Schizophrenia - A Reflection of Architecture in Twenty-first Century by Kim Võ

schizophrenia A Reflection of Architecture in Twenty-first Century

The University of Melbourne Melbourne School of Design Master of Architecture

schizophrenia A Reflection of Architecture in Twenty-first Century

by Duy Kim Vo

Tutor Dr. Ming Wu ABPL90117: Twenty-first Century Architecture

schizophrenia noun /ˌskɪtsə(ʊ)ˈfriːnɪə/

A long-term mental disorder of a type involving a breakdown in the relation between thought, emotion, and behaviour, leading to faulty perception, inappropriate actions and feelings, withdrawal from reality and personal relationships into fantasy and delusion, and a sense of mental fragmentation.

(in general use) a mentality or approach characterized by inconsistent or contradictory elements.

Forewords

This is not a manifesto. In this twenty-first-century, asserting a big bold claim seems to be irrelevant to the current state of reality. The market economy of the twenty-century, merging with the rise of the Internet and global social media, is shifting toward to the sharing economy, a new economic system of this century. However, the greatest irony of the global social network and the sharing economy is the extreme idiosyncrasy that human is becoming. Every product, indulgence, and experience is specifically tailored to fit a singular individual, the ultimate satisfactory, creating a bubble of oneâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s own reality. The world has become so polarized. Our perception of the world has been expanded, up to the point that we realize everything is intertwined in an increasingly complex relationship. Problems have become more and more complicated and seemingly insurmountable, requiring interdisciplinary collaborations to find the solutions. Thus, this leads to the disintegration of boundaries between professions, ideas, and concepts. This is the age of inflection, when boundaries are collapsing, when concepts are being redefined, morphing into new chimeras, when the difference between the real and the virtual is becoming obscure. On top of these, thanks to the multiplying calculation power of computers, the world is changing at an unprecedented speed, both physically and ideologically. Discoveries are being made every day due to the orchestrated global accumulation of human minds, resources, and technologies in every field. As a matter of fact, changes are inevitable. To be critical in this contemporary world means to become a schizophrenic, moving between this physical world and the digital landscape, shifting viewpoints, forgetting and assuming new identities, ready to tear oneself from one extreme to another. Thus, this writing should not be a manifesto, rather a reassessment of the current state of architecture. It is an attempt to answer the question: How can architecture be relevant in a world of accelerating irreconcilable differences? The world is always changing at a proliferating rate in an unpredictable trajectory. To stay relevant, one needs to be constantly alert to the world, open to any signal of changes. The state of mind should not stay fixed, but rather fluid, malleable, ready to morph itself into another. This document should remain open. It should be constantly updated, reread, and revised. Kim Vo October 2017

Contents (To be revised)

The Absurdity of Architecture New World Orders Attempts First Attempt Second Attempt Break

Bibliography

The Absurdity of Architecture

The permanence of even the most frivolous item of architecture and the instability of the metropolis are incompatible.

Rem Koolhaas â&#x20AC;&#x153;Elegy For The Vacant Lot,â&#x20AC;? in S, M, L, XL (USA: The Monaceli Press, 1995), 937.

The Absurdity of Architecture

German Democratic Republic Berliner Mauer, Germany (1961-1989). (Top) Unknown photographer, A wedding couple from West Berlin is waving to their parents in East Berlin from across the Berlin Wall through the barbed wire (1962). (Bottom) Unknown photographer, The Berlin Wall (1962). The Berlin Wall, a structure of anything but uniform construction, a shoddy workmanship, an architectural and engineering laughingstock, is probably the most political and social devastating piece of architecture ever created. During its relatively short life, the Wall caused various mass exodus, economic depression, political tensions, military hostilities, family dramas, and deaths, affecting lives of millions both directly and indirectly. “Apparently, the lightest of objects could be randomly coupled with the heaviest of meanings through brute force, willpower.” Rem Koolhaas, “Field Trip - A(A) Memoir (First and Last...),” in S, M, L, XL (USA: The Monaceli Press, 1995), 227.

The Absurdity of Architecture

The Absurdity of Architecture Architecture is too long in gestation to be a serious problem solver. Cedric Price “Anticipating the Future,” RIBA Journal (September 1981).

Architecture is a structure of limited possibility. What exactly is the point of designing if the design itself becomes obsolete within years since its creation? In architecture, this outdating process is even more alarming, as the progress from concept to construction takes years for realization. When the construction of a building is completed, it is basically outdated. The accelerated pace of changes happening in our society further exacerbates this. For socially media, it only takes seconds for what has just been published to be considered old. Architecture is too slow! It can never catch up to the instability of our time, to the change of technology, to the advancement of human society. The existence of architecture is an inherent eternal conflict between its perennial physicality and the instability of the rationality justifying its own existence. Despite its permanence, architecture is needed for the ephemeral desire of human, for our instant gratification. Desire drives the conception of architecture. Desire sustains the continuity of architecture. However, desire is momentary, architecture is almost permanent. Without desire, there is no architecture, but architecture runs a risk of failing to satisfy new desire with its existing physical form.

