www.ebook3000.com A Topology of EvErydAy ConsTEllATions www.ebook3000.com Writing Architecture series A project of the Anyone Corporation; Cynthia Davidson, editor Earth Moves: The Furnishing of Territories Bernard Cache, 1995 Architecture as Metaphor: Language, Number, Money Kojin Karatani, 1995 Differences: Topographies of Contemporary Architecture Ignasi de Solà-Morales, 1996 Constructions John Rajchman, 1997 Such Places as Memory John Hejduk, 1998 Welcome to The Hotel Architecture Roger Connah, 1998 Fire and Memory: On Architecture and Energy Luis Fernández-Galiano, 2000 A Landscape of Events Paul Virilio, 2000 Architecture from the Outside: Essays on Virtual and Real Space Elizabeth Grosz, 2001 Public Intimacy: Architecture and the Visual Arts Giuliana Bruno, 2007 Strange Details Michael Cadwell, 2007 Histories of the Immediate Present: Inventing Architectural Modernism Anthony Vidler, 2008 Drawing for Architecture Leon Krier, 2009 Architecture’s Desire: Reading the Late Avant-Garde K. Michael Hays, 2009 The Possibility of an Absolute Architecture Pier Vittorio Aureli, 2011 The Alphabet and the Algorithm Mario Carpo, 2011 Oblique Drawing: A History of Anti-Perspective Massimo Scolari, 2012 A Topology of Everyday Constellations Georges Teyssot, 2013 www.ebook3000.com A Topology of EvErydAy ConsTEllATions G e o r G e s Teysso T The MIT Press CaMbrIdge, MassaChuseTTs London, engLand www.ebook3000.com © 2013 Massachusetts Institute of Technology All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher. MIT Press books may be purchased at special quantity discounts for business or sales promotional use. For information, please email [email protected] or write to Special Sales Department, The MIT Press, 55 Hayward Street, Cambridge, MA 02142. This book was set in Filosofia and Trade Gothic by the MIT Press. Printed and bound in the United States of America. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Teyssot, Georges, 1946– A topology of everyday constellations / Georges Teyssot. pages cm — (Writing architecture) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-262-51832-1 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Space (Architec- ture) 2. Spatial behavior. I. Title. NA2765.T49 2013 720.1—dc23 2012028541 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 www.ebook3000.com c o ntents Acknowledgments vii sources ix 1 A Topology of EvErydAy ConsTEllATions 1 2 figuring ThE invisiblE 31 3 drEAm housE 83 4 ThE WAvE 119 5 ThE sTory of An idEA 153 6 ToWArd A Cyborg ArChiTECTurE 183 7 prosThETiCs And pArAsiTEs 219 8 WindoWs And sCrEEns 251 n otes 285 Index 343 www.ebook3000.com www.ebook3000.com Acknowledgments Bernard Cache of Objectile in Paris generously shared his unpub- lished manuscripts, including his 2009 PhD thesis on “paramet- ric” Vitruvius. Francis Strauven, whose body of work introduced me to the contradictory issues of “structuralism in architecture,” was very generous with his advice. My gratitude also goes to Dirk van den Heuvel, who invited me to the biannual peer-review col- loquia for PhD researchers at the Department of Architecture of Delft Technical University, and was a gracious and outstanding guide to the Dutch landscape, figuratively and literally. Research for this volume was carried out while I was a visiting scholar at the Institute for the History and Theory of Architecture (GTA), Department of Architecture, at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH), Zurich, in 2009. A special debt of gratitude is owed to Marc Angélil (D-Arch), Christophe Girot (MLA), and Laurent Stalder (GTA). Chapters of this book were presented in lectures and seminars with colleagues, including: Martin Bressani and Aaron Sprecher, School of Architecture, McGill University, Montréal; Jean-Louis Déotte, Maison des Sciences de l’Homme–Paris-Nord, Saint-Denis; Antoine Picon, Gradu- ate School of Design, Harvard University; Paulo Providência, University of Coimbra, Coimbra; Dominique Rouillard, École Nationale Supérieure d’Architecture, Paris-Malaquais, Paris; Nasrine Seraji, Institute for Art and Architecture, Akademie der bildenden Künste, Vienna. Discussions with the hospitable colleagues of the School of Architecture, University of Montréal, have been ongoing, including Georges Adamczyk, Jean-Pierre Chupin, Anne Cormier, and Alessandra Ponte. Moreover, I want www.ebook3000.com to express thanks to the colleagues of Laval University’s School of Architecture, Québec, who helped set up a creative environ- ment. The contribution of Marjorie Bradley-Vidal and Ariane Ouellet-Pelletier, as copyright assistants, extends throughout this volume. Gregor Harbusch was very helpful in providing im- ages from the Archives of Sigfried Giedion at the GTA. Access to the amazing collection of Werner Nekes (Mülheim/Ruhr) was crucial, as was the permission to publish rare items. At the FRAC Centre, Orléans, Marie-Ange Brayer kindly provided stun- ning images from the collection. Many thanks to Dirk de