Studio Mumbai, house Copper II

Studio Mumbai, “Emotional architecture and architecture of proximity” [1]

Bijoy Jain of Studio Mumbai was in Porto’s Forum of the Future, last November, as part of the 2015 edition on the topic of Happiness. The Mumbai-based office has gained increasing visibility within the architectural scene of the past few years. This is largely due to a commitment to the use of artisanal materials and construction techniques, and to a discourse that advocates a sense of emotion and proximity with nature and place in an attempt to escape the “normativity imposed by globalization” (as can be read in the presentation brochure). Tradition, modernity, nature, landscape, are keywords of Jain’s lexicon, who graduated from the University of St. Louis, USA, in 1990, and whose career passed through Los Angeles and London before settling in India, where most of his built work is located.

Bijoy Jain’s presentation was consistent with his ethos. Following the modus operandi of many current architectural presentations, Jain entwined images of his personal cabinet of curiosities with photographs of his oeuvre. He devoted special attention to the description of construction details and traditional techniques, often emphasizing the work of artisans on site and evoking an overall harmonious relation between materials, techniques, architect, artisans and nature.

In a world where architecture is being increasingly afflicted by pure techno-logistical automatism and empty prêt-à-porter formalistic experimentations, Studio Mumbai seems to offer that last glimmer of hope and dignity that appears to have abandoned the discipline once and for all. It is thus not by chance that in a recent exhibition catalogue by the Canadian Center for Architecture – entitled Rooms You May Have Missed: Umberto Riva, Bijoy Jain, edited by Mirko Zardini – one can read that Studio Mumbai “proposes an alternative means of production for contemporary architecture and role for the architect in the economy of building”. However, it is precisely within this elated note of glorification that disturbing signs emerge to tarnish such an optimistic portrayal.

Athanasius Kircher, ‘Topographia Paradisi Terrestris’ (1675).

1. Artificial islands – nature, interiority, immunization

The first sign is the recurring appearance of the same type of program, the single-family house (notably generous regarding both dimensions and economy), but also the same kind of landscape, an exotic and wild piece of nature. Even in the case of their own office-house, located in a densely urbanized area of Mumbai, the city itself is presented in an aerial view taken at night, veiled in the quasi-poetic atmosphere of a soft mist (or is it smog?) that tempers the density, chaos and, most importantly, the disturbing inequalities that flourish in a megalopolis like Mumbai. These houses present a version of India that is absolutely idealized, stripped and disinvested of all the social and economic contradictions and discrepancies that dramatically affect and produce its everyday life and territory. [2]

It is not by chance that these houses tend to fold inwards. They act as shelters that either open up to chase fragments of a mystified virgin nature, or enclose themselves inter muros seeking to recreate an original Eden, a miniaturized and idealized Earth like a hortus conclusus [3]. Therefore, contrary to what is being claimed, this is not an “architecture of proximity”, but rather an architecture of distance: it separates and detaches. Paradoxically – and this is Bijoy Jain’s magical touchstone – the effective apparatus of this detachment from the exterior is nature itself, or rather, nature converted into landscape.

The erasure of the exterior is not operated by walls and fences but by the large openings – windows and doors framing those miniature paradises or staging those nature-cloaks. But exteriority is not merely a question of opposition between outside and inside, nor is it simply a matter of genius loci; it is the social, political, and economical circumstance in which every house is de facto inscribed. Exteriority is a condition of togetherness, a relationship with otherness that belongs irreducibly to the human, shaping his sense of community, his own social self. It is not space that is a condition for the possibility of being together, but it is the being together that makes space possible.

The more idyllic this nature-as-landscape is, the more efficient the exorcising of exteriority becomes. But this architecture has no nostalgia for a return to pre-capitalist ideas of community (as in William Morris) or to a status of spontaneous and holistic relation with nature (as with Rudolph Schindler, to name a reference close to the Indian architect). These houses are neither “shelters from the bustle of the city”, in the euphemistic formula of Bijoy Jain, nor the hortus conclusus of a subject who retreats from the world in an act of resistance or exhaustion. They are artificial islands (a sort of singular family condos or gated communities) where fences and walls have been replaced by the eloquent nature-landscape apparatus, subtly detaching the houses from an exterior, which in the particular context of India assumes an especially problematic and disturbing condition.

