Architecture Research / Arhitektura, raziskave The Line Notes on Politics / Črta Zapisi o politiki 2020 Architecture Research / Arhitektura, raziskave The Line Notes on Politics / Črta Zapisi o politiki 2020 CONTENTS / KAZALO Editor’s Foreword 11 Marina Lathouri Uvodnik 21 Marina Lathouri Selected Works I–VIII 31 Deborah Stratman Following Gregory’s Line into the Interior 51 Hélène Frichot Drawing Time: Making the Rio Meander Map 73 Chris Taylor Blowing Dust Off the Trails: An Itinerary Through Trans-Saharan Lines 117 Alvaro Velasco Pérez A Stroll on the Line Ethel Baraona Pohl & Léopold Lambert in Conversation Lines of Architectural Potency 145 Thanos Zartaloudis Knowledge Apparatus Mariabruna Fabrizi, Fosco Lucarelli 7 A View on Nature: Leon Battista Alberti’s Legacy 207 Chiara Toscani Home/Studio: Rosa Bonheur and The Plein Air Artist 241 Elena Palacios Carral Party Line/Line of Flight Alessandra Ponte Non-Aligned Third Way: A Chronological Line of Ideological Shifts 269 Eliana Sousa Santos Lines of Action and Readymade Stones: Lev Rudnev’s Monument to 1 the Victims of the Revolution 287 Markus Lähteenmäki Re-Drawing Javanese Building Practice 325 David Hutama Setiadi Bus-Aula 351 Alejandra Celedón, Francisca Gómez Boundary-Work: Scale, Fragment, and Totality 375 William Orr Selected Works IX–XVI 409 Deborah Stratman 429 Biographies Editor’s Foreword Marina Lathouri The Line: Notes on Politics Marina Lathouri Editor’s Foreword 13 Nothing is more complicated than a line or lines. Gilles Deleuze and Claire Parnet, Politics, in On The Line, 94 Lines are everywhere. Physical or imaginary marks, traces – drawn, inscribed, subtracted, written, spoken, limits, thresholds and connections, modes of thinking. The issue, however, lies in “the ways in which they were understood,” which “depended critically on whether the plain surface was compared to a landscape to be travelled or a space to be colonized, or 1 1 Tim Ingold, Lines: A Brief History (London and to the skin of the body or the mirror of the mind.” New York: Routledge, 2007), 52. For early builders, the line was the cord (the mason’s line) used for taking measurements and for making things level. Later, in the 16th century it stood for ‘a crease of the face or palm of the hand’ and for the equator, a line notionally drawn on the earth. Land bound by lines was transformed into property, resource, terrain and site of work, contempla- tion, or battlefield. The diverse heterogeneous arrangements, transferred into a whole range of registers, are historically and semantically precise, and hence avowedly political. Making the surface or inscribed “both on a material soil and within forms of discourse,” lines reveal but also manipulate, contest 2 2 Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected and alter deep cultural and political forms. Shifting borders, zones of Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–1977, ed. occupation, networks of distribution, migratory patterns, prompt the Colin Gordon, trans. C. Gordon, L. Marshall, J. Mepham, and K. Soper (New York: Pantheon confluence of a multitude of histories, real and imaginary geographies, Books, 1972), 69. multi-scalar and multi-dimensional bodies. Bundling and unbundling of territorial rights, boundaries stretched thin and overlapping jurisdictions, shape an economics of exchange as a form of lived politics. Coordinates set on a blank surface or words shuffled around on a sheet of paper, meld the personal and the political, the molecular and the planetary. Writing has nothing to do with signifying, Gilles Deleuze and Félix but with land surveying and map-making, Guattari, Rhizome even of countries yet to come. The basic disciplinary and professional boundaries of architecture were signaled in the early treatises (trattati). The coalescence of geometry and The Line: Notes on Politics Marina Lathouri Editor’s Foreword 15 optics, music, medicine, astronomy, philosophy, and law on the printed pages of the first books about architecture defines and delimits a distinct form of practice, distinct from the manual labor and the actual construc- tion. Convergent lines, numbers and words replace templates and taut threads. The invention and writing of the idea (disegno) is depicted as the object of architecture and the surface of the drawing the site par excel- lence of the architect. New procedures, tools, techniques, visual conven- tions and norms of use as well as histories and epistemological assump- tions are introduced. The same instruments are employed to measure the human body, to survey the land and project upon it social visions and civil ideals. Alberti uses the astrolabe, a navigational instrument, to describe 3 Leon Battista Alberti, On the Art of Building 4 Sebastiano Serlio uses the linee occulte the body in De Statua and the cipher wheel to form the words. The treatise in Ten Books, Book IX, trans. Joseph Rykwert, as a tool in his Book II On Perspective becomes but a demonstration (dimonstrazioni) of the process of construc- Neil