DIPLOMA 19

THOUSANDS OF TINY
LITTLE SEXES
Diploma 19, 2021-22 Extended Brief
Architectural Association
Brendon Carlin and James Kwang Ho Chung
Yanling He _ 2nd year Experimen
ntal 6 2021_ Divine City Factory
Joonsung Kim - 2nd year Experimental 6 2021 - Staircase to Nowhere (Cafe)
Thousands of Tiny Little Sexes

Torn, we hang-on but also yearn for something different. Something else, entirely. Quarantine brought disorientation, con-
finement, isolation, drudgery, and blur - but also a kind of liberation. Boundaries between separate times, spaces, and ac-
tivities like home, office, school, gym and so on melted, flooding kitchens, living rooms, floors, stairs, roofs, gardens, parks,
grasses, bushes, benches, bridges etc. There are now calls to adapt and keep new rules/surveillance, but also to go back to
normal; to get back to life as routine and endless production. But a new social ‘epidemic’ haunts the politics of control: re-
fusal, apathy, nihilism, desire, and criticality have amplified with the pandemic’s suspension of our typical habits. Most are
reassessing their values and forms of life; perhaps even finding moments of bliss in an absence of any horizon.

The pandemic was of course only an acceleration. Older political instruments like housing typology and its classes, sexes,
interior programmatic divisions, roles, and values are rejected or exceeded by an intensifying flow of the same wild creative
power architects unearthed to invent them. New soft or ‘invisible’ political instruments work to ‘modulate’ life in increasingly
open or flexible space. Our singularity – the becoming of our thousands of tiny little sexes - is increasingly conjured up and
set free, but just as quickly re-ordered, modulated, and captured. But make no mistake, history’s tyrannical god’s, mythologies
and machines have not been exceeded, but interweave with nanotech.

However, increasing demands on our capacity to adapt, create and destroy expose and suspend our ‘capture’ in habits, envi-
ronments, genetic coding and so on; revealing the fact that we are ‘inessential’ beings: that we lack any fixed and preordained
work, ‘nature’ or destiny. This is precisely why we have the possibility of Politics and Architecture. Therefore, DIP19 is inter-
ested in pushing dissolution and ‘misuse’ much deeper. We are interested in opening up forms, myths and spectacles – things
once typologised, plannified, separated, restricted and prescribed – to the possibility of new, free uses; to joyous experiments
with the architecture of our reality and selves as an end in itself.

Brendon Carlin has taught at the AA since 2011 and founded the architecture and research practice Fake it Twice. He recently
completed a PhD at the AA, leads the Tropicality Visiting School and is developing a new research group at Leeds University.

James Kwang-Ho Chung is a lecturer at the RCA and leads the AA Visiting School Seoul. He has practiced in numerous
studios, has given lectures at various academic institutions in Korea and Leeds University. His work with Brendon Carlin will
Joonsung Kim - 2nd year Experimental 6
6 2021 - Staircase to Nowhere (Cafe)
Yanling He _ 2nd year Experiment
tal 6, 2021 _ Divine City Factory
Isabel Alves Santos De Castro _ House as
which has No Walls, and 60% of w
s a Desert for 500 ‘Floating’ Tech Workers
which has No Façade and No Roof
Top left to bottom: Alice Foreman RCA ADS9, Brendon Carlin and John Ng. w James Chung and Maria Paez
Jack Berret, temple House for Non-believers, RCA ADS9, 2019
Kin Yat Uno Lam, Temple for Doing Nothing House, AA EXP 6, 2019
Free, Rational, Axial Spaces 1:100 Models AA EXP 6, 2020

Architectural Association - Diploma 19 2021-22

 Kin Yat Uno Lam _ Te
A House for 500 young precarious workers organi
emple for Doing Nothing
ised around a central space for do-nothing events
Towards Poetic Infrastructures

Architectures are reality engines. Political instruments. Apparatuses. Since ancient times they have been and remain part of
a functional, structural, performative, symbolic, affectual and ‘religious’ infrastructure that constructs, reproduces, and keeps
us suspended in the specific forms of reality and culture in which we live. From examples like the 3000-year-old Hypostyle
Temple at Karnak, Nile plain agriculture land measuring and partitioning instruments, to the planned city Kahun, designed
as a culture-factory to produce the pharaoh’s tombs and coffers, power and reality; to more recently, suburbs, parks, tourist
resorts and infrastructure, Silicon Valley tech headquarters, software design offices, data storage centres, global digital sat-
ellite networks, hallucinogen drug ritual retreats for precarious creative workers; to nano-bio tech and pharmaceuticals that
re-design the architecture of our sexes, organs and minds. These disparate examples share something critical in common:
a reproduction of monopoly on design, decisions and command. As infrastructures, indexes, and components of a larger
assemblage that includes mythology, law, ‘culture’, science and so on, they destroy and re-order, ‘freeing’ but instantly then
re-ordering our irreducible singularity and the becoming of a thousand of tiny little sexes into reductive and instrumental-
ising forms.

