Performative Architecture Design Strategies for Living Bodies

Sam Spurr A thesis submitted in fulfilment of the requirements of the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

School of English, Media and Performance Arts University of New South Wales 2007

i Originality Statement

‘I hereby declare that this submission is my own work and to the best of my knowledge it contains no materials previously published or written by another person, or substantial proportions of material which have been accepted for the award of any other degree or diploma at UNSW or any other educational institution, except where due acknowledgement is made in the thesis. Any contribution made to the research by others, with whom I have worked at UNSW or elsewhere, is explicitly acknowledged in the thesis. I also declare that the intellectual content of this thesis is the product of my own work, except to the extent that assistance from others in the project's design and conception or in style, presentation and linguistic expression is acknowledged.’

Signed ……………………………………………...... Date …………………10.01.2008…………………………......

ii Acknowledgements

Sincere thanks must go to my supervisors James Donald and Ed Scheer. I am particularly grateful to Ed, where in amongst the caffeined conversations have been your continual reassurance, dedication and inspiration to this changing project throughout the years.

I am very grateful to the Deutscher Akademischer Austauch Dienst for the opportunity to live and research several aspects of this thesis in Berlin. I would also like to thank Erika Fisher-Lichte and the Sonderforschungsbereich Kulteren des Performativen Research group at the Free University in Berlin, for their support and welcoming into an inspirational place of research. Thank you to Gabrielle Brandstetter for your innovative introductions to the body in dance theory. Thankyou also to the Bauhaus Archive, Berlin for their interest and help with this project.

Thankyou to my persevering editors Roger Dawkins, John Golder and most specifically to the articulate and charming Hamish Ford, for going above and beyond your editorial roles. Thankyou to Justin Tauber for your phenomenological insights and to Kim Roberts for your thoughtful reading. To all the friends who have remained accepting of my moods and absences, and those that have particularly supported me; Samantha Newman for your friendship and home, Charles Rice for your ever wise and calming council, Ben Hewett for the tangible and intangible support of my fragile sanity, and to Toby Winton-Brown for your love and care through these many, many years.

Finally thankyou to my family; Mum, Peter, Pam and Michael and my dear father. For all the last minute demands, housing, phone calls and desperations, funding, editing, and continuing, irrational love.

iii Abstract

Under the title ‘Performative Architecture’, this thesis draws on theories from performance studies and phenomenology in order to look beyond humanist practices that see the body as fixed and static. This thesis addresses two questions that I will be arguing are of increasing significance to contemporary architecture: Firstly, in the context of emerging digital and digitised spaces, how does the living body interact with the surrounding environment?; and secondly, what do these changing forms of human inhabitation and movement mean for the practice of architecture?

The time frame spans from the work of Oskar Schlemmer in the 1920s to contemporary built works, examining the different ways that performativity has infiltrated architectural design. The case studies are divided into architectural performances that highlight the living body, and performative drawings that explore how to bring that body into the design process. In doing so a number of emerging paradigms become apparent that find built form in contemporary architectural examples. This approach is used to describe and analyse recent projects by Daniel Libeskind, Peter Eisenman, Diller and Scofidio and Lars Spuybroek, and to identify a common orientation through very different types of built environments.

Acknowledging the change in both bodies and spaces in the Information Age, this research seeks to make room for the living body in the design of emerging, multi- dimensional, built environments.

iv Contents

Originality Statement ii Acknowledgments iii Abstract iv Contents v List of Illustrations vii

INTRODUCTION 1 0.1 The Body 7 0.2 Performance Studies 10 0.3 Performative Architectures 14 0.4 Justification of Research 15 0.5 Research Methodologies 17 0.6 Key Terms 19 0.7 Thesis Outline 22

ChapterONE: The Space of Architecture 26 1.1 The Situation of Space 27 1.2 Technology and Architecture 29 1.3 Stable Spaces and Moving Bodies 35 1.4 The Space of Architectural Discourse 40 1.5 The Body in Architecture 43 1.6 Previous Connections Between Performativity and Architecture 56

ChapterTWO: Bodies and Drawings 60 2.1 The Creative Body 62 2.2 The Phenomenological Body 65 2.3 The Space between Bodies 74 2.4 Drawing Architecture 80

ChapterTHREE: Architecture Performances 90 3.1 Moving Bodies and Buildings 92 3.2 Making Visible Body Movement: The Ballets of Oskar Schlemmer 93 3.3 Pedestrian Improvisations 114 3.4 Activating Spaces/ Spaces: The Performances of Vito Acconci 120 3.5 Urban Transactions 135

ChapterFOUR: Performative Drawings 140 4.1 Mapping Situations 143 4.2 Losing Perspective 149 4.3 Scripting for Experience: The Masques of John Hejduk 157 4.4 Drawing Dance 171 4.5 Moving Drawings: The Drawings of Bernard Tschumi 178 4.6 Drawing Conclusions 192

v ChapterFIVE: Non-Standard Architecture 194 5.1 Performative Design Processes 196 5.2 The Diagram 199 5.3 New Spatial Structures 207 5.4 Topological Architecture 210 5.5 Bodily Interfaces 212 5.6 Emergent Design Paradigms 216

ChapterSIX: Performative Architecture 227 6.1 Extension to the Jewish Museum, Germany 229 6.2 The Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, Germany 240 6.3 The Blur Building, Swiss Exposition 250 6.4 The H20 Pavilion, Netherlands 263

CONCLUSION 279

Works Cited 287 Electronic Resources 293

vi List of Illustrations

Figure 1 95 Schlemmer, Oskar The Triadic Ballet, 1922. Source: Ehrlich, Doreen The Bauhaus (Mallard Press: US, 1991), p.154.

Figure 2 100 Fuller, Loie (photograph), 1894. Source: Kruman, Susan Gillis, The Early Moderns, www.pitt.edu Retrieved 06.06.2007 at

Figure 3 112 Oskar Schlemmer, Slat Dance,1927. Source: Oskar Schlemmer, Slat Dance (1927) The Expressionists, 12.08.2000. www.english.emory.edu. Retrieved 10.03.2007 at

Figure 4 116 Debord, Guy The Naked City. Source: De Zegher, Catherine, The Activist Drawing: Retracing Situationist Architectures from Constant’s New Babylon to Beyond (The MIT Press: USA,1999), p.96.

Figure 5 124 Acconci, Vito Instant House,1980. Source: Linker, Kate. Vito Acconci (Rizzoli: New York, 1994), p. 46.

Figure 6 127 Acconci, Vito Seedbed (performance), 1972. Source: Linker, Kate, Vito Acconci, (Rizzoli: New York, 1994), p. 46.

Figure 7 137 Nuiwenhuys, Constant, Sector Constructie, New Babylon, 1956. Source: De Zegher, Catherine, The Activist Drawing: Retracing Situationist Architectures from Constant’s New Babylon to Beyond (The MIT Press: USA, 1999), p.119.

Figure 8 145 Debord, Guy, page from Mémoires, 1957. Source: Careri, Francesco, Walkscapes: Walking as an Aesthetic Process, (Editorial Gustavo Gili: Spain, 2002), p.105.

Figure 9 150 Piranesi, Giovanni Battista, Le Carceri, plate 6 (second state), 1761. Source: Bloomer, Jennifer. Architecture and the Text: The (s)crypts of Joyce and Piranesi, (Yale University Press: New Haven & London, 1993), p.121.

vii Figure 10 151 Libeskind, Daniel, Micromegas 3, Leakage. Source: Libeskind, Daniel. Libeskind at the Soane: Drawing a New Architecture, (Sir John Soane's Museum: Great Britain, 2001), p.9.

Figure 11 156 Hejduk, John, ‘Retired General’s Place’ from The Lancaster/Hanover Masque Source: Hejduk, John. The Lancaster/Hanover Masque, (Architectural Association: London, 1992), p.25.

Figure 12 156 Hejduk, John Text for ‘Retired General’s Place’ from The Lancaster/Hanover Masque Source: Hejduk, John. The Lancaster/Hanover Masque, (Architectural Association: London, 1992), p.26.

Figure 13 178 Tschumi, Bernard, from The Manhattan Transcripts (2). 1978 Source: Tschumi, Bernard. Architecture and Disjunction, (MIT Press: Cambridge, MA, 1994), frontispiece.

Figure 14 190 Tschumi, Bernard, Screenplays. 1977. Source: Tschumi, Bernard. Architecture and Disjunction, (MIT Press: Cambridge, MA, 1994), p.152.

Figure 15 228 Libeskind, Daniel, Extension to the Jewish Museum, 2001. Source: photographs by Ben Hewett.

Figure 16 240 Eisenman, Peter, Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, Berlin, 2005. Source: photograph by Ben Hewett.

Figure 17 250 Diller & Scofidio, Blur Building, Switzerland, 2002. Source: Diller, Elizabeth & Scofidio, Ricardo, Blur: The Making of Nothing, (Harry N. Abrams: New York, 2002), p. 371.

Figure 18 263 NOX Architecture, The H2O Pavilion, 2006. Source: photographs by Toby Winton-Brown.

Figure 19 263 NOX Architecture, The H2O Pavilion, 2006. Source: photographs by Toby Winton-Brown.

Figure 20 280 Phaeno Science Centre, Germany, 2006. Source: photograph by Ben Hewett. viii Figure 21 280 Mercedes Museum, Germany, 2006. Source: photograph by Ben Hewett.

Figure 22 280 Digital image, World Millennium Tower, Busan Korea Source: www.europaconcorsi.com, 04-04-2007. Retrieved 10.06.2007 at

ix ChapterINTRODUCTION

1 This thesis is concerned with bodies and spaces, both singularly and in the way they inter-relate. Entering into the new millennium it has become more important than ever before that we reassess the ways in which bodies and spaces are used to construct our built environment. Human movement in everyday life is now a fluid transition through multiple spaces and geographical co-ordinates are as likely to be defined by mobile phone reception as a road map. These spaces mesh and blur, indifferent to physical boundaries. Technology has created new environments both virtual and material, and to inhabit these terrains the body must re-invent itself. In order to negotiate these spaces, bodies must learn to improvise. Mobility becomes the key to habitation, the flexibility and dexterity to leap, flow or fall from one space to the next. In this context, this thesis has been inspired by two questions of increasing significance for the contemporary practice and understanding of architecture. First, how is the human body responding and adapting to the new environments brought into being by new technologies, new social relations, and new ways of building?; and second, what do these changing forms of human inhabitation and movement mean for the practice of architecture?

Architectures are now situated in a variety of unstable sites, from buildings made of cardboard tubes to virtual art museums. The once assumed, constant ground of architecture is shifting and the relationship between bodies and built environments has become a key issue throughout a number of disciplines. Changes brought about by media and telecommunications have raised questions about traditional design forms and the role of the body within them. In the same way that the automobile would change the everyday mobility of bodies, advances in technology during the last fifty years have changed how bodies interact in, and with, built environments. Firmly situated in the Information Age, the greatest transformations are sited virtually.1 In addition to physical buildings, inhabitation

1 The ‘Information Age’ is a term formulated by Manuel Castells to describe the social and economic dynamics of the contemporary age. This condition Castells characterizes by the

2 now incorporates both the digital spaces of virtual worlds and the digitised spaces of the material one, interwoven with new interfaces and other spaces. These changes are mirrored in the new design systems that are being used by architects. Developments in computer-aided design and manufacturing have changed how architects design, as well as make, buildings. Computational processes stress fluidity and flexibility, encapsulating the changing contemporary relations between bodies and spaces.

This research stems from the belief that architecture too often forgets to incorporate the animate, sensory body in its practice. This argument has been made by several theorists, with a variety of agendas, including architectural historians such as Iain Borden, architects Peter Eisenman and Bernard Tschumi, and particularly theorists advocating phenomenology in architecture, like Alberto Pérez-Gómez and Juhani Pallasma.2

The primary influences for this research are two philosophers of space: Iain Borden and Elizabeth Grosz. Borden emphatically argues against the typical focus on the object in architecture history, demanding that ‘architectural historians must move away from seeing architecture only as things, imagination as that only of architects, mapping as only by drawing, and space as only interior, façade, composition and garden.’3 He is dedicated to a subversion of architectural history. Instead, Borden describes architecture as a ‘set of flows, as set of experiences and reproductions’.4 Exemplified in the practice of skateboarding, Borden’s understanding of the essentially performative relationship between bodies and built environments has been paradigmatic for the approach that I have taken.

exchange and fluidity of networked information. See his trilogy The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture (1996, 1997 & 1998). 2 Their ideas will be examined in this thesis in Chapters One and Two. 3 Iain Borden, Skateboarding, Space and the City (Berg: New York, 2001), p.7. 4 Iain Borden, ibid, p.6.

3 The second important primary influence on this research comes from the philosopher Elizabeth Grosz. From 'outside’ of architecture, Grosz challenges the profession to rethink its operations and processes in a transforming world of multiplying and increasingly virtual spaces.5 Grosz argues that the fundamental relations between bodes and spaces are being transformed, and the formulations of space and temporality, by such theorists as Giles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Jacques Derrida and Henri Bergson, provide new pathways to open architecture up to emergent spaces. In her book Architecture from the Outside, Grosz confronts architects with the changes to bodies and spaces that have occurred via new technologies. She writes: ‘[I]t is the task of the architect to negotiate how these spaces (the virtual and the real) are to exist in contiguity with each other and how we are to inhabit them.’6

Back inside architecture, it is specifically in the expanding digital field where these questions have been most extensively discussed, because it is here that design methodologies themselves are being transformed. Hani Rashid from Asymptote, a design firm renown in this growing field, declares:

[B]y understanding the new form and new space that is occupied by the body in our digital and electronic universe, we can build up a map of this activity as a kind of internal geometric organ or a new geometric situation for architecture, so as we proceed ever further into this digitalized world, I am investigating a way of physically reproducing what I see as an irresistible state of excitation, a state of modernity and a kind of new way

5 Elizabeth Grosz has rigorously explored the impact of digital technologies on space and the body. She has been accepted into architectural discourse through the ANY conferences and publications, while always making clear her position as a philosopher from ‘outside’ the architectural profession. Grosz has focused on architecture and philosophy in terms of sexuality and Deleuzian theory. 6 Elizabeth Grosz, ‘Cyberspace, Virtuality and the Real’ in Architecture from the Outside: Essays on Virtual and Real Space (MIT Press: USA, 2001), p.82.

4 of being in the 21st century.7

Rashid recognises the shift needed in architecture due to this new spatial context. Led by these digital architects who are pushing the conventional limitations of architecture, there is a demand to reconsider the design of buildings. The first decade of the new millennium has seen the infiltration of radical forms of architecture not only in the journals and academy, but realized in built projects. This thesis has been generated by a perceived need in this context, to construct design strategies that incorporate living bodies in these novel tectonics.

This thesis asks how explorations in the changing negotiation between bodies and buildings have influenced innovative and unprecedented architectural forms over the last fifty years. It argues that in the incorporation of new design processes, it is important that the moving, breathing, experiencing body is not left behind. It is in this space that architecture can be understood as conjured into presence by bodies. It is here that the seemingly opposite states of performance and built form begin to blur. To this purpose this thesis looks at the cross over between theatre and architecture in terms of performance, and the living body through the lens of phenomenology.

Typically, throughout the history of architecture, the body is laid out like a cadaver to be measured and dissected, from the medieval body of Christ to the Corbusien body of man. This form has remained stable and frozen, pressed into building plans or abstracted into programmatic requirements. While novel architectural practices in digital media are creating extraordinary forms, living bodies are just as absent in these design processes as their historic predecessors. For the body-based discourse of theatre, however, architecture has proved less solid than it appears, preferring the more ambiguous conditions

7 Hani Rashid, ‘Approach the Future - The Asymptote Experience’ (interview). Design Boom Website. Retrieved 31.05.2007 at

5 of non-prescriptive spatiality. Moving out from the stages and galleries, into the streets and everyday life, architecture has come to symbolize for many in theatre only control and confinement. The fundamental interdependence between the functional building and the creative performance tends to provoke either antagonism or absence. It is precisely this overlap between theatre and architecture, which will be re-examined in this thesis in terms of performativity and phenomenology.

‘Performance’ is typically used in architecture to describe a building’s performance in terms of structural and functional capabilities. Recently it has begun to be used describe computational processes in architecture that use building performance as procedural within the design process. This thesis draws the term from its disciplinary origins in theatre, where performativity is used to define the body’s symbolic behaviours. The aim is to analyze the dynamics of the animated body and building, and to bring together the discourses of architecture and performance studies. Phenomenology has been used in architectural discourse predominantly in the search for an authentic relationship between bodies and the built environment. In contrast to this ontologically focused reading, this research will articulate an understanding of phenomenology, which presents a contemporary, theoretical framing for the body-world relationship. This thesis will argue that the body as a living, animate entity has become a defining challenge to contemporary architectural design. Accordingly, a framework for this thesis has been built on Maurice Merleau- Ponty’s phenomenology of perception.

Both phenomenology and performance theory understand bodies, space and the world as interwoven and overlapping, in continual confrontation and collision. Together they help form an understanding of how bodies and their environments interact.

6 By understanding the mechanisms that are driving these changes in our bodies and our spaces, it is possible to consider the implications and inform the possibilities for radical architectural practices. This thesis aims to investigate these new relationships in order to provide strategies for incorporating living bodies into the design of new architectures. A key objective is to escape from seeing architecture purely in term of static presence. Instead to consider the space made between bodies and buildings, a space that is constructed through the interaction between the two, which is performed into existence.

As the environment is further augmented with digital spaces, finding ways of incorporating the sensorial body into the design of architecture becomes essential. What is at stake is a changing world that the built environment has been slow to acknowledge. What is being challenged is how to both embrace these changes and build environments for living bodies.

0.1 The Body Performativity and Phenomenology

In order to construct an understanding of the body based on concrete experience and movement, this thesis draws on aspects of the philosophy of phenomenology to allow an examination of spatial experience. By basing its foundations on concrete experience, phenomenology proposes an existential analysis of the world, a real world built on structures of consciousness that can only be seen from the subjective viewpoint. What phenomenology brings to architecture is an accentuation of the sensorial body, whereby the visceral and the unconscious connection to the built environment is evaluated and analysed along with material buildings.

7 It is from architectural phenomenologists that the most strident calls for reconsidering the role of living bodies in architecture have come. Alberto Perez- Gomez, a noted theorist from this field, describes the need in terms of the contemporary condition:

Fully to address the dangers of aestheticism, reductive functionalism and either conventional or experiential formalism, architecture must consider seriously the potential of narrative as the structure of human life, a poetic vision realized in space-time. The architect, in a sense, now must also write the “script” for his dramas, regardless of whether this becomes an explicit or implicit transformation of the “official” building program. This is, indeed, a crucial part of his design activity, and also the vehicle for an ethical intention to inform the work. Only by accepting this responsibility will it be possible for his work to invite the radicalised “individual” of the late 20th century to exercise, with his/her freedom, a reciprocal responsibility to “participate” in the re-creation of the world of art that is no longer a mimesis of a shared, socially validated or transcendental order no product of a Romantic imagination attempting a construction ex nihilo [out of nothing].8

Pérez-Gómez uses several performative terms here; scripts, dramas, participation. Defining the role of the architect through an engagement with the narrative, or performance, of human life, Pérez-Gómez emphasizes the importance of seeing architecture as more than a tectonic arrangement of form, but impacting and shaping how people live. This will be discussed in Chapter Two.

8 Alberto Pérez-Gómez, ‘The Space of Architecture: Meaning as Presence and Representation’ in Steven Holl et al, Questions of Perception: Phenomenology of Architecture a+u special issue (a+u: japan, 1994), p.24.

8 Understanding the body as placed within a specific and changing historic time, as opposed to an authentic and continuous definition of being, has become the key difficulty in the phenomenology of architecture. It is important to recognise the reasons for its reputation in the architecture academy for a retrieval of archetypal forms, in order to reason whether it could still be the premise for an architecture based on future innovations. This thesis argues that though the use of phenomenology in architecture has until now failed to satisfactorily address the issue of embodiment, it holds the possibilities for doing so.

In order to pursue these possibilities it is essential to articulate the differences between the philosophy Martin Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty. Mainly through Heidegger’s essay, ‘Building, Dwelling, Thinking’, phenomenology has been developed as an important aspect of architectural theory. His texts have most often been used to justify a return to a more profound and spiritual way of building on the earth.9 Despite Merleau-Ponty’s focus on an embodied understanding of bodies and their surrounding environments, his theories have only rarely been used.10 This thesis argues that Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of perception is more suitable for conceptualizing a performative, body-based understanding that can be used in designing novel kinds of built environments.

In The Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty describes a body in which the world layers and ingrains itself, becoming sedimented beneath the skin and through the bone. In this way we could say the world is in the body. This is not any body, but the individual, particular body, and thus through knowing one’s

9 See architectural phenomenologist such as Pérez-Gómez, Christian Norberg-Schulz and Karsten Harries. This will be further discussed in Chapter Two. 10 One example is Mario Frascari’s Monsters of Architecture, Anthropomorphism in Architectural Theory (Rowman & Littlefield Publishing: USA, 1991). Frascari uses Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of perception in order to reconsider the position of the body in architecture, specifically in terms of the body’s semiotic representation in the drawing. More recently, Lars Spuybroek from NOX Architecture cites Merleau-Ponty in his design process, which will be looked at in Chapter Six.

9 own body one could know the world. Merleau-Ponty argues that knowing is brought about by experience: there is no pre-existing world separate from our experience of it, nor do we construct it separately in our consciousness. Instead, the world is brought into being through the individual experience of it. This action of conjuration is performative in several ways, as will be discussed in Chapter Two. The point here is to note that Merleau-Ponty's insistence on the lived body is essential to how we perceive our own existence separates him from other ontologically-focused phenomenologists like Heidegger and Jean-Paul Sartre. This emphasis, without the transcendental tendencies of Edmund Husserl and Heidegger, brings his writing into line with the discourse of performance studies.

0.2 Performance Studies

This thesis will argue that Performance Studies are a way of bringing the unacknowledged issues surrounding the living body into architecture. 11 These are the elements of ‘liveness’, of animation and the essential interconnectedness of the body and space. In contrast to the static representation of bodies, performativity describes how bodies act and interact with each other and their surroundings, proposing new ways of designing architecture. While the discipline of Performance Studies incorporates a wide range of definitions, this thesis draws from Clifford Geertz, who describes performance as the symbolic action of human behaviour.12 It is a discipline that reads body movement as enacting actions in space that are layered in meaning. This anthropological understanding

11 Theatre theorist Erika Fischer-Lichte has written concisely about the importance of performance as a tool of analysis across disciplines. Fischer-Lichte however situates her investigations in theatre studies, where, despite acknowledging the importance of built environments, the discourse still fails to understand architecture as more than potential shells for performance. For this reason in contrast to theatre, performance studies provides a useful basis for inquiry in its understanding of built environments. See Erika Fischer-Lichte, The Semiotics of Theater, trans. by Jeremy Gaines & Doris L. Jones (Indiana University Press: Bloomington, 1992). 12 See Clifford Geertz, Interpretation of Cultures (Basic Books: US, 1973).

10 of performance focuses on the study of human interaction. Performativity is being used in this thesis in order to define the living body and its behaviours as a method to document and examine the buildings I am defining as performative architecture.13

The term ‘performative architecture’ refers to the academic field of performance studies developed during the 1970s, pioneered by the work at New York University by theatre director and academic Richard Schechner and anthropologist Victor Turner. This relationship between the two disciplines proposed an interdisciplinary mode of cultural critique. It aims to describe a kind of architecture formulated around ‘liveness’ and the animated body. As a discipline, while performativity initially developed in the realm of theatre studies, it also incorporates and is now incorporated into the fields of anthropology, ethnography and sociology. As the study of individual bodies in specific contexts, it is an ideal basis for an architecture of animation and experience. Schechner describes the ingredients of presence, live-ness, embodiment, action, behavior and agency, as inherent to a discipline based on a broad spectrum of human activities. 14 It is these performative issues that tie it essentially to architecture, to an understanding of architecture as something inhabited and experienced. Performance studies reads through the given taxonomies of stable objects and re-envisions them as practices, events and behaviors. The state of performativity is specifically constructed on temporality; live-ness is essential on a stage where the past and present play a fundamental part in shaping the perception of the viewer. This is in comparison to the accepted definition of architecture that is weighted in a state of immovability. It aims to conquer time.

13 Performance is being used now throughout disciplines as a way of reading the world. Whereas previously it was texts and artifacts that were seen as the manifestations of culture, it is now being recognized that the performative allows us an alternative viewpoint. Seeing culture as performance is a strategy by which Erika Fischer-Lichte explores the production of meaning. She has been a leading protagonist in highlighting the importance of performativity, advocating the investigation of events from religious rituals to sports carnivals in the critique of contemporary culture. 14 Richard Schechner, Performance Studies Handbook (Routledge: USA, 2006), p.2.

11 The term ‘performativity’ is derived from J.L. Austin's original linguistic formulation.15 For Austin, performative speech acts are utterances that bring action into being; where ‘to speak’ is also ‘to do’. Austin’s book How to Do Things with Words described a specific speech act where, in contrast to making a statement (termed as descriptive or constative), the action occurs in its enunciation. In Austin’s definition, this act does not occur anywhere else but in the saying of the words itself. As Andrew Parker and Eve Kosofsky Sedgewick explain, these speech acts are ‘utterances that accomplish in their very enunciation, an action that generates effects’.16 Phrases such as “I do” (as in the ritual of the Marriage Act), “I dare” and “I resign”, are performative because of the fundamental action of performing them, without which the action could not eventuate.

In the performative utterance, the act of speaking becomes creative. This bringing together of word and action provides the framework to describe spaces as performative, where spaces are created through movement. In opposition to the Cartesian idea of absolute and measurable space, performative spaces can therefore be seen as transformational, dynamic and open to possibilities. The emphasis is on modes of ‘doing’. This brings it back to the question of the phenomenological relationship between body and world. It demands an ability to see how the interaction of the body and the world is bound in the contingent relationship of perception, movement and space. This underlies the many rich connections between performativity and Merleau-Ponty's embodied conception of mobility and the world. The inseparability of word and action in the performative act becomes an essential relationship between the body and action. It brings the idea into being through doing it; it is active, a process of making.

To bring this definition of performativity into spatial tactics is to incorporate the

15 Austin first explores this in How to Do Things with Words (Harvard Uni Press: USA, 1975). 16 Andrew Parker & Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, introduction to Performance and Performativity (New York : Routledge, 1995), p.3.

12 idea of action as making. Theatre theorist Peggy Phelan uses the term ‘performativity’ to describe a kind of writing based on the enacting rather than simply describing of ideas.17 Performative writing is a method, which, instead of using literal descriptions, draws on various personal and autobiographical techniques in order to perform itself. Performative writing is used in this thesis as a method to analyze the final architectural case studies. Like a performance, it is based on the same fleeting temporality, ‘the act of writing towards disappearance, rather than the act of writing towards preservation’.18 Phelan’s description of performative writing is useful for developing a methodology for considering performative architecture. This issue of preservation is also one of presence. To consider buildings aiming toward disappearance provokes a contradictory premise to the conventional basis of architecture. It means to focus on the ephemeral behaviors, movements and interactions of bodies. For architecture this means allowing for transformation and embracing indeterminacy, two aspects that have become integral to contemporary, digital architecture processes.

Performativity therefore posits the temporal, situated actions of the body as central to an understanding of space. The question for architecture is: How can the built environment enact ideas? How to critique the making of architecture as an experiential act made through the unfolding of spaces through the body? The inseparability of word and action in the performative act becomes an essential relationship between the body and action. Reminiscent of Heidegger’s description of Einraumen (making room), it brings idea into being through action, a process of making or creating.19 The potentiality of the performative speaks of a latency inherent to buildings, but this does not mean that architecture becomes a series of empty rooms waiting for the performing body. Philosopher Andrew

17 See Peggy Phelan, Mourning Sex: Performing Public Memories (Routledge: NY, 1997) and Unmarked: the Politics of Performance (Routledge: NY,1993). 18 Peggy Phelan, Unmarked: the Politics of Performance (Routledge: N.Y,1993), p.148. 19 Heidegger discusses the concept of Einraumen in his essay ‘Building, Dwelling, Thinking’ in Poetry, Language, Thought (Harper Perennial, USA, 1976).

13 Benjamin describes this through the concept of l’informe, where architecture, rather than being fixed, is in a constant state of change.20 To bring performative practices into the making as well as thinking of architecture, foregrounds bodies instead of buildings. It is this reconsideration of the relationship that can be the stimulus for dynamic and innovative performative architectures.

0.3 Performative Architectures

‘Performative architecture’ is a term that Australian architect John Andrews used in the early 1990s to describe his understanding of architecture as a backdrop to body movement.21 More recently the term has been taken up by architects in order to describe a variety of intents. Branko Kolarvic’s and Ali M. Malkawi’s book ‘Performative Architecture’ presents a range of these uses.22 Kolarevic notes that despite its multiple applications, it is the contemporary merging of construction processes with design processes, which are promoting its wide usage. He writes: ‘The increasing interested in performance as a design paradigm is largely due to the recent developments in technology and cultural theory and the emergence of sustainability as a defining socio-economic issue’.23 Despite its acknowledgement of various considerations of what performance may mean for architecture, the book is weighted toward the engineering of architecture and how digital technologies can be considered in this arena.

This thesis may be considered as a missing chapter in this first collection of examinations in performative architecture. My analysis is situated in the space

20 See Chapter One for further discussion of Benjamin’s use of l’informe in architecture. 21 See John Andrews, Architecture: A Performing Art (Oxford University Press: UK, 1991). 22 Branko Kolarevic & Ali M. Malkawi Performative Architecture: Beyond Instrumentality (Routledge: US, 2005). 23 Branko Kolarevic, prologue in Kolarevic & Ali M. Malkawi Performative Architecture: Beyond Instrumentality, p.205.

14 between bodies and buildings. This is not an absolute or abstract idea of space, but space creatively constructed through the animate body. In order to distinguish this space, which is still to be essentially architectural, I am calling this ‘performative architecture’. Closer to the definition this thesis will use is the ‘performative architecture’ termed by artist Vito Acconci’s to describe his interactive environments. Rather than passive spectatorship, this is architecture where the visitor engages actively with the space.24 This thesis uses the term ‘performative architecture’ to describe a mode of ‘doing’ and in this sense it is an ideal declaration for an architecture based on the construction of sites of potentiality and the possibility for the human act or event. Reminiscent of Phelan’s description of writing towards disappearance, the best kinds of performative architectures are the ones where the presence of the building dissolves to such a state where the built form promotes diverse activities.

This thesis begins by tracing this performative architectural history through a series of examples from the fine arts. Especially by spatially orientated artists and designers. In the last twenty years however, performative elements have begun to slip into the architectural profession, which have taken on the tactics of performance studies to produce new kinds of built environments.

0.4 Justification of Research

In order to begin this project it was necessary to have a clear understanding of the contemporary social and cultural changes relevant to regarding how people now inhabit the built environment. Accepting that technology is reshaping body movement and interaction in a variety of spaces, demands understanding the historic basis to those changes and their implications on a broader level. From

24 Acconci describes this mutual engagement between bodies and environments as ‘transactive’, a term that will be examined in Chapter Three.

15 this point it will be possible then to relate these new definitions of bodies and spaces to architecture.

It became apparent during this research that in order to understand the implications for digital technologies in the architectural design process, it is necessary to return to the origins of the architectural drawing. By tracing its history to the primary systems of Euclidean geometry and single-point perspective, it is possible to see what is gained through these new technologies and what is lost. Rather than succumb to the structures and systems of new computational processes, it is essential to critically understand digital systems and processes in architectural practice, from basic CAD (Computer-Aided Design) drawing systems to new generative, design processes.

Case studies are to develop an argument for how to rethink designing buildings in order to incorporate the living performance of bodies. These examples begin with the Bauhaus dances from the early 1920s up until the spatial documentations of Daniel Libeskind in the late 1980s. The case studies show how artists have grappled with the changing relationship of bodies and building in the context of technological and spatial transformations during the 20th century.

Looking beyond the disciplinary boundaries of architecture was necessary in order to reclaim the body in spatial design. This thesis draws from several disciplines in order to explore this contemporary shift in architecture. In the same way that radical disciplines in practises such as dance have incorporated aspects of other fields, this thesis incorporates examples in performance and installation. These examples from the fine arts focus on alternative body-spatial relationships. For example, in his Triadic Ballets Oskar Schlemmer focused on the geometry of the moving body in space, tracing volumes in the same way that the contemporary choreographer William Forsythe would later construct his own dances. By examining both processes from this understanding of spatial construction, it is possible to draw parallels in the built environment with a

16 dynamic interior such as Daniel Libeskind’s design of the Jewish Museum in Berlin. This means returning to a core issue of architecture: how bodies move in spaces. This becomes the acknowledged starting point, rather than what occurs after a building is constructed.

0.5 Research Methodologies

This thesis relies on written documentation and critical analysis in order to provide a context for the project. The architects of each case study have written extensively on their ideas and processes. It is necessary to understand how they have come to their built work in terms of theory and other projects, as well to examine the specific buildings themselves. The writing of Libeskind, Peter Eisenman, Elizabeth Diller and Ricardo Scofidio and Lars Spuybroek interweave throughout the theoretical framework of this thesis. Because this research draws on phenomenology as a critique of the way built environments are experienced and can be conceptualized, it was important not to rely on quantitative research methods. Where ever possible, personal documentation of the examples have been made. In cases where this was not possible, this research has utilized written experience and other forms of media documentation, such as photos and videos.25

25 Schlemmer was well aware of the failures of choreographic notation to encapsulate three- dimensional movement, therefore without viewing re-enactments it is extremely difficult to picture the movements and gestures of the dances. His Triadic Ballets were performed in the early 19th century, but there has been three noted re-enactments that were viewed at the Bauhaus Archives, Berlin. The Archives also hold original drawings by Schlemmer of his costume designs and stage sketches. The opportunity to view original drawings early in my research, as in the case of Libeskind’s ‘Chamberworks’ series or a selection of Situationist maps, became important to crafting my thinking on spatial representation. The interaction of the viewer with the image became fundamental to my discussion of the work. LIbeskind’s Chamberworks and Micromegas drawings were viewed at ‘LINEAGE: The Architecture of Daniel Libeskind’ 18.10.2000 until

17 A visit to such buildings as the Jewish Museum in Berlin were important to this project because such built environments need to be experience. These authors’ aims in regard to physical disequilibrium, for example, must be experienced in order to judge whether they are successful. Experiencing recent examples of architecture developed from new digital design processes was also very important in order to understand the physical impact of these future environments. Such examples as the Mercedes Museum in Stuttgart by UN Studio and the Kunsthaus in Graz by Colin Fournier and Peter Cook, are the realizations of these new technologies. It is only in the last few years that buildings are now being completed which utilize, from their inception, these new systems. While advances in building hardware catch up to what can be achieved in architectural software, it is now becoming possible to experience the built outcomes.

Placing my body within these environments and considering my own actions through those spaces as essentially performative acts, made it possible to construct a description of performative architecture, which I have documented in the style of performative writing. Performative writing is therefore a way documenting the concrete actions of living bodies. It is a writing form that arises through the doing of writing, which is also the doing of performance. Della Pollock describes the relationship between performance and writing as: ‘Performativity describes a fundamentally material practice. Like performance, however, it is also analytic, a way of framing and underscoring aspects of writing/life.’26 This thesis has claimed the need to understand spaces through the performance of bodies rather than representations or abstractions.

18.01.2001at the National Gallery of Victoria on Russell Melbourne, Australia. Constant and Situationist drawings were viewed in the ‘Future City:Experiment and Utopia in Architecture 1956 – 2006 from15.06.2006 until17.08.2006 at the Barbican Art Gallery, London. 26 Della Pollock, ‘Performing Writing’ in The Ends of Performance ed. by Peggy Phelan & Jill Lane (New York Uni. Press: USA, 1998), p.75.

