arch-blog

In Brian Massumi’s “Sensing the Virtual, Building the Insensible” he writes, essentially, that virtuality (the insensible new potential) is not manifest in material, but in mode, as it is the catalyst of confluence. Confluence is the relationship facilitator, nebulous connection-maker. Greg Lynn further implies that complexity in architecture is achieved not through contrast and contradiction and their implicit visual and physical violence, but through pliant flexibility, fluidity. Thus a cunning, folding, pliant architectural strategy (not architectural form) is that which elicits a smooth response. Systems, as such, are pliant; form is not. Systems of shifting confluences give rise to processes which, in their shifting virtualities, demarcate relationships that can be further fused or plicated to fold in new connections enabling smooth shifts as the system of connections dictates.

It may very well be that I do not understand the concept of the architectural fold, or perhaps it has a dual definition in the lexicon but, it seems that the concept of “folding” is practiced both as a geometrical, form-creation strategy and also as a theoretical, pliant generative strategy which I think is more in line with Lynn’s argument. I do not think that any physical fold, flip, or inversion of an existing form is equivalent to the “fold” as it is discussed in Lynn’s paper. Yet, I see this physical, literal “folding” peddled as a legitimate smoothing strategy. As I approach the conclusion of my M.Arch, and the conclusion of this course, I find myself increasingly questioning architectural potentials and perhaps the inefficacy of strategies we as designers read into our practice—is folding really folding? Does architecture really do all that we hope it does?

When you marry, marry a railroad man oh-ah

When you marry, marry a railroad man well now

Everyday Sunday, dollar in your hand oh-ah

Everyday Sunday, dollar in your hand well now

O Lord Berta Berta O Lord gal oh-ah

O Lord Berta Berta O Lord gal well

~ “Berta, Berta” (Gandy Dancers)

Resonating in my reading of MacGregor-Wise’s “Home: Territory and Identity” and Parr’s “Deleuze and Memorial Culture” was MacGregor-Wise’s discussion of sound and territory (building upon the significance of Deleuze and Guattari’s song bird’s refrain) as well as the becoming subject which both M-W and Parr make mention of.

Reflecting on sound, habitual activity, body memory, the song bird’s refrain, M-W’s car-singing during his commute—all in the context of territory / home / space demarcation—I see the African work song tradition, transported to various colonies with the slave trade, being demonstrative of vocal enunciation in service of the becoming-home. M-W writes that “a refrain always carries earth with it” (M-W, 304) and indeed this song tradition carried home in its traditional expression (“call and answer” format and physical expression of rhythm in the execution of labour), but it also manifested in the becoming-home as well (new language, new subjects, new rhythms?). This new life develops as a “becoming within an always already territorialized space” (M-W, 300) and a new cultural expression is born… one that morphs, as all things do, in their interaction with other vibrating assemblages, ad infinitum.

Culture, as M-W argues, is one of the “ways one makes oneself at home” (M-W, 300). Created from habitual activity, “the creation and repetition of habit” (M-W, 304), culture is rhythmic and it is in the participation in this rhythm that we live, mark space as ours and leave traces of ourselves vibrating within even more encompassing territories. We are subjects of these rhythms “caught up in… [their] the becoming of that rhythm, the rhythm created by coming together of the pulses of territories and milieus” (304). In as much as we are subject to the vibrative activity of rhythms and their territories, we also react to these rhythms and create a plethora of new affects (influencing the development of new musical genres as in the case of the work song). Take for example the work parties / chain gangs / Gandy Dancers fixing or laying train tracks across the United States… subject to the rhythm of colonial / post-colonial territorial (home) expansion and nation-making, while also becoming within this milieu. This might not be celebrated by “majoritarian history” (Parr, 58)—except in February–but its rhythms have imbued the North American cultural milieu in the subterfuge of the becoming subject, an action not altogether distinct from Maya Ying Lin’s Veteran’s Memorial—affect, not monument, but nonetheless, “traces of movement that has passed” (M-W, 298).

I speak in the square

and I speak in the circle

~Karl Telfer, Kaurna artist (Adelaide Plains)

On Monday landscape artist Gavin Malone and Kaurna culture bearer Karl Telfer, a self-described “black fella” from the Adelaide Plains region, presented a lecture for us on “An Aboriginal Adelaide.” Not surprisingly, Kaurna history and the particular brand of colonization deployed in South Australia is not unlike that instituted in early to modern Canada; it boasts a history of residential schools, abusive institutionalization, displacement, disease, cultural erosion and endemic social strife still witnessed today.

