Architecture as a time-based agent: examining the transformational potential of space from a social-technological perspective Socrates Yiannoudes Abstract The argument of this paper is based on the assumption that architecture, seen from a socio-technological point of view, can be conceptualized not as an inert object resisting time and change, or a functionalist machine, but rather as a time-based agent actively involved in negotiations and transformative complex associations with unpredictable agents, i.e. its human users. Although ideas and techniques to make architectural space flexible run through the history of architectural design since modernism, no concrete theory has been developed to systematically account for the time-based transformational potential of domestic space. Drawing on actor-network theory and its methodological concepts, such as scripts, inscription, de-inscription, re-inscription and so on, we are attempting to open up the possibility for a theoretical systematic investigation of the incalculable tactics by which space is appropriated, used or misused. In the light of these concepts we discuss the well documented practices of appropriation and subsequent restoration of Le Corbusier’s row houses built in 1926 at Pessac, in order to conclude that, from a socio-technological perspective and in the light of actor-network theory, prescription and negotiation, order and disorder, the conceived and the lived are intertwined constantly dissolving into each other. Key Words: Flexibility, transformation, space, actor-network theory, Pessac, script, inscription, de-inscription, program of action.
1. Introduction: flexibility, adaptability and space The idea that houses should effectively stand the test of time and avoid obsolescence by accommodating change, runs through the history of 20 th century architectural design which adopted different ideas and design techniques to make spaces flexible, i.e. adaptable to changing needs and living patterns. The most often discussed application of flexibility would involve sliding partitions in plan and foldable furniture,1 what Forty calls ‘flexibility by technical means’,2 as in the classic case of the Rietveld-Schroeder House. However, this type of ‘hard’ flexibility, as Schneider and Till choose to call it3 to stress its determinism, is simply an extension of functionalism, shadowed by the architects’ will to extend their control on buildings even after they are built and inhabited.4 On the other hand, although the practices for controlling and ordering domestic space were part of the modernist functionalist design rationale,5 throughout the 20th century other proposals focused
2 Architecture as a time-based agent: examining the transformational potential of space from a social-technological perspective __________________________________________________________________ on less determinist attitudes to flexibility, what Schneider and Till call ‘soft’ flexibility.6 This type would usually mean an open plan, i.e. functionally unspecified –or in Hertzberger’s term ‘polyvalent’-7 rooms and generally without physical changes.8 Thus, whereas in the first determinist approach, flexibility has served to extend functionalism (by means of mechanical chargeability), being a property of buildings themselves, in the second it was employed to resist it, being a property of space acquired through the use that they are put.9 Space thus, as an object of control and regulation, becomes central to the study of architecture as a time-based agent. One of the most radical and comprehensive critiques of space and its relation to practices of regulation and control is discussed by Lefebvre in his book The Production of Space. In Lefebvre’s theory, space is not a distinct category of architecture but rather a social product, caught in the activities and processes of production in any society. Lefebvre treats social space as a triad of spaces: the perceived space (involving spatial practice), the conceived space (its representations by planners, urbanists, scientists, social engineers etc.) and the space as directly lived and inhabited by the body (the representational space). Thus Lefebvre attempts to expose the problematic distinction, prevalent in modern capitalist society, between space as an abstract construct tending towards domination and homogenization and the lived space of ‘users’ and everyday practice, favoring qualitative difference, imagination and appropriation.10 In this case users are not to be conceived as abstract undifferentiated entities as defined in the context of orthodox modernism having something ‘vaguely suspect about it’, as Lefebvre put it.11 They are rather active agents bearing the potential not only to occupy space but also to appropriate and creatively re-interpret it or even misuse it.12 This space of everyday practice which is not regulated by functionalist design, involves another type of flexibility, what Forty calls ‘flexibility as a political strategy’,13 i.e. a strategy against architecture, functionalism and determinist design techniques. As we shall see, this kind of flexibility points to instances of space, and in particular domestic, which can absorb change, constantly escaping control, engaging the incalculable aspects of the life of buildings in time. Through ‘treatments of space’, or what Michel de Certeau calls ‘tactics’, users manipulate, transform and at the same time resist pre-established structures of imposed order.14 2. The transformational potential of buildings: Les Quartiers Modernes Fruges It is rather common for buildings to transform in time, despite the initial intentions of their architects and designers as Stewart Brand makes clear: ‘From the first drawings to the final demolition, buildings are shaped and reshaped by changing cultural currents, changing real-estate value, and changing usage’.15 This transformation capacity characterizes most buildings and even when they are not allowed to (due to legal limitations), although with different rates of change or cost. 16
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__________________________________________________________________ One classic example of radical post-occupancy transformation and paradoxically from within the outcome of modernist housing design, is Les Quartiers Modernes Fruges, an experimental project of 51 houses for industrial workers designed and built by Le Corbusier back in the 1920's at Pessac, a town near Bordeaux, sponsored by industrialist Henry Fruges. The project, which expressed Le Corbusier’s vision about industrialization in housing,17 was another case of considerable dispute around the social issues of modern architecture. But regardless of the reasons behind the hostility it initially received (from local officials, town residents and architecture critics), those that actually lived in it very quickly started to transform and customize their spaces to better suit their practical needs and aesthetic preferences, thus overriding the purity of the original form. As Philippe Boudon’s original study of these transformations revealed, those changes included extensions and closing open spaces for living, changing the plan layout, replacing ribbon windows with smaller ones, adding pitched roofs, padding and redecorating facades with new materials. 18 Although the houses are being recently ‘restored’ back to their original state, these initial ‘sabotage’ tactics ‘against’ architecture, a case of flexibility as a ‘political strategy’, lasted for more than 40 years (provided that no legislation constraints prevented them) demonstrating that architecture, especially housing, can never fully control the actions of users, as in a functionalist determinist rationale. Despite the fact that architectural theory hardly accounts for such incalculable practices, usually dismissing them in favor of more ‘obedient’ users, these practices cannot be considered insignificant for architectural thinking particularly if we consider that, as Boudon concluded, the project was built to be able to register subsequent change.19 In that sense, users, instead of passive should be regarded as active and creative agents whose presence and unpredictability is as important in the formulation of architecture as that of the architect. 20 Lefebvre, in the preface to Boudon’s book, mentions that the occupants of the project, instead of ‘passively’ adapting to their houses, decided to live ‘actively’ in them, adding their needs by creating difference: ‘They created distinctions… They introduced personal qualities. They built a differentiated social cluster.’21 This points to what Lefebvre terms ‘differential’ space which, against the dominating and homogenizing abstract space of capitalism, enhances difference, and everyday life. 22 Thus we are led to a fundamental question: How do we account for the users’ space, especially the appropriated space, and what would a proper methodology or theory be to examine their transformative practices in specific case studies? This question naturally follows if we consider Brand’s statement that no intellectual discipline, theory or standard practice yet exists to study buildings as spatiotemporal wholes, i.e. how spaces adapt and transform in time.23 As we shall see, the social studies of science and technology provide useful theories and concepts, such as the Actor-network theory and script analysis, to propose the possibility to see a building as a ‘thing’, that is, ‘a contested territory’ of flowing transformations and complex
