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Architecture and Indeterminacy
eld: volume 1, issue 1 (October 2007)
Editorial
Architecture and Indeterminacy
Renata Tyszczuk, Doina Petrescu
Articles
The Meaning of Use and Use of Meaning
Peter Blundell-Jones
badlands, blank space, border vacuums, brown
elds, conceptual Nevada, Dead Zones ...
Gil Doron
Atmospheres Architectural Spaces between Critical
Reading and Immersive Presence
Ole W. Fischer
Architectural Historys Indeterminacy: Holiness in
southern baroque architecture
Helen Hills
The Active Voice of Architecture: An Introduction to
the Idea of Chance
Yeoryia Manolopoulou
Trading Indeterminacy Informal Markets in
Europe
Peter Mrtenbck, Helge Mooshammer
The Indeterminate Mapping of the Common
Doina Petrescu
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The Space of Subculture in the City: Getting Specifc
about Berlins Indeterminate Territories
Dougal Sheridan
Architecture and Contingency
Jeremy Till

A quick conversation about the theory and practice of
control, authorship and creativity in architecture
Kim Trogal, Leo Care
Games of Skill and Chance
Renata Tyszczuk
Notes on Contributors
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Editorial
Architecture and Indeterminacy
Editorial
Renata Tyszczuk, Doina Petrescu
When we sent out our call for papers for Architecture and
Indeterminacy, as part of the Theory Forum we were organising
at Shefeld, we didnt know what to expect. We were interested
in indeterminacy as a suspension of the precise meaning of an
architectural object action or idea. Our invitation to contribute to
the discussion suggested that indeterminacy in architecture could be
physical, material, social and political; it could be both theoretical and
pragmatic, cognitive and experiential. We hoped that it would be an
inspiring topic and generate an interesting response because it was
open, not prescriptive and offered a forum, a shared space to address
the ways in which architecture is a dynamic practice. Our research
confronts the recognition that architecture incorporates interlocking
yet distributed elds of knowledge, social practices and economic
forces. However, architectural discourse has become anxious about
itself, about its status, its contingency and its position with respect
to these related yet disparate elds of interest. Architecture and
Indeterminacy proposed to investigate those moments where
there was a questioning of the disciplinary limits of theorising and
practicing architecture.
At the same time we had started to imagine where the outputs of
events, workshops and activities in Shefeld and beyond, could be
located. We had started to think that books were no longer the obvious
place partly because of the prohibitive costs of publication and
partly because of the difculty encountered by many (non academics)
in nding or accessing the material. We were interested in developing
a context where our work and research could be reected on, but
also where reection on the material and immaterial conditions in
which our practice as architects is engaged would be made possible.
We were interested in a space of creative and critical production
and not the habitual display of knowledge. This is how eld: came
about. The journal eld: is not an empty location waiting to be lled
but hopefully will continue to be discursively formed and reformed
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vol.1 (1)
Editorial
through our practices of research and engagement. This inaugural
issue of feld: is therefore focused on the indeterminate felds of
architectural practice, education and discourse.
Architecture and Indeterminacy connects disparate work, weaving
narratives and arguments that bring together critical writing, creative
and exploratory practice, different media and documentation. The
topic was a challenge to rethink some of the ways in which we think
and practice architecture; to question some of the meanings we ascribe
to cities, to buildings, to social formations to individual experiences.
Peter Blundell Jones short essay reviewed architectures traditional
investment in the symbolic, its use of meaning and its capacities to
encapsulate and embody meaning of use.
Gil Dorons discussion of the dead zone, those places habitually
overlooked or avoided in cities, places on the edge, places of confict
and negotiation; reveals these indeterminate spaces as contested
space rather than neutral or empty.
Ole Fischer explores a number of recent attempts by practitioners
and theorists to grapple with the indeterminacy of atmosphere;
among them Diller and Scofdios Blur building and Olafur Eliassons
Weather Project.
Helen Hills article opens with a discussion about the potential and
shortcomings of interdisciplinary thinking for architectural debate.
She presents Deleuzes concepts of immanence, intensity and
rhizome as indeterminate ways of engaging with the spiritual in
Baroque architecture.
Yeoryia Manolopoulous article posits itself as an introduction to an
architecture of chance. She argues for the acceptance of chance and
the contingent along with the assertion that architecture can and
already does use this condition to advantage.
Peter Mrtenbck and Helge Mooshammer looked at informal
markets as micro-sites of paradoxical and indeterminate cultural
production, as part of their work on the EU funded project Networked
Cultures.
Doina Petrescu discussed the practices of tracing and senses of place
in the work of Fernard Deligny with autistic children. It detailed
an alternative, properly indeterminative, practice of the common,
through ways of mapping.
Dougal Sheridan draws on personal experience of the changing nature
of Berlin for his discussion of sub-culture and the actual specifcity of
the citys indeterminate territories.
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Jeremy Tills discussion wrests architecture from its comfort zone
where it is often characterised as a discipline whose primary remit
is to resist contingencies and instead to embed it in a wider set of
social and economic responsibilities and circumstances.
Kim Trogal and Leo Cares contribution combines architectural theory,
criticism and personal dialogue in an exploration of their experience
of architectural education and the aspirations of contemporary
architectural practice to resist determination.
Renata Tyszczuks article develops a series of refections on modes
of indeterminacy through the themes of narrative, imagination,
experiment, games and shadows. Thinking indeterminacy invites
a questioning of how architecture is constructed, produced and
inhabited.
The inaugural issue of feld: Architecture and Indeterminacy is
therefore the start of a conversation about architecture and also an
invitation to comment, to respond and above all to engage in a forum
for practice and research.
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The Meaning of Use and Use of Meaning
The Meaning of Use and Use of Meaning
Peter Blundell Jones
Studies of indigenous buildings across the world have revealed
time and again, that dwelling structures have served as symbolic
representations of the world as it was understood by the peoples that
produced them. Thus the concept advanced by William Lethaby in
his early book, Architecture Nature & Magic that the development
of building practice and ideas of world-structure acted and reacted
on one another has repeatedly been substantiated.
1
Examples too
numerous to list can be found in the pages of Guidonis Primitive
Architecture,
2
or Olivers more recent Encyclopaedia of Vernacular
Architecture,
3
but to gauge the full richness of possibility one needs
to consult deeper ethnographies. A good example is Marcel Griaules
Conversations with Ogotemmeli, the classic text on the Dogon.
4
Here
is revealed how the house symbolises the union of man and woman,
its parts identied with their various organs, while the faade and
its doors symbolise their ancestors stretching back to the primordial
couple, at the same time combining the key numbers eight and ten.
The orientated square layout of the house reects the measure and
making of elds, the original geometry, and this is further reected in
the technology of weaving, the warp and the weft intersecting like man
and woman.
5
Thus we come full circle, noting that the interlocking
mythical system nds in the constructed world endless forms for its
reection, almost as it were looking for them.
1
W.R. Lethaby, Architecture Nature
& Magic (Duckworth: London, 1956)
p. 16. (reprint of the 1928 version
published in The Builder, which in turn
updated Lethabys book Architecture,
Mysticism, and Myth of 1892).
2
Enrico Guidoni, Primitive Architecture
(Faber: London 1987).
3
Paul Oliver, Encyclopaedia of Vernacular
Architecture, 3 vols (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1997)
4
Marcel Griaule, Conversations
with Ogotemmeli (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1966).
5
Ibid.. Most of this is described
in the chapter The Large
Family House, pp. 91-98.
5
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The Meaning of Use and Use of Meaning
Fig. 1. (Left) Dogon Shrine showing emblems including the chequerboard of geometry,
the mythical iron sandals of the smith, the cockerel, and other symbolic fgures. Image:
Marcel Griaule, Conversations with Ogotemlli (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1966).
Fig. 2. (Right) The ideal Dogon village plan, based on the human body with the Toguna,
a kind of parliament, as head. Image: Marcel Griaule, Conversations with Ogotemlli
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1966).
In oral cultures, which means for most of human history,
6
buildings
must thus have served as the principal mnemonic base on which
memories could be inscribed and passed on to the next generation,
and this was arguably the origin of architectures monumental role.
Parents could refer to parts of the building when explaining the order
of things to their children, not only through the stated meanings of
painted fgures on the faade or of holy shrines and god-fgures within,
but also in the implicit order of the house as a whole, with its open
and forbidden areas, its territories in varied ownership. This locally
experienced and shared order could be extended to support the idea
of a world-house a world order or be expanded into imagined
houses for gods and animals. Deep ethnographic studies like those of
the Hugh-Joneses among the Tukanoans, have further shown that the
same house could support different symbolic readings on different
occasions, even switching in gender.
7
We can conclude that symbolic
readings are neither fxed nor exclusive. They are always open to
reinterpretation, but with the important proviso that the meanings
must remain shared.
Less obvious than those applied paintings or ornaments, which almost
demand to become vehicles for conscious symbolic communication,
are the implicit orderings in buildings the structural patterns. Time
and again these are found to refect gender and kinship structures,
as in the classic example of the circular Bororo village described by
Claude Levi-Strauss.
8
These Amazonian people had evolved a form
of social organisation depending on two moieties or intermarrying
groups, each occupying half the perimeter of the village. Property
being vested in the female line, it was the males who moved across
to join a wife on the other side, having spent the phase after puberty
in the central mens house. Levi-Strauss reports that a group was
6
We have had 5000 years of cities and
writing, 10,000 years of agriculture,
at least 100,000 years of language
with intelligence at a modern level.
The hunter-gatherer existence did not
preclude reorganisation of the landscape
for symbolic and mnemonic purposes, as
studies of modern Aborigines have shown.
7
Stephen Hugh-Jones, Inside out and
back to front: the androgynous house in
Northwest Amazonia in Janet Carson
and Stephen Hugh Jones (eds.), About
the House (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1995) pp. 226-252.
8
Claude Levi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques
(London: Jonathan Cape, 1973).
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persuaded by missionaries to replan their village on a grid, and as a
result their social structure fell apart. This example demonstrates how
the village plan was more than a mere visible symbol: who you were
was linked to where you lived, and the whole social network was daily
on display. The village constituted the order of things.
Fig. 3. Birds eye view sketch of a Bororo village based on the plan in Claude Levi-
Stausss Tristes Tropiques. The ring of huts is divided by a notional axis, shown dotted,
which divides the two inter-marrying moieties. In the middle is the mens house with its
dancing ground. Image: Peter Blundell Jones.
We can argue further that buildings have always been involved in the
framing of rituals, those repeated practical and symbolic acts through
which people defne relationships and communicate with one another,
and which need ordered space in which to take place. I do not just
mean the church. A blatant modern and secular example is the law
court with its rigid hierarchical arrangements for the various actors in
the legal drama. The judge is always on the central axis in the highest
seat, and there are complex spatial layerings to keep the various
parties out of contact with each other.
9
But much humbler rituals can
also be shown to be played out in buildings, even if we tend to take
them for granted. As Mary Douglas showed in a key essay, ordinary
meals can be regarded as rituals, for they both mark out time and help
defne social relationships. They exist in a structured hierarchy along
with their settings, from a wedding feast at the Ritz to consuming a
Mars Bar in the street.
10
Just as the hotel gives place to the reception,
so the street is nowhere in particular or non-place for this example,
making a signifcant contrast.
Architecture gives rituals their settings, whether or not it is designed
for the purpose, but usually architects and their clients have it in
9
All this is a surprisingly recent
development: for the history of the
English Law court see Clare Graham,
Ordering Law (London: Ashgate, 2003).
10
See the essay Deciphering a
Meal in Mary Douglas, Implicit
Meanings (London: RKP, 1975).
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mind. Certainly it can be diffcult to read the symbolic values and
ritual implications in buildings of ones own time, but buildings ffty
years old and more become obvious and inescapable barometers of
social values. Changing patterns in school building between 1850
and 1950, for example, can now be seen to refect not only changing
attitudes to education but also changing attitudes to age, class and
gender.
11
Doubtless the new school buildings of today will read equally
clearly in ffty years time, reminding us of the values of the PFI. We
can conclude from all the foregoing that to make an architecture is
inevitably to imply a world and a set of relationships.
Architecture still refects society
Even if former local rules and habits have been replaced by
international ones, and even if buildings have been greatly distanced
from social life by technical and bureaucratic processes, architecture
still refects society. For example, we might claim that the mass-
housing forms adopted in the 1950s and 60s accurately and
appropriately revealed the domination of technical and bureaucratic
imperatives over individual lives and wishes. The anonymous
repetition of such structures, whether in the form of the hastily
built tower blocks in the UK or the larger and more monotonous
ones across the Iron Curtain, showed a consensus on the part of the
building authorities and their political masters that a kind of equality
was being enacted, with rationally defned good standards consistently
being put in place, nobody above the average and nobody below it.
The fast rate of social and technological change and an increasingly
autonomous building process led in the same period to a widespread
belief in loose-ft between buildings and their contents, and a romantic
desire for open-ended fexibility. This reached one kind of peak in the
work of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and his followers, who proposed a
series of universal building types supposedly adaptable to all purposes,
all climates and all cultures: truly an international style. This reached
a ftting if monumental extreme in the adoption for an art gallery in
Berlin of a building type earlier intended as a company headquarters
in Cuba.
12
Miess quest for quiet perfection seduced a generation, but
ironically it turned out less a bid for real useful variability than for
simple old-fashioned monumentality. Only a building divorced from
the impact of its social occupants could be suffciently indifferent to
purpose and time to avoid being touched by life, requiring no kind of
conversion. Berlins Neue Nationalgalerie remains a fascination and
a puzzle for artists and curators who are always seeking ways to take
possession of the aloof, overpowering, and ill-lit space: one exhibit a
few years back consisted of offering the visitors bicycles on which to
ride round and round the empty room. It is almost as if, feeling the
11
See for example, Chapter 3: Formation
in Thomas A. Markus, Buildings and
Power (London: Routledge, 1993).
12
For the full argument see Peter Blundell
Jones and Eamonn Caniffe, Modern
Architecture Through Case Studies
(Oxford: Architectural Press, 2002),
Chapter 14, which deals with this building.
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denial of ritual implications in the architecture, people are obliged to
seek them in the void.
More ruthless in his preparedness to abandon architectures
monumental preoccupations, more sincere in his bid for open-
ended fexibility, was Cedric Price, who strove to reduce the social
public building to a mere servicing framework. The paradigmatic
example, though it remained on paper, was the Fun Palace for Joan
Littlewood of 1963, a great skeleton of steel trusses and cranes which
could be assembled and reassembled in all kinds of guises for as-
yet-unpredicted types of theatrical performance. Price later built his
Interaction Centre, but it proved less fexible than he hoped and was
eventually demolished. The idea of the Fun Palace was taken up again
with Centre Pompidou in Paris, designed 1970-71, the breakthrough
work of Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers.
13
An enormous budget
was now available to make this technology work: to create the huge
frames and the external servicing system, while the idea of an arts
centre which could grow and evolve in unpredicted ways rhymed
with the informal atmosphere of the late 1960s. But in practice the
placing of art galleries like shelves on a rack was soon considered too
raw and parts of the building were given added interiors. In nearly 40
years of existence, the much-vaunted fexibility has been little used,
while unpredicted changes have occurred against the fundamental
concept, like the addition of internal circulation. Most ironic of all is
that the anti-monumental arts centre planned by those students in
jeans of 1968 has become a world monument, while they have become
paragons of architectural respectability. In the absence even the
denial of an architectural rhetoric about organisation, ritual and
memory, it is the technical apparatus that has been monumentalised
instead.
Fig. 4. (Left) Typical page from Rolf Kellers, Bauen als Umweltzerstrung (Building as
pollution) 1973, decrying the anonymity of post-war mass-housing.
Fig. 5. (Right) Main exhibition gallery in Miess Neue Nationalgalerie Berlin, completed
1968. This supposedly universal and fexible space has always posed a challenge to
curators, but was enlivened in 2001 by an artwork inviting visitors simply to cycle
around in it.
13
This building is discussed
in Ibid., Chapter 14.
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The fexibility cult of the 1960s resulted in a rash of general-purpose
building types without much relation to place and purpose, and they
tended to be autonomous if not autistic. Experience showed, however,
that the future is always unpredictable, and fexibility could only
be achieved within set limits. Buildings in practice never seemed
to prove fexible enough to resist the need for change. The desired
neutrality which went hand in hand with fexibility also proved
elusive, for neutral architectures have also turned out in retrospect
to belong inevitably to their time, sometimes becoming overbearing
in their aloof presence precisely because their order is an abstract and
independent one. The call for timeless architecture is also a vain one,
for growth and change continuously occur, and to engage with them
architecture must be a social product, involving complicity with the
inhabitants and feedback from use into building. If sometimes a work
like the Barcelona Pavilion appears timeless, we need to remember
that it has always existed primarily as a much exposed photographic
image, and that its two incarnations as German Pavilion in 1929 (for
only 6 months) and as architectural monument in modern tourist
Spain have been very different it is if anything the myth that
remains the same.
14

To reiterate, making an architecture is inevitably to imply a world and
a set of relationships, but these must operate within the terms of a
reading that of the user. Harmony between the implication of the
design and the reading of the user perhaps produces the resonance
which is to be regarded as architectural success, but there can also
be dissonance. Architecture can be restrictive and oppressive, both
through its dictatorial or constraining organisation and through
imposing ideas about taste, as the buildings and projects of Hitler and
Speer in both ways make clear. But architecture can also be liberating
and utopian, suggesting new ways to live and think, which if they
strike a chord with their public are more widely taken up to receive
broader social currency. It can reinterpret social rituals in new and
vital ways like Scharouns Philharmonie in the 1960s
15
or Miralless
more recent Scottish Parliament. It can also identify a place and a
nation with extraordinary power, as in the case of Utzons Sydney
Opera House, in retrospect the frst modern icon building, and
herald of the current tendency. Architecture can be an instrument of
propaganda or a bringer of hope. It cannot altogether renounce these
duties.
14
Argued at greater length
in Ibid., Conclusion.
15
See Chapter 10 The Concert Halls,
in Peter Blundell Jones, Hans
Scharoun (London: Phaidon, 1995).
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badlands, blank space, border vacuums, brown elds,
conceptual Nevada, Dead Zones
badlands, blank space, border vacuums, brown elds,
conceptual Nevada, Dead Zones
1
, derelict areas,ellipsis
spaces, empty places, free space liminal spaces,
,nameless spaces, No Mans Lands, polite spaces, , post
architectural zones, spaces of indeterminacy, spaces of
uncertainty, smooth spaces, Tabula Rasa, Temporary
Autonomous Zones, terrain vague, urban deserts, vacant
lands, voids, white areas, Wasteland... SLOAPs
Gil M. Doron
If the model is to take every variety of form, then the matter in which the
model is fashioned will not be duly prepared, unless it is formless, and free
from the impress of any of these shapes which it is hereafter to receive from
without.
2

The void cannot be earmarked as nature reserve, succession habitat,
recreational eld, or any other such designate, because to name it is to
claim it in some way. And what is potentially more socially liberating
about the void is precisely the absence of recognition and the subsequent
indifference toward it. One simply does not see it, even though it
surrounds and enables performance, and is itself sustained by invisible
mechanism and regulatory infrastructures.
3

1
The term I have used to describe these
spaces, which is reected in all the
other terms mentioned above, is dead
zone. The term was taken directly
from the jargon of urban planners, and
from a particular case of such space in
Tel Aviv (cf. Gil Doron,Dead Zones,
Outdoor Rooms and the Possibility of
Transgressive Urban Space in K. Franck
and Q. Stevens (eds.), Loose Space:
Possibility and Diversity in Urban
Life (New York: Routledge, 2006). The
term should be read in two ways: one
with inverted commas, indicating my
argument that an area or space cannot
be dead or a void, tabula rasa etc. The
second reading collapses the term in on
itself while the planners see a dead
zone, I argue that it is not the area which
is dead but it is the zone, or zoning, and
the assumption that whatever exists
(even death) in this supposedly delimited
area always transcends the assumed
boundaries and can be found elsewhere.
2
Plato, Dialogues of Plato, vol. 3
Republic, Timaeus, Critias [1892] in
The Dialogues of Plato trans. & intro
by B. Jowett, 5 vols (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1892) III in The
Online Library of Liberty, http://oll.
libertyfund.org/EBooks/Plato_0343.
pdf; p. 54; [accessed 2007].
3
G. Daskalakis et al. (eds.), Stalking Detroit
(Barcelona: ACTAR., 2001), p. 124.
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badlands, blank space, border vacuums, brown elds,
conceptual Nevada, Dead Zones
Taken from architecture and planning discourse, the title / list above
is not a comprehensive lexicon of various types of urban space.
This list is a desperate attempt by the discourse to make sense of a
certain type of space, which, as I will argue, has existed in the city
since antiquity. As some of the names suggest, from the subjective
position of the urban researcher this place seems to be vague and
undetermined, if not derelict or even empty. Nonetheless, to muddle
through the ostensible marshy-ness of this space, the discourse has
tried to dene over and over again what it is, how it came about, and
more than anything else, where it is located. Behind these attempts
is the assumption that this space is unique, an anomaly that can be
located in a certain place, and therefore managed, if not colonised.
This paper will try to draw a map of the genealogy of this space, within
the discourse and within the city. However, this map will not attempt
to locate it, but to show that this space transgresses the notion of a
(localised) place. The effect of the map will be not to redene it but to
show that only in its disappearance from the map of the discourse can
it truly come into being. In doing so this ostensibly uncertain space
shows that the discourse itself is where uncertainty lies.
Fig. 1. Naples, Bagnoli. Photo: Gil Doron, 2004.
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The derelict land and the elephant
Ultimately, dereliction is a question of degree. Like the elephant, it may be
hard to describe but it is relatively easy to recognise.
4

I would like to start with what is supposed to be the most concrete and
prescribed categorisation of the space that is the subject of this paper
the categories of derelict and vacant land. These categories must
be crisp and clear since they are legal denitions, upon which grants
and building permissions are given. The location of these spaces and
their size must be apparent because they are the basis for much of the
housing stock and urban developments in the foreseeable future.
5

The UKs National Land Use Database of 2007 (NLUD) describes
some of the land that was previously used, and currently falls outside
the norms of occupancy, use, and acceptable appearance as Derelict
Land. The term derelict land means Land so damaged by previous
industrial or other developments that it is incapable of benecial
use without treatment. It is somewhat equivalent to brown elds,
which the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency describes as sites
in which real or perceived environmental contamination impedes
redevelopment and to TOADS - Temporarily obsolete, abandoned,
or derelict sites (U.S. General Accounting Ofce 1997) Using these
denitions, derelict land could be spoil heaps, excavations or pits,
derelict railway land, military bases, mining subsidence or general
industrial dereliction.
6
According to NLUD and the US Environmental Protection Agency,
derelict land does not have to be empty, or devoid of all use. Land is
dened as derelict when it has been used more extensively in the past,
probably in more lucrative ways, and when it seems to have further
development potential. By dening as derelict a site that has some
uses and that might not be empty, these agencies are at odds with the
more formal dictionary denition that denes a property as derelict,
when it has been abandoned or neglected. This meaning is also the
convention in legal terminology.
7
However, the UK governments
denition for derelict land is not concerned with actual abandonment
or ownership. It is worth noting that in a survey of attitudes towards
such sites, the public often perceived them as public spaces.
8

The term derelict has some moral overtones it implies somebody
has intentionally left something (or somebody) behind that is destitute
and/or delinquent. The implication is understandable considering the
places the term originally refers to were production sites that having
been deemed unprotable by their owners, were closed down with
business transferring elsewhere. However, the term colours these
4
Rupert Nabarro et al., Wasteland: A
Thames Television Report (London:
Thames Television, 1980), p. 11.
5
cf. Urban Task Force, Our Towns
and Cities: The Future: Delivering an
Urban Renaissance (London: Queens
Printer and Controller of Her Majestys
Stationery Ofce, 2000) at http://www.
odpm.gov.uk/index.asp?id=1127174#P
78886090; [accessed 1 August 2006].
6
cf. John F. Handley, The Post Industrial
Landscape: A Resource for the
Community, a Resource for the Nation?
(Birmingham: Groundwork Foundation,
1996) at http://www.changingplaces.
org.uk/upload/documents/
document11.doc; [accessed 2007].
7
J. Barr, Derelict Britain (Harmondsworth:
Penguin Books, 1969), p. 38.
8
cf. Handley, The post
industrial landscape.
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spaces in overly negative hues even though, as I will show later on,
they are often considered to be assets.
9

Another term that refers to previously used land is Vacant Land.
Vacant Land is land which is now vacant and could be redeveloped
without treatment, where treatment includes any of the following:
demolition, clearing of xed structures or foundations and levelling.
Vacant land can be any land that was previously developed, thus
making this term both broad and imprecise.
10
What makes this
denition even vaguer is the fact that vacant land does not have to
be vacant it can include, for example, structurally sound buildings.
11

The vacancy is neither physical nor occupational it is temporal.
Vacant land is de facto never empty but is sometimes empty of human
presence. A similar argument was made by the Civic Trust: Vacant
land, in general, is seen to be a problem when vacancy is prolonged,
when it is an eyesore, or when it is an obvious social and economic
waste of a scarce resource.
12

By excluding particular areas from their denitions of derelict and
vacant land, government agencies have allowed these categories
to slip into ever more fuzzy and open interpretations; for example,
land damaged by a previous development where the remains of any
structure or activity have blended into the landscape in the process
of time (to the extent that it can reasonably be considered as part of
the natural surroundings)also, land in which there is a clear reason
that could outweigh the re-use of the site such as its contribution to
nature conservation or it has subsequently been put to an amenity
use and cannot be regarded as requiring redevelopment.
13

The problem with these exclusions is that derelict sites and buildings
often contribute to nature conservation and sometimes even new
natural terrain, even though they are not seen as part of the natural
surrounds. Take for example, sunken boats that provide the platform
for aquamarine life to exist, or industrial ruins and wastelands that
often stimulate biodiversity (London Wildlife Trust 2007). These ruins
simply create new nature.
14

Even more problematic is the exclusion, in NLUDs denition, of
land that has subsequently been put to an amenity use. Originating
from the Latin word pleasant, amenity refers to social, cultural
and aesthetic suppositions and preferences. Would NLUD, for
example, exempt from the registry of derelict land a site that is
known for amenity uses such as raving, dogging or making bonres?
According to Tony Swindells, Browneld Land Consultant from
English Partnerships who is responsible for NLUD, probably not.
The informal land uses that would prevent land being classied
as derelict or vacant, would be recreational activities undertaken
9
Denition of derelict from, Dictionary.
com (2007) http://dictionary.
reference.com/browse/derelict;
[accessed August 2007]: For a further
discussion these issues see, Gil Doron,
The Dead Zone & the Architecture
of Transgression, CITY: Analysis
of Urban Trends, Culture, Theory,
Policy, Action, 4(2) (2000): 247-264.
10
Ann Om Bowman and Michael A.
Pagano, Terra Incognita: Vacant Land
& Urban Strategies (Washington DC:
Georgetown University Press, 2004), p. 4.
11
cf. National Land Use Database,
NLUD (2007) http://www.nlud.
org.uk; [accessed 2007].
12
S. Joseph, Urban Wasteland Now
(London: Civic Trust, 1988), p.1.
13
NLUD, 2007.
14
cf. R. Mabey, et al. (eds.), Second
nature (London: Cape, 1984); T. Edensor,
Industrial Ruins (New York: Berg, 2005).
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by the general population, for example walking the dog or off road
cycling etc..
15
Of course, the idea of general population in a diverse
society is problematic, and excludes or marginalises various groups
from using and therefore redening such sites sites that are exactly
the kind of places that marginalised groups often use.
16
Nonetheless,
the mere possibility of excluding land from the derelict and vacant
land registry because it is used for informal uses is an interesting
anomaly, in a system that from the start has catered to hard land-use
redevelopments.
The key issue of time and temporality is entirely excluded from the
ofcial denitions of derelict and vacant land, and for good reason
because this factor can make these denitions completely futile. This
issue was recognised by Thames Televisions The Wasteland Report
which stated: A precise denition is virtually impossible: whether a
site in partial use or a building unused for a given amount of time is
derelict remains to some extent a matter of subjective judgement.
17

The attempt to include as much land and as many sites as possible
weakens the category of derelict and vacant land further. Looking at
the issue in an historical perspective, it seems that whilst the amount
of this space has decreased in the past few years,
18
the amount of
land that is perceived as or could be identied as vacant and derelict
has increased. Until the 60s, the terms derelict and vacant land were
usually used to single out areas sucked dry of their natural resources
by mining concerns and only since the 70s has it been applied broadly
to urban situations.
19
From 2000, NLUD has started to include under
the denition of Previously-developed land by type (Browneld
land) sites which are currently in use with permission, or allocation,
for redevelopment in addition to derelict and vacant land. This has
caused some confusion since other agencies such as the Urban Task
Force (2000) and CABE (Commission for Architecture and the Built
Environment) (2003) have included in their audits of derelict land,
sites that have had permission for redevelopment. Furthermore,
CABEs 2003 campaign Wasted Space? included formal public
spaces such as parks and squares that, due to neglect or anti-social
activities, were perceived as derelict. As part of the campaign, the
public was asked to identify what they considered was a waste of
land in their areas. No parameters were given to help them determine
what constituted waste or wasteland. It was evident in the publics
feedback that the appearance of such sites was used as the main
criterion to judge such places i.e. aesthetic (dis)appreciation.
A similar generalising approach, relying on aesthetic judgement to
determine what is derelict, vacant or wasteland, can be seen in a Mori
survey that looked at perceptions about such spaces. In this survey,
15
T. Swindells, Request for Information
(15.05.2007), personal email.
16
cf. Doron, The Dead Zone & the
Architecture of Transgression, pp.
247-264 and also Doron, Dead
Zones, Outdoor Rooms.
17
Nabarro et al., Wasteland, p. 11.
18
NLUD, 2007.
19
cf. Nabarro et al., Wasteland.
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commissioned by Groundwork, derelict land was interpreted broadly
as urban and industrial waste land. It may be vacant, unused or
ineffectively used, or land which is neglected or unsightly. It can also
mean land, which is likely to become any of these things.
20

The tension between the different denitions of derelict and vacant
land by the government and other organisations is not new and
was already highlighted in the late sixties. For example, in Derelict
Britain, Barr argued that the governments denition for derelict
land was narrow and exclude[d] so much that an average observer
would consider derelict To most of us derelict land means virtually
any land which is ugly or unattractive in appearance.
21
Relying on
the appearance of places as a key to identifying wastelands was also
used by CABE (2003) and Groundwork (2003) in their surveys, and
earlier by the author of Reclaiming derelict land.
22
The association of
a certain appearance with wasteland is, I would argue, reducing the
whole debate about these spaces into indeterminacy. Why? Obviously,
if beauty is in the eye of the beholder, so is unsightliness. But more
importantly, the seemingly disordered landscape cannot be examined
just by its appearance since it is known to be harbouring various
spatial, natural, architectural, and social qualities that cannot be found
in, and are often actively excluded from, other urban spaces, including
the formal public space. These qualities show that these sites are not a
waste of land.
Fig. 2. Detroit. Photo: Gil Doron, 1999.
20
Handley, The post industrial
landscape, p. 3.1.
21
Barr, Derelict Britain, p. 14.
22
cf. J. R. Oxenham, Reclaiming Derelict
Land (London: Faber and Faber, 1966);
Nabarro et al., Wasteland; Doron,
The Dead Zone & the Architecture of
Transgression; Edensor, Industrial
Ruins; INURA, Possible Urban Worlds
(Berlin: Birkhauser Verlag, 1998);
S. Willats, Beyond the Plan: The
Transformation of Personal Space in
Housing (UK: Wiley-Academy, 2001).
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marks of indeterminacy
Most of the space the governmental agencies have dened as derelict
or vacant, that is, dead zone, is of the post-industrial landscape.
Because of their high visibility and concreteness, they have been the
focal point in the war of dcor. Exactly for this reason, post-industrial
space or industrial ruins, such as abandoned factories and disused
harbours and train yards, can provide a set of attributes or qualities
that can be located in other, more mundane yet elusive urban spaces.
Having observed sites of industrial ruin throughout Europe, the US
and Asia as part of my research, together with analysing works by
various writers on this subject and most notably Edensor, I have found
the following:
23

Industrial ruins are mainly to be found at what was the
edge of the cities in the 19th or early 20th century. As
such, they are spaces in-between the downtown and the
suburbs. They can be just a single factory or an entire
industrial zone.
The spatiality of industrial ruins vary it can be an open
space, an empty lot or a dilapidated structure with hidden
and barely accessible spaces. Often it combines both
characteristics.
As ruins within the urban or rural landscape, they usually
create a hiatus within the continuum. They stand out and
do not correspond to or with their surroundings.
The aesthetic of such spaces are the aesthetic of ruins
disordered and messy but in some cases, bare and dull.
The industrial ruin is a place that does not have a formal
usage or a programme.
As such, it is assumed to be an unproductive space,
but it can still be protable as a speculative space, and
productive in a way that cannot be quantied nancially.
It is often occupied by informal activities (by humans and
non-humans) that transgress the original usage of the
building.
These informal usages, predominantly carried out by
those who are not the owners of the place, create a space
that is neither private nor public.
The industrial ruin is both a concrete place but also,
because it has lost its identity, a hollow place that can
engender and contain fantasy, desires, expectations.
The industrial ruin stands outside history (the ofcial
past) and the present and at the same time is entrenched
in both. If it does not undergo preservation or
documentation it will fall outside the corpus of history,
and if it does, it will lose all the attributes mentioned
here and will become a dead ruin. Essentially, it is of the
23
cf. Doron, The Dead Zone & the
Architecture of Transgression; Kevin
Lynch, Wasting Away, ed. by M.
Southworth (San Francisco: Sierra Club
Books, 1990); Robert Harbison, The
Built, the Unbuilt, and the Unbuildable:
In Pursuit of Architectural Meaning
(London: Thames and Hudson,
1991); Rubio Ignasi de. Sola-Morales,
Terrain vague in Cynthia C. Davidson
(ed.), Anyplace (London: MIT
Press, 1995); C. Woodward, In
Ruins (London: Chatto and Windus,
2001); Edensor, Industrial Ruins.
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present because it changes everyday, yet it is also outside
the everyday working of the city.
The industrial ruin is an indeterminate and volatile place:
structurally, since it is dilapidating, and socially because,
in contrast to formal public space, where the rules of
behaviour are determined by norms and laws (often
place-bound by-laws), the industrial ruins space has no
such laws. It is agonistic and radically democratic since
the ways of being in this place are negotiated between
the various groups and individuals who use it rather than
those who pass laws elsewhere.
Stripped of their specic association with the industrial ruin, the
characteristics mentioned above can be summarised as follows:
These are either spaces in-between or at the edge and
their interiority transgresses the boundaries of open/
close, interior/exterior, private/public;
They have no ofcial programme or usage and as such
they trigger and embody limitless choice and desires.
They are perceived to be with no history (since they are
not recognised ruins) and have no future (demolished
or preserved, they have lost their essence). Thus, they
seem to live in a temporal break, a hiatus, and exist in
the continuous present i.e. outside time. Nonetheless,
because these spaces are unkempt and free of a
programme, they are continuously changing.
Their aesthetic is of disorder where boundaries between
autonomous objects disintegrate, and they are without
seams where no boundary whatsoever is apparent;
as marginal spaces, in both spatial and socio-economic
terms, these spaces are the constitutive outside and are
thus the embodiment of the agonistic place. This is true
both in their relationship to the outside city and in the
relationships between the various inhabitants
All the above characteristics portray these spaces as other
to the city between utopian places and dystopic ones.
To counter the determinacy of seeing the industrial ruins as just The
dead zones (which as I have insisted before are not dead), I will give
here examples of two other seemingly unrelated spaces, that have been
only marginally considered part of the problem of the dead zone, if at
all. However, as the industrial ruins, both these spaces also share most
of the above characteristics.
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chora and the toilet on the Bartletts ground oor.
Transgression contains nothing negative, but afrms limited being
afrms the limitless into which it leaps as it opens this zone to existence
for the rst time. But correspondingly, this afrmation contains notion
positive: no content can bind it, since by denition, no limit can possibly
restrict it. Perhaps it is simply an afrmation of division; but only insofar as
division is not understood to mean a cutting gesture, or the establishment
of a separation or the measuring of a distance, only retaining that in it
which may designate the existence of difference.
24

This force of rupture is due to the spacing which constitutes the written
sign: the spacing which separates it from other elements of the internal
contextual chain but also from all the forms of present referent that is
objective or subjective. This spacing is not simply negativity of a lack, but
the emergence of the mark.
25

Embodying the characteristics I have described above, the dead zone
can be the result of any act of demarcation. This space is not, however,
a dichotomous Other, that forms beyond the line as a secondary
space, but it is the space of the boundary itself. Short of expanding on
this, it can be best described through the notion of transgression and
spacing.
26

The most obvious and ancient space of demarcation, on an urban
scale, is the city wall. Within the wall, the Greek polis (city-state) was
dened by the ability of the members of the governing class to meet in
common places. Although the city-state often spread outside the walls,
24
Michel Foucault, Preface for
Transgression in D.F. Bouchard
(ed.), Language, Counter-memory,
Practice (Ithaca, NY: Cornell
University Press, 1997), pp. 34-35.
25
J. Derrida, Margins of Philosophy
(Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1982), p. 317.
26
For transgression see, Georges
Bataille, Eroticism (London: Penguin,
1962) and Foucault, Preface for
Transgression; for spacing see,
Derrida, Margins of Philosophy.
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this ability ended at the citys gates, i.e. it depended on geographical
unity. The space beyond was the chora (or Khra) part agricultural
land, part nature, and always militarised as it was the no mans land
between the city-state and its often rival neighbours. A linguistic
indication that the state of the chora was a no mans land can be found
in the verb chre which, in the military sense, meant giving ground
before the enemy. As a no mans land, the boundaries of the chora
were never stable and always contested and in fux.
27

In the Timaeus, some of these attributes can be found in Platos
concept of the chora as one of the three dimensions of the world/
reality. According to Plato, the chora was a unique kind of space
a receptacle in which things were formed. It was associated with
maternity, with the mothers womb. In itself, it lacked essence and
could not acquire permanent identity. It was formless.
28
Reading
Plato, Derrida sees chra as a radical otherness, or more precisely as
a space that produces difference: It has to do with interval; it is what
you open to give place to things, or when you open something for
things to take place and chora is the spacing which is the condition
for everything to take place, for everything to be inscribed.
29

Derrida emphasises that although Plato did not present the chora as a
void, because it was at least temporally flled with content, he did see it
as untouched and therefore virgin space. But it is a very special virgin
The Virgin who produced change, and gave a place for change to
happen, but her surface stayed blank and unmarked. The virginity, the
lack of characteristics, the passivity are all characteristics that would
constitute the dead zone imagery after that.
In reality, it seems that the chora was indeed a transformative place,
as it was on the out-skirts of the city that the new institutions, which
set it off from ancient types, found a home.
30
But this space was not
serene. Generally speaking the chora was a space of contest, not only
between rival city-states but also between reason and faith. The chora
was dominated by faith, as it was here that most of the sanctuaries
were located. The exception was Athens, but even here the Eleusinian
Mysteries initiation ceremonies were held outside the city, as were the
Dionysus anarchic celebration where sexual identity was transgressed.
Even Socrates lost his mind in a state of erotic frenzy on the banks of
the Ilissus when he ventured outside the city.
31

The space outside the city is also the place of dissent where
politically marginal fgures, women such as Antigone and the Wife
of Phocion, transgressed the city laws and buried their brother
and husband against the will of the king and against the will of the
democratic regime. These womens conduct transformed not only
27
cf. L. Mumford, The City in History
(New York: MJF Books, 1961); J. Bintliff,
Issues in the Economic and Ecological
Understanding of the Chora of the
Classical Polis in its Social Context,
in G. P. Bilde and F. V. Stolba (eds.),
Surveying the Greek Chora: The Black
Sea Region in a Comparative Perspective
(Aarhus: Aarhus University Press, 2006);
Indra K. McEwen, Socrates Ancestor:
An Essay on Architectural Beginnings
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993).
28
Plato, Dialogues of Plato, p. 50, 51.
29
J. Derrida, Architecture Where the
Desire May Live Interview with Eva
Meyer in Neil Leach (ed.), Rethinking
Architecture: A Reader in Cultural
Theory (London: Routledge, 1997), p. 9.
30
Mumford, The City in History, p. 144.
31
cf. Ibid.; Dag istein Endsj, To Lock up
Eleusis: A Question of Liminal Space,
Numen 47(4) (2000): 351-386; P. Dubois,
The Homoerotics of the Phaedrus,
Pacifc Coast Philology, 17(1/2) (1982):
9-15; Plato, Dialogues of Plato.
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the marginal space where they carried out their deeds, but effected
and changed the policies both of the city and of the home. Elsewhere,
a transgressive act by a marginalised woman, Rahab the whore, in
a marginal place, her home within the citys wall, had even more
shattering effects.
32

The chora, as McEwen argues, was a transformative space, and played
a key role in the colonisation and re-organisation of the Mycenae
and other cities in the region that were conquered by the Greeks.
However, the chora as an exterior space and space of exteriority was
not suitable for ordering and regulating the archaic and chaotic cities.
For this mission, an entire utopian socio-political vision and a strict
grid system was congured by Hippodamus, the rst town planner.
However, this social and spatial utopia could have been realised only
on a place that was imagined to be a tabula rasa, or was made to be
such.
33
Thus, the about to be colonised cities were projected with the
imagery of an uncertain, chaotic, and blank space, or in other words
imagery that resonated chora. But this chora, as a complete otherness,
had to be tamed. The means for this task was, as I would argue, the
chora itself but this time not as a radical exteriority but extrapolated,
reduplicated and internalised to form the grid system. The chora as a
spatial Pharmakon.
34

In-conclusion
The dynamics of contemporary life are such that crisis, and its discomting
space of uncertainty and anxiety, is drawing ever nearer to the core of our
common experience. Is there a no-mans land next door? if not, maybe you
are already in one.
35

The story does not end here of course, it just begins. Years
after, in the modern city, the rational grid itself started showing
its choraic innate traits in the form of what Jane Jacobs called
Border Vacuum and in the perplexing Space Left Over After
Planning (SLOAP) The imagery of the blank yet stained space
of the Greek colonies was projected onto other colonies, in
Asia and Africa, just to then be projected back again onto the
metropolitan areas of the poor ... In post modern cities, away from
the dead zones of the industrial ruin, in the sprawling expanse,
new nameless spaces, lacking identity or definition have sprung
up ... And from all the metaphors that have been drafted in to
capture this space, the imagery of the no mans land has struck
the deepest: In the age of late capitalism, when the frontiers have
been brought right into the heart of cities, the chora as a place of
radical exteriority has become the total interior with no exterior
32
cf. Gillian Rose, Mourning Becomes the
Law: Philosophy and Representation
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1996); Joshua (2001) The Holy Bible,
English Standard Version, Crossway
Bibles, (Joshua 2001: 2 and 6).
33
cf. R. Paden, The Two Professions of
Hippodamus of Miletus, Philosophy
and Geography, 4(10) (2001).
34
cf. Derrida,Platos Pharmacy in
J. Derrida, Dissemination, trans.
by Barbara Johnson (Chicago:
University of Chicago, 1981).
35
Lebbeus Woods, No-Mans Land
in A. Read (ed.), Architecturally
Speaking: Practices of Art,
Architecture and the Everyday
(London: Routledge, 2000), p.200.
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Fig. 3. Rome, Campo Boario, an abandoned abattoir, at the site of ancient Romes walls.
The place was squatted about 15 years ago, and transformed into a gypsy camp, Kurdish
info centre, social art and activism centre and more. Next to the Campo Boario on th e
banks of the River Tiber, there used to live homeless people. The area was also depicted
in Pier Paolo Pasolinis lm, Accattone (The Beggar) 1961 (top right photo). Collage and
photos: Gil Doron, 2000.
And yet, in another twist to the story, exactly at the moment we
are told that an external position is impossible, because the dead
zone is everywhere, and it is not as bad and not as dead as has
been assumed, we are offered the real thing the resurrected
chora, in a suburban park which celebrates rational thoughts.
(Although, I must say, the failure of some of Parc de la Villettes
follies to generate any productive activity has resulted in them
being truly empty and dysfunctional thus transgressive. So, the
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project may yet succeed) elsewhere we are promised that
radical exteriority can be generated, deus ex machine, in zones
free of architecture inside some extra large projects
36

