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number 32 fall 2014
weak systems
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CAN/USA $14 display until May 2015
Andrea Branzi. Weak strategy for in-formality. Rio
Elisa C. Cattaneo. WEAKCITY Notes on Landscape Urbanism Trento, Italy: Listlab, 2014 www.weakcircus.com
de Janeiro case . o-n/3 Milano: Maggioli, 2014
Juhani Pallasmaa Encounters: Architectural Essays Helsinki: Rakennustieto Publishing, 2008 ISBN-13: 978-9516826298
Stefano Munarin, Maria Chiara Tosi. Welfare Space. On the role of welfare state policies in the construction of the contemporary city. Macerata, Italy: Quodilibet Studio, 2014 ISBN 978-8895623917
Sanford Kwinter. Requiem: For the City at the End of the Millenium . Barcelona: Actar, 2010 ISBN-13: 978-8492861200
Jane C Loeffler. The Architecture of Diplomacy: Building America’s Embassies.
Princeton Architectural Press; 2nd revised edition, 2010 ISBN-13: 978-1568989846
Barbara Stauffacher Solomon. Why? Why Not? San Francisco: Fun Fog Press, 2013 ISBN: 978-0-9885546-2-7
Jane Bennett. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2010 ISBN-13: 978-0822346333
Douglas Spencer, Alfredo Ramirez, Eduardo Rico, Eva Castro Ctitical Territories, from Academia to Praxi s
Peter Eisenman. Re-Working Eisenman. London: Academy Editions, 1993 ISBN 13: 978-1854901125
Anna Kostreva. Berlin: A Morphology of Walls Berlin: Archive Books, 2014 ISBN: 978-3943620139
New York: Actar, 2013 ISBN 978-8895623375
ON SITE r e v i e w
32 fall 2014 weak systems
legacies and definitions Stephanie White Elisa Cattaneo Cameron Hu Yann Ricordel-Healy Ania Molenda building case studies Felix Wing Lam Suen Tom Martin
Weak systems, the death of heroics Weakcity. A text, a word, a topic Life and death in the open system
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12 15 18
The idea of a de-materialised dwelling in 1960s and ‘70s USA ‘Weak will open, strong is closed’ The legacy of Oskar Hansen
Indeterminate frames and open territories Surprises and good fortune. Small post-tensioned concrete bridges Weak systems and fluctuating contingencies, Venice as theatre There’s nothing to see here, Lead Pencil Studio
21 24 32 37
Karianne Halse Lyndsay Leblanc
land and landscape Neeraj Bhatia Ruth Oldham Tim Cresswell
Deceptively weak: Arcadia invaded The Beckton Alp, towards a typology of the unused and unrecognised Desire lines
40 44 47
found systems Joshua Craze Michael J Leeb Jennifer Davis Eduardo Aquino
Saving the bad new things Residual structures, inevitable ends Weight and weakness, Formlessfinder The soft surface of the city
48 55 56 60
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fragile urbanisms Rodrigo Barros Virginia Fernandez Rincon Will Craig
Sunset at the end of the urban age. Valparaiso’s struggle for place Underpinning informal urbanisms, the barrio and the rancho Urban policy, by stealth, Madrid
62 66 70 72 76 78
Queer diaspora, making places in transition Paris for everyone, Enfants du Canal et PEROU Doppelgänger in the open, a Canal Street case study
Thomas Strickland Natalia Scoczylas Can Vu Bui
walking Dennis Keen
Walking Almaty I, access ramps Walking Almaty II, antennas, addresses Why? Why Not?
69 82 86
Barbara Solomon
who we are
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On Site review gratefully acknowledges the ongoing support of our contributors, our subscribers and the assistance of the Canada Council for the Arts through their Publishing Grants to Arts and Literary Magazines.
On Site review also acknowledges the kind support of Calgary Arts Development, City of Calgary.
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Jeffrey Burland Lindsay
The construction of a geodesic dome, the predecessaor of Skybreak, at Baie d’Urfe, Quebec, 1951. Designed in 1950 by Jeffrey Lindsay of The Buckminster Fuller Research Institute, built by Lindsay, Ted Pope, Pete Cano and friends.