These artificial islands are not enclaves of resistance against a specific logic of contemporary spatial production, they are softened cosmopolitan capsules, biospheric universes of highly connected networked individuals, artificial continents where an elite with high economic power finds a form of isolation and immunization from the processes of spatial production of which they are primarily responsible. They are systems of immunization that create an artificial, self-sufficient environment while minimizing all outside communication and simulating their own private public sphere. In line with Peter Sloterdijk, we can claim that these houses constitute themselves not only as “integral mechanisms of defense”, but also as “ignorance machines” where “the fundamental right of not-respecting the exterior world finds its architectural formula.”

Unsurprisingly, the reverse of these artificial continents – so cynically frugal – is the slum. The city of Mumbai – built over the years on landfills conquered from the sea – is itself an archipelago of artificial islands surrounded by the great ocean of slums. As always, the flip side of the “ecology of fantasy” is the “ecology of fear and violence”. And in any case, as Lieven de Cauter points out, “where fear and fantasy build artificial biospheres, the everyday is abolished”, immersed as it is in the lonely design of its own self-immunization and self-consumption.

Studio Mumbai, house Tara

2. Artisans, nostalgia, indigence

But there is a second sign, another crack in this Arcadian mise-en-scène: the employment of traditional processes and construction techniques comes with a condescending view of the artisan. The example presented by Jain in his conference in Porto of a woman at the building site transporting – “with such elegance” – a pile of bricks on her head, is a clear indication of this. In praising the gesture’s aesthetic and performative dimension one does not respect the artisan’s know-how – her techniques, modus operandi, authorship or social relevance – but simply romanticizes and fetishizes the condition of being-artisan. If, on the one hand, this approach may be helpful in calling for a lost harmonious relationship with labor – useful to challenge the automation and abstraction of large building sites – on the other hand, it does not do more than soften and naturalize the artisan’s framework of exploitation. Naturally, an entirely different situation would arise if the artisan were mobilized in a process where her emancipation (political and social) or that of her community’s would be at stake, for example, in the construction of a collective building where she would be contributing with work and knowledge and where the architect would act as a technical mediator of this process.

The act of romanticizing the artisan thus accomplishes the same function as the nature-landscape apparatus: if the latter softens the contrasts and inequalities of capitalist spatial production, the former, by sustaining the myth of original happiness in labor, naturalizes the artisan’s indigent social and economic condition, for, once finished the job, she has no choice but to return to the field of slums without qualities and to the eternal destiny reserved to her by the castes and capitalist economy.

Studio Mumbai, house Copper II

3. Studio Mumbai: “an alternative means of production for contemporary architecture”?

The fundamental matter here at stake is not to assess the aesthetic or technical quality of studio Mumbai’s work, but rather to attempt to deconstruct the current critical narrative that legitimizes this practice as “an alternative means of production for contemporary architecture”. Both the praising of traditional techniques and the idyllization of nature have been, for quite some time now, the impetus behind multiple architectural practices who appoint themselves a role of resistance against processes of globalization (for example, Peter Zumthor). This sensitive phenomenological discourse, endorsing a relationship with the world under the umbrella of sustainability and ecology, is particularly powerful because it addresses an essential gap in the relationship between humans and nature that has permeated modernity and globalized capitalist production of space.

But the real ambition of this kind of discourse is far from any real resistance, on the contrary, it fully integrates within the dominant logic of production. It frames our nostalgia for a lost paradise, an original Eden, and it dissimulates the problematic recurrence of a territory impregnated with social inequalities and violent processes of extraction-production-consumption. All the while, its success within the architectural field stems from the fact that it works as a fetish, a “stand in”, replacing that which one cannot have. It gives us the illusion of effectively attending to architecture’s real anxieties, and so it captivates many people: the increasing technocracy of architectural design, its empty formal experimentation, the absence of any content independent of the monetary-economical circuit, its conversion into a lifestyle commodity, its reduction to mere instrument of territorial logistics (from the exhausting icons of the Western world to the urbanizations sans rêve et sans merci in China and Dubai). In short, this kind of nostalgic discourse is the way through which architecture attempts to exorcize the ghosts of its immediate future without giving them, however, any effective solutions.

