Sabina Berariu UCL The Bartlett March Part II 16/17 BENVGA05 Year 5
DECONSTRUCTED DOMESTICIT Y
A study of the spatial definition of hybrid constructs for the new novads*
DECONSTRUCTED DOMESTICIT Y
A study of the spatial definition of hybrid constructs for the new novads*
* [from Latin novaturient] individual who adheres to a lifestyle of transience due to a desire to seek powerful change in their life, behaviour or situation
Š 2017 The Bartlett School of Architecture
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher. Printed and bound in London, England Berariu, Sabina. Deconstructed domesticity / Sabina Berariu. Includes bibliographical references and illustrations
BENV GA05 Year 5 Thesis UCL | The Bartlett School of Architecture MArch Part II Architecture 2016/17 Supervisor: Dr.Camillo Boano Word count: 9750 [including citations in text]
CONTENTS
1.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
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ILLUSTRATIONS
ix
ABSTRACT
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INTRODUCTION
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the Subject | deleuzian digital nomad
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Reflections on the ontological orientation of a new type of human assemblage, their identity, affectivity and biological construction
2.
the Object | deconstructed home
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Thoughts on contemporary domesticity, modes of habitation and new patterns of dwelling in time and space
3.
the Territory | hybrid soft tissue
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Understanding of territories [both digital and physical], forms of sovereignty, navigation and positioning, methods of spatial organisation and division
CLOSURE
82
REFERENCES
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v
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I offer deep thanks to my thesis supervisor, Dr.Camillo Boano for his continuous support and critical help and to my design tutor, Dr.Penelope Haralambidou, without their strong encouragement and advice this paper would not exist.
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ILLUSTRATIONS All figures are the author’s own work, except for those acknowledged below:
Chapter 1 | the Subject Figure 2: Pastoral nomad. [image]. Available from: http://www. keepbelieving.com/2016/12/20/shepherds-watching-in-the-fields/ [Accessed: 13.04.2017] Figure 3: McKell, I. (1992): 21st Century Gipsies, New Age travellers. [image]. Available from: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/ article-2793737/but-sparkly-dresses-stunning-pictures-shed-lightfascinating-world-britain-s-new-age-travellers.html [Accessed: 13.04.2017] Figure 4: Hunter-gatherers in Tanzania. [image]. Available from: http://theolduvaigorge.tumblr.com/post/71527693243/a-new-study-ofhunter-gatherers-suggests-social [Accessed 13.04.2017] Figure 5: Page from ‘Fin de Copenhague’, Asger Jorn & Guy Debord, 1957, Situationism. [image]. Available from: http://observatory. designobserver.com/rickpoynor/feature/on-my-shelf-fin-decopenhague/37720/ [Accessed: 10.02.2017] Figure 6: Vertov, D. (1929): Man With A Movie Camera. [video]. Available from: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z97Pa0ICpn8 [Accessed 02.12.2016] Chapter 2 | the Object Figure 10: Friedman, Y. (1959): Ville Spatiale. [image]. Available from: http://vernaculaire.com/yona-friedman-ville-spatiale/ [Accessed: 05.01.2017] Figure 11: Cook, P. (1964): The Plug-in City. [image]. Available from: http://www.archdaily.com/399329/ad-classics-the-plug-in-city-petercook-archigram [Accessed 05.01.2017] Figure 12: Nieuwenhuys, C. (1959-1974): New Babylon. [image]. Available from: https://proyectos4etsa.wordpress.com/2014/01/14/ the-new-babylon-1958-constant-nieuwenhuys/ [Accessed: 05.01.2017] Figure 13: Tschumi, B. (1982-1998): Parc de la Villette. [image]. Available from: http://www.tschumi.com/projects/3/ [Accessed: 05.01.2017]
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Figure 14: Gehry, F. (1997): Guggenheim Museum. [image]. Available from: http://www.archdaily.com/422470/ad-classics-theguggenheim-museum-bilbao-frank-gehry [Accessed: 05.01.2017] Figure 15: Denari, N. (1997): Vertical Smoothhouse. [image]. Available from: http://www.nmda-inc.com/ [Accessed: 05.01.2017] Figure 19: Rahm, P. (2012): Heat Transfer. [image]. Available from: https://urbannext.net/cooling-climate-devices-at-jade-meteo-park/ [Accessed: 05.01.2017] Figure 20: Rahm, P. (2010): Neuro-vegetative exchanges. [image]. Available from: http://www.philipperahm.com/data/projects/convectiveapartments/ index.html [Accessed 05.01.2017] Figure 21: i-weather (2001): Circadian Rhythms. [image]. Available from: http://www.i-weather.org/rhythms.html [Accessed 20.03.2017] Figure 22: i-weather (2001): Application interface. [image]. Available from: http://www.i-weather.org/download.html [Accessed 20.03.2017] Figure 23: Rahm, P (2002): The Hormonorium. [image]. Available from: http://www.philipperahm.com/data/projects/hormonorium/hor11. jpg [Accessed 20.03.2017] Figure 24: Rahm, P(2002): The Hormonorium. [image]. Available from: http://www.philipperahm.com/data/projects/hormonorium/ [Accessed 20.03.2017] Figure 25: Rahm, P(2015): Human, animal and vegetal physiological perception based on wavelengths. [image]. Available from: http:// www.philipperahm.com/data/projects/spectrallight/index.html [Accessed 20.03.2017] Figure 27: Candilis, G (1963): Gipsy Settlement. [image]. Available from: http://sobrecegueira.tumblr.com/#39516503682 [Accessed 19.03.2017] Figure 28: Les roulottes tsiganes. [image]. Available from: http:// olivier-blochet.over-blog.com/tag/histoire%20et%20ethnologie/ [Accessed 19.03.2017] Chapter 3 | the Territory Figure 30: Inside China’s factory. [image]. Available from: https:// anticap.wordpress.com/2013/07/19/the-china-syndrome-2/ [Accessed 19.03.2017] Figure 31: Venturi, R. (1972): A comparative analysis of vast spaces. [image]. Available from: https://fopnews.wordpress.com/2011/11/10/ repository-a-typological-guide-to-americas-ephemeral-nuclearinfrastructure/ [Accessed 19.03.2017] Figure 33: Nieuwenhuys, C. (1957): A project for a gypsies’ camp.
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[image]. Available from: http://articiviche.blogspot.co.uk/p/constant. html [Accessed 19.04.2017] Figure 34: Matsuda, K. (2004): Hyper-reality. [image]. Available from: https://www.dezeen.com/2014/06/11/keiichi-matsuda-augmentedreality-road-markings-signage-navigation-digital-layer/ [Accessed 19.04.2017] Figure 35: Jefferson, T. (1785): The Land Ordinance of 1785 that would serve as the basis of the Public Land Survey System. Available from: https://architizer.com/blog/the-largest-landscape-the-grid-ofamerican-agriculture/ [Accessed 19.04.2017] Figure 36: Ungers, O.M., Koolhaas, R., Kollhoff, H., Ovaska, A., Riemann, P. (1977): The City within the City - Berlin as a Green Archipelago. [image]. Available from: https://www.academia. edu/4837551/T_H_E_P_O_S_S_I_B_I_L_I_T_Y_OF_A_N_A_B_S_O_L [Accessed 07.02.2017] Figure 37: Allen, S. (1985): Diagrams of field conditions. [image]. Available from: https://peterhudac.files.wordpress.com/2013/04/ diagramy-stan-allen.jpg [Accessed 19.04.2017] Figure 38: Le Va, B. (1971): Extended vertex meetings. [image]. Available from: http://www.walkerart.org/collections/publications/artexpanded/barry-le-va/ [Accessed 19.04.2017] Figure 39: Benglis, L. (1969): Quartered meteor. [image]. Available from: http://www.cheimread.com/exhibitions/2007-06-21_circa-70lynda-benglis-and-louise-bourgeois [Accessed 19.04.2017] Figure 40: Saret, A. (1980): Infinity cluster with red and dark green. [image]. Available from: http://www.jamescohan.com/ exhibitions/2009-01-16_shaping-space/artworks/10 [Accessed 19.04.2017]
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ABSTRACT
The present conditions we live in are characterized by mobility, by the increasingly present voice of globalization, urging a shift towards permeable boundaries, cosmopolitanism and free movement of capital, but also by the presence of fixed physical constructs and their territorial imprint. We are now witnessing the rise of a modern nomad, defined not by what they carry, but by what they leave behind. The flexibility and movement — both social and spatial — practiced by nomads are strategies for dealing with the present’s continuous instability. This study deals with nomadology and domesticity, as two central registers of the present human condition, investigating the possibility to apply them in architecture and generate spatial constructs able to reflect the new changing living patterns. In order to give nomadology a spatial determination, this thesis uses the digital nomadic movement and the mobile lifestyles of a new type of human assemblage as a grounding arena. The study of domesticity, as a recurring element through the chapters of this paper plugs into the home and its territorial significance as the evident element through which nomadology emerges. Deleuze and Guattari’s ‘counter-philosophy’ of nomadology is the construct used in the context of architecture, questioning the contemporary nature of the human subject and suggesting strategies to re-think the spatial definition of an architecture which responds to new forms of belonging and belongings, to our biological and psychological needs, as well as to our understanding of territorial ownership. A series of illustrations from architecture as well as cultural and artistic sources are injected to support and contextualize the theoretical arguments: the architectural avant-garde of the ‘60s, Rahm’s microsensible architecture, as well as examples of the author’s own work. The text also navigates the precedent of peculiar Roma nomadism practices and their mobility, bearing reference to Lucy Orta’s work. London is used as the ground for nomadology and domesticity as territory for speculation connected to the design project undertaken in studio.