Fake binaries, like sexes and classes are created and reproduced through destroying/uprooting, and differentiation. But we
are also violently integrated, unified, and homogenised. As older modern ‘disciplinary’ apparatuses like housing typology
and its interior programmatic divisions, values and nuclear family roles are rejected or exceeded by the same wild cre-
ative power architects conjured up to invent them, new soft or ‘invisible’ apparatuses ‘modulate’ life in increasingly open
space. Smart cities and a cybernetic management via surveillance, sensors, data collection and rapid adjustment of control
apparatuses needs less to plan and pre-determine, but can simply react, manage and capture. But the ancient is never really
exceeded: gods, mythos, states and ‘family’ ally with nanotech. Apparatuses have always worked via fatal attraction mirror
capturing our refusals to be instrumentalised and fit into predefined forms, categories and roles, and evolving to increas-
ingly give us a semblance of freedom, power and control. Thus, through the very same gesture with which we command,
we obey commands inscribed in their structure. We are typified.

However, in a positive sense, deepening colonisation’s conjuring of our wild destructive/creative forces only hastens an
exposure and suspension of our ‘stunning’ or capture in habits, environments, genetic coding, and any supposedly natural
order of things. We become inessential beings who lack any preordained work, nature, or destiny - this is precisely why we
have the possibility of Politics and Architecture. Contemporary modes of power and their accelerating destruction con-
stantly suspend us in a desert space where we (falsely) feel we must furiously invent from scratch. Therefore, we need not
reject the apparatuses which, despite their dominating functions, we have built in common. Instead, our architecture might
expose and suspend their instrumentalising functions, ‘misuse’ them, and provoke experiments with forms-of-architecture-
and-life that have joyously forgotten any goal.

Architectural Association - Diploma 19 2021-22

Yanling He _ 2nd year Experimental 6, 2021 _ Divine City Factory
Iunia Borsa _ Jungle House: A house for 30
in which the core architecture, and ‘liv
 precarious white or no-collar New York workers
ving space’ is a dense artificial jungle.
Shanna Sim Ler Chung _ K-Pop Permanent Idol House: The proje
cubators and dormitories, and ‘random-play’ K-Pop dancers who se
become fluid and where they set up large camps together and sha
ect researched both government backed, culture-industry K-Pop in-
elf-organise events where everyone dances, audience and performer
are cooking, cleaning etc. and to live a life centred around dance.
Cheryl Wan Xuan Cheah _ (IN)AUSP
PICIOUS HOUSE _ EXP 6 _ 2020_
Notes on Architecture as Infrastructure

When the word infrastructure is used in relation to the city, it typically refers to the utilitarian networks, structures, and
elements that sit ‘behind’ and ‘beneath’ and keep the city functioning smoothly. It doesn’t take much digging to see that
infrastructure is intimately related to the ordering and reproduction of a specific forms of life, social relationships, and
experiences (banal example: the highway allowed my work to be separate from my house and meant that I spend 6 years of
my life in a commute alone). Infrastructure is therefore a cultural and political construct, a series of machines, apparatus-
es and artefacts that organise and index specific forms living, producing, and specific organisations of power and effects.
Infrastructures can be low (sewage, highways, bridges, gas and water lines) or high-tech (networks, satellites, medical robots
etc.), not only do their forms and functions organise the lives of those who use them, but those who design, build, and
maintain them (not to mention those who mine the materials for them, assemble and process chemicals and so on).

Using the same kind of definition of infrastructure: as a kind of political and economic apparatus that organises life into
specific forms - we can also include other artefacts and technologies into the category ‘infrastructure’. Namely here we
should speak of, for example, the architecture of temples, forts, banks, hospitals, housing, schools, museums, supermar-
kets, data server farms, Amazon distribution centres, software and so on, in their own material structure and organisations,
an in their interior spatial composition, distributions and coordination concerned with things like bodies, technology and
goods. They are also infrastructural nodes or components within a larger urban and global assemblage and network con-
cerned with the organisation, composition and distribution of space, flows, forms of life and production. Architecture,
however, might be called a special kind of infrastructure precisely because it is concerned not only with what is usually un-
derstood as utilitarian functionalities, but is concerned with organising living, thinking, feeling beings as part of the urban
machinery.

The term Infrastructure is composed of infra, which refers to beneath, and structure which comes from struo or to devise,
contrive, arrange, compose. Therefore, we can understand infrastructure as that which is devised and contrived, which
arranges and composes beneath and behind, often escaping or claiming to be necessary for economic growth, jobs and
progress, and somehow outside of political or cultural categories. Infrastructure - and architecture as part of the social
factory of the urban - is cultural, it’s about constructing and reproducing forms of life, forms of social relationships.

Notes on the rise of the Architect and Architecture as Infrastructure

Architecture as we typically think of it is a specialisation that was made possible in ancient times (and continues to be
made possible) by a division of labour via which an individual, group or class of rulers, priests and artisan workers ap-
propriate a monopoly over the design of religious, ritual spaces, symbols, buildings, housing, streets etc. It is important to
note that this also unfolded hand in hand with a division of the sacred from the profane, with the separation of places of
religious worship away from houses, domestic space and the everyday life and spaces of people.1 This evolving separation
gave rise to religious institutions that priestly casts took control of an through which they could claim an exclusive access
to the ultimate knowledge, power and right. The emergence of the architect and ‘profession’ is clear when we look at the
rise of dynasty in ancient Egypt2 where one of the earliest records of a clear figure of the architect, Imhotep, emerged as
the ‘right hand’ of the pharaoh.3 This moment of course also gave rise to institutions, or kind of reality workshops, in which
buildings and the city are designed. Make no mistake, we are not only talking about the past here but looking at the pres-
ent. Much is revealed about our current situation and the current role of architecture when we look at these moments of
its emergence as a specialisation or profession – this will become clear later.

