FORMS OF TIME

Spring 2008

Brian Massumi
with Jason Nguyen and Mark Davis
Brian Boigon
with Izabel Gass

MANIFOLD
 To the Reader
9 Izabel Gass
Brian Massumi
17 with Jason Nguyen and Mark Davis
Bergsonism Gilles Deleuze
31 reviewed by Nicholas Risteen
Kant’s Critical Philosophy Gilles Deleuze
39 reviewed by Izabel Gass
Ambiguous Etiologies
59 Robert Crawford and Federico Cavazos
Brian Boigon
69 with Izabel Gass
Architectures of Time Sanford Kwinter
77 reviewed by David Dahlbom
Duration and Simultaneity Henri Bergson
89 reviewed by Matthew Conti

Islands and Worlds Reinhold Martin

95 reviewed by Jamie Chan
Writing on Architecture Yale University
99 reviewed by Stephen Nielson
talk20 Philadelphia University of Pennsylvania
109 reviewed by Jason Nguyen
FOA Alejandro Zaera-Polo
115 reviewed by Francis Bitonti
Shrinkwrapping Vague Things Neil Denari
121 reviewed by Molly Wright Steenson
Mass Mysteria David Erdman
125 reviewed by Izabel Gass
Founding Editor-in-Chief
Izabel Gass

Associate Editors
Sanford Kwinter
Nana Last
Tait Kaplan
Joseph Lim
Nicholas Risteen
Etien Santiago

MANIFOLD PUBLISHING GROUP

info@manifoldmagazine.com
www.manifoldmagazine.com

First published in 2008

All work copyright the original author.

©2008 Manifold Publishing Group

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a

retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any means without prior written
permission from the publisher.

This issue is brought to you through the generosity of the 2006-2007 Dr. Bill
Wilson Student Initiatives Grant.

Manifold is sponsored by Lars Lerup, William Ward Watkin Professor and Dean
at Rice School of Architecture.

Cover design by Ann Chou

Printed and bound in the USA by the Manifold Publishing Group

MANIFOLD
 To the Reader
Izabel Gass

“The traditional concept is that things are in time, whereas the new concept is that
time is in the things”- Karlheinz Stockhausen

Manifold Magazine was founded in May 2007 to provide a platform

for a reinvigoration of philosophical thought within the discipline of archi-
tecture. We made a promise to the reader in Manifold 1: the second issue
of the journal would be released only when a meaningful philosophical
discussion had been generated within its pages. We hope and suspect that
time has come.

The theme of Manifold 2 is “Forms of Time,” (a play on the title of

Sanford Kwinter’s 2001 book Architectures of Time). The editorial direction
was twofold. Our first aim was to generate a discussion of time as a mor-
phological order through which form is articulated. This meant returning to
scientific developments of the late 19th and early 20th centuries to explain
the scientific grounds for a Modern chronotope in which space, time, and
matter are not maintained as distinct variables but rather are collapsed
within what Einstein called “the field condition,” or a perfectly immanent
material world in which space-time-matter are all one continuous thing
(“Immanence” from the Latin immanere, to inhere within). In its philo-
sophical use, the term “immanence” indicates a world that is founded in
nothing transcendent—no timeless “substratum” (Aristotle) against which


change occurs. There is a parity between the Einsteinian field and ontologi-
cal immanence in that what “inheres within” the immanent world—essence,
difference, “god” — does not ground it or ontologically precede it; similarly,
for Einstein, space and time no longer exist as “carriers” for events (a word
he uses throughout his writings to describe Newtonian mechanics) but
instead constitute a single time-event, an indistinguishable force. As the
quote of composer Karlheinz Stockhausen above suggests, the immanent
world differentiates itself. Despite Gilles Deleuze’s recent oblivion within
contemporary architectural discourse, he remains the central philosopher
of an immanent ontology; it was in this light that we sought a thorough
reading of Deleuze’s lesser known texts.

Second to this primary discussion, the editors aimed that a critical

undercurrent run below the surface of Manifold 2, an undercurrent meant
to quietly suggest that many contemporary practices which claim owner-
ship of “topological” morphology and immanentist philosophy have done
little to dismantle the notion of the architectural object as fundamentally
static and individuated from its environment. Hence, the decision to allow
the title of Manifold 2 to echo the propos of Kwinter’s six-year-old book:
The problem of Immanence has still yet to be addressed.

The first set of our book reviews covers two of Gilles Deleuze’s
early works, Bergsonism (1966) and Kant’s Critical Philosophy (1963). It
is my hope that these texts provide a more foundational introduction to
the origins of Deleuzian “immanence” than can be found in the mere pil-
laging of Deleuzian jargon still common in architecture today. With these
reviews, we hoped to illuminate a personal statement of Deleuze’s from a
1988 interview:

10
 Setting out a plane of immanence, tracing out a field of imma-
nence, is something all the authors I’ve worked on have done
(even Kant — by denouncing any transcendent application of
the synthesis of the imagination, although he sticks to possible
experience rather than real experimentation). Abstractions
explain nothing, they themselves have to be explained: there
are no such things as universals, there’s nothing transcendent,
no Unity, subject (or object), Reason; there are only processes,
sometimes unifying, subjectifying, rationalizing, but just pro-
cesses all the same. 

Also, Jason Nguyen and Mark Davis interviewed Brian Massumi on

the intellectual origins of the Deleuzian virtual as well as of the Foucauld-
ian diagram, assessing the potential for creating a “temporal architecture”
along these lines.

It seemed only fair that Henri Bergson, as the great 20th century
philosopher of time, deserved a place of his own in this issue along with
Deleuze’s reading of his work. Matthew Conti studied Bergson’s interpreta-
tion of the scientific paradigm shift from classical mechanics to Einsteinian
relativity in Bergson’s brave (though sometimes muddled) book, Duration
and Simultaneity (1922). The book requires some amount of historical con-
textualization; Robin Durie does a particularly brilliant job in his English
translation. I will try to do half as well:

Classical or “Newtonian” mechanics rested on a notion of time as

“absolute.” Absolute time can be understood as a universal framework for
the measurement of movement, outside of or distinct from movement
i. See Negotiations, trans. Martin Joughin; Columbia University Press, 1995

11
itself; or, as Einstein succinctly phrases it:

According to classical mechanics, time is absolute, ie, it is

independent of the position and the condition of motion of the
system of coordinates.ii

In the classical model, time has no creative agency because time

does not regulate movement, but merely measures it. Crucial here is that
the concept of “simultaneity,” the notion that two events can occur “at
the same time,” relies on the relation of distinct events to a standardized
temporal scale.

The linch-pin is jerked from the theory of “Absolute Time” in the

1880’s, when Albert Michelson and Edward Morley discover that the speed
of light remains constant regardless of the speed of its point of observation
— an observer moving at 65 mph does not perceive light moving faster than
an observer standing still. Einstein eventually uses this finding to reveal the
fallacy of the “Theorem of the Addition of Velocities,” the notion that the
sum total of the relative velocities of an observer and her object of observa-
tion provide the velocity of the system in “Absolute Time”:

Let us assume that the simple law of the constancy of the veloc-
ity of light c (in vacuum) is justifiably believed [...] If a ray of
light be sent along [an] embankment [...] the tip of the ray will
be transmitted with the velocity c relative to the embankment.
Now let us suppose that our railway carriage is [...] travelling
along the railway lines with the velocity v, and that its direction

ii. Einstein, Relativity: The Special and General Theory, p. 62

12
 is the same as that of the ray of light, but its velocity of course
much less. Let us inquire about the velocity of propagation of
the ray of light relative to the carriage [...] The velocity W of
the man relative to the embankment is here replaced by the
velocity of light relative to the embankment. w is the required
velocity of light with respect to the carriage, and we have

w=c–v

The velocity of propagation of a ray of light relative to the car-

riage thus comes out smaller than c. iii

Thus, the total velocity of the system of the speed of light rela-
tive to the speed of its observer is irreducible to Absolute Time, inasmuch
as the speed of light is constant — time is not, in the Newtonian sense,
“independent of the condition of motion” of light; rather, light maintains
its own condition of motion, or its own time.

In his Duration and Simultaneity, Henri Bergson uses Einsteinian

relativity to legitimate a science of “Duration” — consciousness understood
as a temporal flow internal to the human subject. Matthew Conti’s review
of this text attempts to pinpoint exactly where the philosopher loses the
scientist — and where the scientist loses the philosopher — unfolding
Bergson’s enigmatic reading of Einstein.

The design project featured in this issue, Robert Crawford and

Federico Cavazos’ “Ambiguous Etiologies”, modulates turbulence and
catalyzes material and climatological interactions to produce architectural
iii. Einstein, pp. 21-22

13
forms from drifts of snow in Wyoming’s barren landscape. The project
could be said to operate under the assumption that time and matter exist in
a single, continuous, self-integrated manifold, (Einsteinian “field”) not the
“dichotomized” (Massumi) world of Newtonian time and space. Einstein
again:

In Newtonian mechanics, space and time [...] play the part of

carrier or frame for things that happen in physics, in reference
to which events are described by the space co-ordinates and the
time. In principle, matter is thought of as consisting of “mate-
rial points,” the motions of which constitute physical happen-
ing [...] If matter were to disappear, space and time alone would
remain behind (as a kind of stage for physical happening).

By contrast:

The concept of field [replaced] the idea of a particle (mate-

rial point) [...] Temperature is here a simple example of the
concept of field. This is a quantity (or a complex of quantities)
which is a function of the co-ordinates and the time. Another
example is the motion of a liquid. At every point there exists
at any time a velocity, which is quantitatively described by its
three ‘components’ with respect to the axes of a co-ordinate
system (vector). The components of the velocity at a point (field
components), here also, are functions of the co-ordinates (x, y,
z) and the time (t) [...] Even in classical physics the event is
localized by four numbers, three spatial co-ordinates and a time
co-ordinate; the totality of physical “events” is thus thought of
as being embedded in a four-dimensional continuous manifold.

14
 But the basis of classical mechanics this four-dimensional con-
tinuum breaks up objectively into the one-dimensional time
and into three-dimensional spatial sections, only the latter of
which contain simultaneous events. iv

While Cavazos and Crawford’s design work attempts a material

interpretation of the field condition, David Dahlbom ventured a review
of Sanford Kwinter’s 2001 Architectures of Time, homing in on Kwinter’s
understanding of the “subjective bloc,” or a theory of the subject within
an immanent ontology. Dahlbom particularly raises the question of how
free will and socio-political agency, as they have been typically constituted
in Humanist discourse, are to be rethought in this framework — a hugely
important subject that Kwinter has never managed to fully address.

Lastly, my own interview with Brian Boigon turns to a discussion of

the mundane world of Perez Hilton, instant messaging and computer gam-
ing. Boigon offers a disjunctive and rambling manifesto on the capacity of
contemporary technology to define a “dynamic architecture” that extends
beyond the disciplinary literalism of architecture as built form.

At the conclusion of his interview, Boigon demands: “if you want to

make your architecture into a building, enter through Marcel Duchamp’s
Door 11.” Door 11, of course, was Marcel Duchamp’s puzzling doorframe
construction in which one door shared two frames, such that, to close the
door in one frame was to open it in another. I particularly liked Boigon’s
reference here, mostly because it is our aim that each issue of Manifold
provoke more than explain, which is to say, we hope to never close the
door on any idea, but merely move our readers and contributors from one
iv. Einstein, pp. 165-166

15
room of questions to another. In Deleuze’s words, “abstractions explain
nothing.” This is to say, without fail, the elaboration of any thought always
yields a complexity that reconfigures the whole of an idea. On that note,
we thank you for reading and, as always, challenge you with an invitation to
join our endeavor.

Sincerely,

Izabel Gass
Editor-in-Chief

16
 Brian Massumi
with Jason Nguyen and Mark Davis

Nguyen, Davis: Historically, a Western understanding of the material

world has relied on a desire to understand things for what they “are.” But
the work of Deleuze and Guattari proposes an ontology rooted in “becom-
ing.” Paradoxically, this way of thinking debases the singular moment of
instantiation, elevating instead the abstract collection of circumstances that
intersect to produce it. What is the role of the “Virtual” in this ontology,
and how does it differ from the Platonic “Ideal”?

Massumi: An effort of thought is required to prevent the Deleuzian “vir-

tual” from slipping into the Platonic ideal. The concept automatically shifts
in this direction the instant it is separated from “the singular moment of
instantiation,” or in deleuzian terms, the “actual.” It is the virtual which
is debased by being separated in thought from actuality — not the actual
which is debased by its association with the virtual. The two are inseparable.
They must be thought strictly together. From a deleuzian point of view they
have no philosophical meaning apart from their dynamic embrace of each
other. The movement of becoming is not on one side or the other: it is the
result of their coming together. “Dynamic” and “movement” are the key
words. There would be neither dynamism nor movement were the virtual
and actual in separate realms. There is one world, and it is they.

The virtual separated from the actual would be utterly “sterile” be-
cause it would have nothing through which to express itself. Unexpressed,

17
it would not give itself to thought. The actual apart from the virtual would
be absolute stasis, because a thing in change is like a doppler effect through
the present of a just-past moving into the future. The past and future are
precisely what are inactual, so they fall to the virtual. The moment you
think change, you have actually appealed to the virtual. Think the actual
without the virtual, and you have fixity.

Deleuze needs a concept of the virtual because of his project of

thinking the actual. The starting point of that project is the heraclitean
observation that the only constant is change. Conversely, Deleuze needs
the actual to hold the reality of the virtual. Deleuze considers his thought,
including the thought of the virtual, to be a variety of empiricism. He
accepts the dictum that everything that can be considered real must in
some way be experienced, with “experienced” minimally defined as having
effects or taking effect. The actual is nothing other than the taking-effect of
the virtual. A supernal virtual could never get past the post of this effective
philosophy.

This is just a first approximation. The virtual is a slippery concept.

It is by nature elusive. I call it “recessive.” It does not expend itself in its
effect. It withdraws back into itself, constituting in the same stroke the
just-past of that effect, and the to-come of the next. It is always in the gaps
between chronological moments, in a nonlinear, recursive time of its own:
just past – yet to come; future-past. When the virtual withdraws back into
itself in the gaps in the actual, it has no “place” to go. It goes only into its
own return. You can only think it across its iterations, and the mark of each
iteration is an actual change. However: every change can be expressed as a
change in an order of juxtaposition of actual elements. In other words, the
virtual, by nature elusive in a time-like way, takes effect as a spacing. It does

18
not take effect without its effects taking place.

This is where the paradox of Deleuze’s thinking lies: not in an alter-

native between the actual and the virtual, but in how they come together.
The way in which they come together creates a space-time tension that is
difficult to model conceptually because our habits of thought tend both to
dichotomize space and time (treating them as independent variables) and
to erase their difference (for example, by construing time as a “line”). It
is difficult to talk about the virtual without falling into one of these traps,
or most often both at the same time. For example, the suspicion that the
virtual is a Platonic ideal has already spatialized it as a realm apart, a higher
plane or other world.

Deleuze has two base strategies to deal with this slipperiness of the
virtual in its relation with the actual. First, he multiplies models for it. A
given model may tend toward spatializing the virtual. He will immediately
undermine it with a temporalizing counter-model. If you put the two to-
gether, you get a space-time tension, or even a paradox. You are making
progress. None of the models are meant to be adequate descriptions of the
virtual. They are conceptual tools meant to assist in following the move-
ment of the virtual into and out of the actual. This movement will be dif-
ferent in each case. And in each case, a particular set of models will have to
be mobilized. The virtual is most adequately expressed in the interference
patterns between them. The thought of the virtual is all about process, and
must itself be a process. It can never come in one go.

For example, Deleuze often speaks of the virtual as being composed

of sets of “pure singularities.” These are point-like, and taken together form
“constellations.” Taken that way, the virtual begins to resemble a fixed

19
space-like structure. So Deleuze will go on to say that the singularities
“extend” toward one another. This undoes the fixity by adding a vector
aspect carrying a time connotation. The constellation is starting to feel like
a projective geometry (in which points and lines are interchanged, and the
plotting of space requires a time of transformation). Then just as you’re
getting used to that he’ll say that each singularity “includes” all the oth-
ers, in the dynamic form of its extensions toward them. The singularity is
now sounding like a curve: an integration of singularities. We’re now in a
calculus model, each singularity an integrable differential. If you try to put
the models together, you get points stretching out into lines, lines curv-
ing, curves folding back into mutual inclusion -- the whole bending into a
topological model. Point, set, structure, vector, curve, differential, integral,
topological transformation —all these are the virtual. And that is only a
few of the mathematical models you might appeal to (there are others:
Riemann space, Markov chains, fractals, and on and on). There are also
physical models (the singularity as quantum of event). Biological models
(rhizome, phylum). Geological models (strata, plateaus). Military models
(war-machine, “fleet in being”). The models never end. Their multitude is
only limited in the working out of a particular conceptual problem. Each
problem approached will take its own selection of them. The materials and
formations in question will simply not be able to bear the embarrassment
of conceptual riches. The models will shake down, under pressure, into
a restricted set. The movements into and out of the reduced plurality of
models that are left will mimic the actual pattern under study. The problem
will have been processed in thought. Thought will have mimicked its actual
object in and as its own process – making that process analogical.

