I miei non avrebbero saputo fare di meglio. Adam avrebbe gradito.
(Mini) Sabotage
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il blog di Marco De Amicis / Giornalista, papà, uomo dei sogni
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In the “Critique to Pure Reason”, Kant repeatedly draws on a metaphor of construction to emphasize the importance of an argument’s architectonic [1]. We believe that the structure of Mark Goulthorpe’s lecture reflects this position towards discourse. His presentation was characterized by a series of strategical choices not only regarding its content, but also its hierarchy and ordering. To provide a platform for discussion, this synopsis sets out to follow the structure of Goulthorpe’s presentation, utilizing the act of (loose) “reproduction” as an opportunity for further reflection.”Theories of Technologies for Digital Design Paradigms” [2] Before Kuhn borrowed the term to refer to a self-enclosed referential system, “paradigm” as a grammatical or rhetorical term that was used exclusively to refer to a thing that served as a pattern, a model, or an example. Goulthorpe performs a “catachresis” of Kuhn’s terminology, using the term “paradigm” to discuss cultural production. This third meaning of the word, building up on its previous versions, calls for a constant “bringing forth” of the older terms with the productive tensions that these juxtapositions can produce.On every valid identification form there is always a date of birth. Goulthorpe locates the change of paradigm that asserted the “Digital” in the Pompidou Center Exhibition “Non Standard Architectures” (2003), curated by Frederic Migayrou and Zeynepp Mennan. Directors of FRAC Center in Orleans, Migayrou and Mennan have a strong connection with architecture’s experimental/ utopian sparks. For Goulthorpe, locating the birth of this “paradigm change” in the recent past does not deprive the digital of historical and conceptual depth. In fact, as he argues, digital architecture was prefigured by numerous precedents.Goulthorpe carefully prepares his audience for a plunge in the substrate of the digital: his point of departure is a tangible example, an interior design project in One Main, which gestures towards all of the constitutive elements of a digital praxis: formal liberation, new plasticity, change of representational techniques, labour management, fabrication procedures, affects to the users, efficiency and sustainability. The rigorous description of the One Main intervention serves a double purpose: it both introduces the audience to the primary themes of his following theoretical discourse while it accentuates Goulthorpe’s engagement with the materiality of form as a persistent demand in his work.Having anchored himself in the realm of built architecture, Goulthorpe calls for a rigorous examination of preconceived notions of “history”, “theory” and “design” and starts tracing the “affective substances” which inform (his) digital praxis. After this journey “deeper and deeper” (to use his own words) into the world of ideas and the works of the past, Goulthorpe returns to the “here and now”, recapitulating his definition of the “digital” and resuming the description of dECOi’s works as instances of the world he has precisely (re-)constructed. The audience is invited to build upon this narration, extracting schemes, questions and interpretations.Goulthorpe distances himself from fantasies of autonomy and purity of the discipline and accepts the unavoidable reality that the “architecture-of-the-digital” is a product of its media. The reference to Marshall McLuhan (“The medium is the massage”) dissolves any ambiguity: “Media is so pervasive in personal, political, economic, aesthetic, psychological, moral, ethical and social consequences that they leave no part of us untouched, unaffected, unaltered”. If the roman brick changed the politics of the world, then digital technologies will shake its foundations. Goulthorpe welcomes this change, evaluates the electronic revolution as “bigger than any other” and sees architecture as an active participant in this field of infinite potentiality.Having established a definitive rupture from the “old world” in every possible level, Goulthorpe calls for a re-theorizing of the term “design” itself, positing, in the tradition of his “difficult questions” (an allusion to Jarzombek’s presentation last week?), two main trajectories. On the one hand, his reference to Benjamin is in fact a call not for a revisiting of the content, but rather the procedure, of his analysis of the deep changes that mechanical reproduction would bring to the field of aesthetics. Vattimo’s critique on Benjamin’s overoptimistic visions about the appropriation of art, combined with the previously stated assertion that “everything will change”, bring to the surface the necessity of the redefinition of contemporary aesthetics. As he very clearly states: “We need a new Benjamin”.While Goulthorpe describes his work as possessing exhibitionary