Throughout history, the eye has claimed authority over the other senses, the entirety of the natural world recognizable and catalogued through their perceived discernible differences. 18th-century invented taxonomies provided unquestionable truths that have persisted in society under the guise of logic. CARTHA has spent the last year researching the ways that these pre-organized systems continue to shape the environment by looking at architecture. A discipline heavily reliant on visual order, architecture insists on form and material, yet at the same time, equally as significant are the unseen layers. The contributions are an exercise in the nuances of visibility.

This was an elaborate task, the evident breadth of the topic provoking us to tackle the very nature of our systematised way of thinking. Marking out the imperceptible forces in architecture reinforces the idea that this exercise is not linear, but rather reciprocal. The study perpetually turns back on itself revealing in ever greater depth the dance between architecture and culture as they simultaneously create one another.

The Open Call for Submissions invited contributors to respond to prompts put forward by an economist, biologist, artist, architect and historian in the Invisible Structures: Prologue. The themes that emerged from their research were meant as a starting point to explore systemic influence in the built environment. Some of the contributors for this issue chose to respond directly to the Prologue essays and others sprawled out, questioning agendas of governance and labour, dismantling gender in architecture, or describing love in spatial terms. 

Through storytelling, academic research, film and visuals, the contributions navigate and attempt to manifest how invisible structures are realized in space. This issue tackles how historic systems of classification persevere, but also introduces the ways in which softer structures of intimacy and affect play equally as important of a role in architecture and society. They begin to map out aspects of contemporary life that are produced by things we cannot see or touch. 

Lena Appel’s loosely connected short essays question memory as structure. Masa Tomsic unearths the sublime dialectic between ground and heart, while Viola Ago traces the invisible forces of western oppression that have defined the fate of the Albanian built environment in the last decade. Galo Canizares wonders what compassionate software would look like in practice. Reflecting on digitally-mediated buildings, Gillian Shaffer describes ways that machine vision has permeated the urban fabric already from half a century ago. More speculative in nature, Alina Nazmeeva looks at how our current methods of viewing digital representations affect our understanding of reality. Edoardo Cresci analyzes the origins and impact of the network of Cisterian abbeys in Europe. Shou Jie Eng explores the construction of both physical and metaphorical feminist comunities across centuries and continents, and Brett Zehner & Kylie King found the foundations of corporate psychology lying among the ruins of Cold War defensive architecture in the US. In the form of a video essay, JDA Winslow reprocesses the ways that the West depicts and appropriates Russian language in its cinema industry since the fall of the Berlin wall. Exploring the concept of the digital twin, the collective State Of The Heart researches its deployment as a medical device to monitor the health of the planet. Marianna Charitonidou draws from the saturated history of László Moholy-Nagy and Alvar Aalto to research the influences of biosemiotics in architecture. Marco Zelli dissects key moments in the unfolding of Modernism to suggest its hidden project: the disappearance of the author. Mariana Meneguetti speculates on representations within the patriarchal practice of modern Brazilian architecture. Hamish Lonergan travels to venice on off-grid queer pilgrimage to the Garden of Eden, and Alexandra Pereira-Edwards questions contemporary infrastructures of intimacy.

The cycle’s contributions are widespread in their approaches, all negotiating the fine line of new types of spaces becoming visible, even if they were designed to be obscured, or safely tucked away in the monotony of the everyday. A peculiarity that emerged from these contributions is the instability of this exchange, between visible and invisible. At what point do more abstract things like acceptance, desire, memory, scent and labour enter the visual arena, and how much space do they take up, even if for a brief moment? 

Heart is like the ground.

Not due to their obscurity or the parallels between the interests of anatomy and archaeology. Heart is like the ground in that the workings of its chronometry are as persistent as gravity. In a sense, this makes them both conductors of time: the ground operates towards its endless capture, and the heart towards its gradual release. What they embody is effort versus time.

The likeness of the center and the foundation doesn’t end here. They both exert the gravitational force as their innermost depths remain unknown. In effect, much like the ground can evoke a sense of irrefutable belonging, the heart can be felt as the very epicenter of foreignness; and vice versa. – Inhumation of one, unearthing of the other.

What Alphonso Lingis came across when he visited the monolithic churches in Lalibela¹, Ethiopia, was not “a mound in the wood”; no one was buried there. There was no pyramid, no soil piled up. Instead, there was indentation, there were gaping pits from which the earth had been removed and, in place of a body, another kind of interior was laid. It could seem a site of excavation, rather than of interment – if the two were not, in essence, the same.

The churches that he talks of are carved earthwards and straight out of living rock, reachable through descending stairs, and interconnected with underground pathways and tunnels. Some of them are freestanding, which makes them a rare and unique example among their kind. The beginning of their construction is dated to the 12th century and attributed to the ruler of the same name, King Lalibela, but in truth, many facts regarding their coming into existence still remain unresolved, including as to how exactly they were built, and why.

The aim of situating them in the ground might have been a quest – as pragmatic as idealistic – for protection, durability, indestructibility. What one experiences there is quite the opposite: all-encompassing degradation, a result of a variety of natural and anthropogenic factors. In Lingis’ account, despite the exposure to the processes of the transformation towards a ruin, the place makes you want to stay, as it evokes “an instinct for the depths of rock, a sensibility for the stillness, the silence, the inexpressibility, the separation from all explanations and understanding, all the cross-wires of meaning.”

These rock-cut inward erected structures seem to belong undeniably to the very same ground they are made of. However, if there was anything that distinguishes them from, say, the Tower of Babel, the epitome of erection and dissimilarity, could it be found solely in their subterranean constitution? Does constructing them of dust to which they will indefinitely return (because, after all, that’s where they already are) make them any truer, any less posterior and less prosthetic? If the leveling attempts to perform the equalizing, does it succeed to annul difference and deferral? Or, is it all just a towering reversal?

The spatial and temporal inversions as well as standstills of such a site are captivating. But whether it was time or space that fascinated Lingis upon his visit is beside the point (although not entirely irrelevant). Lalibela is hard to reach. After a several-days’ journey, previously done on a mule, now in a jeep, one has to climb the heights of Ethiopian mountains to set foot on this remote, steep-cliffs surrounded place. What brought Lingis there is therefore of true intrigue: effort and desire. Effort, quite literally, as oxygenated blood was pumped through his vascular system against the backdrop of his body’s weight; and desire, quite literally too, as the affective determination, gravitating towards the goal. Both generated and propagated by means of the same pulse.

Once there, exposed to the extent of this difficult-to-get-to, difficult-to-conceive architectural accomplishment, while witnessing a progressive and relentless decay of its material structure, Lingis echoes the beliefs of a certain half-past time when recalling that “the sacred is in decomposition.” Hence, the inclination towards the penetrating proximity to the earth: the deeper, the more consecrated.
Not unlike the heart.

Buried in the depth of a rib cage and within the dense network of enveloping tissues, it is the solid, inaccessible reference point of one’s being: the motor of the vital functions, the sentient capacity to know ‘heartfelt’ and ‘deep-down’, a firmly rooted unifying element. – And yet, one that can be substituted. A heart deteriorates and can be replaced with another.

Considering the possibility of such prosthesis: is it stranger to receive a stranger’s heart, or a strange heart? The mere act of receiving a heart is strange in itself. And, what to make of one’s own heart then, if you think about it well enough? Once you sense its location, its beating, its life … can you really tell what makes it precisely yours, what makes it belong to exactly that place there, the inaccessible inside which, most probably, you will never know?

It took an actual transplant to install quite viscerally the thinking of otherness within the core of selfhood. When Jean-Luc Nancy had to give up his heart, extracting it from the chest, and having another one inserted, he would later write L’intrus², the intruder. There, he voices the unsettling prospect of disowning something central and vital to his existence, now gradually detaching: “If my heart was giving up and going to drop me, to what degree was it an organ of “mine,” my “own”? Was it even an organ?”

It was not the new heart, its unknown origins or existence of a previous life in another body that was foreign. At least no more than that which was revealed as the greatest stranger, impossible to ever grasp, know or appropriate: the self. Not due to the scale, size, depth or complexity of its structure and organization, but precisely due to the inclusion – or, intrusion – of the other within. This intruder can only remain there as intruder, and its designation implies at least two things: it was not invited and – it is already inside. The tension between solipsistic fantasies that resist making the outsider an invitee  and the realities of the trespass having already occurred without one’s knowing is partially amended by the necessity of this intrusion: only by means of the other can I ever utter a reflexive ‘me’. To be able to acknowledge the self, to relate to oneself, a detour through the other is required. Without the presence of exteriority that is ramified around and into everything interior, there would be only an endless territory of the latter, unable to reflect on itself in the absence of the possibility of taking any other perspective but the one of the same contemplating the same. In the light of this, the longing for continuity appears as futile as the quest for indestructibility and invariable endurance.

As Nancy writes, it is “neither logically acceptable, nor ethically admissible, to exclude all intrusion in the coming of the stranger, the foreign”. The strangeness must be preserved, for ontological and ethical reasons, which makes the continuity of selfhood fundamentally interrupted. Saying that the inside must contain the outside is as paradoxical as it is inevitable, but their pairing can lose some of its contradictory load if not conceived in terms of strict dichotomy. Exteriority and interiority are defined by mutual contamination, and the persevering line of difference that binds them is not a simple linear one.

Being at the same time bound and differing is less of a restraint than a potential: it multiplies rather than limits the possible courses of direction in relating. There are several angles to take. Lines turn, break, cross, twist, split, and bend outward or onto themselves. A heart is buried and it can be dug – not only out, but also inward, into its hollows, cavities and passages. The cardiac underground is subject to a further spacing: its chambers are as many, as vital and no less sacred as those in the grounds of Lalibela – or any other underground. In such space, in the absence of light, there persists a concealed, remote and ungraspable quality to the expanding rooms that keep unraveling during any excavating process. Then again, what is the outside and inside of the ground? Is it marked by the line of the horizon; implied in the vertical trail of magma expelled from ground’s core; or does it reside in the felt resistance of corporeal mass against the floor? In all the parallel, curved, perpendicular, and oblique layers that compose the matrix of the perceptive field, lines make the contour but not the actual distinction. Lines represent. Yet, never independently of the coordinates that set up the framework for their possibility; there is an outside of the line as well.

There are fissures and there are veins. Provided that the line is the domain of a relation, either division or connection, it is here where the relevance of openings begins to take shape. Any sort of opening – a crack, a hole, a cut, a crater, a break, a wound, a dig, a puncture, a tunnel, an incision – is an exposure that permits the passing and the merging between sides. Exposure connotes vulnerability. It is manifest in the acts of contracting and dilating, taking in and letting out, in interventions in the places of decomposition.

Finally, what outweighs the risks of cutting open either a living body or a solid rock, in order to construct another space within, is the prospect of new time being built. The issue has never been that, by setting up a new interior (however coinciding or distant in regard to what it replicates), exteriority gets established in turn. Rather, the matter in question is the time. No less than spatial, the proliferating differences are temporal. Prosthetics as extensions to and of life take effect beyond the three dimensions.

Ultimately, it is difference that forms the basis for construction. A distance to be overcome between two surface points, an earthward vector, an electrocardiogram: it is effort that is depicted in a baseline.

 

1 The text “Lalibela” appears in two Lingis’ publications, with slight modifications: Lingis, A. (2000). The return of extinct religions. New Nietzsche Studies, 4(3/4), 15-28. Lingis, A. (2004). Trust. Minneapolis & London.
2 Nancy, J. L., & Hanson, S. (2002). L’intrus. CR: The new centennial REview, 2(3), 1-14.issues/29/lessons-in- cruising.

Maša Tomšič (1986, Slovenia) is a Lisbon-based researcher, trained as a psychologist, neuroscientist and photographer with a background in curatorial studies. Currently, she holds a doctoral grant for the interdisciplinary PhD program in Philosophy of Science, Art, Technology and Society at the University of Lisbon, with a project that deals with the sense of touch and its relational aspect, namely, its role in intersubjectivity and aesthetic experience.

Marianne Skaarup Jakobsen (1985, Denmark) is a Copenhagen-based artist, working predominantly with sculpture. She was trained at Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam, Netherlands, and Malmö Art Academy, Sweden. Since 2012, she has been in residence and exhibiting in various galleries and museums in Sweden, Portugal and Denmark.

Several days earlier than the legal permit allowed, at 4:30 a.m. on May 17, 2020, the National Theater (Albanian: Teatri Kombëtar) located in Albania’s capital, Tirana, was demolished by police bulldozers under the orders of the Albanian government. This demolition, which was proposed by prime minister Edi Rama in 2018 (and which he attempted as early as the year 2000 during his time as the city Mayor) had been met with fierce resistance from some of the theater’s artists, political activists, civilians, and members of the opposition.¹ Mandates from politicians to demolish historically significant buildings is not uncommon in post-civil war Albania.²  The Pyramid of Tirana (Albanian: Piramida), a former museum designed by Albania’s tyrant ruler Enver Hoxha’s daughter and her husband, suffered a similar story and almost a similar end.³ 

The typical narrative—or rather propaganda—to support demolition proposals for historically significant buildings is typically based on two conditions: said building is deteriorating and its presence is reminiscent of a painful past. Though both statements contain factual truths, the narrative is woefully absurd and even paradoxical. The state-owned Pyramid and National Theater are in fact deteriorating because the government has consistently failed to prioritize the maintenance of these structures. It is also true that each building register times that dilapidated the land and tormented its people: the 50-year long tyrannical totalitarian communist regime of the second half of the 20th century in the case of the Pyramid and the Italian fascist colonization at the start of World War II for the National Theater. However, both buildings are prominent cultural institutions regardless of the conception and construction of the built structures. With that in mind, I can’t help but question the motivations behind Rama’s unwavering will—and the measures he took—in this recent case to demolish the National Theater. Putting aside the financial incentives exposed in his blatant corruption schemes ⁴ (rather normal behavior for a lot of government officials), let’s instead trace the invisible forces that propel the desire for such large-scale and arguably unlawful demolitions.

The flagrant⁵ demolition of the National Theater materializes a deteriorating and increasingly polarized relationship between the public and the state. There are two distinct (and by association paradoxical) instantiations of oppression that have been infused in the general public and the state. Before offering a thought experiment for creative discourse, it’s important to note the most peculiar aspect of the situation: for a people that has been occupied, colonized, invaded, ruled with an iron fist, isolated from the world, stripped of more than half of its collective GDP overnight, ethnically cleansed—to name but a few of its catastrophes over the last 600 years—how is it possible that during the demolition of an institution built during the fascist colonization, the same people placed themselves physically inside the building in a final attempt to protect it?⁶  Are they still under the lure of its original western promise (a Stockholm Syndrome of sorts)? Or do they occupy a different conceptual and lived plane than that of their government and the complacent part of the community?

Part 1 – The Paradoxical Axis

Designed in 1938 by Italian Architect Giulio Berté (during the Italian fascist era under Benito Mussolini) and built by the Pater Costruzioni Edilizia construction company in 1940, the National Theater was one among several notable buildings that were part of a new urban planning trategy designed in the style of Italian Rationalism⁷. Italian rationalism was exercised in Italy and imposed on most of the Italian Fascist Party’s colonies (including Somalia, Libya, and the Dodecanese Islands)⁸.
In Albania, it was particularly easy to enforce this new design-paradigm because it offered an ordered, modernist aesthetic to an ancient and unruly land ⁹. Enter oppression instantiation 1. The intricate history of Italy’s occupation of Albania and the handover of all building projects exclusively to Italian construction companies is deep and lengthy (to do it justice, you would have to start with the Roman colonization of Illyria 230 BCE–169 CE¹⁰). Again leaving power and financial gains aside, there are two primary circumstances that permitted the rise of Italian Rationalism in Albania that are important to the question of oppression, and more particularly, the more dangerous and detrimental ones, such as the invisible and unforeseeable ones—deeply rooted in the psyche and body. For one, this occupation was successful, sudden, and bloodless because the strength of the Albanian Resistance Forces was waning—they had been fighting for independence in various capacities since 1479. In addition, the public was indoctrinated to believe that architectural and urban designs by modern Italian architects and planners promised a speedy one-way ticket to the “West”. Allow me to rest and expand on the sentiment for another moment: One of the most ancient tribes of the Balkan peninsula, who speak one of the oldest languages in the world and who have millenia of historical, cultural, and traditional richness, discounted their capacity to contribute to the “West” (or to reside in the margin for that matter) at the turn of the 20th century because they had fallen so behind in industrial power from exhausting all resources towards fending off foreign invasion for almost 500 years. That’s not the worst part.
Enter oppression instantiation 2. The most painful part of this continuous history is that, analogously, present-day Prime Minister Edi Rama continues to discount the Albanian people and their seemingly inexhaustible culture by demolishing and completely erasing a performing arts institution that had supported the accumulation of intellectual and artistic capital in the country for the last 80 years. In eerily similar details, Rama justified the demolition of the National Theater by replacing it with a new theater designed by Danish corporate firm BIG Architects (including a hidden agenda for the construction of three or four private luxury residential towers on the same property¹¹) in what he said was going to be “[A]nother cultural destination of European proportions.” ¹² Make no mistake that Rama’s “European” refers to a Europe that aligns with a neo-liberal image of the West exclusively.

Under the same narrative, other westerns architects whose projects have been endorsed and commissioned by Rama’s government include: Italian based Archea Associati, Belgium based 51N4E, Netherlands based MVRDV, and Austria based Coop Himmelblau. Most of the proposals/built works from these commissions offer at best fleeting notions of contemporaneity with their corporate aesthetics and are purely capital-driven, neo-liberal nightmares. Rama’s fascination with “European proportions” displays a complex set of desires (shared by many non-western populations), including the desire to belong to the Occident regardless of the price-tag¹³ and to eventually be accessioned to the European Union. To reiterate, invisible forms of oppression are powerful and deeply ingrained, and they create these catastrophic conditions where one attempts to escape a previous occurrence of coercion by exactly using the same force (i.e. using the same oppression narratives of the past that the present is trying to escape).

Part 2 – Insights for Creative Discourse

“‘If Europe only understood,’ he says (and it should be remarked that he rarely, if ever, classes himself as European)— ”

Edith Durham, 1905, reporting from her trip to the Balkans on behalf of the Macedonian Relief Committee.¹⁴

Reducing the existence and importance of the National Theater to one characteristic—the fascist ideologies of the time period it was built in—is in and of itself oppressive, and it can even be aligned with racist and xenophobic tactics of western right-wing extremists. It is indisputable that this institution carried an inestimable amount of cultural cache for its people. Its inflammatory demolition caused demonstrations to erupt instantly at the realization that—among other things—history repeated itself in top-down fascist-like manners reminiscent of those from 80 years ago. For the people, this is not simply a fight for the theater, but also a fight for democracy itself¹⁵. Yet, Rama’s and city mayor Erion Veliaj’s concern for the people was nonexistent partly due to their unwavering conviction that they are forging the path towards a progressive future; there is a strange we-know-best tone emanating from their government. 

Slogans such as “Unë jam teatri” (translated: I am the theater) and speeches from the various continuous demonstrations by artists and activists describe a unique relationship to the physical building, its space, and its associated cultural collective. Sentiments such as these—being the theater, feeling that the theater is part of a person’s body, and associating the birth of many artistic and creative institutions with the physical presence of the building¹⁶—are extremely captivating from an architecture perspective.