The thinking of the virtual is always analogical, in an irreducibly

complex way. Simondon has an ugly name for this kind of analogical think-

20
ing of and with complexity. He call it “allagmatics.” Here it means you can
never model the virtual once and for all. And that you can never simply
apply the models of it that you produce. You have to put them to work.
You have to work through them, and work them through, differently in
each case, under problematic pressure. You have to enact them. It’s a real
process.

Mistrust anyone who privileges any one model of the virtual. They
are standing back from the process. It is a common tactic of critics of De-
leuze to take one of his proliferation of models for the model, and then
on that basis critique the concept of the virtual as inadequate. This is like
amputing someone’s thumb and then criticizing them for not living up to
the definition of the human by failing to display opposable digits. You can’t
grasp the virtual without a full conceptual hand. You can’t actually grasp it
at all. It’s more like prestidigitation. You make the moves that conjure it up
performatively as a thought-effect.

Nguyen, Davis: As Deleuzian-Guattarian preoccupations seep in to ar-

chitecture, practices are emerging which pose philosophical questions for
the process of form-making, yet still have not confronted the largely static
nature of the built environment. Is it possible to re-conceive the discipline
of architecture entirely as an art of temporal, rather than spatial, organiza-
tion? What are the implications of such an agenda?

Massumi: Approached processually, there is no contradiction between form

and formation, stasis and transformation, or even time and space. The most
useful way of approaching these “oppositions” is to treat them as phase
transitions. We do not say that ice “contradicts” water. Water becomes ice,
and ice water. They are processual extensions of each other. Each contains

21
the other as its own potential. They are in a state of “mutual inclusion” in
the same line of variation. They belong to the same “phylum.” Their starkly
different formal qualities, it is true, commit them to different destinies.
Water enters prioritarily into regimes of flow, ice into regimes of rigid ac-
cumulation. However, the formal differences do not belie their belonging
to the same phylum. Quite the contrary, they express it – differentially. The
transitions from one phase state to another give the process to which both
forms belong the opportunity to express itself more fully. The potentials
each phase state contains appear differentially, in a distribution bringing
to expression at the same time what the process immanently includes, and
its engagement with external conditions belonging to other processes. The
ice-form expresses at the same time a potential of the material phylum to
which it belongs, and an environing set of weather conditions. The expres-
sion of the potential of the water process is conditioned by another, more
encompassing process. The second process takes the first up into itself. It
sets the conditions under which a specific form belonging to the first process
will present itself in it. This is what Deleuze and Guattari call “capture.”

Capture is always “double capture,” because as I noted the process

taken up has something to say about what happens, and co-determines the
more encompassing process determining what form it takes. Today’s weather
conditions wouldn’t be what they are were water not part of the phylum it
is. Weather conditions may determine which of water’s potentials will ap-
pear, but the weather is dependent on water’s offering up those potentials
for it to be what it will have been on any given day. It’s the difference
between rain and snow. The point is: even “static” or frozen forms belong
to processual continuums populated by phase transitions between related
forms which express the same process in starkly different formal qualities.
Which form presents itself with what precise qualities, when, where and

22
how, is determined in dynamic encounter with another process that is more
encompassing than the first but with which the first is nevertheless in a
relation of co-determination.

The design process, what your question calls “formation,” is archi-

tecture’s liquid phase. The “static” form that emerges from that phase is
the built structure. The weather is the urban environment (including all its
constituent dimensions or strata: zoning, circulatory patterns, commercial
pressures, cultural preferences, trends in taste) providing the conditions for
that building. Urbanism and architecture are in a relation of double capture.
To be thought fully, neither can be thought apart. They are co-determining.
The determination doesn’t end at the erection of the building. The urban
process that takes it up may continue to bring new architectural potentials
contained in the building to expression. How a building takes effect, what
architectural-urban effects it has, varies according to what passes through
it, how it is inhabited, and what goes on around. A building may be repur-
posed, qualitatively changing what difference its formal qualities make in
the life of the city – the architectural equivalent of snow or rain, a city
chill or urban warming trend. An entire architectural genre might modulate
which potentials actually appear, even without explicit formal reconfigura-
tion, in response to economic or cultural changes redefining the prevailing
“weather” conditions of the urban environment. The building next door
might be demolished and replaced, changing the local urban fabric in a
way that modulates the remaining building’s lived qualities and perhaps,
as a consequence of that, its program. The street in front might evolve into
a pedestrian mall, changing patterns of circulation, those changes in their
turn entraining others. The building may deteriorate, contributing through
its very breakdown to the conditions for urban renewal. The possibilities
are infinite. If you look at the larger picture of the double capture of the

23
built form and the urban environment, over the long term the fixity of the
“static” form reliquefies. All that is concrete melts into city.

The “static” form is only a provisional stop in the architectural

process. It is better conceived of as a threshold in a process that contin-
ues past it, and sweeps it up in a co-determined movement of continuing
transformation. The architectural process is ongoing for two reasons: 1) fol-
lowing to the principle of mutual inclusion, each form (or phase) virtually
“contains,” in processual potential, all others belonging to the architectural
continuum; 2) through the encounter with the encompassing, conditioning
process of the city, different sets of these architectural potentials are serially
expressed, with or without actual formal modification (sometimes relation-
ally, much the way one color modulates another by its proximity).

The question, then, is: how can the design process pre-adapt itself
to the continuation of process, which is in any case inevitable? How can
it build into its built result as-yet unexpressed architectural potentials,
enriching or intensifying the way it lends itself to re-uptake and recursive
reforming by other processes (double capture). How can it multiply its own
co-determining contributions to the double captures it engages? As Lars
Spuybroek argues, answering these questions requires shifting the vocabu-
lary from, for example, “ambiguities” of code or meaning, to ontogenetic
“vagueness.” Ontogenetic vagueness is not a lack of definition. It is a surplus
of it: a mutual inclusion in the same actual form of potentially divergent
takings-effect belonging to different phases of the same process. Greg
Lynn also speaks of this surplus-determination when he calls the produced
architectural form the dynamic “form of a multiplicity.” This question of
the surplus-determining continuation of the architectural process is the
problem my own work on architecture has focused on.

24
 Surplus-determination has to do only marginally with what is most
commonly taken to be the “content” of architecture: the typologies of
constituted form-defining styles which can be infused with new meaning
through a recoding or cross-coding of their component formal units. It is
less concerned with architecture’s formal disciplinary understanding of
itself than with its living through the encounter with its outside. There is a
particularly important “outside” of architecture that the built environment
actually contains: the body. It cannot be forgotten that the living-through
of the architectural process is always, and always variably, embodied.

There is a third “double capture” in close embrace with the two

already discussed. The material phylum of the human body, with its im-
manent process of experience-formation and all the potential that process
holds, enters into complex relations of co-determining continuation and
recursive reforming with the built structure. The built form is to body as
the built environment is to the building. The qualities of the built environ-
ment are the weather conditions for embodied experience.

A logic of perceptual emergence, of experiential ontogenesis, must

be added to the larger picture. What experiential phase transitions does a
passing or inhabiting body engage in double capture with the built form?
How do these continuous transformations feed back into urbanism? Or
back into architecture, at its interface with urbanism? What unexpressed
potentials are capacitated, at what thresholds, and to what effect? How can
architectural form surplus-determine perception and qualities of experi-
ence? Arakawa and Gins answer that question by adapting the concept of
“affordances” from J.J. Gibson’s “ecological” approach to perception theory.
The unit of architecture, from this processual perspective, is not a formal
unit of style. It is the “landing site”: the way in which an architectural

25
element beckons the body to actualize one of its experiential potentials.
Or many at once. When there are several, without one necessarily being
privileged over another, the architectural element has become surplus-de-
termining: the unitary form of an experiential multiplicity whose conditions
of emergence are an architectural encounter with the phylum of the body,
that encounter itself enfolded in the urban encounter with architecture:
triple articulation.

It cannot be emphasized enough that this foregrounding of percep-

tion and experience is not a call for a phenomenology of architecture. Phe-
nomenology returns experience to a form of interiority (the transcendental
ego) or a closed loop (the “flesh” of the world as preflective of subjective
expression). Experience is but an echo. In the ecological approach I am
advocating experience is an emergence. It returns the body to a processual
field of exteriority (encounter). The same goes for architecture itself. The
model at all levels is what I have called “relational autonomy”: the emer-
gent expression of a process’ singular potentials in a dynamic of encounter
with its processual outside. Applied to architecture, this undermines the
explanatory power of any approach that begins by separating the inside of
the discipline from its outside, as if architecture itself were effectively a
form of interiority defined by historical periods, a repertory of styles, or a set
of characteristics procedures. All of these change. All are under continual
variation. Architecture as a “discipline” is what passes through these ongo-
ing phase-shifts. It is in the gaps between chronological moments. It is in
the surplus-determination of elements of style in virtue of which they carry
an in-built, or immanent, potential for modulation. It is in the invention
of new procedures which retool its interface with other processes. Architec-
ture is the indiscipline flowing through its own complexly co-determined
iterations. It is not an edifice itself. It is not a structure. It has no definitive

26
content. It is a living process. As Deleuze and Guattari were fond of saying,
escape is the life-blood of process. A creative discipline is defined by how
it escapes its past content and internal constraints. It renews itself through
the rigorous indiscipline of its effective couplings with processes other than
its own.

Nguyen, Davis: The predominant architectural (mis-)use of Deleuzian-

Guattarian philosophy in architecture has been on form-making, often
confusing digital tools for “abstract machines” for dynamic form generation.
But isn’t architecture itself a socio-political abstract machine, as Foucault
showed time and again (Bentham’s Panopticon, the poor houses, the hospi-
tals, the public registers, etc.)? If so, what consequences might this present
for a “critical” architectural practice?

Massumi: By the logic I have been advancing, digital tools can indeed be
considered “abstract machines” for dynamic form generation. And architec-
ture itself, in the “big picture,” would be a socio-political abstract machine.
These are not mutually exclusive propositions.

The definition of an abstract machine would be: the generative

principle by which a continuum of potentials belonging to the same phy-
lum are vaguely determined to mutually include one another, and by which
that mutual inclusion is iteratively expressed through the serial emergence
of fully constituted actual forms punctuating phase transitions occurring
at the interface with an outside process. There is not room to unpack this
here, or to deal adequately with the complicated question of digital tech-
nology in architectural design. It will be sufficient to get a provisional idea
of why I would defend digital design procedures as an abstract machine to
replace “generative principle” in the definition I just gave with “algorithm”;

27
continuum of potentials with “permutational iterations”; emergence with
“stochastic operator”; and to construe any form at which the process of
form-generation is stopped as the fully constituted actual form. What then
are the outside processes with which this digital process interfaces? First:
human perceptual processes, at the inter-process threshold of the literal
interface of the screen. Second: the forces of the intended site and the
larger environment, and the values of the architect and/or client. Third:
both of these as they return to the process to modulate it.

What is unique about the digital design process it that it allows

any of its encounters with outside processes to be folded back into itself,
so as to become creative factors for its own iteration. It can turn outside
constraints into internal factors of creation, simply by folding them back
into its own process in the form of a tweaking of the generative parameters.
This infolding of external constraints transformed into internal creative
factors can be of many kinds. It might be a stylistic preference (curvilinear-
ity, for example) or a zoning imperative. It may be a desire to pre-engineer a
structural characteristic like load-bearing without dichotomizing aesthetic
form and architectonic structure. It may be to enable computer milling or
to experiment with modularity in response to cost constraints. One way
in which outside “constraints” may be integrated as creative factors into
digital design is to program basins of attraction or repulsion and limits of
divergence or fusion which inflect the forms generated so that a certain
value, or lived quality, is embodied in the resulting building. Lynn was an
early pioneer in this approach, for example in his Long Island House proto-
type which translated the constraint placed on the design by the client for a
certain view into a generative factor internal to the digital abstract machine
of the form-generating process itself.

28
 I do not mean to privilege digital design techniques over others. The
same translation of external limits or constraints into creative factors can
be achieved by other means (as the current interest in analogue computing
clearly illustrates). I just mean to say that every technical or procedural
innovation provides architecture as a living process with an opportunity
to renegotiate its relation to its outsides, and in doing so to renew the
relational autonomy it lives by. There is no reason not to call this process of
disciplinary readjustment to constituent outsides a “critical” practice. It is
not critical in the sense of judging according to a preestablished standard
(of taste, political ideology, etc.). It is creatively critical in its operative en-
counter with the outside. It is critical in the sense that it benefits by these
encounters to carry the process across thresholds and to effect phase shifts.
These thresholds and phase shifts are “critical” points in the sense that
what is at stake is the changing nature of the process, and as a consequence
the very definition of the discipline claiming that process as its own. This
bringing into question of the process occurs as a function of its own ongo-
ing operations. It is a form of what Deleuze calls “immanent critique.” You
might also call it “operative” or “effective” critique.

An effective critique belongs to a gift economy, not an administra-

tion of judgment. By producing the effects that it does, the process gives of
itself – and gives itself up. It gives itself up to selection. The way in which
its takings-effect couple with outside process will have positive feedback
effects or inhibiting effects. This will affect the process’ viability and self-
expressive capacity. In short: it is the city that “judges” architecture. Except
it is not a judgment. It is a living out.

Or is it real estate speculation that “judges” architecture? It could

well be that the outside process of speculation is in a stronger position to

29
select. Critical architecture practice is more concerned with how the disci-
pline gives itself to which outside, than in what content standards it sets
for itself as a discipline. Critical practice is part of what Isabelle Stengers
calls an ecology of practices where “judgment” is lived out processually, in
outside encounter. Prime among the larger processes with which architec-
ture couples is the process of capital itself, with its fearsome global powers
of capture. It goes without saying that every architectural practice must
grapple with the forces of capital, which at the same time constitute the
most powerfully enabling of the outside constraints that it has available
to translate into a creative factor for itself, and the most cruelly selective
environment. The same could actually be said of any practice today. Im-
manent critique of any kind has no choice but to be in some way, however
humble, an operative critique of capitalism.

30
 Bergsonism Gilles Deleuze
Zone Books, 1990

reviewed by Nicholas Risteen

In their introduction to Bergsonism, Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara

Habberjam, both extensive translators of Deleuze, offer an excerpt from
Deleuze’s letter to Michel Cressole relating Deleuze’s efforts to escape the
‘scholasticism of post-war French academic philosophy’:

My way of getting out of it at that time, was, I really think,

to conceive of the history of philosophy as a kind of buggery
or, what comes to the same thing, immaculate conception. I
imagined myself getting onto the back of an author, and giv-
ing him a child, which would be his and which would at the
same time be a monster. It is very important that it should
be his child, because the author actually had to say everything
that I made him say. But it also had to be a monster because
it was necessary to go through all kinds of decenterings, slips,
break-ins, secret emissions, which I really enjoyed. My book on
Bergson seems to me a classic of this case. 

This passage underscores Deleuze’s desire to set his text squarely

on Bergson’s shoulders; the words of the text are Bergson’s, the ideas pre-

i. Deleuze, Bergsonism, p. 8

31
formed, and their explication is a means of discovery more than argument.
Deleuze seems to be exploring the work of Bergson as much for himself as
for an academic reader looking to discover some ‘new’ insight on Bergson’s
philosophy. In a sense, Bergsonism construes the accumulated philosophy
under examination as a kind of data set, working in a scientific fashion to
elicit the underlying structure of Bergson’s writings.

“Intuition as Method,” the first chapter, details what Deleuze de-

clares to be “one of the most fully developed methods in philosophy” ii by
describing three essential rules to intuition as a method, or more precisely
three “distinct sorts of acts that in turn determine the rules of the method:
The first concerns the stating and creating of problems; the second, the
discovery of genuine differences in kind; the third, the apprehension of real
time”.iii Most important in this litany is the issue of ‘problems,’ specifically
the identification of false problems and their most common basis in the
misdiagnosis of “differences in degree” as “differences in kind.” Deleuze
quotes Bergson directly on this front:

The truth is that in philosophy and even elsewhere it is a ques-

tion of finding the problem and consequently of positing it,
even more than solving it. For a speculative problem is solved
as soon as it is properly stated. iv (emphases his)

Finding the problem, for Bergson (and subsequently here for De-
leuze as well) comes down to distinguishing between differences in kind,
and understanding that “there are no differences in kind except in dura-

ii. Ibid, p. 13
iii. Ibid, p. 14
iv. Ibid, p. 15

32
tion—while space is nothing other than the location, the environment, the
totality of differences of degree.” 

