as we will see in the case study act), sidewalks mix with hotel floorplates and walls invert themselves into apertures and everywhere the old boundaries between things are replaced by new, diffuse
048
‘divisions’ (if they can even be called that) which, through their heightened interdependence,
[MASTER’S DEGREE PROJECT DOCUMENT]
[Act 04]
049
Endnotes 1
Koolhaas 1998, 971
2
Haraway 1988
3
Williams 2005, 125
4
Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 24
5
Agamben 2000, 117
6
Spuybroek 2009, 35
7
Zizek 2008
8
Vattimo 1988, 85
[Act 04] [MASTER’S DEGREE PROJECT DOCUMENT]
050
Act 05
Case Study: Imaging a New Agora for Calgary
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Preamble By now we have firmly established the theoretical bases of the project as well as its ambitions and aspirations. The intent of this act, then, is to address and hopefully reify some of these desires in a concise manner. This case study is by no means meant to be taken as the projection of an idealized end state or terminal condition for the city. Indeed, such a suggestion would run contrary to everything that we have advocated for thus far in this project. Instead, one might consider this case study as a crystallization of a relatively brief series of moments: a
The decision to site the project in a ‘real’ location, rather than to keep it abstractly siteless, stems from a desire to engage its audience in a sensational way; sensational here meaning tangible and visceral. By relying on bodily – and embodied – reactions to its own content, the project sidesteps the potential for intellectual paralysis that accompanies purely abstract speculation. This approach brings with it a host of complications, particularly with respect to what might be perceived as arrogant historical erasure. Certainly, the project makes some severe moves in terms of subtracting elements of the city’s fabric, but it does so only to excise those spurious conventions that anchor the future to the past.
transitional (perhaps even liminal) phase between an existing paradigm of thought about
While the general character of the contemporary urban public realm is homogenous, not
the city and a new one where the very idea of a single, coherent ‘paradigm’ no longer applies.
all sites are equally thus. The site for this case study encompasses the four blocks between
Site Overview
First and Fifth Streets SE and Seventh and Ninth Avenues SE in Calgary. The criteria for site selection focused mainly on the character of existing programmatic relationships in
Because this project is highly speculative, and because it seeks to distance itself from
and around public plaza conditions. The selection of this particular site was based on its
normative approaches to architectural thought and practice, it should come as no surprise
identification as a potentially fecund locus of intervention because it presented the most
that the process of site selection and site analysis for this project has been an unorthodox
pronounced gap between its claims to programmatic ‘openness’ and the reality of its failure
one. Whereas site selection is traditionally approached with deep reverence to existing
to function as a violently productive piece of architectural infrastructure.
conditions, the chief conceit behind this project is that the spatial and programmatic logic already defined by the paradigm of the camp. Accordingly, the project has little regard for
The site is currently home to Olympic Plaza, the city’s de facto public square, much derided for its inhospitable ‘public’ spaces, as well as Calgary’s City Hall/Municipal Building, the Epcor
052
of the contemporary polis is (apparently unbeknownst to architects and urbanists) always
[Act 05]
Post-Humanist Heterotopian Urbanism
then, give the project a site at all?
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Liminal Landscapes
respecting things that tend to be considered ‘valuable’ attributes of the public sphere. Why
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054
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[Act 05]
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SCENE: 05.003 DATE: 2084.04.14 CAMERA: 01 FPS: 29.97 TAKE: 01 [Aerial Rendering]
the site marks the dividing line between an affluent consumer culture embodied by Stephen
Returning again to Deleuze’s observation of a ‘self destructive dependence’ on identity (an
Avenue’s upscale outdoor shopping mall and the markedly less affluent community of the
identity formed through habit) we can begin to unveil some of the mechanisms that enable
East Village. In fact, the East Village is highly symptomatic of the progressive abandonment
the perpetuation of sameness in the built environment.2
of the population from the protection of the state. It is, in effect, a camp quarantined from the rest of the city. The Municipal Building quite literally turns its back to the East Village: a telling gesture that underscores the degree to which architecture functions at the mercy of insidious mechanisms of Empire. The East Village Area Redevelopment Plan as Nostalgic Regression The site also provides an interesting opportunity for speculation because of its implication with the East Village Area Redevelopment Plan (ARP) and the Calgary Municipal Land Corporation (CMLC) (See Appendix D). The ARP/CLMC scheme, like many master planning projects of its kind, sets out a highly nostalgic vision of the future. The conceptual renderings
In architectural terms, these mechanisms tend to present themselves as a synthetic combination of program and form. Architectural programs become those scripts by which Empire is able to construct a veil of order and omnipotence over the contemporary city and the bodies that constitute it. Fixed, rigid programs condition behaviour in extremely specific ways and for very particular ends (namely the control of life itself). Public space has not been a space for ‘free’ use by members of the public for some time. Use of ‘public’ space is
[Act 05]
Why then, does the ARP (and documents like it) propose such anachronistic futures?
