Unorthodox Ways to Think the City

Representations, Constructions, Dynamics

Teresa Stoppani

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780367664084
• eBook ISBN: 9781351341103
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture General

This book argues that architecture and the city and their processes can be better understood by drawing categories from disciplines that exceed the architectural and urban cultural context. It performs an open intellectual reading that traverses architecture and architectural theory, but also art theory and history, cartography, philosophy, literature and cultural studies, to unfold a series of 'figures' that are ambiguously placed between the representation and the construction of space in architecture and the city.

The paradigm and philosophy, the island and the city, the map and representation, the model and making and the questioning of form performed by dust, are explored beyond their definition, as processes that differently make space between architecture and the city and are proposed as unorthodox analytic techniques to decipher contemporary spatial complexity.

The book analyses how these 'figures' have been employed at different times and in different creative disciplines, beyond architecture and in relation to changing notions of space, and traces the role that they have played in the shift towards the dynamic that has taken place in contemporary theory and design research. What emerges is the idea of an 'architecture of the city' that is not only physical but is largely defined by the way in which its physical spaces are regulated, lived and perceived, but also imagined and projected.

1    Introduction

Words for architecture

Unorthodox Ways proposes to reconsider a few key terms that architecture often takes for granted as if they were or could be defined once and for all. They instead change, as architecture changes. They are symptomatic of a situation of permanent instability that has recently become more apparent but has always characterised the discipline. They show how open, porous and malleable architecture is.

This is not a dictionary. Neither systematic nor exhaustive, this book considers terms that put architecture at risk. The questions it asks destabilise the given. They do so by looking around and outside architecture, looking at it from the margins, or rather from within those forms of thought that have recently been marginalised in and by architecture. The key terms it discusses are instances of an argument that claims a production of knowledge and a form of thought in architecture, with the ambition to practice an architectural philosophy, indebted, as architecture itself, to the influence of many other practices.

This is perhaps a cry in the dark. It sounds an alarm against an architecture reduced to a service. Ideologies may be dead, political systems are crumbling, religions are screaming, the global market glases over differences. Architecture may have lost its traditional and historical referents, but this does not mean that its propositional role must be reduced to a service. Architecture may be lost, but this does not mean that it needs to lose itself. Proposing an architectural philosophy is perhaps an ambitious attempt to think architecturally. Not only to think around and within architectural terms and ideas, and to think them in relation to its outside, but also to construct a mode of thinking that is specific to architecture while drawing from other disciplines.

At a time when the city is considered an obsolete institution but the world is heading towards global urbanisation, and architectural amnesia seeks grounds of disciplinary reinvention in biology, genetics and material sciences, this book takes on the unfashionable task of returning current debates to the architectural discourse. It aims to revisit old words and concepts for architecture and the city in new ways, to show that the issues that are at the heart of contemporary architecture are not a break away from the history of the discipline, but a form of its development. Rather than ‘forgetting architecture’ it seems worthwhile to return to it, and to its discours(iv)e, intellectual, critical and creative voice in the making of the man-made environment, and to continue its difficult discourse, always precariously balanced between its specificity and the necessary openness to other disciplines. A return to architecture to resume a discourse on its specificity seems to have been forgotten in recent years. Still, this seems to go in cycles: architecture periodically opens up and appropriates changes and techniques of other disciplines to refresh its own voice and contents.

In the 1920s, Le Corbusier had invited architects to open their eyes and embrace the developments of engineering; by the 1950s the late CIAM were readdressing existing urban forms and their social dimension. From the 1960s, architecture began to look for answers outside of itself, no longer as a propositional force that could redesign the world (and with it its inhabitants), but as an interactive and collaborative agent. From social geography and urban history (Rossi), to morphological analysis and the philosophy of science (Rowe), to semiotics and structuralist studies (Agrest and Gandelsonas), to popular culture and new media (Venturi and Scott-Brown), to philosophy (Tschumi), the 1970s pushed the architectural discourse in different directions. The 1980s discovered a privileged relationship with philosophy (Derrida), connected in the 1990s to a revived interest for the materiality of architecture (Deleuze) and to the development of digital technologies. In more recent years this has expanded to a renewed interest in biology, processes of emergence, materialism and object oriented ontologies. Still, within the apparent blurring of disciplinary boundaries, architecture has always continued to seek a specific and critical voice, and this has found a most crucial expression in relation to the city, architecture’s context of expression par excellence.

This book proposes and reactivates a series of key ‘words’ (concepts) that are necessary to reengage in a discourse on the architecture of the city in the 21st century, challenging and re-conceptualising established categories and proposing new ones. Its ‘case studies’ are therefore ideas, theoretical architectural writings, philosophical texts, and artworks. Its task is to redefine and establish a vocabulary to talk of an architecture of the city today. The book addresses the borrowings and the appropriations that have occurred in architecture, but have not always been systematically examined and articulated. It argues that architecture is ‘speaking’ old words in the city, offering and using new images, and these still require a critical consideration in relation to the past of the discipline.