Looking at the fragmented map I have presented here, one thread
of the many it offers discloses that the imagery of the dead zone
has existed since at least antiquity and that this imagery has in
the past few decades proliferated in the architectural discourse,
and although this space seems to come closer and closer to
home we have still yet to understand what exactly it is and what
its potentialities are.
Post Script
It isnt a question of producing: its all in the art of disappearing. Only what
comes into being in the mode of disappearance is truly other. And yet that
disappearance has to leave traces, has to be the place where the Other, the
world or the object appears.
37

Some time ago, at my MPhil to PhD transfer meeting at the Bartlett
I wanted to demonstrate the mundaneness of these ostensibly
extraordinary places. I decided then to take the committee and 30
or so guests for a journey in a search for the dead zone. Leaving the
lecture room on the 3rd oor, we partook on a long and treacherous
journey, through the chaotic studios, and the uncanny corridor spaces
off the tutors rooms, to the mens room of the ground oor. The
female entourage were ecstatic they for a long time had heard stories
about this contaminated shoddy pit, but could have only experienced a
faint whiff of it, until now.
We enter. An eerie silence is ooding the place, interrupted only by
the sound of dropping water. Making sure that we are not encroaching
on any natives, I cautiously open the door of one of the cubicles. The
place is empty. Pointing at the partition that separates this space from
the adjacent cubical, I announce: here is the anonymous place where
you can let all your self/ves disintegrate, this is the space public and
private mix, where boundaries are transgressed, where unpredictable
forms and programmes are created. Praise the architects (to be) who
created this space. Their architecture shows us, yet again, the weak
boundary between the architect private and public life.
38
This creative
piece of architecture demonstrates the architects desire to see,
traverse the lecture hall and penetrate the privy.
The bafed faces of the delegation make it clear they have not seen the
void. Stepping into the cubical, I lower the loos lid, sit down and point
at an area of the partition about a meter above the oor. And there,
36
cf. Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life
of Great American Cities (New York:
Modern Library, 1993); J. Marriott, The
Other Empire: Metropolis, India and
Progress in the Colonial Imagination
(Manchester: Manchester University
Press, 2003); Stefano Boeri, New
nameless spaces, Casabella 57(597/598)
(1993): 74-76 & 123-124; Paul Virilio,
The Lost Dimension, trans. by M.
Moshenberg (New York: Semiotext(e),
1991); Jameson, Frederic, Demographic
of the Anonymous in Cynthia C. Davidson
(ed.), Anyone (New York: Rizzoli
International Publications, 1991);
Bernard Tschumi, Architecture and
Disjunction (London: MIT Press, 1996).
37
Jean Baudrillard, Jean Baudrillard:
Photographies 1985-1998 (Berlin:
Hatje Cantz Publishers, 2000), p.131.
38
cf. G. Stevens, The Favored
Circle: The Social Foundations
of Architectural Distinction,
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998).
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there is the void. About two square centimetres in diameter, made by a
repetitive etching, a hole transgresses the boundary of the space.
It is not the rst time that young architects project their desires,
frustrations, and, I must insist, critique, into architecture, in the
shape of penetrating holes. Gordon Matta Clark did it spectacularly.
Of course, peeping holes and Matta Clarkes work have signicant
differences, but for our discussion on indeterminacy and voids, these
holes have a similar effect. Not unlike Clarkes holes, the peeping kind
has made the rest room a bit restless, diversifying the relationship
with the architectural event, accommodating but also engendering
desires that have no place where architecture is institutionalised.
These holes have created architecture where a desire may live.
39

p.p.s.
Two months later the toilet was renovated, and the space next to it
became a neat lavish gallery. The void was determinately designed out.
39
cf. Derrida, Architecture Where
the Desire May Live.
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vol.1 (1)
Atmospheres Architectural Spaces between
Critical Reading and Immersive Presence
Atmospheres Architectural Spaces between
Critical Reading and Immersive Presence
Ole W. Fischer
Postmodern and post-structuralist theories in architecture have
entered a phase of revision and re-evaluation. Taking the current
academic debate of critical theory versus post-critical or projective
practice as a starting point, this essay analyses three examples of
atmospheric spaces to test the alternative modes of interpretation
and to question the clear oppositional dialectic developed by the
protagonists. Especially the common denominator of weather and
atmosphere in the projects of Diller Scodio, Philippe Rahm, and
Olafur Eliasson, might be able to introduce uncertainty, ambiguity and
suspicion against the rendering of clear alternatives to the discourse.
Whilst the arguments of the post-criticality debate are primarily
based on a linguistic model of architecture, the indeterminacy of
atmospheric spaces opens up different readings, with the brief
remarks about the philosophers Gernot Bhme and Peter Sloterdijk
being just a rst step. Instead of giving answers, this essay asks for a
reformulation of critical thinking in architecture beyond the current
atmospheric interferences.
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Within the contemporary discourse on architectural theory there is a
phase of reorientation: the defnition of architecture (and especially
theory of architecture) as a critical practice the similarity to
the notion of critical theory of Frankfurt School philosophy is
not by accident is challenged by a post-critical or projective
understanding of the discipline, characterised by the development
of scenarios, design of user interfaces and production of multiple
lifestyles. The main issue of this debate is the relationship between
architecture and society, or, to be more precise, between architecture
and power, capital, media: On one hand there is a concept of
architecture being a critical device, refecting on the power and
gender discourse, economy and globalisation, participation and
resistance, law, politics and representation. On the other hand there
is an arrangement with the driving forces of society (the architect
as surfer on the wave of capitalism) and a focused concern about
pragmatic questions of acquisition, concept, design, realisation and
cultivation of architectural urban environments.
Criticality as the default mode of refection, interpretation and
evaluation of architecture was established in the US after 1968, under
the impression of Continental European philosophic, linguistic and
Neo-Marxist writings. Soon these theories turned into canonical
readings, rhetoric strategies and an established academic discipline,
although they were originally meant to question the very idea of
historisation, disciplinarity and elite culture. Post-Criticality stems
from the same Anglo-American academic background and exploits the
transatlantic cultural transfer, but this time operating with the work of
European architects as evidence: especially the projects and buildings
of the Swiss Herzog & de Meuron, the London-based Foreign Offce
Architects (FOA) as well as the Dutch Offce for Metropolitan
Architecture (OMA) of Rem Koolhaas, which are used to proliferate
the idea of a projective practice beyond the resistance and negation of
critical inquiry. Post-critical theorists attack the regime of Criticality
as a set of established concepts, strategies, texts and key-works, which
they suspect to limit and pre-determine the discourse on architecture
on a linguistic basis. Instead, they try to stage an open, multiple and
liberal understanding of the discipline by introducing alternative
reading strategies.
After pop and media culture and new pragmatism
1
had challenged
the institution of criticality in architecture in a frst round, the second
attack came with the essay Notes around the Doppler Effect by Bob
Somol and Sarah Whiting,
2
in which they differentiate between a
critical project linked to the indexical, dialectic, hot representation
and a projective practice linked to the diagrammatic, atmospheric,
cool performance.
3
This critique of critique by Somol & Whiting
1
So called Pragmatism Conference at the
MoMA, N.Y.C., November 10th 11th
2000, with the full title: Things in the
making: Contemporary Architecture and
the Pragmatist Imagination, organised
by Terence Riley and Joan Ockman.
2
Robert Somol and Sarah Whiting Notes
around the Doppler Effect and other
Moods of Modernism, Perspecta 33. The
Yale Architectural Journal, (2002): 72-77.
3
autonomy versus pragmatics:
disciplinarity as autonomy and process
(critique, representation, signifcation)
versus disciplinarity as instrumentality
(projection, performativity, pragmatics),
force and effect; resistance versus
engagement: resistance and critical
commentary versus engagement as
experts in design: operating with
qualities of sensibility (effect, ambience,
atmosphere) in addition to the work
with object qualities (form, proportion,
materiality, composition); single
articulation (program, technology,
form) versus possibility of multitude
and emergence; hot versus cool: hot
representation, high defnition, distinction
versus cool media, low defnition
(atmospheric interaction of viewer);
performance versus representation:
alternative realities, scenarios, expanded
realism (as if) versus narrative,
belabored representation of the real.
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was broadened and intensifed by other U.S. theoreticians of the
same generation, like Sylvia Lavin, Stan Allan or Michael Speaks,
but there is more at stake than an academic generational confict or
the call for a new style: this debate is addressing the relationship of
architects and society, meaning not only clients, the housing market
or the users of buildings, but the question of architecture as a cultural
practice with political and social implications. The term projective
provokes an emphasis on design as architectural expertise (projective
as in project, that is plan or scheme) and the aspect of engaging and
staging alternative scenarios (pro-jective as looking forward or
throwing something ahead). The main argument of the projective
is formulated in opposition to a linguistic (over) determined
architecture, legitimised by instruments of political correctness and
institutionalised critique,that insists on a status as autonomous
formal object or negative comment. Instead, Somol & Whiting point
out that strategies of engagement with mass culture, capitalist society
and globalised economy can serve as powerful sources to generate
liberating scenarios and alternative lifestyles, and they confrm their
argument with constant reference to pop and media theory and the
work of OMA/Rem Koolhaas. Another, maybe unintentional notion
of the projective derives from psychoanalysis and refers to the
projection (imaging technique) of internal wishes onto external objects
or persons. In this regard it is consequent for Somol & Whiting to
align the projective with the psychological, perceptional and sensual
qualities of architectural space experienced by the observer, an agenda
they share with Sylvia Lavins architecture of the mood.
However, the distinction of architectural concepts and practices
between critical and post-critical architecture is not as clear as
the dialectic argumentation of Somol & Whiting implicates. Firstly,
there are undeniable differences within the combined front of the
critics of criticality, as George Baird has clearly observed and
demonstrated.
4
Secondly, there is not a single exemplary post-critical
building to exemplify projective concepts, qualities, and the change
of spatial perception, not a single projective design to illustrate
performance in architecture and the change in social interaction
and effect.
5
And thirdly, what kind of qualities anyway? So far, the
contributions to the post-critical debate can be described as either
radical abstract, a kind of meta-discourse on the epistemological
paradigm shift following the end of critique or the end of theory. Or,
the protagonists of the projective practice eluded successfully from
describing nameable architectonic characteristics maybe to sustain a
pluralistic credo of just do it and everything goes, or maybe to avoid
the commitment and petrifcation to a projective style. Interestingly
enough, post-critical theory following the scheme of post-modernism,
post-structuralism and other post-isms: defnes its project ex
4
George Baird, Criticality and Its
Discontents, Harvard Design
Magazine 21, (2004): 16-21.
5
At the Stylos Conference Projective
Landscape at TU Delft, March 16th 17th
2006, that intended to cover the debate on
projective and critical design, there were
just few architectural examples discussed
as potential candidates for projective
architecture: F.O.A Yokohama Terminal,
O.M.A. Seattle Library, Herzog & de
Meuron, Prada Aoyama Epicenter,
Tokyo; today I would add the Gazprom
City competition in St. Petersburg.
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negativo, as a critique of an established practice, without staging a
clear alternative at frst.
So far post-criticality has been discussed primarily in U.S. academic
circles and magazines, but there are signs of an exhaustion of theory
in Europe as well. So called critical theory has been diluted by
methodological popularisation and turned into a kind of critical
gesture or refex, instead of opening new perspectives on momentary
conditions and challenging the status quo with alternative concepts.
Within critical discourse there has been a race for new theories
within the last 30 years that lead to the impression of arbitrariness
and fashion. In addition, everybody has noticed that revolt and
critique are part of the game of (late) capitalism: critical gestures
are soon internalised, commodifed and recycled as a consumer
product; (Fig. 1), or critique is marginalised and corrupted by its own
protagonists critical strategies have proven their ineffciency in
several ways.
Fig.1. Starbucks revolution series, marketing campaign. Image: Frankfurter
Allgemeine Zeitung am Sonntag, 13.11.2005; Frankfurt: 2005, p. 63.
As an example of the dilution between critical and post-critical
practices and as a testing ground for the transfer of the projective
argument in European discourse, we might look at the Blur Building
in Yverdon, by Diller & Scofdio for the Swiss Expo 2002; (Fig.2).
The newspapers and visitors of the Swiss national event favored
this pavilion above all other exhibition buildings and named it the
wonder cloud, though there was nothing to see, except a hint of a
steel structure in dense fog.The rest of the programme was rather
negligible: a water bar and a media project that was reduced from an
interactive media-scape to a straight-forward sound environment,
because of the exit of the telecommunication sponsor a few months
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before opening. Still everybody was fond of the beauty of this
habitable medium, as Liz Diller had phrased the concept, and
journalists were astonished about the new Swissness: No use, just
fun. Though abstract, the cloud, hovering above the lake high-tech
product of the water of the lake was immediately perceived as a
poetic happening. Backed up with the success of the pavilion after the
opening, Liz Diller said in an interview with the national newspaper:
Our architecture is about special effects [] Fog is inducing some
sort of Victorian anxiety about something that one cannot defne.
6
;
(Fig. 3). The immersive effect of being surrounded by dense fog, to
walk alone or in groups in a cloud a dreamlike or surreal situation
with just the noise of the nozzles, has something of the dramatic
visionary of Victorian fantastic novels, indeed. Earlier, during
the design process the architects pushed the idea of constructed
naturalness and the mode of individual perception even more:
The project goal is to produce a technological sublime, parallel to the
natural sublime experienced in the scaleless and unpredictable mass of
fog. This notion of sublimity, however, is based on making palpable the
ineffable and scaleless space and time of global communications.
7

Fig. 2. Diller & Scofdio, Blur Building, area view, Yverdon, Expo02, courtesy
of the architects. Photo: Beat Widmer.
Fig. 3. Diller & Scofdio, Blur Building, inside, Yverdon, Expo02, courtesy of
the architects. Photo: Beat Widmer.
6
Elizabeth Diller, interview with Gerhard
Mack, NZZ am Sonntag, special
edition to EXPO 02, 05.05.2002.
7
Ricardo Scofdio, Presentation Sunrise
Headquarters, March 2000, in Diller
+ Scofdio, Blur: The Making of
Nothing (New York: Harry N. Abrams
2002), p. 162.Abrams 2002), p. 162.
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This is a reference to the transcendental philosophy of Immanuel
Kant, who discussed the sublime as the second aesthetic category
next to beauty in his Critique of Judgment.
8
For him, the observer
receives eerie aesthetic pleasure from perceiving the limitation of his
power in front of nature. Kant continues to explain, that the delight
in confronting a superior force can be transferred into abstract
imagination as well. Diller & Scofdio applied both notions of the
sublime and proposed a simultaneous effect of manipulated climate
(nature) and abstract media presentation (imagination). Since the
theme of this national park was I and the universe the architects
refected on the dialectic between the individualised experience of
the observer (I) and the environmental scale of their atmospheric
installation in the landscape, and by addressing the topic of weather,
its relationship to the whole of society and culture (Universe):
Blur is smart weather. Within the fog mass, man-made fog and actual
weather combine to produce a hybrid microclimate. [] Weather is at
center of a technological debate. Our cultural anxiety about weather can
be attributed to its unpredictability. As a primary expression of nature,
the unpredictability of weather points out the limitations of technological
culture. [] At the same time, global warming are proof that weather and
climate are not impervious to human intervention. When we speak about
the weather, its assumed that more meaningful forms of social interaction
are being avoided. But is not the weather, in fact, a potent topic of cultural
exchange a bond that cuts through social distinction and economic class,
that supercedes geopolitical borders? [] In truth, contemporary culture is
addicted to weather information.
9
There is a rhetorical ambition to charge the topic of weather in
common terms connected to small talk with additional meaning,
and stage the Blur Pavilion as an example of direct sensual experience
and at the same time a product of mediatisation and representation. If
we analyse the effect of this building on visitors and apply the matrix
of projective practice, established by Somol & Whiting, we are able to
identify the following features of the Blur:
- performance
- special effect
- ambiance and mood
- immersion and synaesthesia
- it requires engagement and participation of the observer,
therefore a low defnition media (McLuhan: cool)
- it is diagrammatic (in the sense of Deleuze: imposing a form of
conduct on a particular multiplicity)
- it stages alternative scenarios and the virtual (what is more
surreal than walking in a cloud?)
- architecture as design expertise engaging with other
disciplines: media and IT, irrigation technology, civil
8
Immanuel Kant: Kants Critique of
Aesthetic Judgment, trans. James
Creed Meredith (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2007) from the
original: Kritik der Urteilskraft (1790).
9
Elizabeth Diller, Ricardo Scofdio, 2nd
Presentation Sunrise Headquarters, June
2000, in: Diller + Scofdio: Blur, p. 182.
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engineering, government offcials, sponsoring by corporate
capital, landscape architecture and environment, etc.
So, we might think, check on all boxes, and therefore proceed
to conclude: the cloud is a paradigmatic example of projective
architecture? Well, not quite, because the architects designed
the Blur Pavilion as an act of architectural resistance and critique.
The Blur was meant to question the idea of national exhibition
and spectacle and to problematise the superiority of visual
representation.
10
A critical gesture takes an object of consumerist
mass culture and turns it upside down. This shift of perspective is
thought to break with conventions and display mechanisms of the
everyday, which then become perceptible and intelligible and
fnally changeable. If exposition pavilions are manifestations of
spectacle and progress, the anti-pavilion makes use of these
expectations in order to frustrate them. Further instruments of
the critical include the display of suppressed topics in society, the
intentional displacement and misuse of elements, or the revelation of
the construction behind the production of effects, like the theater of
Bertold Brecht. In comparison with a common exposition pavilion,
the Blur Building stands out as an anti-object, since it has no skin,
no faade, no ground or roof; it has no defnite form, nor size, if the
steel structure is read as mere sub-construction of the cloud. Above
all, it does not exhibit anything, except atmospheric experience itself.
11

Within a critical discourse, vision is connected to unbalanced power
relationships, constructions of identity and truth, in the same way as
representation or display is labeled with exploitation, manipulation
and consumerist commodifcation; therefore they qualify as primary
targets of critical practice.
12

There is a similar attitude towards media and technology: For Blur,
Diller & Scofdio have used computers fed with weather scenarios
of the site and informed with data about actual weather conditions,
in order to calculate the pressure and distribution of water and the
correcting of the artifcial fog. The nozzles came from irrigation and
cooling technology (though a similar technique was used by Fjiko
Nakaya for the Osaka Worlds Fair of 1970), whilst the steel frame
employed tensegrity structures developed by Buckminster Fuller,
and the bridges were made of fberglass. In addition there was the
braincoat an unrealised media concept of wireless communication
devices integrated into waterproof clothing that should have kept
track of visitors and matched their digital personal profles. This
embracing application of material and construction techniques,
information and communication technology, is on one hand strictly
operational to stage artifcial weather, to keep control of the density
of the fog or to optimise the steel construction as carrier of the visitor
10
Ibid., p. 162.
11
Ibid., p. 195.
12
See: Scanning. The Aberrant
Architectures of Diller + Scofdio (New
York: Whitney Museum of American
Art, 2003), exhibition catalogue.
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platform and nozzles: this is the special effect part of technology.
13
On the other hand the architects address the problematic aspects of
modern technology, the dehumanising, restrictive features and side
effects of control, optimisation, instrumentalisation and reifcation
of people and things not by avoiding, excluding or hiding them,
but by an experimental implementation of high-tech devices in a
deviant way of pose or game; (Fig. 4). Originally Diller & Scofdio were
asked to provide a media concept for the Yverdon site, but during the
competition they focused on a messageless message. Hence the cloud
does not stand for phantasm, performance or event, but for silence,
emptiness and absence. Following this argumentation, the Blur
must be read as critical architecture, because it demonstrates the
characteristics of:
- autonomy: featureless, meaningless, objectless, formless
14
(or
hyper-form)
- resistance against spectacle, the pavilion as display at
display
- critique of mediatisation and visual consumerism
- problematisation of technical evolution and futurism
- references to external critical discourses: representation:
history of expositions; environment: climate and weather;
media theory; technological based power, etc.
Fig. 4. Blur Building, early sketch, courtesy of the architects. Image: Diller &
Scofdio, 1998.
13
Elizabeth Diller, Blur/Babble in:
Cynthia C. Davidson (ed.), (Anything,
Cambridge: MIT Press, 2001), p. 132-139.
14
For the term formless in critical
discourse see: Yves-Alain Bois
and Rosalind E. Krauss, Formless.
A User Guide (New York: Zone,
1997) (French original: Linforme:
mode demploi, Paris: 1996).
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One reason for blurring the boundaries between critical and post-
critical features of the Blur might have to do with a different point of
view: a projective interpretation relies on performance and effect on
the observer (reception), whilst a critical reading puts emphasis on
intention and content as defned by the author or critic (refection).
But in the case of a national event like the EXPO 02 experience is
constructed by mass media. The spectators knew what to expect,
because their experience of the Blur was immediately conditioned by
special editions of newspapers, TV, and the marketing campaign of the
Expo; (Fig. 5). On the other hand there might be some doubts about
the critical content of Blur as well: There is the general question of
the critical potential of immersive atmospheres, events and icons,
is an image, even a blurred one, able to be critical? In addition, the
critical content of the Blur shows the same traces of predetermination,
this time not by mass media, but by the architect-authors themselves:
Diller & Scofdio have used the channels of institutionalised critique
(magazines, lectures and reviews) to distribute their authorised
reading of the work.
15
A number of articles that enforce a critical
interpretation of the Blur Building show a signifcant degree of
coherence. Diller & Scofdio defne themselves as conceptual architects
and regard theory and critical content to be essential parts of their
design product.
Fig. 5. Diller & Scofdio, Blur Building, night view, 1998, with courtesy of the
architect. Photo: Beat Widmer.
However, the self-regulating academic criticality might not be aware
of features that have not yet been introduced to critical discourse,
i.e. topics beyond ideology and representation, gender, colonialism,
minorities, reifcation, commodifcation, etc. To give a short
15
Not to forget the documentary book to
the building, see: Diller + Scofdio: Blur.
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example, the German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk has contributed
an interpretation of the Blur Pavilion as a macro-atmospheric
installation and as an immersive climatic sculpture, which might
be still within the range of options set by the architects. But he went
on to read the atmospheric and climatic qualities not as an aesthetic
metaphor, but as initial experiments of air-design. He identifed air
as a relevant product of a future market society and predicted the end
of communal atmosphere. For him, the design and commodifcation
of air follows from the history of privatisation of public services,
common space, water, ground, etc.
16
Within modernity he
distinguishes the dialectical opposition between an individual cell in
the atomised foam society and the macro interiors as social collectors
and urban space multitudes, such as the stadium, the congress center
or the exhibition hall, where individuals transgress to groups and
masses. The architecture of the self Sloterdijk thinks of the ego-
cell as externalised immune system, therefore as prosthesis has
integrated more and more common goods and functions, to enable an
autonomous existence within the conglomerate society of the foam.
17
And fnally, it is not that far from universalised air conditioning of
interior spaces to a complete autarkic air-design.
For another example not discussed by Sloterdijk, but addressing
similar issues of technologically controlled climate as the Blur, and
therefore another possible testing ground of projective theory on
European ground, I suggest to look at the Jardin dHybert, the winter
house in Vende, France, by Philippe Rahm; (Fig. 6). This project
takes into account the generalised climatisation of contemporary
spaces, and proposes an architectural approach to this condition. In
the past, the question of air conditioning has been a technological one,
solved by engineers; nowadays it has become a political one, revolving
around sustainable development, energy standards and ecology and
climatic change. The project, a country house for a writer close to the
French Atlantic coast, does not work within the common standards of
assuring a habitable environment for humans, or of creating comfort
and cosiness, but stages the technical devices of climatisation. The
machines for heating, ventilation and humidifcation are exposed,
the whole building is arranged around a closed palm herbarium with
artifcial light; (Fig. 7). The house enables the inhabitant to live in a
different climatic zone, in a different season, within a different time
zone for example Tahiti regardless of outside weather conditions.
The special quality of the climatic house, from the outside a black
box, must be experienced from inside. Its main feature is invisible,
but not insensible: the artifcial atmosphere triggers direct effects on
the human melatonin production, and therefore on the health and
mood of the inhabitants. If we apply the matrix of projective practice
suggested by Somol & Whiting, there is:
16
Peter Sloterdijk, Sphren III, Chapter
2: Indoors. C Foam City (Frankfurt/
Main: Suhrkamp, 2004), pp. 669-670.
17
Ibid., p. 534.
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Fig. 6. Jardin dHybert, winter house in Vende, France, perspective; courtesy
of Dcosterd & Rahm, Paris/Lausanne, and Collection Muse National dArt
Moderne, Centre George Pompidou, Paris). Image: Philippe Rahm, 2002.
Fig. 7. Jardin dHybert, winter house in Vende, France, inside; courtesy of
Dcosterd & Rahm, Paris/Lausanne, and Collection Muse national dart
Moderne, Centre George Pompidou, Paris. Image: Philippe Rahm, 2002.
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- performance
- special effect
- ambiance and mood
- immersion and atmosphere
- it requires engagement and participation of the observer,
therefore a low defnition media (McLuhan: cool)
- it is diagrammatic (in the sense of Deleuze: imposing a form of
conduct on a particular multiplicity)
- it stages alternative scenarios and the virtual (what is more
surreal than living in Tahiti, but located on the French Atlantic
Coast?)
- architecture as design expertise engaging with other
disciplines: engineering; air conditioning; gardening;
psychology; environment, etc.
In addition, the architect thinks of himself as decisively post-critical,
or better non-critical: he is not interested in a theoretically informed
design practice employing the critique of globalisation, simulation or
the lament about the loss of individual and specifc characteristics, put
forward by authors like Jean Baudrillard or Marc Aug.
18
This attitude
towards architecture can be described as applied projectivety,
because he is working on extending the possibilities of architectural
design into the felds of infrastructure, technology or the invisible
qualities of space. With his projects he is testing the thresholds of
the architectural discipline and engages with scientifc methods and
technological imports, which might be typical of the generation of
1990s, if we think of other architects like FOA, MVRDV or Jrgen
Meyer H.
But on the other hand, against the rhetoric of pragmatism and
experimentation, there is a distinctive critical aspect to the works
of Philippe Rahm. This object, though set into a touristy landscape,
remains closed, dark and anonymous, and frustrates common
expectations of a country house. The unseen and soft factors of
architecture are explored, framed and displayed. His architecture tries
to uncover the space conditioning technologies, instead of integrating
them into the construction or conceal them behind architectural
surfaces and interfaces; (Fig. 8). His architectural projects
problematise the subconscious mechanisms of climate control; they
unveil the artifcial constant climate continuum spread out from
apartments, to lobbies, offces, cars, trains, airports and shopping
malls, atriums and congress centers, which encloses us almost
everywhere. They can be read as a comment on the de-localised,
de-territorialised and de-temporalised way of life of the jet-set, who
have made artifciality into a program or cult. At the same time, this
excess of technical devices refects on the issue of minimum-energy
18
Interview with the author on January,
20
th
2006; Marc Aug, Non-lieux:
Introduction une Anthropologie de la
Surmodernit (Paris:La librairie du XXe
sicle, 1992); Marc Aug, Non-places:
Introduction to an Anthropology of
Supermodernity, trans. John Howe
(London, New York: Verso, 1995).
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building regulations or the dependency of Western culture on fossil
energy sources, as you like. With the interpretation of Sloterdijk in
mind, the projects of Philippe Rahm can be read as a laboratory of the
individual, as experiments with the ego-cell, or as a new stage of the
externalisation of the human immune system, closing the inhabitant
into a herbarium, but enabling independence from environmental
factors like light, temperature, humidity, time and space. But even
without the display of the manipulative aspects of building technology,
one could feel inspired to articulate connections of the concept to the
Western myth of the noble savage (Tahiti!), and the exit fantasies from
modern civilisation, with the help of state of the art technology.
19
A
short roundup of the critical features of Jardin dHybert lead to this
conclusion:
- autonomy: container architecture, form as absent discourse,
independent from environment outside and touristy view
- resistance: against ecological regulations as well as
globalisation
- critique of mediatisation and visual representation
- problematisation of technological climate control and soft
effects of spaces
- references to external critical discourses: environment:
climate and weather; globalisation; tourism; psychological
and physiological manipulation; technological based power;
cultural history: the noble savage, utopia, etc.
Fig. 8. Jardin dHybert, winter house in Vende, France, herbarium; courtesy of
Dcosterd & Rahm, Paris/Lausanne, and Collection Muse National dArt Moderne,
Centre George Pompidou, Paris. Image: Philippe Rahm, 2002.
19
This is not the space to discuss the
infuence of utopian projects of the 1960s
and 1970s and the idea of a technological
based exit from history, but there are
obvious references in contemporary
architectural practice to the atmospheric
and pneumatic projects of Reyner
Banham, Cedric Price, Archigram,
Haus Rucker & Co., Superstudio,
Archizoom, etc.; see for example: Exit
Utopia: Architectural Provocations
1956-76, (Munich: Prestel, 2005).
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Compared with each other, both examples of atmospheric architecture
show the problematic relationship of critical and projective discourses:
The resolute critical practice of Diller & Scofdio was able to deliver
a projective object, if not to say an icon, with obvious potential for
commodifcation, whereas the non-critical approach of Philippe
Rahm turned out to produce concepts and projects, that enable
a critical commentary on ideology and society. The theoretically
informed process of scanning, slowing down and blurring
20
of a mass
spectacle produced an immersive event, whereas the straightforward
instrumentalisation of technology and engagement with scientifc
research on hormonal effects of light and climate, questions
architectures role of providing human habitats.
With constant reference to indeterminate elements of atmosphere and
weather, and as a detour to contemporary installation art, I suggest
a look at a piece by Olafur Eliasson as a third and last example: The
Weather Project at the turbine hall of the Tate Modern, London,
2003. Eliasson used the enormous room of the former turbine hall,
reconstructed by Herzog & de Meuron, to create a lasting sunset:
He covered one end of the hall with mono-frequency lamps emitting
bright orange light, arranged in a semi-circular form that became
a virtually complete full circle by refecting off the mirror ceiling;
(Fig. 9). The dimensions of the hall, now virtually enlarged by the
double height of the refected image, were made palpable by artifcial
mist that wafted inside and dispersed the orange light. The turbine
hall, which is open free to the public, turned into a space for non-
museum activities ranging from transcendental perception to talking
or having lunch. People met, sat or lied down on the foor, sometimes
people organised themselves in ornamental group patterns that were
refected from the mirrored ceiling. If we apply the projective matrix
again, though being aware, that the installation is neither an object
nor architecture, we get:
- performance
- special effect
- ambiance and mood
- immersion and atmosphere
- it requires engagement and participation of the observer,
therefore a low defnition media (McLuhan: cool)
- it is diagrammatic (in the sense of Deleuze: imposing a form of
conduct on a particular multiplicity)
- it stages alternative scenarios and the virtual (what is more
surreal than exhibiting real elements of a fake landscape in an
art gallery?)
20
K. Michael Hays, Scanners in
Scanning: The Aberrant Architectures
of Diller + Scofdio (New York: Whitney
Museum of American Art 2003),
p. 129-136 (exhibition catalogue).
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Atmospheres Architectural Spaces between
Critical Reading and Immersive Presence
- concept art as design expertise engaging with other
disciplines: architecture; landscape; air conditioning;
environment, etc.
Fig. 9. Olafur Eliasson, The Weather Project, Tate Modern London, 2003-2004;
courtesy of the artist. Photo: Jens Ziehe.
However, this is just half the story: when Olafur Eliasson talks
about the weather, he is interested in the fundamental aspect of life,
because he reads culture as a process that produces body-friendly
environments. This notion of physicalness, haptics and presence
leads to the German philosopher Gernot Bhme, who refers with the
term atmosphere to the emergence of things, and who assumes
interdependence between the physical perception of an emanating
presence (object) and the realisation of the physical presence of the
observing self (subject).
21
With the help of phenomenological and
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Critical Reading and Immersive Presence
communicative theory, aesthetics might transcend the fxation with
artwork and the question of the rational judgment of taste (Kant), in
order to develop an integral perception of physical presence that is
always embedded in a continuous exchange of energies and signals
with the surrounding environment thats what he calls atmosphere.
For Bhme, the experience of synesthetic, immersive environments
does not exclude a refective and critical stance, on the contrary, the
self-consciousness of physical presence and the awareness of the
relativity of human apperception are the foundations of intelligence,
of maturity and of an aesthetic access to reality opening the
emancipating effect of art. In addition to this epistemological and
ontological refection Eliasson questions the construction and
mediation of human apperception: For him, weather is not only
addressing physical presence, but is a cipher for time, including
the future. Weather in urban societies, he says, is a mediation of
indeterminacy, the unforeseeable, the dialectic of duration and
constant movement. The term mediation describes the degree of
representation that interferes with the experience of a situation
which can be language, cultural codes, media, or social, moral and
ethical ideologies. Eliasson is well aware, that experience is mediated
per se, but he wants to problematise the subconscious mediation (by
others). In his works he questions and frames the construction of
accustomed ways of experiencing by infecting the view of the observer
back on perception: seeing yourself seeing.
22
The Weather Project
disclosed its imaginary machinery, (Fig. 10) and was meant to unmask
the artifcial aesthetic environment as a constructed experience.
Though Eliassons critical inquiry does not halt at his own work, his
installations aim at the frame of the museum as an institution, not
by repeating formal avant-garde moves, but by taking responsibility
of media reports, public relations, marketing and the museum
education of the Tate Modern. Eliasson believes in the utopian aspect
of artwork: museums are radical, because they enable alternative
frames and constructions of life, providing evidence, that reality is
just one out of many possible world models, and therefore functioning
as the immune system of society.
23
But critical strategies have to be
light, fexible, temporal, for the context of here and now, in order
to avoid the ineffciency of petrifed critical gestures: an art beyond
objects.
24
And last but not least: staging the topic weather had less
to do with neo-romanticism, than with sociological considerations,
since everybody talks about the weather. To close the argument of the
critical aspects in Eliassons work:
- autonomy: from disciplinarity of art, exhibiting art, perceiving
art
- resistance: against representation and mediated experience
- critique of representation and normalised thinking
21
Gernot Bhme, Atmosphre: Essays
zur Neuen sthetik (Frankfurt/
Main: Suhrkamp, 1995).
22
The title of another work by Olafur
Eliasson, mirroring the view of the
observing visitor back on himself, 2001,
exhibited in the MoMA, New York, etc.
23
Olafur Eliasson, Behind the scenes.
A roundtable discussion in: Susan
May (ed.), Olafur Eliasson: The
Weather Project, (London: Tate
Publishing, 2003), p. 65-95.
24
Olafur Eliasson, Museums are radical,
in Susan May (ed.), Olafur Eliasson:
The Weather Project (London: Tate
Publishing, 2003), p. 129-138.
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Atmospheres Architectural Spaces between
Critical Reading and Immersive Presence
- problematisation of institutions, commodifcation and
marketing
- references to external critical discourses: architecture; media;
environment: climate and weather; globalisation; natural
science; technologically based power; sociology and utopia,
etc.
Fig. 10. Olafur Eliasson, The Weather Project, Tate Modern London, 2003-2004;
courtesy of the artist. Photo; Jens Ziehe.
Though these examples are not strictly interdependent, the issue
of weather and climate seemed to offer possibilities for staging
experimental concepts in art and architecture. These atmospheric-
immersive spaces elude the oversimplifed categorisation of critical
or projective practice, because they combine performance with
refection, engagement with resistance. At the same time they are
able to transgress the alternative modes of delivering an autonomous
formal object or producing a documentary display of socio-political
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Critical Reading and Immersive Presence
or ethical problems, frictions and discourses. And this is maybe
part of the answer to the post-critical debate and its transfer to the
European architectural landscape: the post-critical or projective
theory might not gain the same impact and disturbance in Central
European discourse, since the dependence of art and architecture on
criticality has not been as dominant as in the US. Nonetheless, critical
architecture has shifted from a mindset to a style or methodology, and
criticality has been stereotyped to gesture and refex. Criticality has
lost its critical effect and therefore it is time to criticise critique and
question theoretic production. On the other side, if architecture wants
to be more than a services provider for design and planning, and art
more than decoration, it relies on conceptual thinking, on experiments
and on discourse. Critique as the debate about these concepts
and perceptive modes is necessary to identify relevant topics and
to provide criteria to produce, analyse, understand, evaluate and
therefore improve architectural ideas. Critique is the mode to focus
on the cultural surplus of architecture beyond mere production,
to relate architecture to other cultural practices and society itself.
Therefore it is necessary to understand, accept and apply the constant
shift of the relationship architecture-critique-society. Critique needs to
be revised to regain its ephemeral and agile status of refecting on its
own basis, concepts and constructions.
Maybe, the irreconcilable juxtaposition of criticality and projective
is to no avail, maybe it has to be understood as a dialectic relationship.
Maybe the projective is a critical device to reform criticality. Maybe the
projective is just criticalitys other? If we have a look at the history
of critical theory as formulated by Frankfurt School philosophy,
critical thinking was developed to liberate critique from history and
description, and to activate its potential for contemporary questions.
Critical theory was meant to engage with reality and to analyse
society in order to initiate change and project alternative scenarios. In
other words: the projective has once been part of the critical, and it
has to become part of its future.
42
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vol.1 (1)
Architectural Historys Indeterminacy
Architectural Historys Indeterminacy: Holiness
in southern baroque architecture
Helen Hills
This article is a critique of architectural historys tendency to over-
determine in thinking about practice and theory in general, and
in thinking the relationship between architecture and spirituality
in post-Tridentine ecclesiastical architecture in particular. It rst
demonstrates what is meant both by over-determination and
resistance to interdisciplinarity within mainstream architectural
history before critically exploring in relation to this how post-
Tridentine architecture and spiritual life or religious devotion might
be thought together, the sorts of relationships between the two that
may be thought to take place, and asks where this relationship might
be located. Suggesting that it might be protable to follow Deleuzes
philosophy of the Baroque in refusing the tripartite division between
a eld of reality (the world) and a eld of representation (in his case
the book, in ours, architecture) and a eld of subjectivity (the author,
the architect), and rather to adopt like him, the notion of rhizome
without beginning or end, always in the middle, between things,
interbeing, intermezzo, indeterminate. The article seeks to consider
Baroque architecture as rhizomatic construction, rather than the usual
(and unhelpful) preoccupations with it as dichotomous, expressive, or
propagandistic.
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Architectural Historys Indeterminacy
Last year I was invited to write a short paper on architecture and
spiritual life in Tridentine Naples.
1
My frst inclination was to dismiss
the idea: there seemed so much that was wrong with the underlying
assumptions. But in articulating what I felt to be wrong, I found myself
on new ground. The ensuing problems might, I think, be pertinent to
the aims of this special issue of feld in thinking about architecture and
indeterminacy. This is, then, both a consideration of architectural
historys tendency to reductively over-determine, both in thinking
about practice and theory in general, and in thinking the relationship
between architecture and spirituality in post-Tridentine ecclesiastical
architecture in particular. How might we think post-Tridentine
architecture and spiritual life or religious devotion together? On
what terms may architecture speak in regard to anything as slippery
as spirituality? What sort of relationship between the two may be
thought to take place? And where would this relationship be located?
Might we proftably follow Deleuze in refusing the tripartite division
between a feld of reality (the world) and a feld of representation
(in his case the book, in ours, architecture) and a feld of subjectivity
(the author, the architect), and rather, adopt like him, the notion of
rhizome, without beginning or end, always in the middle, between
things, interbeing, intermezzo, indeterminate? Baroque architecture
as rhizome, perhaps, rather than as dichotomous, expressive, or
propagandistic?
2
First, I turn to architectural historys generally steadfast resistance
to such ideas, indeed to any ostensibly theoretical intrusion at all a
resistance which increases in intensity with regard to early modern
architecture.
3
This is neatly encapsulated in a recent edition of the
Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians (USA), which, for
the sake of argument, can be described as the leading architectural
history journal. Volume 64 n.4 Dec 2005 was a special issue dedicated
to Learning from Interdisciplinarity. It contains 8 short essays
encompassing less than 24 pages or one-ffth of the volume on inter-
and multi-disciplinary issues. After this relatively brief space dedicated
to these interdisciplinary refections, follow four longer articles
(totalling 110 pages). While each author might adopt knowledge from
disciplines other than art or architectural history, none of its four
principal articles pays the slightest attention to interdisciplinarity or to
the theoretical developments discussed in the frst part of the volume.
4

In one volume, therefore, we are presented with a strange chimaera
an architectural history which promises to be porous, to welcome
ideas from other disciplines and between disciplines, to learn from
interdisciplinarity (my italics), but which nevertheless in the same
issue blithely turns its back on these challenges, ignores them in an
untroubled familiar fortress island of architectural history, shut up
behind a cordon sanitaire. Of course, all disciplines harbour these
radically divergent approaches. But what is remarkable here is that
1
The term refers to the Alpine city of
Trent (Tridentum in Latin), where a
Council of Church leaders met in three
phases between 1545 and 1563. Among
much else, the Council reaffrmed
medieval teachings on the authority
of tradition, transubstantiation in the
Mass (repudiating Protestant beliefs in
consubstantiation), the sacraments and
veneration of saints and relics. On the
Council of Trent, see H. Jedin, Geschichte
des Konzils von Trient, 4 vols (Freiburg
im Breisgau: 1958-75); John W. OMalley,
Trent and all that: renaming Catholicism
in the early modern era (Cambridge
MA: Harvard University Press, 2000);
R. Bireley, The Refashioning of
Catholicism, 1450-1700, (Basingstoke:
Macmillan, 1999), pp. 45-70.
2
See G. Deleuze and F. Guattari, A
Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and
Schizophrenia, trans. by B. Massumi
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 1987). For treatment of baroque
architecture as expressive of context,
and/or as representation of the will of
the architect or patron, see S. Ostrow, Art
and Spirituality in Counter-Reformation
Rome: The Sistine and Pauline Chapels
in S. Maria Maggiore (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press: 1996);
John Beldon Scott, Architecture for
the Shroud: Relic and Ritual in Turin
(Chicago: The University of Chicago
Press, 2003). For an interpretation of
baroque architecture as propaganda,
see E. Levy, Propaganda and the
Jesuit Baroque (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 2004). For the problems
with such an account, see Helen Hills,
Too Much Propaganda, Oxford Art
Journal, 29(3) (2006): 446-453.
3
Of course, all scholarship is informed,
consciously or not, by theoretical
frameworks of some kind. I refer here,
however, to the overt articulation of
theoretical or political approaches.
While theoretical sophistication is
welcomed in architectural historical
analysis of modern or contemporary
architecture, this is not the case with
pre-modern architecture (including
medieval, Renaissance and baroque). The
reasons for this are complex and have
to date not been adequately analysed.
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Architectural Historys Indeterminacy
there is no embarrassment in such a brazen juxtaposition. The Editors
Introduction presents the interdisciplinary ideas, not as inherently
divisive issues for debate but rather as a bouquet of interesting
ideas on which future architectural history might usefully draw, but
the avoidance or ignorance of which presents no handicap to present-
day architectural history.
5
Indeed, the packaging presents them as a
whimsical sideline.
I wonder how this special issue now functions. As encouragement to
architectural historians to absorb some of the selected ideas labelled
Learning from interdisciplinarity? Perhaps. But surely far more
readily as reassurance, that its perfectly OK to ignore them, as the
really signifcant portion of the same volume does. The message
from this volume seems to me to be Business as usual: either you
can learn from interdisciplinarity or you can do real (autonomous)
architectural history.
6
Never the twain shall meet. The lesson to learn
from interdisciplinarity is that it is irrelevant to the serious business of
architectural history.
7
We are shown an Architectural History that is,
in JM Coetzees sense of the phrase, Waiting for the Barbarians.
8
Steiber ends her Introduction thus: Despite their varied and
contrasting points of view, these essays make clear the objective of
an interdisciplinary yet autonomous architectural history: to reveal
the often unarticulated ways that architecture embodies how people
have lived, thought, and worked.
9
Architecture, then, as embodiment
of lives, thought, and work. Architecture is understood here as an
apparently magical materialisation of, at worst, verbs, and at best,
ideas. This is to limit architecture in a manner characteristic of much
architectural history, proceeding on the assumption that there is an
autonomous base or origin outside of architecture which can serve
to explain architecture, and which architecture seeks to represent,
to house, to embody (or exclude).
10