4 Architecture as a time-based agent: examining the transformational potential of space from a social-technological perspective __________________________________________________________________ associations, that ‘cannot be reduced to what is and what it means, as architectural theory has traditionally done’.24 3. Architecture in the framework of science and technology studies Erasing essentialist notions of what counts as culture, nature, society and technology, actor-network theory (ANT), initially developed by Bruno Latour, John Law and Michel Callon in the context of the social study of science and technology, deals with the hybrid forms overriding distinctions between the social and the technological, subjects and objects, attending instead to sociotechnical networks involving complex associations between actors, or rather ‘actants’, 25 humans and technologies, humans and non-humans.26 Part of the appeal of ANT is its versatility and its capacity to explain relational phenomena in diverse disciplines. In Reassembling the Social, Latour distinguishes between the ‘sociology of the social’, which reduces the social to a priori definitions of what constitutes it, and a subfield of social theory he calls ‘sociology of associations’, in which the social depends on the results of its unstable assemblages and associations.27 In this way Latour re-introduces ANT not so much as a theory, but rather as a method to trace associations between things that are not themselves social. He explains that [ ]in situations where innovations proliferate, where group boundaries are uncertain, when the range of entities to be taken into account fluctuates, the sociology of the social is no longer able to trace actors’ new associations. 28 This is where architecture could fit in; an ANT perspective could account for the mediating role of buildings in the complexity of associations between all involved agents either in the production, construction, renovation or use of architectural space. An ANT perspective and methodology in the context of architecture would explore the capacity of buildings to act, to form associations, to redistribute agency and redirect or facilitate the course of action.29 Fallan, who investigates the potential and relevance of ANT to the study of architecture, explains: So, architecture in action is architecture in planning, design and construction, or architecture in use and mediation. That’s when action takes place, that’s when networks are formed, that’s when translation goes on, that’s when facts and artefacts are constructed, that’s when matter and meaning are transformed. 30 ANT overrides the instrumentalist view of technology, within which artifacts are neutral intermediaries of human actions, and proposes the idea of mediators, arising in the complex relations between actants, constantly modifying meanings and
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__________________________________________________________________ making possible programs of action pointing to what ANT theorists, as we shall see in a moment, call ‘delegations’, ‘inscriptions’, ‘de-inscriptions’, ‘translations’ and so on. Thus to study the transformational time-based potential of architectural space would mean to study what transformations, i.e. mediations, it undergoes by its use and the shifting meanings associated to these spaces; how users’ actions are constrained by space, the extent to which space is shaped and reshaped by these mediations, the various ways in which it might be used, in a word, to study the boundary between users and space as a consequence of their interaction.
4. Actor-network theory concepts as tools in the study of space It is for the study of this in-between territory that the concept of the ‘script’ and its analysis is useful. In his article Where are the missing masses? Latour examines how action within actor networks is negotiated between humans and artifacts, and describes how programs of actions31, may be delegated from one actant to another, either human or non-human. These programs of action take the form of scripts, i.e. ‘instruction manuals’ that include those visions embedded in the product for its intended use and meaning involving both physical properties and socio-technical aspects.32 According to Latour scripts are thus delegated from less reliable to more durable actants, from written instructions or humans to artifacts and technologies. In the framework of ANT this translation of action from one actant to another is called inscription, transcription or encoding.33 Analyzing scripts can be useful for the understanding of how functions, expressions and meanings between producers and users are negotiated and constructed, and also for the study of the relation between what was intended and how it was interpreted, what was inscribed onto the artifact (or the architectural space) and how it was translated by its users.34 Thus the concept of the script in the study of architectural domestic space, is useful because of its etymological versatility as it can be modified to include the cases when users decide not to play the role ascribed to them (to subscribe) by the visions and intentions of the designer (what is inscribed onto the artifact). Instead they may choose to de-inscribe, reacting to their prescriptions,35 or adjusting their setting through some negotiations. As Fallan puts it: [ ]there is always the chance that… the users misunderstand, ignore, discard, or reject the “instruction manual” and define their roles and the product’s use and meaning at odds with the producer’s/designer’s intentions as conveyed through the script.36 Or as Akrich puts it: ‘To be sure, it may be that no actors will come forward to play the roles envisaged by the designer. Or users may define quite different roles of their own…’.37 When the behaviors of human actors in a given scene are imagined