weak systems the death of heroics
notes | unfinished ideas by stephanie white
Horizontal spread makes several appearances in this issue: weak systems operate laterally, never hierarchically. From the social interactions on Eduardo Aquino’s beaches to General System Theory and its military appropriation outlined by Cameron Hu, a number of essays moil around the terms weak city , weak architecture , terrain vague and landscape urbanism which above all take plant ecologies as models for urban growth and organisation. There is little room for heroism in any of this; change is incremental and gradual, action is collective and diffuse. Thomas Strickland’s project in Barcelona with a group of LBGTQ refugees is so quiet, so slow, so face-to- face, palm-to-palm that we are stopped in our tracks: it hardly registers on the scale of what constitutes architecture, yet has done more to inscribe value on the city for these refugees than most highly-awarded buildings. This architecture isn’t always about form. Take the iconic thin pencils of the1973 World Trade Centre, strong in form and hubris, weak in structure. Its original enemies were the capacity of limitations: elevator systems and wind. The open joists that acted as bracing for the bundled steel tubes of the exo-skeleton also supported the floors – a loose system, not unlike Karianne Halse’s Venice, interdependent parts as in a tensegrity system – cut one element and it fails completely. This kind of failure was unanticipated, as inconceivable as an attack by a thin-skinned airplane armed with Stanley knives and an ideology. Our conceptions of what constitutes strength in architecture and urbanism must be revised. Not only were the Maginot Line and the Atlantic Wall superseded immediately by military technology, so the Green Line and the various Red Lines are rendered ineffective as soon as they are made: they come from a paradigm that valorises strength as power, and doesn’t understand weakness as a discrete entity with its own philosophy, its own literature and its own practitioners and, increasingly, useful strategems. Weak, loose, uncertain systems show their resiliance when terms of reference are reconstructed to include not politics, not economics, not military might, but human life where everything is negotiable. My (weak) training was as a modernist, where such ideas were anathema, where architecture was declarative, brutally military, rarely discussed. It is fitting that for a journal which collects starting points, outlines of ideas and theories and little-known projects by relatively unknown people that this issue, 32: weak systems , should finally examine why the unfinished is so appealing. We have had, perhaps, enough of hegemony, enough heroics. ~
In the investigations that collectively constitute this issue of On Site review 32: weak systems , some interesting congruences have emerged between very disparate contributors. There is a refocussing on the architectural theory of the 1960s, especially open form, systems theory and indeterminate structures. Buckminster Fuller keeps cropping up as a kind of exemplar of a new technology that was both dematerialised and able to be endlessly replicable. By coincidence I recently spent some time with an archive of work unseen since the middle 1980s, Jeffrey Burland Lindsay’s domes, tensegrity structures, umbrella sun shades and water reservoir roof systems. While manning the Buckminster Fuller Research Institute in Montreal from 1949-53, he quite literally built what Fuller envisioned. On the facing page is the building of a prototype for Arctic installations on the DEW line, erected near Beaurepaire, north of Montreal, in the winter of 1951. One forgets, looking at end results and subsequent versions, just what 1951 looked like, where men in their mid-twenties wore overcoats, girls wore skirts and furs and everyone wore galoshes, even to build a magical, ephemeral, thin dome of light weight wood and cables in a snowy field. Lindsay spent much of his subsequent career in Los Angeles developing a modular housing system of fibreglas spheres that could be deployed wherever there was a housing need and no wherewithal to provide it – migrant workers camps, poor parts of American cities. He wrote, in 1982 and somewhat bitterly, ‘molded spherical atmospheres weren’t worth the effort, the insolubles notwithstanding’. Yann Ricordel-Healy has written in this issue about the Reyner Banham – Francois Dallegret manifesto ‘A Home is Not a House’ of 1965. On the cover is a plan of a module that can fit together to make a configuration: it was an era when rooms and houses were simply not seen as appropriate or adequate for the future. Curvy bubble-shapes that could attach to each other in infinite patterns seemed much more interesting. The speed with which these ideas were taken up by the counter- culture who wanted nothing to do with the suburban rooms and houses they grew up in must have come as a shock. There was no one more un-counter-cultural than Fuller, or Lindsay, or Reyner Banham: they were, by and large, engineers, Fuller deeply connected to the American military, Lindsay an ex- WWII RCAF pilot, Banham an engineer with Bristol Aeroplane Company. Candilis-Josic-Woods, active CIAM members, proposed an open system for the Berlin Free University in1963. Growth took the form of webs of connections: a built rhizomatic structure. Ania Molenda writes in this issue of Oscar Hansen’s Open Form Manifesto of 1959 realised in his 1969 PREVI project in Peru. There was a dimension to open form that responded to the politics of the Cold War, the impenetrability of the Iron Curtain and the paranoia of the HUAC – a bi-polar world that was rigid and completely controlling. Open form in this context is clearly subversive: like algae, or a virus, a ‘weak’ indefinite informal structure with no centre and no borders is uncontrollable .