Georges Bataille, “Architecture,” in Oeuvres Completes, 12 vols. (Paris: Gallimard 1971 – 1988), 1: 171 – 72, quoted in Denis Hollier, Against Architecture: The Writings of Georges Bataille, trans. Betsy Wing (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1989).

The meaning of architecture is beyond the control of its physical properties and aesthetic manifestation. It is decided by the social, economic and political situation in which the building is created regardless of the designers’ intentions. All attempts of the architects to devoid the meaning of their buildings are futile as the slightest architectural gesture can still carry the greatest impact on the context. Moreover, “architecture is the expression of the very soul of societies, just as human physiognomy is the expression of the individual’s souls.”1 A shift in social perception of a building can result in its own demise. Architecture’s permanency is fragile against the projected ideology of society, which is constantly in a state of continual flux.

The Absurdity of Architecture

Giuseppe Terragni Casa del Fascio, Como, Italy (1936). Mass gathering in front of Casa del Fascio in Como, May 5, 1936, black-and-white photograph published in Quadrante, no. 35/36 (1936). “What is then so disturbing about the photograph is how the building, so elegantly hermetic, has come to function as an icon of the Fascist state. How can a self-referencing object, timeless in its fidelity to the art of its discipline, be capable of addressing a specific place, time, and political ideology? How can a modern building simultaneously represent a thoroughly contemporary political body and sustain an argument that transcends representation, voluntarily denying or suppressing its power to represent anything but itself?” Albert Pope, “Mass Absence,” in Ladders (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1996).

New World Orders

Man increasingly dominates nature - he knows the composition of matter and roams through space - but he remains “ancient”, still thinking along ancient lines, acting in ancient ways, and staring up on the fruits of his labors with the same startled eyes he did thousands of years ago. And that fruit? - the prospect of self-destruction, the yawning chasm that has opened up between technical and scientific achievement and the human capacity to think.

Lina Bo Bardi “The Moon (1958),” in Stones Against Diamonds (London: Architectural Association Publications, 2012), 64.

New World Orders

We are living in the beginning of the twenty-first century, a key turning point of human history, when the shift from physical to digital is happening. The rise of the internet, wearable devices and virtual reality has profoundly changed human perception of the world, so radically that even we fail to grasp the extent of these transformations. One of the most fundamental changes happening is the transformation of human beings, the Homo sapiens, into a new species, Homo cellular, thanks to the rise of smart phones and wearable devices.1 In fact, the cellphone has become an extension of human cognition, shifting the way we work, entertain, and form our relationships. Thanks to smart phones, the idea of having to be physically present in one place has vanished, replaced by the juxtaposition of different simultaneous experiences in various places through the flickering small screen. Our experience of the world has completely changed. The fact that “people feel naked, inadequate, and utterly vulnerable without their phone”2 has proven that our sense of being has become dependent on the devices we hold in our hands.

Beatrix Colomina & Martk Wigley, “Homo Cellular,” in Are We Human? Notes on an archeology of design (Zürich: Lars Müller Publishers, 2016), 239.

Colomina & Wigley, “Homo Cellular,” 240.

Rem Koolhaas & Benjamin Bratton, “Posthumanism in Architecture. A Conversation Between Rem Koolhaas and Benjamin Bratton,” Strelka Magazine (July 2017). http://strelka.com/en/magazine/2017/07/05/koolhaas-and-bratton

Jemery Till, Architecture Depends (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2009), 104.

However, rarely have we realized that the smart phone is just a visible tip of the iceberg, the Internet. The Internet is sustained by a massive physical network wrapping around our world: cables, satellites, wireless networks, and gigantic data centers, which are nearly inaccessible to human, invisible to our eyes, a “ghost” infrastructure. Through the smart phone, humans are attached to this system. This infrastructure has become a part of our consciousness and we have become a part of its system of sensor and stimuli feeding information back to it. The fact that this infrastructure exists and weaves itself into our physical landscape, asserting its materialistic presence without our critical awareness, puts “ourselves in a situation of extreme vulnerability and questionable dependency.”3 Architecture used to be designed for the human bodies. However, the paradigm shifts ushered by digital technology have redefined the concept of human, human needs, as well as the purpose of architecture. The conceptual boundaries between physical and digital, between men and machines, between here and there, between past, present, and future have been blurred. The world is moving toward to the age of entropy, “a condition of ongoing uncertainty and with it the potential decline into disorder, something beyond the jurisdiction of any professional body.”4 It is the challenge of the twenty-first-century architecture to address this inevitable disturbance of stability.

