Speculation vs.

Indifference
Author(s): Mark Foster Gage
Source: Log , Spring/Summer 2017, No. 40 (Spring/Summer 2017), pp. 121-135
Published by: Anyone Corporation

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Mark Foster Gage

Speculation vs.
Indifference

Doing battle is a key aspect of architecture as a discipline - that is

to say, the making of arguments.
- R.E. Somol

There can never be any movement in architecture without a dialec

tical viewpoint.
- Peter Eisenman

Every morning we all begin the day by confronting the im

portant issue of bedhead. As with all weighty academic sub
jects, it's important to get our definitions straight, or properly
parted as the case may be, so we need to identify the two of
ficially recognized types of bedhead: actual bedhead and pub
lic bedhead. Actual bedhead is simply the state of your hair
when you wake up. It defines you at your aesthetic worst -
when your hair is plastered to your face or in your mouth or
is greasy or reveals that embarrassing orange bald spot that
you normally try to camouflage with a ridiculous comb-over.
If tomorrow you take a selfie upon waking, that will reveal
actual bedhead. Public bedhead, on the contrary, is the type
that, after you're properly doused with Axe Body Spray, you
spend 20 minutes gelling, coiffing, twisting ends, and shaking
your head like a damp retriever to achieve. It's so cool, and it
makes you cool because you're ([seemingly) too cool to care
about your hair. But you actually do. A lot. It's confusing. To
spend an inordinate amount of time sculpting the precise ap
pearance of indifference is a complex process. That is to say,
public bedhead is hair in a highly designed state that is meant
to convey the appearance of indifference without actually be
ing indifferent.

The Shampooing
The precise relevance of bedhead to architecture will be re
vealed shortly, but it is important to first reintroduce the
grand tradition of weaving together hair and architectural
discourse. This important legacy simultaneously began and
reached its apotheosis with Jason Payne's 2009 essay "Hair and
Makeup" for Log 17 - an issue loosely dedicated to the topic

121

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1. Jason Payne, "Hair and Makeup," Log 17: of "the superficial" that I guest edited with Florencia Pita.1
Superficial, ed. Mark Foster Gage and
Florencia Pita (Fall 2009): 41-48. Payne's essay explores the evolution of hair in hard rock by
2. Ibid., 42.
covering the coifs of David Bowie, Vince Neil, Axl Rose, and
J. "Matters of Sensation, September 2$—
November 22, 2008," Artists Space, accessed Kurt Cobain to claim — with an extrafirm Aquanet hold - that
June 14, 2017, http://artistsspace.org/ these visual and tactile shifts in material Chair) were aesthetic
exhibitions/matters-of-sensation.
indicators of similarly significant shifts in creative ideology,
in this case music. This lays the groundwork for explaining
an important shift in architecture at a time when, in Payne's
words, "terms like process, technique, iterative, generative, and
so on - now give way to a decidedly friendlier bunch: mood,
atmosphere, sensibility, color, sensation, feel."1 Payne articulates
an early softening of contemporary discourse that emerged
as the recession took hold and, with fewer resources available
for complex architectural dreams, interest in the digital deri
vation of architecture began to wane. After staring at com
puter screens for a decade, architecture once again wanted to
touch something, to feel something, to run its fingers through
its hair and remember the joy of sensation, perhaps even to
feel, for the first time in a while, simply pretty. I love this
essay, primarily because it makes me feel like I might have
something in common with Vince Neil - I saw him live with
Motley Criie at least three, maybe four, times between Girls
Girls Girls and Monsters of Rock - but also because it so bril
liantly articulates the disciplinary struggles of a then-emerg
ing generation of architectural practitioners and thinkers.
Many of the architects in Payne's essay overlap significantly
with those included in "Matters of Sensation," the 2008 ex
hibition at Artists Space gallery in New York City, mounted
by then director Benjamin Weil and curated by Marcelo Spina
and Georgina Huljich. Weil's description gives a sense of the
show's ideological position:
Whereas architects' use of computers first affected shape and struc
ture, the participants in this exhibition address the way materials
are not just about construction choices but also a means of creating
diverse sensations in a space, focusing on the effects produced bj the
materials' textures and surfaces.... The best of these explorations
avoid a neo-utilitarian tone in favor of aesthetic andpsychologi
cal investigations.... Unaligned in their interests and bored bj old
debates, the [young architects] featured in "Matters of Sensation"
produce work that attempts to answer no questions, solve no prob
lems, and broach no oppositions.J
The show included work by David Erdman and Clover
Lee (David Clovers), Tom Wiscombe (Emergent), myself and
Marc Clemenceau Bailly (Gage / Clemenceau Architects),
Heather Roberge and Jason Payne (Gnuform), Jason Payne