18 0.6 Key Terms

Several of the terms used in this thesis are loaded with multiple meanings and it is important to clarify how they are to be read. These terms can be separated into those concerned with the body and those concerned with space.

This thesis defines the body in terms of individual, multiple bodies. Elizabeth Grosz’s inquiry into the evolution of theories of space and time is made in order to reconsider the body in terms of gender.27 Cultural and social theorists have critically reconceived this lived body in terms of socio-spatial relationships, such as Edward Soja or through postcolonial and cultural issues like Homi Bahba.28 In acknowledging the importance of sexuality and gender, and socio-cultural formulations in terms of contemporary conceptualisations of the lived body, this thesis takes a transgendered and transcultural approach to the body. For this reason, using performativity as a specific practice, constructs an open, transformative approach to bodies, rather than defining specific models for action and behaviours.

The body is understood as a hybrid of virtual and actual. This thesis argues that architecture must now recognise the phenomenological needs and desires of the material body, but also the flexibility and accessibilities demanded by the virtual one. In order to understand the body as animate, interactive and creative in its relationship with space, this thesis uses Merleau-Ponty’s description of the ‘living body’, whose knowledge of the world is based on concrete experience.

27 Grosz makes a clear argument in Architecture from the Outside, that historically privileging masculine perspectives must be deconstructed in order to allow for other bodies. 28 See Edward Soja, Postmodern Geographies: the reassertion of space in critical social theory (Verso: London,1989) and Homi K Bahba, The Location of Culture (Routledge: UK, 1993).

19 In staking a conceptualisation of space on a bodily, performative reading, the differences between places, spaces and environments also become blurred. Through this thesis recurs the sometimes subtle, but essential differences, between ‘built space’, ‘built environments’, ‘buildings’ and ‘architecture’. These distinctions are important in this thesis, which endeavours to look beyond the physically-situated boundaries prescribed by architecture and examine its essential components of bodies and spaces through other disciplines. ‘Built space’ refers to spaces that are physically constructed, whether delineated in building walls, the edges of a sculpture or between the arms of a dancer. In contrast to the natural landscape, the term ‘built environments’ describes places that have been designed and constructed by people.

The term architecture is particularly difficult to define. Tschumi draws on Hegel to describe the conventionally held difference between architecture and building. For Hegel architecture is the immaterial quality of a built environment, the ‘artistic supplement added to the simple building’.29 Le Corbusier, the master of architectural modernism, made the distinction between building and architecture as the materiality of construction and the impact of a building on people:

The Engineer, inspired by the law of economy and governed by mathematical calculation, puts us in accord with universal law. He achieves harmony. The Architect, by his arrangement of forms, realizes an order which is a pure creation of his spirit; by forms and shapes he affects our senses to an acute degree, and provokes plastic emotions; by the relationships which he creates he wakes in us profound echoes, he gives us the measure of an order which we feel to be in accordance with that of our world.30

29 G.W.F Hegel, The Philosophy of Fine Art, vol 1, (G.Bell & Sons: London, 1920), quotation in Bernard Tschumi, Architecture and Disjunction (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2001), p.67 30 Le Corbusier, ‘Vers une architecture’ in Towards a New Architecture (London, England: Rodker, 1931), p.1.

20 In this quotation the architect is described not only in their traditional role as ‘master builder’, but as a kind of conduit between ordinary people and the greater cosmos. This god-like status is being challenged by the digital design processes that will be explored in Chapter Five. Rather than seeing the architect as a sole genius of a building, these processes provoke a rethinking of the architect’s role in design. As terms, ‘architecture’ has typically described the entire event, where forms are generated through a design process. ‘Buildings’ describes the physical, constructed result of architecture in space. The first part of this thesis highlights the separation between these two terms, exploring architectural endeavours without construction as a goal. These examples come under the titles ‘architectural performances’ and ‘performative drawings’. The final two chapters bring architecture and building together to explore new built environments generated from performative architectural processes.

These design processes are situated in two contested sites: virtuality and the digital realm. Virtuality fundamentally describes a condition separate from reality, brought forth through constructed media. This means that it is possible to talk of the virtuality of a book as well as the virtual space of an interactive computer game. The virtual is described as a state of being actualised, rather than having been realized. Virtual space is located between information and reality, a location that can be inhabited mentally if not physically. The term ‘digital architecture’ describes architecture generated through and with digital technologies. Not only in terms of visualization and fabrication, but where digital technologies are a leading component in the design process. Digital architecture is architecture initially sited in virtual, computational spaces. The foundations of this kind are architecture is based on information, which can be used to create forms not held by the constraints of Euclidean space. These later forms have been given names such as ‘non-standard architecture’ to describe their use of such unconventional design processes.

21 0.7 Thesis Outline

The formulation of the body in architecture has been based on an anatomical and figural approach, perpetuating the dichotomy of the subjective, centralized body and the objective, stable world. The Information Age has created new relationships between bodies and buildings, which demand new modes of thinking and of making the built environments.

This thesis is structured in three parts. The first (Chapters One and Two) are dedicated to describing the condition and framework in which to strategize an understanding of performative architecture. The second part (Chapters Three and Four) use examples from the fine arts to show how alternative ways of thinking and designing architecture emerges when performance practices are brought into spatial design. The third part (Chapters Five and Six), bring these strategies into contemporary architecture. In this way there is a clear development from ideas into the creation of those ideas into spaces, and then into contemporary architecture. The final chapter uses personal analysis in order to critique performative architecture through my own body.

First Chapter OUTLINE : The Space of Architecture The first chapter is dedicated to laying the foundations for a concept of performative architecture by siting contemporary spaces and bodies within the architectural condition. It begins with the essential tenet of architecture – space. This thesis adds to this architectural principal, the body. The concept of space has become very slippery, laden with debates on ‘place’, ‘virtuality’ and reconceived ‘reality’. Here space will be considered in terms of the body and its role in representing built environments. This starting point will provide the basis for rethinking the design process. I wish to clarify how the assumed ‘truths’ of spaces and bodies can be unpicked to reveal their historically constructed systems. This will allow for alternative pathways for new kinds of architecture.

22 Second Chapter OUTLINE : Bodies and Drawings This chapter defines the theoretical framework for performative architecture. It describes the two spatial principles of this thesis: bodies and drawings. The first issue is how the lived body actively constructs space. This will be explored by drawing on aspects of Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of perception. The focus is on the interconnectedness of body, space and world, brought about through movement. As well as Merleau-Ponty, the body constructed in terms of movement as described by Edmund Husserl and Michel de Certeau will be examined.

The second issue is how conceptions of space shape architecture through the design process. This necessarily has cultural and social ramifications, but what is important for this thesis is how contemporary understandings of space impact how architecture is conceived through the systems developed for designing buildings. In order to do this, I trace the architecture drawing’s history from its inception in Renaissance Italy, showing how it is necessarily specific to a particular age and way of thinking. The analysis of these two essential, yet ultimately questionable states, of the living body and the architectural drawing provides the basis for exploring performative architectures through the following examples.

Third Chapter OUTLINE : Architectural Performances Chapter Three examines the first spatial condition articulated in the theoretical framework: exploring how the living body actively constructs space. Phenomenological and performative practices are shown as imported into various creative processes. The aim is to look at built spaces designed with architectural concerns, but without the pragmatics of building construction. These projects come from the fields of performance, fine arts and literature.

23 Following this examination of the body from a phenomenological basis constructed through movement, this chapter explores the relationship between dance and architecture, using the projects of Oskar Schlemmer as a case study. This traces a shift in thinking from the figural towards new possibilities for the body and architecture. Looking at the body as an active force that works interactively with its surrounding environment finds explicit, expressive form in installation art. The art projects of Vito Acconci reveal the implicit political machinations between bodies and buildings.

Fourth Chapter OUTLINE : Performative Drawings To begin at the origin of the design process is to begin with the drawing. This chapter explores the second spatial condition proposed in the theoretical framework chapter: the importance of the architecture drawing within the design process. The drawing will recur through this thesis as an integral part of bringing animated bodies into architecture. To bring movement into architecture the architectural drawing may be considered as not as a fixed representation of reality, but as a map, a musical score or a diagram. The examination of the architecture drawing as the connection between spatial conceptions and the design process is premised on the radicality of Bernard Tschumi and John Hejduk’s re-interpretations of the drawing. Clarifying how conceptions of space shape built work through the drawing opens the design process to new possibilities of thinking architecture in a contemporary context.

The case studies so far are all transient structures. Whether staged or mapped out in a dèrive, they are built in the ephemeral space of the event. What happens when these strategies are solidified into concrete form? Architecture, whose physical weight tends to drag it behind other creative disciplines, has increasingly begun to address these ideas through the virtual, where explorations of habitations created in digital surfaces have created dynamic, three-dimensional,

24 virtual forms. The following chapter looks at how to relate bodily placement in space and its architectural containment.

Fifth Chapter OUTLINE : Non-standard Architectures Chapter Five brings the elements of embodiment and the architecture drawing into contemporary digital design practices. This chapter traces the possibilities of a performative architecture through new design and drawing systems. It aims to show how these technologies, instead of alienating living bodies, can instigate new kinds of corporeal interaction. This leads to the explication of four performative paradigms: Destabilization, flux architecture, improvisation and blurred space.

Chapter 6 OUTLINE : Performative Architectures This chapter performatively presents a qualitative analysis of four architectural case studies. Through retelling the performance of my own body through these environments, emerge the strategies previously outlined. This chapter aims to show how the defined paradigms are made physically apparent in these built environments. As architects create new kinds of environments for these new bodies and spaces, these performative strategies have been drawn upon. What results from this examination is not a definitive answer to how the phenomenological body can be incorporated into new architectures, only a selection of proposals presenting possibilities. In the exciting shift in making and thinking architecture, these case studies show the potential richness and complexity of the living body, as incorporated and also instigating the extraordinary forms being produced.

25 ChapterONE The Space of Architecture

26 This first chapter examines the field of architectural research within which this thesis is placed, tracing a genealogy of ideas that contribute to a conceptualization of a performative architecture. It is necessary to first understand the context out of which new bodies, spaces and technologies are emerging. The shifting definition of space through time and different discourses become the starting point for looking at the way new technologies have led to different relationships between the body and new architecture. The body in architectural discourse has a history of its own and it is necessary to distinguish the specific, performative usage of the living body used in this thesis. In the same way that an understanding of the body has evolved from a specific architectural discourse, the contemporary condition of architectural practice has been developed out of a unique context that has supported innovative and critical forms of architecture. The different issues of this chapter come together to describe how this thesis understands the contemporary space of architecture.

1.1 The Situation of Space

Since the mid-20th century there has been a cross-disciplinary growth in the field of spatial theory across various disciplines. Though philosophy has deliberated about space since antiquity, in the last fifty years spatial theory has increasingly infected and impacted upon many different discourses. Academics from various fields regularly refer to geography, cartography, boundary, bringing with them new concerns and viewpoints. The rapid expansion of cities in the Western world due to industrialization promoted urban life as the symbol of modernity, with urban planning and architecture becoming objects of social and cultural critique. Transformations in tourism and immigration through globalization have changed how we understand placement, geography and location. Changes in technology have led to the creation of new kinds of spaces. Telecommunications through virtual media, from the birth of the telephone through to the Internet and mobile

27 phones, have become easier, cheaper and more common. These virtual spaces can no longer be considered separate from our daily lives. Now the everyday can be defined as interwoven networks of electronic and information-based systems. As the cultural theorist Margaret Morse writes, people now move and inhabit multiple, simultaneous worlds, which are co-present in different modes.31 In this context, more options are continually opening up in order to escape from our physical selves. Morse distinguishes the differences between different realms of cyberspace, from virtual worlds to networks and virtualised physical spaces, all of which demand different kinds of experiences. These aspects have resulted in the issue of dislocation and alienation as a key concern in critical theory - dislocation of the body from the world, from each other, from ourselves. These two issues of multiple, co-present spaces, and the ease of losing the body in these kinds of places, present a new spatial ground upon which architectural design is constructed.32

These new spaces demand new kinds of movement and inhabitation. Questioning conventional design methodologies has usually meant discarding the body in favour of virtual interfaces or returning to a figural approach to design and the body, both processes based on representation. An important question is the relevance and application of the moving body in these new, technologically immersive spaces. This question has become more relevant than ever before and in a selection of contemporary architectures it can be seen how architects have begun to address this question in new ways. The architects of these projects are finding new methods of bodily incorporation beyond humanist practices that see the body as fixed and static. In order to progress using new technologies not as simply tools but as new design methods, this thesis argues that architects need to focus on retaining the corporeal body. People still live

31 Morse, Margaret, ‘An Ontology of Everyday Distraction: The Freeway, the Mall, and Television', in Logics of Television: Essays in Cultural Criticism, ed. Patricia Mellencamp (Bloomington and Indianapolis / London: Indiana University Press / BFI Publishing, 1990),p.203. 32 As will be discussed in the next chapter, the architecture drawing as a system that supports and limits a particular design process, is formulated on the understanding of bodies and spaces as fixed, stable and homogenized.

28 with, experience and are affected by architecture. By pursuing strategies drawn from phenomenology and performance studies, this kind of architecture has taken on an embodied approach to design.

This chapter lays the foundations of thinking in this area. The research draws on 20th century projects and follows this line of thought into several contemporary manifestations. This time frame encapsulates the extreme and rapid changes to bodies and spaces during modernity. They present a movement from machine- based technologies towards the information age of today. This movement also shows the shifts in attitude toward technology, from the technophobia of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, to Le Corbusier’s utopian pedestalizing of the machine and now the current condition of spectatorship encapsulated in reality time television and blog sites. The case studies chosen reflect these changing perceptions and experiences of the body, environments and technology.

1.2 Technology and Architecture

Perhaps the most striking transformation effected by these [digital] technologies is the change in our perceptions of materiality, space, and information, which is bound directly or indirectly to affect how we understand architecture, habitation and the built environment.33

Elizabeth Grosz articulates the link between advances in technology and architectural practice. While the relationship between the experiential body and buildings has long been a part of architectural discourse, the difficulties have been multiplied by the effects of technological innovations. It is essential to architecture more so than to other creative disciplines due to its basis in

33 Elizabeth Grosz, Architecture from the Outside: Essays on Virtual and Real Space (MIT Press: USA, 2001), p.76.

29 construction and materiality. It aims to be made, and this making is both dependant on new technology and set free by it. This is itself not new advances in technology have always been a catalyst for new kinds of architecture. Architectural historian Siegfried Gideon articulated this point in 1941 through the schism that occurred in the 19th century between architecture and technology in the industrial age. Here he quotes from a contemporary newspaper:

1850: Mankind will produce a completely new architecture out of its period exactly at the moment when the new methods created by recently born industry are made use of. The application of cast iron allows and enforces the use of many new forms, as can be seen in railway stations, suspension bridges, and the arches of conservatories.34

In quoting from contemporary popular discourse, Gideon noted the shift that must occur in architecture in line with changes in technology. Otherwise, he warned, architecture, as an artistic and cultural form, would be left behind. In the same way today, it is crucial that architecture comes to terms with new digital technologies. In a purely practical sense, it is impossible to disregard the importance of rapid advances of technology in architecture in terms of rethinking bodies and buildings. The last ten years have solidified the reliance on CAD programs in architecture firms across the globe. The specific aspect of these new technologies that separates them from traditional drawing tools is that there are now computers that can not only build a scale model directly from a digital image, but can also size and cut component parts for the 1:1 building. The stages of translation from ideas to buildings are therefore minimized. Design using these new technologies is to explore new digital, spatial territories, but with the option now of bringing those investigations into the material world.

34 Seigfried Giedion, Space, Time and Architecture: The Growth of a New Tradition, Fifth Revised (Harvard Uni Press: USA, 2003), p.149.

30 1.2.1 Digital & Virtual Spaces

‘Cyberspace’ was first described in 1984 by William Gibson as an abstract collection of data made up of virtual worlds, networked spaces and augmented material spaces.35 This original definition is based on cyberspace as a three- dimensional simulation of real environments. Malcolm McCullough notes the paradigm shift that occurred during the 1990s that initially presented cyberspace as a coherent, distanced and idealized realm. Instead, McCullough writes, ‘[D]igital technology, pours out beyond the screen into our messy places, under our laws of physics; it is built into our rooms, embedded in our props and devices – everywhere’.36 Technology has become pervasive. To write about space in the 21st century is to bring together multiple typologies which were not only previously irrelevant, but non-existent. In order to conceptualize new spatial structures architects have increasingly turned to Giles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Henri Bergson and Michel Foucault. They have looked to Situationist cartography and biological structures, presenting pathways and directions that explode, opening to multiple opportunities. These new modes of spatial thinking and representation have been further complicated by the addition and infection of digital, virtual spaces. These spaces are what Deleuze and Guattari described as ‘rhizomatic’, breaking from an arborous structure of cause and effect and presenting the relationship of time and space as something fluid, unstructured and based on the experiential as the catalyst for future possibility.37 What the digital domain has proposed is a multivalent perspectival space. Instead of a single, static viewing point and subject, multiple, simultaneous possibilities allow for inclusion and immersion for many different kinds of bodies. These can be

35 Cyberspace was first described in Gibson’s science fiction book Neuromancer, published in 1984. 36 Malcolm McCullough, Digital Ground (MIT Press: USA, 2005), p.9. 37 The Rhizome has become an emblematic term for describing the contemporary condition of networked mobilities and flows. Deleuze and Guattari propose the rhizome in their book A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Continuum: London,1988).

31 reached through movement, they can change, they can adapt and transform with, and by, the viewer. As several of the paperarchitecture examples show, to bring mobility into architecture we might now think of the architectural drawing, not as a precise image of reality, but as a map, a diagram or a score.

Throughout this shift the brute matter of reality has proved surprisingly porous. It is this porosity that has led many artists to comment on the ‘blurred’ condition of contemporary built environments.38 These are spaces where the material and virtual converge. Several architects have noted the importance of this spatial state in which to reconsider inhabitation and interaction. Notably, they have come out of the digital arena, led initially by Marcus Novak and Steven Perella, calling for the need for built environments to acknowledge this new, technology provoked, condition. Perella describes this condition in architectural terms as replacing the anxiety of ‘lost in space’ with ‘lost in the home’, whereby, rather than staying abstract, this state has become domestic.39 Virtual spaces are no longer separate from our daily lives; instead the everyday is negotiated through interwoven networks of information. Novak uses the term ‘eversion’ to describe the bleeding of the virtual into the real.40 Rather than pejorative, this can be seen as an opening up of new kinds of movement and inhabitation. The body moves through these spaces in a state of constant transformation and adaptation. This occurs both consciously, in the accumulation of prosthetic devices such as mobile phones and satellite navigation systems, and also unconsciously in terms of how these technologies are changing the way we organise, co-habit and socialize. This can be understood to follow on from Merleau-Ponty’s description of the ‘habitual body’, which accumulates an intuitive knowledge of the world as it

38 Peter Eisenman, Diller and Scofidio and Hani Rashid and Lisa Couture have all used ‘blur’ in different ways; see Chapter Five for further examinations of this idea. 39 Perrella, Steven, ‘Hypersurface Theory: Architecture> 40 See Gullbring, Leo, ‘Marcos Novak’ (interview) Calimero Journalistik Och Fotografi Website. Retrieved 25.04.2007 at

32 moves through it.41 But the spaces we’re moving through are no longer only material. At the interface is what Perella has called the ‘hypersurface’, events described as tangible, vital, phenomenological experiences within informational states that include both space and time.42 As well as acknowledging the co- presence of these new spaces, we must also reconsider the performance of bodies within them.

1.2.2 The Body in New Spaces

The absence of the corporeal body in virtual architecture is problematic due to a failure to accept that physical bodies in physical spaces construct a different relationship from that of virtual bodies in virtual, digital spaces. In order to design buildings in and for these new spaces, we must recognize this new form of embodiment. Recent work using motion capture suits have created more realistic body movement, usually for human animations, where a three- dimensional mannequin is given the fluid movements of a ‘real’ body.43 But, though more lifelike, they fail to change how our bodies interact in these new spaces. They forget that rather than objects, as Grosz points out, it is information that occupies virtual space.44 To thus place a body, regardless of its dimensionality, into virtual space creates a new association. The issue of scale is important in any virtual model, whether cardboard or computer, where the anthropometric scale to the human figure is lost. Rather than bemoaning this

41 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Phenomenology of Perception, pp.129-131. 42 Stephen Perella, Hypersurface Theory: Architecture in Architecture and Science, Guiseppa Di Cristina (ed.) (Wiley~Academy, 2001, Great Britain), p.140, see Chapter Five of this thesis for further analysis of the Hypersurface. 43 An alternative approach can be seen in explorations by artists and choreographers such as Australian performance artist Jude Walton. These projects program the body into virtual environments as sets of co-ordinates, foregoing the body as an anatomical figure and focusing on embodied movement. 44 Elizabeth Grosz, Architecture from the Outside: Essays on Virtual and Real Space (MIT Press: USA, 2001), p.41.

33 loss, digital technologies provide new modes in which to reclaim a non-figural approach to the body.

Negotiating movement through the interface of the computer screen is also in flux; from keyboards to voice activations, to virtual bodysuits – but the body is still present. Both Grosz and philosopher Brian Massumi point out that this interface means that an analogue process is still being utilized in order to ‘connect up’ to new digital spaces. This is an essential point for the relationship between physical bodies and digitized technologies, where claims to corporeal transcendence presuppose an ability to leave the body behind. In line with McCullough’s description of pervasive digitized environments, Grosz describes cyberspace as an in-between space between the built and the unbuilt. It occurs only between the user and the network, or the viewer and the system, or even the user and the user (as in telecommunications). Total disembodiment is not an option offered by virtual environments, because the body is still connected to the machine or working with its interface in real space.45 This is why Grosz argues that a separation of the virtual from the real (like the Cartesian division of the body and mind) is an impossibility:

If we don’t just have bodies, but are bodies…there can never be the threat of displacing body in favour of mind or abandoning the real for the virtual. Rather, cyberspace, virtual worlds, and the order of computer simulation – whether imagistic or computational – show that our notions of real, of body, and of the physical or historical city need to be complicated and rethought to accommodate what they seem to oppose.46

Grosz believes that it is the task of architects to negotiate how to make spaces for this virtual and material body in this new condition.47 We must now accept

45 Elizabeth Grosz, ibid, p.18. 46 Elizabeth Grosz, p.86. 47 Elizabeth Grosz, p.82.

34 that the body has a virtual presence based on communication and information, rather than only a material one.

It is essential to recognize the consequences of these changes that have occurred to the body as well as to spaces, in order to propose new processes for architecture. I am defining the body as a hybrid of the corporeal and the virtual. The hybrid body is one that can physically move in material space but just as easily, and at the same time, fluidly in a virtual one. Bodies are accumulating more and more equipment – mobile phones, mobile entertainment systems, navigation tracking systems. More than leisure or pragmatics, these devices hold for many the essentiality of prosthetic limbs. This image of a body physically attached and extended through technology encapsulates the hybrid body.48 In accepting Grosz’s argument that it is still a corporeal, living entity, the hybrid body means accepting that a theory of phenomenology still has an essential role in spatial inhabitation.

Having looked at how new spaces and bodies have emerged from digital technologies, the question is how to bring them into architectural practice. A key factor that is recurring throughout this primary research is the importance of movement; bodily mobility and spatial mobility. Far from a recent issue in architectural discourse, it is important to trace its history before considering further destabilization of its foundations.

1.3 Stable Spaces and Moving Bodies

In trying to re-instigate living bodies in architecture, rather than considering them

48 This body can be seen in reference to Donna Haraway’s The Cyborg Manifesto, published in 1985, which described the contemporary body as a cyborg, a fusion of organic and machine, constructed by the social, cultural and political.

35 as animated individuals, it is much easier to simply use the form of the body. This thesis questions how to bring these ideas of interaction and motion into architecture. How is it possible for buildings, whose strength seems to rest on its weight and immovability, to incorporate in bricks and mortar notions of movement? How is it possible to reconsider the continual separation of the body and space, where the subject moves and the space stays still?

Architects have often posed these questions, but now new technologies are providing answers. In two very different books dedicated to movement and architecture, one on the work of Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava and the other on new digital Dutch architects, both authors note the historical connections between motion and architecture. Kari Jormakka reminds us that in his famous treatise on architecture, Vitruvius included mobile objects and constructions along with fixed buildings.49 Anthony Tzonis writes how Heinrich Wölfflin formulates a theory of movement in architecture whereby it finds expression through a specific style of ornamentation and occasional structural form.50 Wölfflin defined a particular preoccupation with movement in the Baroque age, which can be seen in the architectural forms. This question of architecture and motion is not new, but the desire to transcend the weight of architecture was specifically revived in the 20th century obsession with speed and mobility. This has been re-emphasized with new digital technologies.

In Space, Time and Architecture first published in 1941, Giedion described a conception of space that was based on the notion of time.51 He recognized that with the shift into the industrial age, time and space were being interwoven. He was the first to write about the importance of this specifically in terms of architecture. Gideon elucidates a new conception of space through several art

49 Kari Jormakka, Flying Dutchmen: Motion in Architecture (Basel: Birkhauser, 2002). 50 Heinrich Wölfflin, Renaissance and Baroque (London, 1964) referred to in Alexander Tzonis & Liane Lefaivre, Movement, Structure and the Work of Santiago Calatrava (Birkhäuser: Basil, 1995), p.11. 51 See the chapter ‘Space-Time in Art, Architecture and Construction’.

36 movements of the 20th century. By looking at Cubism, Constructivism and Futurism, he showed how breaking from the limitations of the Renaissance understanding of space can bring about new models for the architectural design process. Though he articulated the importance of architecture accepting these changes, Gideon failed to continue this area of his book into an examination of how this could be achieved. While he is often considered to be the first to see the potential of bringing time and motion into architecture, understanding the importance of moving bodies through architecture, he retained the separation of body and space, where the subject moved and the building stayed still. When motion was considered again in architectural discourse and practice in the 60s and 70s, it retained this hierarchy. Architecture was seen as a stage set, allowing designers to talk about buildings and motion without having to change their design processes. This is illustrated in the following statement by the postmodern architects Kent Bloomer and Charles Moore, whose book aimed to retrieve a sense of the experiencing body: ‘All architecture functions as a potential stimulus for movement, real or imagined. A building is an incitement to action, a stage for movement and interaction. It is one partner in dialogue with the body.’52

This statement shows the dialogue in architectural discourse with the body as one with a single direction; the body reacting against the architecture and therefore not disturbing the accepted roles of buildings as stable, static structures, which instigates actions and events. This was also John Andrews’ description of ‘performative architecture’ in the 70s, as previously discussed. By the late 20th century, movement became a key issue in the architectural discourse of digital media. Digital architects, such as Greg Lynn, who have based their design methods on animation and motion are regularly attacked with this essential argument: buildings don’t move. Virtual and material mobility is becoming more essential in today’s spaces. Understanding that while buildings

52 Kent Bloomer & Charles Moore, Body, Memory, and Architecture (Yale Uni Press: USA, 1977), p.59.

37 may not move, spaces can and do, emphasizes the reconsideration of how we think and make architecture.

The theme of movement in terms of fluidity has become an essential conceptual component of digital spaces. The structure of everyday movement is now based on fluid transitions through multiple spaces, simultaneous flows instead of linear, individual experiences like those portrayed in Etienne-Jules Marey’s frame-by- frame photography. Physical movement weaves into digital movement as people walk through streets with mobile phones or email from personal palm pilots on buses. Nearly half a century after the Futurists, radical architecture groups such as Archigram and Archizoom embraced the new world of speed and technology. They focused on mobility and flexibility in direct contrast to the fixed heaviness of modernism. Programs of campervans, space ships and submarines were used, critiquing the desire for stability and consumption. These hypothetical projects have become known as ‘Futurist’ or ‘Utopic’ architectures, due to their disregard for the practicalities of construction.

Meanwhile European Modernist cinema in the 1960s explored the counter position to stable buildings and moving bodies, producing films where the motion of architecture and bodies intermeshed. Films by Alain Resnais’ and Michelangelo Antonioni (who was originally an architect) showed architecture as a key protagonist in the cinematic narrative. The art historian Erwin Panofsky wrote about this new cinema in which;

[A]s movable as the spectator is, as movable is, for the same reason, the space presented to him. Not only bodies move in space, but space itself does, approaching, receding, turning, dissolving and recrystallizing as it appears through the controlled locomotion and focusing of the camera and

38 through the cutting and editing of the various shots.53

This new imaging of architecture through film proposed an alternative portrayal of spaces that were contingent on individual bodies. Non-linear and durational conceptualizations of temporality were shown through multiple, simultaneous framings of spaces. As will be discussed in Chapter Four, these new cinematic processes were picked up by Bernard Tschumi in order to reconsider the systems of representation in the architecture drawing.

A different approach to these avant-garde and cinematic proposals is Tzonis’s descriptions of Portuguese architect Santiago Calatrava explorations of movement in his structures, beyond visual representation. Calatrava’s design for the World Trade Centre transportation building in New York presents a biomorphic impression of momentary stillness. Like many of Calatrava’s buildings, its chrysalis form exposes a complex structural system, whose skeletal form appears on the edge of organic motion. Calatrava creates mobile architectures which feature what Tzonis describes as a paradoxical state of permanence in space and time through movement, ‘incorporating fleeting moments within their static body; effacing their own fetishist aura by constantly reminding the viewer of their generic process; manifesting their victory over collapse by pretending to be in the process of falling’.54 The architecture of Calatrava is an excellent example of a non-literal process of bringing movement into buildings themselves. While they are often very reminiscent of joints, wings or limbs, the forms are drawn from the poetics of structure, rather than an existing mimicry. The built works seem often at the point of collapse or flight. They provide an excellent reply to the traditional doctrine of buildings staying still while bodies move through them. Calatrava’s projects are monumental, they are

53 Quotation in Sik, Cho Im, ‘Diagramming; Lars Spuybroek’ interview, Sarai Reader 02, ‘The Cities of Everyday LIfe’. Sarai Website. Retrieved 10.01.2007 at 54 Alexander Tzonis & Liane Lefaivre, Movement, Structure and the Work of Santiago Calatrava (Birhauser; Basel,1995), p.13.

39 to be viewed as iconic sculptures in the landscape. They present an idea of architecture that encapsulates motion in its form. They are not formed by the performance of bodies, and it may be argued that their spectacular forms only heighten the hierarchy of the architecture over the pedestrian. My description of performative architecture, however, endeavors to incorporate motion in terms of moving bodies. As can be seen in new generative CAD programs, some contemporary architects, such as Greg Lynn and Lars Spuybroek, are also finding ways of bringing this information into the forms themselves.

1.4 The Space of Architectural Discourse

Examples of performative architectures have emerged from a particular time in the discipline of architecture in which visionary projects and theoretical research have been actively promoted. The extensive theoretically rigorous architecture now emerging can be attributed to this condition within the discipline in the last few decades of the 20th century. The architects examined in this thesis have worked within academia during the last forty years, building reputations in theoretical projects, texts and alternative design and art practices. The 1970s saw the radical visions of Archigram, Archizoom and Ant Farm exploring utopic and dystopic urban life in collages and text. Architecture schools led by the Architecture Association in London and Cooper Union in New York were breeding grounds for pushing the boundaries of what architecture could be, incorporating politics, literature and theatre into studio practice. John Hejduk, Dean of the School of Architecture at Cooper Union, infamously insisted that building was not essential to architecture. Inspiration could come from Italo Calvino’s book Invisible Cities, or a film by Resnais.55 In these design courses there were a focus on drawing and other media of artistic representation, rather

55 See Nigel Coates (ed.), A Discourse of Events (Architecture Association Press: UK, 1983).

40 than building technology. It was at the universities rather than on the building site that key thinkers such as Bernard Tschumi, Rem Koolhaas and Peter Eisenman explored new ideas, inspiring the next generation of architects such as Daniel Libeskind, Elizabeth Diller and Ben Van Berkel. This section traces recent architectural discourse, in order to clarify historic background of the case studies in Chapter Six.

While there has always been a strong theoretical discourse in the discipline of architecture, during the 70s and 80s critical theory became very influential in practice. This can be seen in the flourishing of journals such as Oppositions and Assemblage. Oppositions was edited by Eisenman and Kenneth Frampton, concentrating on the possibilities and uses of Deconstruction in architecture. In 1986 Assemblage established itself as a journal for critical exchange in architectural discourse, the writers of which have included many of the most important and vocal architectural theorists of the late 20th century.56 Its subtitle was ‘A Critical Journal of Architecture and Design Culture’ and it aimed to make theory part of practice.

These journals presented an initial focus on linguistic and semiotic concerns, based on deconstructive strategies in architectural theory. A decade later interest turned to cultural issues, opening architectural critique up to gender, race and spatial theory. By the new millennium Foucault was usurped by Deleuze as a key theorist for architects, whose work is well suited to the multifarious and transformative digital domain. This opening of architecture to other disciplines meant an awareness of architectural issues beyond the pragmatic. At the same time, architecture became more than backdrops of events for artists and performers. Performance practitioners such as Trisha Brown and Vito Acconci were exploring architecture and urban space in a specifically bodily way. An understanding was established of how an installation work such as Gordon

56 Assemblage was published by MIT Press and included such regular writers as K. Michael Hays, Stan Allen, Jennifer Bloomer, Beatriz Colomina, Stanford Kwinter and Mark Wigley.

41 Matta-Clarke’s ‘Splitting’ could be an important critique of not only art, but also architecture. 57 The solidity of architecture as both a material form and a way of thinking was becoming more porous. Later, in the 1990s, the ‘Any’ conferences and subsequent journals focused on intellectual inquiry regarding architecture. Incorporating many of the theorists from both Assemblage and Oppositions, they aimed to establish architecture in contemporary cultural and social discourse, bringing together people from philosophy, film and art as well as respected architecture theorists, and young digital architects. The ‘Any’ group were important in generating debate internationally between leading architectural theorists, and open the typically closed world of architecture theory to the outside.

During this time emerged the phenomenon of the ‘star architect’. Despite the lack of actual building projects, Peter Eisenman, Daniel Libeskind and Tschumi became known in the architectural world through their ideas voiced in teaching, journalism and publications. The publication of the seductive, ‘hyper-monograph’ S,M,L,XL brought Rem Koolhaas international acclaim, redefining graphic design, architectural and urban theory. This notoriety has spread over the last few decades into the public arena, with the growth in ‘star’ architects, where celebrity names mean increased revenue, from cultural buildings to expensive apartment blocks. Beginning with Renzo Piano and Richard Roger’s design of the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris in 1977, during the last ten years several architects have become household names, perhaps never so exemplified as by Frank Gehry’s entry into pop knighthood by appearing on ‘The Simpsons’. Gehry’s design of the Guggenheim in Bilbao in 1997 showed that a single building could be instrumental in making an unknown, industrial city in Spain into an internationally-recognised tourist destination. Bilbao showed the branding potential of architecture, but also the brand naming of celebrity architects. What

57 The disillusioned architect Gordon Matta-Clarke became famous with this installation work in 1974, where he split a typical suburban house up the middle, the beginning of his subversions and dissections into architecture.

42 this means for architectural practice is the growth of big-budget, international projects, whose organisers are actively seeking originality and innovation.

By the late 1980s the architectural climate began to change. This was the time when the first projects of Tschumi, Eisenman and Libeskind began construction. The focus began to shift from critical discourse to making things. The theorists who had been so important in writing about ideas were starting to put concepts into built form. The last edition of Assemblage marked a shift in the agency of critical architectural discourse, from thinking to production. The final edition in 1999 spoke of a specific turn in architecture, whereby the idea of theory as distinct from practice in architectural discourse need no longer be emphasized. Stan Allen wrote, ‘[T]he most urgent and interesting issues are no longer debates about formal language, its origins or affiliations, but rather, the complex questions attending its realisation in built form. Debates about blobs versus boxes dissolve in the common filter of technical information.’58 Today architecture, Allen argues, must negotiate the issue of the virtual and actual. Allen ends by writing ‘[T]he results in process suggest an optimistic future based on practice itself as source of innovation and creativity.’59 This thesis argues that the shift from critical theory to practice also means the reemphasis on not only the idea of the body, but also the body as a living and animate entity.

