Field and farm Field: Old English folde , land or earth. Shaped through earthworks, measurement and maintenance, it is a primary building material at territorial scale. Furrows, parcels and terraces organise soil into legible surfaces capable of ownership. Long before buildings appear, the field prepares ground for architecture by fixing land into measurable, drawable and governable form. Acre: Old Norse akr , open country. By 1000 CE an English acre was a piece of ploughed ground, signifying human presence. It evolved from a measure of labour applied to the earth into a measure of land surface, part of an intricate and materially grounded system of measurement. This system, a cartographic instrument, renders unused or ‘empty’ ground dispossessed, a terra nullius , available for other uses. The military lineage of field , first a battlefield, later an area of operations, is found in military aerial photography of the 1930s, which shaped a mode of seeing that established what John May calls a ‘managerial surface’, an orienting schema through which territory is organised, recorded, monitored and prepared for infrastructural and architectural intervention. 10 Field names a constructed ground surface shaped through earthworks, measurement, and maintenance. As a building material at territorial scale, it supplies soil, biomass, water, and aggregate that architecture absorbs and stabilizes as foundations, fill, lawns, and infrastructure. Agrilogistics describes this condition. Farm. 11 Built apparatus that stabilizes soil and field into productive ground through enclosure, infrastructure, and maintenance. As John Stilgoe notes, the shared lineage of farm, firm, and home frames farming as a practice of fixing land, laboor, and livelihood in place. 10 From medieval firma to eighteenth-century enclosure, the farm binds cultivation, provisioning, and obligation into durable spatial arrangements. Farms are a false promise of permanence. Frank Lloyd Wright, Ludwig Hilberseimer, and Andrea Branzi imagined landscapes and farming as structural to urban form, anticipating modern interests in architecture of food and agrarian production. These architectural imaginations follow a Lockean logic of improvement. Soil is fixed through labor, fields subdivided into plots that can be measured and enclosed. Soil becomes a managed surface, entangled in histories of dispossession. Field also describes a constructed ground surface shaped through earthworks, measurement and maintenance. As a building material at territorial scale, it supplies soil, biomass, water and aggregate that architecture absorbs and stabilises as foundational: a condition described as agrilogistics . 12
Diana Guo
Diana Guo
Laurian Ghinitoiu / AMO. Metropolis Feb 2020
from the top: Tilling Land division
10 John May, ‘The Logic of the Managerial Surface’, Praxis Journal of Writing and Building 13, 2012 11 John Stilgoe. What is Landscape . Cambridge: MIT Press, 2018. Stilgoe draws out the uncanny connection between farm, firm, and home: ‘when a firm is a farm, it is fixed indeed, grounded in a place, steadfast, forced to succeed or fail in place— a family-owned farm fuses home and business’ 12 Timoth Morton, ‘She stood in tears amid the alien corn: Thinking through agrilogistics’. Diacritics , Climate Change Criticism, Vol. 41, No. 3.Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013
Robotic cutouts of Stalinist-era political iconography in Countryside, The Future , Guggenheim Museum, New York, 2020. Photo originally published in Metropolis , Feb. 2020
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on site review 48 :: building materials
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