The special issue of JSAH is a useful demonstration of
contemporary debate within architectural history at least at its
not unsophisticated, if conservative, core.
11
The question of why
architectural history as a whole, and particularly early modern
architectural history, has been so peculiarly resistant to theoretical
approaches and learning from interdisciplinarity far more than any
other branch of art history is an important one whose scope extends
beyond this paper.
12
The conjunction and in architecture and spiritual life stages an
agon in which architectures social vocation is enabled but also
contained by its own powers of representation. How might we think
of architecture and spirituality, then, without treating architecture
4
I am drawing a distinction between
multidisciplinarity whereby scholars
use additatively ideas and knowledge
from more than one discipline (e.g. the
use by an architectural historian of the
history of mathematics or geometry), and
interdisciplinarity, or the development
of approaches to problems and questions
arising between, rather than within
disciplines (e.g. sexuality), which then
require changes in the precepts and
practice of all involved disciplines.
5
Nancy Steiber, Learning from
Interdisciplinarity; Introduction,
JSAH, 64(4) (Dec 2005): 417-419.
6
Steiber structures her Introduction
around the question Is architectural
history an autonomous feld? Steiber,
Learning from Interdisciplinarity, p. 417.
7
What happens when the passivity of verbs
symbolise, represent, and refect that
we use to describe architectures relation
to society and culture is replaced with the
forcefulness of verbs such as transform,
perform, inform? the editor asks, before
singling out one essay, which proposes
a new social history of architecture that
explores its contribution to identity
formation, considering the built
environment as the stage for performing
identity (p. 417). Here then architecture,
having been pushed towards agency, is
quickly steered out of the limelight, simply
to form a stage on which the real action
takes place, architecture as backdrop,
as stage, not as player. Architecture,
in this model, does not take place.
8
J. M. Coetzee, Waiting for the
Barbarians (London: Vintage, 2004).
9
Steiber, Learning from
Interdisciplinarity, p. 418.
10
For a nice discussion of this, see Andrew
Benjamin, Eisenman and the Housing of
Tradition: Art, Mimesis, and the Avant-
garde (Routledge: London, 1999).
11
Crucially, the conservative core remains
the principal organ for scholarship on
early modern architectural history. While
JSAH may well be amongst the more
conservative scholarly journals, it is also
the only journal dedicated to architectural
history including pre-modern architecture
from countries beyond the USA and
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Architectural Historys Indeterminacy
as simply the enactment of idea? I should like to offer, rather than
defnitive answers and interpretations, some questions and issues for
refection, attempting to move away from an interpretation based on
secure identities, an hermeneutics of depth, and linear historical time,
to thinking instead about the relationships between architecture and
spirituality in Tridentine Italy as a continuing travail of openings,
fssures, and delays. I want to avoid defning either architecture or
spirituality by confning them to a box of periodisation in terms of a
(fnished) past. Instead I consider both architecture and spirituality as
pluralistic, while also tending to produce each others limits.
Architecture in Tridentine Naples was not homogenous or unitary.
It would, in any case, be wrong to foreclose the discussion by
restricting it from the start to ecclesiastical architecture, to assume
that architecture built for the Church had an exclusive relationship
to spiritual experience. What is it to say of spirituality outside
ecclesiastical buildings, in wayside shrines, in domestic chapels, or
in kitchens, storerooms, bakeries and laundries, and numerous other
places sometimes occupied or preoccupied by spirituality?
13
The
sacred and profane did not occupy separate architectures. The church
was a place of transaction and confict, as much as of transcendence
and tranquillity. Always fractured, always spilling out into the street
and into more registers of meaning than can be contained within a
rubric, church architecture cannot be contained by a verbal logos.
What is it to say of spirituality outside of buildings, above all in
processions which unfolded through the city, articulated at specifc
sites by temporary altars, triumphal arches, facades laced with
epigraphs and encomia, but not composed of them?
14

Spiritual lives extended beyond the liturgical to all religious practices
and beliefs. In Tridentine Naples, just as the practices of architecture,
including ecclesiastical architecture, were many, contested and
contradictory, so also though in different ways were the practices
and precepts of spiritual lives. There was no single spiritual life to
which all adhered, and there was no distinct form of life that was
spiritual, separate and autonomous from other aspects of life.
Even within the main religious orders, religious practices varied
considerably. Outside these groups, spiritualities also embraced
those beliefs and forces, which were marginalised and repressed by
(certain groups within) the Church. This outside imprinted even the
offcial architecture of orthodox Catholicism with its marks. In so far
as church architecture of this period made it its business to exclude
difference, to divide and taxonomise those accepted within, it bears
the imprint of all it sought to exclude.
Britain. The terminology pre-modern
is awkward, but it refects what is, I
believe, a divide in scholarship between
the history and theory devoted to
modern / contemporary architecture
and that which addresses architecture
from earlier periods. See note 3 above.
12
The claim that architectural history
is conservative because both
architecture and history conserve is
insuffcient as an explanation of this.
13
This is not the distinction between sacred
and profane indicated architecturally
by Michael Camille. For Camille, the
architecture of Chartres manifests the
desire to encompass and structure
offcial exegesis in opposition to the
instability of the countless unoffcial
and indecipherable meanings that are
projected onto it and that proliferate in
the profane world it seeks, but fails, to
exclude. Michael Camille, At the Sign
of the Spinning Sow in Axel Bolvig
and Phillip Lindley (eds.), History and
Images: Towards a New Iconology
(Turnhout: Brepols, 2003), pp. 250-251.
14
The manipulation of a space that
exists prior to the parade is necessarily
accompanied by the production
of a space that is specifc to it. L.
Marin, On Representation, trans.
Catherine Porter (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 2001), p. 42. The best
discussion of the procession in this
regard remains Marins, pp. 38-52.
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Just as the practices of architecture, including ecclesiastical
architecture, were many, contested, and also contradictory, so also
though in different ways were the practices and precepts of
spiritual life. There was no single spiritual life to which all adhered,
and there was no distinct form of life that was spiritual, separate
and autonomous from other aspects of life that were not. Spirituality
is also the relationship between oneself and infnite alterity that
sees without being seen, the mysterium tremendum, the terrifying
mystery, the dread and fear and trembling of the Christian in the
experience of the sacrifcial gift. Rather than a substantive, spirituality
as having an essence that can be identifed and stated as such, is better
termed an actative. This actative was confictual and therefore unable
to support an essential. Thus these categories architecture and
spirituality were never sharp-edged, and our analysis of them should
not be so either. Spirituality seems to proffer a useful key to unlock
architecture, to explain it (away). Indeed, the spiritual is readily seen
as opposed to the architectural, and therefore outside it (rendering
the displacement of architecture almost salvational, redemptive).
Spiritus, immaterial breath, is the counterpart to the materiality of
architecture; the immateriality of the spirit and of spiritual matters is
readily opposed to the body and matter that constitutes architecture.
Some approaches, effectively Hegelian, nevertheless search for a
commonality between (or above) thought and matter (architectural
and philosophical) seeing architecture as the materialisation of the
spirit.
15
The Protestant hermeneutic that confates the Holy Spirit with
the spirit of the biblical text also works against architecture in this
regard.
16

In offering for consideration architecture and spirituality,
architecture is thereby conceived as separate from spirituality and
as constituting its material embodiment or its material evocation
a pointing to of something which either is imagined or actually
exists already elsewhere. This elsewhere haunts much architectural
history, displacing and replacing architecture with its imagined
predecessor (religion) or destiny (spirituality). Architecture thus
becomes a sort of interloper the illegitimate occupier of a space,
which is more appropriately occupied by word or deed, by origin
(birth) or destiny (death). Architecture approached this way is off-
limits, already always elsewhere.
If architecture is conceived as a technique separate from thought (and
affect and spirit) and either as coming after, or preceding it, then
it produces affect and spirit. Architecture, especially ecclesiastical
architecture, appears like a gigantic butterfy net, able to trap
spiritual experience and pass it on to its users. This conception of
architecture as capturing pre-existing transcendental effects, termed
15
Such a conception underpins Erwin
Panofskys famous attempt to incorporate
into one explanation the principles of
Gothic architecture and Scholasticism.
He searches in two contemporaneous
but diverse phenomena, the University
disputation and the system of Gothic
vaulting, for common principles
of clarifcation and conciliation of
opposing forces. Erwin Panofsky,
Gothic Architecture and Scholasticism
(Latrobe PA: Arch Abbey Press, 1951).
16
For by a kind of mutual bond the Lord
has joined together the certainty of
his Word and of his Spirit so that the
perfect religion of the Word may abide
in our minds when the Spirit, who
causes us to contemplate Gods face,
shines; and that we recognise him in
his own image, namely, in the Word. in
Jean Calvin, Institutes of the Christian
Religion, trans. John Allen, 3 vols
(London: SCM, 1961) I, bk.1, p. 95.
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Architectural Historys Indeterminacy
spiritual, or better still, recognised as such by viewers / users (like
the identifcation of the butterfy in the net by reference to the pre-
existing wallchart) reduces architecture to little more than a conveyor
belt or tunnel through which precious (pre-determined) feelings
can be transmitted. Like the butterfy, such spirituality, deemed
to be immanent within certain buildings, is divorced from history.
As we have seen above, that architecture refects or expresses
remains a common assumption in architectural history practice,
but it is fundamentally fawed, as its dependency on the mode of the
mimetic, relies on binary logic to describe phenomena of an entirely
different nature. However, rather than simply dismiss this manner
of practising architectural history, I shall return to it below as not
coincidental to what is habitually presented as the Council of Trents
own architectural history.

Might we think instead of spirituality, not as restricted to church
architecture (nor as chronologically or teleologically corralled within a
pre-modern period enclosure), but as intensity of affects which may
both mobilise architecture and be mobilised by it?
Reading Trent: Architecture as Representation
The Council of Trent has little to say about architecture directly. The
Decrees show concern for images, but little interest in architecture.
Indeed, Catholic treatises throughout the sixteenth century, largely
ignore architecture and are overwhelmingly concerned with images,
especially paintings.
17
While word and image (painting) have readily
been seen as competitors for the status of revelation, architecture has
not.
Nevertheless, for Rudolf Wittkower and others, the Council of Trent
set in motion a spirit, which artists pursued and caught up with (or
not): Are we at all capable to judge whether, where, and when the
artists caught up with the spirit of the Council?
18
Consequently, architectural history has tended to treat liturgy and the
Decrees of the Council of Trent as principal explanators for Counter
Reformation church building. The most familiar model is the analysis
of the Ges in Rome (Fig. 1) (rising from 1568 and consecrated in
1584), as if it were an illustration of the Decrees of the Council of
Trent. Thus Rudolf Wittkower in 1958 treated it as the archetype
of a typology, its form read in terms of its function (more or less a
container for the masses being preached at):
The beginning was made with the Ges, the mother church of the Jesuit
Order. With its broad single nave, short transept, and impressive dome this
17
This point has been made, but not
critically considered, by several scholars:
C. Dejob, De linfuence du Concile e
Trente sur la literature et les beaux-
arts chez les peoples catholiques (Paris:
1884), p. 265; Giuseppe Scavizzi La
teologica cattolica e le immagini durante
il XVI secolo, Storia dellarte, 21 (1974):
171-212; Scavizzi, The Controversy
on Images from Calvin to Baronius
(New York: Peter Lang, 1992), pp. 242-
248; and Pamela Jones Art Theory as
Ideology, in C. Farago (ed.), Reframing
the Renaissance (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1995), pp. 127-139.
18
Rudolf Wittkower, Art and Architecture
in Italy 1600-1750, Early Baroque I, (ed.)
J. Connors and J. Montagu (Singapore:
Yale University Press, 1999), p. 1.
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church was ideally suited for preaching from the pulpit to large numbers of
people. It established the type of the large congregational church that was
followed a hundred times during the seventeenth century with only minor
variations.
19
Fig. 1. Rome, Il Ges. Interior view east towards main altar. Photo: Helen Hills.
This can, of course, be read as another of architectures founding
myths. By this account the Neapolitan church of S. Maria degli
Angeli a Pizzofalcone (1600), with its vast and luminous dome at the
crossing (Fig. 2), S. Caterina Formiello, or the fabulously decorated
San Gregorio Armeno, simply repeat a solution (the bare bones of the
Ges) invented in Rome.
20
By this account, architecture elsewhere was
merely a repetition of the Ges that was itself little more than reactive
representation. Beyond this, Wittkowers account treats architecture
as expressing the social forms, which are also those capable of
generating and using it. The building of the church sets up a place
that did not exist before; yet, at the same time, its inhabitants God,
clergy, worshippers required the place before it was invented.
Indeed, the spiritual is readily seen as opposed to the architectural,
and therefore outside it (rendering architectures displacement
almost redemptive).
Any assumption that liturgy and architecture (often even further
reduced to architectural plan) encompass each other in corresponding
form is problematic. Analysed in terms of liturgy, architecture is
seen as accommodating a pre-existing function that is coherent and
19
Ibid., p. 15.
20
For these churches, see Anthony Blunt,
Neapolitan Baroque and Rococo
Architecture (London: Zwemmer,
1974); Helen Hills, Invisible City:
The Architecture of Devotion in 17th
C Neapolitan Convents (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2004);
Silvana Savarese, Francesco Grimaldi
e larchitettura della Controriforma a
Napoli (Rome: Offcina Edizioni, 1986).
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productive. It is usually envisaged that architecture houses liturgy,
as if liturgy were conceived independently, already, and in existence
somewhere else, quite autonomously from architecture, which is then
produced to house it. Parallel to this is a tendency within architectural
history to see the architect as explanator, as originator of the new.
The architect, understanding the requirements of liturgy, produces a
new form, all the better to house it. The liturgico-architect, positioned
outside of architecture, is then advanced as its explanation and cause.
The architect is spiritual prophet as his architecture presences the
divine. Yet such an account uncomfortably matches the ambitions for
architecture of Trent.
Fig. 2. Naples, S. Maria degli Angeli a Pizzofalcone (1600), with its vast and luminous
dome at the crossing. Photo: Tim Benton.
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The Tragedy of Trent
The tragedy of Trent was that the command was mistaken for
something to be understood, obedience for knowledge itself, and
being for a fat. This was the resort of the Catholic Church in a
state of emergency, threatened by Protestants (as historians always
remember), and by Muslims (as they often forget).
21
The Council of
Trent claimed separation for the Roman Catholic Church: separation
from the Protestant churches and from secular Catholic powers. Yet
Trent declared the Church to have responsibility for spiritual (as
opposed to temporal) matters, in an era where the spiritual seeped
into all aspects of life.
Catholicisms culture was to shield it from Judaism, Islam and
Protestantism. The Council of Trent sought to infuence culture,
to contain the unconstrained, and to martial the errant in a mode
familiar to us today by which clarity of message becomes key,
martialling art to tame and recuperate, a sort of ethics of knowledge,
directed when expedient at unlettered people and those who were,
in a range of ways, considered to be inferior, in need of corrective
instruction:
The Decrees of Trent treat art as being in the service of religion and
spirituality, their docile instrument, servile and exterior to the dominant
power of Catholicism. But the Decrees institutionalisation, and their
institutionalised interpretations, imply a performative and interpretative
force, a call to faith, in the sense of architecture that would maintain a
more internal, more complex relation to what is called spirituality, faith,
religion.
22

Architecture and intensifcation
It may be more fruitful to think of architecture as tracing the spiritual,
or that which cannot be contained, of gesturing elsewhere, as allowing
through one space though not in a hermeneutics of depth an
opening to another beyond, hidden, invisible, transcendent. Might
we think of the sacred and architecture as producing each other at
the edge of the same limit? Both architecture and religion not only
institutionalise but shift and transform. Both cannot be except as they
constantly distance themselves from their own boundaries. They are
continuously in the process of becoming and changing, even while
they are institutionalising and establishing.
Ecclesiastical architecture does not only contain worshippers; it is that
place where people become worshippers. It fnds them, refnes them,
defnes them, and limits them. The church gives to worshippers their
21
Our impious and ruthless enemy the
Turk was never at rest. J. Waterworth
(ed. & trans.), Decrees of the Council
of Trent, The Canons and Decrees of
the Sacred and cumenical Council of
Trent (London: Dolman, 1848), p. 2.
22
Ibid., p. 235.
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outlook both on God and on themselves as worshippers of God. Yet
the church is not the place where worshippers feel at home; they are
displaced, in anothers house, in the house of the Other. Ecclesiastical
architecture assumes the task of letting God be present, letting God
be, being Gods house, housing God, domesticating God, bringing God
down to earth.

Architecture inevitably played no small part in the Christian
technology of the believer. We are told the Christian sacralisation of
space is not as old as Christianity itself, that Christianity sacralised
people, not objects.
23
Early Christian apologists strove to distinguish
their Christian God from pagan gods by denying Him a home. While
pagan temples housed their gods, the Christian God was boundless,
uncircumscribed. For St Augustine (Sermon 337) the true dwelling
place of God was in baptised Christians hearts, rather than in their
churches.
24
Yet although the location of a church was not sacred,
the celebration of the Eucharist sacralised the church: Haec est
corpus meum.
25
Like the sacrifce of the Eucharist, the sacrifce of
martyrdom sacralised Christian place, too, as soil stained with the
blood of martyrs and their tombs marked the place for Christians to
worship. Here the idea of the sacred, while appearing to be spatial, is
in fact temporal or atemporal, the sacred as abolition of time. The
Church, by encompassing and enclosing these sites, thereby sought to
enclose both place and time. Together, the Eucharist and martyr saints
formed a specifcally Christian way to sacralise both space and time
through each other.
26
By affrming the cult of saints and of relics, Trent
attempted to sacralise both location as temporal, and the temporal
as location. Architecture was central, not incidental, to this work and
both its measure and its limit.
Therefore, Tridentine architecture, particularly through its emphasis
on sanctity, martyrdom, and relics, was orchestrated by its claims to
temporalise place and to localise time. Such ambition was doomed
to failure, betrayed by the impossibility of closure, because time is
shot through with delay, and place with fssures. Sites could never
be enclosed. The virtus, or good will of the saint was localised
intensifed in both time (feast days) and place (through
relics).
27
Thus a church on a feast day was particularly resonant with
sacredness. The gifts piled high on the tomb of Andrea Avellino in
Naples, for example, always increased in number around the time of
his annual feast.
28
Much was based on an archaeological regression toward a foundation.
Insistence upon the relic as starting-point, or, more precisely, on
martyrdom as place through the relic, is at its most spectacular in the
church of Santa Cecilia in Trastevere, Rome where Stefano Madernos
23
Batrice Caseau, Sacred Landscapes,
in G. W. Bowerstock et al. (eds.),
Interpreting Late Antiquity: Essays
on the Postclassical World (Cambridge
MA: Harvard University Press, 2001),
pp. 40, 42; Robert Markus, How on
Earth Could Places Become Holy?
Origins of the Christian Idea of Holy
Places, Journal of Early Christian
Studies, 2(3) (1994): pp. 257-271.
24
Quincy Howe (ed. & trans.), Saint
Augustine, Bishop of Hippo, Selected
Sermons (London: Gollancz, 1967), p. 132.
25
For a development of this claim, see
Caseau, p. 41. In the Sacrament the
essential body or the bodily fesh of Christ
is eaten. This means that the domains of
faith and sense-perception intersect. In
the real presence spirit and fesh are one.
26
Ibid., p. 42.
27
On relics see especially, E. Bozky
and A. M. Helvtius (eds.), Les
reliques: Objets, cultes, symbols
(Turnhourt: Brepols, 1999).
28
ASN, Corp.relig. sop.S. Paolo
Maggiore 1180, ff.1r-93r.
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famous sculpture, St Cecilia (1600), shows the saint supposedly as
her body was found on its excavation from the catacomb (Fig. 3).
29

The sculpture seeks to combine historical truth, represented by the
archaeological discovery of the saints body, with spiritual truth;
her martyrdom, thereby combining the spiritual origin with the
historical (archaeological) discovery. Or, more accurately, it combines
two different sorts of origins of the contact point between human
and divine: the point where a woman slithers into martyrdom and
sanctity, the end of her life, end of the human being and beginning of
the spiritual being; and the inventio of the saints relics. The sculpture
shows spiritual truth both as confrmed by archaeology (history,
knowledge) and as beyond it. The body bears the wound of martyrdom
(Fig. 4). That wound is turned to the viewer, even as the face is turned
away. That wound, like a mouth replacing the mouth, is an opening to
something, as if to utter something yet being unable to say something;
a mouth of the ineffable, the point of entry to the beyond, that beyond
which now holds the woman, but which is invisible to her whose
head and eyes are turned. The body lies twisted before us, chastely
beautiful, the face swivelled away, the wound marking the turning
point between the body and the head, between the visible and the
ineffable, the unspeakable unseeable of the eyes.
Fig. 3. (Left) Stefano Maderno, St Cecilia (1600), Santa Cecilia in Trastevere, Rome.
Photo: Helen Hills.
Fig. 4. (Right) Detail of the neck wound on Madernos St Cecilia. Photo: Helen Hills.
The basilica of Santa Cecilia where the statue occupies the key
position in front of the main altar, is thereby reinscribed, in relation
to the perpetual start that is the martyrs end, the repetition of the
sacrifce, back to origins, and therefore the end of something old and
the beginning of something new. The wound a gap is where
spirit and matter become one, the start of something new. The gap,
something missing, becomes an opening to something entirely
unknown. The wound that marks the death of the subject marks the
opening to martyrdom, the transformation of body into relic. The
relationship between Self and Other is presented as this gaping slit,
this dumb mouth, a departure from history (continuity, human time).
29
For a reading of this sculpture as a
fulflment of contemporary liturgical
concerns, see T. Kmpf Framing Cecilias
Sacred Body: Paolo Camillo Sfondrato
and the Language of Revelation, The
Sculpture Journal, (6) (2001): 10-20.
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The main altar becomes the point at which historical time (the fnding
of the body) meets spiritual time through the martyred body (the
relic), meeting at that juncture which is severed, at the wound. But it
is something new that is positioned outside of historical time. It is the
end of history and the start of that which is beyond the edge of history.
Here visual analogy represents the embodiment of spiritual faith.
Spirituality is embodied at the point where it is disembodied. This is
what the Tridentine concern with the relic proffered, and which has
been too hurriedly smoothed out by historians into a linear history.
Even as it sought to localise time, Trent described time that was
circular: images of saints admonished the people to revolve in their
minds articles of faith, whilst other images showed miracles to prompt
the imitation of saintly actions in the future.
30
It is perhaps more
useful to think of ecclesiastical architecture less as an enactment of
the Decrees of the Council of Trent, than as their translation. Such
architectural translation is neither an image nor a copy. If there is
a relationship of original to version between the Decrees and the
architecture that followed, it cannot be representative or reproductive;
architecture does not represent or reproduce, nor does it restitute. In
writing about translation, Walter Benjamin uses the image of the core
and the shell, the fruit and its skin, a body and a cloak: the language
of the translation envelops its content like a royal robe with ample
folds. For it signifes a more exalted language than its own and thus
remains unsuited to its content, overpowering and alien.
31
The royal
cloak, foating and swirling about the royal body produces the body
underneath it, makes it royal. Likewise, architecture does not seek
to rehearse the Decrees, to say this or that, or to house this or that
concept, but to exhibit its own possibility, and to do so in a mode that
is both anticipatory and prophetic.
Reform meant desire for another form. The desire for a new place, new
churches, new cloisters, new corridors, new colleges, new seminaries:
not simply new repetitions, but new forms. The re-evaluation of
the visible God, following Protestant denunciation, coincided with
a re-evaluation of the senses, since it was through the senses that
divinity was received.
32
It maybe useful to think of architecture, less
as mimetic representation of spirituality (preconceived) / liturgy,
etc., but as producing zones of intensity, or pure affect, which
can enhance the human power to become. Thus rather than as the
structuring of and container for Trent, its Decrees and Catholic liturgy,
baroque architecture might be thought affectively, as productive and
intensifcational. Rather than think of the Tridentine church as the
container for the well-attended sermon (Wittkowers Ges), thereby
reducing it to a generalisation and (empty) locus for instruction, might
we think of it in terms of affect? For Deleuze speakers are the effects
30
Council of Trent, p. 235.
31
Hannah Arendt, The Task of the
Translator: An Introduction to
the Translation of Baudelaires
Tableaux Parsieins, in Walter
Benjamin, Illuminations: Essays and
Refections, trans. H. Zohn, (New
York: Schocken Books, 1969), p. 75.
32
The Eucharist is not a Platonic
representation (adumbration) of
historical events. Rather, fesh and
spirit, the sensuous and the spiritual,
the literal and the fgurative are actively
involved. It entails a conjunction of
categories, a form of transgression.
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of investments in language. Might we usefully think of worshippers as
the effects of investments in architecture?
Here are two contrasting examples to explore this suggestion. First,
Cosimo Fanzagos doorways in the large cloister of the Certosa di
San Martino, Naples (Fig. 5). About these extraordinary doorways
by Cosimo Fanzago, in his classic Neapolitan Baroque and Rococo
Architecture (1971) Anthony Blunt writes:
Here the forms are more complex. The triangular consoles, which break the
pediments over the doors and support the busts, are squeesed in between
the scrolls, the same arrangement being repeated above the niche, but with
the scrolls inverted. The arches supporting the vault end on consoles which
are linked to the jambs of the door by marble ribbons, from which hang
fowers, leaves, and fruit. Over the door itself the architrave bursts into a
life of its own, projecting upwards a curl of marble and downwards two
scrolls, which [] seem to act as clamps to the top of the door itself. The
whole is so like a grotesque mask volutes for eyes, curl of marble for the
nose, scrolls for lips, cut out lobes for cheeks that the illusion can hardly
have been unintentional.
33
[T]he illusion can hardly have been unintentional. Blunt seems
reluctant to greet the puzzled, puzzling faces that look down on us,
tongues lolling, in spite of the evident strain placed on his attempt to
read them in classical terms of architectural grammar. And indeed,
what are they doing poking out impudently below the busts of saints
above? Those busts (not fnished until the 1640s) which, instead
of sitting in niches above the doorways, burst forward, overfow
them, just as the elements of mouldings and architrave overfow
the boundaries they begin to sketch. Blunt himself ascribes these
strangenesses to Florentine artists, Buontalenti and his school,
brought to Naples by Michelangelo Naccherino, who, by the 1620s
had established a fashion for it in tombs, fountains, and other
decorative features.
34
(Compare Fig. 6.)
Yet something of the provisionality of these sculptural-architectural
forms, seems in danger of being overlooked by this genealogical formal
ancestry. Most striking is the way that these hard forms, fashioned
in marble and stucco, so evidently are shown to seem to be; we are
shown the anthropomorphising of architectural mouldings not their
anthropomorphosis the malleability of form, a fearful slippage of
architecture into body and back again.
The mobility of the face, the eyes, the mouth, the tongue, that they
evoke, also inherently imply a rapid disbandment and dissolution.
It is not just a face that is suggested, but a particularly mobile,
expressive face; not just eyes but rolling eyes; not just a tongue, but
a cheekily licking one (Fig. 7). This is as far from Gombrichs static
duck-rabbit as you can get. This is also what renders them particularly
33
Blunt, Neapolitan Baroque, p. 74.
34
Ibid., p. 74.
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interesting from a Deleuzian perspective. They do not represent a
face, though they may suggest one. The saints busts seem closer to
that mimetic idea of representation though even they, instead of
sitting in niches above the doorways, burst forward, overfow them,
just as the elements of mouldings overfow the boundaries they begin
to sketch, and their fne light smokiness deliberately undercuts any
presupposition that this is a portrait bust, a feshly body.
Fig. 5. (Left) Cosimo Fanzago, doorways in the large cloister of the Certosa di San
Martino, Naples. Photo: Helen Hills.
Fig. 6. (Right) Michelangelo Naccherino, Fontana dellImmacolatella, 1601, Naples,
Photo: Helen Hills.
For Deleuze any actual thing maintains its own virtual power. What
something is, is also its power to become. Art works are singular by
transforming the world through images that are at once actual (being)
and virtual (having the power to become). Art including architecture
has the power to imagine and vary affects that are not already given.
It is the vehicle for producing holiness rather than its expression.
Less important than what architecture is, are the forces or powers of
becoming that it reveals.
Fig. 7. Detail of the face in
Fanzagos doorways in the
large cloister of the Certosa di
San Martino, Naples. Photo:
Helen Hills.
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Thus the setting of the scrolly eyes (architrave becoming face) and the
beniched bust (saint becoming architrave) directly one above the other
begin to make more sense. One is to illuminate and undercut that
which the other is (not). The two becomings interlink and form relays
in a circulation of intensities pushing the deterritorialisation further.
But while such overspilling and destabilising may seem at home on a
fountain, its use in a Carthusian cloister, and particularly at a junction
which supports busts of saints, is striking. The gurgling faces seem
to undercut the seriousness of St Bruno et al.. The participation in
the formation of connections and over-runs is unlimited. This sort
of architecture-sculpture is particularly rhizomic. Rhizomes can
shoot out roots, leaves, and stems from any point. A rhizome has no
beginning: no roots; it has no middle: no trunk; and it has no end:
no leaves. It is always in the middle, in process. It can connect from
any part of itself to a tree, to the ground, to other plants; to itself.
Fanzagos swivelly-eyed face as rhizome.
35
These hump-backed anthropomorpho-architraves, where we seem
leered at, jeered at, and in on the joke, show us, half ludically half-
threateningly, that the middle is by no means an average; on the
contrary, it is where things pick up speed.
36
Deterritorialisation is the
chaos beneath and within territories; it is the lines of fight without
which there would be neither territory nor change in territory. There
is an intensity or enjoyment of movement itself, of openings that
reveal further openings; of faces that appear to peer out of curlicues of
stone and stucco; of crossing space, and burrowing, disappearing, re-
emerging. The sculptured doorways are produced from this movement
(rather than being the supposed end of the movement).
Fig. 8. Naples Duomo, Treasury Chapel of San Gennaro, interior. Photo: Helen Hills.
35
The rhizome is alliance, uniquely alliance.
The tree imposes the verb to be, but the
fabric of the rhizome is the conjunction,
and and and. Deleuze and
Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 25.
36
Deleuze and Guattari, A
Thousand Plateaus, p. 25.
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My second example is the Treasury Chapel of San Gennaro (Saint
Januarius, principal patron saint of Naples) in Naples (Fig. 8). This
Chapel was built in 1608, within Naples Cathedral but fnancially and
administratively independent of it, to fulfl a vow made during the
plague of 1526-27. It remains the most venerated sanctuary in the city,
where the miraculous liquefaction of San Gennaros blood occurs. This
compression chamber boasts not only San Gennaros prodigious relics,
but the fabulously wrought silver reliquaries of all its (competing)
protector saints, martyred in diverse places and times and restituted
through sanctifcation at different times (now present both on Heaven
and earth). It might therefore be thought of as thwarting linear time
and relationships with compressed time and place, with a sort of
instantaneous circularity, with intensive time and place rather than
with extensive time and place.
Fig. 9. (Left) Wall reliquary display in the Chapel of S Francesco de Geronimo in the
Ges Nuovo, Naples. Photo: Helen Hills.
Fig. 10. (Right) Naples, Certosa di San Martino, Treasury Chapel: reliquaries of ebony
and gilt copper by Gennaro Monte (1691), Jusepe de Riberas Piet (1637). Photo: Helen
Hills.
If we compare this reliquary chapel to the Chapel of S Francesco de
Geronimo in the Ges Nuovo, where the bones are aligned beneath
the busts of their saintly owners, like a barracks a visual taxonomy
of sanctity (Fig. 9) or to the reliquaries of ebony and gilt copper
by Gennaro Monte in the Treasury Chapel in the Certosa di San
Martino, Naples (1691) (Fig. 10), where the reliquaries and bones are
arrayed on each side of Riberas beautiful Piet altarpiece (1637), as
if in jewelcases, immobile and fxed, part of a narrative of Christs
martyrdom, then the Treasury Chapel is striking in its treatment of
the saints as living presences, not a peep-show of bones behind glass,
but part of our world, mobile and fuid, animating not just the chapel,
but out into the street during annual processions back to their church
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of provenance. Far from Stefano Madernos St Cecilia (Fig. 3), which
locates history and redemption in martyrdom, the Treasury Chapel
in Naples looks ahead to the future, to redemption through repeated
miracle. Hardly does it pause to consider death or loss, unlike the
other reliquary chapels, here we see no bones.
The silver reliquary busts themselves were modelled on that of San
Gennaro, famously donated to Naples Cathedral by Charles II of Anjou
in 1305 (Fig. 11). In these exported objects, such as Lorenzo Vaccaros
St Mary of Egypt which belonged simultaneously to Neapolitan
convents and churches and to the Treasury Chapel nature, artifce,
and the holy were combined and refracted (Fig. 12). Gilt silver
assumes the place of fesh and skin, resplendent with the bones that it
both conceals and stages. It is anticipation incarnate, the glory of the
saints body transfgured for eternity, reunited with its happy soul, on
earth and in heaven.
Fig. 11. (Left) Reliquary bust of San Gennaro (St Januarius) famously donated to Naples
Cathedral by Charles II of Anjou in 1305. Photo: Helen Hills.
Fig. 12. (Right) Unknown Neapolitan silversmith to design by Lorenzo Vaccaro, St Mary
of Egypt, silver reliquary bust (1699), Treasury Chapel, Naples. Photo: Helen Hills.
In the re-liquefaction of San Gennaros congealed blood, the miracle
is seen, and seen to be seen. The Treasury Chapel is a striking visible
testament to that seeing. Here the miraculous liquefaction of blood
is less transcendental than transformative. Twice or thrice a year,
spurred on by fervent prayer, worshippers became witnesses to his
martyrdom. The severed head and spilled blood, made the miracle
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inside the chapel, and concentrated the saints virtus amongst the
thronged crowds, thus affrming the future.
The chapel did not represent the power of the Deputies or the power
of the saints; it produced a capacity for being affected, a puissance.
It did not contain something pre-existing elsewhere. Its impetus
multiplied Naples patron saints. Under the aegis of the citys Seggi
(Naples aristocratic political and administrative centres) and right
under the nose of the Archbishop, indeed, in the cathedral itself,
the chapel gathered together an army of patron saints, martialling
an unparalleled spiritual force on behalf of the people of Naples,
to protect them from cataclysmic nature; from Vesuvius eruptions
to depredations of the plague.
37
One after another patron saints
were promoted by rival religious orders and institutions. The
convent of Santa Patrizia advanced St Patricia, the Theatines St
Andrea Avellino.
38
They competed over which reliquary bust should
occupy the best places in the chapel, whether a mere blessed could
take precedence over a fully-blown saint, or whether precedence
should depend simply on date of election as patron saint to the city.
Meanwhile the Deputies sought to attract famous painters from
outside Naples to decorate altarpieces and vaults, and the painters
of Naples sought to deter them by threats and violence.
39
The chapel
set new currents seering through Naples already complex devotional
practices and civic politics. And thrice a year the deputies, the
archbishop and viceroy, aristocrats, and people of Naples gathered
to witness the terrible and longed-for liquefaction of the blood of San
Gennaro. The Chapel was not simply the setting for that astonishing
event, nor did the miracle produce it or it the miracle; they mobilised,
intensifed, and circumscribed each other.
The citizens of Naples were brought together, even assumed a shared
identity, through their worship of their protector saints, particularly
San Gennaro. The investment produced the body (not the other way
about). The architecture of the Treasury Chapel was not a vehicle for
messages about sanctity in general or about San Gennaro in particular,
rather it was a creative intensive event that produced its users
(believers). Just as the bones become a relic through the reliquary, the
reliquary chapel here produced San Gennaros spiritual consequence.
Conclusion
I have not intended to produce a critique that claims to be a
methodological examination in order to reject all approaches except
for a single (correct) one. Rather, I hope to have contributed to the
problematisation of our understanding of the relationship between
architecture and holiness, while seeing religious architecture
37
The march of patron saints in Naples is
unparalleled. At the end of the sixteenth
century Naples had seven patrons
including Gennaro. There followed: 1605
Tomas Aquinas; 1625 Andrea Avellino
and Patricia; 1626 Giacomo della Marca
and Francesco di Paola; 1640 St Dominic;
1657 Francis Xavier; 1664 St Teresa of
Avila; 1667 St Philip Neri; 1671 St Gaetano
da Thiene; 1675 Gregory of Armenia
and Nicola di Bari; 1688 St Michael
Archangel; 1689 Chiara of Assisi; 1690
Peter Martyr, Maria Maddelena de Pazzi
and St Blaise; 1691 Francis of Assisi and
Cecilia; 1695 Giovanni da Capestrano
and Anthony Abbot; 1699 S Maria
Egiziaca; 1705 Mary Magdalen; 1711 St
Augustine, 1731 St Irene of Thessalonica.
38
For their rivalries, see Helen Hills,
Nuns and Relics: Spiritual Authority
in post-Tridentine southern Italy,
in C. van Wyhe (ed.), Female
Monasticism in Pre-Industrial Europe
(Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008).
39
On the history of the building and
decoration of the Treasury Chapel, see A.
Bellucci, Memorie storiche ed artistiche
del Tesoro nella cattedrale dal Secolo
XVI al XVIII (Naples: Antonio Iacuelli,
1915); F. Strazzullo, La Cappella di San
Gennaro nel Duomo di Napoli (Naples:
Istituto Grafco Editoriale Italiano, 1994).
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as necessarily a site of contestation including while it was
built throughout the seventeenth century and as an object of
interpretation today; a site whose meaning has not been closed down,
and which is not unifed, in spite of all the efforts, architectural and
scholarly, to close it down and to unify it.
Two precepts, then. First, architecture must be thought of as beyond
any patrons or architects intention (even if that were ascertainable).
40

Second, style or form is not the external or accidental adornment
of a message; it is the creation of affects from which speakers and
messages are discerned. Style is not something that ornaments voice
or content. Voice, meaning, or what a text says is at one with its
style. Likewise, there is no message behind architectural affect and
becoming; any sense of a message or of an underlying meaning is an
effect of its specifc style.
Thus rather than think of the Tridentine church as a mere container
for the well-attended sermon, we might instead, think of it as
producing the crowds it housed so well. We might, for instance, think
of the Treasury Chapel of San Gennaro in terms of its exceptionality,
its intensifcation. We might think of the Chapel as generating
its (increasing number of) protector saints, rather than simply
housing their reliquaries. If we think of architecture, less as mimetic
representation of preconceived spirituality (liturgy, etc.), but as
producing zones of intensity or pure affect, which can enhance the
human power to become, then, rather than as the structuring of and
container for Trent, its Decrees, and Catholic liturgy, architecture
might be thought affectively. Might we think of architecture as
presenting singular affects and percepts, freed from organising and
purposive points-of-view? In and through spiritual intensity, we
apprehend architectures mobilisation. Architectural location, in spite
of Tridentine ambitions and appearances, was never static. Multiple
investments, different speeds and plural determinations, albeit drawn
together at the same location, sabotaged stasis and coherence. It is,
then, architecture itself that is desirable and affective; not a concealed
belief or meaning behind it. Architecture is not the expression of
meaning, but the production of sense, allowing new perceptions, new
worlds.
Architecture makes a promise to spirituality and spirituality to
architecture. Unlike promises we may make to each other, these
promises can never be broken. But they can also never be fulflled.
Southern Baroque architecture seems to participate in a constant
emotional storm in which architecture and ornament are wrested
apart and driven together again, like torn and fapping banners,
emblematic of the tension between immanence and transcendence.
40
Some art historians persist in seeing
the artist as key explanatory to all
works. Interestingly, those who insist on
agency in the artist also tend to treat
context as explanation, and to limit
admissible evidence accordingly.
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Architectural Historys Indeterminacy
Architecture and decoration work together and challenge each other
in the harsh light of their changing resolve. Concertedly architecture
and decoration epitomise a state of emergency in the soul, the rule
of the emotions.
41
This twisting turning architecture is not a polite
representation of an underlying human norm, not an embodiment
of lives, thought, or work or of anything else already existing
elsewhere, but the creation and exploration of new ways of perception,
worshipping, and becoming.
I am pleased to thank the British Academy for a Research Readership
which greatly facilitated the research for and writing of this paper.
My thanks also to Renata Tyszczuk and the anonymous readers at
feld for their comments and suggestions.
41
cf. Walter Benjamin, The Origin of
German Tragic Drama (Ursprung
des deutshen Trauerspiels) trans. J.
Osborne (London: Verso 1985), p. 74.
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The Active Voice of Architecture: An Introduction
to the Idea of Chance
Yeoryia Manolopoulou
In this text I hope to present a preliminary inquiry into the idea of
chance in architecture and to begin a discussion on the theorisation of
chance in the process of design. To a certain extent the institution of
architecture is interested in making predictions this is how chance
enters in the process of design, as a creative play of probabilities.
This play can be impulsive, systematic, active, or a combination of
these a number of examples from the arts give us critical ground
to explore preferred ways of using chance in design. But when
designs are realised as built environments chance takes a forceful
and unpredictable role: it becomes a synthesising function of space,
time, and the on-lookers, constantly inuencing the equilibrium of
forces that constitutes experience. Buildings attempt to frame but
sustain this equilibrium and within it negotiate architectures defence
against the real. This architecture, call it architecture of chance, is
all architecture: it is the architecture of the moment, indeterminate,
vulnerable to accidents, but constructively so; it gains from failures
and imperfections, and accepts chance as an essential element of
existence.
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Unnoticed Beauty
Chance, in the form of coincidence and simultaneity, is inseparable
from our experience of space and time. The activity around the dining
table at a specifc moment, the sound of the passing train, a bright
refection on the window, the sudden opening of the door, the coming
of the evening storm and the rear gardens smell, all these orchestrate
a spatiality that is based more on chance factors and relationships
than on design. It is this modest simplicity of chance, feeting and
hardly noticeable or spoken about, that builds up architectural
experiences magical complexity and everyday beauty. This beauty,
I suggest, is what Andr Breton meant by the marvellous, beautiful
reality made by chance.
The architecture of the moment, its calm or terror, requires subject-
object relationships that architects can infuence to only a limited
degree. While inhabiting an architectural environment, chance and its
greater realm of indeterminacy play crucial roles in infuencing these
relationships and in possibly reshaping the architects initial work.
Chance may mean an event proceeding from an unknown cause and
thus the equivalent of ignorance in which we fnd ourselves in relation
to the true causes of events.
1
But it may also mean the unforeseen
effect of a known cause. Although we go about our everyday lives
and to a certain extent produce space, with a view to fending off
the unknown aspect of existence, we often note a furtive enjoyment
related to the unpredictability of chance. Even modern societies,
which believe in causality and the impossibility to fully predict the
future, secretly enjoy oracles related to chance. Throughout history
many cultures have seen chance as having a sacred and magical power.
Greek mythology, for example, tells us how Tuch, the goddess of
chance, is superior in her say about peoples fates to that of all the
other gods (even Zeus, the leader of the gods). But the civilisation most
exclusively preoccupied with chance as central to the worlds order is
the Chinese. While the West accepts the role of chance primarily in
opposition to causality, chance in China and most of the Far East is
understood as an independent concept deeply embedded in life:
What we call coincidence seems to be the chief concern of this peculiar
[Chinese] mind, and what we worship as causality passes almost unnoticed.
We must admit that there is something to be said for the immense
importance of chance. An incalculable amount of human effort is directed
at restricting the nuisance or danger represented by chance. Theoretical
considerations of cause and effect often look pale and dusty in comparison
to the practical results of chance. The matter of interest seems to be the
confguration formed by chance events in the moment of observation.
While the Western mind carefully sifts, weighs, selects, classifes, isolates,
the Chinese picture of the moment encompasses everything down to the
minutest nonsensical detail, because all of the ingredients make up the
observed moment.
2
1
David Hume quoted in Harriett
Ann Watts, Chance: A Perspective
on Dada (Ann Arbor: UMI
Research Press, 1980), p. 155.
2
Carl Gustav Jung in Richard Wilhelm
and Cary F. Baynes, The I Ching
or Book of Changes (New Jersey:
Bollingen Foundation & Princeton
University Press, 1977), pp. xxiixxiii.
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The Chinese picture of the moment is a chance image. It encompasses
all minuscule impressions of reality simultaneously present.
3
It
anticipates the possible and appreciates chance as a mediator for
beauty and change.
Habit and Accident
For Marcel Duchamp the possible is an infra-thin: a passage between
two states, a paper-thin separation between two very similar
conditions that happens in the interval of a second. He writes:
The possible / is an infra-thin
The possible implying / the becoming the passage from / one to the other
takes / place / in the infra thin. / allegory on forgetting
Sameness / similarity / In time the same object is not the / same after a 1
second interval
The warmth of a seat (which has just / been left) is infra-thin
Subway gates The people / who go through at the very moment /
infra-thin
4
The infra-thin is an ethereal quality that characterises the thinnest
possible slice of space reaching sameness and the shortest
possible duration in time reaching synchronicity. It exists between
visibility and invisibility and emerges in tiny details that quickly
escape our attention.
According to Henri Bergson we, involved in many similar daily
actions, become conscious automata and respond to our environment
with refex acts. This kind of perception depends on memory,
resemblance and familiarity. It is not conscious or specifcally
motivated; it is just automatic. We go down a staircase without
thinking and guided by habit, for instance, because we have memories
of doing this many times before. But habit protects us from the
plethora of information that surrounds us and the confusing and
indeterminable changes of our environment by making us inattentive.
5

