albatross: The question is, beyond condemning it or voting against it, or perhaps volunteering to work there, what can we do about these issues as architects?
nothing

the wall is a certainly a political consequence, but it is preceded by a political nature. for a wall to form, there is an assumption of a shared identity and all identities result due to conflict (archtypally between a prey and its predator). i think this echoes the schmitt reference. from multiple viewpoints, the wall is an archeological reification ,a physical reinforcer and a mental reminder of the conflict despite the argument made that it minimizes conflict. a wall is also a dam, as long as this exists the promise of its breach persists. i would argue therefore that what is being indicated is not the possibility of conflict but rather, in a dramatic tense 'subterranean' fashion, the definitude of its occurrence. the momentary truth of the architectural envelope is that it is an outcome of humanity's spurious sparklike will to hold the inconceivable at bay; its more permanent truth is the eventual cataclysmic rape, penetration, dilapidation brought on by the build-up of antagonism battering against it. thus the archeological wall is never an architectural wall; it is not a thing that encloses, it is a thing that one walks around...it is equal to a coin or to a piece of armory. the archeological wall is the wall devoid of all wallness value, all corpses are the same.

i think the conundrum here is where we situation the idea of the envelope: just before politics, or just after politics. the envelope as politics can only be the aesthetician's concern, a solipsistic channeling of art history. on this account, i'm sliding this little bead of the abacus into sevensixfive's account. for the sake of the argument, that is.

albatross I believe that Lynn's work is actually much more rigorous

how so?

Dear Prof. Aplomb
That is an intriguing link. There is an obvious relationship between PVA's and AZP's text, and yet, they seem to be coming from entirely different political stances. Is interesting that PVA came out of AZP's tenure at the Berlage Institute, and they are both being sponsored by Eisenman (no wonder both texts were featured in Log...) There seem to be a long personal history to this relationship beyond the connection you are now proposing. It may be that they are the perfect enemies of each other, in PVA's positive description of confrontation. It may be that PVA is confronting AZP and the whole pragmatist generation to find his own place in the picture claiming a political stance and demanding the identification of the politics behind their smooth operation, and AZP is trying to trump the criticism by making claims over the political from a different perspective (that's where Latour, Sloterdijk and Thrift come in...) I had already mentioned PVA as one of the potential agents in this tapestry of contemporary architectural politics that AZP's text seems aimed for.
I think the fundamental difference between both approaches is that PVA seem to be interested in a dialectic of opposites as a central part of a political architecture, while AZP's discourse seem to be more interested in promoting a sort of material mediation, where political confrontation and dialectic are not "signified" in architecture but merged seamlessly into a sort of political-material composite. This has also some formal/material implications. While PVA seem to be attracted to simple, strong and symbolic forms manipulated in a compositional arrangement, AZP seems to be interested in fuzzy, organic, complex and intricate form which is amalgamated and constructed via morphogenetic processes. So both political stances have a very clearly distinct formal outputs.
The question is interesting: in order to do politics in architecture, do we need to identify formally the contenders, do we need to re-present them, take "readable" distinct ideological positions? Is there a form of non-representational politics that we can practice in architecture?
You forgot the redefinition of formal...

noctilucent can't reply now. more later...

Noctilucent, sorry for the small delay. You may have a point in your assertion that the wall is a political consequence, precisely because it is preceded by a political nature of the worst kind. I am not sure whether it qualifies just as an archeological reification, as it still has a very direct and physical effect: people can’t cross, people can’t shoot across and people can’t see each other. True, rather than enabling the resolution of the conflict it builds it up and may have a catastrophic effect. Whether it is working or not, the theory of those who built it is that by mitigating physical confrontation and violence, it may shift the resolution of the conflict to a negotiating table, which eventually would make it unnecessary. That is also what dams do: channel the energy and the flow to make it useful. And what mountains, rivers and geographical accidents use to do before we have the power to alter nature so substantially as we do now. And that is also what envelopes can do for politics, channeling conflict, moulding identities, sparing and distributing resources…
As an architect I am not yet prepared to give up the possibility for architecture to have a political effect, however modest it may be. I believe the wall could have been designed in a different way, perhaps allowing for vision, perhaps allowing for partial openings, for a more osmotic condition… Some left-wing Israeli friends showed me around a few years back and I know sometimes this is not so easy because it is also aimed at preventing shooting across… The geometry of it is another subject where perhaps something could have been done. The issue of the settlements and which ones are left in or out and how certain supply routes are strangled are design matters that can contribute to intensify or defuse conflict. People like Eyal Weizman, who are not suspects of siding with the occupation are toying with the idea of building secured elevated highways to allow both populations to flow across each other without having to confront each other… Walls or highways are powerful tools to structure societies, not just aesthetic concerns. In any case I find difficult to entirely detach aesthetics from ethics and politics, and therefore I do not think that the envelope goes before or after politics, but all the way along.
Re Greg Lynn, you should look at what BvB was writing and designing around 1994-1995, when all these guys were starting. GL was miles ahead of BvB both in terms of the theoretical rigour and design intelligence: BvB was building little buildings with curvy walls as a sign of “dynamism” while GL had already constructed a whole theory of Animate Form and found in Alias the instrument to implement it … The problem is that while the Europeans, MVRDV, UnStudio and FOA have had a great time in Europe doing buildings and developing other disciplines, GL had no chance in the US to do anything and has settled to become a sort of eccentric designer exploring the aesthetics of blobbiness and intricacy and toys… Once he accepted that he was going to focus on exploring sensibility instead of trying to implement his original program, he lost it. This is a case of envelopes losing their functional, structural and political sense. I still think that some of the furniture have some of that early rigour though, but now it is the other guys that have got the chance to evolve envelopes into a transformative device. Not that aesthetics and affects are not transformative, but they need a political substrate.
btw, Happy 2009!

