Guest-edited by

VIOLA AGO

INDETERMINACY
AND DISORDER

02 | Vol 92 | 2022
 ALT-FORM: 02/2022
INDETERMINACY AND DISORDER

Moving Pictures 44
Three Installations
About the Guest-Editor 5 for Public Life
Viola Ago Jennifer Newsom

Introduction 6 Heavyweight 52

Embracing Uncertainty Undermining Power

Structures Through
How Policies Shape the World Spatial Destabilisation
and Force Simulation
Viola Ago
Jeffrey Halstead

Chaos, Creativity, 14 The alternative in form does not

Change necessarily mean an approach to form
The Cybernetic Logic devoid of structure, hierarchy or order.
of Late Capitalism Rather, an alternative one prefers not
Andrew Culp to favour these attributes, and instead
invites an external formalism (social,
Architectonisation 22
literary, scientific, etc) to collapse onto
The Spatio-Temporal
the architectural and aesthetic one.
Rhythms of Contemporary — Viola Ago
Sculptural Practices

Suzanne Cotter

36
Kombinat 30
The Unseen and Their
Architectural Oddkins

Dorina Pllumbi

Painterly, Misfit 36
and Redundant
Challenging Precision
and Optimisation
with Scavenging

Faysal Tabbarah

2
ISSN 0003-8504 Guest-edited by Viola Ago
ISBN 978 1119 748793

Rude Forms 60 Rendering 90

Among Us Representational
Contemporary Construction
Atmosphere
of Prehistoric Ruins Appropriating Formalisms
Anna Neimark Around Invisible Objects
in Film

Carl Lostritto

84
Signature Urbanism 96

Shaping Subperceptual
Forms for the New
Multispectral City

Ersela Kripa and Stephen Mueller

Rebellious Architecture 104

Bayou Reconstructed

V Mitch McEwen and

Kristina Kay Robinson

An Aesthetic 114
of Collapse
Alternative Form, Disorder
‘Strange Networks’ 68 and Indeterminacy
A Conversation with
Inhabiting the Boundary Jack Halberstam
Condition
A Conversation with Thom Mayne Viola Ago

Viola Ago

Chromophobia in 78 From Another Perspective

the ‘Smart’ City Sculpting the Forest 120

Carolyn L Kane
of Symbols
Nick Ervinck

Neil Spiller
Images of Former 84
Futures and
Reformations Contributors 126

Dalena Tran

3
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4
 Viola Ago directs the design research practice Miracles Architecture,
ABOUT THE
and teaches in the Architecture and Urban Design programme at the
GUEST-EDITOR
University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). She was previously
VIOLA AGO
a Wortham Fellow at Rice School of Architecture in Houston, Texas
(2019–21), a Yessios Visiting Professor at the Ohio State University
Knowlton School of Architecture (2018–19), a University Design
Research Fellow at Exhibit Columbus (2017–19), and a Muschenheim
Fellow at the Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning,
University of Michigan (2016–17). In 2019, she undertook a
MacDowell artist’s residency in Peterborough, New Hampshire, and
a research residency at the Autodesk Technology Center in Boston,
Massachusetts. She was previously a lead designer in the Advanced
Technology Team at Morphosis Architects in LA.
Her written work has been published by Routledge and Park
Books, as well as in Log, 2, Offramp, The Journal of Architectural
Education, Texas Architect, The Architect’s Newspaper and Archinect.
Her design and research work has been exhibited in LA, Boston,
Houston, New York, San Francisco, Miami, Columbus, Ann Arbor
and Cincinnati. Through her publications and exhibitions she
questions the instabilities and uncertainties in architecture. Her
inquiry into the destabilised and the indeterminate began as an
aesthetics-oriented investigation; her stand-alone drawings, for
example, trace a decade-long endeavour in ghostly and emergent
potentials of architectural form. In tandem with her drawing
practice, she developed a research trajectory that understands this
(current) contemporary moment in architecture as one in urgent
need of alternative forms of thinking and making, due to internal
(for example, the rigid and conformist residual mandates of high
Modernism) and external (the need for architects to carefully
examine their agency in relation to political, economic and social
conditions of a given site) disciplinary pressures.
More specifically, her design proposals focus on architecture’s
role in a world conditioned by material (the body) and immaterial
(the psyche) forms of duress. Her interest in the affective conditions
of misalignments and slippages in architectural conceptual
investigations and productions has fuelled her investigations
towards a design research project that celebrates the aesthetic
and formal agency of destruction and disorder. Her architectural
project looks to political theory and the method of phenomenology
of empathy, and digital technological advancements such as
real-time physics engines and production methodologies. It is
through this lens that she formulated the fundamental aspect
of this 2 issue. 1

Text © 2022 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Image © Hatixhe Ago

5
Embracing INTRODUCTION

Uncertainty VIOLA AGO

How Policies
Shape the World

6
Something needs to be destroyed in order for the Julia Jalowiec,
I just came here to hang
new to be created. So argues French philosopher out with y’all. Should
Catherine Malabou who supports her argument with we order a pizza?,
First Year Exhibition,
the biological analogy of in utero suicidal cells that die The Lantern, Lenfest
so that fingers can be created.1 This is not an unpopular Center for the Arts,
New York,
thought. We have understood and accepted that the 2021
emergence of the new is viable at the destruction – and
Jalowiec’s work operates outside the
at times the literal death – of the previous, or the old. bounds of conventional disciplinary
Alt-Form: Indeterminacy and Disorder is thematically artistic narratives in two ways: by
subjectively challenging the formal
invested in revisiting previous trajectories in relation and aesthetic norm of the biological
to the emergence of new forms so that we can revise body, and by forcing the two distinct
genres of surface painting and iron
and then devise alternative ways to respond and casting in order to produce other
invent architecturally. More specifically, this issue of visual conditions.

2 is concerned with the different types of destruction

of and violence against the built environment, the
collective memory and the body – all extensions of
architecture, broadly speaking. In an attempt to think
through alternativism rather than novelty, Alt-Form Previous Trajectories
seeks projects and research that do not shy away from The trajectory of the Western canon of architecture is
politically, technologically, economically and socially modelled as a lineage. Chronologically, style eras in the
charged and woefully distraught sites, but instead field of architecture have been synthesised, documented
confront them head-on with sincerity, dedication, care, and theorised in a formulaic manner: the new style is
endurance and creativity. almost always in response to – or measured against –
the previous one; the old. In our more recent collective
Viola Ago / Miracles
memory, one might think of the anti- or post- movements.
Architecture, Or perhaps in the popular psyche, one can consider the
House 1,
2021
patricidal act as the most explicit manner for the new to
establish its dominance. A prime example that comes
House 1 pushes the erroneous
moments of a graphic/form event
to mind is the physical and artistic act of American artist
where the graphic blanket that Robert Rauschenberg who, in 1953, literally erased an
originated from a vector line drawing,
and the formal composition at times
original Willem de Kooning pencil drawing in an attempt
align and at other times deviate to signify that the birth of the new artistic movement was
to create their own independent
localised agencies. The pixel drips
at the expense – or erasure – of the old.
and stretches in this rendering assert The most analogous example in architecture can be
a faulty aesthetic language that seeks
an architecture as an event.
described with the Deconstructivists who in the late 1970s
and early 1980s started to react to their predecessors: the
Modernists and the Postmodernists. The Deconstructivists
were working through projects that defied the laws of
physics, confronted wholeness with finite libraries of
elements, challenged geometric truths, and resisted
conventional typologies and assemblies. For example,
in his eponymous residence (Gehry Residence, Santa
Monica, California, 1978, remodelled 1991), the American
architect Frank Gehry altered his typical single-family
suburban balloon-frame house by exposing wall studs
in the kitchen and using industrial materials such as
construction-grade plywood and corrugated metal as
finish surfaces – in opposition to the white and clean
aesthetics of the Modernists. The British-Iraqi architect
Zaha Hadid is another quintessential example. In her Vitra
Fire Station (Weil am Rhein, Germany, 1993), she used a
multitude of degrees for positioning walls and ceilings,
while avoiding the right angle – which was another
defining quality of the High Modernists. This churning
of old and new through literal destruction or erasure
spans the creative disciplines of the Western world and
is currently understood and disseminated as styles that
belonged to distinct period timelines.

7
Overcoming Style
Deconstructivism, as described above, inevitably
became a style, even though its creators claimed that
they were interested in ideas and, as such, argued
that its placement in the canon as a style was in a way
antithetical to its original ambitions. This, too, is not
a new phenomenon. New architectural ideas do not
necessarily seek to establish a new style. They do however
lead to movements; movements gain momentum; and
momentums lay the groundwork for the establishment
of style. Similarly, the two primary architectural projects
that followed – the digital and the neo-Postmodern – also
inevitably became styles. It could be argued that the early
digital project (late 1990s to late 2000s) originated as
an extension of Deconstructivism. Its procedure-based
methodologies and compositional apparatuses – here one
thinks of Bernard Tschumi’s Parc De la Villette (Paris, 1982–
98), Daniel Libeskind’s Jewish Museum (Berlin, 1999),
Peter Eisenman’s series of House drawings (1970s–80s) –
paved the way to architecturally oriented digital processes
as computers started to support complex 3D modelling
environments and animation tools.
During this time these projects were still guided by
design ambitions that were not rooted in the digital.2 It
was not until the end of our current century’s first decade
and the beginning of its second that the digital project
incited other complex subgenres such as the surface
project (or façade), object-oriented ontology, fabrication
and optimisation, and the computation project which later
developed its own set of subprojects – ones that were
primarily informed and driven by mandates discovered
and developed in the digital world alone. This moment of
the digital project was defined by the field being wholly
obsessed with novelty and technological advancement.
The hermetic nature of the digital project however led to
the subsequent neo-Postmodernist project (neo-PoMo,
2010s–2018) – and perhaps even the brief but potent
post-digital one. In so doing, these two projects fell back
into the conventional strategy of the death of the past;
the old. To be specific, architects of the neo-PoMo realm
turned towards simplified permutations of colour and
2D shape illustrations and operations in an attempt to
erase recognisable digital traces, while those of the post-
digital realm started operating with intentionally banal
and seemingly poor-resolution digitally rendered visuals
to counteract the high precision and fidelity afforded by
advanced digital technology.
In accepting the risk of reducing complex architectural
historical scenarios to a few traits, it is important to
place these shifts into an architectural style diagram
so that we can collectively best understand our current
moment – a moment that cannot escape its past either. was exclusive (and highly subjective), centralised, linear,
The suggestion here is not to be informed by the vetted hierarchical and non-porous. The ambition of this purging
Western canon, but rather to leave it temporarily aside moment in history seeks to encourage an architecture that
while we as architects, collectively and individually, can also host peripheral disciplinary problems as well as
develop new ideas and proposals that can avoid the social, economic and political conditions in much more
hermetic nature of that canon – one which, with minor dedicated and real ways, so as to achieve pluralistic and
exceptions of course, developed an architecture that intersectional approaches to architecture.

8
 Aranda\ Lasch,
Another Circle,
Exhibit Columbus,
Mill Race Park,
Columbus, Indiana,
2017

The installation consists of stacks of limestone arranged in

self-similar but never identical manners. The placements
and postures of the clusters seem completely random from
human eye level, while on plan view it becomes clear that it
has been intentionally composed with organisational logics
that favour human experience, site, landscape and geometry.

Alternatives for Novelty or Techno-positivity

Favouring the thought experiment that the new (not the
novel, but the new as the mere present condition) can
reach outwardly towards other urgent and previously
omitted avenues can be incredibly powerful and even
liberating in a lineage that is predominantly based on
new architectural conditions emerging in response to its
predecessor. Furthermore, the political theorist Jairus
Grove, director of the Hawai‘i Research Center for Future
Studies at the University of Hawai‘i at Manoa, argues that
the new – and more specifically our present new – does not
necessarily depend on the destruction of the old. Rather,
the old, and consequently the things that we are left
Maya Alam and Daniele Profeta, Casa Zwei, ‘Cloud~ing’, with, destructive as they may be, must be embraced as a
College of Architecture and Urban Design,
Kent State University, Kent, Ohio,
present condition.3 It is precisely through this embracing of
2018 aspects of life that seem external to our being in the world,
This rendering presents alternative material capabilities that take cues from digital
that we can find creative potential, rather than defaulting
imaging technologies, cultural outtakes of the proliferation of the digital image, as well to conventional conditioning that has trained us to either
as tectonic affinities innate to the digital rendering engine. Such complex digital data
compression destabilises the conventionally understood architectural material as merely
deflect or resolve the bad, the negative, the wrong, the
physically mineral. destructive, the unstable.

9
 To be clear, there is no assurance that history will
not repeat itself; neither should that be the primary The collective intention
focus. However, in the space of plurality, architecture
can transcend the erasure of the past paradigm towards must work towards
an axis of alternatives gained from observations and
integration of knowledge. In other words, the primary
transformative alternatives
ambition is not to seek novelty and advancement.
Instead, the collective intention must work towards
which are based on existing
transformative alternatives which are based on existing
problematic, unjust, hermetic and forgotten yet very
problematic, unjust, hermetic
real current forms of life.
During this moment, some emergent architectural
and forgotten yet very real
practices have turned their attention to more aleatory
affinities. The seduction of the ruin, unhappy wholes,
current forms of life
faulty aesthetics and other non-ordered mandates are
proliferating in the field as our being in the world has
become indisputably more unstable and uncertain.

10
Viola Ago / Miracles Architecture, Forces of Disruption
House 3,
2021 In the search for alternative formalisms, the work of my
design research practice Miracles Architecture has been
above: From a series of speculative house designs,
this drawing of the house as a graphic blanket uses building on project proposals conceived through material
algorithmic processes and consists of parallel lines methodologies and digital engines to develop forms and
with varying densities parcelled out in a top-view
composition in an attempt to create dynamic graphics in states of duress or to aggregate collections of
and unexpected relationships between the objects into casual, loose and intentionally misoriented
parcel outlines (in magenta) and the line clusters
(in green). The drawing is then rasterised and compositions. More specifically, this work attempts to
used as a graphic shrink-wrap. integrate violence as a central force in creative disciplines
Heather Roberge, En Pointe, SCI-
and surface as a supporter of visual phenomena. For
Arc Gallery, Southern California example, some of the earlier design research work
Institute ofArchitecture,
Los Angeles, California,
(MADTBIM, 2017; Poppy Red, 2018; So Graphic!, 2019)
2015 was based on surface articulations rooted in commercial
left: The column-like units in the installation lean
and, by extension, capitalist-centric practices: sign
and support one another precariously in an upright printing, backlighting, plastic coatings, graphic wrapping/
organisational composition, while the formal
attributes of the individual parts suggest a bend –
shrinking, image mapping, electronic sensorial systems,
an action that almost challenges the overall upright etc. The studies produced for these projects explore
stance. This compositional strategy is a refreshing
alternative to formal arrangements that are rooted
forceful and aggressive events between 2D graphics and
in the orderly and the rigid. corresponding 3D forms.

11
 In his 1961 book The Wretched of the Earth, in the
chapter on violence, the psychiatrist and political
philosopher Frantz Fanon sketches an immersive parallel
between the coloniser and the colonised. Simply put,
he describes the coloniser’s imposed value system as
violence and the response of the colonised as aggression.4
This weighs heavy, that a destructive atmosphere – a
complex network of multi-axis diagrams between violence
and aggression – is inherent in not only our contemporary
being, but persistently through most of modern life. In
our context, the Western creatives of the second half
of the 20th century missed this, perhaps due to the
institutionalised nature of knowledge production and
dissemination.
The violence–aggression axis offers a captivating
potential for an architecture in need of a shake-up. The
work of Miracles Architecture further builds on this
thinking by constructing architectural sequences using
digital simulation platforms that afford our field design
and creative agency that is not merely visual, but also
haptic, gestural, spatial and, by extension, political. More
specifically, conflating the laws of physics (for example
the behaviour of shrink-wrapping a graphic blanket
on a volumetric aggregation), affective experiences of
natural behaviours (such as the tears and stretches of a
digital image) and attributes in a network of things (or in Viola Ago / Miracles Architecture,
House 2,
other words, the relation between self-similar parts in a 2021
massing study) can productively engage our perceptual
The tectonic articulation in this project breaks rules based on visual
apparatuses in ways that extend past the traditional dynamics that emerge from the visual conditions of the graphic/form
narratives of architectural thinking and making towards event rather than preset or standardised rules. The structural members,
skin panels, furniture, graphic lines, etc, are all loosely composed in
truer forms of engagement with the world. response to the author’s sensibilities and perceptual mechanisms.

Viola Ago / Miracles

Architecture,
House 3,
2021

This drawing consists of five

layers of information that include
representation, fabrication, illustration,
geometry information and other
undefined categories. The drawing
imagines near-figural aesthetic
possibilities by appropriating
information that is strictly used for
production phases in architecture.

12
 focuses on a site-specific case study to sketch an intense
and fraught architectural correspondence between
discourse mandates, political agendas and occupant
realities. In another type of correspondence, Jennifer
Newsom whimsically interrogates industrial and city-
scale materials and structures with empathetic pluralistic
experience.
Contributors Ersela Kripa and Stephen Mueller present
an imperative space of creative activism where architecture
and urbanism collapse with military realities and politics.
Thematically adjacent, V Mitch McEwen and Kristina
Kay Robinson describe new forms of collaboration and
performative imaginaries that are necessary to revisit
realities of city planning, systemic structuralism and Black
life. Another deeply architectural lens is on offer by Anna
Neimark who convinces us that forms can have an attitude
and does so through a technological lens of three implicit
timelines: prehistoric, post-industrial and current. Pushing
us further into the imaginative, Faysal Tabbarah offers
painterly, new materialist trajectories that zoom in on the
problem of Modernist precision, while Jeffrey Halstead
constructs new perceptual methods through geometrical
implausibilities based on material and gestural behaviours.
Working through more lyrical formats, Dalena Tran informs
us of an emergent type of aesthetic condition that responds
The Current Paradox of Form to pressures of the visual, technological and political, while
Form is by definition something that encompasses Carl Lostritto takes us through cultural and technological
hierarchy, ordering mechanisms and structure. Alternative implications of the misconception of architectural digital
formalism might sound counterintuitive – or antithetical representation through atmospheric and transient registers.
at first glance. However, the alternative in form does not In all, the issue presents a survey of alternative forms
necessarily mean an approach to form devoid of structure, of engagement through some of the leading figures in
hierarchy or order. Rather, an alternative one prefers not architecture, art, design and critical thinking.
to favour these attributes, and instead invites an external We live in a world where it is no longer possible to
formalism (social, literary, scientific, etc) to collapse onto deny the uncertainties and instabilities that dictate daily
the architectural and aesthetic one. life. As architects, we have a responsibility not only to
Alt-Form can be thought of as a structural principle the built environment, but also to other forms of life. As
undergirding many experiments in contemporary such, it is also no longer possible to operate within the
architecture’s culture. With this objective in mind, this 2 conventional disciplinary bounds because architecture has
issue invites critics, theorists and artists, in addition to an been an active participant in complex structural systems
influential group of architects and designers, to articulate, that have been imposed top-down. The contributors to
argue for/against and think through current projects that this issue poignantly revisit this role and offer profound
speak to faulty aesthetics, erroneous forms, fictitious alternatives by co-residing in the distraught, the disorderly,
systems, responsive apparatuses and more. the unstable. 1
Conventionally perceived as the outermost layers of the
discipline, in their contributions to the issue Andrew Culp, Notes
1. Catherine Malabou, Ontology of the Accident: An Essay
Carolyn L Kane and Jack Halberstam offer architectural
on Destructive Plasticity, trans Carolyn Shread, Polity Books
parallels in cultural theory, media studies and gender (Cambridge), 2012.
2. Greg Lynn, ‘Going Native: Notes on Selected Artifacts from
studies respectively while keeping a keen eye on aesthetic
Digital Architecture at the End of the 20th Century’, in Andrew
consequences. Reeling us in a little closer to architecture, Goodhouse (ed), When Is the Digital in Architecture?, Canadian
Centre for Architecture (Montreal) / Sternberg Press (Berlin),
Suzanne Cotter interrogates the liminal and irregular
2017, p 290.
space between sculpture, performance and architecture. 3. Jairus Victor Grove, Savage Ecology: War and Geopolitics
at the End of the World, Duke University Press (Durham, NC),
Perhaps more unapologetically centred in our field, Thom
2019.
Mayne presents a series of drawings, the descriptions of 4. Frantz Fanon, ‘On Violence in the International Context’, in
The Wretched of the Earth [1961], trans Richard Philcox, Grove
which resist human language and instead develop their
Press (New York), 2004, pp 1–62.
own semi-autonomous vocabulary based on chance and
willfulness that are still inextricably tied to architectural
Text © 2022 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Images: pp 6–7(b), 11(t), 12–13 © Viola
contingencies. Through photography and various modes Ago / Miracles Architecture; p 7(t) © Julia Jalowiec; pp 8–9 © AlamProfeta
of research, and also centred in the field, Dorina Pllumbi 2019; p 9(r) © Aranda\Lasch; pp 10–11(b) Photo © Joshua White

13
Andrew Culp

CHAOS,
CREATIVITY,
CHANGE

14
THE CYBERNETIC
LOGIC OF LATE
CAPITALISM

Chaos theory is the

motive force behind
a wider cultural and
artistic shift, not
predicated by any
overarching grand
unifying narratives.
Professor of Media and
History at the California
Institute of the Arts
in Santa Clarita,
Andrew Culp examines
the contemporary
Unknown Fields Division (Kate Davies and Liam Young),
destabilising
We Power Our Future With the Breastmilk of Volcanoes,
film still,
2019
condition of chaos
Lithium mine evaporation pools in Bolivia. Lithium is a necessary element
for batteries, which power our ubiquitous devices, from cellphones to
and our decades-
electric vehicles. The film highlights the often hidden relationship between
technological advancements and the toxic exploitation of natural resources. long pact with it.

15
Chaos conjures fearful images of uncertainty, But by then, new models coming on the heels of a neoliberal
turbulence and even destruction. But that is only the revolution took markets to be the emergent quality of
half of it – the story of the last five decades is also a various conditions. That is to say, thinkers adopted a
tale of how scientists, designers, philosophers and synthetic outlook in which underlying conditions could be
many others learned to stop worrying and love chaos. programmed and reprogrammed in an effort to construct
But is there a new, darker or more alien chaos that new outcomes.
still haunts our imagination? Using an ecological metaphor, economics since the
Second World War remade national economies into tide
Stalemate pools. The pools are still fed by the ocean but are protected
Close examination of the tectonic shifts in economic through partial separation from its vastness and violent surf.
policy provide a mirror into chaos as a period-defining They came under threat, however, with the dissolution of
concept. Only after shedding its categorisation as the fixed global currency system in the early 1970s. While
moral philosophy with the marginalist revolution currency pegging had provided certainty by specifying the
of the 1870s did economics as we know it arise. exchange rate, the provided stability became too costly. In
A century later, the maxims of the grandfather turn, the new free-floating system provoked a paradigm shift
of modern economics, Adam Smith, came under in business thinking away from smaller predictable growth.
pressure. He had argued that markets and economic The subsequent neoliberal revolution soon began, with the
behaviour were the result of a human natural New York City debt crisis in the 1970s, and went national
‘propensity to truck, barter, and exchange’.1 under the watch of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher.
Foregoing calmer waters, chaos was welcomed as the force
of creative destruction.
Risk suddenly replaced stability. And with it, chaos
transformed from enemy to assistant. The associated
Liam Young, mentality is famously captured in figures like Gordon Gekko
Where the City Can’t See, in the film Wall Street (1987), with catchphrases like ‘money
film still,
2018 never sleeps’ to describe the new pact with chaos.2 As early
as the 1980s, the new business environment embraced it in
A futuristic city shot entirely through laser scanning
technology. It is set in a near-future Detroit Economic the form of organisational restructuring and layoffs, mega-
Zone (DEZ) owned by China, in which mapping mergers resulted in ever-complex global divisions of labour,
technologies like Google Maps, urban management
systems and surveillance sensors are the primary and globally coordinated supply changes began pinballing
means of governance.

16
Thinkers adopted a synthetic outlook
in which underlying conditions could be
programmed and reprogrammed in
an effort to construct new outcomes
around. Chao’s judgement – whether in the market or Unknown Fields Division (Kate Davies
and Liam Young) and Toby Smith,
elsewhere – was a new god bestowing wealth and poverty. Madagascar Expedition Portraits,
film still,
2017
Critical Chaos Theory
Economics was far from alone at this time. Similar above: Unknown Fields is a nomadic design research
studio directed by Liam Young and Kate Davies that
transitions occurred across thought and culture, many uncovers the shadows cast by the contemporary city on
of which under the sign of ‘Postmodernism’ in art, landscapes, ecologies and lives elsewhere. In this film
they explore the recent gemstone boom in Manalobe,
architecture, literature and more. Orit Halpern traces their Madagascar that brought foreign investors in the area
cybernetic side in Beautiful Data (2014), such as through to mine for sapphires. While modern-day mining can
depend on machine assistance, local workers still get
Kevin Lynch’s The Image of the City (1960) and Nicholas paid €2 per day for shovelling 5.6 tons of dirt.
Negroponte’s The Architecture Machine (1970), further
drawing out connections to design approaches like that of
Charles and Ray Eames.3 She sees it as a transition away
from the organic utopia of Le Corbusier or Jane Jacobs

17
 Liam Young and Alexey Marfin,
Seoul City Machine,
film still, towards a new aesthetic perspective. The key characteristics
2019 of the new aesthetics: a shift of representation towards
Seoul City Machine, a visual city-symphony of tomorrow. process and environment away from meaning and identity,
It is imagined as a love letter written by an administrative a new observer characterised by behaviour and patterned
City Operating System to the people and things it
effectively governs. Key structural elements, such as the interaction rather than perceptual experience or underlying
narration and script, were decided by an AI chatbot which truth, a media environment of instruments with screens
was trained on smart city data.
depicting processes of communication and circulation
instead of documents or objects, and a new structuralism of
networked observer-subjects replacing social totalities like
race or class. All became tools for finding the edge of chaos,
that zone of indistinction between order and disorder typified
by the techie phrase ‘creative disruption’.
This was also a period of transition for the sciences.
Roughly it coincided with what feminist theorist N Katherine
Hayles identifies in a second wave of cybernetics that shifts
its focus from homeostasis to self-organisation.4 Whereas
The explosion of the first concerned itself with maintaining stability in a
changing environment (eg W Ross Ashby’s homeostat
interest around (1948)), the second understood order as actively self-
generated (eg a frog’s visual cortex).5 The latter would lead
chaos theory to work on emergence, from the complex organisation
of bird flocking to the structure of crystals. A key concept

arose from is Chilean biologists Humberto Maturana and Francisco

Varela’s autopoiesis, which describes the self-assembly

an interest in of components into a closed system whose internal

organisation is actively reproduced in the manner of a living

systems that organism.6 A near cousin is Nobel Prize-winning chemist Ilya

Prigogine and philosopher Isabelle Stengers’s discussion

seem to exhibit of dissipative systems in Order Out of Chaos (1984), which

considers the philosophical consequences of reproducible

randomness structural stability in thermodynamically open systems

operating outside equilibrium.7 Such post-cybernetic inquiry

or disorder
and experiments in computer modelling would prepare the
ground for the rise of chaos theory.