Bergson’s concept of “duration,” or lived time, is one of his most

famous and complex philosophical contributions. This issue occupies the
bulk of the next three chapters of Deleuze’s study, as extrapolating the
nuances enveloped in Bergson’s ideas becomes more complicated. Noting
the descriptions given of duration in Bergson’s Time and Free Will and
Creative Evolution, Deleuze describes duration as “a case of a ‘transition,’
of a ‘change,’ a becoming, but it is a becoming that endures, a change that is
substance itself,” further noting to the reader that “Bergson has no difficulty
in reconciling the two fundamental characteristics of duration; continuity
and heterogeneity.” vi How does Bergson presume to do so? By positing
duration itself as a multiplicity, based on the realization that duration

...divides up and does so constantly ...but it does not divide

up without changing in kind, it changes in kind in the process
of dividing up: This is why it is a nonnumerical multiplicity,
where we can speak of ‘indivisibles’ at each stage of the divi-
sion. There is other without there being several; number exists
only potentially. In other words, the subjective, or duration, is
the virtual. vii (emphases his)

Enter here another crowning piece to the puzzle: the virtual.

Deleuze’s study appears to flounder a bit at the introduction of the virtual,
as Bergson’s philosophy seems to almost spin out of control in a string of

v. Ibid, p. 32
vi. Ibid, p. 37
vii. Ibid, p. 42

33
equanimities: duration is the subjective is the virtual is memory is a multi-
plicity... In some instances this could be read as sticky philosophy, and the
subsequent chapters appear a bit convoluted to be sure, but not without
significant gains for Bergson’s argument. Those gains rest primarily on a
distinction between the ‘virtual’ and the ‘possible,’ a distinction which, in
Bergson’s inspection, philosophy (and also science) seemed to conspicu-
ously lack.

Deleuze draws the distinction between the virtual and the possible
from their respective relations to the real (and the means by which both
come into the real). Within Bergson’s philosophy, the virtual and the pos-
sible can be distinguished from each other “from at least two points of
view:”

From a certain point of view, in fact, the possible is the opposite

of the real, it is opposed to the real; but, in quite a different op-
position, the virtual is opposed to the actual. We must take this
terminology seriously: The possible has no reality (although it
may have an actuality); conversely, the virtual is not actual, but
as such possesses a reality. viii (emphasis his)

The second point from which to distinguish the virtual from the
possible rests in the process of ‘realization.’ Possibilities, for Bergson, come
to be realized through a process of limitation, “by which some possibles
are supposed to be repulsed or thwarted, while others ‘pass’ into the real”,ix
and work essentially in a negative fashion. The rules of actualization for the
virtual, by contrast, “are not those of resemblance and limitation, but those

viii. Ibid, p. 96
ix. Ibid, p. 97

34
of difference or divergence and of creation”. 

Bergsonism insists that this movement from the virtual to the actual
is not a dialectical process, which leaves the former behind in preference for
the latter (Bergson proffers the dialectic as a “false movement” due to its
imprecision). Instead, duration (or the virtual, or memory) retains its mul-
tiplicity in its process of actualization as “the conservation and preservation
of the past in the present” (emphasis his).xi In this way, Bergson’s duration
is “defined less by succession than by coexistence”.xii Positing duration
as virtual coexistence lends credence to the process of differentiation, as
the process of actualization need not thwart one virtual in preference for
another but instead allow them to develop along divergent lines.

The distinction that Deleuze elicits between the possible and the
virtual is the opposition between a negative and a positive process of re-
alization, respectively. That Bergson would come down on the side of the
positive process of actualizing the real should be clear from the introduc-
tion of Bergson’s method of intuition, which places the utmost importance
on the proper identification and creation of the problem itself (a positive
act). Reliance on the possible to describe the real would qualify as a false
problem for Bergson, as “it is not the real that resembles the possible, it is
the possible that resembles the real, because it has been abstracted from the
real once made, arbitrarily extracted from the real like a sterile double”.xiii
The movement from the possible to the real is a false movement, a kind
of conceptual back-tracking that seeks to identify a sequence of abstract
possibilities but only after the fact.
x. Ibid, p. 97
xi. Ibid, p. 57
xii. Ibid, p. 60
xiii. Ibid, p. 98

35
 Movement for the virtual, by contrast, describes an entirely differ-
ent process:

We know that the virtual as virtual has a reality; this reality,

extended to the whole universe, consists in all the coexisting
degrees of expansion and contraction. A gigantic memory, a
universal cone in which everything coexists with itself, except
for the differences of level. On each of these levels there are
some ‘outstanding points,’ which are like remarkable points
particular to it. All these levels or degrees and all these points
are themselves virtual. They belong to a single Time; they
coexist in a Unity; there are enclosed in a Simplicity; they form
the potential parts of a Whole that is itself virtual. They are
the reality of this virtual ... When the virtual is actualized, is
differentiated, is ‘developed,’ when it actualizes and develops
its parts, it does so according to lines that are divergent, but
each of which corresponds to a particular degree in the virtual
totality. There is here no longer any coexisting whole; there are
merely lines of actualization, some successive, others simul-
taneous, but each representing an actualization of the whole
in one direction and not combining with other lines or other
directions ... For what coexisted in the virtual ceases to coexist
in the actual and is distributed in lines or parts that cannot
be summed up, each one retaining the whole, except from a
certain perspective, from a certain point of view. These lines of
differentiation are therefore truly creative: They only actualize
by inventing, they create in these conditions the physical, vital
or psychical representative of the ontological level that they

36
 embody. xiv (emphases his)

This truly creative enterprise finds its fullest outlet in ‘the human
organism’ as expressed through the élan vital. Often translated as the ‘vital
impetus’ (which lacks particular subtleties of the French ‘élan’), the élan
vital manifests as the culmination of self-conscious creation, of the organ-
ism becoming aware of its ability not only to be affected by this process of
actualization but to effect it in turn to “create an instrument of freedom,
‘to make a machine which should triumph over mechanism,’ ‘to use the
determinism of nature to pass through the meshes of the net which this
very determinism had spread.’” xv Using intuition as method to arrive at
the interval between instinct and intelligence (that differentiating point at
which the human organism separates itself from its “animalistic” counter-
part), Bergson offers ‘emotion’ as the final working method of his creative
evolution. It is emotion that differs “in nature both from intelligence and
instinct, from both intelligent individual egoism and quasi instinctive so-
cial pressure” in an effort to liberate man “from the plane or the level that
is proper to him, in order to make him a creator, adequate to the whole
movement of creation”.xvi Bergsonism’s ideal creative emotion takes place
in a kind of ‘privileged soul,’ like an artist or a mystic, far more so than in
the work of philosophers: “At the limit, it is the mystic who plays with the
whole of creation, who invents an expression of it whose adequacy increases
with its dynamism.” xvii

Deleuze’s unpacking of Bergson in this short text covers enormous

ground, and shows numerous inklings of ideas and issues tackled in later
xiv. Ibid, pp. 100-101
xv. Ibid, p. 107
xvi. Ibid, pp. 110-111
xvii. Ibid, p. 112

37
decades in Deleuze’s own philosophy: multiplicity, duration, the virtual.
But it is important to remember that initial letter to Michel Cressole, and
the necessity to read this work by Deleuze as the kind of “buggery” or “im-
maculate conception” he intended it to be. After all, it is Bergson himself
who had to “say everything that I made him say.”

As such, tracing lines of descent from Bergson to Deleuze through

this text becomes a tricky matter. Deleuze does leave us some insight into
what elements within Bergsonism he took to be worth pursuing further, in
short afterward appended to the translation of the text in 1988 titled “A
Return to Bergson.” In taking stock of Bergson against modern advances
in science, technology and society, Deleuze offers three main features of
Bergsonism that can be useful in continuing his appraisal of metaphysics as
a rigorous discipline today: the method of intuition, the necessity of view-
ing metaphysics as a complement to science, and a continued examination
of the nature of multiplicities. Those three threads permeate much of
Deleuze’s own work, but it would be overstating the case to offer Bergsonism
as the ‘foundation’ (as some have done, even going so far as to say Deleuze’s
work constitutes “the new Bergsonism”). What would be fair, though, is
to see this text, this “immaculate conception,” as a work foundational to
the development of Deleuze’s own work in subsequent years, as Deleuze
worked through, against, and within the utility of Bergson to at last create a
body of work that was his own ‘monster.’

38
Kant’s Critical Philosophy Gilles Deleuze
University of Minnesota, 1985

reviewed by Izabel Gass

Deleuze’s 1963 study of Kant, Kant’s Critical Philosophy, which

Deleuze once described as a “book on an enemy,” is a subversive exercise
in delineating an impetus toward immanentism within the Kantian theory
of the transcendent subject. While, on one level, Deleuze’s book offers a
close textual reading and faithful synopsis of Kant’s three Critiques, it also
illuminates particular logical practices within the Kantian method— largely
the philosophical ties that bind Kant to empiricism — that serve to refigure
the traditional conception of the Kantian Transcendental Method. Most
radically, Deleuze depicts Kantian reason as a self-interested process aimed
at folding empirical experience into its own framework, exacting a legisla-
tive agency on the objects of experiential phenomena. In Deleuze’s reading
of Kant, reason becomes an engine or operative function that assimilates
experience to the mind of the subject, collapsing the distinction between

39
the subject and the objects of the subject’s perception. Deleuze herein
posits a limited commonality between Kant’s transcendent subject and his
own model of ontological immanence in which subject-object distinctions
are obliterated.

An Immanent Critique: Reason as Reason’s End

Deleuze defines Kant’s work as “a struggle on two fronts: against

empiricism and against dogmatic rationalism.”  The conflicting ontologies
of empiricism and rationalism differ fundamentally in their respective
answers to the skeptical question: how can we confirm the existence of the
self? For the rationalists, cognition objectively confirms being, which is to
say, to think is to exist. Descartes’ well-known formulation, “Cogito ergo
Sum,” (I think therefore I am) presupposes an objective existence for the
thinking self:

The fact that I [the “I” of Descartes’ formulation] exist is an

objective fact . . . Whatever the world contains, it contains the
thinking being who I am ii

Thus, for the rationalists, the thinking being can objectively con-
firm his own existence because of his very cognitive capacity to ask the
skeptical question. And because thought confirms being, thought (reason)
is determined to precede, or ground, “experience” in the construction of
knowledge, which is to say that

rationalism derives all claims to knowledge from the exercise

i. Deleuze, Kant’s Critical Philosophy, p. 1

ii. Scruton, Kant: A Very Short Introduction, p. 17

40
 of reason, and purports to give an absolute description of the
world, uncontaminated by the experience of any observer. It is
an attempt to give a God’s-eye view of reality iii

In other words, empirical experience is superfluous to the work of

reason because reason is innate to the mind and is the ontological precedent
for experience.

By contrast, the empiricist viewpoint, most radically articulated by

David Hume and John Locke, skeptically erodes the possibility for objective
knowledge, positing that only conscious perception or “experience” can be
subjected to philosophical inquiry. What “experience” leaves just outside
its purview is any evidence of the mechanism that synthesizes it, which is to
say, any confirmation of a “self,” as differentiable from a world of perceiv-
able objects:

In basing all knowledge on experience . . . all claims to objectiv-

ity become spurious and illusory. . . Hume took his scepticism
so far as to cast doubt upon the existence of the self . . .saying
that neither is there a perceivable object that goes by this name,
nor is there any experience that would give rise to the idea of
it iv

For the empiricists, the “self” has no perceptible correlate, and

therefore falls outside the range of philosophical investigation. Thus, Hume
opens his Treatise of Human Nature with the claim that an evaluation of
the experiential marks the limit of a science of man:

iii. Ibid, p. 21
iv. Ibid, p. 25

41
 Tho’ we must endeavour to render all our principles as universal
as possible, by tracing up our experiments to the utmost, and
explaining all effects from the simplest and fewest causes, ‘tis
still certain we cannot go beyond experience; and any hypoth-
esis, that pretends to discover the ultimate original qualities of
human nature, ought at first to be rejected as presumptuous
and chimerical 

What is crucial to note here is that, if inquiry into the nature of the
self is impossible for the empiricists, it is because the self cannot be distin-
guished from experience —in fact, this very indistinguishability between
“self” and “phenomena” is what Deleuze particularly takes hold of in his
own work on Hume. Because Hume’s empirical method has no means at
its disposal for differentiating the subject (“the ultimate original qualities
of human nature”) from phenomena (“experience”), he implicitly proposes
a collapse of the subject-object dichotomy. The individuation of the self
goes unconfirmed; experience is a single “plane of immanence” that fully
integrates both subject and object.

Kant’s “struggle on two fronts” is also a synthesis on two fronts, in

this regard. Kant first rejects empiricism on the grounds that an a priori
framework for knowledge must necessarily ground experiential perception.
Kant argues that reason is, in Deleuze’s terms, a “faculty of ends,” which is
to say, reason is absolutely necessary for the cognitive synthesis of the world
of objects, making reason a faculty without which empirical “experience”
would be impossible. Thus, Kant upholds the notion of innate ideas in the
mind and names them the “a priori.”

v. Hume, Treatise of Human Nature, p. xvii

42
 However, Kant also refutes the rationalist notion that all knowledge
is innate, and experience superfluous to thought, positing instead that
while the a priori grounds experience, it must be also be actuated through
experience. Kant’s innate ideas are

concepts and principles which the reason derives from within

itself on the occasion of experience. A child is not born with, for
example, an idea of causality. But on the occasion of experience
its reason derives the concept from within itself. [This is] an a
priori concept in the sense that it is not derived from experience
but is applied to and in a sense governs experience. There are,
therefore a priori concepts and principles which are grounded
in the mind’s own structure. These concepts are ‘pure’, in
the sense that they are, of themselves, empty of all empirical
content or material vi

The Kantian a priori then, as a grounds for the experiential, is also

paradoxically reliant on experience for its actuation.

Deleuze herein delineates Kant’s rejection of rationalism (the tri-

umph of reason over experience) in terms of value, absurdity, and conflict.
Kant makes the “argument from value” that without cultural experience,
there is nothing to distinguish human reason from “animality,” or an ab-
ject, primitive existence — in other words, there is a value to reason as it is
cultivated through experience. Second, Kant poses the “argument from the
absurd,” which, in Deleuze’s terms, makes the claim that “if Nature had
wanted to achieve its own ends in a being endowed with reason” it would

vi. Copleston, A History of Philosophy, p. 213

43
not have provided the possibility for experience.vii Finally, Kant makes the
“argument from conflict,” suggesting that if reason were intended to pro-
vide an ends to knowledge without experience, or culture, then there would
be no conflict between man “as both animal and moral species;” in other
words, the cultural assimilation of the primitive or animalistic through law
and order would not be necessary. viii

Thus, Deleuze concludes that for Kant, “only the cultural ends of
reason can be described as absolutely final,” meaning, only reason that is
actuated within experience has achieved its intended, final “end.” ix Simply
put:

Neither experience nor reason is alone able to provide knowl-

edge [...] Only in their synthesis is knowledge possible; hence
there is no knowledge that does not bear the marks of reason
and of experience together 

It is crucial here that in stock summaries of Kantian philosophy what

Deleuze calls “the ends of reason” is simply referred to as “knowledge,”
the nominal term for a sublation of “reason” and “experience.” Frederick
Copleston’s above summary comes closer to Deleuze’s aim by describing
the a priori as that which “governs” experience, but it is by selectively
honing in on a language of “ends” and “means” that Deleuze uniquely il-
luminates Kantian reason as a self-interested process. For Deleuze, reason
is “self-interested” in the sense that it has its own goal (reason is a means
for achieving its own ends), and reason is a “process” in the sense that its
vii. Deleuze, Kant’s Critical Philosophy, p. 2
viii. Ibid, p. 2
ix. Ibid, p. 1
x. Scruton, Kant: A Very Short Introduction, p. 27

44
“goal” is merely an interminable exercise of its own faculties — simply put,
reason’s interest is in reasoning.

Deleuze here illuminates the implicit empiricist immanentism in

the Kantian Transcendental Method. In Deleuze’s formulation, reason
goes beyond itself, or reaches into the realm of experience, only so as to
subsume, or reintegrate, experience into reason’s own logic. In other words,
reason wants only to reason, and it assimilates experience to its own self-
interest in this regard. Deleuze contrasts this with the rationalist viewpoint,
in which

What reason recognizes as an end is still something external

and superior to it: a Being, a Good or a Value, taken as a rule
of will xi

Instead, Deleuze argues

Against rationalism, Kant asserts that supreme ends are not only
ends of reason, but that in positing them reason posits nothing
other than itself. In the ends of reason, it is reason which takes
itself as its own end . . . The ends or interests of reason cannot
be justified in terms of experience, or of any other authority
outside or above reason xii

And it is reason pursuing reason’s end that will enable the methods
for Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, in which

xi. Deleuze, Kant’s Critical Philosophy, p. 2

xii. Ibid, p. 2-3

45
 an immanent Critique — reason as the judge of reason — [be-
comes] the essential principle of the so-called transcendental
method xiii

Kant’s first critique is thus understood as an attempt to “undertake

a critical investigation into the powers of the pure reason itself,” delineat-
ing the a priori conditions of the mind and their processes in the role of
the understanding. xiv As Kant describes in his preface to the Critique, the
work presents reason’s inquiry into reason’s capacities, a quest to define the
axioms of metaphysics:

Human reason has the peculiar fate in one species of its cogni-
tions that it is burdened with questions which it cannot dismiss,
since they are given to it as problems by the nature of reason
itself, but which it also cannot answer, since they transcend
every capacity of human reason.