1.5 The Body in Architecture

There are various ways in which the body has been brought into architectural design. An example that has been popularized through Gehry’s work has been called ‘Biological Spatiality’, where a building’s form reference organic body

58 Stan Allen, ‘Federation Square, Melbourne, Australia Lab Architecture Studio’, Assemblage 40. (Dec., 1999), p.59. JSTOR. Retrieved 10.01.2007 at < http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0889- 3012%28199912%290%3A40%3C56%3AFSMALA%3E2.0.CO%3B2-V> 59 Stan Allen, ibid, p.59.

43 forms. While it has been critiqued as creating a visceral reaction in the beholder, this kind of architecture tends toward a particular style rather than bodily interaction. The process which the body has been traditionally brought into architecture has usually been described as a ‘figural’ or ‘humanist’ approach. Figural architecture uses the size and measure of the human form in the design of buildings. Historically, the body has been brought into architecture through an anthropomorphic process of representation. It traditionally describes the Renaissance use of the image of the human form in a building’s design, leading it also to be called ‘humanist architecture’. This is exemplified by Leonardo da Vinci’s image of the Vitruvian Man in 1492. In this famous drawing, the male figure reaches out to the edges of his kinosphere, delineating the Euclidean geometry of a circle and square. He is the unifying element, the centre of universal form. For Vitruvius, the metaphor of architecture came from reflections on the human body – architectural beauty (Venustas) came from the proportions and geometry of this circle and square.60 It defined an order and strength, which architecture was to emulate. This parallels the onset of single-point perspective and Cartesian space as a centralizing of the individual human body in the world. ‘Figural architecture’, therefore, means the scaling and homogenizing of the human form.61 The body becomes a regulating system of the world around it, becoming particularized into a specific gender and type. What this means is that instead of considering the body as living and animate, it can be brought into architecture in terms of mimetic reproduction.

60 Indra Kagis McEwen, Vitruvius:Writing the Body of Architecture (MIT press: USA, 2003), p.12. 61 The term Figural Architecture has also been used to describe a style of architecture in response to Modernist abstraction. Post-modern architect Michael Graves in his essay ‘A Case for Figurative Architecture’ in Michael Graves: Buildings and Projects, 1966-1981, (Rizzoli: New York, 1983), describes the use of suggestive and familiar symbols in architecture which relate back to the body.

44 1.5.1 Figural Architecture

Figural architecture is described by architect Robert McAnulty as a ‘projected interiority’, where the body’s image becomes the blueprint that is extruded directly upwards into built form.62 A key problem with figural architecture is that it sets up a dichotomy between the body and the world. This binary relationship creates a distance between the two, defining separate positions of subject and object. By homogenizing the body, either it tends towards the particular male body (as in the Vitruvian Man or Corbusier’s Modular Man), or it becomes asexualized. Importantly, it enforces stillness, taking on the static qualities of an image and allowing it to become a dimension-able, measurable entity.

In trying to re-animate the body in architecture, it is difficult not to resort back to a figural process. Beyond the basic representation of the body in architectural form, many theorists in the search for a contemporary body-building relationship fall back into this humanist approach. This issue forms the basis of McAnulty’s essay ‘Body Troubles’, which is significant as one of the few texts to discuss the need to critically examine the issue of figurality in terms of reformulating the body in contemporary architecture.63 McAnulty draws on Foucault’s definition of the social body, specifically in order to open up contemporary thinking in architecture beyond this classical approach to the body. Contrasting the Vitruvian figure of a pre-existing body that projects itself onto the built environment, he uses Foucault’s understanding of the body in terms of exteriority and its engagement with the world. McAnulty makes clear that a figural architecture is only a return to the classical model, ‘that finds the body as an interiorized subject projecting itself onto an exterior world’.64

62 The clearest example is the body of Christ directly forming the ground plan of the church. 63 Robert McAnulty ‘Body Troubles’ in Strategies in Architectural Thinking John Whiteman, Jeff Kipnis, Richard Burdett (eds.) (The MIT Press: USA, 1992). 64 Robert McAnulty, ibid, p.191.

45 In ‘Body Troubles’, McAnulty examines two contemporary approaches to retrieve the body in architecture, the first is phenomenological and the second psychoanalytic. Both are unveiled to expose their still essentially figural grounding. McAnulty defines the need to look at the spatial, rather than figural, inscriptive rather than projective techniques, and sexual rather than animistic. These three alternative aspects he proposes point to a physicalized, animated and multi-dimensional view of the body-world relationship. The body is seen not as a form, but as an animate being, inscribed by the social and cultural world as in Foucault’s exterior body, gendered and interactive. Rather than foregrounding either the body or the built environment, McAnulty argues one must begin by examining the relationship between the body and the world.65

In arguing for the legitimate use of phenomenology in architecture, it is useful to look at McAnulty first case study; Alberto Perez-Gomez’s reading of John Hejduk’s work, which seeks to ‘renovate and reclaim’ the body in architecture in order to find an authentic, metaphysical relationship to the world.66 McAnulty argues that this Heideggerean longing takes the body back to an interior projection of the body, in this case into the notion of the ‘clearing’, an issue that will be explored in the next chapter. While Pérez-Gómez also wants to escape from the body-world dualism, McAnulty argues that phenomenology posits the body first ‘making room’ and ‘making space’; necessarily returning to a hierarchy of first body then world relationship. The resulting form is still projected onto the outside world. It therefore returns in the end to the classical model. This failure to relate to the exterior world, whether environmental or cultural, is a key problem. McAnulty sees the difficulty in using Heidegger’s concept of dwelling in architecture as bringing something non-volitional into the pragmatics of

65 McAnulty ends his essay by using the work of Diller and Scofidio to present an alternative approach to these previous examples. He sees in Diller and Scofidio’s work a reformulation of the body also without recourse to the figural. 66 The examination of Hejduk’s masque projects in Chapter Four, argues that it is possible to make a performative reading of his work, which incorporates embodiment beyond the figural.

46 architecture, which is essentially instrumental.67 This understanding of architecture as an instrumental system of potential actions and flows is literally realized in digital architecture processes that design structures in which data generates form. It is for this reason that the fifth chapter is dedicated to exploring how these new processes incorporate embodiment in order to create new kinds of architecture.

McAnulty’s consideration of the body in terms of spatiality rather than figurality is an essential distinction for this research, emphasizing the space made between bodies and buildings. For this reason this thesis uses performativity to get away from the necessity of an a priori figure. In the process it challenges McAnulty’s claim that phenomenology in architecture must necessarily bring us back to the figural. While acknowledging the difficulties in using phenomenology in this regard, it will be argued that it is integral to find a strategy for bringing the experiential body into the architectural process. By using performativity as defined by Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of perception rather than Heidegger’s ontologically-based theory, the body is brought into architecture in animate and creative interaction, rather than mimetic replications of the human form. The architects Reiser and Umemoto put this issue into a physical example, showing that in breaking away from the figural, architecture can focus on the performance of bodies;

Anthropocentrism is representational and is the most limiting when it is applied at the scale of the body. We prefer architecture to engage what a body can actually do. A skateboarding ramp, for instance, is not patterned on a human. Rather, it is an intervening technology that belongs to a totally different pattern of order upon which the human works. The ramp

67 Robert McAnulty, ibid, p.187.

47 augments the body; it is an extension of the body via the vehicle of the skateboard, but it does not represent it.68

1.5.2 The Body as Scale

If the body is no longer to be conceived as an anatomical figure, the question of scale becomes a key issue. Scale describes a standard of measurement. In the relationship between architecture and the body, it implies a ‘proper’ proportional rule. As the architect Steven Holl writes: A re-assertion of the human body as the locus of experience (whether on the street or from the 50th floor) as well as to affirm the aim to re-establish roots in the perceptual world with its inherent ambiguity presents us with new questions of proportion and scale in the development of future architectures’.69

Eisenman ties the issue of scale to figurality, arguing that it irrevocably results in what he deems an obsolete, anthropomorphic architecture. Eisenman contends that it is only through the artificial that architecture can truly embrace embodiment, otherwise, he writes ‘[M]imesis claims only mimesis’.70 In the Vitruvian Man the issue of scale is clear; the body is the central point around which the built world measures itself. In order to escape this tradition-bound anthropomorphism, Eisenman uses scale as a strategy of subversion. By changing the expected scale of objects, he dislocates the body as the authorial generate of a building’s measurements.71 To stop using the body as the basis of architectural scale or to actively subvert that position does not mean that one

68 Reiser & Umemoto, Atlas of Novel Tectonics (Princeton Architectural Press: NY, 2006), p.85. 69 Steven Holl et al, Questions of Perception, p.116 70 Peter Eisenman, Blurred Zones Investigations of the Interstitial: Eisenman Architects 1988- 1998 (Monaceli: 2003), p.314. 71 In the experience of Eisenmen’s design of Memorial for the Murdered Jews of Europe, the result of this is destabilization and the need to re-orient the body.

48 must forget or ignore the bodily, phenomenological elements. As Eisenman argues, the result of this scaling actually provokes physical interaction whereby, rather than relying on assumed movement, people are forced to actively engage with the space.

An argument often made against architects who work in the digital domain is the loss of scale that occurs when designing in cyberspace. Though seen as a negative trait, to accept that the everyday is now permeated with virtual, digital spaces, the question of scale becomes more complex. In defining the bodies of today as hybrids of virtual and actual dimensions, the issue of scale must be rethought. Digital architecture adds to these new bodies the possibilities for spaces to become fluid and transformative. In these environments dedicated to flux, the use of scale is further problematized. This will be explored in the final chapter through the work of NOX architecture. Architectural methodologies that take a non-figural approach to the design process have been developed in terms of the event, where the body’s scale can be entirely reconsidered in favour of exploring action.

1.5.3 Alternative Strategies for bringing Bodies into Buildings

The ‘Event’ is the most popular strategy by means of which embodied action has been brought into the architectural design process. It can be seen in the early projects of Bernard Tschumi and Peter Eisenman, typically drawing on the texts of Derrida and Foucault. While it is based on the body in time and space, the Event situates itself in the moving state of action rather than bodily form, thereby bypassing the possibility of figural representation. Several theorists of both architecture and philosophy have extrapolated a theory of the Event in order to provide placement in space. Edward Casey traces its beginning to Heidegger’s

49 description of space as the act of ‘clearing’ and ‘making room’ for the Event.72 In this way we understand its basis in creative action, in embodied making.

The Event may be described as a point, it is a marker, a hinge, a breaking point, an interruption, a disruption, the moment of coalescence, the moment of opening. Events are not the result of actions or context, they imply changing direction or transformation. Events are known to be both novel and creative, providing the opportunity for change and progress. Derrida contrasted this disruptive ‘point’ to architectural practice’s primary concern for the surfaces of forms and objects. Events in this way are interruptions in the historically-linear course of time. From these descriptions the Event can be understood as performative, based in movement and embodied action. Similarly it was a term brought into theatre discourse to describe avant-garde performances such as ‘Happenings’. It described a ‘live’ act, cutting a slice out of the causal system of time.

Derrida became practically involved in architecture through his collaboration with Peter Eisenman in the design of a garden in the masterplan of Bernard Tschumi’s Parc de Villette. Although it was never realized, the publication of their dialogue between architecture and philosophy presents the struggle between the practices of philosophy and the making of architecture.73 Derrida had previously used Heidegger’s notion of the ‘act of clearing’ in his concept of Events, where the Event becomes an opening and a disruption of space. Derrida connected the idea of invention with Event, which comes from the same derivation in French of ‘venir’. It implies unanticipated newness, opening up multiple future possibilities. For Derrida, as with Foucault, these Events must be singular, a turning point and a breaking point.74 In this kind of spacing, potentiality becomes the essential

72 Edward Casey, The Fate of Place: A Philosophical History (University of California Press: USA, 1997), p.313. 73 See Jacques Derrida, & Peter Eisenman, Chora l Works (Monacelli: USA, 1997). Derrida wanted to design ‘Chora’, what he described as an impossible place. This set Eisenman the difficult task of designing an architecture that cannot be designed. 74 Edward Casey, ibid, p.316.

50 component, but coupled with themes of motion – two aspects that recur throughout this research in performative architectures.

The difficulty is in what philosopher John Rajchman pinpoints as the spatial problem of inhabiting time.75 Repeated acts, which become known as function, exist in a historic temporal dimension. The Event becomes that which explodes this temporality, opening architecture up to the purely present and the future. As Casey points out that for Derrida, a building is more of a happening than a thing, it is in continual occurrence.76 Instead of accepting presence as essential to architecture, Derrida proposed to rethink it as ‘a writing of space, a mode of space which makes place for the Event’.77 This ‘spacing out’ offers the built environment a sense of interiority; the spectator is placed within the architecture, as opposed to outside it where the emphasis is on form. This opening up of space becomes what he termes an 'Eventalising of architecture'. He writes:

The question of architecture is in fact that of place, of the taking place in space. The establishing of a place that didn’t exist until then and is in keeping with what will take place there one day, that is place[...]the setting up of a habitable place is an event.78

Derrida argues that architecture must embrace the notion of the Event in order to make places that are both true to the present and open to the future. In this way Events can be key sites for architectures that incorporate both the now and the indeterminate actions of the future. This is the difficulty in creating architecture based on Derrida’s definition of the Event and it was the sticking point in his

75 See John Rajchman’s examination of this idea of the event in philosophy and art, Philosophical Events: Essays of the 80s (Columbia Uni. Press: US, 1991). 76 Edward Casey, ibid, p.313. 77 Jacques Derrida, ‘Point de Folie- Maintenant L’Architecture’ AA files, no 12 (1986), trans. by Kate Linklater in The Fate of Place, p.312. 78 Interview with Jacques Derrida ‘Architecture where Desire can Live’ in Nesbitt, Kate (Ed.), Theorizing a New Agenda for Architecture: An Anthology of Architectural Theory 1965-1995 (Princeton Architectural Press: USA 1997), p.145.

51 collaboration with Eisenman – how to build the unbuildable. For Derrida, deconstruction in architecture is about questioning the foundations of the architectural metaphor. For the Parc de Villette project it became a philosophical discussion, the translation of which into built structures finally proving too difficult.

Tschumi was the architect to first bring the Event directly into the architectural design process. He opened architecture to the Event by way of the drawing, using the ‘point’ as written symbol. This process can be seen in his design for the Parc de Villette.79 Following Derrida's theorizing of space, Tschumi named his architecture the ‘Architecture of the Event’, proclaiming ‘there is no space without Event, no architecture without program’.80 The program defined the parameters of action, while the Event held the opportunity for the experiential. Tschumi wanted to use the Event to describe this encounter between the body and space. As for Derrida and Eisenman, an Event was something totally unrepeatable for Tschumi, a cataclysmic moment in time exemplified in his notations of fireworks, but also in the quotidian movement of a single step across a room. Cataclysmic because it had been cut out of the continuously unraveling sequence of chronological time and held for a moment in the light. These metaphors of sequence and narrativity lead to Tschumi’s use of cinematic techniques in his restructuring of the architecture drawing in order to include the Event.

Tschumi’s project, Manhattan Transcripts presents the possibilities of the Event in incorporating the living body and architecture. Using the Event as a strategy for making architecture however is problematic in its translation into the design process. This thesis therefore looks to alternative practices that engage with physical movement, such as dance, or that provoke bodily interaction, such as installation, in order to construct a performative reading of space. The Event

79 Tschumi won the competition to design the master plan for the Parc de Villette in Paris in 1982. This project allowed him to physically explore his experiments with the event in architecture through a built project. 80 Bernard Tschumi, Architecture and Disjunction (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2001), p.121.

52 opens space to the experiential, but does not construct a new methodology in which to bring that animate body into the design process. Instead, it remains fixed in the traditional form of the architectural drawing, represented in points and surfaces. While the body as a figural image has been removed, it has been replaced by another set of symbolic abstractions. Its applicability to a diagrammatic system results in simply another notational form. Two other methodologies that refuse such symbolic representations are the Interstitial and L’inform, which remain based in embodied movement.

1.5.4 The Architectural Interstitial and L’informe

The ‘Interstitial’ and ‘L’informe’ (translating in English to the formless), are two very similar terms connected to Event theory which have been used to develop an architecture based on temporality and the experiential. Both describe architecture as a process of ‘becoming’, in the manner of Deleuze and Guattari, as opposed to a fixed method of form making.81 Both the Interstitial and L’Informe propose a new conceptual site for the design of architecture that embraces eventmental spaces.

The Interstitial in architecture was formulated by Eisenman, who defines it as a state of in-between, ‘a condition where architecture is neither dependent on its former narratives nor devoid of meaning by residing between the two, where other forms of meaning, and meaningful situations, can occur’.82 Like the Event, the Interstitial creates a liminal space between the past and assumptions of the future. This allows room for alterity and experimentation, temporarily incorporating past, present and future. Time is understood here through Henri

81 Deleuze and Guattari discuss the idea of ‘becoming’ as process of continual transformation, see their chapter ‘Becoming Animal’ in A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. 82 Peter Eisenman, Blurred Zones Investigations of the Interstitial: Eisenman Architects 1988- 1998 (Monaceli: 2003), p.7.

53 Bergson’s notion of ‘duration’, rather than chronological lineality.83 The Interstitial proposes a way of understanding architecture, rather than a strategy. In this way architecture is understood as never complete, but in constant transformation. Instead of what Eisenman sees as an anti-functionalist humanism spawned from modernism, he argues that architecture must focus on its ‘interiority’ based in human events and experiences.

The Interstitial relates to Bataille’s concept of L’Informe. The philosopher Andrew Benjamin brought this term into architectural discourse from the art world. L’Informe is not the opposite of form, but the subversion of it. 84 Benjamin uses the term to critique the projects of Eisenman along with the new field of digital architects such as NOX, who use generative design systems.85 Benjamin works from Bataille’s description of L’informe in poetry, as that which ‘working to undo/ disturb/ rearrange, demanding generally that each thing has its form/ the form proper to it’.86

L’Informe is a state of becoming, a state in transition from what is, to what is to be. As such it is a productive as well as a destabilizing element. As Benjamin writes: ‘It is not empty spaces awaiting programmatic injection. Rather the complex activity of blurring produces the yet-to-be determined.’87 This state of blur provides the opportunity for new kinds of inhabitation, rather than assumed practices. Functional and programmatic elements are still present, but transformed. This transformation, whether through scale, or blurring between

83 Bergson described time as durational, rather than discrete and objective, which unfolded through movement in the experience of it. It can also be related to Deleuze and Guattari’s description of ‘becoming’, see Duration and Simultaneity (1921). 84 For further work on the informe within a fine art context see Rosalind Krauss and Yves Blois, Formless (Zone Books: 2000) 85 See Andrew Benjamin, Architectural Philosophy (Athlone: London, 2000) and Benjamin’s essay ‘Notes on the Surfacing of Walls: NOX, Kiesler, Semper’, in Lars Spuybroek, NOX: Machining Architecture. 86 Georges Bataille Oevres Complètes, 1:217 quotation by Andrew Benjamin, Architectural Philosophy, p.29. 87 Andrew Benjamin, ‘Opening up the Interstitial: Eisenman’s Space of Difference’ in Blurred Zones p.310.

54 expected dichotomies (for example, interior and exterior, or old and new) or hierarchies, opens architecture to new kinds of experiences. Rajchman describes it through Eisenman’s work as ‘[A]n architecture of the informe is one that exposes its containing grid as “constraining” or “framing” something that is always exceeding it, surpassing it, or overflowing it’.88 It is therefore a methodology that seeks constant radicality, it must be continually aware of these limitations in order to fight against them. Eisenman believes architecture should always strive to be ‘dislocative’. By this he means that the form of architecture should always dislocate itself from previous, historic typologies. In this way architecture is constantly re-inventing itself. Eisenman believes that the Interstitial is a way of instituting a contemporary, ‘meaningful’ connection between people and the built environment.89

The Interstitial and L’informe are very useful terms for rethinking the assumed tenets of architecture. Benjamin has shown it to be highly suitable as a form of critique. As the site for a design methodology though, the tendency is for both terms to ultimately lapse into uninhabitable, anti-architectures. Despite this they are very useful for providing strategies such as scaling and blurring, which have physical applications. From the previous strategies that have been based in active, embodied processes for reconsidering the body in built environments, this chapter comes to looking at how performativity as a practice has made its way previously into architectural discourse.

88 John Rajchman, Constructions, p.20. 89 The issue of dislocation in Eisenman’s design of the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin, will be examined in Chapter Six.

55 1.6 Previous Connections between Performativity and Architecture

Despite their regular intersection, critically relating performativity and architecture has been rare in both theatre and architecture discourse.90 Performativity as an interdisciplinary practice has more flexibility to infiltrate architecture. The ‘Strangely Familiar’ group of architecture and art historians based in London have focused on theorizing urban space through a lens of cultural theory.91 With its focus on bodily interaction in specific contexts and environments, performativity fits well into these contemporary examinations of public spaces. The specificity of the body as a culturally constructed individual moving through space, is acknowledged by the Strangely Familiar group as essential to critiquing built environments. The relationship between the spatiality of the built environment and this animate body is the basis of their investigations that integrate a variety of disciplines. Architectural historian Jane Rendell, for example, brings a feminist perspective to this area, examining how urban mobility and visibility have constructed and segregated certain bodies.92 Her book The Pursuit of Pleasure examines the notion of the ramble through the public and private spaces of Regency London. Gender theory is used to show how spatial and social relationships of bodies in public space are interwoven with the architecture of the time. Rendell examines the performance of bodies within a specific time in history, in order to construct a new kind of architectural history.

90 An exception is Alan Read, professor in Performance Studies at Roehampton University, who has endeavoured to bring together the two disciplines in his publications and in the development of the Performance Architecture Location project. But this research and focus has remained specifically in the field of performance studies, failing to sufficiently engage with architectural discourse. See Theatre and Everyday Life: An Ethics of Performance (1993/1995) and Architecturally Speaking: Practices of Art, Architecture and the Everyday (2000). 91 Iain Borden, et al (eds.), Strangely Familiar: Narratives of Architecture in the City (Routledge: UK,1996) and Iain Borden, et al (eds.), Iain Borden& Jane Rendell (eds.), InterSections: Architectural Histories and Critical Theories (Routledge: UK,2000),The Unknown City: Contesting Architecture and Social Space (The MIT Press: UK, 2002). 92 Jane Rendell, The Pursuit of Pleasure (Rutgers University Press: UK, 2002).

56 This section will briefly focus on a key example of how performativity and architecture can be brought together. Iain Borden, an architectural historian and skateboarder, has become a well-known figure in the bourgeoning field that connects architectural and cultural theory. Like Rendell, Borden claims that the typical architectural historian has concentrated on the production of buildings as opposed to the production of spaces. His aim is to recreate the historian as a revolutionary, whose role is not simply a retelling of the past, but a rethinking of the possibilities within it. This opens architecture up to the possibilities of the present and future.

Borden is the only architectural theorist to specifically bring J.L. Austin’s concept of performativity into a critical discourse of architecture. His book Skateboarding, Space and the City: Architecture and the Body, presents a unique and innovative connection between performativity and urban architecture.

Borden aims to show how the practice of skateboarding fundamentally enacts, both politically and dynamically, the relationship between space, time and the social body. Through this, an alternative understanding and engagement with urban architecture is possible to that constructed by dominant capitalist ideology. Using Henri Lefebvre's texts as a theoretical framework, Borden proposes skateboarding as a performative encapsulation of those theories, not only in refusing and resisting capitalism, but by 'restlessly search[ing] for new possibilities of representing, imagining and living our lives'.93 Borden argues that skateboarding denies the codification that characterizes the production and reproduction of other signifiers. He draws on Merleau-Ponty, writing that the mobility of the body allows the skateboarder to live out Merleau-Ponty's belief that '[B]ecause movement is not limited to submitting passively to space and time, it actively assumes them’.94 Borden uses skateboarding to open interaction in spaces to new kinds of movement and new ways of seeing and being in built

93 Iain Borden, Skateboarding, Space and the City (Berg: New York, 2001), p.10 94 Quotation by Borden, ibid, p.100.

57 environments. Borden’s definition of architecture is a changing space for productions and reproductions – an architecture neither stable, nor fixed, but constituted by the discourses and practises of social life.95 In this way he breaks down the concept of architecture as a pre-existing structure, into one that is produced and created by living bodies.

Skateboarding is presented by Borden as successfully performative in its fundamental 'liveness', retaining a temporal immediacy. It is a practice where action and creation coalesce. Skateboarding actively writes the city, rather than passively reading it. In the sense of Austin's performative utterance, the doing becomes a creating. Through this Borden can make the claim that skateboarding actually becomes architecture, 'not as a thing, but as a production of space, time and social being'.96 Borden puts skateboarders above the average, scopically focused pedestrian because they engage with space using their entire bodies. Skateboarders experience a visual and phenomenological connection to the urban environment, shared only in part with the cycle couriers. Like the earlier statement by Reiser and Umemoto, the board becomes an extension to the body, a prosthesis, which constructs a specific mode of movement and engagement. The city is transformed into a series of ramps, of slides and runs – a city of surfaces and textures. Through these fragments, a unique relationship is constructed with distance and time.

The Strangely Familiar group use the performative body as a strategy to analyse urban space. They focus on city environments, examining how urban spaces can be rethought through alternative practices that occur within it. Borden is focusing his studies on skateboarding itself and the political implications of it as a performance, rather than looking more generally at how the performance of bodies construct spaces – the practice of skateboarding as a form of critique, with the skateboard as a political tool. What this thesis aims to achieve is to

95 Iain Borden, ibid, p.9. 96 Iain Borden, ibid, p.1.

58 accept this body as a producer of architectural space and question what this means for making architecture. In accepting this new understanding of bodies in built environments, it is important to address how the origins of those spaces have been constructed and how they can be constructed in new ways. For this reason the case studies that will be examined in Chapter Three and Four focus on what will be argued are the two core elements of the design process; the living body and the architecture drawing. Extrapolated from these two issues will be performative strategies for designing architecture.

This chapter has endeavoured to place this thesis in the context of contemporary architectural discourse. It has traced the key issues concerning the incorporation of living bodies into the design process. This began with the primary problematics of defining space and how advances in technology have added to this discussion. The impact of new technologies on the thinking and practice of architecture were shown to provide new opportunities for spaces that can be described as performative. The moving body was added to this spatial formulation, tracing how it has been considered within architectural thinking; from the figural image to the body as Event. This brought these ideas into the contemporary context of architecture, which has promoted and allowed for the possibilities for new and performative buildings. These foundations provide the spatial basis for this thesis. Through this in the following chapter, the theoretical framework of phenomenology and performativity will be woven in order to construct a description of performative architecture.

59 ChapterTWO Bodies and Drawings

60 This chapter is dedicated to laying the foundations for a concept of Performative Architecture. Whereas Chapter One placed this thesis in the space of architectural thinking and practice, this chapter formulates a framework for performative architecture. It begins with the essential tenet of architecture, space. Added to this architectural principal will be the living body. This chapter endeavors to clarify how the assumed truths of spaces and bodies can be unpicked to reveal their historically constructed systems. It will argue that paring these foundations down will reveal two key spatial issues, from which can be developed a new reading of space based on the performative body and contemporary ideas of space generated by technological and social changes. The first is how the lived body constructs space; the second is how conceptions of space shape architecture through the architecture drawing. This knowledge will allow for alternative pathways to be made for new kinds of architecture.

By drawing on Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of perception, this chapter begins by looking at how the body actively makes spaces. The ‘body’ is defined as the living, moving body, which can be said to ‘perform’ space. To define this more specific reading of space, this chapter looks at theories based around movement, examining how performative theory and walking practices have been explored in relation to the built environment. It is important to emphasize that the thesis is not primarily concerned with the body itself, but how to think about the body’s active relations to built spaces. The aim is to look beyond architectural pragmatism or fashion, in order to propose a different approach to how the interaction of the phenomenological body can inform new architectures. It is to try to fathom what is at first obvious: the relationship between bodies and buildings. This study of space formed by the body will be the basis of an examination of bodies in creative interactions with the world around them. This leads to the new body geometries of Oskar Schlemmer and the transactive relationship of bodies and buildings in Vito Acconci’s installations.

61 In doing so, this section lays the groundwork for constructing built space around the moving, living body.

The second part of this chapter will look at how architects have traditionally imaged space. This imaging of space has direct repercussions for the design process. The concept of space has become slippery, problematized by debates on ‘place’, ‘virtuality’, ‘reality’. Here it will be considered it in terms of the body and its role in representing built environments. In order to consider these new relationships in the design process, it is important to understand how the central role of the architecture drawing reflects the need to pursue the historically- produced systems in which it is structured. Its basis in systems of Euclidean geometry and linear perspective need to be understood in order to rethink the way that computers and information systems are changing not only how we make architecture, but also how we inhabit it. This will in turn emphasize the radicality of John Hejduk’s and Bernard Tschumi’s re-interpretations of the architectural drawing. Clarifying how conceptions of space shape built work through the drawing will open the design process to new possibilities of designing architecture using new tools in a contemporary context.

2.1 The Creative Body

In the pre-industrial making of architecture, artisans used their bodies as measuring tools. The nomenclature of imperial measurement retains the residue of this, when buildings were literally handcrafted, feet and hands scaling mammoth cathedrals. The body has always been important in architecture, but as an inanimate fixed form. Today the body’s essential role in the play of architecture has produced a kind of transparency – as if only a vague outline remains. Elizabeth Grosz describes these absent bodies as architecture’s ‘unspoken condition’, where the assumption of their essential importance leads to

62 neglect. 97 This condition allows an unquestioned status, where bodies are presumed to be integral to architecture, without needing to integrate them into the design process. The last chapter observed how this leads to anthropomorphic representations. Today, despite digital drafting tools, the body is still frozen in the inanimate image of Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man or Corbusier’s Modular Man. The question is whether it is possible to reconfigure its placement in architecture as an animated, culturally and socially constituted body.

It is not enough to think of the body as simply form, but rather living, breathing, moving. It is neither purely representational as in the case of the figural architecture previously discussed, nor purely anatomical or biological. It is the individual body that dreams, laughs, dances, falls over – the particular body. For this reason I am employing aspects of phenomenological philosophy to emphasize the body as animate and, most importantly, as situated in the world. The important shift this posed for philosophy was a return to concrete experience as the foundation of philosophical thought. Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy of phenomenology is built on an existential analysis of the world, a world built on structures of consciousness that can only be understood from a subjective viewpoint. Everyday experiences are pivotal for phenomenologists, who seek to uncover the hidden significance and complexity in the quotidian.

In defining the body through this active engagement with the world, will be added the discourse of performativity. This is in order to describe a new kind of spatial interaction, which allows the possibilities for an actively creative approach to how bodies and buildings relate. It is this process, fuelled by the rapid changes in the last fifty years in spatial inhabitation and movement, which is leading us to a new understanding of built space. These changes in how we live and move in the spaces of the twenty-first century are leading to new possibilities for architecture. The traditional divisions that separated body, space and world are now

97 Elizabeth Grosz, Architecture from the Outside: Essays on Virtual and Real Space (MIT Press: USA, 2001), p.14.

63 inextricably interwoven. Both phenomenology and performativity demand as fundamental the active body as a creative force, where the process of movement is a conjuring into existence. In this way space is not presumed to be absolute, but something in constant transformation.

2.2 The Phenomenological Body

In advocating the use of phenomenology in a contemporary critique of architecture it is important to resist resorting to traditional modes of bodily representation. The body is understood by Merleau-Ponty as the ‘living body’. His emphasis is on an interacting body-subject, characterized by an embodied consciousness. It is through our body that we could know the world. It is an aim of this thesis to find a way of using phenomenology in architectural discourse beyond the restrictions of authenticity described by Heidegger. Unlike Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty is specifically concerned with experience over ontological questions of being. 98 This emphasis, without the transcendental tendencies of fellow phenomenologists Heidegger, Jean-Paul Satre and even Edmund Husserl, finds echoes in the key writings of Performative studies.

The Phenomenology of Perception is considered Merleau-Ponty's masterwork, where he defines perception as the process in which to understand 'being' as an active engagement with the world. His procedure is to first describe an Objectivist understanding of the world and through that critique propose his alternative approach. His writing can be read as an attack on European society of the mid 20th century, whose understanding of the world he felt was bound in an Objectivist vision that either accepted scientific rationalism to explain the

98 Merleau-Ponty continued from the phenomenological work of Edmund Husserl, generally known as the father of phenomenology. In his later writing Husserl turned away from searching for a deeper ontological significance, toward focusing on the everyday.

64 surrounding world or the prevailing philosophical intellectualism in French universities of the time. Merleau-Ponty saw both these approaches as the dead world of objects or the abstract world of the mind; a viewpoint that kept people separated from the world and others, creating a detachment between body and mind.

By the mid-20th century Merleau-Ponty believed that two world wars and a series of major scientific breakthroughs severely damaged the possibility of a philosophy based on truth and certainty. He drew on the new literature that was being published in science, physiology, psychology and psychiatry, and in this way more than any other phenomenologist he brought philosophy closer to the human sciences and away from abstract theory. In contrast to Kant’s abstract conceptualization of space, Merleau-Ponty believed space must be engaged with physically in order to know it. He believed that the primary condition of our knowledge of the world was through our experience of it. For Merleau-Ponty, body, space, movement and world were inseparable, working continually through each other. Exploring the reciprocal interactions of these issues he defined his concept of ‘being-in-the-world’, built on the foundations of engagement and action rather than objective analysis or reflection. 99

2.2.1 Merleau-Ponty’s ‘Being-in-the-World’

In The Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty proposed a body in which the world would layer and ingrain itself, becoming sedimented beneath the skin and through the bone.100 Our bodies become ‘habitualised’, they accumulate knowledge of how to interact with the world beyond our own conscious desires or

99 Merleau-Ponty first mentions his concept of ‘Being-in-the-world’ in The Phenomenology of Perception trans. by Colin Smith Routledge: UK, 1995), p.79. 100 For Merleau-Ponty’s use of the term ‘sedimentation’ see The Phenomenology of Perception, pp.130-131.

65 demands.101 This pre-reflective state is not consciously prescribed, rather the intention is brought forth from the body, what Merleau-Ponty calls bodily or operative intentionality. In the same way that an object is understood by picking it up, feeling it, reflecting and describing it, so too an environment is comprehended through movement. This bodily intentionality demands, and is both limited and extended by, the abilities of our body movement. Merleau-Ponty argues that movement brings about knowing, there is no pre-existing world separate from our experience of it, nor do we construct it separately in our subconscious.

The viewpoint is always situated in the body-subject, otherwise the world is neither objective, nor subjective, existing only through inhabitation. 'Being-in-the- world' is a key phrase to illuminate this relationship. Heidegger also uses the term ‘being-in-the-world’ or ‘being-there’ (Dasein) to emphasise that a person cannot be separated from the context of the world, that to be human is to be somewhere. In this sense, through architecture’s ability to make places, it has the possibility of facilitating a meaningful ‘being-in-the-world’. It can, but often doesn’t, ground and place the body in space. But Heidegger's prevalent concern with ontology would keep his embodied subject abstracted from concrete existence. By contrast, Merleau-Ponty’s concept of ‘being-in-the-world’ means exactly what it sounds like – that to be, is to be in the world. Rather than distinguishing between two separate concepts of the body and the world, this is a way of talking about both as fundamentally connected. As Eric Mathews describes it; ‘To explore our being-in-the-world is to explore our ways of being involved with the world, the purposes we have in relation to surrounding objects and the meanings that we give to them.’102

Merleau-Ponty argues that one cannot separate the world from one’s experience

101 For Merleau-Ponty’s examination of habit and the body see The Phenomenology of Perception, pp.142-147. 102 Eric Matthews, The Philosophy of Merleau-Ponty (McGill-Queens Uni Press: USA, 2002), p.9.