The moment when the ‘figure’ of the architect emerges represents a profound historical rupture or difference from other
societies, where tasks analogous to those architects were distributed across much or all of the community and may have
been part of everyday life, seasonal cycles, collective negotiation from experience on the ground, traditional knowledge
and so on. It is important to note of course that knowledge, technique, and technologies had profound effects to on cul-
ture, forms of life, social and political organisation but cannot be said to be entirely deterministic of them. It is also clear
that some societies moved “regularly between groups of varying size and density, often on a seasonal basis. But uniquely
for humans, with their particular type of social cognition, such alternations involve corresponding changes in moral, legal,
and ritual organization. Not just strategic alliances, but also entire systems of roles and institutions are periodically disas-
sembled and reconstructed to allow for more or less concentrated ways of living at different times of year.”4

Returning to the example of anceint Egypt – and not dissimilarly from ancient Mesopotamia, and Mesoamerica for

1 Richard Bradley, Ritual and Domestic Life in Prehistoric Europe (Routledge, 2012).
2 V Gordon Childe et al., “Man Makes Himself,” Science and Society 4, no. 4 (1940).
3 Leonard H Lesko, Pharaoh’s Workers: The Villagers of Deir El Medina (Cornell University Press, 1994).
4 David Wengrow and David Graeber, “Farewell to the ‘Childhood of Man’: Ritual, Seasonality, and the Origins of Inequality,”
Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 21, no. 3 (2015): 597–619.

Architectural Association - Diploma 19 2021-22

Ruoning Wu _ A ‘Cathedral’ House of fixed domestic Islands for canal boat dwellers
instance - in order for the priestly ruling class and architect’s specialisation and design role to be possible, there had to be
a surplus of food and resources that were collected, stored and redistributed to those who do not produce resources or
food. This allows for the reproduction and maintenance of the architect. Tasks of production for reproduction and maintenance
- for example food growing, care and harvesting, cooking, and cleaning - were in many societies and until even recently
distributed amongst most members of a society. They must however be provided for the priestly ruling classes so they did
not need to produce and so that they could focus on organising or maintaining a system of taxation of foods, products
and labour, storage, rituals, ideology, mythology and meaning that was effective, and justified, naturalised or compensated
for their extraction from farmers and other producers. The reproduction and maintenance of the architect was organised and
provided for by the priestly ruling classes so that they could focus on the design of built mythology and narrative but also
structurally and strategically functional and performative spaces, temples, buildings, and cities (like Kahun, often described
as one of the earliest examples of urban planning)5 for workers who would produce and reproduce the infrastructure of this
organisation of production and the pharaoh’s and ruling classes’ power.

Thus, despite typical perceptions of architecture as both art and ‘objective’ engineering, or as virtuously involved with
creativity, idealism, humanism, freedom and expression, and maybe even democracy and progressivism, we could argue
that architecture has very often been in fact an infrastructure for specific forms of power. Power can be defined as the ability of
a group or individual to produce intended effects.6 Paradoxically though, we should understand that it is precisely because
of architectures simultaneous concern for an effective coordination of space, bodies, resources, their production, accumu-
lation and distribution while simultaneously imbuing that machinery and infrastructure of specific order with heightened
emotions, aspiration, meanings, performance, spectacles that connect with aspiration, awe, fear, insecurity and that give us
a sense of purpose and orientation after our previous forms of life have been lost or uprooted.

Moreover, it is crucial to note, and especially as we progress towards today, that rites, roles, functions, tools, furniture’s,
spaces, objects, and machines must continually allow us to take command, or to control them. Ritual (and architecture, machines,
technologies) can never impose but must put us in command. However, it is through the very same gesture with which
we command, that we are commanded. This is true of ancient Cristian prayer, space and rituals for instance, where one
commands God: “give us our daily bread”, “rescue us from evil”; but is even more true of contemporary infrastructures
of power.

Look no further than the computer, a machine built as a command interface. Commanding ourselves to be entrepreneurs,
to build our body of work and profile to get our big break, we spend all of our time giving it commands, and yet we are
thoroughly delimited by its hardware, keyboards, screens, processors, their logics and the logics of software, not to men-
tion by language itself and the fact that what we produce creatively in the computer is about the construction of virtual
worlds that do not profoundly transform the reality outside of them in any way that we can command. Therefore, we can
say that there is a displacement of command inherent in architecture. What is constantly redesigned is the interface, so that it
can give a semblance or limited form of command that nowhere touches the deepest structures - the pharaoh continues to
reign.

Indeed, I believe that a good description of the so-called democratic societies in which we live consists in defining them as societies in
which the ontology of the command has taken the place of the ontology of assertion, yet not in the clear form of an imperative but in
the more underhanded form of advice, of invitation, of the warning given in the name of security, in such a way that obedience to a
command takes the form of a cooperation and, often, of a command given to oneself. I am not thinking only of the sphere of advertis-
ing and that of the security prescriptions given in the form of an invitation, but also of the sphere of technological apparatuses. These
apparatuses are defined by the fact that the subjects who use them believe themselves to command them (and in fact push buttons de-
fined as “commands”), but in truth do nothing but obey a command inscribed in the very structure of the apparatus. The free citizens
of democratic technological societies are beings who incessantly obey in the very gesture with which they impart a command. 7

Nowhere too was the vocation of the architecture more transparent Le Corbusier’s maxims, “Architecture or Revolution”
and “The house is a machine for living.” Architecture in modernity began to deemphasise an overt representation of hier-
archy and order or a natural or proper, meaning and organisation of power through symmetry, narrative decoration, and
symbolism, and instead began to increasingly emphasise the distribution of space, technology and meaning for the habit-
ualisation of bodies involved in new forms of production in cooperation with new technologies. The anti-revolution of
modernity it seems, would keep us on track to finally be liberated from work, gravity, poverty, needs and wants.

