A Family Affair Jeffrey Kipnis ‘This morning, my wife was humming “The Girl from Ipanema," and | soon found myself unable to get the damn thing out of my head. To rid myself of it,| decided to listen to it, o | opened iTunes—where | found thirteen versions of the song—t¢ tell you not to ask, but | know you won't be able to help yourselves. There were one or two bossa novas, a few tropicélias, some traditional and new-wave jazz, lounge, standards, and pop—all interestingly different from one another. Checking further, ‘on Rhapsody.com, | found nearly five hundred more versions, including, aside from the usual, every imaginable instrument used in endless but wonderful jazz excursions, rap, garage, trance, punk, and anything you can imagine in between. And at the moment | am listening to them all. One at a time. The novelty and exotic versions are the most attention grabbing, of course—like the Vinnie and Stardusters’ punk paranoid “The Girl from Ipanema Wants to Kill Me,” or the Devils, or Mrs. Miller, or Pono, or the B-52's, or Calvin Coolidge’s uncanny hybridization of "The Girl...” with Bob Dylan's “All Along the Watchtower.” During the course of all this it occurs to me that this family of performances is distinct not just in degree but in kind from another musical family llown: the ten or so different performances by various artists of Beethoven's Piano Sonatas. Now, an analogy between architecture and music is not so easily made as platitudes would have us believe, particularly when the question turns to performance, but one thing about this musical case interests me in relation to Greg Lynn's work on families. Though rich with interpretation, the variations in classical performance operate within a tight ethos of ideality as determined by the composer's score—as if to protect a genetic code— whereas to continue to thrive, jazz—like most viruses— requires a particular form of rapid mutation called improvisation. As a result, what began as a single species ‘of music in the early twentieth century has, in less than a hundred years, burgeoned into an entire genera hosting more than ten different species of music—traditional, big band, swing, bebop, cool, mainstream, third stream, hard bop, ethnic and world, avant-garde, fusion, and crossover. It also spawned entirely other genera such as R&B and rock. Of the more than a hundred music stations ‘on XMradio.com, three are classical and more than eighty trace their roots to the emergence of pop and jazz. There is, | believe, inherent in much of contemporary speculative architecture—including Greg's—an envy of that burgeoning and a deep desire to encourage architecture along @ more rapidly evolving path by one ‘means or another. Greg, like many of his colleagues and, Peter Eisenman before him, pursues this goal through a critique of the idealities that underwrite architecture's own regime of strictures, following this up with an altemative practice design that seeks to sidestep that regime. Now, it must be acknowledged that these strictures have arisen for obvious reasons out of architecture's relation to the patterns of quotidian and symbolic life, and the expectation of convenience and reliability, and they are hardened by the economics of real estate and building ‘material production and the inherent limitations of structure and construction. The urge among 3 few architects to more rapid variation arises from the conviction that itis not architecture but building that serves the stasis, of these patterns—a fact that grounds the service profession. Architecture, on the other hand, is best understood as an instrument of our intellectual and cultural becoming, a position it seems to me that is supported by the way we construct architectural history. Afterall, the periods we study—e.g,, the Renaissance, Baroque, Mannerism, Enlightenment, Romantic—do not sequence the profession's improved power to produce comfort, convenience, and familiarity but rather the discipline’s power to engender new world views, social arrangements, institutional forms, and modes of subjectivity. Many efforts have been made to overturn that view of architecture in the name of everyday life—not least of which was Manfredo Tafuri’ call for architects to leave the boudoir and turn its attention to building practices. The fact that the historical and cultural construction of architecture's self-image as a discipline still persists speaks not to a conspiracy of elitists but to the extraordinarily long-lived success of the discipline in these terms. And in these terms, the contemporary urge to greater variation simply speaks to the reality that our contemporary social coherence no longer seems grounded in a common subjectivity, but in a common embrace of multiple, partial subjectivities. This state does not reflect the naive model called pluralism, which understands that multiplicity as between one person/ group and another: | ike green, he likes yellow, we're both entitled to our opinion. Rather it spepostmodern state of the subject (which should thus, strictly speaking, be called a subject) that is composed of multiple, partial, and conflicting subjectivities that rol within each of us. | remember clearly the confusion in the press when it learned that David Lynch was a staunch Republican. How could an intellectual art-film weirdo be Republican? In a more specifically historical sense, Greg's own discussion of families and the parallel interests of his colleagues as evidenced, for example, in Foreign Office Architects's (FOA) discussion of speciation in Phylogenesis: FOA’s Ark (2004), is mounted as resistance to collage and its claims to serve best our postmodern state, The attack on collage stems mainly from the fact that collage serves a pluralist model, collage represents diversity. It is not a model, in and of itself, of multiple internal, partial subjectivities, because collage is preeminently a semiotic endeavor, and these subjectivities are primarily erotic, sensational, and affective. Articulated in immaterial and scaleless signs and symbols, collage robs architecture of the source of its most irreproducible effects—its size and materiality— effects that are crucial to sensations and affects. Further, in that the elements of a collage are, by definition, dislocated from an original circumstance, they inevitably construct a proper ideality in absentia. It should be noted that this broad interpretation of architectural collage allows us to consider certain key developments in architecture that do not appear lke typical art-collages but nevertheless behave as collage en effet—e.g., any dynamic reading of an architectural form so sheer, shift, rotation, and absence would fit into this sense of collage in that they are, first, readings and, secondly, construct idealities in absentia Greg's compelling but unfortunately titled book, Fold, Bodies & Blobs (1998) remains the most brilliant, original, and thoroughgoing account of these issues, and had it simply