The unorthodox ways that are proposed here – representations, constructions, dynamics – aim to challenge established categories for the understanding and the representation of the city derived from urban studies, geography, sociology, and to develop instead an architectural reading of the city. Ultimately, the book proposes a reconsideration of architecture beyond its form, and looks at it in terms of its space-making operations. It is focused on architecture’s histories and theories, but it intersects also art theory and practices, land surveying and cartography, literature, film theory, philosophy and cultural studies, to identify a series of ways that are ambiguously placed between the representation and the construction of space in the city. These operations, acting beyond the figural and difficult (or too easy) to represent, produce outcomes that exist beyond strict (orthodox) definitions of architecture and urbanism (and other disciplinary definitions). Their categories are intentionally not always clearly and exclusively defined, and often propose the need to look away and outside the city in order to understand its dynamics. Form is intended here as a process of forming, of form making, a process; and yet the concern remains formal, in the sense of the form and the processes of its generation addressed by architecture. The categories proposed here are therefore explored beyond the appearance of their form.

The paradigm, the island, the map, the model, and the ambiguous pulverisations of dust are ‘figures’ that have been employed at different times and in different visual disciplines, beyond architecture and in relation to changing notions of space. This work traces the roles that they have played in the shift towards the dynamic that has taken place in contemporary theory, design and architecture, and proposes them as unorthodox analytic techniques to rethink contemporary architecture and urban complexity. Some of these unorthodox ways are specifically architectural or derived from architecture, other are borrowed from other disciplines and merged with architecture. All ways offer, beyond a reading of forms, an understanding of the processes that differently make (i.e., produce, form, change, represent) space in the contemporary urban complexity – by perceiving, interpreting, but also inhabiting and making architecture and the city.

Paradigm (from the Greek paradèigma, ‘example, exemplar’) is an action and relation word that contains within itself the possibility of variation and movement; it indicates oscillation and multiplicity rather than fixity and oneness. As an intellectual operation the paradigm defines a distance of the object from itself, removing the object from its singularity to then return it to another singularity. It also enables a distancing from acquired historical, morphological and typological preconceptions and classifications that are well known in architecture and urbanism. The paradigm as a cultural operation works towards the production of a non-dialectical form of knowledge, which does not aim to achieve the universal and to derive principles (rules) from it. ‘Notes for a definition of architecture as paradigm’ argues that the architectural and urban ‘project’, as a cultural construction around its object, performs in the city the relational operation of the paradigm, a form of knowledge that dismisses oppositions and resolutions.

The city is no longer defined by a fixed form, or by a series of physical objects. Yet, it has internal and external boundaries, holes, and discontinuities, and these are both non-physical and always subject to negotiation and redefinition. The city changes: its form is successful if it remains adaptable and flexible, and the relationships that determine it remain open to the ‘different’ – that which originates elsewhere and operates according to different rules. Interiority needs to be redefined here as a relational space ‘within’. Dissociated from the notion of enclosure, the relational space of the city remains exposed and open to change. Far from closed, defined, and protected, the city is always at risk – challenged, reworked, softened, penetrated. Exposed, malleable and adaptable like its name, the city is also very fragile; and yet it remains recognisable in relation (or reaction) to processes of dispersion and rarefaction.

‘Island: the possibility of the city as an island’ redefines the island in relation to the nature of its edges, rather than to the condition of physical delimitation and finishedness. ‘Island’ is conventionally defined from the outside as a delimited field of physical discontinuity. At the same time, the island increments concentrations and density; it more clearly manifests processes of centripetal convergence; it tolerates, or even imposes, proximity and coexistence. The island can be reconsidered as a field subject to incremental saturation, to the point where an endless interiority could be hypothesised. At once space and edge, the island is an unstable figure, with a mobile and constantly redefined edge. The idea of city as island here becomes instrumentally useful to question conditions of spatial delimitation and physical finitude in the city, in relation to its openness and networked remote relations.

In cartography the grid is an instrument of rationality and the repository of a set of conventions that allow for communication and transfer of information. At the same time, the cartographic grid produces an opacity that reveals intentions – a ‘project’ – while it masks them in its presentation. From the impossible viewing of early bird’s-eye-views as portraits of cities to the measured space of ichnography, the conventions and the ‘lies’ of the map reveal mapmaking as a ‘project’, that is, a never neutral production of space. Always partial, mapping is not co-extensive with that which it maps, but produces a relation of difference because it is differentiated from its terrain. ‘Map: from description to making’ is constructed as a map; it unfolds to reveal ‘places’, partial views and their connections. It shows how mapping produces an excess to the terrain it (cl)aims to represent, and thus becomes a generative tool that con-tains (holds together) and enables the many and different possible unfoldings of the project(s).