18
 The explosion of interest around chaos theory arose from generation of order or the complexity of fractals proved
an interest in systems that seem to exhibit randomness too great for appropriation well beyond science. Through
or disorder. It defines systems that appear random but neologisms like ‘chaosmos’, thinkers would equate chaos
actually express patterned behaviour or are even governed with the generative movement of the cosmos.10 As with the
by deterministic rules. In a technical sense, chaotic systems many others periodising the ‘postmodern’, Marxist critics
are those whose initial conditions are so sensitive that even like Fredric Jameson and David Harvey would categorise
slight changes will result in a radically different outcome – as the shift through architectural references, opposing the
in the famous butterfly effect whereby a butterfly flapping its Modernism of Der Scutt’s Trump Tower in New York (1984)
wings in Brazil could provoke a series of atmospheric events with the Postmodernism of Philip Johnson’s AT&T Building
that result in a tornado in Texas. An early observation of in the same city (also 1984), and the Modernist shopping
the phenomenon occurred when American mathematician complex of Benjamin Thompson’s The Gallery at Harborplace
and meteorologist Edward Lorenz was running computer in Baltimore (1980) with the Postmodernist leisure of interior
simulations on weather in 1959 on a digital computer, shopping of John Portman’s Bonaventure Hotel in Los
discovering large changes after rerunning some calculations Angeles (1976).11
with rounded-off numbers.8 The canonical entry on Postmodernism remains Jean-
With only a few decades of hindsight, many of its François Lyotard’s 1979 book The Postmodern Condition: A
applications are already taken for granted. Up-to-the-minute Report on Knowledge.12 Many reduce it to a footnote defining
localised weather is consulted without a second thought, a Postmodernism as the ‘rejection of grand narratives’, which
computer-automated financial system is expected, and the are often equated with Modernism’s utopian impulse. By the
many other predictive models that shape everyday life are rejection of grand narratives, he means a scepticism towards
mundane. Regardless of the specific models of chaos theory, any one overarching explanatory system for how the world
its popularity represented the victory of uncertainty. Not only works, such as gradual refinement through Enlightenment
did chaos theory not exclude uncertainty, it did not even try progress, the slow march towards freedom of democratic
to dampen it. A new column was added to the proverbial liberalism, or mastery of the material world through state-
chart of all behaviour (human, animal, machine) in chaotic
systems. While outcomes were still unknowable, general
tendencies and abstract rules could be ascertained.

The Cybernetic Logic of the Contemporary Condition

Liam Young,
Chaos provided philosophy with many splashy concepts. In The Robot Skies,
Grumpy scientists angry over the abuse of precise tools film still,
2018
would pen screeds like physicists Alan Sokal and Jean
Bricmont’s famous 1997 denunciation of ‘fashionable In the urban condition of mass surveillance,
the film imagines two teenagers finding love
nonsense’.9 But the allure of ideas like the spontaneous in this new media ecology.

19
 Marxist science. Their presence is replaced by a chaotic mix
of knowledge coming from too many different places
to be known.
Less discussed is the opening argument of The
Postmodern Condition. The conditions that spawn
Postmodernism, according to Lyotard, are quite specific:
the ‘computerisation’ of society. He notes two major
shifts in the role of knowledge since the early 1950s. First,
the theoretical paradigm of cybernetics formalised the
interaction between human, animal and machine through a
mixture of engineering and mathematics; and second, the
miniaturisation and commercialisation of computers made
the world the object of encodable knowledge.
Thirty years before Web 2.0, Lyotard had already warned
about the ‘mercantilization of knowledge’.13 He speculated
about the rise of information-power and those who would
profit from knowledge being exchanged, whereby its context
Liam Young, is considered unimportant. The scandal is by no means
The New City: The City in the Sea,
film still,
limited to the internet, as the monetisation of knowledge
2018 and its associated social worlds was central to the extractive
A speculative futuristic city. It has many of the
technologies of colonial sciences, with the manufacturing
characteristics promised by futurists – namely it of people and things in the industrial age, and now through
is multicultural, high-tech, dense. But it is also
polluted, full of trash, and in extreme disrepair.
the ever-growing forms of media endemic to the information
age. Today’s platform capitalism layers on top of those older

20
processes, adding on newer and more abstract layers of The struggle to name the current moment might signal
knowledge-peddling. It affects everything from the extractive the final nail in the coffin for Modernism. Has Modernism’s
labour of coltan and lithium mining to the bundling of online thirst for the new finally been extinguished? Maybe we
retail behaviour into big data. finally have the distance from the initial event to evaluate the
last half-century. In that time, Modernism’s utopian impulse
Life on the Edge seems to have been replaced by different technical processes
Computation has grown leaps and bounds since of change and confrontation, ones that can be recognised
Lyotard’s 1979 report. Algorithmic complexity now aids in the violent upheavals caused by creative disruption.
everything from rapid iteration to the 3D printing of unique Paradoxically, the consequence has been a steady stream of
objects. Yet cultural critics are struggling to name the brilliant technological marvels but also a troubling narrowing
trends of our period. Certainly it is something other than of the possible to permutations of the familiar. Perhaps what
Postmodernism’s long hangover. we need now, more than ever, is a bit more chaos. 1
The chaos theorists of sci-fi, the authors of cyberpunk
classics such as Neuromancer (1984)14 presaged the internet.
The sprawling cities they imagined are much like the
Songdo International Business District near Seoul, South
Korea, completed in 2015, which Orit Halpern suggests as
the culmination of the shift away from Modernism – a fully
networked eco-city built on reclaimed land, so saturated
by sensors that everything is meant to appear effortlessly
automated to maximum efficiency. The irony, of course, is
that the hyper-connected city appears eerie to visitors, who
report it being strangely smelly, not really functional, and too
expensive to attract many inhabitants.

Notes
1. Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth
of Nations, vol 1, Strahan and Cadell (London), 1776, p 16.
2. Wall Street, directed by Oliver Stone, 20th Century Fox, 1987.
3. Orit Halpern, Beautiful Data, Duke University Press (Durham, NC),
2014; Kevin Lynch, The Image of the City, MIT Press (Cambridge, MA
and London), 1960; Nicholas Negroponte, The Architecture Machine,
MIT Press (Cambridge, MA and London), 1970.
4. N Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman, University of
Chicago Press (Chicago, IL and London), 1999.
5. W Ross Ashby, Journals, vol 11, 1948, p 2435: www.rossashby.info/
journal/page/2435.html.
6. Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela, Autopoiesis and
Cognition [1972], D Reidel (Dordrecht, Boston, MA and London), 1980.
7. Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers, Order Out of Chaos,
Heinemann (London), 1984.
8. Edward Lorenz, The Essence of Chaos, University of Washington
Press (Seattle, WA), 1993, pp 134–6.
9. Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont, Fashionable Nonsense, Picador
(New York), 1997.
10. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus [1980],
trans Brian Massumi, University of Minnesota Press (Minneapolis,
MN), 1987; Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What is Philosophy?
[1991], trans Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchill, Columbia
University Press (New York), 1994.
11. Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism: Or, The Cultural Logic of Late
Capitalism, Duke University Press (Durham, NC), 1989, pp 39–44;
David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity, Blackwell (Cambridge
and Oxford), 1990, pp 72–9.
12. Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report
on Knowledge [1979], trans Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi,
University of Minnesota Press (Minneapolis, MN), 1984.
13. Ibid, p 5.
14. William Gibson, Neuromancer, Ace (New York), 1984.

Text © 2022 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Images: pp 14–15, 17

© Unknown Fields; pp 16, 18–21 © Liam Young

21
 Suzanne Cotter

ARCHITECTONISATION

The Spatio-Temporal
Rhythms of Contemporary
Sculptural Practices

22
Monika Sosnowska,
Façade,
‘Monika Sosnowska: Architectonisation’,
Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art,
Porto, Portugal,
2015

The free-standing sculpture, made of steel latticework, and

more than 7 metres (23 feet) in height, was suspended from
above the top-lighting structure in the atrium of the Álvaro Monika Sosnowska,
Siza-designed museum; its not-visible structures of attachment The Staircase,
contributed to the paradoxical sense of light, draping form. ‘Monika Sosnowska: Architectonisation’,
Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art,
Porto, Portugal,
2015

This twisted- and painted-metal freestanding sculpture

was installed off-centre in one of the main gallery spaces,
and secured in position between floor and top-lit ceiling,
as if a stairway to elsewhere slowly collapsing on itself.

23
Suzanne Cotter is In his book The Art-Architecture Complex (2011), art
historian and critic Hal Foster recalls the oft-quoted quip
Director of the Museum of from the 1950s by American painter Barnett Newman that
sculpture was ‘something you back into when you back up
Contemporary Art Australia. to see a painting’.1 He goes on to recall the heroic canon of

Here she explains some predominantly male Minimalist and Postminimalist artists
of the 1960s and 1970s who took on architecture as site,
of the artistic installations and architecture’s scale as part of sculpture’s condition. This
recognition of sculpture’s dependence on, and insertion
and performances she into the spatial context of architecture was indebted in part

curated while Director of to the early 20th-century Russian avant-garde and calls for
the merging of art and society as part of a utopian vision
the Alvaro Siza-designed of art’s capacity to change the world. Among the direct
heirs to these ideas were Polish artists Katarzyna Kobro
Serralves Museum of and Władysław Strzemiński, who developed the concept

Contemporary Art in Porto, of ‘Unism’ in which sculpture, with painting, served as test
models or prototypes whose principles could be applied to
Portugal. She reflects on architecture, industrial design and urban space.

exhibitions she curated Orchestration

with three individual artists In the 2017 catalogue to an exhibition on Kobro and
Strzemiński published by the Reina Sofia Museum,
whose work engages with Madrid, Jarosław Suchan, director of the Muzeum Sztuki in
Lodz, Poland, whose avant-garde collection was founded
concepts of architecture by the two avant-garde artists, refers to their 1931 text

as an aesthetic and social ‘Composition of Space: Calculation of Space-Time Rhythm’.

Suchan notes that ‘the analysis of sculptural space passes
language of agency. into a programme for new architecture. Like sculpture,
architecture is no longer just a solid but becomes the
orchestrator of the spatio-temporal rhythm of the human
being performing vital functions.’2
Preparing an exhibition of her work for the Serralves
Museum of Contemporary Art in Porto, in 2015, the Warsaw-
based sculptor Monika Sosnowska referred to Kobro’s and
Strzemiński’s concept of forms reproducing themselves
in architecture and in sculpture as ‘architectonisation’.3
While intended as an overview to Sosnowska’s by-then
considerable oeuvre, the exhibition was also an invitation
to engage with the architectural context of the museum
designed by Pritzker-prize-winning Portuguese architect
Álvaro Siza. Occupying seven of the museum’s 12 galleries
and the external courtyard beside the entrance, Sosnowska’s
freestanding sculptures and sculptural interventions entered
into dynamic dialogue with the spatial and perceptual
unfolding of Siza’s architecture. A specially conceived
display of smaller-scale sculptural propositions that included
abstract forms and functional objects such as a door handle
cast with the imprint of the artist’s hand seemed to echo
the sculptural attention to detail present in the transitional
moments of Siza’s limpid lines and volumes.
If the flow of the exhibition tapped into the circulation,
sightlines and luminosity afforded by the museum’s
architecture, Sosnowska’s twisted, buckled and painted
metal sculptures and maze-like corridor spaces were
actively present in a relationship that might be described
as cantilevered in their apparent equilibrium of opposing
forces. Commanding the gallery spaces, they seemed to
defy their architectural logic. The more than 7-metre (24-

24
foot) high steel latticework of Façade (2013), referring to While the address to the human body that is
the steel facades of Modernist skyscrapers, of which Mies evident in Sosnowska’s sculptures resonates with
van der Rohe’s Lake Shore Drive Apartments (1948–51) in the heightened awareness of our progression in
Chicago are emblematic, was suspended in an uncanny space that is a defining feature of Siza’s architecture,
drape from above the skylights of the museum atrium. In her reference to ‘architectonisation’ in this context
one of the main exhibiting galleries, the twisted forms of clearly was not one of looking to reproduce the
the painted metal sculpture Stairway (2010) seemed to hold forms and rhythms of it as sculpture. Rather, drawing
floor and ceiling in dynamic separation. In the museum’s upon its specificities in the choice of presentation of
central, double-height gallery, the various and precisely works, the artist sought to give dramatic emphasis
profiled white polyhedrons of Hole (2006) that lay on the to processes of deformation and fragmentation that
floor functioned as fragments of a jagged opening from underpin her sculptural thinking. In referring to the
the (false) ceiling above. Their witness was the gallery’s structural and aesthetic vocabulary of architectural
signature central window that acts as cinematic membrane Modernism, Sosnowska makes of her sculptures
in Siza’s architecture between the museum’s interior and the counter-monuments to the loss of the revolutionary
outside world of sky and trees. optimism of modernity and its appropriation by
ideology, be it totalitarianism or market capitalism.
Monika Sosnowska, It is, however, in the processes of their making, their
Hole,
‘ Monika Sosnowska: Architectonisation’,
seemingly nonsensical transformation of a functional
Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art, form into an aesthetic proposition, and their subversion
Porto, Portugal,
2015
of architectural relationships of scale, support, solidity
and transparency, that she evokes an architectonisation
In this installation, precisely contoured polyhedrons
intended to evoke the stylised outline of a jagged cut-out
in reverse. Her appropriation of the language of
in the fake ceiling installed above, appeared as a fallen architecture as de-sublimated history becomes a
pile on the floor below. Daylight entered from Siza’s
signature picture window as if a witness of nature on to
poignant and pointed expression of people and society
the sculptural scenario before it. – forgotten, frustrated and bound by absurdity.

25
 Projection
In the work of certain artists, architecture is a metaphor
with which to reflect on societal values, the contingencies
of context and the subjective self. In 2017, the New York-
based British artist Liam Gillick accepted an invitation
for an exhibition at the Serralves Museum that would
unfold over the course of a year. Describing his intended
approach, he stated: ‘I had the opportunity to use the frame
of the museum and its … architecture to give weight to
things that could not be realised before or were secondary
components intended to operate in the background.’4
Gillick’s exhibition was composed of four distinct
‘moments’ with the museum’s central gallery as its
privileged space. In the accompanying publication, the
passages between each of these moments were described
as ‘tactical shifts’.5 Each shift enacted processes of

In revisiting a project from transformation and translation subtended by ideas that

define much of Gillick’s practice and related to recuperation
23 years earlier, Gillick and renovation, planning the future and the aesthetics of
political and social discourses that shape our lives.
looked to architecture as both A central motif in the exhibition’s progression was an
unrealised project for a social centre for young people
possibility and failure. This proposed in 1993 by Gillick as an artist commission

tension was built into his initial for a new urban development in Milan. Consisting
of an architectural ‘shell’ conceived according to the
proposal in the 1990s when stylised lines of Mediterranean Modernism that looked
to Postmodernism, notably the work of Aldo Rossi, the
the concept of public space exterior walls of the Scale Model of a Social Centre for
Teenagers for Milan structure were to feature texts from
and urban development had lyrics by 1970s bands AC/DC and Joy Division. The lyrics

become largely subsumed were intended as a reference to the artist’s aesthetic

consciousness at the time, and as an invitation to other
by the prevailing neoliberal expressions of subjective sensibility. As the artist explained:
‘The original proposal was not a finished structure …
economic order It would have to be completed by other people.’6

Liam Gillick,
Model for Milan House #1,
1993

The 1993 maquette for a public

commission proposal took the form of a
simply constructed structure alluding to
Modernist architecture with sign-painted
lyrics from 1970s rock and punk bands
AC/DC and Joy Division. Gillick’s intention
was to reimagine the idea of the public
commission as something that could be
used by young people in a marginalised
urban situation. The song lyrics were
intended as contradictory expressions
of youthful angst and self-absorption,
and acknowledgement that the surfaces
would be eventually overwritten by the
teenagers who gathered there over time.

26
 Liam Gillick,
Silent Factories in the Snow,
fourth moment (30 September),
‘Liam Gillick: Campaign’,
Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art,
Porto, Portugal,
2016

For this fourth and final iteration, or ‘moment’, the piano

of Factories in the Snow, its algorithmic musical score
and snowfall, were blanketed and silenced by a draping
black cover, as if to mark the end of a performance or a
mourning of the past.

In revisiting this proposal for the second stage of his

exhibition in Serralves, Gillick developed a new model –
Scale Model of a Social Centre for Teenagers Milan 1993
(Porto) – scaled to the architectural dimensions of the
museum’s central gallery and constructed in the space by
local builders and artisans. For the third moment of the
exhibition, the model was replaced by an identically scaled
Absent Model constructed from transparent Plexiglas and
bearing the same song lyrics on its facade. Visible inside
this structure was a reprise of Gillick’s work Factories in the
Snow (Il Tempo del Postino) (2007) comprising a Disklavier
piano whose algorithm attempted to replay the artist’s
own tentative rendering of the Portuguese revolutionary
song ‘Grândola, Vila Morena’ with an artificial red snow
falling from the ceiling onto the sculptural ensemble. In
the exhibition’s fourth and final moment, Silent Factories
in the Snow, both model and piano were heavily draped
with a large black cloth, like a house and its furniture
covered over when its inhabitants have left. Overhead, the
artist had installed structure panels of coloured Plexiglas
in the existing skylight that left visible the workings of the
lighting system above.
In revisiting a project from 23 years earlier, Gillick
looked to architecture as both possibility and failure. This
tension was built into his initial proposal in the 1990s when
the concept of public space and urban development had
become largely subsumed by the prevailing neoliberal
economic order. A similar implicit tension existed in
Gillick’s choice of Plexiglas, the material transparency of
which belies its associations with the US military as well
as the applied Modernism of kitchen and bathroom design
and commercial signage, and in more recent decades
with the protective barriers and equipment of security
enforcement and soft control. Here we encounter the
Liam Gillick,
Absent Model of a Social Centre for Teenagers
language of architecture as ghosted, a non-functioning
for Milan 1993 (Porto), third moment (25 May), duplicate of the original, or as a phantom in its concealed
‘Liam Gillick: Campaign’,
Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art,
state beneath the shroud of time. For Gillick, this morphing
Porto, Portugal, from one state to another while remaining in the same
2016
place resonates with the figure of the artist as an aesthetic
This second iteration of the Model of a Social Centre as an absent agent who must continually renegotiate their position with
model replaced the first solid structure with a transparent replica,
reintroducing the Disklavier piano of Factories in the Snow and its
respect to the world, in successive moments of projected
attendant artificial red snow falling from the ceiling. futures, and as memory.

27
Agency
‘The Black Monastic’, which took place at the Serralves
Museum in 2014, orchestrated by the Chicago-based
artist Theaster Gates, offers an example of the activation
of architecture and its context as part of a socially and
politically engaged practice that we can also consider as
sculptural. For Gates, whose formal studies encompassed
urban planning and ceramics, architecture is recuperated
and rearticulated through socially driven actions that
transform the fabric and physical location of buildings into
sites of agency.
Gates was invited to visit the Serralves Museum and
Foundation following on from his performative artwork of
12 Ballads for Huguenot House created for Documenta 14 in
Kassel, Germany, in 2012, and a visit to the artist’s Archive
House and Listening House and the future Stony Island
Arts Bank that were part of his Dorchester Projects (2009–)
on Chicago’s South Side.7 Gates’s response to Serralves,
the museum, its grounds – comprising an Art Deco villa
designed by architects Charles Siclis and José Marques da
Silva, and formal gardens by the French landscape architect
Charles Greber (known in the US for his masterplan for
Benjamin Franklin Parkway in Philadelphia) – was to propose
a retreat for himself and the musical group The Black
Monks of Mississippi to talk and test out ideas and works in
progress. Arriving with the group’s musicians and singers
Theaster Gates,
together with studio assistant and retreat coordinator, and ‘The Black Monastic’,
a filmmaker, a photographer and a writer, the museum Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art,
Porto, Portugal,
became a site of hospitality, work and exchange. 2014
During the two-week period of the retreat, Gates mapped
‘The Black Monastic’, which took place over a two-week period,
out a programme of ‘moves’, both public and private, across was conceived as an artist’s retreat and a moment of reflection
19 different locations, together with a series of impromptu and production in which Theaster Gates and his invited musicians,
writers, photographers and filmmakers worked through a daily
and ‘scheduled performances’ in the museum, library, set of what Gates described as ‘moves’. One of these moves was
auditorium and former tennis courts and gardens. They to improvise on a daily basis within the temporary exhibition and
permanent display galleries.
included Gates making ceramics in the villa accompanied
by improvised singing sessions by the Black Monks, choral
responses in posed and processional performances in
response to works from the Serralves collection on display,
and reading and ‘performing’ items from the Serralves
library of contemporary art catalogues and artists’ books.
The final scheduled performance of Gates and the Monks
in the Serralves auditorium was a concert led by Gates
drawing on the sung forms of African-American spirituals.

The programme for the retreat was both announced

and unannounced with the possibility for visitors to the
museum to encounter Gates and the Monks performing
throughout the grounds of the Serralves Foundation, in
this case in the avenues of the formal Art Deco gardens.

28
 Gates has stated: ‘I leverage artistic moments to effect
real change.’8 He is an amplifier of architecture and its
value, both as history and its potential in the present.
Underpinning his artistic, intellectual and social production
are questions of economy – the economy of the art world
and the museum, the economy of real estate, and the
socially segregated structures that sustain them. In his
socially expanded practice, the revolutionary logic of
architectonisation – Kobro’s and Strzemiński’s reproduction
of a sculptural vocabulary of form and space into the realm
of architecture and how we act in the world – takes on new
and urgent meaning with respect to race and representation
and an architecture of the social and the ideologies
expressed in the built and urban environment. 1

Notes
1. Hal Foster, Preface, The Art-Architecture Complex, Verso (London and New
York), 2011, p viii.
2. Jarosław Suchan, ‘Kobro & Strzemiński: Prototypes of a New Thinking’, in
Jarosław Suchan et al (eds), Katarzyna Kobro & Władysław Strzemiński: Avant-
Garde Prototypes, Museo Reina Sofia (Madrid), 2017, p 37: https://issuu.com/
museoreinasofia/docs/kobro_ing.
3. Gabriela Switek, ‘Elements of Modernism According to Monika Sosnowska’, in
Monika Sosnowska: Architectonisation, Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art
(Porto), 2015, p 35.
4. ‘Somewhere Specific in Mind: A Conversation Between Liam Gillick and
Suzanne Cotter’, in Suzanne Cotter (ed), Liam Gillick: Campaign, Serralves
Museum of Contemporary Art (Porto), 2017, p 14.
5. Ibid, p 7.
6. Ibid, p 15.
7. www.theastergates.com/project-items/dorchester-art-and-housing-
collaborative-dahc.
8. Theaster Gates, ‘Statement’, 12 Ballads for Huguenot House, Koenig Books
(Cologne), 2012, p 23.

Members of Gates’s musical group

The Black Monks of Mississippi
responded in music, song and
movement to works from the
Serralves Collection on display.
The presence of black bodies
responding to the representation
of black bodies was a powerful
action for visitors to the museum.

Text © 2022 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Images: pp 22–3, 25 © Monika Sosnowska.
© Fundação de Serralves, Porto, photos © Filipe Braga; pp 26–7 © Liam Gillick.
© Fundação de Serralves, Porto, photos © Filipe Braga; pp 28–9 © Theaster
Gates. © Fundação de Serralves, Porto, photos © Sara Pooley

29
 Dorina Pllumbi

Kombinat,
Tirana, Albania,
photographed in
November 2019

Although production ceased

in the textile factories with the
fall of the totalitarian regime
in 1991, an industrial landscape
still prevails in Kombinat.

30
Architectural researcher In the southwestern part of Tirana, about 6 kilometres
(4 miles) from the city centre, is Kombinat, a peripheral

Dorina Pllumbi explores ex-industrial neighbourhood. Anarchic episodes and

a transitioning weak state followed the dismantling
the appropriation of of state totalitarianism in 1991. It was then that the
deindustrialisation of Kombinat started. Once the pride
an ex-industrial area of the Communist party-state, it turned into a ghost
terrain of empty abandoned mills. These structures were
of Albania for dwelling appropriated and transformed into dwellings by migrant
inhabitants arriving from all around Albania.
purposes. She points The story of Kombinat is emblematic in understanding
the Albanian reality of the totalitarian past and the
out the need for the transition to a new form of a neoliberal state, which
has recently been denounced by many as having
architectural discipline developed authoritarian features. Citizens have little or

to learn from the no opportunity to contest the decisions impacting their

lives. After many years of neglect, and in the aftermath of

unconventional process an earthquake that hit central Albania in November 2019,

a new masterplan by the Italian architectural firm Archea

of transformation of Associati, which proposes a drastic transformation of the

area through massive demolition and new construction,
these realities by their was approved and presented to the public through a
meeting that was held online because of the Covid-19
new inhabitants. pandemic situation. Kombin-Art – as the masterplan
renames the area – has the ambition of creating a new
image, a beautification operation that artificially imports
art activities into the few existing buildings that are
proposed to be saved, while ignoring the rich history of
Kombinat and wiping out other forms of life that have
mushroomed at the mills. This article proposes a different
reading of these structures, without romanticising them,
but recognising them as material evidence of inhabitants’
efforts to improve their living conditions on their own,
unaided, in solidarity with each other but forgotten by the
state and the city of Tirana, for whom they are invisible or
subject to stigma.
The discussed tacit and genuine processes of
appropriation of the ex-industrial buildings for dwelling
purposes are usually considered as in the architectural
canon as a form of disorder. This results in the unseeing
of these processes by architectural professionals,
academics and the state. This article argues instead
that they offer valuable and paradigmatic architectural
knowledge – a field that although longing for a shift
towards inclusive modus operandi, still does not have
the capability to incorporate these sorts of disorderly
processes in its operational protocols.