[MASTER’S DEGREE PROJECT DOCUMENT]
Center for the Performing Arts, and the King Edward Hotel. In the broader urban context,
everywhere conditioned by a myriad of devices, laws, and spatial logics that limit its range. We are reminded to keep off the grass, that we are not welcome in Olympic Plaza after 10pm, and that we are not allowed to sleep (or do any number of other things) in ‘public’ space. These programmatic cues are both enabled and enforced by their formal manifestations.
fronting onto quaint, pedestrian filled sidewalks. The ARP speaks vaguely of ‘great streets’,
Circulation networks are fixed by material boundaries and surveyed via closed circuit
yet offers little in the way of explicit explanation of what constitutes a ‘great street’ or how
television cameras. Spaces for seating are made distinct from spaces for working and those
one might go about making such a thing.1 Ultimately, of course, this project suggests that
for sleeping or eating. We accept this reality because its repetition has made it seem perfectly
such an aspiration amounts to an impossible folly in an increasingly ethically ambivalent
natural, and yet nature itself is something of an abstract and arbitrary category developed
world where distinctions between ‘good and bad’, ‘right and wrong’, and so on are becoming
specifically to delimit and differentiate human control from the horrific complexity of the
ever more difficult to discern, let alone control.
world ‘out there’.
056
produced as part of the document project a future saturated with faux historical buildings
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057
SCENE: 05.004 DATE: 2084.03.14 CAMERA: 01 FPS: 29.97 TAKE: 02 [Site Overview Rendering]
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058
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of engaging such an alien vision of the city are at once disorienting and liberating. The Instead of prescribing a ‘cure’ full of discrete and orderly programmatic entities working happily towards a ‘sustainable’ future for the East Village, this project proposes a progressive weakening of existing programmatic relationships in order to produce a terrain of flexible opportunity where expectations about programmatic and formal relationships are continually confounded by a violently involute landscape. Currently, the site is comprised of a civic building (the Calgary Municipal Building), a performing arts venue (The Epcor Center for the Performing Arts), a ‘public’ square (Olympic Plaza), an LRT switching yard, and a few (allegedly) historically significant former hotels (the King Edward and the St. Louis). The site also sits adjacent to the Calgary Public Library, which is slated for demolition and is to be replaced by a new building on the lot behind the Municipal building.3
project invokes Bernard Tschumi’s notion of ‘programmatic violence’ or ‘those uses, actions, events, and programs that, by accident or by design, are specifically evil and destructive’ in articulating its programmatic intentions.4 Programmatic violence, in the context of a posthuman (and perhaps post-ethical) world, can no longer necessarily be labeled as ‘evil’, but can perhaps be reconsidered as violently productive. Tschumi himself points to violence as ‘the possibility of change, of renewal’.5 The imaging and modeling of the project depart from the conventional approach to such techniques as typified by the East Village ARP and the CMLC masterplan. The images are not necessarily immediately recognizable as architecture and they do not project the same cheerful outlook as conventional architectural renderings. They are dark, dirty, dangerous and perhaps even offensive. Yet it is precisely this ability to violate conventional sensibilities
With the exception of some residential units, the project does not change much in terms
that allows the project to engage audiences and (perhaps) alter those sensibilities in such
of the programmatic composition of the site. Instead, it works to warp and twist existing
a way that opens them up to new possibilities of sensation. To return to Walter Benjamin’s
programmatic entities until they are all but unrecognizable as their former selves. The ‘all
suggestion that, ‘as regards the images themselves, one cannot say that they reproduce
but’ qualification of this process is important because the intent here is not to completely
architecture. They produce it in the first place.’6
eradicate the identity of the site or the programs on it, but rather to push them far enough
Heterotopia and the New Agora
from their original, stable incarnations in order to open them up to new means of occupation
In the Greek city-state, the agora (public market) constituted the locus of bios politikos, or politically meaningful life (i.e. that form of life that is defined by its ability to exert dominance
In such a landscape, behaviour is no longer so tightly governed by the familiar programmatic
060
and engagement.
[Act 05]
and formal cues on which we rely on a daily basis to navigate our lives. The consequences
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A Modest Proposal
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[Act 05]
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062
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[Act 05]
063
SCENE: 05.007 DATE: 2084.03.14 CAMERA: 01 FPS: 29.97 TAKE: 02 [Arcade Exterior Rendering]
democracy and thus also the basis of the paradigmatic state of exception cited by Agamben
The future will demand more and new means of challenging convention and destabilizing
as the cornerstone of political modernity.
static conditions.
The aim of this case study is not a revitalization of some romanticized, nostalgic vision of
The vignettes and projections of alternative futures presented in the rest of this act cannot
public life, but rather a critical evisceration of that fundamental division between public and
and should not be interpreted as ‘good’ or ‘bad’. Instead, what is important is that they are
private that makes the agora and the political order it supports possible.
different. It is only through this continual engagement with the horrific and the unknown
Just as Art Nouveau renders the work of art superfluous and sensationalizes everyday objects, Constant Nieuwenhuys’s New Babylon projects a future - a ‘utopian infrastructure’
(yet vaguely familiar) that we can ever hope to give life a fighting chance against those forces that would stifle it.