Stepping backwards for a moment, the division and distribution of labour, tasks, machines, bodies to achieve specific or-
ders, representations and reproductions of power can also be clearly seen at the emergence of the liberal modern architect
at moments like 14 and 15th century renaissance Italy in the figure of Brunelleschi, and in for example 19th century Japan,
where in order to appropriate achieve a monopoly on design, construction, and technique, new modern architects had to

5 N Moeller, The Archaeology of Urbanism in Ancient Egypt: From the Predynastic Period to the End of the Middle Kingdom (Cambridge
University Press, 2016).
6 Michael Mann, The Sources of Social Power: Volume 1, a History of Power from the Beginning to AD 1760, vol. 1 (Cambridge univer-
sity press, 2012).
7 Giorgio Agamben, Creation and Anarchy (Stanford University Press, 2020), 52–54.

Architectural Association - Diploma 19 2021-22

Georgia Kestekoglou _ A Weekend House for 500 strangers floating in the forest centred around collective cooking
AA Intermediate 6 2019
completely reorganise the way that the workers who build the city were organised and habitualised both on the building
site, as well as at home or in their ‘private lives.’8

This runs parallel to one of the defining features of what is called modernity: when a concern for design of the most
intimate spaces of daily life and social cooperation become, for the first time, the concern of ruling powers and the state
- whether ‘democratic’ or not - and architects. This is when typology in housing becomes a concern, and when housing
becomes a political and architectural project. Housing, along with other apparatuses of political economy with its drive
towards increasing productivity, military, and economic power, can therefore, again, be understood as an infrastructure of
ritualisation and habituation. The profession of the architect expands dramatically in modernity because of this ever deep-
er and at the same broader and expanded reach of specialised design into everyday life and across broad territories and
because of an expanding division of labour and specialisations amongst all workers.

Notes on the Misuse of Architecture and Infrastructure

Despite that fact that infrastructure has been an apparatus for domination, it is still made in common. Infrastructures,
like a highway bridge for instance, are also not predestined to serve their intended functions, and can be stripped of their
instrumentality and misused as distinct forms with rhythm and structure, with edges and limits, but that do not prescribe a
proper form of behaviour when inhabiting them. They are open to inventiveness, but they are not a desert with no limits,
reference or horizon.

So, although infrastructures have been wrapped up with control and order to reproduce a narrow form of reality and
power, when stripped of their narratives and functions, they offer an immense set of knowledges, forms, and resources
that can be experimented with an opened up to possible new use. We need not accept the blackmail of contemporary ar-
chitecture and much creative work that impels us to think as if everything must be completely new; that we live in a desert
with a few lines on the ground. Infrastructures have orientation, form, and materiality and index not only what we have
in common but the fact that we have no predefined or fixed nature or reality – this is precisely why we have Politics and
Architecture.

Ritual, ritual practices and distinctive, decisive forms of organisation too – are not predestined to be a kind of tool of
domination. There are examples, for instance in ancient Japanese villages, in a site in present day Ukraine, Neblivka, and
perhaps even in the site in current day Turkey, Gobekli Tepe, where ritual and distinct form appears to have been a mech-
anism for the maintenance of an egalitarianism or autonomy of individuals in different ways. For instance, at Neblivka,
hundreds of houses where organised in an oval form with a large void of ground at the centre.9 Unlike the urban centres
of Egypt and Mesopotamia during the same period (where crafts and art were increasingly homogenised and their produc-
tions, meanings and expressions controlled by central authority or homogenised culture) individual households had unique
versions of crafts and arts and most were roughly similar scales. As a collection though they of course took on a distinct
form.10

It is also know from anthropological research that “egalitarian societies of the Americas were typically marked by an
ethos of extreme individualism. Far from encouraging a stifling conformity, they emphasized individual autonomy and
self-realization. In practice this meant that even in these least materialistic and competitive of societies, individual differ-
ences – whether of psychology and personality, or for that matter physical capacities and appearance – were treated with
respect, and even valued in and of themselves. This ethos existed in tension with egalitarianism, and such societies were
also marked by mechanisms (e.g. mockery of proficient hunters) that seem designed to prevent extraordinary individuals
from undermining the fundamental principles of the group.”11 It would seem that a society that values extreme individual-
ism and autonomy, a degree of egalitarianism in status and power must be maintained through distinct cultural and ritual
forms. This perhaps explains elaborate burials in pre-agricultural societies where “an effort was clearly made to contain the
bodies of the deceased by covering them with heavy mammoth scapulae, pinning them down with wood, tightly binding
them, or weighing them down with stones. Saturating bodies with clothing, weapons, and ornaments may extend these
concerns, celebrating but also containing the dangerous powers of extraordinary individuals.”