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INTRODUCTION
This thesis opens up debate into the spatiality of an architecture of nomadology, grounded in the context of the digital nomadic movement, centred around the digital nomad as a new type of human assemblage. Nomadology has been introduced by Deleuze and Guattari in Mille Plateaux, referring among other studies to the ways of thinking and living as a nomad. The paper is structured in three main chapters, focused on the key constructs of nomadology: the Subject – the Deleuzian digital nomad, the Object – the deconstructed home which is no longer fixed and unitary, but spilled at urban scale and making the most out of circumstance, and the Territory – the hybrid soft tissue whose spatial conditions shape the nomad’s way of being in transit. The reflection on contemporary domesticity recurs through all chapters, using the home as a visual, evident element through which nomadology emerges and spatializes. Beside being a rhetorical organization, the complex interconnection of the subject, the object and the territory is illustrative of the emerging condition of belonging, questioning notions of residence, spatial permanence and identity. William Mitchell states that the burst of the “dot-com bubble” announced the interweaving between physical space and cyberspace (2003, p.129). Through the interconnectivity between wireless communication, bodies, places, and devices, a new, sophisticated spatial definition is established. Digitalism permeates the reality and this connectivity creates a new subjectivity – the digital nomad. The philosophical implications of this phenomena are supported through the reflections of Zygmunt Bauman in Liquid Modernity, whilst questioning a potential direction in architecture following Mario Carpo’s Digital Turn in Architecture. The emergence of the new nomad is portrayed through Deleuzian lenses, and not as a romanticized image of actual nomadic people, for example Roma communities. The reference of this group in the text is used as an inspirational testament of a community’s ability to survive and adapt to uncertainty and lack of territorial significance, which challenges domesticity, one of the most fundamental disciplines in architecture,
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questioning our contemporary relationship with the home and its current fixity. The house is an enclosure which shelters one from the weather and provides privacy and a sense of belonging. It is supplied by networks: the electrical network, the air network and the information ones. Over time, homes have acquired more and more sophisticated networks. Prior to the Industrial Revolution, most homes only had their envelope and structure. The Industrial Revolution brought water, energy, heating and ventilation supplies, which meant that homes acquired a kind of mechanical physiology. Nowadays, along with the information networks, homes also acquire a kind of nervous system, through the addition of digital intelligence. The house has come a long way from its fundamental functions, its evolution being tightly linked to the human’s transcendence of his own primal nature. According to Mitchell, the development of wireless technology has resulted in the spread of networks and the scaling down of the apparatuses for transmission and reception. Today’s hand-held devices have become extensions of our physical bodies, altering our dynamics with the environment. A dramatic new urban territory is established, one that is defined less by boundaries and more by the reach of our networks. Conducted as a conceptual and philosophical study, this thesis reflects upon a wide range of secondary sources, mostly from humanistic disciplines, as well as through illustrations from architecture and arts projects. Such theoretical relations are fundamentally based upon the Deleuzian nomadology, the Heideggerian dwelling, the Hegellian bad infinity, the Kantian transcendence, Foucault’s reflections on territorial governance, as well as Fuller and McLuhan’s ideas of network culture and Debord’s situationism. These integrated and multisite theoretical reflections are decoded through examples from architecture, spanning the last six decades. Illustrations depicting the ‘60s avant-gardist visions represented by Archigram and Yona Friedman, the exuberant Dutch postmodernism of Rem Koolhaas, as well as the physiological architecture of Philippe Rahm are injected in the text, providing substance for the investigation of new spatial topologies. The thesis is connected with the author’s own speculative work – stills from experimental films, concept drawings and diagrammatic studies – as an attempt to find an architectural register responsive to current
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nomadic trends. Through the interweaving of illustration and critical analysis, this paper speculates on potential stylistic languages and hybrid instruments which may be used by the post-modern designer to define a spatial register which is able to reflect the contemporary living patterns. The study does not seek to propose an end product, nor definite theoretical assemblages, but a description of a strategy, providing new ways for designers to engage with the contemporary changing realities of domesticity and nomadology.
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The Subject Deleuzian digital nomad
1 The subject | Deleuzian digital nomad “The Soul is a simple substance. Its identity, as intellectual substance, gives the conception of personality. Its relation to objects in space gives us the conception of connection with bodies.” — Kant, 1781
A new ontological orientation defines the contemporary nomad – that of the networked, transcendent individual. Following Kantian philosophy, the nomad is a sovereign individual subject, transcendental as a purely philosophical conception, still residing in the thinking person, the cogito. Nomad thought was not new in philosophical explorations. It was at the core of Spinoza’s ethics, Nietzsche’s gay science, Artaud’s crowned anarchy, Foucault’s outside thought, however the term nomadology has been coined through translation from Deleuze and Guattari’s nomadologie, and it designates not only the behavior of nomadic people, but also the way of thinking as a nomad, a “practice and a knowledge, potentially present in relation to any event, potentially effective in relation to any struggle for survival” (Benterrak, Muecke & Roe, p.241). Deleuze and Guattari describe nomadic trajectories through images of vectorial movements rather than by points or nodes. Cresswell writes that while sedentary people use roads to “parcel out a closed space to people”, nomadic trajectories “distribute people in open space” (2006, p.49). The author goes on to imagine the desert as the metaphorical space of the nomad (Fig.1), a “curiously isotropic space” (Ibid.), across which the nomad shifts, making the most out of circumstance.
Figure 1. The metaphorical space of the nomad
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[1] The Digital Revolution is an on-going process which has begun in the 1950s, which refers to the shift from mechanical and analogue to digital electronics, as well as the sweeping changes brought about by computing and communication technology in the second half of the 20th century. The Digital Revolution has marked the emergence of the Information Age. [2] “A cyborg is a hybrid creature, composed of organism and machine. But, cyborgs are compounded of special kinds of machines and special kinds of organisms appropriate to the late twentieth century. Cyborgs are post-Second World War hybrid entities made of, first, ourselves and other organic creatures in our unchosen “high-technological” guise as information systems, texts, and ergonomically controlled labouring, desiring, and reproducing systems. The second essential ingredient in cyborgs is machines in their guise, also, as communications systems, texts, and self-acting, ergonomically designed apparatuses. “
Deleuze defines the nomad as a transcendent state of being, virtual and presupposed, with a tendency towards de-territorialisation, and not through the romanticized image of actual nomadic communities, such as the Bedouins, the groups of hunter-gatherers or the traveller Roma gipsies. However, more recently, Sloterdijk argues that the mythicized presence of these nomadic people has “migrated out of nature into our own mental world, our own metaphorical and allegorical worlds” (Sloterdijk cited in Elden, 2012, p.67). The digital revolution[1] renders possible a new form of nomadism – one that is defined not only by geographical non-fixity, but also by the deployment of complex, well-integrated fluid data compositions at a global scale. Leonard Kleinrock defines this infrastructure as “the system support needed to provide a rich set of computing and communication capabilities and services to nomads as they move from place to place in a way that is transparent, integrated, convenient, and adaptive” (Kleinrock, 2001). This requires “independence of location, motion, computing platform, communication device, and communication bandwidth, along with general availability of access to remote files, systems and services” (Ibid.). Cyborg[2] nomads [the term cyborg has a connotative meaning in the text] are fundamentally different from other traditional forms of nomads, who have adapted to a lifestyle of mobility due to the sparse distribution of food, water and other resources necessary for survival. The economic, cultural and social development of the bands of pastoral nomads (Fig.2), the ancient hunter-gatherers (Fig.4) or the gipsy travellers (Fig.3) depended on the alternation of movement and temporary sedentarisation on sites which allowed for the accumulation of food surpluses or their trade activities.