Contemporary thinkers such as architecture critic Sylvia Lavin and political theorist Jane Bennett have theorized extensively on culture, surrounding, and being/becoming in the world through affective experiences and phenomena. In her Architecture in Extremis article, Lavin argues for a rejection of standardized contemporary architectural proposals in favour of “temporal flows” and “architectural ambiances.”¹⁷ If Lavin saw BIG’s proposal for the new National Theater—shaped like a bowtie, placed on a flat ground, oriented in alignment with its property lines, represented in typical contemporary materials, and rendered with predetermined behavior of programmed space—she surely would be dismayed by it. I would argue that her call to allow objects and participation to occupy interior space or architecture at large can generate new productive ideas. She suggests the method of “churning” for architectural alternatives. To be specific, Lavin argues that taking existing things¹⁸ from the past and putting them on display again out of turn—a non-ordered, cyclical return of things—can be a form of active resistance against the standardized architectural projects that emerge out of a lineage of embedded and inherited predispositions (modern, post-modern, neo-modern, etc.).

 

From another point of view but in alignment with Lavin’s thinking, Bennett, in her recent book Influx and Efflux: Writing Up with Walt Whitman offers an alternative understanding of the world through the phenomena of atmosphere. She argues that all material things make up an atmosphere filled with forces and actants whose primary mode of communication is not just the human language, but rather lyrical and haptic, and by extension, indeterminate and non-ordered.¹⁹ In Bennett’s proposal, by flattening the material structure of humans, animals, plants, and minerals, meaning and value are then not only human, but rather they reside in a shared material continuum. Such is also the sentiment from the artists and activists that have defended their theater with their bodies. I am the theater. Even after the demolition, when the built structure could no longer be saved, the theater was not lost; it continued to live with the people who felt its presence. A piece of debris carries its essence, such as the one requested by performance artist/actor Neritan Liçaj after the demonstration.²⁰ 

With these parallels in mind, it seems that the theater, the people, and history suggest a context that was primed for a productive, invigorating, and refreshing yet-to-be-known architectural alternative: one that did not rely on mimicking the West and, in doing so, repeating atrocious cycles of human and civil injustices. This was a perfect case where with some recognition of self-worth, conversations with practitioners, critics and theorists, and the involvement of the people that occupy the building with such “lyrical force,”²¹ a new model could have emerged. Sadly, history found a way, yet again, to coldly betray our present.   

Parting Thoughts:

The erasure of the National Theater is emblematic of the desire for Rama’s government to suppress the intellectual and artistic wealth of the people of Albania. In the pursuit of liberation from such modes of coercion, the Albanian people reacted strongly to the demolition proposal but to no avail. As previously mentioned, the maintenance neglect had admittedly left the theater in a rather deteriorated state. But in the wake of such destruction, negating the binary narrative of old vs. new, or east vs. west might offer a way out of this oppression. Following Lavin’s and Bennett’s calls for resistance and non-human centric lenses, a collapse might occur: a collapse that encompasses binaries by stripping them from their previous value systems—the East and the West, the old historical theater and new contemporary interventions, the old rough algae-binding cement and the new shiny synthetic siding, the dirty and the clean—into a flattened continuum that creates an atmosphere of events and indeterminate phenomena. I am the theater.

1 Monika Kryemadhi, a Member of Parliament, leader of the Socialist Movement for Integration Party (Albanian: Lëvizja Socialiste për Integrim, or LSI), wife of the current President (head of state) was one of 30 people detained at the demonstrations on May 17th, 2020. See: Dellanna, Alessio. “Wife of Albania’s President Detained during Protest.” Euronews, 18 May 2020, www.euronews.com/2020/05/18/wife-of-albania-s-president-detained-during-clashes-over-national-theatre-demolition.
2The Albanian civil war was primarily caused by the collapse of the ponzi pyramid schemes in the late 1990s.
3 Nikoli, Fatmira. Albania Activists Lament Demolition of Hoxha Pyramid. 28 May 2018, balkaninsight.com/2012/05/30/albania-activists-lament-demolition-of-hoxha-pyramid/.
4On May 8th, 2020, the Albanian government transferred the land ownership of the theatre from the Ministry of Culture to the Municipality. This transfer signified that public land could now legally be used to develop private and commercial projects. See: Taylor, Alice. “Albanian Government Hands Ownership of National Theatre Land to Municipality of Tirana – Exit – Explaining Albania.” Exit, 10 May 2020, exit.al/en/2020/05/09/albanian-government-hands-ownership-of-national-theatre-land-to-municipality-of-tirana/.
5 Çela, Lindita, and Gjergj Erebara. “Zbulohet Projekti i ‘Fushës’ Me Afro 90 Mijë Metra Katrorë Kulla Dhe Teatër.” Reporter.al, 27 Jan. 2020, www.reporter.al/zbulohet-projekti-i-fushes-me-afro-90-mije-metra-katrore-kulla-dhe-teater/.
6 According to Romeo Kodra, Nerital Liçaj was inside the building during the demolition. Liçaj and other supporters and activists had been staying in the theater on 24hr cycles in order to protect it from demolition. See: “Cynicism and collaborationists in arts. Destroying monuments and art in Albania.” presentation in the framework of “Friday 17th: Two Months Without Teatri Kombëtar”, organized by Forum dell’Art Contemporanea Italiana, 17/07/2020. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-AGaM2nDfvc&t=7358s
7 Mandates for a new urban plan had been long-in-the-making and had started after World War I with mutual relations between Musolini and the Albanian king at the time, King Zog. See: Peter, Tase. “Italy and Albania: The Political and Economic Alliance and the Italian Invasion of 1939.” Academicus International Scientific Journal, vol. 6, 2012, pp. 62–70., doi:10.7336/academicus.2012.06.06.
8 Fuller, Mia. “Building Power: Italy’s Colonial Architecture and Urbanism, 1923-1940.” Cultural Anthropology, vol. 3, no. 4, 1988, pp. 455–487.
9 The new Urban Plan divided the city into old and new.
10 Durham, M. Edith, and Robert Elsie. Twenty Years of Balkan Tangle. Centre for Albanian Studies, 2015.
11 Let alone the fact that he flagrantly transferred land ownership rights to the municipality without following constitutional law. The backdoor deal with Fusha SHPK (speculated such that Fusha agrees to build the new Theater at no cost if they allowed them to build luxury towers on the theater’s) was not unlike King Zog’s with Musolini’s government and trade business (and banks). See: Kodra, Romeo. “Architectural Monumentalism in Transitional Albania.” Studia Ethnologica Croatica, vol. 29, 2017, pp. 193–224., doi:10.17234/sec.29.6.
12 Block, India. “Protests in Tirana Ahead of BIG Project as Albanian National Theatre Demolished.” Dezeen, 21 May 2020, www.dezeen.com/2020/05/19/protests-tirana-ahead-big-albanian-national-theatre-demolished-news/.
13 It would take another essay to describe the geo-political intricacies of Albania as the tug-of-war land between two giants: the Orthodox/Catholics to its northwest (the Occident) and the Islamic Turks to its southwest (the Orient, the Near East).
14 Durham, M. E. The Burden of the Balkans. Forgotten Books, 2017.
15 A lot of the demonstration chantings were “Liri, Demokraci” which translates to “Freedom, Democracy”. This chant has a long and weighted history in the country’s political transitional periods.
16 Taylor, Alice. “Albanian Government Hands Ownership of National Theatre Land to Municipality of Tirana – Exit – Explaining Albania.” Exit, 10 May 2020, exit.al/en/2020/05/09/albanian-government-hands-ownership-of-national-theatre-land-to-municipality-of-tirana/.
17  Lavin, Sylvia. “Architecture In Extremis.” Log, no. 22, 2011, pp. 60. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/41765708. Accessed Aug. 2019.
18 Thing is used here in an anthropological sense such that items, objects, ideas, resist their definitive boundaries. This way, a thing can be material or immaterial, active or passive, and can be used to describe essence that can flow from one form into another.
19 Bennett, Jane. Influx and Efflux: Writing Up with Walt Whitman. Duke University Press, 2020, ch 2, 8.
20 Neritan Liçaj requested a piece of rock from the theater after the demolition. He announced publicly that he will attempt to place in the foundations of the new theater if things go according to his plans. Otherwise, he will request in his will to be buried with the rock in his (translated from alb.) “forever-after place of living when my time comes”.
21 Bennett, Jane. Influx and Efflux: Writing Up with Walt Whitman. Duke University Press, 2020, pp 74-77.

Viola Ago (b. Lushnjë, Albania) is an architectural designer, educator, and practitioner. She directs MIRACLES Architecture and is the current Wortham Fellow at the Rice University School of Architecture. Recently, Viola was awarded the Yessios Visiting Professorship at the Ohio State University Knowlton School of Architecture and the Muschenheim Fellowship at the University of Michigan Taubman College of Architecture. Viola earned her M.Arch degree from SCI-Arc, and a B.ArchSc from Ryerson University. Her written work has been published by Routledge and Park Books, as well as in Log, AD Magazine, Offramp, Acadia Conference Proceedings, JAE, TxA, Architect’s Newspaper, and Archinect.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Barely a month into online teaching I noticed a new type of debate occurring during university faculty meetings. Suddenly, it seemed there were numerous ongoing arguments over which software would be best suited for distance learning. Should we use Zoom, Microsoft Teams, Google Meet, or the odd sounding BlueJeans? What’s better, Slack or Blackboard? How does the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) and security factor into our software preferences? It wasn’t a simple argument over specific computer applications; individuals had to convince other faculty that their preferred tool was the best, the most powerful, the most productive, or the most efficient. Absent from these judgements on software, however, was any mention of compassion, community, pleasure, or delight. No one associated software with anything meant to spark joy. There was only productivity and efficiency.

While quarantine brought to the surface many broad systemic injustices and inequalities, it also revealed some smaller oppressive technological structures that had remained up until then largely invisible. Not only did online teaching call attention to a massive gap in internet access and digital surveillance systems reveal their nefarious role in policing, the software we engage with on a daily basis began to appear increasingly cruel in an already cruel world. Zoom’s lack of security led directly to countless hateful zoombombings; Twitter’s image algorithm was proven to actively suppress non-white skin tones; and despite initially pausing their Creative Cloud subscription fees, Adobe continued to hold their users hostage and dependent on their proprietary tools. Perhaps most unnoticed of all was the emergence of spyware-esque remote proctoring software, a somewhat organic by-product of institutionalized examination protocols sold to universities and testing companies to monitor at-home exams. Far from the dark web’s version of villainy, these episodes constitute a kind of quotidian cruelty, an almost boring malevolence that most of us ignore as we attempt to remain productive. Our ability to look past these phenomena or perhaps dismiss them as simple glitches or errors is a testament to the normalization of software’s cruelty. As Ruha Benjamin reminds us in Race After Technology, a software glitch is a “slippery place…between fleeting and durable, micro-interactions and macro-structures, individual hate and institutional indifference.”¹ In other words, glitches and errors in systems reveal at best ignorance or indifference and at worst hatefulness and racism. Think back to the resignation one feels when a program crashes and the only option is to click OK. Or the helplessness one encounters when a much needed file is incompatible with their current application version. Such episodes not only make for sympathetic anecdotes (including cathartic internet memes), but also illustrate how user-friendliness does not necessarily mean compassion.

A big problem with user-friendliness is its reliance on extracting value. Contrary to popular belief, software is not made for users, it is made for the value users can generate. Whatever kindness we might perceive in these tools is purely transactional. A computer application need only be friendly if it helps users achieve an external monetizable goal, not necessarily an internal one. As a result, software’s imagined users must resort to customization in order to cope with the endless process of being monetized either through time or labor. Workers are allowed colorful backgrounds if it means they can stay attentive during Zoom meetings; individuals may turn on dark mode to withstand staring at their screens for longer periods of time. These ostensibly user-friendly features feed directly into Big Tech’s play-as-you-work ideology, which, under the guise of compassion, often acts as a trojan horse to extract as much value from individuals as feasibly possible while they play.

More coping mechanism than invited attitude, play in software is a means of dealing with the fact that software is not made for us. Or so the writer and video game critic Ian Bogost claims in his book, Play Anything. After describing it as “a way of operating a constrained system in a gratifying way,” Bogost goes on to note that play is essentially turning “misery into fun,” a way to cope with the banality of the world.² In design, for instance, users typically play freely or use software tools incorrectly to achieve novelty. Play, particularly in form-making and representation, at times leads to innovation. But Bogost’s kind of play relies entirely on individual resistance or creative freedom that is not always afforded to all. Moreover, to find joy and amusement in the mundane world largely not built for all of us is more of an anesthetic than a radical way of being. Instead of relying on individuals to train themselves into seeing the world as a playground, a more profound position would be to make the world more intentionally playful. To make it a place where we don’t have to gamify mundane situations but are instead invited to play by its systems inverts the logic of late capitalism. Is there room beyond the live-work and play-as-you-work models of economic extraction that pervade contemporary life for more purposely playful exchanges? Without compassion and care from a system’s designers, play is simply a tactic for enduring that system’s indifference to us.

After reading Curtis Roth’s call for new modes of self-care, I thought about the potential for emotionally comforting and compassionate software. Although current business models for software companies do not offer room for tools that can heal without turning a profit, current calls for caring infrastructures have gained momentum as a result of the global pandemic. In the summer of 2020, for example, the School for Poetic Computation in New York asked students in their course, Digital Love Languages, “What if all the software we used was made by people who love us?”³ This provocation suggested a potential fusion between programming and compassion beyond “user-friendliness” that may engender new models for software design. Around the same time, architects in the U.K. expressed their dissatisfaction with the prominent industry-standard software, Autodesk Revit.⁴ In a letter that gained notoriety in architectural press outlets, a number of leading international firms painted Revit as highly constraining and a tool with which users must constantly wrestle. If professional software is subject to the whims of a profession, then architecture’s current frustration with its relationship to software also hints at a collective desire for alternative approaches.

To shift the perception of professional and productivity software, however, requires a radical re-thinking of professionalization and industry standardization altogether. It may also require developers to imagine tools for small groups rather than universal audiences. Often it is this general applicability and desire for a wide consumer base that pressures software developers to keep adding features with every update, to buy out other start-up companies, and, quite frankly, to make their tools anything but fun.

While it may appear daunting to reverse this mode of thinking, video games offer some insights. In contrast to productivity software, games are built for satisfaction. They shift the location of value from product to experience: a game’s value is in its playability. Above all, games provide alternative structures for communication, labor, and creative thinking centered around amusement. Take Nintendo’s Animal Crossing: New Horizons, for example. Released just as many of us were getting restless at home during quarantine, Animal Crossing offered comfort, escapism, and delight in what Ian Bogost called the game’s “cute pastoralism.”⁵ Combining quotidian goals with visual delight, Animal Crossing became the ideal quarantine pastime. Sourdough bakers and Peloton riders found in it a means to stay productive. Those who needed an escape saw an alternate reality. And for those in need of routine, it provided delightful rituals such as harvesting fruit or planting flowers. Bogost even went as far as to label the game “a political hypothesis about how a different kind of world might work.”⁶ More significantly, Animal Crossing offered indefinite playability. Much like Electronic Arts’s The Sims, the game does not end. It also involves intricate labor and goals, so in a way, it is a productivity-oriented virtual platform. Why then does the labor enacted within this virtual world appear far removed from that which we encounter in Microsoft Excel or Autodesk Revit? If building a custom home in The Sims requires a similar information dataset as a BIM file and methodically harvesting your fruit in Animal Crossing is conceptually similar to plugging data values into spreadsheets, why must one be so much less satisfying than the other?

Video games also provide an alternative economic model for software production. Like music and film, video game production is now split into major and independent developers. The former, referred to as AAA game studios includes figures like Nintendo and Electronic Arts; the latter encompasses small studios and self-publishers. Unburdened by the market obligations of the bigger publishers, indie game developers have produced some of the most experimental and delightful virtual experiences out today, from the visually striking aimless wandering of ThatGameCompany’s Flower and Adam Robinson-yu’s A Short Hike to the heartwarming empathy of Popcannibal’s letter-writing game Kind Words (lo fi chill beats to write to) to Julian Glander’s quirky simulation of art school life, ART SQOOL. Unlike Microsoft, Autodesk, or Adobe, which seek to monopolize their respective fields, these games stand independently, cater to smaller audiences, and address various perceptions of delight. Removing the economic burden of a vast user base and all-in-one solutions allows software developers to craft bespoke, intimate, and diverse experiences. Something like an indie subset of design software focused on delight could be a radically liberating and compassionate form of care.

Although software that makes us feel good might not sound like a radical proposition, it might be exactly what we need right now. For a start, let’s imagine software not simply as a tool, but as an instrument, something that can be tuned and played and enjoyed. Let’s also collectively seek out alternative mediums for work where we may share experiences and communicate meaningfully with each other beyond the supposedly neutral sterility of skeuomorphic pages, spreadsheets, CAD layouts, talking head grids, and chat dialogues. There must be something between productivity software’s utility and video game frivolity. As of now these sites are hazy and difficult to find; they might just need to be designed.

 1 Ruha Benjamin, Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code (Medford, MA: Polity Press, 2019).
2 Ian Bogost, Play Anything: The Pleasure of Limits, The Uses of Boredom, & The Secret of Games (New York: Basic Books, 2016).
3 Melanie Hoff, Max Fowler, Adina Glickstein, and Amber Officer-Narvasa, “Digital Love Languages,” accessed December 19, 2020, https://lovelanguages.melaniehoff.com/
4 Matt Hickman, “Leading architecture firms pen open letter to Autodesk over rising costs, sluggish development,” The Architect’s Newspaper, July 27, 2020, accessed December 19, 2020, https://www.archpaper.com/2020/07/leading-architecture-firms-pen-open-letter-to-autodesk/
5 Ian Bogost, “The Quiet Revolution of Animal Crossing,” The Atlantic, April 15, 2020, accessed December 19, 2020, https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2020/04/animal-crossing-isnt-escapist-its-political/610012/
6 Bogost, “Animal Crossing”.

 

Galo Canizares is a designer, writer, and educator. His work blends absurdity, genre fiction, world-making, simulation, and parafiction to address issues in technology and the built environment. He is the recipient of the 2016-17 Howard E. LeFevre ’29 Emerging Practitioner Fellowship, and in 2018 was awarded the Christos Yessios Visiting Professorship at The Ohio State University. His writings have been published in various journals and he is the author of Digital Fabrications: Designer Stories for a Software-Based Planet, a collection of essays on software and design published by Applied Research & Design. He co-directs the architectural practice office ca.

 

 

Vision has always been among the structuring topoi of architecture as a discipline. The relationship of vision to the built environment has been renegotiated by digital technologies: smartphone cameras, satellites, image recognition software, and new spectral ranges of vision have created unfamiliar temporal and spatial relationships that do not correspond to human cognition. Technology now mediates the visibility of objects, and new structures present themselves in varying degrees of obscurity. Buildings can be viewed and rendered through an interface, recreated with point clouds or reconstructed through the lens of algorithms. Moreover, the definition of “vision” has to be enlarged to encompass data that can be obtained from household appliances (laundry loads, waste, floor plans surveyed by Roomba vacuum cleaners), wearables (heart rates and health monitors), and everyday technologies of all types and scales. The influence of new technologies is also characterized by their ubiquity: we all live digitally-mediated lives, feeding data—visual and otherwise—to the machines around us. 

This new condition defines a space of virtuality, in which multiple digital spaces are inscribed on top of physical environments, converging and intersecting across time-scales into a dynamic field of simultaneous, transnational temporalities. Recognizing this, architects must take into account many possible technological perspectives, all of which operate apart from the traditional relationships to the human figure. 

Paul Virilo responds to this situation by negating the need for physical architecture. In “The Overexposed City”, he writes, “if there are any monuments today, they are certainly not of the visible order, despite the twists and turns of architectural excess… this monumental disproportion now resides within the obscure luminescence of terminals, consoles and other electronic nightstands”¹. But the converse perspective views the infrastructure which powers our digital lives as embodying a contemporary definition of monument. The undersea cables, the data centers, the power stations, the servers, the piles of electronic waste. All of these undergird our information economy, and define a new architecture of contemporary power.