been named The Geometry of the Anexact Villa, it would surely have assumed its inevitable place on the relatively spare list of seminal architectural books by now. The genius of his argument is to expose across several fronts—historical, critical, and material—the association in architecture of mathematics (as a trope) with a desire for dematerialized ideality and to demonstrate 1) that only geometry as such, not as an aspect of mathematics, is fundamental to architecture as 2 cultural discourse, and 2) that geometry as such behaves too promiscuously to underwrite any ideality. Though the book must be read in its entirety to glean the fullness of its insight, its critique of Rudolf Wittkower's, reduction of Palladian villas to an ideal diagram—a reduction that authorizes the Collage City project of Colin Rowe—is a tour de force of architectural theory. Rather than oversimplifying his complex argument, allow me to offer in its stead a simple analogy. Plane geometry categorizes triangles into types (scalene, right-angled, isosceles, equilateral) and provides techniques for assessing sameness and similarity within each type. Projective geometry trades in the power of those categories in order to gain the power of transformation—we can project any triangle into another. However, the triangle as a formal ideality as such remains intact. As we move to topology we relinquish all formal idealities to gain the power to transform any form into any other, as long as each possesses certain minimum qualities that fall short of formal idealities, e.g., the number of holes, Thus, we can transform the donut into the coffee cup into the human body all because they each have one hole through them. What is most important, however, is that none of them can lay claim to stand as the referent primitive. Thus, within the confines of a few minimum qualities, the morphological manifold is intrinsically diverse, rather than a representation of diversity. The problem for design research then becomes to identify @ topology intrinsic to architecture—the basic issue driving much of the digital work of the last two decades. Though the first phases of that work have produced some significant steps forward, we have not yet conceived of that intrinsic topology. And, from a purely conceptual point of view, no other project has yet surpassed Greg's Embryological House in the pursuit of that goal. This project, which set into motion a process yielding innumerable variations that construct a formal family from a kit of parts while circumventing any referent to an ideal primitive, went a good distance toward demonstrating proof of concept. On the other hand, it only accomplishes this by radically separating the production of sensation and affect from the reading of the project, which tacitly relies on a new kind of absence—the existence “elsewhere” (i, in the space of the intellect) of the other houses. Each house is an affect generator, but beyond the voluptuousness of its form, affects are generated by distraction—the gold tones, for example—and are not intrinsic to the core architectural project. FOAS Yokohama International Port Terminal (2002), UN Studio's Mobius House (1998) and Mercedes-Benz Museum (2006), and Reiser + Umemoto's Sagaponac House Project (2003) have all made significant progress in that regard, as did the United Architects’ World Trade Center proposal (2002) While the inflected towers ofthis last project might have ‘operated as deviations from the vertical tower as an idealprimitive, the clustering of them into a contemplative grove in the context of the tragic site obviated such readings in favor of affect. The limitation of al of these first-phase works arises from the fact that they assume architectural topology to be, like mathematical topology, monotonic and ‘monolithic. Although this stems in part from the initial and inevitable deployment of representations of geometric topology, many of the issues arising from that representation were quickly surmounted. The Mobius House does not look like a mobius strip as much as it acts like one in the affects it produces; Yokohama was triangulated without significant degradation; and the shredded isoparms as apertures/windows in the Embryological House distance it substantially from the register of representation. More significant, it seems in retrospect, has been a knee-jerk avoidance of all figuration as part and parcel of the intial ceaction against postmodern collage The ultimate goal would be to conceive of a conceptual architectural topology that would generate sensation and affect from both haptics and intellection without reference to an ideal primitive. To do that, we ‘might consider the fact that topology is a thought about manifolds—ie., intrinsic uniti ss that unite vast numbers of conjugate variables enabling them to mutate from one to another. In that sense, the family constructed around "The Girl from Ipanema” is in every sense a topological manifold; an ecology is a topological manifold, as is the game of college football. For example, the Bow! Championship Series rankings are achieved by expressing all of the strength variables of a football team as a topological manifold so that the team closest to the single point of invariabilty (analogous to the poles of a spinning sphere) is the strongest. The variables that produce architectural effects are many, and must include figurality, syntactic, semantic, and rhetorical devices, as well as other features unduly relegated from our study to date (though FOA and a few others have now started to, explore those issues). In that sense, the topological claims by Peter Eisenman made for House VI (1975) become important to revisit, since itis his argument that his disposition of a set of transformations about the diagonal of a cube—denoted by the green and red staircases at each opposing corner—constructs an intrinsic architectural topology, though no claims of affect are made for the work, of course. It is my conviction that Greg's Slavin House takes an important step in that direction, one that in the long run will prove even more valuable than the Embryological House. The improvisations in it are virtuosic, producing quotation, figure, and ornamentation in a highly original manner, The pretzel-and-spaghetti structure draws (literally) Le Corbusier's Villa Savoye (1929) and Mies van der Rohe’s Farnsworth House (1951) in the same cartoon, shapes the apertures and lights wells into ornaments, and delimits figures with such wit that @ hand-mirror— shaped aperture presents the master bathroom on the facade. It brings to mind the key thought that evolutionary theorists, and which is perhaps the best expression of postmodemn subjectivity. That thought was not survival of the fittest—an argument which can be found fully articulated in Aristotle—but that every individual was, under changing circumstance, potentially the progenitor of a new species. 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