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0. WEAK : A TEXT, A WORD, A TOPIC Weakcity research starts from analysis of the word weak and, thinking through its factorisation and transposition, delineates a theoretical-practical approach for a renovated urban design. The purpose of the research is to experiment with how, inside the ‘construction’ of contemporary cities, a weak approach is able to defy the object/architectonic events and established methodologies of urban studies, going beyond the designative value of architecture. Through a weak language, in a weak context, with recycled and innovative materials, Weakcity identifies decoration as able to transform urban scenarios, privileging relational and open spaces more than built ones. The notion of ecology and of an ecological system, as intended by Landscape Urbanism, is the infrastructure of the method, in which ecology is Technonature – an evolution of nature in artificial terms, focussed on trans-disciplinarity, crucial in transforming codes and instruments of urban design. Operatively and transversally, the term ‘weak’ undergoes variations according to the following steps: 1 as theoretical method : relational, complex, rhizomatic, trans-disciplinary, baroque 2 as noun : for the multiple variations that it generates from a paradoxical etymology 3 as verb : (urban strategy) becoming a performative and active process 4 as adjective : (operational tools) as devices 5 as territory : in a conceptual sense before a formal one
urbanism | a necessary paradigm shift by elisa cattaneo
0. WEAKCITY a text, a word, a topic
This is the reason for the term weak architecture. It allows a diagonal and oblique cut. Not exactly chronological and not generational. Its purpose, in situations apparently different, is to reveal the constant that, in my opinion, lights in a particular way contemporary conditions. 1 — Ignasi De Solà-Morales
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1 Ignasi De Solà Morales, ‘Weak city’, in Differences . Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996
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Elisa C Cattaneo
1. CORE OF THE PROBLEM The exaltation of the architectural object-project’s role and its fixity is a synthesis of a process that absolutises conceptual methods and shapes. The development of Weakcity assumes a bi-polar cultural system that on one hand glorifies the magnificence, the extraordinariness and the subjectivity of self-referential, a-topic shape: shapes that consider the marvellous as the ‘supreme instance legitimising all’. 2 On the other side, contemporary research resists experimentation with new project-based methods that go beyond the vertical, remaining firmly inside the ‘science of space’. Attitudes which belong to present-day culture underline three principal causes that become the base assumptions of Weakcity: 1 The exactitude synthesised by both the architectonic object and urban design – an exactitude that is ineffective for new urban problems. We break the relationship between project and object (i.e. project = methodological precision 3 , project = drawing, project = type). Instead we underline instability as a new process, proposing non-designative space characterised by relative and rhetorical qualities of decoration, of ephemeralisation and of secondariness, both methodologically and formally. 2 The hypertelos of architecture. In fact, architecture is a hypertelos of images, a simulacrum of reality that produces simulative shapes more than interpretive or imaginative ones. We wish to erase from the real this ‘invisible other’. Possible and different levels of reality compromise not only the transformative attitude of space, but new meanings, new ‘substance’. 4 By eternalising and problematising only the present, architecture erases the possible, virtuality, allusion, and the relationship with an invisible in the construction of the city. 3 Atony: the expression of a monotone line that does not observe differences, suspense, alternations of spaces. Atony refers to two specific conditions: the linguistic homogeneity of contemporary architecture, revealed by a lexical and methodological globalised evenness, and the loss of place- specific conditions. Atony is closely related to the concept of atopy. These three conditions represent three different levels of ‘reduction’ in different and consequential ways; they specify the hyper-valuation of design as a project-based principle: methodology is locked into established codexes; the architectural object is at present unable to renounce itself; and there is an incapacity for thought to be dynamic and differential moments of a process for which ‘the essence of architecture is its disappearance’.
2. NON-FIGURATIVE AND NON-DESIGNATIVE TERRITORIES: SCIENTIFIC ETYMOLOGY
Methodological branches related to non-figurative and non-designative spaces comprise an ‘inverse codex’ inside urban theory, linked to the critics of modernism and its logic- synthetic codes.
The scientific parentheses of the research are: Situationism, from which we take the values of temporary/impermanence/modification
Radicality, in particular Archizoom’s and Superstudio’s research from in which we find the dissolution of the architectural object and the values of performative and genetic surfaces. The research of Andrea Branzi, in particular, is crucial here. Land art, from which we assimilate the techniques of ephemeralisation, the glossary and the concept of entropy. Landscape Urbanism of Charles Waldheim, James Corner, Moshen Mostafavi and Stan Allen, from which we take the conceptual substitution of landscape for architecture and planning. Weak architecture of De Solà-Morales, for the methodological cuts, the decorations, the dissolution of architecture in its absolutist role. Weakcity’s relation with Landscape Urbanism amplifies the short-circuit inside previous hermeneutical steps in the theory- project relationship. We can read this relation as connected to the sequence space-place-context-landscape , where Landscape Urbanism is a new experiment composed of: 1 Theory, developed through a critique of Modernism and synthetic-exact approaches; through trans-disciplinarity as a scientific development of continuous regeneration (a substitute for the ‘science of space’) and through the formulation of an adaptive urbanism. 2 Methodology, that substitutes and hybridises an ecological logic for the traditional urban logic of plan, program and urban design. It privileges dialogue over the dialectic suggested by theory of complexity (as culture/ nature, nature/city, figure/background), and it reduces the centrality of architectonic scale and architecture in general as a topic for urban design. 3 Operational strategy, that privileges horizontal surfaces over vertical ones, reactivating the field as the favoured space of transformations and relations inside the role of performative surface. In this way, we lose vernacular/ romantic ideas related to landscape.