One might notice the importance of camouflage in buildings and their sited relationships as already being a reflection of these new monuments. Opposed to the decadence of Apple and Google’s corporate headquarters, the banality of data centers appears as the deepest form of camouflage: a black box that minimizes what can be deciphered from outside. Similarly, the layers of polyethylene and steel wires which encase submarine communications cables hide from view fibre-optic cables which represent more than 100 years of development and billions of dollars of investment. What these examples tell us is that camouflage is no longer a problem of legibility between two and three-dimensions—as seen in animal prey, faux aerial villages, WWI warships painted in dazzle camouflauge, or even Hito Steyerl’s “How Not to be Seen: A Fucking Didactic Educational.MOV File”. Instead, one must consider the panopticon of digital vision, balanced against the absolute need for reliability, speed and security.

A striking example of this style of power infrastructure is the Pionen data center, buried below the White Mountains in Stockholm, Sweden and occupying the inside of a former command center and nuclear bunker. The Swedish internet service provider Bahnhof converted the bunker into a datacenter in 2008, and it took another two years to blast out an additional 141,000 cubic feet of space needed for backup generators and server racks. For a while, WikiLeaks stored their servers at Pionen. Designed to withstand a hydrogen bomb attack, Pionen is 30 meters below granite and strategically placed in its cold climate in order to offset the heat produced by the high concentration of servers. At the same time, Pionen features fountains, greenhouses, simulated daylight and a saltwater fish tank.

 

An early precedent is Sir John Soane’s Bank of England, adjacent to the “Ring of Steel,” which stores £257 billion worth of gold bars in underground vaults beneath an urban center. Each bar has a serial number etched on it, allowing for it to be circulated without leaving the shelf. Ornamentation is eliminated from the physical space that houses the memories, secrets and raw data of contemporary society.

 

 

Further west, the AT&T Long Lines Building² Manhattan is a windowless, 170m tall structure that was the likely site of the NSA mass surveillance hub codenamed TITANPOINTE. Yet, windows are perhaps the clearest unit in which traditional (not synthetic) definitions of vision and architecture intersect: they frame views, admit light, and filter interior from exterior. In her book The Virtual Window: From Alberti to Microsoft, Anne Friedberg enlarges the terminology of windows beyond building apertures to include the windows on our computers and screens, which frame new views. Moreover, as Friedberg notes: “Alberti’s window was not a transparent “window on the world,” but provided us with a Renaissance root for a “windowed elsewhere”—a virtual space that exists on the virtual plane of representation.”³ Or, as Deleuze writes: “Doors, windows, box office windows, skylights, car windows, mirrors, are all frames.”⁴ But windows have become increasingly contested under the influence of new technologies. Thus, paradoxically, the resources needed to power our world of screen-windows are housed within monumental, windowless structures, with no consideration made to human occupation.

WAYS OF SEEING

These windowless black boxes and buried vaults illustrate the mismatch between the rapid pace of technological change and the conception and deployment of architectural responses. A building is designed at a specific temporal, technological and infrastructural moment. In contrast, a new sensor can render decades’ of design solutions worthless. 

Visual camouflage designed for eyes and cameras can no longer conceal subjects from viewers, but rather today the definition of vision must be enlarged to encompass data and new ways of seeing. Through the collection of (non-visual) data, it is possible to recreate the geometries and spatial qualities of a plan. Recently, information about 3 the locations, plans and staffing of active US military sites was made publicly available when the fitness app “Strava” released a map showing activities tracked by the app’s users. Other apps make it possible to visualize how materials move across dynamic systems, while satellite images allow the fluctuations of stock prices to be predicted by tracking the duration and number of cars parked outside office parks. Buildings can now be read as the combined representation of Roomba data, waste output, biometric tracking and utilities. 

All of this blurs the delineation of what were once public and private territories. But abrasions in the urban fabric still allow for the existence of hidden “shadow zones”, which expand and contract amorphously while offering passages to move through undetected. These off-grid spaces, no-service areas permit the individual to hide within the map; they function as a kind of digital camouflage. Whereas camouflage was formerly based on deception and trickery, the new relationship to vision must be defined by escape, diversion and translation across media. A value gets removed from an offshore financial account, or a political refugee renounces their citizenship. Inevitably, the architect crosses these hierarchies in their system of representation. Design today comes with a choice: to work in service of the technological panopticon, to enhance its vision, or to work against it. Whether to pick the viewer, or the subject.

 1 Virilio, Paul, and Steve Redhead. “The Overexposed City.” The Paul Virilio Reader. Columbia University Press, 2004. pp.446.
2 Warnecke, John Carl. AT&T Long Lines Building. Manhattan, New York, 1969.
3 Friedberg, Anne. The Virtual Window: from Alberti to Microsoft. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 2009. pp.243.
4 Deleuze, Gilles. Cinema. Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, 1996.

Further reading:
Bastani, Aaron. Fully Automated Luxury Communism: a Manifesto. London: Verso, 2019.
Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality. Vol. 1. Harmondsworth: Penguin/Pelican, 1981. Print.
Le Roy, Julien David. Les Ruines des plus beaux monuments de la Grèce. N.p.: n.p., 1758. Princeton University Plates.
Mozingo, Louise A. Pastoral Capitalism: A History of Suburban Corporate Landscapes. The MIT Press, 2016.

Gillian Shaffer is an architect, researcher and faculty member at UCLA Architecture and Urban Design, whose work investigates the impacts of new technologies on cities, space and visual media. Her design work has been exhibited in the Venice Biennale: Fundamentals (2014), the Seoul International Biennale on Architecture and Urbanism (2017), and several galleries in New York. She holds a Master of Architecture II from Princeton University, where she received a certificate in Media + Modernity. Gillian is the co-founder of the Los Angeles based practice, sl Collective, and has previously worked at architecture offices in Berlin, Tokyo, Boston, and New York City. 

 

 “Houston, we’ve had a problem”: In 1970 during the Apollo 13 — which was to be the third lunar landing mission, an oxygen tank of the spacecraft exploded and damaged the ship. The explosion changed the spacecraft’s trajectory. Without oxygen, needed for electricity and for breathing, both propulsion and life support systems could not function. Quickly, the mission control team in Houston had to identify the best strategies to safely bring the crew back home. 

The Apollo 13 mission is known as the first use of a so-called digital twin — a digital instance of a physical entity, object, system, or person that can be updated in real time to reflect the changes in its target system (so-called physical twin).¹ With the continuous stream of data from the spacecraft and the reports of the crew, the command control team was able to modify computer simulations of the mission and the physical models of the ship to reflect the unfolding changes in its state, and to test and determine strategies for action. This proto digital twin made up of coordinated simulators, computer systems, and full-scale physical models was a critical device used both as a training site for crew and command control, and as a design tool for the development of mission protocols and scenarios. Lastly, after the accident, it played an integral role in returning the crew back to Earth. 

50 years after the successful failure² of Apollo 13, digital twin technology is made possible through the combination of Internet-of-Things, high-precision geolocation referencing, RFID, LiDAR, Real-Time 3D, machine learning, artificial intelligence and other technologies. Digital twin is claimed to be applicable in virtually any industry and to any object, living being, or system. Not yet available as a product on a massive scale, this imaginary³ technology is being developed and invested in by big tech players, studied and experimented within academic research, put into industry reports by global consultancies, awed, praised and feared in the media. 

RT *real time* 

In the context of architectural design, models and simulations have historically worked as design tools, risk management devices, core disciplinary acts, and products. Conventionally preceding the building, drawings (considered as early geometrical simulations), digital or physical models, and other forms of representation had a sequential position within the architecture at least since the Renaissance. Today, with digital twins used in architectural, urban, or other territorial decision making, as well as in research and design, neither the product or the model are ever complete, the iterative design and calibration process between physical and virtual instances virtually never stops.

 

Digital twin amalgamates the design logic of images with predictive computation. Capturing reality and (re) producing it as Euclidean geometry, volumetric data, or a dashboard, digital twin technology continues the legacy of cartesian mapping, Albertian projectional notation, CAD and BIM. In synchronization with their physical counterparts (AKA target systems), digital twins mix – up design, governance and information management. In doing so, digital twin is seen to shift the digital imaging from being notational towards becoming operational, beyond indexical and sequential towards instrumental and synchronous. An instance of a digital twin as a managerial object, changes the status of digital image and spatial data in relationship to the actual space, and produces new forms of temporality and objectivity. Digital twin becomes an operational device for shaping and steering the reality. 

In this regard, digital twins continue the legacy of technologies and techniques that automate visual perception as an instrument to capture and represent information about three-dimensional space, via identification of individual shapes and distances. Lev Manovich calls this way of perception visual nominalism.⁴ Starting with wooden frames with physical grids, and other kinds of mechanical and optical devices to assist in perspectival painting, today the technologies of automation of visual nominalism are digital tools that capture, record and interpret the information, both visual, and beyond the capacity of human vision. 

Fundamentally, the duration of time between information gathering and production of image has become negligible. With the aid of remote sensing devices, information previously inaccessible to human senses, can be tracked and instantaneously delivered and represented in a human-legible. As with photography, where perspectival representations of real objects could be mechanized, now LIDAR scans and digital photogrammetry software enable the capturing of volumetric data that can be converted into a three-dimensional model in a matter of minutes. 

Virtual absence of delay between recording (data capture), event (new data occurrence) and the representation of the recording (data displayed on digital twin interface), produces a different kind of temporality, conditioned by the possibility of the inscription of the momentary. To update Bernard Stiegler’s statement on real-time technologies, with digital twins, time has become an interface.⁵ The time is delocalized and de-realized, as real-time connection between virtual and physical twins both negates the distance and makes the duration negligible. The reality thus is constructed through synchronization, rather than reflection. 

Digital twin connects the instantly collected and represented information with its target system. Used for performance simulations, vehicle crash tests, virtual destruction, and any possible experimentation prior to any change in the target system, digital twin becomes the perfected version of its counterpart. As it is updated according to the target system’s changes, so the system adjusts to the digital model. Synchronization, at times, makes either a digital twin or its target system invisible—- as digital twin stops being a static representation, and becomes a “ghost” of the far-flung machine. 

-3D- *three dimensional* 

In 1998 the vice-president of the US Al Gore created a vision of Digital Earth—- a virtual spinning globe saturated with georeferenced data. The initial vision of Digital Earth was meant to be the planet’s twin, in a sense that it would reflect the changes taking place on a planetary scale — from climate to the built environment and infrastructure. The project would aggregate the data from disparate sources, captured by military and corporate satellites, airplanes, and sensors around the earth. This real-time, interactive replica of the Earth was aimed to become a system of exchange of scientific knowledge and understanding of the planet. 

While the Digital Earth imagined by Al Gore was never realized, similar visions came into being with Google Earth, NASA World Wind, Marble and others. Commissioned in 2019 by the EU, project DestinE (Destination Earth) echoes the Digital Earth objectives as it aims to develop a high precision digital replica of the Earth, with simulated human nature and activity, continuously monitoring “the health of the planet” in support of European environmental policies. Combining multiple data resources, DestinE is planned to be used for testing and analysis of scenarios for sustainable development, and to reinforce Europe’s industrial and technological capabilities in simulation, computing, and predictive data analytics.⁶ 

Just as the planning of Baroque Ideal cities, Corbusier’s views of the city from the aeroplane, military perspective or planar projections, the way the world is revealed through a digital means of three-dimensional simulation, exemplify particular legibility regimes as primary tools for production of knowledge and control. Whereas, as argued by Erwin Panofsky⁷, perspective (perspectival projection) has been a “symbolic form” that linked social, cultural and technical practices in the West, and formed the particular vision of the world, so the digital twin, combining volumetric 3D and a corresponding data-base⁸, could forge a particular worldview. Today, as 3D simulation has largely replaced projectional representation, and as more and more everyday interactions with reality involve the “spinning” of the digital content — from Pokemon Go, navigating through Google Maps, spinning Rhino models, to the virtual tours on Houzz.com, the moving, navigable and three-dimensional digital space overlayed with dynamic information from a corresponding database are exemplary of the contemporary legibility regime. Jordan Crandall calls this type of (re)presentation “operational media”⁹: representations of events overlayed with floating monitors, calculated distances, graphs and other. These overlays filter, tag and sort the mediated reality beyond visual nominalism. 

Mario Carpo writes that with the development of the new volumetric capture technologies, “knowledge now can be recorded and transmitted in a new spatial format”.¹⁰ The amount of volumetric data captured by tech companies, planning agencies, military and police bodies is increasing both in scale and resolution. William Mitchell in The Reconfigured Eye noted the striking similarity between linear perspective and CGI (Computer-Generated Imagery), as a medium that, unlike photography, does not sample reality, but produces its own virtual worlds.¹¹ Seen as a quest for accuracy and exactitude, or for so-called photo-realism, virtual worlds are often created and imbued with scale, dimension and texture as life-like as possible. The 3D volumetric data for digital twins, captured with Lidar or photogrammetry, is made legible using software with opaque data-processing algorithms, polished with additional 3D simulation and visualization. Samples of reality, in the form of volumetric data are utilized as raw material to produce the new reality of digital twin, similarly to virtual worlds of the entertainment industry. 

DT *digital twin* 

The Centre for Digital Built Britain is working on a so-called National Digital Twin — an ecosystem of connected digital twins across the United Kingdom. The vision for the national digital twin is not that it will be a huge singular twin, replicating the shape and geography of Great Britain, but more of a topological networked federation of digital twins, connected through shared data. Here the design is equated with information management at the scale of the nation-state, and the quality, value and profit of a remote asset are made visible through its digital replica. The direct relationship between the space, and those who design, develop, build, use and manage it, is further mediated via digital twin. Digital twin streamlines, directs and orchestrates the relationships between the stakeholders that have access to it. 

Building Information Modeling, a predecessor of digital twin technology, enables participation of different agents in the design processes. Yet participation in BIM design, while allowing for negotiation and consensus among the architects, engineers and consultants is by invitation only, whereas Gemini Principles, for example, advocate for open source digital twins. 

Furthermore, the data that comprises a digital twin as a holistic entity typically originates from heterogeneous sources, which need to be correlated and confirmed; sensors, tools and systems that capture and transmit data utilize different formats that have to be re-encoded and translated into a cohesive whole. A large-scale standardization system that would enable broader digital twin interoperability and integration has yet to be devised, and is currently available as a set of proprietary solutions.

 

As with any software which is aimed to “to organize the world’s information” and make it legible and useful, digital twin does implicitly organize the world itself,¹² not unlike architectural notational systems that translate certain values and ideas into a particular spatial layout. As Benjamin Bratton wrote, images are a specific genre of machines, digital twins can be seen in the similar perspective.¹³ Directly affecting the systems it represents, digital twins are not only providing semiotically and instrumentally convincing and legible diagrams of distant objects and processes, they actually do what they represent. It then becomes an aperture through which both algorithms and the users retrace the world.

The technologies that make digital twin possible and the concepts they entail have developed in part due to a particular paradigm of the world, one that sees space as Euclidean geometry, emphasizes exactitude and discreteness of objects in space, and confuses seeing and knowledge, production and reproduction, spectacle and recording. The graphic user interfaces of existing prototypes of digital twin platforms, such as Microsoft’s Azure Digital Twins, Cityzenith’s SmartWorldPro or XMPRO’s solutions are a peculiar amalgamation of the familiar parts of a code editor, 3D modeling software, business communication app and a cockpit. Combining heterogeneous interface semiotics, and a wide array of technologies, digital twin, however, seems to be virtually indifferent to what kind of entity is its actual counterpart. It virtually equates a city to a factory floor, to a house, to a person, and perhaps, makes everything a subject for optimization and re-calibration. 

With its aesthetics equated to the operationality, the anticipatory logic of digital twin makes things and relationships appear, and produces new kinds of spaces for action and speculation. Ultimately, digital twins contribute to a legibility regime in which images and spaces are updated in real-time, enhanced through digital processing and filters, overlaid with numeric, non-visual or other types of data, implying (inter)action and a capacity to respond. As with mapping, ballistics and surveying techniques in Baroque era co-constructed ideal cities, so airplane photography pushed the limits of modernist urban planning, and social media currently engenders global architectural styles and travel destinations, digital twin technology is prone to generate new type of space and reality. While it is not yet available and ubiquitous, dozens of companies, big tech players and regional startups are building solutions at the moment. For now, digital twin is surfing waves of hype, discussed and speculated upon. Joining the discussion with a more critical lens, this essay aims to unpack some of the aspects of digital twin and its capacities to digitally (re)produce the world.

 

 

 

 1 At the moment, there are multiple definitions of the term, I provide the generalized version. For more see David Jones et al., “Characterising the Digital Twin: A Systematic Literature Review,” CIRP Journal of Manufacturing Science and Technology 29 (May 2020): 36–52, https://doi.org/10.1016/j. cirpj.2020.02.002.
2 Lee Mohon, “Apollo 13: The Successful Failure,” Text, NASA, April 6, 2020, https:// www.nasa.gov/centers/marshall/history/apollo/apollo13/ index.html.
 3 While digital twin technology is not readily available as a consumer product or a clear and scalable industry solution, it is discussed and speculated upon. Many traits of the emerging technology are described in the media, yet not so much visual depiction of it or recording of how it works iis shown except marketing material.
4 David Gelernter, Mirror Worlds or the Day Software Puts of the Universe in a Shoebox: How It Will Happen and What It Will Mean (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992).
5 Stiegler refers Paul Virilio to suggest that real time technologies turn the duration of time into a ‘writing surface’, Bernard Stiegler, Technics and Time 2: Disorientation (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2009), 124
6 “Destination Earth (DestinE),” Text, Shaping Europe’s digital future – European Commission, August 18, 2020, https://ec.europa.eu/digital-single-market/en/destination-earth-destine.
7 Erwin Panofsky, Perspective as symbolic form (New York: Zone, 1997).
8 Lev Manovich, “Database as Symbolic Form,” Convergence 5, no. 2 (June 1, 1999): 80–99,
https://doi.org/10.1177/135485659900500206.
9 Jordan Crandall, “Operational Media”, CTHEORY, (2005)
10 Mario Carpo, The Second Digital Turn: Design beyond Intelligence, 2017.
11 William J Mitchell, The Reconfigured Eye: Visual Truth in the Post-Photographic Era (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 2001),134
12 Here I am paraphrasing Google’s famous corporate mission statement: “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.”
13 Benjamin H Bratton, The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 2016), 219-250

 

Alina Nazmeeva is a Russian architect and researcher, investigating the relationship between digital images and social spaces produced by them, interfaces and publics, digital twins and videogames.
Alina is a graduate of Master of Science in Urbanism, MIT; and a former fellow of the New Normal program at Strelka Institute of Media Architecture and Design. She is a research associate at future urban collectives lab at MIT, where she works on design of spaces and platforms for new forms of collectivity, and a research analyst at MIT Real Estate Innovation Lab where she focuses her research on understanding the economy and design of virtual worlds and online games. Her writing has been published in PLAT Journal and Media-N. 

 

Saint Robert, in 1075, dissatisfied with his experiences in the monasteries of Moûtier-la-Celle, Saint-Michel-de-Tonnerre and Saint-Ayoul, founded the Abbey of Molesmes after having retired for a period with some hermits in the Forest of Collan. 

Molesmes quickly flourished, attracting many vocations and a great deal of wealth, but Saint-Robert, who knew that “virtue and wealth do not remain associated for long”, and who preferred a poorer and more isolated life in closer contact with God, in 1098, left Molesmes to found a new monastery in the Forest of Cîteaux. 

The monastery and the Order of Cîteaux were founded from the desire for a more sincere adherence to the Benedictine Rule, a desire for a true ‘re-form’: not inventing anything but returning to the purity of the source, only in this the Order can be said ‘new’, the Cistercian ideology does not want to add anything, it only cuts away and purges. The construction of Citeaux was meant to be nothing other than a purified Cluny, the ‘new’ monastery was intended to be a hermitage and a cloister at the same time, and the brotherhood of monks wanted to be a close-knit family that adopted, as if it were a single body, the life of the perfect recluses.