- where citizens ‘no longer make art, but create everyday life’.8 Truly democratic space cannot
The new agora takes the form of the camp whose violence is turned in on itself; a heterotopian
exist in a capitalist society. At the same time, capitalism, and the mechanisms of Empire
sanctuary from the control instruments of biopolitical modernity achieved, paradoxically,
that constitute it, cannot be stopped but through the same media that presently enable
through those instruments themselves. The new agora is not an open public space flanked
it. We are once again faced with Vattimo’s embrace of nihilism and vital weakness as the
by private program, but rather a field of varying programmatic intensity, where the usual
only way forward. Only through devaluing those things (identity, subjectivity, individuality)
markers of programmatic division are replaced by a synthetic formal language of topological
that underwrite the current biopolitical model of power upon which capitalism is founded
continuity. Conventional divisions between public and private spaces are rendered indistinct
can we ever hope to truly autonomous (ironically, of course, by relinquishing all claims to
through weakened boundaries. Spaces flow into on another and programs coexist in an
individuality and autonomy).
awkward and uncomfortable union that resists the separation of life into discrete categories.
This prospect of an authentically democratic public realm; one beyond the ‘perpetual
Conclusion
training’ of Deleuze’s ‘Societies of Control’ rests firmly in our ability to think outside of our own habits, customs, and reactionary tendencies.9 These habits can only be subverted by
In the pages that follow we will examine a few vignettes that investigate, at various scales, the possibilities of conceiving of and imaging form and program in this way. At the urban scale, we look broadly at the site and register the impact of reconstituting its programmatic elements
064
perpetual engagement with the new. The digital means of imaging and, to an extent, physically
[Act 05]
realizing this project offer such subversive abilities, but they will not always be sufficient.
[MASTER’S DEGREE PROJECT DOCUMENT]
over the sphere of the oikos, or the private home).7 It is the foundational model for modern
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[Act 05]
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SCENE: 05.009 DATE: 2084.03.14 CAMERA: 01 FPS: 29.97 TAKE: 02 [Interfacial Subtraction Rendering]
terms such as partition, aperture, and circulation. Finally, at the scale of the body itself, we scrutinize the potential(s) of integrating furniture, utensils, and various other objects into broader aesthetic systems. In short, the goal of this aspect of the project is the resurrection
1
City of Calgary Land Use Policy and Planning, Development and Assessment
Department 2005
2
Williams 2005, 125
3
Calgary Public Library Board 2012
4
Tschumi 1996, 134
5
Ibid. at 132
6
Benjamin 1988, 89
7
Habermas 1991, 3
8
Wark 2008, 21
9
Deleuze 1990, 7
of the concept of Gesamtkunstwerk through digital means of imaging and fabrication.
[Act 05]
we examine the effects of programmatic weakening through a redefinition of architectural
Endnotes
[MASTER’S DEGREE PROJECT DOCUMENT]
in alien (yet simultaneously endogenous) formal articulations. At the architectural scale
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071
SCENE: 05.011 DATE: 2084.03.14 CAMERA: 01 FPS: 29.97 TAKE: 02 [Tower Suite Rendering]
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072
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[Act 05]
073
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074
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[Act 05]
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076
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[Act 05]
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078
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[Act 05]
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[Act 05]
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082
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[Act 05]
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084
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[Act 05]
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086
Epilogue
087
SCENE: 06.001 DATE: 1999.01.01 CAMERA: 01 FPS: 29.97 TAKE: 01 [Scene from Fight Club]
at least bare life) for those same subjects architecture claims to champion. Yet the alternative paths are difficult to navigate and offer no certainty of salvation. Ultimately, of course, it is not possible to forecast the future through the lens of humanity or humanism. In fact, it is
‘Oh, a storm is threat’ning/My very life today/If I don’t get some
precisely this nostalgic addiction to the apocryphal notion that the world exists for us as human beings that stands in the way of change. The question, then, is not ‘what do we have to
shelter/Oh yeah, I’m gonna fade away’ -Mick Jagger + Keith Richards1
do to make things better?’ but rather, ‘how to we overcome our own obsession with ourselves long enough to allow things to change, and to change us?’ This project has proposed that architecture ought to engage aggressively with the new and
[Epilogue]
Post-Humanist Heterotopian Urbanism
instrument of Empire and biopolitics is suicide for the discipline and quite literally death (or
[MASTER’S DEGREE PROJECT DOCUMENT]
Liminal Landscapes
This project has argued that for architecture to continue on its present course as a blunt
the unknown as one way to allow life itself to flourish. Though horror is typically viewed in
On Inhabiting a Post-Human Planet [Gimme Shelter] The world is once again at war, only this time, according to Hardt and Negri, the terms of engagement are quite different.2 No longer are the primary combatants sovereign nations. Instead, the battles being waged today are between life and life itself.3 Life is simultaneously ‘the threat, the threatened, and the response’.4 It is in this tumult that architecture finds itself caught at present. In the voided shell of ‘the human diagram’5 architecture is left with the opportunity to design the future, but what might that future look like? And what side of the war between life and itself should
The project has also advocated for the weakening of disciplinary boundaries through the collapsing of nature into culture and culture into nature and the collapsing of all of it into architecture. Exposure to the unknown, though, is not enough. Architecture, and architects, must once again be incautiously ambitious in speculating about the future. These speculations must overreach the limits of mere projection and achieve full immersion in new sensations, new effects, and new affects. These new sensations, and specifically more intensely productive sensations, are possible explicitly through the use of new technologies and new means of imaging futures we cannot yet fathom. These technologies will, of course, change in the
088
architecture take if it is to seize this opportunity?
a negative light, this MDP sees it as a fecund catalyst for the evolution of the discipline.