Through protecting ourselves in this way, we are menaced by a sense
of repetition and boredom. An accident can then act as an antidote to
this vicious circle to disrupt our routines with novelty.
The human ability to design and produce ideas within different
registers of thought is evidence of the operations of the infra-thin.
However, the spatial register of the passing of the infra-thin cannot be
easily grasped. Chance can rupture its passing to reveal a possibility
3
For Jung the interdependence of events
and observers is based on an a priori
principle he calls synchronicity: the
occurrence of meaningful coincidences
in space and time, which he regards as an
acausal connecting principle. He writes:
it seems [...] necessary to introduce,
alongside space, time and causality, a
category which not only enables us to
understand synchronistic phenomena as
a special class of natural events, but also
takes the contingent partly as a universal
factor existing from all eternity, and partly
as the sum of countless individual acts
of creation occurring in time. See Jung,
Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting
Principle (London: Ark, 1991), p. 143.
4
Marcel Duchamp, Notes (Paris: Centre
National dArt et de Culture Georges
Pompidou, 1980), unpaginated.
5
For, to regain control of ourselves
in the midst of the moving bodies,
the circulation of their contours, the
jumble of knots, the paths, the falls, the
whirlpools, the confusion of velocities,
we must have resource to our grand
capacity of forgetting. Paul Valry
quoted in Jonathan Crary, Suspensions
of Perception: Attention, Spectacle,
and Modern Culture (Cambridge: MIT
Press, 1999) p. 299. See also Henri
Bergson, Matter and Memory (1896)
(New York: Zone Books, 1988).
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for change. This is why it is important to architecture, as it is to any
creative process.
Design In and As Play
Nearly all our ordinary actions require an understanding of chance,
the notion of probability and the ability to automatically estimate
the likelihood of expected events. We know, for instance, there is a
better chance to see a leaf falling if we stare at a tree for hours rather
than for a second. But is such a strong and frequent intuition based
on a gradual understanding of probability, acquired empirically, or
is the concept of chance inborn? Jean Piaget and Brbel Inhelder
investigated whether the intuition of chance is as fundamental as,
say, that of whole numbers. Through a number of experiments with
chance (meaning here the interaction of independent causal series),
they demonstrated that young children have no concept of chance.
6

This is because they have neither a concept of law nor a concept of
design as an ordered operation. Design and chance are fundamentally
interdependent ideas, which start emerging and evolving in ones
consciousness after the age of seven.
7
The two ideas when woven
together in play are especially attractive for adults. Neither intuition
nor conscious logic can affect the result of the cast of a die but, though
aware of this, we are often tempted to guess the result and bet on it.
This pleasure perhaps refects a desire to overthrow our gradually
acquired logic and attachment to causality, at least temporarily, and
return to that nave age of ignorance when we understood neither
design nor chance. This principle of pleasure in coupling design and
chance is necessary in all creativity.
Duchamp, who was deeply interested in the interaction of skill and
chance, makes the following remarks about the pleasure of playing
chess:
The aesthetic pattern that develops on the chessboard seemingly has no
visual aesthetic value and is similar to a sheet of music, which can be played
over and over. Beauty in chess is much closer to the beauty of poetry;
the chess pieces are the alphabet that shape the thoughts; and although
these thoughts form a visual pattern on the chessboard, they express
beauty in the abstract, like a poem. I really believe that every chess player
experiences a mixture of two aesthetic pleasures; frst the abstract image,
which is closely related to the poetic idea in writing, and then the sensual
pleasure involved in the ideographic representation of that image on the
chessboards. Based on my own close contact with artists and chess players,
I have come to the personal conclusion that although not all artists are
chess players, all chess players are indeed artists.
8
Playing chess means formulating a strategy, a number of moves,
which although dependent upon the rules of the game and the
6
The defnition of chance as the interaction
of independent causal series is given
by the mathematician and economist
Antoine-Augustin Cournot (180177).
7
Piaget and Inhelder explain that four-
to-seven year olds make decisions about
future occurrences in an emotional
manner not based on probabilistic
considerations and fail to differentiate
between the possible and the necessary.
Seven-to-eleven year olds discover the
existence of chance but only through
its antithesis to tangible operations of
organisation and order they can now
perform. They also understand the
irreversibility of chance confgurations.
Finally, at eleven or twelve years
children can deal both with tangible and
imagined operations. In this way they
can construct a synthesis between the
mechanisms of chance and of operations,
and gradually organise better their
judgement of probability. See Jean Piaget
and Brbel Inhelder, The Origin of the
Idea of Chance in Children (London:
Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1975).
8
Duchamp quoted in Kornelia
von Berswordt-Wallrabe (ed.),
Marcel Duchamp Respirateur
(Schwerin: Staatliches Museum
Schwerin, 1999), p. 22.
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opponents performance are also independent actions with particular
objectives. While the game unfolds as a complex feld of relationships
and movements, numerous possible patterns are shaped mentally
and abstractly projected onto the chessboard. The sophisticated
alphabet of chess provokes inspiration but always within a framework
of causality in which the game unravels. Naturally, each game is
unique. The process can be paralleled with the creative freedoms and
limitations involved in the course of architectural design. The aesthetic
pleasure of coupling chance and skill in play can be similar to the
aesthetic pleasure involved in architectural drawing and making, at
least when the design process is both imaginative and refective.
Impulsive Chance
The interplay of necessity and chance has been a principal concern
in the creative consciousness of the world throughout history. But,
contrary to philosophy, science, and the arts, architecture has not
suffciently interrogated the idea of chance in its own production.
Architectures dominant theories and practices have hardly pursued,
at least not openly, the thought that chance may be a positive agent
in the different stages of architecture, from design conception to
construction and use. Is this partly because the actions of chance
question the architects authorial control? Is it also because they
challenge one of architectures elementary purposes to defend itself
against the contingencies of physical reality? After all most buildings
try to offer protection against the environment and construct an order
within its chaotic and unpredictable facets. Architectures resistance
to chance is however contested by a number of radical approaches
in the arts. The pressures on architects are different from those on
artists but it is worth examining how others have engaged with chance
and what they can possibly offer to architects and vice versa. As I will
show it is also important to realise that although artists, more often
than architects, have been consciously drawn to chance, architectures
troubled relationship with chance is not unknown in the arts.
Dadas employment of chance, for example, was linked to an intense
opposition to art as a practice based on formal and rational values.
Its reliance on chance was part of a greater anti-artistic perspective,
a general attack on rationality, which frequently became an
overpowering concern. Gradually chance-related operations became
prescribed and unsatisfactory to many Dada artists. Richter notes:
We were all fated to live with the paradoxical necessity of entrusting
ourselves to chance while at the same time remembering that we were
conscious beings working towards conscious goals. This contradiction
between rational and irrational opened a bottomless pit over which we had
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to walk. There was no turning back; gradually this became clear to each of
us in his own secret way.
9

Finally, Dada realised the relationship between design and chance
was more complex: the realisation that reason and anti-reason,
sense and nonsense, design and chance, consciousness and
unconsciousness, belong together as necessary parts of a whole this
was the central message of Dada.
10
The surrealists cultivated the use of chance differently from Dada.
They saw the outcome of their well-celebrated automatism as a point
of departure for further elaboration, something that subsequently
required skilful work. Joan Mir, for instance, would be stimulated
to paint through a mistake or an accidental, which for others was an
insignifcant detail. He called this a shock: I begin my pictures under
the effect of a shock I feel that makes me escape reality. The cause
of this shock can be a little thread out of the canvas, a drop of water
falling, that fngerprint Ive left on the brilliant surface of the table.
11

It is clear that Freuds investigations of the unconscious workings
of the mind and the meanings he assigned to symptoms and such
everyday phenomena as mistakes, jokes, dreams or slips of the tongue,
greatly infuenced the artistic modes of the frst part of the twentieth
century. Freuds thought encouraged chance to be seen as impulsive:
an intuitive mechanism of creativity that could unlock unconscious
desire to escape the Cartesian thought. This kind of impulsive chance,
artists thought, could assist plunges into indeterminacy, offering
momentary glimpses of an a-causal world that transcends existing
knowledge. On the other hand scientifc theories of the period
related to new conceptions of time, probability, and the principle of
uncertainty pointed to systematic notions of chance.
Active Chance
A fascinating range of theories and practices of chance can be traced
in the humanities as well as the social and natural sciences of the
twentieth century, from literature and music to economics and
biology. The history of this development and its full implication in
our area under discussion is too big to review within the limits of
this paper. But it is useful to isolate another example: the contrasting
position to Surrealism and Dada as expressed by the Situationist
International.
The Situationist International were suspicious of the unconscious as
a creative source and disputed the surrealists absolute fdelity to it.
We know that the unconscious imagination is poor, that automatic
9
Hans Richter, DADA: Art and
Anti-Art (London: Thames
and Hudson, 1965), p. 61.
10
Ibid., p. 64.
11
Joan Mir quoted in J. H. Matthews,
The Imagery of Surrealism (New York:
Syracuse University Press, 1977), p. 146.
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writing is monotonous, and that the whole genre of ostentatious
surrealist weirdness has ceased to be very surprising, Guy Debord
writes.
12
By distrusting the surrealists search for the unconscious,
the Situationist International also distrusted the spontaneous use of
chance.
13
However, chance was a signifcant factor in their practice
of drive. The constantly changing psychogeographical relief of the
city and its diverse microclimates and centres of attraction made the
drive a practice of unpredictable wandering. But Debord hurries to
indicate a danger:
[] the action of chance is naturally conservative and in a new setting
tends to reduce everything to an alternation between a limited number of
variants, and to habit. Progress is nothing other than breaking through a
feld where chance holds sway by creating new conditions more favourable
to our purposes [] The frst psychogeographical attractions discovered run
the risk of fxating the driving individual or group around new habitual
axes, to which they will constantly be drawn back.
14
Hermetic processes which become strictly methodical are likely to
exclude pure chance. Pure chance has to embrace indeterminacy and
the possibility of change. It has to be active, in other words to operate
dynamically in time.
Through the experience of the drive the Situationist International
aimed to arrive at objective and determinate conclusions about
the city that could be utilised to inspire a new consciousness about
urbanism and about architecture. Yet the drive was not a determinate
act in itself and did not exclude chance. Accidental rendezvous and
conversations with unknown passers-by, weather contingencies,
vague terrains of leftover spaces, hidden back streets layered
overtime, and emotional disorientings, all led to discoveries of
unforeseen unities of ambiance. These discoveries were achieved by
enabling two types of chance: the impulsive chance of the group or
individual (based on hidden unconscious forces) and a kind of active
chance operating through time within the complex forces of the city.
Whether or not the Situationist International admitted it, the drive
was a positive practice of employing chance, arising collectively and in
time as an expansive indeterminate drawing of action on the surface of
the city.
If chance is always present in our experience of the city and of
architectural artefacts, it then comes as a surprise that architects
have not suffciently considered it during the design process. The
above examples are only a selection from the many artistic, political
and scientifc movements of the twentieth century that engaged
with chance.
15
The diversity of the approaches and, at times, their
contradictory philosophical positions can offer architects valuable
ground for critical refection.
12
Guy Debord in his Report on the
Construction of Situations, in Ken
Knabb (ed.), Situationist International
Anthology (Berkeley: Bureau of
Public Secrets, 1995), p. 19.
13
Debord insists: the discovery of
the unconscious was a surprise, an
innovation, not a law of future surprises
and innovations. Freud had also ended
up discovering this when he wrote,
Everything conscious wears out. What
is unconscious remains unaltered.
But once it is set loose, does it fall
into ruins in its turn? Ibid., p. 19.
14
Debord, Theory of the Drive,
Situationist International
Anthology , p. 51.
15
For a related discussion directly
linked with the process of design see
Yeoryia Manolopoulou, Drawing on
Chance: Drafting Pier 40, Journal of
Architecture, 11(3) (2006): 303314.
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Pseudo-indeterminacy
Bernard Tschumi has based many of his ideas in cinematic montage
and has defned architecture as making room for the event. His
proposals are relevant to our discussion of chance and indeterminacy
as he argues for an architecture of event and an architecture of
disjunction where space, movement, action and event can permeate
each other. However, in his Manhattan Transcripts (1981) the trio of
movement, action and event is manifested as a translation of bodily
movement into fxed curved walls and corridors. When fuid action is
translated to solidifed concrete form, Tschumi achieves not an open
space, an architecture of event and action, but a restricted space, an
architecture of control.
In his built project of Le Fresnoy, the National Studio for
Contemporary Arts in Tourcoing (1997), Tschumi attempts to offer an
ambiguous space between the new large roof and the lower building
it shadows. The large roof acts as a hangar offering a void between
itself and the rest of the building, which is left undetermined and in
a sense useless. Tschumi explains: what interested us most was the
space generated between the logic of the new roof (which made it all
possible) and the logic of what was underneath: an in-between, a place
of the unexpected where unprogrammed events might occur, events
that are not part of the curriculum.
16
In Le Fresnoy the signifcance,
according to Tschumi, lies in the in-between, the unexpected. But
Tschumis emphasis on the indeterminate possibilities of Le Fresnoy
is false. The project is characterised by pseudo-indeterminacy: it
leaves some space for unprogrammed events but, I would argue, not
necessarily more than other buildings.
In modernist architectural discourse indeterminacy in buildings
is usually discussed in terms of fexibility, a term associated with
function and effciency. A fexible building should allow change. This
may be done by redundancy, the absence of determined content or
use. But useless and empty spaces are no more vulnerable to chance
than ones with a predetermined use. A building may also provide
fexibility by technical means, a system for rearranging components,
say.
17
But by designing a building as fexible in mechanical terms, the
architect defnes how the building can change, trying rather to control
its appearance and use.
Indeterminacy in architecture does not just mean fexibility. Flexible
and infexible buildings can equally, although differently, provoke
doubt and possibilities for the unexpected. Unpredictable chance can
affect all types of building, whether fexible or not, functional or not.
16
Bernard Tschumi, Event-Cities (Praxis)
(Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1994), p. 399.
17
See, for example, Cedric Prices idea of
free space. For his Generator project
Price writes: a menu of items caters
for individual and group demands
for space, control, containment and
delight. Quoted in Stanley Mathews,
From Agit-Prop to Free Space: The
Architecture of Cedric Price (London:
Black Dog Publishing, 2007), p. 245.
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There is no defnite boundary where design ends and chance takes
over.
Interrogating the Real
Our perceptual experience cannot claim objectivity and certainty;
it involves instead a great range of indeterminacy. Jacques Lacans
dialectic of the eye and gaze shows that psychologically subject
and object are not absolutely distinct. A sense of contact between
subject and object on the screen of representations affects perceptual
experience in ways that cannot be determined.
18
Whether the
unconscious is seen as a subjective mechanism in Lacans terms or
a collective one in C.G. Jungs terms, a mistake, dream or accident,
ruptures ones habits; it causes disturbance, a noise in the feld of
experience. Simultaneously, it brings into light a glimpse of something
initially invisible.
Accidents operate beyond the realm of representations: they cannot
be forecasted or drawn. Their presence in the architectural process
should be particularly welcomed because it brings to the front an
element of the real. In his book on photography, Camera Lucida,
Roland Barthes defnes a relevant term, the punctum. Closer than
the Lacanian gaze to the accident, it is this element which rises
from the scene, shoots out of it like an arrow, and pierces me.
19
The
punctum is a sting, speck, cut, little hole and also a cast of the
dice. A photographs punctum is that accident which pricks me (but
also bruises me, is poignant to me).
20
The punctum is the effect of
what the Greeks call tuch, which Lacan translates as the encounter
with the real.
21
Tuch is an aspect of reality that the spectators are not
aware of until they encounter a rupture in their representational feld.
The rupture comes unexpectedly and interrupts the norm of ones
perception. Its location is confusing but it has the potential to expand
and affect the meaning of the whole. Although causality can explain its
presence, from the spectators viewpoint the punctum is an addition
to the picture that is offered as if by chance. As a result of chance, not
design, the punctum is not determined by morality or aesthetics.
Architecture is being shaped by planned and unplanned actions, logic
and chance. But what kind of architectural ideas does the acceptance
of chance untangle? What kind of practices does it invite? The design
tools we choose are not innocent as they imply different kinds and
degrees of control. Which working tactics can help us achieve a
positive distance from the expected for revelation to emerge? An
engagement with chance in the design process might mean the use of
impulsive or systematic processes, which remind us of experimental
18
At a sub-atomic level, events are
impossible to determine except on a
statistical basis. Werner Heisenbergs
principle of indeterminacy, the
uncertainty principle, shows that the
act of observing a physical process
modifes the outcome of the event, so
that prediction is rendered impossible by
the observers unavoidable intervention.
Quoted in Watts, Chance: A Perspective
on Dada, p. 155. By analogy, we can
hypothesise that any act of observing
can infuence the observation whatever
the scale of the event. The process of
perceiving a building can affect the
mental image and meaning of the building
and, thus, the way in which it lives.
19
Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida:
Refections on Photography
(London: Vintage, 2000), p. 26.
20
Barthes, Camera Lucida, p. 27.
21
Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental
Concepts of Psycho-Analysis (London:
Vintage, 1998) p. 53. Lacan bases his
seminar Tuch and Automaton on
Aristotle who links the function of
the cause with the notions of tuch
and automaton. See Lacan, Four
Fundamental Concepts, pp. 5364.
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techniques used by avant-garde writers or musicians such as Stphan
Mallarm, Iannis Xenakis or John Cage.
22
But an engagement with
chance might also mean the opposite: acknowledging the role of
chance in the experience of the users of architecture but rejecting its
function as a design tool. In the second case the design process would
aim to generate a simple architectural framework where chance can
be lived, felt and celebrated. In any event a truly creative engagement
with chance would be able to challenge deterministic approaches to
design, functionalism, taste and authorship.
The history of architectural design is dependent on the parallel
history and evolution of our attitude to indeterminacy and chance. It
is time to write an account of the evolution of the idea of chance from
the early avant-garde scenes of fne art, design, and performance of
the twentieth century, to the current condition of virtual and mixed
realities.
23
Such an account would be fascinating for architecture,
design culture, and the broader histories and theories of creativity. It
would highlight how architecture has ignored chance or has engaged
with it in hesitant and unspoken manners, sometimes even with guilt.
We can uncover different conceptions of chance in the work of Cedric
Price, Bernard Tschumi, Rem Koolhaas, and Coop Himmelblau, and
less successfully in the work of Peter Eisenman, Daniel Libeskind and
Frank Gehry, for example. These works offer a limited and not always
a positive account on the subject, yet a good foundation.
There is almost no published literature on the subject of chance in
architecture. This is why I have deliberately given many heterogeneous
references, mainly outside architecture. I consider them crucial if
we are to take a holistic approach to the subject. These sources of
course require further analysis and interpretation. So the purpose
of this paper is foundational: to begin a conversation about the
principles, operations and formations of chance and ask if and how
architectural practice might theorise chance. Beauty, play, impulse,
and the encounter with the real are key issues I have pointed to. But,
if this introduction aims at something, it is a defnition of architecture
as an embracing agent of the indeterminate. To a certain extent the
institution of architecture is interested in making predictions this
is how chance enters in the process of architectural design, as a play
of probabilities. But when designs are realised as built environments
chance takes an even stronger role: it becomes a synthesising function
of space, time, and the on-looker, constantly infuencing the complex
equilibrium of forces that constitute experience. Architecture is the
practice of sustaining this equilibrium: confronting indeterminacy,
appreciating and at times purposefully enabling the performance
of chance rather than trying to rule it out. This architecture, call it
architecture of chance, is all architecture: it is the architecture of the
22
Contemporary aleatory practices in
the performing arts can perhaps give
further inspiration as they suggest time-
based and interactive operations.
23
Signifcant research on the area under
discussion can be found in my doctoral
thesis Yeoryia Manolopoulou, Drawing
on Chance: Perception, Design, and
Indeterminacy (PhD thesis, UCL, 2003).
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The Active Voice of Architecture
moment, vulnerable, but constructively so, to accidents; it gains from
failures and imperfections, and accepts chance as an essential part of
existence. Chance is the only real and radical voice architecture has.
We should nurture it.
My warmest thanks to Dr Victoria Watson who made critical
suggestions during the writing of this piece.
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Trading Indeterminacy Informal Markets in Europe
Trading Indeterminacy Informal Markets in
Europe
Peter Mrtenbck & Helge Mooshammer
Informal markets generate sites of counter-globalisation based on
a deterritorialisation of cultures. Many of these markets are hubs of
migratory routes whose idiosyncratic complexity reects the tension
between traditional economies, black markets and the new conditions
of deregulated and liberalised capital markets. The dynamics of
these sites highlight the network character of the radicalised and
deregulated ows of people, capital and goods worldwide. One
of the effects this network phenomenon creates is an increased
transnationalisation and hybridisation of cultural claims and
expressions. In view of growing cultural homogenisation, this brings
to the fore one of the most potent traits of informal markets: the
sprawl of a myriad of indeterminate parallel worlds existing next to
each other or literally within the same place. Along a set of case studies
carried out by the EU funded research project, Networked Cultures
(www.networkedcultures.org), this text looks at three different
informal markets as micro-sites of paradoxical and indeterminate
cultural production: Izmailovo Market Moscow, Istanbul Topkapi and
Arizona Market Brko (BaH).
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A striking facet of the many contradictions produced by the global
economic system is the resurgence of markets as prime sites of
struggle relating to questions of governance and self-governance.
Markets have turned into a stage upon which battles over existing
societal order and alternative forms of organisation are smouldering.
The notion informal market is commonly used as an umbrella term
to describe scattered phenomena of trade whose origins and spatial
materialisations are of varied character, while having more or less
the same political and historical context. Most often these globally
distributed nodes of the informal economy are an effect of political
upheaval, global economic deregulation, migratory movements and
new labour situations. These days they emerge in periods of transition,
between omnipotent government control and globally oriented
neoliberal societies, in which the states role is confned to optimising
informal arrangements. Hand in hand with the dissolution of the
Soviet Union in the early 1990s, new nodes of exchange have sprung
up in previously peripheral regions of Europe. These spots have
turned into transient agglomerations of thriving informal trade,
bringing different cultures together along the new axes of commercial
gravitation. This development accounts for an abundance of
uncontrolled interactions, indeterminate spaces and eclectic imageries
in different pockets of Europe. From the improvised shanties of post-
war economies, such as street traders and kiosks, which provide basic
supply in derelict urban areas, to the widely ramifed infrastructures of
Eastern Europes shuttle trade, informal markets have become prime
sites for economies of survival to impinge upon contemporary forms
of spatial organisation. Driven by the new imperative of social mobility
and the undertow of expanding transnational spaces, these sites have
evolved into novel and extreme material confgurations. Among the
best known European markets of this kind are Arizona Market in
the Northeast of Bosnia-Herzegovina, Izmailovo Market in Moscow,
Jarmark Europa in Warsaws Dziesieiolecie stadium and the so called
suitcase trade between the Balkans and the Caucasus with its Istanbul
base Laleli. They contribute to a proliferation of transitory spaces in
which different cultures engage in a variety of shadow plays alongside
the homogenising forces of globalisation, and in doing so, have
become a vital source for architects, artists and theorists to study the
potential of accelerated spatial appropriation and self-organisation.
Many examples could be given. There is the work of the longstanding
Lagos project by Rem Koolhaas and its intimate engagement with
the citys informal economies.
1
This project probes the effects of
growth in the self-regulating organism of Lagos Alaba Market, in
the spontaneously emerging links between transport and informal
trade, and in the many ingenious inventions which help organise
1
Rem Koolhaas, Lagos Wide & Close:
An Interactive Journey into an
Exploding City, DVD and booklet
(Amsterdam: Submarine, 2005).
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Trading Indeterminacy Informal Markets in Europe
everyday life in a seemingly dysfunctional mega city.
2
Another case
would be Ursula Biemanns video geographies: works that bare
highly complex topological relations by portraying the tactics and
disguises of smugglers in the Spanish-Moroccan border region, or by
documenting the geo-strategic rivalries and representational politics
around the trans-Caucasian oil pipelines and through investigating the
economy of Mediterranean migration. What emerges through these
works are relations which complicate the clear distinction between
formality and informality, between inside and outside in dealing
with material and symbolic goods.
3
Using maps and diagrams of the
trajectories which link global sex work, informal economies, self-
organisation and migration, these relations are further explored in
Tadej Pogaars project CODE:RED. Its support in the formation of
communication networks for informal economic actors, instigates an
uncontrollable space of dialogue whose geometry is both mobile and
affected by the encounters between its users. This is also true of the
street kitchens of Atelier dArchitecture Autogre or Osservatorio
Nomade which engaged a plethora of people in an unregulated
space of communication and collaboration. The formation of open
communications and infrastructures also plays an important role
in Azra Akamijas proposals to make Arizona Market, in the south-
east European Brko District, sustainable by means of what she calls
Provocateur Poles: poles furnished with complex ICT infrastructure,
which would be available to all market users free of charge. Or, the
9
th
Baltic Triennial Black Market Worlds (2005), which scoured the
potentials of grey economies stretching between Vilnius and London:
an exhibition that considered black markets less as its subject than as
an organising principle for practices and systems, in which moments
of social exchange are brought into being through opaque operations.
4
This list of experimental explorations of informal economies could
be extended with many more examples. Each of these projects
engages singular transgressions and violations against existing
spatial arrangements, and produces a set of openings in the matrix
of economic inclusions and exclusions, hubs and peripheries. What
is common to all these endeavours is the question of how to organise
a space, which has neither centre nor specifc end; a space that is
neither characterised in relation to a central authority nor through
programmed identities and strict objectives. What is at stake here is
a complex and transient spatiality, which resists the usual analytical
tools suitable for static associations and formalised institutions.
A possible way of incorporating this challenge into our research
strategies is to look at the dynamics emerging from the contact
of formal and informal urban structures; to look at the impure,
contaminated and situated networks effected by the coming together
of formal and informal urban forces. How do the formal and the
2
Rem Koolhaas and Edgar Cleijne,
Lagos: How It Works (Baden:
Lars Mller Publishers, 2007).
3
Ursula Biemann and Brian Holmes
(eds.), The Mahgreb Connection:
Movements of Life Across North
Africa (Barcelona: Actar, 2007).
4
Sofa Hernndez et al. (eds.), The Black
Box: BMW (Black Market Worlds),
9th Baltic Triennial Vilnius/London
(Frankfurt am Main: Revolver, 2005).
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informal engage with one another? What kind of cultural encounters
does this constellation provoke? What leads us to believe that these
encounters produce innovative spatial effects that reach beyond the
immediate situation? And how can we negotiate these glimmers of
hope with the more unfortunate aspects of the realities of informal
markets?
Relational Spaces
Informal markets are spaces of transition in one way or another. For
one thing they act as places of transient inhabitation, for another, they
are themselves seen as mere boundary effects; as adaptors between
deregulated conditions and controlled order. The shortcoming of
such thinking is that it presents transition as a linear process whose
endpoint is a foregone conclusion. It also presupposes the existence
of a central plan governing the slightest manipulation, as well as
the presence of a regulatory scheme that has the power to cover the
totality of progress. The notion of transition that we prefer in our
own deliberations, is more connected to a slide into a condition as
yet unknown, whose particular spatial character reveals itself slowly.
5

This transition is a-physical in the frst instance, but generates an
accelerated space saturated with an abundance of conficting signs
and practices of signifcation. In this sense, transition characterises
indeterminate sites prone to a constant reshuffing and reinvention
of subjectivities, and informal markets become unsurfaced places,
hidden in the matrix of territorial and ideological belongings of
individuals and cultures. They form trajectories in which cultures
begin to interact with the forces of globalisation beyond the assigned
sites of encounter. The underbelly of the liberalised capital market
performs a shadow play, whose relation to the homogenising force of
globalisation, is most of all characterised by a paradoxical production
of micro sites of cultural heterogeneity. Here, the cultural paradoxes
of globalisation make themselves manifest conspicuously; the
traditions of spatial appropriation and self-organisation of markets are
intimately tangled up with the dynamics of neoliberal globalisation,
in the shape of accelerated network formation, movements of capital,
people and goods, transterritorial spatial production and cross-
cultural experience.
Looking at these sites, we cannot condone the convenient co-optation
of survival strategies of the global South by neoliberal myths that
equate informality with an nebulous expression of free individuality.
Mobile and transient accumulation seem to be as much a constituent
mechanism of black market worlds as of effcient capital markets.
Elmar Altvater and Brigitte Mahnkopf have argued a certain structural
5
S. Boeri, Eclectic Atlases, in Multiplicity
(ed.), USE: Uncertain States of Europe
(Milan: Skira, 2003), p. 434.
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alliance behind this kind of ephemeral accumulation, describing
informality as a shock absorber of globalisation beyond the means of
the welfare state. It ought to be located through structural changes in
the interaction between global, national and local economy following
the requirements of global competition.
6
Indeed, this complex
entanglement of neoliberal technologies of government and forms of
self-organisation, alongside the incorporation of a market mentality
into the organisation of creative processes and critical practices,
7
has
led to an unfortunate point of departure in approaching the question
of how we can organise cultural experience that creates a space for
expressions whose form is yet to come.
In Saskia Sassens sceptical view, informal markets are the low-cost
equivalent of global deregulation, which act frst and foremost as
modes of incorporation into the advanced urban economies. The only
difference they make, is that at the bottom of the system all risks and
costs are to be taken over by the actors themselves. Her main concern
is that the growing inequalities in earnings and in the proft-making
capabilities of different sectors in the urban economy [] are integral
conditions in the current phase of advanced capitalism (and not)
conditions imported from less-developed countries via migration.
8

In dismissing postmodern myths of informality, Sassen strikes the
same chord as Mike Davis in his refections on the informal sector
in Planet of Slums (2006): From hidden forms of exploitation and
fanatic obsessions with quasi-magical forms of wealth appropriation
(gambling, pyramid schemes, etc.) right through to the decrease of
social capital effected by growing competition within the informal
sector, Davis instances all the epistemological fallacies of those who
follow Hernando de Sotos popular economic model of an invisible
revolution of informal capital.
9
Instead of delivering on the promised
upward mobility in the unprotected informal sector, through means
such as micro credits for micro-entrepreneurs and land titling for
urban squatters, the booming informal sector has been paralleled by
increased ethno-religious separation, exploitation of the poor and
sectarian violence in the 1980s. Davis idea of a counteroffensive
against neoliberal informality consists in strengthening union
structures and radical political parties as well as in renewing bonds
of worldwide solidarity to refuse Informal survivalism as the new
primary mode of livelihood.
10
This wealth of arguments and all its supporting statistics, maps and
diagrams seem to suggest a condemnation of informality, a rejection
which rests upon well documented dynamics of poverty, exploitation
and oppression. The role played by global power has been clearly
positioned and seems to be far too immovable to consider the
emergence of unforeseen alternative social formations. But what if we,
6
E. Altvater and B. Mahnkopf, Die
Informalisierung des urbanen Raums,
in J. Becker et al. (eds.), Learning from*
- Stdte von Welt, Phantasmen der
Zivilgesellschaft, informelle Organisation
(Berlin: NGBK, 2003), pp. 24-25.
7
Karl Polanyi, Our Obsolete Market
Mentality: Civilization must fnd a New
Thought Pattern, Commentary (3)
(1947): 109-117, reprinted in G. Dalton
(ed.), Primitive, Archaic and Modern
Economies: Essays of Karl Polanyi
(New York: Doubleday Anchor, 1968).
8
S. Sassen, Why Cities Matter, in
La Biennale di Venezia (eds.) Cities,
Architecture and Society I (Venice:
Marsilio Editori, 2006), pp. 47-48.
9
Mike Davis, Planet of Slums (London:
Verso, 2006), pp. 178-185.
10
Ibid., p. 178.
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for a moment, tried to suspend the monolithic gravity of these logics.
Wouldnt we notice a whole array of shortcomings in the apparatus
of global economic control, shortcomings that offer a space for social
experience outside the boundaries of its exercise of power? What if
beyond the boundaries begotten by the economic system we became
aware of a political space of boundaries that is not fully governed
by economic agency and thus offers a possibility to break up the
dominance of calculative norms. An arena for all sorts of social and
cultural encounters would emerge. Oblivious to what ought to be done
under the rule of the capitalist economy, there are minor changes
occurring locally through unexpected constellations of actors and
spontaneously co-ordinated conduct. These changes may infict a set
of irregularities and interruptions both on determinate movements
in space and movements of the mind. Looking away from the clichd
notions of slum culture and economic chaos, social mobility and
transitional society, we hope to stir up other notions, expressions,
images and experiences, which throw some light upon how local co-
ordination takes place in sites of informally organised trade, and how
the virtue of transformation cannot be appropriated and circulated as
an analogy of belongings and goods.
In his lectures at the Collge de France (1975-76) Foucault has
pointed at the circulation of power, arguing that people are never the
inert target of power. While power is exercised through networks,
individuals are always its relays. Power passes through individuals and
can thus be seized and defected.
11
These are the terms that we would
borrow to abandon the usual interrogations structured by questions
around the true nature of informal markets and their ultimate aims.
Instead, we are interested in what they help to enable on another level.
The question we direct at informal markets is not oriented at a level
of intentions. It is oriented at the point where transformation takes
place, effected by the coming together of informal market realities
and their felds of application: the place where they temporarily
settle, solidify and provide a basis for widening the feld of social
perception and behaviour. We are interested in how we can produce
an alternative engagement with the spontaneously emerging spaces
of informal market activity and its material and visual peculiarities,
in order to stimulate a logic of resistance, which not only touches at
the level of concrete experience but also the horizon and modalities in
charge of organising these experiences.

There are several temptations that need to be shuffed aside
within this engagement: an alleged specifcity of trading places; a
cartography of places geographically predestined for such activities;
a comprehensive typology of the dynamics of networks or informal
markets or a typology of places where informal trade takes place. All
11
Michel Foucault, Society Must Be
Defended: Lectures at the Collge
de France 1975-76 (London:
Penguin, 2004), p. 29.
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these temptations tend to re-inscribe and stabilise the indeterminate
turmoil of informal markets within established categories of
knowledge, instead of challenging the categories around which we
have been told to conceptualise the relationship between subjectivities
and places. If we refer to the local as the sphere of illicit trade, then
that is because it matches the perspective from which the many
transient fows, the movements of aggregation and the dispersal
characteristic of informal trade are thought. And it is also the place
in which visual clues, spontaneous scenes, physical mutations and
inconsistencies begin to make themselves felt early on. They all play
off each other in miniscule movements, and provide an indication of
the self-creating fow of meaning that fashions subjects and spaces.
Full of indeterminate relationalities and idiosyncratic encounters,
these places are at the same time, however, to be seen in an enlarged
way, as trans-local sites formed by fows of intensities, pressing ahead
in a multitude of combinations.
Istanbul Topkapi: Trading among ruins
In 2005 a bustling site of high-contrast undertakings emerged in
Istanbuls central district of Topkapi: the process of rapid urban
transformation constituting of the strong political gestures of
reconstructing the Byzantine city walls and building the tracks of a
state-of-the-art low-foor tram, was suddenly faced with kilometres
of informal traffcking. This spontaneous black market took place just
outside the gates of the historic city, along the construction sites of the
high-capacity interchange between Topkapi Edirnekapi Caddesi and
the eight lane Londra Asfalti. Squeezed in between newly delivered
and derelict building material, busy freeways and almost impassable
heaps of crushed stone, tens of thousands of people formed an
endlessly meandering and pulsating structure.
The lower end of this formation is marked by the Metro station
Ulubatli, the upper end by Cevizlibag, a new stop along the ultra-
modern tram line, which runs from Zeytinburnu past the Grand
Bazaar (Kapali arsi) to the old centre of the city and across Galata
bridge up to the Bosphorus. The merchandise consists of heaps of
second-hand goods and clothes laid out on the bare ground blending
in with new TV sets, refrigerators, computers and pieces of furniture.
In stark contrast to this wild and bustling accumulation, the whole
place is bordered with an immaculate but deserted layout of formal
green, whose ghostly abandonment is amplifed by the garish colour of
the artifcially irrigated lawn. In 1852 Thophile Gautier wrote about
this stretch along the city walls:
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It is diffcult to believe there is a living city behind these dead ramparts! I
do not believe there exists anywhere on earth [a thing] more austere and
melancholy than this road, which runs for more than three miles between
ruins on the one hand and a cemetery on the other.
12

The informal market repeats the archaic model of the citys organic
emergence at the intersection of traffc routes and trading places. In
the case of Topkapi, however, trade fourishes in the shadow of offcial
urban planning, transforming the latter into a vehicle of informality.
The wide spread impact arising from this informal economy is not
confned to the markets own dynamics, though. It is amplifed by a
series of secondary services linked to it: shuttle buses, street kitchens,
intermediaries, suppliers, vendors and occasional street performers.
It is through this bizarre entanglement of modern transport systems,
symbolic sites of national renaissance and short-lived subsistence
economies, through the complexities of legal work, third economies
and informal trade, that this temporary market accounts for more
than just an incidental set of happenings. Certainly, the mutual
permeability of formal and informal structures, the aberrant
utilisations of urban space and the acceleration of spontaneous
cultural eruptions, designate the emergence of new urban networks,
trajectories and hierarchies.
Fig. 1. Informal Market Istanbul Topkapi. Photos: Peter Mrtenbck & Helge
Mooshammer, 2005.
In summer 2005 the informal market in Topkapi had grown to an
agitated swarm-like shape more than two kilometres long; thousands
of people wandering around small piles laid on dusty sand, many
of the latter barely distinguishable from disposed waste, vanishing
among existing debris. What black markets like Topkapi render
visible is the increasing pace with which vast networks of self-
organised economies enter, inhabit and withdraw themselves from
unsettled territories, without being mitigated or isolated from the
politics of formally organised space. There are neither recognisable
borders nor consistent frameworks on whose grounds an exchange
12
Orhan Pamuk, Istanbul: Memories
and the City (New York: Alfred
A. Knopf, 2005), p. 231.
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between systems would take place. We live, as Laclau has suggested,
as bricoleurs in a world of incomplete systems, whose rules we co-
produce and revise by constantly retracing them.
13
Flagging down a
mini-bus at Topkapi market, we dont know if it will pull up, until we
have actually boarded.
Parallel economies: Izmailovo Market Moscow
Izmailovo is the largest open market in Europe, its foot print three
times larger than the Moscow Kremlin. More than 100,000 workers,
traders and buyers frequent the location on a busy weekend. The
former site of the historic Izmailovo village and the Royal Estate,
15 kilometres east of the Kremlin, Izmailovo served as one of the
main venues to host the XXII Olympic Games in 1980. The Olympic
event facilitated the regeneration of the 1930s Stalinets stadium at
Izmailovo, the construction of a new all-purpose sports hall for the
weightlifting tournaments and, on the southern fringes of todays
market area close to the metro station Partisanskaya, the biggest hotel
complex built for the Olympics to accommodate some 10,000 visitors
and participants.
As public investment in the sports facilities decreased after the
Olympic Games, owing to the worsening fnancial situation of the
Soviet Union especially after the demise of the USSR, traders began to
move into the vacated parts of the complex and to use ever expanding
sectors of the adjacent outdoor area. In 1989 a private company took
charge of the stadium and, while keeping the football pitch intact,
developed it into a curious mix of historico-cultural venues and sports
and health facilities, equipped with massage and beauty parlours, a
shooting gallery, an underground concert hall, a war time museum,
restaurants and other recreational facilities open to the general
public. Assisted by the rapidly sprawling Eurasian market, the former
sports complex has been transformed into a fathomless labyrinth of
improvised stands, containers, warehouses and open market areas.
The stadium and its new amenities are completely engulfed and
dwarfed by thousands of small retail spaces of what is one of the
largest European hubs for goods, capital and humans. Over more
than 80 hectares of retail area, Moscows Izmailovo market, and its
Cherkoizovsky Rynok in particular, are one of the most important
nodes in the transnational suitcase trade between Eastern Europe,
China, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, the Caucasus region and Turkey.
Traders travel long distances in crowded overnight buses or lorries to
buy large amounts of goods, which they sell on at domestic markets.
13
Ernesto Laclau, Emancipation(s) (London
and New York: Verso, 1996), pp. 79-82.
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attraction in Moscow. It is located towards the southern tip of the
market, shielded off from the hustle and bustle of the adjoining
subsistence economies, through a mock wooden fortress, which
provides the backdrop to a bewildering array of matrioshka stalls,
Soviet memorabilia, Russian handicraft, Central Asian rugs, antique
busts, Georgian shashliki, street performers, and bear shows.
Considered to be the worlds largest exhibition-fair, Vernisazh
houses a leisure centre named The Russian Court, which boasts the
reconstructed Palace of Tzar Alexander and is expected to become part
of a new ambitious project to set up a large-scale Trade Centre in the
heart of Izmailovo.
Fig. 2. Izmailovo Market Moscow. Photos: Peter Mrtenbck & Helge Mooshammer,
2006.
While nested dolls may be Vernisazhs best selling item, the market
moulds itself into a gigantic urban matrioshka, a gure of countless
parallel economies nested into each other without visible contact
points. Izmailovo is a place of extreme geopolitical entanglement,
while the touristy Vernisazh points out the illusory expectations
generated by the Western market, these expectations nd their match
next door in the informal economies of Eastern transitory societies.
The entire market is made up of a plenitude of parallel worlds, zones
of Soviet planning interspersed with zones of wild capitalism and
numerous deregulated zones of cultural co-existence, whose presence
is hardly known to an outside world. As is the case with the cultural
renaissance of the 15,000 Caucasian Mountain Jews in Moscow,
whose central synagogue is a carpeted room measuring thirty-feet-by-
eight-feet under the stands of the multi-faceted Izmailovo stadium.
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Arizona Market: Inter-ethnic collaboration in Brko/BaH
Arizona Market, one of the best known open markets in the Balkans,
is based in the district of Brko, a separate entity at the intersection
of the Bosnian, Croatian and Serbian territories. 2,500 stalls and
shops sprawling over 25 hectares of land, 3 million visitors per year
and some 20,000 people employed, together make up the market. For
some, it is a model for all multi-ethnic communities in the region, for
others the largest open air shopping mall in southeast Europe. And for
others still it is hell on earth. The difference in perspective rests upon
the numerous stages and transformations of what is commonly called
Arizona Market.
Initially, Arizona emerged as a black market at a US military
checkpoint, along the main road connecting Sarajevo and eastern
Croatia, via Tuzla and Oraje in post-Dayton Bosnia. The informal
trade was fostered by the international SFOR troops as a way of
encouraging inter-ethnic collaboration and economic growth. As the
shanty of mobile stands, livestock, produce stalls, CD shops, motels
and night clubs fourished and grew into a bustling site of commercial
activities, the area also saw the arrival of unauthorised dwellings
ranging from improvised shelter to single-family houses. The illicit
building structures were set to be the harbingers of a self-organised
urbanisation process. At the same time, Arizona increasingly attracted
human traffcking and the trade in drugs and weapons. When the
Brko District came into existence in 2000, political decisions were
made to confer legal status on the market, to formalise it and to collect
revenues from the commercial establishments. After years of heavy
struggle against the proposed master plan, large parts of the initial
structures were cleared, bars and brothels were shut down, and a vast
private shopping mall erected on the adjacent piece of land.
Fig. 3. Arizona Market, Brko District (BaH). Photos: Peter Mrtenbck & Helge
Mooshammer, 2006.
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This further period of transformation, between the years 2002 and
2007, highlights the complexities and limits of converting the informal
structure of a black market into formal businesses. The protest of
resident traders had little effect on the development of the privately
managed shopping centre, a joint venture between Brko District
and the Italian consortium Ital Project. An estimated 120 Million
Euros will be invested to build 100,000 square metres of retail area,
storage and warehouses, restaurants, entertainment facilities and even
residential units. Once at its peak, the economic and merchants centre
for southeast Europe will include multiplex cinemas, hotels, casinos
and a conference centre. More than 100 Chinese businesses will be
housed in a separate mall billed as Trade City of China. 15 Million
Euros in taxes and fees annually contribute in turn to what is now one
of the richest districts in this region.
14
In architectural terms, Arizona Market comprises two different areas,
one predominantly occupied by commercial premises, and another
boasting an idiosyncratic hybrid character: two storeys of sales foors
are supplemented with a third storey, which resembles the typical
features of contemporary residential estates. Flower arrangements,
garden furniture, awnings, loft conversions, balustrades and miniature
turrets of different style and colour produce a scene of patched
domesticity, some seven metres above industrialised retail space.
The improvised individual ft-out of the corporate master structure
exposes the self-regulated hierarchies of these trading networks, the
bizarre mix and structure of this development echoing the struggle
between offcial planning and the dynamics of informal economies.
In this small segment of Arizona Market, the clash of the two systems
has led to a paradoxical co-existence of contradictory cultural claims
and practices. Bringing into existence a whole set of eclectic and
contradictory aesthetic expressions, the parallel worlds of Arizona
Market materialise the tension between formal and informal spatial
organisation. They make manifest the relationship of determinate and
indeterminate forces and create an antithesis to the fxity of the master
plan. This ground-level cultural and economic contestation facilitates
a strange aesthetics of spatial use, which Srdjan Jovanovi Weiss has
termed Turbo Architecture: Turbo Architecture is an unconcealable,
unrestrainable effect of the black market. Turbo Architecture is proof
that architectural production depends neither on a stable market nor
on a stable political system.
15
14
B. R. Scott and E. Murphy Brko and
the Arizona Market, Harvard Business
School, Case 905-411 (2005).
15
S. J. Weiss What Was Turbo
Architecture?, in Weiss (ed.), Almost
Architecture, edition kuda.nao (Stuttgart:
merz&solitude, 2006), p. 28.
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The informal market test
The production of architecture may not depend on a stable market,
but the market does depend on architectural production within the
structures of civil society. As Foucault has noted in his writings on
homo conomicus, there are several preconditions for the functioning
of markets, including relations of mutual trust, expedient spatial
production and a proper socio-institutional layout. The question
is always just how much market we can afford within the matrix
of civil society.
16
Along the fringes of this matrix, informal markets
behave as a mobile stage on which civil society and its relation to
territorial, political and global power is questioned and negotiated
through temporary arrangements and an unmediated collision of
worlds. This is showcased in the attempted nation building around
the now disappeared informal market in Topkapi Istanbul, in the
initiation of a regional economy in Brko District and in the abstruse
revitalisation of a former Olympic site in Moscow. These three markets
vary signifcantly in how they deploy structures of indeterminacy,
but they are all recognised as urban catalysts in the making of
cultural co-existence: Moscows Izmailovo Market is a complex
assemblage of layers held together through formal and informal
segments of economic activities, Arizona Market could be seen as
the transformation of a black market into a strategically formalised
economic hub in Bosnia and Herzegovina, while Istanbuls Topkapi
market simply disappeared after the modern transport infrastructure
had been completed and the market site cleared. In close vicinity
to strategic elements of urban planning, military and transport
infrastructure, sports facilities and tourist attractions, these markets
all employ creative structures based on principles of nonlinear
interaction between many different people and produce effects that
were neither planned nor intended.
Given their proximity to the transformation of large-scale urban
infrastructures, what can be the role of these markets in terms
of subject formation? In his essay Actor Network Theory The
Market Test (a term obviously borrowed from Foucaults analysis
of political economy), Michel Callon has argued that market
transactions depend on continuous processes of decontextualisation
and dissociation of sellable things from other objects or human
beings. Actor Network Theory pictures a market world in which the
(transient) disentanglement of objects from producers, former users
or contexts enables buyers and sellers to achieve a market situation
where both ends of the transaction are quits once the deal is done.
17