66 of it, that one knows something only through that experience. This constitutes a transformative and fluid notion of space based on embodiment, rather than an a priori and fixed definition.103 Merleau-Ponty would insist on the examination of self and world through the physical, actual experience. The priority is ordinary, lived experience, where the world is 'my' world. Instead of an isolated consciousness, it demands the acceptance of the individual body in space.

Rather than focusing on the body as an object, this thesis understands it as a living entity moving through space. It must therefore be understood through its relationship with the internal self and the outward construction of the social body. Spatiality is formed by the inhabitation of lived bodies, objects and the relationships that are constructed between the two. Merleau-Ponty sees the world as inherently part of the human experience. It is not an object that can be examined separately from the historical, cultural and physical interactions of the body, nor is it a determinate, impersonal, geometric space. In this relationship mobility becomes central, ‘Bodily spatiality, inherently dynamic, is the very condition for the coming into being of a meaningful world. Thus it subtends our entire existence as Human Beings.’104

The body is defined by Merleau-Ponty as a ‘potentiality of movement’.105 Our bodies are what orientate us in space, they locate us, giving us a point of origin with which to comprehend the world. Merleau-Ponty describes body movement as having its own intentionality, rather than simply responding passively to stimuli. The world cannot be made up of determined, pre-existing objects or abstract constructions of our subconscious. Instead he sees the world as individually created anew by the moving body. In this sense we may understand the world to be made up corporeal objects that are only brought into being

103 Merleau-Ponty uses Stratton’s experiments with vision and retinal inversion, in order to show the differences between the bodies conception of physical space and geometric space, see The Phenomenology of Perception, pp. 244-245. 104 Eric Matthews, The Philosophy of Merleau-Ponty, p.9. 105 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, p.109.

67 through interaction.106 This conceptualization of the body in relation the surrounding environment, describes an animate and interactive relationship which will be brought into spatial constructions over the next few chapters.

2.2.3 Heidegger and the Act of Making Room

Accepting the body as the dynamic basis of the world around it, Heidegger also provides a useful way of describing spatiality. It is important to reiterate however, that Heidegger’s insistence on an authentic relationship between the body and the world, put him at odds with a performative reading. This chapter will later discuss how phenomenology has previously found its way into architectural discourse, which typically has been based on Heidegger’s writings. Heidegger has been very influential in architectural theory for inspiring an understanding of architecture based on bodies, space and being, rather than on materiality and function. He continually questions and explores the subject of ‘being-in-the-world’, which he connects with the issue of building. Despite not having written specifically about architecture, the importance of dwelling and place-making are recurring themes, particularly in his later work. Writing during the early to mid-20th century, Heidegger wrote in the context of a changing world through modernization, capitalism and consumerism. As this age becomes faster and even more physically disengaged due to technology, many writers have returned to him for an alternative approach to architecture, an approach which emphasises the spiritual and the profound. Heidegger advocates the ‘poetic’ as an architectural aim, which lies between building and dwelling. By the poetic, Heidegger means a state that touches us deeply, beyond the obvious structures of language and form. As a phenomenologically informed philosopher, like

106 This act of bringing into being, is the process in which the individual subject knows the stuff around them, beyond their state of pure form. The object is thus said to transcend the experience of them. To move through the day, people constantly using this kind of knowledge in order to interact with things.

68 Merleau-Ponty he bases an understanding of the world on concrete experience, rather than abstract ideas. What is important is how things are apprehended and understood by people. Importantly for the examination of a performative architecture, in Heidegger’s text the landscape is not simply a measurable Cartesian space, but as architectural theorist Christian Norberg-Schulz points out, space where human life takes place.107 It is therefore a ‘lived space’, rather than a pre-existing, isomorphic one.108 Despite its dense style, Heidegger’s 1951 essay, ‘Building, Dwelling, Thinking’, has become extremely popular in architectural teaching. This essay is an etymological investigation of key spatial terms, which Heidegger argues expose an original and fundamental basis for a poetics of dwelling. His phrase the ‘Genius Loci’ that translates to ‘spirit of place’, is still prevalent in architectural discourse and practice.

In relation to Merleau-Ponty’s ‘being-in-the-world’, it is useful to look at his notion of ‘making room’. Here spatiality (Raumlichkeit) is described not as a fixed element, but something active, a making of space through interaction with the surrounding environment. Heidegger writes about space as a making of room, drawing on the German etymological roots of Raum to describe a giving and clearing of space.109 Space is a ‘making’ which for Heidegger places ourselves in the world. Heidegger’s word Einraumen literally translates as ‘making room’ and ‘arranging of objects’, but it also speaks of ‘the spaciousness of the world’, a kind of ‘roominess’.110 The act of creating a boundary delineates space, allowing it to be opened from those edges. Rather than pre-existing, space for Heidegger is therefore something that has been made room for. What is being expressed is a bodily act of spatial construction, a marking out and moulding of space. It is space that is acted upon, shaped and delineated by bodies. In terms of

107 Christian Norberg-Schulz, ‘Heidegger’s Thinking on Architecture’ in Kate Nesbitt (ed.), Theorizing a New Agenda for Architecture: An Anthology of Architectural Theory 1965-1995 (Princeton Architectural Press: USA 1997), p.435. 108 Norberg-Schulz, ibid, p.435. 109 See Martin Heidegger, Being and Time trans. by Joan Stambaugh (State University of New York Press: New York, 1996). 110 Martin Heidegger quoted in Edward Casey, The Fate of Place: A Philosophical History (University of California Press: USA, 1997), p.266.

69 architecture, this fluid understanding of space, changes how built environments can be conceived as containers or vessels. Highlighting movement as central to a bodily process of engaging with environments, means clarifying ways in which the body relates to the outside world.

2.2.4 Phenomenology in Architecture

Such elements of Heidegger’s philosophy have been taken up by several architectural theorists, most notably Karsten Harries, Norberg-Schultz, Juhani Pallasmaa and Alberto Pérez-Gómez.111 Each of whom uses Heidegger’s texts as a way to escape from what they perceive as the 20th century, architectural approach to space and buildings as fixed and disengaged from the everyday and from a spiritual definition of space. Heidegger’s theory of dwelling and place- making have been fundamental to each of their approaches, providing the directions toward an ‘authentic’ way of being human and on the earth. Harries and Norberg-Schulz advocate a figurative architecture, where buildings are designed in reference to the scaled body. Along with Pérez-Gómez, these four theorists point to the loss of the poetic in our rationalist understanding of the world around us, seeking to retrieve an authenticity of human inhabitation. Pérez-Gómez looks at the relationship between maths and architecture to show how modern architecture has based itself on a form of demystified mathematic structures. In this context Pérez-Gómez argues that the body has been alienated by technology. Pallasmaa on the other hand describes what he calls an ‘architecture of silence’, uncovering a psychic relationship between people and

111 Karsten Harries, The Ethical Function of Architecture (MIT press: Cambridge, Mass., 1997), Martin Heidegger, Politics, Art, and Technology (Holmes & Meier Pub.: 1994), Christian Norberg- Schulz, Genius Loci; Towards a Phenomenology of Architecture (Rizzoli: 1991,), Architecture: Presence, Language, Place (Skira: 2000), The Concept of Dwelling: On the way to a Figurative Architecture (Rizzoli: New York, 1985), Juhani Pallasmaa, The Eyes of the Skin (John Wiley & Sons: 2005), Steven Holl, et al, Questions of Perceptions: Phenomenology of Architecture (William K Stout Pub: 2006).

70 architecture. He is specifically interested in a haptic, sensual approach to architecture. These theorists want to look deep into both the natural and man- made world, in order to understand its essential characteristics, but also to understand it from an experiential position.

It is specifically the issue of authenticity that precludes using Heidegger in a performative-based understanding of architecture, and that problematizes his usage in the contemporary condition of mobile and transformational spaces and bodies. Heidegger wrote specifically about phenomenology in relation to built environments more than Merleau-Ponty and has been far better regarded in architectural theory. The desire for architecture to be more than shelter or decoration is what attracts architects to his work. The opposite to this profound purpose will be cultivated in the new digital processes that will be examined in the fifth chapter, where designers forgo control of the final product and thereby leave it to bodies to have their own experiences of buildings. Although Heidegger is insistent on the individual identity’s connection with the world, rather than an overriding and fundamental relationship, one cannot escape the universalist answers to his search for meaning. Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of perception searches less for this metaphysical truth, but remains focused on the concrete experience of the body moving through space. This frees architecture from the quest for authenticity, allowing it to focus on the intimate relations of body and space. In embarking on this quest, sovereign control is needed in order to categorize and define the parameters for such authenticity. In this preclusion of difference, the architect is pedestalized as a conduit to spiritual, spatial enlightenment. The search for a primordial relationship to the world is made even more untenable in the current existence of multiple, virtual spaces.

71 2.2.5 The Interior / Exterior Body

The body has often been characterized in two ways: the exterior or the interior body. Grosz discusses the growing interest with embodiment in philosophical, political and social theory as an acceptance of the integral relationship between both the interior body of the mind and the exterior, social body. Escaping the persistent opposition created by this duality between inside and outside may be found, Grosz argues, in the corporeal.112

The interior body is described by the French phenomenologist Gaston Bachelard, whereby the internal desires and needs of the individual is projected out into the world. Focusing attention onto the body in architectural discourse has generally meant turning toward phenomenology. Along with Heidegger, Bachelard has been very important in advocating an intimate, bodily understanding of built environments. His book The Poetics of Space has popularized a particular form of phenomenology in architecture, exploring how memory, dreams and personal histories shape people’s relationships to places.113 This can be seen as an ‘interiorized’ relationship between the body and the world, where the exterior world relates and is read through the internal workings of the mind and subconscious.

An alternative approach can be seen in the exterior body as described by Michel Foucault, who saw the individual as shaped by the external forces of culture, society and ideology. In his 1967 essay ‘Of Other Spaces’, Foucault distinguishes his approach from Bachelard’s very personal poetics of body and space. What Foucault endeavours to define is the social body in the exterior world, ‘in which we live, from which we are drawn out of ourselves, just where the erosion of our lives, our time, our history takes place, this space that wears us

112 See Elizabeth Grosz, Space, Time, and Perversion (Routledge: USA,1995). 113 See Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space (Beacon Press: USA, 1994).

72 down and consumes us’.114 It is space both constructing and constructed by the body. In his book Discipline and Punish, Foucault shows the body to be irrevocably inscribed with the workings of politics.115 He specifies that while Bachelard’s phenomenology had explored the body as an interior force of emotion and memory, what he is interested in is the exterior body, arguing that the social came before the individual. This social body is shaped and manipulated by the outside world. Through this bodily definition Foucault argues that architecture, as a central force upon social bodies, is complicit with structures of power. In his famous example of the Panopticon, through which he creates a metaphor of modern disciplinary society, he shows how architecture effects and regulates people, stating that its role in social control is indispensable. 116 Foucault’s work highlights the fundamental shift in how we understand the body as sculpted by exterior forces. This is a very different body to that of the Vitruvian Man previously examined, who tames the space around him. Acknowledging the way environments impact upon bodies, reveals the political implications of subversive acts. By not following the scripts defined by built environments, individuals can write their own personal performances in spaces. It is therefore essential to understand the body as shaped by interior and exterior forces in order to understand its relationship to architecture. The final chapter presents contemporary architectures that by accepting their inevitably dictatorial power, actively promote possibilities for improvisation.

The interface between the inside and outside of the body is both an issue of separation and of porosity. The relationship between exterior forces as described by Foucault, and the interior of Bachelard’s poetics, is negotiated

114 Edward Casey, The Fate of Place: A Philosophical History (Uni. of California Press: USA, 1997), p.351. 115 See Michel Foucault, Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison (Vintage: 1995). 116 Foucault’s examination of Jeremy Benthams design of the Panopticon describes the relationship of governmentality to everyday life. The panopticon is a metaphor of the effect and distribution of power in 18th century France, marking the time where, for Foucault, architecture first became political through the shift to governmental power. Noting the change from the Enlightenment era toward a state of surveillance and control, the Panopticon was itself a technology of power.

73 through the flesh. The early work of Diller and Scofidio explored the spatial repercussions of the artificial manipulations of this membrane, from cosmetic surgery to prosthetic limbs. Their first monograph Flesh, looked at the possibilities for new types of bodies for the environments of today. Flesh can be considered a lamina of communication where the exterior surface comes into contact with the world. It is also the armour around the vulnerable interior of the body, protecting the subconscious. This is why acts of exposing the interior, such as the surgical cut, become so powerful.117 Transformations of the flesh are not tied to the purely cosmetic, but changes and advances in technology.

Technology has added another aspect to the duality of the exterior and interior body. Today it is no longer possible to talk only of the material body, but also the body that is made up of information. This body moves through virtual networks of communication and data, irreverent of physical geographies. Through devices that range from mobile phones to global positioning systems, technology is remodelling places for inhabitation and transit. While the virtual body may consist of several avatars and personalities, as discussed in the introduction to this thesis, it is important that it cannot be seen as separated or liberated from the material body, of which it is always a part of.118 Having examined specifically how the body will be considered in this thesis, it is useful to now turn from bodily issues to spatial ones, not examining space in general terms, but as the space between bodies and buildings.

2.3 The Space Between Bodies

Having examined the body as a phenomenological subject in the world, it is

117 See Elizabeth Diller & Ricardo Scofidio, Flesh: Architectural Probes (Princeton Architectural Press: 1996). 118 For elaboration of this see Elizabeth Grosz’s description in Architecture from the Outside.

74 important to look more closely at the space between the body and the built environment. This is a space that is constantly shifting. Despite the recent preoccupation with motion that has arisen from new media and sociology, it is important to retrieve the specifically bodily aspect. This thesis emphasizes that the seduction of mobility and flux in terms of architecture, needs to be understood from this bodily perspective rather than simply as forms.

2.3.1 Lefebvre’s Third Space

Dissatisfied with traditional fixed notions of space, several philosophers have proposed alternative conceptualizations that incorporate the living body. It is useful to briefly look at Henri Lefebvre’s location of an experiential understanding of space. Many architects have drawn on Lefebvre’s theories because they are grounded in a clear description of the political and social overlap between bodies and places. Lefebvre’s ‘trialectics of space’ incorporates three elements: spatial practice, the representation of space and spaces of representation – all of which interweave and overlap.119 Spatial practice or perceived space may be defined as the physical or material reality of space. Representations of space describe the various depictions of space in data, analysis and images. The third space is also described as ‘lived space’, the space of experience.120 These three forms of spatiality mesh to create ‘total space’. Through an understanding of these three, Lefebvre believes space can be the fundamental site for understanding the world within a certain historical period. Rob Shields describes third space as: ‘space as it might be…derived from both historic sediments within the everyday environment and from utopian elements that shock one into a new conception of

119 See Henri lefebvre, The Production of Space trans. by Donald Nicolson-Smith (Blackwell Pub.: UK, 1991). 120 The proposal of this lived space has been taken up as a space for alterity. Urban geographers and political writers, such as Edward Soja and Doreen Massey, see it as an alternative spatial field for those who fail to fit into conventional categorizations.

75 the spatializations of social life’.121 This shock can be seen as the provocation for performative actions, where, in contrast to finding an authentic way of being in spaces, people are given room to make their own way.

This thesis does not use Lefebvre’s description of space as a trialectic arrangement of non-hierarchical elements. While taking account of Lefebvre’s considerations of a space based on experiences, performative space is based on a different model. It is in Lefebvre’s description of third space where the twinned aspects of bodies and buildings are brought together, in the space between the mental and the material. This thesis defines the core elements of architectural design into bodies, buildings and space. In order to examine how living bodies can be brought into the design process, these three elements are not considered as separate, but in terms of what happens when they collide. This collision occurs through mobility: the body moving through space and interacting with the built environment in the construction of performative architecture.

2.3.2 Kaleidoscopic Vision

As discussed in Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy, movement as an essential component of the relationship between bodies and spaces, can be considered in terms of perception. The body in movement can be understood through the act of walking as discussed by Edmund Husserl and Michel de Certeau. Husserl wrote that it is only in movement that we understand space, that it positions the body in space. Space here is the dynamic interaction between the body and the world, and when we move the world is brought into perspective. Walking brings together the two bodies of Leib and Körper – the German words Husserl uses to distinguish the lived body and the material body (the physical, objective body and

121 Rob Shields, Lefebvre, Love & Struggle: Spatial Dialectics (Routledge: New York, 1999), p.161.

76 the living, experiential body). When one walks, one acknowledges one’s physical self and also one’s self in relation to the world. Walking is makes both states visible. To walk one assembles together ones body into a unified organism, while at the same time conjoining it with its surrounding environment. The result of this symbiotic action is twofold: both stabilizing and putting into perspective the individual body and the objects of the world. Rather than a perspectival distance separated from one’s surroundings, movement places one in the world by bringing one into and through it. Husserl believed that walking was a process that built up a coherent ‘Core-World’, from the fragmentary images we perceive around us.122 This ‘Core-World’ is comprised of both what he calls the ‘near- sphere’ of similar and accessible appearances and the ‘far-sphere’ of unfamiliar and unknown things. These two spheres are brought together in the act of walking. Without movement, Husserl describes perception as simply ‘kaleidoscopic’ – a mass of images without any comprehensible cohesion.

Edward Casey describes Husserl’s theory of walking as defining the absolute ‘here’ of the body, whose position orientates the world around it.123 Casey’s focus on place means that he uses this idea of walking to show how the lived body activates the space around it, thereby placing the body, and in doing so creating place. Husserl believed that walking proves to ourselves that our body is the centre of things and the world radiates from the centre, the world being formulated out from our body. Man as the centre and measure of the world sounds suspiciously like a return to the Humanist body of Vitruvius, but Husserl emphasizes that this relationship only occurs through animation. The body kinaesthetically connects to the changing world, creating a reciprocal relationship. This is distinct from the Humanist position of the individual as measure of the world. This relationship will be taken up by Vito Acconci in terms of a transactive relationship between the spectator and the artwork. Seeing

122 Edmund Husserl, ‘The World of the Living Present and the Constitution of the Surrounding World External to the Organism’ (1931) quoted in Edward Casey, The Fate of Place: A Philosophical History (University of California Press: USA, 1997), p.224. 123 Edward Casey, The Fate of Place: APhilosophical History, p.225.

77 bodily movement as a process in which the world comes into perspective, will become a central issue for the architecture drawing.124 Instead of representing the material world through the static position of a single viewer, acknowledging Husserl’s perspective through movement, problematizes this founding premise for the architecture drawing.

2.3.3 Michel de Certeau & Scripting the City

Similarly to Husserl, philosopher and cultural theorist Michel de Certeau describes walking as a creative act. De Certeau describes walking as a ‘practice of everyday life’, presenting an understanding of the city other than the geographical, measurable and theoretical.125 By drawing us into the shoes of the pedestrian or voyeur, de Certeau endeavors to provide us with an experiential, kinesthetic reading of the city. In de Certeau’s work, walking becomes considered as performative space making.

De Certeau critiques the practice of walking from a linguistic viewpoint. He associates the relationship between walking and the city as mirrored to that between a statement and the speech act.126 Walking was for de Certeau the ‘space of enunciation’. By this he means that through walking the body writes the urban space. He articulated it as an action that altered one’s environment through motion. The urban form can be understood as a script. The notion of the script can be taken from the performance arts to describe the way environments are devised for specific actions. In the same way that the director or choreographer scripts a space for the performance of bodies, so too do urban

124 This will be further explored later in this chapter and through the spatial drawings of Pirenesi and Libeskind in Chapter Four. 125 See Michel De Certeau, The Practise of Everyday Life trans. by Steven F. Rendall (Berkley University Press:California, 1984). 126 Michel De Certeau, ibid, p.97.

78 planners, architects and designers specify how bodies should interact with the environment and each other. Each environment is inscribed with various scripts over which bodies make their way, from the passive stride of the businessman to the deviant flow of the skateboarder.

In the same way that Husserl describes the kaleidoscopic images around us, de Certeau writes; ‘The long poem of walking manipulates spatial organizations, no matter how panoptic they may be’.127 Walking brings together the world into a decipherable state. Again, the use of poetry discloses a way of connecting on a deeper level with the built environment. The description of walking as a ‘long poem’, intimates a performative relationship, an enacting of a more profound reading of the environment.

For de Certeau pedestrians were fundamental to providing an urban tactic, subverting the dominant institutions and ideology of the city – literally bringing it to life. Texts are written in the form of places, sidewalks and curbs, which bodies follow, constantly personalizing and re-writing. The walker writes the urban space as they move across it, while at the same time illiterate to its semiotic text. De Certeau believed that an ability to read the city could only be gained by climbing tall buildings for the view from above, thus perceiving it as a unified whole. This is only an illusion of wholeness however, because that elevation, while producing the ability to see the city holistically, paradoxically distances the pedestrian from the physical experience of the city.

The image of the metropolis from a height is reminiscent of architectural plans, the manufacturing of impossible views from the positions of gods, looking through rooftops and flattening the curving perspectives of the horizon. The transition from a phenomenological interpretation of the body into how that body moves performatively through spaces, becomes an issue of representation. Changing

127 Michel De Certeau, p.101.

79 how we perceive the world from a static, fixed position, to unraveling, moving ones, necessarily questions the perspectival structures of the architecture drawing.

2.4 Drawing Architecture

This next section examines the architecture drawing as central to the design process. Explicating the difficulties in what Robin Evans calls ‘the translations from drawings to buildings’, means unraveling the systems that have combined to prescribe this key form of representation in architectural practice, allowing us to consider the implications and possibilities of the new design tools examined in Chapter Five. The analysis for a from of representation that endeavors to capture material realities, must necessarily begin by defining space.

Michel Foucault read history as an archaeologist, sifting through the sediments of spaces, reading eras. By bringing together time and space in this way, Foucault recognised that places construct, as well as are constructed, by people: ‘How we are housed helps to determine who we are and may be, and one can thus examine through what means, conceptual and physical, and in response to what problems, we have come, so to speak, to inscribe ourselves in architectural stone’.128

Examinations in how space affects and is infected by bodies, society, history and culture has become a central issue with the expanding urban spaces of the 20th century. Whereas time and history had traditionally been the key aspects examined in theoretical discourse, spatial theory has become a growing discipline in the last fifty years, extending from geography and urban theory into

128 Robin Evans, Translations from Drawing to Building and Other Essays (Architecture Association: UK, 1997), p153.

80 sociology, politics and cultural theory. Michel Foucault has exposed the political machinations inherent to architecture, delineating the social body as constructed by its environments. The focus became specific to the ‘everyday’ by cultural theorists such as de Certeau, Surrealists such as Andre Breton and Louis Aragon and social theorists such as Guy Debord. Lefebvre pulled up the paving stones of the city to free the urban pedestrian, while Richard Sennet has analysed the changing public man through urban architecture. Kevin Lynch drew the city as a map of mental representations leading the way for the field of spatial cognition in urban planning, while the contemporary cities of speed and excess are exposed by Paul Virilio. Meanwhile theorists such as Doreen Massey and Jane Rendell have shown the street as active constructors of gender. These have shown the wealth of perspectives which spatial theory has brought to critical discourse, developments that have enriched our speculations on the inter-connectedness of bodies and built space, providing a multitude of perspectives.

The concept of ‘space’ retains an erroneous legitimacy when it comes to architecture. Buildings must be designed with proper respect to gravity and structural laws so that they can stand in actual space. In order to do this, the systems of the architectural drawing have been formulated in order to facilitate a direct translation of concept into built form. Though theoretical perceptions of space may change, the assumption remains that the act of building demands the acceptance of this basic spatial condition. In reality, the design process of architecture has been fixed on specific systems whose reliance on spatial authenticity is proving more and more fallible. In order to articulate a new space in which we can consider active and interactive bodies as constructive of their environments, we must first understand how conceptions of space have traditionally shaped architectural practices. From the Classical notion of space as a container, to space as a Cartesian grid, the way in which space is conceived has shaped the limitations and possibilities of our built environment.

81 2.4.1 Representing Reality

Architecture is traditionally built on the sturdy foundations of linear perspective and a stable field. The human body is seen as a static object in a measurable volume of space. This is not simply theoretical, but ingrained into its very making. The drawing has held uncontested control over the architectural design process for over five hundred years, premised on a single, perspectival vision. This vision was a product of the Italian Renaissance, which developed a concept of space imaged in the art of perspective. It places the body into the centre of the world, making it the source of all measurement. The geometry of Euclidean space and linear perspective became a documentation of the epistemological truth.

Erwin Panofsky has drawn the link between a cultural way of seeing the world and the changes in perspectival reproduction.129 Panofsky claimed that each civilisation has its own understanding of perspective, for which linear perspective encapsulated the era of the Renaissance. Accepting Panofsky’s claim requires searching for new methods of spatial representation for today’s digital world. The paradigm shift that has occurred from the machinic, industrial society to an electronic, digitized one, has in the same way changed the tools and language of architecture. In replacement of single perspective and Cartesian geometries, the digital domain proposes the possibility of a multivalent, perspectival space. No longer is there one static viewing point, but many possible ones. Most importantly it is now possible not only to create still images from this viewpoint, but to design entirely within this kind of space.

129 Erwin Panofsky, Perspective as Symbolic Form trans. by Christopher Wood (Zone Books: NYC,1991).

82 2.4.2 The Systems of the Architectural Drawing

Unsettled by technology, the central architectural issues of drawing, space and the moving body are in flux. The repercussions of these shifts will not only radically change what buildings look like, but how we design and experience them. The architectural drawing on the other hand is still weighted by gravity, bound by the core systems of linear perspective and orthogonal geometry. The architectural theorist Robin Evans described the drawing as ‘architecture’s greatest security and at the same time its greatest liability’.130 Trained to work within such a circumscribed system, Evans described how the architect could comfortably design in ‘paperspace’ without consideration of placement and experience. Unlike other artists who work directly with the medium of the final product, architects must labour with various forms of simulants, from sketches to drawings or models. Evans uses the word ‘translations’ to describe the distance traversed from drawing to building, expressing the inevitable transformation that occurs. The architectural theorist Alberto Pérez-Gómez points out that the difficulty lies in ‘the illusion of drawing as a neutral tool that communicates unambiguous information, like scientific prose’.131 Despite the architecture drawing’s promises of veracity, Evans reminds us of the unique position of the architectural drawing, that, unlike other drawings, it occurs prior to reality, rather than before it.132 Instead of representing real spaces, they are proposals for future ones. The space of the drawing is therefore an imaginary, visionary one. Instead of representing real spaces, architecture drawings are proposals for future ones.

The claim that the space of the architectural drawing is simply a reduction of real space can be traced to its Euclidean dimensions. The Euclidian concept of space is

130 Robin Evans, Translations from Drawing to Building and Other Essays, p. 186. 131 Alberto Pérez-Gómez, ‘Architecture as Drawing,’ in Journal of Architectural Education (Winter 1982), v. 36, n. 2, p. 3. 132 Robin Evans, ibid, p.165.

83 based on a measurable, stable site. Space is thus understood as linear and dimensionally finite, making it possible to demarcate, dimension and delineate. For the architectural drawing, Euclidian space provides a stable field upon which to build material form.

Euclidean geometry is a rational, mathematical system of points, lines, angles, surfaces and solids, designed by Euclid in 300BC in order to accurately describe the world. After the ancient philosophers, space is thus constantly constrained by an emphasis on its ability to be documented in a two dimensional way. The description of space as encompassing, of gathering and holding as described by ancient philosophers such as Plato and Aristotle, have thereby been reduced to stable, fixed definitions. In the fourth century Iamblichus defined space through boundaries, rather than surfaces.133 In the 17th Century English philosopher John Locke distinguished between two spaces, by describing space as the distance of two bodies, and place as the distance between two points, both relational and measurable. A system of connecting dimension and internal extension through lines, rather than three dimensions, is thus established. Following Euclid’s definition of a measurable container of space, Rene Descartes developed the Cartesian co-ordinate system defining relative positions in space. This would prove the perfect basis for representing architecture in the 18th and 19th century.

New perspectives in geometry began to proliferate in the early 20th century. Non-Euclidean geometry, the ideas of simultaneity and a fourth dimension, were postulated in physics by Albert Einstein and Herman Minkowski. The impact of these new spatial concepts are most visible in the art field of Cubism, a contemporary development of this new way of seeing the world. Despite this, the Cartesian description of space has persisted until today as the primary basis of architectural representation. These two systems epistemologically define a universal truth – a belief that there is an accurate way to document the world.

133 The opposite stance will be taken by digital architects whose construction of forms using CAD programs lend themselves to fluid, surface based forms.

84 It is this imposed geometrical structure that Elizabeth Grosz defines as what ‘conferred scientific and philosophical dignity on space at the expense of time’.134 The difficult, multi-dimensionality of time was put aside, creating an understanding of space that could be systemized and easily comprehended. It removed the movement of unfolding time out of three dimensional space and placed it upon a two dimensional grid. This background in spatial history is important to address because it is this understanding of space that informs the very foundation of architecture, its documentation and therefore the process of its design. This process has changed little from Alberti’s Renaissance Chapel until the recent push toward computer drafting in the last ten years. The architectural drawing demands this stability in order to “stand up” and as such the relationship between the drawing and its built actuality has become inextricably connected. This cartographic description of space as constructed on a relative order of co- existing points enjoys a comfortable status on paper, but fails to encompass the living, breathing, moving elements of lived space.

2.4.3 Single-point Perspective

The art of perspective makes the ambitious claim of creating a true image of the world. ‘Single-point Perspective’ or ‘Linear perspective’ was first developed in Classical Greece, but it was through its rediscovery by the architects and painters of the Florentine Renaissance that it was properly set down and defined.135 Single-point perspective explains the phenomenon of two parallel lines converging in the distance of one’s vision. It is a form of pictorial representation based on sight and reproduction.

134 Elizabeth Grosz, ‘Space, Time, and Bodies’ from Space, Time, and Perversion, p.98. 135 The Florentine architect Fillipo Brunelleschi is usually credited with the rediscovery of the Classical Greek procedure of linear perspective in the early 15th century. It was the Humanist Scholar Leon Baptista Alberti, who first wrote down the principals of linear perspective in his treatise on painting, ‘De Pictura’ in 1435-36.

85 By being based on the viewpoint of a single person at a specified distance from the object, it defines the individual subject as the centre and measure of the world around them. Even through the Baroque age, where perspective was multiplied in paintings and ornamentation, the architectural drawing remained firmly grounded in single-point perspective.

The discovery of single-point perspective was fundamental in instituting the architectural drawing system that is still taught and used today. This allowed space to be represented in the Cartesian grid, it could be measured and dissected as a stable volume. Buildings could be translated from the mind of the architect directly onto paper using the systems of plan, section and elevation. Three-dimensional images presented through the axonometric, presented designs like two-dimensional models; scaled objects seen from impossible distances. At the same time it created a uniform language with which to communicate to builders and other artisans. As the foundation of the design process, it is essential then that the architectural drawing is rethought in terms of new technology and new understandings of space. It is no longer sufficient to continue replicating Renaissance modes of representation, while using completely different tools of production.

For architecture, space is still constructed by the two-dimensional drawing, firmly grounded in the physical. Despite the use of three-dimensional images, they remain dictated by the same systems of hand drawings. The perspective is still that of gods or ghosts, either from up high or as if you were plastered into an interior wall. Rather than the mere replication of traditional forms, CAD (Computer Aided Design) programs present the opportunity to free architecture from orthogonal geometry, with software from industrial design, aviation, film and auto design, now finding their way into design. What was once theoretical musing on alternative geometries and mathematics, are now viable, architectural possibilities. What this means for the process of making architecture is an entirely new set of tools with entirely new potential outcomes. If we accept that

86 space is not Cartesian, that it is fluid and based on bodily interaction, what are the repercussions for the design process of architecture? This question will be taken up again in the fifth chapter, as the performative strategies exposes in the following paperarchitecture sections are brought into the contemporary making of architecture.

2.4.4 New Methodologies in the Architectural Design Process

The work of architecture in the digital domain subverts the dichotomy that has traditionally been maintained between the virtual and the actual. This distinction enforces an inability to see digital architecture as more than simply an image on a screen. However a new kind of design process is emerging, generated from by these new processes of translation. In turn it is informing a new theory of design. New computing programs have led to an emphasis on process and technique rather than the final image. With it new architecture methodologies are appearing based on organic and self-perpetuating systems. Terms such as ‘versioning’, ‘evolutionary systems‘, ‘genetic’, ‘developmental’, ‘biological’ and ‘topology’ are becoming commonplace.

Many architects still insist on their autonomy from CAD programs, calling them another design tool in the same way as a pencil.136 But whether it is a cardboard or digital model, each method of translation will affect the design. As will be discussed in Chapter Three, the complexities of these translations in drawing hold their own difficulties. It is important to emphasize that the computer cannot be seen in the same way as the pencil. In both the design process and in the making of architecture, the computer creates new ways of considering bodies and environments. The illusion of complete control is what architects stand to

136 Frank Gehry has continually stated that despite the extraordinary forms of his buildings, they are generated in the same pre-computational process.

87 loose with these new programs. Brian Massumi describes these technologies as generating a ‘post-heroic’ architecture.137 Massumi calls this ‘post-heroic’ because the traditional role of the architect as ‘creative genius of a finished object is replaced with a less attractive position of ‘creative facilitator’. The focus is on process and technique rather than finished form-making. Rather than a signature of the architect, the building becomes a collaboration between the designer, data and the technology. In this new process the computer is not an imaging device, but a medium in this process of emergence. It becomes an art of ‘potentiality’, creating multiple possibilities rather than coming up with a single ‘perfect’ answer. Analogue traits are fed into the computer, whose interplay shape potential, unanticipated forms. From this process can be generated completely novel shapes. In this way, Massumi says : ‘The art of the architect is the art of the leap’, it is about taking the risk of arbitrariness and seeing what will come of it. 138 This means giving up control and giving up autonomy. This new conceptualization of the design process is arguably the most radical infection of architecture. It threatens the dearly held belief of the bolt of inspiration, of clarity, the art of the pencil drawing and the genius architect. Whether these digital processes will become subsidiary to traditional ones or if they will subsume them is yet to be seen. What is unarguable is that they are never-the-less transforming the way architects see and create built environments.

This chapter has sought to formulate a theoretical basis upon which to extrapolate a performative reading of architecture based on living bodies. It has focused on examining structures of thinking such as phenomenology, alternative spatial definitions and the architectural drawing, through which a new conceptualisation of architecture can be considered. The following chapters will put these two spatial questions of the phenomenological body and the architecture drawing into a contemporary context. Case studies will be used to

137 Brian Massumi, ‘Sensing the Virtual, Building the Insensible’ in Hypersurface Architecture (Academy editions: US,1998), p.9. 138 Brian Massumi, ibid, p.5.

88 unveil their repercussions for architecture through built examples of these speculations. It is fundamental to understand both spaces and bodies as constructions of a particular age. The transformations that have occurred through new technologies affect both how the built environment is designed and how it is inhabited. The following two chapters focus on bodies and drawing respectively. They follow from the two spatial conditions outlined in the previous chapter: the body as a constructor of space and the drawing as an active shaper of built environments. They explore the possibilities of these new interactions, inventing new structures, new systems and new kinds of movement.

89 ChapterTHREE Architectural Performances

90 To adopt a phenomenological description of the body is to awaken it, to exhume it from a state of immobility, transfixed in stone and to get it moving, thinking, feeling. The last chapter mapped out how phenomenological philosophers have written about this body, weaving it into a relationship with the surrounding world. To use this understanding in the creation of artworks means to bring in aspects of live-ness, of sensuality, of action and movement, and of the essential interconnectedness of the body and the world. The focus turns to experience rather than representation, performance rather than the making of objects to be viewed. Instead of a passive entity, the body becomes a tool of inscription or instrument of production.