Reason falls into this perplexity through no fault of its own. It

begins from principles whose use is unavoidable in the course
of experience and at the same time sufficiently warranted by
it. . . The battlefield of these endless controversies is called
metaphysics . . .

Reason should take on anew the most difficult of all its tasks,
namely, that of self-knowledge, and to institute a court of
justice, by which reason may secure its rightful claims while
dismissing all its groundless pretensions, and this not by mere

xiii. Ibid, p. 3
xiv. Copleston, p. 213

46
 decrees but according to its own eternal and unchangeable
laws; and this court is none other than the critique of pure
reason itself xv

Thus, Deleuze emphasizes that Kantian reason, as it governs the

mind as much as the mode of inquiry for the first Critique, is a machine
for assimilating, collapsing, or folding experience into itself so as to make
knowledge available to its own ends. Deleuze ensuingly describes each of the
subsidiary faculties of the mind as a sequence of self-interested processes
that in turn serve the final ends of reason.

The Self-Interest of the Faculties: Powers of the Mind as Processes

In the “Transcendental Doctrine of Elements” of the Critique of

Pure Reason, Kant sets forth the parameters for his Transcendental Method,
positing that

Our cognition arises from two fundamental sources in the

mind, the first of which is the reception of representations (the
receptivity of impressions), the second the faculty for cogniz-
ing an object by means of these representations (spontaneity of
concepts); through the former an object is given to us, through
the latter it is thought in relation to that representation (as a
mere determination of the mind)xvi

The terminology here functions as follows: a “representation” is an

object as it appears to the mind, the “subject” is the cognitive conscious-

xv. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, p. 99-101

xvi. Ibid, p. 193

47
ness that contains this representation, and the “object” is the represented
entity, an entity assumed to be external to the mind of the subject. In Kant’s
Transcendental Method, the faculties of the mind synthesize “sensitive
knowledge” (“the receptivity of impressions”) and “intellectual knowledge”
(“concepts”). xvii

Deleuze deciphers two implications of the term “faculty,” or power

of the mind, in the Transcendental Method. The first meaning of faculty is
the type of relation constructed between a representation, its subject, and
its object:

Every representation is related to something other than itself;

both to an object and to a subject. We can distinguish as many
faculties of mind as there are types of relations xviii

Deleuze names three primary “types of relations,” or three faculties,

each of which informs one of Kant’s three Critiques. Within the faculty of
knowledge, the subject of the Critique of Pure Reason, a representation is
“related to the object from the standpoint of its agreement to or conformity
with it;” that is to say, the capacity of the faculty of knowledge is to pull the
representation into accordance with the object it represents.

Deleuze demonstrates that each of the faculties of the mind, or

types of relations, has a “higher form,” which is to say, a capacity to

find in itself the law of its own exercise (even if this law gives
rise to a necessary relationship with one of the other faculties).

xvii. See Copleston, p. 196

xviii. Deleuze, Kant’s Critical Philosophy, p. 3

48
 In its higher form, a faculty is thus autonomous. The Critique
of Pure Reason begins by asking: ‘Is there a higher faculty of
knowledge?’ xix

The higher form of the faculty of knowledge —knowledge being

the relation of conformity between the object and the representation — is
to uncover the law by which the mind draws phenomena into accord with
itself. To do this, the faculty must explore the first order cognitive synthesis
that underlies the second order cognitive synthesis of empirical knowledge
— the relation of the representation to the object. The first order synthesis
here occurs not between the object and the representation, but between the
representation and the mind. This law is defined as the a priori synthesis:

As long as the synthesis [between phenomena and the mind] is

empirical, the faculty of knowledge appears in its lower form: it
finds its law in experience and not in itself. But the a priori syn-
thesis defines a higher faculty of knowledge. This is in fact no
longer governed by objects which would give a law to it; on the
contrary, it is the a priori synthesis which attributes a property
to the object which was not contained in the representation xx

The higher form of the faculty of knowledge herein relays empirical

knowledge to reason, inasmuch as “synthetic a priori judgments are them-
selves the principles of what should be called ‘the theoretical sciences of
reason.’” xxi Thus, the higher faculty of knowledge reveals that

xix. Ibid, p. 4
xx. Ibid, p. 5
xxi. Ibid, p. 5

49
 Reason has a natural speculative interest: and it has it for ob-
jects which are necessarily subject to the faculty of knowledge
in its higher form xxii

Which is to say, yet again, the cognitive process is self-contained:

reason governs experience in order that it may return experience to reason’s
end, and, as Deleuze establishes in delineating Kant’s immanent critique,
“in the ends of reason, it is reason which takes itself as its own end.” xxiii
Thus, the objects of experience are presided over by reason; phenomena is
selectively represented by reason so as to return representation to reason’s
ends.

This first sense of the term “faculty”— faculty as the type of

relation between the representation, its subject, and its object — reveals
that all of the faculties ultimately serve reason’s end, which is to say, all
representational relations are interests of reason. The second sense of the
term “faculty” addresses the question of how these relations perform the
function of returning experience to reason’s ends:

How does an interest of reason realize itself?’ That is to say,

what assures the subjection of objects [to the mind, to reason],
how are they subjected? What is really legislating in a given
faculty? Is it imagination, understanding, or reason?xxiv

Deleuze answers this question by defining the second meaning of

the term faculty as “a specific source of representations,” attributing catego-
ries of representation to corresponding faculties of (or, sources within) the
xxii. Ibid, p. 5
xxiii. Ibid, p. 3
xxiv. Ibid, p. 9

50
mind. Each of these sources, in containing representations, is then assumed
to maintain responsibility for the organization of presentations:

The important thing in representation is the prefix: re-presen-

tation implies an active taking up of that which is presented;
hence an activity and a unity distinct from the passivity and
diversity which characterize sensibility as such. From this
standpoint we no longer need to define knowledge as a syn-
thesis of representations. It is the representation itself which
is defined as knowledge, that is to say, as the synthesis of that
which is presented xxv

Together, these two senses of the term faculty — a type of relation

and a source for representations — delineate the capacity of the mind as a
set of self-referential processes that order experience so as to return it to the
ends of reason. In sum, reason assimilates phenomena to its own end.

Legislators of Nature: Consciousness as a Power Relation

In the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant put forth what he termed

his “Copernican Revolution,” an inversion of the rationalist philosophical
schema for the relationship of “reason” to “experience.” Kant’s “revolution”
proposes that: rather than assuming, as the traditional rationalist viewpoint
contends, that reason provides us with a cognitive framework for objective
knowledge, metaphysics could resituate its project from the perspective that
the objects of experience manifest themselves in accord with the nature of
the mind, rather than the mind accommodating the objects of experience.
In short, the common and colloquial formulation of this is: “objects conform

xxv. Ibid, p. 8

51
to the mind; the mind does not conform to objects.” Kant writes:

Up to now it has been assumed that all our cognition must

conform to the objects [of the senses — objects outside of the
mind]; but all attempts to find out something about them a
priori through concepts that would extend our cognition have,
on this presupposition, come to nothing. Hence let us once try
whether we do not get farther with the problems of metaphysics
by assuming that the objects must conform to our cognition,
which would agree better with the requested possibility of an
a priori cognition of them, which is to establish something
about objects before they are given to us. This would be just
like the first thoughts of Copernicus, who, when he did not
make good progress in the explanation of the celestial motions
if he assumed that the entire celestial host revolves around the
observer, tried to see if he might not have greater success if
he made the observer revolve and left the stars at rest. Now in
metaphysics we can try in a similar way regarding the intuition
of objects. If intuition has to conform to the constitution of the
objects, then I do not see how we can know anything of them a
priori; but if the object (as an object of the senses) conforms to
the constitution of our faculty of intuition, then I can very well
represent this possibility to myself xxvi

Deleuze notes that Kant’s Copernican Revolution is foundational to

his “struggle on two fronts” against empiricism and rationalism inasmuch
as:

xxvi. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, p. 110

52
 In dogmatic rationalism the theory of knowledge was founded
on the idea of a correspondence between subject and object, of
an accord between the order of ideas and the order of things.
This accord had two aspects: in itself it implied a finality; and
it demanded a theological principle as source and guarantee of
this harmony, this finality. But it is curious that, from a com-
pletely different perspective, Hume’s empiricism had a similar
outcome: in order to explain how the principles of Nature were
in accord with those of human nature Hume was forced to
invoke explicitly a pre-established harmony xxvii

For the rationalists, because cognition precedes and grounds experi-

ence, the mind can be assumed to function in accordance with the objects
of experience; objective knowledge of phenomena is possible because (even
prior to experience) the mind always already possesses it. Similarly, for the
empiricists, the mind cannot be individuated from experience, and thus is
necessarily in harmony with — in fact fully integrated with — the objects
of experience. By contrast, Kant’s Copernican Revolution inverts the power
relation of the mind’s subordination to experience. Deleuze explains this as
the empowerment of the mind, the endowing of the mind with a legislative
agency:

The fundamental idea of what Kant calls his ‘Copernican

Revolution’ is the following: substituting the principle of a
necessary submission of object to subject for the idea of a har-
mony between subject and object (final accord). The essential
discovery is that the faculty of knowledge is legislative, or more
precisely, that there is something which legislates in the faculty

xxvii. Deleuze, Kant’s Critical Philosophy, p. 13

53
 of knowledge . . . The rational being thus discovers that he has
new powers. The first thing that the Copernican Revolution
teaches us is that it is we who are giving the orders. There is
here an inversion of the ancient conception of Wisdom: the
sage was defined partly by his own submission, partly by his
‘final’ accord with Nature. Kant sets up the critical image in
opposition to wisdom: we are the legislators of Nature xxviii

Deleuze depicts reason as a will or force to be executed over and

against objects, in turn effecting, forming, these objects. Deleuze here rep-
resents the Kantian Transcendental Method as a power relation in which
the act of interpretation actively reformulates the object it interprets.

In this way, Deleuze manages to bring “reason as the ends of reason”

full circle to explain reason’s power relation — and thus, its full authority
over and integration within — the experiential. If we recall Deleuze’s stipu-
lation that, for the rationalists, the will of reason was to achieve “something
external and superior to it: a Being, a Good or a Value,” then here we see
that the will of Kantian reason is to assimilate experience to its own logic,
or to return, through all the processes of the mind, to its own ends. Reason
is an engine that drives all phenomena back into reason. xxix

Time is out of Joint; I is Another

In the introduction to his book, Deleuze proposes four “poetic

formulas” for summarizing Kant’s critical philosophy. In understanding
reason as a legislative engine, a law which governs the forms of the objects

xxviii. Ibid, p. 13
xxix. Ibid, p. 2

54
of experience, we can unravel the meaning of at least two of the “poetic
formulas.” The first of these is

Hamlet’s great formula, ‘The time is out of joint’. Time is out

of joint, time is unhinged. The hinges are the axis around which
the door turns. Cardo, in Latin, designates the subordination
of time to the cardinal points through which the periodical
movements that it measures pass. As long as time remains on
its hinges, it is subordinate to movement: it is the measure of
movement, interval or number. This was the view of ancient
philosophy. But time out of joint signifies the reversal of the
movement-time relationship. It is now movement which is
subordinate to time. . .Time is no longer related to the move-
ment which it measures, but movement is related to the time
which conditions it: this is the first great Kantian reversal in the
Critique of Pure Reason. xxx

In defining reason as a legislative act, Deleuze illuminates a dy-

namic relation between the time of the subject and the time of experiential
phenomena. As opposed to the “objective” framework of rationalist reason,
which posits a fixity, or constancy, between the time-space of the subject
and the time-space of experience, for Kant, time is the time of reason as it
approaches experience and folds experience back into its own logic. Time
is in flux because it is subject to a continual modulation in accordance
with reason’s legislative function and participation in the experiential. Kant
writes:

time is not something objective and real; it is neither an

xxx. Ibid, p. vii

55
 accident, nor a substance, nor a relation; it is the subjective
condition, necessary because of the nature of the human mind
of coordinating all sensibilia by a certain law xxxi

The second of Deleuze’s poetic formulas is borrowed from Rimbaud:

“I is Another,” meaning that

The I is an act which constantly carries out a synthesis of time,

and of that which happens in time, by dividing up the present,
the past, and the future at every instant xxxii

Again, because reason governs the constitution of objects in the

material world, it is the “unity of consciousness” that “synthesizes the
manifold” of experiential phenomena:

Representation means the synthesis of that which is presented.

... My representations are mine in so far as they are linked in
the unity of a consciousness, in such a way that the ‘I think’
accompanies them xxxiii

And yet, because Kantian reason relies on experience to actuate

itself,

Knowledge implies a necessary relation to an object. That

which constitutes knowledge is not simply the act by which the
manifold is synthesized, but the act by which the represented

xxxi. Kant, quoted in Copleston, p. 197

xxxii. Deleuze, Kant’s Critical Philosophy, p. viii
xxxiii. Ibid, p. 14-15

56
 manifold is related to an object xxxiv

Thus, the objects of experience and the reason that governs them
are in a continuous, reciprocal self-definition that constitutes the ever-
changing “I” of the Kantian consciousness.

xxxiv. Ibid, p. 15

57
58
 Ambiguous Etiologies
Robert Crawford and Federico Cavazos

Ambiguous Etiologies, a design

for an outdoor pavilion in the
plains of Wyoming, is a reconfigu-
rable modular lattice system that
harnesses snow drifts to create a
landscape of differentiated spatial
zones.

The pavilion challenges the

understanding of space as a “dis-
crete multiplicity,” and instead
approaches architecture as the
dynamic distribution of intensive
material properties: light, heat,
density, turbulence, pressure. Am-
biguous Etiologies acknowledges
architecture’s full immersion in the
flux of material energies, revealing
the absurdity of dialectic categories
such as the “natural” and the “arti-
ficial,” or the “landscape” and the
“building.” This project is an engine
for the organization of matter.

59
Conditions A
1
A
2
A
3
A
4

The pavilion is climatic-dependent. 12

11
Snow accumulation peaks in late February, 10

Snowfall (in)
which is immediately followed by a spike in 9
8
wind and a temperate summer that usually 7
hovers around the 70’s. Our pavilion seeks to 6
decrease the large swing in temperature to 5
4
create an inhabitable space. The modules 3
act as space heaters in addition to snow 2
1
fences during the winter. Their location J J A S O N D J F M A M
upwind heats the spaces downwind. The
Month
snow is melted into a series of pools during
the summer, also upwind, whose purpose is
the opposite: to cool the breeze before it
reaches the inhabitable space. 13
12

Wind (MPH)
11
10
A 0% Accumulation Level 9
1
Average Temperature (F): 75 8

Average Wind (mph): 8 7

Average Snowfall (in): 0 6

5
J J A S O N D J F M A M

A 13% Accumulation Level Month

2 Average Temperature (F): 32
Average Wind (mph): 9
105
Average Snowfall (in): 4.5
90
Temperature (F)

75
A 70% Accumulation Level 60
3
Average Temperature (F): 16 45
Average Wind (mph): 10 30
Average Snowfall (in): 7.5 15

0
J J A S O N D J F M A M

A 100% Accumulation Level Month

4
Average Temperature (F): 29
Average Wind (mph): 11
Average Snowfall (in): 6

H 1 2

15H

60
 Snow Fence Diagrams

Density - Snow mounds up directly Form - The fetch closely follows the
against solid walls, but not porous shape of the fence.
walls.

Height - The higher the fence the Form + Height - It is clear the hieght
longer the fetch. of the snow fence plays a larger role
than the form.

Four Stages of Growth

1. A lens-shaped drift forms as saltating particles are caught by the fence. The wind force diminishes for a distance
equal to about 15 times the height of the fence (15H). Some blowing snow deposits on the ground, but the wind still
carries some particles from the shelter of the fence. This lens shaped deposite becomes deeper until the wind no
longer follows its curvature. At this stage, an eddy or recirculation zone forms downwind of the lens, causing a
slip-face to form.

2. At the third stage, the drift adds significant resistance to approaching wind. The recirculation zone helps trap
particles blowing off the top of the drift. The lens-shaped drift becomes deeper but not much longer. The efficiency
of the fence may actually increase as the drift adds resistance to the wind. The slip-face and
recirulation zone that form in this stage trap some of the snow that blows off the top of the drift.

3. As the downwind drift approaches its maximum depth (for 50% porous fences, 1 to 1.2 times the height of the
fence), the third stage of growth begins. The recirculation zone fills in as the drift lengthens downwind. This stage is
characterized by a decline in trapping effiiciency as the recirculation zone diminishes in size.

4. The fourth stage of growth begins when the drift first assumes a smooth profile without the slip-face, marking the
disappearance of the recirculation zone. At this stage, the drift is about 20H in length. Subsequent growth is slow as
the drift elongates to its final length of 35H.