This suggests a view of the market in which framing dissociates
individual agents from one another and allows for the defnition
16
Michel Foucault, Naissance de la
biopolitique: Cours au collge de
France 1978-1979 (Paris: ditions
de Seuil/Gallimard, 2004).
17
M. Callon Actor-Network Theory:
The Market Test, in ed. by J.
Law and J. Hassard (eds.), Actor
Network Theory and After (Oxford:
Blackwell, 1999), pp. 181195.
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of objects, spaces, goods and merchandise which are perfectly
identifable. As one withdraws from old relations, transformation
takes place through turning associated goods into commodities. As
the dynamics of informal markets demonstrate, however, the terms of
transformation that pertain to these sites have much more to do with
structures of prolonged entanglement; it is not despite but because
of this entanglement that such assemblages transform themselves
into something new. They reshape themselves into amphibian
structures, meaning that rather than disentangling themselves, they
multiply. This mechanism has less to do with a dissociation of market
transactions from other cultural contexts than with a multiplication
of entanglements on various levels. And this is precisely the structure
through which information passes between informal market structures
and the political subjectivities emerging from these complex sites. The
subject as a boundary process, a deformable and deforming agentic
composite, a resilient force that defes determinateness in trading
objects as much as in trading itself.
There is a lively entanglement of actors evoked by the processes which
stimulate the self-organisation of informal markets and guide their
transactions. It is because of family ties, the prospect of a brisk sale or
the chance to sell items on at other markets, because of friendships,
dependencies, liabilities or debts to suppliers, because of unexpected
twists in ones life or in the light of newly emerging relations, that
people come together in an environment where they can beneft from
other worlds. It is not the constitution of leakage points points
where overfowing is allowed to occur and the commodifcation
of things is partially suspended but a much more generous and
inconspicuous opening up of many different worlds onto each other
that generates the exuberant dynamics and maximises the turnover of
the informal market.
Drawing on analyses by the Swiss sociologists Urs Bruegger and
Karin Knorr Cetina, Brian Holmes has pointed out how markets can
be described as knowledge constructs. They act as epistemic objects
within a sphere of technological and institutional frames. They are
highly unstable and variable in their nature as they always remain
incomplete and changing. This variability makes them seem alive
and unpredictable.
18
Informality adds another epistemic dimension
to markets: as much as they can be conceptualised as knowledge
constructs, they also act as a knowledge flter, allowing only parts
of the goings-on of the market to become intelligible, while certain
secrecies, dubious relations and equivocal transactions are to remain
unframed. It is particularly these sites of knowledge and interest,
the deferral, obfuscation and active fragmentation of archival
composition, which accounts for much of the activities that defne
18
B. Holmes The Artistic Device. Or,
the articulation of collective speech,
Universit Tangente (2006); http://
ut.yt.t0.or.at/site/index.html.
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Trading Indeterminacy Informal Markets in Europe
informal trade as well as accounting for the spatial emergence,
dispersal and re-aggregation of informal markets. Perhaps, this
is the model of fertile undercodings and misapprehensions which
emerges in the trajectories of informal markets: the lack of price
tags, the false trade descriptions, the improvised trading places, the
mutability of constellations, the devalued spaces flled with cultural
hybridities, the abundance of strange objects that can be used for
almost anything. They allow us to consider the potential of cultural
encounters outside the formal market prerequisites of transparency,
clear calculation and disentanglement. A cacophony of sounds, voices
and accents making themselves heard publicly, prior to any neatly
designed arrangement for ideal speech situations. Scattered informal
arrangements of stalls, trailers, trucks and tent cities that dont lead
to what architects, politicians and planners might consider a rich
form of cultural co-habitation but to a place elsewhere. Irregularities
that characterise the mosaic universe of diasporic movements where
things and beings dont converge on a totality, but assert their mutual
relatedness through, inventing junctions and disjunctions that
construct combinations which are always singular, contingent and not
totalising.
19
Arguably, the organising principles of informal markets
may not be ideal blueprints for sustainable alternative economies,
open community projects and new bonds of worldwide solidarity.
They may, however, destabilise processes occurring within larger
institutional and non-institutional ecologies that have been taken for
granted for quite some time. From spatial organisation based around
calculative agents and thoughtful planning to transient alliances,
spatial meshworks and assemblages of autonomous social agents, the
shift in organisation is familiar.
Informal economies thrive on top of formalised ones. This is
not to suggest trajectories which capitalise on the principle of
discontinuation. The prolifc networks of informal trade rather adhere
to a form of amalgamation, which relies on practices of sustained
contradiction. An experimental theatre of civil society, it highlights
the open-ended outcome of operations that emerge from places of
transition.
19
M. Lazzarato To See and Be Seen: A
Micropolitics of the Image, in A. Franke
(ed.), B-Zone: Becoming Europe and
Beyond (Barcelona: Actar, 2006), p. 296.
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The Indeterminate Mapping of the Common
The Indeterminate Mapping of the Common
Doina Petrescu
This article is about mapping and its paradoxes: mapping as a tool
to speak about the indeterminate relationship between humans
and space, but also as a means to operate with this indeterminacy.
These relationships can be represented, mapped out only if they are
performed, acted upon, experienced through. This mapping from
within which relates the psyche and the body to the physical, the
socio-political and the cultural space, has been explored by several art
groups and socio-urban practices, starting with the great walkers and
wanderers of history and including the Surrealists, the Situationists
and contemporary urban research and media practices. The article
takes as an important example the work of the French psychiatrist
and educator Fernard Deligny and his methods of mapping autistic
space. Autistic space and its tracing brings at its limit the question
of indeterminacy within the common experience of space and its
representation, a limit that challenges conventional notions of space
and community. The main question addressed by Delignys work is
that of the common. In a world dominated by the drives of separation
(e.g. increasing privatisation, individualism, exclusion, segregation)
what are the means to construct the common? How can different ways
of mapping contribute to this construction?
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The Indeterminate Mapping of the Common
This text
1
developed from a concern with mapping and its possibility
of researching the indeterminate relationship between humans and
space. This indeterminacy could be represented, mapped out only if it
is performed, acted upon, experienced through. Such mapping could
be therefore considered itself as a relational practice, a practice from
within, but not without a few questions: When, in what conditions
could mapping become a form of collective practice? How could it
create community? How do (collective) practices of mapping address
the question of the common?
Roaming traces
In his book Walkscapes, Francesco Careri suggests that the
architectural construction of space began with human beings
wandering in the Palaeolithic landscape: following traces, leaving
traces. The slow appropriation of the territory was the result of this
incessant walking of the frst humans.
2

By considering walking as the beginning of architecture, Careri
proposes another history of architecture one which is not that of
settlements, cities and buildings made of stones but of movements,
displacements and fows . It is an architecture which speaks about
space not as being contained by walls but as made of routes, paths and
relationships. Careri suggests that there is something common in the
system of representation that we fnd in the plan of the Palaeolithic
village, the walkabouts of the Australian aborigines and the
psychogeographic maps of the Situationists. If for the settler, the space
between settlements is empty, for the nomad, the errant, the walker
this space is full of traces: they inhabit space through the points, lines,
stains and impressions, through the material and symbolic marks left
in the landscape. These traces could be understood as a frst grasping
of what is common, as a frst tool to size and constitute resources for a
constantly moving and changing community.
3
How to make this common visible, how to map these traces? The
traces contain information, but how to reveal it, to communicate it in
another way than by controlling, by imposing, by knowing before hand
how to map unknowing? What lines do we need for this mapping?
What lines are those that map the indeterminate relationships
between subjects and spaces? What kind of place is revealed through
these lines? What kind of knowledge?
1
This article is an extended version
of the article Tracer l ce qui
nous chappe, published in
Multitudes n24 (2006): 45-42.
2
Cf. Francesco Careri, Walkscapes:
Walking as an Aesthetic Practice
(Barcelona: Ed. Gustavo Gili, 2002).
3
This sense of appropriation, community
and shared use resonates strongly with
what is called in English the commons, a
word that acknowledges the importance
of naming in a certain way the land which
marks the territory of a community. But
the idea of the common that we want to
speak of here is maybe larger and more
complex than that of the commons.
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The lines that we are
In some of their texts, Deleuze and Guattari use the notion of the
line to explain their metaphoric cartography of social space. This is
because the line, as opposed to the point is a dynamic element, it can
create millieux. The line constitutes an abstract and complex enough
metaphor to map the entire social feld in terms of affects, politics,
desire, power, to map the way life always proceeds at several rhythms
and at several speeds. As individuals and groups we are made of lines
which are very diverse in nature we have as many entangled lines
as a hand. What we call with different names schizoanalysis, micro-
politics, pragmatics, diagrammatics, rhizomatics, cartography is
nothing else but the result of the study of the lines that we are.
4
The line is somehow the metaphoric basis of all of Deleuze and
Guattaris thinking. They mention several times the work of Fernard
Deligny, a radical French educator and psychiatrist who worked from
the ffties through to the seventies with groups of autistic children who
had been written off as unmanageable by his fellow psychiatrists.
5
He
worked in an unorthodox way, criticising the educational methods
of the time that expressed the will of society to repress whatever
deviated from the norm. Unlike his colleagues who worked in medical
institutions and asylums, Deligny spent time with the autistics, living
with them on an everyday basis. He did not presume that he could
teach the autistic children anything, but hoped instead that he could
learn from them. For someone who is autistic, language is not a means
of expression, so Deligny hoped to learn by following and watching
how the autistic move and create space. He formed a network of
people who chose to follow his method of research, and formalised
their surveys through maps and drawings. The researchers who
were also living with the autistics, mapped the lines that the children
traced on their walks and throughout their everyday life activities,
discovering that there were fxed points where their movements
concentrated, where they stopped and lingered, where the lines they
followed intersected. According to Deligny, these were often sites with
magnetic felds and underground waterways, and autistic children
appeared to be especially sensitive to them.
Deleuze qualifes Delignys approach of the autistic space as
geo-analytical; it is based on the analysis of lines, which map
relationships between the psyche, the body and everyday life. This
geo-analysis is not merely pedagogy or therapy but an attempt to
invent through mapping ways of being and sharing with the other,
the radically other, the one who does not live in the same manner, who
does not have the same means of communication, the same logics, the
same gestures: the autistic, the idiot, the fool There where nothing
is common, instead of language, what is shared is the place and
4
Gilles Deleuze and Claire Parnet,
Dialogues (Paris: Flammarion,
1996), p. 151 (my translation).
5
Deleuze and Guattari refer to Deligny
most notably in their book, A Thousand
Plateaus (London: Continuum, 1987).
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its occupation and this place together with its different activities,
gestures, incidents and presences is drawn on the map with different
lines and signs. The drawing act is a tracing, tracer.
The daily courses of the autistic children were traced through
customary lines and supple lines, marking where the child makes
a curl, a chevtre,
6
fnds something, slaps his hands, hums a tune,
retraces his steps, and then makes meandering lines, lignes derre.
The lines developed in space are sometimes translated on the map as
coloured patches, surfaces, erasures and signs. Tracing is a language
which can be shared by those that can speak and those that only know
silence; some trace with their hands, others with their bodies. The
lines that trace the courses are supplemented with signs that indicate
movements or tools, like a choreographic notation.
They are traced at different moments in time on separate sheets of
tracing paper creating something like a plan of consistency
7
where
the improbable language of the autistic is revealed,
8
through the
superimposition of the different layers of tracing paper. This plan of
consistency represents somehow the place shared by the tracers and
the traced.
The presence of the tracers is also marked on the map acknowledged
as part of the language through which not only the autistic bodies
express themselves but also, as Deligny puts it the common body of
us and them.
9
This place of the common body which reveals itself
in the process of tracing after years of uncontrollable and unforeseen
movements, is called limmuable, the unmoving.
Psychogeographic mapping
The Situationists have also related the psyche to place, to space,
through their psychogeographic practice.
10
They too have traced
courses and drifts, but they were interested in the ephemeral,
the randomness, the aesthetisation of the furtive passage, in the
ordinary within which they wanted to seize, to catch the unique, the
exceptional. Deligny wished on the contrary, to recreate a common
sense, the common body, an ordinary everyday life including those
that were exceptional, incomprehensible, abnormal.
The maps of limmuable differ from psychogeographic maps. The
erring is not a drive. The territory established in the Cevennes
region by the network of people that chose to work with the autistics
by following this method, is not the grid of the modern city that the
Situationists wanted to subvert, but a place to be made; it is what
Deligny calls with different names: le rseau, le radeau. This is not a
6
... a chevtre (an entangled curl)
is similar to a detour as long as the
necessity, the cause of this detour escapes
our knowing. The term of chevtre
designates the fact that there is something
there that attracts a perfusion of lignes
derre. F. Deligny, Les enfants et le
silence (Paris: Galile et Spirali, coll.
Dbats, 1980), p. 25 (my translation).
7
This is Deleuze and Guattaris concept
developed in A Thousand Plateaus.
8
cf. F.Deligny, Les Vagabondes
Effcaces et autres rcits (Paris:
Franois Maspero, 1970).
9
F. Deligny, Les cahiers de lImmuable
1/2/3 : Voix et voir, Recherches,
n18 (Paris: Avril 1975), Drives,
Recherches, n20 (Paris: Dcembre 1975),
Au dfaut du langage, Recherches,
n24 (Paris: Novembre 1976).
10
According to the Situationists,
psychogography is the study of the
precise laws and specifc effects of the
geographical environment, consciously
organised or not, on the emotions and
behaviour of individuals. Guy Debord,
Introduction to a Critique of Urban
Geography, published in Les Lvres
Nues #6, 1955. In 1958, Debord also
wrote the Theory of the Drive, which
served as an instruction manual for the
psychogeographic procedure, executed
through the act of drive or drift.
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political subversion through a sensorial and aesthetic experience, it
is neither play nor pleasure. The maps of limmuable try to reveal
something other than the feelings and sensations related to a place.
This something other cant be sized immediately, it is not in the
realm of the movement, the spontaneous and the furtive but rather
in the realm of the unmovable: tracing-erring in the same place for
years, supported by the passion and the gaze of the tracers. If the
context of the Situationist drive is aesthetical, the roaming of the
autistic is ontological. They do not detour and do not drift, do not play
getting lost in the city, but turn again and again, in chevtre, around
the same place, while being lost for real. They cant really chose to
do it in another way and cant communicate about it. The chevtre
is something different from the Situationist plaque tournante: it is
not a term of a specifc aesthetical lexicon but a marker of hidden
ontological data, the designator of the escaping cause of that which
escapes our control and understanding while being fundamental.
Locative mapping
Today, GPS technology allows for an accurate location in space.
11

This kind of tracing is not the tracing that pays attention to the close
presences of the tracers, but one which is connected to military
technology and surveillance. The individual is traced, or rather
tracked, as a point, which is precisely situated and controllable in
time. GPS equipped pedestrians can now trace real time cartographies,
as in the project Real Time by Esther Polak (one of many other
projects of this kind), which shows inhabitants of Amsterdam making
visible a giant map of their city through the retracings of their daily
routes.
12
This type of cartography has a lot of positive aspects
13
but
as remarked by the cultural theorist Brian Holmes, it also has an
important weakness: it exposes the fragility of individual gestures
to the surveilling satellite infrastructure, which supports and
coordinates the GPS public infrastructure.
14
With these tools that
are always traceable by global satellites and are dependent on global
temporalities, there is no common and possible community between
the tracers and the traced. Global time is not a common time and
the satellite is not a close presence. The lines traced by locative
technology are always exposed and could never be secret, hidden, like
the lignes derre.
As Holmes noticed, technological locative tracing (very fashionably
used in recent years by many contemporary art projects) encounters
here its own limit, which is in fact its own ideology: a kind of humanist
locative ideology of knowing your place, which promotes and exposes
at a global scale, the scale of the Empire,
15
the aesthetics of the drift,
generalising cartography as individual tool, abstract and isolated,
11
The Global Positioning System (GPS) is
composed of twenty-four satellites 20,200
km (12,500 miles or 10,900 nautical
miles) above the earth. The satellites
are spaced in orbit so that at any time
a minimum of six satellites will be in
view to users anywhere in the world. The
satellites continuously broadcast position
and time data to users throughout the
world. GPS was developed in the 1970s
by the U.S. Department of Defense so
that military units can always know their
exact location and the location of other
units. (cf. About.com, Global Positioning
System (2007) http://geography.about.
com/od/geographictechnology/a/gps.
htm [accessed 2007]. Contemporary
Art, Architecture and Urban Planning
projects today, use GPS and other
situated and locative technologies to
allow different ways of designing and
inhabiting the contemporary metapolis.
12
Esther Polak and Den Waag,
Amsterdam RealTime http://realtime.
waag.org [accessed 2007].
13
One of the positive goals is the creation
of public data. In order to oppose the
increased privatisation of geographic
data, media activist groups organise
tracing actions using GPS technology
aimed at creating digital maps of
important urban areas that can be
freely used. See for example the
OPENSTREETMAP movement, Open
Street Map: The Free Wiki World Map,
www.openstreetmap.org [accessed 2007].
14
Brian Holmes, Drifting Through the
Grid: Psychogeography and Imperial
Infrastructure, http://ut.yt.t0.or.
at/site/index.html [accessed 2007].
15
I use here the concept of Empire in
the sense developed by T. Negri and M.
Hardt in their book Empire (Cambridge
MA: Harvard University Press, 2000).
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while giving at the same time the illusion of communication and
traceability.
For Deligny, in order to have an edge, a border, to have something in
common with the autistic, you need an outside and an inside. Also,
for seizing a place, no screen or other scopic prostheses are needed.
What is necessary is what he called this seeing, a seeing which is not
related to thinking, a gaze which doesnt refect; this seeing is for
him the language of the children who do not speak.
Everyday life mapping
The everyday tracings initiated by Deligny are not the tracings of
the city users which caught the interest of the sociologist Michel De
Certeau, who theorised the practices of everyday life at about the same
time as Delignys experience in Cevenes.
De Certeau speaks about the spatial language of walking but at the
same time, he criticises its representation in the urban cartographies
of the time. He speaks of the diffculty of representing the practice of
walking rather than the walking trace;
While making visible the walking trace, what made it possible remains
invisible. This fxation of the trace is a forgetting procedure. The trace
substitutes itself to the practice.
16

De Certeau speaks about the impossibility of representing the very act
of walking, which rather than a simple movement represents a way of
being in the world.
But Delignys mapping escapes this aporia, because it does not pretend
to represent the act of walking: his lines do not seek to make the
walking visible, do not conform to what has happened; the fact of
keeping on tracing a map for several years, makes the act of tracing
itself a way of being in the world.
For De Certeau, the rhetoric of walking is made of a series of tours
and detours, the style fgures that constitute the pedestrian discourse:
walking is the art of touring. By contrast, the chevtres of the
autistics are not simple style fgures they do not belong to a text or
a discursive organisation. They are called customary lines, but are not
yet a proper that could be subject to dtournement. For De Certeau,
the walking body moves in search of a familiar thing in the city. He
invokes Freud, saying that walking recalls babys moves inside of the
maternal body: To walk is to be in search of a proper place. It is a
process of being indefnitely absent and looking for a proper.
17

16
M. de Certeau, The Practice of
Everyday Life (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1984), p. 97.
17
Ibid., p. 103.
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But the autistic children have no origin to recall. Or, maybe, as Deligny
suggests, their courses and their gestures recall a world which is too
far away to be appropriable, hidden in the prelingusitic memory of the
human species. Therefore, if their movement is a language, still this
language doesnt signify, but simply indicates that the human takes
place.
Tracing without control
Contemporary urban cartography searches more and more for
methods to represent fows of matter, information and persons. The
lines of these mappings try to describe space in order to make it
more effcient and more controllable. Tracing in the control society
(Deleuze) is different from Delignys tracing. We trace in order to
make the fows more fuid, the city smoother and appropriable.
An example is Space Syntaxs cartography, which uses lines to
represent degrees of connectivity within the city.
18
These lines are
always, to simplify, right. They are approximations of the trajectories
chosen by different persons in space. They are approximations of the
number of persons (and cars) that have passed by during the time
of observation. These traces are rarely those of the same people.
These observations are a routine rather than a custom. The degree of
connectivity of these routes are supposed to give information about
the degree of sociability of space. Space Syntax (and contemporary
urban planning) seek to emphasise the most connected routes,
the diagonals, the shortcuts, the most secure routes; they are not
interested in the hidden gestures and delinquent routes like those
taken by the autistic children. For Deligny, the human mapped
through chevtres has nothing to do with the quantifable, abstract
representation of the human it is rather something unrepresentable
which is immanently shared by all humans. It is (the) unmoving.
The common body of an impossible community
Tracing is not drawing, it does not represent a social space in order
to control or manipulate it. Tracing is not mapping in order to inform
as do the GPS technologies. The common body is not a cadastre it
is a moment in which the emotion the e-motion is important. The
common body is an affected place.
The common body traces itself at the same time that it assembles.
The common is always a common-there. It is made by the presence of
bodies in the same place, it is a common which does not communicate,
which is refractory to language, to domestication by language. It
18
cf. Space Syntax (2006) www.
spacesyntax.com [accessed 2007].
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reveals itself in bits and pieces that need time to be recorded together,
as a fragmented memory of an ungraspable whole. It reveals itself as
dsoevrement,
19
as a still possible action of an impossible work.
What was still to be discovered between us and them, was the PLACE.
When I say between, I do not mean a barrier, on the contrary the fact that it
was something to share and discover and this was the place, the topos, the
settlement, the outside.
20
The community was then simplifed to what was most ordinarily
common the place made out of traces, gestures, routes, trajectories
and presences. The pile of tracing papers indicated the presence, the
place and the time needed; because it is only by seeing and seeing
again, in the same place and in time, a time spent in close presence,
that the common body could be grasped through lines. It could be
grasped and unknown, because according to Deligny, the maps do not
say much, they only can show that we unknow what is the human, as
well as what is the common.
21
This is Delignys answer to the question of mapping, but maybe also,
his answer to the question of community. This question has been
brought into debate by a number of contemporary thinkers who call
for the deconstruction of the immanent notion of community, which
has been particularly infuential in the Western tradition of political
thinking: community as the dominant Western political formation,
founded upon a totalising, exclusionary myth of national unity, must
19
The term dsoeuvrement (unworking)
is used in the sense of Maurice Blanchot,
who has developed this concept in,
The Space of Literature, trans. Ann
Smock (Lincoln: University of Nebraska
Press, 1982, frst pr. 1955), where
he speaks about the impossibility of
(common) language to seize the full
signifcation of the literary word.
20
F. Deligny, Les cahiers de lImmuable,
p. 24 (my translation).
21
Ibid., p. 19.
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The Indeterminate Mapping of the Common
be tirelessly unworked in order to accommodate more inclusive and
fuid forms of dwelling together in the world, of being-in-common.
22
The mapping experimented by Deligny, constitutes somehow his own
re-presentation, his own enactment of the impossible community,
the inoperative community, the unavowable community, the coming
community that haunt the contemporary imaginary. Deligny states
that the common body of this community which is impossible to
write, to seize and to be mastered, can still be mapped as a PLACE.
Indeterminately.
The autistic space and its tracing push to the limit the question
of indeterminacy within the common experience of space and
representation, a limit that challenges conventional notions of space
and community. The lesson drawn from Delignys work is that the
process of place-making and its mapping are coextensive, and that
the language through which a common place is represented is always
embedded in the way this place is inhabited. Such mapping analyses
traces and leaves traces at the same time. Rather than theories, it
produces practical knowledge and new experiences of place. We learn
from Deligny that tracing is a patient and sensitive collective mapping,
which needs time and attention in order to create the conditions
for sharing, communication and communality. Its aesthetics are
embedded in its ethics.
The question addressed to architects, urban planners and place-
makers is how to operate with a space which is traced at the same time
as it is lived and how to use this tracing to understand and eventually
create more relationships between those who inhabit it. How to allow
them to have access to and decide about their common tracing which
is also the condition of their indeterminate community?
23
Images are from the installation of Delignys drawings in the exhibition, Des Territoires
by Jean-Franois Chevrier and Sandra Alvarez de Toledo (Ensba Paris: October-
December 2001). Photographs by Doina Petrescu.
22
I refer here particularly to the
philosophical inquiries into the notion
of the community of French thinkers
like Jean-Luc Nancy (The Inoperative
Community, 1983), Maurice Blanchot
(The Unavowable Community,
1983) and more recently, the Italian
philosopher, Giorgio Agamben (The
Coming Community, 1993). All these
inquiries that continue in time and
relate to each other, constitute somehow
a whole movement of critical thinking
that has infuenced the contemporary
take on the notion of community in
social science and political philosophy.
23
Delignys contemporary challenge could
be interpreted in many ways one
approach is that of a few urban activist
groups in Brussels, who are developing
research on collective and subjective
mapping tools such as open-source
mapping softwares, which allow for
collective production of knowledge and
subjective representation of different
types of space (geographical, social,
political, economical, sensorial, affective,
etc) and at the same time, their freely
shared experience. See Towards, (2006)
www.towards.be [accessed 2007].
Another way is suggested by the initiative
of the OpenStreetMap movement which
aims at creating and providing free
geographic data such as street maps, as
a reaction against the legal protection
and technical restrictions on their use,
which hold back people from using them
in creative, productive and unexpected
ways. The open ended community of
tracers use GPS technology, and combine
individual and collective tracing with
data collection meals and street parties.
The OpenStreetMap is at the same time
a political tool for subjective mapping
and a device to create community. All
of these restrictions and advances in
technology like cheap GPS units mean
you can now create your own maps, in
collaboration with others and have none
of the restrictions outlined above. The
ability to do so allows you to regain a
little bit of the community you live in
- if you cant map it you cant describe
it; http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/
index.php/whymakeopenstreetmap
[accessed 20 August 2007].
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The Space of Subculture in the City
The Space of Subculture in the City: Getting
Specic about Berlins Indeterminate Territories
Dougal Sheridan
This paper is concerned with those apparently abandoned, disused,
indeterminate urban areas not readily identied and included in the
understanding of cities. Examining such areas of Berlin has allowed
an investigation of them in relation to the historical, cultural and
sociological context of a specic city, and reveals their consequential
and symbiotic relationship to the rest of the city. Do the opportunities
offered by fragments of the city, in the absence of the deterministic
forces of capital, ownership, and institutionalisation affect cultural
formation and development? Extending the notion of indeterminacy
to include its cultural and sociological effects both reveals its
signicance as the space of subculture within the city, and allows
an examination of the nature of this space. This paper is based on
primary research including photographic documentation, mapping,
and a case study of a particular indeterminate fragment of Berlins
urban fabric recording the patterns of activity, occupation, social
formation and architectural action. Walter Benjamins observations
and experiences of Berlin suggest that there are pre-existing ways of
understanding these areas and the urban subjectivity they imply.
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Introduction: Two Postcards
This essay is concerned with those apparently abandoned, disused,
indeterminate urban areas, which have been labelled and romanticised
using the term Terrain Vague coined by Ignasi de Sola-Morales in
the 1990s. In this discourse, indeterminate has been interpreted
as the absence of limits, often resulting in a sense of liberty and
freedom of opportunity. Architecture is associated with a degree of
determination or ordering that reduces the possibilities and potential
embodied in the vacant site.
1
Indeterminacy may be a useful term
with which to interpret these urban spaces. However I wish to extend
and clarify the use of indeterminacy in this context beyond merely
describing the spatial characteristics of these areas. Instead I propose
an understanding of indeterminate territories as any area, space or
building where the citys normal forces of control have not shaped how
we perceive, use and occupy them.
To do this we will look at the specifc historical, cultural, and
sociological context of Berlin, where the existence of such
indeterminate territories has had a signifcant effect on the cultural life
of the city. These places which are not readily identifed and included
in the understanding of cities, nevertheless have a consequential,
symbiotic although often under-recognised relationship to the rest of
the city. We will then examine existing ways of understanding these
areas and the urban subjectivity they imply, by referring to Walter
Benjamins concepts of dialectical images and the illumination of
detail, including his own observations and experiences of Berlin.
Extending the notion of indeterminacy to include its cultural and
sociological effects reveals these indeterminate territories as the
space of subculture within the city. We will examine the nature of this
space with an occupational case study of a particular indeterminate
fragment of Berlins urban fabric.
The research and observations examined here were made between
1994 and 1996, while I was studying and working in Berlin and
living in one of the buildings referred to in the case study. As such
the observations and research in this paper document a particular
time in Berlins urban history and development. We see this in the
two postcard images from this time; (Fig. 1). Rather than some
timeless and identifable scene like the architectural monument, they
depict a situation of rapid change, while still being concerned with
architectural or urban space - the building that is becoming and the
building that is disappearing, the construction site and the ruin.
1
Ignasi de Sola-Morales, Terrain
Vague in Cynthia C. Davidson
(ed.), Any Place (Cambridge:
MIT Press, 1995), p. 120.
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Fig. 1. Two postcards; Gerd Schnrer Postcard Die Zeichenen der Zeit Berlin
Friedrichstrasse 1995; Tacheles 1995.
Usually the ruin reminds us of some other past while the construction
site might evoke the excitement of a new future. Ironically,
observations of Berlin at the time hinted at the inverse; the completion
of the buildings under construction spelt the repetition of the same;
while in the ruins and residual spaces, the possibility of other less
defned alternatives were being pursued.
2
The frst postcard depicts an area on Friedrichstrasse, which in
the 1990s was the most complete and densest area of the critical
reconstruction of Berlin. The illuminated Daimler Benz emblem
informs us of the corporate nature of this development. This transfer
of entire districts into private ownership has been described as a
turning point in the history of modern urban-planning in Europe.
The second postcard is of a semi-ruined building called Tacheles
and its surroundings. This building remains a condensed record of
the forces of extreme change to which Berlins urban fabric has been
subjected. Originally built in 1907/08 as a grand department store,
it was later used by AEG as an exhibition hall and archive named the
House of Technology. The building was partly destroyed by bombing
during the war and then, like much of Berlin further sections of the
building were demolished to make way for roads, which in this case
were never completed. After the reunifcation it was occupied by
squatters who transformed the building and its surrounds into what
has been described as a centre for independent forms of cultural life
in Oranienburger Strasse.
3
The building incorporates a bar, cafe,
theatre, cinema, furniture workshop, music and performance art
venue, studios, gallery spaces, and residences. Tacheles is the publicly
perceived representation of Berlin subculture. The acceptance of
this building into mainstream culture by way of its postcard image,
indicates the extent of this phenomenon in Berlin.
2
J. Hauptman, A view of Berlin,
Werk, Bauen & Wohnen (1995): 6.
3
Planergemeinschaft Dubach
& Kohlbrenner, City Centre
Projects: Offce buildings and
business premises (Berlin:
Lebenswertbauen, 1993).
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Berlin History: Abandoned Territory
The existence of these vacant spaces has never been offcially acknowledged.
On the city map they were covered over with fctitious streets, refecting of
the shame that Berlin is not like other cities with their respectable centres.
4
Examining the specifc history of Berlin reveals the causes and spatial
positions of these indeterminate territories. They comprise those
fragments of the city that were wrested out of the usual mechanisms
of metropolitan development. The destruction of one quarter of Berlin
by carpet-bombing in 1944 and the succession of Fascist, Communist,
and Capitalist regimes, have provided the underlying conditions for
this phenomenon above and beyond the usual processes of spatial
obsolescence resulting from post-industrialisation. These historical
circumstances culminated in two events unique to Berlin, which had
a pervasive effect on both the conditions and spaces described here as
indeterminate. The frst situation was the erection of the Berlin wall in
1961 and the second was its removal in 1989; (Fig. 2).
Fig. 2. Excerpt from map showing concentration of empty buildings and sites,
which became occupied (Besetzt) in Kreuzberg when it was cut off on 3 sides
by the Berlin wall. This includes some of the spaces adjacent to the wall, which
were occupied shortly after its removal in 1989. Image: Dougal Sheridan,
1996.
The erection of the wall cut off the inner city district of Kreuzberg
from its close relationship to Mitte, which was historically the central
district of Berlin. Suddenly this working class quarter of dense
tenement blocks was marginalised on the periphery of West Berlin.
4
W. Firebrace, Jasmine Way,
AA Files 25 (1994): 63-66.
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The wall had the effect of strangling West Berlins economic and social
systems, resulting in Kreuzberg becoming a depopulated cul-de-sac
where property had lost its value as inner city real estate.
Kreuzbergs peripheral position meant that it was no longer a through-
route for traffc.
5
This effectively excluded it from most of the urban
planning projects of the time, as described in the Hauptstadt Berlin
competition of 1957, for the separation of new residential areas and
commercial zones along the newly planned traffc routes. As a result,
the existing urban landscape of semi-derelict housing stock and vacant
tracts of land remained undeveloped.
Although Berlin became economically dysfunctional, it retained
unique ideological and strategic functions for the West German
government, which provided subventions amounting to almost 50%
of the citys total income.
6
In an attempt to save Berlin from becoming
a ghost city, the Berlin Senate (West Berlin had become its own self-
contained state with its own parliament), introduced incentives, in
conjunction with the federal government in Bonn, to bring people
back to the city. The most effective incentive was exemption from
compulsory military service for males living in Berlin. This had a very
specifc effect on the demographics of people moving to Berlin, and
from 1968 onwards the city became a magnet for discontented youth
from all over Germany.
The city, especially Kreuzberg, was described as providing the setting
and infrastructure for a developed, if multi-faceted and hence tension
ridden Second Society.
7
These people were predominantly students,
youth, and immigrant Gastarbeiter. These guest workers were
predominantly Turkish and had no rights of citizenship. Many of the
vacant and deteriorating buildings in Kreuzberg became occupied
with a variety of cooperative enterprises, ranging from residential
communes to alternative businesses. Berlin became the centre of
West German political activism from which the alternative movement
and youth subculture developed. Kreuzberg emerged as the locale and
symbol for this nascent subculture.
8
Kreuzbergs geographic location
on the fringe
9
also became a phrase used to describe its social
situation.
For former East Germany, the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 meant
the abrupt passage from centralised control over land, planning, and
resources, to the mechanisms of western development. This restitution
of private ownership of property nationalised by the communist
regime, resulted in large tracts of property being suspended in
indeterminate ownership or remaining caught within the mechanisms
of the legal system. The successive acquisition of land by the Nazi
5
Marianne Suhr, Urban
Renewal Berlin: Experiences,
Examples, Prospects (Berlin:
Senatsverwaltung fur Bau- und
Wohnungswesen, 1991), p. 58.
6
S. Katz and M. Mayer, Gimme
Shelter: Self-help Housing
Struggles within and against
the State in New York City and
West Berlin, International
Journal of Urban and Regional
Research, 9(1) (1983): 15-45.
7
Ibid.
8
R. Eckert and H. Willems, Youth
Protest in Western Europe:
Four Case Studies, Research
in Social Movements, Conficts
and Change, 9 (1986): 127-153.
9
Suhr, Urban Renewal
Berlin, p. 71.
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regime, the Soviet occupation authorities, then the East German
government, resulted in a complex situation determining ownership
of this property. During the 1990s up to a third of this land of
indeterminate ownership in East Berlin, was once owned by Jewish
people who had either fed Germany or were killed during the war.
10
Additionally, as a result of former East German housing policy and the
absence of renovation associated with private ownership, much of East
Berlins 19th century housing stock was not maintained and slipped
into decay. This condition was so extreme that when the Berlin Wall
was removed, 25000 dwellings were empty in East Berlin. This was
more than twice the number that had been vacant in West Berlin in
the 1980s; (Fig. 3).
Fig. 3. 19th Century building fabric was neglected in East Berlin and replaced
with apartment blocks (Plattenbau). Photo: Dougal Sheridan, 1994-1996.
Thus, in the vacuum of control and responsibility in East Berlin
following the removal of the wall, all kinds of self-generated activities
and projects sprung up as the alternative scene shifted from
Kreuzberg to the eastern side of the city. These groups have been
described as a dense network of subcultures and alternative practices,
encompassing around 200 000 people.
11
It is apparent from Berlins historical circumstances that these
indeterminate territories have resulted from a combination of the
spatial gaps within the city and gaps within the cities regulatory forces.
These indeterminate territories have taken on the form of both empty
or abandoned buildings, and vacant terrains. These buildings, ruins
and urban landscapes all have varied spatial characteristics and urban
10
A. Read and D. Fisher, Berlin The
Biography of a City (London:
Pimlico, 1994), p. 314.
11
Katz and Mayer, Gimme
Shelter, p. 37.
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properties. However, the condition they all share, and that I use here
to defne them as indeterminate, is the absence of the deterministic
forces of capital, ownership and institutionalisation that, to a large
degree govern peoples relationship to the built environment.
This is an understanding of indeterminacy as existing within the
factors affecting the reception of architecture and urban space and
not necessarily within the physical characteristics of these spaces
themselves.
Specifcity and Urban Identity
The waste lands of the city which cut through its centre. They are vacant
or used for what may seem like only minor activities - markets, circuses,
the storage of building materials, motor-repair works, training grounds for
dogs. A journey along the railway lines at times gives the impression of wild
countryside scattered with the remains of an alien culture. The pomposity
of Berlins imperial monuments is somehow mitigated by the landscape in
which they sit.
12
Abandoned buildings offered potential for reuse, and adaptation
in ways limited only by the structures themselves, and the means
and imagination of the occupier. Frequently the buildings potential
permeability was exploited in contrast to the cellular separation
of tenancies and territories characteristic of conventional building
occupancy. These situations offered the opportunity for new uses and
forms of living not possible within the normal tenancy subdivisions.
This enabled the easy insertion of many self-initiated programmes
including theatres, cinema, venues, galleries, cafs, clubs, and
community spaces, allowing these locations to take on public, cultural,
and political roles.
Vacant sites were settled by various mobile and temporary structures
and were used for various transient activities including markets,
circuses, outdoor theatres, parties, and even farming. These spaces
ranged widely in nature. Some aspired to be utopian semi-agrarian
communities playing public roles as places of entertainment and
carnivals, while others were seen as the refuge of the homeless.
The large open spaces remaining where the Berlin Wall had been,
allowed many of these Wagendorfer literally wagon village
to be centrally located on highly prominent sites. With the
Reichstag or other Berlin institutions as a backdrop, these surreal
landscapes appeared to critique conventional monumentality and
fxed urban architecture by visually confronting them with open, un-
institutionalised and implied nomadic space;
13
(Fig. 4).
12
Firebrace, Jasmine
Way, pp. 63-66.
13
J. Hejduk and B. Schneider,
John Hejduk: Riga Exhibition
Catalogue (Berlin: Aedes
Galerie fur Architektur und
Raum, 1988). As objects of
counter-monumentality these
Wagendorfer have a remarkable
equivalence to John Hejduks
victims and his traveling
carnival of objects, animals,
or mobile homes that have
appeared in Berlin, Riga,
Vladivostok and Praha.
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Fig. 4. Wagendorf and farm animals with the Reichstag in the background.
Photo: Dougal Sheridan, 1994-1996.
It is apparent that indeterminacy provides a space for the self-
determination of the occupant. However, I would go further and
suggest from the observations made above that this indeterminacy
allows the occupant a less mediated and more direct relationship with
the specifc qualities of a place; (Fig. 5).
Fig. 5. Informal seating and recreational areas, dwelling structure, and out-
door theatre structure resourcefully exploiting found materials. Photo: Dougal
Sheridan, 1994-1996.
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In the post communist era, Berlins politicians and the citys
development authorities have shown an ambition to establish a
more complete and clear urban identity for Berlin, comparable to
that of cities like Paris and London. Berlins urban environment
was described as consisting of faceless city fragments with isolated
historical buildings, but simply not a city in the tradition of the
great European cities.
14
Architecture was seen to offer the creation
of urban space which can bestow identity on a city torn in half for
so long.
15
These sentiments are still prevalent today within the
cities development authorities as evident in the plans to completely
reconstruct the City Palace (Stadtschloss) on the site occupied by the
former East German Parliament Building. Berlins planning policy,
Planwerk Innenstadt Berlin, planned to fll the gaps within the citys
fabric by restoring the 19th century perimeter block typology under
the guise of critical reconstruction. This plan utilises Architecture as a
tool in the creation of a more singularly defned urban identity.
Fig. 6. Floating caf/restaurant structures, roof terrace, and covered market
all exploiting the specifc qualities of their locations. Photo: Dougal Sheridan,
1994-1996.
In these terms, indeterminate territories are spaces the city chose
not to identify within itself, until recently. Identifcation is usually
linked to the processes of incorporation, registration and control.
The indeterminacy of these areas arises largely due to their position
outside these forces. The absence of those conditions that usually
predetermine our perception of such places, makes our encounter
with their specifc qualities all the more intense. For example, a canal
14
Senatsverwaltung fur
Stadtentwicklung & Umweltschutz
und Tecnologie, Planwerk
Innenstadt Berlin, Erebnis,
Prozess, Sektorale Planungen
und Werkstatten, No. 25 (Berlin:
Kulturbuch Verlag, 1999).
15
Eberhard Diepgen (mayor
of Berlin) in R Stein (ed.),
Hauptstadt Berlin Central
District Spreeinsel: International
Competition for Urban
Design Ideas 1994 (Berlin:
Birkhauser Verlag, 1994).
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bank is used for foating structures, existing waste vegetation becomes
a garden, a roofess ruin becomes a terrace, an industrial shed a
covered market, and a bank vault becomes a club. (Fig. 6.) In these
instances the particular qualities of these places becomes memorable
and these conditions of indeterminacy offer us the opportunity for an
unmediated experience of the specifcity of a place. These conditions
have also been described as allowing the creation of immediate
identities at the moment in which the institutional whole is overruled
by the everyday.
16
Urban Subjectivity
They are not lonely, merely without mood; the city in these pictures looks
cleared out, like a lodging that has not yet found a tenant. It is in these
achievements that surrealist photography sets the scene for a salutary
estrangement between man and his surroundings. It gives free play to the
politically educated eye, under whose gaze all intimacies are sacrifced to
the illumination of detail.
17

