Reiser + Umemoto

A T L A S OF
NOVEL
TE C T O N IC S
Atlas of Novel Tectonics
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 Reiser + Umemoto

ATLAS OF NOVEL
TECTONICS

Princeton Architectural Press, New York

PUBLISHER
Princeton Architectural Press
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New York, New York 10003

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©2006 Princeton Architectural Press

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Printed and bound in China
12 u 987

No part o f this book may be used or reproduced in

any manner without written permission from the
publisher, except in the context o f reviews.

Eveiy reasonable attempt has been made to identify

owners of copyright. Errors or omissions will be cor­
rected in subsequent editions.

Special thanks to: Nettie Aljian, Dorothy Ball, Nicola

Bednarek, Janet Behning, Megan Carey, Penny (Yuen
Pik) Chu, Russell Fernandez, Jan Haux, Clare Jacobson,
John King, Mark Lamster, Nancy Eklund Later, Linda
Lee, Katharine Myers, Lauren Nelson, Scott Tennent,
Jennifer Thompson, Joseph Weston, Paul Wagner, and
Deb Wood o f Princeton Architectural Press — Kevin C.
Lippert, publisher

DESIGN
Research and Development
Reto Geiser and Donald Mak

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Reiser, Jesse.
Atlas of novel tectonics / Reiser + Umemoto.
255 p .: ill. (chiefly col.); 20 cm.
ISBN-13:978-1-56898-554-1 (alk. paper)
1. Architecture— Composition, proportion, etc.
2. Eclecticism in architecture. I. Umemoto, Nanako.
II. Title.
NA2760.R45 2005
720.1— dc22
2005034117
 Contents

Acknowledgments

The Judo of Cold Combustion

by Sanford Kwinter

Introduction

Geometry

1. Fineness
2. Difference in Kind/Difference in Degree
3. The Unformed Generic: Form Acquiring Content
4. Similarity and Difference
5. Variety (Difference) vs. Variation (Self-similarity)
6. Part-to-Whole Relationships
7. After Collage: Two Conditions of the Generic
8. Coherence vs. Incoherence
9. A New Understanding of Difference
10. Selection vs. Classification
7i Matter

11. Intensive and Extensive

12. Geometry and Matter
13. Folly of the Mean
14. Classical Body/Impersonal Individuation
15. Material Organizations
16. Matter/Force Relationships
17. From a Static to an Oscillatory Model (and Back Again)
18. Operating in a State of Poise
19. Poise in an Allied Discipline
20. Refrain
21. Exchanges among Systems
22. Intensive and Extensive II
23. Machinic Phylum
24. The Diagram
25. Diagram Deployment
26. Fineness and the Macroscale
27. Fineness in Allied Fields
28. Interdisciplinary Exchange
29. New Possibilities for Spatial Structures
30. Matter and Context
31. Essentialized Systems vs. System with Singularities
32. Exact/Anexact-yet-Rigorous
33. Material Computation
34. Systems Becoming Other Systems
35. Post-Fordist Implementations
 Operating

36. Mount Sinai

37. Program: Architecture:: Lyrics: Music
38. Operating under a Surfeit of Information
39. Asignifying Signs
40. Moving in the Gradient Field
41. Accidental Animism
42. Migration of a Pattern
43. Emergent Structures
44. Invention
45- Style
46. Panglossian Paradigm
47. Devolutionary Architecture
48. Optimization
49. Classicism without Models
50. Projecting Force
51. Architecture vs. War
52. The Nomad is the One Standing Still

21s Common Errors to Avoid

53. The Abuse of the Accident

54. The Abuse of Data
55. The Abuse of History
56. The Abuse of the Diagram
57. The Abuse of Logic
58. The Typologist’s Error
The World

59. A Parable for Our Time

60. Foamy Realities
61. Pop Iconography as Myth
62. Migration of Practices
63. Migration of Ethics
64. Desire’s Rainbow: Migration of Products
65. Continuity and Discontinuity
66. A Materialist Argument of Culture
67. Neo-regionalism
 I:
Acknowledgments
k
mgy

earch for this book was supported by grants from the Graham
Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, the Princeton
University Committee on Research in the Humanities and Social
Sciences, and the New York State Council on the Arts. We also thank
Elise Jaffe and Jeffrey Brown, and Susan Grant Lewin for their con­
tinuing support.
i ••
The collaboration on projects with engineers Ysrael Seinuk, Guy
Nordenson, Nat Oppenheimer of Robert Silman Associates, and
Cecil Balmond, Charles Walker, Karsten Theim, and Daniel Bosia of
the Advanced Geometry Unit of ARUP provided invaluable material
for this book.
IF
Bernard Tschumi, who made possible the platform from which
a rich dialog developed over the course of the 1990s among col­
leagues at the Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture,
Planning, and Preservation, created the scene (a feeling, like the near­
ness of the sea, of unlimited possibility) to which this book is deeply
indebted. Stan Allen, Greg Lynn, Jeffrey Kipnis, Sanford Kwinter,
Ben Van Berkel, Manuel DeLanda, Robert Somol, Alejandro Zaera-
Polo, and Andrew Benjamin are among those who remain part of
an ongoing dialog of which this work should be considered a part.
Today, discussions that evolved at Columbia have shifted some­
what and become more involutional. The School of Architecture at
Princeton University has offered an opportunity for a deeper, more
io A C K N O W LE D G M E N TS

focused interrogation of the questions that emerged at Columbia.

Mario Gandelsonas, Carles Vallhonrat, and Edward Eigen have made
important contributions to these issues. We are particularly indebt­
ed to friend and colleague Stan Allen, whose gracious guidance and
advice on the raw manuscript is much appreciated; to Jeffrey Kipnis,
whose incalculable contributions to the formative material for this
book and whose sharp and insightful guidance helped us find a final
form for the Atlas; and to Sanford Kwinter, whose encouragement
and provocation initiated this book in the first place and whose fun­
damental philosophical inclination was embodied: it started as one
thing and became another.

This book is dedicated to Aldo Rossi, whose office structure, for

better or worse, became the model for the way we structure ours
(insuring that thinking and working would not occupy separate
spheres); to Daniel Libeskind, for so many things, but above all for
instilling the ethic of non-linearity in our process; to John Hejduk,
for communicating all that is of fundamental importance but which
cannot be said in architecture; to Peter Eisenman, into whose orbit
we have never been pulled but whose forces influence us indirectly
nevertheless; and to Rem Koolhaas, whose fundamental insights on
what an architectural project could be opened the way for this work,
while staying clear of its specifics.

We owe our thanks to the design expertise of Reto Geiser and Donald
Mak of Research and Development, who took on the arduous task of
elegantly mating meaning and matter, and to the editorial sugges­
tions of Salomon Frausto.
 ACKN OW LEDGM ENTS 11

he significance of the contributions of Jason Payne, Yama Karim,

~avid Ruy, Nona Yehia, Todd Rouhe, Matthias Blass, Wolfgang
Gollwitzer, Astrid Piber, Rhett Russo, Eva Perez DeVega Steele, Jason
Scroggin, Keisuke Kitagawa, Hisa Matsunaga, John MacCallum,
Akari Takebayashi, Kutan Ayata, Michael Young, Taiji Miyasaka,
Marcelyn Gow, John Kelleher, Sean Daly, and the many others who
gave countless hours to the design work in our office cannot be
overstated.

Thanks also goes to our publisher, Kevin Lippert, for his immediate
and sustained support of this project and to Nancy Eklund Later,
our editor. Her incisive reading of our manuscript was a constant
through the storm and strife of creation.

Jonathan Solomon, through sustained and indefatigable work on

the manuscript and structure of this book over many years, acted
as a daily sounding board for the arguments presented in the Atlas.

Finally we thank Debora Reiser and Kikue Hirota, into whose spatial
universes we were bom and whose boundaries we sought to push
rather than escape, and Zeke, our son, an ever-present inspiration
and refreshingly candid critic of our work.
 The Judo of Cold Combustion

Sanford Kwinter

The story of guncotton has for years played the role of a founding
myth for Reiser + Umemoto. Central to the history of propulsion
that led not only to modern ballistics but to rocketry and aero­
nautics, guncotton was the product of a famous accident. After
failing in his attempt to dissolve a wad of cotton in a mixture
of nitric and sulfuric acids, a German chemist named Christian
Friedrich Schonbein placed the sodden lump of threads to dry on
his hot stove and went home for supper. With no further need of
encouragement, the great mysteries of chemistry and matter set
about to do their work. Poor Schonbein never saw his laboratory
again, but the world had guncotton.

We might say that guncotton was the type of invention that moth­
ered its own necessity, inaugurating the world of vertical propulsion,
space travel, remote warfare, and so on. But in keeping with the
Reiser + Umemoto position, it is best not to bury novelty too deeply
in the murky mysticism of “invention” but to raise it affirmatively
as a product of a spontaneous— or deliberate— migration. The
migration I am referring to here is the migration of what current
philosophical parlance calls the diagram. But what exactly, after all,
is a diagram? The diagram is an invisible matrix, a set of instruc­
tions, that underlies— and most importantly, organizes— the
expression of features in any material construct. The diagram is the
reservoir of potential that lies at once active and stored within an
object or an environment (or in every aggregate or section of these).
 TH E JU D O OF COLD C O M B U ST IO N 13

III determines which features (or affects) are expressed and which are
saved. It is, in short, the motor of matter, the modulus that controls
what it does.

Reiser + Umemoto operates less like architects and much more like
chemical engineers. Its profound identification with the invention of
guncotton is also an affirmation of the glory and violence of novel­
ty, a thing that can only be prepared for and which scrupulously
reserves the mode and pattern of its appearance for itself. In the
.ibsence of cotton, the acids form solvents, not detonators or propel­
lants. The cotton effectively slows them down, opens them up, and,
by forming complex nitrates with its cellulose, structures the pat­
tern of their interactions and subjects them to the discipline of space
and time. Guncotton, in a word, is geometry in action. It represents
the migration of a diagram from one ensemble (the textile mill) to
another, and the production (selection) of new properties, potentials,
and effects. This is the design ethos of Reiser + Umemoto.

When a tree is configured to function as a wood column or beam, it

is one set of properties of cellulose that is selected for expression; or
more properly, it is the geometry of vascular bundling that selects
the properties of cellulose and conveys their felicitous rigidities
and flexibilities to the macroscopic scale of the building itself. On
the other hand, when a tree is configured into a log for burning, it is
1he fire itself— that exists already inside of the wood, only dormant
or infinitely slowed— that is selected for expression or release. These
two forms of expression, chemical and tectonic, are of exactly the
same order of physical reality. It is a testimony to the diagram’s
action that such diverse properties can be called up and released.
And it is no small revolution in design to have apprehended this
simple but critical fraternity.
14 SA N FO R D K W IN T E R

With guncotton came the infinite, and infinitely suggestive, potential

of cold combustion. Cold combustion suggests the slowing down of
the unfolding of geometry that previously was either held in exquisite
or frozen suspense or was subject to the instantaneous and uncon­
trolled unfolding that we know as explosion. Anyone who discovers
a middle ground, a rhythm of unfolding that delivers the geometries
of matter to the senses in the form of properties, qualities, or affects
in real time, endows the world with novelty. Reiser + Umemoto is, in
this sense, a research project that aims to discover architecture as a
rhythmic pattern that is embedded everywhere in matter but that can
be harvested only by subjecting matter to the action of a structuring
diagram. The diagram serves here retroactively, as a ‘reading device,’
or as a cumbusting engine that extracts information and energy from
the environment by making it flow at an intermediate rate. Wood
is at once an infinitely arrested but still smoldering fire that can be
speeded up and a set of organized strata in whose pattern of contours
and lines the atmospheric, meteorological, and geological history of
a region can be read. And those who work with wood at this level do
nothing but transmit this ‘flow’ of information and time to the sensa­
tions by submitting it to diagrammatic modulation and control.

The era in which we live can be characterized as one in which knowledge

is increasingly derived from the structure of flow (contours and rates
of change in data, patterns of material action, etc.). But flow itself
has, over the past years and especially in design milieus, too often
been allowed to serve as a mere aesthetic marker— a simple conno-
tator of dynamical knowledge alleged to exist but rarely actually
engaged— and not a truly epistemological one. The ethos of combus­
tion, with its habit of subjecting matter to a slowed or accelerated
pattern and then deploying or harvesting what is physically and
aesthetically released, is critical to the new materialism that is
emerging everywhere today.
 T H E JU D O OF COLD C O M B U ST IO N »5

What follows is the first design manual that reflects the foundational
shift that took place seventy years ago in physics, when life was first
understood to represent a pattern in time that could no longer be
amenable to explanation in purely physical and chemical terms. Here,
tectonics is similarly placed at the heart of matter as the liberator of
the knowledge embedded within it, but only as aform o f action (gone
forever, the myth of statics!) that it is architecture’s duty to deliver to
human sensation.

The new materialism may well be a new expressionism.

INTRODUCTION
 Introduction

■ ii '
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The most attentive study o f the most homogenous milieu, o f the most closely
woven concatenation o f circumstances, will not serve to give us the design of
the towers ofLaon.
— Henri Focillon, The Life o f Forms in Art

It may seem a strange contradiction in a book devoted to concepts to

put forward a call for the specific, but all the concepts, all the models
presented here, are meaningless to the architect if the specific reality
of the project is absent. For unlike planning, the success or failure of
architecture rests finally on its specificity, and no account of circum­
stances will ever account for the work as such.

In a time so obsessed with establishing the value of works as the

products of contexts and conditions, the architect may take solace
in the fact that the corrosive relativism that plagues the historian
will not plague the architect who curiously traffics in products that,
if not permanently fixed, and however formed around the flux of
matter, nevertheless rest on the side of persistence. They are never
reducible to the fleeting interpretations— or, for that matter, prac­
tices— projected onto them. Thus, architecture is the substrate for
the accidents of history rather than its embodiment.

This persistence gives us pleasure precisely because of the other

developments that go with it.
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20 IN T R O D U C T IO N

The historian, and the critic, bear an imperative to contextualize and

establish meaning, which stands them in opposition to the practice
of architectural design. History, merely as a form of consciousness,
is not sufficient to give rise to the architectural project. This is not to
deny the importance of histories, texts, and conditions but to point
out a property of the architectural artifact. The history, conditions,
and time of formation of any project are distinct from the effects
of the project itself, which has its own particular way of influenc­
ing histories as it mobilizes effects. Indeed, as Friedrich Nietzsche
points out in his 1874 essay “On the Uses and Disadvantages of
History for Life,” there is always an element of the unhistorical in
any act of creation.1This is not only a vital precondition to creating
anything new but also adheres to the object of architecture itself,
which, after all, will always exceed the words that order architectural
programs. Just as Jorge Luis Borges suggests that an author creates
his own precursors, new architecture fundamentally reorganizes
the canon. Architecture makes a new history; history doesn’t make a
new architecture.

The primary and necessary conceit of this work is that beneficial

novelty is the preferred condition to stability and the driving agenda
behind architectural practice. This in no way requires us to reject
traditional practices or the pragmatics of architecture. In fact, we
consider it doubly incumbent upon those pursuing the novel to
embrace these fields.

The naturalist polymath DArcy Thompson modestly states in his

1917 On Growth and Form, “This book of mine has little need of preface
for it is indeed all preface from beginning to end.”2Like Thompson’s
work, ours is prefatory. Our treatment deals in a qualitative fashion
with issues that ultimately require quantitative treatment: the
province of our collaborators, engineers.
 IN T R O D U C T IO N

Like Anthelme Brillat-Savarin’s 1825 Physiology o f Taste, this is not a

book of recipes, but in its specificity, it suggests a way of operating
within the discipline. Each argument develops around a specific con­
dition or case, but its value lies in its wider application. We see archi­
tectural design as a series of specific problem situations that, contrary
to the discursive disciplines, cannot be argued away. The architec­
tural design process allows openings and advances to occur before
the problem’s sheer recalcitrance shuts down development. Thusly,
design practice becomes agile enough to avoid getting stuck.

P O TEN TIA L

his 1981 book A Scientific Autobiography, Aldo Rossi makes the rela-
nship of matter and energy a fundamental precondition of archi-
re. He describes the physicist Max Planck’s account of a school-
ster’s story about a mason who with great effort heaved a block of
up on the roof of a house:

The mason was struck by the fact that expended energy does not get
lost; it remains storedfo r many years, never diminished, latent in
the block o f stone, until one day it happens that the block slides off
the roof and fa lls on the head o f a passerby, killing him...in archi­
tecture this search is also undoubtedly bound up with the material
and with energy; and i f onefails to take note o f this, it is not possible
to comprehend any building, eitherfrom a technical point o f view
orfrom a compositional one. In the use o f every material there must
be an anticipation o f the construction o f a place and its trans­
formation .3
22 IN T R O D U C T IO N

Rossi’s observations are more pertinent today than ever. While matter
and energy constitute the vital components of Rossi’s formulation,
they exist within an essentialist universe of fixed typologies, the
potential of which is understood as the anima that surrounds objects
of perfect stillness. And yet, the same actors are in play: energy, mat­
ter, and potential, but their roles have been reversed. Rossi delights
in “the double meaning of the Italian word tempo, which signifies
both atmosphere and chronology.”4The mist that daily glides into the
galleria animates its vast silent form with the life that has animated
architecture since the advent of classicism. But we have other ambi­
tions for this vitality, which now must enter and find expression in the
fabric of matter itself. Let’s be clear: it is not the vulgar misconception
that architecture must be literally animate, nor that processes illus­
trated by animation software guarantee dynamic architecture. It need
not move, but its substance, its scale, its transitions and measurement
will be marked by the dilations and contractions of the energy field.

Galleria o f Fog
 IN T R O D U C T IO N 23

A universe defined by a fixed field and unchanging essences has

been superceded by a matter field that is defined locally only in
.ind through its own interactions. This architecture is about speeds
rather than movements. Speed is.understood as an absolute, there­
fore this architecture’s fabric may register speeds from very fast to
very slow while remaining essentially in place. Architecture thus is
110 longer the brooding and silent witness to the flux of tempo but is
is much matter and structure as it is atmosphere and effects. We’ve
gone from seeing temporal work in contrast to permanent architec­
ture to seeing the temporal entering into the very fabric of the archi­
tecture itself, rendering it ambient.

In contrast to Rem Koolhaas’s notion that freedom is an absence of

architecture— as, for example, when he describes the open space
of a town square as embodying the greatest possible freedom— we
side with Rossi’s belief that freedom in Koolhaas’s sense is vacuous;
that, in fact, it is the constraints of architecture, its formal particu­
larity and persistence beyond any functionalist determination, that
truly embodies freedom. For in being neither uniformly open nor
uniformly closed, it lies open to the unforeseen as it works on our
changing activities over time.

We assert the primacy of material and formal specificity over myth

and interpretation. In fact, while all myth and interpretation derives
from the immediacy of material phenomena, this equation is not
reversible. When you try to make fact out of myth language only
begets more language, with architecture assuming the role of illus­
tration or allegory. This is true not only of the initial condition of
architecture but actually plays out during the design process in a
similar way. Material practice is the shift from asking “what does
this mean?” to “what does this do?”
24 IN T R O D U C T IO N

FROM EX TEN SIV E F IE L D /lN T E N SIV E OBJECT

TO IN TE N SIV E FIELD-OBJECT

In response to the perceived sterility and homogeneity of modern

architecture, figures of the last generation as varied as Robert Venturi
and John Hejduk selected and developed highly specific elements
of the movement. This extraction of (generally figurative) motifs
from the more systematic, Cartesian field they had occupied in high
modernism was seen as a promulgation of uniqueness and variety
in architecture. With equal ease, it could be defined through the
development of a singular volume or figure or, in more discontinuous
fashion, the collage technique. But this selective approach carried lia­
bilities as well, for it dispensed with the grand systematic ambitions
of modernism in favor of an idiosyncratic approach and concentrated
on a revision of modernism that foregrounded the object divested of
its field.