what ,for me, is interesting to note in the proposed melange is the prominence of terms of signification:

Aureli: "...indicates"
AZP: "...to convey"
AZP: "...to communicate"
AZP: "indicate"
AZP: "...to explain"

as if the architecturally political were political by virtue not of the consequential effect or presequential design (intention) but rather of the intermediary making-visible cast of its presence. in this. i find a support for the argument that the envelope as a politics only occurs by virtue of the equal solipsism of an aesthetic word, parallel to the everyday world's yet categorically seperated from it by a transparent film: to conceive of an envelope as being political (a synonymous description, and not merely being political by design or by consequence), one must first formulate the world of the everyday as one with an envelope that doubles up, from the outside, as the envelope of the imagination. by reverse analogy, politics, therefore, is that charged envelope seperating yet also maintaining the real (everday) from the possible (imaginary). a politician is a mediator between the real and the ideal, this also explains why the politician, in placing herself on such a delicate faultline, is the one person must likely to be subdividing and self-hypocritizing. but, as in my previous contribution, i maintain that every thing is battered by the forces of annihilation, battered by the possibilities of its absence, until all possibilities endow one of them with a definitude of apotheosis...thus incurring the thing's death. the human keeps two coin-sides imaginary times: a nuanced time and an either-or time. the integrating complexity of the either-or computer language (zeros and ones) that results in a near-nuanced intelligent language of escalatingly sophisticated causes and effects is only an reverberation of our mediation between a nuanced time and an either-or time...between a logic that distinguishes between one moment of life and another and another logic that distinguishes between a moment of life and a moment of death.

albatross;

the above interperates (i won't say explain, as that would be too definitive a word) my observation of a conundrum that has caused rifts on ,also, interperating the architecturally political/politically architectural. i still see that your last post is unaware of architecture's stance towards politics, a consequence and a presequence...a design intention that hopes to translate into an effect.the confounding of architecture and politics, however, must mean the concidence between both worlds...the paradoxical touching of two self-reflecting worlds. the political maneuvering of architecture within itself and not as its after effect...which is to say, a political maneuvering of architecture in its history of forms and articulations (case of its presence...in the way that it sees itself as causing an effect priot to actually causing that effect..in its assumptions about how it relates to the world.

this is the opposite of archeology, which is the accumulation, the deposit, of architectures in the world...the apolitical de-architecuring of the all that exists. this is another viewpoint that does no depend on time. i have, if you note, described the wall from multiple viewpoints that can coexist. a wall is an inert archeology from one view...it is also a charged life-changing barrier...it is also its own awaiting of its absence....all this exists at the same time. i believe that you read archeology in a dogmatic time-denominated manner .

and i still don't understand how Lynn was at any time theoretically rigorous. if anything, i believe the opportunities he presented, or at least were thought to be presented by him, were those of a complete absence of rigour.

correction: the coincedence of both worlds

am not so used to thinking on a laptop

Case of its presence= cast of its presence.

Aplomb,
I think that AZP's has a similar disregard for the iconic buildings to PVA. Check this excerpt from the Volume version of the text:

"The spectacular high-rise, the one that is contingent to the phylum, the one that pretends to be novel, exceptional and revolutionary, is exactly the one that contributes most to the maintenance of the power structures. It is precisely the differential departure from the conventional, the permanent flight from the status quo, rather than a radical opposition, that can actually reveal and subvert the dominant urban powers."

The whole thing about the phylum looks as if he is trying to reconstruct some sort of craft, which operates as a vehicle for a form of non-utopian politics.

Noctilucent,
I am not sure I am following you. You are now writing on a pretty high level of abstraction. So, starting from the end: To me, GL texts on Complexity and Animate Form are still very rigorously built. I have not seen his new book yet, and I do not know what he is preaching now, and he may be claiming total absence of rigour, but I still believe those texts are way more rigorous than BvB has ever written. Out of curiosity given that you seem on a pretty high theoretical level, I am curious to know what contemporary architect/s do you recognise as theoretically rigorous?

I think your observation about the lexicon used in AZP and PVA is very lucid. However, that lexicon is not only about signification, it is also about mediation. Perhaps "explaining" or "explicitation" are the most humanist term within that lexicon. I am trying to remember a Kipnis text that starts in the shower and goes on describing a world in which particles of energy and matter flow and bump into each other producing effects without ever going into any form of linguistic mediation. It ends up by calling cocksuckers to the editors... A sort of materialist delirium of flowers and bees and particles making the world move, indexing, connecting, in a not dissimilar type of vocabulary...