At this stage I would like to refer to Walter Benjamins descriptions
of urban experience based on his memory of similar spaces in Berlin
from the turn of the previous century, which he describes in A
Berlin Chronicle. Benjamin developed a topographical conscience
wherein he organised experience architecturally into areas of the
city. He contrasts the world of respectability, affuence, apparent
completeness, and permanence with the urban landscape of the
subterranean, forgotten, incomplete or deserted spaces of the other.
However, it is in these spaces and not the countless facades of the
city that Benjamin encounters the past and describes, life pausing.
18

Benjamin also encounters these outmoded redundant areas of cities
in Eugene Atgets photographs of 1920s Paris, as described above;
(Fig. 7).
The abandoned spaces in these photographs are of the last pre-
modern remnants of Pariss medieval streets. Theses are images of
the 19th century equivalents of the dysfunctional tracts in todays
cities, described by such terms as terrain vague. These images also
documented the Zone, a strip of land on the periphery of Paris
inhabited by a colony of rag pickers and scrap merchants, Romany and
squatters: the poor and the disenfranchised who didnt ft into the new
order of Housemans Paris; (Fig. 8).
16
K. Cupers and M. Miessen, Spaces
of Uncertainty (Wuppertal: Verlag
Mueller & Busmann, 2002).
17
Walter Benjamin, A small History
of Photography in One Way
Street and Other Writings, trans.
E. Jephcott and K. Shorter (New
York: Verso, 1985), pp. 240-257.
18
Walter Benjamin, A Berlin
Chronicle in Refections, trans.
E. Jephcott (New York: Harcourt
Brace Jovanocial, 1978), p. 25.
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Fig. 7. Coin Rue du Renard et Pierre au Lard - Vue prise de la rue St. Merri
(4e), Eugene Atget, 1912, albumen print; supplied by George East Man
House: International Museum of Photography and Film.
Fig. 8. Porte de Montreuil - zone des fortifcations - zoniers, Eugene Atget,
1913, albumen print; supplied by George East Man House: International
Museum of Photography and Film.
The illumination of detail was central to Benjamins appreciation
of Atgets photos. In Benjamins archaeological analogy of memory,
the goal is the treasure hidden within the earth: the images severed
from all earlier associations that stand like precious fragments or
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torsos in the collectors gallery - in the prosaic rooms of our later
understanding.
19
Atgets images of these indeterminate spaces do
not describe the complete whole that fts seamlessly, both spatially
and historically, into the apparent continuum of the city. Instead,
these spaces are characterised by the fragment, which implies both
as a spatial incompleteness in the body of the city, and the temporal
discontinuity of places where life paused.
The implication is that these gaps in the spatial continuum of the
city also exist as gaps in the temporal continuum of the city. By
being both spatially dislocated from the city, and displaced from its
administrative structures, these indeterminate territories are the
spaces where fragments of the city fall out of the illusion of historical
continuity. These spaces of indeterminacy, by existing as gaps or
cracks in the hegemonic forces of the city, escape the processes of
identifcation and incorporation that tend to locate objects, events,
and our understanding of them within the dominant structures of the
present.
Benjamin describes the fragment of the past dislodged from the
illusion of historical continuity allowing the illumination of detail.
The past is not found in the continuity of urban identity, but in the
specifc dislodged or discovered fragment. On the urban scale, the
illumination of detail manifests itself in the specifcity of these
deserted spaces and fragments. This is because they exist outside the
frame of urban identity, which usually presents an image of historical
continuity.
These fragments have the potential to be read as critical constellations
of the past and present, or as dialectical images.
20
As abandoned or
disconnected fragments of the past, they fracture the smooth totality
of the present, allowing potentially demystifying insights into political
reality. Dialectical images are described as those rough and jagged
places at which the continuity of tradition breaks down and reveals
cracks providing a hold for anyone wishing to get beyond these
points.
21

What occurs at this unmediated junction between the specifcity of a
place and those occupying it? What opportunities does this offer to
those occupying such a space and do such spaces provide a critical
position from which to observe the city?
19
Ibid., p. 26.
20
Susan Buck-Morss, The Dialectics
of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and
the Arcades Project (London:
MIT Press, 1989), p. 290.
21
Walter Benjamin, Das Passagen-
Werk, ed. Rolf Tiedemann &
Hermann Schweppenhuser
(Frankfurt am Main: Verlag,
1972) cited in Buck-Morss, The
Dialectics of Seeing, p. 290.
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The Space of Subculture
Subcultural groups usually fnd themselves differentiated from
more mainstream culture by: ethnicity, occupation, leisure,
sexual orientation, age, and other defning traits. In German, the
word subkultur is commonly used, not just in sociological and
anthropological contexts, but also to describe various forms of fringe
cultural production.
22
Sola-Morales description of terrain vague as
mentally exterior in the physical interior of the city, parallels the
situation of subcultural groups within society. Subcultures often
aspire to be, or are positioned by dominant culture as outside society;
(Fig. 9).
Fig. 9. Youth subculture,
Brunnen Str 6&7. Photo:
Dougal Sheridan, 1994-1996.
22
Basiskultur or base culture
is also used in the media to
describe these cultural events.
23
Dick Hebdige, Subculture: The
Meaning of Style (London:
Routledge, 1979), p. 81.
24
Mike Brake, The Sociology
of Youth Culture and Youth
Subcultures (London: Routledge
& Kegan Paul, 1980), p. 11.
Subcultures are also characterised by situations in which cultural
norms and traditions do not match lived experience. Dick Hebdige
in his analysis of a series of case studies fnds that each subcultural
instance represents a solution to a specifc set of circumstances, to
particular problems.
23
This explains the rapid evolution of subcultural
groups when social, economic, cultural, and demographic conditions
begin to change. The specifcities defning subcultures are borne out
of their attempts to resolve collectively experienced problems arising
from contradictions in the social structure.
24
Indeed subcultures
tend to construct themselves more predominantly out of social and
material experience than from the cultural baggage handed down by
tradition. Therefore subcultures evolve at a more dynamic and reactive
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pace than established cultures and in many respects represent the
marginalised edge of cultural change. These properties suggest that
subcultural groups are potentially more responsive than mainstream
culture to the availability and specifc qualities of the environments
they occupy.
Subcultures often fnd themselves in the position of attempting to
construct meaning without domicile over the forms, objects, language
and spaces of the culture in which they are situated. They tend to
be isolated from the productive apparatus maintaining the culture
by which they are surrounded. This does not preclude subcultural
construction of meaning but determines that its methods are indirect
and liable to be deviant. Subcultural groups construct meaning
by taking those objects, signs, or forms from dominant culture and
injecting them with their own meaning. This can be understood as an
imbuing with meaning or an appropriation of existing cultural signs
or artefacts with new or contradictory signifcance. This subversion or
fracturing of existing identities is synonymous with generating more
specifc identities. Hebdige investigates this in relation to the cultural
objects of fashion and compares Roland Barthes activity of exposing
the artifcial, arbitrary nature and ideological core of dominant
cultures constructions, to the way subcultures likewise interrupt the
processes of normalisation;
25
(Fig. 10).
Fig. 10. Subcultural appropriation of existing objects and spaces: Photo:
Dougal Sheridan, 1994-1996.
25
Hebdige, Subculture: The
Meaning of Style, p. 11.
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However, it is apparent that these techniques are also applied at the
scale of spaces and buildings within the city. Indeed bricolage, the
juxtaposition of apparently incompatible realities, is pronounced in
the occupation of spaces and objects within subculture. This is evident
in examples like the visual confrontation between the architectural
monument and mobile, self-built dwelling structures; the discarded
objects that are assembled into art objects (like the bus wreck that
becomes sculpture); and the found objects that have their original
meanings and functions subverted (like the telephone box which has
been turned into a toilet cubicle); (Fig. 11).
Fig. 11. Discarded objects assembled into art objects, services, and dwelling
structures. Photo: Dougal Sheridan, 1994-1996.
The relationship between urban experience and the formation of
subculture was formulated by Claude Fischer in his subcultural theory
of urbanism.
26
He states that the distinctive claim of subcultural
theory remains that, all else equal, cities increase rather than diminish
ethnic distinctiveness.
27
He also frames this inversely, stating that,
urbanism is correlated with unconventionality, in part because it
stimulates development of subcultures.
28
Countering arguments to
this theory are based in the Wirths theory of social breakdown.
29

This theory explains the higher rates of unconventionality in cities in
terms of the breakdown of social control and moral order, rather
than, the emergence of innovative subcultures and the diffusion of
their culture to others in the city.
30
It is not surprising that public
perceptions of the subcultural spaces associated with Berlins
indeterminate territories swing between these poles.
26
Claude Fischer, The
Subcultural Theory of
Urbanism, American Journal
of Sociology 101(Nov) (1995).
27
lbid, p. 556.
28
lbid, p. 546.
29
Louis Wirth, Urbanism as a Way
of Life, American Journal of
Sociology 44 (July) (1938): 3-24.
30
Fischer, Berlin The Biography
of a City, p. 560.
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In relation to these theories of subcultural formation, it is apparent
there are more factors than just the effects of population size and
density stimulating subcultural formation or accumulation. The
availability of accessible urban space for subcultural groups is a
signifcant factor: this can be seen in the extraordinary circumstances
of Kreuzbergs isolation by the wall from 1961 to 1989 and the
correspondingly exaggerated nature of its social history; and likewise,
the shift of the subcultural scene into East Berlin directly after the
removal of the wall to take advantage of its empty and undefned
territories.
The nature and availability of urban space is indeed a factor that has
been left outside the scope of Fishers subcultural theory of urbanism.
In fact, studies of subcultural groups often tend to concentrate on their
cultural artefacts such as fashion, style, and music, but appear not to
include their spatial environments.
31

Acknowledging the relationship between the accumulation of
subcultures and the availability of space prompts the question as to
whether the nature of this space allows or affects the formation of
subcultures. Do these spaces have a formative effect, or do they just
provide space for existing subcultural groups? The understanding of
indeterminate territories as spaces outside hegemony, offering the
experience of urban fragments removed from the spatial and temporal
continuum of the city, suggests that these spaces may indeed have a
formative effect.
One could imagine that a subcultural space, like subcultural style,
would involve both the occupation of some found form and its
investment with new contradictive qualities and meanings. The
ideology of the dominant culture, according to Hebdige, is often the
most controlling yet unrecognised factor in physical structures. Social
relations and processes are primarily understood by individuals
through the structures in which they are represented to those
individuals. This is particularly the case in buildings, where implicit
ideological assumptions are literally structured into the architecture.
32
Case Study
We will now look at a case study that documents the occupation of
an abandoned complex typical of Berlins courtyard buildings. This
Besetztes Haus which literally translates as occupied house was
documented by the author over the period of a year spent living there
as a participant observer in the years from 1994 and 1996. As we move
through the plans of these buildings I will describe the observations
31
Sarah Thornton, Club Cultures:
Music, Media and Subcultural
Capital (Cornwall: Polity
Press, 1995). Sarah Thornton
identifes and studies nightclubs
as environments of subcultural
groups (youth culture), but her
observations are sociological
rather than spatial.
32
Hebdige, Subculture: The
Meaning of Style, p. 12.
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The Space of Subculture in the City
that were made. Colours and hatching have been used to map the
different occupant groups and uses; (Fig. 12-16).
Private/Public Spatial Graduation
Individual Spaces Bedrooms, Studies/Work spaces
Group Spaces
Kitchen, Eating, Social,
Bathrooms, Toilets
Group Shared Spaces
Bathrooms, Laundries, TV room,
Childrens space
Complex
(Used by all groups)
Computer/Photocopying room,
Library, Workshops, Darkroom,
Band rehearsal
Semi- public
Unter Druck theatre group, Latin
American resource group
Fig. 12. The breakdown of spaces and
facilities from private to public was
highly graduated and complex. It ranged
from an individuals space, to spaces
shared between a few individuals, to
group spaces, to spaces shared between
groups, to spaces shared by the whole
complex, to spaces accessible to a specifc
public, to spaces accessible to the general
public. The courtyards were used as
shared outdoor spaces and event spaces
for parties, performances etc. both for
building inhabitants and the public.
Images: Dougal Sheridan, 1994-1996.
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Fig. 13. Groups defne themselves by
characteristics such as gender, sexuality,
ethnicity, youth subculture, but also by the
description of the particular part of the
building they occupy. For example Latin
American womens group, Lubbi men, a mens
group, a women and Lesbian group, a punk
group, a Turkish group, and then Hinter Haus
back house, Q-Haus cross house groups. In
these last two instances the names describe
both the groups and the parts of the building
they occupy. The more public or widely shared
spaces fnd their logical locations in the lower
levels of the buildings. The complexs shared
facilities (library, computer room, workshop,
darkroom etc) occur on the ground or frst
foor levels and public access spaces like the
nightclub and caf/bar are on ground level.
Images: Dougal Sheridan, 1994-1996.
Fig. 14. The permeability of the building is
increased and manipulated to suit changing
needs. This involved the removal of walls
and foors to make bigger social or individual
spaces. This increased permeability allows the
building to be traversed in numerous ways
as more stairwells become interconnected.
The threshold and usually the only securable
door in a building is from the courtyard to a
buildings stair well. As a result the stair well
becomes understood and treated more as an
interior. In fact there tends to be no locks
applied to any of the doors on the interior of
the building. (In conventional occupancy the
threshold point is between each stair landing
and the individual apartment.) Shared services
like telephones were located on stair landings,
which became locations of much informal
interaction. Images: Dougal Sheridan, 1994-
1996.
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Fig. 15. The scale of various building
sections infuences group sizes and
spaces. This means that the scale of
occupancy is larger than single units,
in many cases operating at the scale of
an entire section of building. The Berlin
courtyard building type is compatible
with a complex and changing form of
building occupation. The density of
its arrangement, the even distribution
of stairs wells, and its courtyard
arrangement has a decisive infuence on
how the building is occupied. Images:
Dougal Sheridan, 1994-1996.
Fig. 16. The various spaces of a particular
group from individual to shared/social
will not always be directly adjacent to each
other and may well have the circulation or
shared spaces of other groups intersecting
or overlapping their spaces. The extent
and arrangement of a groups spaces are
fexible and change as the groups size
and spatial needs transform. Different
territories expanding and contracting in
the building may result from a change
in occupancy or be due to an occupant
forming living arrangements with a
different group in the building. New sub-
groups may also form and create new
social spaces and facilities for themselves.
In some cases new vertical connections
were made by building new stairs up
through the structure to connect specifc
rooms. Images: Dougal Sheridan, 1994-1996.
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Conclusions
It is apparent that subcultural groups are exploiting the spatial
opportunities observed in the case study and the spatial arrangements
suiting these groups would often not be possible within the constraints
of conventional building use. The occupants and building mutually
infuence each other to a degree not encountered in usual building
occupancy. The occupants manipulate the fabric to suit their varied
and changing needs and the buildings form and arrangement affects
the groups formations and usages. In fact, in some cases the building
is incorporated into a groups identity.
Investigating the spatial environment of these groups sheds light on
the objects and structures they are subverting or supplanting. This
example of a Besetztes Haus is most illuminating when we compare
the diagram of its occupation and use to that of the conventionally
occupied building of the same type. We see the certainty and apparent
permanence of a stratifed division of space, compared to the more
fuid and changing occupancy of the Besetzte Haus; (Fig. 17). Latent in
the occupation of these indeterminate territories is the questioning of
existing structures, be they material or ideological. The way in which
the building is occupied and manipulated is similar to subcultures
occupation, de-naturalisation, and re-inscription of cultural artefacts
with new meaning.
Fig. 17. Comparison of the spatial arrangement in Brunnen Str 6&7 and the
conventional occupancy arrangement of a courtyard building. Areas are colour
coded to match the case studys plans. Image: Dougal Sheridan, 1994-1996).
The absence of internal locks, potentially something architectonically
insignifcant, has an enormous effect on the space of these buildings.
The resulting fuidity being equivalent to the de-institutionalisation
of space where suddenly human judgement, tact, trust and
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communication must accomplish the job usually done by the physical
division of space. This opening up of space is further perpetrated
by the removal of walls, resulting in an increased permeability and
larger rooms. The application of locks to individuals rooms within the
building is usually regarded as an indication of the disintegration of
the community. The tasks of improving or repairing these buildings
also necessitate a large degree of collective action and decision-
making.
In the situations presented by these abandoned buildings, the rules
of occupancy are not laid out to begin with, and the division and
distribution of space and facilities are not necessarily predetermined.
Thus the occupants are confronted with questions about living and
the organisation of space that usually would not be encountered. As
a result, normal assumptions about living arrangements may well be
questioned and found to be inapplicable. Indeed, the buildings nature
may suggest a different type, or scale of living arrangement. The
prompting of different or unconventional ideas or ways of living would
indicate that these spaces could indeed have an effect on the formation
of subcultural groups. Both these instances that of the building
affecting the social interaction of the inhabitants, and the inhabitants
adaptation of the building to allow different social needs - suggest
that occupant and building have a less mediated relationship than is
usually encountered. This has already been described as the encounter
with the specifc potential of an urban fragment devoid of the citys
usual ordering structures. The specifc nature and fabric of the
buildings becomes magnifed by the absence of external deterministic
forces. Such situations allow the occupant to interact with the built
fabric as though it were a landscape that is settled rather than a
structure where the rules of occupancy are pervasive. Observations
made in the case study of this increased mutual infuence between the
urban fabric and those occupying it, revealed the formative effects of
these indeterminate territories on subcultures.
Although not the focus of this study, it would be interesting to revisit
the points I have elaborated here, in relation to Berlin today and other
contemporary cities. Hebdiges observations are based on subcultural
groups of the 70s and 80s and refect the strong dichotomies of the
ideologies of that time. Several of the points referred to above also
refect the opposing ideologies and intense contrasts and energy that
defned Berlins urban situation during the 90s, when this research
was carried out.
However, since this time, the distinctions between mainstream
and subcultural, controlled and indeterminate have become more
nuanced both in the spaces and the pluralism of those who use them.
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This is evident in Cupers and Miessens Spaces of Uncertainty,
which investigates life in these left over spaces of Berlin, within the
broader discourse on public space. In the last decade some of these
indeterminate spaces and the initiatives that took root in them
have disappeared, while others have evolved into more formalised
scenarios. It is hoped this essay provides an understanding of the
circumstances that created these indeterminate spaces and the culture
and history of their occupation.
The occupation and reinvention of disused or indeterminate areas
of Berlin, described as the realm of subcultural groups in the 70s
and 80s in Kreuzberg and the early 90s in East Berlin, has recently
been termed the activity of urban pioneers and recognised and
championed by the Berlin Department of City Development
(Senatsverwaltung fur Stadtentwicklung) in its publication of the
same name.
33
Projects that range from alternative forms of living to
leisure and cultural programmes are described as temporary use
projects. This has allowed the retrospective offcial acknowledgment
and acceptance of many unconventional self-initiated projects while
subtly asserting the permanence of landownership, by referring to
them as temporary.
Temporary use projects are increasingly of strategic importance for urban
development, for space pioneers open up new development prospects at
disused sites that defy the bounds of traditional urban planning.
34
Fig. 18. Potsdammer Platz, 1994. Photo: Dougal Sheridan, 1994-1996.
33
Senatsverwaltung fur
Stadtentwicklung, Urban
Pioneers: Temporary Use and
Urban Development in Berlin
(Berlin: Jovis Verlag, 2007).
34
Ibid.
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This publication goes on to document and provide a handbook of
the processes and players involved in realising such projects. It
contrasts ironically with the equivalent publications and agenda of
the Senatsverwaltung fur Stadtentwicklung at the time that the
urban pioneering activities were perhaps at their most formative
during the early 90s;
35
(Fig. 18). Needless to say the public spaces
and informal cultural facilities that evolved out of the opportunities
of indeterminacy remain less generic than those produced by the
planned urban development of this period; (Fig. 19). And while
many of these spaces have since moved to more peripheral areas,
disappeared, or changed, the expectations and opportunities they offer
continue to persist and evolve.
Fig. 19. Berlin urban beach, 2006. Photo: Dougal Sheridan, 1994-1996.
35
Senatsverwaltung fur
Stadtentwicklung, Ideen fur
Berlin: Stadtebauliche und
Landschaftsplanerische
Wettbewerbe von 1991-1995
(Berlin: Kulturbuch-Verlag 1996).
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vol.1 (1)
Architecture and Contingency
Architecture and Contingency
Jeremy Till
Contingency is, quite simply, the fact that things could be otherwise
than they are.
1
The paper makes the argument that architecture is through and
through a contingent discipline, but that architects have to a large
extent attempted to deny this contingency through a retreat to notions
of order, beauty and cleanliness. This stance can be traced from the
rst principles of Vitruvius, with his simplistic, but pervasive call
for coherence, through to Le Corbusier, with his cry for architecture
to be rid of contingent presences. Using the arguments of Zygmunt
Bauman, it becomes clear that this rejection of contingency is not a
trait of architecture alone, but of modernity as a whole. From this it is
clear that the denial of contingency is not simply an issue of aesthetics
and visual order, but a much wider one of social control and cultural
cleansing. Whilst architects might acknowledge the former, they are
less good at dealing with the latter. The paper consciously mixes the
high with the low in its sources and style, in a very partial prompt
that architecture needs to open up to such transgressions. It is, as a
reviewer of the paper rightly said, a bit of a rollercoaster ride.
1
William Rasch, Niklas Luhmanns
Modernity: The Paradoxes of
Differentiation (Stanford, CA: Stanford
University Press, 2000) p. 52.
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Architecture and Contingency
New Labour Vitruvius
I have always had a problem with Vitruvius, the Roman author
of the frst treatise on architecture. Just because he was frst does
not necessarily make him right, but his shadow over architecture
remains long. It is not too much to say, writes Kojin Karatani, that
(until the late 18C) the work of the architect was meant to fll in the
margins of Vitruvian writing.
2
In many ways the Vitruvian legacy
has lasted beyond the late 18C. His triad of commodity, frmness and
delight remains on the architectural rosary, even if the beads have
been updated to refect contemporary concerns with use/function,
technology/tectonics and aesthetics/beauty. There is an uncritical,
unthinking, acceptance of a baton being passed from century to
century, a solace in the prescription.
3
This is not to say that buildings
should not be usable, stand up and generally be delightful rather
than miserable, but these qualities are so self-evident that they should
be background beginnings rather than the foreground ends that the
Vitruvian dogma suggests.
But my problem is not just with the blandness of the triad; it is more
to do with the wider remit of the Ten Books. I decided, Vitruvius
writes with a certain immodesty, that it would be a worthy and
most useful thing to bring the whole body of this great discipline
to complete order. The ambitious task of calling the discipline
to complete order applies not just to the body of professionals
Vitruvius gives precise instructions as to what should be included in an
architects education but extends to the products of that discipline.
Architecture, he writes, depends on ordinatio, the proper relation
of parts of a work taken separately and the provision of proportions
for overall symmetry.
4
Here we have the frst confation of the values
of profession, practice and product that is to be repeated throughout
architectural history: a prescription of order that applies equally to
the knowledge of the profession, the structure of practice and the
appearance of buildings.
As Indra McEwen convincingly shows, the dominating metaphor
in the Ten Books is that of the body (the whole body of this great
discipline) and the defning feature of the body is its coherence and
unity. Bodies were wholes, she notes, whose wholeness was, above
all, a question of coherence. The agent of coherence in the body
of the world and in all the bodies in it was ratio.
5
Right from the
beginning, then, we get the identifcation of the architecture as an
act of imposing order, of taking the unruly and making it coherent.
However, this is not an aesthetic act alone in terms of ratio and
symmetry. Vitruvius had greater ambitions than simply defning taste.
I realised, he writes in the preface directed to the Emperor Augustus,
2
Kojin Karatani, Architecture as
Metaphor, trans. Sabu Kohso (Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press, 1995), p. ix.
3
It is not surprising that over the
years many have found solace in the
prescription commodity, frmness,
delight as the clear account of what a
building should incorporate leaving it to
experienced designers and builders to
interpret this within the tacit assumptions
of a supposedly shared culture.
Steven Groak, The Idea of Building
(London: E & FN Spon, 1992), p. 54.
4
The Vitruvius quotes are from the
translations in Indra Kagis McEwen,
Vitruvius: Writing the Body of
Architecture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,
2003), pp. 17, 65.

The sections in Vitruvius
are Book 4, Pref and 1.1.2. Ordinatio
means literally a setting in order.
5
Ibid., p. 55.
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Architecture and Contingency
that you had care not only for the common life of all men and the
regulation of the commonwealth, but also for the ftness of public
buildings that even as, through you, the city was increased with
provinces, so public buildings were to provide eminent guarantees for
the majesty of empire. McEwan brilliantly shows how this passage
and others supporting it, indicate the wider pretensions of Vitruvius
to tie his architectural approach into the imperial programme of
expansion and authority: it was not architecture as such that initially
attached Vitruvius to Julius Caesars might. It was, rather, the
connection of architecture to imperium.
6
What is happening here is
that under the more-or-less benign cloak of aesthetic codes, Vitruvius
is slipping in a distinctly non-benign association with social reform
and imperial power. The term ordering all too easily confates the
visual with the political. As I have said, just because he was frst
does not necessarily make him right but it certainly makes Vitruvius
infuential, because the mistaken (and dangerous) confation of visual
order with social order continues to this day, with profound ethical
consequences.
My second year lecture series
is called Architecture and
Ideas. The frst lecture starts
with a quote from a critic
writing about the house that
Sarah and I designed and live
in. The critic writes: It has
too many ideas. This is not a
compliment. In architecture,
having too many ideas is a
signal of confusion, whereas
one idea rigorously carried through is a mark of order and control.
7

Where in other disciplines having ideas is the lifeblood, in architecture
they are edited. To illustrate this intellectual conundrum, I put up a slide
with Vitruviuss mantra on it. COMMODITY : FIRMNESS : DELIGHT.
How dumb is that? I ask. How empty of ideas is that? Then, because
the lecture is at the same time as the UK party political conferences,
I add: It is so bland, so commonsensical, that it could be the Tory
conference mission statement, remembering when the Conservative
party election manifesto was called Time for Common Sense. I got a
complaint for that something to do with political bias so next year
I changed it to the Labour conference mission statement just to see what
would happen, and made an appropriately corporate slide to go with it.
No complaints this time, suggesting that the Vitruvian triad is closer to
the emollient spin of New Labours ordering centre.
6
Ibid., p. 38.
7
Jeremy Till, Too Many Ideas
in Research by Design (Delft:
Technical University Delft, 2001).
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Rogue Objects
In Civilization and its Discontents, Sigmund Freud famously
identifes beauty, cleanliness and order as occupying a special
position among the requirements of civilization.
8
We have just
identifed the combination of beauty and order in the Vitruvian
legacy. Cleanliness adds another dimension: it denotes purity, the
removal of waste, whiteness. It is not for nothing, therefore, that
modernist architectural beauty is so often associated with pure forms,
elimination of decoration, and white walls.
9
And it is not for nothing
that this cleanliness is so often associated with some kind of moral
order made possible by the actions of the architect/artist. This is a
theme from Plato The frst thing that our artists must do [] is to
wipe the slate of human society and human habits clean [] after that
the frst step will be to sketch in the outline of the social system
10
to
Le Corbusier: COAT OF WHITEWASH. We would perform a moral
act: to love purity! whitewash is extremely moral.
11
In the rush of
words, we overlook the offensiveness of the association of visual purity
with social morality.
The three terms, beauty, cleanliness and order form a triangle; in
fact a Bermuda triangle that eliminates anything that might threaten
its formal (and social) perfection. Thus alien objects, dirt, the low,
the supposed immoral are cast aside in the pursuit of purity. If we
return to the Vitruvian metaphor of the body, then it is clear that
the triangle will only tolerate the classical body. In their seminal
book on transgression, Stallybrass and White identify the classical
body as the abiding symbol of high order: the classical body was
far more than an aesthetic standard or model. It structured [] the
characteristically high discourses of philosophy, statecraft, theology
and law.
12
The classical body signifes an ordered body of knowledge
as well as an ordered system of form. The Vitruvian body, on which
so much architecture still leans for support, is thus much more than
a nice metaphor of coherence; it designates a closed, homogeneous,
monumental, centred and symmetrical system.
13
If the classical body (of architecture, of knowledge) is to be ordered,
then it must also in metaphorical terms be healthy. Order is the oldest
concern of political philosophy, Susan Sontag writes in Illness as
Metaphor, and if it is plausible to compare the polis to an organism,
then it is plausible to compare civil disorder with an illness.
14
Any
sign of illness is a threat to order, and as Sontag makes all too clear,
the worst illness of all is cancer. She shows how illness, and in
particular cancer, is often used as a metaphor to describe the malaise
of society. No specifc political view seems to have a monopoly of
this metaphor. Trotsky called Stalinism the cancer of Marxism, the
8
Sigmund Freud, Civilization
and Its Discontents (London:
Penguin, 2002), p. 40.
9
See Mark Wigleys exhaustive survey
of whiteness, fashion and cleanliness
in modern architecture: Mark Wigley,
White Walls, Designer Dresses
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995).
10
Section 501a of The Republic: Plato,
The Republic, trans. Desmond Lee
(London: Penguin, 1974), p. 237.
11
Le Corbusier, The Decorative Art of
Today, trans. James Dunnett (London:
Architectural Press, 1987), pp. 188, 92.
12
Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, The
Politics and Poetics of Transgression
(London: Methuen, 1986), p. 22.
13
Loc. cit.
14
Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor
(London: Penguin Books, 1979), p. 76.
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vol.1 (1)
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Gang of Four were called the the cancer of China, and the standard
metaphor of Arab polemics [] is that Israel is a cancer in the heart
of the Arab world.
15
For the person with cancer, this metaphor has
the effect of casting them out as untouchable; cancer is seen as a
kind of punishment. For society, the cancerous metaphor demands
aggressive treatment in order for a cure to be effected. Cancer must be
rid of for the healthy body to be re-established and so for order to be
reconstructed.
And so when Le Corbusier declares in Prcisions, that to create
architecture is to put into order,
16
it is no surprise to fnd that, at
the same time, he likens the city (as the thing to be ordered) to a
sick organism. Nor is it any surprise to note that the illness that Le
Corbusier constantly evokes as metaphor for the sickness of the city,
architecture, and the academy is cancer.
17
If the city has a biological
life
18
which has been infected by illness, then order can only be
effected through radical surgery; the primary care of medicine will
not suffce: in city planning medical solutions are a delusion;
they resolve nothing, they are very expensive. Surgical solutions
resolve.
19
Corbusiers metaphor is telling. The stigma of sickness
must be eradicated, cancerous elements cut out, if a fresh start is to be
made. Only then can the quest for ordered perfection be initiated. The
Bermuda triangle again: purity, cleanliness and order eliminating and
excluding the rogue objects. Orderly space is rule governed space,
Zygmunt Bauman writes, and the rule is a rule in as far as it forbids
and excludes.
20
Some time ago there was a wonderful television series called Sign of
the Times. In it the photographer Martin Parr and social commentator
Nicholas Barker quietly observed the British in their homes. As the
occupants talked about their design tastes, the camera froze on a single
poignant feature, maybe a neo-rococo freplace with gas fames (I
think we are looking for a look that is established warm, comfortable,
traditional), maybe a faux antique candelabra (Im put off real
antiques because to me they look old and sort of spooky.) Generally
the effect was too gentle to be mocking, but at times the scene slipped
into pathos. One such moment is set in a sparse modernist interior.
A woman, voice choked with emotion, is lamenting that her husband
will not allow her to have normal things such as curtains: the camera
dwells on expanses of glazing. When her husband Henry appears, he
despairs of the rogue objects disturbing his ordered interior. To come
home in the evening, he says, and to fnd the kids have carried out
their own form of anarchy is just about the last thing I can face.
21
The rogue objects are his childrens toys.
Henry is an architect.
15
Ibid., p. 84.
16
Le Corbusier, Prcisions, trans.
Edith Schreiber Aujame (Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press, 1991), p. 68.
17
The cancerous germ is coming up against
the fne young, vigorous germ, he writes
of decadent art. In biology, it is a dreadful
disease, cancer, which kills by strangling,
of sensualists. The dilemma is in the
heart of the School [] like cancer which
establishes itself comfortably around
the pylorus of the stomach, or around
the heart. The cancer is in excellent
health, of Beaux Art academies. See
respectively:

Ibid., p. 32, Le Corbusier,
The Decorative Art of Today, p. 207, Le
Corbusier, When the Cathedrals Were
White: A Journey to the Country of the
Timid People, trans. Francis Hyslop
(London: Routledge, 1947), p. 116.
18
Le Corbusier, When the Cathedrals, p. 50.
19
Le Corbusier, Prcisions, p. 172.
20
Zygmunt Bauman, Wasted Lives
(Cambridge: Polity Press, 2004), p. 31.
21
All quotes from: Martin Parr and Nicholas
Barker, Signs of the Times (Manchester:
Cornerhouse Publications, 1992).
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Baumans Order
Now is a good time to introduce Zygmunt Bauman. I came across
Bauman in one of those moments of scavenging amongst footnotes, a
happy accident of reading that brings what has been at the periphery
of ones vision right to the centre. Of course, he should probably have
been central all along: One of the worlds leading social theorists,
reads the blurb on the book, and everyone that I now mention
him to returns a pitying look as if to say: Where have you beeeeen
(pinhead). Everyone, that is, except architects and architectural
theorists.
22
This group tends to bypass the foothills of skirmishes
with reality, and move towards the higher ground of battles with
ideals (or their deconstruction), ignoring on the way Deweys warning
that the construction of ideals in general and their sentimental
glorifcation is easy; the responsibilities of studious thought and
action are shirked.
23
There is an intellectual elitism at work here,
with the supposedly superior status of philosophical thought being
used to prop up the fragile constructions of architectural idea(l)s.
Contemporary architectural theory is thus littered with references to
philosophical texts with hardly a nod to current social theory. I suspect
that architectural theorists have largely ignored Baumans territory
because it is too damn real. It reminds us too constantly of our own
fragility, our bodies, our politics. It reminds us, crucially, of others
and our responsibilities to them. In the realm of this sociology there
is no room for autonomy, indeed the whole idea of architecture as an
autonomous discipline would be treated with the disdain it deserves.
Bauman is too prolifc a thinker and writer to summarise here. He has
produced almost a book a year for the past ffteen years and I came to
each new one with a mixture of dread and anticipation. Dread that my
schedule was going to be knocked still further as I would have to take
on board yet more ideas; anticipation that those ideas would, as they
so often did, locate my small architectural world into a much wider
social and political context. Bauman gave me confdence and for this
I became an unabashed fan; maybe not the best way to write a book
(academics are meant to assume an air of detachment), but at least
you now know. Time and time again I would fnd Bauman articulating
ideas that appeared to me to have parallels to, and implications for,
architectural production.
24
It is not just that he directly addresses
issues of contingency, but that he sees contingency as part of a wider
condition of modernity, and so the argument that I was beginning
to develop suddenly made sense in terms of its broader social and
intellectual context.
Thus when Bauman refers to the surgical stance which throughout the
modern age characterised the attitudes and policies of institutionalised
22
One of the few contemporary architectural
theorists to acknowledge Bauman is Kim
Dovey, who employs Baumans concept
of Liquid Modernity in

Kim Dovey,
Fluid Cities (London: Routledge, 2005).
23
John Dewey, The Quest for
Certainty (London: George Allen
& Unwin, 1930), p. 268.
24
Some commentators have noted that
Baumans daughter, Irena, is an architect
and this may account for some of the
architectural threads in his work. See
Peter Beilharz (ed.), The Bauman
Reader (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001).
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powers,
25
we can begin to understand that Le Corbusiers excising
proclamations are not just the rantings of a self-promoting polemicist
but part of more general attitude. Le Corbusier is seen in the wider
picture not as the inventor of modernism, but as an inevitable
consequence of modernity.
26
He is a symptom not a cause. This simple
truth comes as something of a shock to the inhabitants of the black
box of architecture, brought up as they are on a determinist diet of
cause and effect, in which architectural progress is announced in
relation to previous architectural moments. Take for example the
presumed baton passing of William Morris to Voysey to van de Velde
to Mackintosh to Wright to Loos to Behrens to Gropius: these are
Pevsners Pioneers of the Modern Movement, a sequence of falling
dominos that creates the effect of a completely self-contained world.
27

When Marx says that men make history but not in circumstances
of their own choosing, I am sure that he did not mean to exclude
architects, and yet so many of the standard texts of architectural
history remain within the tramlines of a self-referential architectural
world, ignoring the other circumstances that frame architectural
production. Bauman and other social theorists allow us to see that
what we may have assumed as an architectural necessity, is in fact
contingent on a much more powerful pattern of circumstances; they
lever us into an acknowledgment of the contingency of architecture.
And so to repeat, just to shake the inhabitants from their reverie:
Le Corbusier and the others are not a cause of modernism; they are
symptoms of modernity.
In this light what is striking is the way that the principles of
architectural modernism, ft the more general pattern of the will to
order that Bauman identifes as a central feature of modernity. Of all
the impossible tasks that modernity set itself [] the task of order
(more precisely and most importantly, of order as task) stands out.
28

Thus Baumans argument that the typically modern practice [] is the
effort to exterminate ambivalence,
29
puts into context Le Corbusiers
Law of Ripolin with its elimination of the equivocal.
30
It is not just
Le Corbusier who fts this pattern, though he is used by Bauman
to illustrate certain tendencies in modernism as an expression of
the condition of modernity.
31
Bauman describes the modern age as
one that has a vision of an orderly universe [] the vision was of a
hierarchical harmony refected, as in a mirror, in the uncontested and
incontestable pronouncements of reason.
32
In a striking metaphor,
Bauman describes the modern state as a gardening state,
33
bringing
the unruly, the chaotic and the fearful (as represented by nature)
under the rule of order, regularity and control (as represented by the
garden). It is a metaphor that chimes with Zolas caustic dismissal of a
new public square in Paris: It looks like a bit of nature did something
wrong and was put into prison.
34
The ordering of space can thus be
25
Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity
and Ambivalence (Cambridge:
Polity Press, 1991), p. 99.
26
Hilde Heynens explanation of the
difference between modernity (as a
societal condition) and modernism (as
an artistic and intellectual expression)
is useful here: Modernity here is used
in reference to a condition of living
imposed upon individuals by the socio-
economic process of modernisation.
The experience of modernity involves a
rupture with tradition and has a profound
impact on ways of life and daily habits.
The effects of this rupture are manifold.
They are refected in modernism, the
body of artistic and intellectual ideas
and movements that deal with the
process of modernisation and with the
experience of modernity. Hilde Heynen,
Architecture and Modernity: A Critique
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999), p. 1.
The terms are also explored in Marshall
Berman, All That Is Solid Melts into
Air: The Experience of Modernity (New
York: Viking Penguin, 1988), p. 16.
27
Nikolaus Pevsner, Pioneers of Modern
Design, from William Morris to
Walter Gropius, Pelican Books
(London: Penguin Books, 1975).
28
Bauman, Modernity and
Ambivalence, p. 4.
29
Ibid., p. 7.
30
Le Corbusier, The Decorative
Art of Today, p. 192.
31
Zygmunt Bauman, Globalization: The
Human Consequences (Cambridge:
Polity Press, 1998), pp. 41-43.
32
Zygmunt Bauman, Intimations
of Postmodernity (London:
Routledge, 1992), p. xiii.
33
i.e. in Bauman, Modernity
and Ambivalence, p. 30.
34
From Zola, Les Squares. As quoted in
Denis Hollier, Against Architecture:
The Writings of Georges Bataille,
trans. Betsy Wing (Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press, 1989), p. xv.
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seen as part of a much wider ordering of society. Depending on whose
argument you follow, architects are mere pawns in an overwhelming
regime of power and control, or else architects are active agents in
the execution of this power and control.
35
Either way, they are frmly
situated in the real conditions that modernity throws up and not to be
seen in some idealised set-apart space.
There are two key, and interrelated, aspects of Baumans analysis of
modernity and its ordering tendencies. On the one hand he argues that
the will to order arose out of a fear of disorder. The kind of society
that, retrospectively, came to be called modern, he writes, emerged
out of the discovery that human order is vulnerable, contingent
and devoid of reliable foundations. That discovery was shocking.
The response to the shock was a dream and an effort to make order
solid, obligatory and reliably founded.
36
The important word here is
dream. The possibility of establishing order over and above the fux of
modernity is an illusion. It is an illusion because of the second aspect
of his argument, namely that to achieve order one has to eliminate the
other of order, but the other of order can never be fully erased.
The struggle for order is not a fght of one defnition against another,
of one way of articulating reality against a competitive proposal. It is a
fght of determination against ambiguity, of semantic precision against
ambivalence, of transparency against obscurity, clarity against fuzziness.
The other of order is not another order: chaos is its only alternative. The
other of order is the miasma of the indeterminate and unpredictable. The
other is the uncertainty, that source and archetype of all fear.
37

The gardener gets rids of weeds as part of the controlling of nature. As
we shall see with architecture, as with any project of the modern age,
the more one attempts to eliminate the other of the order, the more
it comes back to haunt one. Weeds always come back. The whiter the
wall, the quicker it succumbs to dirt. In their pursuit of an idea (and
an ideal) of order, architects have to operate in a state of permanent
denial of the residual power of the other of order.
Order can thus only really exist as a form of knowledge from
which will issue a series of abstracted procedures such as design,
manipulation, management and engineering (these being core
activities of the modern age for Bauman).
38
As a form of knowledge,
order is subjected to the modern tests of truth and reason and in a
self-legitimating manner passes them with fying colours. Order is
seen as rational and logical because it has been created out of the rules
of reason and logic. Nietzsche is very clear about the limits of this
closed circuit: if somebody hides a thing behind a bush, seeks it out
and fnds it in the self-same place, then there is not much to boast of
respecting this seeking and fnding; thus, however, matters stand with
the pursuit of seeking and fnding truth within the realm of reason.
39

35
The frst approach is broadly that of
Foucault, the second that of Lefebvre.
36
Bauman, Intimations of
Postmodernity, p. xi.
37
Bauman, Modernity and
Ambivalence, p. 7.
38
Ibid.
39
Friedrich Nietzsche, On Truth and Falsity
in Their Extramoral Sense in W. Shibles
(ed.), Essays on Metaphor (Whitewater:
The Language Press, 1972), p. 7.
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The tests of truth and reason are carried out in a sterile laboratory,
doors sealed against the contaminations that the world would
infict. Herein lies the problem that is associated with the autonomy
of architecture. Truth found inside a tightly sealed room, as Lev
Shevstov notes, is hardly of any use outside; judgements made inside
a room which, for fear of draught is never aired, are blown away with
the frst gust of wind.
40
Ideas developed away from the world may
achieve a semblance of purity of truth and reason but this purity
will always be tormented by the fact that the knowledge has arisen
from within the world and eventually will have to return to the world.
Agnes Heller summarises the paradox: One is confronted with the
task of obtaining true knowledge about a world, whilst being aware
that this knowledge is situated in that world.
41
Her solution gives
no solace: in order to overcome this paradox an Archimedean point
outside contemporaneity must be found. However, this is exactly
what cannot be done: the prisonhouse of the present day only allows
for illusory escape.
42
We are left with the illusion of order but closer
inspection reveals that the underlying reality is rapidly unravelling
that semblance.