6 Architecture as a time-based agent: examining the transformational potential of space from a social-technological perspective __________________________________________________________________ and anticipated by those who delegate action, there is a preconceived idea about their prescribed behavior, but, as Latour argues, nothing prevents those prescribed users from behaving differently in the flesh- thus not subscribing to their anticipated behavior.38 This seems to be analogous to the gap between the alterations –the ‘sabotage tactics’- made by the residents of the Pessac houses and what Le Corbusier may have imagined of them, although, as we shall see, Boudon’s closer survey proves that this may not have been the case. To account for the work that has to be done in order to minimize the gap between ‘built-in users’ and ‘users in-the-flesh’, between anticipated and actual behavior, Latour coins the term pre-inscription, followed by another relevant term, reinscription, which points to subsequent processes of re-designing and re-engineering the artifact, in order to take on those usages or programs of actions of artifacts that fulfill the contradictory wishes and need of humans, i.e. ‘their anti-programs’.39 While Latour in this case mentions examples of everyday behaviors and artifacts, in the context of architectural space this notion would mean either anticipating users’ actions by providing the framework, the spaciousness, to absorb the indeterminacy of everyday life, or restoring a house plan to its initial condition, re-designing and re-constructing it to closely adjust to the needs of its new inhabitants. Both pre-inscription and re-inscription are featured in the case of Pessac. Firstly, the gap between inscription and de-inscription is not to be conceived only as an act of negative appropriation or social resistance on imposed order, as de Certeau would have it. Boudon concludes his book by pointing out that instead of thinking of the project as a failure, we should consider the fact that the modifications constituted a ‘positive and not a negative consequence of Le Corbusier's original conception’, because the houses provided their occupants with sufficient latitude to satisfy and implement their personal needs.40 In Boudon’s book there is a picture with a series of plans showing the different conversions discovered in one of the types of houses at Pessac, all based on one of Le Corbusier’s original plan design. For Boudon it was not only the size, i.e. the spaciousness of the plan that lent itself to subsequent modification, but also the layout of the plan itself.41 The subsequent alterations were taken into account by Le Corbusier’s initial conception and design, whose standardization principles42 provided a reference system of fixed co-ordinates which facilitated variation and even encouraged the alterations made by the inhabitants. 43 While areas for purely functional requirements (kitchen and bathroom) were designed in terms of minimum space, standardization and functional efficiency, the other rooms were left as large and ‘open’ as possible. Thus, Le Corbusier’s design on the one hand involved what Latour calls conscription, to render behaviour predictable,44 and on the other it pre-inscribed space with the capacity to negotiate the incalculable behavior of its occupants. Secondly, 40 years after the publication of Boudon’s study, several of the houses at Pessac underwent significant changes to reconstruct their original ‘authentic’ state under the guidance and financial support of architects, curators, and state
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__________________________________________________________________ institutions. These practices, as Anita Aigner argues, enforced a ‘purifying’ preservationist approach geared towards an ‘aesthetic reconquest’ of the Pessacestate, turning the project into an added-value product existing as both a habitat and a heritage, a house and a museum, in order to win its struggle to acquire the status of a UNESCO World Heritage site.45 This attempt for a return to the original, which according to Aigner is structured by power relations, reflects, in the spirit of Lefebvrian theory, the tension between the imposed authority of the architect, i.e. the conceived space of Le Corbusier’s initial intentions, and the reality of the lived, representational, everyday space of the inhabitants (expressed through their alterations ending in the early 1970s). Aigner discusses the social conflict that is involved in the complex intertwinings between the ad-hoc interventions of the ordinary residents, in ANT terms their de-inscriptions, and the institutional normative practices of the preservationist community, the re-inscriptions. We would add that these practices aim at resisting the initial residents’ anti-programs, disciplining their ‘bad taste’ as Aigner (ironically) puts it, who would not ascribe to the dominating preservationist attitude. 