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Hirsuta's Raspberry Fields displayed in
the exhibition "Matters of Sensation,"
Artists Space, New York, September
25-November 22, 2008. Photo: Adam
Reich. Courtesy Artists Space.
4. Michael Meredith, "Indifference, Again,"
Log ]9 (Winter 2017): 75-79. All quotations
of Meredith are from this article.
5. Payne, "Hair and Makeup," 46.
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(Hirsuta), Eric Howeler and Meejin Yoon (Howeler and Yoon
Architecture), Lisa Iwamoto and Craig Scott (Iwamoto Scott
Architecture), Florencia Pita (FPmod), Michael Meredith
and Hilary Sample (MOS), Karel Klein and David Ruy (Ruy
Klein), Kivi Sotamaa (Sotamaa Architecture and Design),
Ferda Kolatan (SU11), and Hernan Diaz Alonso (Xefirotarch).
The exhibition argued that as interest in the digital, technical,
and procedural, and even in problem-solving as an alibi for
architectural form, waned, there was a new game in town,
which largely became known as the project of affect.
In a similar way, Michael Meredith, in his Log 39 essay
"Indifference, Again," albeit with more of an Artforum than
Rolling Stone alibi, articulates the position of an emerging gen
eration of architectural practitioners and thinkers that seeks
to move not only beyond digital, technical, and procedural
ambitions but also beyond the project of affect from which
they, some perhaps unknowingly but not insignificantly, de
scend.4 Meredith's ambition seems to be to further soften the
hard edges of technical and solution-based discourses into
what he claims is a new architectural project of indiffer
ence. Whereas Payne says the project of affect "makes room
for qualitative dimensions of materiality," where "color,
texture, body, weight, and finish assume a new relevance,"5
Meredith offers a rehearsal of an "aesthetic of indifference" -
an architecture that appears not to care about authored form
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Marcel Duchamp, Wedge of Chastity
ICoin de chastete), 1954, cast in 1963.
Bronze and plastic, 2.1875 * 3.375 x
1.625 in. Photo: Paul Hester. Courtesy
the Menil Collection, Houston. © Artists
Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP,
Paris / Estate of Marcel Duchamp.

or its designed qualities. Largely through rereading Moira

Roth's 1977 Artforum text "The Aesthetic of Indifference,"
Meredith traces this attitude back to Marcel Duchamp, John
Cage, Merce Cunningham, Robert Rauschenberg, and Jasper
Johns. This is certainly good company to place oneself in (far
fancier than Vince Neil for sure), but to ascribe indifference
to these historic artists focuses on what they were not produc
ing rather than what they were. The artists noted in Roth's
essay countered the heroic and domineering presence of ab
stract expressionism with some degree of indifference to that
heroism, but they also produced work with a clearly charged
formal agenda. For instance, during the time in question
(1950-195+), Duchamp produced his "erotic objects" series,
from Female Fig Leaf (1950) to Wedge of Chastity (195+). While
plausibly indifferent to the heroic claims of abstract expres
sionism, these works cannot be considered formally inert or
unauthored, designed as they were to elicit a near violently
erotic response, which itself requires a very precise attention
to form. There is likely no greater antithesis to indifference
than violence or eroticization. These particular sculptures
were less a project of indifference than one of sensation and
aggressive sexual affect generated through often careful atten
tion to form. That this work was not heroic in the vein of ab

stract expressionism does not mean that it was indifferent to

all form or authorship. Citing the work of many of these art
ists as categorically indifferent to their artistic or political cir
cumstances may be a case of posthumous public bedheading.