Our architect Henry, the one who saw toys as rogue objects, clearly
found architecture too unorderly and too unorderable, and so he stopped
practising. Instead he set up a company that manufactures freplaces,
the Platonic Fireplace Company. He fnds peace in the controllable
gas fame playing over little stone cubes, spheres and pyramids in a
semblance of order.
The Ridding of Contingency
In Edmund Bacons classic work on town planning, The Design
of Cities, the titles of the sections are explicit in summarising the
ordering thrust of the argument. Passing through chapters entitled
Imposition of Order, Development of Order and Stirrings of a New
Order one arrives at a page that clearly presents the issues at stake.
43

On it there are two illustrations of Rome. At the top is one of Piranesis
Vedute di Roma etchings. The detail of drawing almost overwhelms
one in its inclusion of low life, weather, fragments, mess, broken
roads, event and vegetating cornices. Each time one looks at it one
fnds something new. Below is Bacons interpretation of the same site.
A few sparse colour-coded lines connecting up isolated monuments;
all is understandable in a glance. One can almost sense Bacons relief
in making the drawing, in his ruthless editing of the contingent.
40
As quoted in Bauman, Modernity
and Ambivalence, p. 82.
41
Agnes Heller, From Hermeneutics in
Social Science toward a Hermeneutics
of Social Science, Theory and
Society (18) (1989): 291.
42
Ibid., p. 292.
43
Edmund Bacon, Design of Cities (London:
Thames and Hudson, 1967), p. 137.
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Out of sight, out of mind. The world, emptied of uncertainty, is now
controlled and controllable. Order all round.
Bacons two drawings make
explicit a general architectural
tendency, that of ridding the
world of contingency so as to
better manipulate that world
into (a semblance of) order.
In a telling passage in When
the Cathedrals Were White
Le Corbusier is waiting at
Bordeaux railway station and
notes down what he sees:
The station is disgusting.
Not an employee on the
crowded platform. An offcial
with a gilded insignia does
not know when the Paris
train will arrive. At the offce
of the stationmaster they
are evasive, no one knows
exactly. General uproar, offensive flthiness, the foor is black, broken
up, the immense windows are black. At 9.00pm the express stops at
platform no 4 completely cluttered with boxes of vegetables, fsh, fruit,
hats, returned empty bags. This short description tells us all we need
to know of Le Corbusiers fears, of his other. Dirt, unruly crowds,
broken time, inexact responses, damaged construction, the lack of
white, and the contamination of categories (food with clothing). Chaos
and transgression all around. But what is really revealing is that Le
Corbusier then slyly hints as to why he is in Bordeaux station. He is
on his way to Pessac, the new modern quarter that he has designed
for Henry Frugs in the suburbs of Bordeaux. It is as if on his journey
from the station to the suburb, Le Corbusier casts off the contingent
presences and so arrives at Pessac cleansed. The buildings there
are pure, ordered, clean, progressive everything that Bordeaux
station is not. He has accomplished the miracle of ineffable space
[] a boundless depth opens up (which) drives away contingent
presences.
44
Well, he has accomplished this in his head. Once he turns
his back, as we shall see, things begin to unravel.
It is important, however, not to see Bacon and Le Corbusier as fringe
fgures waging lonely wars against disorder. They are part of a much
broader trend. If the will to order is an identifying feature of the
modern project, then the means to that end lies in the elimination
of the other of order; it lies in the ridding of contingency. For
44
Le Corbusier, The Modulor, trans.
Peter De Francia and Anna Bostock
(London: Faber and Faber, 1961), p. 30.
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Architecture and Contingency
Bauman, contingency is the twin of order: Awareness of the worlds
contingency and the idea of order as the goal and the outcome of
the practice of ordering were born together, as twins; perhaps even
Siamese twins. The reason is simple: one does not have the need for
order unless one has experienced disorder, one does not conceive of
regularity unless one is buffeted by the unexpected [] Contingency
was discovered together with the realisation that if one wants things
and events to be regular, repeatable and predictable, one needs to do
something about it; they wont be such on their own.
45
And what one
does is to act as the surgeon, separating the Siamese twins, knowing
that one will probably be sacrifced so that the privileged one, the
one with the better structure, can survive. Contingency cannot be
tolerated in the modern project, be it architectural, political, social or
philosophical.
Philosophically, contingency has been demeaned ever since the
initial pairing by Aristotle of contingency with necessity.
46
As one
of his modal categories, contingency becomes the not necessary,
and in the history of ideas subsequently becomes associated with, at
best, the limitation of reason
47
or, at worst, with the other of reason,
irrationality. If a contingent event is an element of reality impervious
to full rationalisation,
48
then it is not surprising that in the realm
of reason, which typifes the modern project, the contingent event
is dismissed as beneath the dignity of explanation. It is consistent
therefore for a philosopher of reason such as Jrgen Habermas to talk
of paralysing experiences with contingency.
49

Contingency must be suppressed as a philosophical category if it is
not to undermine the authority of reason. Probably the most subtle
working of this argument is in Hegel. In order to achieve the essential
task of his Science of Logic, which is to overcome the contingency,
50

Hegel frst introduces the need for contingency, which he beautifully
describes as the unity of actuality and possibility.
51
Contingency
adds a certain concreteness to reality which avoids the pitfalls of
abstracted thinking.
52
For Hegel reality would not be self-suffcient
if it did not contain its own irrationality.
53
He therefore allows
contingency to come to the surface in order to better push it down in
the establishment of the rule of logic.
I introduce this philosophical interlude of the ridding of contingency
not to show off, but as the polished intellectual tip of a much bigger
iceberg. For Bauman modern times are an era of bitter and relentless
war against ambivalence.
54
His most intense example of the war on
ambivalence is the Holocaust.
55
This genocide was the elimination of
the other, but this terrible act was made possible, in the frst instance,
by the dehumanising of the world brought about by, among other
45
Bauman, Intimations of
Postmodernity, p. xii.
46
In Aristotle, De Interpretatione, 22 b11 ff.
47
In classical metaphysics contingency
has always denoted a limitation of
reason. George di Giovanni, The
Category of Contingency in Hegelian
Logic in Lawrence S. Stepelevich
(ed.) Selected Essays on G.W.F.
Hegel (Atlantic Highlands, NJ:
Humanities Press, 1993), p. 42.
48
Ibid.
49
Jrgen Habermas, Postmetaphysical
Thinking: Philosophical Essays
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992), p. 141.
50
di Giovanni, The Category
of Contingency, p. 46.
51
Issues of contingency are discussed
in Science of Logic, Vol. 1, Book2,
Section 3, Chapter 2A. The quote is
from G.W.F Hegel, Science of Logic,
trans. A.V Miller (London: George
Allen & Unwin, 1969), p. 545.
52
Hegel always demanded specifcity
or what he called concreteness Few
philosophers have been so critical of
the type of abstract claims that lack
deteminateness or specifcity. This is
the primary defect of knowledge that
Hegel called understanding which
is to be contrasted with the concrete
determinate knowledge of reason
(Verkunft).

Richard J. Bernstein, Why
Hegel Now? in Philosophical Profles :
Essays in a Pragmatic Mode (Cambridge:
Polity Press, 1986), pp. 157-158.
53
di Giovanni, The Category
of Contingency, p. 56.
54
Bauman, Modernity and
Ambivalence, p. 3.
55
Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity
and the Holocaust (Cambridge:
Polity Press, 1989).
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Architecture and Contingency
factors, the suppression of ambivalence and contingency in the pursuit
of a more ordered and progressive society. Baumans argument is
that we should resist the temptation to identify the Holocaust as a
one-off event, circumscribed by its very Germanness and the so-
called Jewish problem. Nor should we believe that progressive and
supposedly liberalising tendencies will banish the possibility of such
genocide ever happening again. Instead we should see the Holocaust
as a consequence of the patterns and processes of modernity, in
particular the way that the modern world distances us from taking
moral responsibility for our actions.
To go to the furthest shores of humanity (but shores that Bauman
argues are maybe not that far from normal life after all) is to begin
to understand that the war on ambivalence and the ridding of
contingency are not benign processes. It might appear that the
normalising pursuit of order, and certainty and order is self-evidently
sensible. Surely the abolishment of uncertainty must mean that our
lives are more certain? Surely the collective and measured agreement
of morals is better than the subjective response of impulsive
individuals? Surely it is better to share common goals than to promote
fracturing contradictions? But in fact the normalising disguises a
stealthy process of marginalisation of difference, as William Connolly
so convincingly argues in his Politics and Ambiguity. The irony
of a normalising democracy, he writes, is that it [] tends to be
accompanied by the marginalisation of new sectors of the population
or newly defned sectors of the self [] and the suppression of this
ambiguity tends to license the insidious extension of normalisation
into new corners of life.
56
What is normal to one group may be
abnormal to another. The problem is that the defnitions of the normal
are controlled by the powerful and, as generations of feminists have
reminded us, this leads to the suppression of various sectors of society
under the guise of rational ordering. The ridding of contingency, in
whatever feld, thus inevitably brings political consequences with it,
in so much it is predicated on the establishment of a certain set of
values that smother the cacophony of different voices beneath; Le
Corbusiers abhorrence of the general uproar is the other side of his
will to impose his value system. However, all is not lost, because the
driving out of contingent presences is not the once and for all act that
Le Corbusier and many others would have us believe.
56
William Connolly, Politics and
Ambiguity (Madison: University of
Wisconsin Press, 1987), pp. 8-9.
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I am on a visit to the McLaren
headquarters designed by
Norman Foster to house the
production facilities, offces
and associated spin-off
companies of the Formula
One racing group. Many
people are saying that this is
Fosters ideal project. A heady
mix of technology transfer,
undisclosed (i.e. huge) budget, speed, minimal tolerances, vorsprung
durch technik, male hormones and a client (Ron Dennis) who is famously
perfectionist and famously demanding. There was a danger that he and
Norman (who is thought to share these qualities) might clash, but they
are now frm friends (the building is a success). The two even share the
same birthday. How spooky is that? They make cars here, but do not
think grease monkeys and porn calendars. Think white gloves sterile
laboratories with sealed doors. I joke that the specifcation for the
cleaning contract must be longer than that for the building contract,
but am met with stony faces. Neither do I get many laughs either when
a group of silhouetted muscles in black uniforms approach us and I ask
if they have come off the production line as well. I was beginning to lose
patience by then, a decline hastened by a remote control soap dispenser
that had gone berserk and sprayed liquid soap over my expensive new
shirt. It was not just my suppressed anger at the senseless waste of the
whole operation, boys with toys in a sport that effectively sanctioned
global warming. It was not just that the exhibited cars had a better
view than the workers. It was more that there was something deeply
disturbing about the silence, the absolute control and the regime of
power that the architecture asserted. Dont the engineers mind being
seen and watched? I ask, referring to the huge windows that put the
whole process on display. They get used to it, comes the terse reply
that for once eschews the techno-corporate spin used to justify the rest
of the building (Ronspeak as petrolheads affectionately call it).
Counting Sheep
If Le Corbusier had returned
to Pessac in 1964, he would
have found a very different
vision of modern life to
the one he had left for the
incoming tenants some
thirty-fve years before. Open
terraces had been flled in.
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Steel strip windows replaced with divided timber ones complete with
vernacular shutters. Pitched roofs added over leaky fat ones. Stick on
bricks, Moorish features, window cills and other forms of decoration
applied over the original stripped walls. All in all a straightforward
deflement of the masters guiding principles by an ungrateful, even
unworthy, public. Or is it?
Philippe Boudon, in his meticulous documentation of the inhabitation
of Pessac, argues that the combination of Le Corbusiers initial design
and the inhabitants irrepressible DIY tendencies, led to a certain
inevitability that the purity of the original would be overwhelmed
by the urges of everyday life. The fact of the matter, writes Henri
Lefebvre, the philosopher of the everyday, in his introduction
to Boudons book, is that in Pessac Le Corbusier produced a
kind of architecture that lent itself to conversion and sculptural
ornamentation [] And what did the occupants add? Their needs.
57
Their needs. As simple as that. In fact so simple as to make one
wonder why a great philosopher should feel the need to note it. But
it is necessary to state it with full philosophical force in order to
acknowledge that architecture can never fully control the actions
of users. In Architecture, as it wants to be, needs are cajoled into
functions and thus subjected to normalising control. Functions
(mathematical, scientifc and linear) are, however, very different from
needs (full as they are of desires, differences and life), and in the end
of course the needs of the inhabitants at Pessac would well up to claim
the architecture. The distance between functions and needs is just
one of the many rifts that contribute to the gap between architecture
as it wants to be and architecture as it is. I have already fallen foul of
this gap in my use of just the architectural greats and their writings
to introduce my argument. I am effectively setting them up, better to
make them fall into the gap. Clearly not all architects or architecture
accord to the tenets of these greats, but to a large extent architectural
culture has been shaped by them. So whilst it may be easy to parody
these writings, I do it not out of mere dismissal, but in order to break
up the ordered surfaces that we might have taken for granted, and in
so doing, more positively reconstruct alternatives.
58
The gap between architecture as described in these writings and
architecture as it exists in time, partially arises out of the crucial
mistake of confusing architecture as metaphor with architecture as
reality. There is a long tradition of philosophers using the fgure of
the architect to denote rational authority. The architeckton is used
by Aristotle to illustrate the commanding relationship of theory and
practice.
59
In the architect, Plato discovered a fgure who under
the aegis of making is able to withstand becoming.
60
And, most
57
Philippe Boudon, Lived-in Architecture,
trans. Gerald Onn (London: Lund
Humphries, 1972), pp. i-ii. A visit in 2003
revealed that the changes documented
by Boudon are now themselves being
ripped out as the project is restored
back to its original state. Inevitably,
many of the new inhabitants appeared
to be architects or designers.
58
I am absolutely aware that in the
exploitation of this parody, I sometimes
make sweeping generalisations;
architecture tends to stand for everyone
when there are clearly architects operating
out there who do not ft my description
of the profession. However, I am trying
to use parody knowingly. I do not simply
employ it in its negative conception
as a mocking dismissal of ludicrous
or outmoded rituals. For more on the
various ways in which parody has been
used, both negatively and positively
see Margaret Rose, Parody: Ancient,
Modern, and Postmodern (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1993),
pp. 186-90.

As she argues the restriction
of parody to the more negative term in
some modern or late-modern theories
and uses has now been superceded by a
post-modern understanding of both
its complex meta-fctional and comic
aspects (which) may mean that it will
be given some even more complex and
positive functions in the future.
59
For instance in the Metaphysics, Book
III, Part 2 and the Nicomachaean
Ethics, Book VI, Part 4.
60
Karatani, Architecture as Metaphor, p. 6.
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forcefully, there is Descartes who argues that buildings undertaken
and completed by a single architect are usually more attractive
and better planned than those which several have tried to patch up
by adapting old walls built for different purposes [] the latter of
which [] you would say it is chance rather than the will of man
using reason that placed them so.
61
The banishment of chance, the
authority of the individual, the triumph of the rational, the building
of the new on cleared ground these are identifed by Descartes as
the defning attributes of the architect, and so by analogy are then
assumed as the attributes of the philosopher as rational subject. It
is an alliance of mutual convenience. For the philosopher there is a
necessity to refect the metaphysical in the physical, because without
the material world as grounding the immaterial remains just that
immaterial. So the analogous actions of the architect (as originator
of stable constructions) serve as a useful source of legitimation
for philosophical discourse. For the architect the refection of the
philosopher (and in particular the Cartesian philosopher of the
rational) is a means of establishing authority through establishing a
supposedly detached, objective knowledge base. And so the fgure of
architect/philosopher is created.
In reading Descartes, one might assume that he is referring to
the actual actions of the architect and thus that the fgure of the
architect/philosopher is based on some kind of worldly reality. It
may be necessary for both sides to maintain at least an illusion of
this reality without this illusion the fgure loses credence but it
is in fact a conceit. The fgure of the architect/philosopher is simply a
convenient metaphor. This is revealed most clearly in the relationship
being constituted around the common use of language. The terms
of architecture are used to underpin the foundations of metaphysics
to structure knowledge. Thus when Descartes begins the First
Meditation with the words, to start again from the foundations,
62
it
is made clear that the new philosophy of reason is to be demonstrated
in terms of a new construction. Later Heidegger will describe Kants
project in terms of the building trade, with Kant (as architect)
laying the foundations from which the construction of metaphysics
is projected as a building plan. Kant draws and sketches reasons
outline whose essential moment is the architectonic, the blueprint
projected as the essential structure of pure reason.
63

In these examples, and many others, the language of architecture
is being used metaphorically. It is the apparent stability and the
presumed logic of architecture that appeals to the foundational
aspirations of traditional metaphysics, providing a form of
legitimation for the construction of a philosophy. The power of this
association is such that Heidegger can begin to effect a critique of
61
Descartes, Discourse, Part II, Paragraph 1.
62
Descartes, Meditations,
Meditation 1, Paragraph 1.
63
Martin Heidegger, Kant and the
Problem of Metaphysics (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1990), p. 2.
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Western metaphysics through an exposure of the weaknesses of
its architectural metaphors. The architectural image of stability
disguises an inherent weakness in metaphysics, which in fact is not
built on terra frma but an abyss.
64
As Mark Wigley rightly notes,
in this context architecture is a cover and philosophy takes cover in
architecture.
65
This is not to suggest that architects actually read all this diffcult
stuff and thereby get a deluded sense of their own importance as the
mirrors of rational thought. But it is to suggest that the metaphor of
architecture as a stable authority is so powerful, as to make one believe
that this is also the reality of architecture. The danger is not so much
when philosophers come to believe in the myths that this metaphor
promotes; it is when architects do. The Japanese philosopher Kojin
Karatani argues that this has happened, architecture as a metaphor
dominated [...] even architecture itself []
66
It is the metaphorical
will to order and no more than that. We have already seen what
happens when one starts to confuse the metaphorical for the real: the
deluded belief that architecture can be autonomous; the resulting self-
referentiality; the actual will to order; the concomitant suppression
of the contingent. To criticise, as I have done, these aspects of
architectural culture is to take easy pickings, like kicking a man when
he is down, because such architectural culture conceived in all its
purity can put up no resistance to the dirty realism of my boot. In the
end what I am criticising is not really architecture, but a fction of
it a fction that is so powerful that we would all wish to believe it,
but a fction nonetheless. This pure stuff is not architecture, because
architecture is to the core contingent.
67

In one of his early books, Della tranquillita dellanimo, the Renaissance
architect and theorist Leon Battista Alberti recommends that to settle
oneself in times of stress or anxiety one can fnd solace in architectural
reverie: and sometimes it has happened that not only have I grown
calm in my restlessness of spirit, but I have thought of things most
rare and memorable. Sometimes I have designed and built fnely
proportioned buildings in my mind and I have occupied myself
with constructions of this kind until overcome with sleep.
68
Normal
people resort to counting sheep to get to sleep. Renaissance architects
resort to architectural proportion. Sheep (for urban dwellers) and fne
architecture both sit in that twilight zone between day and night, reality
and dream and when one wakes in the morning one is left with no
more than a chimeric memory, revealing the perfection of form as a
mirage never to be attained.
64
Martin Heidegger, An Introduction
to Metaphysics (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1959), p. 93.
65
Wigley, White Walls,
Designer Dresses, p. 39.
66
Karatani, Architecture as
Metaphor, p. xxxii.
67
One of the reviewers of this paper made
some extremely perceptive comments.
The frst was that I had not framed what I
meant by contingency so that contingency
might become anything disorder, dirt,
new empiricism, accidents, materiality,
informe. The other was that in pairing
contingency with order there is the danger
that their relationship is governed by
a complex overdetermination. Both
of these points are right and, to some
extent, I attempt to address them in my
forthcoming book, Architecture Depends
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008), of
which this paper is an early chapter.
68
quoted in Franco Borsi, Leon Battista
Alberti, trans. Rudolf Carpanini (Oxford:
Phaidon, 1977), p. 13. Borsi goes on to
note that: The nights of the ffteenth
century were populated with images:
Paolo di Dono lay awake at night thinking
of sweet perspective and Leonardo was
to praise the straying of the imagination
over the superfcial features of forms
when you lie in bed in the dark.
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A quick conversation about architecture
A quick conversation about the theory and
practice of control, authorship and creativity in
architecture
Kim Trogal & Leo Care
In mainstream architectural practice in the UK, we nd that most
architects are largely concerned with the issues of determination
and denition. At each stage of the process aspects of the project
become increasingly identied, categorised and specied. In this
context indeterminacy is a negative term, synonymous with weakness;
understood as creating a risk for the legal, nancial and professional
position of the individual. As such, architects seek to eradicate
indeterminacy from their work.
The adoption of certain tools and processes serve to limit and x
aspects of the project and the nature of the relationships that create it.
We suggest that these processes are adopted within a particular and
established context that often escapes questioning. It is to this we turn
our attention, and through the form of dialogue, we examine critically
some of the tools and languages of traditional practice and suggest
some alternatives.
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A quick conversation about architecture
Foreword
At the conference from which this publication developed, our
intention was to encourage our student audience to consider
what the topic of the conference might mean for them as future
practicing architects. We wanted to use the opportunity to pose the
question, both to ourselves and to our audience, How might ideas of
indeterminacy alter how we go abut practicing architecture? Through
our conversation, we wanted to emphasise that the work presented
by speakers should not be taken as isolated theory that is abstractly
applied to practice, rather it should be understood as something that
can transform our way of thinking and working. By reecting on our
recent experiences and questioning established processes in practice,
we wanted to use the opportunity to think about how we might begin
to practice differently.
We approached the conference from two differing personal positions.
Having shared our architectural education together at Shefeld
University a few years ago, we have each worked for different
architects, but shared similar concerns over our modes of practice; in
search of something more ethical, transforming and creative. In the
last year, Leo has completed the professional practice course (Part
3) and Kim has begun a research degree (PhD). We were interested
in allowing these contrasting experiences to meet in an informal and
inquisitive way, over our shared concerns. We were the nal speakers
of the day and so in this position we chose to begin a dialogue, to
initiate questioning and debate; specically around the political
potential of indeterminacy in relation to how we go about doing things
as architects.
In the introduction to her essay, The Invisible Mask, Andrea Khan
argues that architecture divides, organises and manages and as such
constitutes a form of control and power. This she argues is achieved
through enclosure, that is to say, through the delineation of particular
spaces for particular uses and this she argues, is the political nature
of architecture.
1
In a similar way, we might view that within the
architectural eld, intellectual property and knowledge is dened and
maintained through the establishment of different boundaries within
the process. As the delineation of spaces for particular uses constitutes
a form of control, so does the delineation of various activities and
duties, by specic groups or individuals, within a process. This
delineation is a means of controlling the process and hence invariably
leads to a control of its architectural product. This is also then, part of
the political nature of architecture.
1
Andrea Kahn The Invisible Mask, in
Andrea Kahn (ed.) Drawing, Building
Text: Essays in Architectural Theory
(New York: Princeton Architectural
Press, 1991), pp. 85-106.
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Along similar lines, and following the work of David Harvey, Katherine
Shoneld connects the xed delineation of space, architecture and
its associated process directly to the development of capitalism. She
writes:
The regular delineation of space whether at the micro scale of a
component, as in the post war building industry, or at the macro scale of
the city smoothes the way to the commodication of space allowing it to
be bought or sold as other products.
2
Again, we can extend this argument to consider architectures
associated processes, and it is here that tension arises between
architectural education, training and the profession. Jeremy Till has
written:
There is a familiar complaint from the architectural profession about
architectural education: You are not preparing students for practice to
which I reply which practice? Underlying the question is an assumption
that there is a single model of practice to which the profession aspires and
it is the task of education to supply students who will passively serve and
support this model.
3
In our dialogue. we wanted to suggest that the delineation of
architectural education is also a signicant issue, and that the Part
3 course serves as professional training at the expense of a more
critical practice. By taking indeterminacy as a specic example, we
wanted to highlight the division of theory and practice in architectural
pedagogical structures, and moreover to suggest indeterminacy
has a radical implication for architectural processes, education and
our ideas of professionalism. By discussing our own experiences
of education and the profession, we wanted to highlight how
indeterminacy in architectural processes is perceived as a weakness
rather than a potential strength. In fact in this context, indeterminacy
is something that we as architects usually try to rid ourselves of as we
continually seek to dene aspects of a project. Indeterminacy is seen
as a risk and increasingly so as a project develops.
The mechanisms and tools we develop as architects, generally reect
the idea that indeterminacy is a weakness. The formal delineation and
determination of architectural processes, acts to control cost, design
authorship and built quality of a building. In this arena, indeterminacy
is understood to create a risk to the legal, nancial and professional
position of the individual. As such, architects adopt standard tools
and processes to safeguard themselves, and thus seek to eradicate
indeterminacy from their work. Francesca Hughes writes:
We go to great lengths to both separate ourselves from and control
the act of making buildings. These lengths, the production of complex
documentation in order to direct construction by others dene the
architect [] like all forms of discipline, the less effective it is, the more
2
Katherine Shoneld, The Use of Fiction
to Reinterpret Architectural and Urban
Space in Iain Borden and Jane Rendell
(eds.) Intersections: Architectural
Histories and Critical Theories
(London: Routledge, 2000), p. 310.
3
Jeremy Till, Five Questions for
Architectural Education paper
presented to the RIBA, UK (1997).
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A quick conversation about architecture
excessively it is employed and the more unbending, frequent and extreme
its application is likely to be.
4
At each stage of the process, be it development of the brief, initial
designs or the production of working drawings, aspects of the project
become increasingly identied, categorised and specied. The tools
employed by architects in practice within this process, such as the
RIBA stages of work, the establishment of tender processes and the
adoption of standard contracts, serve to limit and x aspects of the
project and the nature of the relationships it takes to create it.
The tools adopted by practice are chosen within a particular and
established economic and political context, and it is precisely this
context we sought to question here. We wanted to emphasise that to
work with indeterminacy requires new tools, new ways of working
and ultimately requires a rethinking our professional roles.
5
We
began with the premise that rather than posing a risk to practice,
indeterminacy is essential in creative processes. We felt that in order
to be creative, we need to be open to things, places and people. In
considering indeterminacy and architectural processes, we associate
indeterminacy with openness and generosity to others.
We felt that if we, and our audience, were to take the ideas of the
conference into our working lives we will have to learn to make space
for it.
Kim Trogal: Leo, after 10 years, you are now ocially a fully qualied
architect. Congratulations. To reect on our experiences, I have the feeling
that in the UK we are stuck with the idea that part 2 is about theory,
and therefore irrelevant to practice, but part 3 is something completely dif-
ferent; its about practice and therefore irrelevant to the rest of the school
of architecture.
6
And so it constructs the idea that theory and practice are
divorced from each other. Do you feel your experience reects this?
Leo Care: To help me answer that I had a small diagram, which was very
crude, but it was essentially somebody stood at the beginning of a series of paths
and that was to try to represent how this course the Part 2 course is all
about nding your own way; its about people offering you opportunities. Situ-
ations arise and you choose to follow, to explore different avenues. My feeling
doing the part 3 course, was that all those avenues that had opened up to you
suddenly converged; they came together to form a single route that you had to
go down. So, in a sense the possibility of making space for indeterminacy was
completely taken away from you. I think this goes back to what Jeremy
7
said
this morning, about the profession and architects yearning for simplicity and not
opening our eyes to the muckiness of life, or affording people the chance to look
more openly at situations.
4
Francesca Hughes, Stabat Mater:
on standing in for matter in Doina
Petrescu (ed.) Altering Practices:
Feminine Politics and Poetics of Space
(London: Routledge, 2007), p. 267.
5
Katie Lloyd Thomas has drawn a
connection between the establishment
of particular architectural drawings in
the process and their connection to the
profession. She writes: Although it is
often said that architectural drawings
allows communication between the
architect and the builder, historically
it has produced a separation [] The
standardisation of architectural drawing
[] coincides with the emergence of
the profession. Katie Lloyd Thomas
Building While Being In It: Notes
on drawing otherhow, in Petrescu
(ed.) Altering Practices, pp. 89-112.
6
In the UK, the title Architect is
legally protected, for which the Part
3 qualication is a legal requirement:
you cannot call yourself an architect
without it. Currently, Part 2 is a
postgraduate course, usually 2 years
full-time accredited by the RIBA (Royal
Institute of British Architects). Part 3
also refers to the professional practice
course, usually a part-time course
undertaken over a year at a University,
whilst the student is in full-time
employment in an architectural practice.
7
Jeremy Till, Architecture and
Contingency, eld:, 1(1) (2007): 124-140.
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KT: Do you think the Part 3 course reects a view that indeterminacy is
synonymous with weakness? Or that it cannot accept indeterminacy in
practice?
LC: Yes. I think it does. The Part 3 course is all about learning a set of
protocols. Its about learning the way that you should work and that is a very
established way of working in practice. The course doesnt recognise different
ways of working; it is very set and very linear. I found that very difcult to cope
with; there not being the opportunity to try different things or explore different
possibilities.
KT: Maybe we can talk about the dreaded log sheets? (Fig. 1). Tey raise
questions about the way we categorise and regulate our experience. I dont
know about you, but I would say a lot of my experience doesnt t with
those forms. Te forms had a series of categories that break down the proc-
ess of how you go about doing an architectural project.
LC: There are 26 categories and then four blank stages at the end. Its a linear
process, a very dened package of things, with boxes youve got to tick off to
prove that youve had enough experience, and the four little segments at the bot-
tom that you are allowed to ll in are your only chance to express something.
Fig.1. Kims sample Practical Training
Log Sheet. Image: Kim Trogal.
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KT: Te fact that theyre at the end implies theyre not related to any
of the other stages. I used to work for a practice called uid and I would
say much of my experience there would not be considered, lets say valid,
in terms of that way of measuring and assessing your experience. I was
looking at masterplanning for areas that required regeneration, where
you design the brief for the project and the proposal with members of the
community. So a lot of my work was about designing a process rather than
a thing; designing processes of research, of ways to work with people, or
working on other more art-based projects. A lot of people would put that
into a dierent category and say as a profession its not part of our work.
Yet we are architects doing these things, and there is no space for it on
those forms I would still call it architecture, part of architecture.
Currently I work in a traditional private practice, and I think whats
strikingly obvious, is that there is an attempt to establish everything in
advance, to x everything as quickly as you can before you even know
whos going to build it with you it shows the desire in formal processes
to avoid uncertainty
One thing I did was to draw a diagram,
8
that was a bit nave to draw
about the idea of chora from Plato, describing the relationship of ideas
and matter; lets say theory and practice and the relationship between the
two. Between these two he describes a space, which he calls chora the
unbounded, undened, limitless, formless, indeterminate space, the space
in between these two things, where you are moving from one to the other,
and it is precisely in this space where things change, where things are
transformed and come into being.
9
Alongside this, for eect, we place the RIBA stages of work. Stages A-L,
where you have a completely linear process, where you move from idea to
matter in one direction only and at each stage you determine more and
more what you are trying to do. Jeremy referred to an ordering tendency
we have, and I think that applies to process as well as a desire to order
physical space.
10
Id suggest that the way to deal with contingency or
indeterminacy is, for us at least, an issue of process. So at each stage you
are determining things, but all in advance. As a model of working, it cant
accommodate participative processes very well, for instance.
One project we did together, when we were students, looked at language
and architectural processes. We proposed a double analogy; we took a
recipe for a cake and re-wrote it to read as a recipe for site-mixed con-
crete, and then we took a part of the National Building Specication site
work standards for concrete, and re-wrote them to read as instructions for
making a cake. We were trying to critique the language we use in indus-
try, to show how abstract it is (and in places absurd) and that it assumes
a certain process. Te specication is a legally binding document from
an architect to a contractor, and so by using that tool you are assuming
and setting up, deliberately or otherwise, a very particular relationship
8
Diagram of chora; Kim Trogal.
9
For Plato, chora is that which, lacking
any substance or identity of its own,
falls between the ideal and the material;
it is the receptacle or nurse that brings
material into being, without being
material [] the space of the in between is
that which is not a space, a space without
boundaries of its own [] The space of the
in between is the locus for social, cultural
and natural transformations. Elizabeth
Grosz, Architecture from the Outside:
Essays in Virtual and Real Space
(London: MIT Press, 2002), pp. 91-92.
10
Till, Architecture and Contingency.
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and a very particular way of working. So we thought that other forms of
communication, like the recipe, can oer the opportunity to leave gaps or
openings, for people, for input on the side of the maker, or for someone
other than the author or the architect. It incorporates indeterminacy.
11
If you want to work with indeterminacy, you cant readily use the existing
tools and processes of standard practice. Youll need to radically alter them
or invent your own.
Leo do you nd that you often have to invent new tools?
LC: Yes, I just wanted to talk about a very small project that we undertook, to
create a very modest piece of architecture essentially, which is a temporary youth
shelter in a heritage park in Shefeld. On this project, we tried to change the way
that we work and the way we authored the project in order to create space for
other people to be involved, and we did that in a number of ways.
Firstly, by working directly with people interested in using the youth shelter,
which were local young people in the area. We went through a simple consulta-
tion process (Fig. 2) that involved actually building things, which I think is
something people rarely do nowadays, young or old Established systems of
process can actually stop people being involved but its something we believe in.
Thats the rst stage.
Fig.2. Abbeyeld Park Shelter Project, consultation. Image: Bureau of Design Research.
Then, this project wasnt to be built by a contractor but at the same time it had
to conform to building regulations and pass planning approval as well. But we
werent sure who was going to make and build the project and thats something
maybe were not used to in practice. The person who had commissioned the work
was a park ranger, who has a certain skill in creating things, but he wasnt a
contractor. Therefore the language that we used, the way we communicated with
him and others had to be different.
11
See also Kim Trogal, Open Kitchen in
Doina Petrescu (ed.) Altering Practices:
Feminine Politics and Poetics of Space
(London: Routledge, 2007), pp. 167-188.
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Fig. 3. Abbeyeld Park Shelter Project, DIY drawings. Image: Bureau of Design
Research.
So we developed different techniques, more a kind of DIY series of drawings, in
order to allow different people to come in and to be involved in the creation of the
project (Fig. 3). We were discussing these images last night, one is an invitation
to join in with the building (Fig. 4) and thats not something we suggested, thats
not an invitation from the architects; that was from the person building it. It was
an invitation to anybody passing by to get involved in the project.
Fig. 4. Abbeyeld Park Shelter Project, a modest invitation. Image: Bureau of Design
Research.
Again, I think its something that happens very rarely and you could argue that
on a more complex, bigger building it might not be possible, but I think on a
small-scale it really changes the roles people play, and particularly the role we
played as architect, is removed and no longer the sole author of the project. We
dont have complete control over whats created.
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A quick conversation about architecture
It was really nice I went to visit the site at one point and a group of young
people walked past and did join in with the project. They didnt know what was
going on, the person constructing it introduced them to what was happening, told
them about the tools they were using, and they simply got on and joined in. Its
something that rarely happens and is quite unique in architecture.
KT: One thing I thought, was is this only possible because its so small and
a basic structure? You explained to me how everything had to come from a
DIY shop and so in its very nature, because it is small.
LC: What we were trying to do is to say, ok well design the whole thing, but try
to create space for people to be involved at different stages along the way. So there
was exibility and the whole thing could have changed. There was indetermi-
nacy built into the process.
It does seem a bit like a prison with the metal gates. The idea was that part
of it would be open during a festival at the park, and different materials would
be woven into the screens in order for people to take ownership and inhabit the
space. I suppose in a small way and on a small-scale, it is similar to having
housing units that people can move into and adapt.
KT: I think what you have said about role is important. Tat you are not
the sole author and I think thats a key thing about indeterminacy. Tat
within a process, it suggests some generosity to others, whether thats by you
stepping away earlier or making space for continued involvement by
suspending the denition of things, what they are and how theyre used,
youre leaving space for other people.
I think the idea of indeterminacy, shifts the more traditional role of how
the architect is working, and I think for the profession its probably quite
a destabilising notion.
So, the question is how to be generous? And how to be generous with roles
people can take up in a process.
One thing I noticed in my experience is that getting people involved was
very much about asking questions . But how do you know what to ask
people? Whether you are canvassing in the street or researching into an
area, how do you know that you are asking the right questions? Questions
can be leading and you are coming from a position with your own precon-
ceptions. At uids oce we discussed a lot how you might engage people
in the process, and lots of us were quite preoccupied by the tools and media
particularly text messaging, the internet or using other digital media.
Of course technology is relevant, but whatever tools youre using to engage
people, the main thing itself is the question you are asking them and thats
the way you can make an opening for people.
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A quick conversation about architecture
Fig. 5. Abbeyeld Park Shelter Project, nearly nished. Image: Bureau of Design
Research.
I think Doinas paper is suggesting that its beyond language, so maybe I
need to rethink my position.
12
If you are investigating a city or talking
about the regeneration of an area and you ask, what are the three things
you would change about this place?, its the most useless question you can
ask, because theyll tell you the three things you already know, like the
street lighting is rubbish. It doesnt tell you anything about the place. One
question uid might ask would be, if Sheeld was a piece of music,
what piece of music would it be? you get an idea about a persons
attachment to a place without asking directly about it. I think thats also
what Doina is suggesting, that you are getting beyond what you already
know.
So our openings to you:
How have you made space for indeterminacy?
Do you think in your work in practice there has been space for indetermi-
nacy? Would you have wanted there to be? Do you think its important?
How do you think you could change your work in practice?
12
See Doina Petrescu, The
Indeterminate Mapping of the
Common, eld: 1(1) (2007): 91-99.
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Games of Skill and Chance
Games of Skill and Chance
Renata Tyszczuk
An introductory note
The theme of the Forum, University of Shefeld, November 2006 and
of this inaugural issue of eld: Architecture and Indeterminacy, gave
me the opportunity to reect on games, stories and experiments as
alternative ways of thinking architecture. This paper was originally
presented along with a three-screen digital video work: lhombre.
The video stems from my work in exploring lm in relation to the
architectural imaginary. I do this through writing, teaching and
researching as well as through making: both digital and 16mm, (the
work cant be neatly summarised but has evolved into what I term
the aphoristic documentary aphodoc, and the experimental home
movie expovie).
Some of the themes presented in this paper are new, some are old,
and some are current obsessions. They are presented in this paper as
same-text stories not privileging any particular discourse. If I have
not kept within disciplinary boundaries it is because I do not see them;
if I have not prioritised architecture enough in the discussion it is
because I didnt notice. Architecture to me is about the stuff of life and
the glimpses we have of it; it is as indeterminate as the next thing.
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Games of Skill and Chance
One more thing to add.
This paper is in part constructed from my notes and in part from the
transcript of the recording of my presentation at Architecture and
Indeterminacy. It is an unfnished experiment in academic writing as
an analogue, companion or subtext to the presented Games of Skill
and Chance: where the game of skill involved the composed, crafted
and referenced notes and that of chance, what I actually ended up
saying. The purpose of the paper was not to specify or promote a way
of writing or doing things according to skill or chance, but to explore
indeterminacy as the basis for thinking and learning that extends
through to architectural discourse and practice. Games of skill and
chance concern architecture, its paradoxes and entanglements.
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Games of Skill and Chance
It takes one minute to read this story.
A composer friend of mine
who spent some time in a mental
rehabilitation center
was
encouraged to do a good deal of
bridge playing.
After one game,
his
partner was criticizing his play
of an ace
on a trick
which had
already been
won.
My friend stood up
and said,
If you
think I came to the loony bin
to learn
to play bridge,
youre crazy.
1
1
John Cage, transcript of story 56 from
Indeterminacy, http://www.ledf.
org/indeterminacy. The site contains
186 stories taken from two of Cages
books: Silence and A Year from Monday
and from the Folkways recording
of Cage reading 90 of his stories in
90 minutes accompanied by David
Tudor on piano: John Cage and David
Tudor, Indeterminacy: New Aspect of
Form in Instrumental and Electronic
Music (1959), (Smithsonian: Folkways
Recordings, 1992), 5500 to 5600. For
this story see also Indeterminacy in John
Cage, Silence: Lectures and Writings by
John Cage (Middletown, Connecticut:
Wesleyan University Press, 1973), p. 56.
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Games of Skill and Chance
Puzzles and Stories
I often think of architecture as a game of skill and chance, party to
certain rules (and rule bending), prone to subterfuge, conceit, the
thrilling and the unexpected. And you cant tell architects who
by turns accept chance and deploy skill, to different degrees and in
different ways how to play the game. With architecture, it seems,
chance is never alone, demanding always the gloss of its more
stringent bedfellow. Indeterminacy has a different allure. But its
place in relation to architecture needs to be approached carefully,
remembering what has been referred to as the contemporary Zeitgeist
which, with a generalised vocabulary of contingency, unpredictability,
chance effects and indeterminacy, parades itself as a kind of rebellion
against the excesses of the modern.
2

When I frst presented these thoughts I started by playing a few
minutes of John Cages stories, recordings from Indeterminacy; (the
door in the corridor was banging, I shuffed my papers, someone was
whispering; we heard the one about the the one that and the one
where).
3
Cages stories deal with the unplanned and the complexity
of being. At the same time they call up the ambivalence of telling tales
and the double or contested meaning of fction. Cage explains:
[In oral delivery of this lecture] I tell one story a minute. If its a short one, I
have to spread it out; when I come to a long one, I have to speak as rapidly
as I can. The continuity of the stories as recorded was not planned my
intention in putting the stories together in an unplanned way was to suggest
that all things stories, incidental sounds from the environment, and, by
extension beings are related, and that this complexity is more evident
when it is not oversimplifed by an idea of relationship in one persons
mind.
4
Puzzles and stories. I turned to Cages writings and recordings when
I was beginning to think about what I could present at Architecture
and Indeterminacy. I was trying to think of something that would
both explain my understanding of indeterminacy and something
of what I do or what architecture does, and that was diffcult and
puzzling. But then I started to see indeterminacy everywhere. Perhaps
its obvious really, but it took me some time to realise that I could
turn the tables on the received wisdom, where the indeterminate bits,
the general ontological uncertainty are either not there, or at best,
a fction. Indeterminacy is ontologically pervasive (in fact): what it is
possible to realise is that it is the fully determinate, the permanent
or the discrete that has problematic ontological status, because these
are idealised abstractions or defnitions and not ontological ultimates.
Determinations are there with effort, but indeterminacy, simply is.
And so it is with architecture too, where the language (or jargon) itself
2
Doreen Massey, For Space
(London: Sage, 2005), p. 116.
3
I played the frst six minutes of
Part 1, John Cage and David Tudor,
Indeterminacy (Recordings, 1992). These
stories included the one about Isamu
Noguchis visit, followed by the one that
began You probably know the one about
the two monks but Ill tell it anyway [],
then the one about several of us driving
up to Boston [], about Christian Wolff
playing the piano, about the mechanised
pen on Hollywood Boulevard; and
then I stopped the disc playing after
the one about the anechoic chamber.
4
Indeterminacy in Cage, Silence, p. 260.
John Cage introduced Indeterminacy
into musical vocabulary in the 1950s,
using it as a compositional dimension
with regard to performance.
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is indicative of an obsession with determination: we have projects,
models, specifcations, details, effciency: all is determined, but
nevertheless indeterminacy is.
What Cage draws attention to is, not only that there are related
things that cannot be expressed in words or images but that this
indeterminacy itself should not be understood as empty: [T]here is
no such thing as an empty space or an empty time. There is always
something to hear. In fact try as we may, to make a silence we
cannot.
5
In both the drawn Garden of Emptiness
6
and the performed
empty or Silent Piece, (433), Cage explored found environments,
their potential for chance occurrences, as well as their possible
expression or notation. What is interesting to note, however, is that
for Cage indeterminacy alluded to a particular kind of performative
compositional practice that was distinct from either improvisation,
which relied on taste and habit, or the chance operations which he
often deployed to determine his compositions. Cages indeterminate
pieces asked the composer or designer to take responsibility for,
or engage with, a situation not under their control. For Cage
indeterminacy always happened in duration, in both his stories
and performances, and not in momentary episodes, a throw of the
dice, discrete slices of time or a succession of nows.
7
His work thus
suggests an understanding of the indeterminate as neither a silent
void nor a tragic hiatus (that would feed those jarring and troubled
space/time dualisms), but instead as an open feld of possibilities
and potentialities with no need for distinctions or competition for
space or time.
8
This then, I thought, might provide a good, or more
appropriate start for thinking about architecture; a move away from
formalist approaches to occupying space and time flling their
supposed emptiness. Following Cage then, perhaps the complexity
and relatedness of all things that pertains also to architecture, could
be more evident when not oversimplifed by an idea of relationship
in one persons mind. In other words to determine architecture,
could mean losing it and its creative possibilities. How much more
rewarding it might be to complicate things a bit, not for the glorious
random mixity of it all
9
, nor for the sake of muddying the waters,
but to provoke a rethinking of categories, terms and assumptions. If
indeterminacy is diffcult to pin down, that might not be such a bad
thing.
[] for it is claimed that any experiments that are made precede the steps
that are fnally taken with determination, and that this determination is
knowing, having , in fact, a particular, if unconventional ordering of the
elements used in view. These objections are clearly justifable but only
where, [as among contemporary evidences in serial music], it remains a
question of making a thing upon the boundaries, structure, and expression
of which attention is focused. Where on the other hand, attention moves
towards the observation and audition of many things at once, including
5
Experimental Music in
Cage, Silence, p. 8.
6
John Cage did a series of drawings,
Garden of Emptiness (1991) of the
Ryoanhi monastery garden dating from
1499. See Corinna Thieroff, Sudden
Images: The Ryoanhi Drawings of John
Cage in Joachim Kaak and Corinna
Thieroff, Hanne Darboven, John Cage:
A Dialogue of Artworks (Munich:
Hatje Kantz Publishers, 2000). Cage
developed indeterminate processes and
graphic notation systems for his music
that were infuenced by his adherence
to the principles of I Ching. See also
Yeoryia Manolopoulou, Drawing on
Chance: extracts from Drafting Pier
40 in The Journal of Architecture
Volume 11 (5): 303314; pp. 304305.
7
Cages interest in duration and the
experimental as the continual elaboration
of the new, and the coexistence of past
and present, ties in to Bergsons notion
of time as indetermination itself. See
Henri Bergson, The Creative Mind:
An Introduction to Metaphysics,
trans. Mabelle L. Adison (New York:
Citadel Press, 1992), p. 193.
8
For an account of the space/time
tension and the tendency to characterise
postmodern times as spatial rather than
temporal, see Massey, For Space. pp. 147
ff., where she cites Bruno Latour: I have a
feeling that we are slowly shifting from an
obsession with time to an obsession with
space. Pandoras Hope: Essays on the
Reality of Science Studies (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1999) p. 14.
She discusses her reservations with
this formulation and argues instead for
a temporality integral to the spatial, a
heterogeneity of practices and processes,
and a relational politics of the spatial.
9
As Massey says, It is popular today to
revel in the glorious random mixity
of it all. She is speaking about the
compensatory tendencies for the
determinist excesses of the modern.
Ibid. p. 111; and, she continues, (p. 12)
The language of order and chance has
become loose and problematical.
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those that are environmental becomes, that is, inclusive rather than
exclusive no question of making, in the sense of forming understandable
structures, can arise (one is tourist), and here the word experimental is
apt, providing it is understood not as descriptive of an act to be later judged
in terms of success and failure, but simply as of an act the outcome of which
is unknown. What has been determined?
10