31
FROM GLORY TO UNCERTAINTY
The industrial complex known as the Stalin Textile Factory,
commonly known as Kombinat (from its Albanian name
Kombinati Tekstil Stalin), was inaugurated in 1951. It was a
gift from the Soviet Union to the Albanian people with the
instalment of the socialist regime. For the Communist party-
state, Kombinat was a model working-class neighbourhood.
It would represent the historical moment of a new era of
transition from an agrarian to an industrial Albania. Here
the New Worker and the New Socialist Man were being
fabricated. The Soviet machines gave a new status and
identity to the workers. They and their family members
would all be called kombinats – citizens of Kombinat.1
With the fall of the totalitarian regime in 1991, production
stopped and the machinery and mills were abandoned.
Demographic allocations of the population were no longer
centrally controlled as they had been under the previous
regime. This triggered a flux of migration towards the
capital city from remote areas of the country as people
sought better life opportunities. These migrants in need
of housing discovered the cold and enormous industrial
structures of Kombinat. Once vibrant and the objects of
pride, these buildings now stood in a state of depression,
surprisingly stoic and simultaneously inviting. They were
seen as a place of refuge, a roof over one’s head, with no
comfortable rooms, no heat, but just an opportunity for
shelter in anarchic times when the state was absent. They

Inauguration day,
Stalin Textile Factory (‘Kombinat’),
Tirana,
8 November 1951

The statue of Stalin stood in the main square of Kombinat, which was
considered a model working-class neighbourhood by the Communist
state, embodying the transition from an agrarian to an industrial Albania.2

Kombinat,
Tirana,
photographed in November 2019 and June 2021

A continuous arcade of the ex-industrial building has been

fragmented into smaller segments of three arches for every
house created. Stair elements have been located inside the
arcade to access the second floor of the house.

32
 were there, silent, forgotten, but magnificent, protective
and rough at the same time.
A special encounter occurred between these human
bodies and the forgotten buildings, and a particular
relationship started to crystallise. It was not a romantic or
reverent relationship, nor was it based on nostalgic
sentiments. The buildings had no love to offer, but neither
did the new residents adore these weird structures; they
needed a house, and these wild giants were beyond that
– oversized, to say the least. The new inhabitants never saw
these buildings as untouchable; on the contrary, their
relationship with them was based on a constant effort of
appropriation through transformation. Children were born
inside the buildings and grew up playing close to the
machines, in big halls and tunnels. Weddings were
celebrated in the alleys, not far from enormous chimneys,
and funeral rituals were held here. What many consider
weird, scary, unbelievable, is actually home for the
inhabitants of these structures, the place where they grew up;
it is life itself, the world they know, which is often despised
and stigmatised, but so rich when one gets to know it.
The buildings described here may not exist by the time
this text is published a few months after writing: the area’s
inhabitants are living with the uncertainty of eviction and
displacement. As the pace of reterritorialisation in Tirana
is currently fast, the only certainty is that the city will be
drastically different in a few months.

A large hall has been used as inner courtyard for

the houses attached to the building. The residents,
especially children, have a particular connection as
they used to play in these spaces during rainy days.

33
MAKING ARCHITECTURAL ODDKINS
The forgotten industrial Soviet architecture with its
massive, rough spaces became a place of human–
nonhuman encounter with designerly opportunities
of interventions that are certainly not perfect, not
professional, but rather intuitive, based on common
knowledge accumulated over time. The builder-inhabitants
build directly on site, without drawing up plans or designs
and without work schedules. They build their architectures
at 1:1 scale when a new room is needed for a newborn, or
a couple is about to get married. Through tacit, situational
and common knowledge, construction episodes occur
simultaneously, resonating with life itself, with practices
of eating, working, partying, birthing, playing, all
intertwined in the process of space creation. As Tim Ingold
would have observed, making and using merge into one
here; the material of building and the material of living
are strongly entangled.3 Dealing with mould and humidity
while sharing construction skills with each other is part of
material engagement and community bonding, which go
side by side, never along separate paths.
Builder-inhabitants here operate with the materials
around them, which professional architects often do not
consider or dare to experiment with. To think with Donna
Haraway in material and spatial terms, making oddkins
entails a paradigmatic shift to disturb the canonical
ordered hygienist design model commonly taught in
architecture schools and typically practised in the built
environment.4 In Kombinat we see this material and
spatial kin-making process as an entanglement of a purist,
clean, functional Soviet-style architectural language
with a messy, dirty, situational, need-oriented one.
These oddkins courageously challenge and expend our
aesthetical understandings.

The Soviet architectural

structures of Kombinat
afforded a possibility
for openness, and
enabled the freedom
of genuine involvement.
The architectural
oddkins challenge
our understanding of
ownership, authorship
and aesthetics
34
Kombinat, THE POLITICS OF THE UNSEEN
Tirana,
photographed in The open and unfinished structures embody a slow-pace
November 2019 and June lifestyle. Building two columns on one day, then after
2021
two months a slab, then the stairs, then the grapevine,
above: Architectural entanglements of time becomes an important architectural component,
the large-scale industrial buildings with
the small-scale interventions by those allowing the inhabitants to generate memories and
who have taken up residence in them. strengthen a special relationship with each of the
left: A community of residents created elements that compose their home. Recognition of the
the entrances of their houses to face role of time and the importance of allowing things to
each other. This turned an empty street
between two industrial buildings into settle in their place stands in contrast to Tirana’s speedy
a vibrant space for gathering, playing, transformation and the threatening development machine,
caring for plants, and so on.
with disproportionate power often exercised as a form of
violence towards the city.
The Soviet architectural structures of Kombinat
afforded a possibility for openness, enabled the freedom
of genuine involvement. The architectural oddkins
challenge our understanding of ownership, authorship
and aesthetics. They shift the discussion beyond form and
the market. It is time for architecture to see these other
forms of spatial and material engagement, and see them
differently. 1

Notes
1. Elidor Mëhilli, From Stalin to Mao: Albania and the Socialist World, Cornell University
Press (Ithaca, NY and London), 2017, pp 98–109.
2. The Agjensia Telegrafike Shqiptare requires a watermark in this image to verify its
authenticity.
3. See Tim Ingold, Making: Anthropology, Archaeology, Art and Architecture, Routledge
(London and New York), 2013.
4. Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene, Duke
University Press (Durham, NC and London), 2016, pp 99–103.

Text © 2022 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Images: pp 30, 32(r)–35 © Dorina Pllumbi; p 32(l) ©
Agjensia Telegrafike Shqiptare

35
 Faysal Tabbarah

Painterlly,
y
Misfit and
Redunddant

Architecture + Other Things (A+OT),

Rocks and Sand, Sharjah,
United Arab Emirates,
2019

Redundancy within a painterly project also occurs

through an expression of extreme visual and
physical weight. This image shows an earthen
object cast into soil.

36
Challenging Precision
and Optimisation
with Scavenging

37
Faysal Tabbarah is Associate
Dean and Associate Professor
of Architecture at the
American University of
Sharjah and co-founder of
design studio Architecture +
Other Things (A+OT). Here
he explores alternative forms
through the painterly, the
natural environment and the
architectonic with the aim
of developing new and
original ways of constructing
material that can be used
for building.

38
A YouTube video uploaded in September 2012 shows Architecture + Other Things (A+OT),
Where Do The Twigs Go?,
prolific British land artist Richard Long making one of Dubai Design Week,
his mud circles on a large blank interior wall in a Bristol Dubai, United Arab Emirates,
2018
gallery.1 Specifically, it shows him making one of his
circular mud paintings which forms part of a larger body Below top: A painterly material assembly exhibits redundancy through
numbers, resulting in extremely ambiguous part-to-whole relationships,
of mud-painted works. Long finishes the work rather as can be seen from this close-up of a wall panel constructed from
quickly, as the fairly large circular ring, approximately 4 scavenged twigs and recycled paper pulp.

metres (13 feet) in diameter, takes him a little less than Below bottom: A painterly material assembly also exhibits ambiguities
18 minutes. Moving up and down on a cherry picker, he about the nature of the materials themselves.

holds a lime-green bucket filled with watered-down mud

with one hand, dips the other one, protected by a yellow
dishwashing glove, into the bucket and makes deliberate,
if sometimes seemingly redundant, semicircular markings
on the wall, each marking crossing the others to a certain
extent. The embodied act as well as the outcome itself
exhibit an oscillating tension between the ordered and the
painterly, a tension common in much of Long’s work. In
this instance, the ordered is represented by the geometry
of the circular ring, while the painterly is expressed by his
layered, redundant and embodied textural markings.
Long’s work, along with the tradition of land art itself,
presents strong counterpoints towards ideas of speed
and efficiency in mass-customisation that have become
mainstream in the corners of architectural discourse,
practice and academia that engage explicitly with digital
fabrication and computational design methodologies.
The construction of the built environment is an extremely
slow endeavour, and the historically entrenched pursuit of
precision is one of the strongest forces propagating this
unbearable slowness of building. The origins of the desire
for precision run deep, and a reading of architectural
thinker, author and educator Francesca Hughes might
imply that digital fabrication and computational design
methodologies continue the techno-optimist project
of Modernism, and as such, are unable to escape its
historically entrenched dynamics. Thus, it should not
come as a surprise that these technologies burst onto the
scene with the promise of precision, speed and efficiency
to continue the blatantly false Modernist promise of
advocating for precision in place of dishonest materials
and ornamentation.2
What remains a silent mystery, for anyone who
engages with these technologies or has witnessed the
construction of a digitally fabricated material system, is
how much error still exists and how laborious putting
allegedly perfectly fitting elements together still is. The
promise of precision remains false today for the two
following reasons. First, it is built on already suspicious
Modernist foundations in that it does not replace
dishonest materials and ornamentation: it is just as
dishonest and ornamental (as if reconfiguring materials technologies as well as unpack the potential of materials
and ornamentation were morally flawed things to begin that exist outside of mainstream supply chains and have
with). Second, it does not deliver any real paradigm- been deemed irrelevant for architectural purposes.
shifting degree of precision. Therefore, a painterly attitude How, then, can a painterly attitude disrupt historically
towards tectonic assembly that favours and amplifies entrenched attitudes towards assembly? How can
misfitness and redundancy as a generative design redundancy become a generative design condition? And
parameter can challenge the inherently dubious search can the painterly provide avenues for new technologies to
for precision and the false promises made by these deliver on their paradigm-shifting promises?

39
Painterly Shifts The five distinctions that Wölfflin identifies directly
In the 1915 book later published in English as Principles challenge prevailing attitudes towards digital fabrication
of Art History: The Problem of the Development of Style and computational design. Specifically, a painterly attitude
in Later Art, the Swiss art historian Heinrich Wölfflin towards these technologies results in misfitting tectonic
describes the emergence of a painterly style in the assemblies that express an extreme form of ambiguous
Baroque, emerging in direct opposition to the linear style part-to-whole relationships, nonlinear hierarchies, and
preferred by artists in the Late Renaissance period. In redundancy through sheer number or visual weight.
highlighting the differences between the painterly and the This is also an architectural project that is forgiving and
linear, Wölfflin writes of Bernini and alludes to the contrast potentially fast to assemble. In all instances, much like
between the energy of his work and the relative reserve Long’s work, tectonic assembly in a painterly project is an
of the artists who came before him. In one key sentence, embodied action, requiring the use of a pair, or multiple
Wölfflin states that ‘it is absurd to wonder how he would pairs, of error-prone hands.
have expressed himself in the draughtsmanly style of the
sixteenth century’.3 Scavenging, Three Ways
Within this binary framework, Wölfflin identifies five Scavenging within this painterly framework happens in
key differences between the painterly and the linear. The three interconnected ways. First is the literal searching
first two describe the replacement of lines and planes, for usable material within a non-urban landscape or
as delineators of objects and spaces, with merging and discarded material that is slated for some end-of-life
depth. This implies a moving from singular and finite process at waste management plants. The work of
readings of objects within an artwork towards more Architecture + Other Things (A+OT) takes place primarily
interpretive experiences. In the first instance, Wölfflin in the eastern Arabian Peninsula, and as such, this
tackles how 17th-century perceptions of line as a singular generally means scavenging for material from arid and
delineator of objects made way for a perception that semi-arid lands or public-private waste management
championed limitlessness and merging across a work centres. Mass-customisation, mass-production’s younger
of art. In the second distinction, Wölfflin argues for a sibling, allegedly made extremely feasible by digital
shift from structuring paintings through planes towards fabrication and computational design methodologies, is
perceptions of depth. To illustrate this development, still bound by the confines of linear thinking, traditional
Wölfflin contrasts the ways in which Dürer and Rembrandt material supply chains and production processes that
structured their images. Third, Wölfflin describes a shift govern its predecessor. Thus, a theoretical framework for
from closed form, or an artwork as complete and finite, an architectural project built around the painterly that
towards openness, or a ‘relaxation of the rules’.4 The espouses a looser assembly logic finds potential outside
fourth and fifth painterly shifts involve moves from of codified mainstream supply chains and production
‘multiplicity to unity’ and ‘absolute and relative clarity’.5 processes. One of the key tactical moves that come into
Here, Wölfflin describes a conscious breaking down of play within a painterly workflow occurs by disrupting
rigid linear hierarchies and clearly identifiable part-to- mainstream procurement strategies, and scavenging in
whole relationships. the open landscape offers much to work with.

Faysal Tabbarah,
Other Environmentalism,
Sharjah,
United Arab Emirates,
2020

Scavenging the landscape includes

finding fallen trees that can provide
raw materials for misfit assemblies.

40
Architecture + Other Things (A+OT), Architecture + Other Things (A+OT),
Almost Natural Things?, Where Do The Twigs Go?,
Sharjah, United Arab Emirates, Dubai Design Week,
2014–15 Dubai, United Arab Emirates,
2018
bottom: An excavated object that is a consequence of
collaboration between top-down formal generation below: Digital scavenging allows for the introduction of extreme
and volatile chemical reactions resulting from the levels of redundancy – or, put more simply, searching for misfit
interaction of cast material and formwork. constructs that use a large number of elements that blur part-to-
whole relationships while still responding to predetermined logics
such as allowing self-intersections or favouring a directional bias.

The second type of scavenging is digital. Integrating

a digital form of scavenging with the material one
results in tactically misfit assemblies. Much like material
scavenging, digital scavenging implies an opportunistic
attitude, almost devoid of a-priori intentions, that works
with the potentials that come from translating physical
material into digital information. This has largely taken
the form of the now ever-present 3D scanner, where
newly established digital information can be searched
for configurations or constructs that respond to a set of
loosely predetermined criteria. Examples of such criteria
might be three elements having to all support each other
and touch the ground on a single point each to achieve
some sort of misfit reciprocal structure, or deploying 2,000
self-similar digital twigs to generate solutions for spatial
constructs based on subtle differences in the search
logics such as allowing self-intersections or favouring a
directional bias.
Finally, the third type of scavenging occurs at the level
of embodied making and can be said to mimic acts of
excavation and unearthing. It is used primarily within
painterly casting processes, where chemical reactions
between casting materials and formworks are encouraged
to happen, or where formworks are themselves made to
be misfit and leak, or made to be weaker than the force
they will receive during the casting process. This implies
that demoulding itself becomes a form of design as
excavation, as the final output is only vaguely expected.

41
Making Optimisation Redundant
A project that includes scavenging from an arid landscape
as well as from tactically intercepting material slated
for discarding is A+OT’s Where Do The Twigs Go?, a
300-square-metre (3,200-square-foot) temporary exhibition
structure assembled in 2018 in Dubai. The project explored
the potential of using a relatively large number of self-
similar elements of scavenged natural material, to the point
of redundancy, to create composite wall surfaces devoid of
any mechanical connections. The result was an open and
limitless material system, primarily constructed as a series
of walls, that blurs part-to-whole relationships in favour of
ambiguous material hierarchies through the use of locally
sourced and scavenged palm twigs with sprayable and
fibrous materials – specifically, paper pulp made from
locally reclaimed newspapers. The painterly process of
assembling the twigs with the pulp was digitised to search
for different opportunities around material deposition and
density. Finally, the digital was translated into embodied
spraying and excavation that produced the misfit assembly.

Architecture + Other Things (A+OT), above: Painterly digital prototypes, informed by painterly
Where Do The Twigs Go?, material prototypes, are used to explore the architectural
Dubai Design Week, Dubai, potential of a material system at scale.
United Arab Emirates,
2018

Painterly material prototypes

studying the potential material
relationships between scavenged
twigs and recycled paper pulp.

42
 The material outcomes from deploying a painterly
The material attitude towards designing, making and assembling
exhibit two types of redundancies. The first is the
outcomes from redundancy of numbers, where the assemblies are made
of rather large amounts of scavenged elements that

deploying a painterly are used to construct a limitless material system. In the

second instance, redundancy is expressed through visual
and physical weight, where misfitness is achieved through
attitude towards stacking a rather limited number of relatively large
elements, much like a dolmen.
designing, making Along with the desire for precision described above,
another one of the many externalities that have resulted

and assembling from folding Modernist attitudes into the digital project,
in so far as one can say that there is a mainstream digital
project, is the obsession with optimisation. Optimisation,
exhibit two types in this context, implies an ability to quantify all elements
of a project. This includes both the material elements as
of redundancies well as the production and supply chains that allow for the
project to exist.
Thus, while the misfit stands in obvious contradiction,
or more aptly, in stark challenge to the futile desire for
precision, redundancy is in direct opposition to the
obsession with precision. Here, the continuing Modernist
A painterly 2.5-metre-high (8-foot) wall panel externality of optimisation is challenged as being
constructed of scavenged twigs held together
with recycled paper pulp. inefficient in itself given the potential that redundancy
in numbers, when deployed tactically, is effective in its
speed, potentially outweighing the need for optimisation.
What is at stake here is an acknowledgement that the
ongoing mainstream digital project, by shaping itself in
the image of a digitally focused Modernist project that
desires precision and obsesses over optimisation, has
resulted in a rather one-dimensional response to Cedric
Price’s famous ‘Technology is the answer’ aphorism.
Technology is probably the answer, but it is safe to
assume that Price would have championed pulling it
apart and putting it back together in a rather misfit and
redundant fashion. 1

Notes
1. Steve Jackson, ‘Richard Long @ M-Shed Bristol’. April 2011’,
YouTube video, 13 September 2012: www.youtube.com/
watch?v=JD2Ai_BECbg.
2. Francesca Hughes, The Architecture of Error: Matter, Measure,
and the Misadventures of Precision, MIT Press (Cambridge, MA),
2014, p 2.
3. Heinrich Wölfflin, Principles of Art History: The Problem
of the Development of Style in Later Art [1915], trans MD
Hottinger, Dover (New York), 1950, pp 11–12. This builds on ideas
introduced in an earlier essay: Faysal Tabbarah and Ibrahim
Ibrahim, ‘Painterly Assemblies: Making Through Scavenging’,
Proceedings for ACSA International, Madrid, 2018, pp 152–6.
4. Wölfflin, op cit, p 15.
5. Ibid.

Text © 2022 John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

Images © Faysal Tabbarah

43
 Moving
Jennifer
Newsom Pictures
Dream The Combine,
Longing,
Minneapolis, Minnesota,
2015

Mirrored endcaps created an

infinite reflection on the installation
interior. The convergence of the
receding reflection appears as a
wandering vanishing point within
a single-point perspective image.
The mirrored insertions replicate
the interior from a singular
instance, extending the imaginary
space of the project.

Three Installations
for Public Life

44
 Dream The Combine in
collaboration with
Clayton Binkley of Arup,
Hide & Seek,
MoMA PS1,
Long Island City, New York,
2018

Nine intersecting volumes covered the

entirety of MoMA PS1’s 18,000-square-foot
(1,700-square-metre) courtyard space. Each
prompts various orientations of the body:
a hammock could be used for lounging
and an elevated platform could be used for
picnicking or dancing, while covered areas
provided respite from the summer sun.

Dream The Combine uses film and the scenography

of performance to create multiple-actor events in
shared public spaces. Jennifer Newsom, co-founder
(with Tom Carruthers) of the practice, describes how
participants perceive each architectural installation
differently and how it is their individual perception that
pieces parts together to receive alternative forms.

Dream The Combine

and Clayton Binkley,
Lure,
MadArt Studio,
Seattle,
2019

A gallery-goer is bathed in natural light

from above while pausing within the
installation. Each of the passageways
was either foreshortened or lengthened
through subtle geometric changes to
the walls, floors and ceilings.

45
 The duo comprising Dream The Combine negotiates a series of boundaries,
transgressing accustomed separations of discipline (art/architecture), nationality (USA/
Canada/UK), gender (female/male) and race (Black/White). Working through and with
difference is a real and a conceptual stance that extends to the ethos of the practice,
defining its attitude towards co-authorship and collaboration as well as space-making
and form. Dream The Combine’s socio-spatial sketches embrace ‘both + and’ thinking,
eschewing binaries that seek to ascribe polarities, fixed meanings and proscribed
patterns of use. At the root lies a commitment to commenting on the simultaneous and
intersectional complexity of social systems with architectural means.
The practice builds projects that engage with perception, specifically the modalities
of vision and movement, to probe our relationships to one another and the site-
specific contexts we move through. These installations often conflate what is real with
what is imagined to create perceptual uncertainties that cast doubt upon our ‘known’
understanding of the world. They acknowledge that how we see – a merger of the
sensorial realities of biology, the histories we carry and the medium of the content –
conditions what we see and thus how we relate to that content. The thing perceived is
an image, a construction that can be unpacked and inventively manipulated. The internal
structure of images becomes a space of exploration and risk.
Dream The Combine’s works are images considered sectionally, a three-dimensional
expansion of interior ambiguities like those found in Spanish painter Diego Velázquez’s
Las Meninas (1656) or Canadian artist Jeff Wall’s photographic work Picture for Women
(1979). Through techniques such as doubling (mirrors), juxtaposition (collage), overlay
(projection) and mimicry (casting), the practice produces architectural works that convey
a multitude of viewpoints at a time.
These images and their various props construct the metaphoric infrastructures that
undergird our conceptual systems. Considering them expansively can have implications
for rethinking the larger social systems in which we are all embroiled. Unmooring our
assumptions and challenging our perceptions induces an enmeshing of surface and
support, figure and ground that provokes new questions – a reconceptualisation which
is central to contemporary architectural practice.

Wayward Forms
The project site for the 2015 installation Longing was the only walkway removed from
the City of Minneapolis’s 8-mile-long (13-kilometre) network of downtown ‘skyway’
pedestrian bridges. It sat for nine years on a peripheral city lot, decay taking its toll on the
interior. The practice’s aim was to recursively connect this fragment to a new network of
its own making, acknowledging the memory of a forgotten system. The installation title
was an expression of this yearning as well as a verbal play on lengthening.
Two inward-facing, movable mirrors were suspended at either end of the skyway
from kinetic gimbals, creating a visually infinite environment that bridged towards
distant horizons. The virtual space created by the reflections flexed as wind moved the
mirrors with a mere 35 pounds (16 kilograms) of pressure. Their movements mimicked
those of the eye: side to side and up–down with no rotation. This biological mimesis
served to reinforce the wandering single-point perspectival convergence within the
mirror plane image.
The mirrors appeared to float within a web of steel lines. The structure supporting the
mirrors was a tensegrity system composed of equally balanced tensile and compressive
forces. Steel is visually light and its slenderness helped the installation appear as a
structural drawing, outlining space. As in much of the practice’s work, the industrial
materials used (steel, glass and, in other projects, construction textiles) link the
installations to infrastructure and systems that order our reality.
Some days were calm, with breezes inducing a gentle swaying of the vanishing point.
Other moments were more violent, as the wind pushed forcefully and turned the work
into a grinding, lurching machine. An accompanying film made in collaboration with
artist Isaac Gale begins to capture aspects of this movement.1 There existed a call and
response felt in situ between the occupant and the weather-responsive installation.
The immediate experience was visceral – people felt the wind on their faces, heard the
creaking joints, and saw the environment warp unpredictably in the animate reflections.

46
 Dream The Combine is interested in how this overlap of real space (the 82-foot / 25-metre length
of the skyway) and illusory space (the infinitely reflected network replicated out of this singular
instance) might collide to induce a reciprocity between the environment and the body. As the mirrors
moved, even as occupants were stationary, they might lose their balance through an immersive, full-
body feedback transmitted through their visual systems. Despite its physical presence as a hulking
mass rooted in the prairie landscape, the installation was transporting, shaking visitors out of their
everyday experiences. There was little interior stability as the illusion of depth yearned for a homing
ground. Infinity wandered longingly, and the space it implied bent into new forms.

Dream The Combine,

Longing,
Minneapolis, Minnesota,
2015

The 10 × 15 foot (3 × 4.6 metre) glass mirrors

suspended at either end of the pedestrian
bridge were supported by an armature of
½-inch (15-millimetre) steel rod and a laser-cut
steel ‘basket’. A simple U-joint connected the
basket to the mirror plane.

The Shadows Took Shape

The courtyard at MoMA PS1 in Long Island City, New York is a left-over space. Its awkward triangular
geometry results from intersecting street patterns shaped by the rail yard, the East River, an
extension of Manhattan’s regulating grid, and the property bounds of a neighbourhood holdout.
It is an ‘odd lot’2 of infrastructural overlays, recalling how the artwork Reality Properties: Fake Estates
(1973) by American artist Gordon Matta-Clark revealed urban void spaces formed from physical
disconnects in the abstract process of map-making.
This courtyard was the site for the MoMA PS1 Young Architects Program, an annual invited
competition and a storied proving ground for emerging architects. For the practice's 2018 winning
proposal titled Hide & Seek, Dream The Combine felt the need to deprivilege the context, both as a
physical space and as a cultural institution. In a space focused on reifying objects, how might a non-
objective installation refocus the emphasis towards people? The museum constructs a canon – what
are other potentials that lay latent? How might the museum’s confining limits be rethought? How can
new narratives, new spatial imaginaries and new publics enter in?
Dream The Combine first searched for other disciplinary responses. American artist Lorraine
O’Grady’s artwork Art Is …, performed initially at Harlem’s African-American Day Parade in
September 1983, became an important touchstone. The work complicates notions of audience/
performer at the same time it rethinks edges, borders and the limits of both space and the artistic
canon. O’Grady works with boundaries in an elastic way, complicating their inclusions and
exclusions. At MoMA PS1, 15-foot (4.6-metre) high concrete walls outline the exterior courtyard
space. These walls are Janus-like, sheltering those on the inside while disregarding those on the
outside. Dream The Combine aimed to complicate this periphery, moving inside and outside the
walls simultaneously through both the built installation and supplemental programming the
architects suggested. These programming efforts were meant to invite new publics into the
installation and museum.

