ROUTLEDGE RESEARCH IN ARCHITECTURE

UNORTHODOX WAYS
TO THINK THE CITY
Representations, Constructions, Dynamics

TERESA STOPPANI
Teresa Stoppani
UNORTHODOX WAYS ...

Stoppani, Teresa. Unorthodox Ways to Think the City. Abingdon, Oxford and New York: Routledge, 2018.
www.routledge.com/Unorthodox-Ways-to-Think-the-City-Representations-Constructions-
Dynamics/Stoppani/p/book/9780415724388

‘City’ indicates, together, a physical environment, its forms of inhabitations, the human beings that make, inhabit, and mythicize
it, and the complex networks of their relationships, both permanent and volatile. This book argues that the city and its processes
are intellectually understood not only by reference to the urban cultural context but also by drawing categories from other
disciplines. An open reading that traverses architecture, architectural manifestoes and theory, but also art theory and history, land
surveying, cartography, film theory, philosophy and cultural studies, can identify a series of ‘figures’ that are ambiguously placed
between the representation and the construction of space in the city. The grid, the map, the labyrinth, the meander and
tenderness, collage and morphing, montage and the interstitial, and the pulverizations of dust are explored beyond the appearance
of their form, as processes that differently make space between architecture and the city, and are proposed as unorthodox analytic
techniques to read the contemporary urban complexity. The book analyses how these ‘figures’ have been employed at different
times and in different visual 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 in architecture
and the city. What emerges is the idea of a city that is not only physical, but is largely defined by the way in which its physical
spaces are regulated, lived and perceived, and also imagined and projected.

01
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 consider 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 glazes 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 maybe lost, but this does not mean that is 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

Stoppani, Teresa. Unorthodox Ways to Think the City. Abingdon, Oxford and New York: Routledge, 2018. 1
outside, but also to construct a mode of thinking that is specific to architecture while drawing
to other disciplines.

At a time when the city is considered an obsolete institution but the world is heading towards
global urbanization, 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 the
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 worth 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-
conceptualizing 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 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

Stoppani, Teresa. Unorthodox Ways to Think the City. Abingdon, Oxford and New York: Routledge, 2018. 2
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. Operations beyond the figural, because they are difficult to represent or too easy to
represent, their outcome exists or is recognizable beyond strict (orthodox) definitions of
architecture and urbanism (and other disciplinary definitions). Blurring, the 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 pulverizations and ambiguity 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 role
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 one-ness. 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
tit 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.

Stoppani, Teresa. Unorthodox Ways to Think the City. Abingdon, Oxford and New York: Routledge, 2018. 3
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 recognizable in relation (or reaction) to processes of dispersion and
rarefaction.
‘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 finished-ness. 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 hypothesized. 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.

Stoppani, Teresa. Unorthodox Ways to Think the City. Abingdon, Oxford and New York: Routledge, 2018. 4
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 their
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.

Stoppani, Teresa. Unorthodox Ways to Think the City. Abingdon, Oxford and New York: Routledge, 2018. 5