New World Orders

Evan Schreiber Twitter post, October 2, 2017. The Las Vegas Massacre on 2 October 2017 was “unintentionally” live-streamed during Jason Aldean’s performance. One person in Australia sitting comfortably in their bedroom, casually scrolling down the newsfeed on Facebook, could hear the rain of bullets aiming at festival goers. The joy of music became pure terror in a matter of minute. One does not need to be in Vegas to experience the horror of the event. Digital technology has radically shifted our perception of physical places and events. “We do whatever, wherever, whenever. Anything can happen in any space.” Reinier De Graaf, “The inevitable box: architecture’s main achievement and its main trauma,” in Four Walls and a Roof: The Complex Nature of a Simple Profession, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2017), reprinted in Architectural Review (October 2017).

New World Orders

Google (Top) Inside data center, Douglas County, Georgia. (Bottom) Inside data center, Council Bluffs, Iowa. The data center is a key infrastructure to sustain the Internet which we, humans, are now depending on. Yet, due to the efficiency of space and energy, the requirement for information security, data centers are inaccessible to most human. Their internal environment is finely tuned for the need of electronic chips, carefully monitored to ensure the smooth operation of the system. In fact, humans are considered as guests in data centers, posing the risk to the security and efficiency of the machines. The data center is a humanless architecture, built for machines to sustain the extended consciousness of the Homo Cellular. “If information constitutes the main revolution of our time, it is in its main spatial component – the data centre or, at another scale, the memory chip – that the box reaches its apotheosis.” Reinier De Graaf, “The inevitable box: architecture’s main achievement and its main trauma,” in Four Walls and a Roof: The Complex Nature of a Simple Profession, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2017), reprinted in Architectural Review (October 2017).

Attempts Architecture is inherently slow, permanent and dependent, while the world is changing, stepping into a new age of digital reality. To be relevant, architecture need to react, either by completely ignoring or submitting to the flux of our instable realities.

First Attempt

All buildings are predictions. All predictions are wrong.

Stewart Brand How Buildings Learn: What Happens After Theyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;re Built (New York: Viking, 1994), 178.

First Attempt

Minoru Yamasaki Pruitt-Igoe Housing Project, St. Louis, USA (1954). US. Department of Housing and Urban Development, The second, widely televised demolition of a Pruitt-Igoe building that followed the May 16, 1972. Built during the height of Modernism in the 50s, the Pruitt-Igoe Housing Project was heralded at the time as the triumph of rational architecture over the poverty and urban blight. The complex fell from grace almost immediately and became a hot bed of criminal activities. It is remembered as an exemplary failure of Modernist utopian promises. “It’s a project I wish I hadn’t done.” Minoru Yamasaki, An Interview with Architectural Review (1960s).

First Attempt

Indeterminate Permanency

The state of permanency is architecture’s weakness, but also architecture’s greatest quality. By giving up the pursuit of instant meaning and opening itself to subjective interpretation of users, architecture can survive changes by merely moving toward the state of indeterminacy. In order words, architecture can possibly take on any schizophrenic demand by simply not deciding on anything, by becoming generic. The greatest failure of Modernism is the worship of puritanical functionalism in the strictest sense. “A house is a machine for living in” as Le Corbusier famously stated. In the name of efficiency, functionalism became the straight jacket in which the individual was forced to live. Humans were expected to move, behave and live in a state of total efficiency. Unexpectedly, people have harbored great hostility toward the prison of Modernism despite all of its rhetorical ideology of a utopian dream. When the Pruitt-Igoe building was demolished at 3 p.m., on March 16, 1972, Modernism was euphorically declared dead.1 In contrast to Modernism, the design of a Palladian villa does not explicitly demand humans to use its space in a totalitarian manner. The design of many Palladian villas is strictly based on geometrical rules, with rooms opening to each other. Despite being divided into various individual rooms, the plan is relatively open, permeable to members of the household.2 The fact that the spatial quality of these divided rooms is similar makes them open to idiosyncratic interpretation, as long as the activity can be fitted within the limited boundary. By not settling down to any specific intention, Palladio outsmarted the Modernist architects.

Charles Jencks, The Language of Post-Modern Architecture (New York: Rizzoli, 1984).

Robin Evans, “Figures, Doors, and Passages,” Architectural Design Vol.48, Issue 4 (1978): 267-278.

Justin McGirk, “The Perfect Architectural Symbol For An Era Obsessed with Customisation And Participation”, Dezeen (20 March, 2014). https://www.dezeen.com/2014/03/20/opinon-justin-mcguirk-le-corbusier-symbol-for-era-obsessed-with-customisation/

Rem Koolhaas, “Unraveling,” in S, M, L, XL (USA: The Monaceli Press, 1995), 1328.

Rem Koolhaas, “Unraveling,” 1328.