For fourteen years the Monastery of Cîteaux was growing in the middle of the Forest when Saint Bernard arrived there, only two years later he left Saint-Robert to set up another new monastery: Clairvaux. And thanks to Bernard after Clairveaux had put down solid roots it became, in turn, prolific, spreading in Trois-Fontaines, Fontenay, and Foigny. From his monastery Saint Bernard started speaking to the entire Christianity, his ‘sermons’ were in fact not spoken but written, because his exhortations were addressed to the whole world and to those who would come later. His word made the Cistercian Order flourish. 

Saint Bernard, who never learned how to handle weapons except his word, was actually a true ‘fighter’, always on a ‘warpath’, using every stratagem to conquer noblemen and knights, trying to make them better people, to push them to cultivate their good qualities and eradicate the others. Like Saint Bernard, the Cistercian Order became a ‘conqueror’, solitary and far from the streets but a living structure that expanded itself to absorb the whole of society. 

After the death of the Saint, the Monastery of Clairvaux had founded other seventy abbeys and if we consider those that Bernard’s activities had led to join his family Clairvaux had one hundred and sixty-four ‘daughters’. It was thanks to him,that the Cistercian lineage had pushed its vanguard to the borders of Latin Christianity and became such a coherent, large and widely diffused complex, physically built by thousands of men divided into small teams, who were brought together by a large cohesive institution, ‘white monks’, whose voices had merged in unison in the singing of a choir, and who were buried without an epitaph in the bare earth on the very site of their toil, among the stones of the construction site. 

Saint Bernard did not build anything himself, but in reality, Cistercian structures owe him everything. He was truly the patron of that vast construction site, he was, as they say, its maître d’oeuvre. His word governed the art of Cîteaux because this art was inseparable from his morality, from an interior structure that he embodied and that he wanted to impose on the universe at any cost. For him, both life and art had to be primarily founded on the word, and above all, on the word of the Bible: the material on which, and with which, he ‘built’ the entire Order. It is with his words that he shaped the model to which the Cistercian constructions had to conform, as projections of a dream of moral perfection. 

When it came to building the white monks always followed the same guidelines, all the Cistercian art owes in fact its unity to that of the Order, which sealed all its architecture from Scotland to the Holy Land in one familiar atmosphere. The monasteries, however, were never identical, or just copies of other constructions: every new building followed the same examples, the same typology, but it also adapted to the uniqueness of its particular context producing a multiplicity of solutions held together by the unity of the Rule. 

The work in the field, as well as the work in the laboratory and on the building site, was a fundamental part of the life of the monks and it was never a simple ‘keeping busy’, an economic or sustenance issue. It was a question of an incessant effort for erecting a more beautiful and flawless world. The austere buildings of the Order were for this reason conceived as perfect tools, works from which all excess was banished, and which consequently were good, and therefore beautiful, since for Bernard there was no discord between ethics and aesthetics. 

Saint Bernard, in a pamphlet directed against Cluny wrote: «But in the cloister, under the eyes of the brethren who read there, what profit is there in those ridiculous monsters, that marvellous and deformed comeliness and that comely deformity? […] here we are more tempted to read the marble work than our manuscripts, to spend the whole day contemplating these curiosities rather than meditating on God’s law». 

For Bernard there was a strong need to reduce everything to its fundamental features, to the strictly necessary, to bare structures and forms, the monk had to do away with anything that was superfluous. Saint Bernard also rejected images: it was too easy for them to shift our attention, distancing themselves from their only legitimate purpose, that of finding God. In 1150 the General Chapter of the Order prescribed: “We forbid the placing of sculptures or paintings in our churches and in other places of the monastery, because when you look upon them, the usefulness of good meditation and the discipline of religious gravity are often overlooked”. 

The abbey, and each physical or spiritual ‘body’ of the Order, only desires to be the incarnation of the sacred Word, of the Rule, no more, and in this it becomes a construction ‘pared down to the bare bone’, reduced to ‘skeletons’. The church, as all other buildings of the monastery, let itself be seen naked; humbly, it finds the beauty in the stones reduced by the precise cut, by the rigour, united by the delicacy of their joints, by the cohesion of the same material chosen for all the parts of the building.

The only decoration —if we can speak of a decoration— is the light, parsimoniously distributed, also naked, not covered with jewelled robes as in Saint-Denis.

In the monastery, as in the people it protects, a connection is in this way established between the carnal and the spiritual. All the buildings of the abbey become part of the bigger body of the Order and at the same time part of the soul of the land. The Cistercian house becomes seat of the faculties from which every action proceeds; for this reason until it is not built the Order cannot exist, for this reason the pioneer monks immediately work to build it on the first day of their arrival on the site of the new monastery. 

If the Cistercian construction was so successful and as extensive as we can still observe today after being destroyed so many times, it is because the lifestyle sketched by Saint Robert of Molesmes, and then fixed, purified, inflamed and projected to the four corners of the world by the word of Saint Bernard, met the expectations of a rapidly changing society. The Cistercians, who initially rejected the stately system, enthusiastically put the emphasis on a social structure based on orders, and on this they based their worldview and their ‘structures’; for this, at the end, the success of Cîteaux did not survive the disintegration of the society of the three orders.When the scheme of the three classes disintegrated, allowing the idea that it is up to each of us to build our own salvation, that it is not obtained through the mediation of others, Cîteaux withered.

What Saint Bernard had built, for it to bear fruit, had then to come out from the desert of the monastery. In the momentum of the twelfth century, it was no more possible, as Bernard had dreamed, to attract all humanity towards the retreat of prayer folded in on itself to impose its order, its structure, on the whole world from the depths of his monasteries. 

Cîteaux died, and today, all that remains is its shell, which is all the more moving precisely because it is empty. However, we still can imagine the Cistercian apses filled with possible germinations, the perfect bare walls with their stones joined together to form a crystal of an ordered universe, as still being fertile.

 

Edoardo Cresci, PhD architect. He studied in Florence and Berlin, working then in Switzerland with Gigon-Guyer Architekten and Bearth & DePlazes Architekten. In 2016 he graduated with honors and dignity of publication (supervisor Prof. Paolo Zermani). In 2020 he presented, with honors, a doctoral thesis entitled : “Blue fires. Houses by the sea by Piero Bottoni”. To date he combines professional activity with scientific research and works as assistant professor at Paolo Zermani’s chair at the University of Floreence and at the Academia di Architecture in Mendrisio.

 In the opening of The Book of the City of Ladies (1405), we find Christine de Pizan seated in her study, distressed at the misogynistic treatment of women in the literature of her time.¹ Her state of discomfiture is only interrupted by the arrival of three allegorical figures— the ladies Reason, Rectitude, and Justice—who have come to guide her in the construction of a literary edifice for the defence of women. In the text, the appearance of the figures is initially attenuated by Christine’s distraction. She is preoccupied by her feelings of precarity and a sense of exposure; for Christine, and to the reader, there is a sense of a woman’s space that is either only contingently held or falling into outright abeyance. A provisional quality therefore surrounds this first contact with the figures. Their arrival casts a ray of light on Christine’s lap, breaking through, but never erasing, the fact that the rest of her body remains in the shadow of provisionality. 

Settlements serve as refuges against this sense of provisionality. The City of Ladies is one of the earliest proto-feminist literary constructions in the western European landscape, a reaction against the treatment of women in the early humanist tradition of the 13th and 14th centuries, seen particularly in Jean de Meun’s section of the Romance of the Rose and subsequently in Boccaccio’s Famous Women. The City is written by Christine as a collection of biographical narratives of notable women, organised using the extended metaphor of a walled city. In the space of the text, Christine depicts herself as narrator, protagonist, and builder of the city itself. Stories of women form the masonry of the city, bonded with mortar mixed in her ink bottle and trowelled by her pen. Material is combined with metaphor and emplaced into argument. Contra the prevailing denigration of women, the assertion is that the characteristics of the assembled personages—characteristics such as strength, knowledge, ingenuity, prudence, prophecy, and love—represent qualities that are to be esteemed and are common to women in general. 

Christine’s use of the walled city as her structuring metaphor points to the wall as the primary architectonic element of the City. The purposes of the wall have been extensively debated: whether it serves to protect those within, as in the cities of Troy and Thebes that are cited in the text, to enclose something of value, as in the figure of the hortus conclusus, or to exclude those without, as in the classical polis.² Yet these views of the wall unduly privilege the material over the metaphorical. Its apparent solidity does not dull its numerous “shining stones,”³ and the defensive tenor it lends the city does not overwhelm the diversity of its embodied narratives. 

Indeed, it may be productive to remain at the level of metaphor momentarily and regard the wall as a model, at multiple scales, of the tensions and simultaneities present in the discourse of the City. At the scale of individual stone-stories, Christine re-authors many of the biographies of the wall. A comparative reading of these stories reveals subjective aspects of narratives previously used by others, such as Boccaccio, in service of attacks on women.⁴ The story of Semiramis, foundational to both the City and Famous Women, is one example. Boccaccio’s telling regards the Assyrian queen as courageous and skilful in battle and politics, but deceitful in cross-dressing as her son, the king, after the death of his father, and ultimately as sinful in taking her son as her lover. Christine, on the other hand, does not mention any subterfuge, and explains the incestuous relation as justifiable, even practical, given the state of nature that she ascribes to Semiramis’ time. By contextualising and re-writing Semiramis’ biography, Christine places her in a virtuous position, presenting her as the “great and large stone…the first in the first row of stones in the foundation” of the city.⁵ In addition, the resplendence of the stones, which Christine frequently alludes to, is a result not only of this virtue, but also of the practices of authorship that she deploys. For the contemporary reader, Christine’s re-framing of the biographical stones allows us to see them from different points of view, rendering them as multi-faceted and shimmering, especially when regarded against the backdrop of previous tellings. 

At the scale of the wall as an assembly, the individual stones are collected and brought together by the “grid of intelligibility” that a masonry wall provides. Hubert Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow provide a useful formulation of the grid as a set of practices that constitute, organise, and analyse disparate components.⁶ The grid blends stones of various historical, mythological, and personal narratives, drawing from diverse places and times. The placing of stones within the grid of the wall does not reduce their difference, their individual brilliance, but allows each unit to be visible while structuring the network of the entire edifice. The act of laying stones in the wall is also analogical to the emergent practice of the grid. While the initial disposition of the wall is laid out by Christine and Reason, ordinary women of all classes are enjoined by the conclusion of the text to participate in the continuous construction of the city through their everyday conduct. This is a grid that extends beyond the bounds of the city, and even the text: a fact highlighted by the accompanying illuminations that depict it as a city under construction, a nascent set of walls and half-framed roofs, contingent and full of promise. 

At the scale of the city as a whole, the richness of the wall and its individual stones is likewise reflected in the range of spaces that are found in its urban form. Christine is careful to describe temples, palaces, mansions, inns, houses, and other public buildings, as well as generous streets and squares. Alexandra Verini connects the urbanistic diversity of spaces in the city with the diverse models of female friendship that Christine describes in the text. Spatial and inter-personal relations in the city are unrestricted by binary, public/private domains of the classical (and male-dominated) polis.⁷ If Christine begins the text from a place of precarity and provisionality, the city that she constructs by the end sets out a collection of safer spaces for women that also allow for a more generous and fuller unfolding of disparate voices. 

The Woman’s Building provides public spaces and galleries for individual shows, group efforts, collaborative events, and performances. Here woman’s work and art is honored and made known. We invite all of you to participate with us in the creation of a woman’s culture. ⁸ 

Numerous communities have been constructed since the City of Ladies, six hundred years ago, with the similarly ambitious goal of providing refuge to women (and other marginalised groups) while accommodating the differences between them. The Los Angeles Woman’s Building and its predecessor, the Feminist Studio Workshop, active in downtown Los Angeles from the 1970s to 1991, presents an intriguing example. Founded by an artist (Judy Chicago), a graphic designer (Sheila de Bretteville), and an art historian (Arlene Raven), the Building and Workshop grew out disillusionment with the philosophical, organisational, and physical confines of the institution of the art school—in their case, the California Institute of the Arts.

 

As with the City, the early days of the Woman’s Building arose from a situation of precarity, and the founders met it by endeavouring to create an alternative space for feminist art education. They recognised that the act of building was also an act of building a community and incorporated the labour of constructing space into the education of its initial members and students. Women framed and plastered walls, moved studio equipment and furniture, and sanded and finished wood floors. A student recalled realising over time that she developed her ability to “make stuff” through this process.⁹ Recalling the open-ended grid of the City, individual members constructed a “web of human relationships,” in Hannah Arendt’s terms: a network of individual actions that makes visible the actor, as well as a body of viewers, each recognising themselves and each other as participants in a communal project.¹⁰ One sees this in photographs from the Building. There are few images of an individual that do not also consist of a body of women behind her, seeing her, and seeing themselves through her. 

Critique of the Woman’s Building can be made along the lines of critiques of the City of Ladies, focussing on the insularity and defensiveness of the wall. Scholars have noted the exclusionary and conservative nature of organising a society fixed on virtue, and similarly, the later years of the Building saw recurring questions about the organisation’s ability to accommodate differences within its membership, particularly in relation to race and sexual orientation. But in the face of these challenges, the metaphoric possibilities of the wall as discursive model must be restated. Its ability to locate multi-faceted and diverse stories within a shifting, shimmering grid remains full of potential. Perhaps appropriately, for the opening of the Woman’s Building on North Spring Street in 1975, a poster was designed. Laid out on a grid, the verso of the sheet contained crop marks, revealing that the poster could be cut into postcards for distribution, each with details of the Building and short, potent, statements of purpose. The printed matter recalls the City: simultaneous, episodic, provisional, brilliant, and open-ended—

 

 1 Christine de Pizan, The Book of the City of Ladies, trans. Earl Jeffrey Richards (1405; New York: Persea, 1982).
2 See Sandra L. Hindman, ‘With Ink and Mortar: Christine de Pizan’s Cité des Dames,’ Feminist Studies 10, no. 3 (1984), 470-471.
 3 Christine, City of Ladies, 99.
4 See, for example, Jane Chance, Medieval Mythography, Volume 3 (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2014), 5-8.
5 Christine, City of Ladies, 38.
6 Hubert L. Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow, Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 120-121.
7 Alexandra Verini, ‘Medieval Models of Friendship in Christine de Pizan’s The Book of the CIty of Ladies and Margery Kempe’s The Book of Margery Kempe,’ Feminist Studies 42, no. 2 (2016), 374- 376.
8 Sheila L. de Bretteville, Woman to Woman exhibition poster, 1975, 45 x 58 cm. Woman’s Building records, 1970-1992, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.
9 Jane F. Gerhard, The Dinner Party: Judy Chicago and the Power of Popular Feminism, 1970-2007 (Athens, Georgia: University of Georgia Press, 2013), 73.
10 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (1958; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 182-184.

Shou Jie Eng is a designer, researcher, and writer, whose work examines the relationships between spaces, bodies, and the material histories and cultures of craft. He runs Left Field Projects, a studio practice located in Hartford, Connecticut. His writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Tupelo Quarterly, Speculative Nonfiction, Ritual and Capital, and The Ekphrastic Review. His visual work has been presented at the National Museum of Wildlife Art in Jackson, Wyoming, and the San Francisco Maritime National Historical Park in San Francisco, California. He received his graduate degree in architecture from the Rhode Island School of Design, and previously taught at Roger Williams University. 

 

 

 On a distant lot at the edge of a decommissioned air force base sits the ominous ruins of the most expensive project in human history. New hotel developments are breaking ground while the Stewart International Airport hums along in the distance and disinterested security guards patrol vacant ruins. The history of SAGE and the Systems Research Laboratory tells an intriguing story about contemporary architectures of subjection. 

In 1950, the RAND Corporation Think Tank, responding to internal military reports calling for more computing power in the early detection of enemy aircraft, established Project SAGE, or The Semi-Automatic Ground Environment. After years of development, on September 15th, 1958, the Semi-Automatic Ground Environment Radar Direction Center became operational at what was then Stewart Air Force Base. Constructed of lead-reinforced concrete, the “Blockhouse” was a 4-story high windowless bunker with 24-inch thick walls and no distinguishing features. SAGE was designed and built in such a nondescript manner that few but those with a security clearance knew what took place there. Each of the 24 machines in the Blockhouse weighed 24 tons. Each link in the network was a “black box” of informational processing. There were 23 such centers throughout the SAGE network, each a windowless block of concrete connected through electronic communications lines. 

 

 Now, despite its tellurian interiors and the enormous material heft of these imposing bunker architectures, the ‘soft infrastructures’ of human performance were key in the SAGE system. At the scale of the individual radar site, the “men” in the “man-machine” system were station operators who plotted aircraft tracing their locations and directions using the radar of the time. The machines, of course, were the networks of radar sites, computers, and graphic interfaces. The plotter’s role would be to decide to scramble fighter jets to respond to the threat. Decision-making was the lifeblood for the entire system. So, as SAGE began in its infancy, it became clear that human performance and the emerging field of human resources were important battlegrounds in the Cold War. 

 

 

 To improve the performance of SAGE, The Systems Research Laboratory (SRL) was established in 1952 to study man-machine interfaces and to simulate the performance of human subjects in stressful situations. The lab was established to test institutional behavior and to organize decision-making systems in the service of survival in worst-case scenarios. Air Force personnel scanned the skies, prepared at the touch of a button to intercept enemy planes with remote-controlled surface-to-air missiles. The data of their performance, responding to simulated Russian invasions, were transmitted from 21 different radar sites over phone lines to the SRL. At large, RAND was obsessed with questions of distributed network communications where so-called weak links in the network would “perform and behave the best under system-wide stress” because redundant and unreliable links would be more likely to survive physical destruction. The more distributed and de-centered, the stronger the network. 

To study the procedures of decision-making in high-pressure situations, RAND modeled the SRL as a scale replica of the McChord Field air defense radar station in Tacoma, Washington. Initially, the laboratory was located in the back room of a pool hall due to the limited space at RAND’s early Santa Monica headquarters. This life-sized model of real-life scenarios was directly influenced by the economic behavioralist Robert Freed Bale’s situation room. The development of Bales’ “observational situation” was indispensable for early experiments in behavioral data extraction. It allowed researchers to construct a controlled environment that divided human actions from their situated context while producing a database to construct a universal model of human behavior. The situation was not linked solely with one institution or function. Its practices mutated across various facets of society, from economics to popular culture. The situation operated in diverse settings such as the “sitcoms” of the 1950s and the white house “situation room” designed to contain geopolitical conflict in a microcosm of communicational command. 

Bales worked at the Systems Research Laboratory in the early 1950s. The “human-engineering” of man-machine interactions expanded his situational rationality. Here, abstracted environmental constraints stood-in for all the limitations of human decision-making. The SRL became a “society in miniature” to study and experiment with organizational communications. His report for RAND titled Description of Air-Defense Experiments describes the situational rationality as a procedure of organizational behavior: “It appears that the step-wise operations involved in the total organization, as well as in component sections, could be tolerably well described as an interlocking series of some seven types of information-processing operations”¹. The plotters in the SRL had a limited amount of information to guide their decision-making. They were essentially confined to their informational environment (situation), and through these constraints of organizational rationality, procedures must be derived to find satisfactory solutions. Plotters would report airplanes as they emerged on radar monitors generated by large computers. They would use red telephones to call out the coordinates and trajectories of the simulated invasion. However sophisticated, the computer-generated data simulation was, where the experiment fell short was in its realism. It was here that the director of the SRL sought to bring Herbert Simon into the fold due to his expertise in large scale studies of organizational behavior. 