I guess that if AZP's claim is that the envelope is political, he needs to draw a link between the physical and the political by using these words.
In respect to your proposal of the need for a double envelope in order to perform a politics that exceed design and consequence, I would rather use "virtual" and "actual" rather than "ideal" or "imaginary" and "real". I believe this is where the difference between the politics proposed by AZP and by PVA lies: AZP seems to be proposing a model of the envelope where there is no real and ideal, like in PVA, but actual and virtual. A envelope that keeps triggering virtualities rather than closing realities or implementing ideals. An envelope that does not need a utopian or ideological formulation to gain political agency.
Yes, the risk in all that is that when we try to overcome the model of politics as consequence or presequence of architecture, the difference between real and ideal dissappears in the absence of ideologies and utopias. And the city becomes pure archeology, a sheer accretion of stuff, a palimpsest without any historical direction. I think this is PVA's critique of AZP...
But look at this quote from Latour in AZP's text:

‘The division of things between progressivist and reactionary ought to be abandoned precisely because the topography of time, the repartition of political passions, has been overturned. Because in modernism, we were relatively easily oriented towards a progressivist direction. So we could distinguish between progressivist and reactionary attitudes with relative ease, reactionary being linked to the attachment to the past and progressivist to future emancipations. Today, however, things have changed to the extent that attachments are not only in the past but also in the future. For example, ecological questions, issues concerning the city and urbanism etc. We have gone from a time of Time to a Time of Space, from a time of succession to a time of co-existence. As a result the differentiation is now based on the type of attachment rather than on the old reactionary and progressivist scenography. So we are obliged to change the political passions while they still remain relatively classic, attached to the whole package of progressivist/reactionary, liberal/neo-liberal, anti-globalizing/globalizing. In effect, in the details, we have to open the package to understand the allocation of attachments and the dose of emancipation and attachment they presuppose... On the contrary, politics turns around objects of interest,
“issues”, “affairs”, “things”, αιτία in ancient Greek. So it is of no importance to know whether one is a reactionary or not, but to know what those objects are that one holds dear, and the types of things to which one is attached.’ Bruno Latour in conversation with Konstantin Kastrissianakis for Re-public.

albatross: However, that lexicon is not only about signification, it is also about mediation

signification is by nature intermediary...i do not understand the place of your above quoted phrase. in fact, i went on to say as if the architecturally political were political by virtue not of the consequential effect or presequential design (intention) but rather of the intermediary making-visible cast of its presence

and no, i don't believe those terms used were merely a fortuitous turn of the phrase. a signifying architecture is being described as being political by virtue of its signification. after all, AZP could have established an immediated relationship by claiming, for instance, that architecture, as he understands and espouses it, breaks down the correlation between interior and exterior rather than architecture [/i]explaining[i] the breakdown of the correlation between interior and exterior. architecture (in explaining/indicating/explaining) is being used as an illustrating comic strip associating idiosyncrasies of form with meaning the way a comic book binds figurative gestures with bubble dialogue , that is to say an ecology of encryption that is political by virtue of such encryption. transgression of any one encryption -such as the distinction we maintain between outside and inside- leads to highlighting the artificiality of encryption (yes, here i echo ur brecht reference) thus engendering an attention grabbing controversial spark ..therefore a self-evident political paradigmatic charge (whereas, in the lack of transgression, politics functions in a less self-exhibiting syntagmatic manner). cultural signification and aesthetic intermediacy allow architecture to be simultaneously political with itself...neither a politics of an after- or before-condition. i'm only reiterating here.

You are right that sentence is wrongly written. It should have said: "that lexicon may be about mediation, not necessarily about signification", and yes, your "cast of its presence" is the right way to put it.

Now, I do not understand what do you mean by "immediated". Is it a neologism of did you want to write "un-mediated"? non-mediated? And when you write "espouses" do you mean "exposes"?

I agree with you also that the "explanation" is a tricky word for what AZP is proposing, as it goes back to the model in which architecture is just a vehicle for politics to manifest themselves, the "bubble dialogue" of the real rather than an effective agent of transformation with its own internal drive.

At the same time, I think it is a difficult problem to solve, because if there is no encryption and no transgression, and no controversy, how can we relate those politics to those happening in other sectors of reality? This is exactly the critique that Reinhold Martin made to FOA and GL over their entries to “A New World Trade Center”, which AZP is contesting now. RM criticises their willingness to act as an instrument of the techno corporate empire confining themselves "to facilitating the arrival of the “new,” while washing their hands of the overdetermined historical narratives", to which AZP seem to be answering that you did not need to vote for John Kerry to be a political architect...

Are you saying that the politics of architecture not restricted to the before and after are necesssarily contained within aesthetic intermediacy? And why do you bring together aesthetic intermediacy and cultural signification?

I am not sure I follow your argument...

there is always encryption is what i said. transgression is something else though.

noctilucent: that is to say an ecology of encryption that is political by virtue of such encryption. transgression of any one encryption -such as the distinction we maintain between outside and inside- leads to highlighting the artificiality of encryption (yes, here i echo ur brecht reference) thus engendering an attention grabbing controversial spark ..therefore a self-evident political paradigmatic charge (whereas, in the lack of transgression, politics functions in a less self-exhibiting syntagmatic manner)

albatross:Are you saying that the politics of architecture not restricted to the before and after are necessarily contained within aesthetic intermediacy?

yes. an aesthetic order is an analogical one derived from the order of the real. architecture is structured in an analogical (aside from the "pure ergonomics" tangent) way to the way our bodies are structured and navigate through space, to the way we communicate with each other, the hierarchies of family and society. Architecture represents and reiterates these; it negotiates between tradition and novelty. It does so vis a vis its incorporation of the world's order (cosmophagia/ecophagia ...now these are neologisms...eating the world). Architectural creation is a political creation; it begins with a necessarily prejudiced analysis of society that then leads to a synthesis which physically casts the ideologies inherent behind the analysis. This is similar to what a politician undertakes.

albatross: And why do you bring together aesthetic intermediacy and cultural signification?

because cultural signification is the vernacular vocabulary of said ideologies.

i have enjoyed this chat; not many here have the inquisitive patience, interactive engagement and curiosity you have...judging from this here.

noctilucent an aesthetic order is an analogical one derived from the order of the real. architecture is structured in an analogical (aside from the "pure ergonomics" tangent

perhaps this wsa a silly statement. perhaps, ergonomics, as an indexical art/science, is exactly the funnel head, the first threshold, through which architectural world-incoporation initiates. perhaps, the fact that we are doomed to tailor architecture to suit our bodies, architecture is consequentially doomed to be an analogical avatar of our bodies. necessity (Ananke) breeding mythology, the blood as the wine and the bread as the flesh sort of thing.

noctilucent, I also enjoyed this thread so far, but I am afraid we have lost everybody in the way, which is a pity because I think we have not started to discuss yet the question of pragmatism versus politics...