12+
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6. Meredith, "Indifference, Again," 78.
Emphasis mine.
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Meredith writes that the model of indifference produces
work that "is generally characterized as 'cute' or 'silly'" and
is "indifferent to models (or narratives) of progress through
technology and data." He is more specific about the formal
architectural agenda of the project's architects, who "play,
collect, scroll, reappropriate, and reuse, taking little interest in
tabula rasa innovation or authorial originality."6
In his salon-quality blow-dry, Meredith deftly gels, coifs,
and twists ends not only to define the project of indifference in
architecture but also to recruit, enlist, and battalionize a whole
platoon of emerging practitioners and then claim, on their be
half, this resurrected project of indifference. Meredith's drafted
army (it remains to be seen if they all willfully enlisted) in
cludes a talented lot: "Archive of Affinities (Andrew Kovacs),
Erin Besler, Bureau Spectacular (Jimenez Lai, Joanna Grant),
D.ESK (David Eskenazi), First Office (Andrew Atwood, Anna
Neimark), Formlessfinder (Garrett Ricciardi, Julian Rose),
is-office (Kyle Reynolds, Jeff Mikolajewski), Aniajawor
ska, the LADG (Andrew Holder, Claus Benjamin Freyinger),
MALL (Jennifer Bonner), Medium (Alfie Koetter, Emmett
Zeifman), MILLI0NS (John May, Zeina Koreitem), Nor
man Kelley (Carrie Norman, Thomas Kelley), Curtis Roth,
T+E+A+M (Thom Moran, Ellie Abrons, Adam Fure, Meredith
Miller), WELCOMEPROJECTS (Laurel Broughton)," and, al
beit tentatively, his own office with Hilary Sample, MOS.
I follow the work of many of these younger architects
with interest and genuine excitement, and I hope to see more
of their contributions to architecture in the future, but cer
tainly not because they have no interest in authorship or
formal originality. In fact, I would argue that much of the
work is, as with Duchamp's, rather innovative and formally
dexterous — only with the desire to sometimes masquerade
as not being so. One only has to look at Jimenez Lai's aston
ishing giant sectional cartoon built for the Coachella Valley
Music and Arts Festival or the LADG's skillfully sculpted for
mal characters - little piggies and friendly lumps - or Erin
Besler's razor-sliced aggressive foam masses or the won
derfully weird Flinstonian shapes of T+E+A+M's Detroit
Reassembly Plant, featured in the US Pavilion for the 2016
Venice Architecture Biennale, to know that there is undeni
able formal originality that is clearly authored rather than
accidental. T+E+A+M member Ellie Abrons, in a recent issue
of A+ U, says of their Detroit proposal, "We are quite earnest
about our work. We would love to have the opportunity to ac
tually build something like the Detroit Reassembly Plant. The
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 design proposition is sincere. It isn't meant to exist only in
7. Ellie Abrons, "Interview: Material the realm of representation."7 This statement is significantly
Misuse," A+UW (May 2017): 118. at odds with Meredith's claim for the work of T+E+A+M -

namely, that they are invested in the project of indifference he

outlines, which, as he writes, focuses on architecture's "rep
resentation of itself, as opposed to realism." Furthermore,
Abrons's statement that T+E+A+M is sincere and earnest about

their work surely cannot be considered indifference, as those

attitudes are nearly perfect opposites.
Inevitably, the argument will be made that these ar
chitects are original without trying to be - perhaps in some
form of stumbled-upon authorless originality. This would
necessarily require a great deal of luck: it would be quite an
achievement for so many young architects to be so formally
original without trying. In fact, to "play, collect, scroll, reap
propriate, and reuse" still requires authored form to exist,
whether as an architectural representation or as a physical
construct. Even a pile of rocks is authored: What size are the
rocks? What color? Where were they gathered? How high are
they piled? One could say that the project of indifference is
actually invested in a new, albeit chunkier, entirely authored
formalism — a predictable reaction to the nauseating over
use of smooth digital surfaces in the past decade. To produce
chunky piles and collections of objects in a discipline increas
ingly defined by smooth surfaces is a conscious form of for
mal authorship. To be reactionary is to care enough to react.