(Gandy, 2005, p.27).
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Figure 2. Pastoral nomad [web, year unknown]
Figure 3. 21st Century Gipsies [McKell, 1992]
Figure 4. Hunter gatherers in Tanzania [web, year unknown]
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[3] Wandering was developed into a way of life by the Romantics through the Wandervogel movement in the early 20th century. [4] The Situationist International [SI] is a Paris-based group formed in 1957, of avant-garde artists, political theorists and intellectuals. Their foundation was derived from Marxists ideologies and the avant-garde of the 20th century, particularly Dada and Surrealism. [5] Fifteen short stories about Irish middle class, wrote in a Naturalist approach, focusing on the idea of the epiphany
– Joyce’s characters
experience moments of life changing self-illumination.
Due to the spread of digital technologies on a global scale, today’s sites of production and consumption are no longer associated with fixed geographical locations, which liberates one from the traditional reliance on the architectural program and its physical settings. With the cancellation of distance and physical location, the narratives of the footloose individuals interweave to generate a fabric of simultaneous, interconnected subjectivities, which are superimposed on the physical urban tissue in real time. The differential mobility of traditional nomadic groups was a case of physical capacity. However, in the context of digital nomadism, it is a matter of having access to networks, and the consequences of this differentiation are economic. The fluid collections of wanderers constitute a new typology of human assemblage, one that demands designers to radically rethink what instruments should be used for the representation of their new dynamic condition. The term wandering[3] is used to refer to the situationist[4] practice of dérive [drifting in french] (Fig.5), in which the nomad navigates the territory in the modern sense, at will, without being driven by external urgency. James Joyce’s early 20th century Dubliners[5] forms a depiction of this phenomenon, constructed mostly through the everyday activities of walking, using the tramcars or having public encounters in various public spaces. Through his narratives, Joyce presents Dublin as a site of intricately linked relationships, complex threads of consciousness, motives and desires. However, the spread of miniaturized, portable electronics supersedes this embryonic vision – through the use of their smartphones, today’s Dubliners form their own electronically propagated narratives, interlocked in an intricate, recursive embrace.
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Figure 5. Page from ‘Fin de Copenhague’ [Situationism, 1957]
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[6] Sloterdijk used the neologism Überhumanismus in the title of his 2000 lecture
Through his part-documentary and part cinematic art experimental film Man with a Movie Camera (Fig.6), Dziga Vertov sought to represent an experimentation in cinematic communication, based on Marxist ideologies and rooted in the realities of the Soviet world. Vertov constructs fast-paced montages to suggest a sense of frantic movement, expressive of the new speed of perception and creation introduced by the apparition of the movie camera. His imagery of factories and heavy machinery is suggestive for the shift from the consumption of goods to the consumption of image, anticipating the emerging culture of mass–media and digitalization. Much like the movie camera, the wide spreading of the wireless networks is shaping the new performance of the nomad, whose presence is now marked, atmospherically, by glowing clusters of light, heat and electromagnetic vibrations (Fig.7). The reciprocity between movement and communication means that the nomad, the habitat, as well as the territorial formation, are no longer contained within rigid frontiers, nor bound by non–permeable skins. We are all tied together by our networks – both materially and morally, like foams, “loosely structured, whose bubbles are connected, but separate” (Sloterdijk III 48-51 cited in Elden, 2013). Sloterdijk’s metaphor of the “foam city” draws on the Heideggerian concept of connected isolation (S III 255 cited in Elden, 2013). No longer limited by physical boundaries, but by the reach of networks, the nomad becomes a “homo protheticus, who is supposed to say a wildly joyful Yes to everything that says No to the ‘individuality’ of ‘individuals’”(Sloterdijk, 1988, p.446). This hyperhumanism[6] (Fig.8) does not mean that the nomad is a finished product, but rather one that is in perpetual evolution. Much like the Italian Renaissance humanists used studies of Greek and Roman classics to create a new type of human being, hyper–humanists now use the physical and digital ramifications of the human body to portray what Haraway has defined as a hybrid creature, “composed of organism and machine” (1984, p.151). Although the spread of wireless linkage has led, metaphorically speaking, to the death of distance, this does not imply that the importance of local cultures and genius loci is cancelled, nor the limitation to consumer service areas, such as the convenience of being able to make free international calls, withdrawing money from any ATM, or surfing the web remotely. Instead, it refers to the growth
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Figure 6. Film stills from Dziga Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera, 1929, accessed Dec 2nd, 2016
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Figure 7. Glowing clusters of light, heat and electromagnetic vibrations
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Figure 8. Artistic illustration of Gandy’s concept of hyper-humanism
Orta argues that the Roma lifestyle resembles the notion of temporariness, characteristic to Postfordist societies, whose four key concepts were cited by Italian political thinker Paulo Virno, in Grammar of the Multitude: opportunism, cynicism, chatting and curiosity. The author’s argument is that the study of nomadic cultures, exemplified through the Roma gipsies, offers the possibility to discern the allegory of a recurrent human condition, which we may no longer be able to understand and process.
[7]
of a global system based on networked interdependency, which acts as a social aggregate injected in new territorial patterns. Whilst in traditional terms, architects have been concerned with the aesthetics of the envelope and the sensorial qualities of its immediate environment, there is a fundamental urgency for the development of an architectural register which embodies the atmospheric qualities of the spaces we encounter. For example, Mark Wigley defines atmosphere as a “sensuous emission of sound, light, heat, smell and moisture; a swirling climate of intangible effects generated around a stationery object” (1998, p.18) (Fig.9). The paradox of the present society is that although we dream of nomadism and we operate within a system which declares itself global, the human tendency to seek refuge in settled micro–units is wide spread. Through their narrative, the Roma[7] communities are representative of the paradigm of those who wish to preserve
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Figure 9. The swirling climate of intangible effects generated around a capsule for nomadic occupation
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their autonomy, without having to adhere to a particular society. The increasing gentrification of our historic cities, as well as marginalization and exclusion have pushed the Roma people to occupy the interstitial spaces of our cities, which have not yet been under the gaze of the Gaje [non–Roma]. Territorial formations such as the 8th district of Budapest or the Grande Raccordo Anulare in Rome have become ‘home’ to these people. Often referred to as non– placeable, indefinable and destabilising communities, the Roma had to adapt to a lifestyle of mobility, change and social exclusion outside of the urban, productive environments. Contrary to the conventions of most populist systems, the Roma occupy a deeply subversive position, able to overturn pre-conceived ideas about belonging and non-belonging, idea which has been elaborated by Agamben in The Coming Community and referred to as “belonging without belonging” (1993, p.68). Along the same lines, the challenge in our present society is to develop a system which is able to achieve unity without blurring, and individualism without discriminatory divisions. The value of nomadology and the philosophical aspects of belonging have been broadly debated by the enlightened figures of Deleuze, Guattari, Rosi Braidotti, as well as Irit Rogoff, and previously, by the followers of the Situationists, to which the idea of freedom and the opposition of the capitalist production system were central. Building upon Foucault’s theories of power and the Deleuzian nomadology, Braidotti defines the nomad subject within the broader context of post–structuralist feminist theory, inserting the idea of sexual difference into the core of her analysis. Her work is an invigorating discourse for the study of identity as a transcendental, non-fixed category and a critique of the hegemonic structures of nomadic subjectivity. The re–enaction of a genuine spirit of adventure, characteristic to Homo Ludens[8], had superseded the accumulation of goods and economic survival mechanisms. Given the planetary transience which defines the contemporary condition of the nomad, the history of the Roma people is an inspirational testament of a community’s ability to survive uncertainty and lack of territorial significance, as well as their ability to challenge some of the most entrenched theoretical foundations of Western civilisation. Although the rise of the modern era meant the consistent assault of those settled against the nomads and their mobile lifestyle (McLaughlin cited in Bauman, 2000), the current stage of
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[8] Johan Huizinga talks about Ludens [playing in latin] and the central role of the play element in the human culture. Drawing upon Plato, Huizinga defines play through five key characteristics: free, not “ordinary”, distinct from “ordinary” life as to locality and duration, it creates order, and it has no material interest.
modernity witnesses a revenge of nomadism over fixed territorial preoccupations, empowering the ex–territorial elite with hitherto strength and dominance over the sedentary. Max Weber asserts one’s tendency to keep moving due to a “delay of gratification” (Weber cited in Bauman, 2000, p.28). However, Bauman argues that our contemporary condition is defined by mobility at unprecedented speed, and that being modern means being in “a state of constant transgression” (Bauman, 2000, p.28). The process of individualization is explained by Bauman as a shift in identity from a “given” into a “task”, which invests one with the responsibility to self–constitute, through the performance of their task and accepting its consequences (Bauman, 2006, p.32). This argument inspired the search for a new term available to describe the condition of the contemporary nomad, as depicted in the subtitle of the thesis A study of the spatial definition of hybrid constructs for the new novads. The word novad, derived from the latin novaturient, is coined to describe an individual who adheres to a lifestyle of transience due to a desire to seek powerful change in their life, behaviour or situation, which is fundamentally different from the traditional form of nomadism, which developed as a necessity to access scarce, sparsely distributed resources.