However, on one significant point the two colonies are distinct, and indeed South Australia is an exception to much of Australia, New Zealand and Canada in this respect as well. The Kaurna people do not have possession of a single square kilometre of traditional land in the Adelaide region, though many significant cultural places have been assumed by the colonial regime (the government house, state library, festival grounds, museum and art gallery all erected on a site sacred to the Kaurna). Institutions, as John Urry argues, “matter a great deal to how systems develop” (55).Like some Canadian First Nations peoples, the Kaurna were nomads, migrating from place to place within the region as seasons and needs changed, designating various sacred places throughout the land through ritual and landscape narrative not acknowledged by Colonel Light (head Architect of early Adelaide) as he carved his garden city.

I was moved by what Karl had to say not only because he spoke passionately, but because I feel this issue is incredibly complex, twisted, incomprehensible, and to a certain degree, irreparable, both here in Adelaide and at home. Nonetheless, it is not altogether surprising that these threads began to weave their way into my reading of the Deleuze and Guattari ‘s Introduction: Rhizome and to a lesser extent to Urry’s Global Complexities. Admittedly, these are rather dense and complex texts, but I think perhaps we can understand rhizomatic connections, multiplicities, and assemblages of intensities through the Kaurna / nomadic people’s experience and perhaps through them begin to appreciate integrated design systems that “plug” into not only economy and culture but social, political and ecological systems. D&G themselves write that the nomad is smooth, and that “what is lacking is a nomadology” (23); a portable, mutable, shifting ideology (“self-vibrating regions of intensity” [22]).

The Kaurna, like the rhizome, flow between two worlds; as Karl articulated, he “speaks in the square and in the circle”, proceeds “from the middle” (23), is the “conjunction” (25), the wasp and the orchid at once, in the ‘between’ of systems of thought. This is the place where Delueze and Guattari argue “things pick up speed” (25) where “lines of flight” (9), connection and departure, are possible. It is in the “arborification” of the rhizome– freezing the dynamism of the rhizome’s lines of flight, making the map a tracing, the rhizome a root system, the river a “fountainhead” (19), that we submit to a stasis, re-enact histories and perpetuate a finite–as opposed to an infinite–course. I am not entirely certain that I have made appropriate connections to fully articulate my course of thought and reflection, but I have provided a series of photographs to augment this position.

Life is like riding a bicycle

to keep your balance,

you must keep moving

~A. Einstein

In curious places around Adelaide you’ll find small murals ranging from cartoons tucked round back alley corners to Audrey Hepburns on electrical boxes. The most proliferate of these is Einstein riding a bicycle; it was in fact seeing these in so many different contexts around the city that prompted me to investigate the work and significance of this particular art further.

As it happens, the work is that of a young activist promoting cycling and alternative transport in the city, but this investigation also yielded a quote from Einstein himself about cycling and life that resonated given the themes presented in this and last week’s readings concerning the implications and contextual development of Deleuzian philosophy, or as it were, anti-philosophy. (I say anti-philosophy because I wonder if it can really be described as such since its dogma is anti-dogmatic). Anyway, I recall in the readings from last week that life can only be considered life if it reproduces. Life is therefore constantly on the move to reproduce itself. This is how it remains life; it “becomes worthy of becoming” (Colebrook, 57) by making a “connection with what is not itself in order to transform and maximize itself” (Colebrook, 57). Life is insatiable possibility, constantly seeking new combinations and recombinations; always wanting “what might become” (Colebrook, 59). Powerful works of art and philosophy (ie.Shakespeare) are alive. They, or perhaps themes as “mechanics”within them, live outside of an original context to become new beings when combined with other affects. Deleuze and Guattari write that philosophy is”nothing but screeches around which concepts develop their songs” (311); philosphy is this becoming, the notes of which are affects that join to create sound that join to create melody… that join to create songs… that connect with human cognition to create meaning… ad infinitum. Profundity and possibility, like time, are multiplicitous and multidirectional.

As far as the architectural implications of this understanding of life, philosophy, biological and “more-than-biological” purpose are concerned, I think the most crucial argument presented in Ballantyne’s paper is that as architects, we must forget about form as inention and operate instead“in the milieux” (Ballantyne, 97) as “unselfconscious” (Ballantyne) molecules. This holds the potential for a dynamic architecture that is not static once realized, but part of a continual “becoming,” moving.