Parting the Sides

Meredith's short essay oversimplifies the contemporary state
of architecture — or is just indifferent to some of its nuance.
He writes, "As previous models of neoliberal globalization
have fallen into turmoil, our discipline has focused on two
competing models for architecture," the first being "an archi
tecture that expresses innovation, difficulties, and problems -
from sustainability to social justice and from diagrammatic
clarity to technological precision.... Architecture as techni
cal expertise and urgency, informed through realism, with
an emphasis on engaged problem-solving and producing an
architecture that expresses problem-solving." The second
model he cites is "an architecture that performs and is defined
by an increasing number of refusals, denials, and post-desig
nations through an acceptance of nondesign," which exists
"under the general term indifference." But this division of ar
chitecture into indifference versus everything else is not fo
cused enough to be discursively productive. It unfathomably

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T+E+A+M, Detroit Reassembly Plant,
2016. Model. Photo courtesy T+E+A+M.
8.1 wrote more extensively about OOO's
entry into architecture in my article "Killing
Simplicity: Object-Oriented Philosophy In
Architecture," Log (Winter 2015): 95-106.
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links Peter Eisenman and Santiago Calatrava, Greg Lynn and
Alejandro Aravena, Keller Easterling and Robert A.M. Stern,
Patrik Schumacher and Leon Krier, Thom Mayne and David
Rockwell, in a single category. It would also include all archi
tects everywhere. A more fruitful debate would be to explore
the position of indifference through a more finely grained
sifting of actual contemporary architectural positions, in
cluding the related discourses of speculative realism and
object-oriented ontology (OOO). This is made even more in
teresting when one realizes that Meredith's claim for a model
of indifference already includes multiple positions previously
articulated within the discourses of both affect and OOO.
In the nearly nine years since "Matters of Sensation,"
a large contingent of the architects featured in that exhibi
tion have become interested in the philosophical positions of
speculative realism and OOO, ideas largely introduced into
architecture by David Ruy.8 These philosophical positions of
fer multiple intellectual trajectories, as well as insights into
the qualities so important to Payne's and Weil's descriptions of
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9. "Drawings' Conclusions Symposium
ft. Hernan Diaz Alonso Lecture & Third
Panel: End of the Line," video, 1:26:2?,
recorded at the "Drawings' Conclusions"
symposium at SCI-Arc, Los Angeles, and
posted March 25, 2017, https://livestream
.com/accounts/21?00942/events/7146403/
videos/152641244.
10. See R.E. Somol, "12 Reasons to Get
Back into Shape," in Content, ed. Office
for Metropolitan Architecture and Rem
Koolhaas (Cologne: Taschen, 2004), 86-87.
11. "Drawings' Conclusions - Welcome and
Keynote Address by Peter Eisenman: "Dual
in the Sun," video, 1:19:09, recorded at the
"Drawings' Conclusions" symposium and
posted March 25, 2017, https://livestream
.com/accounts/21J00942/events/7146368/
videos/15256688?.
12. "Drawings' Conclusions Symposium
ft. Hernan Diaz Alonso Lecture & Third
Panel: End of the Line."
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the original project of affect, thereby offering a braid of con
tinuity not only between these two discourses but also to that
of indifference.
The particular alignment between architecture and
OOO philosophy is not without territorial dispute. At the re
cent "Drawings' Conclusions" symposium at the Southern
California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc), R.E. Somol
displayed this sentiment when he ventured that any interest
in speculative realism is "looking for theory in all the wrong
places," adding that "OOO is zipless theory ... no obligation,
no responsibility, no strings attached."9 Although he likely
meant this as a criticism, ironically Somol defined OOO as
being indifferent to obligation and responsibility. This coming
from someone who, in his important essay "12 Reasons to Get
Back into Shape," claimed that the future of architecture lies
in the "easy," "empty," and "arbitrary," and thus would be a
top contender for patron saint of indifference.10
The ancestry of indifference in the project of affect can
be seen in Meredith's rejection of architecture that is de
signed merely to answer questions and solve problems. This
shared viewpoint shows more clearly the dynamic between
indifference and OOO. The hazy outlines of a new discursive