[MASTER’S DEGREE PROJECT DOCUMENT]
[Epilogue]
future. What is important is that architecture change with them; never allowing itself to sit still for too long. To borrow one last time from Deleuze, ‘Make rhizomes, not roots, never plant! Don’t sow, grow off shoots! Don’t be one or multiple, be multiplicities! Run lines, never plot a point! Speed turns the point into a line! Be quick, even when standing still!’6 In this restless liminality, architecture must take up Thacker’s problematic and simultaneously advance ‘life as the threat, the threatened, and the response’.7 In so doing architecture must rediscover its foundational relationship with violence and exploit this relationship as a means of resistance and subterfuge. And yet, while the future has no reason to resemble the past, there is no reason that history cannot be treated operatively and its logics and techniques imported and translated into new means of designing the future. Even as architecture reaches outside of itself to establish new relationships in order to preserve its own autonomy, it moves inwards, forming new bonds within itself and within its own trajectories of growth. In both cases, though, the
089
impetus is the same: ‘Only Connect…’8
Jagger and Richards, 1969
2
Hardt and Negri 2004, 3
3
Thacker 2006, 20. Eugene Thacker’s ‘Biological Sovereignty’ augments Agamben’s thesis on the nature of bare life in the contemporary biopolitical context
through a characterization of the supposed ‘zone of indistinction’ as anything but indistinct. He suggests that the new frontier of biopolitics is life in
perpetual conflict with itself and posits that it is this new problematic that sovereignty must confront and reconcile.
4
Ibid.
5
Bratton 2011
6
Deleuze and Guattari 1988, 24
7
Thacker 2008, 20
8
Forster 2000
[Epilogue]
1
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Endnotes
090
091 [MASTER’S DEGREE PROJECT DOCUMENT]
[Epilogue]
[Epilogue] [MASTER’S DEGREE PROJECT DOCUMENT]
092
[MASTER’S DEGREE PROJECT DOCUMENT]
UP
07
06
02
07 5th STREET SE
AA.001 Site Plan Level 01/-01
01 05
03
MACLEOD TRAIL SE
N
04
AA.002/094
1ST STREET SE
0m 25m 50m
AA.003/094]
UP
UP
UP
[Appendix A: Orthographics]
08
STEPHEN AVENUE
9TH AVENUE SE
093
AA.002/094
AA.003/094]
Program Key 01 02 03
Hotel Tower Residential Tower Park
04 05 06 07 08
Arcade King Edward Hotel Civic Building Theater Performance Stage
+50.0m
01 +25.0m
06
07 0m
25m
+0.0m
-25.0m
50m
[Appendix A: Orthographics]
02
[MASTER’S DEGREE PROJECT DOCUMENT]
+75.0m
AA.002 Site Section AA +75.0m
+50.0m
02 +25.0m
06 07
06
08
03 +0.0m
06
-25.0m
25m
50m
AA.003 Site Section BB
01 02 03
Hotel Tower Residential Tower Park
04 05 06 07 08
Arcade King Edward Hotel Civic Building Theater Performance Stage
094
0m
Program Key
[MASTER’S DEGREE PROJECT DOCUMENT]
[Appendix A: Orthographics]
A
B
C
4
D
4
01
01
01 02
02 01
04
04
04
04
E
02
3 2
02
02
03
3 2
04
02
04
04
04
02
01
01
02 01
1
01
095
1
A
0m
3.125m 6.25m
N
AA.004 Tower Floor Plan (Typical)
B
C
D
D
Program Key 01 02 03 04
Bedroom Bathroom Stair/Elevator Core Kitchen/Living Area
C
D
E
F
G
H
+26.3m
+21.9m
02 +17.5m
[Appendix A: Orthographics]
B
[MASTER’S DEGREE PROJECT DOCUMENT]
A
+13.1m
+8.8m
01
04
+4.4m
03
0m
B
2.5m
C
5m
AA.004 King Edward Hotel Section CC
D
E
F
G
+0m
H
Program Key 01 02 03 04
Terrace Office Bar Aperture
096
A
02
[MASTER’S DEGREE PROJECT DOCUMENT]
[Appendix A: Orthographics]
6
+26.3m
5
4
3 2
1
4
3 2
1
+21.9m
+17.5m
04
AC.005 +13.1m
115
+8.8m
AC.006
01 03
116 +4.4m
02
097
+0m
5
6
0m
2.5m
5m
AA.005 King Edward Hotel Section DD
Program Key 01 02 03 04
Terrace Office Bar Aperture
4
3 2
1
+26.3m
+21.9m
+17.5m
[Appendix A: Orthographics]
5
[MASTER’S DEGREE PROJECT DOCUMENT]
6
+13.1m
01 04
+8.8m
03 +4.4m
02
0m
2.5m
4
5m
AA.006 King Edward Hotel Section EE
3 2
+0m
1
Program Key 01 02 03 04
Terrace Office Bar Aperture
098
5
6
[MASTER’S DEGREE PROJECT DOCUMENT]
C
6
E
F
G
H
04
6
02
03
CC [AA.004/096]
CC [AA.004/096]
4
4
3 2
3 2
1
1
2.5m
5m
N
AA.007 King Edward Hotel Plan Level 01
B
C
D
E
F
DD [AA.005/097]
5
EE [AA.006/098]
5
A
0m
D
DD [AA.005/097]
[Appendix A: Orthographics]
B
EE [AA.006/098]