Ideas resonating from this week’s readings:

I was prepared to dismiss Christopher Alexander’s “The Timeless Way” for his waxing about towns growing out of “the inner nature of people” until I came to his conclusion, at which point I feel his waxing becomes a more solid thing. There is a chaos “rolling, swelling” (97) in us and much of the planning, organization, and capital “C” control that is invested in city planning and modern architectural development is to contain this human chaos; it emerges in fear of it. We fear that if we don’t organize people’s lives, men will come home to find no dinner on the table and drivers will blow unthinkingly through four way intersections.

Contrast these ideas with Cullen’s discussion of the human mind’s response to contrast; mind molding city into “coherent drama” (9), and the pudding begins to gel. Places are conceived as much through planning as they are by human interaction with them. This interaction, this process, is timeless. “Here we create a there” (10). Chaos is contrast. Chaos is dissimilarity, divergence, contradiction, deviance, and drama. Chaos is life. On a side note, I love how Cullen describes the red in the landscape by Corot, juxtaposed by the monochrome green landscape, it is “the reddest thing” (12) he’s ever seen. For Cullen, monotony is lifeless, lacking the contrast that provokes a human reaction to our environment.

Fittingly, for Jan Gehl, places without people are lifeless: “being among others, seeing and hearing others, receiving impulses from others, imply positive experiences” (19); without people, there is no drama–for some this is welcome, for others this is banality. (Even Thoreau would retreat from his wooded solitude for social respite and milk and butter). The human being has come to congregate in cities, to live with and among other people, to engage socially in community, and to obtain access to collective assets (these being secondary).

Flip to Hester’s “Neighborhood Space” and we once again encounter that people-generated communities, not “neighborhoods” in the planned sense, are collections of people that may or may not occupy a specific geography. Space can only fulfill part of the puzzle of people collecting. More important than designing beautiful spaces for people to occupy in their near to home life, is understanding the programmatic requirements of different kinds of human interaction and providing opportunity for different kinds of engagement to occur.

Put the social ecology of cities (buildings, and places between buildings) into the bigger picture of the biological ecosystem, and once more Alexander’s sentiments echo. As all of the ‘man in nature’ readings posit, our city-making is as natural as bees making hives or coral bacteria… doing their thing; however, as far as humanity’s recent habitat development efforts are concerned, we’ve overextended our economy of means, acting out in our global ecosystem, upsetting the fine balance of a system we’re generally not aware of, and have thus propelled ourselves headlong in a finite monotony towards an entropic demise. Design must therefore as Alexander also asserts, re-engage ecologically, submit to chaos, and permit a natural reordering to occur.

Had a few epiphanies whilst in the thick of this week’s readings.

In Lynch’s piece, the idea that city design is temporal and in a state of constant flux (a sentiment echoed in Jacobs’, Krier’s, and Abu-Lughod’s pieces). Also, that mystification is valuable, as long as the whole is legible–though it is crucial for man[woman] to locate him[her]self within this visible whole, via “path, landmark, edge, node, district”, without which “strain and anxiety” ensue due to being unable to recognize one’s own image-making in the matrix of the city. Lynch also writes of the necessity of an “open-ended order” capable of continuous growth and redevelopment.

I think perhaps Lynch’s image-making may be related to Jane Jacobs’ discussion of relationship connections integral to the side-walk-community. Additionally, the “open-ended order” Lynch writes of is transferable to Jacobs’ criticism of the overly-planned city, of organic community versus the inorganic; the directed, staged setting of the suburb and its prescribed public spaces. While we construct our own environments via image-making, I think we also do so via relationships developed with people that exist within our individual city matrix (people as landmarks, nodes?). Most resonant for me is Jacobs’ discussion of the house key depot located at various businesses in the neighbourhood, a practice she describes as being dependent upon “the unshakable understanding of the difference between a person’s key and a person’s private life.” For me, the climactic moment in the Jacobs reading was her articulation of the precise condition of the suburb that, not without good intention, ultimately ensures its social ruin: that public space is so prescribed here, or perhaps so segregated, so zoned, that private space is necessarily compromised to meet basic social needs, resulting in an interaction with your neighbour that is too intimate for comfort. This is ironic, of course, because you would think that private space in the city, being more dense and in greater contact with divergent spaces, is more often compromised, but as Jacobs describes, it is protected by implied social mores and supported public spaces that better fulfill public needs. So, you move to the suburbs for privacy and relative isolation, only to experience intense interaction with stranger-peers.