space shaped by these ideas began to emerge at the aforemen
tioned "Drawings' Conclusions" symposium when the key
note speaker, Peter Eisenman, sought to ignite a discussion
between what he called "the polar discourses that operate in
this country that have nothing to do with the digital... the
argument between speculative realism and whatever is next
door."11 "Next door" referred to the exquisite exhibition of
architectural drawings curated by Jeffrey Kipnis and Andrew
Zago (which included some drawings by architects Meredith
enlists for the project of indifference), as well as to a contem
porary interest in architecture that ends not in building but
in representation. This interest coincides with Meredith's call
for a "focus on architecture's representation of itself, as op
posed to realism." Payne, speaking at the SCI-Arc symposium,
made the same connection: "For some practices I think it's
fair to say that representation is the fundamental problem in
architecture, and further, one that must be worked upon di
rectly and overtly, such that it is the endgame of a project."12
These two statements suggest that a debate is emerging be
tween the project of indifference, which emphasizes architec
ture's representation of itself, and that of speculative realism/
OOO, which maintains the need for architecture's real
ism, even its physical existence, allowing for estrangement
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Hirsuta, Ambivalent House, 2017.
Winning entry of Arch Out Loud's
"Hollywood" competition. Image
courtesy Hirsuta.
XI. David Ruy, "Weird Realism: A Discus
sion between David Ruy and Rhett Russo,"
in The Estranged Object, by Kutan Ayata
and Michael Young (Chicago: Graham
Foundation for Advanced Studies in the
Fine Arts, 2015), 11.
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LYWOOO
between assumed real and flickering sensual qualities. As
Eisenman said in his keynote, such differences have the po
tential to "constellate a debate, which has been missing [in ar
chitecture] these last 20 years." This opposition is made clear
when comparing the protagonists' statements: Meredith's
argument that indifference focuses on representation, not re
alism, and Ruy's argument, based on OOO's focus on realism,
that "architecture is the first thing that tells us what real
ity looks like."1' Somol seemed to further clarify the separate
camps of representation and realism when he said, "One used
to do drawings ... representations ... whatever you want to
call them, as a means toward advancing an architectural proj
ect. Now drawings are the content themselves."
As indifference borrows many of its key defining ambi
tions from both the projects of affect and OOO, it is inevi
table that both positions share certain ambitions, including
an interest in what Meredith calls "cooling things down" so
that architecture productively loses its desperate earnestness
to solve every environmental, social, and political problem.
While I do not intend to speak on behalf of architects in ei
ther camp, it appears that they all share a general distaste for
architecture that relies on narratives of self-congratulatory
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 humanitarianism, the use of simplistic metaphors, and tech
nological fetishism, whether digital, parametric, environ
14. For more on architectural alibis, see mental, or biological.14
Mark Foster Gage, "In Defense of Design,"
Meredith's statement that "at its best, architecture, like
Log 16 (Spring/Summer 2009): 39-45.
15. Timothy Morton, Realist Magic, Object, art, operates politically through aesthetics, not direct en
Ontology, Causality, ed. Graham Harman
and Bruno Latour (Ann Arbor: Open gagement" rehearses a key tenet of Graham Harman's OOO
Humanities Press, 2013), 19.
concept of "vicarious causation," where nothing interacts
16. Ian Bogost, Alien Phenomenology; or,
What It's Like to Be a Thing (Minneapolis: directly, only indirectly, and always aesthetically. Harman de
University of Minnesota Press, 2012), 40.
fines aesthetics as the discipline of indirect causality, a concept
17. Graham Harman, interview by Bruce
Sterling, "More Speculative Realism," Wired, that Timothy Morton echoes when he says that "causality is
June 17, 2011, https://www.wired.com/
wholly an aesthetic phenomenon."15
201l/06/more-speculative-realism.
18. To learn more regarding the points of Indifference also seems to be borrowing from OOO a
contention between parametricism and
OOO see the video of the public debate
fondness for lists. As Meredith notes, the project of indif
between myself and Patrik Schumacher ference employs "antiaesthetic aesthetics of appropriation,
from the "Interface" event at Texas A&M