The greatest impact Modernism had on the contemporary architecture that can outmatch the indeterminacy of Palladian Villas, is, in fact, not a building, but an idea: Maison Dom-Ino (1914) by Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret. The DomIno is “the first case in architectural history of a house as an open system.”3 As a pure idea, the Dom-Ino is visionary by asserting itself as a generic system, without any particular characteristic. By giving up its own identity, it can go on assuming any projected alter ego. The Maison Dom-Ino has become a ghost haunting many contemporary buildings. The unlikely transformation of Torre David into the world’s largest vertical slum is simply just a reinterpretation of the Dom-Ino on a monumental scale under an unexpected turn of economic and political circumstance. The Dom-Ino also lurks behind contemporary architectural works: OMA’s unbuilt Jussieu Library or SANAA’s Rolex Learning Centre, both designed as a fluid landscape acting as “a serene background against which ‘life’ unfolds in the foreground,”4 allowing “unlimited potential for individual expression and difference.”5 The architecture relies on its ambiguity to maintain its own integrity against the unpredictable program filled within its physical structure.

First Attempt

Andrea Palladio Villa Capra (La Rotunda), Vicenza, Italy (1567). “Mathematical, abstract, four square, without apparent function, its dry aristocratic derivatives have enjoyed universal diffusion;” Colin Rowe, “The mathematics of the Ideal Villa - Palladio and Le Corbusier compared,” Architectural Review (March 1947). Function is not specifically dictated in Villa Carpa, as the design is driven by abstract geometrical rules, creating rooms with similar spatial quality. These rooms are open to each other; thus, the floor plan is relatively open. Users are free to interpret the use of these rooms.

First Attempt

Le Corbusier & Pierre Jeannerete Maison Dom-Ino (1914). Conceived after the destruction of Flanders during the First World War, Maison Dom-Ino is the Henry Fordâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s dream of architecture, the first standardized construction system. No room, no walls, just a pure structure, devoid of any predetermined intention. As an idea, it is a phenomenally bold idea, way so ahead of its time that even its authors barely realized.

First Attempt

Where the rectangular prism denotes volume and mass as a single entity, the box separates these. The rectangular prism is a finite entity; the box is by definition incomplete: a container, something empty and in need of filling. The box exists only by virtue of what it contains – in a state of anticipation, waiting for content, whatever that may turn out to be. In architectural terms, the box is not a matter of form following function but of form preceding function – a way to capture the largest possible multiplicity of uses.

Reinier De Graaf “The inevitable box: architecture’s main achievement and its main trauma,” in Four Walls and a Roof: The Complex Nature of a Simple Profession, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2017), reprinted in Architectural Review (October 2017).

First Attempt

Space Caviar (Joseph Grima, Martina Muzi) Screenshots from movies 99 Dom-ino (2014). The movies take a look at Italian domesticity and landscape inspired by Le Corbusier’s Dom-ino over the last 100 years. “Maison Dom-ino efficiently deploys the principles of modern architecture while embracing the unanticipated, and as such, it represents a moment of synthesis and aperture: by absolving the vertical planes of the building from their customary load-bearing duties, it effectively relinquishes control of the building’s exterior mantle, making any number of aesthetic solutions and languages viable” “99 Dom-ino”, Space Caviar, accessed 8 November 2017, http://www.spacecaviar.net/99-dom-ino/.

First Attempt

OMA Jussieu – Two Libraries (1992). “The architecture represents a serene background against which ‘life’ unfolds in the foreground. In this urban concept the specific constructions of the libraries will have unlimited potential for individual expression and difference. Also, the life span of the structure and that of the crust of the ‘settlements’ are not necessarily the same; the path and public domain are analogous to the permanence of the city, the infill of the libraries to that of individual architectures. In this structure, program can change continuously, without affecting architectural character.” Rem Koolhaas, “Unravelling,” in S, M, L, XL (USA: Monaceli Press, 1995), 1328-1329.

First Attempt

Enrique Gómez and Associates Centro Financiero Confinanzas (Torre de David), Caracas, Venezuela (1990-1994). The unfinished tower of Caracas is famously known as the world’s vertical slum, housing 5,000 squatters in 2011. The tower lacks elevators, electricity and water services. To accommodate their needs, residents made various modification to the tower themselves. “...the Dom-ino has become an ever-present ghost in the contemporary city – it seems to be everywhere.” Pier Vittorio Aureli, quoted in Justin McGirk, ‘The Perfect Architectural Symbol for an Era Obsessed with Customisation and Participation,” Dezeen (20 March, 2014).

Second Attempt

The architecture of tomorrow will be a means of modifying present conceptions of time and space. It will be a means of knowledge and a means of action. The architectural complex will be modifiable. Its aspect will change totally or partially in accordance with the will of its inhabitants.

Ivan Chtcheglov “Formulary for a New Urbanism,” trans. Ken Knabb, Écrits retrouvés, Éditions Allia (2006).