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The Object Deconstructed home
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2 The object | Deconstructed home “That’s all you need in life: a little place for your stuff. That’s all your house is — a place to keep your stuff. If you didn’t have so much stuff, you wouldn’t need a house. You could just walk around all the time. A house is just a pile of stuff with a cover on it.” — George Carlin, 1981
The intimate relationship between the nomad and the space inhabited is threaded on an organic exchange of information, where the needs of the nomad transform the surrounding spaces, which in turn shape the subjective experiences of their originator — one cannot exist without the other. The urge to understand the home then flows naturally from this context, investigated in this chapter through the lens of four key theoretical constructs: the domestic realm, the act of dwelling, the house and the homeliness. The domestic realm is understood as “a primary site at which modernity is manufactured and made manifest” (Marangoly George, 1998, p.3), concerning the biological, psychological and social performances of the nomad in space. The definition of the act of dwelling is based upon MerleauPonty’s habiter, which reflects one’s intimate relationship with the home and with the world as a whole, in space and time. The house is seen as the realm of shelter and protection, “the human being’s first world” (Bachelard, 1957, p.39). The fact that man lives in the house is the departure point from which man can then be at home in the world and to dwell in it. Homeliness means the suitability for dwelling [from German Wohnlichkeit]. The chapter questions the relevance of these theoretical constructs in relation to the modern nomads and their new mode of dwelling in time and space. The new, digitally infused, soft urban tissue is home to a radically different human being – the digital nomad, wandering through fragmented habitats and leaving traces of temporary dwelling behind.
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In The Human Condition (1958), Hannah Arendt makes a clear distinction between work, labour and action and their meanings throughout Western history. Labour is defined as cyclical set of activities taken in order to satisfy biological necessities and for reproduction, following Marx’s assertion that man is animal laborans. On the other hand, work is a process defined by a beginning and an end, which leaves behind a durable object, which is not only for consumption, such as a piece of art. The third type of activity, action includes speech and movement, and it is the means through which individuality is made possible and human relationships are shaped.
[9]
[10] The 1960s witnessed a wave of utopian visions focused on mobility and flexibility - Constant Nieuwenhuys (Fig.12), Yona Friedman (Fig.10), Archigram (Fig.11), Archizoom, Superstudio, Gruppo Strum. Their works influenced the perception of architecture as a form of political, cultural and social critique.
Unlike the Vitruvian man, enclosed within a single perfect circle, the new subject is a spatial and temporally indeterminate entity, “in a mutual recursive process that continually engages their fluid, permeable boundaries and endless ramifying networks” (Mitchell, 2003, p.38). The term digitalism, derived from Nicholas Negroponte’s book Being Digital in 1995, describes the new condition of living with digital media technologies which have permeated our reality. This condition alters our everyday lifestyles, including the dissociation of work[9] from fixed addresses, which means that our urban environments no longer require pre-programmed, specialized sites, but flexible, adaptable territorial formations that can fulfil functions as and when required. This wave of change blurs the boundaries between work and leisure, in a process from which the home emerges as a territory which is able to host intertwined functionalities. By imagining an era when one may have total freedom and control over the environment, the ‘60s[10] preoccupation was with an architectural language which combined service mega-structures with plug-in and disposable architectural elements that could be assembled by users themselves. It wasn’t until Marcuse exposed the illusory permissive freedom of the elevated mega-structure as a mere choice of predetermined spaces (Riley, 2002), that the nomadism’s shift in focus really began – from issues of habitation to the changeable nature of the architectural language – connecting with the Deleuzian reflections on language and style through the example of Kafka as “a gypsy of his own language” (Deleuze, 1986, p.19). Although these schemes were intended as expressions of flexibility and freedom of choice (Fig.10-12), their implied largescale physical reconfigurations in response to changing needs has remained an inefficient and expensive process. Although promising and innovative, physical reconfigurability was not considered an appropriate response to the scarcity of occupiable space, nor to the problems of space coordination and division. The overlaying of electronically mediated resource fields on the contemporary urban territory offers a release from traditional spatial practices, opening up to what Jonathan Hill describes as a “formless phenomenon” that deals with “actions rather than forms” (2006, p.3). This concept of immateriality coincides with the Deleuzian milieu, which means being in the middle of something. Immateriality does not imply an absence of shape, but the co-existence of the
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Figure 10. Ville Spatiale [Friedman, 1959]
Figure 11. The Plug-in City [Cook, 1964]
Figure 12. New Babylon [Nieuwenhuys, 1959-1974]
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architectural form and the ambiental in the constellation of forces which constitute home. One of the most notable contemporary advocates of an architecture of mobility is Bernard Tschumi, who creates an inter–textual architecture, which is constantly re–creating its conditions of use, demonstrating that the making of architecture is a productive action, capable to re–configure and provoke further thought. Tschumi refers to works of architecture as choreographic acts, arguing that 20 to 30 percent of a building is transit space, and thus movement is more critical than the envelope, which is usually the focal point of architects. Resonating with the Situationist thought, Tschumi views architecture as the production of vectors, and not of immobile edifices, proposing narratives populated by multiple stories which interweave to create landscapes of collective memory. His projects address architectural narratives in a non–linear fashion, proposing an architecture in constant reconfiguration, centred on the creation of conditions for people to move and meet. Parc de la Villette in Paris (Fig.13) was designed with a vision built upon Derrida’s deconstruction principles – Tschumi proposed a system of points and lines, of juxtapositions and superimpositions which provide a logic of mobility and flow, without rendering the composition as closed. “Physical planning, like anything else, should consist at most of setting up frameworks for decision, within which as much objective information as possible can be fitted” (Hughes and Sadler, 2013, p.442). This explains why the ‘60s Anglo–American vision of the mega–structure was surpassed by the informational infrastructure for dynamic decision making, which Mitchell later explained as “responsive software beats reconfigurable hardware” (Mitchell, 2004, p.166). The concept of non-predictive, self-organizing systems has been of interest to Charles Jencks, who employs aspects of mathematical definition in the formulation of his theories on the animated behaviour of matter. Jencks compares the unpredictability of the spatial system to non–linear mathematical functions, which, he argues, endows it with a kind of free will. His study of self–organizing systems is complemented by a review of several ‘non–linear’ buildings, representative of an architecture based on emergent conditions of
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Figure 13. Parc de la Villette [Tschumi, 1982-1998]
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life, such as Gehry’s Guggenheim Bilbao (Fig.14) and Neil Denari’s Vertical Smoothhouse (Fig.15). Not only should the new spatio–temporal territories allow for social interconnectivity, but they should also be designed in such way to allow for subjective individualism to unfold. Alberti refers to Narcissus in his treatise Della Pittura (1436) and his “image reflected in the water is an exact copy of himself on a flat surface”, hinting at a transcendental architecture constructed as a “mirror of the psyche” (Alberti cited in Blunt, 1963), where the corporeal, the extra–corporeal and the temporal dimensions meet. The study of cyberspace has become relevant in relation to the questioning of fundamental issues about place and its relevance in today’s urban contexts. As anticipated by Buckminster Fuller, John Cage and Marshall McLuhan, the focus has now moved from form to the dynamics between forms, and between the forms and the users. Reinforcing this statement, Carpo assigns a new symbolic role to the new architecture – that of making the invisible visible (Fig.16), “not by the formal expression of the function or shape of these invisible networks, but as an essential part of their function” (2013, p.52). According to Carpo, a phenomenological approach would imply that the reduction of the urban tissue to its purely programmatic, utilitarian functions should be replaced with experiential subjectivity, one that valorizes the performative nature of architecture and the multi–layered individual experience of the subject (Fig.17). Sloterdijk argues in favour of a strategy that “reintegrates on an existential and embodied level our lived being in the world” (Sloterdijk cited in Elden, 2012). Following his vision, the home equips the nomad with a set of tools in the form of envelopes and self–animated spaces (Fig.18), which enable the formatting of their world, into a place where they can “thrive in the hothouse of their autogenic atmosphere” (Ibid.). At the other end of the spectrum, entering a period of globalization and indefinite exploration implies the production of multiple “life-worlds and micro climates which communicate frantically” (Ibid., p.141). This gives birth to a new type of domestic definition, where space is the creature and the creator at the same time, where the act of constructing space becomes an edifice of a variety of creative experiences – of the subject and the cosmos, and the focus is on what is “possible to construct and breathe in” (Ibid., p.143).