47
 Utilising a distributed system of steel infrastructure, mirrors, mist, hammock and
platform, the museum requirements to provide shading, water and seating were
deployed in section. People interacted within a series of mirrored rectangular volumes
that had the dimensional clarity of thick lines, yet were indifferent to the perceptual rules
implied by such bounds. Mirrored voids permitted dislocating views around corners and
through walls, multiplying views and unsettling conventional spatial relationships. By
laterally disrupting the fixity of place, the work produced a glitch within our procedural
memories, encouraging habitual occupants of the space (museum security and staff) to
see the courtyard anew. Further, two upper trusses periscopically connected the interior
of the courtyard to the life of the street, allowing clandestine views from the raised
platforms to the corner and vice versa, extending the overall bounds of the project. An
overhead misting system intermittently filled these elements with a vaporous cloud,
resetting the scene like atmospheric static.
The butterfly-like frames supporting the mirrors were an evolution from Longing’s
tensegrity supports. The ‘X’ cross bracing is moved out of plane, again reinforcing the
perspectival convergence at the centre of the image. A long pipe extending rearwards
counterbalances the mirror’s heft and provides a handhold for manipulating the surface
and the images within its depths. The work becomes animate through its reciprocal
engagement with its inhabitants and the vicissitudes of weather.
MoMA PS1 hosts a summer music series which draws 5,000 people to the courtyard
each Saturday. Dream The Combine worked alongside the education, communication
and curatorial departments to think through how the installation could be a catalyst for
additional connections to various people, distinct from the cacophonous and crowded
concert events. Proposed programming included a community meal along the elevated
platform, a story-time for local children in the large hammock space, and an event for
Double Dutch and other games. (Only the last of these was realised, however, due to
circumstances outside the architects’ control.)
During the weekly Warm Up music series, the cathartic pulsations of the crowd
spread across the site in a ping-pong of views ricocheting off the installation’s surfaces
like sound. Through the defamiliarising effect of an infinite and flexing mirror space, the
walls of PS1 were expanded beyond their physical boundaries, in order to open up a
space for participatory action, spectacle and performance.3

Dream The Combine in collaboration

with Clayton Binkley of Arup,
Hide & Seek,
MoMA PS1,
Long Island City, New York,
2018

The 18 × 27 foot (5.5 × 8.2 metre) hammock was a

soft space for relaxation. Here, the crowd occupied
a room of thousands, as their roving images were
reflected into the distance.

48
Folded Space/Time
Whereas some of the practice’s previous work considered a mirror’s capacity to imply
a flexing depth within a flat plane, at Lure, a 2019 installation at Seattle’s MadArt Studio
made in collaboration with artist Clayton Binkley, movement across the threshold takes
the audience into the space of the image itself. Lure is an image you can step into.4 Dream The Combine and
Clayton Binkley,
The entire front façade of the gallery was masked in blue debris netting, editing the Lure,
building out of our awareness. By recalling the urban blind spots of Seattle’s myriad MadArt Studio,
Seattle,
construction sites, the blue construction textile removed the storefront from the present 2019
time and thrust it into a temporal space of transition between the past and what lay
The front façade of the gallery was
ahead. The vibrancy of its hue also referenced cinematic chromakey compositing, where shrouded in blue debris netting,
one space gets mapped onto or replaced by another. (Indeed, the façade is the proportion editing it out of awareness. The
project appears to recede into the
of a CinemaScope widescreen image.) As an indexical form, the façade becomes an city fabric of construction sites,
empty sign, a stand-in, a secondary image, a window, a ghost. marking it as a space of transition.

As an indexical form, the façade becomes an

empty sign, a stand-in, a secondary image,
a window, a ghost

49
Dream The Combine
and Clayton
Binkley,
Lure,
MadArt Studio,
Seattle,
2019

Three large glass doors were

held open throughout the
duration of the installation,
revealing a circulatory system
that seemed latent within the
site. The stippled space of the
street was brought into the
gallery through a series of
infinite, looping sequences.

50
 The project’s cambered passages traversed a series
of registers. From the front entry doors to the
existing skylights at the rear of the gallery space,
each was geometrically and conceptually integrated
into the installation.

Varying opacities of mesh

fabric created a series of
immersive veils, ghosting
occupants in a hazy blue
hue and tempering the
light entering the gallery
The blue net was folded into the space of the gallery, creating an interwoven series of
intersecting passages, supported by a latticework of steel and expanded metal mesh. With reference
to Andrea Palladio’s Teatro Olimpico in Vicenza (1585), the scaenae frons of the façade revealed an
inflected, perspectival and, in this case, navigable stage set. Large, sliding glass doors, kept open
during the installation’s run, permitted direct entry into the work, encouraging visitors to seamlessly
move from the exterior street into the building interior. Audiences performed within this liminal
zone, moving between the street, the installation’s passageways and the street again in a series of
infinite looping sequences.
The installation was both object and environment, a lure and a trap. Varying opacities of mesh
fabric created a series of immersive veils, ghosting occupants in a hazy blue hue and tempering the
light entering the gallery. The off-camber surfaces of the ramps and elasticity of the fabric underfoot
left people slightly unsteady. The work gently touched the structure of the building at its skylights,
merging into the existing architecture.
By inducing a heightened awareness of our bodies in relation to their environment, the work
aimed to challenge our usual, automatic ways of moving through the world, capturing a moment
of attention. Its looping circulatory system encouraged exploration, curiosity and a reciprocal
engagement between the form and its audiences.

An Exchange of Energy
Dream The Combine utilises the languages of film and theatrical scenography – media of
representation and reality – to engage with the complexities of narrative, image, space and direct
experience. The practice’s works are an invitation to overlapping performances where the actors
are multiple publics in shared places. Each project is like a prepositional phrase; they are relational
structures meant to bring people together. The mirror often serves as a vehicle to prompt the
intersubjectivity of these relationships, creating instantaneous feedback between the form and its
varied occupants.
The practice alters, shuffles, glitches and recombines various contexts in order to unsettle spaces
and the narratives they carry. Whether on city streets, transportation corridors or other public
property, sites on the margins such as these can serve as foundations for an energetic exchange
among the works and the diverse people inhabiting them. People are the activating agents
enlivening these moving pictures, enriching their meaning. 1

Notes
2. Dream The Combine in collaboration with Isaac Gale, Longing (film), 2018, for the installation Longing Text © 2022 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Images:
(2015) by Dream The Combine: https://vimeo.com/185545160. pp 44, 45(b) © Dream The Combine, photos
3. ‘Odd Lots: Revisiting Gordon Matta-Clark’s Fake Estates’, Queens Museum of Art and White Columns, Caylon Hackwith; p 45(t) © 2018 MoMA PS1,
2005, curated by Jeffrey Kastner, Sina Najafi and Frances Richard. photo Pablo Enriquez; p 47 © 2015 Dream The
4. Dream The Combine in collaboration with Isaac Gale, Hide & Seek (film), 2020, for the installation Hide Combine, photo Andrew Latrielle; p 48 © 2018
& Seek (2018) by Dream The Combine in collaboration with Clayton Binkley: https://vimeo.com/470375617. MoMA PS1, photo Brandon Polanco; pp 49,
5. Dream The Combine in collaboration with Isaac Gale, Lure (film), 2019, for the installation Lure (2019) 51 © MadArt, photo James Harnois; p 50 ©
by Dream The Combine and Clayton Binkley: https://vimeo.com/470401309. Dream The Combine

51
52
Jeffrey Halstead

HEAVY
WEIGHT
Undermining Power
Structures Through
Spatial Destabilisation
and Force Simulation

Jeffrey Halstead,
Motel Room,
2015

An animation still taken from the projection series shown at a

one-night stand for art + architecture in Los Angeles during its run
in 2015. In this animation, a camera is parented to the wall folding
in the room and follows it as it collapses in on itself. The animation,
projected onto the original room at 1:1, undermines the ability of
architectural space to maintain a sense of security.

53
Interdisciplinary artist, In the American artist Richard Serra’s One Ton Prop (1969),
four lead-antimony plates lean against one another to
educator and practitioner compose a loose box. The weight of each plate leans
Jeffrey Halstead’s artistic into the corner of another, using counterforce to create
and spatial explorations a state of equilibrium akin to the precarious structure of
a house of cards. ‘The residues of the activities didn’t
reside in the effects of always qualify as art,’ Serra remarked in retrospect. ‘I was
weight, the associated primarily interested in the process, and it was important
collapse of material and that whatever was finally made reveal its making.’1

how gravity can be used Gravity to Collapse

to distort and challenge the As the work’s title suggests, there are two elementary
collective power structures parts of Serra’s methodology at play: the weight (one
ton) and the action (to prop). Though a simple enough
of traditional architectural apparatus, it is precisely the incompatibility of the one-ton
space. Here he describes weight and the leisurely action of propping that creates
his rationale and some a composition that appears to be simultaneously (and
paradoxically) heavy and light. The work appears to be
of the projects that have teetering on collapse – a state that might instinctually
inspired him to think make someone jump back once near it as if parts of the
through alternative modes assembly may fall on them, analogous to the feeling
of a large steel beam dangling from a construction
in contemporary formalism. crane overhead. This relationship to the body extends
structurally to the installation process of Serra’s work.
Recently, the Gagosian in New York City required
extensive renovation exclusively in response to the dead
load of Serra’s Forged Rounds.2

Collapse to Pressure
In Untitled (2006), Polish artist Monika Sosnowska enacts
a series of material manipulations on thin alloy sheets.
Sosnowska began with a small paper study model she
folded and squeezed in a matter of seconds which was
then translated into the larger work with the collaboration
of a fabricator in a former prefab housing factory. Guided
by this paper cube, Sosnowska stood beside a team of
engineers and verbally directed them to hammer and
apply pressure to the metal box.3
Both of these works hover between construction and
destruction or between their assembly and their coming
undone. Sosnowska’s cube resembles an oversized paper
box that was accidentally tossed and stuck between two
exterior walls of the Sprengel Museum in Hannover. The
experience of weight and collapse is present in the nature
of the impressions left on the surfaces of the work. They
appear haphazard, as though they resulted only from the
sculpture’s landing in the gallery. Serra’s lead-antimony
panels on the other hand – though they too exhibit a
sense of undoneness – require a high level of precision in

Jeffrey Halstead,
Illustrated force diagram of Richard
Serra’s sculpture One Ton Prop,
2021

A force diagram highlighting the plate positions and

gravitational vectors of the lead-antimony plates used in
Serra’s 1969 sculpture. The diagram is reflective of those used
in structural engineering and applicable to a series of pieces
dealing with basic building tectonics by Serra.

54
positioning the plates to prop them. It is exactly through
this paradoxical game between precise actions and the
appearance of serendipity that Untitled and One Ton
Prop withdraw from our normative understandings of
structure and form towards more fantastical but heavy
environments.

Pressure to Politics
A number of my own projects, presented here, stem from
pairing Serra’s process of precise action with the loose
formal material translations of Sosnowska. Brushed
Stuff (2020) conflates digital and physical environments
in a 3D register of simulated crumpling forces (digital)
determined by the weight or pressure exerted on a digital
drawing tablet (physical). In an attempt to draw a step
further towards the paradoxical account of precision and
haphazardness, they turn to a highly accurate scripting
Monika Sosnowska,
logic to register the crumple force and recursively semi- Untitled,
automate it to continually manipulate the surfaces of 2006
the cube.4 But Brushed Stuff deviates from real material Installed in a precarious position between two vertical walls,
behaviour, and through its lack of real material properties Untitled is a crumpled metal cube that has been de-formed manually
through a series of verbal and haptic instructions. The work resists
(like those of crumpled paper or hammered sheet predetermined notions of upright propping and smooth surfaces that
metal), the work perpetually resolves itself. The recursive would typically be associated with cubic, metal-alloy forms.
application of the crumpling never causes the digital cube
to tear or wilt. Rather, it maintains some manner of fidelity
to its original state, raising the question of when does the
cube stop being a cube?

Jeffrey Halstead,
Brushed Stuff,
2020

left: Animation still with drawing overlay indexing the modelled

operations of brushstrokes applied on a digital drawing tablet. The
drawing is temporal in that it has been sectioned over the duration
of the animation. The result is a layered drawing that captures the
transformative states of the cube.

above: Animation still highlighting the recursive nature of automated

hand action recordings. The material behaviour of a mesh is unique in
that as it stretches, parts of it decrease in resolution. So, the ability of
the material (mesh) to register continual, overlapping brushstrokes is
directly proportional to its resolution or subdivisions.

55
 Motel Room (2015) is another project that investigates Politics to Deformation
semi-automated processes of a room interior devoid of In Tower (2014), Monika Sosnowska starts with a replica
material limitations. The process involved generating a of a three-floor section of the façade system from Mies
photogrammetry model of a motel room, removing all of van der Rohe’s Lake Shore Drive apartment buildings
the existing furnishings, building new interior walls that (1949) in Chicago. Sosnowska is suspicious of the late
loosely fit the motel room, propping the new walls onto Modernist’s ideas on stability, permanence and stasis.5 In
the existing ones, then projecting an animation sequence reaction to this, she introduces destructive processes to
of an altered version of the original motel room. In this infamous Modernist architectural artefacts. At first glance,
iteration, the motel room is analogous to the cube in the destructive act can be seen in the deformation of the
Brushed Stuff. Instead of crumpling, a folding operation work; however, the first and perhaps most powerful act
was recorded, and then scripted to recursively apply to is laying the vertically hanging grid on the ground.6 High
the digital representation (photogrammetry model) of the Modernism broadly speaking imposed erect, perfect, tall-
motel room. standing, ordered structures and forms in all aspects of
Motel Room produces moments of dissociation life. The act of laying flat the steel façade on the ground is
between an occupant and their familiar semi-intimate and a physical and political force that threatens the historically
semi-domestic interior. The main demographic of motels vetted power of risen structures.
in the postwar period was the middle-class American The animation sequences that comprise my installation
traveller. Over time, with the increased wealth disparity DuctWork (2016) attempt to bring our attention to
from the advancement of our capitalist economy, the another aspect – though utilitarian – of Modernism.
motel room, once a transitory space used for leisure Simultaneously presenting three different ductwork
or business, took on a more destitute form that served simulations in three different colours, they show duct
marginalised communities who suffered from the systems undergoing a series of physically implausible
inequality of government-sanctioned housing rules and transformations where their weight is dragging them
regulations (credit checks, background checks, etc). The down into the space that is typically reserved for human
folding, or collapse, of Motel Room echoes the lived occupation.7 Taking this critical approach towards artefacts
transition from what the motel once was to what it is now. resultant from Modernist thinking, DuctWork twists
The animation sequence slowly displays the history of the these back-of-house items into contorted forms beyond
alterations imposed on the original space – the collapsed recognition to the point where they become imaginary
interior – until it is no longer recognisable, overlapping (digital) pools of molten metal.
altered geometries to expose new politics of the destitute
realities of what once was a celebrated place. Limits, or Slippages
In all of these projects, weight and gravity are used
to undermine the power structures that architecture
In all of these imposes on occupiable space. In the relationship between
architecture and Serra’s work, power structures between
projects, weight buildings and occupants are brought into question.8
Here the gallery is used as a prop, undermining the
and gravity power structure of the gallery itself. In Sosnowska’s
work, the power structure of Modernism is crumpled
are used to and folded to undo the history of cultural superiority
that Modernism imposed.9 In Brushed Stuff, Motel Room
undermine the and DuctWork, artefacts and spaces are subjected to

power structures gravity, weight and other forces to alter their original or
idealised states. The purpose of this work is to create a

that architecture productive destabilisation in the field so that we might

undo – temporarily and fictitiously – inheritances aligned

imposes on to orders of superiority. This thinking, however, is not new.

In 1973, Gordon Matta Clark cut through the structural

occupiable space surfaces of an abandoned house in New Jersey. The result

was a work titled Splitting. After the initial incision was
made, the top of the masonry foundation was bevelled
and the weight of the house forced it to tip back on itself,
splitting the house in two.10 This act of defiance to the
future designation of the house as a demolition site was a
challenge to the ‘repurposing’ policies for urban renewal
at the time.
A House Made Out of Scrunched Up Papery Mass is a
work in progress that tests the limits of these methods

56
 Monika Sosnowska,
Tower,
2014

Still from the construction/destruction process of this installation.

The folded and bent state of the steel façade was produced by
dropping a waste container hung from a crane onto the work.
The act can be read as cathartic or a means to undermine the
power structures of Modernism as experienced by Sosnowska.

Jeffrey Halstead,
DuctWork,
2016

A speculative animation series on performative states of ductwork. This frame

captures the initial moment of the mechanical duct as it begins to collapse. The image
is a part of a longer video sequence accompanied by two additional animations that
were projected on a set of three corresponding surfaces at 1:1 scale.

57
Jeffrey Halstead,
A House Made Out of Scrunched
Up Papery Mass,
2020–

Sections rendering of the scrunched-up house.

Formally, the work reads as a diagram of
forces. From a programmatic standpoint, a
ubiquitous domestic space serves as a means
to register the odd outcomes that occur through
interpretation when given a set of open-ended
instructions and results in oddities such as a
carved-out bathroom and missing floor.

58
The hope is that of force, pressure, crumpling and weight through the
proposal of a house. The house is non-nonhierarchical in
we as architects organisation, and more importantly, it seems weightless
as it sits propped on a wire frame. The house leans and its
of a constantly surfaces crumple, divorcing its effects from conventional

expanding discipline residential construction materials and their behaviour.

A House Made Out of Scrunched Up Papery Mass does
can move away from not seek to replace the material behaviours of housing
typologies. Instead, it tries to reveal a continuance of
vetted determinisms recognisable architectural elements and altered, forceful

towards more open- imaginary states.

The references shown here attempt to present a
ended practices that survey of works that alter commonly accepted material
behaviours in the search for new visual and formal
privilege without phenomena. The design work is driven by a desire to

reservation, the co-opt aspects of the physical world and enmesh them
with ones that are innate to the digital platforms in search
wrinkled, the brushed of affect-driven visual scenes. The art references aid
architects in thinking through complex scenarios of form,
and the crumpled material, natural and synthetic behaviour, and associated
politics. Thinking through these procedural and formal
modes, the hope is that we as architects of a constantly
expanding discipline can move away from vetted
determinisms towards more open-ended practices that
privilege without reservation, the wrinkled, the brushed
and the crumpled. 1

Notes
1. Richard Serra, David Frankel and Hal Foster, Richard Serra: Early Work, Steidl
(Göttingen), 2013, p 7.
2. Hal Foster and Julian Rose in conversation on Richard Serra, Gagosian, New
York, 7 November 2019.
3. Artist Talk by Monika Sosnowska, Architectural Association School of
Architecture, London, 3 February 2012.
4. See Sean Keller, Automatic Architecture: Motivating Form After Modernism,
University of Chicago Press (Chicago, IL), 2018, p 149.
5. Sosnowska, op cit.
6. M Unterdörfer, ‘The Material’, in Andrzej Turowski (ed), Monika Sosnowska:
Tower, Hatje Cantz (Ostfildern), 2015, p 189.
7. For the two not reproduced here, see https://jeffhalstead.com/PS-DUCT-
WORK.
8. Foster and Rose, op cit.
9. Sosnowska, op cit.
10. Splitting, undated: https://ubu.com/film/gmc_splitting.html.

Exterior view of the scrunched-up house. The house

embodies both the unruliness of a ‘loose’ instruction set
applied recursively, and the precise nature of positioned
objects in a state of equilibrium – appearing haphazardly
made by scrunching up paper sheets then delicately
balanced on a set of angled steel beams.

Text © 2022 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Images: pp 52-4, 55(bl&r), 57(b),
58–9 © Jeffrey Halstead; p 55(t) © Monika Sosnowksa. Photo: Aline
Gwose, Michael Herling / Sprengel Museum Hannover; p 57(t) ©
Monika Sosnowska. Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth. Photo ©
Juliusz Sokolowski

59
 Anna Neimark

Rude Forms
Among Us

60
 First Office, The exhibition installation by First Office, containing and inspired
‘Rude forms among us’, by photographs by the natural historian Eugène Trutat (1840–1910),
SCI-Arc Gallery, was a full-scale house that mimicked the form of the Dolmen of
Los Angeles, Vaour, a megalithic monument in southern France. This mock-up
California, for an accessory dwelling unit (ADU), built of structural insulated
2020 panels (SIPs), was four times the size of the dolmen.

Contemporary
Construction
of Prehistoric
Ruins

61
Anna Neimark is a The exhibition ‘Rude forms among us’ at the SCI-Arc
Gallery in Los Angeles gathered a small selection of Eugène

founding partner
Trutat’s photographs from the municipal library and the
archives of the Muséum – a natural history museum
of which Trutat was director from 1890 to 1900 – in the
of First Office, an French city of Toulouse. The Southern California Institute
of Architecture (SCI-Arc) hosts large-scale installations by
architectural firm young architects, such as this one, biannually. Blurring
the line between exhibition and installation, First Office

based in Los Angeles. Architecture built a mock-up for a house that was inspired
by the natural historian’s photographs from the turn of

Here she describes the 20th century of what the architectural historian James
Fergusson called ‘rude stone monuments’.1 The resulting

a recent exhibition artefact offers both a timely and a timeless paradigm, in

which contemporary techniques of construction bear the

design for Eugène

weight of prehistoric ruins.
Prior to setting their gaze on the structure hovering
beyond the photographs, the exhibition’s visitors were
Trutat’s photographs, invited to closely examine the landscape scenes captured in
the delicate focus of ‘piezographic’ prints, framed in Nielsen
and the installation black aluminium profiles. Frédérique Gaillard, Curatorial
Assistant and Head of the Photo Library at the Muséum,

inspired by them digitised and developed the original glass plate negatives,
transferring the image from gelatine and silver bromide to

that was created the contemporary carbon-ink printing process, specially for
the show. The exhibition opened with two scenes captured

at Sci-Arc in 2020. by Trutat, one looking to the future and the other to the
past. They depict human figures awkwardly scaling a pair of

The exhibition is both

objects in the open landscape: a car and a dolmen.

a simple display of
Trutat’s work and a
contemporary take
on his influence on
what she refers
to as ‘Rude Form’.

62
 In the first scene, the driver leans his body on the
automobile’s hood, standing at the head of the engine.
Looking past him at the road beyond, feet planted firmly on
the dirt road, another man reclines against the step leading
to his seat. Perhaps it is Monsieur Béraldi performing as
footman, holding onto the hinged door that encloses the
back couch. Inside, two women are seated, likely Madame
Béraldi, fully veiled by hat and net, puffed sleeves, among
the bags, and the other a young woman in her care. The
automobile is wedged with stones that block its wheels from
rolling. In this still shot, the car – its roof cover retracted,
armchairs tufted, wheel projecting – appears as an object
frozen in space, a Béraldi family prop, not an industrially
produced vehicle in motion.
The second scene takes us off the road and into the rocky
landscape. Here, a smaller group is perched on a 6,000-year-
old monument, one of the dolmens of Le Mas-d’Azil. Centred
in the picture frame is a colossal slab of stone, cantilevering
past orthostates – vertical stones that support it horizontally
in mid-air. One man stands, hovering above the capstone,
his arms idle by his sides; another sits in a thinking pose,
his leg dangling off the edge; the third reclines theatrically,
cradling his head in the palm of his hand. They seem to be
engaged in silent dialogue. ‘Was this rude stone monument
once a house?’ they wonder. ‘Perhaps it was a grave. Or a
giant’s table,’ they quibble. No one knows for sure, though
many theories persist. Is that why two of the men are
donning a hatchet and a handgun, uncertain of something
or someone they might encounter from the chamber’s past?

Time Standing Remarkably Still

Some readers will recall the comparison of the modern
machine with the historic monument famously imagined by
the Swiss architect Le Corbusier on the pages of Towards a
New Architecture, originally published in 1923. That pairing
features this very same early automobile, named ‘Humber’,
as an analogue to the Doric temple at Paestum. For the
modern architect, these crude examples represented
the rustic beginnings in an evolution of vehicles and in
a progression of temples, all leading to the streamlined
‘Delage’ sports car and the idealised Parthenon on the
Acropolis.2 Le Corbusier argued that housing, too, could be
refined along the lines of Greek temples and modern cars,
and even villas could evolve into ‘machines for living in’.3
Le Corbusier developed the reinforced concrete structure
for the open floor plan of the Dom-Ino House (1914–15) to
bring building construction into the era of mass-production.
To this end, he depicted time along with culture moving
steadily forwards.

First Office, The exhibition opened with a pair of ‘piezographic’

‘Rude forms among us’, (carbon ink) prints developed from Eugène Trutat’s
SCI-Arc Gallery, negative glass plates from the archives of the Muséum,
Los Angeles, a natural history museum in Toulouse, France, of which
California, he served as director. Above: The Béraldi Family and
2020 Their Car at the Mountain Pass of Aubisque (1906).
Left: Men and Dolmen, taken in the commune of
Le Mas-d’Azil at the end of the 19th century.

63
 First Office,
‘Rude forms among us’,
SCI-Arc Gallery,
Los Angeles, California,
2020

The pedestal, positioned in the exhibited house, features two

original negative prints realised by Eugène Trutat from the
archives of the Muséum in Toulouse. Framed from left to right
are views of the Dolmen of Vaour, ‘face on’ and ‘in profile’.

Any technological anachronism

is aptly dulled by the equalising
lens of the camera that arrests
the past, present and future
with every shot

64
Eugène Trutat, By contrast, Trutat’s pictures represent time standing
Dolmen of Vaour,
Tarn, France, remarkably still. The car helped its occupants traverse
c 1880 space, while the monument transported them across
This original photographic print of the Dolmen of Vaour was time, but no one seems to know where to go next. Side
realised by Trutat with a silver bromide emulsion on paper, a by side, the upholstered Humber and the unhewn dolmen
technique that he invented to make more durable and portable
negatives than those projected on glass plates. appear primitive, providing shelter to the tourists and the
scientists on their exploration of the Pyrenees. Though the
typical persons, technical objects and ancient monuments
in Trutat’s photographs seem out of synchrony with
time and with one another, they uncomfortably belong
together. Simultaneously, they share the scientific
space of natural history: the background of a unifying
landscape and the format of the photographic medium.
Any technological anachronism is aptly dulled by the
equalising lens of the camera that arrests the past, present
and future with every shot.