Architectural practices such as Studio Mumbai certainly produce beautiful images that easily populate our imaginary; they may even provide us with precious indications of how to apply local construction techniques, or they might suggest seductive conceptions of domestic space. But their relevance does not go further. They do not offer any hints, nor any tentative alternatives, nor do they even begin to state apprehensions regarding the role and task of architecture in the present condition. Contrary to what is stated, Studio Mumbai’s architecture does not offer an “alternative means of production for contemporary architecture”, it does not even critically address it. It only fetishizes nature and the vernacular, fully absorbing them into the endless circuit of neoliberal economy, efficiently converting the anxieties and fractures that it itself triggers into new business opportunities. What Studio Mumbai so blatantly displays in those “beautiful” houses is none other than paradise as commodity.

Studio Mumbai, house Utsav. Photography: Studio Mumbai Architects.

4. Towards a critical project and a project of criticism

Such an “alternative means of production” can never be found in an architecture that renounces to critically assess the territory where it is embedded, the space which it transforms and produces. The question begs for a deeper inquiry into the means, discourses and practices through which architecture can probe and challenge the prevailing processes of territorial production, the mechanisms at play (often violent), the forms of life and modes of existence at stake. Only by establishing a dialogue with this problematic exteriority can one hope to address such fundamental questions – the unstable bond between humans and nature and the revival of artisanal constructive techniques – beyond all fetishization.

In order for this to be possible one must challenge the autophagic consumption that now permeates the commonplace of disciplinary discourse: the cult of minute historical fait divers, the deification of authorship and its backstage creative mechanisms and details, as banal as they may be. In so doing, one must thereby overcome this apparent death in criticism (and its replacement by the curatorial and prize systems) by reviving and assembling both a critical project and a project of criticism.

Studio Mumbai, house in Pali Hill. Photography: Helene Binet.

Afterword. At home – in the inner space of the world – with no threshold

It is difficult to accept Studio Mumbai’s houses as models of reflection on contemporary dwelling. We should rather see them as expressions of a crisis of exteriority that currently afflicts the human. A crisis of experimentation with the world as such, an enclosure towards an outside beyond all culturally dominant mediations. These houses float like lonely commodities that serve the consumption of a voluntary self-immunization. They piercingly announce the ultimate rise of the space of immunitas and the corresponding dissolution of its counterpart: the space of communitas.[4]

If, in these houses, all limits seem dissolved that is solely because the entire exterior has already been interiorized. The threshold fades as an architectural element, losing its meaning and potential for openness, its role of in-between space, of liminal mediation and measure between the house and its exteriority, between the self and the other. That which lies beyond the house remains inside. What is at stake in this dissolution of limits (Gr. Peras) is above all the very dissolution of experience, of the house as experience, because, as the etymological root of the word indicates (Gr. Experientia, ex-per-ientia), there is no experience without a “going beyond”, towards an outside, without the crossing-confrontation of a boundary. Experience is always the experience of a limit, of an unknown. And a house is only a house so long as it achieves to be the place of this liminal experience of the outside – experimentation of the world, for the world.

Therefore, once again paraphrasing Sloterdijk, we can establish that these houses are the inversion of inhabiting: they do not install themselves in an environment, they install an environment of their own. «In this mode of experience the horizon is encountered not as boundary and transition to the outside, but rather as a frame to hold the inner world».

In consequence, we can claim that this is not an architecture of proximity as much as one of absolute distance: an architecture without other and without common. It lives simulated and dissimulated by a nature converted into reassuring and mystifying landscape, incapable of positioning itself in a critical and problematic relation with the surrounding territory. The atmosphere of timelessness in these houses is in no way innocent – they exist in a time that is not of this world. Without present, without past and, especially, without future. These houses are thus paradises from which all mankind has already been banished and from which no redemption can be expected. Finally, in the ultimate glorification of this architecture, the discipline consummates its own dissolution, confirming its absolute estrangement from a world that is now only bearable on the absolute condition of not being visible. “D’emporter le paradis d’un seul coup” [“To carry paradise at the first assault”] was the motto that French writer Charles Baudelaire invoked, rather ironically, in his Artificial Paradises.

—Pedro Levi Bismarck, architect and researcher on the Faculty of Architecture at the University of Porto. Editor of Punkto Magazine.
Translated by Bárbara Costa and Pedro Levi Bismarck.