46 But these complex processes of preservation are only partial, because, as Latour concludes his essay, some sections of the programs of action ‘are endowed to parts of humans, while other sections are entrusted to parts of nonhumans.’47 Despite intentions, the Pessac houses continue to be a territory of dispute between the residents that are resistant and indifferent to preservation, and those committed to the ‘heritage regime’.48 The Pessac estate along with its social, cultural and political practices is therefore a sociotechnical assemblage of intertwined facts and artefacts, in Latour’s words, a ‘trajectory of the front line between programs and antiprograms’.49 5. Conclusion and discussion We have only begun to examine the potential application of ANT theory and concepts for the study and theoretical contextualization of the transformational capacity of architectural space, seen as a technological artifact. 50 We discussed the practices of appropriation and restoration of a well-studied example of modern architecture in the light of concepts such as the script (instead of function) and its related derivatives. Although such a project would involve further case studies and in-situ research,51 our investigation points to a more general observation: the fact that domestic spaces such as those of the Pessac estate, far from being inert, abstractly conceived objects, involve a tension not unlike that between the two types of spaces of Actor-network theory proposed by J. Murdoch; the stable ‘spaces of prescription’ –organization, regulation, and control- and the ‘spaces of negotiation’ –transience, multiplicity, and autonomy- which are always intertwined and flowing into each other, configured by actions and associations within networks. 52 Thus, in the light of ANT, domestic spaces are territories of relations, involving tensions and interactions between the conceived and the lived.
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Notes 1
Tatjana Schneider and Jeremy Till, Flexible Housing (Oxford: Architectural Press, 2007), 18-19. 2 Adrian Forty, Words and Buildings: A Vocabulary of Modern Architecture (New York: Thames & Hudson, 2004), 144. 3 Schneider and Till, Flexible Housing, 7. 4 Forty, Words and Buildings, 143. 5 Examples can be found in the post-war state funded housing programs which involved scientific management techniques (in the spirit of Time and Motion studies), guided by low cost, functional optimization and efficiency. For instance, in Schutte-Lihotzky’s ‘Frankfurt Kitchen’ (1927) and Alexander Klein’s ‘Functional House for Frictionless Living’ (1928) human standardized functions and movements are regulated and optimized through normalizing techniques, such as the plan. As Jeremy Till explains, these practices fit the more general pattern of the will to order which, in Zygmunt Bauman’s sociological theory, is considered to be a central feature of modernity. See: Jeremy Till, ‘Architecture and Contingency’, Field: a free journal for architecture 1, no. 1 (2007): 126, URL: http://www.field-journal.org /uploads/file/2007_Volume_1/ j%20till.pdf. For an account of the processes of Taylorism in industry, time and motion studies and their wider cultural implications see Siegfried Giedion, ‘Industrialization as a Fundamental Event’, in Rethinking Technology: A Reader in Architectural Theory, eds. William Braham and Jonathan Hale, (London/New York: Routledge, 2007), 75-105. 6 Schneider and Till, Flexible Housing, 7. 7 Yet, the emphasis in Hertzberger’s polyvalence is on the way spatial form is creatively interpreted by users to enable different exchangeable uses in the rooms. See Herman Hertzberger, Lessons for Students in Architecture (Rotterdam: 010 Publishers, 1991), 147. 8 Schneider and Till, Flexible Housing, 18-19. The term adaptability rather than flexibility is relevant here because it refers to the capacity for different social uses through the way rooms are organized and connected, which does not necessarily involve physical alterations and technical means (such as sliding partitions, extensions of rooms, folding furniture etc.) as is the case with flexibility. This distinction is made clear in Steven Groak’s book The Idea of Building (cited in Schneider and Till, Flexible Housing, 5). 9 Forty, Words and Buildings,148. 10 Henry Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), 38-39. 11 Ibid., 362.