This is all pertinent because Bales’ procedural situation gave Herbert Simon a language to implement what he called the bounded rationality of institutional behavior². Bales, the Cowles Commission, and the development of the Systems Research Laboratory essentially provided RAND with the tools of algorithmic division of human labor that became the prototype for automated machine learning systems today. Humans were seen as information processors enslaved to the step-by-step logics of giant organizational apparatuses. The Systems Research Laboratory was not only important in the history of computation but also in its revolution of the division of labor³. 

The SRL team identifies stress as an informational problem. Human performers were modeled as mere information processors, and the reduction of noise was the goal for effective, quick, and efficient decision making. It is important to note here that despite the predominantly white male low-level military subject positions of the plotters, all identity information was erased. Human efficiency under stress was still a problem to be solved. Large scale organizations were vulnerable to breakdowns in decision-making when the temporal risk of enemy planes would require a swift response time. To achieve a complex research and training regime, the team had to “simulate environments to get behaviors worth studying,” they tried to make simulated decision environments “genuine enough for the crew to respond as if they were real”⁴. The environment of behavior the simulation occupied was what Simon would come to define as a “task environment”. Simulation was seen to be a promising mode of training users of the man-machine interface because it offered “a feasible method for building organizational potential artificially when the price of failure in the real world (while learning) was prohibitive”⁵. 

The physical infrastructure of SAGE became the prototype for the modern internet. Yet the soft architectures of algorithmic human performance under stress gave modern machine learning programs their language and conceptual genealogy. The SAGE program code comprised a quarter-million lines of instructions, by far the largest software program. The SRL researchers eventually published a plan called A Proposal For Air Defense System Evolution: The Transition Phase ⁶. This became the blueprint for an interface between computational information storage and real-time decision-making. This document came to be known colloquially as the red book or the SAGE bibles. All human behavior interfaced with computers of the time came to be studied by economists at RAND as economic behavior. This is because the organization of knowledge production was seen to be valuable in and of itself as efficiency in labor, consulting, and so-called immaterial informational economies began to take off in the mid-1960’s. These developments, linking human performance with political economy and technological infrastructures, were just as important as the modems, CRT display screens, analog-to-digital conversion techniques, and real-time digital computation of SAGE. 

The networks of human performance undergirded by this nationwide system of bunkers and communications infrastructures were key in establishing contemporary ‘data-exhaust’ systems where online actions are measured and collated to glean information on human behavior. The physical architectures of the SRL and SAGE allowed for the dematerialization, quantification, and exchange of human behavior. It provided a spatial environment, called a “task environment,” where the plotters had a limited amount of information to guide their decision-making. Procedures must be derived to find satisfactory solutions. Just like modern-day data-exhaust procedures in online systems, subjects were divided from within by reducing and compressing identities into programmable decision-response protocols. 

So, despite the immense technological innovation brought on by the combined work of SRL and SAGE, perhaps most importantly, the research into “human factors” or what would be now called “human resources” via flight simulators, combat command centers, radar stations, and gunnery control is seldom the focus of media histories of computation. As Paul Edwards has called it in the “closed world” of computational bunkers, there also emerged a discursive political form⁷. The concrete miniaturization of complex systems replaced reality with simulation, and human performance derived in these test scenarios became the engine that fed the computational systems with the ever-important data for recursive modeling found in modern artificial intelligence systems. Perhaps most importantly, RAND’s SRL was the spatial and ideological prototype for the neoliberal corporate landscape that is the predominant initiator of large scale artificial intelligence systems that we see today. AI is never initiated by an individual but by large scale capitalist interests made up of non-descript interior architectures that flatten subject, algorithm, scale, and time. 

The SAGE Center on the Stewart Air Force Base closed in the late 1960s, its technology made obsolete by intercontinental ballistic missiles. Critics of SAGE and SRL, and their obscene budgets, claimed the system was successful only because enemies failed to attack. However, the performative nature of these systems, in their ideological function to suture Cold War subjects to automated capitalist decision-making and the performative containment of risk, was the true success of SAGE. 

 

1 Erickson, Paul, Judy L. Klein, Lorraine Daston, Rebecca Lemov, Thomas Sturm, and Michael D. Gordin. 2013. How Reason Almost Lost its Mind: The Strange Career of Cold War Rationality. University of Chicago Press, p.136
2 Simon, Herbert. 1957. Models of Man: Social and Rational; Mathematical Essays on Rational Human Behavior in Society Setting. New York: Wiley.
3 Noble, David. 2017. Forces of Production: A Social History of Industrial Automation. London: Routledge. p.71
4 Chapman, Robert L.; Kennedy, John L.; Newell, A.; Biel, William C. 1959. “The Systems Research Laboratory’s Air Defense Experiments”. Management Science 5 (3). p.2
5 Chapman, Robert L.; Kennedy, John L.; Newell, A.; Biel, William C. 1959. “The Systems Research Laboratory’s Air Defense Experiments”. Management Science 5 (3). p.19
6 George Valley and Jay Forrester: 1953. Lincoln Laboratory Technical Memorandum No. 20, A Proposal for Air Defense System Evolution: The Transition Phase.
7 Edwards, Paul. 1997. The Closed World: Computers and the Politics of Discourse in Cold War America. Cambridge: MIT Press.

Kylie King’s work is situated at the productive intersection of architectural design and strategic planning. She hails from the Appalachian region of Ohio. Her interdisciplinary research intervenes in the histories of architectural design, alternative economics, and critical theories of racial capitalism and white supremacy in a rural context. Kylie has presented her work at the HKW in Berlin, is a contributor to CARTHA, The Expanded Environment, and completed a MSc in Adaptive Reuse Architecture from the Rhode Island School of Design. 

Brett Zehner is a media theorist and artist writing on technologies of resistance. Brett’s dissertation project, Machines of Subjection, explores the ubiquitous emergence of predictive media in the form of machine learning. This research aims to conceptualize a new form of political power where individual decision-making is being replaced by the ubiquity of predictive computation. He is currently Ph.D. candidate at Brown University in Performance Studies and Computational Media and he holds an MFA from UC San Diego. 

 

 

 

 

 

I write bad jokes. Bad jokes are more interesting than funny ones. Here’s one:

Q: How does Jason Bourne know he’s Jason Bourne?
A: Because he is Matt Damon.

To get it you need a fair bit of background information.You need to have seen at least one of the Bourne films, unless the one you’ve seen is The Bourne Legacy, in which case you need to have seen two. An even more niche version would go like this:

Matt Damon stands in a room in a Swiss bank, looking at the safety deposit box he’s looking down at. He stares at the passport in his hand. The camera zooms in, shows the text. He speaks. “My name is Lshtshfum. Ashef Lshtshfum.”

That joke isn’t mine. It’s something you see in the comments section of a clip on YouTube of Bourne opening up the safety deposit box. This scene of The Bourne Identity is the one where we learn, diegetically at least, the protagonist’s name. Of course, in the original he decides he is Jason Bourne because the passport is the first one he finds, the American one. Underneath he finds the rest, the Brazilian, the French, the Canadian, the Russian. The Russian passport has two names. First, in the Latin alphabet, there’s Foma Kinaev. Foma’s a credible Russian name. Secondly, written in Cyrillic there’s Ащьф Лштшфум. When I look down at my MacBook now, as I’m writing this, I can see how it would happen. About four years ago I spent a happy hour or two carefully sticking down transfers of Cyrillic letters onto my keyboard. Where the letter F is on my keyboard I have a small cyrillic А. Where I have o I have Щ, the soft sh sound. M has Ь, the soft sign, and so on. The Bourne Supremacy’s goof then could be read as just that, a goof of hitting the same place on a keyboard, even when the keyboard’s layout is changed. I’d argue that, goof and all, it’s also something more. It’s a kind of entry point into a whole new version of Russia, a Russia that exists only in Hollywood movies, only those made since the fall of the Soviet Union. After the end of the Cold War the ideological certainty that Russia was the bad guy begins to fall apart a little. We’re presented instead with a new rendering of a new Russia. It exists in a series of spaces, in decadent bars, derelict basements and bleak Khruschev-era apartments. It’s not confined to Russia alone, but spreads outwards, signified by a new kind of language. This language takes Russian as a starting point, but is spoken only by our friend Ashef. Here I try to map these tropes, to make manifest the Western assumptions present in these depictions of an idealised Other. I show a new route through these spaces as they appear again and again on YouTube, pushed up by an algorithm that says “here, try this.”

JDA Winslow is an artist and writer. Recent exhibitions and publications include a show about the end of the world called Crunchtime (at 1000Fryd, Aalborg, DK) and an essay about the end of labour called Owning It (in Digital Culture and Society, Vol.5, Issue 2).

 State of the space, state of the Earth
Extra-terrestrial mining or space as an Observatory? 

At the closing of the year 2020, we witness the spectacular evidence of planet Earth’s refusal to further contain the human expansionist drive and exploitation competition. Whilst the public consciousness drifts towards a sustainable mindset, governmental military actors have set their sights over and above the Earth’s horizons. The automatic pilot of the Infinite Growth Paradigm is now eagerly targeting outer space. Be it moon landing, space mining or planet colonizing, each country has the ambition to claim their primacy. 

These are highly profitable times for the space economy, which, as the world stalls, is ‘rocketing upwards’, it’s worth expected to escalate up to 1 trillion by 2040 according to Morgan Stanley analysts. While the bigger contenders, among which the US, India and China, are competing in the domain of imperialistic achievements, seeing space as land to conquer in line with the Infinite Growth dogma, we aim to focus on the alternative, “conservationist” model adopted by the European Union’s ‘inward’ strategy. 

This is the European Space Agency, dedicated to the peaceful exploration and use of space for the benefit of humankind. ¹ 

-The European Space Agency (ESA) 

The scenario promoted by the ESA is driven by the ambition to deploy, in the name of preservation, the state-of-the-art digital technology to design and keep under control our given limited territory. The primary tools for this purpose are the invisible entanglement of outer space facilities and their land-based nodes: the great satellite infrastructure, a multitude of observatories that punctuate the cartesian dome, scanning the planetary surface and meticulously monitoring the environment and its transformations. In short, the ESA is reaching out to outer space in order to turn a scopic gaze back onto planet Earth, our very own space to take care of. This inverted perspective is due to different factors. It first comes across as a form of consistency with the European Union’s acclaimed sustainable environmental policies. 2020 was indeed the start of the EU’s new decennial plan, this time decidedly oriented towards the convergence of green economy, technological advance and social equity. In March 2020, the Circular Economy Action Plan was adopted by the European Council as part of the European Green Deal with the aim to become climate neutral by 2050. The confluence of ecology and economy is manifested through technology, with the ESA as the EU’s futuristic tool for the implementation of its environmental protocols. 

Nonetheless, as we acknowledge the recent and upcoming giant steps towards space conquest taken by the other public and private actors in the game, it isn’t far-fetched to assume that this attitude is also expressing the awareness of having to exploit different assets in order to be competitive in the technological discovery race. What can be the inmost significance of this shift from zooming out towards zooming ‘back’ in? 

We mean to question the ESA’s distinctive blueprint through a narrative and speculative analysis of its latest colossal venture, the multifaceted “Digital Twin Earth” DestinE project. 

A manifested DestinE
The “Digital Twin Earth” Project 

As announced last October, a trillion pixel-Digital Twin Earth model is now being developed by ESA. Creating a virtual double of the planet using digital twin technology², the DestinE project has the ambition to bring together meteorological data, in situ measurements and sociological data in order to “continuously monitor the health of the planet”³, strategically combining environmental politics and digitalization. 

The virtual model feeds on optical data from the Copernicus Satellite System – “Europe’s eyes on Earth”⁴ – as well as local sensors scattered all over the Earth’s surface. Powered by three supercomputer centres (Italy, Finland, Spain) and the nascent quantum computing at CERN, the model aims at climate management, along with the achievement of zero emissions by 2050 in the EU. While listing the DestinE project’s aims and expected returns, ESA’s earth observation director – and future general director – Josef Aschbacher constantly refers to the duality between supervising climate phenomena and human behaviour. The terms “health” and “behaviour” are keywords to the DestinE manifesto, whose communicative approach shares similarities and lexicon with the medical sphere. The project itself has a strong link to biological imagery, consisting of the cloning of a complex system seen as a whole body. 

The suggested aim of supervising the planet’s health through constant monitoring implies the wish to engage in an environmental preventative therapy, observing and forecasting in order to cure, triggering discovery through inward examination. 

Does the Earth dream of itself?
A real time self healing via the virtual double of planet Earth 

We can therefore consider the Digital Twin Earth as the projection of a holistic cure of the planetary organism, an integrated and synergetic twin model to enhance the prognosis and diagnosis for the planet Earth. This metaphor resonates with the Gaia hypothesis and the Earth System Sciences, which suggest a conception of the Earth as a complex whole, assimilating Humboldtian holistic views and traditional cosmologies. 

To fully understand the scope of this project, it is worth taking a look at how Digital Twin technology works.
The Digital Twin is an inductive-deductive discovery process, where a simulation is constantly readjusted and recalibrated through a flow of in situ measurement data. This stream is called a digital thread: it can be visualised as a ‘data pipe-line’ that feeds the digital twin with real-time evidence, a flow of information through a timeline. An architecture of evidence, that allows the supervising and surveillance of the whole process, projecting us through past and future scenarios. 

This is how DestinE aims to restructure climate forecasts, and how data science is integrated in the design process. The virtual simulations are to be continuously integrated and implemented with data evidence, possibly allowing spatio-temporal hacking. The term nowcasting effectively evokes this idea: used by both economics and meteorology to describe the present and immediate future predictions to prop decision making in an unreadable now -a form of divination that exudes the extraordinary to a more immediate destiny. 

Where do the real and the replica collide? 

We could trace the DestinE project’s close link to the medical imagery right back to its technological conception: The Digital Twin comes to life as a symbiotic clone, and the Digital Thread is the umbilical cord that relentlessly binds the virtual replica to the original. The model is constantly generated by the source, as a self-projection and imagination of the entity – Earth dreaming of itself.
Will it just keep occurring as an astral-projection, crystallizing and envisioning the state and processes of the planet?  And what will be the extent of its physical existence, the invisible infrastructure deployed for the powering of this hyperreal digital trace?

 

Image control
Observation as design 

If Digital Twin technology is usually deployed in product lifecycle management, the scale and complexity in this case are much higher, if not hyperbolic.
DestinE is set to replicate a highly complex environment, containing several different subsystems. The tension to create a digital clone of our planet is driven by the urge to fully comprehend all its elements and dynamics. Reflecting on the ambiguity of the word, we could claim that along with the notion of knowledge and understanding comes a desire for possession and control over physical and spatial, if not behavioural phenomena.
In all its features, DestinE comes across as yet another up-to-date apparatus for territorial rationalisation. A very European machine, that finds its ancestor in the Medieval Encyclopedia and aspires to an all-encompassing intelligence.  As argued by Benedict Anderson in Imagined Communities, studying the genesis and grammar of geography is fundamental to fully understand the political implications of territorial exploration over time. Anderson identifies the map, together with the census and the museum, as one of the most relevant inventions shaping the way European culture conceives, rules and dominates the environment. Great discoveries of tools designed to observe and ‘navigate’ space in various forms have historically triggered transitions in science and politics and deployed observation as a political control tool.
The renowned “Galileo Affair” may just be a perfect example. If today we recognise Galileo Galilei’s Telescope as the evolutionary step in astronomy that brought the Copernican Revolution to its climax, we should not forget how the invention was sponsored and promoted: with convincing arguments on its military benefits and no mention to the astronomical and scientific implications, as testified by the fund request letter Galileo wrote to the Venetian Doge in 1609. We may wonder whether the fundamental drive of science – that is, the understanding of reality – is destined to be ever-bound to the purpose of controlling it.
The invention of the telescope was the technological prosthesis that allowed astronomers to claim Earth’s spot in the cosmos, yet its potential for control and supremacy was the key element that brought it to accomplishment.
Today, ESA’s independent global navigation system (GNSS, 2016) is named after Galileo, built as a civilian and homegrown alternative to military-based US GPS or Russian GLONASS systems.  Galileo wasn’t the first to invent the telescope, but he had the intuition to turn its lenses “towards the heavens”⁵. 

Several centuries after, the descendants of these lenses are journeying in space installed on satellites and probes, Earth’s eyes to the outside and to itself: does our planetary ‘DestinE’ rely on this anti-copernican turn, from zooming out to zooming back into the highest resolution of our physical surface? A model of the Earth aimed at its observation, gathering data to forecast and watch the environmental degradation as it happens, nowcasting the apocalypse? 

Hyperresolution and over-optimization 

The issue is that we may not know how to best intervene. The present ecological crisis unveils an ideological crisis, and the empirical data is not sufficient to build a system of thought.
In lack of a better strategy, the choice is to invest funds and resources in a titanic observational venture, hoping for it to become a planetary oracle.
From the infinitely large to the infinitely small, the scales collide. From a Digital Twin Earth to a ‘Digital Twin Heart’, the same technology that creates DestinE is also being applied to precision cardiology. The surgeon follows the steps of the operation in front of a digital monitor; a few meters away, a sprawling robot – the Da Vinci machine – operates on a human body.
Correspondingly, neoliberal major forces are calling for a planetary open-heart surgery in the form of climatic geoengineering. It is suggested that, by changing certain parameters in the not yet fully explored environmental equation, a solution to the damages dealt by the infinite growth paradigm can be found within its own structure. We are at an early stage of terraforming our own planet, owning, controlling, holding all this information in advance as a form of luxury.
Are hyperresolution and over-optimization setting us free?
Projecting its digital carbon footprint ahead, this large-scale planetary observance aimed at climate change modelling accidentally takes part in the climate change itself.
As a snake eating its own tail, the coming to life, functioning and maintenance of the digital and physical infrastructure requires significant energetic efforts, and will likely end up contributing to the phenomena it promises to prevent. This may be less due to an accident than to a (recurrent) error in method: the safeguarding machine becomes part of the destruction process.

 

 1 This isESA | TheEuropeanSpaceAgency, https://www.esa.int/ESA_Multimedia/Videos/2019/11/This_is_ESA
2 “[…] the basic concept of the Digital Twin model has remained fairly stable from its inception in 2002. It is based on the idea that a digital informational construct about a physical system could be created as an entity on its own. This digital information would be a “twin” of the information that was embedded within the physical system itself and be linked with that physical system through the entire lifecycle of the system.” Digital Twin: Mitigating Unpredictable, Undesirable Emergent Behavior in Complex Systems (Excerpt) Dr. Michael Grieves and John Vickers
3 Destination Earth (DestinE) | European Commission, https://ec.europa.eu/digital-single-market/en/destination-earth-destine
4 Copernicus. Europe’s eyes on Earth, https://www.copernicus.eu/en
5 Galileo and the Telescope, from collection Finding our Place in the Cosmos, Library of Congress https://www.loc. gov/collections/finding-our-place-in-the-cosmos-with-carl-sagan/articles-and-essays/modeling-the-cosmos/ galileo-and-the-telescope

State Of The Hearts is a woman led discovery practice rooted in the desire of exploring post- and trans-human futures related to technological upheaval in our Anthropocentric environment. Our roots are in architectural education: AAM and ETHZ in Switzerland. Our role as architects is coordination between the tech and the sociological. We strongly believe that space is more and more dematerialized and the future role of architects is to design connections, relationships, and systems. On this ground lays the interest in the invisible infrastructure and in unveiling its collateral agents, observe and carefully adjust the reading of our augmented globe. 

Sofia Gozzi, AAM
Chiara Salmini, AAM
Alessia Bertini, ETHZ
Silvia Cipelletti AAM 

 

It is the artist’s duty today to penetrate yet-unseen ranges of the biological functions, to search the new dimensions of the industrial society and to translate the new findings into emotional orientation. The artist unconsciously disentangles the most essential strands of existence from the contorted and chaotic complexities of actuality, and weaves them into an emotional fabric of compelling validity, characteristic of himself as well as of his epoch.