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2 Tomás Maldonado. Reale e virtuale . Milan: Giangiacomo Feltrinelli Editore, 1994 3 David Harvey in The Condition of Postmodernity , 1990, highlights theoretical and consequential reduction in reference paradigms in the transition from modernity to post-modernity. 4 J. Baudrillard, Le strategie fatali, ed. Feltrinelli, Milano, 2007
Elisa C Cattaneo
3. WEAK AS METHOD. SYNTHESIS OF A PROCESS AS OPEN WORK This leads us to the following fundamental theoretical steps: Horizontal Thought: we abandon known paradigms about the city to replace them with the kind of horizontal thought generated by Gilles Deleuze. Trans-disciplinarity becomes the possibility for a continuous re-signification where the project becomes an open work with different levels of reality, self-defined as relational, hyper-textual and rhizomatic. Complex Thought: the project is a process, dialogic not linear, focused on deliberate ambiguity. Dodging Time: the subjunctive possibly avoids the present, the future perfect dodges the past, the conditional dodges the future. In this temporal assumption, the project is characterised as always different, temporary, dynamic, instantaneous, transitional. The Baroque: a relativisation of contents (anti-emphatic) de-forms it into a decorative and rhetorical moment. The Baroque works with multiplicity, between the folds, between conceptual and formal discontinuities, so that architecture is really decorative – not essential, not fixed. Baroque Diversion: an accent on minor thought emphasises the concept of intermixing, the right of opacity and the conceptual passage from territory to land as defined by Glissant. 5
4. WEAK AS INSTRUMENT
‘Language to be looked at, things to be read’. An apparatus of instruments activates the theoretical conditions of the research to open up to new methodological and operative conditions. Between method and operation, the tools are the game and the paradox, the éclat of the esoteric and a cognitive-projective map. The tools give ‘provisional legitimisation’ to the project and question the long-held validity of the authoritarian principle. In particular, the paradox and the game become instruments that open up a multiplicity of meanings, reorienting the project toward as yet untrodden streets, toward infinite epistemological and formal possibilities that the project foresees. It is a Tangled Tale 6 where sense works with non-sense 7 to define a new degree of freedom, a radical re-definition, where a shape is just one of the possible manifestations of meaning in continuous renewal. The esoteric words of the Deleuzian matrix, the éclats 8 , are not just exercises, but rather an operational method with continuous re-articulations, each unstable, that support a flexible, nomadic and complex methodology. Like quotation marks, they cordon off and specify the temporary subject of the project, which can thus enter into more specific settings while still remaining open. Words are ‘called’ not because they ‘are’ but because they ‘can be’, because they become operative in a broken relation with what precedes them. Each word, each shape is ‘re- territorialised’ 9 without losing the connotations of instability. These tools introduce a process that is rhizomatic, not structural, allowing a variability of contents and shapes in each direction. The tools are heterogeneous. They privilege ‘formal awakenings’ – constellations of similar elements even if disciplinarily different. They avoid a presumed ‘structure of continuity’ of the world. Nor are the tools axiological; they amplify interpretation. And they are, above all, imaginative. Reality becomes promiscuous with visions, able to amplify the transformative power of the project not only in a formal- disciplinary/extra-disciplinary environment, but also inside the contamination between the possible and the real. 5 Édouard Glissant. Poétique de la Relation . Paris: Gallimard, 1990. 6 Lewis Carroll. A Tangled Tale . London: Macmillan & Co, 1885 7 Gilles Deleuze. Logique du sens. Paris: Les Editions de Minuit, 1969 8 As defined by Glissant, ‘the term éclat has in itself a polysemy that, far from correctly traduced, needs to be discussed with the reader. Properly, éclat is a splinter, but it also means the brightness and the roar of an explosion that sends something into pieces by launching fragments in every direction. However, around this word there are more semantic lines: material fracture (the breaking of something in splinters), metaphorical fracture (the scandal), generation of fragments (material and metaphorical), new vital light emanated by the genetic event (from explosion), the transmission and seminal clamour that forms the context to this light. Thus the reader, with this plexus of senses, needs to decipher an expression that seals the indomitable complexity of the matter. We have used the term ‘explosion’ because it covers the material (the illuminating infringe), the metaphoric (a scandalous but fertile discontinuity that propagates itself by an echo that multiplies the explosion), and a communication that manipulates the message by contiguous subdivision, from medium to media, from tool to system.’ 9 Gilles Deleuze. Logique du sens . Paris: Les Editions de Minuit, 1969
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WeakCity
Elisa C Cattaneo
5. WEAK AS VERB We think of the city as relational in a physiological rather than in a formal way. Differentiated situations, settings and micro-environments, the relational capacity of the new, of the non-fragments in a minor history inside major ones create new configurations, not disconnected stratifications. Places become like the ‘noise’ of Serres: a complex intersection of changing modes. Notational, molecular, writing on the sidelines – the multiple stories of the project become side notes in the grand narratives of the city. Autonomous tales, tales inside the tale, independent, minor and unconnected become accents, intuitions in the margins. The small modifies the large. The succession of minor elements determines a city inside the city, and it influences its character by incorporating its dynamics: Reversible, provisional, unresistant. Nothing is fixed. Open to the future, dynamic, an ecology as a never- determined process, always in evolution. Reversible, where time can turn back without projecting itself inside history. Non-figurative, territories in braille and performative field. Space without pre-constituted figures, without metaphor or symbols is a field shaped by inconsistent elevations and imperceptible realisations. The project is background on background. Adaptive, energetic and evolutionary, it is able to collaborate with existing spaces as does a battery or a bicycle’s dynamo.