A House Projected from the Dolmen

In his treatise on the application of photography to the
field of natural history, published in 1884, Trutat wrote that
‘nothing [could] be more complete than the photograph of
the facts of details: folds, intrusions, erosions’, capturing
what he called ‘the physiognomy of a region’.4 His own

65
66
prints depicting the Dolmen of Vaour, a low megalithic First Office,
‘Rude forms among us’,
monument capped by a broken stone, portray a seemingly SCI-Arc Gallery,
petrified creature, striking a recognisably melancholic Los Angeles, California,
2020
pose. The negative print of Vaour’s profile view (we must
do some mental work here to imagine the light values opposite top: The house is composed of several
U-shaped SIP ‘cores’, each one designed to support
inverted) accentuates the rough texture of the rude stones, a utilitarian function, such as a kitchen, bathrooms
the high contrast of light and shadow, and the pictorial or storage. Several vertical elements protrude
beyond the perimeter of the roof, allowing for the
continuity between figure and ground. It is a portrait of illumination of the photographs on display.
landscape, and as such, it models for this contemporary
architect a rude form that holds within it the possibility of
thinking towards a house.
A house projected from the dolmen differs from one
derived from the Dom-Ino, which was defined by its
engineered concrete slabs and columns. The dolmen’s
materials have qualities that exceed their quantities. The
panels of the corresponding house express eccentricities
related to Trutat’s ‘facts of details’, which develop layers of The primary building material for the house is a
fabrication, colour and texture of finish. Looking closely, structural insulated panel (SIP), composed of 4- and
we notice how uncomfortably the structure fills the space 8-inch (100- and 200-millimetre) thick slabs of expanded
of the gallery. It is a compressed but full-scale house, polystyrene (EPS) sandwiched by two ¾-inch (19-millimetre)
an accessory dwelling unit (ADU) developed for the Los sheets of oriented strand board (OSB). The 4 × 10 foot (1.2
Angeles backyard landscape. It is not made of megalithic × 3 metre) SIP modules are splined with wooden posts
stones, but of materials that are environmentally and beams: 3 × 4 and 3 × 8 inch (75 × 100 and 75 × 200
responsive and efficient for construction. Composed millimetre) dimensional lumber, used throughout the
of spaces flanked by infrastructural blocks, the plan walls and roof respectively. These are bound together with
mimics the punctured perimeter enclosed by a dolmen’s an array of 10-inch (254-millimetre) SIP screws at those
orthostates. The U-shaped shafts could house a kitchen, corners where panels abut, exposing the bleached flesh of
bathrooms, storage and other possible utilities. These are insulation foam. Along the continuous surfaces, however,
capped by a monumental terrace that folds to provide a smaller screws are inconspicuous, masked by torn pieces
gap for drainage; its form is a nod to the broken capstone of tape, camouflaging in the rough grain of the OSB’s wood
of Vaour. strands. The rough surface is sealed with ‘black forest’
tinted high-gloss paint, diluted three-to-one with water.
This turns the surface finish both transparent and reflective,
emulating a stony texture for the house inside and out.
opposite: The house is capped by a monumental roof
terrace measuring 16 × 31 feet (4.9 × 9.4 metres). Like With megalithic heaviness transposed onto modern
the capstone of the Dolmen of Vaour, it too is broken
lightness, simulated materials confuse contemporary
and tilted, revealing a gap for drainage. The wood
strands that wrap around the foam within the SIPs are construction with analogical prehistoric assembly,
finished in ‘black forest’ high-gloss paint, simulating a
capturing both moments simultaneously. Their aesthetic is
stony texture from afar.
at once streamlined and crude, minimal and textured, high
and low; their form moves us to consider its hybrid origin.
Updated to our environmental standards, the dolmen
comes pre-approved as a standard plan, registered by the
Los Angeles Department of Building and Safety (LADBS) for
construction. As ADUs inspired by rude stone monuments
begin to populate the backyards of LA, they propagate the
rude forms among us. 1

Notes
1. James Fergusson popularised the term ‘rude stone
monuments’ with the title of his book, Rude Stone
Monuments in All Countries: Their Age and Uses, John
Murray (London), 1872.
2. Le Corbusier, Vers une architecture, 2nd edn, G Crès & Cie
(Paris), 1924, pp 106–7.
3. Ibid, p 235.
4. Eugène Trutat, La photographie appliqué à l’histoire
naturelle, Gauthier-Villars (Paris), 1884, pp x–xi (translated
by the author).

Text © 2022 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Images: pp 60–4, 66–7 © Photography by
Marten Elder; p 65 With permission from the Muséum de Toulouse, France

67
 Viola Ago

‘Strange Networks’
Inhabiting the
Boundary Condition

A Conversation with
Thom Mayne

Thom Mayne,
Memphshan,
'Strange Networks',
2011

The vitality of the work and its

potential to generate architectonic
combinations is infinite – a pure
act of architecture.

68
Guest-Editor of this 2 Viola Ago
interviewed the Pritzker Prize-
winning architect Thom Mayne,
founding member of SCI-Arc
and co-founder of internationally
renowned architectural firm
Morphosis, on the publication
of his recent book Strange
Networks. Also the collective
name of his series of speculative
drawings and reliefs created
over a number of years, ‘Strange
Networks’ is an attempt to reveal
incidental architectural forms
and topologies to expand his
architectural language. Here he
explains the motivation behind
the book and its contents.

69
Thom Mayne is one of a generation of architects who in Thom Mayne,
CompositeXVll (Tianboro),
the 1970s and 1980s began his career with the ideals of ‘Strange Networks’,
reinvigorating architecture and its alignment with modern 2013

society. Now in his 70s, and long past the struggles of opposite: The series is part of Mayne’s efforts
his early practice when, faute de mieux, his architecture to dislocate his architectural self and create
objects, drawings and topologies that he
was primarily conceptual – drawn, not built – the interests cannot preconceive, thereby provoking new
that shape his design philosophy are still expressed in un-predetermined thoughts and forms.

lithographic prints, studies, and the 2½ -dimensional

sculptural works he calls ‘drawdels’ for their amalgamation Thom Mayne,
Beimington,
of the techniques of drawing and modelling. The conceptual ‘Strange Networks’,
improvisations and sculptural work he creates in accidental 2011

fashion in his experiments with forms and materiality go on below: The ‘Strange Networks’ suite of
to influence his architecture. explorations is an exercise in combining chance
operations with Mayne’s highly developed
personal sense of composition gleaned over
decades of practice.

70
Discovering Chance boundaries, control and release, chance, unpredictability
His book Strange Networks (2021)1 features his recent and spontaneity, fragments, the unfinished and works
theoretical investigations into the prima materia of his in progress: ‘The whole set of interests I’ve been
architectural formal language. The book is huge; friends working with over the years, the models and their
have joked they would be buying new tables strong enough derived drawings, have been expanding alongside my
to support it. It is also beautifully produced – an expression investigation into highly organised, multidimensional
of Mayne’s self-admitted perfectionism and the reason systems. The question ultimately was how to formulate an
for its uncommon size: ‘The intricacies of the work could ordered network to create forms of coherency that border
not be morsellised further. For one, the scalar necessity of on the appearance of chaos. The work investigates the
Strange Networks ultimately came out of the demands of formation of ordered spatial relationships across complex
the artwork, such as its material and tactile qualities. Like networks.’
architecture, I am responding to the nature of the project, This notion of willfulness and chance is very much about
and scale cannot be ignored.’ the things that take place out of serendipitous operations
The series of drawings and reliefs featured in the and that represent the release of what one might see as
book explore preoccupations that go back 40 or so years randomness, leading to a tension of the designed and non-
to the very beginning of Mayne’s career: issues with designed as the contingent is incorporated into the work.

71
 Thom Mayne,
Composite 002,
‘Strange Networks’,
2015

One tactic that is explicitly used

is the breaking of the ‘frame’,
whether this is the periphery of
the piece or a series of internal
lines and boundaries.

72
 According to Mayne, contingency is everything for
an architect: ‘Willfulness and chance subvert an a priori
model of the manufacturing of art or architecture. Together
they liberate spontaneity and elevate the qualities of
strangeness. I am challenging the limits of a priori thinking
that find resolution in the complexity of multiple forces
connecting, reciprocating or diverging on the page.’
Thom Mayne,
The strategy of shifting the notion of form and the
Honoluchuan, physiognomic – the look of something – to the operational
‘Strange Networks’,
2011
strategies that formed them – to process – should be
understood as part of ‘a centuries-old investigation into
The pieces do not hide their
generative linear construction;
chance behaviour. Most recently, art in the 20th century
viewers’ eyes can trace their raised essential questions of how painting oscillates
tectonic archeology.
between an artist’s willfulness and unintended outcomes
of the medium. I’m continuing that set of critiques in the
“Strange Networks” series and, more critically, I am looking
directly at how it affects my operational strategies within a
site. This is about making a complex connection between
randomness and intentionality.’
At the same time, although artists such as Marcel
Duchamp, Jean Hans Arp, Richard Serra and Jackson
Pollock used the laws of chance for their compositions,
Mayne invariably Mayne invariably needs ‘measurement and precision as
means of applying a rigour and discipline. The specificity
needs ’measurement of the drawing’s structure is absolutely essential because
it produces an operational strategy that can accurately
and precision as synthesise unintentional, unanticipated behaviour. Without
measurement, I can’t make interconnections and I can’t
means of applying a abstract the work that is inevitably produced through those
connections – every line, every mass, every relationship
rigour and discipline‘ would be off-calibre.’
He goes on to say that the organisation and system in
these models are evident because they are both about
themselves: ‘The three-dimensional work is a system that
is autonomous as it organises and reconfigures itself.
The drawings are the analytical outputs that decipher
their complexity.’

73
Autonomous Zones Whereas the drawings operate on their own scale, they
Although they are intricately tied into his practice’s have always alluded in their complexity to something that
architectural projects, Mayne’s drawings operate as would probably be oriented towards the large scale. Most
autonomous works. This has always been the case, even architects begin by doing small-scale work early in their
very early on in his career as a primarily academic architect careers and shift their strategy as they grow. Mayne says
doing his most influential work on paper: ‘I was very aware that early on: ‘I had a strategy that could organise complex
that the work I was and still am doing creates a parallel intricate problems, problems only afforded in larger-scale
autonomy between art and architecture that exists within work. The methodology had to resolve sophisticated
the initial conceptional phase of Morphosis’s projects. complexity, so working in a smaller scale was already
‘Strange Networks’ could be seen as a totally autonomous confining our interests in synthesising multiple scales of
“art” project that has its own essence outside the built information. Ultimately, we needed more complex stuff to
work, but it became clear at various levels that, for me, the deal with.’ And indeed, Morphosis’s works are enormously
work exists in a “both-and” state of its own independence complex, large-scale projects that require a very different
from and distinct relation to the architectural project. The kind of commitment and approach than the purely
art varies radically between something that is both the conceptual or the purely individual.
conceptual departure point and the final architecture. This One of Mayne’s critiques is that currently architects
aspect of both-and states of the work, built or drawn, is the are somewhat limited in their ability to bring operational
manner of its distinct autonomy and my direct engagement. strategies to bear on design that have a level of complexity
This is true for the forces of willfulness and chance; I can commensurate with the problems of designing today: ‘I’m
respond to the work as it self-organises, allowing the looking for organisational ideas that are in alignment with
artwork to have its own distinct autonomy, and yet I can an urban environment – the city as a dynamic entity. For
also still directly influence its construction as its author.’ my work, the city became the ultimate problem with which
By dissociating his artwork from the work of to interface, engage and challenge existing systems.’ He
architecture, Mayne is able to keep himself free of the goes on to explain that such organisational ideas lead to
contingent behaviour and the realities that inevitably a complex workflow strategy that is highly differentiated,
lock down any architecture that is grounded in reality: both in its organisational structure in coordinating with
‘I’m somehow in between the work in its abstract form a large team, and in terms of its space-making and form-
as an idea and the work within the reality of constraints making, the goal being to preserve flexibility on design
– again, a both-and condition for an architect. The idea while meeting the complex objectives of large projects:
is ultimately unadulterated before it’s cemented in the ‘The urban environment culminates in two models of
fixedness of architecture’s various contingencies: tectonic, organisation: one biological and one cultural. Together, in
economic, cultural, political, etc. This is the reality of doing tension and union, they redefine our notion of beauty, fixity
architecture, but I would not say it detracts from that initial and strangeness when comprehending the city.’
unbridled idea. Rather, the constraints strengthen and Within such an organisational system ‘it is not a question
resolve it, forcing architecture to be a true social art form, of objects, but rather a facilitation of relationships between
both autonomous and engaged.’ objects. We can respond to various forces (social, cultural,

Thom Mayne,
Yonkxi (detail),
‘Strange Networks’,
2011

Sometimes the two-dimensional

drawing metamorphoses into two-
and-a-half dimensions and becomes
complex sculptural reliefs.

74
 Thom Mayne, political) by orchestrating those relationships through
Composite 1 (Anafei),
‘Strange Networks’, the introduction of primary organising elements. As the
2013 multiple forces on a project develop, initial organising
The work is ascalar, occupying the blurred elements facilitate an underlying structure, allowing
boundary between landscape, architecture, relationships to further materialise, spatialise and connect
urban design and meteorology.
to other elements. The accretion of these cascading effects
produces the final complex organisation of the project.
The final output – as both the project in architectural terms
and the underlying organisational structure – cyclically
challenges and reinvents those initial primary organising
elements. It begins to construct its own universe, an
infinite set of possible relationships between objects. That
is what I mean by autonomous art or self-organisation.’ It
is the combinatory behaviour of two things meeting that
produces what Mayne is interested in, and this goes back
to his earlier work when, if there was a novel architectural
invention, it was often caused by ‘the combinatory aspect
of the work which is the act of interaction: the collision, the
reaction and the chance behaviour of two things touching
and speaking to each other. It is very literally forming an
architecture, which has unions and tensions within its own
self-generated structure.’

75
 In its complexity and multiplicity such an approach
could easily collapse into chaos without the application of
absolute sets of rules, ‘and this goes back to the tension
between precision and what appears to be or could
be looked upon as randomness.’ Mayne compares the
choreography of the dance between chance and the specific
with contemporary jazz: ‘Herbie Hancock or Miles Davis
will tell you that to produce extremely complex music at
the edge of noise, at the edge of incoherence, it must take
Thom Mayne, on a radically flexible and intricate structure. And the more
Composite 1,
‘Strange Networks’,
ambitious the complexity, the more structure is needed.
2013 Improvisational jazz is seemingly unorganised, chaotic
The speed and dexterity of the
even, but there is precision in the appearance of chaos.
computer and its algorithms allows It’s ultimately a music that elevates autonomy through
the swift production of work and can
create versions and genealogies of
improvisation by responding and reacting to its own
form and line. generation live.’

76
 The observer who looks at Mayne’s artworks might drawing. Some may not totally understand their unique
see that they are organised but, he says, they will seldom input within the production or thought process behind it.
understand how, even though ‘the models are produced During critiques, I’m very suspicious. Not just suspicious;
from an incredibly simple set of rules using the same four I also question the meaning of all those lines and the
elements as the central DNA’. The spaces, numbers and decisions made in the production of the work.’
processes Mayne conceptualises are algorithmically and The computer allowed Mayne to pursue what he was
mathematically stored on computer systems and used as interested in, which was relationships that grew out of
a generative tool to model a limitless number of possible complexity and interactions that were the invention, not
alternative building forms: ‘These models are produced of the things, but of the connection of things. Twenty
by a scripting method, enabling me to produce an infinite years ago, he says he could not have drawn or conceived
number of possibilities. That’s not to say it’s purely a of some of his works: ‘I now have tools that allow me
digital process. If anything, the mechanics have gone to go somewhere beyond the 2D. I’m starting in 3D.
away – the computer is a tool that is merely an extension I’m engaged with model.’ He explains that many of his
of the hand. By not drawing each line, I’ve been able to drawings are, in effect, CAT scans or analyses of his 3D
focus on the thinking and the organisational structure models: ‘And that’s precisely what I’m interested in: going
behind the work. For me as an author, I’m more eager to back to the operational strategies in the production of
direct rather than draw it.’ the three-dimensional generative forms to create two-
Mayne believes that architecture and its complexity, dimensional analytical drawings of those forms. Models
the multiplicity of issues that must be dealt with in the take me to a place where I can’t operate a priori, a place
design of a project, and the radical intricate nature of where I have no idea what the “solution” or final drawing
how things connect and disconnect, demand a certain or output is. I’m challenging the notion of preconception
symbiosis: ‘Architecture is not about the act of single in art and architecture.’
person. That’s old-school. When I was 27, when we started A huge amount of his time is dedicated to running
Morphosis, we dedicated our architecture to a collective his 80-person office. His art is an escape from the
act. The work is produced collectively and the variables contingencies and demands of practice and feeds his
we synthesise and organise are inherently collective.’ creativity. ‘Solitude frees me from the contingencies
His opinion is that the notion of authorship will become of architecture,’ he says. ‘It’s impossible to be totally
even more irrelevant: ‘The nature of synthesising multiple disconnected, but I disappear on my own and my artwork
complex problems requires a team.’ becomes my other world. To keep myself interested, even
Morphosis’s collective approach to envisioning design, just to keep my own brain active, I have to keep asking, or
which parallelled the increase in the complexity of trying to ask myself, new questions.’ Each set of questions
architectural systems, software and tools, has also been and investigations leads to further investigations – some
enabled by the liberation from the mechanical. In the of which are detours – which leads to the next set of
1990s, and far in advance of the mainstream, the practice drawings, the next work, the next investigation, which
chose to adopt computer modelling as its primary design seems to lead somewhere else to be explored: ‘These
tool, because it allowed architects to see visualised questions take me someplace else, recognising that
design options within minutes rather than weeks: ‘I look everything, that all of my philosophical conceptual ideas,
back 40 years and I’m making an ink drawing, and it’s are ephemeral, that they have a lifespan and that lifespan
taking me a good part of a week. Today, I’m producing is finite. And now I’m asking the question, “Where does
100 unique pieces in that same time. My thinking this take me?” all of the time.’ 1
process may take a week, but I am able to produce an
infinite number of variations, and not just variations, but This article is based on an interview with Thom Mayne in Tivoli, New York,
in July 2021.
alternatives that inspire other conceptual directions.’

Digital Enabling
Mayne’s shift from the hand to focus on processes and Note
1. Thom Mayne, Strange Networks, Stray Dog Café in association
systems also involves a move towards a kind of thought with Rizzoli International Publishing (New York), 2010.
leadership within his firm: ‘The fact that we can model
very complex things allows us to deal with many more
intricate problems. But I still have to direct the nature
of the work and its conceptual direction. I come from
a generation that took responsibility for every line
drawn, so I interrogate the work with a critical eye.’ He is
interested in understanding the formation of each line,
and constantly critiques the rules that are used to drive
the work, as well as the work that comes out of those
rules: ‘I understand that young architects are able to push Text © 2022 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Images: p 68(l) Photo Kurt Iswarienko and
a button and end up with an incredibly complex-looking Milenio Magazine; pp 68–9(c), 70–77 © Thom Mayne, photos Jasmine Park

77
 Carolyn L Kane

Grand Basin and Court of Honor,

White City,
World’s Columbian Exposition,
Chicago,
1893

The White City emphasised clean, sanitised

white spaces for the visual and psychological
possession of visitors, setting into play an
imaginary ethos of whiteness in the future of
the American metropolis.

CHROMOPHOBIA
IN THE ‘SMART’ CITY

78
What is it with architects It is necessary to establish the law
of whitening. This cleanliness makes
and their obsession with one see the objects in their sincere
white, clean and neat truth … in perfect purity.
— Le Corbusier, 1925.1
architecture? The world
is, after all, colourful and It is no secret that architects disdain colour. Le Corbusier
messy. Carolyn L Kane confirmed as much in 1923 when he declared: ‘Colour
is suited to simple races, peasants and savages.’2 ‘Let’s
runs us through some have done with it,’ he continued in 1925, ‘it is time to
crusade for whitewash and Diogenes.’3 He was not alone.
of her recent research The annals of architecture are chock-full of likeminded

and analysis on light, connoisseurs with grand visions, crippled by a fear and
distrust colour of any kind. Beyond architecture, colour in
colour, contemporary Western culture has long been a threat to structure and
form, likened to a ‘“foreign” body – usually the feminine,
real and virtual urban the oriental, the primitive, the infantile, the vulgar, the
queer or the pathological.’4 By default, this Western
aesthetics and their chromophobia births an ethos of whiteness, intent on

joyful animation, while maintaining delusions of universality and objectivity.

exposing a problematic The ‘White City’

In May of 1893, the White City opened as the centrepiece
architectural history of the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago.5
Chief architect Daniel Burnham oversaw its flat, white,
that has persisted for neoclassical arches and canals (filled with 60 imported

over a century. gondolas from Italy), lightened by 200,000 incandescent

bulbs. The City’s allusions to Greco-Roman antiquity
invoked the aspirational nature of both classical idealism
and the ‘white imaginary’ that would inform the future of
the American city (‘superior’ in all respects).
But whiteness in the White City was not limited to
visible surfaces. Consider for one its inaccurate allusion
to antiquity. It is by now common knowledge that
polychromatic profusions of paint, jewels and coloured
lights decorated the art and architecture antiquity,
but vested interests in the sanctity of classical white
European preeminence ensured such acknowledgments
remained suppressed. This is the real matter of whiteness
– not its colour, but its insipid capacity to eviscerate
all that diverges from it. Le Corbusier’s compulsory
whiteness, white in the White City, and the progeny of
architectural whiteness that follows in their wake are all
easy targets. The real challenge is unmasking whiteness
where it seems least likely.

Colonised Space
During the ‘long 18th century’ of the European
Enlightenment (1685–1815), fresh coats of whitewash
William Henry Jackson, defined new ways of organising visual space according
‘Agricultural Building at Night,
from North West’,
to the logic of a grid. By equating the logos of the
World’s Columbian Exposition, (white, male) eye and mind to truth, knowledge and the
Chicago,
1893
‘right’ to judge, Cartesian space eventually embedded
itself in the worldview of Western modernity. Media,
The electrified city was lit with gigantic
spotlights and 160,000 light bulbs, aligning
neoclassical architecture and imaging followed suit.
architecture, white power and white light. From painting to photography and cinema, the spatial

79
Jorge Stolfi, order of whiteness was fixed time and again through
Rendering of Cartesian space,
2009 each new representational platform. In fact, the entirety
of the White City was structured for easy photographing
This basic configuration subjects all phenomena to its
predetermined axes (x, y and z), ostensibly allowing (visitors were encouraged to ‘snap pictures without
one to ‘map’ the height, width and depth of any visible thinking too deeply about frame and composition’),6
object or being by submitting it to the grid.
further catalysing notions of the American city as a series
of clean, white surfaces also available for sanctified
consumption,7 which is to say, white possession and
control.
It is also well established that whiteness in the
American context descends from the transatlantic slave
trade where the violent colonisation of space was the
primary means for realising white rule. The White City
perpetuated this legacy. Located on the southside of
Chicago, there was nonetheless a gaping absence of
African American representation, from the planning
committee to the life and culture at the Fair itself;8
130 years later, such pure white spaces of the city are
cordoned off for the sanctity of ‘government’ (another
easy target). The same question persists: how does white
power thrive in the less-obvious, polychromatic ‘smart’
spaces of the 21st-century city? One set of answers rears
its face in the AI-infused ‘electrographic architecture’9 in
New York City’s Times Square, intensifying regimes of
whiteness not by flashing lights or white paint alone, but
through interactive ad campaigns and ‘politically correct’
branding initiatives.

Artificial ‘Intelligence’
The term ‘artificial intelligence’ was coined by American
mathematician John McCarthy at a 1956 meeting of
‘all men attendees’ at Dartmouth College, ripe for the

The AI-infused
Pentagon’s dedication to postwar computer intelligence
in the service of ‘maintaining US supremacy’. As long as

‘electrographic
AI R&D tailored their research agendas to the military
framework of ‘enemy detection’ (image and satellite

architecture’ in
analysis), speech recognition for ‘surveillance and
voice-controlled air craft’ and robotics for ‘autonomous

Times Square
weaponry’, the Pentagon shovelled millions of
‘unrestricted funding’ their way.10

intensifies regimes
The million-dollar drip began with the McCarthy
administration when funds were sent to exclusive labs

of whiteness not
like the Stanford Research Institute (SRI) in California
and MIT’s Artificial Intelligence Lab who, between 1970

by flashing lights
and 1980, received over 70 per cent of the Pentagon’s
AI budget.11 The 1980s saw the height of the Cold War

or white paint
and Ronald Reagan’s Strategic Defensive Initiative,
justifying yet another bloat in AI budgets under the

alone, but through

guise of ‘national security’. By the 1990s, around the
same time that computers introduced 3D modelling

interactive ad
environments, AI faded from academic fashions, until its
resurgence in the 2010s as a hype global phenomenon

campaigns and
newly equipped with a rhetoric ‘social awareness’. In
the 21st century, phenomena like ‘big data’ and ‘smart

‘politically correct’
algorithms’ promised support for cultural projects
ranging from fashion to labour, education and human

branding initiatives
rights organisations. Rebranding AI also helped detract
attention from recent attacks on Silicon Valley’s use of

80
Yahoo! Autos interactive billboard,
Times Square,
New York City,
March 2004

Here, consumer-players used cell-phone interfaces to

challenge one another’s driving abilities in real time.

Google Android,
‘Be together. Not the Same’,
Marriott Marquis Hotel,
Times Square,
New York City,
2014

Using Google’s Androidify app on iOS and

Android smartphones and tablets, users
created their own Android characters that
were printed on t-shirts and postcards,
the campaign depicting a perfectly diverse
array of ‘Androidified’ New Yorkers.

81
All these ‘fun’ candy- smart surveillance. In the wake of Ed Snowden, AI-
reliant companies faced mass criticism for the neoliberal

colours could not

world governance executed through the deployment of
centralised data collection to spy on its citizens.12

matter less to the AI Spectacle

algorithm. Rather,
The first generation of so-called ‘smart’ tech in Times
Square began in the early 2000s, serving American
society by way of new cell phones, flavours of candy
the real stakes of and Coke. Hershey’s World (2002), located at the base
of the Crowne Plaza Hotel, launched the genre with an
AI, as with whiteness, interactive screen display encouraging customers to
have a ‘family-friendly’ personal message displayed on
are the what and the giant LED strip for 15 minutes, at US$4.95 a pop.13
Two years later, for the 2004 relaunch of Yahoo! Autos
who lost during on 23 March, the web provider transformed its Times
Square Internet billboard (purchased in 1997) into a

algorithmic capture real-time interactive video game for participant-

consumers to challenge one another’s driving skills
through their cell phones.
In 2014, Google leased Clear Channel’s billboard
at 1535 Broadway at the heart of Times Square for its
Android campaign ‘Be together. Not the same’,14 during
which time a participant could ‘Androidify’ themselves
by walking up an elevated platform to play one of four
motion-sensing games as their personalised avatar
appeared on the big screen. Results were also used
M&M’s, as advertisements, in a series of animated shorts
Times Unsquared,
Times Square,
depicting ‘Androidified’ New Yorkers as they went
New York City, about their day. The phrase ‘Be together. Not the same’
May 2017
appeared in bold letters, illustrating the campaign’s
For the launch of its new ‘unsquared’ caramel flavour, perfectly parsed distribution of coloured bodies in the
M&M’s transformed billboards in Times Square
into augmented reality ‘ARcade’ game sequences
city’s ethnic rainbow.15
for the 26 participant-customers who attended. In 2015, Coca-Cola’s launched its three-week ‘smart’
#WhatsInAName campaign on the Clear Channel screen
at 1552 Broadway. Consumers were encouraged to
Tweet their first name with the hashtag #CokeMyName
to see a ‘fun fact’ about their name broadcast on Clear
Channel’s digital screen for 15 seconds,16 after which
a photo was taken of the name, tweeted back to the
consumer, and entered into the ‘Share A Coke’ API
where it was matched with 160,000 other names sent to
Clear Channel’s server, along with other data sourced
from Google.17 Lastly, the launch of M&M’s ‘unsquared’
caramel flavour in 2017 transformed billboards in the
Square into augmented reality ‘ARcade’ games where
participants could download the free ‘Blippar’ app and
scan featured billboards to unlock the games on their
smartphones.18
But alas, all these ‘fun’ candy-colours could not matter
less to the algorithm. Rather, the real stakes of AI, as
with whiteness, is the what and who lost during
algorithmic capture. That is, the actually diverse bodies
and colours excluded from participation in the ‘fun’
space of the smart city (and the white city), those
who were excluded from (or chose not to) have their
private lives and bodies tracked, charted and displayed
through mass media.