value in Benjamin’s sense of the term, we propose that this kind of work has a slightly different relation to the audience. We have some ideas as to what these differences are, but we hope that others will engage this question. First off, we absolutely agree that the digitally-proliferating, responsive work engages the audience “politically,” though perhaps the politics have shifted from the ones Benjamin imagines. However, Benjamin’s idea of “exhibitionary value” relies on the distribution of mass quantities of reproductions. Much of the digitally-processed work today relies less on quantity (in fact they are often unique objects though that may change as the technology develops) and more on the quality of the reception. This is so much the case that we think we need a new term for this type of value and we will return to this question below.The second direction that Goulthorpe proposes in the “re-theorizing” of design emerges from a general observation that refers to the distancing of contemporary design, as “trend” or “fashion” from its previously inextricable “utopian” essence. If one considers utopia as a “premature reality”, to use Lamartine’s scheme, then design is the means to approach this reality. It would perhaps be arbitrary to place Goulthorpe’s position in the ideology of progress, discussed in traditional terms. We believe that the reference to Utopia is not a lament for the therapeutic role of the architect-designer, nor a nostalgia for modernist visions. What the use of the term seems to imply is a re-appropriation of architecture as a meaningful action, consciously incorporating intentions, objectives and “care”.In an effort to communicate the constitutive elements of his own “Utopia” in the terms formerly discussed, Goulthorpe focuses on the third term of his trilogy, “technology”. Using Heideggerian terms, he reads man’s volition towards technology as a thrive to “order” and “enframe” the world, and argues that man’s immersion in a technical universe naturalizes and obscures this restrictive act of enframing (gestell). From this statement emerges the responsibility to “bring forth” technology and to expose the nature of our actions. With “care”, man can reach “poeisis”, the materialization of potentiality, and steward existence instead of merely enclosing it.Having reached the fundamental question of the relationship between technology and culture, Goulthorpe starts moving back to the surface, hinting towards the perceptual, functional (with the broad definition of the term) and aesthetic characteristics of the objects produced through his discourse. As he says, “Freud’s notion of the unconscious and of Primary memory is used to posit new cognitive aptitudes for a teletechnic age”. The traumatic amnesiac demonstrations produced by the rupture of digital production from every recognizable precedent constitute the perceptual landscape of this new paradigm, with artifacts more akin to bodily senses than visual logics. The Nietzschian reference to ancient tragedy’s Appolonian and Dionysian dialectic (with which Goulthorpe initiated his problematic) re-emerges to propose a combination of rigorous modeling methodologies and indeterminate creative processes, resulting in a radical rupture in the way we design and the way we perceive space, a new architectural “praxis.”The projects presented are meant to demarcate different aspects and interpretations of dECOi’s thesis of “technical prescience via networked (global) multidisciplinary collaborative praxis” and “responsible speculative innovation”. In an effort to “order” the presented works, we are considering three predominant tendencies whose products develop significantly different behaviors: frozen instances of a generative process (One Main), machines of becoming (Aegis Hyposurface) and materializations of potential (construction methods developed for Haiti housing). Obviously these tendencies are not isolated; they appear in each project in various forms, and to varying degrees.Referring to One Main, Goulthorpe notes that the tension between the realized instance and the process that gave birth to it produces an intellectual motion that constantly destabilizes the object and allows for an immanent relationship with the subject. In his essay, “Two Aspects of Language and Two Types of Aphasic Disturbances” [3], Jakobson distinguishes between similarity and contiguity as the two relations which underlie language structures. Relations of similarity are often expressed by metaphors (“He’s a pig” suggests that the subject shares at least certain characteristics of the object), while relations of contiguity are expressed by metonymies (“The White House proclaimed…” does not, of course, refer to a talking building but rather a person within it). We suggest that Mark’s interest in “metonymic not metaphoric” architecture, which he mentioned in relation to the project One Main, derives from metonymy’s proposal that we can draw relations between things that are temporally or spatially contiguous