UNIVERSIDAD POLITÉCNICA DE MADRID ESCUELA TÉCNICA SUPERIOR DE ARQUITECTURA
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federico soriano Textos 2018-2019
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MODELS. THE SELF-ALINEATION OF ORGANIZATIONS. NAJLE, Ciro. In a+t. SOLID Harvard GSD Series. Organization or Design?. 2015
Organization: what an inexhaustible concept, both challenging and charismatic! If the notion of design, critically downgraded to a shortsighted mode of architectural practice, has come to imply the understanding of architecture as an act of embellishment and competence, characterized by immediacy and effectiveness, and driven to make the-humanenvironment agreeable, visually pleasant, and mild, to make it perform predictably under allegedly good intentions, domesticating what we see or sense around us-and no farther-for the purpose of softening out its sharp edges, and therefore making our supposedly unsatisfactory lives livable, I would say, to start with, that good intentions are generally as perverse as they appear to be amenable, and that the clear-cut notion of organization, as harsh and cruel as it sounds, confronts the rawness of the conditions of our practice, to say the least, straight-forwardly, taking a vehement stance to radically change them from within, through the sheer force of passion, determination, and fearless intensity. Core and backbone of architecture, organization constitutes the inner exteriority of our discipline, and it is only through the will for organization that architecture accomplishes a genuine form of autonomy at the same time as it engages and potentially rules over its performance. 1
Harvard University Graduate School of Design. Borrominations, or the Auratic Dome. Professors: Ciro Najle and Hanif Kara. STUDENT: CHARLOTTE LIPSCHITZ. PROJECT: KNOWLEDGE MARKET.
The idea of beauty, associated, as if naturally, to image-oriented, figuredriven, surface-leaning, and/ or concept-based notions of perfection, has steadily been eroded precisely by the same perfection of which architecture has become nothing but a perpetual slave, subjugated by the increasingly consuming desperation that corresponds to such mirror image, and conditioned by its correspondingly growing demands, which it constantly reaffirms and diversifies. If unmediated by some form of negative pleasure, that is, by a medium of sublimation of the sensible, architecture can never attain enough robustness to endure out there, neither as a discipline nor as an object. It is through the deep vertigo of the sublime that first sinks architecture, as a subject, into its deepest conceptual uncertainties about the real, and then, as a counterpart, sucks it up into the unknown, the threatening, the unpredictable, and the horrifying, that architecture, the organization of material life, may overcome its conditions of production and potentially elevate their routines, protocols, formats over—but through—their irrationality, creating principles that, far beyond amicability, pronounce the presence of overwhelming yet liberating futures. The process by which these pronunciations are made material is integrated into what we call models. Since Kant, the idea of classical beauty was superseded and redefined by that of the sublime, the power of which opened up the spectrum of classical aesthetics —and furthermore, of the notion itself of being in the world— beyond the self-fulfillment of humanist classicism, promising a more expansive form. Still loaded with enlightening purposes, the sublime widened the realm of what could be understood as an aesthetic experience by taking it beyond the sensible, to a status from which 2
Harvard University Graduate School of Design. Borrominations, or the Auratic Dome. Professors: Ciro Najle and Hanif Kara. STUDENT: SEE JIA HO. PROJECT: LIBRARY URBANISM.
architecture cannot return without an implicit nostalgic, over-sentimental, or reductive attitude. Since then, the aesthetic experience cannot but be consciously forced to go through a negative turn in order to surpass the limits of its object as a decorative artefact or as a sheer service. The responsibility toward excess, every time higher and more complex, thus took architecture, irreversibly, into the realm of synthetic thought. This idea, inevitable for any practice that wishes to exceed the demands of the market today, is also, more often than not, misunderstood as merely ideological or conceptual. Yet, it would be futile to neglect the broader fact that the inherent duplicity of candid engagement and brutal commotion of the sublime can turn the very condition of global practice today—its ruthless generality—literally upside down. To turn the ordinary into the extraordinary, the chronically insipid into the ultimate expression of nothingness, the falsely multifarious into an ineffable wonder, the apathetically indifferent into the singularly different and the tastelessly different into the boldly indifferent, the no-content-whatsoever into unprecedented forms of content, paradoxically overcoming the sensible to then recreate it at a higher level that can be experienced as 3
Harvard University Graduate School of Design. Borrominations, or the Auratic Dome. Professors: Ciro Najle and Hanif Kara. STUDENT: THENA TAK. PROJECT: BABYLONIAN SLOWNESS.