For architects, notions of space, until recently, remained trenchantly

Cartesian, whether the field was recognized or the object premiated.
The big shift, in which our work participates is the removal of the
fixed background, of ordinates and coordinates, in favor of a notion
of space and matter as being one. This shift is not simply one in
concept or belief that would leave the architecture unchanged; at a
fundamental level, it changes the way architecture is thought about
and designed, and the way it emerges as a material fact.

Apologists for modernism— or those who simply want to extend the

modernist project by updating their arguments while leaving the
architecture unchanged— are in grave error. In their minds, the
shifting paradigm is simply yet another shift in discourse, it doesn’t
affect the object, and the object has no effect on it. Discourse alone
merely becomes a more fashionable view of the same universe, thus
implying that the early model is but a failure of interpretation.
26 IN T R O D U C T IO N

The Cartesian paradigm, long discredited in the sciences, has lost its
hold on architectural thinking. In fact, it was always a special case of
a larger universe, the potential of which lay untapped and unrealiz­
able before the advent of new paradigms. You need the new model to
think the new work. And so we are not denying the existence of uni­
versal space, we are suggesting that the universal is not coordinates
without qualities but rather a material field of ubiquitous difference.
1 ■ •' ' v :- '■
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Any serious project today must nevertheless contend with the force
of the modernist canon and its outgrowths. We see our project
not as a completion of universal models such as those devised by
the modernists, nor as a counter-model to them, but rather as an
excursion into new territory. Some baggage must be dropped along
the way, or like the Argo, become a vehicle transfigured by the

left Cartesian Grid

r ig h t Unstructured Grid
 IN T R O D U C T IO N 27

journey. This book is part of the critical project, but it aspires to an

affirmative criticality. We seek to dispel the essentialist assumptions
about universality, solidified notions about historical models, and
even the irreducibility of the authors themselves. For it becomes
surprisingly evident that the canonical works display a profound
[ impersonality; they are, in fact, the most comprehensive confron­
tations with a problematic that only later acquire an authorial
I stamp.

This tension among classical models, structural honesty, and com-

i positional formalism constitutes a “both-and” argument in the
Venturian sense.5 But in contrast to Venturi’s formulation, our project
!' understands this dynamic not as a play of signifiers to be “read” (and
| thus, fixed in issues of meaning) but as a properly material contest
in material logics. We would postulate an “and and and” argument—
neither pure classical models, nor pure structural honesty nor pure
I compositional formalism, implying a more open-ended process.

I 11:

Venturi’s “both-and” is a mannerist hierarchy that attempts to regu-

i late complexity and contradiction as a comprehensive whole
.is a legible dimension of the building. “And and and” pushes multi­
plicity to a level of depth that isn’t present in the purely semiotic
.irguments of Venturi. For while all architecture can be read, it is
only the postmodernists who reduce both process and reception to a
■ semiotic game. This architecture of multiplicities operates as much
with the visible conditions of architecture as the invisible processes
of, for example, structure and program. This is, in a sense, more
rlosely connected to a modernist depth than a mere play of surfaces
and signifiers.
28 IN T R O D U C T IO N

For example, the Miesian project in its most impersonal and “uni­
versal” sense may thus be resituated. As a special case within a much
larger and more varied universe. We see a systematicity to endeavors
such as Mies’s which can be exponentially expanded through modes
that allow for emergence rather than merely extension.

This therefore is not yet another plea for eclecticism but a shift for
modernism into new and unforeseen territories. This is a critical
stance that can only be worked out architecturally. Taking the
specific problematic as a starting point, how does one produce
multiplicities in formal arrangements? How does one produce
multiplicity in structure? How does one produce multiplicity in
function? This is the content of this book.

Perhaps the most problematic of Mies van der Rohe’s clearspan projects,
Mannheim must contend with a large scale inclusion—a theater, within
the box—an irreconcilable conjunction revealing the limits of the model.

Mannheim National Theater

 IN T R O D U C T IO N 29

Classical Order (Peristyle)

Miesian Clearspan

Modernist Classical Order

Rod Net Truss Facade

Miesian Poise and Contemporary Poise

30 IN T R O D U C T IO N

f*\
Truss: Vierendel Truss: Shaped Truss:
Reduction to Structure Between Structure Reduction to Form
and Form

Between Form and Structure

 IN T R O D U C T IO N 3»

CONSTRAIN TS

It will be remembered that the principle o f exclusion is a very simple, not to

tay primitive, principle that denies the values it opposes. The principle o f
sacrifice admits and indeed implies the existence o f a multiplicity o f values.
What is sacrificed is acknowledged to be a value even though it has to yield
to another value which commands priority.
— SirE. H. Gombrich, “Norm and Form”

Sir E. H. Gomrich’s 1966 essay “Norm and Form” serves as an instruc­

tive way to navigate both our attraction to Mies’s classical solutions
.md the desire for the resolution, or adjudication, of competing and
dinflicting demands. Gombrich first makes the claim that there are
indeed classical solutions. For example, the resolution of the conflict
in painting between balance and symmetry— once symmetry is chal­
lenged— is arrived at through “an ideal compromise between two
(1inflicting demands.”6This compromise is thought to be classical
in the sense of presenting an unsurpassed solution that could only
be repeated, not improved upon. Deviation on the one side would
1hreaten the correctness of design; on the other, the feeling of order.
Se en from this point of view, the “classical” solution is indeed a tech­
nical rather than a psychological achievement.

Hie classical is what Sir Gombrich calls a “norm,” which embodies

.111 “essence” that “permits us to plot other works of art at a variable
distance from this central point.”7 The art historian distinguishes
such genealogies as classicism and its descendents from mere series
of morphological distinctions. It is only when distinction is defined
by its correspondence with and deviation from certain norms— that
is, its response to human aims and human instruments— that, to
use polymath Gregory Bateson’s term, they embody a “difference
1hat makes a difference.”8
 IN T R O D U C T IO N

Architecture is like the sea, or money: it falls into an intermediate

category between matter and events. It is a modulator.
 IN T R O D U C T IO N 33

There is a kind of paradox in that, one could argue, there is a greater

■ability to something like painting, where aside from the develop­
ments of interpretation and practice, the form and program of any
I'.n ticular painting remain fixed forever in their time, whereas in
.11eliitecture, ever-changing demands and uses are either accom­
modated or resisted by the building. But the very instability of the
temporal inhabitation of buildings, per se, is a part of the force that
di ives the discipline as a whole to novelty, in that it is constantly
being asked to address new and changing problems. And while such
demands can never be finally addressed, they serve as a heuristic
device to invention.

Wliat is of interest to us is distinguishing between the place of the

norm in the perpetuation model of the classical and the novelty that
emerges when architecture addresses evolving demands. This issue
nl the norm, in some sense, is related to the issue of difference, as
for example when a normative model is so elaborated upon and it
departs so much from the model from which it was derived that
it shifts from being a difference in degree to a difference in kind.
Such extreme elaboration, in the minds of conservative critics and
architects, has the unfortunate effect of shutting down highly
profitable areas of invention in a call for a return to order.

They, in effect, operate under what Gombrich characterizes as an

exclusionary principle— a reductive operation, as common in criti­
cism as it is in manifestoes. Under exclusionism, the specificity of
what is being excluded is not engaged but rather dismissed out of
hand. In functionalism, for instance, any element that would be
deemed ornamental is systematically excluded.9
34 IN T R O D U C T IO N

We see that the norms themselves, in so much as they are under­

stood as demands and necessities, are instable. They come in and
out of being and change over time. Extreme elaboration can produce
demands that never existed before. Thus, inventions may lay fallow
for a time, until they are pulled in to the social field when a receptive
context for them comes about. In this way, invention actually forms
a norm (see “Invention,” page 188).

Architectural solutions are never free of the categories they dismiss.

There is a decorative element to functionalism that exists even when
all ornament has been stripped away. Within what Gombrich calls
the sacrificial mode, by contrast, conflicting demands are more
gradually worked out through emphasis and exchange, leaving open
such possibilities as decorative function. The principle of sacrifice
“admits and indeed implies the existence of a multiplicity of values.
What is sacrificed is acknowledged to be a value even though it has
to yield to another value which commands priority.”10

Since what is built and inhabited often persists beyond the social
practices that define its use, there nevertheless exists a hierarchy of
forms and arrangements of the gross form of architecture, which
indirectly work on the more temporal arrangements that go on with­
in it. This relationship is at best probabilistic, like the continuously
changing arrangements of office furniture governed by the market
forces at work in high-rise buildings. We hold to the idea that archi­
tecture is not simply reducible to the container and the contained
but that there exists a dynamic exchange between the life of matter
and the matter of our lives.
GEOMETRY
Fineness confronts the reality that most architecture is not resolved
within the logic of a single model, a single surface, or a single mate­
rial only. Rather, architecture deals with assemblies involving mul­
tiple models, surfaces, and materials. Architecture is generally not
one continuous, monolithic thing but is made of multiple parts and
organizational models operating at different scales. Modem archi­
tecture in its various forms has dealt with these issues, but the ratio­
nalized system of construction it employs typically resolved itself as
a whole that is no greater than the sum of its parts.

The question then is how one manages or works with these diverse
organizations and elements, not merely as an accumulation of the
different but as multiplicities within an emergent organization such
that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. A proper manipu­
lation and understanding of fineness is crucial to this pursuit.

Fineness is a label that defines the culmination of techniques

described in this book. It encompasses an examination of architec­
ture at all levels of scale. Fineness breaks down the gross fabric of
building into finer and finer parts such that it can register small dif­
ferences while maintaining an overall coherence. The fineness argu­
ment is encapsulated in the densities of a sponge: too fine and it acts
like a homogenous solid; too coarse and it becomes constrained to
its members. Architecture must perform similarly, at just the right
balance between material geometry and force.
 2

Difference in Kind/Difference in Degree

We could say that classical architecture is like a game of Chess.

Following Gilles Deleuze’s analogy of the games of Chess and Go,'
architectural orders are like chess pieces: they have a clear, fixed
identity and a range of moves within that identity. Chess, finally, is
semiotic. Any transformation beyond the prescribed moves remains
in the realm of deviation, because in this system change can only be
referenced in kind, by its relation to a fixed model. The manner of
such deviation is limited to elaboration or deformation— in effect,
mannerist or baroque versions of the original.

In contrast, our work operates at times like a game of Go, wherein

each element has no intrinsic and stable meaning outside its
contextual relationships. One strand in a meshwork, or one Go piece,
is no different from another. Meaning is acquired in relation to the
specific behavior and effects we are seeking in a given zone of a
project. For example, the tension rods in a meshwork generate a
column-like zone of structure that is at once structural and atmo­
spheric. To the classicist, a column is a column and no more. Where
the classical model deploys the orderly alternation of columns and
intercolumnar spaces (infill ornament), we deploy a continuous
rod field with degrees of greater and lesser density, the denser areas
acting in a column-like manner, displaying column-like traits. These
areas shade off into zones that act predominantly as ornamental
screens. In this model, no clear distinction exists between ornament
and structure, as neither occupies distinct zones.
 The Unformed Generic: Form Acquiring Content

For you must understand that i f only you have hit o ff such an untidy com­
position in accordance with the subject, it will give all the more satisfaction
when it is later clothed in the perfection appropriate to all its parts. I have
seen shapes in clouds and on patchy walls that have roused me to beautiful
inventions o f various things, and even though such shapes totally lack finish
in any single part, they were yet not devoid o f perfection in their gestures or
other movements.
— Leonardo da Vinci, Precetti

Leonardo da Vinci’s use of the stain relies upon projecting known

content and scale into an unformed field as a means of rendering
visible program and composition. There is no specific content inher­
ent in the stain; in fact, many programs and compositions can be
projected into and emerge from the same stain using this method.
As such, the stain represents a specific form of the generic that is at
once both general and specific. That is, while able to accept a wide
range of projections, the stain is nevertheless highly differentiated
by features that guide the emergence of content specifically.

This is a precise diagram of the vague, it is a foretaste not only of

the general composition but of precise details as well. In contrast to
diagrams that plot one quantity against another, these diagrams plot
a multiplicity of axes, both qualitative and quantitative, against each
other. Such diagrams allow for the emergence of all levels of a work
at once, from the most general to the most particular. They occupy
the space between the abstract and the concrete. Like Leonardo, we
start from the middle, projecting material into a diagrammatic field.
 I
4
Similarity and Difference

You can’t have similarity without difference, and you can’t have difference
without similarity.
— Claude Lévi-Strauss

There are two general developments within the issue of similarity

and difference which are not mutually exclusive. Beyond simple
accumulations of the different, similarity can emerge out of differ­
ence and difference can emerge out of similarity. Gilles Deleuze and
Félix Guattari give the analogy of a racehorse being closer to a grey­
hound, and a draft horse being closer to an ox, than each is to the
other. Even though they look different they are similar at the level
of performance.

At the formal and organizational levels, we are moving away from an

understanding of the discrete, which in recent history has meant the
unique, toward the continuous— that is, toward an understanding
of discrete elements as part of a self-similar structure. Even though
they look similar, they behave differently.
G EO M ETR Y 45
 5
Variety (Difference) vs. Variation (Self-similarity)

Quantity is a precondition tofineness.

Repetition in multiple models is necessary to make selections.
Repetition within a single model is necessary to register differentiation.
Difference, or the possibility fo r difference, is produced as an
answer to program.

Mere quantity allows only for the quality of mere quantity. But
intensive quantity generates a whole irreducible to the sum of
its parts: in other words, whole-whole relationships.

The logic of repetition, like the logic of statistics or the logic of

information, can be applied regardless of content. This is the
crux of Edgar Allan Poe’s theory of composition.1 (See “Refrain,”
page 100.)

What becomes deeply interesting out of this method is pattern.

When tied to information (and not semantics), pattern becomes
the fundamental quantity of the diagram. A system of differential
repetition becomes a means of handling a variety of material within
the same organization.

Just as a single hair is not sufficient to make a hair-do, so too a

single element in architecture will never reveal the rich organiza­
tional possibilities inherent when greater quantities come to play.
 G EO M ETR Y 47

“Quantity has a quality all its own."

—Joseph Stalin
REISER + UMEMOTO
Flux Room Installation
Graz, Austria, 2002
 6

Part-to-Whole Relationships

From the general scheme to the particular detail, the modernist

project deals methodologically and architecturally almost exclusively
with top-down hierarchy. We do not reject the concept of hierarchy,
but rather use it in a new way. We work within a hierarchy that is not
simply nested in scale and distinct from the orders that lie above and
below it. Rather, we are using organizational principles that promote
communication across scales, in which the particular is able to affect
the general and vice versa.

This requires a methodology that involves both top-down and

bottom-up logics operating in a feedback loop. (Thus, hierarchy, in
this case, has nothing to do with power structures and everything
to do with material organization). This methodology, in contrast to
the reductive models of modernism, enables the emergence of new
organizations and new architectural effects out of wholes that are
not reducible to their parts. These emergent organizations become
legible not as parts to a whole but as whole-whole relationships.
 GEOM ETRY

left Simple Nested Hierarchy: Whole Reducible to its Parts

right Complex Hierarchy: Whole More than the Sum of its Parts
 7
After Collage: Two Conditions of the Generic

In pursuit of this new conception of the universal, we work with two

conditions beyond the modernist model of simple repetition of an
unchanging unit. After first rejecting the juxtapositional techniques
of collage as accumulations of the merely different, we posit either
an unchanging unit deployed along a variable trajectory or the
simple repetition of a variable unit. In both cases transformation
is a quality perceived through deployment in quantity. In this way
we understand the universal as the space of ubiquitous difference
rather than of a fixed and unchanging background. In this universe
difference is not fundamentally a property of particular units but
of a transformation, or set of transformations, to the group— what
Manuel DeLanda calls “progressive differentiation.”5
 GEOM ETRY

REPETITION OF HETEROGENEITY/HOMOGENEITY

Accumulation of the Merely Different

Simple Unit Repeated along Variable Trajectory

Variable Unit Repeated along Simple Trajectory

TO P Collage Architecture

m id d l e Brick Paving Pattern

bottom Variable Three-Hinged Arch
REISER + UMEMOTO
Eyebeam Museum Competition Entry
New York, New York
 8

Coherence vs. Incoherence

Internally consistent systems are inherently different from systems

of collage. To illustrate this, one could take a radio and either
condense its form until it is very small or distribute it, spreading it
out over a wide area. As long as no wires are cut the radio would still
function, it would still be a radio. This is because a radio operates
within an internal logic that doesn’t change with scale but rather
relies on ratios. It maintains its systemic coherence. A collage does
not behave that way. The collage as a technique relies on elements
being recognizably out of context, or recontextualized. It is inherently
juxtapositional. Simply collaging the elements of a radio would not
produce a functioning device.

This is not to say that collage lacks systematicity; in fact, collage,

in order to be converted into anything constructible at all, must be
represented in the form of an assembly of building components such
as studs, drywall, etc. The tectonics of collage architecture is not
collage but comprises the same subsystems one would find in any
other construction.
58 C O H E R E N C E V S . IN C O H E R E N C E

Behind even the most incoherent architecture lies the coherence of

building systems. The relationship between the formal motives and
these systems may range from radical incoherence at the volumetric
level rendered in a flexible system such as platform framing to an
intermediate level, as, for example, in the Gehry House, where col­
lage at the overall level of organization is modulated by the systems
of construction.

Still another process unfolds when two apparently indifferent yet

coherent systems come together and imprint on one another to
form a third, coherent system. This is the case in the Bordeaux house
where indifferent and frankly structural and-building systems are
enlisted in domestic service. The example given by Gilles Deleuze
and Felix Guattari is the wasp and the orchid. The wasp’s body is
formed on the shape of the orchid as the orchid is formed on the
shape of the wasp. While both are engaged in completely inde­
pendent activities, the one actually augments the other. The wasp
pollinates the orchid, but its interests lie somewhere else entirely;
pollination is merely a consequence of unrelated actions.3It is an
example of the effects of profound indifference. Architectural sys­
tems are not human relationships; like nature, they are impersonal,
yet habitation is augmented by the pressures of their indifference.
 G EO M ETR Y 59

top Michael Rotondi/RoTo, Dorland Mountain Dwelling

m id d l e Frank Gehry/FOGA, Gehry House
BO TTO M Rem Koolhaas/OMA, Bordeaux House
R E IS E R + U M E M O T O

West Side Convergence Competition Entry

New York, New York, 1999
 9
A New Understanding of Difference

Looking at many trees we fin d that some have structural features in com ­
mon and fo rm a genus or species. This species manifests itse lf in every indi­
vidual tree asfa r as resistant m atter allows, and though individual trees
may therefore differ, their differences are merely “accidental” compared to
the essence they share.
— S ir E . H. G om brich, “N orm and Form":

If idealist difference is understood as deviation from a transcenden­

tal model, then essentialist difference is understood as serial acci­
dent, like the variations in blush in a crate of peaches. If you buy one
thousand tiles, or one thousand mass-produced custom teapots, you
will see this kind of variation in the form or patina of each.

Sanford Kwinter introduces a third idea in his example of how one

reads facial expressions.4 The smile is not a deviation from a straight
face but a whole in and of its own. Neither do we see the face in a
nominalist way, entirely unique and disconnected from other faces,
nor is its expression accidental and thus referred back to an essence.

It is instructive to look at how variation enters the social field for an

analogy. Mass-customization is most successful when mobilized in
some larger construct rather than as individualized units marketed
and released into society in isolation from the rest of the series.
 G EO M ETR Y

7. Seed: S um of all previous

qualities

6 . Fruit: Expansion

5. Sexual Organs: Contraction

4 . Corolla: Expansion

3. Calyx: Contraction
(S tem contracts tow ard calyx)

2 . Stem : Expansion

(Cotyledons: Duality appears)

I. Seed: Contraction

Goethe's Essential Plant:

Essential Features Described in Terms o f Potentials
64 A N E W U N D E R S T A N D IN G OF D IF F E R E N C E

In the latter case their differences only bear an abstract relationship

to the whole. Whereas when you start to look at variations in a field,
difference is no longer isolated but forms emergent wholes not
reducible to the sum of their parts. That is their abstract status, but
it is their deployment that is the crucial issue. Granted, such vari­
ation can be deployed at any scale, but there is a range outside of
which the system becomes invisible. At micro scales they merely
act as decorative texture; conversely, at an extreme macro scale such
difference becomes imperceptible and in that sense meaningless.
It would, for example, be absurd to suggest continuous variation in
the joints of superhighways. It is at the middle to large scale— the
space of mass reception— that there seems to be both an economy
and a need for variation.