I disagree about the containment of politics either within aesthetic intermediacy or historical/ideological discourse. I think that once you exclude ergonomics, you will have to exclude proxemics because is about relationship between bodies, and then you will need to think about transport, as vehicles are also extensions of our body that interact with the envelopes, and then you will need to consider structure, and insulation, and solar shading... None of those are analogical by default, and they are not supposed to be political either, but in fact they are deeply political. It is the technical background of architecture that has to be politicised, that is where I believe the whole subject of the building envelope becomes interesting as a crucial location of political agency. I actually do not think to keep discussing politics within the realm of aesthetics is productive any longer... I am interested in politicising technology.

Re: aesthetics and ergonomics u have misread my last post. Regardless, bon chance on the pursuit of ur interest.

The party in Princeton seems to have already started, and ACTAR seems to have got into the melee... and they are quoting us!

link

Has anybody got hold a syllabus or a program of the research?

Thanks in advance!

Sorry I screwd up the link... try this:

http://www.actar.com/blog/?p=145

Interesting that the discussion got noticed.

I had tagged this thread in the Editor's Picks but needed some time to start at the beginning and read the whole thing.

A couple of thoughts i jotted down while reading the whole thread.

In terms of definition or lens...
I would agree that politics is being used by AZP in a way that seems to focus on the aesthetic/stylistic aspect of politics, focused on representation or on "signification"

This is why I am reluctant to by into the phrase politics of the envelope.

For me i think the most important expression of politics as related to this discussion is neither in the architecture (aesthetics) or the architect (ideology?)

Both are fraught with problems of Politics (the big P).
Rather i think more important is the concept of politics as practice. Meaning not in the made object or in the ideology of the making but in the approach or process of making.
Politics (lower case p) as practice. While this might be a inevitable fact it is I think too often ignored for the other two, ends of the spectrum.

As for the politicization of technology. What do you mean? i don't think emphasizing the politics of sunshading or insulation or even robotic architecture is the most useful approach if that is what you are suggesting.
It seems to me that here again the focus becomes capital P politics. Rather than the politics of people and their varied interactions. Facilitating those perhaps using technology is key, imho. Here i would argue that perhaps it isn't the specific technologies but more the typologies of technology used? Open-source, networked tools of interconnection, real-time input etc?

Not sure...

Nam,
I do not know if you are questioning what we have written in this thread or AZP's texts in Volume and Log.
I think that the texts in Volume and Log are actually pointing to lowercase politics of practice as opposed to the great narratives of utopia and the return to the critical and the ideological that we are witnessing these days (PV. Aureli, R. Martin...)
I noticed in other threads your interest in the discussions on sustainability, so, why are you so skeptical about the potential of sunshading and insulation as political devices? Imagine we could manage to run buildings with almost no energy (this is almost already achievable, the proble is how to retrofit existing buildings) This will reduce the energy demand by half world-wide, and therefore reduce the oil and gas prices, which will in turn reduce geopolitical tensions in the middle east, leading to regime changes... Wouldn't this be a political effect of green building at the largest, most global scale?
Yes, open source, networks and real-time inputs are crucial sources of a more democratic design of the built environment, but it is difficult to translate them into concrete design evidence. AZP's focus on the building envelope as the point of convergence between representation and environmental performance is strategic at giving us architects the chance to engage politics without having to resort to the big ideological narratives... What is interesting precisely is the foregrounding of a material entity.
Did you read the texts, or you are just reacting to this thread?

Albatross,
I watched the video. Did not read the essay(s).
I agree that the technology or form of a building may have sustainablity/political impacts in terms of reducing energy and hence energy independence etc.

However, i don't think that is what he is emphasizing.

At least in the lecture/video AZP keeps using words like representation, mediation. He seems to be focusing completely as he defines envelope, on the relationship between surface and how surface is assembled. Not skin but shape and program perhaps?

A couple of points didn't make sense to me though and maybe you can explain in the context of the essay(s).
He says the "fatter" a building is the more (opportunity for being) political it is.

Once he start discussing the firms work i get the sense that he is trying to shape an arguement around the existing work a post rationalization of the work almost?
For instance he talks about the public plaza created by the mall project in Istanbul as creating a political/public space.

While i don't diasgree with that statement (necessarily) i don't see how this relates to the politics of the envelope.. He also kept talking about micro poltiical statements involving the mediation between envelope/surface and its final built "form".

Ultimately though the whole discussion i think is best illustrated by one of the questioners who starts talking about Deleuzian smooth space and the politics of architecture being not about taking a stance or choosing this or that process but rather about the materiality and experience of a building and space in terms of how relations are acted out.
While i don't disagree that spatially defined relationships can be "political" i don't think breaking down spatial hierarchies by creating "interesting/smoothed" forms is really political in any meanigful sense. If seems at least in how it has devolved in contemporary architecture to be much more about new forms.. Not politics per se. Or as even AZP notes transparency equalling a transparent envelope.
That too me is all politics of representation and aesthetic not politics.