82
 Sample 24/7, publicly accessible, live camera feeds. Note
the availability of different perspectives and the capacity
to zoom, navigate north, south, east and west, listen to live
sound, and post surveilled images to linked websites.

Earthcam,
Times Square Cams,
New York City,
16 May and 27 July 2021

Control Architecture Notes

1. Le Corbusier, in Guillaume Janneau, ‘L’Exposition des arts techniques
Technologies of surveillance, like whiteness and de 1925’, Le Bulletin de la vie artistique, 1 February 1923, p 64.
whitewashed architecture, are always already racialised. 2. Le Corbusier, Towards a New Architecture [1923], trans Frederick
Etchells, Architectural Press (London), 1965, p 143.
Which bodies feels ‘safe’ in sanitised environments of 3. Le Corbusier L’Art decoratif d’aujourd’hui [1925], trans James Dunnett,
control, and which bodies do not? To allow one’s flesh MIT Press (Cambridge, MA), 1987, p 135.
4. David Batchelor, Chromophobia, Reaktion (London), 2000, p 22.
to be measured and tracked is to become a subject of 5. Eric Gordon, The Urban Spectator: American Concept Cities from
a new world order, of a new architecture of whiteness Kodak to Google, Dartmouth College Press (Lebanon, NH), 2010, p 22.
6. Ibid, p 40.
that colours the 21st-century landscape of seemingly 7. Ibid, p 20.
formless citizens. Such ‘smart’ urban spectacles, Lida 8. Jane Brox, Brilliant: The Evolution of Artificial Light, Souvenir Press
(London), 2012, p 135.
Zeitlin Wu argues, are ‘designed [as] … part of an 9. Tom Wolfe, ‘Electrographic Architecture’, Architectural Design, 7, 1969,
attention economy that turns sensory pleasure into data pp 379–82.
10. Yarden Katz, Artificial Whiteness: Politics and Ideology in Artificial
by existing in two places simultaneously’.19 Quantifying Intelligence, Columbia University Press (New York), 2020, pp 3, 22–4,
a body through algorithmic vision is the only means 35, 43.
11. Ibid, pp 3, 25.
through which participants can join the game. To belong 12. Ibid, pp 12, 2, 43, 68.
in (white, dominant) culture today, one no longer pays 13. Louis M Brill, ‘Hershey’s How Sweet It Is: The Eye-Candy of Times
Square’, SignIndustry.com: www.signindustry.com/dimensional/
a fixed ticket price to ‘take’ a picture for themselves, but articles/2008-04-15-LB-Hersheys_How_Sweet_it_Is_Signage_
instead offers (or is forced to offer) up their flesh for Spectacular_Times_Square.php3.
14. ‘Clear Channel Spectacolor Selected’, 17 November 2014: https://
epidermal quantification through the informatic eyes of company.clearchanneloutdoor.com/clear-channel-spectacolor-selected-
the (unseen) apparatus. as-sales-agent-for-worlds-largest-most-technically-advanced-digital-
billboard-in-times-square-to-help-brands-captivate-consumers/.
Remember, the goal of whiteness has always been to 15. ‘Google’s HUGE billboard in Times Square’: https://vimeo.
hide behind the spectacle of coloured Others. Whiteness com/288989298.
16. ‘Coca-Cola “What’s In A Name?” Times Square’: https://shortyawards.
(like AI) was never meant to function in the ‘service’ of com/8th/coca-cola-whats-in-a-name-times-square-2#:~:text=Times%20
society, but rather, to ‘act as a form of policing in its own Square%20visitors%20could%20Tweet,the%20Share%20a%20Coke%20
API.
right’, an automated ‘technology of surveillance’ that 17. Ibid.
puts into motion its own ‘ever-expanding culture of self- 18. ‘M&M’s Launches New Soft Caramel-Filled Chocolate Candies’, PR
Newswire, 11 May 2017: www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/mms-
policing’.20 Silicon Valley and the Pentagon have ensured launches-new-soft-caramel-filled-chocolate-candies-300455785.html.
this. With streets full of CCTV, ‘smart’ lighting, and 19. Lida Zeitlin Wu, ‘Fabricating Images at the Color Factory’, Frames,
17, Summer 2020: https://ojs.st-andrews.ac.uk/index.php/FCJ/article/
‘cops-with-cameras’, all life in public space is subject to a view/2074.
deadening coat of whitewash. This is the ‘sincere truth’21 20. Mark Wigley, ‘Chronic Whiteness’, November 2020: www.e-flux.com/
architecture/sick-architecture/360099/chronic-whiteness/.
of ‘smart’ city space. 21. Le Corbusier, “L’Exposition des arts techniques de 1925’, op cit, p 64.
Is it possible to alter this course – to retrain
architectural algorithms to show all the colours, to
detect nuances in human life, context and politics? The
history of whiteness, AI and architecture collectively
reveal dismal prospects for the future of ‘colour blind’
Text © 2022 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Images: p 81(t) © Stephen Chernin
algorithms if architects in the electronic age do not rise / Stringer / Getty Images; p 81(b) © Andrew Holbrooke / Getty Images; p
to this challenge. 1 82 © Invision/AP/Shutterstock; p 83 Courtesy of Earthcam

83
 Dalena Tran

IMAGES OF
FORMER
FUTURES
AND
REFORMATIONS

Dalena Tran,
In Places Hardly There,
2021

Images processed with predictive algorithms

can be used unconventionally to develop a
bridge between creative and computational
interventions that produce unexpected results.

84
 Dalena Tran,
Still from Incomplete,
2021

In this expressionistic audiovisual project,

musician Ash Koosha’s heavily processed
sounds fragment and collide. Guided
by Koosha’s voice, shrill discordances
transform into a distinct melody. Dalena
Tran’s visual representation, in parallel,
foments creative interventions in what
would otherwise be completely machinic
processes. Incomplete features subjects in
locomotion using 3D animation and novel
implementations of machine learning.
The result is an unstable composite of
synthetic textures applied to discernible
forms. Seen early on in the work is an
abstracted dove with open wings.

Dalena Tran is the creator of the

audiovisual work Incomplete,
which explores open-source
imaging software and is set to
music by Ash Koosha. The work Computational photography has been used since the
is a polemic about the strange invention of digital cameras, however the application
of predictive machine-learning models in enhancing
possibilities and alternatives photographs on smart devices is a relatively new
for developing what look like phenomenon. In contrast to previous methods of software
enhancements, the user has minimal input and decision-
photographic objects that are making power. In Google’s report on burst photography
constructed by the computer, for low-lighting, the team’s design principles include
building a camera system for the user that is ‘parameter-
but have a sense of otherworldly free and fully automatic’, explaining that ‘photographers
should get better pictures without knowing the strategy
form, and questions the nature used for capture or image processing’.1 The architecture of
of racially biased stereotyping in the machine-learning model and the dataset it is trained
on is what primarily influences what in the photographic
digital observation systems. medium deserves to be enhanced and improved –
automating the standardised techniques of the industry
that is currently performed by specialised labour. As such,
the most recent advancements and applications of AI
in the realm of photography reinforce a homogeneous
aesthetic that is practised and perpetuated by industries
and consumers of the contemporary image.

85
 Photography today, a practice made ubiquitous
through smartphones, is increasingly commodified,
automated and preferential – ordained to repeat itself.
How might we examine the implications of photographs
that are partially enhanced or completely generated
by computational logic? What are alternative modes
of investigating these methods of control on encoded
systems? What are alternative forms of creative
intervention in imaging when the style and quality
of a photograph have been pre-programmed for the
consumer before they even take the photo?

Destined Photography
Google markets its latest Pixel camera as giving
the consumer the ability to ‘shoot and edit like the
pros’, to ensure ‘beautiful moments’ are ‘captured
beautifully’.2 Machine-learning models, being trained
to replicate professional photography, further fortify
the same conditions that they are fed back into the
photographs we create and share. These models are
trained from a database of curated and labelled images
to detect patterns that make a photograph ‘beautiful’
or ‘professional’, and reapply these learned features on
to images captured on our smartphones. An emphasis
on curation in this process entails that there are human
preferences and decisions still being made through a
seemingly automated protocol.
Our captured images, with a propensity to be
‘beautiful’, tend to focus on increasing details and clarity
of the overall subjects, resulting in an implicit interest
in higher resolutions, increasing brightness, detail and,
ultimately, visibility; while removing artefacts, noise, or
what the algorithm has classified as imperfections or
undesirable. This process starts to resemble a feedback
loop. With the proliferation of images on networked
platforms such as Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Zoom, that is not neutral.4 Notions of beauty and professionalism
TikTok and YouTube, images enhanced with these may form distinct pillars in each of our minds, however
predictive technologies may one day become the same Menkman’s research suggests that such values reflect
images sourced to train these machine-learning models. less on the visual content at hand, and more so on the
‘political, economic, technological and cultural values and
Platforms of Control and Resolutions ideologies’5 that are rooted in the history of our media and
It could be argued that predictive protocols are not their platforms. For instance, the standard of how human
limited to visual culture. Rather, the programmed, complexion is digitally recognised, captured and processed
hyperclean aesthetics perpetuating the field of image today traces back to racially biased practices in analogue
creation and consumption reflects what media scholar photography in which film emulsion was calibrated for
Mark Nunes considers a ‘crisis of control’ prevalent higher sensitivity of the Caucasian complexion.6
in our networked society.3 To ensure business can
be conducted, entertainment can be accessed and
communication can transpire through our global and
digital networks, the movement of information must
be dependable, accurate and, thus, predictable. Our
‘beautiful’ photographs aspire for clarity, consistency,
registration, stability and an absence of aberration.
How might alternative visions or forms of resistance The anonymous character in freefall in Incomplete
is generated by collecting and labelling thousands
emerge in this new paradigm of pictorial penchant? of photographic images of real people. Textures
Dutch artist Rosa Menkman’s work in resolution change frame by frame, as the algorithm attempts
to make sense of the body in motion. This causes
describes a complex media landscape where each the quivering, fragmentation effect, ultimately an
media platform organises a perception of resolution artefact, as its aggregate form remains coherent.

86
Dalena Tran,
Stills from Incomplete,
2021

Here, the camera pursues a herd

of wild horses as they head
westbound. Their textural bodies
are generated through aggregate
computational processes trained
on photographs of horses in the
real world.

87
 In more recent examples, Google’s Vision AI received the camera movement, composition and motion design
criticism after a Twitter thread, started by Nicolas Kayser- are still determined by human decisions, the process
Bril, a reporter for AlgorithmWatch, exposed how the evolved to leave a significant margin for the visual
software would read a handheld thermometer held by a instability that generative adversarial networks (GANS)
dark-skinned hand as a ‘gun’ while the same photograph offer when applied temporally, frame by frame, by way
with a light-skinned hand was labelled as a ‘tool’.7 of animation. Although aspiring, the algorithm produces
While this case of algorithmic bias demonstrates images that are as photographic as they are inexact. The
how the implementation of flawed predictive protocols result is a series of images that simultaneously attract
may perpetuate pre-existing discriminatory practices, and repulse: remnants of familiarity in a blanket of digital
it also uncovers the human bias associated with a debris. What emerges visually in Incomplete reinforces
process that would otherwise go undetected. While still Ash Koosha’s dizzying and structurally complex music.
urgently problematic, by making the technology more Sounds that are familiar to the modern world are distorted
accessible for users, Google’s AI image-labelling service and rhythmically displaced into an abrasive and highly
also provides an unexpected terminal in structuring digitised melody, while the words that are carried out
critical, alternative practices of machine learning to throughout the song remain distinctly human.
expose, observe and contend with the racist and
discriminatory genealogy of the media often sourced Signals Out of Place: Probing an Unfolding of Architecture
to train learning models. The visual field created in Incomplete and through the
aforementioned algorithmic process forms a complicated
Between Human Control and Algorithmic Failure material context. Unlike photography, which, regardless of
In the Incomplete video project, the method that motivates the degree of manipulation, always finds its provenance in
the work is the paradox of overstimulation and emptiness the physical world, the images that constitute Incomplete
that emerges in a time of constant distraction and allude to a notion of materiality that is intangible to the
growing anxiety about the possibility of a future. While medium of photography, although trained on photographs

The anonymous character in final

freefall, this time solely pinned against
the blue sky.

88
 Dalena Tran,
Stills from
Incomplete,
2021
The character finds footing
on a loosely depicted viaduct,
and is represented according
to the composition of the
image rather than for spatial
accuracy.

that visually signal the material world. The subjects in the Notes
1. Samuel W Hasinoff, ‘Burst Photography for High Dynamic
built environment depicted are not individual units, but Range and Low-light Imaging on Mobile Cameras’, ACM
a mass composed of the visual properties of thousands. Transactions on Graphics: Proceedings of SIGGRAPH Asia,
35 (6), 2016, p 2.
In locating a sense of space through the images, any 2. Google Pixel 5: https://store.google.com/us/product/
geometry that would allude to, or represent, architectural pixel_5?hl=en-US.
3. Mark Nunes, Error: Glitch, Noise, and Jam in New Media
space or structure in a render is collapsed into an Cultures, Continuum (London), reprint edn, 2012, p 5.
aggregate of pixels. Representations of place or spaces 4. Rosa Menkman, ‘Institutions of Resolution Disputes
[i.R.D.]’, 2015: https://beyondresolution.info/Institutions_of_
become an assemblage of pixels that attempt to place Resolution_Disputes.
physical structures and demarcations that are not based 5. Ibid.
6. Rosa Menkman, ‘Beyond White Shadows’, Beyond
on material calculations or of the actual material world. Resolution, i.R.D, 2020, pp v–xi. https://beyondresolution.
And while the depiction of materiality seems familiar, nyc3.digitaloceanspaces.com/Rosa%20Menkman_Beyond%20
Resolution_2020.pdf.
it is overflowing with fragmented, synthetic parts 7. Nicolas Kayser-Bril, Twitter post, 31 March 2020: https://twitter.
that repeat and coalesce into an image that is at best com/nicolaskb/status/1244921742486917120.

a déjà vu.

Known and Unknown Uses of a Wicked Wrench

Technology and entertainment companies, with a stake in
today’s image production, will continue to mediate reality
with a desire to have users forget that ‘reality’ is often
being mediated. As Nunes describes, in a globalised and
networked world inclined towards goal-oriented control
and predictability, the tools and platforms designed and
implemented to reinforce habitual protocols may still
go through creative and social interventions to provoke
practices beyond control and failure. In the spirit of
alternative possibilities, many artists, educators,
students, technologists, designers and amateurs alike
hack a future that no human or predictive model could Text © 2022 John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
have objectively foreseen. 1 Images courtesy of the artist

89
RENDERING
REPRESENTATIONAL
ATMOSPHERE

90
Carl Lostritto Carl Lostritto,
Gold-Plated Fluid Barnacles,
Soft Form,
2021

Sticky particles are dropped into the mesh from

a few directions with different gravities and are
rendered as sparsely gold-plated thick fluid. The lens
blur attempts to convince that this is all one reality-
based system of form growing out of the mesh,
subject to the flaws of photographic technology.

APPROPRIATING
FORMALISMS AROUND
INVISIBLE OBJECTS
IN FILM
We often assume that to render
form is to solidify, materialise or
bake designed digital geometry
into a reality. There is another way.
Rendering can be an act of form
generation that depends on an object
but represents everything but the
object. Carl Lostritto, Associate
Professor at Rhode Island School
of Design, explains how other forms
of representation can emerge from
this phenomenon.

91
In the fictional future, James T Kirk captains a captured what we see is form rather than media. Its animate
Klingon ship – a so-called ‘Bird of Prey’ – back in time to nature, geometric fidelity and optical characteristics are all
1986 San Francisco to heroically save the whales. This designed and calibrated relative to the invisible object.
is the premise of Star Trek IV, The Voyage Home.1 There To understand the form in these cinematic realities is
is an essay to be written about the form of alternate to read geometry as volume, density, movement. True to
timelines in fiction. This is not that essay. Instead, this is their atmospheric characteristics, however, they alone
an essay that will note formal similarities between that are incapable of figuration and require the invisible mesh
Klingon Bird of Prey and a Chia Pet. Both are rendered surface’s counter-formal agency to activate a figure. This is
with atmospheric form. a beautiful and challenging contradiction for architectural
designers. The images included here, from the ongoing
CLOAKED SHIPS MAKING MOVES Soft Form design research project, are likewise all rendered
The ship Kirk and crew travel in is ‘cloaked’, which is to with respect to an identical animate mesh. They lack
say it is invisible. The stealthy Bird of Prey is, of course, a the Boolean certainty of the cloaked ship, but that the
work of architecture, and the film a work of architectural relationship between mesh and the appearance of form
representation confronted with a question: What forms is similarly filmic. Unpacking what it means for an image
can register the invisible ship? Representing nothing – to exist with respect to digital form without articulating
the depiction of perfect invisibility – is not a welcome that digital object is essential. As is the case with quasi-
option. This tension is at home within the discipline of invisibility in film, the objects are the unrendered subject of
architecture, where we often represent space – emptiness the rendering. The mesh object is essential in the pipeline
– with an interest in measurability of that nothingness. from model to pixel, but in-between, new formalisms
In Star Trek, opportunity arises given the hard enclosure emerge. Those new formalisms are fabricated with
of the invisible ship’s hull. Its mission takes it to San intentional adherence to realism and do not exist in the
Francisco. As it lands in Golden Gate Park, its existence digital model, only in the rendered image. Quasi-invisibility
is betrayed by a slight depression in the park landscape. provides the counterbalance of abstraction and speculative
Imagine the result of a digital model of the ship being potential. Everything on-screen or in-image must exhibit
moved a foot below the mass of the earth, all while believable qualities even as the premise of the scene is
continuously computing the Boolean difference between fantastical or impossible.
the earth and the ship. The form of the hydraulic faux
ground represents the ship. Throughout this modest scene,
the ship stays invisible, but viewers interpret its form. This
is akin to the Invisible Man caught in the rain, and the fact
that the Predator’s invisibility sheath is not perfect. Even
when Star Trek starships are in space, what otherwise
might feel like a belaboured four-second cloaking (or de-
cloaking) transition is not a transition between moments
but the moment. The swirling, fluctuating translucency is a
new formal system.
These quasi-invisible filmic approaches to form are
richly visual and often quite detailed feats of rendering or
compositing technology. Film and architecture intersect in
terms of these digital methods and so our appropriation
of filmic representational form involves little conceptual
transformation. These methods are not to be confused
with sleight-of-hand editing that can, along with pacing or
suspense, imply the existence of figure, character or form
that never appears in frame. The forms are agents of a
representational system. They tend to fill the frame. Many
of the epic angles and the camera’s lingering attention
might be mistaken for a car commercial. Technically
speaking, what happens, or what appears to happen
optically is dominated by light transmission rather than
reflection, diffusion or refraction. These scenes are like Carl Lostritto,
Variable Material Mass,
cinematic magic tricks that only get more compelling as Soft Form,
the mystery persists. 2021
Conversely, the representational forms created to Two geometries influence volumetric density.
encounter the invisible object – just like the hydraulic First, a smooth gradient reduces the density
mesh from the centre. Second, spheres packed
ground, for example – are not neutral. Here we can note into a grid aggressively reduce volume within
with certainty that despite its capacity for representation, each of their scopes.

92
EVERYTHING ON-SCREEN OR
IN-IMAGE MUST EXHIBIT
BELIEVABLE QUALITIES
EVEN AS THE PREMISE OF
THE SCENE IS FANTASTICAL
OR IMPOSSIBLE

DIGITAL LIGHT RAYS: FIELD CONDITIONS

Stan Allen influenced the discursive terms for a
generation of formal discourse by articulating the field
condition and as distinguished from the figural object. He
noted, in 1997, that all digital images are field conditions:
‘A significant shift occurs when an image is converted
to digital information. A notational scheme intervenes.
Digital electronic technology atomizes and abstractly
schematizes the analogic quality of the photographic
and cinematic into discrete pixels and bits of information
that are transmitted serially, each bit discontinuous,
discontiguous, and absolute — each bit “being in itself”
as if part of a system.’2 Allen’s assertion that the digital
field is ambivalent about the figure, given that ‘In the
digital image “background” information must be as
densely coded as the foreground image. Blank space
is not empty space; there is empty space throughout
the field,’3 is even more salient today than in 1997 even
though compression innovation and exponentially
increased resolution have changed the effective status of
the digital image.
In a typical computer rendering, the field image meets
the figural model by way of texture mapping and ray
tracing. Rays are traced backwards from pixel, through
some bounces within a digital model which is associated
with other pixels (the mapped images), to a light source.
The premise of figure/field ambiguity here is often more
compelling than the result, which at its worst can be a
kind of paint-by-numbers overlay to the projection. Today,
with aggressive increases in computational capacity, ray
marching can replace ray tracing. Rays ‘march’ through
the scene changing their direction and intensity with
respect to atmosphere at each step regardless of any
mesh intersections. Now, the ray itself is a field condition.
It furthermore interacts with multiple other fields, all of
which conspire to complexify the figure. The mesh’s role
shifts to the beginning of the formal story rather than the
end. The mesh is the Chia Pet fresh out of the box.

93
ATMOSPHERE, GLARE, VISCOUS FLUID, DEBRIS Carl Lostritto,
Leaking Smoke and Light,
AND SMOKE Soft Form,
Realism does not allow for nothingness. More specifically, it 2021

does not allow for perfect consistency. Again, this returns us Smoke particles diffuse as they flow from the mesh, influencing
to Allen’s paradigm for digital fields as they relate to the digital rays on their way from pixel to light source. The white mesh
emits light and particles. Because it resides on a white
image: even the nothingness must be defined. Variation is background, it needs the smoke as much as the smoke needs it.
a necessary but insufficient ingredient for a realistic image.
There is always a ripple, clump, defect, glitch, artefact, stain
or noisy gradient of indirect light from many bounces away.
To appropriate this exhaustive level of inconsistency is to
deploy some combination of faking it and making it. The
most common and least computationally intensive method
for faking it is to sample from a ‘real’ photograph and map
that image onto the mesh. There are no such maps in the Soft
Form project, but there is still maximum fakery. As qualities
of realism are computed with particle physics simulations, the
results may not be superior to texture mapping, but they are
more operable given that they yield more data. These data
can be used for more calculations or the production of new
meshes, always oriented towards qualities of realism.
Particles collect, diffuse and collide, which is to say they
interact with the invisible figure to yield new form. The
conversion between the zero-sized particle and the eventual
pixels is ‘rendering’, in the sense of creation by transformation
rather than display by stylisation. Rendering of particles occurs
relative to the mesh by way of inputs: speed, orientation,
proximity, friction, each of which is an essential ingredient in
the triggering of realism.

THE GEOMETRY HAS

NO ALLEGIANCE
TO MATERIAL, NOR
EVEN TO MATTER.
IN OTHER WORDS,
MATERIAL IS
NOT MODELLED,
BUT TRANSCRIBED
IN THE IMAGE
Carl Lostritto,
Dusty Translucency,
Soft Form,
2021

The angle between the mesh’s normal vector and the vector towards
the camera influences the extent to which each point on the surface is
translucent. This entirely geometric construct triggers association with
material qualities. A bit of dust in the wind collides and collects at the
edge of the mesh, reinforcing the solidity of that which is barely seen.

94
 ‘Materiality’ is a tempting frame here, but one that is
only partially applicable. Of course, to note that ‘if it looks
like material, it looks real’ is as true as saying ‘if it looks
like a photograph, it looks real’. So, to the extent that the
rendering exhibits material characteristics, materiality is
obviously valid. However, the geometry has no allegiance
to material, nor even to matter. In other words, material
is not modelled, but transcribed in the image. If the
photograph’s conversion into digital field stripped it of
material capacity, it now functions as material incubator.

CONSTRUCTING AROUND THE INVISIBLE

These principles are not necessarily confined to the
domain of the generative. Work can be done to make
quasi-invisibility compatible with manual design
operations. This final gesture is both absurd and
traditional. It would appear to both deny the laws of
physics, respect quasi-invisibility, and exhibit the most Carl Lostritto,
A Weak Attempt at Marking Invisibility,
basic of architectural premises: form surrounds space. Soft Form,
In this case, that space is just another invisible form. 2021

Nothing could be more disciplinary. 1 After a wall is cast around part of the mesh, the remainder of the
form is articulated roughly with rubber fabric draped across the
opening. Three invisible hands hold them in place, but the fabric
Notes does not conform to the form it seeks to represent.
1. Leonard Nimoy (Director) and Don Peterman (Director of Photography),
Star Trek IV, The Voyage Home, Paramount Pictures (US), 1986.
2. Stan Allen, ‘From Object to Field’, in Greg Lynn, 2 Architecture After
Geometry, May/June (no 5–6), 1997, p 28.
3. Ibid, p 29.

Carl Lostritto,
It’s Raining Image-Contingent Barbells,
Soft Form,
2021

Little barbells fall from above. Some collect in the

invisible-mesh catch basin. Their colour depends on
orientation in an act of defiance against the ambient
light in the scene even as these objects create their
own atmosphere.

Text © 2022 John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

Images © Carl Lostritto

95
 Ersela Kripa and Stephen Mueller /
Project for Operative Spatial Technologies (POST),
Spectral,
Exhibit Columbus, Indiana,
2021

The target-like forms were designed to simultaneously address and

manipulate several different vantage points from which aerial optical
technologies typically capture images of urban forms. From the overhead
(plan) view, the forms appear as a grid of targets. From the oblique
(isometric) view, the broad sides of the forms block vision between the
forms and create multispectral shadow.