Second Attempt

Machine of Desires

It is undeniable the supremacy of machines over the fixation and slowness of architecture. Machines are always in motion, fast and transformative. Machines possess the unparalleled power of calculation, capable of predicting nearly all possibilities. They “can solve problems by repeating the same operation an almost infinite number of times.”1 Awed by the potential of machines, dreaded by the proliferating complexity of the world, architecture enlists the help of technology to justify its existence. Architecture decides to become a machine, literally. The Corbusian fetish finally comes true. One of the earliest attempts is Cedric Price, Joan Littlewood, and Gordon Pask’s Fun Palace, in which Price acknowledges the limitation of a traditional physical building. As a result, the solution is a structure capable of constructing, deconstructing and reconstructing the enclosure required for any specific need. Fun Palace simply gives up its stable, near-permanent state of a traditional building, embracing the instability by becoming an unstable structure itself. The possibility of the idea lies in the fact that architecture simply submits itself to technology, becoming a giant machine of pleasure and desire.

Mario Carpo, “The Alternative Science of Computation,” e-flux (2017). http://www.e-flux.com/architecture/artificial-labor/142274/the-alternative-science-of-computation/

Neil Spiller, Visionary Architecture: Blueprints of the Modern Imagination (London: Thames & Hudson, 2006).

Royston Landau, “A Philosophy of Enabling,” in Cedric Price (London: Architectural Association Publications, 1984), 15.

Alex Wiltshire, “Pokémon GO Has Redrawn The Map of What People Find Important About The World,” Dezeen (14 July 2016). https://www.dezeen.com/2016/07/14/pokemon-gosmartphone-video-game-brings-augmented-realityto-mass-audience-alex-wiltshire-opinion/

The new prospect offered by the invention of the computational machine ushered the rise of cybernetic thinking in the architectural field: Norbert Wiener’s behavior theory, Gordon Pask’s system-oriented thinking and architect as the designer of the system, Nicholas Negroponte’s soft architectural machine capable of evolving and adapting, and John Frazer’s evolutionary architecture theory.2 This explosion of cybernetic theory reached its fruition through the collaboration between Cedric Price and John Frazer: the Generator Project for Gilman Paper Corporation. The design is an architectural machine which can alter itself through a computational system receiving feedback from users to match their needs. In fact, it is the very first conceptual thought on the idea of what we now know as “smart city,” having “a capacity to learn and a memory and an ability to respond.”3 Architecture is seamlessly deconstructed and reconstructed over and over again according to individual desires. With the advance of digital technology, human perception of the physical world has been shifted dramatically. The Internet and social media has changed the way humans receive information, not necessarily through newspaper or television. The invention of Learning Management System has changed the way students interacting with lecturers and tutors. The Pokémon GO game became a major phenomenon within days of its release, changing the way people perceive their urban surroundings.4 The virtual became more real than reality itself. With augmented reality on the horizon, architecture can satisfy users’ wildest fantasies by giving up its final constrain, its own physicality.

Second Attempt

Cedric Price, Joan Littlewood & Gordon Pask Fun Palace (1960-1965). Fun Palace is not a traditional building. It is an open structure with moving cranes, pivoting escalators, moving walkways. Floor and wall modules are not fixed in place. In fact, it is up to the users to control the enclosure of the space by using the cranes to move the fabricated floors and walls, assembling space that suitable for their needs. “The variety of activities cannot be completely forecast; as new techniques and ideas arise they will be tried. The structures themselves will be capable of changes, renewal and destruction. If any activity defeats its purpose it will be changed.” Cedric Price “The functions, after all, are performed for human beings or human societies. It follows that a building cannot be viewed simply in isolation. It is only meaningful as a human environment. It perpetually interacts with its inhabitants, on the one hand serving them and on the other hand controlling their behaviour.” Gordon Pask, “The Architectural Relevance of Cybernetics,” Architectural Design, September Issue no. 7/6 (1969).

Second Attempt

An evolutionary architectureâ&#x20AC;Ś will conserve information while using the processes if autopoiesis, auto catalysis and emergent behaviour to generate new forms and structures. It will be involved with readjusting points of disjuncture in the socio-economic system by the operation of positive feedback. This will result in significant technological advances in our ability to intervene in the environment. Not a static picture of being, but a dynamic picture of becoming and unfolding - a direct analogy with a description of the natural world.

John Frazer An Evolutionary Architecture: Theme VII (London: Architectural Association Publications, 1995), 103.

Second Attempt

Cedric Price, John and Julia Frazer The Generator Project (1976-1979). (Top) Cedric Price, Generator project, White Oak Plantation, Yulee Florida: initial design network showing three starting points (1976-1979). (Bottom) Cedric Price, View of working electronic model of the Generator project (1976-1979). “…an ‘intelligent’ building which controlled its own organization in response to use. If not changed, the building would have become “bored” and proposed alternative arrangements for evaluation, learning how to improve its own organization on the basis of this experience.” John Frazer, An Evolutionary Architecture: Themes VII (London: AA Publications, 1995), 40.

and touch. A 360-degree 2 LCD video projectors her advanced visual apabilities, and these to express her ral mode and internal l states to visitors.