Furthermore, many societies demonstrated seasonal or cyclical political systems and cultures. For example, ‘the Eskimo,
and likewise many other societies . . . have two social structures, one in summer and one in winter, and that in parallel they
have two systems of law and religion’

Winter aggregations brought together an extended society of both the living and the recent and remote dead, who were inaccessible to the living for
much of the year. The winter houses gave expression – in wood, whale-rib, and stone – to time-transcendent principles of Inuit social life that
endured even through those summer months, when groups dispersed under the authority of a single male elder in pursuit of freshwater fish, car-

8 See Chapter 1, Brendon Carlin, Non-Typological Architecture: Deterritorialising Interiors in Contemporary Japan.
9 David Wengrow, “Cities before the State in Early Eurasia,” Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, 2016.
10 Ibid.
11 Wengrow and Graeber, “Farewell to the ‘Childhood of Man’: Ritual, Seasonality, and the Origins of Inequality.”

Architectural Association - Diploma 19 2021-22

ibou, and reindeer. But many aspects of winter life also reversed the values of summer. In the summer, for instance, property rights were clearly
asserted and sometimes physically inscribed onto personal objects, especially hunting weapons. But in the communalistic atmosphere of the winter
house, generosity trumped accumulation as a route to personal prestige. The right of male patriarchs to coerce their sons (and indeed the group as
a whole) was acknowledged only in the summer months. It had no place around the winter hearth, where the principles of Inuit leadership were
turned on their head. Legitimate authority became a matter of charisma rather than birthright; persuasion instead of coercion… The different
seasonal modes of existence typically involved different forms of political organization and different ways of exercising authority.

What’s more – and this, for us, is the really crucial point – everyone was quite self-conscious about these differences. Among the Kwakiutl, for
instance, individuals adopted different names in summer and winter seasons, literally becoming different people, depending on the time of year.
As a result, social structures not only became more visible as subjects of reflection; they were regularly assembled and disassembled, created and
destroyed. art plays visually on the relation of name, person, and role – relations laid open to scrutiny by their seasonal practices (Levi-Strauss
1982 [1976]).12

Reality workshops are places where people can become aware of the mutability of forms of life and their contingency, im-
permanency etc.

For an Architecture for Architecture

Notes on Diploma 19 2021-22

Let us fully embrace “the naked [human] of the contemporary world who lies screaming like a newborn babe in the dirty
diapers of the present.” Too often we are inundated with stories, shows and films of billionaires, politicians, hero’s or even
philanthropic scientists and humanitarians flying around earth or the wider cosmos with high tech machines, devices and
weapons (or genetic modifications and mutations that turn their body into weapons) saving our current ‘civilisation’ from
destruction by ‘evil tyrants’. Instead, might we imagine new ways in which our architecture and technologies might open
up entirely new realities, experiences and forms of life.

This year Diploma 19 is interested in inquiring how our architectures and infrastructures - networks, biotech, mobiles, sen-
sors, internet of things, surveillance, cultural machines, spectacles, and so on - can be opened up to experimentation and
new uses. How can architecture as an infrastructure and instrument be misused and opened up to “transform human beings
as they have been up to now into completely new, lovable, and interesting creatures. Moreover, these creatures [might] talk
in a completely new language. And what is crucial about this language is its arbitrary, constructed nature, in contrast to [a
language that pretends to the] organic [natural, timeless, or pre-destined]...” No technocratic, reactionary renovation of
architecture and language here, but its mobilization in a struggle to change reality rather than reproduce it.13

This year Diploma 19 will ask you to start from your interests and intuition. From your ‘own space’ and intimate, personal,
and intuitive experiences and to open up an investigation into architecture and your own subjectivity. This will in part in-
volve an unlearning or letting go of certain things we do subconsciously and automatically that have somehow become so
engrained that we don’t see them; that conspire to constantly distract us, help us compensate for the fact that we find our
work suffocating, or make us live for end goals, and not for pleasure.

As mentioned in the texts and prospectus above, we are primarily concerned with the misuse of architectures as infrastruc-
tures and apparatuses – and an exceeding or suspension of their monopoly on the narrow reality we live in. The kinds of
infrastructure we are discussing can include architectures, technologies, literal infrastructures and or elements of archi-
tecture that are normally on the interior like furniture’s, stairs, roofs, floors, walls, utilities etc. etc. We are interested in the
exposure, suspension and opening up to new uses of the institutions, infrastructure and apparatuses of domination and domestication (whether
spatial, mechanical, technological, medical, social, cultural and conceptual). The way that we would characterise the assemblage of
these apparatuses is as institutions and infrastructures, is that they are primarily concerned with the reproduction of certain deep
structures of our reality through ritualisation and the production of habits and beliefs14 in a way that is essentially ‘religious’ but for too long
has claimed to be secular.15

Institutions concerned with ritualisation aim to produce and reproduce habits and forms of life. We can understand that
contemporary architecture and technology do this too when we look at ancient or historical examples of architecture,
architects, and forms of life where, given a perspective and distance (given that we are removed from a habitual bubble of

12 Ibid.
13 Some sections were adapted from Walter Benjamin’s short think-builder piece, Experience and Poverty. Walter Benjamin, “Experi-
ence and Poverty,” Selected Writings, 1999.
14 Pierre Bourdieu, “Habitus,” in Habitus: A Sense of Place (Routledge, 2017), 59–66.
15 “This means that, in a type of what psychoanalysts call “return of the repressed,” religion, magic, and law—and with these,
the whole sphere of nonapophantic discourse, which have been driven into the shadows—in reality secretly govern the functioning of
our societies that wish to be lay and secular.” Agamben, Creation and Anarchy, 53.