This notion of difference applies across a range of scales, from the

very small to the veiy large. The proper use o f continuous variation
consists in taking a molecular population and deploying it as a molar
or large-scale aggregate, thus making the statistical variation compre
hensible and visible for a certain quantity. In this way it becomes a
living datascape.
A Teenager's Mouth
 10

Selection vs. Classification

Besides the avoidance o f essentialist thinking, Deleuze’s speculation about

virtuality is guided by the closely related constraint o f avoiding typological
thinking, that style o f thought in w hich individualism is achieved through
the creation o f classifications and o f form al criteria fo r membership in
those classifications.
— Manuel DeLanda, Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy

Typology plays a significant role within material practice. It allows

for a clear selection of architectural organization from among the
almost limitless possibilities available today. By selecting a particu­
lar typological model we are able to make a correlation, as a modern­
ist would, between a crude typology and functional or structural
criteria. We see typology as extending beyond Manuel DeLanda’s
parsing of Gilles Deleuze. Typology is not only useful as a form of
classifying something at the end of a process but also as a crude
device for use in the design process.

Cu m ulu s S tra tu s C irrus

Cloud Types
 G EO M ETR Y 67

Till s requires a réévaluation of each type within a range of flexibility

K d transformative possibilities. Indeed in this model rather than
Binscendent type, types transcend themselves. In contrast to
l|iin Nicolas-Louis Durand’s conception that type is a limited com-
Bpatorial set of classical elements chosen with respect to their civic
propriety, our deployment of type allows for the selection of a range,
BOt a fixed model. Without precluding mutability and nuance, we
limit the model working within by selecting certain parameters.

R|e selection of a typology now leads to a process within a limited

H i e of constraints roughly set by type. DeLanda calls these “pro-
Mriptive constraints.” Based on assumptions of what a type cannot—
Of will not-— do, they leave open limits on what it necessarily can do or
Will ilo: “not what to do, but what to avoid doing.”6Typology is, thus,
H | a classification or codification than it is the basis for a process
«constrained material expressions. Selection is an element of the
■Iterative, of the field of forces that contribute to the instantiation of
licliitecture. Once the artifact is complete, there is another selective
Bpcess based on the performative— the constellation of programs
Bid activities that play out in the architecture. This classification of
|M1ipe-rties involves grouping figures “by their response to events that
0Ci ur to them.”7 Such selection has more to do with the establish-
K ffit of a bias or tendency than of a category.

Planar Linear P unctual

Crude Types
68 SE L E C T IO N V S. C L A S SIF IC A T IO N

R U N N IN G A L L T H E H O R S E S A T O N C E :

A C A S E S T U D Y IN D E S IG N IN G F R O M A C R U D E T Y P E

T h e com plex form of this geodetic footbridge is the result of a sim ple m anipulation of

a planar type. From plane, it is first rolled into a tube. Slits are then c ut in the top of

the tube from the edge to points nearly m eeting in the center a nd flaps are unfolded

dow n from these slits. O nce the planar form is developed, it is still merely a s u rfa c e ,«

featureless prim itive w ith no thickness or dim ension. T h is is the cru x of the fineness

argum ent and w h at distinguishes o u r practice from those con cerned m erely w ith the

m anipulation of geom etry. W e assum e th a t there is a threshold point at w h ich scale

and material becom e w ed to geom etry. T h is requires that w e con sid e r not sim ply the

geom etrical prim itive but that there exists, em bedded in the prim itive, other orders
 G EO M ETR Y 69

levels of geom etry that are n ecessary to a final m aterialization. Deleuze refers to

as the “analogical m odulator .’’8It is therefore not enough to stop at the geom etry
ned throu gh the m anipulation of a single type; rather, m oving beyond the gen era l-

geom etric prim itive requires w o rking w ith em bedded, finer patterns of o rg an iza-

Hon w ithin the overall prim itive that both enable and make visible the con ne ction

teen geom etry a nd matter. T h is process, however, does not inevitably lead to one
Serial outcom e but instead offers the possibility of different m aterial instantiations.

planar type, in this case, is rendered m aterially as a linear netw ork deployed along

■in face, resulting in a geodetic m esh. H ow ever, once the geodetlcs are determ ined,

final instantiation could be carried out in a range of materials, each feeding back

into the geom etry a ccordin g to their specific properties.

MATTER
 11
Intensive and Extensive

I f we divide a volum e o f m atter into two equal halves we end up w ith two
volum es, each h a lf the extent o f the original one. Intensive properties on the
other hand are properties such as temperature or pressure, w hich cannot be
so divided.
— Manuel DeLanda, Intensive Science and Virtual Philosoph

The most important distinction in our changed notions of architec­

tural design is the shift from geometry as an abstract regulator of the
materials of construction to a notion that matter and material behav­
iors must be implicated in geometry itself. In the older models, the
sovereign role of geometry was to regulate or impress itself upon the
irrational and accidental condition of matter, thus measurement,
proportion, and all of the elements of pure extension maintain a
priority over that which they regulate. The new model must be under­
stood not as a supercession of measuring but as the interplay between
intensive and extensive differences.

Intensive differences, also known as gradients, are properties of matter

with indivisible difference, such as weight, elasticity, pressure, heat,
density, color, and duration. Any intensive property that is halved
maintains an equal property in each half. In other words, a pot of
boiling water, when split in half, is just as hot as it was when it was
whole. In contrast, extensive properties are properties of matter with
divisible differences, such as measurement, constraints, limits, codes/
rules, modulation, mass, total volume, and time. If a pot of boiling
water is split in half, each half has half the mass of the whole.
 M ATTER

left Intensive Difference: Gradient Field

R IG H T Extensive Difference: Scalar System
74 IN T E N S IV E A N D E X T E N S IV E

We must not fall into the trap of saying that the extensive is quanti­
tative and the intensive, qualitative. In fact, the one is simply quan­
titative, and the other, since it is inherently embedded in a material
field, exists always as quantitative and qualitative. Of course, the
poets will say that there absolutely is an intensive dimension to 5:00
p m , just as the artist will say that certain extensive measurements,
such as human proportions or the golden section, resonate with the
soul. But in both cases, one might argue that the effective aspects of
the number arise as a result of their context and for material reasons.
In the first case the number is not merely clock time but a time of
day, with material dimensions, and in the second there is an imme­
diacy to that thing which acquires a proportion as material, without
recourse to a transcendent system.

The relationship between the intensive and the extensive has always
underlayed the minor arts and craft practices and a dimension of
certain specialized forms of architectural design, such as medieval
stone masonry. But it wasn’t possible to fit it into the economy of all
but the most specialized building production. Nineteenth-century
technology and the mechanization process marginalized that dimen­
sion of practice at the scale of architecture because it couldn’t be
easily systematized, nor was it susceptible to standardization— two
prevailing processes of modernization. Above all, philosophically,
it didn’t seem to fit into essentialist notions o f rationality that
governed not only the fabric of building but its organization as well.

The legacy of the essentialist approach to architecture, which elevates

rationality (mainly in the lineaments of geometry) above matter,
precludes the productive and rich capacity of matter to define or
influence geometry. Allowing this dynamic to operate is especially
important not so much in the realm of new materials for architec­
ture but as a way of reconceiving tectonics and organization.
7« IN T E N S IV E A N D E X T E N S IV E

If a q u a n tity o f m atte r is divided into tw o equal parts,

each p a rt will have the sam e value o f the original,
an d h alf the value of the extensive properties....

Intensive (Gradients):
Behaviors o f Matter, Indivisible Difference
 M ATTER 77

Tw o extensive p ropertie s add u p in a sim ple way,

intensive p ropertie s do no t add up, b u t rather average.
— M a nu e l D eLanda, Intensive Science and V irtual Philosophy

Total Volum e T im e M ovem ent

Extensive:
System of Measurement, Divisible Difference
 12

Geometry and Matter

His journeym an, the monk-mason Garin de Troyes, speaks o f an operative

logic o f movement enabling the “initiate” to draw, then hew the volumes
“in penetration in space,” to make it so that “ the cutting line propels the
equation” (le trait pousse le chiffre). One does not represent, one engenders
and traverses. This science is characterized less by the absence o f equa­
tions than by the very different role they play: instead o f being good form s
absolutely that organize matter, they are “generated” as “forces o f thrust”
(poussees) by the material, in a qualitative calculus o f the optim um ....
Royal, or State, science only tolerates and appropriates stone cutting
by means o f templates (the opposite o f squaring), under conditions that
restore the primacy o f the fix e d model o f fo rm , mathematical figures, and
measurement. Royal science only tolerates and appropriates perspective i f
it is static, subjected to a central black hole divesting it o f its heuristic and
ambulatory capacities.
— Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus

The management of intensive and extensive difference establishes

the motives and the limits for a materialist approach to architecture.
To what degree one model is used and at what stage and where it
gives over to the other are the questions for the art today. Extensive
models define limits, but they are not generative. Conversely, models
of pure difference without the limits that extensive models provide
will never acquire the stable definition that architecture, however
dynamic, demands.
8o G EO M ETR Y A N D M A T T ER

The logic of nomad science recognizes the creative capacities of the

matter field and harnesses intensive variability. This has historically
been the engine for the unforeseen to emerge in the design process.
Codified systems of templating, or even the use of drawing conven­
tions like plan, section, and elevation, are, in contrast, self-limiting
techniques. Nomad and State geometries correlate with the two
complementary roles for geometry in architectural practice— the
intensive and extensive. One sees geometry as a generative tool; the
other sees geometry as a way of domesticating matter within metri­
cal space. In working drawings, for example, forms are translated
to coordinate space for the purpose of invariant communication,
even i f the coordinate system was not used as a generative tool. This
is a process that goes back as far as the conventions of architectural
drafting and projection. Plan, section, and elevation were originally
formulated as a system for measuring archeological ruins; only later
did they get turned into projective instruments.1

Geometry derived from fields of intensive difference in matter can

be used generatively. These gradient fields are understood as trans­
scalar and flexible but in order to operate architecturally must be
scaled precisely by being brought into relationship with extensive
models. The creative tendency of intensive fields and the codifying
tendency of extensive fields do not merely work in succession. Like
working drawings following creative sketches, there must be reci­
procity between the two. Extensive units form limits, tympanum
against which the creative forces in the intensive space resound.
While such limits are not creative in and of themselves, they make
novelty possible through the function of their constraints.
 M ATTER

T h e m ost radical surface/space im plications of M e isso nier’s

architecture are realized in his m etalsm ithing, a rococo space freed
from the classical im perative to dom esticate rocaille as decoration.

top The Thyssen Meissonier Tureen

bottom Signature on the Tureen, Reading
“Made by I. A. Meissonier, Architect”
 13

Folly o f the Mean

First then we m ust consider this fact: that it is in the nature o f moral
qualities that they are destroyed by deficiency and excess.
— Aristotle, Nicomachian Ethi

For a variety of reasons, architecture and engineering have inherited

the mean, as described in Aristotelian Ethics, as a virtue. In our work,
we are looking instead at conditions that are both too fast or too slow,
too small or too large to be described by the average or the mean.
Indeed, it seems that the extremes have a way of working together to
produce new possibilities. Indeed, architecture considered materially
acquires a dynamic balance not through the mean but through poise.
There is a kind of degree zero essentialism, not unlike the essential-
ism of the modernist project, in Aristotle’s argument regarding the
concept of the mean: first, that things can have the quality of being
too small or too large, and second, that there is a certain virtue to
inhabiting the mean. The mean is justified initially in terms of
human conduct and then gets transferred to the world of matter as
matter in turn is anthropomorphized. This is a kind of magic. As an
extension of the argument that classicism is linked to cosmology,
or world-building, in which man occupies a privileged position, the
analogy is clear. Proportional systems and orders formed upon the
mean— the basis of classical architecture— purport to carry a magical
connection between the human and the universe. But as abstractions,
these proportional systems have only the most distant relationship
to their referents. Fixated on ideas, by the idea, the architect becomes
blinded to the thing itself.
 M ATTER 83

A state of poise is not an average or a m ean in the Aristotelian sense, and while
operating in a state of poise m ay incorporate extrem es, it does not seek e q u i-
I librium throu gh w ea ken ing of excess o r deficiency. Rather, it seeks a d ynam ic
tension betw een them . If the first c h art refers to classically heroic virtu es (o r lack
thereof), the se co nd refers to a more m odern con ce ption of the a nti-h ero ic, in
w h ich con tra d ic to ry attributes coexist w ith in the sam e subject.

T O P Heroic

bottom Anti-heroic

c
 H

Classical Body/Impersonal Individuation

Instead of relying on analogy and proportion, sublimating the body

to measurement and abstract geometry, our work aims to exceed the
definition of the body as an organism and likewise an organism’s
experiential field. In fact, that kind o f abstraction is simply not
abstract enough. Ours is therefore not an argument about phenom­
enology but an organizational principle of architecture that under­
stands architecture as a great body, or an assemblage of bodies, that
cut across a wide range of scalar and material regimes. While the
phenomenological could be understood as a special case of this work,
it is impossible to simply use embodied experience, or phenomena,
as a generative model. There is no organizational principle in architec'
ture directly linked to phenomenology. In fact, all architecture can
be understood phenomenologically. As a result, phenomenological
architecture typically lapses into some form of modernism for the
purpose of organizing space. Such a phenomenological practice could
never propose a new architecture, only a projection upon existing
systems.

One of the great claims of phenomenology is its return to the human,

or more precisely, its capacity as an antidote to the dehumanizing
effects of positivism and modernization. We are concerned less with
whether the broad sweep of humanism is effective against inhuman­
ity than with identifying particular concepts associated with a human­
istic outlook as being ineffective in general. We question whether there
is a connection between the humanism of classical models and human

1
 M ATTER »5

Behavior at all. We contend that humanism was never terribly humane

SO begin with. Architecture should seek less to be an abstraction of
tlu- lineaments of the body and more to engage the body’s effective and
kffective spectrum. It is a faulty assumption that patterning architec-
lure on the body makes it human. Just as it is a faulty assumption that
Hie body is the pattern of the universe.

leaking architecture anthropocentric in order to deal with movement

Or change in fact makes it much more limiting. Architecture acquires
the images or proportions of a body when the architect is working
through a sublimated representation of a body rather than the body
Itself. Such practice is analogous to creating an architecture around
■Fordist model, in which analyses of movement create an envelope
■lat in turn becomes building or infrastructure. The logic of this
practice fails as soon as you make the envelope of the building the
■me as that of the body.

Anthropocentrism is representational and is the most limiting when

B is applied at the scale of the body. We prefer architecture to engage
■hat a body can actually do. A skateboarding ramp, for instance, is
Bel patterned on a human. Rather, it is an intervening technology
that belongs to a totally different pattern of order upon which the
Bliinan works. The ramp augments the body; it is an extension of the
hmly via the vehicle of the skateboard, but it does not represent it.

Illch an extension of performance belongs to a larger class of singu­

larities known as impersonal individuations. Like the sunset or a
‘time of day, these intense and unique conditions emerge out of the
material world. They have manifold meanings projected onto them,
luit they are not the product of meaning. Architecture belongs to
jpiis class of individuality. It hosts the highly specific but is open and
general at the same time.
 15

Material Organizations

Mies’s constraint of matter by ideal geometry is based on an essen-

tialist notion: that matter is formless and geometry regulates it,
that geometry is transcendental and in some sense indifferent to
the material that substantiates it.

When freed from such essentializing conceptions, matter proves to

have its own capacity for self-organization. As an analog computer,
it can perform optimizing computations that have been shown to
be trans-scalar; as for example, when stretched stockings are vised
to calculate the geometry and form of full-scale tensile structures.

This logic, however, can be expanded to more complex situations, as,

for example, when a magnetized ferrofluid calculates in a dynamic
balance the forces of magnetism, gravity, and surface tension.
In this state, matter is much more dynamic and pregnant with the
possibility of its own constraints and leniencies than any projected
geometry or simple optimizing principle could render. It becomes
a model not only for dealing with structure but for dealing with the
feedback that occurs between multiple forces at work on a building,
encompassing program, use, organization, and form.
 M A TTE R

M iesian Essentialism : Sim ple Optim ization:

M atter as an A c cid en t to G eom etry M aterial as an A n alog Com pu te r

H r" 1

t Index of M atter/Force: W a te r Garden of M ic ro-g rad ien ts:

M aterial B ehavior in a Incarnated M aterial Diagram
M ultidim ensional Force Field
 i6

Matter/Force Relationships

A genealogy of emerging matter/force relationships may be charted

from the simple to the complex. In the simplest case, forces are hid­
den within the post and beam assembly. Through the device o f enta­
sis, the forces that are hidden in post-and-beam construction are
represented. This representation, however, never expands beyond
the single member, and it remains semantic, merely a sign of weight.

In the ribbed concrete slab of Pier Luigi Nervi’s Gatti Wool Mill in
Rome, of 1951, the matter/force relationship is expressed through
the materialization of isostatic lines in the waffle to represent sim­
ply supported plates under uniform loads.2 Nervi, an engineer, rep­
resents the ideal situation by putting material where the theoretical
force lines lie. This is a self-fulfilling prophesy, as forces flow where
the matter goes. If Nervi had configured the waffle otherwise, the
forces would flow otherwise. Despite the appearance of an optimiz­
ing logic, this design by Nervi is architectural, as much an act of will
as a solution to a problem of statics.

Nonetheless, Nervi was unwilling to overcome the disciplinary

boundary beyond structure to influence other levels of organization
and program. Indeed, the imperative to optimize toward structural
efficiency inherent in the ethic of modernist engineering precludes
these possibilities. From structure, to program, to effects, we seek
to proliferate this relationship between matter and force across all
elements of a building.
 M ATTER

P o st-a n d -B e a m :
Forces H idden in the Assem bly

Entasis:
Forces R epresented in a
D iscrete M em ber

W affle Slab Following Isostatic Lines:

Forces Expressed in Discrete Zones

Voronoi W affle:
Forces Expressed across S ystem s
from S tru ctu re to S pa ce to Program

Genealogy of Matter/ Force

 17

From a Static to an Oscillatory Model

(and Back Again)

The process of moving out of a nested hierarchy involves increasing

communication between the once discrete domains of structure an
ornament. This can be illustrated through an examination of emerg­
ing structure/infill structure/ornament relations (see diagram, pag
94-95). The modernist pair establishes a clear distinction between
regions. Structure and infill are discrete entities, with structure act­
ing to define zones of infill. In the nascent emergent, limited oscil­
lations develop within which structure and infill remain discrete yet
perturbations in the structure act to inflect the zones of infill.
In the emergent pair intense oscillation results in emergent singu­
larities or features that are not reducible to constituent elements.