University, April 21, 2017, https://youtu.be/

ready-mades, and lists." Harman uses lists so extensively that
ilLHqssdGE8. philosopher Ian Bogost describes them as a "new ontographi
19. Michael Young, "The Parafictional and
Medium Promiscuity," in The Estranged cal method." The purpose and benefit of these lists in OOO,
Object, 65
Bogost argued as far back as 2012, are "disjunction instead of
flow."16 Or, in Harman's words, "These lists of objects, which
often appear in my writings ... reawaken our awareness of
the particularity of individual things."17 In my own office we
have made cursory attempts to translate such listing strate
gies into nonsyntactical architectural structures by using the
technique of "kitbashing," which emphasizes the assembly
of objects as separate entities, not as constituents in formal
relationships. Similar tendencies are evident in the forms as
sembled by (indifferent) architect Andrew Kovacs and his
Archive of Affinities. Kovacs not only deploys lists/collections
of found objects in his design work but is also among the
most prolific of architectural visual list makers through his
wonderfully curated social media feeds featuring obscure
architectural treasures. This interest in individuation can

also be seen as oppositional to the ongoing gushing of Patrik

Schumacher (I say this with love), whose nearly religious
idea of parametricism is defined by interconnection rather
than discrete objects.18
Perhaps the final twist in this braided extension from
indifference back to OOO is what Meredith identifies as an

interest in the "ambiguity between fact and fiction." In OOO,

this is best articulated by Michael Young in his pioneering
work on estrangement. For Young, the conflation of fact and
fiction, or parafiction, "introduces a false condition, and then
exploits all possible mediations to engender its possibility."
This leads, he writes, to "what [art historian] Caroline Jones
calls an 'aesthetics of doubt.'"19 Similarly, in a recent Artforum

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relation do the real fictions reviewed here have to 'alternative
20. Hal Foster, "Real Fictions: Alternatives
to Alternative Facts," Artforum 55, no. 8
(April 2017): 166-75.
21. Carol Vogel, "Damien Hirst Is Back
With an Underwater Fantasy. Will Collec
tors Care?" New York Times, April 6, 2017.
22. Ruy, "Weird Realism," 8.
W Log 40
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essay, "Real Fictions: Alternatives to Alternative Facts," Hal
Foster questions how "artifice, the Utopian glimmer of fic
tion, can be placed in the service of the real" and asks, "What
facts,' and might the former be deployed to challenge the lat
ter in a way that avoids a simple retrenchment to a positivis
tic framing of the real?"20 Parafictional ambitions can be seen
in Damien Hirst's current installation at the Palazzo Grassi
in Venice, "Treasures from the Wreck of the Unbelievable,"
in which he invents the discovery of a shipwreck from which
he "salvaged" vast treasures, including "giant sculptures of
sea monsters encrusted with coral and semiprecious stones;
golden monkeys, unicorns and tortoises; as well as a goddess
whose face looks oddly like Kate Moss, a marble pharaoh that
resembles Rihanna, and a bronze statue of Mickey Mouse,
covered with centuries of marine decay."21 While Hirst plays
with the relationship between fact and fiction, which is also
an ambition for the project of indifference, this relationship
has been an ongoing concern in OOO for nearly a decade.
This aspect of OOO is of particular interest to architects be
cause it prompts us as designers to challenge existing assump
tions of reality. Ruy explains: "We need an architecture that is
completely devoted to the problem of the real, but one that is
aware of its uncertainty."22
Pulling Pigtails
If there is to be a productive, entirely postdigital debate be
tween indifference and OOO, then it will rely on their points
of distinction, which lie largely in their attitudes toward
representation. Where the camp of indifference primarily
sees the project of architecture as one that ends in its repre
sentation, the camp of OOO, for many, sees architecture's
end goal as manifesting realism in two ways: first, a renewed
interest in physical building as the ideal site for choreograph
ing architectural qualities, and second, the increasing use
of highly refined photorealistic renderings as a representa
tional tool able to anticipate and manipulate such qualities to
produce new, sometimes parafictional, estrangements from
reality. For example, as Kutan Ayata recently said, "A close
look at contemporary photographers like Jeff Wall, Gregory
Crewdson or Thomas Demand reveals that the constructed
realities in the images of these photographers are not centered
on the immediate documentation of reality or any kind of
objective truth, even though they appear photorealistic. ... It
is usually in the details of these assemblies that one begins to