Ultimately, Abu-Lughod’s belief that “cities are processes not products” neatly collects the threads of all five readings, suggesting that planning communities either via a functional approach or assembling ingredients of precedent cities to create a specific product are potentially destructive of the urban fabric in its organic form. Part of the script must remain unwritten in order for a population to participate / create their own images / weave their own line / write their own stories / claim their place.

A broad spectrum of urban ideology is presented in this week’s readings; so oppositional, in fact, that I felt somewhat like I was listening to a debate in the house of commons: brandishing a characteristically flamboyant bow tie, but couched firmly with the Progressive Conservatives, Corbusier would declare: “[Mr. Speaker], the curve is ruinous, difficult and dangerous; it is a paralyzing thing” … “a modern city lives by the straight line” … “man walks in a straight line because he has a goal and knows where he is going; he has made up his mind to reach some particular place.”

Ensconced with left-leaning Liberals, Camillo Sitte would shoot up dramatically tossing his notes into the air yelling: “an undeviating boulevard [Mr. Speaker], miles long, seems boring even in the most beautiful surroundings. It is unnatural, it does not adapt itself to irregular terrain, and it remains uninteresting in effect, so that, mentally fatigued, one can hardly await its termination” (these final words would draw the last of his breath, and he’d spit them at his audience, the red in his face deepening, eyes bulging).

Clarence Perry, an independent from Anytown, Saskatchewan would summon his courage in the space of Sitte’s outburst, clear his throat, and rise stammering: “[Mr. Speaker] research has shown… ” only to be interrupted by rogue Albertan Frank Lloyd Wright (erstwhile engaged in his “mayor of Broadacre daydreams”, and thus somewhat out of step with the current conversation) who’d declare that every man should be allotted one acre (and maybe a gun too?).

He’d follow with a lengthy explanation of how we must escape the city and allow individual man to stake his claim, find “dignity in land ownership” by remaining still connected to community via “modern communication” devices… developing the best in man via an architecture that roots him in the organic irregularity of his place which he alone cultivates “by himself, in his own interest”. He’d finish with something along the lines of: “regimentation is a form of death.”

And Corbusier would rebut, “no, no, no, you have it wrong: regimentation is ‘self mastery’. Anything else is loose, heedless, showing a “lack of concentration and animality.”

“Animality?” Sitte would sputter, “I say ‘life’, ‘art’. Where is the joyeux de vive in the gridiron? It is gone! Gone I say! Recoiled from the streets, like a turtle to its shell!”

“Pack Donkey” Corbusier would taunt, and Sitte, clambering over his bench to face Corbusier, would be restrained by more placid liberals at his sides.

With Sitte safely subdued, members of the Green Party would shift in their seats thinking this might be the time to say something. Olmsted would start: “Mr. Speaker, if we could redirect the conversation to our purpose, not dwell on the shape of streets nor the exact size of one’s allotment, but instead on man’s experience of the urban environment, I might suggest some new discussion. Is it perhaps not the curvature of the street, nor whether one owns an acre or city flat, but that the opportunity exists to escape the city into the park which provides ‘relief from the stresses of urban life and brings city populations together?'”

“Yes Mr. Speaker” Mumford would add, “If a man is to live a balanced life, capable of calling out all his faculties and bringing them to perfection, he must live in a community that fully sustains them… a marriage of town and country is needed.”

“Here, here, every man an acre” Wright would cry.

“Ah well,” Corbusier would lament, “how are we to distinguish between what is reasonable and an over-poetical dream?” (74)

(How are we indeed?)

As a meander through the seminal forces that have shaped the Canadian urban landscape, this chapter is informative. However, I find two ideas that Hodge presents somewhat conflicted / divergent. In my mind there are two really persuasive/pervasive forces (automobile / grid) that have shaped Canadian cities. The automobile represents infinite possibility and the grid, infinite expanse (inevitably limited by whatever resource they employ, nonetheless). Hodge includes these in the discussion, but I feel the assertion that that “physical forms and spatial patterns of communities are remarkably persistent once established” (Hodge, 73) is up for inquiry. I take as a case for discussion the city of Nanaimo, established in 1880–as Hodge mentions–as a resource town. I’ve lived in this city with its cobb-webbed Old City Quarter standing in stark contrast to the pervasive form which it is organized around. This form-determinant is a transportation superblock / green belt (Old Island Highway) that separates development along the waterfront from development in the foothills of Mount Benson (E/W), spanning from the township of Lantzville, to Cedar (N/S). This geographical maw was not established via the webbed original form, but exclusively by the endless* possibilities of the automobile.