Moholy-Nagy cited in Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, Moholy-Nagy: Experiment in Totality, foreword by Walter Gropius (New York: Harper, 1950), 236.

Alvar Aalto and László Moholy-Nagy shared the conviction that biology and technique are closely connected. They admired natural and biological forms and developed a reflection around the notion of standardization. The way they conceived the osmosis between technology and nature and the invisible structures that connect them cannot but be related to their endeavour to take seriously into account the socio-economic, and psychological aspects that characterize the creative process. At the centre of Moholy-Nagy’s teaching and artistic practice was the belief in the sociobiological ends, on the one hand, and the possibility to conceive every aspect of creative practice in a holistic and unified way. This was very apparent in his teaching philosophy at the New Bauhaus, the School of Design and the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT), which was based on the intention to reveal the invisible structures of biological functions, and the relate the new dimensions of the industrial society to their emotional effects. Aalto and Moholy-Nagy saw the exchanges between nature and technology and their confluence as an opportunity for rethinking the concept of standardization and the construction of light. Their originality in standardization challenged the rigidity of the more canonical modernist architects and artists. Their writings and designs constitute important precedents for the leading paradigms of industrial, architectural and urban design as mechanisms imitating nature.

 

 During the early thirties, László Moholy-Nagy and Alvar Aalto developed a close friendship. They had the chance to exchange on their design philosophy during the second Congrès International de l’Architecture Moderne (CIAM) in 1929, and two years later as well during a trip that Moholy-Nagy and Ellen Frank made in Finland in June 1931. They also met during the inner circle CIAM meeting in Berlin also in June 1931, and in London in 1933. That same year, they co-travelled on the Patris II cruise from Marseille to Athens during the fourth CIAM (fig. 1, fig. 2). Aalto was greatly inspired by the ideas that Moholy-Nagy developed in Von Material zur Architektur (fig. 3), which Moholy-Nagy offered to him as a present during his 1931 visit to Scandinavia. Aalto’s intention to promote a model of standardization based on biology and nature has many similarities with Moholy-Nagy’s admiration for natural and biological forms.

The complexities of Aalto’s biocentric vision is evident coming out of a lecture entitled “The Reconstruction of Europe is the Key Problem for the Architecture of Our Time” that he gave at various instances in Switzerland in April 1941. At the centre of this talk was his intention to express his admiration for the variety that one can encounter in nature, such as in flowers and trees. The specificity of Aalto’s worship for nature can be compared to the work of Baltic German biologist Jacob von Uexhüll and his contribution to the establishment of the field of biosemiotics (fig. 4). Von Uexhüll’s understanding of Umwelt – referring to a German term meaning “environment” or “surrounding world” – had an important place in Aalto’s thought. His distinction between Innenwelt and Umwelt, that is to say between inner and outer subjective worlds, was based on the idea that “the body takes an active part in the production of mental objects”.¹ Aalto’s rejection of the models of standardization developed by the automobile industry brings to mind Uexküll’s opposition to mechanism and his non-mechanistic approach to life. The distinction between organicism and non-mechanism is of great significance for the model of standardization that Aalto promoted. Aalto’s analogy between the way in which cells in nature are related to each other composing a whole, and the way in which architectural compositional units are related in order to create unity and harmony was undoubtedly inspired by Uexhüll’s conception of Umwelt. According to Von Uexhüll’s perspective, the Umwelt constitutes a phenomenal world embracing each individual like a soap bubble.

In parallel, Moholy-Nagy built his theory upon Raoul Heinrich Francé’s understanding of Biotechnik, and particularly upon his belief that all technical forms can be traced to the forms we encounter in nature. The significance of Francé’s approach for Moholy-Nagy’s conceptual edifice becomes very evident in the ideas he develops in The New Vision, where he expresses his admiration for Françé’s understanding of nature “as a constructional model in creative technique”.² In The New Vision, Moholy-Nagy refers to Francé’s Grundformen, the seven forms of which all natural structures are composed, and uses the term “biotechnique” “to describe a formal methodology that specifically applied seven basic elements – the crystal, sphere, cone, plate, strip, rod, and spiral – to shape all forms of industrial and building design”³ (fig. 5). Moreover, his pedagogical vision in The New Bauhaus in Chicago drew upon Francé’s approach in Bios: Die Gesetze der Welt.⁴ Moholy-Nagy’s holistic biocentric vision and his understanding of Gesamtkunstwerk, which is commonly translated as a “total work of art”, should be interpreted within the broader context of the Lebensphilosophie, and the emphasis it places on the meaning, value and purpose of life as the foremost focus of philosophy. His biocentrism could also be related to the so-called “Biocentric Constructivism” and to the “Constructivist International”, which included, apart from Moholy-Nagy, figures such as Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Ernő Kállai, Lazar El Lissitzky, Raoul Hausmann and Kurt Schwitters.

 

Both Aalto and Moholy-Nagy paid special attention to the interconnections between design, socio-economic aspects, and psychological aspects, and saw design and social conditions as closely interconnected. Juxtaposing the impact of Jacob von Uexhüll’s understanding of Umwelt on Aalto’s conception of the relationship between nature and architecture, and the effect that Françé’s conception on Biotechnik had on Moholy-Nagy’s approach, helps distinguish the meeting points of the conception of standardization of these two thinkers. Aalto’s belief in the capacity of design to broaden “humane, socio-economic, and psychological decisions”⁵ is close to Moholy-Nagy’s understanding of design and its teaching as “a coherent purposeful unity focused on sociobiological ends”.⁶ 

A distinct point of convergence of Aalto’s and Moholy-Nagy’s understanding of form-making is the importance of the notion of light for their thought and work. Aalto was particularly interested in the architectural significance of daylight, while Moholy-Nagy was concerned about the role of light in photography and filming.

Aalto treated light as a means of form-making and was convinced that it is of great importance for rendering architecture more humane. In this sense, he conceived light as a means of rendering rigid standardization into flexible or elastic standardization. This is apparent not only in his tactics of filtering daylight, but also in the way he designed light fittings, specifically for the 1930 Minimum Apartment Exhibition (“Pienasuntonäyttely”) in Helsinki. 

On the other hand, Moholy-Nagy’s interest in light is very apparent in Malerei, Fotografie, Film (fig. 6), where he defines photography as a means of transformation of human perception.⁷ In “From Pigment to Light”, Moholy-Nagy analyses the emergence of photography as a new artistic medium relating to the notion of light-space construction [Lichtraumgliederung].⁸ He saw photography as a means revolutionising vision through light and maintained that the photographer’s task was to enable “humanity […] [to acquire] the power of perceiving its surroundings, and its very existence, with new eyes”.⁹

 

 

Sigfried Giedion had invited Moholy-Nagy to make this silent film, which includes not only scenes on board during the cruise, but also shots of the Greek islands, capturing vernacular architecture and the rhythms of quotidian life. The part of the film entitled “Cruise to the Greek Islands” was filmed during the journey by Afros, a smaller boat on which a group among the attendants of the fourth CIAM visited several Greek islands, including Santorini and Aegina (fig. 7). The departure from Piraeus marked the opening of a different phase of filming for Moholy-Nagy’s Architect’s Congress. The way Moholy-Nagy filmed the island of Santorini shows his shift towards abstraction, arguing that the most essential medium of the film is light. This affected the way he captured the reality of Greek islands; his perception of film as light constructs a new conception of méditerranéité.

 

1 Marcello Barbieri, “Has Biosemiotics Come of Age? and Postdcript”, in idem., ed., Introduction to Biosemiotics: The New Biological Synthesis (Springer, 2008), 105.
2 Moholy-Nagy, Von Material zu Architektur, Bauhausbücher no. 14 (Munich: Albert Langen, 1929); Moholy-Nagy, The New Vision: From Material to Architecture, trans. Daphne M. Hoffmann (New York: Brewer, Warren & Putnam, 1932), 60.
3 Stephen J. Phillips, Elastic Architecture: Frederick Kiesler and Design Research in the First Age of Robotic Culture (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 2017), 132.
4 Raoul H. Francé, Bios: Die Gesetze der Welt (Munich: Franz Hanfstaengl, 1921).
5 Alvar Aalto, “The Influence of Construction and Materials on Modern Architecture”, in Göran Schildt, ed., Alvar Aalto in his Own Words, (New York: Rizzoli, 1998), 99.
6 LászlóMoholy-Nagy, Vision in Motion (Chicago: Paul Theobald, 1947), 360.
7 Moholy-Nagy, Malerei, Photographie, Film, Bauhausbücher no. 8 (Munich: Albert Langen, 1925).
8 Moholy-Nagy, “From Pigment to Light”, in Telehor 1, No. 1-2, (1936): 32-34.
9 Moholy-Nagy, “How Photography Revolutionises Vision”, trans. Philip Morton Shand, in The Listener, 8 (1933): 688-90.

Dr. ir. Marianna Charitonidou is a Lecturer and a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Institute for the History and Theory of Architecture (gta) ETH Zürich, where she works on her project “The Travelling Architect’s Eye: Photography and the Automobile Vision”, and a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the National Technical University of Athens and Athens School of Fine Arts. She is the curator of the exhibition “The View from the Car: Autopia as a New Perceptual Regime” (https://viewfromcarexhibition.gta.arch.ethz.ch/). She is a registered architect since 2010 and the principal and founder of Think Through Design Architectural and Urban Design Studio.

 

The reality of the film operator is fragmented and its parts are composed according to a new law. Precisely on the basis of his intense penetration by the equipment, it offers him that equipment-free aspect that he can legitimately demand from the work of art.

Walter Benjamin “Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit”

Introduction

This text aims to dissect the untold project of the modern, namely the disappearance of the human as author as the true accomplishment of what Andrea Branzi calls “promised land of the humane”. It puts forth the hypothesis according to which the very subject of modern tradition is not architecture as such but the design of an architectural intelligence. This radical idea implies that the main drive of western culture coincides with its own overcoming, through the resolution of the dialectic between subject and system. An obsessive search for order appears throughout western architecture history under different names: geometry, proportions (Alberti) , procedure (Durand), prescriptions (Neufert), and active forms (K.Easterling), all these terms express an attempt to reduce the number of potential choices implied in the very act of design. The latter seems in turn to oscillate between a wish to make something that depends on human decisions and a wish to make something “free” from decisions. Alienation is therefore not merely a collateral effect of technological advancement but its very promise: the separation of making from the realm of responsibility and the return to a pre-technological condition by means of technological autonomy. The text will argue, through the analysis of some pivotal figures and entities how modern design insists on- and progressively achieves a self-regulating intelligence. All this with the final goal of realizing the highest possible form of mimesis (nature imitation). The construction of a second nature (Natura, lit.”things to be born”) entangles in fact the development of a device which is at one time automatic and unpredictable. I will scrutinize the work of these figures in order to isolate the trajectory of the modern script, from notational to computational intelligence and question the implication of this shift for architecture and design at broad.

 

Chapter I – Brunelleschi and Alberti: Scripting The Modern

The epistemological crisis of the Renaissance coincides with the appearance of a principle that is based precisely on the absence of stable truths: scientific thought.mManfredo Tafuri identifies in fact in “exactness” the main character of humanism, as a character derived from classical antiquity and the discovery of its structural rigor. Exactness invests the totality of humanistic fields, from the study of written sources to the study of artifacts (in both cases philology), with a consequent need for systematization of knowledge and its operative translation. More than a rediscovery of the centrality of man, humanism is therefore characterized by the flourishing of a typically human trait, reason, that, however, does not have man as its main focus. It rests on itself, being a general principle indifferent to the subject of its operation. In other words, it generates order. In the first chapter of his book “Theory and History of Architecture” Tafuri points out the dialectic between Brunelleschi and Alberti exploring a hypothetical point 0 of the Modern tradition and the contradictions embedded in it. Filippo Brunelleschi isolates a rational matrix of architectural making, as a static and supra-historical component, while Leon Battista Alberti acknowledges in the accumulation of languages the impossibility of interpreting history as a linear narration. The following centuries will be nothing but an intense dialectic between a Brunelleschian and an Albertian approach, between reason and historical matter, a research for timelessness on one side and the engagement with the magmatic substance of history on the other . While admitting the legitimacy of this reading, it is interesting to note how both approaches lead to a substantial exit from history, an “Eschaton”, following the instance of rationalization of the Renaissance. Besides an organic theoretical formulation of the new architecture and a philological study of the classical language, Alberti’s fundamental contribution concerns the modes of production of the architectural object. In his book “The alphabet and the algorithm” Mario Carpo describes Alberti’s “allographic” revolution as the decisive and definitive moment of affirmation of drawing as the form of architectural notation that structures the production process. Orthogonal projections were already known in the Hellenistic period, but Alberti’s use of them is new: the drawing became the exclusive place for the elaboration of the project and the only support on which all the information describing the building was condensed. The construction was then reduced to a mere execution of the design. The separation between conception and execution is radical. The managerial aspect of both replaces the integral experience of architecture. The discovery of the essentially parametric nature of the classical language and the exactness of orthogonal projections minimize any question of interpretation. the space for interpretation is virtually reduced to zero. The idea of notation of the architectural idea implies in itself an idea of reproducibility, therefore of transcendence of the specific-individual datum in favor of its own autonomy. This new dynamic explains how the Renaissance language can be read as a sort of “ante litteram” International Style. The spread of architectural notation – i.e. the externalization of precise fragments of information – implies an internal organization of the discipline and the formulation of a theoretical superstructure, a collective intelligence capable of branching and articulating autonomously, transcending the individual and his control. If in Alberti the character of rationalization of the classical repertoire and the modes of production anticipate the characters of modernity, it is Brunelleschi who isolates the most radical character of the avant-garde. His architectures are born from the need of a rapid re-foundation of vast urban portions in Florence of the fifteenth century.

The wish for optimizing the planning and the productive system required an extremely pragmatic attitude. As a consequence, the essence of his projects consists in a stark denial of the specificity of the historical substance through a super-imposition of another language, rational, therefore timeless. Brunelleschi’s organisms based on square- (the basilica of the Holy Spirit) or cubic- (the Hospital of the Innocents) modules respond to a desire to reduce the compositional logic to the minimum possible number of parameters. The most elementary logical (geometric) construct is chosen for its ability to be freely articulated in space, allowing, for example, the continuity of nave and transept within the same principle, or to equally articulate internal and external space, virtually projecting a perspective and isotropic space on the Florence of the time. Even the reuse of classical language is instrumental, not at all philological and obeys to a necessity of reduction. The use of historical lexicon is for him partial and clearly oriented to a reengineering of the additive pre-Renaissance urban space, following a logic that invested all scales of design, from the element to the urban space. The objects designed by Brunelleschi can be “mentally contained” insofar as they are the product of a purely rational operation. They represent an unprecedented form of compression of information determining space. They are a formal logical construct that is easy to reduce to a limited number of operations and therefore represent a major achievement in the “compression” trajectory of Western culture isolated from Carpo and more generally an optimization of the design process reducing the number of choices associated with the process itself. In these operations we can already see how the most radical hypothesis of the modern is an exit from history based on the primacy of ultra-temporal reason, the fulfillment of which perhaps coincides with the dissolution of Western intelligence itself.

Chapter II – Précis de Leçons, Jean Louis Durand – Mechanic of Composition

The enlightenment can be considered to a certain extent a step of further refinement of the process that started with the Renaissance; Rationality instead of humanism is here ultimately recognized as the truly human feature. Within this cultural frame Durand (1760-1834) emerges as a pivotal figure, shifting the interest of the discipline from design to design methodology. Prompted by his task, the formation at the École Polytechnique of a number of engineers devoted to the construction of the most pragmatic building, he theorized a mechanic of composition and dropped the base for a science of Architecture. His “Precis de Leçons d’architecture données à L’École Polythechnique” ” is structured according to an increasing degree of complexity “from the simple to the composed”: 1_Elements establishing a relation between architecture elements and their material cause. 2_Composition in General showing elements combination combined and assembled to create part of buildings. 3_Procedure to be Followed in the Composition of any Project showing through different degrees of abstraction how it is possible to structure an ensemble. The students are called to familiarize themselves with the composition process through an analytical survey of the part to whole relations at different scales.The sequence could be then inverted if one wants to execute the composition “procedure”. Composing requires a synthetical approach proceeding from the ensemble to the parts and finally the details. The treatise of Durand results therefore in a manyfold device capable of being oriented toward an analytic or a synthetic approach depending on the order of its components. The dissection of traditional architecture categories is thoroughly carried and restructured in a sort of progressive tree-like figure, logically organizing the composition process, according to a formal strategy reminiscent of the rhetoric construction of Ramon Lull’s Tree of Science in the 13th century. Not a specific content but a structure is what reason has to offer, a dynamic principle that will endure the entire season of the modern. The design process coincided then with the reckon of the forces at stake and starting from a given program and budget, could almost automatically be translated into a project accommodating the required needs. The frontal attack to the Vitruvian Triad “construction, distribution, decoration” reoriented the whole system toward a more laconic “utility”. In 1802 Durand writes in his “Précis” “that if instead of devoting one’s time to the production of designs – one was to first look at the principles of the art and then familiarize oneself with the mechanism of composition, it would be possible to execute with facility, and even success, the design of any building whatever, even without having previously done any other”. Such a statement is a quintessential expression of the modern and represents the most radical attempt to reduce architecture to a set of rules. The design of a system has been isolated as the main subject of architecture. According to Durand the architect as a designer is no longer necessary and architecture dissolves itself within “Reason” as collective intelligence. The project is not conceived but mechanically executed. His provoking statement claims with unprecedented clarity the priority of systematic thinking over formal manipulation and opens the doors to a new undertaking to design, namely the scripting. This conceptual approach tends to articulate the design process according to the modality of automatism, almost annihilating the space of decision. Architecture becomes “doing almost nothing”. The primacy of the syntactical aspect of design and the radical simplification of architecture vocabulary clearly connoted a linguistic understanding of the discipline where the construction of a grammar defines the very possibilities of architecture. The work started by Brunelleschi has been further optimized and just as in the renaissance it is relentless. Durand adds in fact a further module to his theoretical construct called “Examination of the Principal Genres of Edifices” where he extends the part-to-whole logic to the urban space. “Just as walls, columns and so on are the elements of which buildings are composed,buildings are the elements of which cities are composed”. Once again reason embraces the whole scale of design. In the book “recueil et parallèle des édifices de tout genre, ancien et moderne..” the eclipse of history by reason reaches its highest accomplishment: in this publication the most relevant architecture of the past are published in the same scale facilitating comparison and recombination, i.e comparison as a progressive tool for improvement. Paradoxically the operations of Brunelleschi and Alberti seem to reach a synthesis in the Theory of Durand. Rationality goes radical and even eclectic. The repertoire of history, flattened to a ultra historical ready made catalogue, gets systematized in order to be re-employed…Re- becomes a crucial prefix of the subsequent history.

