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In collaboration with Manoever 5-
contemporary.spaces team: Heiko Kampherbeek, Marc Matzken, Martin Kessler
Formsache - Notes towards a dissimulation of form
Christopher Hight
Formalities - Traditionally, the task of an exhibition's introductory text is to explain the work that stands before the viewer and if that work derives from more than one source, to draw the connections that span each project, to unearth within their diverse forms a common signification and to trace this as a theme representing a Zeitgeist, a Weltanschauung, new school or "paradigm."
Indeed, when confronted with unconventional architectures, curatorial texts are to re-integrate them into that genre called "architecture," to show how even these projects in their apparent strangeness adhere to this proper name. That is, such texts are meant to sythesize an organic identity to otherwise diverse, perhaps heterogeneous, matters. It is best to treat such explanations with skepticism. For however sanguine it might be to believe that work can be explained by locating similarities and thus sublimate our anxiety about any apparent strangeness to known referents, the dynamic of this identification is problematic as it subsumes all possible differentiation and transformation under a model of an implicit or explicit Sameness and continuity. Rather than illuminate work, it is this absent model of the Same that is at once imposed and occluded in such "explanations."
Thus, rather than offer these four practices and their projects as examples of a new paradigm, school or movement, it is more useful to indicate some of the disparate problems they confront, and the contemporary field of possibilities from which they emerge. Rather than search for resemblances, these projects are best engaged through their irreducibly complex conditions of formation, themselves usefully thought via the alternate regimes of identification given by the three sense of the exhibit's title, formsache: formality, form thing, and being in form.
Form and Things - This exhibit depends on a supposition that today hardly anything is less relevant to architecture than the "visible." This might seem a perverse statement when it is read projected onto a screen, surrounded by other projections of projects. Here is a exhibit, one might think, designed to provide a visually interesting surface of projection, itself representing projects complexly formed, skillfully rendered and generated through the screen interface of the computer.
Reactionaries might see the entire installation and the work it presents as another sign of architecture's consumption into the global economy of images. Yet, the image has little to do with vision. To suggest that it does not only confuses optics, perception, representation and what Duchamp derided as the "retinal," but forgets the conditions under which something is perceived as an image. In each of these projects, the image should be understood in the sense of an imago completely integrated into the conditions of being for the work yet not delimited by the putative "real" architectural object.
Instead of an "image of something" it is more useful to think of the imaging of things as forming: that is before something can be made apparent as a coherent representation to the eye (the banal idea of an image) there must be a schematic organization through which a quality, form or trait can be recognized as such. This lay between matter and its latent potential form, integrated into the conditions of formation itself. The role of the image is thus neither to represent a notional "real" object nor by the same token can it threaten the "reality" of architecture.
Nor does computer visualization make the image less trustworthy due to the degree of manipulation and photo-realism enabled by software. Today, as epitomized by Plasma's representational devices and formative strategies, the image in architecture is not so different from the electro-chemical gradient fields swarm intelligence studies misleadingly call templates - an efflorescent envelope through which the manifold of what constitutes architecture is re-imagined.It is this diagrammatic imago of architecture that these formal researches address.
Augmented Sensors - Likewise, everyone knows that visible light constitutes a very minute section of the electro-magnetic wave spectrum. The rest - that is, almost everything - remains "invisible" to human(ist) sight. We need prosthesis for the rest to become available to our reality and the formation of these prosthesis offer schema through which these realities become available to knowledge. Similarly, for these projects, the built environment is only minutely available to the eye and is understood as a far more extensive field of forces and wave packets.
Context no longer refers to those forms accessed through figure-field drawings and elevation but the fields of capital, consumption, branding and the electronic signals that effuse the metropolitan milieu. Computers do not permit more "scientific" or positivist analysis so much as open the informatic spectrum to architectural knowledge, treating the built environment in non-humanist terms, like in the way bats navigate capture prey by sonar. By the same token, formalism is not now a scholastic abstraction but an intimate engagement with the flow of matter - including the quantum levels of EM transmission. These projects are different actualizations of a contemporary condition in which empiricism is sublime.
In form: Pragmatic Geometries - As developed by C. S. Pierce and William James, pragmatism suggests that the only things that are knowable are those things that have effective effects. Everything else is inconsequential, meaningless, and for James not even real. In contrast, the "critical" project, as it was construed in architecture construed reality as something laying behind veils of ideology and other representations. For the pragmatist, however, ideology is only "real" when effective and hence not ideological.
This is why none of these projects represent value in a traditional or hermeneutic sense nor in some vain quest for minimalist silence or pure function; rather, they install an ethics of formal, spatial and material affects. To this end, an ideology of the fragmented, "blob" or surface topology is not at play in any of these projects, nor is an opposition to so-called Cartesian geometry. This might make their "position" seem less clear than the previous generation; it marks a certain threshold of maturity.
Plasma Studio has a constrained palate of geometrical articulations to configure platforms of events, others, such as Information Based Architecture, have a more ecumenical range deployed as envelopes of performativity. Blue Architects employ nothing less fashionable than circular geometries to create an isotonic space that belies any centricity.
Ocean North develop affiliative strategies in which the project's geometries are formed by mapping - as Deleuze calls the Wasp-Orchid - its milieu of forces, be that the city or a "body." Rather than identify a geometry with an essential character defined via dialectical identity (Cartesian/topological, humanist/non humanist, simple/complex), each project employs geometry (often rather "simple" or based on simple parametric input) to construct choreographies of spatial effects.
Material as Form - Likewise, these projects occupy a zone far beyond the debates about truth or presence of materials and structure. They are produced at a time when material sciences are developing techniques not only to produce wholly synthetic materials and nanotechnological structures, but are also beginning to seamlessly fuse steel with rubber at a molecular level, creating entirely new - not even hybrid - materialities. There is no truth to material as the new ontologies of matter are essentially informational, defined by transformation and error rates. Blue Architecture's use of material perhaps best exemplifies this approach to matter. Here "brick" as material is stripped of its laden materiality and pseudo-ontology and treated as a texture bump map applicable to any surface or form. The questions are no longer what "a brick wants to be" nor illusionist tricks but what effects can be actualized through material manipulation and recombination.
Conclusion - Thus, in each of the works, there is a re-working of the role of the architect as the avatar of artistic genius. Indeed, they often nominate their role as explicitly multi-disciplinary product designers in which architecture is only one line of production. If so, then each of these projects might be approached as discrete trajectories of research into the conditions of architectural production, explorations into the limitations of what can be known through the projections of that formation of practice and ideas called "architecture."
Walter Benjamin's classic article might be reformulated today as a problem of the "work of the architect in the age of electronic proliferation" because it is not the technology that drives this transformation but a broader reconfiguration of the creative subject's relationships to its "objects" of practice. If for Kant the formal lay on the side of the transcendental subject, for us, the subject and the transcendental have entered into the a pirori historical processes of formation. The use of geometries employed by all four practices can be understood as engaging this terrain in which there are only mixtures of subjects and objects, indeed, when these poles no longer can retain any sovereignty (if they ever could). These projects adhere to no model and offer only simulacra, copies that have no model and that have thoroughly overrun their Platonic masters through promiscuous forming.
October 2002