099
A
01
G
H
Program Key 01 02 03 04
Terrace Office Bar Aperture
C
D
E
04
03
H
02
DD [AA.005/097]
04
G
EE [AA.006/098]
6
F
6
CC [AA.004/096]
CC [AA.004/096]
5
5
01
4
3 2
3 2
1
1
EE [AA.006/098]
DD [AA.005/097]
4
A
2.5m
5m
N
AA.008 King Edward Hotel Plan Level 02
C
D
E
F
G
H
Program Key 01 02 03 04
Terrace Office Bar Aperture
100
0m
B
[Appendix A: Orthographics]
B
[MASTER’S DEGREE PROJECT DOCUMENT]
A
C
D
E
F
6
04 03
CC [AA.004/096]
G
H
DD [AA.005/097]
[MASTER’S DEGREE PROJECT DOCUMENT]
B
EE [AA.006/098]
[Appendix A: Orthographics]
A
6
04
CC [AA.004/096]
04
01
5
5
4
4
3 2
3 2
02
101
A
0m 2.5m
5m
N
AA.009 King Edward Hotel Plan Level 03
B
C
1
DD [AA.005/097]
EE [AA.006/098]
1
D
E
F
G
H
Program Key 01 02 03 04
Terrace Office Bar Aperture
C
A
B
C
6
6
04
CC [AA.004/096]
CC [AA.004/096]
04
CC [AA.004/096]
04
04
5
CC [AA.004/096] 5
4
[Appendix A: Orthographics]
B
[MASTER’S DEGREE PROJECT DOCUMENT]
A
4
02
02
3 2
3 2
1
1
A
2.5m
5m
N
AA.010 King Edward Hotel Plan Level 04
C
A
Program Key 01 02 03 04
Terrace Office Bar Aperture
0m
2.5m
5m
B N
AA.011 King Edward Hotel Plan Level 05
C
Program Key 01 02 03 04
Terrace Office Bar Aperture
102
0m
B
[MASTER’S DEGREE PROJECT DOCUMENT]
[Appendix A: Orthographics]
+26.3m
+21.9m
+17.5m
+13.1m
+8.8m
+4.4m
103
+0m
0m
2.5m
5m
AA.012 King Edward Hotel South Elevation
+17.5m
[Appendix A: Orthographics]
+21.9m
[MASTER’S DEGREE PROJECT DOCUMENT]
+26.3m
+13.1m
+8.8m
+4.4m
+0m
2.5m
5m
AA.013 King Edward East Elevation
104
0m
[MASTER’S DEGREE PROJECT DOCUMENT]
[Appendix B: Site Evolution]
01
02
03
04
05
06
07
08
105
SCENE: AB.001 DATE: 2075.03.14 CAMERA: 01 FPS: 29.97 TAKE: 01 [Site Evolution]
Residential Tower
Hotel Tower
[Appendix B: Site Evolution]
Arcade
[MASTER’S DEGREE PROJECT DOCUMENT]
Civic Building
Theater
Performance Venue
SCENE: AB.002 DATE: 2080.02.10 CAMERA: 01 FPS: 29.97 [Programmatic [Re]composition]
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TAKE: 01
[MASTER’S DEGREE PROJECT DOCUMENT]
[Appendix B: Site Evolution]
Archetype 01: Exoskeleton
Circulation
Civic Building
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SCENE: AB.003 DATE: 2080.03.14 CAMERA: 01 FPS: 29.97 TAKE: 01 [Formal Archetypes]
Archetype 02: Landscape/Gathering
Park
Archetype 03: Cell [A]
Auditorium
Stage
Archetype 04: Bridge
Arcade
Archetype 05: Cell [B]
Tower
Awning
Residences Cell Type [A]/Exoskeleton Hotel Suites
Theater Cell Type [B]/Exoskeleton Council Chamber
[Appendix B: Site Evolution]
Landscape/Bridge
[MASTER’S DEGREE PROJECT DOCUMENT]
Circulation
Arcade Landscape/Exoskeleton/Bridge Park/Arts Venue
SCENE: AB.004 DATE: 2080.03.14 CAMERA: 01 FPS: 29.97 [Programmatic Hybridity]
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TAKE: 01
[MASTER’S DEGREE PROJECT DOCUMENT]
[Appendix B: Site Evolution]
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SCENE: AB.005 DATE: 2080.03.14 CAMERA: 01 FPS: 29.97 TAKE: 01 [Tower Elements]
[Appendix B: Site Evolution]
[MASTER’S DEGREE PROJECT DOCUMENT]
SCENE: AB.006 DATE: 2080.03.14 CAMERA: 01 FPS: 29.97 [King Edward Hotel Alteration]
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TAKE: 01
[MASTER’S DEGREE PROJECT DOCUMENT]
[Appendix C: Construction]
111
SCENE: AC.001 DATE: 2012.01.01 CAMERA: 01 FPS: 29.97 TAKE: 01 [Construction Techniques]
document. Recent advancements in 3D printing technologies allow large scale forms to be printed using a mixture of epoxy resin, sand, and an inorganic ink binding agent. This process is up to four times faster than conventional construction techniques (using elaborate concrete formwork, etc.) and is considerably more efficient in terms of both energy usage and CO2 emissions. Where the project interfaces with the existing urban fabric, these new fabrication methods are combined with conventional construction techniques in order to provide a bridge between
[Appendix C: Construction]
been deployed at the scale of the urban and architectural interventions explored in this
[MASTER’S DEGREE PROJECT DOCUMENT]
The project imagines a future wherein emerging fused deposition modeling techniques have
‘the new’ and ‘the always the-same’.