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23. Kutan Ayata and Michael Young,
"Interview: The Aesthetics of the Estranged
Object," A+ U 560 (May 2017): 172.
24. Graham Harman, Weird Realism:
Lovecraft and Philosophy (Alresford: Zero
Books, 2012), 51.
25. Michael Young, email to the author,
June 5, 2017.
26. Ayata and Young, "The Aesthetics of
the Estranged Object," 174.
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discover profoundly strange qualities where tensions between
reality and its representation begin to emerge."2' Young &
Ayata's own use of photorealistic rendering becomes the site
for engaging realism, not through a direct appeal ^o "truth"
but through the production of an "ambiguity between fact
and fiction," which, ironically, Meredith also claims as an
interest of indifference. This productive ambiguity has been
a significant aspect of OOO since Harman's 2011 book Weird
Realism: Lovecraft and Philosophy, where he writes, "Reality
itself is weird because reality itself is incommensurable with
any attempt to represent or measure it."24 For both Harman
and the architectural project of OOO, representation will
always be incapable of capturing truth. Instead, our human
comprehension of truth is always and only tangentially ac
cessed through aesthetic qualities. In architecture, this ten
sion is being explored through photorealistic rendering that
allows for the appearance of assumed "true" realities along
side often indistinguishable fictional content - a combina
tion that calls attention to the strange and shifting natures of
reality. As Young says, "The photographic realism we're using
makes sense if you're trying to defamiliarize the background
of reality and you're trying to experiment with how a built
architecture would be able to do that. This requires a strange
realism."25 Such use of photographic realism rejects the trend
of what Ayata describes as the "distrust in the photorealis
tic image as a false or illusionistic representation. Somehow
it became a commonly held belief that if you wanted to do
a photorealistic rendering, you were an uncritical architect,
naively or nefariously concerned with the illusion of how the
building would exactly look.... To throw the [rendered] im
age completely out, to treat it as just a suspicious seduction, is
to ignore one of the most important modes of contemporary
cultural engagement."26
The project of indifference operates largely through 2-D
drawings, flatness, pastel Adobe Illustrator fills, and what
Meredith calls "bad sketches." The project of OOO invests
heavily in the 3-D complexity of "the real," often, although
not exclusively, through highly manipulated renderings
that are precise enough to be believable alternatives to ex
isting reality and that thus challenge the assumptions we
make about our own versions of these realities. The differ
ing emphases on fast versus slow, easy versus difficult, and
2-D versus 3-D mean that the sheer output of the project of
indifference will outweigh that of OOO. The May 2017 is
sue of A+U, on "EmergingTalent in the USA," supports this
Log 40
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Young & Ayata, "Vessel Collective," theory in its selection of the six architecture firms featured
Bauhaus Museum, Dessau, Germany,
in the issue: four from indifference (Archive of Affinities,
2016. One of two first-place winners of
the Bauhaus Museum Dessau design Bureau Spectacular, LADG, and T+E+A+M) and two from
competition. Image courtesy Young & OOO (Young & Ayata and my own office, Mark Foster Gage
Ayata.
Architects). In academia, the emphasis on easiness works in
favor of the project of indifference because it relies on exist
ing drawing strategies with established techniques and ideo
logical ambitions: from fast Adobe Illustrator axonometrics
reminiscent of John Hejduk's drawings to cartoons, photos,
and collages, which are purposefully easy to digest and faster
to teach. OOO's reliance on the strange and complex, the
philosophically engaged, and the making of highly detailed
realistic imagery requires significantly more time and will
invariably produce a smaller, more exclusive pool of affiliated
designers. The impact of these outputs - architecturally, dis
cursively, and perhaps politically - remains to be seen.
Meredith writes that "many contemporary practices
have left behind heroic expression and, with it, those models
of architecture embedded in a neoliberal, globalized real
ism." This criticism, emerging from the belief that renderings
are the tools of realism used by corporate architects, implies
that architects who use such tools are complicit in perpetu
ating neoliberal consumerism. Yet one could level a similar
critique against the camp of indifference for a reliance on the
playful, the cute, the humorous, and the cheap, all of which
produce the type of consumable architecture easily absorbed
by neoliberal capitalism. The camp of OOO, with its work
on the fine line between fact and fiction, produces a curious