I mean even in responding to the question AZP seems to want to shy away from the term smoothness and instead suggests pliant/consistency. He goes on a rift about multi-cultural (ie: difference) vs sameness (ie: equity?) This is perhaps the closest to my idea of politics.

But even then for me i think equity/consistency is much more interesting when applied to the inclusive creative process not really the end form..

As for the technology issue. For me it is less about the specific typologies of tech and more about the style. Meaning how the technology is used. Tech for tech or newness sake isn't any more political (at least in terms of pushing my own political aims/agenda) than old school tech that is used for more equity
etc.
For me i guess i keep going back to intent and process. Not envelope, form, skin or surface...

Those are all too representational in my mind. While politics and representation are closely linked I still am more interested in analyzing/encouraging politics (as a process) not representational politics.

Dear Nam,
I am not sure I can answer all your questions, and I do not remember everything in the lecture, but I think if you read the texts, the environmental drive is pretty clear. The focus seem to be about a relationship between the massing and the aspect ratios of different envelope categories, and their physical assemblage are related and involved decisions of a political nature. Energy conservation and security concerns seem to be the drivers of this revision of the building envelope.
I can not recall the statement about "more fat=more political" and I think it would be dissapointing if that is what he said.
Yes, I think the reading of the work is a posrationalisation, but I find quite interesting that he is able to read the his work with such a conprehensive scope, although I am not sure that the projects are necessarily the best examples to explain the categories. I think the texts are probably more consistent, but I quite like the tension between the work and the argument. I think if the argument about the work could be written in a book format, it would become more consistent and interesting. I wonder why he has not done a book of the work under this scope. It could be one of the most significant publications of the work of a practicing architect.
I think the micro-political is refered to the fact that following his approach, a building may operate on different political allignments, rather than to belong to a single, unitary, utopian ideology.
Although I do not think this is explicit in the lecture, as far as I can remember, I think he seems to propose that, in respect to a certain situation a smoother form, or a more differentiated tiling of the envelope may produce certain political effects. This is where I find the proposal most compelling and where I think I kind of agree with you. I believe that he ends up reducing the problem of politics mostly to a problem of representation, to be able to pitch it against the environmental performances. And this is where I believe the discourse is too reductive. I do not think that you can reduce politics just to a problem of representation. Even if in the texts he tries to expand the political performances beyond mere representation, I do not think that he manages to describe many instances where other political modalities are explored in envelopes.
But I disagree with you that the location of the politics in architecture can be placed just in the way the decision-making process is made. I believe that certain geometrical and material devices may contribute decisively to the way politics work in a certain community, regardless of how the form has been achieved. And this is why I am curious about how this research is developing, as it would be interesting to see what are the political potentials associated to certain forms. This may finally enable architects to practice politics not as a representation of an ideal political discourse or ideology, but as a politically active design. Going back to the subject of technology, how many times have you heard architects complaining about having to integrate solar panels or chimneys, or grills on a building envelope? Well, I believe that it is time for someone to conclude that an architecture that is not capable to integrate those elements that will optimise the energy performances and "represent" them as a political statement is a regressive architecture, full stop. And this means the aesthetics of building envelopes have to be entirely reconstructed. And style is the wrong tool for this. Let me be a bit polemical: Zaha Hadid's and Daniel Liebeskind's architectures, always thought to be progressive, is incredibly regressive because it does not start from where it should: the consideration of the facade ratios, the consideration of energy-saving skin devices, the consideration of embedded energy into the materials used... Everything is done for the sake of making a "revolutionary" form which is totally regressive in terms of using the right technologies for the contemporary politics. Technology precedes style!
What do you think about this?

I certainly agree with the last statement technology precedes style.

As for the general point i think we both find his argument to reductive. It would indeed be interesting to see him (or someone) develop an explicit political "framework" of the envelope with regards to
"the political potentials associated to certain forms."
I think you also helped me to see the link between technology and politics a bit more clearly.
In the sense of "using the right technologies for contemporary politics"

As for the fatter i think he meant not explicitly a fatter form, but fatter in terms of the potentiality of the envelope and it's relation to political opportunities?

Does that makes sense? An almost metaphorical "fattness"

I would not say exactly that the argument is reductive. I think to frame such a statement you need to make it concise. My concern is that "political representation" is being used in the text almost as a byword for politics, and I believe that politics are a wider problem. Is true that a building "represents" a constituency, a community, and that is an important role of architecture that the more orthodox discourse of pragmatism would probably diminish. The composition of the political body of, say, a building's constituency may be shadowed in the building's body -in this case the building's envelope- as in some of the examples of AZP's essays. In some cases the constituency may be represented by allegorical languages or iconographies that belong to the community that occupies the building. The building's envelope may also perform politically in a more literal sense, for example by allowing visual or physical engagement between the two milieus split up by the envelope (like in the comments earlier in this thread about the Palestine wall). I think it is unclear in the text what are the potentials of each one of these modalities of performance of the envelope. The research will need to become more precise in terms of how it categorises between these "political technologies", which potentially could challenge the 4 envelope categories he is proposing. Or at least they could be crossed with them in a matrix that could determine for what category a certain political technology may be adequate, in the same way that the research could say which environmental technology will be better for which envelope category.
I do not remember when did he talked about fatness, but is interesting you bring forward the idea of metaphor. If you have read AZP's text "The Hokusai Wave" (I think this was published in an earlier issue of Volume, and there is a huge thread in Archinect about this subject) you will see that he writes about iconographies and metaphores as one of the possible tools for a building to embody politics. It is a tricky argument that dates back to Venturi, Boullee, etc and that borders on populism. The question is, amongst the different political technologies of the envelope, which ones are adequate. He seemed to underline the moments in which the functional organisation resonates with an iconography and this triggers a certain feedback process. But in the latest issue, the statement is less clearly formulated.

