Ugly, Useless, Unstable Architectures

Phase Spaces and Generative Domains

Miguel Paredes Maldonado

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780367086220
• eBook ISBN: 9780429657504
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture General

Ugly, Useless, Unstable Architectures traces productive intersections between architecture and the discourses of Post-Structuralism and New Materialism. It investigates how their unique 'ontological regimes' can be mobilised to supersede the classical framework that still informs both the production and the evaluation of architecture.

Throughout its three main chapters, this enquiry challenges one of the most prevalent tropes of architectural assessment: Beauty, Utility and Stability. Author Miguel Paredes Maldonado critically unpacks the spatial and operational qualities of these three idealised concepts, before setting out an alternative framework of spatial practice that draws from Gilles Deleuze's post-structuralist take on the production of the real and Manuel DeLanda's model-based branch of New Materialism. This book reads and situates a series of spatial works through the lens of this critical methodology to contest the conceptual aspects traditionally underpinning architectural 'value'. It posits that architecture can operate as a continuous, generative spectrum encompassing a broad range of potential configurations.

Written for academics and students in architectural theory, design and contemporary philosophical thought alike, this book should appeal to a wide audience.

1 Introduction

Why bother? New Materialism as a tool for reappraising the classical architectural canon

In a nutshell, this book aims to put forward a series of potential transferences between architecture and contemporary thought. It attempts to explicitly situate a subset of contemporary perspectives on New Materialism within the field of architecture, with a focus on the realist insights developed as part of an ongoing collective endeavour to revise and update the Post-Structuralist legacy of Gilles Deleuze (championed, among others, by philosopher Manuel DeLanda). The vehicle for presenting these transferences is a recursive discussion that identifies, unpacks and subsequently challenges the hegemonic conceptual underpinnings of architectural ‘value’.

However, this book can also be described the other way around: A challenge to the conceptual aspects that historically underpin architectural ‘value’, methodologically developed through a specific subset of the contemporary framework of New Materialism, and specifically deployed with an architectural audience in mind. In any case, its main critical proposition is that valuable insights can be gained when we start looking into architectural categories as continuous material domains rather than as singular elements of an immutable canon.

The last few decades of architectural production have witnessed an increasing number of design strategies (operating within a very broad range of scales) that seem to avoid fulfilling some or all of the classically informed criteria of Beauty, Utility and Stability – often deliberately. To add more confusion to this apparent gap between the critical and the operative domain, the architectural results emerging from these strategies often seem to perform well within the contextual conditions of our contemporary societies. Funnily enough, as architects these canonically incorrect solutions also seem to attract our interest as something more than just a slight provocation. In spite of this, more often than not we keep assessing them on the basis of criteria that were formulated two millennia ago. We may thus wonder if explicit critical value can be found in the architectures that fall outside the classical system of values embodied in Beauty, Utility and Stability. In other words, is there a contemporary value in the Ugly, the Useless and the Unstable?

As a response to this question, this book attempts to reframe the classical criteria for the production and evaluation of architectural works within the broader landscape of current design practices and their allegiances to specific strands of New Materialist thought. In doing so, it will challenge the prevalent role of classical criteria in the context of contemporary production and criticism. The goal is not, however, to categorically dismiss the classical altogether, but rather to reconsider its status by critically resituating it alongside other current modes of production. I will describe how specific strands of twentieth-century Post-Structuralism and their gradual evolution towards twenty-first-century New Materialist ontologies have had a substantial influence in the reappraisal of the classical canon in regards to our understanding of the built environment. The ultimate goal of this book is to outline how the operation of reframing the classical may also be mobilised as a methodological approach to architectural design.

In 1985 Peter Eisenman published ‘The End of the Classical: The End of the Beginning, the End of the End’. This paper provided an insightful analysis of the productive and critical mechanisms of the classical, which in his view took the form of a continuous tradition – an extended period of consistently upheld conditions that affected both the making and the appraising of architectural works.¹ This is a convenient point of departure for us, for it provides a suitable characterisation of the classical as a contingent value structure, as well as a historical datum for us to mark off as a starting point for our enquiry: The final years of the twentieth century and the unprecedented transformation of practices involved in the production of the built environment since then, primarily afforded by the mainstream availability of digital technologies in the design field. Besides this unprecedented technological condition it would also seem that the incorporation of key contemporary developments in the fields of metaphysics and epistemology into architectural discourse can provide an opportunity to broaden the limits of our critical framework beyond the replication of classical paradigms.

As suggested in Eisenman’s text, the transmission of the fundamental principles of the classical critical apparatus occurred through an extended period starting from the mid-fifteenth century onwards, and until the early twentieth century. Within this broad episteme² we propose to mark off the Western Enlightenment as the temporal locus of the most recent and comprehensive intellectual endeavour to rediscover and implement the values of classical culture in the context of architectural production. This is indeed the extended historical period in which, after undergoing substantial transformations, Vitruvius’s original triad Firmitas, Utilitas, Venustas, was eventually consolidated into the modern notions of architectural Beauty, Utility and Stability.³ This book will interrogate the prevalence of these three paradigms under the light of contemporary critical positions concerned with the subversion of their classical principles. The goal is not only to articulate a reaction to the changes and transformations that characterise contemporary models of architectural production, but also to inform future methodological approaches to architectural design. In doing so, this is an attempt to mobilise the domain of the descriptive into something generative.