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Figure 14. Guggenheim Museum [Gehry, 1997]
Figure 15. Vertical Smoothhouse [Denari, 1997]
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WiFi hotspot location
WiFi signal spread
WiFi fields interference
Figure 16. Aesthetic study of a spatial organising system through mapping WiFi hotspots
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Figure 17. User generated thermal fields which manifest in colour gradients
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loading parameter
texture
cloudy sky
passage
glazing
permeable boundary
cell
solid
settings
light vegetation
temperature
Figure 18. The nomad’s set of tools and self-animated spaces
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Given that this paper questions the very nature of the nomad as a bodily construct, as well as its relationship with the home and the environment, one may trace back the origins of architectural constructs, which has emerged as a response to the human biological necessity for thermal comfort, which later became the home. Décosterd & Rahm’s work calls for an integrated vision of the human organism into an architecture that is attentive to the micro– sensibility of the corporeal body in relation to the constructed extra– corporeality. The work of Décosterd & Rahm was inspired by Hegel’s aesthetics, which describes architecture as a “simple reflection of the mind” (Décosterd & Rahm, 2002, p.196). Their work revolves around the concept of “fluctuating central state” (Vincent, 1986 cited in Décosterd & Rahm, 2002, p.215), proposing an extra–corporeal architecture that acts upon, and is gently transformed simultaneously by the corporeal landscape. Physiological parameters such as the production of melatonin, dopamine and circadian rhythms are the core of Décosterd & Rahm’s work, who views architecture as an experimental method that infiltrates into the micro–scale of human vegetative functions (Fig 19-20). The i-weather.org installation is an experimental project which emerged from the development of the network-based application i-weather (Fig.21), as a regulator of the interface between the extra– corporeal and the corporeal, which acts upon the sensory channels that occupy the “frontier territories of the body” (Vincent, 2002, p.48). i-weather creates a virtual climate specific to the web, which establishes “chemical bonds between the machine and the human body”, offering an artificial circadian rhythm which is synchronised with the human endocrine system (Fig. 22). As we witness the dissolution of architecture into ethereal digitalism, one may argue in favour of Erik Adigard’s vision of a chemical future, which has been imagined by modernist architects as an invisible architecture defined only by its atmospheric qualities, the “ritual, experience, code, and effect of architecture itself” (Betsky, 2002, p.50). Rahm’s work comes to reinforce Mitchell’s description of buildings as “loading docks for bits” (Mitchell, 1995, p.103), envisioning that architecture will liquefy to the point where it becomes the mere projection of digital information in visual, auditory or tactile form, as well as the conversion of bodily actions.
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Figure 19. Heat transfer [Rahm, 2012]
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Figure 20. Neuro-vegetative exchanges [Rahm, 2010]
Figure 21. i-weather app interface [i-weather, DĂŠcosterd & Rahm & fabric | ch, 2001]
melatonin rate - 10%
melatonin rate - 30%
melatonin rate - 70%
Figure 22. Artificial circadian rhythms synchronised to match the inner cycle of the hormonal and endocrine system [i-weather, DĂŠcosterd & Rahm & fabric | ch, 2001]
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The Hormonorium is an installation for a de–contextualized public space, based on blurring the boundaries between physical space and the biological organism. With an alpine–like climate and UV lights, it operates at an intra–functional level, stimulating the body physiologically, which provokes thought into developing models of physio–chemical space (Fig.23-24). James Turell argues that the very limitation of our retina to perceive the whole spectrum of light should make us re–think our pre– supposed perceptions of space and how it ought to be designed (Fig.25). Décosterd & Rahm go beyond the canonical modernist brand of utopia, which Henry-Russell Hitchcock and Philip Johnson had made most famous, as an architecture that is generic, functional and liberated from everything that is unnecessary (Hitchcock, 1977). In a world characterised less and less by material and governed more and more by question of code and mobility, the rules of engagement with spatio–temporal territory are shifting. In this sense, Décosterd & Rahm’s use of bytes, atoms and scents replaces the modernist grid, adding another depth to the architectural syntax through the use of elementary, sensory materials. This ‘naturalist’ approach invites one to reconsider the interface between one’s being and the exterior environment on a more profound level. Rahm’s work designates the body as the only viable “ecological outlet” (Tortosa, 2012, p.63), where the transfers between the physic and the psyche happen: “We never perceive the world in its reality, but only the impact of physical forces on our sensory receptors” (Kilpatrick, 1961). Such examples serve as a humbling reminder of the fundamental biochemical composition of the nomad, which cannot be overwritten. The study of mobility is hence central to our understanding of what makes one a nomad. Since mobility is a fundamental geographical attribute of our current condition, Cresswell argues that its study is critical in the formulation of new social and spatial constructs which are anchored in our hybrid, dynamic routes, and no longer in our roots. Borrowing from philosophy and social theory, the author anticipates the “end of sedentarism and the rise of foundation– less nomadism” (Cresswell, 2006, p.1) The development of an architectural and urban language which responds to the complex dynamics associated with nomadic mobility involves not only the study of the physical bodies moving through material territories
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Figure 23. The Hormonorium [Rahm, 2002]
Figure 24. The Hormonorium system [Rahm, 2002]
Figure 25. Human, animal and vegetal physiological perception based on wavelengths [Rahm, 2015]
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but also the “categorical figures moving through representational spaces” (Delaney, 1999 cited in Cresswell, 2006, p.4) (Fig.26), connecting with the Deleuzian definition of the nomad as a “latent state of being, virtual and presupposed” (Buchanan, 2010, p.345). According to Kantian philosophy, time and space are the most basic forms of classification, around which life revolves. Through delineations, mapping and geometry, space has been classified, divided and organised, whereas time has been standardized as clock time. These processes have removed time and space from the field of immediate experience and relocated, instead, in the world of abstraction. Subject to the demands of trade and capital, as well as to various forms of patriarchy, colonialism and imperialism, time and space have lost their social meaning. The emergence of the new nomadism has marked the end of this. The home has lost its expression of statutorily attributes, no longer bearing the literal and figurative meaning it had in medieval times. In feudal society, territory had a great significance, and mobility was considered a luxury. Inferior social classes were referred to as adscripti glebae [Latin for bound to the soil], reinforcing that their right to move was granted only by their masters. Bauman argues that the pre–modern world was characterised by security and stability, and that mobility meant living outside obligations of place, roots and duties; the mobility of the contemporary nomad does not relate to that any longer. The mercantile capitalism of the sixteenth century has brought with it the disconnection from the traditional forms of order which had tied societies together for many centuries, and the association of mobility with trade meant that the old system was made inoperable. The new “masterless men” were “too listless and too numerous to be tamed and domesticated by the customary method of familiarization and incorporation” (Cresswell, 2006, p.12). The recognition of mobility as a human right slowly gave rise to the figure of the modern citizen who was able to move at will, and further, to the image of the tourist, through the extended voyages afforded by the well–to–do young men. In his research, Scott sought to “understand why the state has always seemed to be the enemy “of people who move around (1999, p.1), citing the experience of pastoralists, gypsies, homeless people, and runaway slaves. The author argues that the lack of geographical stability of these marginalized groups was seen as a threat to spatial legibility.