Alba,
I think we are more on the same wave length than i previosuly believed.
Such is the fault of initial reactions.

Came across this quote today and thought it topical.

"Even if there is no political architecture, there is certainly a political way of making and reading architectural form.
Via

Not sure i agree completly that there is no poltiical architecture but i think it is right to focus specifically on the distinction between a political way of making and/or reading architecture.

I always thought we were on a similar wavelength, judging from some of your other threads!

I would say that architecture has always been political, but the political of architecture has been monopolised by the politicians. And it is time for architects to become political in their own terms, rather than on the terms of the politicians...

Alba,
I meant just on this thread I specifically. And more generally i suppose it wasn't you as much as the articulations of AZP that were "turning me off/bugging me"

As for your last statement right on.
I guess my question for AZP would be does representation seem to be the best frame with which to tackle such an agenda?

I agree that representation is not the best frame to tackle the agenda of reconstructing a politics of architecture. And I do not think that this is what is implicit in AZP's texts either, for what I can gather, although I would like to see what is happening in Princeton in this respect. I wonder if someone has any info about how the research is set up.
What I like of the four envelope categories is precisely that the reframe the problem of the envelope in very physical terms, as opposed to the more conventional type-based discussions, or the discussions about transparency/opaqueness, and other more typically political terms. It seems to be shifting the discourse towards environmental terms and the design of "atmospheres"...

As for representation, I think it should be part of the equation, and I believe it is important that the retrieval of the subject comes from the camp of the pragmatists, who used to despise that sort of approach in favor of a more supposedly "factual" approximation.

Finally, politics is about the construction of power structures and power struggles, and in a democracy power is constructed through re-presentation. Those who forbid representation and pretend that thing as "as they are" are fundamentalists. (quite literally in some cases) In order to have confrontation and debate you have to allow for people to have different opinions and approaches and that means that reality needs to be "represented". And in the way we produce representations of reality through architecture is in the way we can develop a political charge to architecture, beyond buildings becoming, supposedly, embodiments of an ideological position. It is the way in which a building "represents" the way it controls the environment, or establishes a border of exclusion where architecture becomes political. (although as we have already seen, architecture may become political also as a mere byproduct of its environmental performance...)

you've misunderstood if you think it's about representations of political situations.

Who me?
Either way APZ's focus is one representatiosn fo what then?

they aren't talking about representing politics architecturally at all. they are talking about the kind of micropolitics that foucault and de certeau call 'tactics'. politics is enacted in very basic power-relations, many of which, as AZP points out, are established spatially.

Ag,
I understand. But itsn't that a kind of representative architecture?

I mean whether because of hegemonic/dominant power structures or non-critical practice et al, our experience of space (which is shaped by architecture, although not solely) in that it is representative of such power relationships, even if not intended as representational by the designer... Right?

That was my whole point about lowercase and uppercase politics.

I guess i don't see a difference between micro-politics vs politics (as oppossed to Politics).

no. a representation of power or politics would mean that power or politics is a substance of which architecture is a kind of picture. foucault's point about politics is that it isn't something which is held or exercised, but is continually circulating, forming and reforming.

for example, in an office building, a power-relation is established by the disposition of space such that certain individuals get closed-door offices with views of the exterior, while others in the interior share semi-partitioned space. this is a micro-political relationship. it is not 'capitalism' or 'feudalism' or whatever - it is a power-relationship at a microscopic level. Individuals working in the semi-partitioned space may attempt to strengthen their position by customising their space, or by wearing headphones to permit the kind of isolation the office-dwellers have. It is in all these microscopic interactions that power consists. The space does not represent power. It is the site of power being constructed.

Agfa,
I don't want to get into a whole discussion of Foucauldian et al theory . Had enough of that in grad school.
However, a couple of points.
Obviously power-relationships, like many other aspects of social identity and relationships (religious, ethnic et al) are continuously created and articulated.
Yet, it seems to me that there is to much of a focus placed in such a frame on the idea of politics equalling 'capitalism' or 'feudalism' or whatever. All poltiics even those poltiical ideologies which is i think a better description are at some level about power-relationships.

My whole point earlier on was to say that i think the more interesting aspect of politics especially within an design/architectural/spatial context is the poltiics as active process, precisely the constant changing nature of power relations at a societal level. For me a somewhat weak example of this is design processes that focus on stakeholders, equality and polticial (as in power-relations) involvement of multiple parties in determining the finished product.

One end result of such political participation can include a reworking of spatial arrangements/experience. PArtially because in your example above by the time the building is built and the interior is laid out the "power-relationship at a microscopic level" are already defined as taking place within a proscribed spatial layout...

you've pointed out another very important area of architectural politics: the power-relations and politics involved in the production of architecture. But what i think AZP are trying to get at is that politics are not just outside or prior to the actual architectural artefact, but that a building is already deeply imprinted with power-relations, even from the most general strategic decisions like the shape of the building envelope.

i like his approach, because without seeing things this way, architects can claim to be mere servants of political decisions and power-structures instead of recognising their own deep responsibilities as spatial designers.

regardless of whether you want to talk about his analysis, foucault's ideas form the basis of the micropolitical approach that AZP is taking.