is made up of pressure sensors, neon tubes and a microcontroller. Using this extensive surface, Ada can track her visitors, test their responsiveness Second Attempt to visual and sensual cues, and interact with them through different types of games. Local visual effects can also be created with the RGB-coloured neon lights in each tile, rather like a chameleon. A ring of ambient lights sets the overall visual emotional tone of the space, while nine gazer lights with pan, tilt and zoom capabilities make up Ada’s ‘eyes’ (although she does not take the form of a representational concept in this

Ada: the Intelligent Room

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Imagine a creature that lives, behaves, communicates and feels – and imagine that it is a Zurich room called Ada. Ada, the intelligent room, Institute of Neuroinformatics, ETH Ada: the intelligent room, Expo 02 Neuchâtel, (2002). which is farSwitzerland away from any known creature, is a multimodal immersive interactive space An experiment by ETH Zurich ‘s Institute of Neuroinformatics, Ada is an immersive interactive space, capable to tracking the visitors, learning their response and adjusting its behaviors developed for Expo 02, the Swiss national accordingly. Ada can remember the visitors who it has interacted with. In other words, it is able to learn exhibition held at Neuchâtel, Switzerland. She from its past experience, improving itself. was conceived by a multidisciplinary team of 25 people led by psychologist Paul Verschure,1 working at the Institute of Neuroinformatics,2 University ETH Zurich in Switzerland. As an artificial organism, Ada has the ability Above left and right to interact and communicate with her visitors, A responsive environment which, like a human being, has but that is because she is a project based on the many faculties, Ada tracked latest research in neuroinformatics. As project visitors as they wandered around the space, tested their leader Verschure explains, the intention was to compliance by gauging their trigger a public debate about the application and responsiveness to cues – for

number of dynamically mo large multipurpose buildin of behavioural integration adaptive functionality, is a of living architecture. Named after Lady Ada L of computer science, Ada f 10 hours a day over six mo average technical infrastru exhibitions. But then the p her real-time interactions. programmed to balance vi identify, track, guide and g play games with them. The sequenced: visitors approa ‘conditioning tunnel’ – whe introduction to Ada’s comp

Second Attempt

Axel Kilian Flexing Room, 2017 Seoul Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism (2017). “The Flexing Room combines an active bending structure with sensors for controlling actuation pressure and motion tracking for capturing human actions. The interaction between visitors and the structure is open ended, allowing for the building’s response to human presence to evolve over time, adjusting actions based on the perceived responses of visitors. The physical posture of the building is in part computationally determined through the set pressures in the actuators, and in part resolved through the active bending response of the fiberglass skeleton and less predictable as it is soft and responsive to environmental forces. Through the sensed position of visitors, space becomes interface and building behavior communication.” Axel Kilian, Description for 2017 Seoul Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism.

Second Attempt

Niantic Pokémon Go, a location-based augmented reality mobile game (2016). An augmented reality game based on real world, in which players attempt to “catch” Pokemon appearing randomly around certain locations. The game uses real-life landmarks such as museums, libraries, even MI5’s headquarters as key locations in the game, forming a new relationship between city dwellers and places. Players are venturing into areas they never usually go. In other words, the game has mentally remapped the city, changing the social and political nature of different territories. “The information revolution – the revolution of our time –doesn’t change buildings, it changes the way we use them... By further disengaging buildings from what goes on inside them, the digital (more about that later) makes architecture less important, not more.” Reinier De Graaf, “The inevitable box: architecture’s main achievement and its main trauma,” in Four Walls and a Roof: The Complex Nature of a Simple Profession, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2017), reprinted in Architectural Review (October 2017).

Break

Diagnosis Waste brings us face to face with the destructive potential of time and the inevitability of time. Jeremy Till Architecture Depends (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2009), 74.

The denial or submission of architecture to the acceleration of changes are simply absurd. On the one hand, architecture hopelessly delays its eventual obsolescence through the deceptive ideas of Zeitgeist’s timelessness or Vitruvian durability. On the other hand, the transformation of architecture into a machine of pleasure simply sustains its delusional relevancy through endless machinery simulation and complete detachment from reality. No matter what attempt is made, architectural works “always enter the social realm as transient objects, subject right from the beginning to decline in value and an inexorable slide to the status of rubbish.”1 The dread of falling into dereliction is, in fact, symptomatic of the modernity’s fear of time. The differentiation between the past and future is the modern peculiar interpretation of time: “the present is outlined by a series of radical breaks, revolutions, which constitutes so many ratchets that prevent us ever going backward.”2 In fact, the mindless pursuit of innovation and the inability to comprehend the ever-increasing complexity of the world are the results of modernization. In order to break the vicious circle between delusional relevancy and inevitable obsolescence, it is necessary to make a further inquiry into the mechanism of the modern mental state.

Jeremy Till, Architecture Depends (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2009), 71.

Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993), 71-72.

Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, 10-11.

Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, 39.