6. WEAK AS ADJECTIVE Technonature is an operational strategy where ecology is degree zero. In a vision that considers the nature-artefact relation as crucial, we hold Pessoa’s definition as central: ‘Maybe it doesn’t only happen to me, but also to all those who civilisation has given birth to for the second time. Yet I feel that for me, or for those who feel like me, artificiality has become a natural thing, and what is natural seems odd. I stand corrected: artificiality has not become natural: natural has become different.’ 10 Weakcity bases itself in landscape strategies, in particular techno-nature that rethinks the territorial and urban project. Its operational modalities and its chameleon linguistics responds to the project crisis through ecological logic. In its theoretical and methodological conditions developed within the philosophy of science 11 , Technonature is able to overcome dichotomies between the city and the vernacular, the hybrid and the conciliatory. It is an aesthetic of disappearance 12 , a camouflage, a metaphor and, above all, a restoration of environmentalism and sustainability. Forman’s landscape ecology considers the urban project as a ‘not-only-anthropocentric’ condition, and the product of differentiated effects of synergies, not of scale. 13 A new design process uses ecology as a structural field for the urban project; the primary steps are to recover, to remedy and to reactivate ecological qualities. Ecology as degree zero predisposes the urban ground to consequent modifications. In this sense, ecology is the level of the maximum projectual possibility because it resets and prepares new ground for future transformations. In its formal specifications, ecology reclaims the contents of ecological and environmental art, disciplines with which it shares not only topics, but also the overlapping of multiple disciplines. The aim is to transform urban space into a new aesthetic of the city. ~
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10 Fernando Pessoa. Livro do Desassossego: Composto por Bernardo Soares, ajudante de guarda-livros na cidade de Lisboa . Lisboa: Assírio & Alvim, 1998 11 In particular, Merleau-Ponty, La nature , 1996 12 The aesthetic of disappearance underlines the virilion concept of in- formative and perceptive excess, which is able to produce an absence. 13 Neil Brenner. ‘Rescaling Urban Questions’ in New Geographies 0. Harvard GSD, September 2009 and Daniela Perrotti. ‘Conceiving the (everyday) landscape of energy as a transcalar infrastructural device’. Projets de paysage 04/ 01 /2012, www.projetsdepaysage.fr : ‘In his 1999 text Infrastructural Urbanism, Allen distinguishes between two kinds of effects produced by infrastructures and apt to influence the field conditions: the capillary effects of scales, generated by a great number of small elements that compose the infrastructural network, and the effect of synergy, that originate where there is convergence and interchange between different systems in the network.’
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WeakCity model: System no. 3 Infrastructural limits Agriculture as energy production
Elisa C Cattaneo
theoretical appropriations | politics by cameron hu
below and on following pages: various editions of Ludwig von Bertalanffy’s General System Theory . A book cover must act as a kind of précis, a graphic
life and death in the open system
abstract of an abstract theory that nonetheless
whether one evaded them or learned to love them, systems presented fixed and immutable forms, machinic media of restriction and confinement, obstacles to the wild and organic flourishing of life. In the final accounting, our sense of system affiliated and perhaps still affiliates with death. It is curious, then, that just months after Smithson and Holt recorded East Coast, West Coast , no less an avatar of the counterculture than Buckminster Fuller found himself writing in support of a Nobel prize for the proponent of a theory of a ‘general system’. Fuller insisted that such a theory was absolutely essential if the movement of scientific and technological progress was to be diverted, as he wrote of nuclear research, ‘from lethal to vital uses.’ Is this the suggestion of a different version of the systems worldview, one whose political affordances may be distinct from those of ‘the system’ as such? Ludwig von Bertalanffy — Austrian born, son of a railwayman (and so hatched, perhaps, into a fully clockwork and Newtonian universe), itinerant professor orbiting the outer stations of the North American academy — authored at least a dozen books that culminate in his General System Theory of1968. 1 The book’s dull title and industrial prose belie the semi- mystical, even cosmic scope of Bertalanffy’s work. It amounts to an argument for the mass assumption of a new global consciousness: one that proceeds from the sublime and lively unity of the entire world to the necessity of a unified science to describe it. This new science is to rescue humans from themselves. ‘The question of what course the scientific world-conception will take,’ he writes, ‘is at the same time a question of the destiny of mankind.’ General System Theory is the document of a strange project to transform humans’ image of the world, and in doing so redeem the world itself. Bertalanffy’s theory of systems is complicated but relies on a simple premise. Modern science, he insists, has erred in studying the world via a process of reduction in which particles are identified, separated from their environments and then described in terms of individual properties. Attention to elementary
In the middle of the last century it was not uncommon to open a book or watch a film or attend a lecture only to be informed that you, at this very moment and without having previously known it, were within or even trapped by one or another ‘system’. This would not have come as good news. The systems discovered to bear down upon the ordinary subject — whether the symbolic structures tirelessly excavated by scholars, or the previously unspoken political or economic orders named by activists — were typically all-pervasive and unbearably restrictive. System came to serve as a flexible shorthand for a wide range of inflexible social arrangements. The term conveyed a rigidity, totality, and permanence that was suddenly apparent everywhere. It lent itself to whichever order challenged our cherished expectations about the capacities of individual human beings: that they acted autonomously, fashioned their own personalities and sensibilities from whole cloth, and more or less independently determined the course of their own futures. System dwarfed individual action. It dimmed the heroic possibilities of a human life. How, then, to carry out a life at all? One could dream about ways out of the system, in search of (and so perhaps expressing) a previous era’s bequest of human freedom. Or, as with an entire generation of artists and scholars, one might develop increasingly sophisticated methods to enjoy one’s disinheritance. You might count among these the entire adventure of structuralist and post-structuralist thought, as well as the funniest document of the whole of American conceptual art, which stages precisely this opposition of equally depressive strategies for ongoing existence in a systematic world. The video East Coast, West Coast (1969) mounts an informal conversation between Robert Smithson and Nancy Holt, who play caricatures of quintessentially California and New York artists. Smithson, possibly tripping on something strong, has bought ten bicycles and just wants to ‘get on the bicycle and ride, man… feel the sunshine’. Holt, however, insists that Smithson must get with the program: ‘you could make a lot of plans for these ten bicycles, a lot of plans, you could make diagrams within a system’. But no matter
resonates within the graphic language of popular culture.