Architectural Association - Diploma 19 2021-22

thinking, being and believing) we perceive those architectures, forms of power, forms of life and belief as constructed,
strange, temporary and often obviously oppressive. We shouldn’t make the same mistake they likely did and think that we
live in a state where things are as they should be, and we are free.

This year we are interested in the ritualising, and habituating functions of architecture as an infrastructure. Ritual - which is
closely tied to form, movement, aesthetics, and the absorption of certain meanings or ideologies - can be understood a
kind of ‘alchemical’ political mechanism that transmutates the ‘obligatory’ or commands and duties coming from a figure
of power with specific goals (and that are important to maintaining certain narrow realities and orders of power) into the
desirable.16 Again, this is important because architecture has historically been a kind of apparatus of habitualisation which
is concerned with the construction and reproduction of our bodies, beliefs and habits, and therefore is also too often
entangled with the reproduction of monopolised, specific, limited, and temporary forms of reality, the city, architecture,
social relationships, and experience. In this way architecture technologies and their design have for too long been involved
precisely with avoiding a real and deeper transformation that are always already underway. Therefore, we could also say that architec-
ture, the architect’s office along with the priesthood of ruling classes, are reality workshops where design of a life has histori-
cally been separated from those who live it.

Things seem to have changed dramatically in the past 20 years. But fact that the new habit is a habit of having no habits171819
in fact only indicates a new mode of narrow reality shaping of power that wants to reproduce endless work and obedi-
ence, keeping us suspended in a kind of loop or “bad infinity”. We don’t have to dig very deep to see that lately, claims to
massive change, progress, and transformation are merely and increasingly contained or vented into virtual space and are
therefore never allowed to suspend and overcome the most ancient of norms.20 In fact we have become so habitualised
into certain beliefs through narratives that they seem natural, timeless, and predestined. But history is not linear, we have
no destiny, and so many other worlds have existed and are possible.21

Dip 19 invites you to a collective that is interested in opening up experiments with the design of architectures as ‘frames’
or ‘platforms’ and as ‘openers of imaginaries’ for different cultures and forms of life to emerge. If architecture was like
infrastructure and machine for the organisation of life in a specific form that is endless production yesterday, then today, we
want to re-appropriate the infrastructures and machines and allow uses to conceive of new Architectures and forms of life
through their own experiences, aspirations, and peculiarities. We hope to begin to make architectures that can themselves
aspire to become reality workshops under the direction of inhabitants.

More details on what we will do (with exercise number indications as (1))

We will start from short studies of very intimate and personal and intuitive experiences, interests, and spaces (1). We will
conduct a series of deprogramming exercises (3)(5), to exorcise some of the tasks, beliefs, habits, behaviours, concepts, and
ideals that we somehow automatically reproduce as workers and architects. The most difficult and deceiving aspect of
many of these behaviours is that they resemble their opposite. They appear to us, right, liberating, liberated, expressive,
caring, just, progressive, expressive, compelling and morale. They appear to give us control, power, and freedom – but this
is precisely the means through which they condemn us to the reproduction of architectures, realities, and a way of precari-
ous life that in fact shuts down any real potential for a more lasting realisation of those same aspirations and drives.

Through experimental forms ‘forensic’, ethnographic, historical, and typological research and drawing (4)(5), we are interested in
exposing and suspending the instrumentalising function of institutional infrastructures and apparatuses of domestication22
(whether spatial, mechanical, technological, medical, social, cultural and conceptual). Each student will conduct a close
reading through drawing and writing of at least 2 different subjects or groups. One should exemplify an emerging or es-

16 Durkheim was fascinated by the problem of why many social norms and imperatives were felt to be at the same time
“obligatory” and “desirable.” Ritual, scholars are coming to see, is precisely a mechanism that periodically converts the obligatory into
the desirable. The basic unit of ritual, the dominant symbol, encapsulates the major properties of the total ritual process which brings
about this transmutation. Within its framework of meanings, the dominant symbol brings the ethical and jural norms of society into
close contact with strong emotional stimuli. In the action situation of ritual, with its social excitement and directly physiological stimuli,
such as music, singing, dancing, alcohol, incense, and bizarre modes of dress, the ritual symbol, we may perhaps say, effects an inter-
change of qualities between its poles of meaning. Norms and values, on the one hand, become saturated with emotion, while the gross
and basic emotions become ennobled through contact with social values. The irksomeness of moral constraint is transformed into the
“love of virtue.” Victor Turner and Victor Witter Turner, The Forest of Symbols: Aspects of Ndembu Ritual, vol. 101 (Cornell University
Press, 1970), 30.
17 Paolo Virno, “The Ambivalence of Disenchantment,” Radical Thought in Italy: A Potential Politics 7 (1996): 13–36.
18 Giorgio Agamben, The Open: Man and Animal, Meridian (Stanford, Calif.) (Stanford University Press, 2004).
19 Maurizio Lazzarato, “The Concepts of Life and the Living in the Societies of Control,” Deleuze and the Social, 2006, 171–90.
20 See lecture on poetic technologies, “bureaucratic technologies and the future” by David Graeber
21 See lecture “How to Change the Course of Human History” by David Graeber and David Wengrow
22 Giorgio Agamben, “ What Is an Apparatus?” And Other Essays (Stanford University Press, 2009).