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Figure 26. Artistic illustration of categorical figures moving through representational spaces
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Adopting the Marxist notice about capitalist modernity – “all that is solid melts into air” (Marx, 1848, cited in Berman, 1982, p.1), Bernam writes that modern environments “cut across all boundaries of geography and ethnicity, of class and nationality, of religion and ideology” (1982, p.1), implying that modernity is one of indeterminacy and mobility, rather than one of certainty and fixity. Cresswell calls modernity “an obsessive march forwards”, through a series of places of arrival which are all nothing but non-privileged, “temporary stations” (2006, p.19). Liisa Malkki uses the term of “sedentarist metaphysics” (Malkki, cited in Cresswell, 2006, p.26) to explain the phenomenon of inscribing moral valences to the act of being fixed in space and place, which she argues through notions of identity rooted in the soil of home. Malkki argues that the process of rooting conceptions of culture and identity into place is so ingrained, that the consequences of a sedentarist metaphysics for mobile people are severe. Arguing in favour of sedentarist metaphysics translates as actively associating identity to the ownership of property and the belonging to a nation and a specific geographical place. Humanists also affirm that the concept of belonging to one place is crucial in our rapport with the outside world, as “to have roots in a place is to have a secure point from which to look out on the world, a significant spiritual and psychological attachment to somewhere in particular” (Relph, 1976, p.38). Bachelard also speaks of the home as a protective, persistent element which provides a deeper stability, “the man’s Resistance” (Bachelard, cited in Bollnow, 2008, p.128). However, the example of the Roma nomadic practices demonstrates that one’s identity does not necessarily imply belonging to a particular geographic place or owning the soil of the home. Although there have been several attempts to design settlements for the Roma communities, Candilis’ housing for gypsies on the outskirts of Avignon (Fig.27) reveals that there is a fundamental lack of understanding of the true essence of their culture and lifestyle: “The notion of ownership is entirely different in these people (...)The old trucks and carts in which they travelled became one with the houses during the winter (Fig.28). In the end, after 20 years without maintenance these buildings fell to ruins and were torn down” (Candilis, cited in Orta, 2010, p.14). This point highlight the critical requirement for the designer to understand the very essence of the emerging nomad, in order to
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Figure 27. Housing for gypsies in Avignon [Candilis, 1961]
Figure 28. Les roulottes tsiganes [web, unknown year]
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develop new strategies of spatial definition which can accommodate their particularities. Learning from their adaptability to vagueness, remix and mobility may prepare us for the unknown of what the post–capitalist society might bring. Against the norms of conventional society, humanity has always longed for the liberation associated with an on-the-go lifestyle, as well as for its symbolic meaning of challenging the traditional governance, which could also have given rise to the contemporary nomad. Following the settling of most traveller communities as a result of detrimental legislation, the requirement to provide ‘traveller’ sites has been cancelled — however, one can witness the inadvertent codifying of ad–hoc community structures into the design of living arrangements for the ‘settled’. This comes to reinforce the necessity to design versatile spatial constructs which enable the co–existence of the nomads as well as the settled. The emergence of nomadic lifestyles alters the dynamics between the subject and the traditional spatial organization of the home. The understanding of the nomad from an anthropological perspective is fundamental for the development of new topologies of domestic space which can provide security and a sense of homeliness without adhering to current prescribed definitions of the home and its architectural register. The nomad–space interdependency gives rise to the domestic realm as primary site of the nomad’s multifaceted existence. Scrutinizing the act of dwelling reveals insights into his relationship with the home and the world. The house is the realm of shelter and protection, the starting point of man being settled into the world, and so homeliness is effectively a gauge of its suitability as a companion in the nomad’s journey through the world. Boundaries are permeated — if man is defined fundamentally by his occupation, the nomad navigates space and time in a state of shapelessness. Simply reconfiguring the geometry of the space is not enough, as this merely scrapes the surface of the nomad’s new needs, rooted in the depth of functionality, coordination, and division brought by the dislocation of architecture in time and space. The process is thus twofold: on a micro level, the focus is shifting towards addressing the fundamental biochemical composition of the nomad, while on a macro level, the old paradigms of property ownership and social status are superseded; we are now witnessing a spilling of the home at urban scale, where old bonds break, spatial linkages dissolve and new types of domestic urban composition emerge (Fig.29).
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Figure 29. Illustration of the dissolution of the spatial linkages of a high-rise residential complex
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However, this does not imply that the contemporary architect is no longer required to design functional and comfortable domestic environments which satisfy human needs. The design of the new spatial constructs will be as much a matter of interface design and logical integrity of software overlays, as it is of floor plans and the physical integrity of structural frames.
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The Territory Hybrid soft tissue
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3 The territory | Hybrid soft tissue [11] Latin expression referring to a phenomenon which is indispensable, without any doubts.
The spatial evolution of the home as an interdependent construct in relation to the subject has, so far, described a linear trajectory, where primordial nomadic behaviours have progressively diluted into less mobile social structures that gave rise to an architecture constrained in space and time. As a social being, however, the human need for proximity reverses this trend in an ambitious attempt to remove barriers and connect. Mitchell argues that urban history has always been a struggle between the enclosure and the connection, and that eventually, the network won. Mumford associates this victory with the rise of capitalism – a new assemblage of economic forces that “favoured expansion and dispersal in every direction, from overseas colonization to the building of new industries” (1960). For emerging modern cities, this paradigm meant that “the demolition of their urban walls was both practical and symbolic” (Mumford, 1961, p.410), connecting with the Aurelian condition of limitlessness, brought about by capitalism. Cerdà’s argument is that this “vast swirling ocean of persons, things” (Cerdà, cited in Aureli, 2008, p.97) can no longer be contained within the territorial formations of the typical urbe, and that new forms of human habitat are emerging. The fact that our future living environments should be designed as functional hybrids of material and ambiental consistency has become a condition sine qua non[11]. Mitchell states that the emerging spatial formations will be implanted in specific physical structures, localized within particular territorial parameters, and served by transportation and utility infrastructures. These zones will be defined by vagueness, intersections and intermittencies, and their spread will not be contained within borders, fortifications or political division lines, but within and beyond boundless electro-magnetic vibrations. In relation to the tendency to disassociate space from identity, cultural theorist Iain Chambers refers to the modern airport as the ultimate expression of the postmodern world and its shift towards an
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existence within non-places: “With its shopping malls, restaurant, banks, post-offices, phones, bars, video games, television chairs and security guards, it is a miniaturised city. As a simulated metropolis it is inhabited by a community of modern nomads: a collective metaphor of cosmopolitan existence where the pleasure of travel is not only to arrive, but also not to be in any particular place” (Chambers, 1990, p.57). Perhaps Vitruvius’ principle of architectural decorum, explained as the relevance of form to status, or Ledoux’ architecture parlante – with buildings being erected as illustrations of restructured institution, architects must now contemplate the underlying principle of the digitally enhanced nomadic existence. It is now time to update Winston Churchill’ bon mot: “We make our buildings and our buildings make us” into “We make our networks and our networks make us” (Churchill, cited in Mitchell, 1995, p.49). Whilst travelling in medieval times was detrimental only in terms of comfort and convenience, the discovery of the steam and the internal combustion engines during the industrial revolution has marked the end of the wet–ware based equality. Power no longer means owning territory, but being able to break geographical boundaries, having access to dislocated resources and operating on principles of globalisation. Although the surpassing of feudalism did result in the dissociation between labour and territorial constraints, it did not take long until a new product of rational thought emerged and replaced the previous traditional order. This time, the appropriation of wealth to labour lead to the exploitation of the latter more ruthlessly than ever before: the heavy capitalism has brought forward an even stronger confinement between capital and labour, tied to each other by their mutual interdependency. The places of intersection between the two were pinned down at specific addresses and the enclosed walls of the factories united both capital and workers within the tight envelope of the common habitat, which soon became “the battlefield for trench warfare and the natural home for hopes and dreams” (Bauman, 2000, p.145) (Fig.30). Once the relationship between time and space had shifted from a predetermined and static entity into a continually mutable and dynamic process, the digital revolution came to cancel the gap
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Figure 30. Inside China’s factory [web, unknown year]
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between near and far, allowing for the navigation of space in ‘no time’. Within this endless field, space witnesses, for the first time, its loss of strategic value, as it can no longer be contained within closed borders or invested with any kind of statutorily meaning or financial attribute. The “fluid”, contemporary era is defined by free movement, dismissal of pre-programmed functionalities and elusiveness (Bauman, 2000, p.120), and social divisions are no longer based on the accumulation of wealth or territory, but instead they illustrate the lightness of liquid capital, which, detrimentally, poses a constant threat of uncertainty. The key ingredient of this multi-faceted change is the short-term principle, which came to replace the rigid, structuralist long-term mentality. Since flexibility has become the most desired quality, the labour market has witnessed the alteration of the definition of the job as we know it, promoting a work based on short–term contracts, rolling contracts or no contracts at all. The territory is no longer associated with work, and the nomad can navigate it freely. However, a less positive but immediate effect of this is a lack of built–in security and certainty over one’s working life, which has led to the rise of the ‘instant gratification’ culture, granting one access to whatever one may desire hie et nunc [Latin for here and now]. As an illustration (Fig.31), Venturi describes the landscape of Las Vegas as a spatial construct of mobility, which through its oversized signs and symbols responded to the necessity of information to be intelligible at speed, announcing the apparition of the order of motion. Today’s heterogeneous dynamics between time and space dissolve the hierarchical delineation between the subject, the machine and the trajectory, and this demands a re–thinking of the symbolism of the urban landscape. Bauman argues that although the evolution of modernity can be assessed using different markers, the difference that makes the difference lays in the changing dynamics between space and time. The uncertain, fluid state of our current condition (Fig.32) is compared to that of liquids, which “flow, spill, run out, splash, pour over, leak, flood, spray, drip, seep, ooze”, and our mobility is described as “light and weightless” (Bauman, 2000, p. 2). In order to develop a spatial register which reflects our new hybrid lifestyles, Elizabeth Sikiaridi argues that it is essential that we comprehend the
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Figure 31. Study of the relationship between space, scale, speed and symbol [Venturi, 1972]
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Figure 32. Stills from an experimental animation illustrating the liquid state of the contemporary city
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[12] Through his artwork, artist Jeremy Woods has investigated the possibility to use GPS technology not only an essential navigational tool, but also as a means of recording movements and lifestyles within the urban fabric. Similarly, credit card transactions and the use of Oyster cards for London Public Transport have become testaments of our choices, itineraries and economic stability.