‘Model: from object to process’ returns the shift ‘from description to making’ to the architectural. It argues that the concept of the model has a fundamentally ambiguous relationship with the ideation, the representation and the construction of architecture. It is this ambiguity that enables the model to engage with the multiple relations that affect the definition of architecture as both a discipline and an edifice. As a prototype, a template or a guide for the production of the edifice of architecture, the model both proclaims and obfuscates the point of origin of the project, triggering a multiplicity of variations that render the discipline and the practice of architecture possible. As an object, the model offers a description, a presentation and, more significantly, an anticipation of the architectural object. Engaging in the making of architecture a plurality of agents beyond the historical figure of the artifex architect, the model challenges the single authorship of architecture. The model’s oscillations between object and concept (and object again), engage the production of the architectural project in a dynamic set of references, tensions and variations that continue to involve the viewer/actor/inhabitant.

Dust too is discussed as both an agent and an index of the shift from form to transformation. The idea of dust is introduced in relation to architecture to indicate what remains after the explosion of its established orders – the architectural object and its representations, space and its definitions – but no longer belongs to them. Dust embraces at once the notion of the fragment and the fragmented, and that of possible new assemblages. In this context the fragment(ed) loses any reference to an a priori whole(ness) and form, and is redefined as a generative possibility for the production of space (as growth, as inorganic breeding). Dust can be seen as an index of different economies of the body, architecture and the city. It is related to systems of order and disorder in an attempt to overcome their oppositions, through a reconsideration of the material in architecture. The working of dust on architecture and its implications in the dynamic redefinition of space have been suggested by Georges Bataille. Contemporary redefinitions of form making in architecture and the city have been related to ‘dust’ as agent of a negotiated process that defies the distinction between the old and the new, and embraces the discarded and the reclaimed to break the boundaries between forms and materiality.

2 Paradigm

Notes for a definition of architecture as paradigm

Is it possible to propose that the relational operation that the ‘project’ of architecture performs is paradigmatic, and that the work of architecture in general is paradigmatic? In order to do this the paradigm needs to be redefined as an operation, and the work of the paradigm must be considered as a cultural operation that produces a non-dialectical form of knowledge, a knowledge that acts in the environment without aiming to achieve the universal and to derive principles (rules) from it. In recent times, and indeed at every moment of change, when the discipline of architecture is questioned and opened up (or re-opened) to new practices and forms of thought, and is both challenged and informed by them, architectural discourse refers to a ‘paradigm shift’. What is an architectural paradigm? If we accept the term borrowed from scientific thought, we imply that a paradigm for architecture exists, that is, architectural paradigms or paradigms for architecture existed, will exist and will keep changing. Rather than assimilate architecture to scientific disciplines and take for granted that architecture too operates and changes according to or within the ambit of recognisable paradigms, here I propose that architecture’s nature is in itself paradigmatic, in the way it establishes and maintains a series of relations, in order to be and to change.

Redefining paradigm in architecture, or rather architecture as a paradigmatic operation, means that architecture does not work through predefined operations, but in an ad hoc, case-by-case way. Architecture does not imitate (we are well beyond the 18th century debate on the imitation of nature in architecture),¹ nor does it follow models. Functionally defined typologies established by the architecture of the Enlightenment and then reinterpreted by the Modernist tradition need to be dismissed too. The notion of ‘Type’ as defined by Antoine Quatremère de Quincy² in the 19th century can be reinterpreted in contemporary terms, to propose an idea of generative type that follows from the 1990s debate on the diagram in architecture developed from Focaultian and Deleuzian thought (from the Panopticon to the fold to cartography),³ and is informed by the redefinition of the paradigm in a dynamic sense proposed by Giorgio Agamben.⁴ In The Signature of All Things Agamben discusses the paradigm as a modus operandi that presupposes ‘the impossibility of the rule’ and ‘implies the total abandonment of the particular-general couple as the model of logical inference’.⁵ The key question that drives these notes is whether it is possible to identify a continuity in this line of thought, to suggest a reading of the operative/generative diagram in architecture as a trace of its paradigmatic operation. The Platonic argument to which Agamben resorts, although rigid and biased toward the existence of an ideal, provides an interesting opening because it allows for, and indeed suggests, the possibility to consider the paradigm as the element of mediation between the opposites of the dialectical process. The reference and the confrontation no longer happen in the opposition of the two, but take place (literally) in the space of negotiation. The space of this negotiation, which Plato calls ‘measure’, needs to be reconsidered here, not in relation to an aspiration to the ideal, but as the locus of negotiation that enables a cloud of instances, an idea in a midst...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• 1. Introduction: words for architecture
• 2. Paradigm: notes for a definition of architecture as paradigm
• 3. Island: the possibility of the city as an island
• 4. Map: from description to making
• 5. Model: from object to process
• 6. Dust: from form to transformation
• Index