Source: Tabler, Ronald. Snow Fence Guide. National Research Council

3 4

35H

61
Connection Matrix
Plan Front Right Axo
Connection Type 1
Density: Loose
Angle: 90 to 90
Legs: Long to Long

Connection Type 2
Density: Loose
Angle: 90 to 90
Legs: Short to Short

Connection Type 3
Density: Loose
Angle: 90 to 90
Legs: Long to Long

Connection Type 4
Density: Loose
Angle: 30 to 90
Legs: Medium to Long

Connection Type 5
Density: Loose
Angle: 90 to 90
Legs: Long to Short

Connection Type 6
Density: Moderate
Angle: 90 to 90
Legs: Long to Short

Connection Type 7
Density: Moderate
Angle: 30 to 30
Legs: Medium to Medium

Connection Type 8
Density: Moderate
Angle: 30 to 90
Legs: Medium to Short

Connection Type 9
Density: Tight
Angle: 30 to 90
Legs: Medium to Short

Connection Type 10
Density: Tight
Angle: 90 to 90
Legs: Short to Short

Connection Type 11
Density: Tight
Angle: 90 to 90
Legs: Short to Short

62
Simulations
Temperature Connection Type 3
Environment: 5 °F
Nichrome: 200 °F

The warmth exuded by

tested by holding he environ-

ment temperature and air
velocity constant.

The denser module

configurations block more
Right Front
wind and give off more
heat, as can be seen in the Connection Type 6
following flow trajectory visu-
alizations of temperatue.

Mock-Up

Right Front

Connection Type 10

The physical mock-up

tested the wiring, heating,
and structure of the module.

Right Front

63
Plan Phases
Phase 4 - 100% Accumulation (with connection types)

The fences which do not produce mounds may only make use of
planar connection types such as 1, 2, 3, 5, 6, 10 and 11.

The fences in front of the ‘snow fences’ are composed mainly of

dense connection types 10 and 11 as to more easily melt the mounds
they inhabit.

The fences behind the ‘snow fences’ vary much more in density as to
create more or less private micro-climates.

Lounge

Bar
Outdoor Seating

Dance Floor

64
Phase 1 - 0% Accumulation
The hardscape.

Phase 2 - 40% Accumulation

The begining of the snow accumula-
tion.

Phase 3 - 70% Accumulation

Snow continues to accumulate, but
not where the ground is paved, such as
the dance floor.

Phase 5 - 0% Accumulation
The melted snow is collected into pools in
front of the snow fences. The topography is
constructed to maintain access to the pavil-
ion and maximize the amount of wind that will
blow over the water and cool the space in the
Summer months.

65
Module
1. Heats Space
2. Melts Moguls
3. Delineates Space
4. Provides Light and Shade
5. Creates Moguls
6. Reduces Wind Chill

The profile of the branch is a triangle to assure a

rigid connection yet allow for variable configurations.

66
 Electrical wire is threaded throughout the branches.
Nichrome, a hybrid of nickel and chromium that heats with
electricity, is spliced in at the connections.

The cap piece is

rotated 15 degrees off center
to allow for multiple connec-
tions to occur in a column-like
fashion without the modules
intersecting.

67
68
 Brian Boigon
with Izabel Gass

Gass: I want to discuss a pedagogical exercise that you and Sanford Kwinter
explored in a studio, “Manual for 5 Appliances in the Alphabetical City.”
You set your students to the task of designing five “appliances” as a way
of addressing architecture as a problem of the diagram, in the Foucauld-
ian sense — architecture as the manipulation and organization of human
and material activity. While years have passed since Manual’s publication,
I think its conception marks an important point in the understanding of
what might constitute a “temporal architecture,” — an understanding of
which contemporary discourse has largely lost sight. Two ideas in particular
interest me here:

1. First, you proposed Manual as a way to “reconceive architecture

outside the classical framework, which is the problem of form and its rep-

69
resentation (hylomorphism).” In many ways, contemporary practices that
claim to embrace an ethos of “dynamism” still understand the architectural
act as the conjuring of “form” from a formless material substrate. Innova-
tions in digital technology have in fact increased this tendency in thinking,
providing programs that administer “forces” on “matter”, resulting in
computer-generated representations of “form.” Using “Manual for 5 Ap-
pliances” as a springboard, in what ways could architecture really transcend
its reliance on the hylomorphic mindset to become actually dynamic?

Boigon: In the academic mayhem of architecture and urbanism (now one

and the same), the question of what you have called dynamically generated
form should first be historically framed by identifying the mediocrity of its
trailer park attendees and their attendant rules, known, to the outside world,
as “Design Pedagogy.” While there have been intensive transformations in
the tools, language, and influencers that have surpassed ‘real’ architecture,
there has been very little homework done by the staff of the surrounding
amusement parks called “Universities” and “Colleges” to update their
rides.

Compare: The recent computational masterpiece of folding mat-

ter in the feature film The Transformers, or the real time online motion
pathways contained by X-Box 360s, Halo3, or the new urbanisms called
Social Networks, such as Facebook (where up to 40% of a teenager’s time
is spent consuming-producing space and event sequences using everything
from a mobile phone-cam to the new dimensional elevation of architecture
known to tween-kind as IM chat windows).

With: Architectural teachings.

70
 And you get to see: How off-mark the world of architecture is from
its internal banter and its failure to keep up with the downloadable Jone-
ses.

We (meaning the pedagogical angels of academia itself) have yet

to catch up to the follow-me generation with relevant upgrades to our
pedagogy 1.0 circa 17th Century Descartes, 18th Century Johnson, 19th
Century Rousseau and 20th Century Pavlov. Now this... the 21st Century-
South Park, Second Life, Grey’s Anatomy, YouTube, Futurama, Jetman,

Jackass, Perez Hilton, the Ipod, Facebook, Cell phone with unlimited Text
Messaging, Bratz TV, Batteries sold separately...are the new fuel and pro-
grammable chips for our architecture design schools. Professors then must
press enter after they type in this question on their computers: “Is this thing
working?,” this thing, meaning the actual production of pedagogy itself.
Pedagogy is never really examined in the same way that the actual discourse
of form has been audited throughout the centuries.

71
 Professors may look better with laptops, internet, WiFi and course
uploads, podcasts and YouTube lectures, but isn’t the pedagogical model
still basically stuck inside Rousseau’s theory of education as nobilizing the
savagery grafted onto the French Judicial system, (alias — design critique)
guilty until proven innocent?

Are we, as teachers, just playing our golden oldies on new plat-
forms?

Unaccountable atoms aside, Pedagogy has, since the 17th century,

positioned the teacher as the purveyor of intellectual produce and the
student as mass consumer. The flaw, here in today’s world, of thinking and
being, is that the digital age has reduced all matter to an inconsequential
set of talking numbers...and that has coincided with the rise of new con-
sumer-producer culture (Playlists, YouTube, on Demand Cable, Facebook,
My Space, Secondlife.com). In truth, the student has become the producer
and the teacher has become the consumer. This reversal of information
ecology at the level of a Pedagogical discourse (the assembly of pedagogical
texts, reliable sources— not Wikipedia and Google) has been hiding from
the guns and roses of video games and flirt networks. We (meaning anyone
who teaches a thing) are negligent in our practice to not look first at what
Heidegger called “the first dwelling,” our bodies, and to see where they have
landed in time and space before we utter a language of knowledge that sets
out to describe an order of things which no longer exists.

By the way... I divided your question of student producing com-

putational automaton form into two coupled parts: a dynamical system is
fundamentally a coupling of A THING, like a car, and another THING,
like a trailer. There is the bilateral movement of the hitch pin against the

72
friction of wind, left to right, and then there is the subscription to forward
motion by the pull of the car. In other words, when you start your engines,
everything is moving and you never stand still. Our X and our Y axes are
vibrating in a blender.

We must therefore foreground any discussion of dynamical systems

theory in what I currently call the “follow me generation.” This — or rather,
“they” — are the moving conveyors of the social. If we are to understand
dynamical system theory at all, it would not wholly reside within the math-
ematical formula that was first rendered into a CGI script by Alias Software
in Toronto. To reduce the mathematician’s formula for computational
lathing around a behavioral axis called the “spline” would do some justice
to the advancement of life at Pixar but it would also ignore the devices that
intermediate between self and others such as mobile phones, texting and
Instant Messaging.

A dynamical system for architecture today is actually a social matrix

and not a system at all. Intermittent lines of flight are what we now have
here... and there. Imagine us at a Toshiba ring assembly plant all working
on a car made out of virtual macrame—rendered across a desert of multiple
screens (Computer/Laptop/Mobile Phone/Television). This is the world of
dynamical dwelling. This and That are of concern to me as are Here, There
and everywhere as the social interweaving rises into a chaotic critical mass
...spikes and then settles down to reframe itself like a house party does. I ask
you: Design and Pedagogy: “Is this thing working?”

Gass: Secondly, in the Manual, you explore the Diagram as a way of un-
derstanding architecture, “not by how it appears but by practices: Those
it partakes of and those that take place within it.” What might it mean

73
for architecture to extrapolate a theory of form along these lines, perhaps
in the vein of, say, Pierre Bordieu’s Outline of a Theory of Practice, or any
similar anthropological approach? (Certainly Foucault’s work would be of
paramount relevance here.)

Boigon: When Sanford Kwinter and I first conceived of the studio “5 Ap-
pliances in The Alphabetical City”, there were several fundamental social
attributes that we decided to define as having architectural meaning. The
most pervasive of those attributes was—and still remains for me—the Dia-
gram. Specifically, diagrams that impact the body in real time and space.
For example: social lines, chalk on the pavement that becomes a hop-scotch
game; sports lines, such as those inscribed on basketball courts, football
fields, tennis courts and running tracks; traffic control for the “parking
spot” and roadway lines. We referred to these types of diagrams (from a
quote in my book Speed Reading Tokyo from 1990) as “Diagrammatical
Reality.” Meaning, we found diagrams that were first and foremost cast
as guidelines for the body and its machines. As we excavated the diagram
from the thousand plateaus of innocuous presence, we made it clear in
our studio that a diagrammatical reality could be as physically restrictive
as the extrusions of windows, walls, floors and corridors which grow out of
the lines which one uses to distinguish the total architecture of a potential
building. And now this, the diagram was simply a tipping point into a world
of geometry that never led to form and yet changed the movement of bodies
in space which in turn would set off a chain reaction then leading to some
awesome climax called a goal, basket, hole, spot, love and culminating in
the coupled words hitched together in the bliss against time: “The Finish
Line” and “Game Over.”

Gass: In what ways can the chronotope of the “diagram” permeate the

74
representational realm? Might we find a correlation, for instance, between
the Deleuzian notion of “smooth space” (the space of lines rather than
contours, vectors rather than segments, the space of ‘direction’ not ‘place’)
and the dynamic landscape that you have explored in technological innova-
tions of the cartoon?

Boigon: The answer is yes. One can most certainly draw a correlation be-
tween the life of the diagram in “vectors/direction” and landscape in “the
cartoon.”

Despite its 2 dimensions, the diagram can impact the third dimen-
sion. The 2-cause and 3-effect dyad is not without segmentation and a loss
of depth. What is at stake in setting out to demarcate the surface is the
“stake” itself. What we have lost is the ability to hold ground for more than
an instant. The Automobile, Electricity, The Internet, Mobile Phone to
name but a few of the accelerators of time and space conduct our move-
ments. Such is the life of a mobile society which gives up its stake in the
ground for a currency of lines and interoperability that constantly gives
you the option to either take part with or without your body and multiple
personality.

As particle physics has revealed, the surface is deep and nowhere is

that more apparent than in the brilliant luminosity of the blinking cursor at
the entry line on a computer text code line/word processing program. The
Cursor and its Double has both surface and infinite depth as it breathes,
as it beats, as it glows, as it pulses. The cursor is alive and stakes out life,
living computational consciousness, across the screen. There has been no
other creature born in computational space that has such profound allu-
sions to life and to which we can recall every frame from every television

75
show, feature film, how the cursor buys time for the director, creates space
for the user, turns the effervescence of light from simply being a screen to
that of becoming a being. We have here, the cursor, the very first offspring
of digital space that is both diagram, representation, signage, border and
the emotional intelligence. The cursor is the first interface to dwell in a new
architecture of computer networks and communications.

To Note: Architecture is one of the great cross disciplinary arts and

must be defended against the master narrative of Architecture = Build-
ing. If you want to make your architecture into a building, enter through
Marcel Duchamp’s “Door 11.” An architecture design school should offer
Duchamp’s “Door 11” and other doors that lead to absolutely nothing and
everything. We must, still to this day, oppose the reductionism and surren-
dering of architecture to its profession as a “building-only” public service,
when indeed architecture as a discourse and discipline provides a completely
infinite and provocative speculation on the meaning of dwelling and shelter
from the multi-identities that one fashions on through electronic devices
— say, the fakery of a cell phone call on the street to create a social buffer.

76
 Architectures of Time Sanford Kwinter
MIT Press, 2001

reviewed by David Dahlbom

There is an underlying, indeed motivating, dissatisfaction with the

current state of affairs evident throughout Sanford Kwinter’s Architectures
of Time: Toward a Theory of the Event in Modernist Culture (2001, from
material originally published 1984 - 87). Kwinter states flatly: “the era of
cultural production we are traversing is unarguably one of impoverishment
and mediocrity.”  His book must therefore be understood as a response to
this condition—an attempt to find a way out. Kwinter emphasizes that this
way out cannot be found in critique, which is doomed by its very nature to
a continual re-inscription within existing conditions, but instead in, and

i. Kwinter, Architectures of Time, p. 5

77
only in, novelty. Much of the work is therefore dedicated to exploring the
conditions necessary for the creation of novelty, and specifically defining a
conception of novelty in an immanentist cosmology.

Kwinter outlines two conceptions of morhpogenesis, one appropri-

ate to a world capable of sustaining transcendental ontological categories,
and the another inherent in a world of perfect immanence. According to the
classical, hylomorphic model, a necessarily limited number of possibilities
(forms or images) are reproduced (mirrored in reality) over a substratum, in
a linear time-line. The insufficiency of such a model, however, is evident in
its inability to find a place for novelty. Something either is or is not possible.
This model cannot account for new possibilities and it fails to confront the
inevitable imperfections and degradations evident in all of its realizations. It
is indeed the inevitability of corruption and imperfection inherent in classi-
cal “creation” that points to the second mode of morphogenesis. This mode
is dependent on an understanding of the world as “a ceaseless pullulation
and unfolding, a dense evolutionary plasma of perpetual differentiation
and innovation.” ii In this world forms are not carried over from some tran-
scendent realm, but instead singularities and events emerge from within
a rich “plasma” through the continual and dynamic interaction of forces.
The morphogenetic process at work in such a world is not one whereby
an active subject realizes forms from a set of transcendent possibilities,
but rather one in which virtualities are actualized through the constant
movement inherent in the very forces that compose the world. Virtuality is
understood here as “free difference or singularity, not yet combined with
other differences into a complex ensemble or salient form.” iii Kwinter offers
the example of Hans Jenny’s Kymatic images, in which tones were emitted

ii. Ibid, p. 4
iii. Ibid, p. 8

78
across steel plates on top of which had been placed a layer of fine powder.
The patterns produced in this powder (the actualization) are the product
of the way the tone interacts with the complex metallurgical properties of
the plate (the virtual components). Kwinter is keen to emphasize here both
that the virtual is real even when it is not actualized, and that actualization
itself occurs in and with time.iv

It is of course this immanentist description of the world and its at-

tendant mode of morphogenesis that Kwinter posits as viable, and he is clear
that it leaves no room for the classical model, at least from an ontological
standpoint. There is no “threshold beneath which classical objects, states,
or relations cease to have meaning yet beyond which they are endowed with
a full pedigree and privileged status.”  Indeed, it is the nature of real time
to ensure “a constant production of innovation and change” in all condi-
tions.vi This is evidenced precisely by the “imperfections” introduced in an
act of “realizing” a form. The classical mode of morphogenesis, then, has to
be understood as a false model which is imposed on what is actually a rich,
perpetually transforming universe. But the sort of novelty which the enact-
ment of the classical model produces, a novelty which from its own perspec-
tive must be construed as a defect, is not of primary concern for Kwinter.
The novelty which interests him registers its status as having emerged from
a complex collision of forces. Above all, it is a novelty uncontaminated by
procrustean notions of subjectivity and creation.

Kwinter offers a series of models of this sort of novelty, the most

significant of which are found in the works of Sant’Elia and Kafka. Kwinter

iv. For complete discussion, see Ibid. pp. 6-10

v. Ibid, p. 49
vi. Ibid, p. 109

79
does not, however, put forward their work as something which is to be di-
rectly imitated; this would only mean a return to a representational mode of
thought. Indeed, the crux of his examination of both of these figures lies in
establishing the non-representational nature of their productions. Sant’Elia
embodies “a new orientation toward a phenomenal field of events and in-
teractions—not objects, but the abstract regimes of force that organize and
deploy them.” It is precisely his “orientation” toward the world that permits
the works to “assume, rather than represent, an extended field of movement
and circulating forces.” vii Similarly, Kafka is portrayed as an author who does
not attempt to bring forth works from his private, creative internal space,
but as someone fully embedded in his world. He is characterized as a sort
of catalyst whose productions are the result of his own complex mechanism
interacting with the forces surrounding and traversing him.

