to selectively codify and frame desire and subjectivity as a contingent act, comes in the Deleuzian sense from “material process of connection, registration, and enjoyment of flows of matter and energy coursing through bodies in networks of production of all registers, be they geological, organic, or social”. 4 The flows and processes, no matter how imperceptible, are what link the landscape, inhabitation and the reflexivity of both. If the Deleuzian ‘geological’ is a vast network of sorting computational machines, the volcanic model can be seen as an extreme geological mechanism. 5 The current tranquility of Auckland’s volcanic field conditions mask vast apparati whose working parts are tectonic tension, heat pressure and molten depths. The volcanic field conditions belie the transportation of future sedimentation, the repetition of the genesis of automatic landscapes. On this physical and geological time scale, architecture would appear as etchings on the slow pouring surface. This architectural etching leads us to a calligraphic-diagrammatic model of urbanism, one that demands a more insightful examination of the geological. The city as a geological extension is conceptually drawn as an urban pressure map, as a three- dimensional mapping of stratifications, as metaphoric and conceptual fault lines in the socio-spatial assemblage, bringing us closer to answering De Landa’s question, ‘is it possible to find a diagram (or abstract machine) that operates across geological, meteorological and social formations?’ 6
The unique contingencies of the architecture and urbanism of Auckland derive from equally contingent geological, meteorological and social movements. Auckland’s volcanic geology, read as a geo-philosophy, allows us to project it upwards to Auckland’s urban architecture and landscape, specifically as dissonant outgrowths of the geologic drift or or buoys on the geologic flow, as an archaic field condition. 1 Once-molten volcanic cones in and around Auckland, quarried and excavated since Maori settlement, form an uneven and unstable ground condition of irregular concentricity, which architecture networks must negotiate. 2 The dynamic volcanic field condition produces unique social and spatial institutions, and as such it functions as a philosophical and a contextual grounding for design processes. Geophilosophy, as a discipline, examines emergent socio-spatial networks as extensions and assemblages in, of and through a core of geological thought. It is concerned with processes of stratification – literal and metaphoric, and the interpretation of relations between geology, the built environment and structures of thought. Mobility, of people and ideas, tracked as excess and flow, allow the empirical prospect of geophilosophy to refigure architecture as an artificial landscape operation adrift in a much deeper and older series of densifications and stratifications. 3 Speaking geophilosophically, architecture and its extension into the urban is an assemblage, always in flow, with minimal grounding, The necessary function of architecture
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Sir George Grey Special Collections, Auckland Libraries: NZ Map 6409, used with permission
facing page: Ferdinand von Hochstetter. The Isthmus of Auckland with its extinct volcanoes. Gotha: Justus Perthes, 1865. Originally published in Geologisch-topographischer Atlas von Neu-Seeland (Hochstetter and Petermann, 1863), and republished in English in 1864. above: Street map of Auckland City and suburbs circa 1950
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