Having defined a concept of the body based on an active engagement with the world, this chapter look at projects that use this body concept to create spatial forms. These can be described as ‘architectural performances’, artworks that are informed through architectural issues and that can be seen as precursors to a formulation of performative architectures. What this chapter explores is how to relate these ideas of the body to a creative process that can be brought into designing architecture. The following projects have been chosen in order to substantiate a performative making and understanding of space. They show how embodied interaction with the environment and the spatial conditions set out in the theory framework find physical form in a selection of architecturally focused performances. The disciplines of dance and performance art are the most potent sites for these explorations, which in contrast to traditional architectural practice, put the body first. For this reason this chapter begins by looking at how dance and choreography have understood spatial issues, focusing on the work of Bauhaus teacher, Oskar Schlemmer

91 3.1 Moving Bodies and Buildings

The fields of dance and architecture initially appear in direct opposition; one dedicated to movement and the other to stasis. In many ways dance appears to hold all the qualities eternally beyond architecture; of conquering gravity, of ‘live- ness’ and the ephemeral. It is precisely these fantasies that are inspiring so many digital architects. As architecture struggles with these new desires, the discipline of dance may provide new directions and processes. Importing ways of thinking as well as doing from dance into architectural practice is conditioned through the shared focus on the encounters between bodies and built environments.

The relationship between dance and architecture has been bound in the dichotomy of the performers/audience and the stage/theatre architecture, where the building is again a static backdrop to the moving body. As both disciplines endeavoured in the 20th century to break away from their historic ties, their aims began to converge. While classical forms of Western ballet focused on patterns of the body in space, contemporary dance has become known for exploring the physicality of the body carving into and interacting with space. Space is here reconsidered as solid and interactive.

Modern dance can be read as an attack on the geometry of the Cartesian space that classical ballet was contrived within. In the same way that architecture is striving to remove itself from these historic ties, the discipline of dance has also searched for alternative understandings of space and movement. John Rajchman touches on the relationship between dance and architecture, noting that they are the two disciplines directly concerned with gravity.139 The desire to understand gravity, use it and surpass it, provides a shared goal. Lightness and floating has

139 See Rajchman’s essay ‘Lightness’ in Constructions (MIT press: USA, 1998), p.52.

92 been facilitated by new materials, but it is also a strategy imported by digital technology. Virtual spaces provide contexts whereby the natural laws of gravity are no longer applicable. In the same way that CAD programs allow buildings to be designed in the anti-gravitational sites of digital space, computer-aided choreographic tools also allow the design of movements physically impossible on earth. Unbound by these assumed truths, radically new forms can be explored.

The following section brings together dance and design in terms of the body in movement. Rather than separating the body-based practices of gesture and movement, from the spatial and design ones of stage and costumes, the ballets of Oskar Schlemmer combined them into one entity. Together, the performances used the artificial world of design to reveal the natural movement and interaction of the body. What makes these dances so important to constructing an architecture based on performativity, is that they are manifestations of the performance of movement. Through costumes and gestures, they are formulated from the moving body, where space becomes animated and tangible.

3.2 Making Visible Body Movement The Ballets of Oskar Schlemmer

The creative investigation of design in the technologically informed culture of the modern age was pioneered at the Bauhaus. The period of the Bauhaus School in Germany from 1919 until 1933 had a fundamental impact on the world of design and architecture. The work produced here would become a catalyst for the new century’s encounters between bodies and architecture. In Schlemmer’s productions of the Triadic Ballet and the Space Analysis Dances, the body was not a passive occupant of space, but an active creator. Through costumes and props, this dynamic relationship between body and space was made solid. To facilitate this, the theatre became an

93 experimental ground. Schlemmer’s creations were an abstract theatre of space and movement. The dances were made up of bodies, forms and objects, whose changing relationship to each other in movement and stasis constructed the narrative. It was the space between bodies and buildings that became essential.

Schlemmer’s dances mark a specific time when the implications for the body in the new spaces of the modernity began to be explored and examined. Rather than avoiding new technology, Schlemmer embraced and actively sought out those advances, in order to generate what he described as ‘the boldest fantasies’.140

The narratives of the Triadic Ballets were delightfully bizarre, focusing on emoting reactions rather than describing characterizations. An interpretation of the first part of the ballet may be surmised as follows: An alien falls from the sky onto a beach in southern France, where a beautiful ballerina saves him from drowning. Despite his head shaped like a moon and his staccato struggles at communication, amongst the sunbaked sand dunes they fall in unlikely love. Schlemmer wrote that there is nothing deeper to grasp behind the ballet, that it is all on the surface to be perceived and engaged with, writing: ‘No feelings are “expressed” but rather, feelings are aroused.’141 While the choreography of Schlemmer’s ballets incorporated some traditional ballet movements, they were experimental performances involving the uncanny actions that were demanded by the rigid costumes: such as the continuous jumping of the deep- sea diver. The performances, in their documentations as photos, drawings or re- enactments, still have the ability to amaze and seduce. As constructions of performative space, they make visible the geometry of movement, constructing a new understanding of scale and measurement through bodily motion.

140 Oskar Schlemmer, ‘Man and Art Figure’ in Gropius, Walter (ed.), The Theatre of the Bauhaus trans Arthur S Wensinger, (Wesleyen University Press: 1961, USA), p.17. 141 Schlemmer quoted in Howard Dearstyne, Inside the Bauhaus (Rizzoli; USA, 1986), p.179.

94 Fig.1 Oskar Schlemmer, Costume Sketch, The Triadic Ballet, 1922. Doreen Ehrlich, The Bauhaus (Mallard Press: US, 1991), p.154.

95 The performative aspects of the dances are clearly apparent, the performance of bodies in space, but where the interaction between these two elements is dynamic and interactive. Schlemmer understood space itself as performative, active and in constant dialogue with the body. He understood the body as a hybrid entity, which actively made spaces. Through costume design Schlemmer made solid the idea that movement is what creates space. This chapter delineates two aspects in which embodiment can be seen in relation to spatial construction; firstly in the physical costume design and secondly through the conceptualisation of a spatial, bodily geometry.

3.2.1 Bauhaus bodies

Under the direction of visionary, modern architect Walter Gropius, the Bauhaus aimed to bring together the design fields of art, craft, technology, theatre and design into a fully realised Gusamtkunstwerk (a total work of art). Despite the absence of a dedicated architecture school until 1927, it was acknowledged that Gropius centred the work of the Bauhaus on architecture.142 This meant that architectural issues infected each of the different design schools. The body was understood as central to the design teaching of the Bauhaus. The school integrated gym and fitness into the teaching day and even incorporated a course called Movement Training, which aimed to develop body and movement awareness in a way that would bring mental harmony and directly contribute to artistic creativity.143 Rather than the body as figural or symbolic representation, the Bauhaus conceived of the intermeshing of the living body through the different design courses.

142 Gropius believed that building was the “ultimate goal of all artistic activity”, quoted by Eva Badura-Triska ‘Free Painting at the Bauhaus’ in Jeaninne Fiedler (ed.), Bauhaus (Ullmann/Tandem: Germany, 2006), p.160. 143 A combination of gymnastics and bodywork, the course was run by Gertrud Grunow, whose background was in music and colour theory. Movement Training was part of the core Bauhaus course from 1928 and 1932.

96 The Bauhaus theatre department was situated in the middle of tumultuous times in theatre history.144 Avant-garde theatres across Europe were revolting against narrative and realism, looking to abstraction and expressionism for new approaches to performance. Revolutionary theatre practitioners such as Edward Gordon Craig, Adolphe Appia and Antonin Artaud were questioning the fundamental issue of what appeared on stage. Schlemmer’s response was the occupation of space.145 He believed that the challenges of modernity lay in abstraction, mechanization and the impact of new technology, and it was in the theatre that he felt these issues could best be explored. His aim was to focus on three specific elements: the body in space; light in motion, and architecture – essentially: bodies, motion and buildings. He noted that, while form and colour are fixed in their usual domains of art, sculpture and architecture, it is in theatre that one can explore them in motion.

Despite Schlemmer’s focus on the visual aspects of the performances, dance was a very important part of his ballets, which experimented in the new movement forms being developed in Europe at this time. Schlemmer recognised that man as dancer (Tänzermensch) specifically understood gravity and weight, the way space holds and embraces the body. The human body created its own rhythms through heartbeat and blood flows, resonating beyond the body and connecting with the world.146 Schlemmer was greatly influenced by rhythmic gymnastics and it was originally incorporated into the Triadic Ballet, though this element was reworked by the time it reached the stage.147 During the time Schlemmer was teaching in Weimer, the Austrian set designer Adolphe Appia partnered with Dalcroze at the Festspielhaus

144 There are surprisingly few dedicated texts to the theatre workshop of the Bauhaus, considering the plethora on its design and architecture courses. The importance of the theatre as an experimentation ground for the new spatial ideas of not only the Bauhaus but the burgeoning genre of Modernism has been greatly underestimated. 145 Howard Beckman, Oskar Schlemmer and the Experimental Theatre of the Bauhaus: A Documentary (Uni of Alberta: Edmonton, Canada, 1977), p.36. 146 Oskar Schlemmer, ‘Man and Art Figure’ in Walter Gropius, (ed.) The Theatre of the Bauhaus trans Arthur S Wensinger, (Wesleyen University Press: 1961, USA), p.25. 147 Eurhythmics was devised by the Swiss music teacher Emile Jacques Dalcroze, a system which combined movement and rhythm. Eurhythmics has been taken up by various choreographers including Vaslav Njinsky and Mary Wigman.

97 Hellerau near Dresden. Appia also believed that the interaction of body and space on stage held transformational possibilities.148 On stage, actor or dancer animated the tectonic arrangement of objects and in the process delineated a spatial and plastic volume. This connection between dance and a volumetric understanding of space, proposes understanding body movement that is not two-dimensional, but spatial.

3.2.2 Body Buildings and Moving Architectures

In the relationship between bodies and buildings, is it possible to make a building move like a body? Frank Gehry’s ‘Dancing House’ in Prague is a literal translation of a dancing Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, in the form of a steel and glass building. Stylistically a deconstructivist icon, the building strives for lightness and motion, while remaining solidly on the ground.149 A different approach is the Laban centre in London by Swiss architects Herzog de Meuron. They used shifting light and shadows to animate the translucent, minimal form of the dance school. This introduces the subtleties of bodily movement into an orthogonal building form.150

Similarly, how does one make a body into a building? The first image that comes to mind is perhaps the famous photo taken at The Beaux Arts Ball at the Hotel Astor, New York, in 1931, where architects came dressed as their favourites skyscrapers.151 But there are more than simply literal metaphors in considering bodies as buildings. In

148 See Adolphe Appia, The Work of Living Art & Man is the Measure of All Things (Uni. Miami Press: US, 1969). 149 The ‘Dancing House’ was originally called ‘Fred and Ginger’ after the famous couple, and was designed by Gehry with the Czech architect Vlado Miluni. It was completed in 1996. 150 The Laban Centre, London was designed by Herzog de Meuron in 2003. They worked with the artist Michael Craig-Martin to create a modernist, orthogonal form upon which a light-based artwork moves. It is encased with polycarbonate panels, which change in light and colour, allowing glimpses of shadow and movement into the interior. Herzog de Meuron decided to focus on movement through these translucent panels, rather than the technique of Labanotation in the design itself. 151 See Andrew Saint, The Image of the Architect (Yale University Press: New Haven and London, 1983), p.11.

98 the introduction to The Theatre of the Bauhaus, Walter Gropius describes Schlemmer’s ‘magic of transforming dancers and actors into moving architecture’.152 Dance choreographers who have understood architecture as more than just static objects have multiplied in recent years. William Forsythe has described dance as an ‘architecture of movement’,153 but the body first famously described as ‘dancing architecture’ was the young American dancer Loie Fuller. Fuller became famous in 1892 with ‘The Serpentine Dance’, a hypnotic performance of light and movement that fed the current fashion for elemental spirits and mystical phenomena. In the same way that Schlemmer aimed for a direct emoting of reactions by his audiences, Fuller described her dances:

To impress an idea, I endeavour, by my motions, to cause its birth in the spectator’s mind, to awaken his imagination, that is may be prepared to receive the image…I have motion. That means that all the elements of nature may be expressed.154

Fuller soon became internationally famous for her distinctive, multi-media performances. She would dance with draperies attached to long rods that would seem to extend her arms into wings. Lighting would highlight and wash dramatically over the moving gauzy, material.

152 Walter Gropius, introduction to The Theatre of the Bauhaus, p.9. 153 William Forsythe, BBC radio interview by John Tusa, 2nd February, 2003 (transcript). Retrieved 10.12.2006 at 154 Loie Fuller, Fifteen Years of a Dancer’s Life, With Some Account of Her Distinguished Friends (Boston: Small, Naynard & Co, 1913), p.70, quoted by Amy Zornitzer Revolutionaries of the ‘Theatrical Experience: Fuller and the Futurists’, Dance Chronicle, Vol. 21, No. 1. (1998), Retrieved 12.05.2007 at

99 Fig.2 Loie Fuller, (photograph), 1894. Susan Gillis Kruman, The Early Moderns, www.pitt.edu Retrieved 06.06.2007 at

100 Like Schlemmer’s bodies, the individual is subsumed into moving form. Often Fuller’s body was barely recognisable, only a shadowed silhouette or hand was sometimes to be seen. The dances became pure, rhythmic movement, devoid of individuality. In this way Fuller reconceived her own body as space and form. Fuller’s body was at the same time astral and technological enhanced, the extended and mechanized cyborg of the future, birthed by the possibilities of electric lighting. This was the new body, expanded, extended and transformed by technology. In this way her performances encapsulate how the changes in bodies could directly relate to new spatial formations.

3.2.3 Costumes as Spatial Forms

In the same way that modern painters such as Pablo Picasso and Amedeo Modigliani looked to Eastern cultures for novel stylistic and figural imagery, Schlemmer also looked to alternative theatrical systems such as those found in Japanese, Chinese and Javanese traditions.155 This led to a focus on puppets and marionettes. Schlemmer wanted to pare the theatre down, away from traditional narrative structures, allowing him to focus on the body and movement as form.

Choreographically, bodily form and motion were isolated, analysed and reduced to the most minimal number of shapes and movements, which were systemized into repeated gestures. They became artificial beings, while the costumes were no longer purely ornamentation but architectural form. Actors became tools, props, parts of the set, serving a function for the production as a whole rather than presenting characters. As with Fuller’s body, Schlemmer’s dancers were more like mechanized mannequins than typical dancers, divested of identity. In this way the dances became more like sculptures in motion than physical dance

155 The interest in primitivism that drew contemporary art to look at primordial images, rituals and costumes, can also be seen in the aesthetics of Schlemmer’s costumes and puppets.

101 pieces. The costumes themselves generated the choreography based around bodily geometries.

It is easy to read Schlemmer’s bodies as characterizations of the 20th century ‘Modern Age’: bodies that have been mechanized, divested of humanity. The image of the robotic Maria in Fritz Lang’s film Metropolis that premiered in Germany in 1927, is a contemporaneous example of the blurring between flesh and metal. The questions and fears of subsuming the body into the machine, were still raw in Schlemmer’s time. In his work can we see some of the earliest examples of dealing with the body in the age of new mechanic and electronic technologies. Despite the depersonalised nature of his costuming and actions, it is important to understand that he was not advocating turning the body into a machine. Schlemmer points out that in an age where mechanization is everywhere, one must recognise what in the world cannot be mechanized.156 Schlemmer did not believe that it was necessary to have to choose between technological innovation and embodiment.

During this time the set designer and theorist Edward Gordon Craig was cultivating his theory of the ‘Ubermarionette’.157 For Craig it was movement that was the most important theatrical element. This was stressed specifically through the use of masks, but also costuming, in order to dehumanise the actor. Craig believed the actor was a puppet emphasising movement, gesture, dance and mime rather than word. He scandalously wrote that the Ubermarionette would be an evolved and better alternative to a human actor. The equivalent mechanization of the body at the Bauhaus can be seen in the ballet of Schlemmer’s student Kurt Schmidt. ‘The Mechanical Ballet’ was performed by five dancers completely hidden behind coloured flats. These flats consisted of geometric, multi-coloured shapes, against an equally abstracted stage set. The body was transformed into a completely mechanized series of colours and shapes that changed through their relationships with other shapes,

156 Oskar Schlemmer, ‘Man and Art Figure’ in The Theatre of the Bauhaus, p.17. 157 See Edward Gordon Craig, ‘The Actor and the Ubermarionette’, in J. Michael Walton (ed.), Craig on Theatre (London: Methuen, 1983).

102 against different backgrounds. While Schlemmer also acknowledged the future possibilities of using mechanized puppets instead of humans, his bodies were not subsumed into the costume’s form. Instead, merging with the mechanical and technological, they became hybrid bodies. Prosthetic limbs, attachments and devices connected flesh to the external world. The costumes became an extension and expansion of the human body.

3.2.5 Costume Forms

Schlemmer’s theatre transfigures human form, which can now perform any type of movement. Its motion defies gravity. Costumes and mechanical devices, automatons and marionettes, precision machines, glass, artificial limbs, outfits designed by deep-sea divers and modern soldiers expand the human capacity they simultaneously restrict.158

Gropius’s description illustrates Schlemmer’s abstraction of the body through costumes. Fuller’s abstraction of her own body into the mystical and inhuman allows her transformation into pure form. This emphasized the spatial tectonics produced by the movement of her clothing against the dramatic lighting. With this technology Fuller’s body could take the appearance of the stone folds of a caryatid or the transparent flutter of butterfly wings. Schlemmer’s costumes also used abstraction to define form over narrative in the ballets. As either exaggeration or transformation, both Fuller and Schlemmer founded their choreographies based on embodied movement.

The costumes encapsulated certain essences that Schlemmer categorised as fundamental to the human body. In his essay ‘Man and Art-Figure’ (Mensch und

158 Oskar Schlemmer, ‘Man and Art Figure’ in Walter Gropius, (ed.) The Theatre of the Bauhaus, pp. 28-29.

103 Kunstfigur), Schlemmer defines an order of four essential costume forms, which transform the body on the stage. (These can be viewed in the Triadic Ballet costumes Fig.1) They present different strategies for designing costumes based on the laws of space and the body. It is useful to describe them, in order to see how costumes can be formulated through different systems of body movement that in turn can become spatial.

The first Schlemmer called ‘ambulant architecture’, based on the body’s ability to move. It enclosed the key elements of the body in orthogonal forms, creating a machinic, robotic appearance. Each component of the body became a distinct element. The outline of the natural body shape was still visible, revealing the negative space formed by the geometric appendage. The second was based on what Schlemmer described as ‘the functional laws of the human body in their relationship to space’. This was the marionette, dissecting the body into separate elements, connected by moveable joints. The drawing shows a figure of curved forms, like a wood turned puppet. The emphasis on this marionette body is its ball and socket joints, suggesting rotation, arcing and torsion. The third body was defined by the laws of human motion in space, what Schlemmer called the result of a ‘technical organism’. It was made by taking each component of the body and created forms based on their movement in space. It took the marionette and traced its allowable movements. From these geometries Schlemmer created specific forms. The ‘technical organism’ is the most compelling for performative architecture and is a natural progression from the first two. Building on movement, it also has the most surreal appearance. Most of the costumes of the Triadic Ballet take their forms from this style, though they are were often an amalgamation of elements of the four. The fourth was based on metaphysical forms of expression, which aimed at ‘dematerialization’. These costume forms were made by what Schlemmer designated as the symbolic elements, which can be found in the body. While the first three costume forms are useful and innovative constructions from body movement, this fourth form

104 looks to a symbolic level and I would argue in the process of leaving behind corporeal movement loses its relevance to the body.

The costume as an abstraction of movement and form is most visible in Schlemmer’s Triadic Ballet, which was first performed in Stuttgart in 1916.(Fig.1) The ballet consisted of three dancers performing twelve pieces, with eighteen different costume changes, and was the most refined and extravagant of all his performances. Schlemmer called it in the genre of the ‘costume dance’ or masquerade. It is here, through the drawings, the existing and reproduced costumes and the video documentation that it is possible to have a holistic vision of how these costumes worked with the choreographies.

Initially looking at the many drawings that Schlemmer made for these costumes, it is their flatness that is apparent. The shapes are made up of compasses and rulers and it is very hard to imagine them in three-dimensions. This makes the photos from the performances even more extraordinary, circles become cylinders and spheres, lines transform into cones, stilts and disks. The look of the costumes were padded cloth and stiff papier maché, painted bright colours or metallic shades. They were physical extensions, for example, the ballerina in the first act is a woman in a tutu, but her arms are padded to look larger and rounder, her torso is sculpted to look like a turned, wooden mannequin.

The performance of the Triadic Ballet was divided into three acts, each designated by a colour. The first act was yellow and in the tradition of a comic burlesque. The costumes are reminiscent of a beachside frolic and the colours are bright and patterned with stripes and curves. The second was rose-coloured and defined in the manner of a solemn festival. In this scene the costumes have become stranger, the colours richer. The final act was black-based, to be performed with the heroic quality of a Greek tragedy. By now there is an almost alien quality to the costumes, moon

105 shapes, planetary rings, reflective and metallic materials against black body suits.159 The juxtaposition of costumes creates very distinct spaces between the performers. At times these are comical, with changing shapes and forms, like the relationship between the ballerina and the deep-sea diver. But in the final act the spaces seem cast in stone, the gestures starker and the costumes cut the space into angles. These costumes play with perspective, flat planes become spherical, harsh profiles soften into tubes. The movements exploit this, very defined gestures and movements switch between two-dimensional and three-dimensional perspectives.

Schlemmer expressed a desire not to completely do away with the human element. The rigidity of the costumes is extreme, but they were not meant to allow for unbridled movement, they were meant to limit it. Schlemmer’s experiment was to see whether the body could transcend the parameters set by the costume, both physically and metaphysically. Here the two challenges of abstraction and mechanisation were met, where the costumes, rather than simply mechanising the body, would intensify what Schlemmer felt to be the intrinsic human being. This occurred through the dance itself, opposed to an image of a static body.

3.2.6 Bodily Geometries

“Man the measure of all things” provides so many possibilities for variation and for relationships to architecture and craftsmanship that one would merely have to extract the essentials.160

159 The description of the Triadic Ballet is taken from a journalist A. Ho’s description of the performance at the National Theatre, 1923, described in Howard Dearstyne, Inside the Bauhaus (Rizzoli; USA, 1986), p.176, and personal descriptions from video footage of re-enactments of the ballets. 160 Oskar Schlemmer, Diary November 1922 (Pasedena Art Museum: USA, 1968), p.133.

106 The second element of Schlemmer’s dances that are useful for a performative understanding of space-making, is the idea of new body geometries. Understanding the body as a three-dimensional moving entity presents new ways of designing spaces around the body. One of the key developments of modernity that Schlemmer was interested in was the new mathematics of relativity.161 This proposed alternative geometries of space that could be used in dance. The human figure was the central reference to Schlemmer’s work. Schlemmer made an abundance of drawings of the human body, from analytical diagrams to life-drawing studies. His detailed study of the human form drove his explorations of how the body moved in three-dimensional space. At the beginning of ‘Man and Art-Figure’ Schlemmer describes the history of theatre as that of ‘the transfiguration of the human form’.162 While the materials for this transfiguration are form and colour, the placing he called; ‘the constructive fusion of space and building’.163 In this context, the three aspects a performance is built around is firstly the body enacting the event, secondly the physical object of the body or built environment, and thirdly constructed space. The figurines that Schlemmer designed made solid the parameters of the body.

The dances can be described as a mathematical and machinic understanding of the body moving in space. On seeing the Triadic Ballets, Bauhaus student and biographer Howard Dearstyne described them as ‘more like mobile geometry than fluid arabesques’164. Following from the body as marionette, Schlemmer derived the physical gestures and movements from mathematics, the joints and notations of limbs or the rhythms of machines. Like Acconci’s early performances that showed simple, repetitive physical actions, Schlemmer described the premise of his dances, as beginning with: ‘the physical condition, from being, from standing, from walking and finally from jumping and dancing. For taking a step is a tremendous event, lifting a

161 Oskar, Schlemmer, Diary May 1929, p.127. 162 Oskar Schlemmer, ‘Man and Art Figure’ in The Theatre of the Bauhaus, p.17. 163 Oskar, Schlemmer, ibid, p.17. 164 Howard Dearstyne, Inside the Bauhaus, p.174.

107 hand, moving a finger no less of an achievement’.165 They were far from the classically poetic and are still shockingly unappealing for those expecting a traditional ballet. Schlemmer however was not interested in repeating the same steps of traditional ballet scores. He saw in everyday actions the premise for a new kind of poetry, prophesying the future use of quotidian movement by choreographers later in the 20th century.

Schlemmer defines two possible relationships for the body and space on the theatrical stage. The first is in the illusionist theatre, where the space of the stage is made into a literal representation of nature in order to fit with the natural body. The second possibility is the opposite, where man succumbs to what Schlemmer described as the abstract space of the stage.166 He illustrated this with the sketch, ‘Figure in Space’, which shows a central human figure in a rectangular cube. Through this drawing he endeavoured to describe the geometry that is created by the surrounding environment, showing lines that criss-cross the space forming dissections, connections and pathways. This drawing is misleading however because it only shows the geometry set up by the space, the dark figure is immobile, passive, and as such not generating any interactions in the space. Schlemmer describes the body entering the stage as an ‘event’, where the figure becomes a ‘space-bewitched’ creature.167 The drawing presents a figure caught in the webs of geometry that the space is held in and up by, webs made by the geometry of the surrounding environment. In the second that they move, the geometry will shift with them.

Schlemmer described this as an ‘architectonic-spatial organism’, which existed intermeshed in a spatial relationship.168 Into this matrix the body enters, weaving its own geometries. The space surrounding the body becomes animated by this geometry, with connections and intersections, lines and sweeping curves that

165 Oskar Schlemmer, Diary May 1929, p.127. 166 Oskar Schlemmer, ‘Man and Art Figure’ in The Theatre of the Bauhaus, p.23. 167 Oskar Schlemmer, ibid, p.92. 168 From a lecture by Schlemmer at the Bauhaus to ‘The Circle of Friends of the Bauhaus’ in March 16th, 1927 in The Theatre of the Bauhaus, p.85.

108 traced the potential movements of the body. By making visible these spatial geometries, space was understood as something essentially connected to the moving body. This effect of the human figure on space was what Schlemmer called the ‘stereometry of space’.169 ‘Stereometry’ means the measurement of volumes in contrast to ‘planimetry’, which describes two-dimensional measurement. Schlemmer uses the term stereometry to describe a geometry of movement, tracing bodily patterns and forms in space. These patterns become the blueprints for solid matter, for spatial forms. This is a strategy that resonates in the contemporary dance field, but also for a making of architectural searching to base itself on the moving body.

3.2.7 Felt Space

I have in mind dance creations derived from spatiality, from the feeling for space. Space, like architecture, is primarily a construct of dimension and proportion, an abstraction in the sense of a contradiction – if not a protest – against nature. Space, in the sense that it influences everything within it, also defines the behaviour of the dancer. If we were to fill up space with a soft pliable substance, in which stages of the dancer’s movements were to harden into “negatives” of the movement, this would demonstrate the direct relationship of the planimetry of the stage floor to the stereometry of space.170

Schlemmer was a renowned painter who had originally joined the Bauhaus in the sculpture department. His fascination with the theatre led him to take over the theatre workshop in 1927, bringing to the theatre course the interests and perspective of both painting and sculpture. ‘Space, Form and Gesture’ was the first subject that

169 Oskar Schlemmer, ‘Man and Art Figure’, p.98. 170 Oskar Schlemmer, ‘Tänzerische Mathematik’ quote in Howard Beckman, Oskar Schlemmer and the Experimental Theatre of the Bauhaus: A Documentary (Uni of Alberta: Edmonton, Canada, 1977), p.37.

109 Schlemmer taught, which evolved in his sculpture course. What was so unique about Schlemmer’s approach to performance was this sculptural way of dealing with space, focusing on volume instead of mass. Rather than building form, he taught his students to explore enclosing space. In this way Schlemmer’s theatre works give us a vision of performative space, where the body is seen to cut into the space around it as it moves.

This feeling for space is suggestive of a phenomenological description of the body. Through movement, the interaction of the body and space becomes palpable. Neither is passive in this interaction and their relationship creates a multitude of parameters and lineaments. The body perceives its surroundings physically, gathering knowledge of the world as it moves through it. Instead of the feeling for space, it is rather a feeling of space. Rather than this being a situation confined to specific moments or contexts, this is being constantly produced whenever bodies and spaces come into collision. Schlemmer visualizes body movement three-dimensionally, whereby the body inscribes space as volumes. The movement drawings or scores, which describe motion only upon the singular plane of the floor, are hereby connected with the rest of the body’s movements. ‘Stereometry’ therefore describes three-dimensional movement.171

3.2.8 Space Analysis Dances

During the late 1920s Schlemmer experimented with these ideas using a series of dances that became known as the Space Analysis Dances. These were developed in the late 20s consisting of ‘The Slat Dance’, ‘The Metal Dance’, ‘The

171 The relationship between planimetric notations and stereometric movement in terms of bringing the living body into the architecture drawing, will be explored in Bernard Tschumi’s The Manhattan Transcripts in Chapter Four.

110 Hoop Dance’, ‘The Form Dance’ and ‘The Gesture Dance’, usually lasting for only a minute or two. Materials were instrumental, such as in the Metal Dance where light, shadow and the reflections of the hanging, metal pieces became active participants in the dance. ‘The Hoop Dance’ on the other hand created a graphic three-dimensional environment made up of dozens of connected hoops, which with dramatic lighting and continual arching rotations, made an impressive spectacle in circular forms (though it is difficult to understand how the black clad body interacted with it).

The most successful of the dances was ‘The Slat Dance’, where Schlemmer’s process of analysing how the body constructs connections with the space around it is clearly apparent. ‘The Slat Dance’ was performed by a single dancer with long slats attached to their arms, elbows and knees. In Schlemmer’s sketch of stilt walkers the year before, one can see the development from stilts and the extension of body parts, into a performance. The dancer’s movements, slowed by the unwieldy appendages, would be traced in grand gestures by these prosthetic limbs. Here the costume becomes prop, becomes architecture, integrating the body into a seamless relationship with space. The slats show the animated body as directional. Velocity and force can be perceived through the proposal of each movement, followed through visually down the length of each slat. In elevation one sees the geometric division of space through the body. The edges of the body segment space and the movements expand or contract sections like a graphic diagram. But, as the performer turns into a three-dimensional view, they present a perspectival image, lines becoming arcs. The diagram becomes volumetric.

111 Fig.3 Oskar Schlemmer, Slat Dance (1927) The Expressionists, 12.08.2000. www.english.emory.edu. Retrieved 10.03.2007 at

112 In the performance entitled Lines in Space in 1927, the geometry has been simplified and takes its cues from the stage. In the photo that documents this performance, the image is overlayed with a differently posed body, many arms and legs out stretched. The parameters of a rectangular room create a geometry that seems to interact back onto the lone, central figure. It is reminiscent of perspectival drawings from the Renaissance, documenting the way the eye understood space. Schlemmer is trying a similarly radical approach, not through the eye of the spectator but the body in the space. This is what the ‘Slat Dance’ needed in order to ground the physical geometry in a real space. In the installations of Vito Acconci that will looked at in the following section, this level of transaction between bodies and buildings describes a reciprocal interaction.

It was not so much architectonic space that Schlemmer investigated. He was focusing on the body and how that individual form dissected, divided and moulded space. Occasionally there were flats or screens that created a framing device or were used for projections. It was only in the Slat Dance however, that Schlemmer extended his experiments of the body and costume into architectonic space. In other works they remained only as separate stage sets. Replacing the static image of the Vitruvian Man, Schlemmer’s work proposes that true scale occurs only in movement. Measurement in this sense revolves around individual bodies, creating dynamic forms that are constantly shifting and reacting to their spatial surroundings. Such a conception of the body in this thesis will be extended from the intimacy of costume designs into built environments, where motion and interactivity will formulate the basis of a performative approach to architecture.

Schlemmer’s ballets at the Bauhaus encapsulate the desire to design form from the performance of the body in space. In these costumes and choreographies it is possible to see how a performative understanding of the way bodies interact creatively in spaces, producing exciting and innovative forms. While these forms are far from those of buildings, they propose new spatial geometries – blueprints for built

113 environments. Schlemmer placed the body on centre stage, seeing it as an essential protagonist in the construction of spaces. From this focus on the moving body, the following case studies expand the scope of this performative reading into projects more specifically concerned with built environments. Situationist theory provides a performative strategy for connecting the body with the urban geography. In doing so it moves the analysis from the stage, out into the streets, a shift that will be mirrored in Acconci’s process explored later this chapter. Through the practice of the dérive, the moving body enacts its relationship with its surroundings, providing a new, improvisational approach to how bodies and spaces interact.

3.3 Pedestrian Improvisation

The built environment has always been a physical delineation of power structures and ideology, from the central and safe positioning of religious buildings and palaces in medieval towns, to Georges Eugène Haussman’s boulevards that sliced through the revolutionary potential of Paris. Modernity heralded centralized governments, which allowed a much greater and far reaching control over entire cities and regions. By the early 1950s Le Corbusier had instituted his plan for modernist architecture, with his vision of the ‘radiant cities’ of the future. Le Corbusier’s dictate of architecture as ‘a machine for living’ summed up for the avant-garde the pitfalls of the modernist dismissal of living bodies. The Situationist International was a group of artistic and political provocateurs that resolved to fight against this prevailing ideology. Though the group was made up of painters, writers and theorists, they aimed to change the urban fabric itself. The response of the Situationists came through performance. Despite the belief that architecture would always subjugate its inhabitants, they believed that flexible, creative urban planning could support an egalitarian, utopic society.

114 3.3.1 Experiencing the City

As you can see, we’re flying over an island, a city, a particular city, and this is the story of a number of its people, and the story, also, of the city itself. It was not photographed in a studio. Quite the contrary…the actors played out their roles on the streets, in the apartment houses….this is the city as it is, hot summer pavements, the children at play, the buildings in their naked stone, the people without makeup.172

In the opening sequence of the 1948 Hollywood detective film ‘The Naked City’, a voice-over read the above quote while the camera flew above a city. It exposed the desire to uncover the ‘real’ city, peel away its layers and understand it from within, the experience of it. In this film, that inspired Guy Debord’s Situationist map of the same name (Fig. 4), the urban environment is shown as layered and multi-dimensioned, enriched with daily experience, aspects usually overlooked in the glossy images of the 20th century metropolis. Understanding how the quotidian held the key to bodies and spaces allowed the possibility of re-making it. To experience the metropolis is to step inside it and across it.

172 The opening sequence of the ‘The Naked City’, written by Malvin Wald and Albert Maltz, directed by Jules Dassin that inspired Debord, quoted by Simon Sadler in The Situationist City (MIT Press: USA,1999), p.82.

115 Fig.4 Guy Debord & Asgar Jorn, The Naked City. 1957. Catherine De Zegher, The Activist Drawing: Retracing Situationist Architectures from Constant’s New Babylon to Beyond (The MIT Press: USA,1999), p.96.

116 The transformation of the everyday was fundamentally a Surrealist concept, taken up by Henri Lefebvre who expanded the idea politically in The Production of Space and Critique of the Everyday. These theories took Marxist concepts that operated on a political and social level and applied them to the intimate realms of existence as well – to leisure time and the minor details of the everyday. Lefebvre understood the animate body as that which followed the regulations in which built environments prescribed for pedestrians. But it also held the potential to be renegade tool that could subvert these rules. Lefebvre, who was a Situationist member in its early stages, aimed to critique and transform everyday life. Debord wanted to construct situations through activities that were both artistic and political, from the personal to the metropolis. In this way society itself could be transformed. Like other avant-garde artists of the time, the Situationists were breaking down the stability of architecture by focusing on the fluidity of performance making, rather than simply what it looked like.