—–
[1] “Emotional architecture and architecture of proximity”, was the title of the conference held by Bijoy Jain in Porto’s Forum of the Future, 5th November 2015.
[2] According to the World Bank, one third of world population living in poverty is in India: 400 million (30% of Indians), a number growing since 2007. India is a territory stratified and crossed so much by the system of castes as by capitalist processes of spatial production, giving shape to a space where social and economic inequalities are particularly visible.
[3] Expression used by the Indian architect echoing a certain zumthorian geist or spirit. Hortus conclusus was the title of the Serpentine Gallery summer pavilion designed by the Swiss architect in 2011.
[4] Roberto Esposito, Communitas. Origene e destino della comunità. Einaudi, 2006.

Everything spins around Guidi’s 20 by 25cm, full-scale contact prints: the camera was the media of Guidi’s research on Scarpa’s architecture, as the prints are the media that engages the viewer. Being full-scale contact prints the images have colors and details unfamiliar to our contemporary eyes: there is a physical translation – or traveling – of the light at San Vito de Altivole, to its reflection in Brion’s Tomb’s materials, to the negative film on the photographer’s camera, to its direct imprint in the photosensitive paper, and to the eyes of the viewer. Nothing is immediate, and we can learn about these slow travels in Guidi’s text at the end of the exhibition. The words tell how he learned to “see” through the camera, to grasp the physical movement of light between materials, presenting a self-evident reality inexistent before his observation through the lens. This observation affected him, the shade moving through the building, creating forms reminiscent of Klee’s formal theories and abstract compositions, transporting Scarpa’s obsessions towards Guidi’s own. Often visiting the cemetery to see the building under specific light, he was frequently betrayed by the weather, and was thus forced to discover new aspects and produce unexpected images. He mused: “I would have liked to stop the sun every now and then—don’t move!—so that I could run around and record the effects of the same light on the other areas of the cemetery.”

Guidi’s photography allowed him to avoid the traps set up by Scarpa’s own obsession with architectural detail and form; the images are not descriptive, but are inquisitive. It is as if architect and photographer were in dialogue. Neither of them had to dismiss their own ideas about architecture or photography, and the images return the fruits of a respectful conversation.

The exhibition brings another, physical, dimension to this dialogue. The viewer has the opportunity to emerge within the conversation. One enters the exhibit trough an axial corridor that forms symmetrical square spaces with white-washed walls at a 45 degree angle to the hypostyle parking lot. The first group of exhibition rooms has a Greek-cross plan. Thus when entering one room, the remaining spaces are left behind. The photographs are hung at an unusual height, one that forces the viewer’s neck into a slight, though not uncomfortable, downward movement. We are pulled into the amazing colors and details of the photographs, the sequences set for us to follow Guidi’s research and discoveries. When the room sequence is complete, we have to lift our heads up again and, suddenly, the whole scenario changes. The relationship towards the axial space through which one engaged the exhibition has disappeared. Seeing the images has shifted our place; the exhibition has moved us from one place to another. It is an architectural trick: the inner corners of the Greek cross are retrieved 1.5 meters from the outer corners – one wall is smaller than its facing wall – thus, when we think back to the entire space, we are not in the position we were when we entered. Feeling the shift, and contemplating it, makes us aware of the intellectual and physical processes taking place while seeing experiencing the exhibition. Back to the central space one can repeat the experience in the following rooms, and in doing so, placeless, find the required suspended time to join Guidi’s research on Scarpa’s time and place.

This thought-provoking exhibition is preceded by a William Blake aphorism: “The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.” In today’s frenzied world, overpopulated by images and speed, the quietness of this exhibition is decisive. Its tricky laconic title already offers advice: Carlo Scarpa. Brion’s Tomb. Guido Guidi. Once emerged in the exhibition’s rich conversation, where apparently everything is slower, one has, rather, to think faster: time runs faster, images run faster, ideas run faster, the world runs faster, even faster than the sun. No themes or boundaries allowed, just architectural obsessions.

— André Tavares, February 2015

/// All images by Paulo Catrica.

Carlo Scarpa. Brion’s Tomb. Guido Guidi.
Exhibition in the South-Garage of Centro Cultural de Belém, Lisbon.
December 1st 2014 to March 8th 2015
Curated by Joaquim Moreno and Paula Pinto.

[and ABOUT THE PLEASURE OF THE APPROPRIATION OF A TEXT].