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Forty, Words and Buildings, 312-315. This second connotation, although attributed to the term by Lefebvre and Hertzberger much earlier, it re-appears in architectural theory in the 1990s. For instance see Jonathan Hill, ed., Occupying Architecture (London: Routledge, 1998). 13 Forty, Words and Buildings, 148. 14 In a less political manner than Lefebvre, and more interested in the power of narratives, stories and myths, Michel de Certeau in his book the Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984) examines the ordinary practices, the ‘tactics’ as he calls them (such as speaking, walking, cooking, or dwelling), by which people in everyday situations re-appropriate the imposed institutional order of culture, manipulating and conforming to the grid of ‘discipline’, only to evade it, transforming and adapting it to their own interests. In this framework, the house, from the bedroom to the attic, which can also be seen as a geography of imposed order, acquires stories of everyday practice, ‘tactics’ that describe possibilities of use and everyday activity in its rooms, that is , ‘treatments of space’ that defy and resist pre-established structures of domestic environments. See de Certeau, The Practice of everyday Life, 121-22. 15 Stewart Brand, How Buildings Learn: What happens after they’re built (New York: Penguin, 1995), 2. 16 Ibid., 7-10. 17 Each of the housing units of the project, which embodied several of Le Corbusier’s principles (such as long open windows and roof gardens), started from a common module of 5 x 5 meters but varied in form according to 5 typologies: detached, semidetached, row and three-story houses. 18 Much of these alterations were thoroughly documented in Philippe Boudon, LivedIn Architecture: Le Corbusier’s Pessac Revisited (London: Lund Humphries Boudon, 1972). 19 Ibid., 161. 20 This idea is proposed by Jonathan Hill when he discusses the significance of the analogy between writer-text-reader and architect-building-user (although he makes clear that texts cannot be compared to buildings). Paraphrasing the title of Roland Barthes’ text The Death of the Author (London: Fontana, 1977), he proposes, not the death of the architect, but a new architect who takes into account the creativity of users in design, and the fact that users construct a new building through use in the same way that readers, as Barthes argued, make a new text through reading. See Jonathan Hill, Actions of Architecture: Architects and Creative Users (London: Routledge, 2003), 71-72. 21 Henry Lefebvre, preface to Lived-In Architecture: Le Corbusier’s Pessac Revisited, by Philippe Boudon (London: Lund Humphries Boudon, 1972). 22 Lefebvre’s notion of differential space was recently linked to architecture by Richard Milrgom in his discussion of the relevance of this notion of space to Lucien Kroll’s participatory processes for the design of the student residence at L’Universite
10 Architecture as a time-based agent: examining the transformational potential of space from a social-technological perspective __________________________________________________________________ Catholique de Louvain, which parallels the work of John Habraken in participatory design and reflects the situationist urban critique on Modernist space. For Kroll this vision to address the representational spaces of users (the space of everyday lived experience) and enhance difference, is part of a continuous process of social change and involves an opportunity to directly engage in spatial practice the values and needs of users. See: Richard Milgrom, ‘Lucien Kroll: Design, difference, everyday life’, in Space, Difference, Everyday Life: Reading Henri Lefebvre, eds. Kanishka Goonewardena et al. (London/New York: Routledge, 2008), 264-281. 23 Brand, How Buildings Learn, 2-11. 24 Bruno Latour and Albena Yaneva, ‘‘Give me a gun and I will make all Buildings move’: an ANT’s view of architecture’, in Explorations in Architecture: Teaching, Design, Research, ed. Reto Geiser (Basel: Birkhäuser, 2008), 86. 