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1 von Bertalanffy, Ludwig. General Systems Theory: Foundations, Development, Applications . New York: George Braziller, 1968
the mechanistic world picture with another, of sublime global systematicity: ‘Possibly the model of the world as a great organisation can help to reinforce the sense of reverence for the living which we have almost lost in the last sanguinary decades of human history.’ General System Theory aspires to restore unity and relation to a world that has been analysed (and subsequently broken) into fragments, and to the extent that it is successful, it will remove humans from the path to the species’ end. But ‘reverence for the living’ is not just a platitude. Bertalanffy was trained as a biologist and at the core of his work is a radically expansive redefinition of life itself. Bertalanffy’s major innovation was to reinterpret life itself as a kind of systematicity. Thus to revere the living is not just to loathe the destruction of human life, rather, to avert mass destruction one must learn to recognise life differently. Bertalanffy’s first significant article, perhaps the foundation of all subsequent work, quietly outlines a new theory of life through an opposition of ‘closed’ and ‘open’ systems. 2 He asks us to consider a sealed vessel in which chemical reactants have been brought together. No materials enter or leave the vessel. A complicated reaction occurs, slowly or quickly, and then the chemicals slowly settle into their permanent end state. Now imagine instead a cell that ‘maintains itself in a continuous inflow and outflow, a building up and breaking down of components’. The cell is constantly at work to block or permit entry to foreign materials, metabolising them and assimilating or disposing of them. Bertalanffy’s point is that the sealed vessel and the cell present utterly distinct temporalities. Within the sealed vessel, the exemplary ‘closed system’, time is the engine of a process whose course is known in advance. The sealed vessel has but one end-state, and time draws its contents toward that state without digression. And when it arrives at that end- state, nothing else will ever occur. But in the lively open system of cells we find a condition of permanent flux and indeterminacy, and a constant effort to stretch the system’s existence from one instant into the next, and into the next after that. Open systems, Bertalanffy argues, make up our lived reality, and the ongoing labour of a system’s self-maintenance is the process of life itself. Life, however ingloriously, adds up to nothing more than an open system in a state of temporary exchange with its environment, what Bertalanffy calls ‘the steady state’. Death is merely the disturbance that throws the system permanently out of sync.
units in isolation from one another misses the proverbial forest for the trees. Bertalanffy argues that the proper object of any science, whether social, psychological, or biological, is the quality of ‘wholeness’ — rather than parts in themselves he focusses on their sums. A science of wholeness redirects attention to the dynamic patterns of interaction among parts as they make up the vital processes of larger-scale phenomena: cells, fisheries, psyches, societies, planetary ecologies. What matters is not the thing in itself and its immutable properties, but what so many things amount to in each others’ presence, across time. Can one develop a vocabulary that accounts at once for the rise and fall of civilisations and the life and death of a cell? Bertalanffy’s systems theory aims to generalise the principles according to which almost all things may emerge, change, maintain themselves and disappear. General System Theory travels far afield from the nefarious politics of ‘the system’. System is such a primordial characteristic of Bertalanffy’s world that it makes little sense to speak of systems as a threat to either the free-willed and autonomous individual, or of one’s dreams of escaping system altogether. To Bertalanffy, we are always somewhere within an infinite hierarchy of systems. The individual, whether construed biologically or psychically, is itself a variety of system, not an indivisible unit but a complex of elements in a holding pattern of interaction. And in turn there can be little horror of assimilation into something larger than the self if every entity, in turn, is necessarily party to processes of greater scale. The science of whole systems aspires to another kind of politics entirely. As he wrote about mainstream science: ‘The mechanistic world view, taking the play of physical particles as ultimate reality, found expression in a civilisation which glorifies physical technology that has led eventually to the catastrophes of our time.’ This is Bertalanffy’s impetus for the formation of a theory of a general system: modern thought has misdiagnosed the world as an arbitrary collection of independent, individual bits moving reliably along pre-determined tracks; humans accordingly take a view of nature as mechanistic and of human beings as machines, and they have come to worship machinic power. Nuclear warfare and the real extinction of the human species follows as the logical conclusion of this line of thought. Bertalanffy believes that humans’ basic way of thinking about matter has lead them to the brink of nonexistence. And so his solution to our crisis is not in any traditional sense a political one. He offers an alternative at the level of our basic metaphysics where salvation lies in replacing
The covers for General System Theory on the facing page illustrate many of the fears of 1960s: categorisation, stuck in boxes, part of a diagram, loss of individuality. The covers on this page, mostly from the 2000s and Europe show none of these fears, rather the individual is in some relationship with some sort of context, from nature to molecular biology.