with one another.We believe that there is a qualitative difference between the condition of One Main’s frozen form and the potentialities of Aegis Hyposurface. The real-time materialization of interaction that the latter allows, and its responsive behavior towards the actions of collectivities rather than individual users (with the enchanting dissonance of the sound platform being a very successful example of this collective effect), produces an unpredictable outcome, actualized in a constant present and allowing for no inscriptions of memory or habit. To draw on Michel Serre’s terminology, Massumi’s “quasi object” obtains attributes of a “partial subject” [4], an actor playing a constitutive role in the formation of the collectivities with which it comes in contact (Serres argues that the ball is the actor in a football game, as without it neither the game nor the team would exist). The implications of this “petrification of the collective in things”, combined with Goulthorpe’s rigorous approach to new perceptual and aesthetic conventions, remains an open field of investigation, capable of reforming the way that we think about our tools and artifacts. It is this new understanding of reception that we think suggests a “new Benjamin.”Goulthorpe does not only see an opportunity for radical conceptual transformations in the “digital revolution;” rather, digital processes and technologies also enable unprecedented changes in the field of construction. From the beginning of his lecture he inserts the parameter of a “skillful use” of technology and is clearly committed to the precision as well as the challenges of new fabrication methods. Goulthorpe is without doubt a maker, postulating a holistic approach to architectural production. His interest in the remarkable properties of the fiberglass surfaces developed for Haiti, as well as his detailed description of the articulation of the joints in the “Sinthome” sculpture, clearly indicate a strong volition towards the mastery of the tools and the control of the construction.We conclude with a leap from the specific discussion presentation to a more contextual question regarding the nature of this speculative praxis within contemporary practice. Goulthorpe mentioned in his lecture that he teaches in order to operate independently. This is a common sentiment among architects, especially young architects who want to engage in “design research” (in its many forms). As Goulthorpe wryly (though not disparagingly!) notes in “Technological Latency” [5], clients require “financial and constructional legitimacy.” In this regard, Lyotard’s “The Postmodern Condition” [6] in which he distinguishes between a dialectic (research) language game and a didactic (pedagogical) language game raises some interesting questions regarding the relationship between research and teaching. Of course, Lyotard is describing science disciplines, but his observation that “research appeals to teaching as its complement” applies to a broader field.In this context, it is particularly interesting to consider MIT as an institution, which has taken a particular position regarding the commercialization of intellectual property developed within or through it. We were furthermore struck by the description of the dynamics of the Haiti project, which was instantiated through an academic design workshop and whose findings were supported by the research of another academic institution. At the same time, we are mindful of the fact that academic institutions, as academies, require a maintenance of a certain enrollment level in one’s classes. In other words, while the material and computational foundations of the Haiti project evolve very clearly from Goulthorpe’s earlier work, the particular focus (low-cost, quick-to-build housing for a devastated country) just as clearly derives from a societal interest. We do not see these multiple influences as compromising; rather, we consider their engagement to open new fields of possibility. Nevertheless, it does raise an important question: in a world in which capital, technology, academia, and social opinion are so closely intertwined, how does one negotiate these constituencies to set the digital paradigm?. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
References:
[1] Kant, I. “Critique of Pure Reason” (transl. Pluhar W.S), Indianapolis: Hackett, 1996
[2] Goulthorpe, M. “Theories of Technologies for digital design paradigms”, presentation for theSMArchS Faculty Colloquium, MIT Department of Architecture, 09/24/2010 (Unless otherwise noted, quotes come from this presentation.)
[3] Jakobson, R. “Two Aspects of Language and Two Types of Aphasic Disturbances” OnLanguage. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990
[4] Serres, M. “Le parasite”, Paris: B. Grasset, 1980
[5] Goulthorpe, M. “Technological Latency”
[6] Lyotard, J. “The Postmodern Condition” (trans. Bennington and Massumi), Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984
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