The reproduction [the rewriting] of texts.

Such reproduction/rewriting of texts implies a constantly active attitude.

From the choice of the text [act of love] to the preservation and rehabilitation as re-design [new conception].

One avoids the [mystic-mysterious] tension of invention-creation and adopts the [entirely secular] quiet readiness to accept the inertia of [Darwinian] evolution.

One avoids the [anxiety-inducing-paralyzing] tension of invention-creation and adopts the [author’s] quiet readiness to self-adapt.

…

Fidelity-infidelity. Faithful in the transcription. Unfaithful in the transcription.

Literal-parallel. Literal-diverging. Aware-unaware.

The rewriting of texts avoids the [mystical-mysterious] tension of the invention-creation and adopts serene availability [all secular] to the inertia of evolution [darwinistic].

The rewriting of texts avoids the tension [that puts anxiety-that paralyzes] of the invention-creation and adopts the serene availability [of the author] to adaptation to himself.

…

The calm act

[because it requires no effort – even only to prepare the creative act]

of transcribing a text

chosen from the texts I love

and therefore even more beloved

often

sometimes

[from time to time]

almost as an adaptation to myself

fills some folds

with the unexpected and light

[and therefore wonderful] act

of invention.

Invention as an act of filling the voids.

INVENTION OF COMPENSATION.

[OBVIUS, 2014]

/// All drawings and texts by Beniamino Servino. More about his work, here.
/// We want to thank Beniamino who kindly shared this project with us.

http://www.new-territories.com/ZOO/  includes memories, current views, maps, history, and the concrete innovation and evolution from XIXth Craft Man Know How, from a Walter Benjamin and John Ruskin uniqueness to… NOW…

Credits: François Roche + R&Sie(n)

http://www.new-territories.com/

The complete article can be read at The Architectural Record

As interesting as this work is and continues to be, it was a Columbia University student of historical preservation named Michael Caratzas, whose 2005 graduate thesis made me think about infrastructure in truly new ways. The project was a proposed “historic preservation” of the Cross-Bronx Expressway in New York City. For those not familiar with the Expressway, it was the notorious masterwork of Robert Moses and his public works force. The roadway, finished in 1955, displaced thousands and gutted several lively working-class neighborhoods in the Bronx of their most central spaces and streets. Many continue to think of this as one of the most awful roadways in New York, if not the United States.

In his proposed preservation, Caratzas suggests that these types of infrastructural networks can now be viewed as historical constructs. He has developed a “historical” vision of the possible pasts that might be recovered within a network society or a network culture — ie a social sphere defined by relationships to and within networks. A preservation of the Cross-Bronx Expressways is a fascinating idea because it takes the discursive apparatus of preservation, which is often used for buildings or built landscapes, and directs it into a vast infrastructural system that is difficult to contemplate with a historical consciousness. The Cross Bronx Expressway is a stretch of highway without clear boundaries; it is filled with both a difficult beauty and the more obvious unpleasantries. Because it is a roadway, we tend to think of it as a site demanding constant upgrades. How does one simultaneously preserve and upgrade a roadway system?

Perhaps more to the point, Caratzas notes that the construction of infrastructural systems generally, highways more directly, and the Cross-Bronx expressway more particularly, often destroyed historical neighborhoods and buildings. They are anti-preservation incarnate. We tend to view these mid-century highways as so suspect that they are outside of that realm we call culture. A few historians and curators recently historicized and focused upon the spatial power evident in the Cross-Bronx Expressway and Moses’ other New York City projects. Yet, we safely and nostalgically celebrate the work of people such as Moses in museum exhibitions. In this context, looking at a model, the true power and horror of what was staged can be appreciated with a historical mentality that is more pacifying than sublime. The Cross-Bronx is where Robert Moses decided to “swing the meat ax” — displacing thousands and destroying entire precincts of the City for this stretch of highway.

Caratzas thesis inspired the image that accompanies this brief essay. This image is part of a series commissioned by The Nevada Museum of Art’s Center for the Environment and its guest curator, Geoff Manaugh. The exhibition — Landscape Futures — invited architects, landscape architects, artists, and historians to envision the future landscape from their particular disciplinary and theoretical vantage point. The image is part of a contribution that examines how we might think about and see historical landscapes in the future.