25 Actants are distinguished from actors to point to the possible non-human status and therefore the fact that their agecny may be delegated by an actor who is usually the source of action. See Bruno Latour, ‘Where Are the Missing Masses? The Sociology of a Few Mundane Artifacts”, in Shaping Technology/Building Society: Studies in Sociotechnical Change, eds. Wiebe E. Bijker and John Law, (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992), 117. 26 Most of the relevant bibliography on ANT can be found on ‘the Actor Network Resource’ website at: ‘Actor Network Resource’, accessed May 18, 2014, http://www.lancaster.ac.uk/fass/centres/css/ant/antres.htm 27 Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: an Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 1-17. 28 Latour, Reassembling the Social, 11 29 See Albena Yaneva, ‘How Buildings ‘Surprise’: the Renovation of the Alte Aula in Vienna’, Science Studies 21, no. 1 (2008): 8-29; Thomas Gieryn, ‘What Buildings Do’, Theory and Society 31, no. 1 (2002): 35-74. 30 Kjetil Fallan, ‘Architecture in action: Traveling with actor-network theory in the land of architectural research’, Architectural Theory Review 13, no. 1 (2008): 88, accessed 6 March, 2014, doi: 10.1080/13264820801918306. 31 ‘The program of action is the set of written instructions that can be substituted by the analyst to any artifact. Now that computers exist, we are able to conceive of a text (a programming language) that is at once words and actions. How to do things with words and then turn words into things is now clear to any programmer’: Latour, ‘Where Are the Missing Masses?...’, 176. 32 The term ‘script’ was coined by Akrich. See Madeleine Akrich, ‘The De-scription of Technological Objects’, in Shaping Technology/Building Society: Studies in Sociotechnical Change, eds. Wiebe Bijker and John Law (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1992), 205-224. For further discussion and its relation to design see Kjetil Fallan, ‘De-scribing Design: Appropriating Script Analysis to Design History’, Design Issues 24, no. 4 (2008): 61-75. 33 Latour, ‘Where Are the Missing Masses?...’, 176.
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__________________________________________________________________ Fallan, ‘De-scribing Design’, 63. ‘We call prescription whatever a scene presupposes from its transcribed actors and authors’: Latour, ‘Where Are the Missing Masses?, 177. 36 Fallan, ‘De-scribing Design’, 63. 37 Akrich, ‘The De-scription of Technological Objects’, 208. 38 Latour, ‘Where Are the Missing Masses?...’, 161. 39 Ibid., 161-168. 40 Boudon, Lived-In Architecture, 161. 41 Ibid., 121. 42 The relative positions of standard housing units, the unit plan and the standardizations of structural components 43 Ibid., 57. 44 Latour says: ‘We call conscription this mobilization of well-drilled and wellaligned resources to render the behavior of a human or a nonhuman predictable’: Latour, ‘Where are the missing masses?...’, 178. 45 Anita Aigner, ‘Transformation unwanted! Heritage-making and its effects in Le Corbusier’s Pessac estate’, in Consuming Architecture: On the Occupation, Appropriation and Interpretation of buildings, eds. Daniel Maudlin and Marcel Vellinga (London/New York: Routledge, 2014), 85. 46 Ibid., 79. 47 Latour, ‘Where are the missing masses?...’, 174. 48 Aigner, ‘Transformation unwanted!...’, 85. 49 Latour, ‘Where are the missing masses?...’, 175. 50 To pursue such a research project, as Gieryn has proposed, architecture should be conceptualized as a technological artefact, instead of a functionalist machine (or in Corbusian terms ‘a machine for living in’) which both informs social behavior and is being continuously transformed by social activities (in terms of form, use and meaning). 51 As Latour has explained, an ANT methodology involves ‘following the actors’ closely at the places where socio-technical networks come into being and tracing the complex relationships and associations between heterogeneous actors –which is the main issue that is there for ANT. See Latour, Reassembling the Social, 12. 52 Jonathan Murdoch, ‘The Spaces of Actor-Network Theory’, Geoforum 29, no.4 (1998): 357-374. 34 35
Bibliography Aigner, Anita. ‘Tranformation unwanted! Heritage-making and its effects in Le Corbusier’s Pessac estate’. In Consuming Architecture: On the Occupation, Appropriation and Interpretation of buildings, edited by Daniel Maudlin and Marcel Vellinga, 70-88. London/New York: Routledge, 2014.