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2 von Bertalanffy, Ludwig. ‘The Theory of Open Systems in Physics and Biology’. Science vol. 111, no. 2872 pp 23-29
The fragile orchestration of open systems did not necessarily inspire reverent feeling so much as endorse a heavily armed anxiety about the unpredictability of the world. Here the openness and open-endedness of the system becomes a problem for swift solution. The thought of an open system, it seems, does not necessarily induce appreciation for life in general. If General System Theory encourages us to re-imagine our social worlds as fragile and temporary collaborations, it has also justified considerable investments in securing one’s own fragile world against its ‘threat environment’, or, in rendering unlivable the environments of others. To reconsider the world as an open system may compel nothing so much as a vigorous defence of the normal against all disturbance and deviance. Devised in appreciation of life, Bertalanffy’s open system eventually lent itself to the cause of permanent warfare and the pre-emptive strike. ~
We may read this as an alternative politics to our various horrors of ‘the system’ and our individual powerlessness within it. Life, in Bertalanffy’s theory, is not the mystical property of free beings untrammelled by forces beyond them, rather it is the very fact of relation, exchange and association within a messy and contingent world. Life as , and not against, system. Fuller’s letter was ultimately composed in vain. Bertalanffy died before his nomination could be considered. But had he, or shall we say his system, continued living into the extremes of old age, he might have worried at the ends to which his thought was applied. Indeed the basic concepts elaborated in General System Theory , once radical and utopian suggestions, found wide appeal among the architects of the paranoid nationalism of his adopted country. Consider, for example, the introductory sentences of the US State Department’s 2011: A National Strategic Narrative : ‘The twenty-first century is an open system in which unpredictable external events/ phenomena are constantly disturbing and disrupting the system.’ 3 One or another concept of open systems has come to supply a good deal of intellectual firepower for a new era of American militarisation. Defence research institutes are now flush with scholars insisting — not unlike Bertalanffy once did — that students adopt a new model of the world-as-dynamic-system. How else, they ask, to advance American interests in the complicated twenty-first century? A pair of US Army War College professors theorise that Americans require nothing less than ‘an ecological metaphor to examine an organizational response to a changing environment. The ‘open system’ ecological metaphor is rooted in chaos, complexity, and systems theories. Several elements of the metaphor can be applied to the military’s adaptation to the evolving threat, security, and operational environments.’ 4 Of course, even in Bertalanffy’s lifetime the theory of open systems helped frame new modes of war-making. As early as the 1960s Charles Fritz, a disaster sociologist at the Institute for Defense Analysis, recommended his colleagues conceive of normal national life as a ‘steady state’. The new concept would help to conceive of a more precise science of disasters whose purpose was ‘to produce the maximal amount of disruption to the enemy in the event of war’. 5
We can’t find a larger image for the psychedelic Italian edition, but it is reminiscent of both Aubrey Beardsley and Rorschach tests: polar fascinations of the 1960s. The Spanish version is a development of one of Bertalanffy’s diagrams, and the Soviet cover, from 1972 shows the individual as part of a larger, cooperative system.
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all images pulled from various websites, without permission thus their miniscule size
3 Slaughter, Anne Marie. ‘Preface’ to A National Strategic Narrative . Washington DC: Woodrow Wilson Centre, 2011 4 Braun. William and Allen, Charles, ‘Shaping a Twenty-first Century Defense Strategy’, JPME Today 73:2, 2014, 52-59. 5 Fritz, Charles E. ‘Disaster’ in Robert K. Merton and Robert A. Nisbet (editors), Contemporary Social Problems . New York: Harcourt, 1961
François Dallegret Un-house. Transportable standard-of-living package, 1965 The Environment Bubble Dessin au trait sur film translucide et texte sur acétate transparent, 76 x 76 cm. inv. 005 12 02
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the idea of a de-materialised dwelling 1960s and ‘70s USA architecture | political influences by yann ricordel - healy
During the last ten years, the Chinese littoral from Shanghai to Guhangzu through Hong Kong has progressively become the largest continuous urbanised zone in history. This most extreme present is the development of a phenomenon first observed at the very beginning of the 1960s in the USA by French geographer Jean Gottmann in Megalopolis, the urbanized northeastern seaboard of the United States ,1961. From Louis Sullivan’s criticism about the lack of coherent urban planning at the end of the nineteenth century to Rem Koolhas’ Delirious New York of 1978, the American northeast megalopolis has been seen as unstable due to social, economic, political and
demographic issues. In Jane Jacob’s Death and Life of Great American Cities , published the same year as Jean Gottman’s book, this instability turns to a real state of crisis with over- rational dehumanised city-planning policies inspired by Robert Moses that neglected real human needs and emphasised functional zoning. An informal school of thought on the American city arose at this time, stressing ideas of ecology and the possibilities of self-construction, reaching its apex with Peter Reyner Banham’s Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies of 1971.
Meanwhile, architecture, which has always been concerned with urban issues, looked away from stereotomy and classical principles of architectonics to think about new means of construction inspired by engineering and new material technologies. From modernism to the international style, new structural forms presented themselves physically, materially, and optically ‘light’. Philip Johnson and Richard Foster’s Glass House ,1949, intellectually rooted in German Glasarchitektur of the 1920s, appears both as a seminal statement and the most representative example of this trend of de-materialisation. The Glass House assesses the possibility of an openness to the environment, stressing the lightness of visible supporting structures that blur the line between the inside and outside. Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s Farnsworth House , built between 1945 and 1951, is a further dematerialisation, a system of piles making the house look as if it is levitating, independent of its topographic locality — all in opposition to vernacular architecture strongly rooted in a place and in activities related to the resources of a specific environment, such as farming, which induces a particular mentality and social relations. Of course, such radical proposals didn’t make a school given that, along with technical problems, they clearly challenge a deeply-rooted need for privacy and the invisibility permitted by opaque walls. Such work remains as a theoretical model for dwelling in a very hypothetical future. The Glass House couldn’t have been built in an urban environment; the forest surroundings in New Canaan, Connecticut makes it the modernist version of the country house.