What is at stake here then is not establishing models of works to

be imitated so much as identifying the conditions for the emergence of
novel works. To pose a question more specifically: what behavior or mode
of existence is Kwinter encouraging in order to maximize the production
of that radical novelty which might overturn the present state of affairs? To
address this question properly we must first examine the behaving mecha-
nism itself, what it has traditionally been called “the subject.”

From the outset, it must be made clear that the category of the
subject (like that of the object) has no place in an immanent world. There
can be no transcendent, subjective essence. What, then, is the ontological
status of a body and its attendant instance of consciousness? In what would
it exist? Kwinter here offers:

vii. Ibid, p. 83

80
 It would exist precisely in the ever-shifting pattern of mixtures
or composites: both internal ones —the body as a site marked
and traversed by forces that converge upon it in continuous
variation; and external ones—the capacity of any individu-
ated substance to combine and recombine with other bodies
or elements (ensembles), both influencing their actions
and undergoing influence by them. The ‘subject’ ... is but a
synthetic unit falling at the midpoint or interface of two more
fundamental systems of articulation: the first composed of the
fluctuating microscopic relations and mixtures of which the
subject is made up, the second of the macro-blocs of relations
or ensembles into which it enters. The image produced at the
interface of these two systems—that which replaces, yet is too
often mistaken for, subjective essence—may in turn have its
own individuality characterized with a certain rigor. For each
mixture at this level introduces into the bloc a certain number
of defining capacities that determine both what the ‘subject’
is capable of bringing to pass outside of itself and what it is
capable of receiving (undergoing) in terms of effects.viii

This description is sufficient to explain the immanent nature of the

subjective bloc as something entirely embedded in and conditioned by its
surroundings. What it does not offer—and what is not offered in any detail
in the entirety of the work— is an in-depth account of what, exactly, these
“defining capacities” are. To be sure, it would be unfair to demand a com-
plete description of these capacities. Kwinter himself has elsewhere referred
to the states of the nervous system as “magically complex” and he continues
to express a deep interest in the study of human cognitive and perceptual

viii. Ibid, p. 110

81
apparatus.ix Regardless of the specificity with which these capacities can
presently be defined, we must nonetheless agree that it is at this interface, as
he calls it, at this location where so many systems are densely overlaid, that
consciousness is produced. We may be convinced that this consciousness,
this apparent internal space of thought, is derived entirely from immanent
conditions and can only be granted the ontological status of an effect, but
this effect still manages to produce certain difficulties when attempting to
define modes of behavior appropriate to an immanent world.

There is a palpable suspicion of the role of consciousness throughout

Kwinter’s work, at least insofar as it is equated with some kind of internal,
subjective space. (In one text he optimistically awaits the day when this
space will “be left utterly in shreds.” xi) The basis of this suspicion is mul-
tiple and obvious. Among the capacities of consciousness is the ability to
attribute to itself the (false) image of a stable and transcendent essence.
The workings of consciousness are precisely what allow the subjective bloc
to orient itself in a sequence of time, separating itself from an absolute
experience of the moment. It is within consciousness that limiting and
arbitrary moral categories seem to most stubbornly lodge themselves. (To
be sure this is the location of all critical thought.) And, above all, conscious-
ness may serve as the repository for conditioned behaviors which believe
themselves to be free of external determination. Consciousness, in short,
contains within itself an enormous number of limiting factors which would

ix. Kwinter, ‘Virtual City, or the Wiring and Waning of the World’, Assemblage 29, p. 92 See
the discussion of architecture and science in the previous issue of Manifold for more on Kwinter’s
interest in the potentials of scientific examination of the human perceptual apparatus.
x. For a discussion of the derived nature of the “subject-effect”, see Kwinter’s discussion of the
event, Architectures of Time, p. 98
xi. Boigon and Kwinter, ‘Manual for 5 Appliances in the Alphabetical City: a pedagogical text’,
Assemblage 15, p. 35

82
retard the production of novelty. Insofar as it appears to possess the ca-
pacity for self-determination, this capacity would seem most productively
applied by turning on itself—that is, precisely by making the choice not
to make conscious decisions and instead to permit oneself to be seized by
extra-subjective forces.xii

The basic incongruity of consciousness in an immanent world finds

its most clear expression in Kwinter’s invocation of Bataille’s claim that
“[t]he true impulse at the basis of life is the impulse towards indistinction,
continuity, unconsciousness (notably the philosophical un-self-conscious-
ness), and death.” xiii In particular, this impulse may be manifested in a
fascination with animality: “For animality is immediacy (l’immédiateté)
and immanence. The animal, in other words, inhabits its world in pure and
perfect continuity; its glance is totally devoid of “intelligence” (science)
and self-consciousness—and yet the animal is neither a mere object nor
does it belong to this world of the human.” xiv But for all the desire to free
oneself from the limiting confines of consciousness, it is clear that neither
becoming animal nor “inflicting a mortal wound to one’s biological being”
constitutes a viable option.xv

Kwinter does however offer us various examples of behaviors that

seem to sidestep the limitations of conscious behavior. In his “pedagogi-
cal” text, “Manual for Five Appliances in the Alphabet City,” written with
Brian Boigon, he notes that in fact an instantaneous, non-reflective mode

xii. Instructive in this connection is Alain Badiou’s characterization of Deleuze’s theory of

choice. See Badiou, The Clamor of Being, p. 11. See also Deleuze’s discussion of Bresson and the
“purified automaton” in Cinema 2: The Time-Image, pp. 177-179
xiii. Kwinter, Architectures of Time, p. 177
xiv. Ibid, p. 178
xv. Ibid, p. 179

83
of “inhabitation happens all the time, at the cinema and watching TV,
weaving through traffic, or reading an air terminal schedule (not to men-
tion all recently emerged forms of provisional tenancy such as logging on,
downloading, jacking in).” xvi Much of the text, moreover, is devoted to
strategies that would limit conscious guidance and critical or evaluative
reflection. The “principle of speed,” which does not permit the reflective
consciousness to interrupt the constant flow of production, is an obvious
example.xvii Indeed, the whole process of making evaluative judgments is
purposely subverted by a continually affirmative (and explicitly amoral)
philosophy of “‘just say yes.’” xviii

Other models of non-reflective behavior are discussed in the open-

ing chapter of Architectures of Time, specifically those of the surfer and of
the rock climber. In these activities also the subjective bloc abandons, or
at least does not activate, its capacity for conscious guidance or evaluation.
The surfer depicted in the opening image of the book could not possibly
survive the wave he is about to engage if he were forced to consciously
calculate and determine every minute adjustment of his body. Rather, he
must intuitively find his way down, spontaneously reacting to the unpre-
dictable development of the water beneath him. Similarly the rock-climber,
whose every limb and digit is conditioned to operate spontaneously and
independently in response to a complex and unpredictable surface, could
never afford “a strategic command center that programmed the body to
behave globally in response” to a generalized understanding of the climbing
conditions.

xvi. Boigon and Kwinter, p. 35

xvii. Ibid, p. 36
xviii. Ibid, p. 35

84
 To these examples we might also add the experiment (scientific or
otherwise), insofar as this is understood to be an establishment of what is
ultimately an impersonal process that leads to results independent of any
specific guiding hand.xix

While we may agree that genuine novelty cannot be brought into

existence by some consciously guided, “creative” process, we need to fur-
ther specify the role of conscious behavior in the creation of the conditions
for the production of novelty. We may begin by noting that while all of
the activities above involve a period in which conscious guidance is neces-
sarily relinquished, in every case there is also at least a moment in which
conscious guidance must be exercised. The examples of the rock climber
and surfer are particularly notable for the obvious need of prior condition-
ing before the more spectacular performances are possible. This process
of conditioning inevitably involves some degree of conscious evaluation.
One must isolate an area for mastery (surfing, rock-climbing), familiarize
oneself with the basic techniques in this realm, learn to shift one’s weight
in ways that at first might seem counterintuitive, tell oneself to stay calm.
It is only once these various conscious actions have been ingrained in the
subjective bloc, once they have become automatic mechanisms, that con-
scious guidance can again be relinquished. Similarly, the construction of an
experiment demands a period of conscious construction that precedes the
impersonal course of its actual execution.

To approach the same issue from another position, we might note

that the mere ability to get outside of one’s confining internal space,
though a necessary condition for the production of substantial novelty, is

xix. Kwinter, ‘Virtual City, or the Wiring and Waning of the World’, Assemblage 29, p. 92. For
a brief discussion of the experiment, see Manifold I, p. 11.

85
not the only such condition. Let us return to the example of the television,
mentioned earlier as a model of non-reflective behavior:

Herein lies the specific beauty and insidiousness of television:

it easily lures attention with its flow—it lures attention easily
because it lures it initially along its pathway of least work or
resistance—then, once captured, confines and tunnels it into
rigid, disconnected pathways of predigested, continually, but
only infinitesimally, varying monotony.xx

To be clear, Kwinter never makes the inane suggestion that simply

giving oneself up to anything, be it television or scientific experiment, is
a guarantee of novelty. What is perhaps not given sufficient attention,
though, is the critical, evaluative process whereby one would make the
determination of whether watching TV is the worth the time.

All of this is to suggest that the conditioning of the subjective bloc

can never be escaped entirely. The dangers and limitations of acting as a
self-determining “creator” of forms are made perfectly evident in this study.
Insofar as the consciousness associated with a given subjective bloc takes its
own existence as evidence of some fixed subjective essence, it has become a
blockage point in the production of novelty. It is doomed to act within the
boundaries of what it thinks it knows, capable only of critique and represen-
tation. But activity that is never interrupted by conscious reflection exposes
itself to limitations of its own. The subjective bloc that exhibits behavior
characterized by the “relative blindness of an immanent viewpoint” is open
to novelty but is incapable of monitoring itself.xxi It exposes itself to the risk

xx. Kwinter, ‘Virtual City’, p. 95

xxi. Kwinter, Architectures of Time, p. 127

86
of falling into unconscious and unproductive patterns. Consciousness must
finally be seen not as the grounds for some creative process, but, in part,
as an auto-regulatory mechanism. This mechanism must be continually
activated to introduce alterations not only into “the world,” but also within
the nebulous and changing boundaries of subjective bloc out of which it
arises.

87
88
Duration and Simultaneity Henri Bergson
Clinamen Press, 1999

reviewed by Matthew Conti

Duration and Simultaneity was written by Henri Bergson in the

early 1920’s to explore how his concept of duration (lived time) fit with
Einstein’s special theory of relativity. As with almost all of Bergson’s major
writings, he set out to see if he could solve a specific problem. In this case,
Bergson’s goal was to update philosophy and its conception of time in a
similar manner to the way Einstein’s flurry of papers on relativity displaced
a stale Newtonian physics in 1905.

Duration and Simultaneity presents a flawed and at times para-

doxical argument that has endured almost continuous controversy in the
80 years since its publication. The predicament a reader of Duration and
Simultaneity finds oneself in is twofold. On one hand, the reader has to
understand Einsteinian physics, and the mistakes Bergson is making in his
reading of the special theory of relativity. On the other hand, the reader
needs to understand how this book relates to Bergson’s earlier writings,

89
especially Bergson’s concept of duration, which he first lays out in Time
and Free Will, and develops further in Matter and Memory and Creative
Evolution.

In these and other earlier writings, Bergson investigates the char-

acteristic differences between time as it is lived and time as a measurable
and quantifiable phenomenon. Through this, he builds a scientific founda-
tion for intuition that accounts for what he sees as two critically different
and mutually exclusive ways of knowing. One way, the way of Newtonian
science, sees the universe in discrete and spatial terms (as an actual or
“discrete multiplicity”). The other way, the way of intuition, sees the uni-
verse as continuous, immediate and in a perpetual state of flux (a virtual or
“continuous multiplicity”).

Focusing on the continuous multiplicity, Bergson argues that hu-

man understanding does not move from perception to recollection, but
instead moves from recollection to perception. With this observation he
articulates his notion of duration, a concept he illustrates with his famous
diagram of a cone (representing the totality of recollections accumulated
in one’s memory) and a plane (representing the perceivable universe). It
is at the intersection of the cone’s point and the plane where difference
is developed in relation to the contraction and relaxation (position in the
cone) of the totality of memory, where the past and present exist at once.
This differentiation, which can only be grasped by intuition, is continuous
and qualitative and is the defining feature of lived time or duration. It is
this immediate and individualized definition of duration, not the expanded
version described in Creative Evolution, which Bergson is attempting to
reconcile with the special theory of relativity in Duration and Simultane-
ity.

90
 Bergson’s central criticism of Einstein in Duration and Simul-
taneity is that Einstein mistakes a discrete multiplicity for a continuous
multiplicity, failing to see that time begins with duration, not the relative
speeds of objects in space. Bergson appreciates the radicality of relativity,
but believes the theory is undermined by its dependence on the observer.
However, as he tries to prove this, the paradoxical aspects of Duration and
Simultaneity become apparent. For Bergson, the notion of simultaneity
implies at least two perceptions understood through a single mental act,
the smallest possible division of duration. Given this, Bergson is critical of
Einstein’s ability to ascertain if two events are simultaneous, but Bergson is
also locking himself into a phenomenological argument which is even more
dependent on the observer than Einstein’s thought experiments with light
clocks. This paradox is further complicated by Bergson’s investigation of
the role of the Lorentz equations, which leads him to believe in complete
reciprocity between the relative times of different frames of reference. In
essence, Bergson’s conclusion here is that the special theory of relativity can
be simplified because the multiple times it predicts are mathematical fic-
tions, and the time dilation which the hypothetical observer sees is nothing
more complicated than the Doppler Effect with lightwaves.

The glaring omission here is that Bergson only briefly discusses time
dilation, and when he does, he gets it wrong. To be fair to Bergson, this
concept is only alluded to in the special theory of relativity, and is explained
with clarity only in the general theory of relativity, which Bergson does not
explore. Nonetheless, Bergson fails to acknowledge that it is possible for
subjective consciousness to accelerate from one temporal frame of refer-
ence to another, which is to say, he fails to acknowledge that duration also
presents a form of time that is by nature inconstant. Bergson thus falsely
concludes that there is one universal duration (time) encompassing all

91
other durations.

While this conclusion seems like a fatal error for Bergson’s argu-
ment, the mistake does not completely derail Bergson’s central argument
that the “temporality” of time itself begins with duration. Bergson’s intent
is to update the philosophical conception of time through an investigation
of Einsteinian relativity. Although his flawed analysis of the special theory
of relativity brings him into conflict with Einstein and other physicists, the
concept of a single duration still has traction regardless of the nature of
time dilation, inasmuch as an intuitive duration does not imply an absolute
and universal temporal frame of reference.

When Bergson and Einstein met in 1922, Einstein concluded their

conversation by stating that there was an unbridgeable gap between the
time of the physicist and the time of the philosopher. The closest a physicist
will get to defining time is to say that it is what we measure with clocks. It is
therefore left to the philosopher to interpret time as duration. And thus the
gap remains between physics and philosophy, until neuroscience and more
recent developments in physics take us inside the flow of duration.