12 Architecture as a time-based agent: examining the transformational potential of space from a social-technological perspective __________________________________________________________________ Akrich, Madeleine. ‘The De-scription of Technological Objects’. In Shaping Technology/Building Society: Studies in Sociotechnical Change, edited by Wiebe Bijker and John Law, 205-224. Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1992. Boudon, Philippe. Lived-In Architecture: Le Corbusier’s Pessac Revisited. London: Lund Humphries Boudon, 1972. Brand, Stewart. How Buildings Learn: What happens after they’re built. New York: Penguin, 1995. de Certeau, Michel. Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984. Fallan, Kjetil. ‘Architecture in action: Traveling with actor-network theory in the land of architectural research’. Architectural Theory Review 13, no. 1 (2008): 8096. Accessed 6 March, 2014. doi: 10.1080/13264820801918306 –––, ‘De-scribing Design: Appropriating Script Analysis to Design History’. Design Issues 24, no. 4 (2008): 61-75. Forty, Adrian. Words and Buildings: A Vocabulary of Modern Architecture. New York: Thames & Hudson, 2004. Giedion, Siegfried. ‘Industrialization as a Fundamental Event’. In Rethinking Technology: A Reader in Architectural Theory, edited by William Braham and Jonathan Hale, 75-105. London/New York: Routledge, 2007. Gieryn, Thomas. ‘What Buildings Do’. Theory and Society 31, no. 1 (2002): 35-74. Hertzberger, Herman. Lessons for Students in Architecture. Rotterdam: 010 Publishers, 1991. Hill, Jonathan. Actions of Architecture: Architects and Creative Users. London: Routledge, 2003. –––, ed. Occupying Architecture. London: Routledge, 1998. Lancaster University. ‘Actor Network Resource’. Accessed May 18, 2014. http://www.lancaster.ac.uk/fass/centres/css/ant/antres.htm. Latour, Bruno and Albena Yaneva. ‘‘Give me a gun and I will make all Buildings move’: an ANT’s view of architecture’. In Explorations in Architecture: Teaching, Design, Research, edited by Reto Geiser, 80-89. Basel: Birkhäuser, 2008. Latour, Bruno. Reassembling the Social: an Introduction to Actor-NetworkTheory. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. –––, ‘Where Are the Missing Masses? The Sociology of a Few Mundane Artifacts’. In Shaping Technology/Building Society: Studies in Sociotechnical
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__________________________________________________________________ Change, edited by Wiebe E. Bijker and John Law, 151-180. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992. Lefebvre, Henry. The Production of Space. Translated by Donald NicholsonSmith. Oxford: Blackwell, 1991. –––, Preface to Lived-In Architecture: Le Corbusier’s Pessac Revisited, by Philippe Boudon. London: Lund Humphries Boudon, 1972. Milgrom, Richard. ‘Lucien Kroll: Design, difference, everyday life’. In Space, Difference, Everyday Life: Reading Henri Lefebvre, edited by Kanishka Goonewardena, Stefan Kipfer, Richard Milgrom and Christian Schmid, 264-28. New York/London: Routledge, 2008. Murdoch, Jonathan. ‘The Spaces of Actor-Network Theory’. Geoforum 29, no.4 (1998): 357-374. Schneider, Tatjana and Jeremy Till. Flexible Housing. Oxford: Architectural Press, 2007. Till, Jeremy. ‘Architecture and Contingency’. Field: a free journal for architecture 1, no. 1 (2007): 120-135. URL: http://www.field-journal.org /uploads/file/2007_Volume_1/ j%20till.pdf Yaneva, Albena. ‘How Buildings ‘Surprise’: the Renovation of the Alte Aula in Vienna’. Science Studies 21, no. 1 (2008): 8-29
Socrates Yiannoudes is a Lecturer in architectural design at the Technical University of Crete. His research interest focuses on the theoretical study of the relation between computational technology and architectural space, as well as on the application of the sociology of technology in the study of architecture.