Meyer at Ghent University for arranging a visit to the Hôtel Max Hal- let in Brussels. In addition, I thank Tess van Eyck, who liber- ally granted the permission to publish items from the Aldo van Eyck Archive. My gratitude also to Jurriaan van Stigt (son of Aldo van Eyck’s student, Joop van Stigt), who gave me access to, and permission to publish from, the Forum archive. I thank Didier Faustino (Bureau des Mésarchitectures, Paris) for making avail- able examples of his “mis-architecture.” I want to express my gratitude to Hiroo Iwata at the University of Tsukuba, Japan, for the photo of his prosthetic contraption. For the generous help she provided, I am grateful to Eva Neumann, daughter of Alfred Neumann. I thank the various galleries, archives, libraries, mu- seums, private collections, architects, artists, and institutions who kindly provided help, advice, and permission for this publi- cation. At the MIT Press, Roger Conover was always encouraging and patient. Cynthia Davidson was very supportive, and without her confident optimism and editorial skill, much of this work would have remained on various computer screens. Lastly, for her enthusiasm, intelligence, and vast expertise on the subject, I am, as ever, indebted to Alessandra Ponte, whose unflinching support has sustained the making of this book. viii Acknowledgments www.ebook3000.com s o urces The texts published here are either newly conceived or have been thoroughly rewritten, sometimes translated anew by the gifted writers Pierre Bouvier and Julie Rose. An abridged ver- sion of chapter 2 appeared as “Norm and Type” in Architecture and the Sciences, a collective volume edited by Antoine Picon and Alessandra Ponte (2003). Parts of chapter 3 were published as “A Topology of Thresholds” in Home Cultures (vol. 2, no. 1, 2005) and as “Mapping the Threshold” in AA Files (no. 57, 2008). The text here has been wholly reworked and retranslated. Chapter 4 appeared as “The Wave” in AA Files (no. 61, 2010), and, in a pre- liminary form, in the collection Experiments: Architecture between Sciences and Arts, edited by Ákos Moravánszky and Albert Kir- chengast (Berlin, 2011). Chapter 5 was published in Log 11 (2008), then revised for the anthology Structuralism Reloaded, edited by Tomáš Valena, with Tom Avermaete and Georg Vrachliotis (Lon- don, 2011). Chapter 6 was originally written in French for the 2003 catalogue Architectures expérimentales. 1950–2000, edited by Marie-Ange Brayer and published by the FRAC Centre in Orlé- ans; however, it appears here as a newly written essay. A version of chapter 7 appeared as “Architectural Embodiment” in the col- lection Perspective, Projections and Design, edited by Mario Carpo and Frédérique Lemerle (Abingdon, UK, 2007). Chapter 8 was first published (abbreviated) in ARCH+ (no. 191/192, 2009), an issue edited by Laurent Stalder, then in Log 18 (2010), and ap- pears here in a revised form. 1 A Topology of EvErydAy ConsTEllATions Research into that serious disease, hatred of the home. Pathology of the disease. Progressive growth of the disease. — charles Baudelaire, My Heart Laid Bare1 [T]hat’s what I feel, an outside and an inside and me in the middle, perhaps that’s what I am, the thing that divides the world in two, on the one side the outside, on the other the inside, that can be as thin as foil, I’m neither one side nor the other, I’m in the middle, I’m the partition, I’ve two surfaces and no thickness . — samuel Beckett, The Unnamable 2 In the Arcades Project, Walter Benjamin invoked a history that dispensed with the reverence accorded to great names and the political, artistic, and individual heroes of older histories.3 By opening the “trash can” (der Abfall, waste), he directed history toward new objects: the horizon of technological civilization, the crowd of unknown figures, and the effects of repetition within long series. Reading Benjamin today is still to rethink the pos- sibility of history as a constellation saturated with tensions. So, too, the ambition of the studies in this book is to open up a series of paths cutting across the tangled thicket of everyday life, with its burden of miseries, perpetual bad habits, repressed desires, in- effable longings, and untold melancholies—but a gloom relieved by the animated chatter of gossip, the cozy reassurance of main- stream opinions, and the uncanny comforts of familiarity. The essays collected here examine the nature of spaces, pub- lic or private, at the moment they become part of the innumer- able series of devices and technical equipment that control the movements of people and things. Inhabited spaces in society present themselves as institutions that open a place for life, offer shelter and refuge, command the precepts of domesticity, set the rules of hospitality, and prescribe those of hostility.4 Such spaces are also places where the law is inscribed and human technics and technology can mature, as well as locations where one can rest or linger, stay or dwell.