Finally, in the neo-modernist pair, a threshold of scale and intensity

is crossed. Beyond it, difference becomes overabundant and produce
similarity. Such white noise is consistent with a high-level homo­
geneity, as, for example, in structural glass, in which structure and
infill are assimilated to the point that they become one and the same.
This pairing is an abstract synthesis, like an argument. It requires
no material experimentation, only external logic. In contrast, the
emergent pair shows a moment of poise. A phase transition only
possible through experimentation in a material field.
 M ATTER 93

¡I

■■Order for this kind of process to be effective, an element of fineness

■lecessaiy: a delicate attentiveness to precision and scale. A gross
flgtn r-ground distinction, showing structure and infill, for instance,
■ in su fficien t. The transmission o f effects across a field is impos-
llblc when a dialectical relationship occurs from the start. The differ-
■t zones of structure and infill have first to be described as a field
'§( »imilarity in order for them to register difference. This establishes
H hn as densities in a common field gradient.
94 FRO M A S T A T IC TO A N O SC ILLA T O R Y M O D EL

Nested H iera rch y D ifference Expressed

w ithin a D efined Region

U n iform ity w ithin Initial Vibration

Ea ch Region Established

t i

Post and Beam Isostatic Slab

Orthodox: Heterodox:
Modernist Nascent Emergent
 M ATTER

I
Com m un ication across W hite Noise
R egions and Levels

V ibration Generates A n O vera bu nd an ce of D ifference

Singularities P rod uces Sim ilarity

Ik

ir

S tru c tu ra l Glass

Heterodox: Orthodox:
Emergent Neo-modemist
 18

Operating in a State o f Poise

The most pregnant tectonics may be found in that intermediate state 1

between two forms of optimization. For example, on one extreme we I
might encounter a classical modernist infill structure, where there I
is a clear articulation of structure-infill/structure-ornament. Here
structure, guided by standardization and efficiency, delimits and
constrains what is in between. At the other extreme, this dialectic is I
materially and semantically synthesized. Over-optimized technology, 1
in solving the problem by erasing it, advances the early modernist
ambition for architecture to become “almost nothing.” In becoming |
too smooth, in reducing difference to total homogeny, the model
actually loses qualities.

The middle condition occupies a moment of dynamic poise, where

systems on their way toward optimization display singular features
that are, by varying degrees, structural and ornamental. The result­
ing structure/ornament gradient is less autonomous than in the other I
two models. The virtue of the middle condition lies in the range of
its ambient effects, its reciprocity to program, and its channeling
of movement within the spaces it encloses. In contrast, a system like
structural glass creates a completely homogenous spatial effect. Its
only logic lies in resisting structural forces with the least amount of j
material difference.
 M ATTER 97

on Its W a y to. H om ogenized H iera rch y

Coherent, N o n -lin e a r Coherent, Linear

Heterodox S ystem O rth od ox System

left Infill Structure

M ID D LE Rod Truss

R IG H T Structural Glass
 Poise in an Allied Discipline

The desire for a pure structural skin, an optimal condition for air­
craft, becomes a limiting factor for architecture. Where the contra­
dictions of structure and skin are resolved too smoothly they lose
architectural potential. In aviation technology, geodetics geometri­
cally and structurally registers the transition from a skeleton model,
derived from the technology o f boat-building, to a pure structural
skin model. While the ultimate resolution of this technologically
is monocoque construction, we find that the geodetic moment
displays greater capacity for structural variation and adaptability.
The monocoque shell skin, in contrast, optimizes toward a single
function— structural economy.
 20
Refrain

A salient architecture requires, first, the consideration of effects

over history and narrative.

There is a radical error, I think, in the usual mode o f constructing a story.

Either history affords a thesis— or one is suggested by an incident o f the
day....I prefer commencing w ith the consideration o f an effect. Keeping
originality always in view— fo r he is fa lse to h im self who ventures to dis­
pense w ith so obvious and so easily attainable a source o f interest— I say
to myself, in the fir s t place, “O f the innumerable effects, or impressions, o f
w hich the heart, the intellect, or (more generally) the soul, w hat one shall
I, on the present occasion, select?
— Edgar A llan Poe, On C o m p o sitio n
yknd second, the establishment o f complex repetition.

As commonly used the refrain, or burden, not only limited to lyric verse,
fat dependsfo r its impression upon theforce o f monotone— both in sound
pnd thought. The pleasure is deduced solely from the sense o f identity— o f
«petition. I resolved to diversify, and so vastly heighten, the effect, by
I dhering, in general, to the monotone o f sound, while I continually varied
that of thought: that is to say, I determined to produce continuously novel
Meets, by the variation o f the application o f the refrain— the refrain itself
remaining, fo r the most part, unvaried.
— Edgar Allan Poe, On Composition
102 R E FR A IN

Edgar Allan Poe’s discussion o f com position begins w ith a mood,

rhythm, or refrain that only later acquires a narrative. Indeed, the
refrain from “The Raven,” “nevermore” went into the poem before
the raven did, in order to generate a certain tonal effect. The nar­
rative came only later, at the end. Continuous variation w ithin a
homogenous refrain is also a means o f m odulating the possible
duration o f an effect. Variations in thought are generated around
the same sound, changing its tone. “Nevermore” is like a zero and a
one, it is objectively meaningless repetition read through in various
narratives. It is an expression o f a certain tone and intensity with
variable emotional resonances projecting from it, including humor.
Nevermore is the migration o f a diagram.

Just as in Sigmund Freud’s account o f nightmares, or in the comic

repetition o f slapstick, the content o f the narrative is arbitrary; it can
in fact be something utterly banal. It is the speed or slowness o f its
repetition which causes the fear or the laughter.
 21

Exchanges among Systems

A systemic ecology is established in the relationships o f exchanges

among structure, effects, ornament, and program. As compared to
twentieth-century expressionism, w hich foregrounds the formal
and emotive characteristics o f architecture as the product o f a purely
personal sensibility, we regard expression as the properly impersonal
capacity o f matter and material systems, in w hich human w ill and
intentionality play a part but are not the sole determinants. The
architect is, in effect, neither a passive observer o f determined sys­
tems nor a determined manipulator o f passive material, but rather,
the manager o f an unfolding process.

For example, shifting the placement o f the chim ney in the density
o f the rod truss as it accomodates the change in the stress field of
the facade. The consequences o f this shift are twofold: First in the
ambient effects related to the density o f the "skin” and consequently
in the locations o f the partitions and live load (i.e., people and furni­
ture) within the space.
 MATTER

CO M PO N EN TS AR R AN G EM EN TS

R od T ru s s

Plate

Option B

Colum n

O p tion C

C h a n g in g density in a rod tru ss responds to shifting location of internal

su pp ort a nd program s: a play betw een structure , program , and effects.

 22

Intensive and Extensive II

How the components that comprise an automobile engine m ix is

conditioned by an array o f com peting lim its both intensive and
extensive. Theoretically, given unlimited space to expand, the engine’l
parts might very well develop as an expanded grid consisting o f linkec
yet distinct entities. But this is a distant abstraction, divorced from
material realities. Given the very real limits exerted on the one hand
by the envelope o f the car (the extensive limit) and on the other hand,
by the necessary proxim ity o f mechanical, chemical, and electrical
components o f propulsion (the intensive limits), a mediating assem­
bly such as an engine block must accommodate and incorporate thes(
functions and influences within limited space. In doing so it molds
tightly around cylinders and crank shafts, while sprouting numeroul
appendages and attachment points for the systems that feed its
organs, all the while growing w ithin a highly defined lim it o f the
body shell.

The same relationships are present at the scale o f architectural

organization. Under a purely extensive model, compression would
lead to a simple rescaling o f the organizational system, a shrinking
o f the ordinates and the coordinates. In an intensive model,
however, performance and proportion enter new relationships as
scale changes.
io8 IN T E N S IV E A N D E X T E N S IV E II

Looking at the process in reverse, when intensive limits are loosened,

extensive controls increase. For example, as information technologiei
become dematerialized (paradoxically, by becoming more intense),
the typical office program ceases to have a one-to-one relationship
w ith the technologies that function within it. Paraphernalia and
function, in taking up space, simultaneously force the workplace to
represent what it does. W ith the dematerialization o f function, hard­
ware shrinks, and the fit between program and space becomes looser.
This opens up the possibility for two very different conceptions of
the function and atmosphere o f the workplace. The first, an extra­
polation o f the modernist model, would ordain a featureless white-
box container for dematerialized technology. The second recognizes
the opportunity for an entirely different ambient space— one that
may very well have functions that, by having nothing to do w ith the
business at hand, actually augment it.
 O ld O ffic e S p a c e :
P a ra p h e rn a lia a n d F u n c tio n T a k e U p
S p a c e a n d R e p re s e n t W h a t T h e y D o

N e w O ffic e S p a c e :
D e m a te ria liza tio n o f F u n c tio n S h rin k s
H a rd w a re a n d E x p a n d s S o ft S p a c e s , an
E x tra p o la tio n w ith o u t Q u a litie s

E xten sive: T h e O ffice Space

 23
Machinic Phylum

Gilíes Deleuze and Felix Guattari have suggested that [the] abstract
reservoir o f machinelike solutions common to physical systems as diverse
as clouds,flames, rivers, and evenphylogenic lineages o f living creatures,
be called the “ machinic phylum”— a term that would indicate how non­
linearflow s o f matter and energy spontaneously generate machinelike
assemblages when internal or external pressures reach a critical level,
which only afew abstract mechanisms can account for. In short, there
is a single machinic phylum fo r all the different living and nonliving
phylogenetic lineages.
— Manuel DeLanda, Non-organic Life

The “machinic phylum” o f Deleuze and Guattari describes the same

non-nested hierarchy as the continuum theorized by the engineer
Robert Le Ricolais. Le Ricolais suggests that matter, material, con­
structional systems, structural configurations, space, and place
comprise a continuous spectrum rather than isolated domains.
Such an understanding provides a model for organizing forces and
their effects that is communicative, reverberating across scales and
regimes.3

Le Ricolais’s studies o f column failure are a specific instance o f this

model in operation. Transcending the purely geometric generation
o f a structure, Le Ricolais is interested in the new geometries that
arise as a consequence o f the column’s deformation on the way to
112 M A C H IN IC PH Y LU M

failure. Thus, material behavior takes an active role in the genesis of

new structural forms. Moreover, the forces that act on the component
model behave diagrammatically, in that they can be rescaled to those
o f an entire tower.4

Like the relationship between intensive and extensive logics, or the

relationship between matter force logics and codification systems,
architects are inevitably implicated in the tension between the gen­
erative and lim iting poles o f both. The potentials that flow o ff o f this
tension inevitably find their expression w ithin multiple levels, from
the non-human stu ff o f construction to the character o f a building’s
occupation. This burgeoning machinic reservoir is tapped through
the agency o f the diagram.
 M A TTER «3

K t
.
s / / \
\
’ / ( \ / 1
)( \
I
\
/ V

/ ? \\
i \
}
\ \ f \ \ \ / \ a
1
f ) ( \
)( /
/ V
> \

T h ird O rd e r of Failure T h e B ea uty of Failure

H ■

The Beauty o f Failure:

From Le R icolais’s Experiments w ith Autom orphic Tubes
 24

The Diagram

In short, it often happens that o f theforces in action in a system some vary as

one power and some as another, o f the masses, distances or other magnitudes
involved; the “dimensions” remain the same in our equations o f equilibrium,
but the relative values alter with scale. This is known as the “Principle o f
Similitude,” or o f dynamical similarity, and it and its consequences are of
great importance. In a handful o f matter cohesion, capillarity, chemical
affinity, electric charge are all potent; across the solar system gravitation
rules supreme; in the mysterious region o f the nebulae, it may haply be that
gravitation grows negligible again. ,..[T]he effect o f scale depends not on
a thing in itself, but in relation to its whole environment or milieu; it is in
conformity with the thing’s “place in Nature,” itsfield o f action and reaction
in the Universe.
— D'Arcy Thompson, On Magnitude

Material organizations at the macro scale m ust o f necessity be

modelled in order to predict or track changes to their behavior.
Thus an analog connection m ust be made to micro scale. Macro­
organizations o f material behavior can be approximated at smaller
scales, but adjustments are necessary as the system becomes rendered
in a more intensive or more extensive model. For instance, a model
airplane cannot be exactly scaled down and expected to operate in
flight, because the behavior o f airflow and lift is not consistent at the
smaller scale. For this reason, operable model airplanes m ust undergo
deformation in the wing according to a coefficient o f scale dictated
by a dimensionless parameter known as the Reynold’s Number.
116 T H E D IA G R A M

A i96os-era model o f a water table approximated by networks o f

resistors and transistors, is an example o f an analog model at a small
scale o f larger scale properties. First pump tests at square mile inter­
vals calculate average values o f capacity and flow for the water table.
These values are represented by resistors and transistors in an elec­
trical field. The behavior o f material at one scale allows scientists to
predict its behavior at another.

The implications o f this scalability o f material behaviors has far-

reaching implications for architecture.

The medium o f these implications is the diagram, which provides

an abstract model o f materiality. Such a diagram can be derived
from any dynamic system at any scale. A close tracking o f a certain
dynamic (temperature, pressure, wind speed, etc.) can be mapped
as a gradient field that can be abstracted from its origins or its
material source. A diagram o f relationships, not o f scale, emerges.
Or, more precisely, the diagram is a field o f relationships awaiting
a scale and a materiality. This elastic yet precise diagram thus can
acquire other material systems such as architecture and have the
capacity to affect those systems in ways specific only to architecture.

Representation always ties its meaning to an origin, while in a

trans-scalar diagram origins are irrelevant; it is how they are finally
instantiated that matters.
 25

Diagram Deployment

Using the same diagram at different scales can produce drastically

different effects. Diagrams considered conventional at the large end
o f the spectrum— the scale o f the city or the neighborhood— or at
the small end— the scale o f clothing— are regarded as radical at the
middle scales o f architecture. They resist traditional architectural
arrangement and tectonics at these scales; These territorial infringe­
ments on scale are among the most difficult to operate well within, '
but they can be most rewarding when successfully negotiated.

C O N V E N T IO N A L / U N C O N V E N T IO N A L / C O N V E N T IO N A L /
L E S S IN T E R E S T IN G IN T E R E S T IN G L E S S IN T E R E S T IN G
 M ATTER

Larger than a Building and Smaller than a City

A t this scale the form , w hile alien as a b uild in g type, begins to becom e
coextensive w ith urb an netw orks, the natural/artificial geography of the city.

A t the Scale o f the Landscape, the Form Appears Natural Again

A t this scale both the form and the n etw ork have slipped back into
conventional relationships: folds a ppear in cloth and rock alike.
 26

Fineness and the Macroscale

In his paper “On Being the Right Size,” the Marxist geneticist and
biometrist J. B. S. Haldane, famous for self-experimentation unde
extreme conditions, systematically illustrates why it; would be im
sible to linearly re-scale a small animal into a large one or vice ver
Bones begin to fail under their own weight; the grip o f surface ten­
sion becomes impossible to sustain w ith a shift in scale from the
small to the large. Likewise in architecture, the inherent scalabili
o f the material diagram does not directly correlate to the scalabili
o f material behavior. Rather, there is a particular material and scale(
for instance, to the behavior o f the dew drop that is lost when the
drop’s m orphology is formalized in a different material at a differ
ent scale. Haldane identifies the same problems in biology when
gravity overcomes forces o f surface tension: a fly dropped down a
would not be harmed in the least, while “a fly once wetted by water
any other liquid is in a very serious position indeed.”5Assuming thad
the scalability o f behaviors relates directly to the scalability o f the
diagram is a logical fallacy that leads to cumbersome formal mode

When a diagram— be it the Cartesian geometry o f modernism or th

geometry o f material behavior— overcomes the matter it is being
projected into, the result becomes representational. Whenever matter 1
is sublimated to geom etiy it loses qualities— and is reduced to its
most basic reading. A mere rescaling o f a microscopic process, such
as surface tension, or macroscopic process, such as a storm, will inev
itably be read as an enlarged dewdrop or thunderhead in miniature.
 M ATTER i*3

D e w D rop

o
D ew D rop H ouse

L type of error becomes even more egregious as a result of softwar

Inertia, where the governing algorithm becomes so insistant that it
I r c e s the same expression at all levels of the project, independent of
I t architect’s w ill for or against it.

We are concerned w ith scale not as a tool for the representation of

loniething small or large at another size but rather as the transposi-
I.on of the real relationships between matter and force at one scale
B t o another.
 Fineness in Allied Fields

The collaboration o f organizational models w ithin the same object at

the extremes o f scale promise to yield new possibilities. An example I
o f this comes from the allied field o f aeronautics, where, innovations
in metallurgy, in m odeling aerodynamic behavior, and in laser
fabrication have opened up a new horizon in aeronautical design.
Increasingly, engineers have realized that diminishing returns are to I
be expected from the simple manipulation o f gross form. The very
large is synthesized w ith the very small; the very slow w ith the very
fast. The ability to fabricate the metal skins o f air foils w ith literally
millions o f laser-cut pores have radically extended the low-speed
performance o f aircraft to such a degree that their actions appear
completely counterintuitive and unnatural. The Capacity to radically
extend maneuverability in that strange, instable region at the edge
o f a stall, like the microgrooves in fabric that reduce water drag on
competitive swimwear, suggests an analogous possibility in archi­
tecture, allowing for the incorporation o f extreme yet codependent
regimes o f scale and organization. Confronting such a model would,
among other things, serve to address the apparent paradox o f the
global and the local occupying the same space.
 M ATTER

M icro sco p ic organization affects perform ance

w ith o ut n ecessarily affecting form .

La se r cuttin g m icroperforations on w in g

m aterial radically enha nces w in g perform ance.

top Swim wear Fabric w ith M icrogrooves

bottom left Microscopic M aterial M anipulation
b o t t o m r ig h t Macroscopic Performance Enhancement
 28

Interdisciplinaiy Exchange

Science is not always the source o f transdisciplinary exchanges;

sometimes there is a flip. Henri Bergson’s work in philosophy, for
instance, prefigures Bernhard Riemann’s w ork in mathematics.
Theoretical physicist Lee Smolin gives the example that solving
the structure o f amorphic geodesic pool covers led him to tensor
calculus, and then into the physics o f gravity.6Tensegrity structur
are now serving as the model for cell membranes themselves. Our
modes o f thought in architecture might indeed influence ways of
understanding the universal.7

This opens a tremendous opportunity for growth within the discipli

o f architecture. Architecture w ill always be a defective representati
o f other disciplines, hence the exhaustion o f architecture that base^
itself, for example, on cinema and literature. But there are models
that exist that are as useful to the film director in the discipline of
film-making as to the architect in the discipline o f architecture.

This suggests that the same conceptual models can migrate betwei
disciplines, where they are instantiated within the conditions and
limits inherent in those disciplines.
 M ATTER

top Structural Tensegrity

bottom Biological Tensegrity

J
REISER + U M EM O TO
West Side Conveigence Com petition Entry
New York, New York, 1999
M ATTER
 29

New Possibilities for Spatial Structures:

The Case of Geodesics/Geodetics

The current discussion regarding the tactics o f achieving formal

and programmatic heterogeneity in the realm o f architecture and
planning has occasioned a reassessment o f spatial models and tech­
nologies heretofore relegated to the scrapheap o f utopian modern
ism. Such modernist systems have come to be associated with the
structures o f a totalizing spatial ideology and an attempt to produc
homogeneous and unified architectural languages.

W ith the advent of new models for organization, changed conceptio

o f geometry and geometry’s relation to matter, and new conception*!
o f universal space, a thoroughgoing réévaluation o f the modernist
models for structuring space and the execution and delivery o f such
systems is possible. Non-repetitive tiling, fractal geometries, branc
ing systems, and unstructured grids are among the new geometries
available for use.

The geometric and structural system known as geodetics is one such,

direction we have explored. Popularized by R. Buckminster Fuller
and his followers as an architectural and urbanistic panacea, it is
presently encountered in the occasional fairground structure or
m ilitary installation, usually in the form o f a dome. Fuller’s geodet
ics have become detached from their utopian projections, but this
history has unfortunately obscured a prior and, ironically, more
open set o f possibilities in the field o f descriptive morphology and
aeronautics.
 M ATTER »33

A n idealist use of geodesics (F u lle r’s special case use of the geodetic)
insists on tw o thing s: an ideal global geo m etry in the form of a
hem isphere, and self-sim ilarity of all m odules. T h e result: extreme
exclusion and hom ogeneity— even a door is difficult to accom odate.

T h is geodetic stru c tu re modifies in tw o different w ays: the taper causes

regular reticulations to com press at the w in g tips w hile rem ainin g strictly
geodetic geom etries, and local b ran chin g allows the reticulations at the
leading and trailing edge of the w in g to close a ro un d the geom etry.