Here is the really interesting question. As much as we may try to keep away from operating with reified generalities such as Power, the State, Capitalism, Labour... and to work on a micropolitical level such as the example put forward by Ag, representation always kicks in. You can only avoid representation if you depart from a fundamentalist political position that assumes that there are certainties (for example the way capitalism operates, Empire, God...)
If you believe that material organisations are matters of concern and that they are political agents (which is what AZP is pointing at, after Latour) then you need to accept that an object, a fact, a building... have slightly different forms of representation, and power relationships are constructed through their confrontation.
Re-presentation in architecture is always associated to Boullee, Venturi and so on but these are rather primitive forms of representation. But we must not forget that the alternative to representation and iconography is the defacement of the Bamiyan Buddhas, for example. I believe that what is at stake in this investigation is whether there are other forms of representation that can be applied to less comprehensive subjects to the ones architecture has traditionally addressed.
If we manage to solve the adequate scale of representation for architecture today to achieve political agency, we may also be able to question also the "iconic" architectures that focus the contemporary architectural debate.
Nam, I do not think you can avoid representation if you want architecture to be part of a process of political participation, even if you try to address the problem from a Foucauldian scope, as agfa8x states...

Prof,
I think the performance angle is definetely key. Although he only briefly mentions in the lecture. I think I need to try and track down the actual article. Anyone got an electronic copy they want to send me?

If the politics lies in the performance than this seems to focus more on politics as a active process not on politics as power relationships. I personally find the discussion of performance much ore interesting than that of representation in terms of it's possibilities but it does seem then to ignore architecture as it relates to Politics and the dynamics of spatial experience...

albatross, we may be using the term 'representation' with very different scopes - I have no idea, for example, why the alternative to representation is smashing buddhas. i disagree that we always come back to representation. not everything is a picture of something else. we can make generalisations about 'how capitalism works' for example, but those generalisations aren't capitalism. capitalism is a whole series of sites, practices, memes, tools...

i agree, prof - performance, not representation.

agfa8x
Now we are getting into the real discussion at last!
I agree with you all on the first level: performance is important, very important. We live at an age in which we can perform things that we could not have dreamt a few decades ago. Blogging is on of them...
Reality is not about imposing a certain worldview to others, and architecture should probably aim first to perform certain basic functions, before trying to re-present anything. I am not in favor of representation of a picture of something else either; this is what people usually understand as representation in architecture, but I think this is just a very small part of the representational techniques in architecture.

Why I believe that we always come back to the problem of representation in architecture? Because, once we have satisfied the performances and the technical criteria, which are also part of our job description, we get into having to decide what are the modalities in which these performances are done. And that is where architecture appears. Call it affect if you do not like representation. Call it mood... For example, we can design a train station and H&dM will design it in a very different way than, say, Foster. That is where the core of architecture, its highest performance, lies. Do we move trrough a space designed to handle passenger flows as if we are part of a mass in a container, or as if we are part of a series of streamlined flows? What is the feeling, the spirit, the mood that a certain architecture infuses to a certain program? That is the real essence of architecture. The rest could be potentially given to engineers and consultants. And that core is how do we understand a certain social ritual is performed: as part of a collective swarm, as a well organised choreography, as a linear or turbulent flow... And that is a fundamentally political act.

If you read Latour, one of the authors quoted in AZP's text, you will see that what he defines as "things" are precisely assemblies of different opinions around a material organisation. The only way to construct a contemporary democracy is to accept that "things" out there are not part of an inquestionable nature or science, but a subject of debate between different representations of the world. representation is what allows us to include non-humans as political agencies... Those who do not think that every statement, every form of knowledge is a representation of the world. Those who believe that we can access directly the truth if we have faith and therefore we do not need to represent it tend to end up forbidding any sort of image and representation, and often destroying images. So architects create the images (in the broadest sense of the term) of social, political, economic performances... And that is why architecture is political by nature. We are not just consultants. If we want to retrieve our power to transform reality, we need to If you have a chance try to read the text from "Iconoclash", the show Latour organised a few years back, where all this is discussed.

Nam, I will see if I can scan the texts and email them, but I can't promise I could do it tomorrow. I am curious to see what you will think of them.

You seem to be inconsistent. You say that architecture has some primary duties of service, which it must carry out before attaining a 'representational' status. This suggests that is it possible to have a 'fundamental' architecture, free of all representation. But in the same sentence, you say that reality is not about imposing a certain worldview. The very concept of representation carries with it the idea of something that is being represented, something behind, above, or beyond the representation which has some essential, higher existence than the representation. This is a worldview.

Latour is very much against this idea of representation, according to my reading of him. At one point in Reassembling the Social he cites Deleuze to the effect that relativism is not the relativity of truth, but the truth of relation.

Can you define representation, please?

just very quickly, a fragment I have of Latour's Politics of Nature.