SCENE: AC.002 DATE: 2012.01.01 CAMERA: 01 FPS: 29.97 [Construction Techniques]
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[Appendix C: Construction]
Medium Extrusion Cable Medium Mixing Manifold
Medium Deposition Nozzle
Deposition Mechanism Gantry Deposition Mechanism Track
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SCENE: AC.003 DATE: 2012.01.01 CAMERA: 01 FPS: 29.97 TAKE: 01 [Construction Techniques]
Weatherproof Nylon Shell HSS Tubing
Steel Bracket
Steel Beam Printed ‘Honeycomb’ Core Steel Column
[Appendix C: Construction]
Rigid Insulation
[MASTER’S DEGREE PROJECT DOCUMENT]
Brick Veneer
Sprayed Concrete
0m
0.5m
1.0m
06_47 Fabrication Detail
Utilities Chase
SCENE: AC.004 DATE: 2012.01.01 CAMERA: 01 FPS: 29.97 [Construction Techniques]
06_48 Wall Section Detail [Typical]
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TAKE: 01
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[Appendix C: Construction]
Weatherproof Coating
Wide Flange Steel Beam HSS Core
Epoxy Bonded Honeycomb Sprayed Concrete Anchor Rigid Insulation 0m
0.25m 0.5m
115
SCENE: AC.005 DATE: 2012.01.01 CAMERA: 01 FPS: 29.97 TAKE: 01 [Wall Section Detail]
Epoxy Bonded Honeycomb
[Appendix C: Construction]
Rebar Reinforcement
[MASTER’S DEGREE PROJECT DOCUMENT]
HSS Core
Weatherproof Coating
0m
0.25m 0.5m
SCENE: AC.006 DATE: 2012.01.01 CAMERA: 01 FPS: 29.97 [Wall Section Detail]
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TAKE: 01
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[Appendix D: ARP Critique]
117
SCENE: AD.001 DATE: 2012.03.26 CAMERA: 01 FPS: 29.97 TAKE: 01 [Critiquing Regressive Nostalgia]
Sufficient Reason as the basis for design decisions. In so doing it removes the possibility of imagining a truly different future, subjugating its own (well intentioned) desires to make a better world to the dictates of destructive and unproductive design habits. The ARP rests on the assumption that it is possible, and indeed desirable, to project and realize a vision of the city based firmly on the observation of past and current conditions. This case study rejects that approach. The remainder of this document is devoted to imaging a perspective of the future that embraces the impossibility of knowing or controlling said future. The case study challenges normative means of imaging architecture in order to
[Appendix D: ARP Critique]
and urban modernity in that it betrays a self-destructive addiction to the Principle of
[MASTER’S DEGREE PROJECT DOCUMENT]
The ARP is symptomatic of the endemic ignorance of the biopolitical foundations of political
dissolve the bonds that tie us to the perpetuation of an inherently undemocratic regime of control (Empire).