Vilified seemingly without exhaustion, I feel the car, and the efficient grid that serves it, is responsible for the cities we live in today, whether or not fashionable planning principles have been applied at any given time in history, or in any given part of the cities we discuss. It goes without saying (because it’s been said ad nauseum) that challenging this prevailing city form involves wrestling control from the grips of the steering wheel.

I feel as though I’m stating the obvious here, but I suppose I’m troubled by Hodge’s definition of “established”… at what point does one determine when a city has been established?

As I pull together the threads of this week’s “Urban Life” readings a few themes have begun to articulate. First, that intentional urbanity (a redundancy; I don’t know if urbanity is anything but intentional at even the most basic level) opens us and our experiences to an “extended family of eyes” (Berman); eyes outside our given socioeconomic class, etc. Haussman’s boulevards lanced the cloistered boils of Parisian poverty hurtling populations and politics into collision; creating discomfort, unsightliness, dissonance, and contradiction. They brought gluttony and starvation face to face; in one fell swoop they revealed the fractures of a previously smooth urban form, introducing life “on the run” (Berman)–life as change. Berman suggests that such urbanity puts us all in the gutter, de-sanctified, chasing fallen halos, dodging speeding carriages, confronting our antitheses, but I think moreover this collision serves to heighten difference and as a result create tension: “the glitter lights up the rubble” (Berman). Does this illumination of the lives “at whose expense the bright lights shine” (Berman) actually serve to change said lives? Is this Berman’s suggestion? Or is its magic here administered merely the aggravation of a boil that cannot be lanced, only made known?

This theme is echoed slightly in Kotto’s Polis, particularly in his suggestion that “the polis made it possible for each citizen to reach his spiritual, moral, and intellectual capabilities” (Kotto). From Kotto’s inquiry we can surmise that the larger a given polis gets, the more clumsy and cluttered it becomes, increasingly incapable of performing this ideal function. Haussman’s boulevards and their bleeding out of poor, forgotten neighborhoods, support the idea that Paris had become too large and unwieldy, failing the smallest of the small, alienating citizens from their civic community. How can each citizen be inspired to reach new potentials if he or she is not even counted? Urbanity = inclusion?

There are a number of ideas presented in the readings this week that have resonated (at least in the days since my Saturday binge-read). First, Jackson and Lynch’s discussion of the ties of city and country, both in terms of a given hinterland’s carrying capacity, but also as one understands and appreciates the landscape in which, and upon which, one exists. Aware of the land around you, and the food this land has produced–or hasn’t produced–like Optimo’s farmers and ranchers who “consider Optimo’s prosperity and importance entirely their own creation” (Jackson, 168), you garner both a sense of identity and belonging to place from dependence on it and participation in it. I read somewhere this summer that eating honey produced by bees in your geographic area is good for your immune system. Could be a clever farmer’s market peddling strategy, but I think this is support for the idea that we are indeed more intimately connected to our environment than we imagine. With a well-connected hinterland, a city is geographically (physically) and socially (identity) located in place. Biologically limited by what this land can sustain, its citizens have a conscious ecological connection to their environment.

Two sides of the same coin, city and country (hinterland) work in tandem to produce a geographically and socially connected place, but like Mumford and Jacobs / Appleyard write, the city is not the country and the country is not the city. Societal gathering requires the organizing force of buildings and gathering spaces. Whereas the country is largely a site of production, the city is a site of social interaction, a “stage” for a quality of social interaction and participation not encountered elsewhere. This quality varies with design, of course, and the method of measurement is necessarily varied–as we encountered in Moudon’s “catholic approach.” Not surprisingly, a more scientific means of measurement is favoured, but I’m pleased to see that more and more value perceived in derived etic–I think this holds the potential to unlock “truths” about cities and experiences of them that are otherwise intangible. I recognize that there is value too in dogmatic, normative perspectives and their prescription of essential components, but I think moreover, a “magical” urban environment is achieved in through the bridging of disciplinary inquiry, as Moudon maintains “a good urban environment can do little to alleviate the basic state of poverty” (6)–a hollistic understanding of the total human experience is necessary in order to understand how to best design environments that serve and elevate human potential.