96
Ersela Kripa and Stephen Mueller

Signature
Urbanism
Shaping Subperceptual
Forms for the New
Multispectral City

Ersela Kripa and Stephen Mueller,

codirectors of the Project for Operative
Spatial Technologies (POST) research
centre at Texas Tech University
College of Architecture, describe the
city in all its newfound multispectral
complexity and how their architectural
interventions reveal a world
determined by scopic regimes.
97
 The city has transformed into a ‘multispectral’ While their planimetric view suggests
seemingly two-dimensional objects,
environment. Low-cost multispectral sensing and the crosses in this volumetric reticle
imaging technologies capable of detecting shifting array are stretched in the Z-direction,
creating volumes of space which can
patterns of infrared wavelengths, body heat, ultrasound be inhabited.
and other signal trails are now ubiquitous. These
technologies are rapidly expanding the ways of
knowing the city beyond historical limits of human and
technological perception, allowing analysts, citizens and
designers access to the subperceptual spectrum.
Buildings are the main protagonists of the ‘new
multispectral city’, their internal activities and
environmental impacts leaving countless multispectral
traces, fields of information detectable only by those
devices tuned to these invisible wavelengths. Each
building in the multispectral city silently broadcasts
its hidden processes, producing countless ‘signatures’
– identifiable patterns of temperature, radiation and
movement across buildings, blocks and neighbourhoods
– for multispectral sensors to detect. While each urban
signature is unique, patterns of signatures emerge
consistently across shared situations, types, uses and
circumstances. The recognition of patterns amongst the
signatures allows trained analysts to equate a host of
attributes (eg, materiality, construction type, building
programme, industrial processes, occupancy) with their
multispectral footprint.
Elements of the built environment are thus becoming
the unwitting building blocks of a new system of
communication. The structures and structured activities
of the city compose a new vocabulary, syntax and
language communicating untold stories through their
signatures. As more of these messages are broadcast,
everyday behaviours contribute to a growing lexicon of
signature definitions.

Buildings are the main protagonists

of the new multispectral city,
their internal activities and Seen here from above, the
pyramidal units are aggregated,
deviating from the expected

environmental impacts leaving grid, varying distances between

reticles while allowing for
inhabitation. The cones block

countless multispectral traces multispectral imaging as thermal

activity occupies the installation.

98
99
 Signature Management Strategies
Security and military specialists are especially fluent
in this new language. New forms of multispectral
intelligence-gathering are emerging, enabling
specialists to codify anticipated or desirable signatures,
predict behaviours, identify transgressions and target
anomalies. Private security companies and military
contractors are establishing early multispectral
dominance, developing ‘signature management
strategies’ to control the narrative, and deploying
advanced textiles and other near-future technologies to
block thermal and infrared detection and disrupt signal
transmission.
The US military is refining its signature management
strategies in purpose-built training environments. For
the past two decades, the Department of Defense (DoD)
has significantly expanded its inventory of brick-and-
mortar simulated urban environments to train its forces
for combat in protracted urban conflicts.1 Activities on
the simulated training sites have routinely telegraphed
changing military postures towards urban environments,
predicting new forms of militarisation in public space.
These sites have historically been designed to simulate
the sensory overload human combatants encounter
in urban warzones. In recent years, the simulated
sites have become increasingly accurate in simulating
material, physical and geophysical signatures to train
analysts using advanced sensing equipment towards
proficient targeting and deployment of lethal force
within complex multispectral environments. Within these
urban simulations, the military is mastering its ability to
define, detect, locate and respond to perceived threats
within the new multispectral city,2 suggesting that a
securocratic future is near at hand.

100
 Signature Urbanism Futures
As a counterpoint to this securocratic multispectral
dominance, architects and urban designers must
turn disciplinary attention towards engaging these
transformations, enabling alternative futures for
‘signature urbanism’ under the multispectral gaze.
‘Signatures’ will replace morphologies as prime
identifying characteristics, capable of describing
buildings, neighbourhoods, districts and entire
metropolitan areas. ‘Signature buildings’ will be
distinguished not through formal variation but
through the development of identifiable subperceptual
patterns detectable only to these technologies.
Architects will specialise in anticipating and encouraging
desirable signatures, developing design strategies that
coordinate various usage patterns, and author these
signatures in collaboration with other human and
nonhuman agents. Patterns of energy consumption,
flows of water and heat from plumbing systems,
ultrasonic emissions released from animals and
crowds will distort the signature of neighbourhoods
and districts.
Cities and their inhabitants will race to produce
distinct signatures – ‘signature signatures’ – to
distinguish themselves from others. Public life will
be marked by ‘signature events’, celebrations and
commemorations of significant transformative moments
in the evolution or dissolution of particular urban
signatures. Urban cryptographers and codebreakers
will scan the city for the intended – and unintended –
messages it leaves. The fabric of the city will be newly
layered with coded signatures decipherable only to
these experts and the multispectral sensors. ‘Signature
manipulators’ will emerge, who will have the capacity to
alter the perception of activity within buildings, creating

above: The project was constructed

in six ‘bundles’ in an urban alley,
used as a pedestrian passageway
and a site for public events. As
Cities and their inhabitants
visitors approached the installation,
they found that there were spaces
between the bundles to explore and
occupy. These spaces were not only
will race to produce distinct
signatures – ‘signature
shielded from views from the street,
but similarly shielded from aerial
perspectives.

left: At night, the installation was

activated with an array of LEDs. Tall
shadows cast by the structure filled
the theatre wall, creating an urban
signatures’ – to distinguish
presence inviting pedestrians to
inhabit the installation.
themselves from others

101
 spaces for camouflage or political activity. Activists will
gain expertise in amplifying, depressing or distorting
signatures to conduct activities undetected, and plan
coordinated public actions to exploit momentary
eclipses in multispectral surveillance. City dwellers will
struggle to elude detection or to disengage.

Fabricating Multispectral Shadow

The invisible logics of the contemporary city problematise
expectations of exposure in public and private space.
Designers must subvert multispectral sensing to construct
public spaces that act as the interface between people
and surveillance systems, encouraging people to
participate actively in the construction and curation of
their own urban signature. New material assemblies must
be imagined that protect from the ubiquitous reach of
sensing, while allowing inhabitants to project their own
signature patterns.
The Project for Operative Spatial Technologies (POST,
a Texas Tech University College of Architecture Research
Center) developed and constructed an installation to
provide multispectral protection for the 2021 Exhibit
Columbus art and architecture exhibition, curated by Mimi
Zeiger and Iker Gil. The installation, entitled Spectral,
explored issues of protected space in an urban alley.
Spectral was designed as both a public gathering place
and a meditation on increasingly pervasive aerial infrared
imaging. The project created a protected public space on
an exposed urban plot through the calibrated design and
rapid deployment of custom-fabricated infrastructural
elements. The material array shielded the thermal activity
of visitors to the site from the view of multispectral
cameras and sensors, making it a kind of ‘safe space’ in

Spectral suggests a path towards a

signature urbanism in which citizens
are empowered by built forms that
recognise, engage, redirect and evade
multispectral sensing
102
 the urban landscape. It built on the logics of multispectral
camouflage by suspending an array of infrared reflective
material, fragmenting the legibility of thermal activity
from the aerial perspective while activating the site with
multispectral shadow. The installation camouflaged and
altered thermal signatures, authoring a new collection of
opposite: The composite aluminium material
system echoed the corrugated metal of the adjacent
indecipherable patterns. This created a public interface
wall, providing a degree of optical camouflage for that mediates the public’s relationship with aerial infrared
daytime activity.
imaging while offering a site for new, undetectable
below: The installation was built with aluminium thermal activities.
composite material (ACM), reflective to the infrared
wavelength (IR). While vision was allowed through
The geometry of the repeated modules adopted the
the assembly at ground level, thermal heat signatures formal structure of thermal optics, while exploiting the
were undetectable in infrared aerial photography
when visitors approached the installation.
dependencies of machine vision to disrupt the accurate
spatial and spectral interpretation of the installation and
its activities. The reticle, or ‘cross-hair’ target, widely used
in photogrammetric referencing to register locational and
morphological data of urban forms, here was disturbed by
the proliferation and complexity of multiple and multi-
dimensional cruciform volumes. The expectation of planar
reference coordinates by aerial surveillance technologies
was thus confounded. The interchangeable modules were
capable of addressing multiple orientations of the aerial
multispectral gaze, with overhead conditions creating
an undiscoverable space between the elevated modules
and the ground. Visitors were encouraged to explore new
possibilities within the multispectral shadow and redirect
their gaze, from the sensed ground to the sensing sky.
Within the new multispectral city, the design and
management of subperceptual signatures gains new
currency. Spectral suggests a path towards a signature
urbanism in which citizens are empowered by built
forms that recognise, engage, redirect and evade
multispectral sensing. 1

Notes
1. Ersela Kripa and Stephen Mueller, Fronts: Military Urbanisms and the
Developing World, Applied Research and Design (San Francisco, CA), 2020.
2. Daniel E Archer et al, Modeling and Urban Search Experiments: Fort
Indiantown Gap Data Collections Summary and Analysis, Oak Ridge
National Laboratory (Oak Ridge, TN), 2017.

Text © 2022 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Images: pp 96, 98 © Ersela Kripa and Stephen
Mueller, 2021; pp 99, 100-01(t) © Hadley Fruits, 2021; pp 100(b), 102–3 © Iker Gil, 2021

103
 REBELLIOUS
ARCHITECTURE
BAYOU
RECONSTRUCTED

V Mitch McEwen with Princeton School

of Architecture Black Box Research
Group and Kristina Kay Robinson,
R:R, ‘Reconstructions: Architecture
and Blackness in America’ exhibition,
Museum of Modern Art (MoMA),
New York,
2021

For this installation, McEwen and his research group

at the Princeton School of Architecture worked in close
collaboration with the artist Kristina Kay Robinson to
invent the fictional nation Republica. It features a dense
and floating civic district in the bayou. This architectural
model at 1:500 scale situates collective structures up to
100 metres (330 feet) in height from a soft ground. The
architectural volumes are rendered as 3D-printed space
frames, and the soft ground is modelled with a mix of
canvas, acetate, cosmetic glitter and wood shavings.

104
V Mitch McEwen and
Kristina Kay Robinson

Through redefined
notions of collaboration,
V Mitch McEwen
and Kristina Kay
Robinson intertwined
their respective
critical and creative
works into the project
R:R, exhibited at the
Museum of Modern
Art (MoMA) in New
York in 2021. McEwen,
an Assistant Professor
of Architecture at
Princeton University,
and Robinson, a New
Orleans-based writer,
artist and curator,
question given truths
in the architectural,
the cultural and
the systemic, while
envisioning alternative
conditions of Black life
in America.

105
How might New Orleans have been built had the 1811
Mississippi River uprising against plantation slavery
been successful? Led by Charles Deslondes, the
rebellion was reflective of a trans-Caribbean period
of revolt following the Haitian revolution. Under the
plantation economy, the violent extraction of Black
labour concentrated immense wealth in New Orleans
and along the rich soil of the Mississippi. By the mid-
19th century, half the millionaires in the United States
lived in metropolitan New Orleans. These patterns of
extraction continue today, with carceral facilities, oil
processing and toxic industry often taking the place of
former plantations. Architecture can also counter this to
participate in a radically alternative reality where the old
squares of the French Quarter might meet the swampy
terrain of the bayou in a fictional Black capital founded
on rebellion and its aftermath.
The multimodal installation work Republica:
Temple of Color and Sound, and its leading fictional
figure Maryam de Capita (performed by Kristina Kay
Robinson), explore alternative formalisms as a mode
of figuration and character. The Temple functions as
the itinerant alternative to the Mande roundhouse (an
architectural form brought from West Africa) that houses
the altars, stories and values of a fugitive society.
History and a new framework to imagine the future are
the drivers behind the texts that live within the Temple.
R:R (Republica:Reconstructed), a further installation
commissioned by the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA),
New York for its 2021 exhibition ‘Reconstructions:
Architecture and Blackness in America’, staged an
architecture around this temple, through a civic realm
of the bayou, inspired by Black fugitivity and collectivity
narrated by Maryam de Capita.
R:R deployed historical and locally abundant
materials – canvas, gold leaf, bamboo and felt –
manipulated with both digital fabrication and handicraft.
Through these structures as well as animations and
3D-printed models, it sought to expand the capacity
of architecture, urbanism and landscape to participate
in Black rebellion. And in breaking the fourth wall to
address the troubled racial legacy of the gallery space,
it challenged the museum itself to do so.

The design included a fictive vernacular

building system of woven formwork.
McEwen’s team assembled full-scale
prototypes from felt and bamboo.

106
This still from an animation uses custom
algorithms to demonstrate how woven
formwork would assemble and float to
provide a porous, flexible ground for the
floating architecture of Republica.

INDETERMINATE COLLABORATION
The question of collaboration is central to the content
of R:R. In a recent conversation between the poet and
theoretician Fred Moten and the musicologist Hanif
Abdurraqib, Moten discussed the difference between
what it means to be stolen from, versus what it means
to own.1 There are feelings of fury and a need for
accountability about having been stolen from, yet one
also does not want to have to declare oneself the owner
of something. Architecture has tended to prioritise the
myth of the singular genius author. It was important for
this project to start from collaboration, to counter that
myth and its effects at every level. Moten talked about
the rage that he was feeling about being stolen from –
emanating from the large structure of capitalism’s ability
to corrupt sharing, thwarting any attempts to resist
its forms and processes. So for Black people – whose
survival has always been bound in imagining alternative
ways of being, thinking about alternative societies,
alternative building forms and alternative processes –
collaboration is a necessary act in the effort to create
anything that is alternative to the status quo. Yet, how is
open-ended collaboration possible under the structure
that we are in? How are people trying to manoeuvre
within a context in which claiming and reclaiming are
bound by these terms of property?

107
Exhibition photo of an R:R animation with a
narration performed by Kristina Kay Robinson,
projected on canvas painted with historical
New Orleans property lines and building
footprints in gold leaf.

Still from an animation showing how

floating towers in Republica would be
accessible via watercraft.

108
 Values of stasis and property – what we think of
as safe and foundational – are producing local and
planetary crises. This happens not only at the level of
fossil fuel extraction and the crisis of planetary collapse,
but also at the level of the imaginary – particularly the
imaginary ground of property. The terms of private
property demand an imagination of flat, dry, stable
ground. That ground does not exist. It is not a physical
reality. It is an idea. It does not exist in one instance until
you convert everything into that potential form. Even
then the reality of flat, dry, stable ground is temporary
and contingent. If the ground seems flat, it will probably
flood. If the ground seems dry, it is probably moving.
One of the clearest examples of that is the Mississippi
Delta. Delta means change. Every one thousand years
the Mississippi River is in a different place. But the
levees have produced this artificial stasis that then, of
course, is going to produce all kinds of crises around it.
This relates especially to notions of indeterminacy and
disorder. It is within the terms of property and stasis that
we even link those terms: indeterminacy and disorder.
Indeterminacy can be an order. Disorder can be highly
determined, even over-determined. Indeterminacy
challenges structures of extraction and capitalism
directly. You must be determinable in order for your
value to be set.
In a place like New Orleans, so many things are
Digital photo collage of the Maryam de Capita character indeterminate. The functions or markers that are used
inhabiting the floating district of Republica.
to class people are entirely indeterminate here. They are
not fixed, despite a built environment that tries to tell
you how to fix it. The plantation logics that continue to
determine so much in the Americas can be understood
as a determinacy of disorder. Black death has been so
generative in the Americas, especially in the United
States. Black death is literally where mortgages come
from – the ‘mort’ in mortgage being death. That bond
from bondage and death is how a society made money
off this fiction of owning a person who is mortal. A
determined disorder of Black life never actually being
The plantation reducible to objecthood or property – this produces
bonds, bond markets, Wall Street and all the investment

logics that continue from there. There are so many ways in which Black
death is then built into the temporality of the built
environment. The history of bonds and other financial
to determine instruments traces directly back to the plantation.2
Before sugar cane became the dominant plantation crop

so much in the in Louisiana, indigo dyers were the primary enslaved

workers. They would live an expected 10 years from
their arrival on the plantation. Note: ‘long-term’ Treasury
Americas can bonds start at 10 years.
That time period of Black death built into the

be understood investment cycles of the everyday built reality in the

United States then produces all these other disorders
around things like the floodplain and flood insurance.
as a determinacy All insurance for built property requires replacement of
what existed previously. That reproduces an ongoing
crisis around climate change and the American
of disorder environment. Disaster always then reifies what was

109
there before, but with more investment behind it – the
worst of everything. The plantation similarly needed to
work backwards in order to maintain its false stasis.

RIVER LOGIC
In the artistic work of Republica, the altars that occupy
the Temple and the character create a narrative and
personhood that fluctuates in time, almost breaking
out of that loop – breaking out of that mortgage – that
debt as death as the reification of this disorder of this
plantation logic. In the local social environment of New
Orleans the time-marking of the year differs from time-
marking in the rest of the country. This affects value,
‘productivity’ and all the things that determine the value
of a place. The calendar here prioritises (other) events.
In the second-line, community processionals that take
place weekly on Sundays, there is a priority placed on
an activity that does not focus on the work of the week
ahead but instead reifies social bonds and collectivity.
This is supposed to happen every Sunday. One could
say it would eat up one’s day between 12 noon and
7pm and beyond, potentially. But it is prioritised as a
necessary activity, whereas in the rest of the country,
Sunday is supposed to be for getting ready to go to
work the next day. Or else it is a day for consumption
disguised as leisure – whether shopping, restaurants or
media. In New Orleans, this travelling live music and
processional is seen as a necessary function to make the
working week even possible. People traverse space in a
way that takes space, but it is not permanent. This idea
of structural permanency being the priority is something
that also reifies that death. Semi-permanent structures
may be sound and functional, but they are not meant to
be there and disrupt the ground forever.
This logic of land is comparable to that of the river as
an organising architectural logic. For example, Chicago
as a node within a national train network invented
multiple time zones. Trains give us the notion that we
have of time within a country that is too big. In New
Orleans time is invented with the festivals and the
hurricanes and the river, which is a very different kind
of time. Within that Chicago industrialised time, the
nomadic is easily collapsed into a shorter timeframe
– as if something nomadic would by definition last
for a shorter period, and something fixed would
gain permanence. The kind of movement that one
experiences with the second line in New Orleans is
actually a movement that is aware of much longer
timeframes. This is actually sustainable over a much
longer period in its non-fixity.

Republica offers an alternative historical

form for the city of New Orleans,
composed of wetlands and squares.

110
111
 McEwen’s Black Box team
assembled and documented
this 1:20 architectural scale
model of Republica’s woven
formwork building system
in the Labatut Pavilion at
Princeton University.

112
DELTA TIME
One could even consider these movements in terms of
thousands of years. If the Mississippi Delta is changing
every thousand or so years – slowly – then why would
one build something that refuses to move with that?
Industrialised time displaces and disorders such
movement.
This can be stretched to even a thousand-year frame.
Architecture can be read historically in thousand-year
timeframes (eg the Byzantine). Yet, if you try to actually
design architecture in thousand-year spans now – not
timeless in style, but specifically related to one thousand
years of projection – there is no framework for it. This
can be considered not only a planetary question, but an
interplanetary one. The North Star is actually two stars,
Polaris and Vega, which shift also every thousand years
or so. Polaris, the current North Star, will no longer be
the North Star in some 200 years – it will be replaced by
Vega. We assume within the capitalist framework that
finance has a sort of abstractability to it and that through
this abstraction, capitalism can co-opt time. However,
even at the limit of speculative finance, within the
world of hedge funds and complex modelling, financial
instruments barely push beyond 50 years. That same
debt – that same death – recurs as a bracket on temporal
performance, even at the level of ideation. There is no
model to even begin to think through 1,000 years within
the capitalist framework. The system produces a false
stasis, but then cannot even think past 50 years.
In New Orleans, Bayou Road has been continually
used for at least 5,000 years. The road still exists
because of the disposition of the people who have
occupied it. The indigenous people, Native and African,
set up semi-permanent residences and structures.
As the conditions of the Mississippi River and Lake
Pontchartrain fluctuate, so do the structures and
locations. The disposition was not to think about how to
control these large bodies of water but how to live for
millennia with their patterns. 1

NOTES
1. Hanif Abdurraqib and Fred Moten, ‘Building a Stairway to Get
Us Closer to Something Beyond this Place’, Millennials are Killing
Capitalism podcast, 13 May 2021: https://millennialsarekillingcapitalism.
libsyn.com/hanif-abdurraqib-fred-moten-building-a-stairway-to-get-us-
closer-to-something-beyond-this-place.
2. ‘Episode 2: The Economy that Slavery Built’, The New York Times
podcast hosted by Nikole Hannah-Jones, 31 August 2019: www.nytimes.
com/2019/08/30/podcasts/1619-slavery-cotton-capitalism.html.

Text © 2022 John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

Images © V Mitch McEwen and Kristina Kay Robinson

113
 Viola Ago

Jesse Mockrin,
Some Unknown Power,
2018

In this work, Mockrin zeros in on

a small detail from a Baroque
painting of Samson and Delilah,
cropping the characters into
androgynous and anonymous
figures engaged in a suggestive
ritual. The painting was used
as the cover art for Christopher
Chitty’s Sexual Hegemony (2020).
The enigmatic image adds a
quality of erotic indeterminacy.

114
An Aesthetic
of Collapse
Alternative Form,
Disorder and
Indeterminacy
A Conversation with
Jack Halberstam

115
 According to Jack Halberstam, notions of what is normal
Guest-Editor of this and abnormal, natural and unnatural, what is acceptable

2 Viola Ago discusses and what is not, are societal constructs, embedded in the
very structure – including the architectural structure – of our
societies. In relation to individuals, he says that ‘one way in
societal norms and the which you produce social norms is by giving examples of
people who are in violation of those norms. Just the same
aesthetic of collapse within way that a system of law works by producing the category of
the criminal.’ The resulting binary systems are implemented
architectural discourse, by ‘a set of discursive mechanisms which are then supposed to
do the work of propping up an order of things that is seen as
and the links between natural, inevitable and unquestionable’.
Notions about sex and gender are a classic example of
physical spaces and the such a binary system. Although a variety of biological sexes
naturally exist, Western culture acknowledges only two –
social structures they male and female – and the idea that sexuality and gender are
limited to binary options is threatened by the existence of
support, with distinguished homo- and bisexuality and the multiple gender identities that
fall between ‘man’ and ‘woman’: ‘In order to enforce a certain
author and Columbia orientation to a reproductive order, there must be a kind of
negative category against which the reproductive mandate
University Professor comes into being.’

Jack Halberstam, who The category of the ‘natural/unnatural’ became the

classification by which male homosexuals were cast as
somehow at odds with European civilisational systems
argues that existing towards the end of the 19th century: ‘God and religion began
to diminish as a structuring force of society by the end of
social and architectural the 19th century, but while we may no longer have believed
in God, we did still believe in nature, and where it was no
structures have inbuilt longer compelling to say “you are sinners”, that language was
replaced with “you are unnatural”.’
inequalities and that
The Inconsistent Logics of Domination
‘collapse’ is a better However, just as classifications are flexible, so society’s
relations to homosexuality have varied greatly throughout
paradigm than ‘repair’ the ages. Halberstam cites Christopher Chitty’s book
Sexual Hegemony (2020),1 which addresses the history
in bringing about social, of sexuality in relation to property relations, economic
crises and political institutions within a capitalist system,
gender-based, financial and explains that homosexuality serves different functions
at different times rather than just acting as a subversive
and material equity. undercurrent to power relations. Chitty explains the
function of homosexuality historically by returning to
Renaissance Florence, 19th-century Paris and London
and 20th-century New York City. But Halberstam has
made similar arguments about the contradictory logics of
homosexuality using fascist masculinity as an example.
As Halberstam proposes: ‘Fascist parties turned a blind
eye to homosexuality at certain moments when they
wanted to encourage a certain kind of male bonding and
cultivate a sense of the contaminating influence of women’.
The misogyny of Nazism mandated that women serve as
reproductive vessels and domestic subjects, but that men
keep a distance from the softening influences of the family
home. This constructed forms of masculinity suited to the
production of ‘a fighting machine’ and created homosocial
environments in which ‘homoerotic bonds became the glue
of the fighting force’.

116
 As Halberstam points out, some political regimes have that the house within which other forms of relations might
encouraged and made homosocial bonding consistent with flourish is registered as impossible, or unthinkable
patriarchy, and in others the blurring of the homosocial and or undesignable’.
the homoerotic is cast as the enemy of patriarchy: ‘It is evident ‘I think the goal is to try to understand how it is that
that homosexuality has played very different roles over the we see the world, how that vision has been produced and
centuries than just as a kind of foil for a normative order of condoned by a certain ideological order, and then where
being’. He believes that it is important to understand that the points of resistance or pressure might be.’ Halberstam
the systems of classification used to create such binary logics describes the work of James C Scott, the American political
are more complex and inter-related, fluid and wide-ranging scientist and scholar of comparative politics, who describes
than is generally understood, suggesting that questions the geographies of global power and identifies subtle and
might be asked not only about the artificial and untenable momentous modes of resistance.2 His work ‘forces us to
binary classifications of gender and identity, but also about also see the modes of domination that are masquerading
the larger systems and structures that define the rightness as an inevitable order. These might come in the form
or wrongness of every aspect of our lives according to the of efficiency, streamlined structure or the symmetrical
priorities of various social orders, and about how to resist organisation of space favoured by Le Corbusier, and other
them: ‘The systems that govern us are full of holes and full modern architects. The logic of power is inscribed into the
of contradictions, and we have to be wild and cunning in layout of European capitals, as well as places like Brasilia,
response.’ In this context, Halberstam defines ‘wild’ as ‘a in Brazil.’ These city designs are based on grids, feature huge
zone of indeterminacy, and unnamed mobility, a method boulevards and classically designed buildings, and register a
of declassification’ that offers sources of opposition to level of pomp and monumentalism that seems to suit a major
modernity’s orderly impulses. city even if and when it suppresses social life within it. As so
‘I would say that queer theorists haven’t paid enough many urban theorists like Jane Jacobs have argued,3 urban
attention to the idea that we aren’t just governed by laws and planning has too often been an impediment to good living.
regulations about sexual contact and conduct. We are also Le Corbusier, in particular, offers an example of someone
shaped and constrained by, for example, the understanding of who married fascist sentiments and sympathies to a sense of
what a domestic interior looks like.’ Halberstam explains that design that abhors the random or disorderliness: ‘In terms of
where a domestic interior features a kitchen, a dining room, architecture, Le Corbusier, who was at various moments a
a ‘master’ or primary bedroom, and two ancillary bedrooms, fascist sympathiser, understood that you could govern people
‘the shape and form of the family house is just a given such through design.’

Cyprien Gaillard,
Pruitt Igoe Falls,
film still,
2009

Gaillard here creates a

filmic juxtaposition of
Niagara Falls and a night
shot of a housing-estate
building in the Sighthill
neighbourhood of Glasgow,
Scotland, evoking the
iconic demolition of the
Pruitt-Igoe complex in
St Louis, Missouri, in
the 1970s, identified by
Charles Jencks as the end
of the Modernist project.