From a methodological point of view, our argument is initially grounded on an interpretation of the concept of Inverted Platonism (originally developed by Friedrich Nietzsche, and substantially extended by Gilles Deleuze). Whereas Inverted Platonism implicitly recognised the importance of Plato’s discourse in Western metaphysics, it also attempted to circumvent the limitations of one of its fundamental principles: the distinction between copies and simulacra as an index of the truth of being versus the falsehood of appearances. In other words, undermining the identical is the generative principle of Inverted Platonism – which Plato associated with a true being that was as close as possible to the world of Ideas. In doing so, Inverted Platonism also foregrounds the importance of the notion of becoming.

Although many authors have explored the inversion of Platonism from a methodological point of view, none have specifically attempted to interrogate it within the context of a system of classical values such as that embodied by the synthetic triad of Beauty, Utility and Stability. This triad provides a particularly compelling example of how the structure of Platonism has indelibly permeated Western culture at all scales, and how its conceptual framework was considered – at the very least up until the Western Enlightenment – as a superior instance of civilisation. Further to this, and to stress the novel aspects of the enquiry we are putting forward, we shall note that there is no record of previous attempts to consider the operations of Inverted Platonism within the disciplinary framework of architectural production.

The approach to Inverted Platonism put forward in this book is complemented with an additional conceptual scaffold that taps into the contemporary theory of Models developed in the philosophical context of New Materialism, with a particular emphasis on the work developed by Manuel DeLanda around modern philosophy of science. These two conceptual frameworks become integrated in order to articulate both the methodological and the operative arguments presented in this book. As a result of the analytical processes emerging from this integration, we shall cast an unconventional critical view on a number of contemporary architectures. Under this critical perspective, architectural works that seem ferociously radical at first sight may actually emerge as relatively well attuned to classical conventions. On the other hand, the disconformities of the (apparently) Ugly, Useless or Unstable will be revealed in small gestures, or as forming the backbone of superficially well-disciplined architectural examples.

Theoretical scaffold: Inverted Platonism and the theory of Models

Inverted Platonism

The notion of Inverted Platonism appeared originally in what is commonly referred to as Friedrich Nietzsche’s Nachlass, the complete corpus of unpublished writings left after Nietzsche’s death in 1900. More specifically, Nietzsche first referred to his project in terms of Inverted Platonism around 1871 in a very well-known quote:

Meine Philosophie umgedrehter Platonismus: je weiter ab vom wahrhaft Seienden, um so reiner schöner besser ist es⁴

(My philosophy, inverted Platonism, the further away from what truly is, the purer, the more beautiful, the better it is)

Although at first glance this quote might read as a simple provocation, in reality it is far from that inasmuch as it constitutes a very precise summary of a significant part of Nietzsche’s philosophical work. This body of work attempted to examine the Platonist domain of representation or, put differently, the Platonist notion that difference is ultimately established between copies and simulacra.⁵ Within the Platonist framework, the former would be closer to the true being of Ideas – which would in turn constitute the highest level in Plato’s hierarchical, transcendental ontology – whereas the latter would be relegated to the status of bad or false copies, and therefore distanced from the truth of being. When considered from this point of view, the notion of Inverted Platonism is particularly useful for the development of the conceptual apparatus of this book: On the one hand, it helps us trace the characteristics and the historical lineage of the system of evaluation founded by Platonism, which is based on identity and therefore operates by telling apart ‘what is true’ from ‘what is false’ in terms of its identification (or lack thereof) with a series of transcendent ideas or models. On the other hand, it allows us to anticipate the potential for an updated framework in which the criterion of identity can be superseded or, put differently, a framework in which the things that surround us are not solely evaluated according to their degrees of viability as representations of a series of idealised models.

Since this book is concerned with the interrogation of a series of criteria for the evaluation of the domain of architectural production, it is also critical to recognise the mechanisms by means of which those criteria operate, as well as to clarify how such criteria have eventually become prevalent. In that sense, we can easily recognise the Platonist traits discussed above in a system of evaluation such as that embodied by the classical triad Firmitas, Utilitas, Venustas. It can indeed be argued that, insofar as it enforces a series of conditional properties, this triad undoubtedly relies on the identification of the object of our judgement against the framework of three essential ideas: Beauty, Utility and Stability. Reflecting on our own experiences, we may quickly acknowledge how often we use this mechanism of representation through identification in order to critically assess a work of architecture.

The conceptual origins of difference in Platonism

As previously pointed out, a superficial reading of the notion of Inverted Platonism can easily lead to misinterpreting it as a simple case of antagonism to Plato’s philosophical work as a whole. However, the very notion of Inverted Platonism entails an implicit recognition of the value of Plato’s hierarchical ontology as an operative model that has been prevalent throughout the history of Western philosophy. Moreover, we must note that the operations of Inverted Platonism are strictly focused on articulating a critique to Plato’s mechanism of evaluation through identification or, in other words, Plato’s theory of differences. As important as this aspect of Platonist thought is, its boundaries are also relatively well defined, and hence Inverted Platonism – first in Nietzsche’s work, later in Deleuze’s – is a notion with well-defined boundaries.

Plato put forward an ontological system in which the highest order of entities is that of Ideas, or, put differently, those entities which are considered to be beyond any possibility of change in a world animated by movement. Plato’s Ideas do not represent the things that are original: they are ‘th...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• 2 The project of Ugliness: the trans-Beautiful as a productive domain
• 3 The limits of the Useful: revising the operational framework of usefulness in architectural production
• 4 Unstable organisations: or the spatiotemporal processes of becoming
• 5 Colophon: or the spatial regimes of architectural ontologies
• Index