networked cityscape as part of our contemporary urban condition. In the words of Vilém Flusser, “one must give up geographical notions and categories in favour of topological concepts (...) One should not think of the city as a geographically determined object (…) but as a bend, twist or a curvature in the inter-subjective field of relations.” (Flusser, 1994, p.53). This type of thinking in spatial relations and not in geometries, implies that instead of “thinking geometrically, the architect must design networks of equations” (Flusser, 1992 p.49). The interaction of media networks with physical places is present in our everyday lives – through the use of private mobile telephony, CCTV cameras, smart homes and cars and GPS navigation[12]. The emergence of the digital public domain is altering not only our physical environment but also the social, economic and cultural substratum of our societies. Through the overlap of physical objects and digital information flows, new hybrid zones are created, which are simultaneously digital and analogue, tangible and immaterial, operating both locally and globally. The exploration of the complex dynamics between traditional urbanism and the virtual space of communication networks is realised within the new interdisciplinary field of soft urbanism. The architect and the urban designer are confronted with the challenge to design interfaces between the abstract and the material, as well as hybrid communication spaces for social interaction. As a discipline, soft urbanism is the study of the soft aspects altering the urban sprawl and their interweaving in its finite material counterpart. Less about the design and systematization of material urban fabric, and more about the interconnectivity between the living environment and the invisible networks, soft urbanism demands the full attention of the designer, as a discipline which has the potential to respond to nomadic lifestyles. According to Carpo, the city is a place of the unexpected, of intensive linkages, which accommodates difference and fluid hierarchies, but which is developed through inadequate methodologies of control, separation and unitary thinking. This opens up a debate into the way urban planners and architects address the complex interplay of order and chaos, law and chance in the city, and whether the old technical rationality and the production of functional legible relationships are still of value in today’s heterogeneous collage city. The key instrument for traditional spatial organization, used both at urban and domestic
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scale is the normative programme, encompassing a detailed list of required spaces, specifying floor areas, technical requirements, and adjacency needs. The architecture of nomadology is no longer required to respond to such rigid programs, focusing instead on creating flexible, diverse habitats for nomadic occupation – an architectural register of continually reconfiguring clusters of spatial events which define the duration, intensity, and volatility of the social performance of the nomad. This does not mean there is no need to establish a strategy, but rather to handle the programmatic potential of architecture in a way that renders possible the variation of the design and the occupation of spatial systems “within a matrix of cultural values” (Friedman, cited in Lavin, 2005, p.134). The programme should not be used as a constraining force, as criticised by Colin Rowe in 1979, but rather it should allow for subjective narratives to unfold within programmatic functionalism. Starting from the ‘60s, architects have envisioned flexibility and adaptability through the provision of modular, demountable partitions, or plug–in apparatuses. Constant Nieuwenhuys’s New Babylon (1956) maquette (Fig.33), inspired by a gipsy camp, constructed as a flexible radial structure, employing lightweight elements and a system of movable partitions, was the first prototype of a design which allowed for user–driven spatial reconfigurability. This naive gesture at the time gave rise to the post–war’s fascination with the utopian mega–machine, which eschews functionalism and provides an ambience of transient atmospheric qualities within its constantly re–arranging body. However, the focus is now shifting towards constructing hybrid, electronically mediated environments, which, through the use of technology, are able to self–reconfigure according to the desires of the user and the activity taking place. Mitchell compares this phenomenon to the social practices of pre–capitalist times, such as those of Ancient Greek philosophers strolling with their students along the groves of the campus, or the Hellenistic Library of Alexandria which became an immobile focus of a unique community. His comparative analysis extends to reach our present times, where “the web is our Library of Alexandria, and mobile wireless connection allows scholars to stroll once more” (Mitchell, 2003, p.164).
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Figure 33. A project for a gypsies’ camp [Nieuwenhuys, 1957]
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Dynamically overlaid labels, commentaries, instructions and abstractions on the physical objects, people and places, referred to as Augmented Reality [AR] systems are examples of hybrid constructs through which digitalism adds a layer of meaning to an object, and the object helps to establish the meaning of the digital information. This adjoins a new layer of spatial definition, which allows for the assertion of facts and construction of fictions. The global grasp of digital networks has launched a new type of economy, one that allows the consumption of on–demand, instantly gratifying services. In this sense, it is no longer considered desirable to be in possession of material things, but rather to be able to access them remotely, as and when needed, through the use of abstract, digital specifications. Similarly, the use of AR technology seems to be targeted towards the achievement of financial goals (Fig.34), thus becoming a product of consumption. The rectilinear grid has been used as a territorial organizing device ever since 1573 in the Laws of the Indies, and later in 1765, when Thomas Jefferson used it to divide the open territories of the western United States, based on the one-mile Continental grid (Fig.35). Although this was intended to act as a symbol of democratic equality, its spatial order instigated land speculation and economic competition. Through their permeable boundaries and their interconnectedness with larger networks, metropolitan territories subdivided into archipelagos of ‘cities within cities’ could be seen as prototypes of field conditions. Contained within their porous borders, “variation and repetition – individual and collective – are held in delicate balance” (Carpo, 2013, p.71). The idea that architecture needs to accommodate non-linear, not bounded, “never–realised totalities” (Carpo, 2013, p.78) is shared with Rem Koolhaas, who believes in the importance of the design of the city’s decomposition (Fig.36). He argues that only a revolutionary erasing process and the establishment of “zones of freedom” (Koolhaas, 1990, p.34), a conceptual desert in which all the laws of architecture are suspended is able to mediate the tension between the utilitarian programme and the less predictable configurations of urban indeterminacy. Without denying the socio–economic and political underlying of the urban territory, Koolhaas manifests an interest in the definition of an “anonymous architecture” aiming to avoid pre-scribed closed systems, seeking instead “intersections, diagonals, lines of perspective” (Ibid.).
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Figure 34. Hyper-reality [Matsuda, 2014]
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Figure 35. The Land Ordinance of 1785 that would serve as the basis of the Public Land Survey System [Jefferson, 1785]
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Figure 36. The City within the City - Berlin as a Green Archipelago [Oswald Mathias Ungers, Rem Koolhaas, Hans Kollhoff, Arthur Ovaska, and Peter Riemann, 1977]
5.1 Oswald Mathias Ungers, Rem Koolhaas, Hans Kollhoff, Arthur Ovaska, and Peter Riemann, The City within the City—Berlin as a Green Archipelago, 1977. The city as a “project of crisis,” shrinking the city to its significant and irreducible parts.