 

Chapter III – The Digital Eschaton

The formulation of languages endowed with a high intrinsic logic, (and therefore potentially autonomous) in the Renaissance and Durand’s syntactic research outlines a trajectory that expands throughout the entire span of western architectural culture. The synthesis of the metropolis to its programmatic section operated by Ludwig Hilberseimer for the Hochaussstad, the typological research of Mies, the “genetic” approach of Koolhaas, the kybernetes of Christopher Alexander are to be interpreted as recent expressions of a progressive reduction to a system of architecture making, that aims at replacing the manipulation of the architectural object with the construction of a process able to produce it, a grammar that defines its conditions of existence and frames its content. The flourishing of terms such as genetic (Foreing Office) , generative (Christopher Alexander) or even generic (OMA) in the architectural discourse of the XXth century attests to the maturation of this process, that still preserves the legibility of the mechanics of the design and, a compatibility with notational intelligence. The advent of Big Data technology has radicalized the tendency to the realization of autonomous devices, operating a shift from the conceptual to the operational level and opening the doors to an integral delegation of the design process to an artificial intelligence. While the attack on the author formulated by the super-structural rationale of the modern was based on the externalization of a self-organizing collective intelligence – substantially inhabiting the man, but transcending the individual – the one operated by Big Data addresses the very physiological basis of human intelligence. In spite of the rationalizing operations of the past, Big Data operates a subversion of the Platonic-Aristotelian construct that animated the modern and the western culture at large. Google’s “Search don’t sort” paradigm, as Carpo notices, replaces the notational structure of western intelligence with the sheer accumulation of retrievable experience. The logos replaces its sense of ordering principle with that of accumulation (see Heiddeger interpretation of Logos as “Leghéin” which means to accumulate, to preserve). The simple quantitative gap given by the computational capacity of the machine, i.e. its conjectural ability to formulate and verify myriad of hypothesis per time unit, has determined the obsolescence of the traditional figure of the designer and an atomization of the hierarchical structure in which production processes are traditionally organized. Precisely on the ground of this quantitative shift the product of the algorithmic intelligence becomes inscrutable. It would take ages for an organic intelligence, such as ours to reproduce and assess, hence comprehend, the number of operations leading the algorithm to its decision making. Machine design appears therefore as inexplicable as a natural phenomenon and as necessary as a physical one, not because of its intrinsically notational essence but because of a drastic shift in performances. Describing the distance between computational form-finding and modern engineering causal formulas Mario Carpo writes “Through computational form searching we can design structures of unimaginable complexity. But precisely because it is unimaginable the posthuman complexity belies interpretation and transcend the small data logic of causality and determinism we have invented over time to simplify nature and convert it into a reassuring, transparent, human friendly causal mode. Why does one so unimaginably complex structure work, and the thousand of very similar ones we just ran through FEA simulation do not? Who knows. But the point is that it works” The disconnection between the language of man and that of technology becomes for the same reason definitive. The Techno-Zeitgeist, that informed the grand narrative of the modern and perhaps its overcoming, seems to achieve in the Big Data the ultimate expression of its messianic essence: the exit of man not only from history but from his very existential condition (Ex-istere) by means of the construction of an artificial nature,where he is embedded again. Reason appears to have incubated an intelligence that transcends it. The modern dream to draw a total, synthesizing map organized by a system of intelligible associations undertaken by Warburg is overturned by the potential availability of the entire history of the phenomenal world as raw and unsorted material, i.e. the chaotic landscape of the machine data storage system. The caesura between the digital and the aesthetic implies the impossibility to read the mechanic of design (and generally of the phenomenal world production). It is only partially compensated by special interfaces that translate the otherwise intangible digital content, making it accessible to our physiology, albeit only as users. The generous dream of a responsive space, that Cedric Price envisioned at the scale of the Fun Palace, dissolved in the more capillary scale of design, and is evolving towards a progressive miniaturization and rarefaction in the digital. This dissolution of the visual makes our interpretative apparatus obsolete, our consciousness primitive again. The disappearance of the author within systems capable of autonomously organizing information represents for Carpo a return to a pre-Renaissance conditions, that of “Many hands-project”. The space of the project increasingly coincides with platforms simultaneously organizing information from several sources and configured according to a logic of participation and collective intelligence of a pre-modern kind. The parameterization of urban space inaugurated in the twentieth century realizes in “Deve software” (Sidewalk labs) its highest accomplishment. Here the author, delineated on the basis of a need for production optimization dissolves because of the same ethos. Its disappearance seems to be inscribed in its birth.

Conclusion?

While many architects are now asking how they could reposition themselves in the digital epoch, I wonder whether the digital is not the ultimate product of an architectural intelligence. Isn’t “architecture..once liberated from the obligation to construct the diagram of everything” as Rem Koolhaas says? The dissolution of architecture into design has been widely theorized, and it has been propelled by the very need for defending the project, negotiating the limits of the discipline. I can’t help but think of the question Alberti was obsessively posing as he realized the darkest secret of the modern. Quid tum? (What then?) What would it mean to embrace the scary perspective of the author’s annihilation? Which are the perspectives offered by the dismissal of human intelligence by its own artifice? Is this event going to suppress what we call human or is it just bringing the man to a further level? Does Posthuman architecture enshrine any possible interest for us, or is it just pure beauty? Which kind of preoccupation could possibly shape our approach to design when a “second nature” is going to provide us with all we need? How could we deal with this unprecedented degree of freedom (from choice)? Won’t art be necessary anymore or will indeed art be the only thing we need? What will art mean once the mimesis is accomplished? Which is going to be the focus of its criticism? Will art still serve to translate the raw matter of reality into human categories? What then.

Bibliography:
_Arendt Anna, 1958, Vita Activa, Chicago, U.S.A., University of Chicago Press
_Aureli, Pier Vittorio, 2011, The Possibility of an Absolute Architecture, Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States, The MIT Press
_Aureli, Pier Vittorio, 2011, Architecture for Barbarians, AA Files 63, London, United Kingdom, The Architectural Association
_Branzi, Andrea, 2006, The Genetic Metropolis, from Weak and Diffuse Modernity, the world of projects at the beginning of the 21st century, Milan, Italy, Skira
_Carpo Mario, 2011, The Alphabet and the Algorithm, Cambridge, Massachussets, MIT Press
_Carpo Mario, 2017, Th Innocence II e second Digital Turn, Cambridge, Massachussets, MIT Press
_Colomina Beatriz, Wigley Mark, Are We Human?
_Kentish Coomaraswamy, Ananda, 1977, Traditional art and symbolism Princeton, United States, Princeton University Press
_Easterling, Keller, 2014, Extrastatecraft: The Power of Infrastructure, London, United Kingdom, Verso Koolhaas Rem, 2004, Content, Köln, Germany, Taschen GmbH
_Lucan Jaques, 2012, Composition Non Composition, Lausanne, Switzerland, EPFL Press
_Tafuri, Manfredo, 1980, Theories and History of Architecture, London, United Kingdom, Granada Publishing Limited,
_Wright Steenson Molly, 2017, Architectural Intelligence How Designers and Architects Created the Digital Landscape, Cambridge, Massachussets, MIT Press

Marco Zelli is an architect, researcher, and educator based in Zürich. He graduated in 2009 at the IUAV University of Venice and at the FAUTL of Lisbon. After completing his studies he has been collaborating with several offices in Portugal, Japan, and Switzerland, developing a wide range of projects in all design phases. In 2018 he grounded his own practice. He is co-founder and director of the Forum for Architecture Theory (F.A.T.) and he is teaching at the chair Raum+Entwerfen at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT).

We pressed our hands against the stone and, as in a single move, we jumped over the wall. Without believing that I was already on the other side, I lowered myself subtly to notice some difference between the worlds. When fear reaches the limit, it becomes a beast. The feeling of death that fear causes petrifies the bodies, mutes the subjects, turns them into objects, into statues, but in fear there is also a breath. It seems that the skin becomes thinner, the internal organs wake up and the body is more sensitive to adrenaline. On the other side of the wall, the house produced a curious fascination. Around and even inside it, a series of female granite and bronze sculptures were present. The figurative sculptures, combined with the house’s abstraction, seemed to inhabit in silence. One could say that it was Perseus’ own curse against Medusa, but perhaps it was something else entirely. Next to the rock that merged architecture and local geology together laid two brooms and a barrel of garbage, a woman’s torso and a reclining woman, leaning against a light veil carved in the nakedness of its body. As we moved, other women emerged. We danced around these split-body objects, relating to each missing curve while I filmed in motion. Being there brought a sense of desecration of something, even if quietly, even if out of sight. Nina moved subtly, slowly and in silence, mirroring her movements to those of the sculptures, continuing what had been interrupted or petrified. Like the white of architecture, the white of our garments was gradually soiled with mosses and lichens. Dancing with the statues was liberating; it seemed that it gave life to those forcibly inanimate beings, evoking another body presence.  

The patriarchal house

Designed by the architect Oscar Niemeyer in the 1950s and built between 1951-1953 in Rio de Janeiro when the city was still the capital of Brazil [between 1763-1960], Canoas House was the architect’s residence for six years with his daughter Ana Maria and his wife Anita, before going to Brasília to accompany the construction of the country’s new capital. A preliminary survey of the house is manifested by a series of characteristics that gave the author a name of national and international recognition: sensuality and eroticism materialized by the relationship with the beauty of the curved and organic forms of women, as well as the natural landscape of Rio de Janeiro.

The relationship between loving muses and nature is not fortuitous. Nature has, for centuries, been continuously associated with the virginal love-giving female body. The representation of women, for example, in 19th century landscape painting brought together the concepts of nature, women, motherhood and the “natural” feminine. In the Brazilian romanticism of European influence, the painting “A Carioca” (1882) by the artist Pedro Américo (born in Paraíba, 1843-1905), can be an example, as so many others. The relationship between the pure woman, with white and glossy skin, the bowl dripping with water, sensuality and even masked sexuality, evoke the construction of a moral femininity associated with an equally pure and fertile nature. Coming from a fundamentally masculinist gaze, the representation through the horizontality of the bodies of both architecture, nature and women in Niemeyer’s sketches reinforce this paradigm. But if the sensuality of Niemeyer’s curves showed the woman as landscape by associating body and nature, on the other hand, it perpetuated oppression against women’s bodies confining them to their sex and reproductive means. In this sense, love is materialized by a compulsory heterosexuality, as in its most known poems: “It’s not the right angle that attracts me,/ Nor the straight, hard, unyielding line created by man./ What attracts me is the free and sensual curve./ The curve that I find in the winding course of our rivers,/ in the clouds of heaven, on the body of the favorite woman./ The whole universe is made of curves,/ Einstein’s curved universe.”¹

 

 

However, the enunciation of love as a cultural deed dates back from antiquity. Eros, the god of Love in Greek culture, was paid a compliment by Plato’s “The Symposium” in 380 BCE. Love was built through different narratives and discussed by men, among men since women were excluded from collective debates. Plato’s readings of Eros can deepen the understanding of how Niemeyer’s modernity perpetuated and translated its affections. Eros, when incarnated by his modernity, assumes universalizing and masculinist garments, playing a fundamental role in perpetuating a sexual division into binarism even when gender and sexuality are made invisible functions within the constructive mechanism of modern architecture.

Within architectural modernity, in 1917, Le Corbusier had published Towards an architecture, where he exposed the idea of a house as a Machine for Living in, which had an enormous influence in Brazilian modernism. However, outside the domain of reason, Niemeyer’s alleged modern sensual tropicalism, which enchanted many modernists, evidently arises from an epistemological ethos that embraces modernity within a fundamentally masculine system, masked as universal. When coining the title of a national hero of architecture, through a self-centered masculinity, a characteristic that accentuates the value of the demiurge architect, one can feel doubts about his sensualization of modernism, arising fundamentally via a white, masculine, patriarchal European matrix.

Patriarchy, as Gerda Lerner recalls, is a historical creation formed by men and women in a process that took about 2500 years, based on the commercialization of female sexuality, and on the transformation of women into a resource enchanted by class differences, which according to her, is expressed in terms of gender. Women themselves became a resource, acquired by men. The architecture could not be indifferent to the current sexual system, to the extent that one could call it the modern patriarchal house.

The role of this tropical modernism didn’t look upon the patriarchal eroticism pointed by the objectification of the women’s bodies, that became hegemonic in a place of construction of a national identity. The discursive, imagetic and ideological construction of it can be seen in the encounter of media from the Exhibition of Alfredo Ceschiatti, in 1956 at Niemeyer’s House.

The exhibition

Different from the usual sites of art exhibitions, the one made by Alfredo Ceschiatti, an artist known for the sculptures to be settled in Niemeyer’s buildings, was displayed in the Canoas House’s interiors and gardens. The exhibition was published in the fifth edition of Modulo (The Magazine of Architecture and Visual Arts of Brazil), of which Niemeyer was editor-in-chief, in order to celebrate its fifth anniversary, and the displayed photographs in the Magazine were taken by Marcel Gautherot, a French photographer based in Brazil, who played a fundamental role in documenting the images of a national modernity. Beginning to circulate in the year of the inauguration of President Juscelino Kubitschek (January 31, 1956), the exhibition and the publication are important archives in considering the construction of a modern and public body which contradicts the notion of the house as a private domain.

The house was divided into levels that separate dialectically what is shown and what is secret. While the compartmentalized spaces of intimacy are hidden by the new topography of the house, the free design of the ground floor, held by the spaces of sociability, become stage for this great constructed scenario. This space becomes a voyeuristic exhibition device, both of a built femininity exposed by the figurative sculptures, as much as of the free forms of architecture. Within that, there is a tension between the exposure of a sensual body, in the public sphere and the control of the body in the private sphere. This is evident from the fragments registered and chosen to appear in the Modulo Magazine. Accentuating the patriarchal domination present in modernity, the house is revealed through the vision of an idealized heterosexual love, where the space of sociability is given by the transparency and abstraction of the forms of a white, ethereal femininity. Within that, there is a subjective evidence of the architect’s point of view under a platonic sense of femininity and love.

 

Not only does the architecture have a role of seduction through an imported myth of femininity, so do the sculptures. In this magazine edition, were seven highlighted sculptures: Acrobats, Liliane, Bather, Rooster, Fish, The Three Graces, and Woman’s Torso. Contemporary Brazilian critics might have pointed out the importance of the feminine nudes, its “voluptuous and sexualized” bodies, its adornment function, the woman and its single function of pleasing the men’s universes or even the friendship pact between men that had women sculptures as a trademark. In this sense, the culture of fetish offers a parallel with the culture of the commodity present between the 19th and 20th centuries. Rethinking the use and fetishistic cult of the female body as a formal operation in architecture, it is imperative to rethink the cultural parameters between the feminine as a natural body and merchandise, especially since architecture in a capitalist context makes it the hallmark of a culture, an advertising body. This is especially important when Niemeyer tells in his memoirs books he was invited by Juscelino to build Brasilia in the after-party of Ceschiatti’s Exhibition. Within that, one could argue that in an important political context, that would lead to the building of the new Capital Brasilia, the house functioned as a seductive device.

As Judith Butler already pointed out, beyond culturally constructed or naturally given, gender is social performance. For her, “the sex/ gender distinction suggests a radical discontinuity between sexed bodies and culturally constructed genders” meaning that “when the constructed status of gender is theorized as radically independent of sex, gender itself becomes a free-floating artifice, with the consequence that man and masculine might just as easily signify a female body as a male one, and woman and feminine a male body as easily as a female one.”² (Butler, 1990, p.6). In this sense, it is worth considering: how were images of seduction, historically attributed to femininity, used in the new designs of modernity and permeated in the active circuits of power, dominated by men? How does architecture build the category of sex? How does it perform a gendered body, and what is its impact in the context of building a national identity? How do these subjects participate in the type of pleasure offered when looking at the house, and how do they announce fantasies through power?

Much is known about Niemeyer building his persona through anecdotes of youth, his participation in the “Clube dos Cafajestes” (The Womanizer’s Club), his sexual experiences in Lapa, the meeting with the women on Wednesday’s nights, the jokes in the office he shared with Jorge, Reidy and Hélio at Nilo Peçanha, where, as he tells in his memoirs books, gathered friends such as Vinicius de Moraes, Carlos Leão, Echenique, Luiz Jardim, Eça, Duprat and Cavalcanti. 

It is worth reminding ourselves that in the art scene of the moment, Bossa-Nova was a genre of music pretty much growing in the same space-time of the house – a Rio de Janeiro of 1956. The so sounding words of  “Pra Viver um Grande Amor” (To live a great Love), by Vinicius de Moraes exposes the limits of this idealism: “To live a great love/ First you have to be a gentleman/ And be your lady’s whole/Whatever it is/ We must make the body an address / Where the beloved woman is cloistered/ And stand outside with a sword/ To live a great love”³

Not much different from the love song by Vinicius de Moraes, Niemeyer has built for himself a love machine. The lustful and imaginative being, as he himself says, led him to “the paths of sex, architectural invention and fantasy”⁴. What it seems is that his double-persona allows him to be the playboy in architecture, even if he has built a family home for himself. The space of the modern playboy architect is the space of the erotic masculine, the sensual, permissive and public and it is positioned – scenically – the heteronormative and patriarchal family life. When building an erotic apparatus, from the masculine sense, materialized in the violent objectification of a body, architecture becomes the platonic woman built for himself.

In the myth of Daphne and Apollo, it is by turning into a forest that Daphne manages to outwit the enemy from abuse. The forest here also acts as a defense, a shield for the simulacrum, for the very chaos it entails. This may also be a track where the erosion of a sort of heteronormative culture resides. The category of woman, unlike a return to an origin, to an ornament or to a petrified state, is a performative multitude against its violent objectifications and affections, in pursuit of the still invisible other forms of loving.

1 “Não é o ângulo reto que me atrai,
Nem a linha reta, dura, inflexível criada pelo o homem.
O que me atrai é a curva livre e sensual.
A curva que encontro no curso sinuoso dos nossos rios,
nas nuvens do céu,
no corpo da mulher preferida.
De curvas é feito todo o universo,
O universo curvo de Einstein.” – (poem by O. Niemeyer)
2 BUTLER, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the subversion of identity. New York: Routledge, 1990
3 “Para viver um grande amor
Primeiro é preciso sagrar-se cavalheiro
E ser de sua dama por inteiro
Seja lá como for
Há que fazer do corpo uma morada
Onde clausure-se a mulher amada
E postar-se de fora com uma espada
Para viver um grande amor.” (verses of “Para Viver um grande amor”, by Vinicius de Moraes)
4 NIEMEYER, Oscar. Playboy interviews Oscar Niemeyer. Interview with Zuenir Ventura. Playboy. São Paulo, number 185, p. 39 to 58, November,1990. p.43

Mariana Meneguetti, Rio de Janeiro (1989), is an architect based in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. She co-founded Entre, a collective of architects with whom she researches architecture and its urban transformations through verbal reports, having co-authored the publication “8 Reactions for Afterwards”, Rio Books (2019) and “Entre: Interviews with Architects”, Vianna and Mosley (2013). She participated in Walls of Air, the Brazilian Pavillion for the 16th Venice Architecture Biennale, the X São Paulo Architecture Biennial and the XIII Buenos Aires Architecture Biennial.  Through an interdisciplinare approach, she maintains an ambivalent practice between research and building practice. 

 

I went to Venice over Summer to escape the grids of Zurich and Zoom, which seemed to close-in as I retraced the same tidy streets, week after week. I was there through the confluence of another two, equally-claustrophobic grids. A perpetually tanned, muscled boy from Grindr, who I never met but still followed on Instagram, had visited a few weeks earlier, posting videos from a water taxi to the Hotel Cipriani. Even his less glamorous photos showed a city emptier than before cruise ships started docking in earnest in the 1980s. It seemed the perfect time to go. I deleted Grindr on the train there. 

Day 1 

By the time I disembarked, I saw thousands of others had the same idea. I arrived on the Festa del Redentore when, once a year, a string of pontoons joins Guidecca to the main island. Passing the crowds queued in front of Palladio’s church, I turned into Fondamenta Rio Croce instead, on a different pilgrimage. 

About half-way down—up a flight of stairs flanked by squat columns, across a timber bridge— is a portal to the Garden of Eden, Venice’s most storied cruising ground.¹ The garden was unlocked for the unofficial and self-funded ‘Cruising Pavilion’, the only queer ‘freespace’ at the 2018 Architecture Biennale.² Hardly the first time that architectural discourse has neglected these stories. 