Architectural Association - Diploma 19 2021-22

tablished status quo, and the other should somehow be rejecting it (these may often coincide in different ways). Informed
also by a series of important and useful theoretical readings (4) we will produce genealogies on the historical emergence
of these subjects and the spaces, and the apparatuses – technological, architectural and conceptual – within which they are
entangled (2). This will involve both archaeological examples and interpretations, perhaps ancient historical examples, and
modern and contemporary examples. We will draw anatomies of their architecture, objects, routines, rituals, and habits.
This work, your interpretation and critique of it will form the basis for the brief for the ‘design’ project of the second
and third terms during which you might reappropriate and ‘misuse’ or profane many of the apparatuses – spatial, formal,
conceptual, technological, medical etc. – that you studied in the first term.

All of the first term work of course is concerned with developing a very clear, simple and ambitious brief for the 2nd
term design project (6). We are interested and hope to learn from the ways that people are always ‘misappropriating’ and
‘misusing’ the city, its architectures and infrastructures, ‘profaning’ them from their intended, idealised, canonical, ‘sacred’
and instrumentalising functions.23 In other words, in how city is always being freed from its capture in the ‘plan’ and the
‘spectacle’ - collectively (re)appropriated, and its forms opened to free, unforeseen and un-’designable’ uses that are in a
perpetual state of common, negotiated becoming.

At the level of architecture this also involves staging a confrontation with our own values to confront ourselves and to
open up imaginaries and inventions of forms of life, rather than continue a project of designing education, culture or
‘traps of distraction’ for others. Might we be able to develop or reappropriate ritual forms and frameworks that do not
seek to signify or imbue any monopolised, dominant, or transcendent meaning or destiny? Instead, they might offer a kind
of space for ‘useful’ pedagogy or otherwise a kind of formal clarity, a kind of security, perhaps through a formal sequence,
rhythm, and orientation24 without any instrumentalising end goal like moralisation, profit or education (in the bad sense
with which we are all too familiar).

In short, one way of characterising what we may be after is that we will develop architectures that tend towards non-typo-
logical: ‘generic’ and yet precise buildings with substantial form that do not assume, plan or idealise future forms of daily
life and the self, but instead establish a stage for its collective reinvention. Radical, counter-typological architectures; ones
which might welcome the emergence of a politics, a community and a human that can never be categorised or designed.

Postscript: A Manifesto per via Negativa

Let us also describe what we aim not to do. Hence, here we lay the outlines – to which we’re sure you can add points – of a
negative manifesto.
We aim to reject the projection of our values and ideals onto others through the planning and programming of how others
should live.
8
We aspire to reject the idealist trap of thinking we can solve problems with new technocratic architecture, systems, logistics,
‘spreadsheet architecture’ and so on. These are reactionary adventures ultimately tied up with maintaining a deep status
quo that is as “old as the hills” but not predestined.
8
We will reject widely now normalised and obligatory concepts and practices of ‘sustainability’ which are tied up with a
project to keep us busy and distracted from the a ‘deeper’ transformation and worse, are aimed at simply bailing capitalism
(and the Capitalocene) out of the very crises it has itself perpetuated. We argue that only a thoroughly cultural project can
divert us from a continued violation of the nomos (limits) of the earth.
8
Because we are absolutely opposed to any form of domination, racism, sexism, colonisation and so on - we will reject
calls to produce politically correct rhetoric and propaganda (that create a false semblance of real progress or real change)
around en vogue topics destined to be broadcast from the new temples and priesthood25 of museums, exhibitions, prizes and
so on (and eventually trickling into the culture machine). We reject the kind of cultural and behavioural constraint aimed at
‘reform’ that merely puts new colourful and more diverse masks on the same form of parade26 with the same (or deepen-
ing) hierarchies of command and control, and therefore, evades experiments with deeper, fundamental transformation.
8
Our architecture refuses to craft a fresh or aspiring face or narratives and styles as the phantasmagorias that architects,
since figures like Imhotep in Egypt, have produced and which help to lock the world and ourselves into the narrow reality

23 Giorgio Agamben, Profanations (Éditions Rivages, 2019).

24 Francesco Marullo, “Typical Plan: The Architecture of Labor and the Space of Production,” 2014.
25 Childe et al., “Man Makes Himself,” The Urban Revolution. See also Mann, The Sources of Social Power: Volume 1, a History of
Power from the Beginning to AD 1760.
26 Nika Dubrovsky and David Graeber, “Another Art World, Part 2: Utopia of Freedom as a Market Value,” E-Flux, no.
November (2019), https://www.e-flux.com/journal/104/298663/another-art-world-part-2-utopia-of-freedom-as-a-market-value/;
Benjamin, “Experience and Poverty.”

Architectural Association - Diploma 19 2021-22

that is a life as endless work as production and bureaucracy: a life under a continued monopoly “of, and divine authority
for, knowledge of the ultimate ‘meaning” and ‘’purpose” of life…”, one which “…[spreads] when people believe it to be
true.”27 A monopoly on the construction and reproduction of norms, aesthetic and ritual practices, on decision making, on
design, on invention, and on the provision of forms of reference and ‘security’ – whether worldly or existential.28