a stronger --absolute and metaconceptual—form of thought, is both the responsibility and the unprecedented opportunity of architecture today. I would inscribe the notion of organization within this register, and say that architecture is not only a problem of organization, but also a matter of configuring models that turn organization into a self-alienating system, which, precisely by means of creating order out of chaos, turns order into something other than mere coherence or orderliness. Not only it is the duty of architecture to organize stuff and turn the disparate into the intelligible, but, more importantly, to construct hypothetical and unintelligible forms purely out of the excess of intelligibility that those operations generate, surpassing their own conditions of existence in that process—that is, surpassing the conditions of the sensible through organization. Architecture is the inner revolution of organization. This equals to saying that organization is not a given, an allegedly natural condition to which architecture ascribes and in the context of which it behaves as an efficient service or else, under the threat of which it must detach itself and develop a critical apparatus. Rather, organization is the very medium of a construct that unfolds singularities in parallel 4
Harvard University Graduate School of Design. Borrominations, or the Auratic Dome. Professors: Ciro Najle and Hanif Kara. STUDENT: TRISTAN MCGUIRE. PROJECT: COFFER ATMOSPHERE.
to its process. Far from the self-evident realm of neatness, control, or harmony, and away from its common notion as the condition that tends to put things at rest, neutralizing and crystalizing their life into fixed stable forms, organization, due to its intrinsic implausibility, is a source of energy that puts things in motion, enhancing the life of systems and setting processes from within that, in search for more complex forms of stability, proliferate internal relationships toward the construction of a higher status in their order. Instead of being applied, organization is therefore first to be constructed. Or rather, in the process of being applied, the restrictions and contradictions that an organization encounters force it to self-alienate and configure new forms of order, which are intrinsically irreducible to their premises and transcendent to them. What architecture does in this process is to determine, on the way to the making, the forms by which these new forms of order build up. Architecture constructs higher forms of order and thought through the process by which it organizes, delivering, at least, two levels of outcomes: on the one hand, a lower, apparently deterministic level, by which it makes things correspond to one another and get together in a 5
Harvard University Graduate School of Design. Borrominations, or the Auratic Dome. Professors: Ciro Najle and Hanif Kara. STUDENT: NELSON BYUN. PROJECT: ISOLE DELLE FONTANE.
synthetic, compact, graceful form, and, on the other, a higher, apparently paradoxical level, by which it makes this synthetic form go beyond itself and become other than itself, betraying its own conditions of existence and creating the new—or, more precisely, the new in relation to its premises. This newness is neither to be confused with scientific innovation, nor with aesthetic novelty in the common sense. More plainly, it is new in the fact that its organizational characteristics cannot be described by the categories, variables, or forms of evaluation that belong to the initial state of the formation process. Organization, thus, creates new forms of value, and the jargon by which these new forms stand. Architecture, here, does not simply entertain or struggle against the idea of becoming a service, but uses the force of this threat to construct autonomous and self-standing ideas of value —ideas, it must be noted, that may be more or less interesting or discharging, rather than truthful or legitimate. Beyond design and critique lies architecture as organization. On its way to organization, architecture configures models, without which there is no theory —or better, without which any theory is an unexposed assumption that does not challenge or transcend itself. Organizational models are the conditions of existence of architectural theory and 6
Harvard University Graduate School of Design. Borrominations, or the Auratic Dome. Professors: Ciro Najle and Hanif Kara. STUDENT: MICHAEL LEEF. PROJECT: LAND FILLED.