"It was this distinction that imposed the impossible choice between realism and constructivism. We shall no longer speak of "representation of nature," designating by that term the categories of human understanding, while, on the other hand, "nature" in the singular remains even more remote. And yet we shall retain the crucial word "representation" but we shall make it play again, explicitly, its ancient political role: there are no more representations of nature in the sense of the two-house politics we have criticized, it will still be necessary to represent the associations of humans and nonhumans through an explicit procedure, in order to decide what collects them and what unifies them in one future common world.- In fact , by abandoning the notion of nature, we are leaving intact the two elements that matter the most to us: the multiplicity of nonhumans and the enigma of their association. In the following chapters we are going to use the word "representation" to designate the new task of political ecology, but I hope to have removed the ambiguity
that has weighed too long on a term that has been so closely associated to the destiny of the social sciences. We may suppose that the tasks of these sciences will be more inspiring than to prove that there exist "cultural and social filters through which" humans must necessarily pass" to apprehend objects out there, while always missing things in themselves." By refusing the support that the social sciences claimed to be offering it , political ecology frees these sciences to do other jobs and directs them toward other infinitely more fruitful research paths." It is of the pluriverse that they should speak, of the cosmos to be built, not of the shadows projected on the wall of the Cave."


Check out Iconoclash in Latour's own website

http://www.bruno-latour.fr/articles/article/084.html

Tomorrow more...

some more I have sourced again from his website on representation:

A demon haunts politics but it might not be so much the demon of division —this is what is so devilish about it— but the demon of unity, totality, transparency, and immediacy. "Down with intermediaries! Enough spin! We are lied to! We have been betrayed." Those cries resonate everywhere and everyone seems to sigh: "Why are we being so badly represented?" Columnists, educators, militants never tire of complaining of a "crisis of representation." They claim that the masses seem no longer to feel at ease with what its elites are telling them. Politicians, they say, have become aloof, unreal, surrealistic, virtual, and alien. An abysmal gap has opened between the "political sphere" and the "reality that people have to put up with." If this gap is yawning under our feet much like the Icelandic fault line, surely no Dingpolitik can ignore it.

But it might also be the case that half of such a crisis is due to what has been sold to the general public under the name of a faithful, transparent and accurate representation. [35] We are asking from representation something it cannot possibly give, namely representation without any re-presentation, without any provisional assertions, without any imperfect proof, without any opaque layers of translations, transmissions, betrayals, without any complicated machinery of assembly, delegation, proof, argumentation, negotiation, and conclusion.

from http://www.bruno-latour.fr/articles/article/96-DINGPOLITIK2.html

Yes, but what do you understand these citations to be saying about representation?


Going back to your earlier statement, 'affect' and 'representation' are radically different concepts, and it seems odd to suggest that we can use one word or the other equally well.

To take your example of the train station: sure, we can see the difference between the way one architect or another facilitates or restricts the movement of bodies - this is a very good example of a micropolitical situation. I think what AZP are saying though, is something like this:

1. a train station is inherently a linear programme with a horizontally-extruded envelope (it may be possible to design train stations into some other envelope, but it is difficult).

2. thin, horizontal envelopes tend to produce certain kinds of facilitation or restriction of bodies. such envelopes tend to provide a greater connection to landscape, for example, and tend to be less hierarchical, but privilege fleeting human encounters rather than protracted ones. In this way the envelope directly participates in the micropolitics of the situation.

"control of men living in society"

The key operator here is control. Envelopes, or more precisely, openings and access points in envelopes, and the degree to which they are controlled makes up the "politics" of the envelope and of the building itself.

When the very first human put a big rock in front of a cave he was controlling access and creating a politics of relationships. Most early wars dealt with forcefully negating these protective points and fortress/castle architecture is mostly about protecting these access points in the envelope; prisons reverse that dynamic.

I only saw the AZP video, and had these initial thoughts: horizontal envelopes with many entry points are usually more democratic and assert less control, as agfa pointed out, unless, of course, they are a separating wall. Train stations, shopping malls, even sports stadiums, etc. offer less envelope control and admit more kinds of activities. The high rise, that vertical symbol of American freedom and capitalism, is actually tightly controlled through one public entrance and the "reception" desk, and, more often now, ID cards and security checkpoints.

I once read a short story (may have been in Calvino's Invisible Cities) where the protagonist walks down a city street and wonders about the hidden activities happening at that moment behind many walls: people making love, cooking, reading, committing murder or suicide, making art or planning crimes. We architects (and not just we) are certainly one part of the process that creates these containers of "secret" human activity, but maybe the invention of the lock or the card reader system may have had more direct effect on restriction or control of access and thus on the politics of the envelope.

Professor A's point about how the envelope performs resonates, and architects may not have a huge influence (although they do have some) through architectural tactics alone or even through representation. So in response to this statement, "we can see the difference between the way one architect or another facilitates or restricts the movement of bodies", I would ask: does the architect really dictate much of that, or are some of these spatially political moves more usually dictated by the building program and the entity or corporation or bureaucracy that inhabits and controls access to the structure and thus its inhabitants, and the architect's role is to fulfill their requirements or agenda?

(and I realize that the above does not address the enviromental function of the envelope and some of the other issues that have been raised here)

So when AZP says (and I am paraphrasing) "the 'fatter' a building is the more (opportunity for being) political it has", is he describing a less vertical, more horizontal (as opposed to the vertical tall scraper typology) something almost flattened or more accurately expanded/exploded as in size??

This is perhaps the most interesting part of the first Latour quote for me,

In the following chapters we are going to use the word "representation" to designate the new task of political ecology, but I hope to have removed the ambiguity
that has weighed too long on a term that has been so closely associated to the destiny of the social sciences. We may suppose that the tasks of these sciences will be more inspiring than to prove that there exist "cultural and social filters through which" humans must necessarily pass" to apprehend objects out there, while always missing things in themselves."

He seems to be arguing that obviously there are filters but that the representation of them is the least interesting aspect of representation as a concept?? We should focus not on the act of representation but on the multiplicities of future reality that such an act illustrates.