Bibliography

Agamben, Giorgio. “ What Is an Apparatus?” And Other Essays. Stanford University Press, 2009.
———. Creation and Anarchy. Stanford University Press, 2020.
———. Profanations. Éditions Rivages, 2019.
———. The Open: Man and Animal. Meridian (Stanford, Calif.). Stanford University Press, 2004.
Benjamin, Walter. “Experience and Poverty.” Selected Writings, 1999.
Bourdieu, Pierre. “Habitus.” In Habitus: A Sense of Place, 59–66. Routledge, 2017.
Bradley, Richard. Ritual and Domestic Life in Prehistoric Europe. Routledge, 2012.
Childe, V Gordon, A Wolf, H T Pledge, George Perazich, Philip M Field, and J D Bernal. “Man Makes Himself.” Science
and Society 4, no. 4 (1940).
Dubrovsky, Nika, and David Graeber. “Another Art World, Part 2: Utopia of Freedom as a Market Value.” E-Flux, no.
November (2019). https://www.e-flux.com/journal/104/298663/another-art-world-part-2-utopia-of-freedom-as-a-
market-value/.
Eliade, Mircea. The Sacred and the Profane; the Nature of Religion. Harper Torchbooks. Vol. [1st Ameri, 1959.
Lazzarato, Maurizio. “The Concepts of Life and the Living in the Societies of Control.” Deleuze and the Social, 2006,
171–90.
Lesko, Leonard H. Pharaoh’s Workers: The Villagers of Deir El Medina. Cornell University Press, 1994.
Mann, Michael. The Sources of Social Power: Volume 1, a History of Power from the Beginning to AD 1760. Vol. 1. Cambridge
university press, 2012.
Marullo, Francesco. “Typical Plan: The Architecture of Labor and the Space of Production,” 2014.
Moeller, N. The Archaeology of Urbanism in Ancient Egypt: From the Predynastic Period to the End of the Middle Kingdom. Cambridge
University Press, 2016.
Turner, Victor, and Victor Witter Turner. The Forest of Symbols: Aspects of Ndembu Ritual. Vol. 101. Cornell University Press,
1970.
Virno, Paolo. “The Ambivalence of Disenchantment.” Radical Thought in Italy: A Potential Politics 7 (1996): 13–36.
Wengrow, David. “Cities before the State in Early Eurasia.” Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, 2016.
Wengrow, David, and David Graeber. “Farewell to the ‘Childhood of Man’: Ritual, Seasonality, and the Origins of Inequal-
ity.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 21, no. 3 (2015): 597–619.

27 Mann, The Sources of Social Power: Volume 1, a History of Power from the Beginning to AD 1760, 1:302.
28 Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane; the Nature of Religion, Harper Torchbooks, vol. [1st Ameri, 1959.

Architectural Association - Diploma 19 2021-22

Architectural Association - Diploma 19 2021-22
 Joanna Man Hey Chau _ Stairhouse proposes a house entirely c
co-housing in Korea in which kinship relations are fluid and life is in
in the architecture which lacks dead-ends in plan
composed of a staircase. The project departed from research into
n a constant state of becoming something else; this is also reflected
n or section and whose archetype is a giant stair
Ivan Solianik _ The City as
s a Bed. AA EXP 6 2021
Zeena Ismail _ City Kit
tchen, AA EXP6 2021
Overview of Year’s Briefs + Calendar

Exercises + Strategies

The year will be organised into 2 core parts. Roughly, Term 1 is a research and experimentation phase, and term
2 is the ‘project phase’. The terms are also composed of a series of shorter briefs, exercises, workshops, lectures
and seminars the details of which will be handed out as we approach and introduce them. Below is an overview
of these components and further down you will find a calendar for the year with the schedule and important dates
and so on. The unit is conducted as a collective collection of individual and group researches and therefore is
constantly open to learning from your own discoveries what the overall direction of the work is and how it should
evolve.

The briefs and components listed below will be handed out when the assignment is given.

1.1 Infrastructures and Experience (2-3 days)

1.2 Free, Rational, Axial I (group & individual, 1 week, start and end of term)
1.3 Research, Anatomies of Subject, Form/Space, Ritual, Routine - Profane Architectures (individual&group, 11 weeks)
a. Photo Survey
b. Essay/ photo essay
c. Drawings and documentation of habitualness, routines, rituals of subject (arch, person, group)
d. Drawings of historical case studies, examples and events that trace the emergence of that subject
e. Identifiying of element/archetype
1.4 Seminar Series
1.5 House with No-Style (individual, 3 days)
1.6 Free, Rational, Axial II (group & individual, 1 week, start and end of term)
a. With ‘redraws’ of examples, types and ‘archetypes’. From ancient ritual spaces and examples, ‘rational’
and modern spaces or examples, and landscape examples. Catalogue of possibilities provided and can be
added to.
1.7 Redraws of projects that find most interest with student’s research
1.8 Brief (individual, 1 week + break)
1.9 Project Proposal

Tools and others components

Guest Lecture series

Line Drawing Workshops
Unreal Engine 4 and Visualisation Workshops
Grasshopper Workshops
Calendar
Yanling He _ 2nd year Experimen
ntal 6 2021_ Divine City Factory
Yanling He _ 2nd year Experimen
ntal 6 2021_ Divine City Factory
Qinyuan Zhou _ Make-Up Ho
ouse _ Experimental 6 2021
Joonsung Kim - 2nd year Experimental 6
6 2021 - Staircase to Nowhere (Cafe)
Architectural Association - Diploma 19 2021-22
Architectural Association - Diploma 19 2021-22
Iunia Borsa _ Jungle House: The jungle house’s living space has
domestic familiarity. It is accessed through ritual ‘cleansin
s no walls, ceiling or even floor per se, and there are no signs of
ng’ spaces that tightly script form, movement and activity.