TO P Essentialized Diagram o f Geodesics: The Fuller Dome

I o tto m D ifferentiating Geodetic Structure: W ing o f the W ellington Bomber

1
»34 N EW P O SS IB IL IT IE S FO R S P A T IA L ST R U C T U R E S

Geodetics was developed by the English engineer Sir Barnes Wallis.

First used in the R-ioo Airship and later in the Vickers Wellesley,
its most famous employment was as the structure o f the Wellington
Bomber.8 Geodetics derives from the Greek term geodesis, the imagi­
nary geographical lines following the curvature o f the Earth along
straight paths. The property o f a geodetic system is to carry all loa
along the shortest possible paths, hence producing a crisscross
pattern o f self-stabilizing members by means o f w hich loads in any
direction are automatically equalized by forces in the intersecting
set o f frames. This results in a structure that is extremely light
and strong. Its durability is due, in part, to the inherent character­
istic o f extreme redundancy: if some portion o f the structure is
lost, the stresses are simply rerouted to the remaining members.
Therefore, one can say that, in distinction to most conventional
spatial-structural systems, geodetics is structurally diffuse or
nonessential.

As an aviation technology, geodetics represents something o f an

anomaly— a short-lived tributary from the mainstream technology
that tended increasingly toward stressed-skin construction. Though
geodetics was a versatile system that could conform to the intrica­
cies o f aircraft configuration, it was typically cost prohibitive due
to its inherent complexity. In effect, each airplane became a highly
crafted object that required special dies and hand-bending jigs for
each strut.

In an architectural context, however, w ith the interest in structural

systems that could engender complexity through flexibility, geodet­
ics becomes interesting precisely because, as a system, it is capable
o f adapting to complex spatial formations without a corresponding
increase in the complexity o f the system. In geodetics exact geom­
etries such as the dome are no more ideal than any number o f other
 M ATTER

volumetric configurations. Moreover, the advent o f non-standard

design and fabrication has obviated the technical difficulties
encountered in earlier employments.

In a supple employment o f geodetics one finds many properties and

possibilities. Historically and operationally, geodetics falls between
two totalizing systems: the skeletal model (structure and skin) and
t he structural skin model as a monocoque construction. In an
expanded reading, however, geodetics acts as a structural tissue or
flesh— an intermediate structure that would assemble heterogeneous
agglomerations o f space, program, and path. Moreover, geodetics is
protean in the sense that the structure has the capability o f changing
and adapting to the space that it develops in a number o f ways: by
changing the fineness or coarseness o f its reticulations; by growing
tiplying the number o f struts or crossovers; by mim icking the
es of, for example, conventional structures into or onto which
ojected; or by changing by degrees the type o f infill or skinning
carries.

iged conception o f space as a material field has thus occasioned

■réévaluation, and a new flexibility in employment, o f these once
(regular and exclusive systems. No longer, for example, must a long-
s|tsu| space be homogenous in its program, density, character, or
structure.
 30

Matter and Context

The elimination o f the extraneous, in both experiment and theory, has been
the veritable basis o f all scientific advance since the seventeenth century,
and has led us to a point where practically everything above the atom is
understood “in principle.” Sooner or later, however, science in its advance
will have exhausted the supply o f problems that involve only those aspects
o f nature that can befreshly studied in simple isolation. The great need now
isfo r concern with systems o f greater complexity, fo r methods o f dealing
with complicated nature as it exists. The artist has long been making
meaningful and communicable statements, i f not always precise ones,
about complex things. I f new methods, which will surely owe something
to aesthetics, should enable the scientist to move into more complexfields,
his area o f interest will approach that o f the humanist, and science may
even once more blend smoothly into the whole range o f human activity.
— Cyril Stanley Sm ith, A Search for Structure

An architect operating under essentialism would extract from a

natural system such as a honeycomb all that is invariant, an essen­
tial hexagonal cell, seeing all that departs from it in the model as
error or accident. We recognize those preserved errors as inherently
systematic as any pure geometry, the result o f influences from the
context or from within the system itself.

From a standpoint o f natural systems, pure form is an abstraction,

or at best a special case within a wide range o f variation.
 M ATTER

®s$ppsi?
k -k'k-k-k-k-kkk-k-k-kkk-kkk-kkk.k.i,
,'k -k 'k 'k -k ‘ k -k -k -k-k'k -k-k -k’k -m -k -k -k k -k ’
4 44 4 4
,V i% V fc > V ;V - >;k- ;k ;i;V i;« > ;

iVAVkVkVAik.ii-ii-i-fc-i-i;*

top Essential Diagram

bottom Actual Crystal Lattice w ith Singularities
Essentialized Systems vs. Systems with Singulariti

What I want to emphasize is simply that many pattern-generating processes

share with developing organisms the characteristic that spatial detail unfolds
progressively simply as a result o f the lauw o f the process. In the hydro-
dynamic example we see how an initially smooth flu id flow past a barrier
goes through a symmetry breaking event to give a spatially periodic pattern
followed by the elaboration o f a local nonlinear detail which develops out o_
the periodicity.
— Brian Goodwin, in Manuel DeLanda, Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy

The least action principle as described by Manuel DeLanda relates to

the geometry o f the geodetic, in that, defined by the shortest distance
over a curve, geodetics w ill allow for the most efficient transference
o f forces w ith the minim al amount o f material. There are two ways
o f moving within this logic. The first is by essentializing the geometry,
as R. Buckminster Fuller did in his deployment o f geodesic domes.
This is a way o f optimizing the system. It precludes any possible devi­
ation or swerve from the system, any novelty or expression emerging
out o f the system, or indeed any inclusion into the system from the
outside. It results in a static conception o f geodetics as preordained
and inextricably linked to pure forms w ith the attendant regularized
and optimized geometry.
1 4 0 E SS E N T IA L IZ E D SY S T E M S V S. SY S T E M S W ITH SIN G U L A R IT IE S

The other way to move within this logic recognizes first that these
geometries need not be developed within the featureless space of
ideality but m ust be conceived as enmeshed w ithin a universe o f dif­
ference. In this model, quantitative and qualitative difference is an
inherent attribute o f matter and space, w ith the two being inextri­
cably linked. Most importantly for architects, this model allows for
the consideration o f many levels o f order at once w ithin a coherent
system. Here too the least action principle governs the development
o f the system. However, in contrast to the optim izing ethos o f Fuller
an entirely different conception o f the minimal comes into play.

Deviations from the geodetic, for example, are not failures in engi -1
neering logic or irrational expression under this model but rather
represent emergent patterns o f order that are the result o f many
different material traits operating in the system at once— the reso­
lution o f forces at different scales o f matter. Thus, in the dynamic
interplay o f geometry, materials, and forces at multiple scales, the
least-action principle governs even the deviation.

It is a common trait o f all matter and material systems to resolve

themselves at the lowest energy state they can acquire. Thus, at the
material level there are forces moving equally in a pastiche post
modern facade and a suspension bridge. The critical issue then
becomes how to set up those conditions in the architecture that will
be minimal enough to index force yet maximal enough to enable
emergent organizations to arise. It should be neither as reductive as
the suspension bridge nor as over-coded and materially sclerotic as
the postmodern facade.
 M ATTER

Generic Geodesic Dome:

Diagram o f an Ideal Geometry

D ifferentiated Geodetic Space Frame:

Geometry Forming a Real M atter Field
142 E SS E N T IA L IZ E D SY ST E M S V S. SY ST E M S W ITH S IN G U L A R IT IE S

T Y P O L O G IE S O F S IN G U L A R IT IE S

T h e phenom enon of the singularity, as com pared to a m erely additive architecture,

assum es that local difference em erges out of changes to regions of a continuous
field of sim ilar elem ents. As su ch it is an excellent model for dealing w ith repetitive
system s like spacefram es. A n associated model is the inclusion/singularity. H ere a
foreign organization is “included” in the field, b u t in contrast to a mere juxtaposition,
its presence, like a stone in a flow of w ater, creates a local distu rba n ce pattern. T h lt
b o un d ary organization at once m im ics the organization and incorporates it into the
field, su ch that even if the foreign elem ent w ere rem oved, its effects, both locally a*
a m ould and as reverberations across larger regions, w ould remain.

Swell Pinch

U N IL A T E R A L A U T O IN C L U S IO N S
D isturb an ce Zones Differentiation Achieved
aro un d a Foreign O bject through Intensive Transform ation
of a S yste m at a Local Level
 M A TTE R

T h e regular field of structura l elem ents established in a lo n g -s p a n space fram e is

t Interrupted by the inclusion of program s (theaters, m u seu m s) below. T h e resulting
Im undary organizations in the flow of the structure s com prise the lobby and public spaces.
 32
Exact/Anexact-yet-Rigorous

Gilles Deleuze defines three types o f geometry: the exact, which corre
lates w ith the regular, or royal, science; the inexact, an accidental or
worldly approximation o f exact geometry; and the anexact, which
correlates w ith the vague or nomad science.

Edmund Husserl speaks o f a protogeometry that addresses vague, in

other words vagabond or nomadic, morphological essences. These
essences are distinct from sensible things as well asfrom ideal,
royal, or imperial essences. Protogeometry, the science dealing
with them, is itself vague, in the etymological sense o f “vagabond”: j
it is neither inexact like sensitive things nor exact like ideal
essences, but anexact yet rigorous (“essentially but not acci­
dentally inexact"). The circle is an organic, ideal, fixed essence,
but roundness is a vague and fluen t essence, distinct both from
the circle and things that are round (a vase, a wheel, the sun). A
theorematic figure is afixed essence, but its transformations, dis­
tortions, ablations, and augmentations, all o f its variations, from
problematic figures that are vague yet rigorous, “ lens-shaped,”
“umbelliform” or “indented.” It could be said that vague essences
extract from things a determination that is more than thinghood
(choseite), which is that o f corporeality (corporeite), and which
perhaps even implies an esprit de corps.9

W hat makes the anexact different is that its geometry is assumed to

play out in real space rather than in the ideal space of abstract geometry,
 M ATTER 145

C u rta il) W all Superim position

W J.
Local deviations in isolation appear Seen together, th ey p roduce
to be erroneous or accidents. em ergent optical effects.

Facade Developm ent, New M useum o f Contem porary Art

■r
1
146 e x a c t / a n e x a c t -y e t - r i g o r o u s

The anexact is thus the result o f forces on matter, whereas the exact
and the inexact are only assessments relative to a purely geometrical
model. In the anexact, the matter/force index is precisely that which
establishes its rigor and distinguishes it from the inexact, w hich is
merely a less precise form o f the exact. The anexact is therefore
intimately tied to a material field, the expressions o f which are the
direct index o f forces and the energetic o f which is manifest through
intensity. Rather than seeing, for example, a catenary either as a
correct (exact) or incorrect (inexact) parabola, the anexact sees it as a
calculus o f forces on matter. In contrast to the dichotomy o f inexact
and exact, the essences o f which are read and interpreted for meaning,
the anexact field is asignifying and delivers up expressions based
upon intensity and consequent effects rather than signification.

Institutionalizing this behavior then becomes a problem in societal

organization, since it does not lend itself to fixed laws and codes. A
state o f flux runs up against all o f the systems society has in place to
see construction through. The anexact thus emerges as a category as
a consequence o f the shift away from both idealist and essentialist
conceptions o f matter and geometry toward a geometry that is inex­
tricably linked to a spatial field that is material. It is interesting
that the classical form/matter duality persists in the architecture of
modernism both as a fundamental philosophical concept o f design,
per se, and in the way design arrives in the social field. For the same
duality that stipulates a hard division between sovereign form and
passive matter enforces a corresponding division o f labor between
conception and construction. It is not surprising, therefore, that
lacking any paradigm beyond form/matter the modernists would
view as, at best, a temporary i f necessary evil and at worst, unethical,
practices that navigate the singularities and variations o f matter, i.e.
craft. Such work would be viewed as excessive: formally, structurally
(ornament), and economically, traditional craft resists standardiza­
tion and generalization both quantitatively
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148 e x a c t /a n e x a c t -y e t -r i g o r o u s

While the new models o f production cannot make any undue claims
for their socially liberating effects, they nevertheless have increased
the degrees o f freedom available to the designer and, by extension,
to their productions. Virtually every facet o f the design process, in­
cluding the spectrum o f material properties and effects, are actors
in this parametric field. Moreover, this new pattern o f organization
operates not only at the scale o f the matter field from which it was
derived but can migrate into radically different scales and material
regimes. In effect, this means that for architecture a vast spectrum
o f organizational models become available, from the microscopic to
the macroscopic, and w ill operate not as representations in architec­
ture but as organizing principles for architecture.
 M ATTER >49

L IM O G E S F A C T O R Y R E J E C T S

Differences su ch as those in a Lim oges c up, w h ic h are not catastrophic

yet stra y from perfection, im pa rt a certain anim us to the object that
perfect geom etries sim p ly do not contain. T h re e -s ta r restaurants in Paris
w ould send these straight to the trash bin, if th ey eve r m ade it that far.
m , W e seek th em out.

T h e In e x a c t
 33
Material Computation: The Case o f the Catenaiy

The argument for poise in geometry can be equated to an argument

for poise in matter. This relates to the historical development of
maxima and minima problems in mathematics and physics. The iso­
lation o f a minimal or maximal principle appears in the works o f the
Ancients through the development o f m odem physics and calculus
as the solution to physical problems, as, for example, when the mini­
m um energy is extended to perform a given action, or the minimal
path is taken by a particle or wave. The pure minima and the pure
maxima are brought together in states o f economy, as, for exam ple,'
the engineering problem solved by a maximum span w ith minimum
materials. The calculus o f variations is the branch o f mathematics
that deals with these kinds o f relationships, the method devised by
Joseph-Louis Lagrange to find the change caused in an expression
containing any number o f variables when one lets all or any o f the
variables change. While such solutions are resolved through the
definition and interaction o f variables fed into an equation, our pro­
cedures often follow an inverse logic that employs physical modelin
in advance o f any definitive quantitative determination. We are work
ing w ith calculus in the tradition o f the boot-strap method, which
includes Joseph Plateau’s mid-nineteenth-century discovery o f soap
film structures in physical models that predated the system o f partial
differential equations involved in calculating the surface o f smallest
area w ith a given boundary that weren’t solved mathematically until
1931. W ithin this way o f thinking, the physical experiment is often
 M ATTER 151

PURE PURE
E N G IN E E R IN G A R C H IT E C T U R E

C A T E N A R Y A S P R IN C IP L E
A s long as the geom etry of the
caten a ry falls inside the arch,
the structure is so und. T h e
ideal form of the a rchitecture
exceeds the physical principle.

........ .......R E D U C T IV E E X T R IN S IC

IN T R IN S IC P R O D U C T IV E

A S M A T E R IA L G A U D i’S G R A V IT Y F IE LD A R C H A S S IG N A G E
is equivalent T h e c aten a ry principle is used
an to determ ine stone vaulting.
...... overly T h is kind of calculation
a cco un ts for the dom inant
force of gravity, w h ich is
scalable, but does not take
into a cco u n t lateral forces in
m aterials, w h ic h are not.

L IN K E D M U L T I-D IM E N S IO N A L G R A V IT Y F IE L D
T h e em ergent form of the arch itectu re exceeds
the optim ized form of the c aten a ry principle.
 M A T E R IA L C O M PU TA T IO N

regarded as the only means o f obtaining a resolution to situations in

which variables are so numerous and intractable that they cannot
defined in advance. Whereas Plateau’s example deals w ith a single
minimum principle, we would pursue a resolution among multiple
optima. In this sense the physical model acts generatively. While the
general parameters o f the model are given, the interaction among
the elements produces something new and unforeseen.10

The resolution o f m ultiple optima is no less clearly defined than

that o f the single optima o f minmax principles: in fact, the same
fam ily o f calculus curves populates both environments. It is in the
inverse deployment o f these diagrams that the opportunity for
multiplicities arises. For example, where properties o f speed and
time in minmax define a cycloid curve, a cycloid curve, like any
diagram, could be used itself to define properties o f speed and time,
or o f weight and mass, or o f potential energy, etc. The possibilities
o f this invertability o f the diagram are most fruitful when complex
inversions, combinations and alterations are introduced in order
to achieve specific effects within the general range o f optimization
sought in the properties the diagram defines.

Our interest in flexible systems led us to an experiment w ith an

analog model for structure: the mitigated catenary model. A single
catenary w ill only display gravity loads. It is necessary to cross a
threshold o f quantity and interconnection in multiple dimensions
in order to register more complex forces. The three dimensional
catenary model is effected not only by gravity but by a whole series
o f forces, linked to one another.

In our design for a music theater in Graz, we utilized animation soft­

ware that emulated the effects o f a multidimensional force field on
geometiy. It was hoped that that emulation would be precise enough
 M ATTER »53

to index structural forces, however, when we presented this model to

our engineer he suggested a physical model would be more precise.

We proceeded to build a model similar to the catenary models devel­

oped by Antoni Gaudí for Colonia Giiell, where catenaries and funic­
ulars were hung to establish the centerlines for vaulting. We per­
ceived that this form-finding technique could be adapted not only to
a simple gravity field but could be extended to a multi dimensional
field, where forces move in directions other than the pure direction
of gravity. We then hung closely spaced groups o f chains to establish
a rough approximation o f the vaulting and systematically began to
link those catenaries together and to pull them in directions that
deviated from the straight gravity field. What was fascinating was
that at a certain threshold o f quantity and force the linked catenary
model snapped into a form that closely resembled the earlier com­
puter model. There was, however, a decided difference between the
■mulation and the indexical model: Not only was it a rigorous index
k f structural logics in play but the actual force field on the model
displayed a coordinated elegance, a beauty, that the emulation lacked.
Ily comparison the emulation model appeared lax and lifeless, not
unlike inelegant auto bodies we see today designed with the same
»oftware. The catenary model is an example o f material computation,
[essentially self-calculating, resolving through feedback multidmen-
lional forces acting on the linked field o f strands and weights. It
fcomputes the forces as a calculus o f multiple influences.

Indeed, there is structural analysis software that will, for all intents
find purposes, replicate this process. However, as any scientist deal­
ing with the dynamics o f material systems will tell you, the material
Iicld w ill always generate richer and more singular expressions
Ilian the programs derived from them will produce. Thus, there will
always be a place for the analog in structural experimentation.
REISER + U M EM O TO
BMW Event and Delivery Center Com petition Entry
M unich, Germany, 2001
 34
Systems Becoming Other Systems

While our engineers utilize many o f the structural systems inherit

from modernist practice, we contend that they have a broader rang
o f application than modernism leant them, inherent in their untap
capacity to be transformed. We work on structural and typological
models like a material that can be stretched, warped, and otherwise
subjected to formal and organizational transformation. The conse­
quences o f this is that received systems, such as the space frame,
rather than being subject to systemic purity, can be transformed
through a series o f intermediate steps into other systems altogether.
W ith such mutable models, it is now possible to conceive o f a diver
field o f structural types operating locally w ithin the same structure
while maintaining systemic coherence throughout. It is through
practice that this work operates as a form o f critical history, because
it opens up once solidified models to broader interpretation and,
even more importantly, application.

The insight in our BMW Munich project was that structural systems
are in fact not discrete models but can be grouped along a continu
The initial condition o f the design postulated the transformation of
a space frame system that could be manipulated much like a piece of
fabric, w ith the upper cords oriented 45 degrees to the lower cords a
manipulated on the bias. What became evident was that, given the
changing parameters o f span, depth, and boundary, the space frame
maintained its modernist purity in the zones of longest span but could
be moved into an intermediate state between space frame and two-way
 M ATTER

ZONE OF TRANSITION

One-Way System Two-Way System of Space Frame Two-Way

I becomes... Unequal Depth becomes.. System of Equal Depth
»58 S Y S T E M S B E C O M IN G O T H E R SY ST E M S

system in regions o f shorter span. Likewise, zones o f two-way stru

ture could be transformed into one-way systems (structural bents
for roadways) as boundaries and spans narrowed. It became evident
that the pure system— a received structural definition— was only a
moment o f purity within a continuum o f change.