92
 LECTURES

93
94
 Islands and Worlds
Troubled by the “difficulty that
many architects, students, and theo-
rists seem to have today in thinking
a radical thought and imagining a
utopian future,” Reinhold Martin
spoke boldly of a “re-theorization”
of the Postmodern project in archi-
tecture — the formulation of a new
framework for utopian thinking by
way of reexamining postmodern-
ism.
According to Martin, utopia
is not a place or an ideal city but
rather a “thought made possible
95
Reinhold Martin
reviewed by Jamie Chan
by material conditions.” He spoke
with urgency, arguing that the
ability for a creative mind to think
a utopian thought is what drives
future change, and thoughts today
about changing the world are van-
ishing rapidly.
Understanding the present is es-
sential to thinking about the future.
Martin’s introduction therefore
dove straight into the heart of the
present globalization debate where
mega-structures and transnational
networks threaten to ‘undermine
the authority of capital cities’ and
breed inhuman spaces. This is
the place of the Multi-National
City (MNC), and Multi-National
Corporation—an acronym coined
from Martin’s previous work. He
remarked that, ‘The term Multi-
National Corporation can seem
dated in one place while all too
current in another.’ In essence,
our present, globalized condition is
characterized by “a certain disjunc-
tion, a certain déjà vu in both time
and space.” This image of disjunc-
tion led Martin to quote colleague
Andreas Huyssen, who describes
the present interdisciplinary de-
bates on globalization as analogous
to those of postmodernism in the
1980’s because both are defined by
the same anachronistic qualities.
By matching these descriptions of
anachronism in postmodernism
and globalization, Martin implied
96
that globalization not only paral-
lels postmodernism; it upholds it.
Clearly more than stylistic mixing
or suburban sprawl, the term ‘post-
modernism’ in Martin’s lecture is
used in an abstract sense, to de-
scribe ‘displacement and untimeli-
ness.’ The point was driven home
as he referred to ‘that hallmark of
postmodernism—“the presence of
the past.”’
And just as we began to ask,
‘where is utopia in all of this?’
Martin told us that it never left us
inasmuch as Postmodernism’s very
utterance is also a negation—that
is, a negation of Modernism. There-
fore, the Modernist desire for uto-
pia remains embedded within the
Postmodern ‘undead,’ a ghost that
haunts us in unexpected places;
Martin declares: “the name of the
ghost is Postmodernism itself.”
 Thus we are haunted intermi-
nably, unable to escape this ghost
of Postmodernism as we continually
catch glimpses of a ghastly utopia,
or as Martin tells us, ‘what’s not
supposed to be there.’ Utopia and
its ghost were made more evident
in Martin’s numerous examples.
He presented French semiologist
Louis Marin’s diagrams of Thomas
More’s Utopia—a crescent-shaped
island drawn three times, each de-
picting a capital city in a different
location with respect to the water’s
edge—which served the purpose of
disclaiming Utopia’s fixed image.
Martin also showed a map of Dis-
neyland, in which its participants
were cut off from the real world
while they enjoyed themselves in
a scaled-down reconstruction of it.
Martin pointed out that despite the
common criticism of Disneyland’s
isolated, counterfeit reality, the
97
‘hole’ in the island that leads back
to the outside world is real; partici-
pants are never trapped inside. In
another words, ‘an island is never
just an island’—it leads back to the
mainland.
Martin also uncovered the
association between ‘nowhere
and no-place’ and utopia, as he
was quick to point out that, in
multiple instances, “postmodern
architecture is full of roads that
lead to nowhere.” Among many
examples there was the Strada
Novissima (‘the very image of his-
tory going nowhere’) and Hejduk’s
Berlin Mask (which ‘performs a
story about nowhere’). He also
discussed the work of Ungers, who
documented American communes
and created an inventory of uto-
pian experiments. Through these
examples Martin demonstrated
that the ‘island of architecture has sible” through architecture. If one
a hole in it that leads back out to sees the value of his argument, it is
the world at large.’ an empowering and enormous first
step.
It may seem odd at first when
one realizes that Martin, with his
roundabout logic and negation-
based dialectics, is using the very
thing he is trying to escape to make
his argument, but it serves to prove
his point that we are still unable to
flee the paradigm of Postmodern-
ism. We are made aware that if we
choose not to acknowledge it, to
throw it out the window, so to speak,
we trap ourselves in another world
within it once again. By identifying
the ‘ghost’, Martin cleverly uses
Postmodernism as a springboard—a
starting point at which he ushers
in a new way of thinking in which
“another world can be made pos-

98
 Writing on Architecture
Panel Discussion
Yale School of Architecture
“Writing on Architecture”
Peter Eisenman
Luis Fernández-Galiano
Kurt Forster
Paul Goldberger
Robert A.M. Stern
John Donatich, Moderator
Presented in conjunction with the
Whitney Humanities Center
Monday, October 8
A panel of six representatives
from various positions in the field
convened to discuss, inflate, and
deflate the role of writing in archi-
99
Yale University
reviewed by Stephen Nielson
tecture. The night’s talk, moderated
by Yale University Press Director
John Donatich, aimed to shift our
focus from the visual to the textual.
Summoning the haunting verse of
John Ruskin, Donatich defined the
dual nature of architecture as hav-
ing both responsibilities to shelter
and speak to us. Focusing on the
latter he hoped that with the varied
perspectives of the panel the dis-
cussion might “parse the qualities
of not only the ways in which build-
ings speak to us [and] chat about
what the jobs of those who write
about architecture is.” Through a
series of questions directed mostly
towards architectural criticism, he
attempted to define oppositions
around the relationship of people to
the built environment. The critic is
asked to try on many hats as poten-
tial educator, aesthetic champion,
soldier of public well-being, or social
activist. These provocations speak
to the question of architectural
communication.
As the only official “critic” on
the panel, Paul Goldberger was the
one to address the questions posed
by Donatich in defining the role
of the critic. He first cited notable
‘critics of critics,’ quoting Sir Henry
Walton’s comparison of the critic to
the “washer of nobleman’s clothes”
and increased the fervor of his as-
sault with a line from Lord Byron
who wrote that, “one might as soon
seek roses in December, ice in June,
hope constancy in the wind, or corn
in the chaff, believe a woman or an
epitaph before you trust in critics.”
To these rather disheartening com-
ments Goldberger noted a positive
rebuttal in Matthew Arnold who
100
defined criticism as, “a disinterested
endeavor to learn and propagate the
best that is known and thought in
the world.” It was from this point
that he built his case for the critic
as primarily an educator. To him,
the lofty ambition of the critic to,
through written communication,
serve as an ambassador of intellect
to the people is in fact at least a
part of the job. This task, however,
comes with the peril of judgment.
While honest journalism is of
course a necessity to good criticism
it is in promotion and chiding that
a qualitative assessment must be
made. For clarity in judgment he
insisted that the critic maintain a
distance from issues of aesthetic
choice. With these issues in check,
the remaining requirement for the
critic is quite simply a love of the
subject. If the critic can effectively
convey that love to his or her read-
ers, his or her potential to make
their lives more meaningful and
pleasurable is great.
With a panel comprising three
architects, a historian and but one
critic, the ensuing conversation was
dominated by the question of why
architects write, and whether they
have any place doing so. Bob Stern,
with stinging efficacy, distilled
what he believes are the motivators
behind architects writing, quoted
in part, below:
“1. Very young architects with
little or no work experience in the
profession write to make space for
themselves. In this they reach out to
members of their own generation.
They also write to create the kind
of intellectual noise that is likely to
get the attention of older architects
– for better or for worse.
101
2. Not so young architects with
some professional work under their
belts write about their work to make
more of it than there really is.
3. More mature architects
write to carry forward a line of in-
vestigation with some seriousness.
For example they may look for con-
nections with other fields.
4. Architects write to make the
public aware of the contribution
architecture makes to the wider
culture.
5. Architects, like those in so
many other fields, write to justify
the trajectory of their work with the
hope of influencing history, and in
that way with the hope of justifying
their lives. While most other cul-
tural figures write autobiographies,
Architects prefer to gather their work
together in monographs. Blame Pal-
ladio, whose lead we follow. I would
be less-than-candid were I not to
say that the monographs architects
write about themselves or publish
about themselves are self serving.
But insofar as the work and words in
their pages inspire others to spend
time contemplating the discipline,
I would also argue that such books
serve architecture as a whole.”
Luis Fernández-Galiano would
be the only of the presenters to rise
from the table and take the podium.
From his pulpit he expounded on
“the asymmetrical relationship
where architecture is always the
master and writing is reduced to the
status of servant” likening the phrase
“architectural writing” to “British
Cuisine” or “German Humor.” As
the editor of Arquitectura Viva, he,
through editorial necessity, must
102
coax the two “strange bedfellows”
of architecture and writing into
cohesive publications, so he further
distilled the relationship to the
“word” and the “image” in which the
subject, Architecture, clearly favors
the image. Beyond merely noting
this hierarchy, Fernández-Galiano
persecuted architectural writing,
citing the poor writing of Vitruvius
who was, in his words, “sadly lacking
substance and intellectual distinc-
tion.” In confirmation of Stern’s
comments on self-promotion,
Fernández-Galiano pointed toward
the image-heavy monograph as a
means of advertising. While the
general tone of his talk was a humor-
ous and mildly self-deprecating jab
at architectural writing, he did not
criticize the architect for a reliance
on the image, but simply insisted
that we come to terms with the
reality of the situation. In the end,
Fernández-Galiano admitted that,
while the craft of writing within
the field is historically abysmal,
there is nothing to be ashamed of
in this regard, and that we may not
be “happier or wiser if in the world
of architecture the word were the
master and the image the slave.”
Kurt Forster’s response provided
the much-needed intoxication
to Fernández-Galiano’s sobering
accusations in a discussion of the
recently re-issued articles of George
Nelson. Nelson, a young man of 25,
offers what Forster deems, “a kind
of writing about architecture which
one could compare to writing home
about what you’ve seen.” He sum-
marized with a German proverb:
“If you take the trip, you’ll have
something to write home about.”
The benefit of this type of writing is
the potential for the writing itself to
103
offer insight beyond the actual sub-
ject under consideration. Forster
evoked Marco Polo, the poet Gurte,
and Karl Friedrich Schinkel as hav-
ing whetted the appetites of a great
many readers from the far east to
northern Europe, respectively. He
observed that Gurte recognized the
existence of a “...third life, amal-
gamating truth and fiction [and]
felt that precisely this borrowed life
enchanted the reader.” Nelson’s
journals, beginning in 1932, offer
an American sensibility applied
to a transitional period in Europe.
He wrote home about encounters
with an idling Mies van der Rohe,
an ambitious though disappointed
Le Corbusier, and a remarkable
Margarita Sanfranti. Forster folded
his tale back into the lesson of the
day when he commiserates on the
inability to locate America, the
book of Sanfranti, the “Godmother
of Italian Architecture.” Forster
concluded, “so much for the fate of
books that we typically find inter-
twined with the fate of buildings.”
Peter Eisenman took specific
issue, as he does on a weekly basis in
his design studio at Yale, with Luis
Fernández-Galiano. He countered
that, while architects may, in fact,
be guilty of the self-promoting
monograph, “writers also write
books about themselves and create
characters that are surrogates for
themselves,” citing Proust’s Swann,
and Roth’s Zuckerman as examples.
He argued that we then must allow
architects a similar outlet. Perhaps
the most striking, and insightful,
comment offered by Eisenman was
that “books are more important
than buildings.” Eisenman noted
that buildings have a “life of about
thirty years, in terms of their value,”
104
and so, were it not for publications,
we would have no record of the ex-
istence of a number of buildings; in
this service, “there’s nothing wrong
with a few pictures.” Eisenman of-
fered the immortalizing examples
of Palladio’s four books – for which
Palladio himself redrew all of his
designs as their initial unrealized
intent – and Le Corbusier’s Oeuvre
Complète and Vers Une Architec-
ture as models, without which we’d
have lost the buildings to time and
situation. Beyond the book as a
means of immortalizing the archi-
tecture, Eisenman cited Venturi’s
Complexity and Contradiction as a
text, with minimal readable imag-
ery, which will certainly far outlast
and take priority over its built
counterparts. Including Koolhaas
with the aforementioned collection
of writing architects, Eisenman
concluded that their various un-
dertakings are better described as
“writing architecture.” With this,
Eisenman drew a line in the sand,
making a distinction between the
independent field of architectural
writing, which is comprised of crit-
ics and most theorists, and “writing
architecture” which is architecture
in the form of productive text and
diagram in support of, and of equal
or greater importance to, the built.
Upon conclusion of the
increasingly specific individual
presentations, the initially moder-
ated conversation returned to the
question of the monograph. When
asked of the monograph’s value,
Paul Goldberger characterized it
as mostly reference material for
providing plans and pictures, where
“rarely is there critical insight that is
meaningful.” This was a comment
with which Eisenman promptly
105
agreed, adding that the architect
is the last person you’d want to ask
“what it is, or why it is.” Eisenman
then, again, turned the discussion
to Complexity and Contradiction
as a book, not about Bob Venturi,
but about presenting a new idea
to American architecture — “the
most important book written in the
United States about architecture.”
Bob Stern used this remark to rein-
force his earlier comments, noting
that what Venturi, Koolhaas, Le
Corbusier, and Sullivan do is “[try]
to carve a new place, seeing things
fresh.”
On the issue of the visual and
the verbal, Eisenman distinguished
between the abilities of the ar-
chitect and the writer, offering
Jacques Derrida as someone with
tremendous ideas to offer those
who could “see,” whilst lacking
the ability to “see,” himself. When
asked to provide a philosopher
who can “see” Paul Goldberger
instead looked to Marcel Proust
and, upon Eisenman’s suggestion,
Sal Bellow, both of whose writing,
he argued, was about architecture
and “describe[s] place and build-
ing often more convincingly than
architects have.”
The earlier provocations of
Fernández-Galiano then came to a
head with Eisenman over the utili-
zation of images to describe archi-
tectural ideas. Fernández-Galiano
cited the total editorial control of
Palladio and Le Corbusier, illustrat-
ing the reliance of architectural
texts on the image. It is precisely the
definition, or classification, of the
image that he and Eisenman have
difficulty synchronizing: Eisen-
man insists that the oft referred
106
to canonical texts do not rely on
representational imagery, and that
there is an important distinction
to be drawn between image as rep-
resentation of a reality and image
as clarification of an architectural
concept—simply a matter of the
photograph versus the diagram.
For Eisenman, plans and sections,
while consumed by the eye, are not
perceptual phenomena, but instead
a means of conveying information
to the intellect. While Fernán-
dez-Galiano refuses to allow this
distinction, the point is clarified
by Paul Goldberger who refined
Eisenman’s descriptor of “picture
postcards” to “sexy, colorful, pretty,
seductive images ... architectural
porn,” a realm of the visual that,
at least in architecture, Eisenman
cannot subscribe to.
Thus, at the conclusion of the
evening we saw a rift presenting two
distinct camps. Architectural writ-
ing finds its merit, independent of
architecture’s theoretical projects,
through an inspiration of love for
the subject, or “letters home,” to
much the same end, while “writing
architecture” is subsumed into the
project of architectural autonomy.