The image, and the others in the series, depict various reconfigurations of the type of lights, vitrines, podia, stanchions, and scaffolds used to protect and visualize historical objects. This is the skein of material that surrounds something like the Dendur Room in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in Manhattan. We encounter this type of lighting when we contemplate objects and non-human life in museums or zoos, although generally unaware of its presence. This web-work of museological stuff — lights, podia, vitrines—transforms stuff into objects of our interest. Here, a museological, historicizing framework is laced into the wound created by the Cross-Bronx Expressway and the surrounding neighborhood. It reconfigures the illumination of the highway away from roadway traffic and more towards the highway as a physical totality—as something to be contemplated. It also emphasizes the landscaped residues of the project. The lights begin to announce the Cross-Bronx as a historical object, as much as an organizational network or system.

This image is not an explicit call for preservation, in the manner of Caratzas thesis. However it certainly suggests the presence of a preservation mentality within this place. But more significant, and like Caratzas, it begins to suggest that it may be the curators, preservationists, and historians—and not the engineers—that begin to recuperate the United States’ infrastructure both as a thing and an idea. This in turn, transforms what we understand both infrastructure and history to be.

David Gissen

*Figure: “Cross-Bronx Expressway” David Gissen with Victor Hadjikyriacou, renderer, 2011. Included in the exhibition Landscape Futures: Instruments, Devices and Architectural Inventions, Nevada Museum of Art (August 13, 2011–February 12, 2012) Background image, courtesy of Andrew Moore: “Cross-Bronx Expressway, View East at the Jerome Avenue Overpass at Night, 2006”

More than ever, architecture treats infrastructure as its object of desire. But, as is always the case in such affairs, we find that this intensity obscures both infrastructure and architecture’s relationship to it.

How has infrastructure come into vogue, and what does it mean for architects? To understand the vector uniting both fields today and prognosticate the near future requires that we trace that their trajectory over the last century.

Modern architects understood themselves as planners, imposing a new, rational spatial order on the world. For them, infrastructural technologies were the foundation on which the new order would be built. On the first page of Vers une architecture, Le Corbusier declared that “the engineer puts us in accord with natural law. He achieves harmony”. Upon that foundation, the architect could create “an order which is a pure creation of the spirit”.[1] This becoming infrastructural of the world was equivalent to its modernization. But modernity was a condition of becoming, not being. Once the last traces of the old regimes vanished and the world was modernized, we entered into postmodernity. With this transition, too, society began to shift from an economy based on production to an economy based on information.

There is no clearer marker in the transition from modernity to postmodernity than 1968, the point at which it became clear that the older, production-oriented model of modernization could no longer sustain the long economic boom nor satisfy a populace alienated by its rationalizing tendencies. The postmodernity of the next 25 years was a confused time, an interregnum in which a new condition was emerging, even though its dimensions could not yet adequately be understood. In this context, a generation of postmodern architects set out to address what they understood as, first and foremost, a crisis of meaning, abandoning the idea of planning large-scale interventions and turning to small-scale interventions and semiotic strategies for communicating with the public.

In 1999, reflecting on this turn of events, Stan Allen offered up infrastructure as a means of resuscitating the material practice of architecture. Eloquently synthesizing the intellectual trends among the neo-avant-garde architects of the day, Allen called for a renewed practice of architecture based on infrastructural ambition, a practice that would allow architecture to turn away from the dead end it had reached as a discursive practice, returning it to its status as a discipline concerned with material. Eschewing both modernism’s excesses and postmodernism’s obsession with the local and idiosyncratic, infrastructural urbanism instead embraced the basic organizational strategies of network culture of our day: instead of singular, overarching plans, it turned to emergent, bottom-up schemes, produced by countless actors.[2]

As practised, however, infrastructural urbanism has drifted away from such forward-looking ideals and indulged itself in an unhealthy relationship with modernism. Too frequently, contemporary infrastructural urbanism consists mainly of modern infrastructure retrofitted for the purposes of tourism. Take the High Line in New York City, for example, which opened in 2009 and is perhaps the most celebrated instance of infrastructural urbanism to date. Here Diller Scofidio + Renfro, together with James Corner Field Architects, grafted a meandering landscape onto an abandoned elevated freight railroad built in the 1920s. This sort of strategy seems to be more and more common these days as we try to find a way to live with the ruins of the recent past, a modernity that, in T. J. Clark’s words, has become our antiquity, a crucial reference point for us, no longer directly comprehendible.[3]