Debord referred to the way the landscape affected the psyche as one moved through it as ‘Psychogeography’. It is a way of describing the relationship between the phenomenological body and the surrounding environment. It emphasized that people’s relationship with the built environment was interactive in subconscious as well as conscious ways. Fuelled by a renewal of interest in urban space, the last ten years have seen a resurgence of interest in Situationism by academics and students from architecture.173 Psychogeography is a problem for architecture – how does the architect incorporate these intangible aspects into the design process? To map existing spaces based on personal, phenomenal interpretations is fashionable in architecture schools; streets take the form of bottled smells and zip-lock bags of

173 Simon Sadler notes that Psychogeography can be seen as a part of the growing discipline of social geography in the 1960s, as opposed to academic geography. Texts such as Kevin Lynch’s Image of the City, examined cognitive mapping and urban design, making the area a growing field that examined urban geography beyond the qualitative pre-20th century parameters. A useful selection of architectural essays of these new works can be seen in Iain Borden and Sandy McCreery’s New Babylonians: Contemporary Visions of a Situationist City (Academy Press; UK, 2001).

117 detritus. The question is how to design from Psychogeography, how to utilize information based on personal, transient, experience.174 The performance of the dérive and the making hypothetically spatial of that performance on an urban scale, presents many new opportunities for architecture. Situationist theory has become popular in this field because it makes palpable how environments affect the inhabitants.

3.3.3 Scripting the Everyday

The infamous dérive is itself already a kind of drawing. The drifter, responding to the resonances between the hidden forces of the unconscious and the hidden forces in the city, draws a meandering line through the city. The drift is an automatic drawing that subverts the official city plan by exploiting unmapped sensual and subliminal qualities.175

The architecture theorist Mark Wigley here points out the creative relationship between the performance of the dérive and the drawing. The act of the Situationist dérive is a performance in which the typical spectator is thrown onto the stage, in front of the camera, becoming the leading lady, the detective, the hero. Walking through the metropolis became the central strategy for the politically motivated art group of the Situationists. The core of Situationist theory was the dérive, where Situationism is itself performed by the body through the built environment. The ‘dérive’ was a practice developed around the idea of ‘life’, rather than art or representation. The dérive, (usually translated in English as to ‘drift’), meant moving through the city, allowing the actions, the events, the uncontrollable forces of the city to take you from one place to

174 Later in this chapter the only architectural work to be spawned from the Situationist International (the city of New Babylon) will be examined. 175 Mark Wigley, ‘Paper, Scissors, Blur’ in de Zegher Catherine et al (eds.), The Activist Drawing: Retracing Situationist Architectures from Constant's New Babylon to Beyond (MIT Press: USA, 2001), p.47.

118 the next. The analogy of the pinball machine was used by the Lettrist International to describe the push and pull of forces as pedestrians moved through the urban environment. The bodily inscription of improvisation is performed over the script of the city. In this way it is an act necessarily deviant, like graffiti on a wall. The dérive encapsulates an experience of the city that is emotive and intimate, in contrast to subsuming of the body in the speed of the modern city. An experience both alienating and overpowering. It was also decidedly non-productive and therefore against the contemporary emphasis on consumption, capitalism and modernization.

What the Situationists proposed was art that was not representational, on stage or page, but a methodology in which to participate. Situationist theory revolves around a belief that the transformation of everyday life could be achieved through individual participation in urban space. They began with a very theoretical philosophy and took it to the streets, making the active individual in space the focus. They propose through the body how a new kind of urban space can be constructed. The performance of the dérive is a bodily example of performative architecture. It refocused the issues of city planning and design back onto the body, empowering the individual as a constructor of their surroundings.

The infiltration of the quotidian act of walking into art practices brings with it the performative. The focus on the everyday is important to the foundations of a performative architecture because it moves the issue of the body from the general to the individual, from a theory into the visceral corporeality of the general populace. The body is no longer either passive spectator or object to be viewed, but an active participant.

Considering the body as a creative tool is useful in building a theory of performative architecture on the direct, creative relationship reflected in between bodies and the built environment. Theories of body art explore how the body performs built space through motion and interaction. The connections between body and built environment will lead to the work of Vito Acconci, who has moved from personal body

119 performances into architecture making. Acconci’s projects show how embodied performances can be seen as a ‘transactive’ relationship with its surroundings. Both his performances and installations situate themselves in an inherently social condition, designating physical performances as necessarily political. In Acconci’s installations, the bodily practices proposed by walking artworks and Situationist theory, are constructed into built environments.

3.4 Activating Spaces/Places The Performative installations of Vito Acconci

‘Once a viewer is in the middle of things, art becomes architecture’.176

The collision between the body and art is an act of creation. The encounter is not only one of corporeal forms, but between the haptic perception of the viewer and the artist’s intent. Unlike typical two-dimensional art forms, how people connect with installation art is not simply an optical process of viewing. Creating states of mutual engagement, installation art acts upon the viewer, as the viewer interacts with it. What installation art problematizes is the occupation of built environments with bodies. As an art form it emphasizes that environments are built through individual experiences by a process of ‘Transaction’. For the artist Vito Acconci, Transaction implies a dialogue and exchange between two parties, where both are complicit in the interaction.

Installation art makes evident how this interaction is continually in operation, whether one is cognizant of it or not. It shows how narratives are built into the footprints, the floors, the suspicious holes gaping in the walls. The objects themselves permeate the buildings and seep into the imaginations of the viewers.

176 Heinz Schütz (ed.) & Vito Acconci, Courtyard in the Wind (Hatje Cantz Verlag: Germany, 2003), p.16.

120 As if the volume of the interior had been separated from the building’s form like a Rachel Whiteread sculpture, these negative spaces make eloquent descriptions of performative architecture.177

Acconci’s extensive work over the last forty years has examined how real bodies interact in real spaces. Acconci has interrogated how public spaces control private bodies, offering alternatives in the form of his own body or physical constructions. By comparison, Schlemmer’s bodily-produced spatial constructions, which find form in costumes and movements, Acconci uses the direct interaction between bodies and built environments in order to manifest his examinations of spaces. Projects are formed around people doing things and the architecture doing things back. It is useful to look briefly at bringing this into an urban scale through the Situationist city of New Babylon.

Many note how Acconci’s innovative and always controversial work has moved from the written word of poetry, out into the street for performance art and into the structures of our built environment. His career began as a published poet in the 60s, after which Acconci began using his own body in performances. These performances were highly autobiographical, concentrating on his own body, sometimes in relation to another or many other bodies. A key strategy that emerges in his work and which will be used by a number of the later architecture projects examined, is destabilization. It becomes a physical form that refocuses interaction back onto the body. His work is notable for its aggressive force and for Acconci’s insistence on crossing the boundaries of society’s taboos. For Acconci the issue of architecture is one of publicity - the private body in public space. The Situationist understanding of the city as a script upon which the regulations of society are inscribed is exposed in Acconci’s work. His work stresses the need for improvisation, freeing the body from defined ways of

177 Rachel Whiteread has become known for her sculptures that showcase absence. Setting the interiors of spaces, from objects to houses, in concrete, she solidifies the negative space, creating in the process a new volume.

121 moving through built environments. Acconci is continually seeking solutions to how we live and move through public spaces, provoking alternatives and critiquing current situations. Coming from his background in performance he works from the body out, seeing architecture phenomenologically as a thing that people know with their bodies.178 He founded the ‘Acconci Studio’ in 1988 and now works in architecture and landscape design, having made the move into built space on an architectural scale.179

3.4.1 Body Space

Understanding the body from a phenomenological basis is essential to reconsidering the built environment in a contemporary context. Acconci is always emphasising the flesh in his early works – pain, shame, scarring. The body as a physical, sensorial being is continually highlighted. This corporeal issue was of central importance in his performance work during the 1970s. These performances were visceral examinations of the body – a body of blood, skin, bone. Acconci would often push the limits of his own body, but unlike artists such as Stelarc who put their bodies through extreme and often violent acts, Acconci’s performances allowed just enough room to step into his shoes. These performances were uncomfortable but accessible, dealing with everyday action and Events, framed and broadcasted as heightened reality. In his video work ‘Openings’ (1970), Acconci pulls the hair from his stomach until it is bare, soft and bruised. Watching it as a close up video that frames his stomach, the viewer becomes entirely fascinated by the intimacy of the skin pulled up by each hair, grasping the hairs, the jerking reaction of the body with each movement. The act of

178 ‘Vito Acconci: Good Guys Wear Black’ (transcripts) Redstudio MOMA Website. Retrieved 09.03.2007 at 179 Specific to an examination of performative architectures is Acconci’s installation and public artworks rather than his more recent architecture projects. The reason for this is that his architecture is yet to encapsulate his ideas, which are so direct and emotive in his earlier work. Having moved now into buildings themselves, the ability to play artistic provocateur has had to give way to dealing with pragmatic issues of construction.

122 watching heightens the awareness of one’s own body. The body is never abstracted, but disturbingly fleshy.

Throughout his career Acconci has focused on how the moving body interacts with other bodies or with the space around it. As the bare space of his early performances became more and more populated with props, machines and objects, so did Acconci’s body recede from the stage. What began as a personal exploration of the body, moved into focusing on the absent body or the potential body. This change transferred the appearance of Acconci’s work from the body to built environments. In this process bodies became even more central in his work. The disappearance of his own body makes possible the presence of other peoples.

3.4.2 Making Space

Acconci makes room for possible performances. In contrast to the presentation of an artwork or performance, Acconci creates opportunities for performances by his audiences. In this way the built environments are ‘unfinished’ without bodies. Heinz Schütz describes Acconci’s architecture as creating blank spots for human beings.180 Acconci sees this as inherently political, allowing for alternative actions and improvisation. Making space for non-prescribed public actions is considered in contemporary society as deviant. His installations are formulated on the grounds that space is a substantial thing, something that can be built and made. Spatiality has always been the ground for Acconci’s examinations.181

180 Heinz Schütz, introduction to Vito Acconci: Courtyard in the Wind (Hatje Cantz Verlag: Germany, 2003), p16. 181 As a determinant for social behaviour Acconci often cites the importance of anthropologist Edward Hall on his work. According to Hall, space and location contain the key issues to understanding how human beings are in the world.

123 Fig.5 Vito Acconci, Instant House 1980. Kate Linker, Vito Acconci (Rizzoli: New York, 1994), p. 46.

124 When Acconci began his body performances, this movement was translated into physical poetry.182

Making room means allowing for improvisation. Acconci is well aware of the contemporary idea of public space as something that is named and defined by ruling forces, whether politicians or development companies. Public space is for a chosen section of the community who fit into the defined construction of good citizenship. Those that do not fit, have to in Acconci’s words ‘take public space’. Public space becomes a realm in which to requisition property, to assert one’s body in urban space.183 In this way it becomes a performative space, it can only come into being through physical interaction. Acconci aims to create niches, interstitial places in which one can have intimacy, community, privacy within public space. Acconci insists that these spaces have to be taken, because they are no longer made. The presence of public space can no longer be simply assumed.

In Acconci’s installation works the built environment is always itself active and interactive. ‘Instant House’ (1980) was a key example that showed this implicated body. (Fig. 5) A swing invites the viewer, surrounded on each side by flat boards painted with the US flag. They can see that the boards form the collapsed sides of a house, a comforting image complete with cutout windows and sloped roof. By sitting on the swing the visitor triggers the sides to tilt up around you, enveloping and placing you inside the suddenly three-dimensional house. What you cannot see, but is now clear to other spectators, is that the outside is painted with the Soviet Union flag. There are timely political issues at

182 In some of Acconci’s first forays away from poetry and into performance, his projects showed images of him in action, in a landscape. Photos of him jumping, walking, running. They present a crossover between the two art forms, a kind of concrete poetry. The issue is action, not movement in Acconci’s work. It is based on making the decision to move, not simply arbitrary motion. 183 Vito Acconci, ‘Making Public; The Writing and Reading of Public Space’ in Heinz Schütz, (ed.) & Vito Acconci Courtyard in the Wind (Hatje Cantz Verlag: Germany, 2003), p.97.

125 play in this project, but to look purely at the interaction of the body and the built environment, Acconci makes it clear that neither the body nor the architecture is ever neutral. It is a clichéd image of the ‘home’, but enveloped in the propaganda of patriotism.

Acconci’s performance and installation work is made up of question and critique, making visible the unseen forces, making audible peoples desires and fears. They never aim to be objects of desire, but usable, practical elements in a society. They are to become part of public life, rather than monuments to the artist. As integral to these spaces built for events is Acconci’s refusal to allow the visitor to remain separated from the environment. This is most patent in his notorious work ‘Seedbed’ in 1972.

In ‘Seedbed’ Acconci shared his erotic fantasies of visitors from beneath the floor of a gallery. (Fig. 6) It created the unusual collaboration of minimalist art and confrontingly explicit sexuality. It is here that Acconci’s work became spatially performative. Halfway across the room, the floor ramped upward two feet to the outer wall. Listening to the sound of their footsteps, he would broadcast his desires and masturbate through a microphone. It created an extremely personal interaction between the visitor and the hidden body of the artist, focusing on this relationship through architecture.

‘Seedbed’ was based on the fantasy of the unseen body, how the imagination constructs the other’s body. Acconci brought visitors verbally into his own fantasy, forcing them to participate. The space became charged with the proximity of his body and the broadcasted soundscape. How visitors accept or reject this soundscape adds to the ‘tension in the air’. The project merged the very private realm of masturbation and erotic fantasy with the very public realm of the art gallery.

126 Fig.6 Vito Acconci, Seedbed (performance), 1972. Source: Linker, Kate, Vito Acconci (Rizzoli: New York, 1994), p. 46.

127 When viewed from outside the ramp became a minimalist sculpture, a single object in the gallery space. In the performance, Acconci’s voice eroticised the mute environment, anthropomorphizing the architectural object. Visually dislocated while at the same time physically very close, Acconci in a sense became the architecture. The space is electrified, made volumetric and palpable through the disembodied voice of the artist and the physical presence of the visitor. Both are implicated in this construction, both are essential to making the artwork.

The confronting absurdity of the situation becomes a destabilizing element in the installation. The ramp’s simply shifting of the floor plane is an architectural understatement to the sounds emanating from it, throwing the visitor literally off balance. ‘Seedbed’ exemplifies how Acconci constructs situations where specific actions radically transform existing spaces. In this way they can be described as performative constructions of Eventmental architecture. In Bernard Tschumi’s drawings of The Manhattan Transcripts, which will be examined in the following chapter on drawing, extreme events are juxtaposed against buildings, their disjunction proving the failure of building architecture purely on programmatic requirements. Acconci’s interactive spaces place individual bodies irrevocably in ideas. He has often described architecture as a performance space, a space for the body and its performances, a definition of architecture as occasions for people.184 The built environment provides the space and script for audiences to perform.

184 Vito Acconci in interview ‘Good Guys Wear Black’ MOMA Redstudio, last viewed 09.03.2007 at http://redstudio.moma.org/features.

128 3.4.2 Active Architectures

By destabilizing the ground plane, Acconci heightens the physical reaction by creating a state of imbalance. For Acconci’s architectural installation at the MAK centre, he took the existing interior form and then repeated, shifted and tilted it three-dimensionally.185 The interior felt like it was literally turning in on itself. The traditional cues that the pedestrian uses to negotiate a space are overturned. Floor, ceilings and walls are positioned in disjunctive, uncomfortable angles. The memory of the existing space is partially visible, but fragmented. This emphasizes the disorientation more than if it had simply been discarded. There is grass growing, not only inside, but on the ceiling. This led architecture theorist Anthony Vidler to write, ‘Nothing is stable in Acconci’s world; underneath the ground, which is no more than a quagmire, there are forces always ready to rise up, swallow up, and submerge what is above ground.’186

The built environment is never passive in Acconci’s projects. He creates a brittle edge to space, this volume that lies between the moving body and controlling environment. In a work such ‘VD lives/TV must die’ in 1978 or ‘The People Machine’ the following year, the installations create a tension between viewer and art object by setting up an intriguing, and ostensibly dangerous, situation. In both works the room is bound with pullies and ropes, precariously held together by a complexity that is very difficult to comprehend. There is a visible chain of physical repercussions that one is tempted to start off. But what will really happen? If one pulls free this rope, will the cannonball really catapult through the upper storey window and out into the street? Will the swings really tumble to the ground, what will be the repercussions of such an act? The idea of interactivity takes on a different context; it is the temptation to interact, the fear of doing so,

185 Acconci’s exhibition at the MAK (Academy of Applied Arts) in Vienna in 1993 was called ‘The City Inside Us’. 186 Anthony Vidler, ‘Home Alone’ in Vito Acconci, The City Inside Us (MAK: Austria 1993), p.39.

129 the desire to do so. The space is heavy with possibility. Regardless of which position you will finally take, the viewer is left feeling that their potential actions will dramatically shape that environment.

The experience of being overturned is also apparent in the ‘Bad Dream House’ (1984), which Acconci defines as being his first real move from the gallery into public space.187 Three houses were fitted together, turned upside down and sunk into the earth. One must enter through the floor, which slides open, allowing you to crawl into the connected spaces, complete with bed, shelves and a chair. The house as a representation of home is literally over-turned, the suburban dream home transformed into a nightmare. The result is startlingly disconcerting, by using very conventional objects in very unconventional ways. Acconci takes the object of architecture and turns it into a non-architecture, forcing us to re-consider how we view that object. It highlights the importance of built environments in being a safe or stable ground upon which to live. This destabilizing aspect describes the interactive relationship between the body and the built environment. Instead of ‘interactive’, Acconci describes the ‘transactive’ relationship that occurs between people and environments.

Destabilization is a recurring strategy used in several examples in this thesis. Choreographer William Forsythe shifts the central axis of the body in favour of a spatial geometry that introduces disequilibrium and imbalance into his dance scores. This creates entirely new kinds of movement. Giovanni Battista Piranesi disorientates the viewers of his etchings, provoking both a sense of dis- ease and immersion in the spaces imagined. Architects Peter Eisenman, Daniel Libeskind and Lars Spuybroek use destabilization to re-emphasize the physical body, stimulating an active interaction with the built environment. In their projects the secure ground plane is toyed with, gradients of floors, walls and ceilings shifted, scale manipulated and solid forms made fluid. This strategy elicits

187 Acconci in ‘Art becomes Architecture becomes Art’; A conversation between Vito Acconci and Kenny Schachter, moderated by Lilian Pfaff’ (Springer Verlag: Austria, 2006), p.70.

130 physical responses, where the body must realign, reorient and rearrange itself in order to simply stand upright or move ahead. In many of Acconci’s installations, the expected is overturned in a similar way.

3.4.3 Transactive Spaces

The viewer activates (operates) an instrument (what the viewer has at hand) that in turn activates (builds) an architecture (what the viewer is in) that in turn activates (carries) a sign (what the viewer shows off): The viewer becomes the victim of a cultural sign, which, however stays in existence only as long as the viewer works to keep the instrument going.188

In this statement Acconci illustrates his own definition of performative architecture, the synthesis of his two expertises. Performative architecture for Acconci means ‘transaction’, people actively interacting with the built environment and necessarily provoking repercussions. This is a continual process of activating elements and in turn reacting to them. In it we can see how the interaction of the body and the building create a political space, where the body is always fundamentally implicated. Many of his works show how the interactions of people with the installation expose the invisible machinations at play in built environments. Acconci’s artworks are never static tableaux, they are always in a state of process, being acted out either by himself or by others.

For his installation work in the mid-80s, Acconci has used visitors to activate his artworks. People would have to interact with his installations in order to activate them, often playing with the dynamics between people, through the installation.

188 Jacucci, Guilo & Wagner, Ina, ‘Performative uses of Space in Mixed Media Environments,’ 1981. Helsinki Institute for Information Technology Website. Retrieved 10.02.2007 at

131 In ‘Room Dividers’ (1982), people had to move sliding wall dividers and in doing so created and recreated the space. 189 It was a very simple, architectural idea, but by putting it in the hands of people and giving them the solid, one to one model that they could experience, Acconci made real the architectural idea.

We obviously want space that works as biology. We want a space to live, to live not as a monster that overtakes the person, but as something that reacts. Action is great, but transaction is better. Action is ultimately private; transaction lets other things in as well. We would love to make space that would actually react to people, as people react to those spaces.’190

A photo of Acconci’s ‘House of Cars’ (1988) is not the artwork itself. The installation has the look of a derelict’s refuge, but in order to understand the artwork you must experience it, climbing into the shell and inhabiting it yourself. Here the absent body (that of the inhabitant of the car house) becomes your body (as the present inhabitant). Acconci doesn’t let you turn away from the very real issue of public housing and homeless people, proposing a witty alternative and cheap urban housing. It is a shift from viewing Acconci’s own body in distress, emotive though it was. Now he wants you step inside the action itself and become part of the performance. Now it is your actions that shape the space and change the environment.

189 Room Dividers were made up of 18 units of corrugated aluminium on door tracks. Like Japanese screens in a traditional house, but this was a gallery, and the materials were industrial. 190 Acconci, Vito, ‘Art becomes Architecture becomes Art’; A conversation between Vito Acconci and Kenny Schachter, moderated by Lilian Pfaff (Springer Verlag: Austria, 2006), p.42.

132 3.4.4 Political Improvisations

The built environment, in an electronic age, is a throwback to an industrial era. In an age when quantities of places can be stored on a disc, the built environment occupies too much space; it takes too much time to walk through the built environment, in an age when distant places can be brought home on television.191

Acconci is interested in what changes in public space by technology mean for designing places. For Acconci, the body becomes public when it crosses the boundary of the body.192 With technology this is now everyday practise, whether it is chat rooms, mobile phones or sms. Acconci explores how computers have irrevocably changed public space, arguing; ‘the electronic age obliterates space, and overlaps places’.193 He emphasizes the spatial importance of politics on bodies. The multiplicity of non-physical spaces means that architecture needs to reassess how it creates physical publicity. What does it mean when the internet allows such open and democratic connections? How can an embodied understanding of public space work differently, or even better? Acconci has often said that he wanted the art gallery to be used like a town square, to recapture in the space of the gallery a space of meeting and community, and freedom of thought and speech.

Acconci’s work exposes how social and cultural ideology is enacted by bodies. That people perform politics. By revealing how these scripts are inscribed into architecture, Acconci proposes how it is possible to subvert them and improvise one’s own movements. In this way Acconci’s artworks show that architecture can

191 Vito Acconci in Linda Shearer, (ed.) Vito Acconci: Public Places (Museum of Modern Art: NY,1988), p.27 192 Heinz Schütz, introduction in Courtyard in the Wind, p.16. 193 Vito Acconci, The City Inside Us, p.117.

133 always be considered to be performative, setting the foundations for reconsidering the design process.

Acconci’s work is unique because he has been the most successful artist to bridge the gaps between performance art and built space. Many of the tactics Acconci employs are simply the process of good installation work making the viewer take an active role in bringing the artwork into existence, whether it is simply walking or physically interacting with it. In this way successful installation artwork can always be seen as a good example of performative architecture. What makes Acconci’s work significant is his sensitive understanding of the power structures that weave through our built environments and how they bind and blind our bodies. His dedication to the importance of the built environment projects a substantiality that is lacking in the art field. At the same time the fact that he is not a trained architect helps explain his disinterest with monumentality, an acceptance of time and weathering in this work, and an openness to community discussion and debate over his designs.

Acconci brings to his work an intimate understanding of how the body is in relation to others and to objects. This transactive relationship is continued in Constant’s urban designs. His visions of a future city can be read as a macro, spatial ideation of Acconci’s description of transactive spaces. Though Acconci’s recent architectural work has left behind the very personal nature of his earlier performances, there is still a sensitivity that he has retained with his built works, which understands that baring all can be as much about architecture, as it is about the body. A key aspect of his work is that architecture is never neutral, whether it is the ramp beneath you masturbating, or a wall that looks like a bra. Architecture is always acting upon people, Acconci merely heightens the effect, highlighting it and making it impossible to ignore.

134 3.5 Urban Trans-actions New Babylon

It is useful to view Constant Nieuwenhuy’s design of New Babylon in parallel to Acconci’s installations. The relationship between Acconci and Constant’s urban understandings is based in the transactive connection between bodies and built environments. Conceived by the active mobility of bodies moving through environments, the design of New Babylon solidifies the performative strategies of Situationist theory. As with Acconci’s provocations between the body and environment, New Babylon demands participation and improvisation. In it, it is possible to see an urban environment built on Acconci’s intimate performances and actions, where mobility becomes the key to inhabitation.

Constant put the Situationist theories of unitary urbanism, the dérive, psychogeographical play and detournement, into built form.194 The practice of the dérive is in itself a performative act, but in the extensive models Constant made of the visionary city of New Babylon, it is possible to see an environment based on Situationist theory.195 These models use the methodology of the gypsy camp, a futuristic proposal of nomadism, of cities designed for transient communities.

New Babylon is an urban form based on motion. It is situated in flux, where bodies, environments, atmospheres and experiences are in continual transformation. It proposes an urban image in stark contrast to the historically fixed and stable state of the metropolis. While Le Corbusier pioneered the

194 While Constant was an original member of the Situationist International, his dedication to a built reality put him in conflict with other members (a difficulty with many of the practicing artists) leading to his resignation in 1960. 195 The name ‘New Babylon’ is derived from the ancient Summerian city of Babylonia. In the bible it was branded lawless for its decadence and excess. What was being used pejoratively was for Constant a perfect name for the ludic city, a city of desires and dreams. It came to symbolise an alternative form of urban planning to the functional Modernist dogma of the time.

135 modern vision of the machinic metropolis, Constant responded with a city formed on playful, transactive relationships between bodies and buildings. It aimed at anti-architecture. Displacing the role of the master builder, the inhabitants became individual creators of their environments.

136 Fig.7 Constant Nieuwenhuys, Sector constructie, New Babylon,1956. Catherine De Zegher, The Activist Drawing: Retracing Situationist Architectures from Constant’s New Babylon to Beyond (The MIT Press: USA,1999), p.119.

137 Simon Sadler describes New Babylon’s structure as a space frame ‘ideally suited to the creation of transitory, amorphous architecture, fantastic vistas and fecund space, ready for homo ludens to let his imagination run wild’.196 The look of New Babylon was a labyrinthine world of connected platforms, vast machinic elements suspended from the existing cities and ground. The connection is often made with the urban context of post war Europe; cities of demolition, reconstruction, scaffolding and ladders – forms that pervade the New Babylonian spaces. The city is also reminiscent of oil jetties or the airport terminals often referenced by Constant. Catherine de Zegher also makes the point that Constant was prophesying the World Wide Web, with its networks of flexible, personal spaces, placed on another plane from the existing city structures.197 As an example of flux architecture, New Babylon is both solid and in continual transformation. As environments they vacillate between science fiction and the past, creating psychogeographic spaces that provoke memories as well as propose futures. The forms created an organic, interconnected system of spaces, open to multiple programs and transformable. The structures floated, allowing the ground plane to be free for traffic and the stable monuments and natural spaces of the past. The interiors in contrast were fluid, mobile spaces that transformed through light, sound and various mobile systems. Programs and actions were not pre- determined by the architecture, but were created and re-created by individuals.

New Babylon was devoted to the collective. Reacting against capitalist privatisation, it formed itself around social spaces, where homes were only ever transitory. Highlighting interactions between people, the city’s inhabitants took temporary control over their environments, prophesying the cognitive, smart houses of the new millennium. It marked the conquest of nature through technology. Sadler draws the connection of New Babylon with the utopian

196 Simon Sadler, The Situationist City (MIT Press: USA,1999), p.132. 197 Catherine de Zegher, introduction to The Activist Drawing: Retracing Situationist Architectures from Constant’s New Babylon to Beyond (MIT Press: USA,1999), p.10.

138 architectural projects of Archigram, the faux cities of Disneyland and the excesses of Las Vegas, all heightened artificial environments. But the difference is Constant wanted to give control to each city dweller. The New Babylonians were to be the architects of their city. By displacing the role of the ‘father figure’, world-maker architect, the citizens would really own their city and feel empowered to shape it according to their desires. This emphasis on the political implications of the built environment is what Acconci is demanding in this installation. By merging the private and public realms, Constant proposes a reciprocity between bodies and buildings.

An architecture based on transaction is necessarily improvisational. In the exchange between bodies and built spaces, pedestrians and inhabitants are given the opportunity to innovate across the usual scripts of action. By granting freedom of circulation and freedom of desires, the inhabitants of the city are forced into action. Constant relied on this active participation for New Babylon to work. The architecture would literally bring people together, promoting interaction and community. The architecture was neither a controlling machine of capitalism, nor a passive backdrop of history. Instead Constant wanted to create a symbiotic relationship between architecture and people.

From the intimate spatial geometries of Schlemmer’s Bauhaus dances to the multi-spatial metropolis of Constant’s New Babylon, these projects have shown how performances have incorporated architectural concerns in novel ways. In order to see their use for the design of built environments, lead to the problem of the architecture drawing in bringing these embodied strategies into the design process. The following chapter shows how a selected group of artists and designers have reconsidered the systems of the architecture drawing. In addition or exchange with the conventions of this specific drawing type, these case studies draw on disciplines outside of architecture to present the relationship of living bodies in contemporary environments.

139 ChapterFOUR Performative Drawings

140 The drawing has long been weighted by gravity, held by the same notational limitations for over five hundred years and holding an unparalleled control over the design process. Objects defined by Cartesian co-ordinates situated in a Euclidean definition of space have been the architectural drawing’s core system, perpetuated by its triumvirate of plan, section and elevation. Now that CAD systems provide the opportunity to free architecture from orthogonal geometry, completely new forms of architecture can be explored. Various new kinds of qualitative and quantitative forms of representation have been taken up by digital architects. These systems have been facilitated by software from aviation and nautical design, film and animation and auto design through which multiple forms of data can be incorporated into the design process.

In Chapter Two the history of the architectural drawing was presented from its development during the Renaissance, showing how its structures of representation have been formulated on specific spatial constructs. If we accept that the architectural drawing fails to incorporate the new ways in which we understand space and embodied movement, what are the alternatives? In this section examples will be examined that acknowledge the problems of bringing these elusive aspects onto paper. In the process of doing so, they propose new methodologies. This chapter will argue that these forms, from choreography to cartography, embrace new conceptions of space and the body and by doing so, present new possibilities for the architecture drawing.

In order to escape the presentation of the purely tectonic elements of architecture in the drawing, it is necessary to look to other disciplines. By focusing on bodily movement, dance is a logical starting point for exploring new graphical possibilities for bringing bodies into paperspaces. Movement diagrams as well as dance scores provide notational systems that can be brought into the architecture drawing. The infiltration of alternative graphical systems in

141 architecture is growing, but these examples have be chosen because they specifically contribute to bringing phenomenological concepts into the drawing.

The debate concerning the architecture drawing in the age of CAD must be clarified in order to decide what must be held onto from conventional processes, and what can be lost. This process becomes a questioning of what is important to the design process, and what is a product of potentially outdated social aspects. The drawing traces the ways in which artists or architects have brought performative space into architecture by way of the drawing, looking at how the traditional architectural processes of drawing can be expanded in order to make space for bodies. This is encapsulated in the work of Gianni Baptista Piranesi and Daniel Libeskind, whose drawings can be seen to reconfigure the traditional systems of perspective and scale. This thesis is specifically looking at drawings that embrace body movement, traditionally in the forms of maps, scripts and scores. This takes us to cartography and choreography, two areas that may provide the architectural drawing with new strategies for dealing with the moving body. These highlight the problems of the drawing in architecture, leading to two examples by the architects John Hejduk and Bernard Tschumi. Instead of accepting the formula of single-point perspective, each example immerses the body by using multiple, layered viewpoints. Each recognizes that fluidity is integral to placing the body in the space of the 21st century – spaces structured by the flow of information, communication, as well as bodies themselves. These examples illustrate aspects of the difficult task of developing built environments in this new context. They attack the traditional state of architecture as stable, and integrate motion as a creative force. In Chapter five how each project redefines space and the built environment will be unpicked in terms of the context of changing technologies.

142 4.1 Mapping Situations

Following from the environmental performances of the Situationists and Constant’s design of a city based on their principles, this chapter begins by looking at how those performative practices were represented on paper. The Situationist dérive as a performance of pedestrian improvisation was presented in the previous chapter in relation to bodily movement. To translate these performances into images is to bring elements of motion, freedom and possibility into the two-dimensional plane of the drawing. The Situationists imaged their bodily strategies cartographically. A map directs the body - armoured in car, plane, sneakers – through the landscape towards a desired destination. As such, its purpose is the animate body in relation to places. The map therefore locates the body, past, present and future in space: where one has been, where one is, where one could be. In this way it states location without fixing place. In terms of the architecture drawing, the map proposes a representation of the environment, built on multiple temporalities and potential movement.

The map as a post-structuralist cliché has been embraced during the last fifty years, exemplifying the transfer in interest from time and history to issues of spatial conditions in critical discourse. It may also be argued that what separates the map as a spatial representation from other systems is its potential for also incorporating temporal aspects. While the diagram (which will be discussed in the Chapter Five), depicts movement patterns, the map presents possibilities for movement. In the map, what is important is acknowledged in what happens between the objects shown, spaces for possible transition, whether a city backstreet or a valley cleft through a mountain. In this way the map provides opportunities for incorporating movement into the conceptualisation of space, which is not simply motion, but the movement of bodies. Through its focus on space, the map has been a strategy used in much literary and theoretical architecture discourse, particularly in terms of Deleuzian theory. The map is a

143 system that collates information in order to present it into comprehensible images. Its historic status has been as a symbol of authority, defining ownership. As another graphic process, it can slip into the architecture drawing, bringing with it movement and potentiality. Like the architecture drawing, the map presents data, constrained by functional and historical specifications. The construction of a map is the construction of a language. While maps may utilise the tools of its predecessors, each demand a different kind of reading, whether it is a street directory, sea chart or treasure map. There is the factual information of the map; naming, text, boundaries, and there is also the artistic; symbols, colours and stylistics. Both operate as systems of description, defining spaces and manipulating readership to its vision of the world.

There is a key difference in the way people look at maps in contrast to architecture drawings. When viewing a map one looks at the blank spaces between buildings. One is interested in locating places and transit, rather than objects. When viewing the architecture drawing the focus is the solid lines, the structure and form. What the average street map fails to present are the possible encounters, the collisions and intersections of individual mappings, crossed paths. Exploring the way maps present images of the world, Situationist cartography focused on these empty spaces. The Situationist theory of the dérive was based on moving through spaces, allowing their various sensory and imaginary aspects to pull you from one space to the next. Situationist mapping denied the absolutism decried in the average maps, instead infiltrating contrary elements of possibility and desire. In this way the map is itself performative, because rather than describing action, it allows the viewer to participate in the environment.

144 Fig.8 Guy Debord & Asgar Jorn page from Mémoires, 1957. Francesco. Careri, Walkscapes: Walking as an Aesthetic Process, (Editorial Gustavo Gili: Spain, 2002), p.105.

145 4.1.2 Drawing the Dérive

Whether in the form of a remapping of known cities or in designs for altogether new ones, an imagery of water functioned as the key metaphor for the change and flexibility that modern capitalist society seemed to deny.198

Situationist theory formulated itself on a fluid plane, reacting against the bourgeois notion of stability and comfort.199 Motion was essential to the dérive, in direct contrast to the monument, consumption and architecture itself. Situationist movement establishes being ‘out of place’. Moving through the city, the drifter sees and experiences it with the excitement and freshness of the tourist. In making one’s own city new, it produces a continual sense of nomadism and vagabondage.200 The idea of a culture based on movement summed up the futurist society, without land ownership or other shackles of capitalism. Debord wrote of the city as an ocean, mapping, exploring, ebbs and flows. In the dérive this meant moving through places in the city possibly well known, but seeing them as if for the first time. One would have to read the city in terms of context, the time of day, one’s emotional state. In Constant Nieuwenhuys design of the Situationist metropolis, the architecture would keep changing, instigating continual movement. A key aspect of New Babylon was disorientation, where nothing was recognizable. Exemplified in such places as the airport, Situationist spaces are situated in-between, unbound by the usual structures of capitalism. The opportunities for encounters are thus magnified in this liminal space. Using

198 Thomas McDonough, ‘Fluid Space: Constant the Situationist Critique of Architecture’ in deZegher Catherine, Wigley, Mark (eds.), The Activist Drawing: Retracing Situationist Architectures from Constant's New Babylon to Beyond (MIT Press: USA, 2001), p.102. 199 See Thomas McDonough’s essay ‘Fluid Space: Constant the Situationist Critique of Architecture’ in The Activist Drawing. McDonough where he critiques their practice specifically in political terms of the assumed state of fixed places against freedom of movement. 200 The concept of ‘nomadism’ has become an important term in post-modern theory, described by Deleuze and Guattari’s in A Thousand Plateaus.