Leach, and Robert Tavernor (Cambridge, for the construction of the perspectival 3 Mass.: The MIT Press, 1988), 5. drawing and an imaginary, or better, ‘hidden’ tion of ‘a picture,’ the “form of sympathy, of consonance of the parts.” geometry fundamental for architects. And he From the scale of the letter to the scale of the body and the scale of the demonstrates its importance by associating building and the city, a mental picture and a territory are being de-scribed it with the human body: “we know we have 4 skeleton but we cannot see it”. It also recalls with precision, with the aid of the imaginary lines (linee occulte, vinculi). Giordano Bruno’s conception of linne occulte, The dense web of invisible lines, extended to the vanishing point of human which “are implicit in a line of text, the function of which is to connect words to ideas existence to construe a tradition, mark the limits of a disciplinary field but 5 5 “Here it is the convergence of lines that and meaning.” also the boundaries of a field of action. They project “shifting forms of constitutes the plane as a picture plane, 6 6 Manfredo Tafuri, Interpreting the Renaissance: political authority and jurisdiction but also of new ideal representations.” that is, as a projective surface upon which Princes, Cities, Architects, trans Daniel Sherer constructions are not so much assembled— Numerous transactions between the imaginary and the visual, the (New Haven and London: Yale University as they would be on a real pavement—as Press, 2006), 25. textual and the built, the legal, the political and the institutional, and represented.” Ingold, Lines: A Brief History, 157. multiple descriptions of the object of architecture constantly negotiating its limits and purpose, have been debated since. It is precisely within this fluid (and porous) zone of ‘hidden geometries’ and objects that architec- ture is invented as a culturally codified knowledge and set of practices. In the early textbooks, the line of writing, the line in a drawing, and the pulling of a line on a construction site become analogical procedures. Marco Frascari, in his essay The Drafting Knife and Pen, suggests archi- tectural drawing and writing as an act of cutting. Having recourse to the textual and visual descriptions of the anatomy of the body by the Roman physician Galenus and the latter’s “homology between dissection and writing,” Frascari writes: “The knife sections the body and also organizes the knowledge which is then written in treatises by the pen. The pen is a knife, or stiletto-that is the stylus (grapheion) which can pierce both 7 7 Marco Frascari, The Drafting Knife and Pen, a body and a treatise.” The operation of cutting is consonant with the in Implementing Architecture. Exposing the function of line as a break in a surface, a fissure; a rift that mobilises dis- Paradigm Surrounding the Implements and the Implementation of Architecture, ed. Rob Miller tinctions, that transforms and demonstrates. Cutting the body, cutting the (Nexus Press, 1988). building, cutting the city, cutting the earth, cutting history, lines reconsti- tute the human, the visual, the social, the geographical, and the historical. The Line: Notes on Politics Marina Lathouri Editor’s Foreword 17 Those who first invented and then named the John Berger, And Our Faces, constellations were storytellers. Tracing an My Heart, Brief As Photos imaginary line between a cluster of stars gave them an image and an identity. The stars threaded on that line were like events threaded on a narrative. Imagining the constellations did not of course change the stars, nor did it change the black emptiness that surrounds them. What it changed was the way people read the night sky. No longer objective and measurable but variable and ambiguous, plotlines connect and produce meanings, “a manifold woven from the countless 8 8 Ingold, Lines: A Brief History, 3. threads spun by beings of all sorts, both human and non-human.” What is at stake is the way in which a plurality of stories comes to exist, objects to be constructed and dissolved, topoi to be debated—a fragile, yet infinitely real, knowledge that might blow right away leaving no trace. “Collective 9 9 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, On the Line, arrangements of enunciation” that make us responsible for new relation- trans. John Johnston (Columbia University: ships, and which intensity and diffusion attributes a special role to the Semiotext(e), 1983), 11. encounter with the residual and the untranslatable. History is viewed as a ‘production’, in all senses of Manfredo Tafuri, “The the term: the production of meanings, beginning Historical Project,” in The Sphere and the Labyrinth with the ‘signifying traces’ of events; an analytical construction that is never definite and always provisional; an instrument of deconstruction of ascertainable realities. The various ways of linking what can be said, what can be seen, what can be occupied, what can be inhabited, produce a historical and political space.