Although possessing unique structural characteristics, the space fra

is traditionally lumped together w ith other large-scale structures t
historically have been associated w ith the more monofunctional pr
grams o f urbanization: bridges, stadiums, train stations. Further, tl
traditional role o f the structural system has been to merely establis
the span (or the clearing) within w hich space would be contained.
Now it has become possible to conceive o f the space frame’s potent
within a new paradigm o f continuous variation. Thus employed, a
structure, while large in scale, has the capacity to absorb and to pro
mulgate local and global organizations within its intricate matrices.
Although the space frame is technically precise and large, it neither
promotes structural homogeneity nor imposes universalizing spati
qualities. More than a proposal for extending an uninflected matrix
throughout the world, it is the comprehension o f the fullness o f the
world as a field o f ubiquitous difference.

A t the level o f a literal fabric— a piece o f Issey Miyake clothing, for

instance— new qualities flow out o f the interaction between a geo
ric model and the behavior o f materials on the geometry. The fabric
woven on a grid w ith uniform tension on the warp and the w oof an
then removed from the geometrical frame to produce novel irruptio
in the field.
 I
35
Post-Fordist Implementations

One o f the consequences o f working w ith a variable space frame

igeometry is that every element in the structure— every node, every
I strut— is unique, or better yet, is both similar and different, from
■every neighboring strut and node. Building such an assembly requires
.1 very different conception o f production and delivery than the
modernist models of mass-production. Narrow space frame systems
■ conceived around the variability of a thick set of parametric designs
.ire defined by the angle o f drilling of the nodes, the diameter of the
node, and the length o f the strut. The task o f constructing these ele­
ments is facilitated by mass-customizing the fabrication process and
utilizing a sophisticated parcel tracking system, which allows unique
^ k ie ce s to be delivered to the right place at the right time.
i6o P O ST -F O R D IST IM P L E M E N T A T IO N S

The technology o f mass customization is already a well-established

process. In as much as most architecture is not built monolithically,
but is comprised o f repetitive elements, we take the position that
mass customization is only relevant when the custom elements are
massed together, rather than deployed as discrete elements, becau:
they release an unprecedented richness in assemblies that even tra­
ditionally have required thousands o f pieces. The sheer quantitati
variation o f such assemblies releases vast qualitative wealth.

This distinguishes mass-customization o f architectural elements

from the mass-customization o f consumer elements, w hich are
deployed and spread individually as discrete products. Mass-
assemblies, rather, are not geared toward a single user or group
o f users but gain their meaning through universality.
 M A TTER

JusHn-Time Delivery:
Parcel tracking system directs each component to the right place at the right time.

The M ero Space Frame System: An Example o f Mass Custom Fabrication

OPERATING
 36
Mount Sinai

Many people prowl round Mount Sinai. Their speech is blurred, either they I
are garrulous or they shout or they are taciturn. But none o f them comes
straight down a broad, newly made, smooth road that does its own part in I
making one’s strides long and swifter.
— Franz Kafka, Mount Sinflj

The ambient dimension o f architecture, o f w hich atmosphere and

effect are aspects, has always been w ithin the architect’s control in
as much as those aspects flow directly from the fabric o f building. In
contrast, such perceived stabilities as program— in addition to being
generally out o f the architect’s sphere o f control— are actually much j
more transient.

The ambient, like any material effect, influences meaning and inter­
pretation but does not determine it and is not affected by it. A rabbi
once gave the example o f the Israelites coming to Mt. Sinai in advanc«
o f receiving the Ten Commandments. Seeing the mountain ablaze |
w ith signs and wonders, they knew that something was imminent j
but were not clear as to what. All that was for certain was that some­
thing elemental and intense was happening. Some expressed fear,
others expressed confusion, and still others waited in joyful expec­
tation. People expressed contradictory emotions within themselves
and among each other. The only common factor was that o f intensity.
Architecture, too, seems to operate on this level. As a material system,

J
 O P ER A TIN G

its fabric and effects can be determined to great precision and can be
fc o d u la te d to create highly specific environments. This is arguably the
most permanent feature o f architecture and that w hich is achievable
with the highest degree o f precision. It is no accident that the history
of religious architecture is replete w ith examples o f the same building
housing different religions, over time and even at the same time, that
held very different outlooks.

M ount Sinai
 37
Program: Architecture :: Lyrics: Music

Only architects think that there exists a tight relationship between

how spaces are labeled and what happens inside them. We, on the
other hand, operate under the assumption that a tenuous relation­
ship exists between architecture and program. This relationship is
equivalent to that between lyrics and music. The same musical
sequence that provides the structure for one patriotic song, “God
Save Our Gracious Queen,” becomes “My Country ‘tis o f Thee” when
the lyrics are changed. The music is able to communicate diamet­
rically opposed content w ith exactly the same musical structure and
the same ability to affect.

Notably, lyrics do correlate to music in certain ways, as sonic material,

rhythm , rhyme, etc., but not at the level o f meaning. Similarly,
programs correlate to architecture only imprecisely: approximate
square footages, relative locations and relationships, etc. If there is a
precise fit, it is between certain programs and building systems such
as plumbing, electricity, and gas. You don’t always eat at the table,
but you always cook at the stove.

Programming can indeed alter the narrative o f a space, but it is also

true that despite or even because o f those narratives, people are
capable o f doing almost anything anywhere.
 38
Operating under a Surfeit o f Information

Architects work w ith matter like a chef who manages the complex
unfoldings of food chemistry very precisely but without necessarily
knowing the science o f chemistry itself. One does not, for instance,
need to know how an ovalbumen protein coagulates in order to make
a superior omelet. Architects, too, are in large part the managers of
processes they do not, and cannot, fully comprehend. Ignorance of
science does not necessarily mean ignorance o f material processes;
centuries o f sophisticated material practices that predate exact
science bear this out.

A material practice like cooking requires operating in an environ­

ment w ith a surfeit o f information. Coordination o f this information
takes place at a speed and quantity beyond that o f comprehension,
yet it can be managed w ith exquisite precision. Much like the way we
perform in our own bodies and (thankfully) have no need to constantly
regulate their physiology, knowledge o f exact science is irrelevant and,
arguably, uncertain. The management o f material processes occurs at
an entirely different level.
 O valbum in R aw Egg

Denatured Ovalbumin Cooking Egg

Food Science: Food Preparation

170 O P E R A TIN G U N D E R A S U R F E IT OF IN F O R M A T IO N

The history o f architecture is replete with successful projects that are

the result o f novelty found w ithin false history and, more recently,
outmoded science.

Historian Rudolf Wittkower, in Architectural Principles in the Age of

Humanism, gives as an example Andrea Palladio’s historical error
attributing superimposed pediments to the Pantheon giving erroneous
historical legitimacy to his unsurpassed Venetian churches. In the
realm o f painting, Georges Seurat’s use o f a subsequently disproven
theory o f the physiology o f color 4
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 39
Asignifying Signs

With an understanding o f asignifying signs, the semiotic acquires a

new role and set o f possibilities for architecture. The semiotic in post
modern architecture foregrounded a meaning-based model in which I
architecture was understood as a language to be read or decoded.
Mario Gandelsonas makes the distinction between the semantic work
o f Robert Venturi and Michael Graves, a presentation o f historical
signifiers, and the syntactic work o f Peter Eisenman, a complex
manipulation o f signifiers divested o f stable content. Modernism’s
contemporary legacy, “m odem post modem” architecture, carries
forward this linguistic model and sim ply sheds both historical
reference and syntactic play in favor o f a play o f material signifiers, ]
w ith elements o f the building coded in different materials typically
to signify use. A subset o f the modern post modern is “material
realism,”a term coined by Jeffrey Kipnis. Here the dominant
signification is the phenomenal quality o f a material. While we are not
against this pursuit, we find it a very limited deployment o f material
logics. A ll systems o f signification, whether based on history or
material, treat architecture at its base as a language.

The rainbow o f oxidation that blooms on the heated surface o f a

polished steel bar is an example o f an asignifying sign. Essentially
an outward symptom o f an underlying process or condition, it is
distinguished from signifying signs in the way it is used. For rather
than being linguistic— an object to be read and interpreted— and thus
having meaning, its symptoms suggest becomings— the locus for
the projection o f performative functions, that is, for what it can do.
 O P ER A TIN G *73

In the steel bar, for example, the toolmaker understands that the
spectrum o f colors from light straw to deep purple is an index of
properties: light straw indicates hard and brittle, good for cutting
edges; deep purple indicates flexible and resilient, good for springs.
Thus, the changing oxidation color is an indicator o f hardness and of
the steel’s changing crystalline structure: it is a display o f properties
and tendencies. The possibility o f becoming a knife or a spring is
Immanent but requires the action o f the toolmaker to come about.

In an architectural context, asignifying signs operate in two ways:

in process and in product or effect. In some sense these modalities
are already evident in the above example o f the steel. The bloom of
color may be used as an end in itself, in which case it is operating
effectively, or may be used as a guide for further material unfoldings,
in which case it is taken up in process. This is in itself a type o f
reading, but rather than passing judgment and asking what a thing is,
which has been the dominant mode o f questioning in contemporary
practice from approaches as divergent as historicist postmodernism,
deconstructionism and critical practice, the use o f the asignifying
sign doesn’t immediately fix the process in terms o f a definition but
rather leaves it open. Their tracking guides an unfolding. The use
of asignifying signs also makes possible a richer product, a vastly
expanded set o f material outcomes and effects, as it promotes the
production o f the unforeseen rather than representing the known.

A meaning-based practice actually stops process because it is ju d g­

mental, concerned w ith stability rather than unfolding, and relies on
outside semantic criteria that are generally separate from material
processes. An architecture that has to explain itself, or be explained,
has failed to present its own qualities. It sets up a conventional
relationship between material organization and reference. There is
a certain similarity in the gap between essentialist geometries,matter
and matter’s relationship to signification.
»74 A S IG N IF Y IN G S IG N S

Intense architectural effects, rather than carrying a single meaning,

may be freely interpreted, even in contradictory ways. Our criticism
of historical or material signification comes out o f how it stops the
process o f architectural becoming by moving away from matter and
into transcendent language. We espouse a highly specific material
organization, a poignant architecture that displays certain qualities
but does not mean any one thing.

PLAY OF SIGNIFIERS: POST MODERN

Semantics Syntactics

PLAY OF MATERIAL SIGNIFIERS: MODERN POST MODERN

 40

Moving in the Gradient Field

[T]he notion o f logic in architecture is applicable to several different

'n otions, which sometimes coincide and sometimes do not. The logic o f the
eye, with its needfo r balance and symmetry, is not necessarily in agreement
with the logic o f structure, which in turn is not the logic o f pure intellect.
— Henri Focillon, The Life of Forms in Art

Gradient fields, such as the oxidation bloom on steel mentioned

previously, or, even more pertinent to the architect, the force fields
shown in structural analysis programs, have conventionally been
used by engineers to track stresses with the goal o f optim izing
structural economy and efficiency. This has been characterized as
the drive to get the forces out o f the building as quickly as possible.
We, in contrast, are interested in force delay, detour, and propa­
gation— in short, an architectural elaboration o f the force field.

This elaboration foregoes the optimal path predicted in classical

statics in favor o f the burgeoning, searching line o f variation
of forces in the matter-field. Seeking the m axim um span w ith
minimum material, the optim izing logic that engineering is based
upon is teleological, oriented toward solving only one problem.
A pure engineering logic corresponds perhaps too closely to the
reasoning o f an argument. This indifferent synthesis ignores the
whole range o f transformations o f which matter is capable and to
176 M O V IN G IN T H E G R A D IE N T F IE L D

w hich pure logic is oblivious. This is a crucial point. When you

optimize to one set o f attractors, all the forces takes the path o f least
resistance, and the structure succumbs to a reductive rationalization.

There is an underlying assumption that optimized forms represent

universal truths, when in fact they are isolated, reduced concepts,
in no w ay indicative o f a com plex universe. We look instead to
productive deviations from the minimal path, the clinamen of
Lucretian physics. This approaches the efficiency o f the optimum,
but is not reducible to it. A probabilistic relationship to the minimal
must be maintained. However, the straight path that is solely the
result o f an abstract connection in void space is replaced in our schema
by space understood as an energetic material field that engenders
deviation. Therefore, a resolution is sought through a field of
multiple influences approaching equilibrium instead o f a single
influence, to navigate and to incline through a constellation o f
attractors instead o f optim izing to a single one. The result w ill be
as minimal as it can be given that rich field.

In an environment so saturated, any vector, however much it seeks

the minimum path, w ill provoke a cascade o f effects as the forces
propagate through the field. Thus, when one projects geometry into
such a material field, it is less a question o f the imposition o f a preset
lim it or an external optim ization than the interplay between the
projection and the material field that calculates an optimum. Here
the line between structure and decoration becomes indistinct. Like
the sparks that come out o f a Van de Graaff generator, these are not
straight lines but searching lines. In the transition from one config­
uration to another, there is a point ju st before a stable form is
reached that is the m ost poignant.
 O P ER A TIN G *77

Since most architecture deals w ith assembled materials rather than

simple matter, it must be prepared in such a way to maximize the
propagation o f effects. This requires that the field operate under
three criteria: sufficient quantity o f elements, connectivity, and a
relatively close range o f scale. These are the constituents o f fineness.
 FOLLOWING THE RAINBOW:
A CASE STUDY IN ASIGNIFYING SIGNS

Where the Matter Goes, the Forces Flow

Assuming that structural meshwork will find a balance between

homogeneity and heterogeneity, it must be configured first so that
its “weave” is not homogenous. It should not be so dense as to be
overstructured, nor so sparse as to over-stress any area. Rather, it
should acquire sufficient density so that forces spread and descend
into the field and are not attracted to the edge. At that point the
meshwork would cease to perform as a global structure and simply act
as a link between an essential arch and an essential deck.

Therefore, the meshwork has to be not too thin and not too thick, but
just right. Too thick and it would cease to have the fineness necessary
to show difference. Too thin and it would either collapse or force
necessary essentialized elements to thicken and carry loads.

Having set up the field to register the most clear effects of density, we
then jump to the overall scale of the very fine edged arches. We bring
intensity to its highest pitch by changing the cant of the arches as they
lean toward each other. Intensity in the field increases to the point
where, if they met, the forces would then snap into another form of equi­
librium, a phase transition, in which all the forces would run through the
. edges, erasing the necessity for the densification of the body of the
bridge. Like the elements in a supersaturated solution changing from a gas
to a liquid or a liquid to a coagulation, the object of this architecture is to
arrest this process at the point of greatest intensity, the moment just
prior to a phase transition, when a dynamic equilibrium is reached.
 Essentialist Expression Forces Constrained
Bridge Reduced to Discrete Components

CHISELSANDPUNCHES

YELLOWISHBROWN HOMEMADETAPS/

YELLOWISHWHITE BRITTLEBUTVERYHARO

M ate ria l Practice: M aterial Sign: C o rrelating Effects

Heat Tempered M etal to a Certain Symptom

Polyvalent Expresión Forces Bleed: A Fusion o f Arch and Shell

Thickening/Thinning Members, Densifying/Loosening the
Weave Increasing/Decreasing Layers
 41

Accidental Animism

A certain French critic once characterized our Yokohama Port

Terminal proposal as appearing to be centipede or crustacean. We
agree that the project shares certain organizational traits with these
creatures: namely, it is segmented, axial, and locally differentiated.
The first two characteristics, axiality and segmentation, are charac­
teristics o f all shed buildings o f this type. Had we been looking
at representing insects in architecture, the project would have
remained at the level o f an image and none o f the precise issues of
the architecture would have been confronted.

O f course, it is inevitable that this work w ill be, like all things, read
semiotically. Like a person under the influence o f an antipsychotic
drug, we accept that our work may at times display animistic
qualities or traits: we may continue to have the hallucinations of
meaning but they no longer bother us. We feel it is imperative not
to succumb to animism and, above all, not to interpret the work
during the design process on these terms. That would be the fastest
way to shut down development, foregrounding how a project looks,
not how it behaves. In fact, we find the greatest animus is achieved
through a strict adherence to objective factors.
 O P ER A TIN G l8 l

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Port Terminal Com petition Entiy
Yokoham a, Japan, 1995
 42
Migration o f a Pattern

Our project for a lattice canopy for a synagogue began as a historical

pattern of non-representational (vegetal, rather than anthropomorphic)
decoration, which conformed to biblical prohibitions against the
worship o f graven images. It emerged in descriptions o f Solomon’s
Temple in the book o f Ezekiel and entered architecture as a trait in
such treatises as the Ezechielem Explanationes by Juan Bautista
Villalpando of 1596 and 1604. In our design the latticework acts at
once structurally and decoratiyely. Embedded in the crude type, a
barrel vault, our pattern carries forward traits open to variation and
change rather than sim ply repeating the historical model. As a trait,
the decorative is revealed to be a set that includes the structural.
Before decoration or structure, however, the wider importance of
pattern as a precondition for order becomes evident.

Traits, while they reference past models, are not wed to any partic­
ular historical example. Any historical architecture is the product
o f a temporally specific constellation o f forces, conditions, and will.
In confronting a new design, we put aside the history and regard
the project as a special case o f geometrical and material traits that
are worked on by a new constellation o f forces defined by evolving
material and social realities. Considering lineages as traits leaves
them open to expansion; it keeps models active rather than solid­
ifying them as historical forms that are resistant to change. Traits
allow one to talk about and connect to precedents without being
tyrannized by them.
184 M IG R A T IO N OF A PA TT E R N

LINGUISTIC PLANE

H istoric Preservation
Friends of the Upper West Side
Community Board CODES
INSTITUTION Canopy" vs.

DECORATION
 O P ER A TIN G 185

Topological /M aterial Failed Phylogenetic Departure:

Correlation Scale/Function/C lassification

XL: S ^ p ^ ^ a m e

Training/Academy

Failed Phylogenetic
Departure: Geometry

REDUNDANT ■
■'vs?''
THICKENED MEMBER
+

W/
Planar Typology
'
Punctual Typology
Glazing

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Crude Types
t
PLANE OF PERFORMANCE Tools/Technique
 43
Emergent Structures

Traits can be seen as working in between the fixity o f historical

codification and the variability o f materials and forces. Architecture
must negotiate between the project o f matter-force design, which
follows the logic o f continuous variation and deals inherently with
specific cases, and the legal constraints o f material-form design,
which conform to the lim iting force o f codes. Interestingly, when
we run up against a code in practice what we use to get around it
is called a variance. Indeed, a form o f variability is structured into
most systems o f codification, though its tendency is always toward
maintaining lim its rather than allowing for novelty. We do not
advocate the rejection o f codes. Rather, we propose a working mod
in which codes are more open to variance, in which they become
ranges rather than determinants.
 O P E R A TIN G 187

■
The critical dimension o f architecture challenges the code not through
Jtransgression but through effectively operating between definitions
«within the code itself. Codes are created for stable models o f archi-
lecture, designed around the idea, for example, that a canopy is a
canopy and a marquee is a marquee. Codes are essentially separate
from generative design processes o f materialist practice. While codes
may serve as an invisible limit, they are not in themselves generative.
In certain special cases, the generative capacity o f architecture has a
c ritical effect in that it breaks down the stable definitions prescribed
by the codes. This is accomplished when design practice extends the
range o f a legal definition, changing the code such that it comes to
include new variations,
 44
Invention

In his book Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates o f Human Societies, the
geographer and physiologist Jared Diamond reverses the traditional
assertion that necessity is the mother o f invention. Invention, we too I
find, is often the catalyst for its own necessity. Just as Jorge Borges
suggests that authors create their own history by drawing together
previously unconnected genres and works, inventions such as the
phonograph came to fulfill needs that did not exit prior to its own
invention. We see design practice as existing in a similar relationship I
w ith history and effect. Rather than responding in a critical manner
to existing norms, we prefer an architecture that, while precise, is
open enough to be generative o f unforeseen material outcomes both
in its form and the way it is taken up in use.
 45
Style:
Impersonal Individuations, Material Expressions

While modernism strives to express process and to foreground

difficulty, a material practice is in many ways more traditional.
Architecture should neither express the difficulty o f its production
nor lack difficulty. Architecture should make the difficult look easy.
This stand is distinguished from a process-based endeavor which
fetishizes the difficult and from Pop, which is simply not difficult.