In his analysis of modernity, Bruno Latour defines modern as an absolute distinction between the two practices: the work of mediation creates hybrids of nature and culture and the work of purification maintains the ontological difference between humans (Society) and nonhumans (Nature).3 Modern science is born through the empirical method: transcendental facts are fabricated in the laboratory by human mobilization of Nature, justified through the indication of soulless mute nonhumans observed by Society. New “universal” Laws are created through the mixtures of human and nonhuman, yet their validity is justified through the distinction between transcendent Nature and immanent Society. This is the Great Divide that makes the moderns invincible, allowing them to sustain contradictory possibilities, making them “absolutely free to give up following the ridiculous constraints of their past which required them to take into account the delicate web of relations between things and people.”4

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The mediation between humans and nonhumans gives birth to hybrids, the products of natural and political science: the ozone debate, global warming, deforestation, or even the concept of the blackhole, giving the moderns their greatness: “the ever-increasing scale of their action, the creation of stabilized objects independent of society, the freedom of a society liberated from objects.”5 However, the plausibility of modernity is based on the complete separation between Nature and Society, threatened by the proliferation of hybrids which has no natural origin. Thus, as Latour argues that in an attempt to justify the illegitimate emergence of the hybrids, modernization has to construct the myth of radical revolution, a complete epistemological break from history. To support this complete irreversible disruption from the past, the sorting of these hybrids into progress and decadence, “either as a form of capitalism, an accumulation of conquests, or as an invasion of barbarians, a succession of catastrophes,” is “required to obtain the impression of a modernization that goes in step with time.”6 Thus, progress, innovations, revolutions are necessary to sustain this relentless flight forward, to avoid falling back to the barbarian past in which there is no clear distinction between the two ontological poles. As long as the practices of mediation and purification remain distinct, modernity can continue to justify its temporality. However, the proliferation of hybrids in sheer number and complexity has reached the point where it is nearly impossible to purify them into any ontological mode of modernity. This process has, thus, undermined the framework of modernity, rendered it invalid; also they questioned the nature of progress as a continuous flight to the future.7 “The moderns have been victims of their own success.”8 The tragedy of the moderns is their complete epistemological break with the premodern history, thus leading to their eventual perplexity when being confronted by inexplicable hybrids and uncontrollable contingencies that the modern framework can no longer absorb. In this light, architecture’s fear and great malaises are indications of the modern tragedy. The irrevocable break from the past and the relentless drive forward of modernity are reflected in architectural fear of obsolescence and its requirement of continual novelty. In the desperation of distancing itself from the past, architecture attempts to suspend the act of time through the illusion of permanency or to drag itself to the hopeless race against time with the help of technology. The absolute differentiation between Nature and Society and the complete denial of mediation practice has led to the false belief of necessary Laws fabricated in the laboratory as universal and transcendent. Likewise, architecture also falls into this trap, delivering a rational construction in the name of transcendence and universality of Nature. Inevitably, this plunges architecture into a state of bewilderment when buildings fail spectacularly in face of the complexity and contingencies of the human world. How can transcendence of Nature be conquered by the immanence of Society? 5.

Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, 133.

Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, 72.

Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, 73.

Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, 49.

Since the moderns differentiate themselves from premoderns through the complete distinction between humans and nonhumans, hybrids are regarded as monsters that must be maniacally purified at all costs. The Great Divide pertains its influence on architecture: humans and nonhumans must remain separated. In order words, humans should not meddle with buildings and should be conformed to the universality of architecture. To maintain its purity, architecture would rather be demolished than becoming a hybrid. Where do we go from here?

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Only the idea that we have had of science up to now rendered absolute a dominion that might have remained relative. All the subtle pathways leading continuously from circumstances to universals have been broken off by the epistemologists, and we have found ourselves with pitiful contingencies on one side and necessary Laws on the other - without, of course, being able to conceptualize their relations.

Bruno Latour We Have Never Been Modern (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993), 118-119.

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Speculative No one has ever been modern. Modernity has never begun. There has never been a modern world. Bruno Latour We Have Never Been Modern (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993), 47.

If architecture is experiencing a modern ontological crisis, a shifting of the architectural perception is necessary. “Modernity has never begun” claimed Latour in his essay, in fact, it is only a state of mind. It is because the absolute separation between Nature and Society has never been achieved. However, there has been a process of modernization, thus, we cannot go back to premodern anymore. Latour proposes a state of nonmodern, in which Latour combines the best of both premodern and modern world: “to retain the production of a nature and of a society that allow changes in size through the creation of an external truth and a subject of law, but without neglecting the co-production of sciences and societies.”1 In other words, he calls for the recognition of the hybrids created by humans and nonhumans, he proposes to “take away from them only the mystery of their birth and the danger their clandestineness posed to democracy.”2 In this light, the new human in a nonmodern world is not a puritanical idea but a hybrid of all “its delegates and its representatives, its figures and its messengers.”3

Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993), 134.

Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, 142.

Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, 138.

Donna Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology and Socialist-feminism in the Late Twentieth Century,” in The Cybercultures Reader, eds. David Bell and Barbara M. Kennedy (New York: Routledge, 2001), 295.

Jeremy Till, Architecture Depends (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2009), 167.