SCENE: AD.002 DATE: 2012.03.26 CAMERA: 01 FPS: 29.97 [Critiquing Regressive Nostalgia]
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TAKE: 01
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[Appendix D: ARP Critique]
119
SCENE: AD.003 DATE: 2012.03.26 CAMERA: 01 FPS: 29.97 TAKE: 01 [ARP: Apocryphal Prognostication]
Perimeter Block
Linear Blocks
Townhouses
Courtyard Block
Live/Work Units
[Appendix D: ARP Critique]
Ground Floor Commercial/Residential Above Urban Public Open Space Ground Floor Commercial/Residential/ Institutional Above Commercial/Residential/Institutional
[MASTER’S DEGREE PROJECT DOCUMENT]
Residential/Commercial at Grade Ground Floor Commercial/Residential/ Institutional/Commercial Above
Linear Block
SCENE: AD.004 DATE: 2012.03.26 CAMERA: 01 FPS: 29.97 [ARP: Apocryphal Prognostication]
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121 [MASTER’S DEGREE PROJECT DOCUMENT]
[Appendix E: Outtakes]
[Appendix E: Outtakes]
[MASTER’S DEGREE PROJECT DOCUMENT]
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123 [MASTER’S DEGREE PROJECT DOCUMENT]
[Appendix E: Outtakes]
[Appendix E: Outtakes]
[MASTER’S DEGREE PROJECT DOCUMENT]
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125 [MASTER’S DEGREE PROJECT DOCUMENT]
[Appendix E: Outtakes]
[Appendix E: Outtakes]
[MASTER’S DEGREE PROJECT DOCUMENT]
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127 [MASTER’S DEGREE PROJECT DOCUMENT]
[Appendix E: Outtakes]
[Appendix E: Outtakes]
[MASTER’S DEGREE PROJECT DOCUMENT]
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TAKE: 04
129 [MASTER’S DEGREE PROJECT DOCUMENT]
[Appendix E: Outtakes]
[Appendix E: Outtakes]
[MASTER’S DEGREE PROJECT DOCUMENT]
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131 [MASTER’S DEGREE PROJECT DOCUMENT]
[Appendix E: Outtakes]
[Appendix E: Outtakes]
[MASTER’S DEGREE PROJECT DOCUMENT]
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133 [MASTER’S DEGREE PROJECT DOCUMENT]
[Appendix E: Outtakes]
[Appendix E: Outtakes]
[MASTER’S DEGREE PROJECT DOCUMENT]
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135 [MASTER’S DEGREE PROJECT DOCUMENT]
[Appendix E: Outtakes]
[Appendix E: Outtakes]
[MASTER’S DEGREE PROJECT DOCUMENT]
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137 [MASTER’S DEGREE PROJECT DOCUMENT]
[Appendix E: Outtakes]
[Appendix E: Outtakes]
[MASTER’S DEGREE PROJECT DOCUMENT]
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TAKE: 09
139 [MASTER’S DEGREE PROJECT DOCUMENT]
[Appendix E: Outtakes]
[Appendix E: Outtakes]
[MASTER’S DEGREE PROJECT DOCUMENT]
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TAKE: 010
141 [MASTER’S DEGREE PROJECT DOCUMENT]
[Appendix E: Outtakes]
[Appendix E: Outtakes]
[MASTER’S DEGREE PROJECT DOCUMENT]
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[Appendix E: Outtakes]
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SCENE: AE.012 DATE: 2012.03.14 CAMERA: 01 FPS: 29.97 TAKE: 01 [Formal Evolution]
orthogonal geometry of the contemporary society of control. While this is in part true, the project is actually interested in the indeterminate, liminal zone between the two aesthetic models it examines. Just as life is controlled at the moment of its abandonment1, so too is power grasped when its formal instruments are evacuated. The formal evolution of the project has not followed any linear path (or even a logical one) outside of its adherence to its endogenous aesthetic sensibilities. Over the course of twelve iterations, the project has evolved into its own self referential formal language via the integration of techniques of curvilinear means of conjunction through subtractive design
[Appendix E: Outtakes]
it provoke them? At first glance this project would seem to offer up an ‘other’ to the rigidly
[MASTER’S DEGREE PROJECT DOCUMENT]
What is the form of resistance? Should form respond to the instruments of power, or should
mechanisms enabled by subdivision modeling.
SCENE: AE.012 DATE: 2012.03.14 CAMERA: 01 FPS: 29.97 [Formal Evolution]
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TAKE: 01
[MASTER’S DEGREE PROJECT DOCUMENT]
[Appendix E: Outtakes]
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SCENE: AE.013 DATE: 2012.03.14 CAMERA: 01 FPS: 29.97 TAKE: 01 [Programmatic Integration]
establish a clear distinction between new and existing conditions, later iterations focus on the indistinct zone of interaction between the material systems. As geometries cross contaminate they begin to weaken one another, and, by extension, begin to weaken their programmatic respective responsibilities. It is this formal/programmatic ‘grey area’ that the project seeks to exploit in its latter stages.
[Appendix E: Outtakes]
over the course of the investigation. Whereas the initial approach centers on a desire to
[MASTER’S DEGREE PROJECT DOCUMENT]
The manner in which the geometry of the project integrates with its context has evolved
SCENE: AE.013 DATE: 2012.03.14 CAMERA: 01 FPS: 29.97 [Programmatic Integration]
146
TAKE: 01
[MASTER’S DEGREE PROJECT DOCUMENT]
[Appendix E: Outtakes]
147
SCENE: AE.014 DATE: 2012.03.14 CAMERA: 01 FPS: 29.97 TAKE: 01 [Imaging]
techniques explored in the project pursue images beyond the optical. The strategy aspires to the synaesthetically arresting affect achieved by Francis Bacon’s portraiture.
[Appendix E: Outtakes]
image in particular is exploited for its affective potential for the actualization of space. The
[MASTER’S DEGREE PROJECT DOCUMENT]
In this project, imaging is much more than a mere means of representation. The perspectival
SCENE: AE.014 DATE: 2012.03.14 CAMERA: 01 FPS: 29.97 [Imaging]
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TAKE: 01
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[Appendix E: Outtakes]
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SCENE: AE.015 DATE: 2012.03.14 CAMERA: 01 FPS: 29.97 TAKE: 01 [Scalar Integration]
approach weakens the disciplinary distinctions between art and architecture and allows for direct engagement with the body at the most intimate of scales. In challenging the conventional notion that different scales ought to be legibly different, the project opens up an uncomfortable territory of scalar uncertainty that works to decenter the human subject from his or her position of (imagined) stability.