Style is the expression o f the overcoming o f difficulty, o f making the

difficult appear easy. Material processes and unfoldings express an
impersonal style through the interaction o f their inherent resistance
and tendencies. We pursue a management o f this territory o f materi
expression rather than a style linked only to personal expression of
the psyche.

This amounts to an anti-process argument.

This way o f understanding style is also associated w ith various

traditional practices. When Japanese priests go searching for stones
to include in their gardens, they sort through hundreds o f pieces
formed by the same impersonal processes o f folding and mixing
but displaying different characteristics. All stones are formed by a
consistent and rigorous process, but that process alone in no way
guarantees the significance o f any one stone. While stones are not
formed by explicit human will, impersonal individuations like
folded rocks also have a style. The gardeners, not satisfied by just any
 O P ER A TIN G 19»

stone, search for the most salient or intense piece. In the choosing o f
locks-— an act o f will— the style o f these impersonal individuations is
made manifest.

Talent and intuition, interestingly, remain a dimension central to

the expression o f style. In poetry, for instance, the structures and
rules, say, o f a sonnet, guarantee nothing: there are innumerable
bad sonnets, just as there are innumerable bad rocks. Selection and
^discrimination are crucial to working within any material system.

Even some rocks have a style.

REISER + UMEMOTO
Central Building, BMW Factory
Leipzig, Germany, 2002
 46

Panglossian Paradigm: Origins and Consequences

Thefact that something is secondary in its origin doesn’t mean it’s

unimportant in its consequences. Those are entirely different subjects.
— StephenJa y Gould, The Pattern of Life’s Histo

In his “The Pattern o f Life’s History,” evolutionary biologist Stephen

Jay Gould introduces exaptation, an alternate theory that describes
the emergence o f novelty not as error but as a byproduct. Exapted
features fulfill Jared Diamond’s inversion o f invention as the mother
o f necessity: they were neither adapted nor invented to serve any
specific purpose, but rather, as the byproduct o f the interaction of
larger systems, they have created new ground unintentionally. There is
no teleology toward improvement; there is simply difference that may
be selected or rejected. Exaptation overturns the assumption that the
origin ensures an indelible trait.1

Conventional design methodologies will typically be based on a top

down logic; concepts and goals w ill be established at the outset, even
before actual design starts. The emergence o f secondary elements to
the design project under this regime can only be seen either as faults
o f the concept or mistakes to be eliminated from the final product.

Like the excessive “functionality” o f Pierre Chareau’s Maison de

Verre, these emergent features move away from considerations o f the
optimal toward a celebration o f their own mechanisms.
 O P ER A TIN G 195

We are unconcerned w ith process as a justification for the product.

Architecture should capitalize, rather, on successful byproducts
as much as it seeks overall coherence. That geodetics was first
developed in the context o f a weapon o f war is irrelevant to its
potential effects. Rather than considering such systems as tainted
by their origins, they should be exploited for their active material
potential.
■ p

The Geodetic Basket Weave o f the W ellington Bomber

 Devolutionary Architecture

In Vers une Architecture, Le Corbusier presents a lineage o f vehicles

as models raised to a standard through the selection pressures that
would tend to optimize function. A vehicle is considered a typology
defined by increasingly optimal performance. In fact, Le Corbusier
is not being completely honest about his interests, because a pure
interest in performance would side-step, or at least be indifferent to,
questions o f form and aesthetics.

Refinement, or elaboration o f the type, provides its own qualities,

but these are not always performance based. Formal byproducts of
the selection, rather than the performance, are what are ultimately
most interesting and, in a way, more applicable and more open to
an architectural conception o f performance, which is rarely tied to a
single optim izing logic. Purposes in architecture are manifold; they
depend on a wide range o f practices o f the users, which is completely
different from the position o f the pilot or driver o f a vehicle, who
arguably, as the speed increases, loses sight o f the issues o f form and
aesthetics and comes closer and closer to participating in issues o f
pure performance.

Our relationship to architecture is less that o f a driver to a vehicle

than of a consumer to a meal. The consumer is concerned not with
the evolutionary process and pressures that lead an animal to take
a certain form but w ith what tastes and textures result from that
process.
 OPERATIN G

Goose Becomes Foie Gras.

Shark Becomes Kamaboko.

le ft Dom esticated in Death

rig h t Dom esticated in Life
 198 D E V O LU TIO N A R Y A R C H IT E C T U R E

Le Corbusier makes the argument that posing a problem correctly

results in a successful solution, even w ithin an already accepted
standard. Rather than seeking a final solution, architecture, in so
* far as use is concerned, bears a probabilistic relationship to those
intentions.

Selection pressures indeed work on the animals that become food

and provide a greater or lesser degree o f articulation o f the product.
So a shark, which is 90 percent muscle, and a goose, w hich is 90
percent fat, represent two very different types o f articulation.
The shark is wild, constantly swim m ing until it dies. The goose is
domesticated to the extreme, immobilized and force fed. The shark
is an eating machine; the goose is machine-fed. Yet both undergo a
process of domestication before they can be consumed; the goose,
before it is slaughtered, and the shark, afterward.

Le Corbusier’s evolution argument assumes the constant refining of

a type as the consequence o f the selection pressures o f design. In fact
in architecture, the opposite may be said to be true. To take another
example from aviation: The optimal typically arrives fairly early in
the evolution o f a type and is generally associated w ith doing or per­
forming a single function well. Selection pressures in reality not only
involve refinement but typically must contend with production inertia.
Once in production, an aircraft is rarely taken out o f production as
a consequence o f changing demands, simply because it is too costly
to break the production cycle. Instead, modifications are made to the
existing line. The effect o f these multiple small demands, however,
has large consequences. In wartime, the cumulative effects of
variation may turn the once optimal aircraft into a performatively
ponderous monstrosity, i.e. a sitting duck. As the plane devolves
relative to optimal performance responding to multiple conflicting
demands, it becomes divorced from pure function. Paradoxically,
the devolved type is a more open, “architectural,” object.
 O P E R A TIN G *99

1935
1897

'I
1999

I
Evolution Devolution
 200 D E V O L U T IO N A R Y A R C H IT E C T U R E

In a curious way, the devolution o f the glass nose o f the Heinkel 111
bomber parallels certain contemporary issues o f transparency.
While Allied air crews were distributed throughout their aircraft in
* isolation, Luftwaffe command insisted that their crews be tightly
clustered within the nose o f the aircraft, so that they would not be
isolated from one another and perhaps begin to think for themselves,
So it was within this transparent glass house that battles were fough

As w ith glass architecture, however, the issues attending a desire for

transparency were far from clear at the outset. Test pilot Captain Eric
Brown’s account o f flight testing a captured Heinkel 111 illustrates
this issue. He notes that the extensive glazing o f the nose section
did indeed provide “superlative views for the crew,” however this
extreme transparency was only possible under very specific lighting
conditions. In darkness, or when the sunlight entered the nose from
the rear o f the aircraft, the glazing became a tunnel o f mirrors,
making outward visibility nearly impossible. During rainstorms the
situation became even more dire, thus necessitating the development
o f a sliding roof hatch. The pilot would crank up his seat so that his
head would protrude from the top o f the bomber, thus reducing the
performance o f a WWII-era aircraft to that o f a WWI-era aircraft, with
all the attendant reductions o f speed and maneuverability that pilot
exposure produced. Additionally, rain would pour into the cockpit
area, pooling at the bottom o f the airplane and wreaking havoc with
the electrical system and the radio.2

The comprehensive program o f transparency from the political to

the social to the formal and finally phenomenal in architecture had
similar goals and met w ith a similar history o f successes.
 Optimization

Optimization is all about gaining an objective. It is analogous to a

baseball game that only takes into account those who cross home
plate; the individual dramas, the feints, the plays, the actual concen­
tration o f players and the forces and strategies that they embody are
nowhere considered. The concepts that sustain structural intuition
must be seen in an active dance w ith architectural concepts. There
are many paths to equilibrium, not ju st minimal or direct ones.

When Frank Gehiy piles on the steel in order to achieve the form he
wants, ignoring the behavior o f forces w ithin the project, he is opti­
m izing toward pure form. A work o f engineering purity, such as a
suspension bridge, optimizes toward the behavior o f force only. We
work w ith a process o f optimization to navigate a range between the
minim izing athletics o f pure forces and the m aximizing o f structures
required by the unrestrained aesthetics o f form, keeping both in play
rather than extending into one at the expense o f the other.

A manufactured material like steel can be standardized, resulting in

an invariably uniform product, whereas wood develops out o f a natural
process that makes each piece vary. Wood design codes therefore
include safety factors that take into account the weakest behaviors
and design for the worst case, thus eliminating any intensive
difference in specific pieces. This codification o f matter contrasts
w ith an expert selection o f individual pieces, whereby the relative
strength and performance o f each is made on a case-by-case basis.
 O P ER A TIN G 203

A notorious example o f such individual selection is the Hughes-

aiser HK-i, better known as the Spruce Goose. Teams were
patched into the woods o f the United States and Canada to find
cific trees for specific parts o f the plane.3The HK-i was designed
not w ith the invariant codes o f aluminum but w ith the variant
formance o f specific and unique traits in actual material. Such
a design cannot be looked at in general. Though the Spruce Goose
achieved notoriety as a sitter rather than as a flier in aviation, it was
an unmitigated tectonic success.

Material science promises to bridge the gap between natural

iation and standardization through non-standard materials, the
traits and performance o f w hich can be manipulated even within a
single member according to specific requirements. This w ill liberate
the traits o f steel from modernity’s homogeneity and paradoxically
return them to the heterogeneity o f traditional practices such as
sword-making.

le ft Frank Gehry/FOGA, Walt Disney Concert Hall

rig h t Wood, a Non-standard M aterial, Used in the Construction
o f the Hughes-Kaiser HK-i, or Spruce Goose
 COMPETITION MODEL
The concept produces an ideal
geometry. We presume it could
be built in wood, as stipulated
by the Taiwanese government.

FORM FOUND MODEL

Our engineers run the
form of the bridge as a
minimal surface in order
to optimize for shell action.
Works fine, looks terrible.

OPTIMIZED STRUCTURAL
MODEL IN WOOD
An interpretation of
the optimized model In
wood looks even worse,

WOOD MODEL WITH

TRANSVERSE ELEMENTS
In an effort to improve the
appearance of the model, trans­
verse members are introduced.
Thinner members are added,
but at the expense of th(
original basket weave concept,

Alishan Bridge: A Case Study in Iterative Process

 S T E E L V E R S IO N W IT H
TR A N SV ER SE ELE M E N TS
Phylogenetic Shift: O u r client indi­
cates that the lifespan of w ooden
bridge un d er the environm ental
conditions on site w ould only
be six years. Fruitless effort!
W e suggest a change in materials.
A form al im provem ent, but
m em bers are still too heavy.

S T E E L V E R S IO N W IT H N O
TR A N S V ER S E ELE M E N TS
A form al im provem ent, but
m em bers are still too heavy.

S T E E L EGG C R A TE M O D E L
A s a rem edy w e suggest turn ing
all m em bers 9 0 degrees. O u r
engineers com plim ent us on a
rational m ove. Bridge becom es
tran sp are nt in elevation, yes, but
incredibly solid from a longitudinal
perspective. Unacceptable!

C R A FTED M ODEL:
D O U B L E L A Y E R G R ID S H E L L
Visual lightness is achieved
b y p airin g tw o lighter m em bers
rather than a single heavy
mem ber. Paradoxical return
to the spirit of the original
com petition model is achieved.
 49
Classicism without Models

The historian and the critic look at sets of examples and then seek
to define a lineage from them. The designer seeks not so much to
categorize as to drive a project toward an essential solution for which
there may be no prior model. Typically the designer confronts a
constellation of demands and conditions with the goal of achieving
a taught economy. The designer’s intuition operates not in terms of
a pre-conscious retrieval, but rather through the active coordination
of factors that cannot be held in the mind simultaneously. A great
tennis player considers neither the history nor the mechanics of every
swing. When confronted with something new, he or she can already
see if something is wrong or right without comparing it to a prior
model or elements of a series. The object’s values are immediately
intelligible and, moreover, not merely the idiosyncratic or subjective
responses.

The Campagnolo Delta Brake provides an example of a designed object

pushed beyond the balance between function and form that charac­
terizes a classical formulation and snaps into a Michelangelo-esque
moment. The brake mechanism becomes literally an overdeveloped
muscle, supersaturated, like that of a bodybuilder. The muscular
poise of the athlete has been pushed to an extreme and moves to the
brink of coherence, threatening to devolve from a coordinated body
into an assembly of fetishized zones. In fact, Campagnolo bicycle
components have developed an avid collectors’ market, the parts
acquiring an independent life from the bicycle as a functioning whole.
 O P ER A TIN G 207

The Cam pagnolo Delta Brake

 50

Projecting Force

In his “On Painting,” the poet and critic Paul Valéry writes,

Man lives and moves in what he sees, but he only sees what he
wants to see. Try different types o f people in the midst o f any
landscape. A philosopher will only vaguely see phenomena; a
geologist, crystallized, confused, ruined and pulverized epochs; a
soldier, opportunities and obstacles; andfo r a peasant it will only
represent acres, and perspiration and profits but all o f them will
have this in common, that they will see nothing as simply a view .4

Like the reversibility of the light ray, landscapes are as much the product
o f projection as they are of interpretation. The individuals mentioned
by Valéry project not only their own particular techniques of seeing
but also the technologies their professions onto the landscape. Each
employs their own techniques and technologies instrumentally on
the landscape while the landscape in turn reveals the precise limits
of those technologies. Indeed, it can be argued that there is nothing
to the landscape beyond those technologies, that both are only made
visible by their mutual projections.

Beyond landscapes, technologies define their operational limits by the

territories they are projected into. Their envelopes of performance are
thus a function of their own inherent limits made manifest by the
environment they encounter. When a system of roads defined by stan­
dard specifications and material limits encounters the non-standard
 O P ER A TIN G 209

slopes of a mountainside, switchbacks occur in order to maintain a

gradient necessary for certain types of vehicles to travel safely. In war
planning, theaters of operations are defined by systems in a similar
way. Weapons systems with a certain operational envelope are
orojected into an environment with its own limits and resistances,
here is an equal imminence in territories and in architecture, a
Dtential that is only met when different kinds of negotiations are
entered into, when systems, projected onto other systems, produce
a third. It is in the release of new potentials in the interaction of the
two at the edge of performance that novelty emerges.

Projecting Force on Territories: The Switchback

 51

Architecture vs. War

The theater of war, like that of politics or physics, comprises a tension

between forces that erode coherence (entropy) and forces that are
seeking to maintain it. The forces that prevail in wartime are those
that stay in order the longest. It is within the unfolding relationship
between order and disorder that the battle itself takes place. A paral­
lel to this unfolding balance between order and disorder exists in
architecture, a theater that does not consider battle to be a means to
an end but considers the battle, and specifically the field of battle, as
an end in itself.

Modernism, in resisting difference, pushes forward the military model

of coherence to a homogenous regimen. In challenging modernism,
we do not advocate disorder. Rather, we recognize that order can
emerge out of different elements acting with a similar purpose, or
out of similar elements
lu
o
S
ficeT
h
d acting differently.
a
V
m
cM
so
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K
2
6
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 The Nomad is the One Standing Still

The surfer stays in the same place (summer) by moving in sequence

with climatic progression. Locally, the surfer is engaged in another
pursuit of stasis in a dynamic field, riding the wave. Similarly, the
nomad on the steppes stays still relative to the greening of the land­
scape, by moving at the speed of annual climatic fluctuation they
are riding a wave of green. The endless summer is a global pursuit.

In p ursu it of endless sum m er, the su rfer m oves across the

globe in order to stay in the sam e tem perature ye ar round.

Global M igration Patterns o f Surfers

(Pro Surfing Circuit Shown as Dotted Line)
 O P E R A T IN G

KENYA

AUGUST

W h y the nom ad doesn't move: T h e nom ad rem ains

stationary w ith respect to the gradient of greening.

Serengeti Nomad M igratory Patterns

C O M M O N ERRORS
TO A V O ID
 53
The Abuse of the Accident:
Conventional vs. Indexical Relationships

Justification for architectures that claim a link between data and a

graphic representation of data are in error. Such relationships are
not indexical but are based, like all semantics, on relationships of
convention. An example of this occurs in phonic alphabets, between
a given sound and a given letter. Just as data can and does correlate
to any number of graphs, and vice versa, the same sound could
be— and, in fact, is— represented by any number of symbols. There
is no indexical relationship between the symbol and the sound in
the way that material expressions of phonics, such as Chladni plates,
index resonance as a specific material diagram. The accidental
relationships of convention should not be abused as indices.

Le tte r Form s: C onventional C h ladni Pattern: Indexical

“Ahhh”
 The Abuse o f Data:
Map/Territoiy Confusion
W
f '

us go back to the map and the territory and ask: “what is it in the terri­
tory that gets onto the map?” We know the territory does not get onto the
map. That is the central point about which we here are all agreed. Now,
the territory were uniform, nothing would get onto the map except its
-undaries, which are the points at which it ceases to be uniform against
e larger matrix. What gets onto the map, infact, is difference, be it a
ijference o f altitude, a difference o f vegetation, a difference in population
fracture, difference o f surface, or whatever. Differences are the things that
get onto the map....A difference, then, is an abstract matter.
— Gregory Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind

Under pressure to justify themselves, the datascapists lapse into the

_ ror of false concreteness and thus confuse process with product.
To suggest that the data that informs, for instance, a diagram of
weather dynamics is relevant to the structural diagram of the roof of
a weather station, simply by virtue of their mutual but conventional
sociation to weather, is an unfortunate consequence of design in
the semantic mode.

A typical misuse of the datascape is as a form generating device.

Essentially, the content that is being graphed justifies the use of the
graph’s form as a means of producing architectural form. In fact, the
graph bears only a conventional relationship to the content that it is
218 T H E A B U SE OF DATA

graphing and could take any number of forms, none of which would
have any necessary formal relationship with the architecture. Such
lapses in logic derive from anxiety to provide thematic justification
for the use of form.

Writing on information theory, Gregory Bateson defines a map

itself not as a territory but as the establishment of difference
that defines territories. The diagram, when used properly and
productively, behaves in a similar way, as an abstract gradient
defining a range of difference. Like the projection of various systems
of content onto the same map, there is a potential in “the difference
that makes a difference.”1 This difference is not automatically
produced as an inherent feature of the map but is the result of value
judgments.
 CO M M O N ER R O R S TO AVOID 219

Roof Form of the W ea th er Station

The Liability o f the Datascape: Breathtaking Lapses in Logic

 55
The Abuse of Histoiy:
Critical Proscription vs. Historic Justification

I do not think that there is anything that isfunctionally— by its very nature—
absolutely liberating. Liberty is a practice....Ifone were tofind aplace, and
perhaps there are some, where liberty is effectively practiced, one would
fin d that it is not owing to the order o f objects, but once again, owing to the
practice o f liberty. ...
— Michel Foucault, Interview with P. Rabinow

It is irresponsible to assume that architecture can affect such things

as freedom and liberty. These are practices and are only achievable at
the level of legislation and behavior.2 Once architecture is separated
from convention this must hold true. The agreement we share as a
society that when we walk into the office we will work is a convention;
there is certainly no power within the realm of architecture to compel
such allegiance. When we create institutions for positive effects, they
are certainly augmented and amplified by architecture, but archi­
tecture will never ensure their success or failure.