A flurry of writing on COVID-19 reveled in comparisons to Spanish flu and tuberculosis, overlooking the urban effects of AIDS: the other global pandemic of our lifetime.³ In the name of public sanitation, health authorities cleansed cities of the bars and bathhouses— with their darkroom mazes—that helped men connect, not just hook-up.⁴ Take Samuel Delany’s autobiographical Times Square Blue, Times Square Red, evoking the queer ecosystem that flourished where Broadway slices open the Manhattan grid.⁵ By the time it was published in 1999, the institutions that anchored Delany’s intoxicating world had already succumbed to deliberate gentrification in the wake of AIDS. Families of tourists replacing queers ducking into porn theatres, or cruising for blowjobs in bookstores. 

I thought cruising—this literacy of nods and looks, walks and slight gestures—was lost to me. I knew the theory, from the novels of Alan Hollinghurst or Aaron Betsky’s pioneering Queer Space (1997), but nothing in practice. I am, after all, part of a generation who never had to risk public indecency to get off. Already weakened by HIV transmission, physical cruising was crushed by apps that took sex off-street and out of the club, and turned it into a campy anachronism. 

Peering along the canal, I looked for other men loitering in doorways in the dark. There is no sign today of what literary scholar Janet Todd called, primly, ‘a none-too-discreet extension of gay Venice, where aesthetes came to mingle and pick each other up.’⁶ If I did see someone in the shadows, I am not even sure what I would have done. With the garden closed, where would we go? 

Indiscreet ‘aesthetes’ regularly feature in accounts of a decadent, decaying and diseased Venice. Joseph Brodsky, the Nobel-winning poet, described a party, a flaking Palazzo, and ‘a bunch of giggling, agile, homosexual youths…presided over by a rather distraught and spiteful middle-aged queen.’⁷ Sociologist Richard Sennet implied that flagrant 15th Century gays contributed to a syphilis epidemic and spurred the moral panic that created the Jewish Ghetto, with their ‘flourishing homosexual culture devoted to cross-dressing, young men lounging in gondolas on the canals wearing nothing but women’s jewels.’⁸ It is a seductive vision of a permissive city, yet records at the time show men burned alive in Piazza San Marco for same-sex relations.⁹ 

With outsider voices banished from traditional archives, queer histories have often relied on such fragments. Ephemeral practices and secret identities left little mark on the city, except when they erupted into public scandal and punishment. Their stories need assembly, piece by piece, from traces in criminal and medical records, the implicit in fiction and autobiographies, even accounts as self-indulgent as my summer holiday. 

The poet Raymond Laurent supposedly declared his love for Langhorn Whistler in the Garden of Eden before, unrequited, he shot himself.¹⁰ But the story is altogether more subdued in Jean Cocteau’s autobiographic poem Souvenir d’un soir d’automne au jardin Eaden (1909).¹¹ Cocteau, Laurent and their friends languish in the garden; melancholy without knowing why, they misunderstand Laurent’s hints at premeditated suicide. A euphemistic obituary reads: ‘His life…was destroyed by a very lofty, a very rare ideal, that of the Other Love’.¹² In these snippets there seems something closer to reality, less impetuous melodrama, just a young man tormented by love in a time when that love appeared impossible. 

I imagine the ritual. 21-year-old Laurent unbolts the garden’s gate from inside. Is he beautiful? Our eyes meet in the gloom, I follow him into the densest part of the garden, before I realise: I would never be there. I would never have taken the risk. The freedom of cruising was— still is—shadowed by police patrols.¹³ 

All this time, cruising was never the only way for queer bodies to touch. In the film Keep the Lights On (2012), Erik and Paul first speak in 1998 on a hotline—’No, I’m more of a top. What about you?’—sex first, relationship later, not so different from the apps today. In Maupin’s More Tales of the City (1980), Michael Tolliver vows to meet someone nice away from San Francisco’s bars. Reading it now, I thought: meeting anywhere in person sounds so romantic. Nostalgia like this is an infinite regression. Does every queer generation think it was more real for the last? 

Day 2 

The next day, I picked my way from a modest hotel near Campo San Tomà to the Collezione Peggy Guggenheim. More than once, I pushed past an ambling couple only to rush back the same way, an alley that seemed right running into a canal instead. There is a certain logic to most cities, of streets forming crossroads, meaning one wrong turn can be fixed at the next. Everyone gets lost here, even Brodsky. Knowing the cliché is not enough to avoid it. 

For critic Rosalind Krauss, the grid’s rejection of nature was the principle, repeated motif of Modernism. ‘Flattened, geometricized, ordered, it is antinatural, antimimetic, antireal. It is what art looks like when it turns its back on nature.’¹⁴ This is why Venice, a city of islands in a lagoon, so firmly rejects the street grid. Its writhing tartan of alleys and waterways could never turn its back on the water, even if it tried. 

At the end of Holleran’s Dancer from the Dance (1978), queers burst onto Manhattan’s grid in protest. For most of the novel, they have gossiped or danced in dresses and jockstraps on the fringes of the city, where the avenues disintegrate into parks and piers. If you have ever been called a faggot for dressing loudly, you will know that eyes on wide streets can make an everyday panopticon. Here, for the first time, they want to be seen. For the glares from apartment windows and passers-by—‘Fucking queers, they should be arrested!’ shouts one woman—to bear witness to their liberation. 

We queue to get inside the Guggenheim, queuing again at each room, its capacity marked on the threshold. Signs tell us to keep a metre and a half distance, and I can hear, almost feel, when someone breaches it. To get out of the way, I push up to Mondrian’s Composition No. 1 with Grey and Red (1938/39). This close, I worry my breath will fog the glass. The black grid recedes, and all I can see are cracks across its grey planes of paint. 

The cracks form circles and curves, mountains and valleys, with no respect for abstraction and Neo-Plastic theory. In another of his paintings, ‘yellow paint has cracked over time…red paint oozing through the cracks.’¹⁵ Conservationist Ana Martins wrote that the explanation is rational—his technique of overlaying and retouching coats is especially susceptible to cracking—but in the room, in those cracks, I thought of nature clawing its way out of the grid, seeping up like acqua alta. 

When my eyes refocus, I see a man standing next to me. His glasses flash in the corner of my vision, a waft of shaving cream. His hand brushes mine. ‘Sorry’, I mumble, not for the touch but for standing there, engrossed, too long, I retreat to the next room, the line dissipated. 

Nothing strikes me the same way. I move from one work to another, a glance long enough to see it does little for me, until I smell the man again. This time I turn. I take in linen pants, a singlet, black hair falling on bare shoulders, a moustache, before I realise, he is looking at me too. 

‘This is good, don’t you think?’ 

No, I think, but say ‘Yeah, really interesting.’ 

He touches my back, turns me gently, his hand hot through my shirt. ‘But not as good as that one.’ 

We talk a little more about the art, we hold each other’s gaze, until he says ‘I’m going to the bathroom,’ and I follow him in. Cruising is a kind of spatial practice. Without the hyperawareness of COVID-19, I wonder how often I have been cruised and just never noticed. 

After, we drifted back to his apartment, the route twisting like the chase in Death in Venice. Aschenbach trails Tadzio and his family, lurking behind porticos and on the other side of bridges, the family mostly oblivious, until ‘through the haze…the beautiful boy would turn his head, seek him out, and sight him.’¹⁶ His feverish infatuation is not the effect of the Sirocco winds or Cholera. It is a symptom of Venice itself. This game of meaningful looks, the half-hidden hunt—cruising—was enabled by the very qualities that make it so easy to get lost here. The city’s fitful paths and sightlines are not so different from a bathhouse darkroom. 

Over canals and under buildings, no one noticed we were holding hands. This minor gesture between men that can still draw glances in much bigger cities. It was surprising, our off-grid anonymity.

 

 1 Named after English couple Caroline and Frederick Eden, who created the garden in 1884.
 2 Pierre-Alexandre Mateos, Charles Teyssou, Rasmus Myrup and Octave Perrault, Cruising Pavilion, 24 May 2018,
3 For an especially callous example of this omission, see Eleanor Jolliffe, ‘A short history of epidemics and their impact on the built environment,’ Building Design, 15 April, 2020, https://www. bdonline.co.uk/opinion/a-short-history-of-epidemics-and-their-impact-on-the-built-environment/5105528. article.
4 For one instance of these closures, see Joyce Purnick, “City Closes Bar Frequented By Homosexuals, Citing Sexual Activity Linked To Aids,” The New York Times, Nov. 8, 1985.
5 Delany depicts a broad cross-section of society, including straight-identifying men who had sex with other men. Samuel R Delany, Times Square Red, Times Square Blue (New York: New York University Press, 1999). Barett also writes of the symbolic ‘queerness’ of Broadway’s subversive interruption of the grid: Annie Barrett, “Noncon Form,” Log, no. 41 (2017): 141-44.
6 Janet Todd, ‘Requiem for a Garden of Eden,’ Twenty Minutes, BBC Radio 3 (27 November 2009), https:// www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/ b00nyw61
7 Joseph Brodsky, Watermark: An essay on Venice (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1992), 50.
8 Richard Sennett, Flesh and Stone : The Body and the City in Western Civilization (New York (N.Y.): Norton, 1996), 223.
9 Guido Ruggiero, The Boundaries of Eros: Sex Crime and Sexuality in Renaissance Venice (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 109-145.
10 For versions of the incident see Nikolai Endres, “Emily Eells (ed. and tr.), Two Tombeaux to Oscar Wilde: Jean Cocteau’s Le Portrait surnaturel de Dorian Gray and Raymond Laurent’s Essay on Wildean Aesthetics,” Victorians: A Journal of Culture and Literature, no. 121 (2012): 265- 268; Todd, ‘Requiem for a Garden of Eden.’
11 Cocteau returned repeatedly to Laurent’s suicide in his work, see Claude Arnaud et al., Jean Cocteau : A Life (New Heven; London: Yale University Press, 2016).
12 Translation in Horst Schroeder, “‘Suicide of Vivian Wilde,’” The Wildean, no. 30 (December 5, 2007): 45–51.
13 Reflecting on his own cruising adventures on the Venetian Lido, queer theorist Shaka McGlotten writes that ‘gay identity was shaped by urban spaces and by persecution, by Parisian vice squads cracking down on the sodomites sodomizing in the public toilets.’ Shaka McGlotten, ‘Lessons in Cruising,’ The Avery Review 29 (February 2018), https://averyreview. com/issues/29/lessons-in-cruising.
14 Rosalind Krauss, “Grids,” October 9 (1979): 51–64.
15 Ana Martins et al., “Piet Mondrian’s Broadway Boogie Woogie: Non Invasive Analysis Using Macro X-Ray Fluorescence Mapping (MA-XRF) and Multivariate Curve Resolution-Alternating Least Square (MCR-ALS),” Heritage Science 4, no. 22 (2016).
16 Thomas Mann, Death in Venice, trans. David Luke (London: Vintage, 2002), 82.

 

Hamish Lonergan is an architect, writer and doctoral student at the gta Institute at ETH Zurich. His research explores the role of tacit knowledge in architectural education. Previous writing—on issues of criticism, taste, and authority in architectural culture—has appeared in journals including Footprint, Inflection and OASE. Before joining the gta, he co-curated the exhibition Bathroom Gossip (Brisbane, 2019) and worked worked at COX Architecture on projects including significant Indigenous cultural facilities on Minjerribah (Stradbroke Island).

 

Cities are complex and evocative sites of transformation, with infrastructural networks and intimate connections constantly shifting bodies and things into new social, material, and affective constellations. The ongoing infrastructural turn across disciplines has implicated a wide array of contemporary concerns within the city, in many ways addressing space and structure through understandings that the architectural discourse has not yet become fully attuned to. While infrastructures may often be thought of as physical entities like overlapping highways or buried sewage systems, contemporary theorists strive to imagine infrastructure in more relational terms, seeking to both assess the infrastructural object and to dissolve it, mapping where and how its particulates land. Understood within city space, infrastructure becomes both a tool and a weapon, carving out new forms of intimacy while simultaneously limiting others. For architecture to adequately address these uneven consequences within the urban condition, the role of intimacy must enter the conceptual orbit in fresh, infrastructural terms.

By implicating infrastructure and intimacy—two concepts whose loose and fluid definitions have only recently been addressed in theoretical conjuncture—within spatial understandings of the city, the physical imprint of intimate relations can be traced to expose deep webs of power and the violent and exclusionary potentials that they actualize. Intimacy can be seen as the factor that imbues space with meaning, enabling conceptions of place through intimate association, and its weaponization is what often reinforces stigma and socio-spatial division. Infrastructure’s role in social formations is often visible, with more obvious signs like roads, telephone lines, and fibre optic cables forging affective networks in physical and virtual space. While these palpable and traceable cues have potent capacities to realize discord and disconnection, it is the immaterial forms of infrastructure such as zoning ordinances, laws, and policing structures that are of particular interest in mobilizing intimacy as a theoretical lens. The violence of scales enabled by these immaterial systems, in which a governing body in one geographic location can make decisions that reverberate deep within individual bodies in another, has always been central to the formation of the urban fabric and the furthering of hegemonic standards of intimacy amidst city life. 

In probing the city’s spatial politics in her book Extrastatecraft: The Power of Infrastructure Space, Keller Easterling posits a pertinent consideration of architecture’s role amidst ongoing shifts in understandings of built form, noting that the presence of infrastructure space within the contemporary city could seem to harken to the “death of architecture.”¹ While she quickly points out the fallacy of this logic, noting that in fact this presence only further establishes architecture’s active role, her hypothetical scrutiny has a particularly sticky effect. Architecture must be consistently reassessed in the face of ever-evolving responsibilities in order to adequately respond to the demands of the present day, and can begin to do so through a recognition of the feedback loop between infrastructure, intimacy, and space as foundational to the formation of the city. 

Built form often draws a conceptual line between private and public spaces, a division that innately separates the interior from the exterior, the domestic from the civic, and the personal from the political, severing the body of collective life through binary opposition. As noted by Ara Wilson, this division is easily enabled by the understanding of intimacy as something private, proximate, and embodied², offering a rubric for both deepening and suturing the divides of urban life at various scales and with varying degrees of intensity. While intimacy does exist within this personal ontology, it is also expansive and ambiguous, bouncing off of form and figure to create multi-scalar shifts. Architecture may at times claim to perforate the boundary between public and private space, to blur its limits, yet it is still inherently tied to the regulation of intimacy in one form or another. The ideologies that it bolsters remain visible from the scale of the house to that of the city as it establishes its shape.³ In this way, intimacy can be considered as an intangible ethos through which space comes into being and societal norms become crystallized. Understood as existing within a vast spectrum, intimacies can range from familial to estranged, banal to erotic. Queer and feminist scholarship—which has been at the root of the infrastructural turn since Susan Leigh Star wrote her seminal article “The Ethnography of Infrastructure” in 1999—has also delved deep into the ways that intimacy is shaped by power, seeking to dismantle the systems of oppression that maintain normativity as heterosexual⁴, white, and able-bodied. The thread of dominance that weaves the tapestry of the city implicates all forms of bodies, whether individual, collective, or political, into patterned articulations, creating entrenched hierarchies and regulating acceptable forms of connection. 

In the article “Cities and Sexualities,” the authors delve deeper into these hierarchies by addressing the role of sexuality within the city, noting many of the ways that these standards are simultaneously furthered and transgressed. They cite the city as “a battleground where those with non-normative sexual orientation or proclivities seek to territorialize space, producing neighbourhoods which normalize and promote their identities.”⁵ The grouping of those with so-called non-normative sexualities is just one example of a geographic and largely temporal disposition. While the space of the ‘gay village’ is now commodifiable within many contemporary cities, areas historically developed through other normatively-divergent groups such as sex workers do not often receive the same celebrated treatment, and intangible infrastructural systems continue to disadvantage those whose expressions of intimacy do not fit neatly within deeply-rooted societal norms.

This infrastructural discrimination can be clearly seen through New York’s anti-loitering law known to many as the ‘Walking While Trans’ ban. While supposedly in place to regulate sex work by allowing police officers to arrest and detain individuals essentially at will, it has been seen to disproportionately target trans women for simply existing in public space. The effect here is twofold: in one sense, the ban attempts to censor public expressions of intimacy within the self, targeting personal identities as in violation of the law if they do not conform to hegemonic realities or dominant standards. In another sense, the ban—as well as the criminalization of sex work more generally—has a viscerally spatial implication, relegating sex workers to more marginal, secluded, and dangerous locations through surveillance and policing. This attempted marginalization is also enabled through zoning, as establishments associated with sexuality are continually relegated to areas far from housing, schools, or religious establishments⁶ in attempts to control what constitutes acceptable forms of desire and intimacy while maintaining the fragile invisibility of acceptability’s breach. Under the guise of guarding against ‘public nuisance’, legislations carve a thick line in the sand in attempts to uphold rigid heteronormative values. In many cases, infrastructures of the law seek to control not just transgressive intimacies, but transgressive existences in general.

To these ends, there is also a productivity in thinking of intimacy as infrastructure, working to regulate connections much in the same way that a highway works to connect two cities but divide a landscape, or a pipeline is capable of transferring either water or waste. Intimacy is real and felt, but it is also ephemeral, shifting, and binding. Its powerful dispossession makes it something widely coveted and also widely guarded against, and it becomes a particularly powerful tool when invoked within spatial contexts. In Brian Larkin’s assertion of infrastructures as political and poetic devices, he posits them as “objects that create the grounds on which other objects operate, and when they do so they operate as systems.”⁷ Intimacy as infrastructure thus enables care and collectivity to operate in systemic confluence, mingling within atmospheres of place to build the space of the city. By considering the ways that infrastructures create the backdrop to everyday realities, enabling movement, lighting, electricity, plumbing, and environmental comfort for some while halting these actions for others, intimacy becomes the intangible currency of daily life and personal affect. Building on understandings of intimacy, Lauren Berlant asserts that to “rethink intimacy is to appraise how we have been and how we live and how we might imagine lives that make more sense than the ones so many are living.”⁸ Intimacy as an infrastructure, as a spatial determinant and an affective structure, thus has direct implications on the practice and poetics of architecture. The pressing task of the discipline must become how to generate spatial commons that confront the binary division between public and private spheres, rethinking intimacy not only as localized but as diffuse, inclusive, and multi-scalar, instrumental in creating the space of the city and in striving toward futures that embrace the intimate in its many forms.

1 Keller Easterling, Extrastatecraft: The Power of Infrastructure Space (London and New York: Verso, 2014), Introduction, eBook.
2 Ara Wilson, “The Infrastructure of Intimacy,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 41, no. 2 (January, 2016): 249.
3 Kim Dovey, Framing Places: Mediating Power in Built Form (London, England: Routledge, 2008), 45.
4 Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner, “Sex in Public,” Critical Inquiry 24, no. 2 (January, 1998): 548.
5 Phil Hubbard, Andrew Gorman-Murray, and Catherine J. Nash, “Cities and Sexualities,” in Handbook of the Sociology of Sexualities, ed. J DeLamater and R.F. Plante (Switzerland: Springer International Publishing, 2015), 288.
6 Hubbard, Gorman-Murray, and Nash, “Cities and Sexualities,” 295.
7 Brian Larkin, “The Politics and Poetics of Infrastructure,” Annual Review of Anthropology 42, no. 1 (October, 2013): 329.
8 Lauren Berlant, “Intimacy: A Special Issue,” Critical Inquiry 24, no. 2 (Winter, 1998): 286.

Alexandra Pereira-Edwards is a designer and current Masters student at Carleton University’s Azrieli School of Architecture & Urbanism, where she also currently teaches undergraduate studio. She is involved in an ongoing project at the Canadian Centre for Architecture titled Toward Unsettling that highlights the continuous effects of settler colonialism while questioning architecture’s role in its proliferation. Her current research explores the dynamics of power, infrastructure, and affect as they relate to space, with a focus on spatial justice and the politics of visibility within the built environment.