Latour is not the first to call for the embrace of hybridization, Donna Haraway, in her Cyborg Manifesto, also makes the same call with the image of the cyborg. “Cyborg myth is about transgressed boundaries, potent fusions and dangerous possibilities which progressive people might explore as one part of needed political work.”4 Essentially, her cybernetic revolution is a new possibility without unnecessary totalizing universality or hierarchy. Its lack of hierarchy and boundaries offers a vision of a world of “infidel heteroglossia.” In the same light, if architecture accepts the existence of inexplicable hybrids, it can finally remove itself from the madness of moving forward since there is no need to distinguish itself from the past. And if hybrids and contingencies are parts of this heteroglossia world, we cannot continue to sustain the idea of architecture as a problem-solving process, in which there is always a problem in the world that needed to be eliminated. Instead, architecture should be about recognizing new possibilities within existing situations and exploring different responses to them.5

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Thus, it is essential to expand our understanding of the contexts, not only in separated terms of Nature or Society, but also how these networks are related and intertwined which might not be limited to the physical boundary of the site.

Gordon Pask, “An Architectural Relevance of Cybernetics,” Architectural Design, September Issue No 7/6 (1969), 494-496.

Till, Architecture Depends, 193.

Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, 144.

At the same time, it is also possible for architecture to regard itself as a hybrid. Gordon Pask once suggests the work of an architect is the work of a system designer.6 Though Pask advocates for a cybernetic, heavily technocratic architecture, it is worth to consider his idea in a broader term. Architecture can be a system, a framework, a network, which weaves together all relationships between humans, nature, and hybrids, allowing them to strive, to develop, to evolve over the time. Thus, the idea of architecture as a building might become too restrictive, as Cedric Price asserts throughout his career, the response to a situation might not necessarily a building. Architecture should become an agent of freedom, providing opportunity. Following this train of thought, the role of architects is “not about the implementation of generic solutions to particular problems. It is not about the architects as the detached polisher of form and technique, but as the person who gathers the conflicting voices of a given situation and makes the best possible social and spatial sense of them.”7 Architects, in term of Latour, can become the mediators capable of translating the work of their hybrids, redeploying them to profoundly modify Nature and Society. However, in his nonmodern world, the works of mediators are clandestine anymore, but are conducted in the Parliament of Things, where the mediators, representatives of Nature and Society discussing the implications of their hybrids and the extended networks they have created in a democratic manner. Welcome to the age of new humanism!

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...a cyborg world might be about lived social and bodily realities in which people are not afraid of their joint kinship with animals and machines, not afraid of permanent partial identities and contradictory standpoints. The political struggle is to see from both perspectives at once because each reveals both dominations and possibilities unimaginable from the other vantage point. Single vision produces worse illusions than double vision or many-headed monsters. Cyborg unities are monstrous and illegitimate; in our present political circumstances, we could hardly hope for more potent myths for resistance and recoupling.

Donna Haraway â&#x20AC;&#x153;A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology and Socialist-feminism in the Late Twentieth Century,â&#x20AC;? in The Cybercultures Reader, eds. David Bell and Barbara M. Kennedy (New York: Routledge, 2001), 295.

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Such requests are not necessarily of an architectural nature and are frequently in the form of a challenge which does not necessarily suggest an architectural response.

Cedric Price â&#x20AC;&#x153;Introduction,â&#x20AC;? in Cedric Price (London: Architectural Association Publications, 1984), 18.

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Cedric Price Potteries Thinkbelt (1963-1967). (Top) Cedric Price, Overall plan showing primary road and desire line for the Potteries Thinkbelt (1964). (Bottom) Cedric Price, Perspective sketch of transfer area, Potteries Thinkbelt (1966). “Instead of campus centrality, Price proposed the network. His argument against centrality were many - centrality led to self-congestion and disallowed expansion, it promoted physical and intellectual isolation (hardly desirable in an institute of higher learning) and it suffered from inaccessibility. A network, on the other hand, would be indeterminate, flexible and extendable, allowing the educational facilities to spread over and integrate into the area of the Potteries. This process of integration was expected to generate not only major economic benefits to the whole area, but also offer support and stimulation even for those not directly attached to the institution.” Royston Landau, “A Philosophy of Enabling,” in Cedric Price (London: Architectural Association, 1984), 13.

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Pool CHUTE DU MUR BERLIN/Gamma-Rapho A man celebrates on the Berlin wall on November 12, 1989 in Berlin, Germany (1989). â&#x20AC;&#x153;If we do not change the common dwelling, we shall not absorb in it the other cultures that we can no longer dominate, and we shall be forever incapable of accommodating in it the environment that we can no longer control. Neither Nature nor the Others will become modern. It is up to us to change our ways of changing. Or else it will have been for naught that the Berlin Wall fell during the miraculous year 1989, offering us a unique practical lesson about the conjoined failure of socialism and naturalism.â&#x20AC;? Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993), 145.

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