107
108
 talk20 Philadelphia
Entering the Institute for Con-
temporary Art (ICA) at the Univer-
sity of Pennsylvania on the evening
of October 11th, you would have
thought you were interrupting an
ongoing party and not the prelude
to a presentation on contemporary
architecture and design. With syn-
thesized beats emanating from the
lecture hall, beer and wine being
served by the glassful and throngs of
students and young designers mill-
ing about the current exhibits, the
scene was fitting for the an event
advertising itself as “not as a lecture
but a gathering, an open forum for
the dissemination of ideas in art,
architecture and design.”
109
University of Pennsylvania
reviewed by Jason Nguyen
Given the institution’s predilec-
tion for liberal and intellectual aes-
theticism, it’s of little surprise, then,
that such an event found its home
at the ICA, that groundbreaking
institution most known for hosting
the first solo Andy Warhol exhibi-
tion in 1965 and originating the
highly controversial Robert Map-
plethorpe: “The Perfect Moment”
show in 1989. Though it is unlikely
that talk20 will compete with such
milestone events, what it does do
is usher in a refreshing and much-
needed approach to contemporary
architectural discourse.
Talk20 began in Philadelphia in
February of 2006. Since then, it has
spread to six other cities – Boston,
Barcelona, Chicago, Mexico City,
Spartanburg (South Carolina) and
Toronto. Its intrigue lies not only
in the content covered but also in
the structure of the event itself.
As opposed to having one speaker
lecturing, talk20 organizes a central
theme and opens the podium to
the designers and academics which
typically constitute the audience.
To maintain a swift, steady and
brevity-attuned dialogue, each
speaker is allowed twenty slides
with an allotted speaking time of
twenty seconds per slide. Such a
structure forces a direct yet disci-
plined conversation which is part
dialogic, part artistic, part critical
and wholly dynamic. The discus-
sion remains frank, cutting directly
to the conceptual underpinnings
of each project. Presenters address
110
issues of theory, practice, fabrica-
tion and culture, all while avoiding
(or attempting to avoid, at least)
the trap of esotericism which has
come to plague much of theoretical
discussions within academe.
The October 2007 installment
of talk20 Philadelphia, its fourth,
centered on “Feedback.” Though
the organizers offered little more
than that single word as guidance,
it’s hardly shocking that the major-
ity of the presenters latched on, at
least implicitly so, to prevailing De-
leuzian philosophy. Though some
presented projects which adopted
the once-revolutionary, but now
seemingly mainstream, use of the
algorithm as a means of producing
an architecture representative of
such an ontology, there were quite a
few who addressed the theme with a
refreshing and slightly more critical
hand. As a complete review of each
discussion would be far too wide-
ranging for a concise review, I’d like
to cover two presentations which
addressed the theoretical concepts
of “feedback” innovatively.
Scott Knowles, Next American
City
Scott Knowles, a professor of
political science at neighboring
Drexel University, offered an inter-
esting perspective of “Feedback”
in his presentation on the recent
endeavors of non-profit research
group, The Next American City—a
group whose interests lie in the
realm of psycho- and political-ge-
ography. In his short presentation,
Mr. Knowles rather chaotically
presented an experiment which he
and his group conducted the sum-
mer prior. Equipped with a video
111
camera, no set agenda and a jovial
spirit, his group set out to see what
it meant to experience Philadelphia
for one twenty-four hour period.
The experiment was less a lesson
in good urbanism, urban semiotics
or post-modern meaning and more
an analysis of non-linear, empirical
existence. As the group transitioned
from one location to another—from
tourist venues leading impromptu
tours to municipal parks playing
football—each subsequent move
was determined solely by the
adjacencies of the location and
action taking place. While some
could view this endeavor as mere
spontaneity gone urban, what it ac-
tually constituted was a lighter, less
esoteric, approach of addressing the
temporal existence which makes up
the actual act of experience. The set
of events – the actions and reactions
which conspired in the creation
of the overall experience – was
not one of reducible, linear, time-
contingent entities. Instead, these
individual events fused to create a
whole new event altogether. Fur-
ther, their treatment of the city less
as an object representing cultural
modulations and more as an active,
participatory container assisting
in the propagation of these event
themselves, proved a fresh, material
alternative to the algorithmic-based
architectures of recent years.
Phu Hoang, Phu Hoang Office LLC
(New York)
Another presentation which of-
fered a fresh and decidedly critical
approach to “Feedback” concluded
the event. Phu Hoang, New York-
based architect and design critic
at the University of Pennsylvania,
leads a design and research practice
112
interested in the multiple scales of
urban socio-politics. A quick glance
at his oeuvre reveals an interest in
the dissolving of physical bound-
aries, architecturally, politically,
economically. In his presentation
on the project No Man’s Land, he
addressed the dually ecological and
political role that water takes in
the Dead Sea region of the Middle
East. As the Dead Sea continues to
shrink, he claims, the ecological,
economical and political nature of
the ever-volatile region has begun
to shift. His proposal, thus, takes
the resorts which line the shores of
the Dead Sea (and which have pos-
sibly contributed to its recession)
and relocates them to a series of ar-
tificial islands within the Sea itself.
Interspersed within this system of
artificial islands would be stations
for desalination for potable water
generation, ecological refuge and
future development. Such a system
is organized “externally,” each
“island” interacting and affecting
its neighbor in innovative architec-
tural and political ways. What he
appears to suggest in this proposal
is that through transposing current
social and political entities (enti-
ties being materially converted to
phylum-organized “islands” in this
project), new cultural realities can
become possible. Furthermore, in a
world where ecological concerns are
becoming increasingly intertwined
with the political, it is becoming in-
creasingly imperative to introduce
meaningful ideas of sustainabil-
ity—and its impacts on the critical
agenda—to the discourse.
During the whole of the event,
the lecture hall at the ICA was inun-
dated with a series of innovative and
novel proposals implicitly dealing
113
with many of the issues which per-
meate contemporary architectural
discourse. Through the dissemina-
tion of theoretical positions in a
forum for honest, unpretentious
dialog, the event allowed for an
event both casual and intellectual,
dynamic and laid-back, provisional
and sustainable.
Talk20 currently exists in seven
cities across the globe: Boston,
Barcelona, Chicago, Mexico City,
Philadelphia, Spartanburg (South
Carolina) and Toronto. For more
information, please see http://www.
talk20.org.
114
 FOA
Alejandro Zaera-Polo (of For-
eign Office Architects) began his
lecture by presenting a taxonomy of
envelope types: flat, spherical and
vertical. The lecture brought forth
the notion of “envelope” as a coun-
ter-critique of common themes that
Alejandro Zaera-Polo has identified
in the past five years, both at FOA
and across the discipline. Zaera-Polo
noted that architectural projects
are becoming increasingly driven
by envelopes and volumes rather
than flows of intensive properties
engaging transformations of surface
driven geometries. Contemporary
115
Alejandro Zaera-Polo
reviewed by Francis Bitonti
discourse has regarded architectural
surfaces such as floors, walls etc. as
differential and continuous. Con-
nectivity of surfaces and various
topological transformations such as
stretching and folding have domi-
nated an architectural language
oriented towards mediating inten-
sive differences between social and
material flows.
In his lecture, Zaera-Polo
brought into question the role of
“the surface” and the significance of
the building envelope. Zaera-Polo
argued that architects are asked by
developers to define architecture in
terms of dimension with particular
preference to volume rather than
topological models which are more
concerned with connectivity. In
doing so, Zaera-Polo chooses to
emphasize volumes above the non-
Euclidian geometries which have
recently dominated architectural
discourse. This brings architecture
into an intellectual arena where
extensive rather than intensive
thinking assumes paramount im-
portance. In his lecture Zaera-Polo
defined envelopes as mediators of
intensive properties rather than
surfaces, and therefore imposed an
alternate understanding of materi-
als and geometric transformation
which hybridizes extensive and
intensive thinking.
In support of his argument,
Zaera-Polo pointed out that the
116
envelope of a building is inherently
political, and a poignant point of
departure for a discussion about the
relationship between politics and
architecture. The envelope defines
the legal limits of property and ne-
gotiates the division between public
and private. Zaera-Polo stated that a
way of thinking about politics, more
specifically a “politics of things,” has
been absent from architecture in
recent years. He criticized previous
generations of architects for being
overly pragmatic.
As Zaera-Polo describes it, a
“politics of things,” can be under-
stood through an emphasis towards
the building envelope. The defini-
tion of geometry, described above,
accounts for the differentiation of
the three envelope types. While as
far as topology is concerned each
of these three envelope types (flat,
 spherical, and vertical) are identi-
cal cells, by standards of Euclidian
geometry they define three unique
entities. This perspective allows
architectural typology rather than
topology and nuanced negotiations
between architectural form and
fluctuating cultural and economic
conditions to be reflected through
a contemporary discourse that
politicizes geometric and inten-
sive difference. The emphasis on
Euclidian and metric differences
allows our understanding of mate-
rial organizations to be more closely
linked to economy. As a result the
architectural volume is free to as-
sume a highly politicized role while
intensive differences are regarded
in relation to an understanding
of topology that operates as an
organizing rather than geometric
principle.

117
 This may seem to be a surpris-
ing argument from Alejandro
Zaera-Polo. However, it should
be noted that projects from FOA,
despite being topologically driven
for many years (for example the
Yokohama Port Terminal and
Virtual House), show a tendency
to understand architectural differ-
entiation though formal typology.
Phylogenesis, meaning genesis of
type, discusses in great detail the
emergence and mutations of archi-
tectural form. The introduction to
the text describes the challenge of
maintaining the identity of a single
architectural practice while at the
same time taking advantage of the
potential mutations of architectural
form that occur when the architect
is asked to work within a variety of
geographic locations.
This argument is somewhat
118
analogous to the notion of the
“epigenome” in contemporary ge-
netics. The notion of an epigenome
reflects the idea that certain genes
can be activated and deactivated as
a result of conditions in the physi-
cal environment, thus creating
differentiation from a single entity
operating autonomously. In Zaera-
Polo’s text, architectural speciation
or rather “Phylogenesis” becomes
the product of a particular architec-
tural genome operating in opposi-
tion to various local factors such as
socio-economic and programmatic
demands.
Rather than discussing archi-
tectural projects in terms of static
typologies, the text instead looks to
the patterns through which a type
emerges. This is the realization of
type through intensive differences;
in short, architecture has its own in-
telligence and does not necessarily
need to borrow geometric models
for expression but only for criticism.
Intensive differences create traces
upon architecture only in so much
as they inform the evolution of a
species with its own requirements
for geometric organization. This
justifies structuring the discussion
around Euclidian transformations
which are more appropriate for
discerning differences of type with
regard to architecture.
The philosophy of Bruno Latour
and Peter Sloterdijk were cited in
the lecture as being an appropriate
point of reference for this discus-
sion. Sloterdijk recently published
an essay in Log titled “Cell Block,
Egospheres, Self-Container” that
discusses the emergence and sig-
nificance of the apartment building
in the 20th century. For Sloterdijk,
119
the envelope becomes a mecha-
nism through which inhabitants
mediate their relationship between
themselves and the collective or
“foam” as it is described in the
essay. Sloterdijk lays a philosophi-
cal framework for thinking about
architecture in terms of envelopes.
In the case of the apartment build-
ing, Sloterdijk describes the living
unit as a discrete and self referential
entity while at the same time part
of a large aggregation.
While Sloterdijk focuses on
the discrete living unit, Zaera-Polo
discussed the building envelope in
relation to the large urban context,
rather than as a single self referential
entity part of a larger architectural
composition. Zaera-Polo then dis-
cussed the three envelope types.
Flat envelopes are horizontal
and serve to redefine the ground
plane. Spherical ones are as equally
tall as they are wide; they are
neither horizontal nor vertical.
These volumes have a tendency
to become extremely dense, so it
becomes important for the designer
to always balance their volume with
their surface area. Vertical volumes
have an even stronger relationship
to their skin. The surfaces of these
volumes become a negotiation
between expressing program and
structure.

The argument for envelope-

based design that Zaera-Polo
presented offers a design logic that
engages the larger composition of
the city through the inward looking
model of building construction—
the processes and organizations
that are unique to architecture.

120
Shrinkwrapping Vague Things
Neil Denari knows how to
interact with his audience, how to
explain his projects, how to gauge
the room, how to wield an image.
He can argue about the lineup of
80’s bands that you probably don’t
know. Above all, he is a deft archi-
tect with a broad portfolio of built
projects, one who practices design
at every scale. Denari’s November 7,
2007 lecture at Princeton featured
his scalar acrobatics and cultural
ergonomics: the process of organiz-
ing into place a shrinkwrapping of
vague things.
121
Neil Denari
reviewed by Molly Wright Steenson
Ankles, eyes, hands, codes, soft-
ware
Denari frames arguments with
photographs. The images oper-
ate on a Lilliputian level, his lens
catching young adults in Shibuya
on a sultry August night. From the
street-grade vantage, he catches the
ankles of his subjects as the camera
looks up at them against a black
night sky. They are illuminated by
small signs and doorways on a side
street, and by Shibuya’s grand-
est interface: the Qfront with its
famous living billboard (the one
you remember from Lost in Trans-
lation, with the walking elephant).
The photographs capture moments
at different scales. These instances
shift from the body, to the door,
to the sign, to the street, to the
billboard. They catch people’s in-
teractions with devices, and yet the
devices stand in juxtaposition with
the spaces they inhabit: a boy holds
a game controller in a crowded
arcade; a photocopier backs against
a sea of blue cubicles opposite a
religious shrine. It is the relation-
ship of the hand, the eye, and the
billboard, a triangular interaction,
micro-to-mini-to-macro, that De-
nari brilliantly catches.
Denari’s moves reflect the ap-
proach of interaction design. This
discipline creates the products,
systems and interfaces (usually elec-
tronic) with which people engage. It
122
developed in the early 1980’s out of
the desire for the interior behavior
of a computer to meet the molded
exterior of its hardware. Doing this
effectively requires an understand-
ing of several levels of interiority:
human behavior, system function,
and site limitation, to name a few.
Could we see his projects, especially
his interior renovations, as a new
type of software that brings many
interactions into focus?
Pristine, in effect
Denari twice mentions
Antonioni’s Blow-Up during his
lecture. This isn’t a surprise, given
the ways his zooming in and zoom-
ing out reveals what is not available
upon first glance. MUFG Nagoya
(a private client center for one
of the world’s largest banks) uses
separations of scant millimeters on
panels and joints on its 28-meter
black stainless steel façade; zygotic
shapes forming into circles and then
lighting for the entrance; tangerine
custom furniture for the lobby. But
zooming out to the High Line 23,
a residential building in New York,
Denari occupies a different dimen-
sion altogether. Here, it is a matter
of hacking building code. Each
facet of the “leftover” site the 13-
story residential tower will occupy is
won through negotiation. “Zoning
x Desire = What it takes to build
in Manhattan,” quips the DMNA
website. The building is the mani-
festation of these interstices. For
the projects he showed, the typical
plan and program are straightfor-
ward, nearly boring. It is always the
building section that shows the po-
tential and kinetic energy; it is the
ceiling plan that shows the ulterior
motive for circulation of the body
123
and the eye. In construction, the
elements meld together smoothly,
vacuum-formed and glossy.
Or do they?
With the 1956 House of the Fu-
ture, Peter and Alison Smithson cre-
ated a plastic house with undulating,
white, pristine surfaces—at least,
in effect. In reality, the Smithsons
achieved this surface effect through
layers of plaster on plywood: the re-
sult of detailed crafting and not of
space-age manufacture. As Denari
zeroes in on the ceiling detail of
the MUFG Ginza banking branch,
he first shows the underlying metal
framing. He then notes the mo-
ment where the wooden surface
bends to meet the white, planar
pathways of the ceiling. But here,
appearance and construction differ.
Handworked stucco achieves the
effect, not technology. It is similar to Tokyo. Through all its scales of
to the prototyping tools industrial operation, it is the dance of interac-
and automotive designers use as tion that sculpts his immaculate
they model the form factor: they surfaces of covert construction.
sculpt it from clay. Denari wins
with cleverness, for knowing the (Thanks to Shawn Protz and En-
right design tool for the job. When rique Ramirez for their insights.)
technology can’t offer pristine
effects, it doesn’t matter whether
the year is 1956 or 2007. The hand
completes the curve and the eye is
none the wiser.

Shrinkwrapping vague things,

then, commands an understanding
of motion beneath the surface,
bringing things into alignment, the
structures the film clings to. Denari
plies these things on all levels in his
conversations as well as his build-
ings. It is eye, hand and billboard,
the laws and politics governing the
site as much as it is 80’s avant-garde
rock and a contrail connecting LA

124
Mass Mysteria David Erdman
reviewed by Izabel Gass

David Erdman, formerly a

member of the design collaborative
SERVO and now a founding partner
of the firm DavidClovers, was the
2007 Cullinan Visiting Professor of
Architecture at Rice University. He
presented his design work to the Rice
community in a school-wide lecture
titled, “Mass Mysteria.” Erdman
opened his lecture by announcing
his own professional transition
out of SERVO and into practice

125
with wife Clover Lee, explaining
that their design partnership was
founded “more on our differences
than our similarities.” Erdman then
showed a slide in which two col-
umns of text read, respectively: He
Likes, She Likes, including state-
ments such as “He Likes Mystery;
She Likes Mass,” and so on. While
this initial introduction expressed a
flippant regurgitation of stereotypi-
cal gender roles geared at marketing
the “cuteness” of a husband-wife
design team, Erdman’s following
description of his work left little to
be desired and in fact suggested a
timely and provocative rupture in
the contemporary museum as well
as the domicile.
The title of Erdman’s lecture
alludes to a definition of “mystery”
derived from pop-Economist Mal-
colm Gladwell, who distinguishes
126
between puzzles — quantitative
problems, or questions with a single
or definitive answer — and myster-
ies — questions that can be resolved
analytically in a number of differ-
ent ways. Erdman sees his work as
cultivating “mystery” inasmuch as
it develops a visual and spatial com-
plexity that demands to be resolved,
or at least explored, by an engaged
viewer, rather than reverting to the
immediately recognizable iconicity
— or “branding strategies”— com-
mon to the visual language of much
contemporary architecture.
Erdman’s field of work backs up
this claim brilliantly. The SERVO
exhibit “Dark Places,” an instal-
lation for a video art show at the
Santa Monica Museum of Art, was
designed with the ambition “that
the artwork could cross contami-
nate itself.” A translucent video
 projector armed with eight separate
screens showcased the works of sev-
eral different artists in ever-variable
rotation. As Erdman explained, “as
much as we were working with dif-
ferent elements [in designing the
projector] what became important
was the commingling of strands,”
meaning, the plasticity of the
architecture lent itself to a similar
plasticity in the presentation of the
digital work, inasmuch as the ever
changing juxtapositions of the films
redefined their immediate contex-
tualization and, consequently, their
meaning. Dark Places effectively
develops an architectural morphol-
ogy for a hypertextual system of
classification: the exhibit becomes
a liquid archive in which discrete
cultural artifacts are continuously
redefined by means of their ever-
changing contexts and arrange-
ments. The project emulates the

127
distinctive construction of frames
of knowledge in the digital era,
immersing the viewer in a fresh and
complex perceptual field in which
she must continually redefine her
interpretation of the visual material
at hand in terms of its ever fluctuat-
ing surroundings.
In partnership with Lee, Erd-
man has recently won a competi-
tion for a housing complex in the
Greater Beijing Arts District, in
which discrete housing units are de-
rived from formal distortions of the
geometric “box,” allowing for a play
of luminosity and a liquid interior
space. The spatially “mysterious”
domicile created seems almost a
contemporary iteration of the un-
heimlich, calling to mind Anthony
Vidler’s uncanny house, but forgo-
ing the ‘mystery’ of a supernatural
‘Other,’ in lieu of the mysteries of
128
spatial geometries.
Perhaps the most enticing qual-
ity in Erdman’s work, on the whole,
is its perceptual difficulty—which
is to say, its capacity to engage the
inhabitant/viewer on a level of cog-
nitive participation more complex
and provocative than the simplistic
image recognition, or market-
oriented branding strategies, that
dominate contemporary visual
culture. Erdman’s work maintains
space and form as its own distinctive
mode of knowledge to be unraveled
by a perceiving subject, but does so
without recourse to Phenomenol-
ogy.