Theodor Nelson pronounced the term hypertext during a conference in 1963. More than a simple word, it conveyed the concept of a whole ‘new world vision’ 1 on which the World Wide Web built itself, a construction allowed by accelerated innovation in communication technologies; in 1967 Marshall McLuhan coined the expression global village and in 1969 Neil Armstrong took the first picture of Earth from another planet. The Civil Rights Movement, protest against the Viet Nam war, feminism — at the end of the 1960s America entered a period of consciousness of planet Earth as a global, ecological, economical, geopolitical system with a pressing need for change, for replacement of inadequate old administrative, technical and intellectual structures. In the field of visual arts, conceptual art gained importance. John Chandler and Lucy Lippard explained it in their famous 1968 article ‘The Dematerialization of Art’ published in Art International : this tendency gave more importance to ideas than to materials and used informational means (text, schemes, photography as a simple tool for representation rather than a skill) to permit the artistic fact to exist in the beholder’s brain. Channels and methods of conceptual art were chosen for their ability to inform, not for their own material value, recalling the two slogans of modernist architecture: ‘form follows function’ and ‘less is more’. Urbanism was closely concerned with these needs. Melvin Webber, in a special issue of Daedalus devoted to urbanism linked to social issues, proposed that maybe the model of the city delineated by Lewis Mumford was at an end. This Post-City Age goes along with the end of the industrial era, which whereby the close gathering of workers near the means
1 Spanish sociologist Manuel Castells’s The Rise of the Network Society , first published in 1996, remains the most insightful study on the way the idea of network infiltrated all aspects of human activity.
François Dallegret Power Membrane house, 1965
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Dessin au trait sur film translucide et texte sur acétate transparent, 50.9 x 101.5 cm. inv. 005 12 06
all images: Photographie : François Lauginie, Collection FRAC Centre, Orléans
Banham cites a number of references: Louis Khan’s plans and model for an unrealised Philadelphia City Tower, Myron Goldsmith, and Buckminster Fuller’s Standard Living Package – an easy to carry and install crate of utilities and furniture that suggested mobility and a new family model for whom material and sentimental attachment to a specific place would be of little importance. The package would be sheltered by the Skybreak Dymaxion Dome , sharing with the Glass House the quality of ‘simple’ protection from bad weather. Numerous examples of the same kind of projections of a mobile, wired habitable unit, of which Archigram’s Plug-In City of 1964 is perhaps the most renowned, can be found worldwide. Coming back to the Chinese example I began with, we have to observe that this kind of mobile dwelling, even if not totally dematerialised (and can any habitable structure be held only by force of information?) and that can be dismantled and reconstructed somewhere else, remains confined to experimental architecture, very far from being the new standard. Melvin Webber himself had to note in his 1998 text ‘Tenacious Cities’, that his views only stayed views, and that people remain attached to delimited areas where public and private spaces coexist. For Webber, this is principally due to the need for face-to-face interaction in business. Sociology, anthropology and psychology certainly could help us identify other factors for this persistent model of a town developing around an historic centre. Meanwhile, demographics suggest that the concept of dwelling will have to be rethought in a very near future, especially in emergent, economically empowered and increasingly influential countries. ~
of production gave way to a society of services 2 , and the inadequacy of centred and centralised policy. Webber clearly decoupled ideas of city and urban , and suggested that the constructed environment needed a new thinking frame closely linked to a new social order to come. In fact, this is the continuation of a modernist consideration of architecture, and especially of the dwelling inscribed in the city, which never was separated from social, anthropological concerns. ‘Our failure to draw the rather simple conceptual distinction between the spatially defined city or metropolitan area and the social systems that are localized there clouds the current discussions about the crisis of our cities’ Webber states, extending the recommendations formulated in The Athens Charter , collegially written under the patronage of Le Corbusier during the fourth CIAM (International Modern Architecture Congress) in 1933. The charter, published in France as La ville fonctionnelle (the functional city) in 1941 and not translated or published in North America until 1973, points to the failure of the modernist architectural and urbanist project that couldn’t go along with the political and economic necessities of the form that capitalism took as structure and ideology. These speculations naturally had manifestations in architectural thought. When a house contains such a complex of piping, flues, wires, lights, inlets, outlets, ovens, sinks, refuse disposers, hi-fi reverberators, antennae, conduits, freezers, heaters – when it contains so many services that the hardware could stand up itself without any assistance of the house, why have a house to hold it up? This question was asked by Reyner Banham in a 1965 article ‘A home is not a house’ published in Art in America , illustrated by François Dallegret.
2 The history of this shift and of its developments at the turn of the new century are clearly exposed by Jeremy Rifkin in The Age of Access , 2000.
François Dallegret Anatomy of a Dwelling, 1965
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Dessin au trait sur film translucide et texte sur acétate transparent, 61.1 x 50.6 cm. inv. 005 12 03
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