Michel Foucault asks whether architecture can generate greater

freedom, and he finds the answer to be no. If liberty is an issue of
practice of human conduct, then matter is indifferent to it, and as
Foucault demonstrates, a monastery can be turned into a prison,
or a school. Indeed we believe it would be impossible to propose a
school that was so specific to the program of “school” that it would
be impossible to use as a prison.
 222 TH E A B U SE OF H ISTO R Y

The politics related to the creation of buildings, the institutions and

the actors that are necessary to bring buildings about, are projected
into buildings from their inception and will bias the way they are
• used. But a building cannot be reduced to politics, any more than
matter can be held responsible for freedom. All that can be said is
that at one moment, politics is a force that works on design, but
the artifact, once formed, has no less tenuous a relationship to
further, future uses because of it. Just as program is no guarantee
of freedom, neither is the nature of the space. As Gilles Deleuze
points out in his discussion of smooth space: The submarine’s
operational dynamic taps into the temperature and flow gradients
of the ocean, the ultimate smooth space, yet it is a weapon of war.
Conversely, and contrary to the stance of critical historians, the
military origins of the technology in no way colors or condemns the
technology as essentially or irrevocably military when the techno­
logies of navigating smooth space are applied to benign uses.

A corollary to the confusion between process and product in the data-

scape exists in the confusion between historical or political conditio“
and architectural production. The relationship, for example, betwee
classical architecture and political values is conventional, or language
based. Republican virtues and representative democracy developed
more or less in parallel with classical architecture. Now, out of an
accidental relationship, classical architecture has come to represent
these virtues, though it could have— and later on did— represent other
values that are entirely opposed, such as totalitarianism.

The historicist impulse is to use origins to either justify or attack the

selection of a certain architecture. But using history to either justify
or dismantle material reality amounts at best to a form of magic.
 56
The Abuse o f the Diagram:
Exhaustion

I
Any one organizational model has limits. The ambition to carry a
diagram through all levels of a single architectural project is exhaus­
tive and reductive. To have one model determine all aspects of
design is to simplify what is in reality a richer, more heterogeneous,
complexity. A true multiplicity requires that many different models
be coordinated. A single model relentlessly deployed at all scales
emerges as merely formal.

In conventional practice, for example, the overall spatial diagram

doesn’t dictate the layout of the toilets. The application of less conven-
! tional models doubly requires that the appropriate limits of function­
ality be observed. It is in the interest of neither the overall diagram nor
the organization of specific functions that a single model would be
adequate to both. The use of several models within a single project is
a more nuanced and productive mode of operation, fosters necessi­
tating and incorporating transitions and the novelty that they promote.

Building S tru ctu re Furniture Fixture

Relentless use of the sam e form at all scales

w itho ut a value jud ge m en t leads to exhaustion.

 57
The Abuse o f Logic:
Confusing Time and Effect

The generating processes of architecture are commonly confused

with its eventual product and effects. This is in fact a logical falla
what Bateson calls an error in logical typing.

Time of formation must not be confused with the time of effects.

Mountains work on the weather to create microclimates and influ
ence larger patterns, but this work is done on a different time seal
than the geological forces that effect mountain building. While
the forces that generate a mountain range do indeed influence the
patterns of weather that move over them indirectly, the one does no|
provide any justification for or meaning to the other. The form of t
mountain, not its formation, is what is relevant to the atmosphere.

Consider confusion between levels of processes that take place in

the same temporality. Ho one giving a party would ever make the
mistake of confusing the cake recipe with the steps of a dance. At
schools of architecture, however, a similar confusion is common,
when data at one level is used as representation at another.
 The Typologist’s Error

[For the typologist, there] are a limited number o f fixed, unchangeable

“ideas” underlying the observed variability [in nature], with the eidos
(idea) being the only thing that isfixed and real, while the observed
variability has no more reality than the shadows o f an object on a
cave w all... [In contrast], the populationist stresses the uniqueness of
everything in the organic world.... [A]ll organisms and organic pheno­
mena are composed o f uniquefeatures and can be described collectively
only in statistical terms. Individuals, or any kind o f organic entities,
form populations o f which we can determine the arithmetic mean and
the statistics o f variation. Averages are merely statistical abstractions,
only the individuals o f which the populations are composed have reality.
The ultimate conclusions o f the population thinker and the typologist are
precisely the opposite. For the typologist the type (eidos) is real and the
variation an illusion, whilefo r the populationist, the type (the average)
is an abstraction and only the variation is real. No two ways o f looking
at nature could be more different.
— Ernst Mayer, in Manuel DeLanda, Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy
THE W ORLD
 59
A Parable for Our Time

In a society within which everything has been reduced to media-

driven representation, the only thing left to believe in is physical
pain. The protagonists of Fight Club have to meet in small groups
and be beaten to a pulp in order to feel alive. Pain is the only thing
that is real, and the only medium through which to exercise free will.
The return to material effects in architecture parallels this thirst for
the real. Effectiveness sidesteps the interpretive space of history,
context, and representation in an effort to see and feel things for
what they do rather than what they mean.

The lye sequence: In order to endure pain the narrator is being urged
by his alter ego to go out of his body in order to get closer into it.
One could parallel the desires in Fight Club with phenomenology— the
desire to have everything grounded within the body and within
experience. Such an understanding holds that architecture is rooted
in irreducible notions of the body and identity. The end of the movie,
in fact, splits this notion open again to reveal that identity is ambiguous.
There is finally no clear boundary between the narrator and his alter
ego, yet their acts, and the consequences of those, are decidedly
unambiguous. b
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 *3* A PA R A BLE OF O U R T IM E

These acts culminate in a mission by the members of Fight Club

(here dubbed “Project Mayhem”) that goes beyond battle among
themselves to engage society. Beginning with the destruction of a
- piece of “corporate art,” the attempt to destroy the corporate body
is accomplished by taking artwork out of its representational state
and turning it into a giant bowling ball, a thing with weight, mass,
and inertia, leading to the destruction of a “franchised coffee bar.”
This is, of course, a futile effort. When one of the members of the
operation is shot and killed, Project Mayhem tries to make the body
“go away” by burying it anonymously in the garden. The narrator
insists on returning identity to the corpse and establishing its
singularity, insisting on the name “Robert Paulson.” Project Mayhem
immediately seizes upon the mark of individuality and turns it into
a mantra, which horrifies the narrator by rending the name from
its singular identity. A name, once it becomes repeated, ceases to
become semantic and takes on the characteristics and properties of
a rhythm, or refrain.

The refrain accomplishes the charge of effectiveness by severing the

semantic from its links to meaning. First by exhausting meaning
through repetition, and second by imparting a rhythmic structure
to the repetition, which serves as a diagrammatic armature that can
acquire meanings but is not reducible to any particular meanings.
Like the tenuous relationship between lyrics and music, or program
and architecture, the connection between narrative and structure is
not fixed. The materiality of the language, its musicality, its capacity
for rhyme, is ultimately what adheres to the structure of rhythm,
while its semantic dimension bears only a conventional relationship
to that structure.
 I
60

Foamy Realities

The foaminess of our built world is a direct expression of late capi­

talism— of junk bonds, etc., a celebration of all that is insubstantial.
A return to materials, like a return to the “authentic” gold standard,
is beyond us. We advocate neither a material realism, nor a return
to phenomenology, nor a Pop representational use of materials that
hysterically celebrates— like after-dinner chit-chat— the simulacrum
(i.e., dryvit masquerading as stone). Rather, we are looking paradox­
ically at greater levels of artifice like puts and calls for matter. This
does not simply mean material innovation that is, if left by itself,
simply an extension of the modernism we already know.

W h a t you d raw is w h at yo u get: T h e true horro r is not the gap in representation (le ft)

but the inexorable drift of ou r w orld tow ard it (rig h t).

 6i

Pop Iconography as Myth

The enjoyment of Pop art and its persistance in architecture is a

categorical enjoyment. No one takes any particular interest in one
Campbell’s Soup can over another Campbell’s Soup can. Aside from
its status as a secondary representation (a problem that painting
doesn’t have to confront), architecture is built up of things that
have a constructed logic indifferent to their representational status.
The interchangeability of any Pop object with any other Pop object,
in contrast, derives from its critical promotion as a categorical
ideological object, a sign of late capitalist production, rather than
as an object of intrinsic merit in and of itself. It exists solely as an
object of critical discourse. Having been invented once, it could
very well have been repeated endlessly and it would not make any
difference. It is this arbitrary relationship to content (and to form,
for that matter) that is its undoing. For it is arbitrariness— the
same kind of arbitrariness that connects the grassy knoll to John
F. Kennedys assassination— that finally reveals Pop for what it is:
an art of sentiment. It is not the work, per se, but the free-floating
nostalgia that is associated with the Pop object that provokes this
less-than-demanding interest.

Indeed, valorizing Pop production as a naïve or natural sign of

society in general is belied by the fact that when one looks carefully
at any instance of Pop one finds it is the work of very deliberate
specialist planning and is the farthest thing from a popular creation:
as authentic as the notion of corporate soul.
 62

Migration o f Practices

Only the organic can adapt to the organic.

— Sigfried Giedion, Mechanization Takes Command

The mechanization of various practices across the full spectrum of

production, processing, and eventually dissemination and consump­
tion is open to migration rather than fixed in supercession. We note
Sigfried Giedion’s observation that certain organic tasks, such as the
plucking of chickens, are retained as handwork within an otherwise
automated system. But a larger argument can be made that rather
than falling into obsolescence, the practices of the nineteenth century
migrate into modernity as luxuries. Hobbies become indistinguish­
able from work in as much as they comprise the same practices of
work (such as the complex handwork of model making, or the careful
acquisition and scrupulous filing of collecting).

Craft, therefore, does comprise a natural response to material

necessity, be it the organic moments in mechanized process, the
rapid prototyping of mass-produced components that takes place
in auto production, or the customized, one-off at Lockheed’s
SkunkWorks program. Rejection of craft, therefore, is reactionary
and cannot be justified by an ideological platform that purports to
reinvent production without recognizing the distribution of craft
practices.
Êk
 64

Desire’s Rainbow: Migration of Products

If y o u like eating...

Special K Cereal...
I

w e kn ow yo u ’ll like...

B rau n Electric S havers...

and yo u enjoy w atching...

Seinfeld Reruns...

and spending $ 2 5 0 on...

an A rm ani sport coat...

or m aybe just splurging for that...

Land R over S U V .
REISER + UMEMOTO
Fenqihu Station Infrastructure
Alishan M ountain, Taiwan, 2005
 65
Continuity and Discontinuity

Only nature is truly continuous. The builders of buildings must

contend with construction in parts. Operating thusly, under original
sin, the will to continuity and discontinuity is the source of pleasure
and pain, virtue and vice. Man is finite and so are his products.

M a n is finite and so are his w orks.

 A Materialist Argument o f Culture

Insofar as culture is itself material, it is susceptible to the sameforces of

change that work on matter in general. Thus, metamorphoses in culture are
worked on by the same objective structures and phenomena, ...In exactly
the same wayfo r instance as ancient medicine explained all biological
phenomena by the action o f a vital “principle.” But i f we no longer try to
separate what isfundamentally united, and instead try simply to classify
and conjoin phenomena, we see that technique is in truth the result o f
growth and destruction, and that, inasmuch as it is equally remote from
syntax andfrom metaphysics, it may without exaggeration be linked to
physiology.
— Henri Focillon, The Life of Forms in Art

Instead of seeing regionalism emerge out of distinct cultures as was

once the case, a universal regionalism assumes a global culture in
which material logics engender regions rather than the other way
around. In fact, territories are no longer only defined by physical
locale. One realm in which this is found increasingly to be the case
is that of global tourism.

Tourism today cannot be separated from ecological, political, and

social issues. In fact, given the positive goals for tourism in all these
categories, the traditional understanding of a tourist economy is
replaced by a model that is integrated into a larger continuum of not
only economic but cultural forces as well. New tourist infrastructure
244 A M A T E R IA L IST A R G U M E N T OF C U LT U R E

is being designed with national and international goals that range

from renewing interests in the natural landscape among a primarily
urban population to encouraging international investment by
establishing a culture of business amenity, to fostering recognition
through new institutions. As such, tourism no longer comprises
people as spectators to a past history or to static natural conditions
but involves the tourist in the creation of something entirely new.
In some sense this has always been the case. The presence of tourists,
especially in quantity, do fundamentally change the places they visit.
But the tourist has historically been seen as foreign to this system and
detrimental to a perceived authenticity, contributing to the dilution
or eradication of traditional cultural practices. This has rendered the
act of tourism purely in its negative effects, rather than recognizing
its potential to act positively through fusion.

Rather than fetishizing flows of capital and production as a formal

device, architecture affirms this new touristic mode through active
intervention with material practices as a substrate to culture.

Neither a superficial or invasive overlay of uses on the site nor a

nostalgic postulation of an imagined past but rather a positive projec­
tion for the future, the possibilities of this work emerge from a
coherent utilization of the inherent ecological structure for a series
of transplanted regionalisms.
 67

Neo-regionalism

Traditional regionalism, like any fundamentalism, is the true inter­

national style. All regionalisms are structurally the same; only the
semantics of their local narrative differs. More homogenous, struc­
turally, than globalism, regionalism is a reactionary formation that
only becomes recognizable as an ideology when its opposite emerges.

Where the global market relies on imposing transnational products

onto often hostile markets, introducing sameness and repetition as
means of establishing hegemony, a materialist notion of culture and
technique establishes an ultra-regionalism that manifests regional
difference as an inherent structure. It is a new kind of universality
that rests on ubiquitous difference constituting a larger whole. As
such, it neither proposes imposition of a homogenous universalizing
system nor does it seek to fix or circumscribe traditional regional
differences. It is an erroneous assumption that global capital is
always in a one-to-one correspondence with global trends. Rather,
ultra-regionalism proposes working within existing transnational
systems where they intersect local practices but understands the
local as two-fold: first, that changed conceptions of universalizing
systems hold that they are not homogenous but can create their own
internal regions and logics, and second, that fixed notions of cultural
and national regions belong more to ideology than reality and in fact
with very few exceptions are constantly changing. So the task is not
to resist the global but to seek out the most creative ways to develop
richer regions within it.
246 N E O -R E G IO N A L ISM

W h y m ust eve ryw h ere be like everyw here else?

 T H E W ORLD *47

The universal no longer means that all categorical difference can be

ased, that everything is exchangeable with everything else. In fact,
the opposite is true. Capitalism assumes this logic at the level of
economics, but material and cultural systems resist such simplifi­
cation. Within a material or cultural framework, everything has
a range and a capacity; therefore, their limits are in some sense
concrete. The difference is, categorical assumptions are regarded
differently; they are not based upon what things are, but rather,
what they do.

While not entirely interchangeable— following certain pathways

and logics— regionalisms can be manifest artificially in the creation
of material networks of all kinds. The accidents of place no longer
I codify regions but instead serve as a range, much as structural and
legal systems are no longer maintained in a universal exclusivity. This
I |requires another level of artifice. The melting pot and its attending
[ anxieties about homogeneity can now give way to a new sense of
I the alloy; not a mixture that erases difference, but a compound that
i creates new kinds of difference.
248
Notes
IN TRODUCTION
1 Friedrich Nietzsche, “On the Uses
and Disadvantages of History,” in
Untimely Meditations, ed. Daniel
Breazeale, trans. R. J. Hollingdale
(Cambridge, Mass.: Cambridge
University Press, 1997), 57-124.
2 D’Arcy Thompson, On Growth and
Form, rev. ed. (New York: Dover,
1992), prefatoiy note.
3 Aldo Rossi, A Scientific
Autobiography, trans. Lawrence
Venuti (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT
Press, 1981), 1.
4 Ibid.
5 Robert Venturi, Complexity and
Contradiction in Architecture (New
York: Museum of Modern Art,
1966), 30.
6 E. H. Gombrich, “Norm and
Form ,” in Studies in the A rt o f the
Renaissance, second ed. (New York:
Phaidon, 1971), 95.
7 Ibid., 96.
8 Gregory Bateson, Steps to Ecology
o f M ind (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2000), 459.
9 Gombrich, “Norm and Form,” 97.
10 Ibid.
GEOMETRY
1 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari,
A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian
Massumi (Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press, 1987), 352-53.
2 Edgar Allan Poe. “On Composition,”
in Great Short Works o f Edgar Allan
Poe: Poems, Tales, Criticism, ed. G. R.
Thompson (New York: Harper and
Row, 1970), 528-41.
3 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand
Plateaus, 10,
4 Sanford Kwinter, cited in Jesse
Reiser and Nanako Umemoto, Tokyo
Bay Project, Emerging Complexities
Symposium (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1986).
5 Manuel DeLanda, Intensive Science
and Virtual Philosophy (New York:
Continuum, 2002), 17.
6 Ibid., 28.
7 Ibid., 18.
8 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand
Plateaus, 352-53.
M ATTER
1 See Werner Oechslin, “Geometry
and Line: The Vitruvian Science
of the Architectural Drawing,”
Daidalos 1 (1981): 20-35.
 N O TES
Mario Salvadori and Robert
: Heller, Structure in Architecture:
The Building o f Buildings, 2nded.
(Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice
Hall, 1975), 272.
Peter McCleary, “Robert
Le Ricolais’ Search for the
‘Indestructible Idea,”’ lotus
International 99 (1998): 102-31.
See, for example, the proposal by
Foreign Office Architects for the
new World Trade Center towers in
New York. The towers are a direct
rescaling o f Le Ricolais’s column
experiments.
J. B. S. Haldane, “On Being the
Right Size,“ in The World o f
Mathematics, ed. James R. Newman
(New York: Simon and Schuster,
1956)» 953-
Lee Smolin, The Life o f the Cosmos
(New York: Oxford University
Press, 1997), 7.
Donald E. Ingber, “The
Architecture of Life,” Scientific
American 278, no. 1 (Jan. 1998):
48-57.
Martin Bowman, Wellington: The
Geodetic Giant (Washington, D.C.:
Smithsonian Institution Press,
1989).
Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand
Plateaus, 367. Our reading o f this
text is a specific departure from
how it has been previously used by
Greg Lynn to emphasize the geo­
metrical dimension of the inexact
and anexact over a materialist
understanding.
249
10 See James R. Newman,
“Commentary on Queen Dido,
Soap Bubbles, and a Blind
Mathematician,” in The World o f
Mathematics, ed. Newman, 882-85.
OPERATING
1 Stephen J. Gould, “The Pattern of
Life’s History,” in The Third Culture:
Beyond the Scientific Revolution,
ed. John Brockman (New York:
Touchstone, 1996), 51-73.
2 Capt. Eric Brown, cited in Wings of
the Luftwaffe, ed. G. William Green
(London: MacDonald, 1977).
3 Bill Yenne, The World’s Worst
Aircraft, ed. John Kirk (Greenwich,
Conn.: Brompton Books, 1990),
100.
4 Paul Valéry, “On Painting,” in
Selected Writings o f Paul Valery,
trans. Anthony Bower (New York:
New Direction, 1964), 222.
CO M M ON ERRORS TO
AVOID
1 Gregory Bateson, Steps to an Ecology
o f M ind (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2000), 459.
2 This argument is made by Stan
Allen in his Points and Lines (New
York: Princeton Architectural
Press, 1999), 102.
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Archivo Mas: 151 center
A it Institute of Chicago, Helen Birch
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©James A. Bednar: 222
Biblioteca National, Madrid: 183,184
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Collection Centre Canadien
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http://www.focusmag.gr/links/view-
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http://www.kamaboko.com/recruit/
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 IL L U ST R A T IO N C R E D IT S
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images/bldgs/large/washdc/
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I 13 top
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©Richard L. Howey: 39 bottom
©Werner Huthmacher courtesy of
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Douglas Gauthier: 174 bottom left
©Aaron Igler: 129
Toyo Ito Architect: 109 middle
©Ken Kay: 115 top
Kunsthistoriches Museum, Vienna: 211
Rollin R. La France, courtesy of Venturi,
Scott Brown and Associates: 174
| top left
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255
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©Melissa Stanek, 239 top
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Jim Wilson/The New York Times: 235
Princeton Architectural Press