146 the liminal as a context for improvisation is a strategy devised in the Masque projects of John Hejduk, where drawing the liminal will become a key issue for representing the built environment.

Situationist cartography was a re-reading and re-inscribing of the city. It took various forms, ink and paint on metro or country maps, collages from newspapers and cartoons, aerial photographs and models. Due to their focus on urban design, city plans were one of the most important techniques. The Situationists were looking for new ways of presenting and seeing the city, understanding how it could be understood pyschogeographically, rather than held in the confines of quantitative geographical systems. Instead of observation from a distance, they advocated experience in the action itself.

The dérive itself was shown on the map in arrows whose different sizes, weights and tones suggested differing intensities. Situationist maps aimed to show that moving through the city was always contingent and open to change. The determinants of the dérive were intensities of both emotional and ambient types and an ability to read the characteristics of places that repelled or seduced the drifter. This was described through the analogy of the pinball machine, whereby the urban inhabitants were continually pushed and bounced through the city by unseen forces.201 There were also patterns which were mapped out cartographically, such as the tendency to continue flows along ‘fissures in the urban fabric’, which proved least resistant.202 The dérive was analytically constructed in the map careful placement of the fragmented plans would express how one remembered the sequences of places in one’s journey. The inscription of lines, arrows and borders would show how environments shape our bodies movements. This was most visible in the famous drawing of The Naked City (Fig.4) by Debord, where movements were shown in arrows, lines, points of

201 Simon Sadler, The Situationist City, p92. 202 Simon Sadler, ibid, p90.

147 intensities and explosions.203 Like the dérives themselves, these maps were open-ended and transformational, intimating new possibilities rather than defining end points. The Situationists drew from the original Surrealist descriptions of moving through the metropolis as a coalescence of art and life. The drifter moving through the metropolis saw the pavement as paper upon which their meandering journey would be written. The cartography was connected to the belief that the performance of the dérive itself was a kind of drawing.

Guy Debord and Asgar Jorn would cut up maps and displace and disconnect them, floating segments of the city, disconnected and dislocated from their original connections. In order to map the dérive, the Situationists had to invent new notations of space and time. For the book Mémoires, Debord and Jorn created a series of Situationist maps, combining Debord’s text and Jorn’s paintings. They amalgamated abstract paintings with textural narratives and prose poems, presenting a series of dérives through Paris. This was fundamentally the Situationist image of the city, constructed through the accumulation of personally experienced situations. Jorn’s dynamic paint splatters conjured the expression of desire, the state of drifting and explosions of events, while Debord’s words expressed memories, imagination and desires. They provide a different way of documenting the space of the built environment made by bodily interaction. The images of Mémoires are strange yet evocatively personal mappings, which address the strict specificity of the map. The smell, the dirt, the event of falling over, falling in love, falling asleep, the way places are understood and ingrained in the human head rather than the Cartesian logic of the road map.

In the drawings of Mémoires it is possible to decipher a new cartographic language that grappled with the intangible issues of spatial negotiation such as events, memories and desires. (Fig. 8) In it are methods used in The Manhattan

203 The map of The Naked City (1957) covered a specific area of central Paris, presenting a psychogeographical account of movements across its terrain.

148 Transcripts; collage, constructing series of initially disjunctive spaces and the use of movement notation. They expose the map as an object of imagination, of daydreaming, showing how the perception of places is contingent on a multitude of personal interactions. To move further away from the role of the architecture drawing as a communication device is to understand it as an examination of spatial experience. The following drawings expose the experience of space as a perspectival labyrinth. In contrast to passive representations of environments, they demand from their viewers total immersion.

4.2 Losing Perspective

The autonomy of linear perspective and orthogonal geometry has been questioned by radical architecture groups across Europe and America in search of new ways of incorporating space and bodies into the design process. ‘Archigram’ in the UK, ‘Archizoom’ in Italy and ‘Antfarm’ in the USA, all experimented with the architecture drawing using collage, photocopies and sketches of visionary designs that critiqued the contemporary urban condition. The governing structures of the architecture drawing were exchanged with techniques borrowed from pop culture, more like advertising posters or record covers. Rather than reconfiguring the design process, the aim was to construct new representations of architecture as a subversive form of social critique.

149 Fig.9 Giovanni Battista Piranesi, Le Carceri, plate 6 (second state), 1761. Jennifer Bloomer, Architecture and the Text: The (s)crypts of Joyce and Piranesi, (Yale University Press: New Haven & London, 1993), p.121.

150 Fig.10 Daniel Libeskind, Micromegas 3, Leakage, 1979. Libeskind at the Soane: Drawing a New Architecture (Sir John Soane's Museum: Great Britain, 2001), p.9.

151 Gianni Baptista Piranesi and Daniel Libeskind create two very different images of built space that abandon the designated drawing systems and provide alternative structures in which the architecture drawing can incorporate dynamic and embodied elements. Both drawing types open up a phenomenological relationship between the architectural image and the viewer. A key strategy used by both artists is the play on perspective. In the loss of perspective that occurs in these drawings, is the transformation of depth and scale. This creates a state of immersion, where the viewer becomes part of the image.

Architects such as Bernard Tschumi, Peter Eisenman and John Hejduk have all cite Piranesi’s influence on their work. Piranesi’s architectural etchings from the 18th century retain a flagrant disregard for linear perspective. In his ‘Carceri’ etchings of the mid-eighteenth century, there is no central perspective, but a perspectival labyrinth. (Fig. 9) Forgoing the tradition of single-point perspective means forgoing a single reality. In order to see his ruins, prisons and temples, one must personally enter into the image and move through the drawing, negotiating a way through the spaces. Piranesi’s dream-like interiors disorientate; the spaces seem to seethe and proliferate, drawing the viewer in and letting them fall. The security of a singular dictated way of seeing the world is replaced with multiplicity and a resulting destabilization. The viewer is made to physically feel part of the image, rather than remain at a comfortable, separated viewing distance. This is heightened by the roughness of the drawing style. The coarse strokes allow areas to lose definition and dissolve into shadows.

The contemporary architect Daniel Libeskind would create another kind of spatial mapping in his Micromegas series (1978) (Fig. 10) and Chamberworks (1983). Unlike Piranesi’s visions of ancient Rome, these drawings are more like spatial fantasies. They allude to space and architecture, without providing the viewer with the necessary clues with which to see them as buildings. In these drawings

152 Libeskind creates a new kind of spatial mapping. Rather than starting from the premise of setting down an image of past experiences or concrete places, these drawings propose an alternative understanding of space. They are speculative architectures: they hint at possible but non-prescribed spatial experiences.

Libeskind uses the traditional tools of architectural drawing – compass, set square and ruler, inked lines on paper. The drawings however are purposefully unoriginal. They are drawn from architecture itself and constantly refer back to architecture. Libeskind describes the architectural drawing as: ‘as much[…]a prospective unfolding of future possibilities as it is a recovery of a particular history to whose intentions it testifies and whose limits it always challenges’.204 For this reason he works within the systems of the architectural drawing – a method of subversion from within. Libeskind utilizes the semiotics of architectural drawing but subverts their rationalism, the results are images that are readable in fragments but as a whole seem incomprehensible. Rather than only using the typical architectural language for notating spatiality, Libeskind, who was also a musician, incorporates the language of music. The drawings construct a rhythmic patterning, repeating elements and forming dynamic motile structures that hint at musical scores.

John Hejduk has described Libeskind’s drawings as profoundly phenomenological.205 Architectural phenomenologist Juliana Pallasma has similarly described Libeskind’s drawings as ‘architectonic visions [which] interpreted a new multidimensional space-time experience’.206 Micromegas does not immediately strike one as creating a felt, embodied space. They are hard- edged drawings, full of points and lines, angles like sheer cliffs and broken shards. The drawings have a geometric density that produces multiple points of

204 Jeffrey Kipnis preface in Daniel Libeskind: The Space of Encounter (Universe Publishing: NY, 2001), p.84. 205 John Hejduk, ‘Cross Over’ in Libeskind Macroscope to End Space: An Exhibition at the Architectural Association (Architectural Assoc. Press:UK 1980), p.6. 206 Juliana Pallasmaa, ‘Images’ in Libeskind Macroscope to End Space: An Exhibition at the Architectural Association, p.2.

153 entry. In the same way that Piranesi’s etchings provided multiple perspectives that create a disorientating reading of the space, Libeskind’s images allow one the possibility of entering into the drawing and becoming immersed in the space. As with Piranesi’s etchings, it is not possible to stand separate from it as in linear perspective drawings. One must visually enter the image.

Having multiple perspectives simultaneously present, also liberates the drawing from the traditional position of authority and control. Libeskind’s drawings are continually proposing spatial narratives. Instead of perpetuating the architecture drawing as a representation of absolute truth, Libeskind consciously exposes its inability to present a single understanding of space. He recognises that once something is formalized as built object it is assumed to become fixed. These drawings are his attempt to show architecture as something in flux.

In the fluid environments of both Piranesi’s and Libeskind’s drawings, representations figural imagery is specifically absent. The traditional architecture drawing demanded the submission of the body to the authority of the image. Any bodies on paper are generally featureless and few, their existence dedicated to providing scale. At the same time the viewer’s body must be docile, accepting the authority of the image and what it decides to make visible. In Piranesi’s etchings, outlines of bodies are only occasionally glimpsed in shadows and they are conspicuously absent from Libeskind’s. Yet this does not mean that the body is forgotten. The absent imagery of bodies is a strategy that will be used in both Tschumi’s Transcripts and Hejduk’s Masque projects. The body is central to each of these artists: The body as an experiential entity relating and interacting with the environment around it. In contrast to the figural body in architecture that presents a singular and static form, both artists allow for two kinds of bodies. In order to incorporate phenomenological aspects into the two-dimensional state of the drawing, the body of the viewer is highlighted.

The body in both works is not that of a separate and distanced entity, but of the individual and personal body-subject of the viewer. It is not possible to remain

154 passively separate from the work as in a linear perspective drawing – one must dive into it. Though initially they seem far from images of embodied interaction, both Piranesi and Libeskind make space for the viewer’s body, allowing one to participate in the environment. This emphasis on embodiment, while refusing to regress into pictorial anthropomorphism connect their drawings with new digitally processed drawings. Looking at the work of Piranesi and Libeskind next to some of the contemporary digitally produced examples, reveals many visual similarities that will be further examined in Chapter Five. In the next case study is a concerted effort to rethink the architecture drawing, using cartographic systems. The Masques of John Hejduk reflect the map’s qualities of presenting opportunities of potential movement and interaction, integrating the intangible elements of the poetic experience into its imagery.

155 Figs.11 & 12 John Hejduk, Retired General’s Place, from The Lancaster/Hanover Masque(above) John Hejduk, The Lancaster/Hanover Masque (below) (Architectural Association: London, 1992), pp.25 & 26.

156 4.3 Scripting for Experiencing Bodies The Masques of John Hejduk

The phenomenologist Gaston Bachelard believed that poetry was a strategy for reaching a lyrical engagement with the subconscious. He called poetry a ‘phenomenology of the soul’, because the poetic image draws on the imagination to affect an experiential response.207 In The Poetics of Space, Bachelard dissects the spaces of memory, through poetry: the nests we long to curl up in, the stairways that draw us into secrets and the cellars where we hoard our fears. The poetic becomes a process that encompasses the interiorized phenomenological experience.208

The poetic is a critique that typically comes after construction. It is formed through layered experiences, built up over time. To consider it during the design process therefore initially appears incongruous. To bring the poetic into the architecture drawing is to search for new methods of imagery. The architecture drawing is made up of a series of orthogonal projections with annotated information. It is based on conveying the adequate amount of information needed to either see the building in one’s imagination; and, in the case of the construction drawings, to build it. Neither premise provides the possibility of an embodied or experiential understanding of a building. It is from this point where the late American architect John Hejduk seems to begin.

Hejduk’s drawings delight as much as they dismay. The obscure imagery and poetic narratives that accompany them are often considered pretentious and impenetrable. Looking at these drawings I am drawn into them; they immerse me in a drama that I

207 Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space trans. Maria Jolas (The Orion Press: NY, 1964), p. XVI. 208 As discussed in Chapter One, phenomenology formulated around an interior body too easily leads to another form of figural projection out into the world. This is the danger of reading Hejduk’s drawing purely through a Heideggerean or Bachelardian view. Instead, by focusing on transformative exchanges between bodies and built environments, Hejduk’s Masque projects can be read as bringing a performative engagement into the architecture drawing.

157 cannot quite fathom and must therefore fill in with my own thoughts and memories. Instead of presenting only built forms, they also show the aspects typically absent from the map or architectural drawing – the movements, actions and bodies. In these projects the architecture drawing is rewritten as a presentation of the performance of, and in, architecture. While Hejduk’s drawings seem to bear few similarities with Tschumi’s graphic notations, they share an underlying belief in the interweaving of bodies, events and architecture. While the Transcripts describe the incorporation of movement into the architecture drawing, the drawings that make up Hejduk’s Masque projects bring the experiential into architecture drawings that are typically distanced and passive. Instead of presenting drawings of specific buildings or places, the Masques provide the scripts and backdrops for actions and events.

The Masque projects provoke two key questions. First: how does one draw the sensorial body? Second: how does one draw spaces for their embodied movement? If the architecture drawing is a presentation of the tectonic elements of a building, how is it possible to incorporate the other intangible elements of architecture. Hejduk chooses to focus on these absent aspects of architecture. They are memories and emotions and how people view their surroundings or the way people enact rituals in certain places. The author Wim van dem Berg described the framing device of the Masques as, ‘Theatrical/architectural models in which Hejduk simulates the space of poetic thought in order to investigate its qualities and order, the “architecture of inhabiting it”’.209 Rather than focusing on the metaphysical elements of the poetic, looking at what van dem Berg could mean by an ‘architecture of poetic inhabitation’, provides opportunities for rethinking the architecture drawing in terms of embodiment and indeterminacy. The space of these drawings, situated somewhere between theatre and architecture, provides a liminal site bound by neither and thereby open to questioning and examination.

209 John Hejduk, The Lancaster/Hanover Masque, (Centre Canadien d'Architecture: Canada, 1992), p.83.

158 Hejduk’s Masque projects use the theatrical script as a structure in which to bring bodies, spaces and buildings together. While the Transcripts draw on diagrammatic techniques to incorporate the moving body, Hejduk’s Masques are reminiscent of choreographic scores. While the Transcripts utilise modes based on cinema, the Masques are indebted to theatre. Unlike the Transcripts, which documented extreme events in realistic spaces, the Masques propose quotidian possibilities in the liminal space of the theatre. Instead of information for building an object, Hejduk provides information on people and their actions.

In a literal sense Hejduk uses the poetic in the accompanying text to open up interaction with the reader rather than limit it to specific characters or situations. The narratives that accompany each structure and character must be personally deciphered. Their ambiguity provokes reflection. The texts allow for improvisation, for taking on the role oneself. The poetic also describes the strategy that Hejduk uses through each Masque. The Masque is a structure that engages the imagination through the theatrical, drawing the viewer into the drawings.

Hejduk has left an abiding legacy from his teaching to such publications as a book of cartoon-like sketches titled Architectures in Love.210 Hejduk has consistently denied that building is essential to architecture, proclaiming that ‘drawing on a piece of paper is an architectural reality’.211 Instead, he has rigorously explored the discipline through poetry, drawing, hypothetical urban and residential designs and the Masques.

It is significant of the complexity of Hejduk’s work, that these projects have been scrutinized through so many different theoretical lenses, from the linguistic and

210 John Hejduk, Architectures in Love: Sketchbook Notes (Rizzoli: NY, 1995) Hejduk was Dean of architecture at Cooper Union New York for twenty-five years. He has mentored and influenced many innovative American architects of the late 20th century, advocating the interdisciplinary nature of architecture. Elizabeth Diller, Don Bates, Peggy Deamer are all ex-students of Hejduk’s who have been vocal of his influence, but this is most apparent in Daniel Libeskind’s work. Libeskind also wrote the introduction to Hejduk’s collected works, The Mask of Medusa (Rizzoli: NY, 1989). 211 John Hejduk, The Mask of Medusa, p.69.

159 metaphysical to urban theory and critiques of modernity.212 Their status as architectural drawings that incorporate embodiment and motion, is useful for rethinking them through the discipline of performativity. Architecture theorist K. Michael Hays describes the aim of Hejduk’s drawings as: ‘to destroy the false picture of a world already finished, whose features are already decided before the architect arrives on the scene, to purge architecture of decades of accumulated biases and partitions.’213

As with Libeskind’s architectural mappings, our recognition lies in the language of architectural communication that Hejduk employs, a communication that implies built form. Site drawings, elevations and sections betray their disciplinary roots through the tools of compasses, rulers and coloured pencil renderings. While this strategy will initially lull the viewer into the supposition of their status as ‘real’ building designs, their seduction lies in the continual slippage between fact and fiction. Here the presumption of the architecture drawing as a pictorial representation of reality is used to question our own assumptions about architecture. The people who inhabit buildings, what they do and what the buildings look like, assume the status of information in these drawings. What the viewer is left with is an intermingling of character, event and building – a performative understanding of architecture.

4.3.1 Drawing Restraints

Hejduk began the Masque projects in the late 1970s. Each drawing is titled with a European city: Berlin, Lancaster/Hanover, Vladivostok, Riga. The Masque was a type of dramatic entertainment from the European mummery tradition, popular

212 For a collation of different theoretical approaches to Hejduk’s work see Hejduk’s Chronotype (Princeton Architectural Press:1996, USA), which includes essays by writers such as K. Michael Hays, Robert Somol and Stan Allen. 213 K. Michael Hays (ed.), Hejduk’s Chronotype, p.13.

160 in the 16th and 17th centuries. These events were presented for courtly entertainment, usually incorporating mythological or allegorical figures. The narratives of Masques were traditionally open ended and without a building storyline or crisis, more like festivals than theatre productions. Stage sets were incorporated into existing spaces, often elaborately designed by leading architects of the time. They defined a specified space, cordoned off from reality similarly to the carnival. These historical details form the grounding of Hejduk’s projects, on top of which he builds his own, architecturally focused, performative form.

Hejduk calls the first project ‘A Contemporary Masque’ with structures, emphasizing the inclusion of free standing, architectural objects. The composition of each Masque is text and drawing: character and action, beside an image of an architectural form. As in the typical architecture drawing, the text – usually appearing as annotations – are integral elements of information in the drawing. A physical script, in the form of a site map, places each object and provides the blueprint for imagined interaction. The Masque creates a field in which the interplay between people, events and buildings becomes visible.

In setting the stage for improvisation in the drawing, the viewer is continually prompted for physical manifestations. We ask: What will happen between these characters and their strange buildings? How will the Masque be acted out? Or are they still-lives, tableaux? Does the Masque only happen once? Are events played and replayed, night after night? How can you envision the movement and interaction of the spectator around these events? Will the usual programs suffice between these strange partnerships of characters and structures. The naiveté of Hejduk’s drawings prove deceptive, making them easy to dismiss as simply playful images. There is often something too clear and simple about them. The flattened perspective of the structures in the Masques produce a cartoon-like appearance. One is rarely sure about how to enter them. If they have doors, how can they open? Are the windows actually transparent glass, or like eyes revealing only your own reflection? A Masque

161 implies something hidden, something beneath the surface. When Libeskind describes Hejduk’s work as making visible the invisibility of architecture, he is describing the carnality of everyday life.214 The elements normally absent in the architecture drawing or map are the corporeal mess, encounters, deviations, memories – too garbled and elusive to pin point using Cartesian co-ordinates.

4.4.2 Liminal Opportunities

The Masque’s placement in the theatrical defines a liminal site, but the architecture drawing, being essentially an illusion of real places as previously discussed, also describes a liminal space of representation. Replacing cartographic clarity, the Masques are located in an in-between or other space, where the typical program of architecture does not apply. Released from the onus of representing reality, the Masques can deviate from typical spatial representations, providing an alternative to space defined by Cartesian systems. The word ‘liminal’ comes the Latin limen, which translates to ‘threshold’.215 The was made very popular in performance studies through Victor Turner, who used it in terms of rituals describing a state of ‘betwixt and between’ social catagories and personal identities.216 Richard Schechner notes that what interested Turner in the liminal was the opportunity for creativity to be brought into rituals, whereby new situations, identities and social realities could be performed and explored.217 The liminal is essentially an ambiguous and open site, and in this sense it is an ideal space for performative actions.

The liminal creates a spatial opportunity for deviant architectural exploration, making room for transactive relationships and actions in the architecture drawing. The usual

214 Daniel Libeskind, introduction to The Masque of Medusa, p.16. 215 Richard Schechner, Performance Studies Handbook (Routledge: USA, 2006), p.58. 216 Victor Turner quotation in Richard Schechner, ibid, p.57. 217 Richard Schechner, ibid, p.57.

162 structures of the architecture drawing are dissolved through this liminal site. Siting architecture in a liminal space allows for the performative and makes space for improvisation.

The Masques trace a journey. They are reminiscent of a band of travelling players presenting a show and disappearing over night, only to appear again in another foreign city. They have the seductive quality of circus performers or magic-makers. Hejduk had only visited half of these cities. The Masques are not meant to be extrapolations of a specific city’s site analysis, but like a circus are implanted into each new site. Similar to a performance troupe, they animate the new location with their actions. Buildings are presented in architecture drawings as monumental, cut out from their surroundings and spotlighted. The theatrical setting of the Masque gives them the quality of stage props. There is no permanence to them – rather, they are firmly placed in the ephemeral as if they could be packed up in a few hours and sent on to the next site. In this way Libeskind describes the Masques as locating architecture in a human condition rather than a physical place.218 They are constructed by bodies, rather than by places. The absence of site specificity in the architecture drawing is highlighted in these drawings, because they are so markedly detached from any sense of place. Libeskind contends that the act of specifying location shuts out the possibility for the performance of architecture.219 Architecture becomes freed from representation. It is through this liminal siting that Hejduk can thus critique this notion of being and architecture. Eisenman strategizes this issue of site through what he calls ‘the graft’. By removing traditional ideas of location, Eisenman believes architecture can focus on its own specific issues, such as inhabitation. Grafting becomes the process that is added to a place.220

218 Daniel Libeskind, introduction to The Mask of Medusa, p.14. 219 Daniel Libeskind, ibid, p.14. 220 The graft is an artificial act upon the site, where the new system or structure transforms the existing one will be explored further in the Chapter Five in terms of Eisenman’s design of the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe.

163 The Masques have often been described in terms of the historian and cultural theorist Johan Huizinga’s descriptions of “states of play” and philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin’s examinations of the “carnival”.221 Both describe temporary spaces separated from prescribed and productive reality. This allows for aberrant actions. The carnival is traditionally a space of release and celebration from the everyday, but Hejduk’s Masques do not speak of escape, the angels have amputated wings and the people are weighted with everyday fears and ambitions. 222 Instead, Hejduk uses the essentially liminal space of the drawing to question the relationship between bodies, Events and buildings. The suspension of normative social and temporal rules and structures allow the possibility for new social configurations. Rather than the typical scripting of movement and interaction, the bodies within these spaces are enabled to improvise.

4.4.3 Drawing Space & Time

In the carnival, conventional temporal rules are overturned. In Hejduk’s Masques the relationship between time and motion is emphasised. This is exemplified in the Berlin Masque’s structure of the Clock Tower, an architecture of temporality. A tower is numbered along two sides, when the hour strikes a square blank surface covers the number. Hejduk explains, ‘blocking it out so to speak, or we can not see fixed time, or

221 In the 1930s the Dutch historian and cultural theorist Johan Huizinga described the “state of play” as a separate space outside of ordinary life, where free, voluntary, unproductive and non- ulititarian acts could occur. Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element (Beacon Press: New York,1986). Mikhail Bakhtin describes the carnival in terms of collectivity, as a space which gathered together people beyond the typically held social, economic and political catagorizations. Costumes and Masques heigtened the subsuming of the individual into a larger, performing body, promoting a greater sense of ones own sensual self. 222 The ‘carnivalesque’ is a term, which comes from the carnivalizing of normal life. The carnival inverts official social norms, and in this way they can be considered highly subversive, proposing alternative social possibilities. They were also traditional events where participants would be totally immersed in a separated world that was turned upside down, and therefore allowed for alternative performances.

164 feel the present, we are simply in motion’.223 Motion takes the place of time, a continual sense of moving on, forward, backward, and the action of events rather than the linear structure of time. This state of motion, however, only heightens the sense of the present. The clock does not define the time; time is defined by the body.

Hays uses the term ‘Chronotype’ to describe Hejduk’s work, also the name of a collection of noted essays published about Hejduk.224 The term is also taken from Bakhtin, who defined the Chronotype as the phenomenal aspect of a constructed space, holding specific temporal and spatial features.225 Hays quotes Bakhtin’s description of a space where, ‘time, as it were, thickens, takes on flesh, becomes artistically visible, likewise, space becomes charged and responsive to the movements of time, plot, and history.’226 In the performance the Hejduk Masques, space is understood, as in Schlemmer’s dances, as something volumetric. No longer passive, the space actively interacts with the people and objects within in it. Temporality gives way to the transaction between bodies and this solid space.

4.3.4 Theatrical Perspectives

The Masque was historically a specific from of theatre whose perspective changes through movement. In contrast to the proscenium arch, masques were originally viewed while moving through external spaces such as courtyards. Unlike the Renaissance Theatre that would evolve later, there was no dedicated stage in the masque and the division between spectator and performer often

223 John Hejduk, The Mask of Medusa, p.141. 224 K. Michael Hays (ed.), Hejduk’s Chronotype. 225 The term ‘chronotype’ was described by Bakhatin in his essay ‘Forms of Time and of the Chronotype in the Novel’ in terms of literature. Chronotype literally translates to ‘time space’, expressing the essential intermeshing of time and space in concrete reality. 226 Mikhail Bakhtin ‘Forms of Time and of the Chronotype in the Novel’ in Micheal Hoquist, ed. The Dialogic Imagination, Carl Emerson & Holoquist, M, trans (University of Texas: Austin, 1981), quoted by K. Michael Hays, introduction to Hejduk’s Chronotype, p.10.

165 blurred. This was heightened by the fact that courtiers often participated in the performances along with the actors. In order to present this through the drawing, Hejduk infiltrates the traditional systems of the architecture drawing with the theatrical.

The presentation of the Masques is the listing of character and event next to an image of the structure. The images themselves retain the fixed nature of architectural orthogonal projections but they are destabilized by the text, or rather by the bodies described in the text. In this way, to describe the employment of perspective in the Masque projects are through both image and text, and as an unfolding series, rather than encapsulated in a single image. Unlike the typical architecture drawing, there is no single viewing point and the boundaries between subject and object are uncertain.

Motion is highlighted in the Masques through the essentially static quality of drawings and text. Unlike Tschumi’s Transcripts, where the drawing system itself incorporates mobility through cinematic and dance techniques, the Masques are almost disturbingly static. The carefully delineated and rendered architectural drawings present themselves as empty spaces awaiting inhabitation, devoid of figures and dependant on the accompanying text for action. In the Transcripts perspective becomes multiplied and montaged, layering in the manner of Libeskind’s Micromega drawings. In Hejduk’s Masques perspective is something one travels through. The Masque is read in movement from one event and structure to another.

This dramatic program is produced in the drawings by Hejduk’s refusal to present a single, overall image. Instead the spaces unfold as one moves through them. There are site plans showing the layout of structures, lists of structures and characters, rough sketches. They are almost incomprehensible when read individually, but in accumulation they build up the performance. There is no finished, single performance – and one is forced to give up on the idea of finding

166 it. As one begins to randomly look at different structures or pick out character names, one realizes that the performance is already underway in one’s reading of it. The drawing is not the Masque, it is the script for the Masque. But it provides the potential for the performance, a potentiality lived out in its reading. This interaction between the reader and the Masque bring the body into these projects.

4.3.5 Drawing Bodies

As noted in the drawings of Piranesi and Libeskind, the absence of figural body allows the possibility of the viewer, allowing them to enter the imaged space. In the Masques there are two bodies that are presented: the character within the drawing and the body of the viewer. In the same way motion in the Masques is two fold: the character’s action within the Masque and the viewers navigation through the space of words and images. These two bodies negotiate the space of the theatrical Masque and the space of the drawing, a process that enacts the performance of Hejduk’s architecture.

The body in Hejduk’s Masques is shown as a trans-active, creative force. Whether it is the architecture working on the body or visa versa, the interaction of object and subject is essential. The body is presented in the Masques as the specific body. In this first body it is not simply a physical, abstracted entity, but a character, named and expressed through a dedicated action. In this way Hejduk denies generalizations: the bodies are individual bodies in line with a phenomenological reading. The body is characterized to become a specific body – the time-keeper, the general, the suicide. The character described in the text functions as the bodies within the drawing. The body is not imaged in the Masques, but shaped in text. Rather than physical descriptions, the characters are presented through an event. These bodies then are formed by their actions,

167 rather than external features. Their personal interactions in space are what shape the environments. The viewer receives only a name and an event against the backdrop of an architectural form, they must fill in the gaps themselves and writer their own performances.

The body of the viewer is needed to fulfil the latent action of the Masques. They are a game in which to participate whereby the viewer animates the still images. When viewing the drawings, the emptiness between objects is extreme and strange. There are almost never people drawn into the images of the Masques, only very occasionally as shadowed figures aimed to show scale. The text functions to fill these empty spaces or rather for the viewer to fill it. In this way the viewer’s body becomes essential. Motion is presented through the text of the event. This is created by the viewer: one reads the text, and in the process imagines the event. This is fundamental to the Masque becoming a performance, the active (through the imagination) participation of the viewer. The perspective is custom-built. In this way the viewer’s body becomes the co- ordinating point around which the environment is constructed.

4.3.6 The Creative Collision of Bodies and Buildings

In the Lancaster/Hanover Masques Hejduk describes the first three drawings as X- rays. These extraordinarily fine and detailed pencil drawings, stand out separately in detail and style. They seem to expose the internal organs of the buildings they present. Hejduk describes the Court house as exposing the entire story, where the accused is sentenced, the judge seen through. But when you look at the drawing, there are no figures or tableaux of this event, only the structure. 227 The rendering of

227 John Hejduk, Masque Lancaster/Hanover, p.13.

168 the drawings expose the narratives of events that shape it. It is as if this repeated scene had become ingrained into each carefully wrought line.

The impact of individual bodies on architecture takes on a dreamlike quality in the Masques. The initial reassurance of their clinically constructed pencil lines and the repeated use of archetypal building typologies (towers, bridges, theatres etc), transforms into a growing discomfort. The shapes become almost too familiar, spikes, hair, claws protrude from walls and prisons, anthropomorphic or animistic, dangerous and monstrous. Van den Burgh suggests that they can be read as prostheses of the inhabitant, man-made extensions in architectural form.228 Like the cyborg, where flesh and metal combine to construct a new human body, the architecture in Hejduk’s masques seem implanted with visceral, bodily qualities. Where as with Schlemmer’s costumes, the body takes on architectural propose that extend out toward the surrounding environment, it is the buildings in the Masques that seem to reach out to the inhabitants. Far from being a subservient backdrop to human emotions and actions, the architecture appears to actively act back onto people.

In the interaction of bodies and architecture Hejduk reveals the most provocative questions for the possible practice of performative architecture: in the performance of everyday life, do buildings shape bodies or do bodies shape buildings? In this chicken and egg paradox the question for the design process is which end should we start from? The body could be a reflection of the architecture, or architecture’s reflection in it. It takes the idea of phenomenology, where space is felt through embodied action to an extreme, where the built space is also intimately formed by the inhabitant. One is not sure what happened first – has the structure transformed over years to become an extension of its owner? Or has the person somehow taken these obtuse shapes into their consciousness? The clearest example is ‘The House for the Suicide’, where the harsh radiating roof of spikes evoke clearly and emotively the internal desperation of the inhabitant. The question of whether buildings are shaped by bodies or the other

228 Wim van den Bergh, ‘Icarus’ Amazement, or the Matrix of Crossed Destinies’ in Masque Lancaster/Hanover, p.83.

169 way round, is constantly being posed. If the architecture has not anthropomorphised into an avatar of its inhabitant, has at least been formed by the events within it?

The key question posed by Tschumi was how Events sculpt built environments. Tschumi showed it through the disjunction of Events and spaces, that it is the interaction between Events, buildings and what they are programmed for, which create architecture. Hejduk is putting forward a similar claim, but his strategy is based around embodied Events. In doing so the Masques retains an even greater ambiguity, allowing for personalized interaction. Rather than focusing on disjunctive relationships, Hejduk presents Events and buildings as seamlessly connected.

Many writers have described the Masques in terms of a matrix as a structure for understanding their complexity. As with Tschumi’s Transcripts, each disparate part constructs a reality through its relationship with another element, creating an interlocking system contingent on each connection. In this way it that it is not possible to say that the forms are made by bodies or the other ways around. Instead, it means to understand the relationship between events and structures as interwoven, in constant dialogue and change.

Hejduk’s Masques become a distillation of the relationship between architecture and inhabitant. The buildings themselves are merely odd forms without their human partner, fixed shapes while the characters contain the stories. The structures are essential in order to place the bodies. The text of the Masque functions as an essential piece of the project, as opposed to explanatory wording. Together the two propose architecture. This proposition however is not itself architecture. The architecture occurs through the Masque, through the performance between character and structure. The actions of the inhabitants performatively construct the architecture. The existence of the architecture is only within the performance because it occurs only through action. For example the vault passage of the bank is constructed by the Bank-Key Man’s ritual of key

170 making; the Weatherman’s tower is made by his refusal to forecast the weather. Hejduk’s Masques are important in questioning the architecture drawing because they bring together bodies and buildings in the most profound and poetic sense. They endeavor to map the very personal interactions that occur in real space, between real bodies.

Rather than fetishizing architectural forms, Hejduk shows that only through the interaction of people and buildings can drawings begin to present architectural properties beyond the purely tectonic. Instead of perpetuating the great distance between the architecture drawing and the viewer, that drawings can pull you into spaces, allowing you to participate in the performances, inhabit the places. These emotive performances refuse to remain distanced from the viewer. As a result they transform the traditionally silent state of buildings and expose its many voices. As theatrical scripts they propose that rather than seeing bodies and buildings as separate and hierarchical entities, that their interactions and subsequent transformations are continually interweaving. Allowing opportunities for improvisation across this script, means allowing for creative and active involvement. An important part of any drawing is the language it uses to present the non-visual qualities of space. The incorporation of experience and motion for example, demand abstractions of information. For this reason it becomes useful to look to the field of dance for how it has coped with similar difficulties in its documentation.

4.4 Drawing Dance

In forgoing the assumed state of the body as figure, the architecture drawing can open the design process to new bodily understandings. Transcribing the phenomenologically understood body is a difficult project. It means fixing the multiple sensory and ever shifting body into a graphic system, while at the same

171 time relating that body to the spatial surroundings. The moving body is one of the invisible elements of the architecture drawing. It is implied in the blank spaces between the lines and the possibility of traversal and gathering as walls create corridors and openings. When the body is absent it is assured, consequently, that it is an element that will be included post-construction. In this way it is made to ‘fit’ into the architecture. To incorporate it at the beginning of the design process is fraught with difficulty.

Drawing the living body has been of great importance to the discipline of dance, whose practice, being based on live performance, has had to grapple with the difficulties of its documentation. Dance notation provides possible systems of representation focused on the animate body. By using a language connected with movement, it brings with each notated line the intimation of the body moving through space. It shares with architecture the use of movement diagrams. Unlike architecture, which sees them as additional information, the central issue for dance is this body in space. Several contemporary choreographers see this interaction as dynamic and interactive and have been dedicated to searching for new modes of representation in order to document this.