13?
Log 4-0

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27. David Ruy wrote about Ferrari
Adria's desserts as a foil for architecture
in his article "Lessons from Molecular
Gastronomy," Log 17 (Fall 2009): 27-40.
28. See Jacques Ranciere, The Politics of
Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible,
trans. Gabriel Rockhill (London: Blooms
bury, 2015).
29. Jacques Ranciere, "The Method of
Equality: Politics and Poetics," in Recogni
tion or Disagreement: A Critical Encounter on
the Politics of Freedom, Equality, and Identity,
ed. Katia Genel and Jean-Philippe Deranty
(New York: Columbia University Press,
2016), 146.
30. "Aesthetic Activism" engaged these
political and aesthetic issues across multiple
disciplines. It included participants from
philosophy (Ranciere, Harman, Morton,
Elaine Scarry), art practices (Gregory
Crewdson, Diann Bauer, and Pamela
Rosekranz), architectural thinkers (Keller
Easterling, Michael Speaks, Catherine
Ingraham), and others, including the
architects most clearly affiliated with OOO
(Ruy, Young, Payne, Ferda Kolatan, Rhett
Russo, Tom Wiscombe, and me).
163.178.101.95 on Wed, 06 Jan 2021 21:35:53 UTC
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estrangement from multiple physical and intellectual con
texts rather than a likeable morsel for easy consumption.
That is to say, where indifference seeks to be unconsciously
loved like chewing gum — which inevitably gets stuck in
someone's bowl cut and requires a precise mixture of ice and
peanut butter to remove - OOO aspires to be a bit more like
Ferran Adria's infamous "stone" desserts, which seemed to
be table decorations, not food to be eaten.27 Confused diners
spent more time contemplating the confections and discuss
ing whether or not they were edible than would have trans
pired if the concoctions had been simply rocks or obviously
desserts (they were desserts). As such, their design prohibited
immediate consumption and instead, through estrangement,
brought the objects to the foreground of the diner's attention.
Untangling the Braids
When Meredith guest edited Log 22, on "the absurd," he in
cluded a 2002 essay by the philosopher Jacques Ranciere,
and he references Ranciere in "Indifference, Again" when
he writes (parenthetically), "Confronted with a choice be
tween the politics of aesthetics or the aesthetics of politics,
indifference focuses squarely on the former and the insti
tutions of aesthetics, which are everywhere." The politics
of aesthetics and the aesthetics of politics have been at the
heart of Ranciere's work for more than 20 years.28 "A politi
cal capacity is the product of an aesthetic revolution," he said
in a lecture in 2009. "An aesthetic revolution is not a revolu
tion in the arts. It is a revolution in the distribution of forms
and capacities of experience that this or that social group can
share. Those forms of'aesthetic experience,' those forms of
appropriation of the power of [the] word, do not work by
providing definite messages or conveying specific forms of
energy - they work by strutting the way in which bodies fit
their functions and destinations."29 For Ranciere, the political
dimension is inherently aesthetic, and its reception is largely
contingent on how people are heard and how "bodies fit their
function and destinations." If it is only possible to address
such requirements of space and body through an architec
tural and spatial realism, then the project of indifference,
with 2-D representation its endgame, would be inherently so
cially and politically inert.
In October 2016 I organized a symposium at Yale Uni
versity titled "Aesthetic Activism," in which I had a public
conversation with Ranciere.50 "The ground meaning of the
aesthetic is not about art... it is what constitutes the sensible
Log 40
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Arguably, this coincides with Payne's
"Hair and Makeup" essay about architec
ture that produces "mood, atmosphere,
sensibility, color, sensation, feel." See
"'The Aesthetic Today'Jacques Ranciere
in Conversation with Mark Foster Gage,"
YouTube video, 1:25:07, recorded during
the J. Irwin Miller Symposium, "Aesthetic
Activism," at the Yale School of Architec
ture, New Haven, on October 14, 2016,
posted by "YaleUniversity," November 18,
2016, https://youtu.be/w4RP87XN-dI.
Mark Foster Gage is the principal
of Mark Foster Gage Architects and
assistant dean of the Yale School of
Architecture.
135
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experience," he said. That is, to be engaged in the project of
aesthetics, and therefore politics, one must be engaged in the
project of sensible experience. "Architecture has always taken
up the idea of being an instrument for the reform of percep
tion," he later commented. "Architecture is not only supposed
to construct units for inhabiting, but really construct new
senses of seeing, working, acting, feeling, etc."'1 This idea
also describes the interests of many architects in OOO, where
qualities are divided into the sensual and the real, and the ten
sion between them defines the very nature of our sensory and
existential contexts - or their estrangement. To extrapolate
Ranicere's comments, the realm of sensible experience, rather
than mediated representation, becomes the only site available
for architecture's future political engagement.
It seems that architecture has once again found itself
with a clearly defined discursive space between the positions
of indifference and OOO. If history tells us anything, it is
that adjacencies (perhaps most clearly recalled in architecture
through the debates of the whites versus grays) are an incred
ibly productive format that architectural discourse will, from
time to time, assume. As Ranciere said during our discussion
at Yale, "Architecture has always been at the same time ...
making buildings, planning, and planning towns, etcetera,
but also making projects." For the first time in a while there
are two clearly distinct projects, freshly shampooed, condi
tioned, blown-out, styled - even if to look unstyled - and
ready for a productive tousle.
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