urban occupation : berlin

I just went to see Sunn O))) live at Prater. They nailed us against the wall. Drone at its best. Just to give you an impression: 
Two guys, two guitars, smoke and a wall of speakers. Vibrate the concrete…

Through a series of essays architectural theorist (and anti-theory representative!), Michael Speaks draws out a distinction between innovation and novelty, or originality. Where innovation, which is part of a process that contributes to what Speaks calls ‘design intelligence’, assumes that architecture is a research-based business, originality and the avant-gardist pursuit of the novel or original assumes that architecture is a medium of artistic expression. Speaks elaborates on innovation as resulting from an approach to problems (let’s say a given architectural brief) that does not take the problem as a given, but adds something more to the problem, or elaborates upon it. Here a distinction between mere problem-solving and innovation comes into play. By augmenting a design problem, and by seeking solutions to the problem through proto-types, material tests, and so forth, design intelligence is gradually, incrementally, increased. The idea is that each time a new [design] problem is addressed, the design intelligence that has been accumulated from past, hands-on experience places the designer in a better position to address the problem. In contrast the myth of the creative genius, and the figure of the architect as author is challenged. Instead the architect can be seen to always act within a greater, more complex network that includes a number of actors, other architects, engineers, materials specialists, local council, clients, users, etc!

The now rather controversial essay by Somol and Whiting, Notes around the Doppler Effect and Other Moods of Modernism, which has stirred a considerable amount of debate since its publication in 2002, seems to argue with Speaks in forwarding a projective approach to architecture. They counter criticality with projective architecture and build their argument around a series of binary pairs: index vs diagram; dialectics vs Doppler hot vs cool. The latter term in each of these pairs is the one they wish to argue for, and in making their argument they call on such diverse theorists, thinkers, and philosophers as Gilles Deleuze (diagrammatics) and implicitly, C. S. Pierce with respect to their account of the index; Marshal McLuhan (hot=high definition vs cool=low definition); and so on. Rem Koolhaas is exemplary in the context of their argument for the Doppler effect, as he employs force and effect with the promise of forming new forms of collectivity, as distinct from Peter Eisenman and K.Michael Hay’s different arguments addressing the autonomy of the discipline of architecture (is architecture a cultural product or a discrete autonomous discipline?) and concerning process, as well as issues of representation.

Some terms we had to disentangle in Somol and Whiting’s article included the difference, after semiotician, C. S. Pierce, between sign, icon and index. Where the sign always has some relation to a referent in a world, but does not necessarily resemble the thing out their that it signifies (also, the sign may refer to an idea, and not  thing as such ‘out there’; the icon is a sign that bears a discernible resemblance to the referent it refers to. Finally the index, which is the term that Somol and Whiting are using to discuss critical architecture and its failings, is, in their terms, a physically driven sign that combines materialism with signification. So, for example, Mies van der Rohe’s Barcelona Pavilion is both a material work of architecture (a reconstructed version of which you can visit in Barcelona), but at the same it signifies ideas or concepts about architecture that seem to escape the given material of the building itself, potentially displacing our attention from the pavilion to a history and theory of architecture, processes of design, and questions of representation, and so forth. Of course, you could probably suggest that any built form also operates as an index, but what Somol and Whiting what to do is counter this effect with the action of the diagram, or diagrammatics. Where the ‘index’ is the trace of the real the ‘diagram’ is the force of the virtual, Somol and Whiting suggest. By forwarding and argument for the diagrammatic Somol and Whiting are wanting to demote (critical) architecture’s fixation on representation, and consider an architecture that acts into the socius opening up the possibility of new modes of behaviour, new ways in which multiplicities of actors connect up, and new forms of collectivity. The risk of this is an insidious slide into a repressive biopolitics whereby architecture comes to operate as a device that imposes forms on the socius, considered as clusters of docile bodies.

The concept of the diagram is being drawn explicitly from the philosophical work of Gilles Deleuze, who discusses the diagram in Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, and in Foucault, amongst other places. Deleuze and Guattari frequently use diagrams in their books to elaborate on concepts, but the concept of the diagram or diagrammatic action needs to be distinguished from diagrams as we commonly understand them. The diagram activates the virtual in that it does not attempt to represent what is already known (or the ‘real’), instead the diagram as a process opens up the potential of unexpected forms and concepts; it is an activating force that resists cliché, illustration and mere habit. Perhaps this is a concept we will need to elaborate upon further?