Just as Rome left its aqueducts and sewers behind after it collapsed, so modern infrastructures remain among us. Many of these infrastructures still serve us, but slowly bridges are declared unsafe, railroads cease to run and highways become potholed. Now, there is nothing wrong per se with the High Line, and the sort of imaginative reuse that Gary Paige undertook in his retrofit of an old railway depot into the Southern California Institute of Architecture in Los Angeles in 2001 is to be applauded, but too often retrofit is postmodern, concerned with creating tourist attractions out of the ruins of the modern.

Governments want little to do with infrastructure anymore. Of course, from time to time, a bullet train is built, and new airport terminals are an inevitable necessity for global cities, but the short event horizon of recent investment compounded with the rampant fear that new infrastructure might impact property values or result in higher taxes actively represses new infrastructural construction.[4] Allen is right in saying that by abandoning infrastructure, architects have contributed to its defunding.[5] As he puts it: “If architects assert that signs and information are more important than infrastructure, why would bureaucrats or politicians disagree?” A forward-looking infrastructural urbanism can certainly help accustom the broader population to thinking about infrastructure again.

But more than this, a forward-looking infrastructural urbanism would seek to understand not only modern infrastructural systems but also systems more appropriate to network culture.

In his “Postscript on Control Societies”, Gilles Deleuze outlines how power has changed its mode of operation, from the (modern) model of operating through enclosures to the contemporary model in which it operates through endless modulations. Notwithstanding that Deleuze’s aim is to critique such forms of power, those states can be understood as dominant spatial regimes that architects need to grasp and work with. Indeed, infrastructural urbanism is already a step in the right direction, less a matter of discrete spaces and more the construction of variations within fields formed by—and forming—infrastructures.[6]

But we have not gone far enough yet. The Deleuzian modulations that govern our society are increasingly invisible. Like it or not, just as industry once took over from agriculture, finance has come to dominate economies across the globe. We all need to eat, we all need to dress in clothes and inhabit houses, but economies are increasingly governed by the financial sector and its demands. Nor does finance find itself easily grounded: trading floors across the world are emptying out, unable to keep up with the ultra-rapid movements of liquidity in anonymous facilities such as the NYSE Euronext installations in Mahwah, New Jersey, and Basildon, a suburb east of London.

The financial services sector reflects our condition of living in Hertzian space—the cloud of electromagnetic signals that surrounds us—as much as in physical space. Take a look at a city street: passers-by relentlessly text each other, listen to music on their iPods, navigate with geolocative devices or talk on wireless phones.

Physicists tell us that electromagnetic forces are far more powerful than gravity (a tiny magnet holds up a paperclip against the entire gravity of the Earth). As I write this, destroyed nuclear power plants smoulder on Japan’s Pacific coast, carving out vast exclusion zones across the island nation’s inland territory. Proponents of infrastructural urbanism often cite flocking conditions exhibited by birds, marine mammals and other animals as examples of the sort of effects they wish to achieve, embracing both the individual and the collective, autonomous agency and massive change. But these behaviours are not made solely according to a genetically encoded rule set. Rather, they are done with reference to the invisible but very real electromagnetic world. Even though we cannot directly perceive the electromagnetic spectrum, the way we have reshaped its modulations impacts the behaviour of such creatures. It is time for architects to understand that the structures of infrastructural modernity are just so many ruins and, in conceiving of new infrastructures for the millennium, to learn how to embrace the new modulated world of invisible fields.

References

[1] Le Corbusier: Towards a New Architecture. New York, Dover Publications, 1986, p. 1.

[2] Stan Allen: “Infrastructural Urbanism”, Points + Lines: Diagrams and Projects for the City. New York, Princeton Architectural Press, 1999, pp. 48–57.

[3] T. J. Clark: Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism. New Haven, Yale University Press, 1999, p. 3.

[4] I cover this condition in The Infrastructural City: Networked Ecologies in Los Angeles. Barcelona, ACTAR, 2008.

[5] Stan Allen: ibid., p. 51.

[6] Gilles Deleuze: “Postscript on Control Societies”, Negotiations. New York, Columbia University Press, 1990, pp. 177-182.