practice, their ground and plane of consistency. Often disregarded as a default mind frame to which architecture simply adheres when effectively operating on things, they are, in fact, the artificial and frequently invisible master mind that architecture constructs in the process of organization becoming a singularity. Yet, far from general methods, models are not simply predefined systems that validate the project because of their internal logical coherence, and they are not scientific taws, ideological or conceptual apparatuses that preexist architecture and objectively regulate its behaviour. Rather, models are rigorous yet irreducible procedures that, because of their systematicity, construct forms of artisticity whose properties both belong to the project that nurtures its rules and transcend its very contingency as a creative event. These systematic singularities achieve, paradoxically by means of their irreducibility, the status of a general projection, which involve, within the act of organizing, the higher act of constructing a form of organizing. A model is therefore not merely a system, not even just a system of systems, that is, a rationalized pre-systemic condition that blindly establishes the rules by which a system operates and defines formally their relationship 7
Harvard University Graduate School of Design. Borrominations, or the Auratic Dome. Professors: Ciro Najle and Hanif Kara. STUDENT: BENJAMIN BURDYCK. PROJECT: SOCIAL CIRCLES.
to outcomes, these being predetermined or not, why would it matter? The reduction of model to system of systems lobotomizes in advance the mind that systems are capable to engender, and condemns them to remain in the realm of form-finding or of solution-optimizing devices, eventually disregarded for being merely formalistic or efficient. Far more unnatural and self-challenging, a model is conscious of the form by which a system operates as it progresses, and constructs the form of the presystemic condition per se, its form being its object. The grasping of this form involves the understanding of the way in which its properties and outcomes self-alienate. A model is thus systemically unpredictable but culturally conscious. Furthermore, a model is the very particular form that this self-alienation takes its ingrained quality, its unforeseeably relevant value-- and can only be evaluated by the system of values that it creates. This is why models both belong to architecture and transcend its limits. Every time an organization unfolds, there is a model at work that implicitly creates an idea of architecture from within, each time different to itself, projecting itself outward and serving its true organizational purpose: to update the wider spectrum of thought into a new level of consciousness. 8
Organizational models at the scale of buildings, urbanizations, or territories: this is what only architecture can engender and what it is meant to offer to the world, its innermost condition and its farthestreaching aptitude. It is at this level where architecture’s ubiquity truly lies. It is here where architecture both remains contained and projects itself expansively. Evidently, the dual property of models does not dilute architecture’s autonomy but rather invigorates it and toads it with a renewed form of power: architecture does not need to design everything and literally become the world in order to engender the potential of new worlds. Neither futuristic anticipations, nor far-fetched fictions, models are synthetic constructs that integrate modalities of organization for the purpose of expanding knowledge. Generic precisely because of their singularity, they are islands of determined indeterminacy, machines of generation of irresistible forms of noise through the bunt reification of information, planes that veil the illusion of overpowering the world as it is. The problem of organization, to conclude, exceeds the capability of architecture to organize stuff, and cannot be bypassed, neglected, or rejected as a deterministic device. It more broadly grounds the capability of architecture to configure models as organizations are constructed, acquiring singularity by means of their self-alienation. This higher register overcomes the dichotomy between disciplinary autonomy and heteronomy by assuming that any organization implicitly involves a construction of a model that operates as a reference system, which architecture necessarily affirms and challenges back. Far from a method, a discourse, an ideology, or a conceptual apparatus, models involve the construction of a mind that is sensitive to contingencies but generalizes and synthetizes them into a singularity. With this, the making of architecture invokes, each time, the construction of a subject, but this subject is not an author in the traditional sense, but an artificial, selfstanding, amoral, supra-critical form, created purely out of doings, and coincident in its features, trends, gestures or proclivities, with the motifs and patterns that its organizations take. Such a structurally embedded sense of subjectivity engineered, to our amazement, along and through models.
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