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Kenzo Tange reflected in 1966 that “in modern civilized society, space is a communication field” and that “creating an architecture and a city may be called a process of making the communication network visible in space” (1970, p.240). By the early 1970s, designers and theoreticians came to agree that invisible digital networks require a physical network for their delivery, and the necessity to design the interface between virtual process and physical forms became crucial. Buckminster Fuller and Marshall McLuhan’s ground–breaking ideas on network culture and its potential to generate a revolution in urban spatial dogmas were highly inspired by the fluidity of electronic connections and its superiority over the immobility of solid urban form. The two gurus of the network culture believed that the dependency of the city on rigid, immobile infrastructures was not in line with the hyper–mobility of the emerging society, and proposed instead that an assemblage of dynamic infrastructural elements, able to react to social, economic and cultural fluctuations should replace the old, inflexible infrastructural networks. To Fuller and McLuhan, the city was a concentration of capital, people and form, within which networks of connections between nomadic forms of un–settlement should be established. Freed from traditional methods of spatial division, one might imagine rediscovering Baudelaire’s flânerie, the Situationist drift, or the Deleuzian dynamic genesis. Deleuze holds that space, time and ideas develop in “dynamic genesis”, starting with the sheer atomic exteriority of sensations to one another (what Deleuze [1994,70] will call mens momentanea) and moving to “virtual ideas” (Protevi, 2013, p. 180). In other words, digitalism offers us the opportunity to rearrange existing patterns that exist in the physical world, from micro to macro scale. The situationist preoccupation with the subjective choreography of the city, explained through notions of play and chance, opposed the domination of pure utilitarian structure, seeking instead to provide opportunities for the re–enactment of a spirit of adventure within the territorial psycho–geography. Through the introduction of personal desire as a mechanism of urban interactivity, the Situationist thought was formulated as an ironic response to modernist Utopia, proposing an alternative ethical and aesthetical reality, one that transcended the traditional limits of the discipline.
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Stan Allen has used the term of field conditions to define a mode of composition relevant to today’s modern theories of form, which has to do with the invisible tension between physical spatial indicators (Fig.37). He argues that the reality of today is better illustrated through the logics of flows and vectors, fluids and swarms, rather than rigid patterns and geometries, or Deconstructivist theories. In more technological terms, the shift from analogue to digital generates a shift in the composition of the new urban fabric, now associated more with the nature of non–linear dynamics and mathematical fluid theories. Similar to how the minimalist works of the ‘60s and ‘70s gave priority to architectural specificity and clarity over figurative character, the compositional principles defining today’s reality should seek to introduce technology, fluid, representations of the body in an informal manner, which is representative of the complex dynamics we operate in today. Barry Le Va’s sculptures, in the mid ‘60s, sought to record the process of making and displacement, focusing on the relationships formed rather than the final, overall form (Fig.38). Working with materials such as blown flour, the artist deliberately decided not to have full control over the resulting work of art, hinting at the ephemerality of materiality and form, which begin to function as a “delicate registration of process and change” (Carpo, 2013, p.69) His work, along with other artists such as Linda Benglis (Fig.39) and Alan Saret (Fig.40) provoke further investigation into how architecture can respond more fluidly to local difference while maintaining global stability. While painting and sculpture have always operated on the premise that relationships are critical, the field of architecture has not moved beyond Cubism, operating largely with the same compositional principles. Carpo stresses the urgency to use Stan Allen’s field conditions as an argument “for the recuperation of an existing territory”, and not as “a claim for novelty” (Carpo, 2013, p.70) (Fig.41-42).
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Figure 37. Diagrams of field conditions [Allen, 1985]
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Figure 38. Extended Vertex Meetings [Le Va, 1971]
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Figure 39. Quartered meteor [Benglis, 1969]
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Figure 40. Infinity cluster with red and dark green [Saret, 1980]
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Figure 41. Artistic illustration of the field conditions reflecting our dynamic condition
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Figure 42. Artistic illustration of the application of field conditions over the territory of London
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Closure
“time signifies the transitory nature of all earthly things” — R.M. Rilke, 1931
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This thesis has attempted to provide an alternative approach to thinking the domestic realm for nomadic occupation, based on phenomenological psychology. The rise of the modern nomad is accompanied by flavours of absolute freedom interwoven through fixed constraints, as spectral bars of light peek through cracks in the walls of the old order. The nomad is defined by his individuality and transcendence of precedent behaviours and thinking patterns. His interdependency with the space inhabited gives rise to the domestic realm as primary site of the nomad’s multifaceted existence. The subject is sheltered by the object in an intimate exchange of expressions and subjective experiences, which sees the home as the nomad’s window into the world, a window that shapes horizons and fields of view, while viewpoints shape it, defining its homeliness. With such ever shifting and fluidity of thought and movement, the barriers of space and time are pushed back to a state of mere illusions better suited for them, and so the territory stretches outwards for the nomad to navigate freely in his quest to bridge gaps and fulfil his intrinsic urges. Bollnow argues that although man remains unsheltered in time, lived space is the “friend of being” (Bachelard, cited in Bollnow, 2011, p.281). The question of temporality in human existence and the investigation of the subjective, experienced space have been at the core of philosophy over recent decades. However, the manifestation of the new nomadic condition in spatial, architectural terms has not been touched upon as much. Given the strong link between time and space, the urgency to develop an architectural register in close connection with the simultaneous research into the temporal dimension of the nomadic existence seems evident. In regards to the relationship of the subject with the object, the biological, psychological and social needs of the nomad still need to be satisfied through the act of dwelling in space. The senses of belonging and homeliness are still fundamental to the nomad’s existential stability and the need to provide comfortable and functional habitats remains. However, the understanding of belonging and the strength of one’s identity are no longer concerned with the rigidity of deceptively secure, closed-off spatial systems. The house, as a physical construct, remains the response to the nomad’s need for shelter and protection, however its objective architectural form is now surpassed by the subjective experience and the atmospheric
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qualities of the space. The separation between functions into serviced and servant areas, as well as the provision for intimate as well as public spaces is preserved, however the distribution of these ‘rooms’ in territory should be done in a non-linear fashion, utilising the redundancy of the urban fabric or through temporarily changing the use of existing spaces. This results in the fragmentation of the home as we know it into multiple volatile clusters, which challenges the current unitary, fixed planning of homes. The substance of these fragmented habitats for domestic occupation will be a combination of social networks, physical and digital structures, based on an ambiguous set of conditions, which harness the programmatic potential of architecture. The homeliness of these habitats will be a case of intervening with digital technologies in the objective architectural fabric in order to allow the nomad to customise the ambiental qualities of the space as desired. From an architectural perspective, the rigidity of domestic aesthetics will be loosened, and the resultant of the nomad’s interaction with the physical construct will define the new character of the domestic realm. The suitability for dwelling of these habitats will still be provided through some of the most fundamental principles of interior design, for example the size of space, the arrangement of furniture and the sensorial qualities of the space – its thermal comfort, light, and acoustics, which can be adjusted according to the nomad’s personal desire. In this way, the Heideggerian act of dwelling remains the expression of individualism, allowing for homeliness to emerge within transient constructs, without the need for territorial or property ownership. At urban scale, these will take geographical shape, but they will be characterised by volatility, ephemerality and spatial discontinuity. The physical constructs will be illustrative of a city in dérive, in a constant process of assembly and dis–assembly, allowing the urban territory to be adapted according to the ad–hoc requirements of the nomad. Assembling these territories will be an exercise in representing the dynamics of the nomadic condition, rather than the geographical records of immobile features. Deconstructed domesticity should be seen as platform with the aim
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of rehearsing research strategies, articulating different formats for architectural practice, which advance new ways of understanding the transformed relation of architecture to enclosure and stability. The discussions triggered by this study are aimed to destabilise the canonical definition of the house, questioning the very notion of homeliness and the complex aggregate of objects, bodies, spaces, technologies and dreams that make a home. All the formats, media and speculations contained in this thesis aim to address and imagine the spatiality of a new condition of belonging, new ways of being in transit and new ways of being at home. Without reclaiming architecture as a problem-solving discipline, Deconstructed Domesticity aimed to untangle the agency of spatial interventions as well as the capacity of the architect to challenge the definition of these spaces in relation to the particularities of the modern nomad.
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