117
Changing Spaces to Change Frameworks recognisable forms or idioms.’ This is another lesson from
Halberstam believes that the upending of normative categories James C Scott’s work, and he calls these counter-intuitive
and ideologies issues challenges to structures of sex, gender, forms of opposition ‘weapons of the weak’. Although often
race, class and patriarchal systems in the form of debates misunderstood, aesthetic acts of refusal that challenged
about the mismatch between bodily forms and the built existing political frameworks, such as those of the American
environment, acts of sociopolitical anarchy such as the anarchitect/artist Gordon Matta-Clark (1943–78), have
removal of racist monuments, and a growing understanding opened spaces for new political vocabularies to emerge.
that changing the physical spaces with which and within In the early 1970s, Matta-Clark, a trained architect, began
which we live also changes the social structures they support. making cuts into already dilapidated structures and made
He says there are historical models for what people are it his goal to bring structures to the point of collapse. And
proposing: “Where a system of oppression is installed, a this was at a time when parts of New York City were falling
system of resistance rises up to meet it – there is no force down and derelict, while in other corners of the city increased
without a reaction – and yet resistance may not come in easily private ownership set the terms for a booming real-estate
market. Some neighbourhoods had become ghost towns filled
with abandoned buildings and rubbish-covered sidewalks,
other neighbourhoods, like the Bronx, were ablaze due to
fires set deliberately by greedy and corrupt landlords: ‘The
Wai Think Tank, city looked like it had been bombed, and instead of saying
Palace of Failed Optimism,
2013–14
“we need to clean up this city”, Matta-Clark’s work seemed
to push in the opposite direction to help the city fall down!
This inverted ziggurat is a theoretical project for a
repository for architectural utopian thoughts and
What would it mean, he kept asking, to bring a structure to
schemes throughout the whole of architectural history. the point of collapse?’

118
 Matta-Clark took aim at a system that prioritises property Baltrop, who photographed the homeless people, criminals,
ownership and profits over the basic, universal need for artists and primarily the underground gay culture that eked
human shelter, and offered potent critiques of the discipline out an existence among the derelict and semi-collapsed
of Modernist architecture in which power and a high- shipping piers along the Hudson River in New York, was
modernist sensibility is embodied in the structures designed gripped by the grandeur and danger of the architectural
by the architects. Such figures literally built the world and, setting: ‘Baltrop gives us another answer to the question of
to quote James Brown, ‘It’s a man’s world’, a white world, how to bring a system to the point of collapse, and that is by
and a world for the rich and privileged. Matta-Clark called changing the relationship between figure and ground. In many
his counter-architectural, site-specific cuts into abandoned of his photographs the images of the human bodies are tiny
buildings, and other forms of anarchic or creative destruction, against the backdrop of the massive structures that are slowly
‘anarchitecture’. Halberstam says: ‘I’m writing about Matta- declining, collapsing and falling in and on themselves.’
Clark within a project on the aesthetics of collapse. He wanted
to find the point where a structure is just barely standing, A Shift in Focus
where collapse and form cave into each other. He was By ‘shifting our attention from foreground to background;
architecturally finding the place where that structure could from figure to ground; from body to architecture’, we are
collapse and then hold.’ offered productive pathways for thinking politically against
It is important to Halberstam to think about what it would the grain of world building efforts. ‘And I think that at this
mean politically to bring a system to the point of collapse: moment of environmental crisis, it would serve us well to
‘That’s a more interesting question right now than “how do invest in an architecture that could figure out how to unmake
we fix things?”. I know about the eco-responsible orientation the world, how to unbuild, how to bring down, how to level,
to repair right now and I’m not against repair. It’s just that if a equalise, horizontalise,’ reimagining the structures of luxury
system is broken and the exploitation is built into that system and draining property of its value.
as a kind of structural condition, you repair it in order for it Once an ideological shift has been actually brought about,
to continue to do its exploitative work.’ If repairing the system Halberstam argues that different kinds of directional strategies
is not the answer, he says, then destroying it is. ‘We must be will open up more ideological and physical space for us to
more like the diggers and the levellers of the 17th century see what happens next: ‘What if we shift our gaze and shift
who sought to unmake the early forms of capitalism they saw our orientation to space, not just to have a new postmodern
going up all around them in the form of enclosures and the architecture that is about slashing and cutting dead space,
private sequestering of public space.’ and tumbling architectures as opposed to straight lines and
There are, of course, no guarantees that, having seeded the symmetry, but to figure out how to work against the climate
ground of opposition, the next thing one does will not become crisis that we have built ourselves into, that is both capitalist
the force that needs to be confronted by the next generation. and environmental.’ He says that ‘we need small strategies that
However, Halberstam believes that it is a mistake to assume are manageable within a local context, and that people can
a defeatist logic in which capitalism always and everywhere commit to, and in order to get there, you first have to change
wins: ‘You know, one does not come up with interventions people’s minds’. This is where the aesthetics of collapse comes
by worrying endlessly about whether as soon as you’ve in; art can address reality and act as a catalyst to open up a
scripted something different, it will be co-opted.’ He says that space in which to create positive change. Early opposition
it is very possible that we could come up with new designs to capitalism and to enclosures was ferocious and intense.
that could just become new forms of domination. Concepts Now, just as then, people do not need to simply lie down and
like ‘failure’ and ‘collapse’, after all, are as much a part of accept that new world order. 1
business self-help languages as they are part of a vocabulary of
resistance. ‘But it’s also possible, as many utopian architectural This article is based on video-conferencing calls between
Jack Halberstam and Viola Ago in July 2021.
projects have offered, that we could imagine living otherwise,
precisely by designing space with other goals in mind than just
privacy, domestic, calm, nuclear families and so on. I am very Notes
1. Christopher Chitty, Max Fox and Christopher Nealon,
interested in what design can offer for rethinking social life Sexual Hegemony: Statecraft, Sodomy, and Capital in the
and social worlds.’ Rise of the World System, Duke University Press (Durham,
NC), 2020.
And at the same time, he says it is important to be 2. James C Scott, Seeing Like a State, Yale University
suspicious of aesthetics: of beauty, straight lines and symmetry. Press (New Haven, CT), 1999.
3. Jane Jacobs, The Life and Death of Great American
‘Sometimes when we’re engaged in the work of opposition, we Cities, Random House (New York), 1961.
may very well be, in fact, complicit with the order of things
and we have to not get caught up in the romance of rebellion.
Because when that happens, we become a new vector by
which the everyday repeats and confirms.’ The alternative
worlds created by artists and activists such as Matta-Clark Text © 2022 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Images: p 114 Image
and as documented by the photographer Alvin Baltrop courtesy of the artist and Night Gallery; p 115 Photography by
Vincent Tullo, reproduced with permission; p 117 © Cyprien
(1948–2004) did not emerge from utopian visions, but out of Gaillard. Courtesy the artist and Sprüth Magers; p118 © WAI
gaps in the crumbling structure of the city. Architecture Think Tank

119
 A Word from
1 Editor
Neil Spiller

Sculpting
the Forest
of Symbols
Nick
Ervinck

Nick Ervinck, TANATILSUR (detail),

‘EvoDevo’ series, 2017–19

Detail illustrating the precision and

intricacy of Ervinck’s interplay of void,
mass, line and colour. The work has a
delicacy to it but also resonates with
older tribal traditions.

120
 Nature is a temple whose living pillars
Sometimes give forth a babel of words
Man wends his way through forests of symbols
Which look at him with their familiar glances
— Charles Baudelaire1

Belgian artist Nick Ervinck takes inspiration from nature

such as trees, rocky outcrops, flowers and other natural
forms and has an appreciation for other artists who have
specialised in sensuous work defined by the play of void
and mass (such as Barbara Hepworth, Henry Moore
and Hans Arp). Ervinck combines these preoccupations
with gimp masks, anthropocentric robots, Wolverine,
Meccano, tower cranes, deformed bodies, the Predator,
Trojan and Spartan helmets, punk mohicans and
sophisticated computer software and hardware to
produce arresting work. His output takes the viewer on
a journey through the ‘forests of symbols’, evoking here,
suggesting there, but it is always contemporary and
speculative.
Asked about the theme of this 2, indeterminacy and
disorder, and its relationship to his creative practice,
he replies: ‘As a child of the computer generation I’m
a control freak. Probably also because of my personal
character I have some autistic traits in terms of sorting.
So in my world I have a system of order. But at the
same time as an artist I like indeterminacy and disorder.
Sometimes unpredictability and coincidence brings you
to a much better idea than you could think of yourself.
I think a good artist knows how to embrace these
moments and transfer them to their own voice.’2

A Taxonomy for a Genus of the Future

Incorporating a number of his recent works, the ongoing
‘EvoDevo’ project (begun 2017) is a complex jumble
of influences and formal associations. The pieces read
like alien scarabs whose iridescent carapaces shine and
gleam like the surfaces of polished jewels and precious
metals. Equally, they can be read as High-Tech, ritualistic
masks for future shamans of a yet to be evolved hybrid
between humanity and technology. How did this line of
work come about?
‘In the past, as part of my “HUMAN MUTATION”
project (begun 2009), I have designed hybrid heads
with detailed larynxes as well as numerous cyborg
sculptures that assumed the traits of heroes and gods.
These artworks challenged the time-honoured traditions
of the figural bust, exuding a kind of power and
energy that seemed alienating and even threatening.’
The vicissitudes of artistic production can lead to
creative swerves, and new projects, preoccupations
and ambitions can emerge. This was the case with the
‘EvoDevo’ series. ‘After I worked with “negative space”
where for me Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth are
the pioneers. I started a new project where I wanted to
study the line in art. But the project was skipped mostly Nick Ervinck, AGRIEBORZ, ‘HUMAN MUTATION’ series, 2009–10
because they evolved into the “EvoDevo” project with
The hybrid organic/inorganic head piece breathes new
works like TANATILSUR and TANATIRIUB.’ android life into art history’s established bust typology.

121
122
 The artefacts have both a futuristic yet an
archaeological aesthetic to them, at once capturing ‘I was inspired by
historical formal associations of past civilisations
such as the Incas or the Aztecs juxtaposed with the
the typical historical
exquisite craftsmanship of Tutankhamun’s death
mask and channelling them through a biologically
clothing of different
enhanced post-human, hyper-evolved body. The societies like African,
suggestion of bodies and face masks is in part due to
Ervinck’s use of symmetry in their construction. ‘The Mayan and Inca to
symmetry is of course a logical part of working with
a computer, designing one part and mirroring it to create pieces and
the other. With computer design, making symmetry
is easy but doing this in reality manually is much
colours that are
harder. At the same time symmetry gives a feeling
of peace and balance.’ This is true: the sculptures,
floating between the
whilst talking of technological human augmentation, old and the new’
have a strange beauty to them, like intricate
jewellery, and not a macabre fascination; the impulse
when viewing them is to touch their smooth surfaces
and visually rejoice in their wonderful complexity.
This beauty is as much to do with what is not
there as what is there: for Ervinck, the space or
void between material is just as important for his
compositional protocols – ideas learnt from Moore
and Hepworth but greatly accelerated by present-
day computational techniques. ‘The masks that I
created are based upon 3D printing techniques and
the very personal assemblages that I added here
exercise a strange impact on the viewer, and it is this
mysterious fascination that I would like to share with
other people, especially with a younger public that is
not yet aware of the fantastic possibilities offered by
3D printing and techno drawing techniques. I think
the younger generation is more familiar with new
technology generally but not with art history, and
the older generation can appreciate the layer of art
history and start to get familiar with the culture of
youth today (technology, sci-fi and pop culture).’
With this recent work Ervinck is expanding his
colour palette, and this also makes the sculptures
more inviting, often utilising warmer colours. In
his home country he is most well known for his big
yellow sculptures. He enjoys the colour immensely
but does not want to get typecast as ‘the guy who
does yellow art’ – ‘So in the last few years I’ve
introduced much more colour in my work. Here,
I was inspired by the typical historical clothing of
different societies like African, Mayan and Inca to
create pieces and colours that are floating between
the old and the new. Reinterpreting one past to
create a new future.’

Nick Ervinck, TANATILSUR, ‘EvoDevo’ series, 2017–19 Nick Ervinck, TANATIRIUB, ‘EvoDevo’ series, 2017–19

opposite: Looking simultaneously to the past and Almost anthropomorphic, this sculpture brings
to the future – Janus-like – TANATILSUR evokes thoughts of Japanese samurai and African totems,
previous cultures and their rituals but also suggests creating a rich mix of colour and pattern, yet also
others yet to be established. suggesting the billowing forms of fabric.

123
Versioning Wunderkammers Being consistently creative demands a certain
One assumes that Ervinck, being a digital native and mental dexterity in Ervinck. As well as the
adept, can create work swiftly, but in fact the reverse is ubiquitous resource of the internet and a large
true, especially for the ‘EvoDevo’ pieces. Development personal library, he often employs his aptitude for
of such work, even aided by powerful machines, is ‘sorting’, placing disparate things together, and the
long and painstaking. There is an element of digital resulting juxtaposing of forms and ideas allows
craft about designing and building these constructions him to reinvent his source material. This is no more
and a massive concentration on detail. ‘A lot of people apparent than in his recent exhibition installation
think that I code or program my works. But I’m actually NHIECNKREYRMVOIONRCEK (2019).
designing everything old school manually but with a One is reminded of the Parisian study wall of
computer. We are designing with different 3D softwares André Breton, the founder of Surrealism. Breton’s
and searching for our own solutions and methods. For collection was by its nature very private, often
this project I started with different sculptural computer intimately autobiographical: ‘Regarded as having
drawings, projecting these cool drawings on a shape, personal significance, the objects were not
and then started to make 100, 1,000 variants to select 10 labelled or catalogued. They were arranged and
to work out in depth. I took around 2,000 hours with my often rearranged with the ebb and flow of the
team to design these 10 virtual drawings. And around author’s imagination, and he often engaged in
another 2,000 hours to design two of these sculptures in active dialogue with his pieces while working …
3D for 3D printing.’ Through their thematic arrangement, Breton’s
world was articulated.’3
For Ervinck this same but contemporarily
Nick Ervinck, NHIECNKREYRMVOIONRCEK, 2019
used approach has further fermented his artistic
Mobile display cabinets, designed and populated preoccupations, inspirations and future ambitions:
by Ervinck, create a Wunderkammer (a collection of
curiosities and rarities) of his work and develop a
‘I don’t come from a culture background. So the
dialogue between it and Henry Moore’s oeuvre. concept of collecting, even art was unfamiliar for me.

124
 I think I was already collecting at the age of 10 without
knowing what this meant. A few years back I made a
cabinet, a homage to Henry Moore where I put 300 of
his monographs and images that I collected in dialogue
with my own work, African masks, rocks, pebbles, but
even my childhood toys and milk teeth – more than
700 objects. But it was also understanding that I had
been doing this my whole life. It was creating my own
Wunderkammer. And today I’m working on a similar
project – a sort of virtual museum. Searching for my
position in life, searching to try to find the meaning of
all this. And what better way to do this than creating
your own world?’
His world exists at many scales from the large
and architectural to the small and finely honed. ‘I like
working big. My biggest sculpture up to now is 15m
[50 feet] high. I enjoy the confrontation of the human
body and scale against the big sculpture. But I also
like working small, almost like a candy, designing a
small collector’s item. I have made sculptures that are
less than 5cm [2 inches]. But scale is also a part of the
technical fact. For example if you work big or small the
techniques you use are often determined by the scale of
the object you are creating.’
Ervinck’s fecund imagination is kept fully active: he
receives many international invitations to create work
often very much in conversation with the contexts he
exhibits in. ‘Today I’m preparing a few new shows. I am
creating a dialogue with the archaeological collection of
the Musée Fenaille in Rodez, France, a dialogue with the
15th-century chapel of the Adornes family in Bruges, to
my biggest show up to now in the 13th-century castle
Nick Ervinck, EITZO, 2009, collaged into Häme Castle in Hämeenlinna, Finland, in collaboration
Sint-Pieterskerk in Sint-Pieters Kapelle,
Middelkerke, Belgium, 2021 with the National Museum. But the most crazy project
I’m working on now is the birth of my own Kunsthalle in
Collage illustrating the type of
environment and sculptural combinations a formal church.’ The curation of himself and his friends,
that Ervinck can achieve within his new the collecting, the sorting, the making continues ever
museum, KERK (Kunsthalle ERvincK),
curated by himself and featuring his own onwards and in the process Nick Ervinck discovers his
and others’ artworks. creative practice, building a personal universe of artistic
discourse. For someone just entering his forties, the
volume and the variety of his output is astounding. 1

Notes
1. Charles Baudelaire, ‘Correspondences’ [1857], The Flowers of Evil / Les Fleurs

Ervinck’s world
du mal, trans William Aggeler, Digireads.com, 2015, p 30.
2. All quotes are from an email interview between Neil Spiller and Nick Ervinck
on 12 May 2021.

exists at many
3. Dagmar Motycka Weston, ‘The Situational Space of André Breton’s Atelier
and Personal Museum in Paris’, in Soumyen Bandyopadhyay et al (eds), The
Humanities in Architectural Design: A Contemporary and Historical Perspective,

scales from
Taylor & Francis (London), 2010, p 208.

the large and

architectural
to the small and
finely honed Text © 2022 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Images: p 120(t) © Robbie Munn; pp 120(b),
121–5 © Nick Ervinck

125
 ALT-FORM:
INDETERMINACY AND DISORDER

Suzanne Cotter is Director of the Museum on wildness titled Unworlding: An Carl Lostritto lives, works and practices
of Contemporary Art (MCA) in Sydney, Aesthetics of Collapse. in Providence, Rhode Island. He is a
Australia. Between 2018 and 2021 she Graduate Program Director and Associate
was Director of the Musée d’Art Moderne Jeffrey Halstead is an interdisciplinary Professor of Architecture at Rhode Island
Grand-Duc Jean(Mudam) in Luxembourg. artist, educator and practitioner, and School of Design. He practices architecture
As Director of the Serralves Museum of currently a Master of Fine Arts (MFA) speculatively and with an interest in
Contemporary Art in Porto, Portugal, from candidate at Columbia University. He making or manipulating software. He
2013 until 2018, she curated exhibitions has taught at the Taubman College of writes about drawing, computation,
and projects with Nairy Baghramian, Architecture and Urban Planning at the rendering and representation, including in
Theaster Gates, Liam Gillick, Giorgio Griffa, University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, two books published by AR+D Publishing:
Julie Mehretu, Philippe Parreno, Monika and at the Southern California Institute Computational Drawing From Foundational
Sosnowska and Haegue Yang among of Architecture (SCI-Arc) in Los Angeles. Exercises to Theories of Representation
others. She previously held curatorial He holds a MArch from SCI-Arc. He was (2019) and Impossible and Hyper-Real
positions at the Solomon R Guggenheim recently awarded a MacDowell Colony Elements of Architecture (forthcoming, 2022).
Foundation, New York – Guggenheim Abu fellowship and a residency at Art Omi
Dhabi project, Modern Art Oxford, UK, in Ghent, New York. His work has been Thom Mayne is founding partner of
and the Hayward Gallery, Whitechapel Art exhibited at the A+D Museum, Wedge interdisciplinary and collective architecture
Gallery and Serpentine Gallery in London. Gallery at Woodbury University and the and planning practice Morphosis. His
SCI-Arc Gallery in LA, and at the Room honours include the Pritzker Prize (2005)
Andrew Culp is Professor of Media History Gallery in Venice, Italy. He previously and the American Institute of Architects
and Theory in the School of Critical worked as a designer for Frank Gehry. Gold Medal (2013). In 1972 he co-founded
Studies and MA in Aesthetics and Politics SCI-Arc, where he continues to lead the
programme at the California Institute Carolyn L Kane is the author of High-Tech Now Institute, a graduate-level think tank
of the Arts in Santa Clarita. His books Trash: Glitch, Noise, and Failure Aesthetics for urban sustainability and resilience. He
include Dark Deleuze (2016), which has in the Innovation Age (University of has held teaching positions at Columbia
been translated into more than half a California Press, 2019) and Chromatic University; Yale University in New Haven,
dozen languages, and A Guerrilla Guide Algorithms: Synthetic Color, Computer Art, Connecticut; the Harvard Graduate
to Refusal (2022), both published by the and Aesthetics After Code (University of School of Design (GSD) in Cambridge,
University of Minnesota Press. His writing Chicago Press, 2014). Her current research Massachusetts; the Bartlett School of
has also been published in symplokē, project examines the role of light and Architecture, University College London
Stasis and The Spectator. colour in the development of 20th-century (UCL); and the University of Pennsylvania
urban aesthetics. in Philadelphia. His artworks are held in
Jack Halberstam is Professor of Gender collections at MoMA, the San Francisco
Studies and English at Columbia Ersela Kripa is an architect, founding Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) and the
University in New York. He is the author partner of interdisciplinary practice Chicago Art Institute, among others.
of seven books, including In A Queer AGENCY, Associate Professor and Director
Time and Place (New York University of the Texas Tech University College of V Mitch McEwen is an assistant professor
Press, 2005), Trans*: A Quick and Quirky Architecture in El Paso, and Director of at the Princeton University School of
Account of Gender Variance (University Projects of its Post (Project for Operative Architecture in New Jersey, principal of
of California Press, 2018), and Female Spatial Technologies) research centre. She Atelier Office in New York City and one
Masculinity (1998), The Queer Art of is the recipient of the 2021 Architecture of ten founding members of the Black
Failure (2011) and Wild Things: The Award from the American Academy of Reconstruction Collective. At Princeton,
Disorder of Desire (2020), all published Arts and Letters and the 2018 Emerging he directs the architecture and technology
by Duke University Press. Places Journal Voices award from the Architectural research group Black Box. His design work
awarded him its Arcus/Places Prize in League of New York. She holds a has been awarded grants from the Graham
2018 for innovative public scholarship BArch from the New Jersey Institute of Foundation, Knight Foundation and New
on the relationship between gender, Technology in Newark, and a Master of York State Council on the Arts. Her writing
sexuality and the built environment. Science in Advanced Architectural Design has most recently been published by e-flux
He is now finishing a second volume from Columbia University. Architecture and the MIT Press. Atelier

126
 CONTRIBUTORS

Office projects have been commissioned She earned a BA in Architecture from of Greenwich in London. Prior to this
by MoMA, the US Pavilion at the Venice Yale College and a MArch from the Yale he was Vice Dean at the Bartlett School
Architecture Biennale, the Museum of School of Architecture. Through her of Architecture, UCL. He has made an
Contemporary Art Detroit and the Istanbul practice, she has co-produced numerous international reputation as an architect,
Design Biennial. She holds a MArch from site-specific installations in the US and designer, artist, teacher, writer and
Columbia University and BA from Canada. Dream The Combine won the 2018 polemicist. He is the founding director of
Harvard University. Young Architects Program at MoMA PS1 the Advanced Virtual and Technological
for Hide & Seek, and has been selected to Architecture Research (AVATAR) group,
Stephen Mueller is a Research Assistant the curatorial ensemble for the triennial which continues to push the boundaries
Professor at Texas Tech University College exhibition ‘Counterpublic 2023’. of architectural design and discourse in
of Architecture and founding Director of the face of the impact of 21st-century
Research of the college’s POST research Dorina Pllumbi practices postcolonial technologies. Its current preoccupations
centre. He is a registered architect and a and feminist thinking in relation to the include augmented and mixed realities and
founding partner of AGENCY, a design and architectural field. In her doctoral studies other metamorphic technologies.
research practice leveraging spatial design at the TU Delft Faculty of Architecture
and spatial information to counteract in the Netherlands, she explores the Faysal Tabbarah is Associate Dean and
nascent forms of global and urban theme of commoning as material and Associate Professor of Architecture at the
inequality. He is the recipient of numerous spatial engagement in realities of political College of Architecture, Art and Design at
awards, including the 2021 Award in transition. Her writings have appeared in the American University of Sharjah in the
Architecture from the American Academy several Albanian cultural journals, in the UAE, and co-founder of the architecture
of Arts and Letters, the 2018 Emerging Danish journal Politiken, the Architectural and design studio Architecture + Other
Voices award from the Architectural League Review, Architecture and Culture and, Things (A+OT). His teaching, research
of New York, and the 2010–11 Rome Prize in most recently, in the book Design and practice explores the relationships
Architecture from the American Academy Commons: Practices, Processes and between environmental and architectural
in Rome. Crossovers (DERF Springer, 2021). imaginaries to develop alternative
building solutions that are rooted in
Anna Neimark is a founding partner of First Kristina Kay Robinson is a writer, curator their surrounding material and cultural
Office Architecture in Los Angeles. She and visual artist. Her work centres on environments. To achieve this, he works
holds a BA from Princeton University, a and interrogates the modern and ancient with computational tools, emergent
MArch from Harvard’s GSD, and teaches at connections between world communities, technologies and materials research, as
SCI-Arc. First Office’s exhibition installation focusing on the impact of globalisation, well as historical archives.
‘Rude forms among us’ at the SCI-Arc militarism and surveillance on society
Gallery in 2020 was in part made possible and their intersections with contemporary Dalena Tran is a media artist based in Los
by the Graham Foundation for Advanced art and pop culture. She is the co-editor Angeles. Her research-based practice
Studies in the Fine Arts. The practice’s of Mixed Company, a collection of short reinterprets applications of traditional art
work and writing have been honoured fiction and visual narratives by women forms with emerging digital technologies
with the Architectural League Prize and of colour. Her writing has appeared in through hybrid mediations. Engaging
the Architect’s Newspaper Best of Young Guernica, The Baffler, The Nation, The various media forms as semiotic
Architects, and nominated as a finalist in Massachusetts Review and Elle among storytelling, she investigates the everyday
the MoMA PS1 Young Architects Program. others. She is a 2019 recipient of the confluences of language and expression,
Their book Nine Essays was published by Rabkin Prize for Visual Arts Journalism, presence and immateriality, voyeurism and
the Graham Foundation in 2015. and is currently serving as the New surveillance, urbanism and hegemony, and
Orleans editor at large for the Atlanta- play and pause. She is an editor at FLAT
Jennifer Newsom is a licensed architect, based Burnaway magazine. journal and a member of sooz.global.
artist, assistant professor at Cornell
University College of Architecture, Art, Neil Spiller is Editor of AD, and was
and Planning in Ithaca, New York, and previously Hawksmoor Chair of
principal of Dream The Combine, which Architecture and Landscape and Deputy
she co-founded with Tom Carruthers. Pro Vice Chancellor at the University

127
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Volume 91 No 2 Volume 91 No 3 Volume 91 No 4

ISBN 978 1119 717485 ISBN 978 1119 747222 ISBN 978 1119 717522

Volume 91 No 5 Volume 91 No 6 Volume 92 No 1

ISBN 978 1119 717706 ISBN 978 1119 812241 ISBN 978 1119 743255

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