[Appendix E: Outtakes]
explored the integration of form making and imaging techniques at multiple scales. This
[MASTER’S DEGREE PROJECT DOCUMENT]
In pursuit of a contemporary Gesamtkunstwerk, or ‘total work’ of art, the project has
SCENE: AE.015 DATE: 2012.03.14 CAMERA: 01 FPS: 29.97 [Scalar Integration]
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TAKE: 01
[MASTER’S DEGREE PROJECT DOCUMENT]
[Appendix F: Physical Modeling]
151
SCENE: AF.001 DATE: 2012.03.26 CAMERA: 01 FPS: 29.97 TAKE: 01 [Physical Modeling Specimens]
fabrication technologies exerted pressures on both the former and the latter. The project produced geometries that stretched the capacity of the fabrication technology to its limit, and this limit in turn helped to (literally) shape the project itself. Physical modeling is more than mere representation in this project; in many respects it is a proof of concept, albeit on a very small scale. The language and materiality of the models suggests that they are fossilized artifacts from a future that never was. A fictive future that might condition our own very real future(s).
[Appendix F: Physical Modeling]
a whole. The negotiation between advanced digital modeling techniques and available
[MASTER’S DEGREE PROJECT DOCUMENT]
The issue of physical modeling is of critical importance to the viability of the project as
SCENE: AF.002 DATE: 2012.03.26 CAMERA: 01 FPS: 29.97 [Physical Modeling Strategies]
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153 [MASTER’S DEGREE PROJECT DOCUMENT]
[Appendix G: 2012 MDP Show]
[Appendix G: 2012 MDP Show]
[MASTER’S DEGREE PROJECT DOCUMENT]
SCENE: AG.001 DATE: 2012.04.20 CAMERA: 01 FPS: 29.97 [2012 MDP Show Exhibition at Art Central]
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TAKE: 01
155
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SCENE: B.001 DATE: 1968.05.15 CAMERA: 01 FPS: 29.97 TAKE: 01 [Paris, May 1968]
Liminal Landscapes Post-Humanist Heterotopian Urbanism
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Spuybroek, Lars. ‘The Radical Picturesque’ in The Architecture of Variation pp. 34-39, Lars Spuybroek, ed. London: Thames and Hudson, 2009.
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Image Citations
SCENE: I.001 DATE: 1992.05.15 CAMERA: 01 FPS: 29.97 TAKE: 01 [Scene from Aliens]
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160
01.006. Walls. http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lyc6zltIMO1qk9swjo1_1280.jpg
[MASTERâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;S DEGREE PROJECT DOCUMENT]
[Image Citations]
02.002. UC Davis Protest. http://i.i.com.com/cnwk.1d/i/tim/2011/11/21/occupy_pepper_spray_AP111118053177_fullwidth_620x350.jpg 02.003. Occupy Calgary Protest. http://www.cbc.ca/gfx/images/news/topstories/2011/11/07/li-occupy-monday-620.jpg 02.004. Anti-Coalition Protest. http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f2/Calgary_anti-coaltion_protest_2.JPG 03.003. Pope Innocent X. http://www.askyfilledwithshootingstars.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2009/06/06_francis-bacon_head-vi_1949.jpg 03.004. Still from The Thing. http://www.dvdbeaver.com/film2/DVDReviews41/the%20thing%20blu-ray/large%20the%20thing%20blu-ray5.jpg 06.001. Still from Fight Club. http://www.daftblogger.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/blow-up-scene-after-explosion.jpg AC.001. 3D Printer. http://www.inhabitat.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/printer1.jpg AD.001. Conceptual Site Plan. http://www.calgary.ca/_layouts/cocis/DirectDownload.aspx?target=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.calgary.ca%2FPDA%2FLUPP%2FDocuments%2FPublications%2Fe ast-village-arp.pdf&noredirect=1 AD.003. Conceptual Renderings. http://www.calgary.ca/_layouts/cocis/DirectDownload.aspx?target=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.calgary.ca%2FPDA%2FLUPP%2FDocuments%2FPublications%2 Feast-village-arp.pdf&noredirect=1 AD.004. Building Typology Renderings. http://www.calgary.ca/_layouts/cocis/DirectDownload.aspx?target=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.calgary.ca%2FPDA%2FLUPP%2FDocuments%2FPublicatio ns%2Feast-village-arp.pdf&noredirect=1
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06.001. Still from Fight Club. http://www.daftblogger.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/blow-up-scene-after-explosion.jpg B.001. Sous Les Paves, La Plage. http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_RBOY6FSVz0w/S9wiSzbqhNI/AAAAAAAAARw/ZsNzf3Gg9wA/s1600/France-01.jpg
[Image Citations]
[MASTERâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;S DEGREE PROJECT DOCUMENT]
I.001. Still from Aliens. http://image.toutlecine.com/photos/a/l/i/aliens-le-retour-1986-10-g.jpg
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