This brings me to experiment. The word experimental is sometimes
misconstrued as to do with the causal or procedural, but what Cage
suggests is an interpretation of the experimental where it defes
understandable structures by being about unknown outcomes and
many things at once. Could there be an experimental architecture
whereby inclusive might mean inventing ever-shifting categories,
thus including the known with the unknown, the useful with the
non-useful? It would suggest openness to experimental process
in architecture, which could not be fxed, as this would reduce its
multiplicity and heterogeneity. However hard we try, however good
our foresight, our risk-aversion strategies, it is not possible to make
a list of all the things we might consider in a design and then to
deal with them. Architecture is not an exhaustive project (and nor
is it sustainable); instead, recourse to the experimental suggests
a recognition of this diffculty and ambivalence, and challenges
the prevalent determinism in architectural thinking. What can be
determined? (If anything?) Cage approaches this question through
his stories stories that are suggestive of both puzzling cases and
second-hand fables (thought experiments and re-tellings).
11
Cages
approach to indeterminacy and his ambition to take stock of, to relate
stories, incidental sounds from the environment, and, by extension
beings parallels the potential for ethical engagement in any story.
And after all is not the fruitful fable also the ground for invention, for
experimentation?
To leave an enormous amount open seems to belong to the essence of
a fruitful fable and to myth. Precisely thanks to its own indeterminacy
myth is able to produce constant new invention from within itself with the
thematic horizon continuously shifting in different directions.
12

Architectural discourse and expression however, tends to avoid
indeterminacy, bar one or two oft-cited examples such as Tschumis
undecideable Folies or Van Eycks spaces of labyrinthine clarity.
13

This is not surprising; how could one in rhetorically convincing ways
make indeterminate areas appear in the design and be understood
as indeterminate without losing the authority of the designer or the
control/command of the interlocutor? For the most part designs
that confront indeterminacy or chance have resorted to convoluted
formal combinations that are meant to speak of complexity or have
simply left room an allocated space for the unexpected (where
is the surprise in that?). It is similarly diffcult to give an account of
indeterminacy per se. How can anything remain as indeterminate
10
Experimental Music: Doctrine in Cage,
Silence: Lectures and Writings, p. 13.
11
I have explored thought experiments
and their relation to architecture in The
Laboratory and the Imaginary: How
Real is that? in Renata Tyszczuk (ed.)
Architecture and Interdependence:
Mappings and Explorations by Studio
Six (Cambridge: Shed, 2007).
12
Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method
(London: Sheed & Ward 1989) p. 454.
13
The relation of architecture to
indeterminacy has been the subject of
renewed interest. For example, Doreen
Massey describes a number of instances
where indeterminacy has been used as a
device in an approach to architecture,
(For Space, pp. 112114). She refers to
Tschumi, Van Eyck and the infuence
of the French Situationists. It is not my
intention to pursue this inquiry here with
extensive examples from architectural
design; what is important to note is
that in architectures meeting with
indeterminacy designs have tended either
to mimic the chaotic or act as a taming.
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once it has been explained, coerced into neat lines, an ordered
delivery, a written paper? The problem occurs in attempting to render,
draw out, the unrepresentable. I struggled to write this down at all
and it works much better as a conversation, a play with words, or
a game. This brings me (back) to the notion of lexis. The capacity to
place some past event or person vividly before the readers mind was
identifed by Aristotle in the Rhetoric as lexis, or locution (usually
translated as diction or style, but more precisely a way of saying
things to do with a particular situation), a way of making things
visible as if they were present.
14
Evidently this is what designers also
attempt to do when communicating projects: they try to place their
audience as if they were there. It is not surprising therefore that they
are attracted to stories. The as-if is the essential component of any
story, as Cage demonstrates (so we can be on Hollywood Boulevard
and in the mental institution with him). However, stories are, after
all, where indeterminacy is allowed to coexist with the determined
and even enhance and validate it. In stories, villains and the grubby,
unexpected, tangential and inconclusive, rub shoulders with heroes
and fairy-tale endings.
This attraction to the as-if, to the story, is by no means new, but what
is interesting is how since the seventeenth century this attraction
has transpired as a fctional contingency
15
, an urge or compulsion to
resort to, or to harness the experience of life as you get in any story
to reconfgure or to compensate for the vacuity of an appropriated
temporal/spatial vision such as the utopia. When reality, as is so often
the case, is considered uncertain, contingent, ridden with accidents,
unexplainable, stories harness those rogue or chance elements. This
has transpired in many different areas of culture the storyteller
saving the case for the scientist or engineer (and often being one and
the same) whether in the writing of utopias or in the construction of
gated communities.
16
Architects continue to sneak stories in, with
considerable skill, and often by the back door, in a kind of smuggling-
in of experience, a legacy of the common imaginative project that
arose in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
17

Invariably it works. Shifting between fact and fction, the domain
of the as-if has acquired the character of an exchange between the
conceptual order of theory/practice and the experiential order of
the inner life.
18
In a world understood as contingent, experience is
drawn upon in order to either substantiate or to counter the claims
of the theory, project or scientifc experiment. It is then considered a
skill and proof, that one is after all, experienced. Good or bad, self-
refexive or not, such a confation of experience and rational thought
has often been capable of provoking an inevitable, if unexpected,
engagement with the world, in all its hazy reality and indeterminacy.
The key element of any story is that the modes of discourse, reasoning
14
Cages stories can be explained as an
example of poetic invention: presentation
of a self in terms of another ethos
(character, the ethical argument)
with appropriate lexis (diction) and
melopeoia (rhythm and song).
15
A term I used to explore the eighteenth
century attraction to the story with
reference to the utopian discourse of
the period. See Renata Tyszczuk, in
spem melioris aevi: The Architecture
and Writings of Stanislas Leszczynski,
roi bienfaisant, 17371766 (PhD thesis,
Cambridge, 1998); published as The
Story of an Architect King: Stanislas
Leszczynski in Lorraine 17371766
(Oxford: Peter Lang, 2007).
16
Elizabeth Grosz discussion of utopian
discourse also draws attention to this
admixture of fantasy and theory, what
she calls the theoretical doubling of
utopic texts: texts with composites,
amalgams, with a self-contained fctional
representation, which is explained and
justifed through a theoretical addendum,
commonly a text written after the more
speculative and fanciful account. She
writes that the philosopher Michele Le
Doeuffs explanation of this awkward
but prevalent coupling of theory and
vision [] is that the theoretical or
analytical doublet is written in part to
contain the ambiguity or as she calls it,
the polysemic quality, of the visionary
text in an attempt to fx its meaning,
to provide it a guaranteed reading.
Elizabeth Grosz, Chapter 15, The Time
of Architecture in Bingaman, Sanders
and Zorach (eds.) Embodied Utopias:
Gender, Social Change and the Modern
Metropolis, (London and New York:
Routledge, 2003) pp. 265278; p. 270.
17
It was the nature of the common
imaginative project that guaranteed
the close affnity of eighteenth century
art, architecture and science. That
modern aesthetics could be a science
of artistic experience was conceivable
only in this imaginative project. See
Dalibor Vesely, Architecture in the
Age of Divided Representation: The
Question of Creativity in the Shadow of
Production (Cambridge, MA and London:
MIT Press, 2004) p. 443, note 49.
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and experience, whether analysis, conversation, witnessing or
evidence, memory, imagination, skill or chance, impinge on each
other. Here we have come full circle: dealing with our aversion
to or confusion with indeterminacy and ambivalence requires the
reassurances of storytelling; and stories, lead us back, by way of
imaginative and resolute detours, to indeterminacy.
Fig. 1. Film stills from Remote Worlds in Four Parts (R. Tyszczuk, dv, 12 mins, 2004).
In Georges Perecs La Vie mode demploi; Life a Users Manual: Fictions, trans. David
Bellos (London: Vintage, 2003), the main character Percival Bartlebooth spends his life
making and unmaking puzzles.
18
See Charles Taylor, Sources of the
Self: The Making of the Modern
Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1992), p. 163.
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Aphodoc and Expovie
Ill try a different way in to the question of Architecture and
Indeterminacy. I have started to explore the relationship between
story, experiment and play in a series of experimental flms and
writings. The aim of this work has been to develop a way of thinking
and communicating architectural ideas that are diffcult to describe
in either words or images. It suggests the mutability of flm as a way
of exploring the situational and relational nature of architecture.
Conventional architectural representation attempts to describe reality
uniformly and consistently. Working through the medium of flm
suggests an alternative approach to the poetics of praxis where design
imagination and poetic thinking can intersect with the mutuality
of necessity and chance. The work falls into two new categories:
the aphodoc - the aphoristic documentary or the expovie - the
experimental home movie, (and thus an exposure of life). These are
modes of description that defy their own logic (documentaries arent
usually in brief; home movies arent meant to be more than that).
19

The flms are used as quick sketches, short-lived experiments
that share characteristics with aphorisms and their exploration of
paradoxical relationships. The essence of an aphorism is paradox.
20

The power of the paradox, or why I fnd the notion of it compelling,
is in its ability to affrm all the directions of sense at the same time:
good sense, common sense, best sense and nonsense.
21
In other words
the paradox can be a short story where the many things at once take
place, not simply in a synthesising mode however, but in one that
engages and questions. This kind of story is the ground for rethinking
categories, of adding complications to oversimplifed frameworks;
it offers respite from theoretically elaborate concepts where thought
is considered to be already grounded. Paradoxes pull the ground
from under your feet. The aphodoc and the expovie are necessarily
open-ended in their presentation of life situations: they resist the
fxation of meaning; they do not function as illustrations to their own
conceptualisation. I prefer to think of them in relation to the notion of
a story at its limiting case, (if not exact limits) or at its most concise.
This story wont take a long time to tell.
The flm lhombre is one of a series of expovies I have made that
explore the real and imagined territories present in a simple domestic
setting. Lhombre began as an accidental fragment of moving image, or
found footage, which could not have been predicted in the planning
of the piece. The relationship between what can be said in a verbal
presentation, and the visual and spatial installation of the flm work
is understood as complementary but indeterminate. I did not attempt
to legitimate the visual work with the words (this would simply have
19
This is part of ongoing work that explores
the architectural imaginary in relation to
documentary and flm. See for example,
Renata Tyszczuk we dont know when
its coming in (www.interdependance.
co.uk), an essay which describes the
video piece of the same title (Tyszczuk,
Guy Greaves, dv, 10 mins, 2006).
20
Aphorism is the most paradoxical mode
of discourse, and, like any paradox, it is
a formulation of a partial or ostensible
contradiction that originates from a
particular experience and elicits an
abundant range of further insights. The
paradoxical nature of aphorism has its
source in life situations, from which it
also receives its meaning. Vesely, The
Question of Creativity, p. 453, note 10.
21
See Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense
(Logique du Sens) ed. Constantin
V. Boundas, trans. Mark Lester and
Charles Stivale (London and New York:
Continuum, 2004), pp. 35; on the
relation of paradox to Stoic thought,
where it was used both as an instrument
for analysing language and as a means
of synthesising events, see pp. 10 11.
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rehearsed the problem of theory and practice as a single planned set of
relations, that is, a theory set up as a blueprint that seeks to govern the
practice). Instead I prefer to think of the making, speaking, listening
and watching as a layering or assemblage of different interpretations
and approaches in imaginative variations. I have borrowed the
phrase imaginative variations from Ricoeur, which he explains
as the deployment of an imaginary space for thought experiments
that allows the play of fantasy and praxis.
22
The play emphasises
movement as a thinking mode for architectural variations: as thought
experiments or puzzles analogous to the stories, always negotiating the
discord between the actual and the possible. Playing here means not
simply revelling in the commonplace but paying attention to what is
conventionally hidden. It is not about aesthetics a distant view, but
about taking note and an engagement with the world. Thinking about
indeterminacy suggests alternative ways of encountering the world
neither defned by a specifc set of skills, techniques and actions, nor
privileging a certain kind of discourse. Instead it suggests an inventive
or experimental relation with the world that fosters potentialities and
possibilities.
Bringing about indeterminacy is bringing about a situation in which
things could happen that are not under my control. Chance operations
can guide me to a specifc result, like the Music of Changes. An example of
indeterminacy is any one of the pieces in a series called Variations which
resemble cameras that dont tell you what picture to take but enable you to
take a picture []
23
Fig. 2. 16mm flm reel returned by Soho Images; photo: R. Tyszczuk.
22
The phrase imaginative variations is
from Paul Ricouers discussion of literary
narrative in Oneself as Another, trans.
Kathleen Blamey (University of Chicago
Press, 1992) p. 159; (my emphasis).
Ricouers orientation is to writing
but I would argue that the recourse
to the as-if, to mimetics as a constant
negotiation between the dramatic as-
if and the hypothetical as-if is not
confned to literature or narrative.
23
John Cage, cf. D. Campana Interview
with Cage Form and Structure in the
Music of John Cage, (PhD, Northwestern
University Evanston, 1985), p. 109.
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Games and Shadows
Just as the pleasure derived from a game of lhombre consists in a kind of
suspension mixed with curiosity of the three possible outcomes winning,
placing another bet, or losing; in the theatre we are left hanging and
uncertain not knowing what is about to happen and such is the effect of our
imagination.
24
The game of lhombre
25
was a game of skill and chance. It was
extremely popular in the eighteenth century where life was considered
a game of the imagination a suspension mixed with curiosity and
thus also compared to the experience of theatre. Montesquieus Essai
sur le Got expresses the essential parity between theatre and game
playing. The meaningful difference between play in the theatre and
in the game, however, was the autotelic nature of the game; where in
effect, the signifcant audience was that of the player himself. Game
playing provided the arena for the irresolvable differences of the self
and of the imagination, (the dichotomies of the Enlightenment) to be
both revealed and explored. Game playing has a far-reaching history
where it has been understood as an essential element of human beings
ontological make-up, a basic existential phenomenon often expressed
as life is a game.
26
It is not surprising therefore that Wittgenstein
chose the example of a game when trying to explain what he meant by
a concept with blurred edges.
27
Life has blurred edges. The play of the
world is inevitably blurred.
In the eighteenth century, lhombre was a three-handed trick-taking
card game with its own terminology and one of the frst games to
introduce bidding. One player was the declarer or lhombre and
the other players cooperated to prevent this player from making a
contract. It thus demonstrated a considerable element of both skill and
chance. The most popular games in those days tended to be divided
between the jeux de commerce (games of skill such as chess, draughts,
and billiards), and the jeux de hasard (games involving chance such
as the majority of card games). In practice, however the distinction
was irrelevant: and in any case the games of skill usually served as
a cover for the games of chance that attracted most players to the
academies des jeux or tripots, the venues for gambling and games.
28

The following remark from Diderot indicates what was at stake with
the world itself taken as a gambling den and life as a game:
The world is the domain of the strongest: I wont know until the end what I
have lost or won in this vast gambling house, where I have spent sixty years,
cup in hand shaking dice.
29
The prevailing attitude towards le hazard or chance understood it as
a function of ignorance, or as a fction.
30
Recognition of the presence
24
Comme le plaisir du jeu de lhombre
consiste dans une certaine suspension
mle de curiosit des trois vnements
qui peuvent arriver, la partie pouvant tre
gagne, remise, ou perdue codille; ainsi,
dans nos pices de thatre, nous sommes
tellement suspendus et incertains, que
nous ne savons ce qui arrivera; et tel est
leffet de notre imagination. Montesquieu,
Essai sur le Got in Oeuvres Compltes,
II, ed. Roger Caillois (Paris: Bibliothque
de la Pliade, ditions Gallimard,
1951) p. 1263; (my translation).
25
The game of lhombre was developed in
Spain in the early seventeenth century and
was originally called Hombre Renegado.
In England it was called Ombre.
26
For studies on games and play see Johan
Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the
Play Element in Culture (London: 1949);
Roger Caillois, Les jeux et les hommes,
Le masque et le vertige (Paris: 1967).
27
One might say that the concept game
is a concept with blurred edges.But is a
blurred concept a concept at all? Is an
indistinct photograph a picture of a person
at all? Is it even always an advantage to
replace an indistinct picture by a sharp
one? Isnt the indistinct one often exactly
what we need? Ludwig Wittgenstein,
Philosophical Investigations (Oxford:
Blackwell, 1998) 71, p. 34; for his
discussion of games see 6671, pp. 3134.
28
For studies of gambling in the eighteenth
century, which was toler mais non
permis and permeated all sections of
society, see John Dunkley, Gambling
in France: a social and moral problem
in France, 16851792, SVEC 235
(Oxford, 1985); Thomas M. Kavanagh,
Enlightenment and the Shadows of
Chance: The Novel and the Culture
of Gambling in Eighteenth Century
France (Baltimore and London: The
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993).
29
Le monde est la maison du plus fort: je ne
saurai qu la fn ce que jaurai perdu ou
gagn dans ce vaste tripot, o jaurai pass
une soixantaine dannes le cornet la
main tesseras agitans. Diderot, Elments
de physiologie, in Oeuvres, Tome I:
Philosophie, ed. Laurent Versini (Paris:
Laffont, 1994) p. 1317; (my translation).
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Games of Skill and Chance
of chance implied an inability to reason toward, and become part
of any natural order or determination; thus indicating the limits of
reason as a faculty that ultimately refected its own presuppositions.
Game playing, with its permissive attitude to superstition and luck,
refected the area of mystery or domain of ambiguity diffused through
life in general that was being culturally and institutionally silenced.
The reduction of the world to a series of abstract phenomena in
a didactic space, as presented for example, in the entries of the
Encyclopdie, induced a situation where one could all too easily fnd
oneself having to deal with too many in the hand at one time. Chance
came to be understood as corresponding simply to the unsettling
nature of life and reality, and was no longer the domain of Fortuna,
which had stood for indeterminacy, the incommensurable and the
endlessly iterable.
31
Chance was to be controlled and this is where skill
in a confusing array of method, deft movements, manoeuvres, and
trickery came in.
The experimental video lhombre re-presents both the play of a card
game and a play on the words lhomme (man) and lombre (shadow).
Lhombre is an experiment with the use of both negative and positive
images and the correlation of light and movement inherent within
the mechanics of flm.

Movement, image and time coalesce.
32
In this
work the failing light entering the 16mm flm camera has determined
the erratic motion of the game on flm, expressing human gestures as
an exchange between the mechanical and the ephemeral. A game of
cards with its distinctive and repetitive actions was shot at home at
dusk on a single reel of colour flm stock. The game had involved two
card players sitting at a table (and a third player with a camera). The
flm was returned by the lab as a negative, its processing incomplete.
It looked like a mistake to the technicians. The card game, which had
been just visible in the half-light, had been captured as a futtering of
shadows that duplicated the exaggerated mechanical movements of
the two players (laying down cards and regaining others). The found
footage of retrieved chance images, like Cages found environments,
was not fully designed; the fedgling structure allowed for the
unexpected.
The enigma of the work is partly created by the fragility of the medium
(and partly by the cranky 16mm Krasnogorsk camera). The flm
endured chance exposure, projection and digitisation, where the
matter of the flm itself was eroded and reformulated (from three-
handed trick taking into three-screened digital trickery). It suggests a
world of luminous and virtual matter as well as the phantasmagoria
of the new magic lantern shows. Equally, it calls up an undefnable
place that has lost its contours but remains vivid what Deleuze
named any-space-whatever.
33
Chance is about shadows. The history
30
See the article Jeu in Diderot et
DAlembert, Encyclopdie: o
Dictionnaire raisonne des sciences, des
arts et des mtiers (Paris: Chz Briasson,
17611772); Facsimile edition, 5 vols
(New York: Readex, 1969), pp. 531532.
31
On Fortuna as simultaneously a symbol
of the iteratability of all occurrence
and of the incommensurable, see
Reinhart Koselleck, Futures Past:
On the Semantics of Historical Time,
trans. Keith Tribe (Cambridge MA and
London: MIT Press, 1985) pp. 117119.
32
Deleuzes writing on cinema sought
to abolish the distinction between the
physical world of movement and the
psychological world of the image. All
things considered, movement-images
divide into three sorts of images,
when they are related to a centre of
indetermination as to a special image:
perception images, action-images and
affection-images. And each one of us, the
special image or the contingent centre,
is nothing but an assemblage of three
images, a consolidation of perception
images, action-images and affection-
images. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The
Movement-Image, trans. H. Tomlinson
and B. Habberjam (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1986).
33
Any-space-whatever is not an abstract
universal, in all times, in all places. It
is a perfectly singular space, which has
merely lost its homogeneity, that is,
the principle of its metric relations or
the connection of its own parts, so that
the linkages can be made in an infnite
number of ways. It is a space of virtual
conjunction, grasped as pure locus of the
possible. Deleuze, Cinema 1, p. 109.
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of probability (verisimile the appearance of the apparently true) is
inextricably linked with that of the metaphorics of light.
34
In the flm,
the play of interfering images and shadows which are always there
and not quite, of fgure and ground, merge in confused perspectives,
amidst the doubling of the documentary surface and the shallow
screen. The shadows are all characters or players but you cant quite
make them out; strangely familiar, they dwell in an unspecifed room
and an open time. Shadows are made in the process of habitation to
live is to leave shadows (in a paraphrase of Benjamins to live is to
leave traces
35
). And yet the ambiguity of the shadow, lombre the
trace that leaves no trace and its relation to chance occurrences
and feeting memories provokes a play of variations that resist
representation. The shadow is neither coincidence nor estrangement:
it is both familiar and other, suggestive of unacknowledged worlds and
indeterminacy.
The digital reworking of the original material (from 16mm ve to
digital and +ve) reinforces the repetitiveness of the original game.
Negative and positive are revealed to be of equal importance as the
fgures and the space merge ambiguously with the moving shadows.
Although the viewers perception is challenged and brought into play,
the briefest sketch of a room and table along with the to-and-fro
movement of almost-bodies provoke some kind of recognition: we
fll out the story according to experience. The flm reveals a past that
cannot be captured but only glimpsed at random, and in unpredictable
intervals in an exchange of scattered references between memory and
home movies. It is an expovie: an exposure of life and experimental
tinkering a game of life. The presence of the game of cards and
its blurred setting becomes more discernible the longer one stays
with the work; and the experience depends also on repetition and
presentation.
36
Yet the experimental nature of the work mitigates
against the usually determined and directed interventions of the flm,
video, or documentary maker and their construction of scenarios
and scenes. Instead, the expovie builds on the accidental, barely
noticeable images of cardplay and the paradoxical interplay of possible
references.
I showed the work, not for the sake of illustration, nor to fx its
meaning but as a visual analogue for speaking about games of skill
and chance, and also about indeterminacy. The game with its recourse
to chance and indeterminacy can be construed as a laboratory for
probing the meanings of the relations of the world, the self, to things,
to others and shadows. Yet games readily caricature or act as a
counterpart to all those activities (like architecture) that adhere to
principles, from rules, via hypotheses (what if?) to distribution and
results:
34
The history of probability demonstrates
the ambivalence in the change of
meaning of verisimile. Originally, the
appearance of the apparently true is
entirely appearance as the pale refection
of the proximity of truth. For Descartes
appearance means possible deception;
the apparently true (probable) is only
something that looks like the true and
must therefore be methodologically
bracketed. Until an object can be
confrmed by clare et distincte percipere,
it is without signifcance for truth. The
idea that one could hit upon the truth
by chance is a previously unthinkable
thought. From this time method takes
the annoying element of chance by the
hand and puts it at mans disposal.
35
Walter Benjamin, Paris: Capital of the
Nineteenth Century, in Refections,
trans. Edmund Jephcott (New York:
Schocken Books, 1986), pp. 155156;
cf. Beatriz Colomina, The Split Wall:
Domestic Voyeurism in Beatriz Colomina
(ed.), Sexuality and Space (New York:
Princeton University Press, 1992), p. 74.
36
The flm has been presented in a number
of different ways: as a three part flm
that tracks the digital transformation
of the original 16mm projection from
negative to positive, as a simultaneous
digital play across three screens that lasts
just over 2 minutes; as an installation
which includes the original 16mm reel,
the three part flm, a table covered in
green baize, and the play of shadows;
and fnally as the backdrop and topic
of this paper. Previously screened
at Cambridge Arts Picturehouse,
April 2006, Experimental Video Art
Workshop funded by Arts Council and
Kettles Yard Gallery, Cambridge.
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Fig. 3. Film stills from lhombre (R. Tyszczuk,
16mm/dv, (3 x) >2 mins, 2006).
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Whether it be Pascals gambling man or Leibnizs chess-playing God, the
game is explicitly taken as a model only because it has implicit models
which are not games: the moral model of the Good or the Best, the
economic model of causes and effects, or of means and ends.
37

Riddles and Questions
Todays games of skill and chance tend to propping up those coercive
environments where the motives and rewards are decided by the
designers or the players themselves, and yet it is impossible to
create a game or a story, or for that matter architecture, in which the
possibilities for success or failure are as unpredictable as real life. We
can still see the same fctional contingency at work: the need to deliver
palpable stories to cope with the worlds systemic contradictions.
Bauman following George Steiner, describes the current mode of
being-in-the-world as casino culture: each game is short, games
replace each other in quick succession, the stakes of the game change
with a lightning speed and often devalue before the game is over.
38

Each game is a self-enclosed episode such that life patched together
by a casino culture reads as a collection of short stories, not a novel.
39
Before we get carried away with the metaphor, forever consigned
to see the world as a gambling den of suspense or iniquity is
this supposed to be a win or lose situation? Or should architecture
succumb to the interplay between the aesthetics of order and near
chaos as in Constants ludic New Babylon.
40
Architecture is too
frequently seen simply as a game of episodic quick starts and restarts,
an aesthetic or technological achievement, as the object or container
for cultural, political, economic aspirations, as the carrier of function
over meaning, as an end in itself. Surely it cannot be enough to simply
ask questions about success or failure in architecture? To begin to ask
more or less, or rather differently of architecture, it is time to ask a
riddle:
Which of all things in the world is at once the longest and the shortest, the
quickest and the slowest, the most divisible and the most continuous, the
most squandered and the most regretted, something about which nothing
can be done, which obliterates what is small and gives life to what is great?
[...] Some said the answer to the riddle was fortune, some said the earth,
and others light. Zadig said it was time.
41
The answer is obvious (or is it given that there were other possible
answers: fortune, earth, light ?) and it only makes sense in the story
in another Babylon as told in Zadig not in abstraction (not space
for the sake of space, nor time for the sake of time). Indeterminacy?
37
Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, p. 70.
38
Zygmunt Bauman, As Seen
on TV; http://www.politeia-
conferentie.be/viewpic.php?LAN
=E&TABLE+DOCS&ID+120.
39
The casino culture of instantaneity
and episodicity portends the end of
politics as we know it. Loc. cit.
40
See Catherine de Zegher and Mark
Wigley, The Activist Drawing: Retracing
Situationist Architectures from Constants
New Babylon to Beyond (New York and
Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 2001).
41
Voltaire, Candide and Other Stories,
trans. Roger Pearson (London: Everyman,
1992); Zadig, p. 179. The scene of contests
and riddles in the Babylonian court of
Voltaires Zadig reveals the ludic activities
of the eighteenth century as a play with
the socialised perfection of court life.
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Maybe, but not for the sake of indeterminacy, that is, not when used
as a device or a formal construct. Indeterminacy is. Indeterminacy is
space and time, regardless of space and time, as perhaps understood
best in a narrative imagination, in the telling of stories and in their
capacity for the complex interweavings of an unfnished world. In a
narrative imagination, the relationship between ethics and poetics
can converge. It is in stories that the imagination can be both more
provisional and more approximate; and the conviction of theory
and effciency can be dissolved in favour of indeterminacy and
experimental openness. The play, the meeting-up of different stories,
the many things at once, and the experiment, are characteristics that
make art or architecture at once real, and at the same time capable of
challenging presuppositions about the world:
This game is reserved then for thought and art. In it there is nothing but
victories for those who know how to play, that is how to affrm and ramify
chance, instead of dividing it in order to dominate it, in order to wager, in
order to win. This game which can only exist in thought and which has no
other result than the work of art, is also that by which thought and art are
real and disturbing reality, morality, and the economy of the world.
42

Affrming chance here suggests thinking through indeterminacy.
My own design strategy for architecture, melding storytelling and
experiment, and occasionally involving some indeterminate-non-
linear-indistinct-moving-image-time-based-spatial-sketches,
is necessarily inconclusive. It is one of inexact explanations and
roughly drawn boundaries. And to borrow Wittgensteins words
again, Yes: why shouldnt we call it inexact?
43
In one sense this
design practice contests pre-determined notions of time/space/sound
etc. and the uniform and consistent descriptions of architecture, as
well as the all too frequent calls for authenticity, style, technological
prowess. At the same time it is all too aware of the irony of doing so.
Games of skill and chance inevitably go together; they are in need of
each other, they are games that are familiar yet apprehensive in each
others company. Likewise with games of skill and chance, distinction
is diffcult only the rules differ. The rules occasionally require a more
disciplined more coherent more exacting path, but even then, it is
not everywhere circumscribed by rules.
44
The same tension (of skill
and chance) is present in the elements of architectural discourse and
practice, with an underlying hope and assumption (which therefore
constantly needs to be questioned), that skill, audacity and daring
can win and that the element of chance can be harnessed and enjoyed
critically and aesthetically. In this context chance seems doomed
to be forever methodologically bracketed. Indeterminacy however,
is. It does not reside in an ideal nor can it simply be a mode of
operating in the world. In a sense thinking indeterminacy provides
its own guarantee, which prevents the reduction of reality to what
is then privileged as stable, real or representable. It obliges us to
42
Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, p. 71.
43
Wittgenstein (Philosophical
Investigations 88, p. 41) If I tell
someone stand roughly here may
not this explanation work perfectly?
And cannot every other one fail too? But
isnt it an inexact explanation? Yes;
why shouldnt we call it inexact?
44
(Ibid 68, p. 33) But then the use of
the word is unregulated, the game
we play with it is unregulated.
It is not everywhere circumscribed
by rules; but no more are there any
rules for how high one throws the ball
in tennis, or how hard; yet tennis is a
game for all that and has rules too.
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keep questioning. What I am suggesting therefore is that the task for
architecture may well be that of experiment. In the words of Elizabeth
Grosz:
[T]he radical role of the architect is best developed in architectural
exploration and invention, in recognition of architectures and knowledges
roles as experimental practices. Philosophy, architecture, science are not
disciplines which produce answers or solutions, but felds which pose
questions, and whose questions never yield the solutions they seek but
which lead to the production of ever more inventive questions. Architecture,
along with life itself, moves alongside of, is the ongoing process of
negotiating, habitable spaces.
45
Grosz asks many questions: what are the possibilities of inhabiting
otherwise?
46
Interrogating architecture suggests a recognition of
the kinds of experimental practices and processes that allow for
a rethinking of how architecture is constructed and produced
as well as inhabited. There are many practices that draw on
indeterminacy, or might be described as having an indeterminate
approach to architecture that need to be acknowledged. These range
from types of critique that open up alternatives within normative
architectural practice, to inventive modes of participatory action
that cultivate change by working directly with people to disclose
new potentialities, to the deployment of alternative imaginations of
the economic that play the part of anomalies within the privileged
macroeconomic structure.
47
Architectural practice could also refer to
the unfnished and the unknown. Experiments in architecture are not
about presenting completed pieces of work but about encouraging the
possible paths that lead beyond the text, the work, the story. With an
awareness however, that the moment your attention slips from the
task at hand, or the demands of the project and the particular skills
it requires, just as if momentarily distracted from the text in front of
you, the rest of the world uncontrollably and inevitably comes fooding
back in. Indeterminacy is.
Fig. 4. Film still from Remote
Worlds in Four Parts (R.Tyszczuk,
dv, 12 mins, 2004).
45
Grosz, The Time of
Architecture, pp. 275276.
46
Elizabeth Grosz, Embodied Utopias,
The Time of Architecture, in
Architecture from the Outside: Essays
on Real and Virtual Space (Cambridge
MA: MIT Press, 2001), p. 130.
47
This is only scratching the surface, as what
I would include in the term architectural
practice is purposefully heterogeneous.
See, for example, Doina Petrescu (ed.)
Altering Practices: Feminist Politics and
Poetics of Space (London: Routledge,
2007); and the Alternate Currents
Symposium at the University of Sheffeld,
2007, feld (2) 1, 2008 (forthcoming).
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My thanks to all the participants, students and speakers at the
Architecture and Indeterminacy Forum, the University of Sheffeld
November 2006, when these thoughts were frst presented. I am also
grateful for the comments of Doina Petrescu, Tatjana Schneider and
two anonymous reviewers, on an earlier draft of this paper.
Notes on contributors
Peter Blundell Jones trained as an architect at the Architectural
Association in London from 1966-72. He has been involved in practice,
criticism and teaching for most of his professional life, but with an
increasing emphasis on architectural history and theory. In 1973-4 he
wrote the rst ever book on Hans Scharoun, and after a short time in
practice joined the Cambridge Department of Architecture as Assistant
Lecturer. Ten years later he joined Londons South Bank University
as Principal Lecturer in Architectural History, then in 1994 became
Professor of Architecture at the University of Shefeld, where he has
remained until now. He has designed buildings of domestic scale,
some published, and has participated in architectural competitions
both as an entrant and a judge. He has curated travelling exhibitions
about the works of Scharoun and Hring and contributed to many
international conferences. As a journalist and critic, he has enjoyed a
long and close working relationship with The Architectural Review,
occasionally acting as guest editor. In 1996 he was made Architectural
Journalist of the Year for articles published in The Architects Journal.
He has contributed to numerous architectural journals internationally,
and his total list of publications runs to over 500 items. But best
known are his books. These include the revised Hans Scharoun
(Phaidon, London, 1995), Dialogues in Time: the story of the Austrian
Grazer Schule (Haus der Architektur, Graz, 1998), Hugo Hring:
the Organic versus the Geometric (Edition Menges 1999) Gnter
Behnisch (Birkhuser 2000), Modern Architecture through Case
Studies, a revisionist history of the modern movement (Architectural
Press 2002), Gunnar Asplund (Phaidon 2006), Modern Architecture
through Case Studies 1945-1990 ( a second volume, Architectural
Press 2007) and Peter Hbner: Building as a Social process (Menges
2007).
Gil M. Doron is a writer, curator, and a PhD candidate at the
Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL. He is the founder member of
Transgressive Architecture group. Dorons main research themes and
art work concern the issue of urban voids and wasteland as a positive
agent for urban sustainability, the redenition of the public space, and
the use of art intervention to foster a radical democratic space.
164
ISSN: 1755-068
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Notes on Contributors
165
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vol.1 (1)
Notes on Contributors
Doron has taught design and history & theory of architecture at
the Universities of Brighton, Greenwich, East London and London
Metropolitan University. His work has been published widely in,
for example, Architectural Design (AD), Archis, BluePrint, Building
Design, City, and Um-Bau, and recently in the book Franck/Stevens
(eds.), Loose Space: Possibility and Diversity in Urban Life, (London:
Routledge, 2006).
For more details please see: www.gmdoron.com <http://www.
gmdoron.com/>
Ole W. Fischer teaches theory of architecture at the Institute
of History and Theory of Architecture (gta) of the Eidgenssische
Technische Hoschschule (ETH) in Zurich since 2002. He studied
architecture at Bauhaus University in Weimar and ETH in Zurich.
As a PhD candidate at ETH he is defending his analysis of the artistic
and theoretic work of Henry van de Velde dedicated to Friedrich
Nietzsche as an example of philosophically informed aesthetic theory
and design this fall. In 2005 he was fellow researcher at the Graduate
School of Design in Harvard, in 2004 and 2005 fellow researcher at
the Weimar Classic Foundation. His architectural offce in Zurich
works on urban and landscape design projects. Ole W. Fischer is
founder of the discussion platform MittelBau at ETH, and he has
published internationally on contemporary questions of architectural
theory (Werk, Bauen und Wohnen; Journal of Society of Architectural
Historians; MIT Thresholds; Archplus; Umeni/Art, GAM).
O. W. Fischer is also co-editor of the upcoming book, Precisions
Architecture between Arts and Sciences, (Berlin: Jovis, 2007).
Helen Hills is Reader in Art History in the Department of History
of Art at the University of York. Her research interests lie in baroque
architecture, spirituality and architecture, non-linear art history, gender
and sexuality and art history. Principal publications include Invisible
City: The Architecture of Devotion of Aristocratic Convents in Baroque
Naples, Oxford University Press, 2004; Marmi Mischi Siciliani:
Invenzione e Identit (Inlaid polychromatic marble decoration in early
modern Sicily: Invention and identity), Societ Messinese di Storia
Patria Scholarly monograph series, Messina, 1999.
Dr Yeoryia Manolopoulou is a Lecturer in Architecture at the
Bartlett, UCL, a founding member of the collaborative practice tessera,
and now a partner in ay-architects. In 2006 she was short-listed for
the RIBA Presidents Award for Outstanding PhD Thesis with her
doctorate Drawing on Chance: Indeterminacy, Perception, and Design
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(UCL, 2003). Selected publications can be found in The Journal of
Architecture (no.3, 2004; no.5, 2005; no.3, 2006); Architectural
Design Research (RMIT, 2005); Borden ed. The Dissertation
(Architectural Press, 2006); The Unthinkable Doctorate (NeTHCA and
Saint-Lucas School of Architecture, 2007). Yeoryia has exhibited work
internationally, including the EMST National Museum of Contemporary
Art, Athens, the RIBA, the Royal Academy and DomoBaal, London, as
well as in Delft, Prague, Bratislava and New York.
Peter Mrtenbck is Visiting Fellow at Goldsmiths, University
of London and Professor of Visual Culture at Vienna University of
Technology. His recent work has focused on spatial confict, urban
informality, models of networking and relational theories. Peter
has been visiting professor at Linz University of Art (2000) and
University of Paderborn (2002). He is one of the founder members of
ThinkArchitecture and author of numerous articles and books including
Die virtuelle Dimension: Architektur, Subjektivitt und Cyberspace
(2001), Visuelle Kultur: Krper-Rume-Medien (co-ed., 2003) and the
forthcoming Networked Cultures (2008).
Helge Mooshammer is a founder member of ThinkArchitecture, a
London and Vienna based practice of architects and cultural theorists,
whose work includes a range of interdisciplinary art/architecture
projects in the urban realm, which have been shown in exhibitions
worldwide. He received his Ph.D. in Architecture from Vienna
University of Technology in 2003. His research and writing have
focused on relational architecture, sexuality and urban culture. Helge
has authored Cruising: Architektur, Psychoanalyse und Queer Cultures
(2005) and co-edited Visuelle Kultur: Krper-Rume-Medien (2003).
He currently teaches at Goldsmiths, University of London and at Vienna
University of Technology where he holds a Senior Research Fellowship
at the Institute of Art and Design.
Doina Petrescu is senior lecturer in architecture at the University
of Sheffeld. She has written, lectured and practised individually and
collectively on issues of gender, technology, (geo)politics and poetics of
space. She is editor of Altering Practices : Feminist Politics and Poetics
of Space (London: Routledge, 2007) and co-editor of Architecture and
Participation (London: Spon Press, 2005).
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Dougal Sheridan studied Architecture at Queensland University
Australia and Technische Universitt and Hochschule der Knste in
Berlin, graduating 1997. Recipient of travelling research scholarship
to Netherlands 1998-9. Practised in Ireland, Germany and the
Netherlands. Project Architect of the Letterkenny Civic Offces (with
MacGabhann Architects) which received AAI and RIAI Architectural
Awards in 2003. Established LiD Architecture in 2003. LiDs projects
have been recognised in the RIAI architecture awards and published
nationally and internationally. Research and Practice interest is in the
application of landscape concepts and strategies in Architecture and
Urbanism. Has also completed research in critical theory in relation
to the appropriation of urban space in Berlin and Belfast. Lecturer in
Architecture at the University of Ulster since 2003 and member of the
Building Initiative Research Group, which recently exhibited at the
Entry 2006 Talking Cities Exhibition in Essen and published the book
Yellow Space: Negotiations for an Open City.
Jeremy Till is an architect and educator. He is widely seen as a leading
fgure in the contemporary debate about the built environment and
lectures worldwide on architecture and education. He is Professor of
Architecture at the University of Sheffeld, a school that has established
an internationally leading reputation in educational theory and practice
concentrating on the social responsibility of the architect. His written
work includes the edited books Architecture and the Everyday and
Architecture and Participation, and his forthcoming Architecture
Depends (MIT Press). As an architect, he is a Director of Sarah
Wigglesworth Architects, best known for their pioneering building,
9 Stock Orchard Street (The Straw House and Quilted Offce), which
has received extensive international acclaim and multiple awards. In
2006 he was appointed to represent Britain at the Venice Architecture
Biennale.
Kim Trogal is a PhD student at Sheffeld University, having received
the LKE Ozolins Award 2007 from the RIBA. Since graduating from the
masters course at Sheffeld in 2002, she has worked in practice, most
signifcantly for the multi-disciplinary practice fuid. There she worked
on a variety of projects including masterplanning and regeneration
projects, educational buildings and more art based projects. She
has contributed to research projects undertaken at the University of
Sheffeld with the Bureau of Design Research and Dr Rosie Parnell.
She has taught postgraduate design studio at London Metropolitan
University and undergraduate design studio at Sheffeld University. She
has recently had a book chapter published, developing the work of her
postgraduate thesis, in Altering Practices, edited by Doina Petrescu.
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Notes on Contributors
Leo Care currently divides his time between architecture practice
with Prue Chiles Architects, Research at the Bureau of Design Research
and tutoring in both Degree and March. schools at the University
of Sheffeld. His particular interests lie in engaging communities
and specifcally young people in the process of design, construction
and localised regeneration. Leo is a founding member of Playce, an
international network of architects, designers and educationalists that
have come together to improve awareness and encourage learning of the
built environment, through design and play. The group was established
in Finland at the Alvar Aalto International Symposium 2003. The group
aims to undertake workshops with young people in different countries,
celebrating cultural and architectural diversity.
Renata Tyszczuk is lecturer in Architecture at the University of
Sheffeld. Her research interests explore the contemporary city and the
role of imagination and experiment in architectural design and practice.
She has participated in interdisciplinary research projects on questions
about globalisation, environmental change and creative approaches to
sustainability. This links to her involvement in the development of the
Interdependence Day project (www.interdependenceday.co.uk). She
is the author of The Story of an Architect King: Stanislas Leszczynski
in Lorraine 1737-1766 (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2007) and editor of
Architecture and Interdependence: Mappings and Explorations by
Studio Six (Cambridge: Shed, 2007). Together with Doina Petrescu she
is the founder editor of feld:
Editors
Doina Petrescu
Renata Tyszczuk
Editorial and review collective
Peter Blundell-Jones, University of Shefeld
Gary Boyd, University College Cork
Stephen Cairns, University of Edinburgh
Peter Carl, University of Cambridge
Murray Fraser, University of Westminster
Andrew Higgott, University of East London
Florian Kossak, University of Shefeld
Thomas Markus, University of Strathclyde
Johan Pas, Antwerp Academy of Fine Arts
Doina Petrescu, University of Shefeld
Wendy Pullen University of Cambridge
Peg Rawes Bartlett, UCL
Tatjana Schneider, University of Shefeld
Robert Tavernor, London School of Economics
Jeremy Till, University of Shefeld
Igea Troiani, Oxford Brookes University
Renata Tyszczuk, University of Shefeld
Stephen Walker, University of Shefeld
Editorial assistant
Nishat Awan
Art editor and design
John Sampson
ISSN: 1755-068
www.eld-journal.org
vol.1 (1)
Contact
For all enquiries submissions and comments please contact:
feld@sheffeld.ac.uk
feld:
School of Architecture
Arts Tower Western Bank
Sheffeld S10 2TN
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