The relationship between dance and architecture notations is few. The Feuillet- Beauchamp system in 18th century France presented body movements and floor plans combined like architecture drawings, so that the front of the stage was also the top of the page. Generally however, the two systems have found little common ground in the past. At the same time that architecture drawing systems were first being refined, the Renaissance also saw the early development of dance notation. Ballet was performed on a proscenium stage, thereby choreographed for single-point perspective. As dance steps became more popular and complex during the 17th century, the previously basic notations became systemized. However these notational forms still failed to show what should happen from the waist up. It was not until early in the 20th century that systems based on abstract information, rather than imagery, were developed.

172 This shift toward abstract systems occurred as a result of the desire to incorporate elements that pictorial representations fail to include: energy, force, direction, intent and potentiality. In abstracted representational systems the shape of movement is not as important as the movement itself. This can be seen in Wassily Kandinsky’s drawings of Gret Palucca in 1926, which present a body distilled into a minimum number of brush strokes.229 Kandinsky created diagrams for a series of photos of the dancer that encapsulated the dynamic action of each pose. The body is presented as creative force, rather than a passive figure in space. It shows how abstracted techniques can allow intent and direction to come into the image. These drawing were of a single dancer striking particular poses. When movement must be considered in multiple transformations, it becomes much more complicated.

The dance score functions similarly to the drama script or musical score. It tends to document a creation, or present a set of instructions delineating how a piece is to be performed. On the one hand like the architecture drawing, the score is a form of translation. On the other hand, unlike the architecture drawing, it holds few of the illusions to authenticity, where, particularly in the drama script, ranges of interpretation has become a generally accepted practice. It presents an overview of an artwork, it is the blueprint of a work that clarifies the intent of the original creator. The notion of the score, therefore, provides opportunities to infiltrate the architecture drawing with the ambiguous and the indeterminate.

The difficulty incorporating the dynamic body into a fundamentally static image has led choreographers to look beyond their own disciplinary borders. Due to their intermingling of theatre and the fine arts, the Bauhaus produced interesting examples of movement scores. In Lazlo Maholy-Nagys’ essay ‘Theatre, Circus, Variety’, he included a score for his suggested production of a Mechanized

229 ‘Dance Curves of the Dance of Gret Palucca’ (1926). Kandinsky analysed four photos of the German dancer Grey Palucca taken by Charlotte Rudolphe. See Ulrike, Becks-Malorny, Wasily Kandinsky 1866-1944: The Journey to Abstraction (Taschen: Koln, 1999).

173 Eccentric.230 It was to be a musical variety show that synthesized form and colour, light, sound and odour.231 In this score the difficulties of the choreographic score is made apparent. Maholy-Nagy was trying to find an alternative way of scripting theatre productions, which was no longer reliant on traditional dramaturgies. His drawing looks like a film score by Sergie Eisenstein or a systemized puzzle of different kinds of imagery and notations. He wanted to incorporate into the drawing the interconnectedness of each element in his production. His sketch for the Mechanized Eccentric score is a vertical score showing the relationships of the different elements for a performance. The first column is made up of collages as well as what looks like movement notations. This formatting will recur in The Manhattan Transcripts, drawing on the cinematic and a matrix of performative elements.

In the last century choreographers have developed a variety of new notational techniques.232 The difficulty has been how to incorporate time and direction into a written system. The first and most influential notation system to do this was invented by the Austrian choreographer Rudolph Laban in the 1920s. Labanotation is the first descriptive vocabulary of movement specifically designed for the field of dance that aiming to record every type of human movement. Duration, movement and the shape of movement was integrated into a complex, graphic language. More than the creator of a movement notation system, Laban formulated a theory of movement based on relating body structure to the structure of movement in space. Laban understood movement as a dynamic process operating between stability and mobility, with the various elements of bodily movement as connecting parts of a unified whole.233

230 See Lazlo Maholy-Nagy ‘Theatre, Circus, Variety’ in Walter Gropius, (ed.), Theatre of the Bauhaus, ibid. 231 Lazlo Maholy-Nagy, ibid, p.49. 232 Two of the most used systems in dance are the Eshkol-Wachmann and Benesh notation. Eshkol-Wachmann Movement Notation is a general movement technique that is essentially numeric, whereby the body is conceived like a stick figure. Benesh notation on the other hand presents three dimensional movement like a musical score on a five line stave that corresponds dimensionally to different points on the body. 233 Vera Maletic, Body-Space-Expression: The Development of Rudolf Laban’s Movement and Dance Concepts (Mouten de Gruyter: Berlin,1987), p.52.

174 Gestures were presented in terms of space, time, force and flow, showing direction, duration and energy. He had initially studied architecture and had a keen awareness of space in his examinations of bodily documentation. Body movement was understood by Laban as built up in space, with direction as the most important element. He ‘believed that moving into various spatial directions contains a form- building force, similar to the building of crystalline forms’.234 The appearance of Labanotation has the look of a musical score in the graphic form of a Bauhaus etching. Being able to encapsulate the multitudes of physical movement in a graphic way is seductive, but their complexity leads to a tendency to see them as representational imagery.235 It may be postulated that this led to Herzog de Meuron’s decision to ignore Laban’s famous notional system in their design of the Laban Centre in London, in favor of capturing movement itself across the façade.

4.3.1 Drawing Chance

The renowned avant-garde musician and artist John Cage inspired many choreographers and performers during the 60s and 70s to incorporate potentiality and chance into their work. Cage’s performance scores merge mapping techniques and informational systems, pushing the conventional assumptions of authorial control. The choreographer Merce Cunningham has been known to choreograph dance sequences by rolling dice. To bring potentiality into the drawing means relinquishing complete control over the final product. Indeterminacy in the design process will become a key tactic for several digital architects, leading to philosopher Brian Massumi’s description of ‘Post-heroic architecture’. The use of indeterminacy to create new kinds of movement and

234 Vera Maletic, ibid, p.176. 235 An example can be seen in the Stevie Eller Dance Theatre on the University of Arizona campus in Tucson that was completed in 2004. Designed by Gould Evans Associates, the design was based on the Labanotational score for the noted choreographer Goerge Balachine.

175 form may be the key overlapping issues between contemporary architecture and contemporary dance.

Specific to both the architecture drawing and the choreographic score is the issue of potentiality. Both drawing types do not aim to represent past actions, but future ones. This means building flexibility into the performance script. Traditional ballet scores and notations present only body shapes, where teaching becomes a process of mimicry. They are formulated on defining fixed events. Alternatively, contemporary choreographers have endeavoured to understand that notations must present a body that is never still, but holds multiple potentialities of movement.

In their shared dismissal of Cartesian space and traditional dance forms, many contemporary choreographers have drawn on different artistic disciplines to present new kinds of movement and interaction. In breaking away from traditional dance typologies, new forms of documentation are needed. Technology has become central to creating systems that can document and represent the essentially live medium of dance. An example is Cunningham, who uses dance notation as a creative starting point, drawing on new technologies. Cunningham was the first notable choreographer who began experimenting with integrating computer technologies into dance works.236 Cunningham uses LifeForms software (now called DanceForms), as a generative device for exploring new kinds of movement.237 LifeForms is a program for creating, storing and editing movement, but is more suited for experimentations in choreography than documenting it. It is ideal for use in collaboration with live performances, and as a tool for creating new kinds of movement. In his well-regarded production of BIPED in 1999 with digital artists Paul Kaiser and Shelley Eshkar, motion capture images were projected onto scrims, allowing dances to perform in real time with their avatars.

236 Jose Gil analysed Cunningham’s choreography using Deluezian theory, describing it as creating a new choreographic language. See Gil’s essay José Gil La danse, le corps, l’inconscient. Terrain n.35 septembre 2000 Danser 237 LifeForms software for choreography developed by a design team from Simon Fraser University in Vancouver. It is now called ‘Danceforms’.

176 Accepting the scripting of living bodies in architecture, means finding new ways of incorporating these bodies into the design process. Instead of focusing on the documentation of solid forms, to look at bodily transition and spatial transaction is to bring into the drawing process possibilities for chance and improvisation. As contemporary dancers such as Cunningham and Forsythe utilize new technologies, the disciplines of dance and architecture start to converge. What dance may provide is methods that respond to the difficulty in retaining the animate body in the virtual acrobatics generated by new, generative, architectural programs. By focusing on the moving body, the interaction and overlap of technologies can bring issues of the environment into dance practice and the body into architecture.

Architecture drawings typically consider these issues from the perspective of the built environment rather than the body. As a result they typically fail to consider the space between bodies and buildings, choosing instead the solidity of buildings. What follows is an analysis of a project by Tschumi who takes the similar themes of the event and the experiential, but is focused on reinterpreting the traditional systems of the architecture drawing. In Tschumi’s drawings of The Manhattan Transcripts can be seen an innovative experiment in endeavouring to capture multiple emotive, physical and bodily elements – in motion, on the page.

177 Fig.13 Bernard Tschumi, from The Manhattan Transcripts, 1978. Bernard Tschumi, Architecture and Disjunction (MIT Press: Cambridge, MA, 1994), frontispiece.

178 4.5 Exploring Movement in the Architecture Drawing The Manhattan Transcripts

Bringing movement into the architecture drawing has become a central concern of the architectural design process. The accepted dualism of body-subject and architecture-object has traditionally allowed only one aspect to be in movement. The weight of architecture has made it the inert element and its mode of representation has followed suit, presenting in paper form, objects in stasis. Reconsidering these assumed states means finding new ways of incorporating motion into the architecture drawing. Bringing movement into the static image of the architecture drawing presents a paradoxical problem. While movement has been the key aspect traditionally missing from the architecture drawing, CAD programs are allow the possibility of bringing dynamism into the design process itself. Firstly however, new systems of notation must be developed in order to facilitate this process. The conundrum of bringing movement into the architecture drawing is illuminated in a project by Bernard Tschumi from 1978. The Manhattan Transcripts was a book in which Tschumi invented a new architectural notational system, combining photos, architectural drawings and movement diagrams into a filmic sequence of images. Tschumi addresses the problematics of the architectural drawing, creating a model for seeing spaces as opportunities for embodied action.

Because of his teaching and extensive publications, Tschumi has been an important figure in architectural discourse for the last three decades.238 Tschumi’s continual and often radical examinations of body, event and space in architecture, make his work important to consider in constructing a theory of performative spaces. His projects have evolved from theoretical propositions to buildings, and retaining the argument

238 Initially during the 1970s and 1980s Tschumi taught at the Architecture Association in London with Rem Koolhaas, Daniel Libeskind and Zaha Hadid and later as dean of architecture at Columbia University, New York.

179 that there is no architecture without events.239 Reacting against both the dominant modernist and post-modernist paradigms, Tschumi demands that architecture give up its dedication to monumentality and stylistic concerns. He argues that architecture must move beyond the doctrine of ‘form follows function’ and embrace human movement and actions. Inspired by Situationist writing and French urban theory of the 60s, Tschumi explored how these politically charged theories could be incorporated into architectural practice. From his early theoretical projects to the large-scale, commercial architecture designs of today, he explores various ways of achieving this.

“In order to understand architecture,” Tschumi argues, “one must not ask: what does it look like? But rather: what is happening in that space? What motion is inhabiting it”.240 Breaking from the historically fixed definitions of architecture, The Manhattan Transcripts propose the following: for architecture to encompass the moving body in space, the process of making and thinking it would have to change. The Transcripts are not meant to be representations of existing spaces or imaginary visions, but – similar to Libeskind’s Micromegas series – they are described by Tschumi as ‘an architectural interpretation of reality’.241 In this way the Transcripts are distinct from the typical brief of the architecture drawing, as either the presentation of potentiality, or Piranesi’s visionary architectural spaces. Rather than a narrative based solely on people’s actions, in the Transcripts the environments contribute their own stories. They provide a new way of envisioning space, which is built around moving, laughing, living bodies. This is in contrast to the descriptions of the built environment as a stage set, ‘architecture ceases to be a backdrop for actions, becoming the action itself’.242

The Transcripts appear more like film scores than architectural drawings. Looking at them is to see the world in flux. The images are fragments caught or stolen

239 Bernard Tschumi, The Manhattan Transcripts (St. Martin's Press: UK, 1995), p.121. 240 Campiotti, Alain, ‘An Architect Who Wins the World’, trans. by Sylvia Hottinger, Saturday 7th, January, 2006. Letemps Journal Website. Retrieved 10.05.2007 241 Bernard Tschumi, The Manhattan Transcripts, p.7. 242 Bernard Tschumi, Questions of Space, Text 5 (Architectural Assoc: UK, 1990), p.95.

180 from time, you must piece them together like clues. They create stories that are spatially transcribed, urban environments shaped and molded by a series of extreme events. The Transcripts incorporate multiple drawing systems in order to formulate each narration and in doing so become critiques of what is absent in the typical architecture drawing.

Tschumi understood that performance practices provided a connection between the event and architecture. Focusing on live actions as the impetus for spatial understanding becomes the basis for his thesis on architecture as an event. His projects with students at the Architecture Association in London during the 70s drew on dance and theatre as well as literature and film. He also collaborated during this time with the performance artist Rosalee Goldberg. The performance of the fall or the murder is enacted in the Transcripts, which repeat each performance like a film. But their lack of clarity means that each performance will always differ depending on the reader. In this way they are far from the fixed and static nature of the traditional architecture drawing.

The Transcripts are an exploration of how to document the late 20th century city. They are similar to how the Situationists explored different mapping techniques in the images depicting their drifting through the Paris. By including time, experience and movement, both Tschumi and the Situationists questioned the core techniques and practises of spatial representation. Tschumi aimed to bring the ephemeral experiences of the body into the practice and the understanding of architecture. His method in The Manhattan Transcripts can be described as a cinematic narrative of space. It distinguished what he saw as the three key interconnected elements: events, motion and architecture. The Transcripts provided a new way of imaging space built on these three programs, specifically devoid of the traditional semiotics of architectural representation. In order to do this Tschumi imported several new language tools from cartographic, cinematic, movement and dance notation. By integrating alternative, but recognisable, methods of representation with traditional architectural drawings, Tschumi

181 proposed a holistic way of seeing the built environment, rather than the singular vision portrayed in traditional drawings. There are three key strategies that Tschumi employs in order to bring motion into these drawings: the layered use of multiple notation systems, the integration of movement diagrams and the development of cinematic techniques. These elements provide a vision of architecture in constant transformation, a state created by the events that occur within it.

4.5.1 Spaces, Programs, Events

The Transcripts must be examined, considered and then deciphered. It is necessary to unravel their systems (architectural notations, movement diagrams, film scores), in order to read them. The architectural programs that stand as titles to each chapter are the spaces that are realised through the drawings: the park, the street, the tower, the block. These chapters are made up of a series of images, amalgams of maps, photos and diagrams in repeated layouts and combined into a small book of sixty pages. The Transcripts present the world of events in photographs, the world of objects in architectural drawings and diagrams, and the world of movements through choreographic notations. Each of these aspects can be interpreted independently, but as interwoven images they produce new interpretations, new narratives.

What Tschumi wanted to highlight is the disjunction created between spaces, programs and events – the ballerina boxing in the church. In the chapter ‘The Block’, the built space is five inner courtyards of a typical city apartment block. It is inserted with unusual figures, such as ice skaters, footballers and soldiers. The focus of these drawings is the disjunction between events, movements and spaces and the outcomes and confrontations these disjunctions produce. Many theatre groups from the avant-garde in London at this time were taking performances into unusual spaces, and playing with the outcomes of such everyday theatres. During the time Tschumi

182 was working on the Transcripts in London, several artists such as the group Fluxus and the choreographer Merce Cunningham were experimenting with the relationship between built spaces and art. They recognised the site specificity of where they performed, searching for stages out of theatre in order to explore new relationships between performers and architecture. From his disciplinary position in architecture, Tschumi emphasized that it is what happens within built environments that makes them what they are. The spaces of architecture are not fixed and absolute, but are transformed by the events that occur within them.

Tschumi considered events as instantaneous and ungrounded. The introduction elucidated Event theory as a specific approach taken up by Post-structuralist theorists in order to rethink time and space. The Transcripts provide a strategy for bringing these theories into the process of designing architecture. The program of a project typically describes function and use. Instead of seeing programs as the singular functional requirement for a project, Tschumi considered them as only a series of events. Tschumi disrupted the conventional use of programs in architecture by introducing alternative, extreme events, such as a murder and someone falling from a building. By doing this he was questioning spatial function – something traditionally seen as the core of architectural design. If form follows function, what happens if the function of a building is transitory or bizarre?

The importance of the Transcripts lies in the questions it poses for the architecture drawing; one such question is how to construct true representations of the world? Through the Transcripts Tschumi asked: How can a different process of design, for so long held in traditional drawing systems, change architecture? If we start drawing the world differently, how can it make us design differently? The use of techniques of representation that remained unchanged for five hundred years point to the possibility that space and bodies are stable and fixed. Or provoke the reconfiguration of the architecture drawing to incorporate the changed in contemporary space and bodies.

183 4.5.3 Multiple Notation Systems

The architecture drawing typically presents the vision of the architect. The accumulation of multiple notational systems breaks down the assumption of a single narrative. Instead, they propose several possible viewpoints that occur simultaneously, from the different protagonists within the stories, an omnipotent presence or the viewer’s own interpretations. It is a question of reading: how do we read architecture drawings, maps or dance scores? What are we looking for and what are we expecting to find? Because the focus of the Transcripts is on architecture, rather than characterization or narration, their method of presentation revolves around spatial systems.

The Transcripts define a sequence by layout. There is a natural progression of frames when read in the typical Western manner – front to back, left to right, from the top of the page, down. They lend themselves just as easily when read backwards, or diagonally. Indeed it is difficult not to start reading them erratically, dipping into random pages, making one’s own connections. The repetitive format supports this, transforming the image into an illustrated hypertext. Tschumi wanted to allow the individual frames to be read singularly but also able to be rearranged in relation and contrast. The transcripts demand an active reading, the viewer needing to imagine and uncover connections and threads, rather than passively accepting information. The use of montage to juxtapose frames, allowed for the participation of the viewer in writing the score. Tschumi believed that this way of seeing space was closest to the experience of built environments. Reality was made malleable, emphasizing that it is what one does in it that matters.

Similar to Piranesi’s and Libeskinds’ drawings, understanding the Transcripts means to actively participate in them. In the chapter ‘The Street’ for example,

184 one’s body is continually moved, rearranged, scaled. One’s eyes follow the background blueprint of the Manhattan street map, pacing down 42nd Avenue across the orthogonal grid. The urban movement is reminiscent of a Situationist dérive, traversing the cracks and in-betweens of an urban fabric, both real and imagined. To move over this single street is to cross various different types of borders, weaving across and through spatial boundaries that do not appear on the usual street map. Tschumi uses photos to create a subjective reading of each event. The photos turn the reader into a witness. They place the reader inside the event. They make them an accomplice. Unlike in the Carceri or Micromegas drawings, Tschumi incorporates a system of changing spatial perspectives rather than a single, multiple one. One is continually jolted into a sudden perspective, or a sectional cut. Instead of the distanced, bird’s eye view of the map reader, one is taken abruptly inside the buildings, between the two lovers, on the street. In this way the Transcripts are not only images of spaces, but propose embodied interaction. Individually they are often seductive, but rarely informative. They show how a representation repeatedly changes in relation to another and that there is no single answer encapsulated in one image, whether a plan, section or ‘close up’.

4.5.4 Movement in the Architecture Drawing

Instead of the Euclidean container, space is portrayed by Tschumi as a cinematic series of events, of intensities assembled together. Rather than being an absolute or fixed concept, he describes this spatial state as an ‘eventmental dimension’, that resides in a spatial structure of ‘sequence, open seriality, narrativity, the cinematic, dramaturgy, choreography’243, this proposes that existent representations of architecture are inadequate in describing spaces formed by Events. By drawing on a

243 Bernard Tschumi, Questions of Space, p viii.

185 cinematic system of representation, Tschumi acknowledged the importance of a particular way of seeing the environment. This kind of seeing is based on transformation rather than a static, all encompassing image. As described in Chapter Two, Edmund Husserl’s kaleidoscopic imagery in the act of walking, defines seeing as a process of accumulating images of one’s surroundings while in motion. Presenting this essentially experiential act in a drawing demands a system of moving images.

The layout was drawn from cinema, like a film reel of consecutive shots. Tschumi was inspired by the Russian director Sergei Eisenstein’s film scores, which juxtaposed music, colour, movement and image into vertically montaged sequences. They create visible rhythms, synchronizing the various elements of the film. The other obvious influence is the stop-motion work of photographer Eadweard Muybridge and Jules Étienne-Jules Marey in the late nineteenth century.244 These documented movement for the first time through sequenced photographic frames. Using a process that Marey incorporated in his photographic series of moving bodies and animals, particular points on limbs and joints are high lighted. They provide threads through each consecutive image, tracing a geometry of movement.

While the Muybridge and Marey photo sequences are an evident visual source of inspiration, what differentiates them from the Transcripts is their sequence of linear narration. The photos aim to elucidate a clear understanding of body movement. Tschumi aims his drawings towards encapsulating the experience of space. The sequencing process that Tschumi uses in the Transcripts is fundamental to how one reads them. The sequence meant that each frame was seen in the context of the surrounding ones. When understood as part of a whole, each frame alters the one that proceeds and follows it. This allows for a

244 Muybridge and Marey both worked in the second half of the 19th century, exploring the documentation of movement through the bourgeoning technology of photography. While Muybridge developed performances around these images, showcasing the novel representations to excited crowds, Marey was more interested in the scientific implications of this new form of graphic recording.

186 plurality of readings and interpretations rather than a single correct answer. The continual use of the square is fundamental to this process. The square provides an accepted, stable structure, which can be in turn manipulated and transformed by the images that it contains, sometimes taking over the frame itself. In the same way that life cannot be unfolded into logical sequences, Tschumi’s Transcripts show that architectural images don’t have to be either.

Movement Diagrams

The logic of movement notations ultimately suggests real corridors of space, as if the dancer has been ‘carving space out of a pliable substance’; or the reverse, shaping continuous volumes, as if a whole movement had been literally solidified, ‘frozen’ into a permanent and massive vector.245

The Transcripts the incorporate the diagram directly into the architecture drawing. The movement diagram is the only existing architecture system that represents motion. It is the diagram most typically used in the practice of architecture, though a plurality of diagrammatic forms are now beginning to infiltrate practice.246 It is a specific type of diagram, which in architecture has a very functional purpose – to show high traffic areas, sizing of thoroughfares and corridors and the need for greater flow or stoppage. Movement diagrams are typically seen as purveyors of information separate from the main drawings of buildings, though more recently they are used more and more in the early stages of design. The movement diagram is drawn as a flat surface. Its potential three- dimensionality has been limited to building walls around the lines representing movement.

245 Bernard Tschumi, Questions of Space, p.10. 246 The diagram will be discussed in Chapter Five as a key system in new digital design processes.

187 In the Transcripts, movement diagrams are integrated into the architectural imagery. Tschumi was the architect who began to play with movement diagrams and explore how they could be used in more creative ways to make architecture. Tschumi wanted to use movement notations to focus on the spatial effects of movement. He used them extensively ‘to recall that architecture was also about the movement of bodies in space, that their language and the language of walls were ultimately complementary’.247 How this complementary relationship finds built form, however, is far from simple. Tschumi understood that movement diagrams could only recall the idea of movement, not encapsulate it. To extrude lines directly upward from movement diagrams is to create spaces directly from abstracted information. Movement notations are two-dimensional lines presenting information of movement, not movement itself. They present bodies as homogenized patterns inscribed on the ground. The problem becomes how to consider body movement three dimensionally in terms of volume rather than lines.

Oskar Schlemmer acknowledges the problems with accurately translating body movement from drawings. He used the disjunction between moving bodies and drawings in order to generate the dances and costumes of his ballet. In this way drawing interacts with the choreography, rather than being considered as useful only prior to a work or after it. Schlemmer recognised the difficulties with theatre or dance notation to encapsulate his radical experiments on stage. Schlemmer recognised that the disjunction between the body and the way movement drawings present motion from an aerial view, could motivate new opportunities for thinking about the relationship between the floor plane and that body. Schlemmer writes:

[I]t should follow the plane geometry of the dance surface and the solid geometry of the moving bodies, producing that sense of spatial dimension

247 Tschumi, Bernard, Questions of Space, p.94.

188 which necessarily results from training such basic forms as the straight light, the diagonal, the circle, the ellipse, and their combinations.248

Schlemmer thought through the dances on paper, the movements the dancers traced across the floor connected upwards into gestures and movements. These became the solid forms of the costumes he designed. These were not simple extrusions of lines, as is the case with architectural movement diagrams. The two-dimensional lines on paper became the instigators for three-dimensional forms. This relates to how Schlemmer defined the planimetry movement diagrams in contrast to the stereometric essence of body movement.

The typical movement diagram has led to the simplification of movement itself into abstract lines without depth. This is evident in Tschumi’s earlier project ‘Screenplays’(1977). (Fig. 14) In these drawings stills from films are juxtaposed next to diagrams of the protagonist’s movements. Tschumi extruded the lines to form volumes, creating axonometric sketches of the negative space formed by the moving body. They are literally physically constructed spaces. What is also evident in the last chapter of the Transcripts, where the movements of groups such as the footballers, sculpt strange three-dimensional forms. Or in the third chapter ‘The Tower’, portrayed as a single column of five changing rows, which charts a fall from a great height and the spaces that made from the falling body. The forms created from this technique are bulbous and uninhabitable. The point is not to provide an alternative type of movement diagram, but to show how conventional movement diagrams, drastically oversimplify the representation of movement through space.

248 Oskar Schlemmer, Diary September 1922 (Pasedena Art Museum: USA, 1968), p.228.

189 Fig.15 Bernard Tschumi, Screenplays 1977. Bernard Tschumi, Architecture and Disjunction (MIT Press: Cambridge, MA, 1994), p.152.

190 The Transcripts propose that the representations of built environments are poorly conceived in typical architecture drawings. They show that in order to instigate previously absent elements of embodied motion and changing emotion, architecture will have to look beyond its disciplinary borders. Cinema and dance are two fields whose graphic systems can be plumbed in order to expand the design drawing. The Transcripts can be read as a possible way of constructing drawing systems that embrace the three-dimensional body movements of Schlemmer’s dancers, as well as the mutually interactive environments of Acconci’s installations.

Tschumi uses the cinematic as a methodology to bring movement into architecture drawings. The key difficulty in his approach, despite his focus on movement, is becoming fixed on an optically cantered position. The camera (a device of representation) is the key source in the Transcripts that emphasizes the image. In this way, abstracted notations are more useful in allowing embodiment into the drawing. The design of architecture is now being created using digital, three-dimensional drawing techniques, far from the limitations of plan, section and even axonometrics. The premise of Tschumi’s argument however, remains the same, as is epitomized in The Manhattan Transcripts. It is that architecture must explore the very margins of bodily experience in order to create built spaces for real life. Because in reality the events that people play out are complex and various, whether it is a dinner party or a murder. It is not possible see the world as purely isolated elements and there is a danger in Tschumi’s work to dissect body, space and events into compartments. Focusing on singular events, moments in time and space, suggests designing architecture in cuts or frames per second. Design becomes based around the incongruity of the break and a specific image, rather than an experienced fluidity. More important than Tschumi’s repeated proclamation of bodies, events and spaces, are the connections, overlaps and negotiations between these elements. It must be remembered that a holistic understanding of spaces can only be achieved through these interconnections of people moving and living in space and in

191 buildings. The Transcripts present a methodology for how the architecture drawing can present the negotiation of the body and architecture. In doing so, the Transcripts propose new kinds of architectural spaces.

4.6 Drawing Conclusions

This chapter has examined two aspects typically omitted in the architecture drawing: motion and embodiment. The case studies have presented drawing notations and systems that incorporate a phenomenological interpretation of the body and conceptualise space in new ways. They use different strategies in bringing these elements into the drawing of built space and propose opportunities for rethinking the design process. These examples emphasize the need to look outside the discipline of architecture for alternative processes. The fields of film, dance, cartography and theatre, all provide fertile arenas for incorporating the phenomenological body. Each example showed that bringing the body into architecture does not need to be limited to a figural approach. In doing so, the opportunities for a physical and individual body in the built environment were explored. This meant integrating phenomenological issues of tactility and motion. These practices proposed spaces shaped around individual experiences, emphasizing the immediate, physical impact that environments have on bodies.

Chapter Three presented examples of how the collision of bodies and built space have been explored – how this in-between space has been described, mapped out or remade by different artists. These case studies so far have all been transient structures. Whether staged or mapped out in a dérive, they are built in the ephemeral space of the event. What happens when these strategies are solidified into architecture form, with all its pragmatics and functional requirements? The static nature of the experiential body implies a significant difference between the examples so far examined and architecture projects. When perceiving an artwork, the body is at

192 a distance from the object or image. While projects were specifically chosen which break down this convention, the site of the gallery still involves a delineation between the body of the viewer and the object or environment to be viewed. By breaking down the distance between viewer and object, from personal interaction to dynamic transaction, these projects build up the notion of a dynamic body-subject. Vito Acconci understood this essential difference and this led him to start working with built architecture in order to connect directly with people.

These examples seem contrary to the essence of typical notions of architectural practise – the edifice of building, the shaping of artificial environments and the act of construction. Their status as art/design projects frees them from pragmatic issues of construction and function. The explorations presented in this chapter have implications for practical approaches to the design and making of contemporary architecture. These processes have been generated, if not instigated, by technology. As architecture has turned to computers to generate drawings, certain strategies are better suited to this new medium. The diagram is particularly appropriate to digital usage and has been heralded as the new essential device for architecture. Other kinds of systems, such as alternative mathematics, also suggest new kinds of spatial thinking in the design process. The following two chapters bring these architectural explorations into buildings. In drawing out a series of strategies that have emerged from the performance and drawing projects, it is possible to begin analysing built, architecture.

193 ChapterFIVE Non-standard Architecture

194 From the two spatial conditions based on bodies and drawings, this chapter looks at the new design processes that are emerging in what has become known as non-standard architectural design. The last two chapters explain how performative practices have brought the living body into the way space is made and represented. Following from John Hejduk’s and Bernard Tschumi’s experiments with the architecture drawing, this chapter presents the contemporary context for innovative architectural practice. This context is examined through the new spaces in architecture and the new tools for its making. It begins by looking at the developments of the architecture drawing. This is in order to propose new ways of bringing concepts and information into the design process. Design methods are being formulated around advances in technology, which are creating new tools of representation, production and most importantly design. This shift is exemplified in the retrieval of the diagram as a mode of conceptualisation in the design process. New digital design processes have been just as distanced from living bodies as their analogue predecessors. This chapter suggests that the key to unlocking this problem may be found in digital programs that create fluid systems where ideas are integrated within transformative processes, rather than a directly translated into form.

Alternative modes of considering the end result of the design process has led indeterminacy to become a key tactic in digital design. This is promoting new spatial structures based on the fluid technologies visible not only in the tools, but in the multi-spatial environments we now inhabit. These spaces are creating a specific kind of design process and aesthetic under the general title of ‘Liquid Architectures’.249 In examining these new spatial forms and their novel interfaces with bodies, this chapter claims that the body’s relationship to these porous and fluid environments is an essential issue for designing buildings in today’s condition. From these new processes and spaces that are shaping architectural

249 This was term was used by Marcus Novak , see ‘Liquid Architectures in Cyberspace’ (1991), April 23, 2003. The Artmuseum Website. Retrieved 10.01.2007 at

195 practice emerge four key strategies: destabilization, flux architecture, improvisation and blurred space. In the light of these patterns it is possible to analyse contemporary architectural examples.

5.1 Performative Design Processes

‘Non-standard architecture’ has been embraced as a term to describe the kinds of architecture emerging out of new, computational design processes.250 In 2003 the Centre Georges Pompidou presented a landmark exhibition of this name, showcasing the leaders in this bourgeoning field that included the work of NOX, UN Studio and Greg Lynn.251 As the name suggests, non-standard architecture describes architecture that deviates in process and, or, appearance from standard architectures. While non-standard architectural practitioners are still in the international minority, it is their work that is becoming regarded as the future of the discipline.252 Their impact on the discourse of architecture is rapidly increasing however, as more examples of non-standard architecture are completed.

The term ‘non-standard’ places itself against the traditional making of standard architecture, understood since modernity as dependant on standardised systems of construction and mass produced components. It describes a methodology rather than an aesthetic. The praxis however, has up until now retained a noticeable style generated from digital tools, where complex curved shapes can

250 Andrew Benjamin describes the term in his article ‘Non-standard’ in Architecture Review, no.87, p.34. 251 The exhibition ‘Non-standard Architecture’ was curated for the Centre Pompidou by Frederic Migayrou. It explored the implications of algorithmic design processes on architecture, showcasing who Migayrou saw as the twelve leading architecture firms of innovative, contemporary architecture: Asymptote, dECOi architects, DR_D, Greg Lynn, KOL/MAC studio, Tom Kovac, NOX, Objectile, Kas Ooosterhuis, R&Sie , Servo and UN studio. 252 This has been previously referred to by Stan Allen in Federation Square, Melbourne, Australia Lab Architecture Studio, Assemblage 40. (Dec., 1999), p.59.

196 be easily manipulated. Where previously points, lines, planes and volumes delineated spatial forms, architectural design now grapples with splines, nurbs, fields and folds, which can cultivate entirely novel lines and shapes. From these basic CAD drawing tools through to entirely new digital design systems, new kinds of forms can be easily designed and manipulated.

An important break through in design modelling is evident in parametric design. Parametric design is a design method formulated through a focus on parameters, rather than shape. Catia is a notable parametric design system, used by Frank O. Gehry for the Guggenheim at Bilbao. The geometry in parametric design is based on associations between data. These parameters create a structure for designing in a virtual paperspace, where information and form is interconnected. The technique originally comes from engineering, and is pragmatically useful for designing structural loading. Parametric design allows aspects of a design to be manipulated, automatically showing repercussions for the building as a whole. The modelling software allows the designer to directly work with the complex structural functioning of a building’s form.253

Parallel to new drawing tools becoming conventional apparatus in architectural software, is the development of hardware to bring them into actuality. With CAD design has come CAM (Computer Aided Manufacturing) processes. Digital fabrication allows for scaled models of buildings to be drawn as well as 1:1 building components to be generated directly from digital images. CNC (Computer Numerical Control) cutting and milling, as well as new 2D fabrication and Rapid Prototyping, means complex shapes on the virtual screen can now be constructed.

253 Bentley's Generative Components system is another parametric design program becoming widely used. Parametric design is the basis of many BIM (Building Information Modelling) programs. This is another three-dimensionable modeling system more focused on production rather than the extraordinary shapes produced by parametric design programs.

197 These design processes are being defined by two specific areas; the first is new spatial structures based on fluidity and the technology in which architectures can now be designed. Both create unique kinds of architectural form. Rather than their original role as tools for representation, since data can have a direct impact on how a building looks, computers have become instrumental in the form making process. Instead of design methods focused on an end result, new architectural modelling programs are based in different processes of working. These programs are generative devices, not representative tools. They provide modes of generating form through coded information, this involves simply modelling three-dimensional forms with a mouse, or the creation of a data code to create new kinds of spatial programs. They are performative methods, based in action, in doing. New programs such as those used by Lars Spuybroek (which will be examining in Chapter Six) are formulating ways of bringing these performative methodologies directly into the design process.

Notable figures theorizing the architectural possibilities of these new technologies from the early 90s were Greg Lynn, Marcus Novak and more recently John Fraser and Mark Burry. They are all considered pioneering figures in critiquing the repercussions of these technologies on architecture, arguing that technology has changed the relationship between the body and space. Philosophically, digital architects have drawn on the work of Michel Foucault, Henri Bergson and Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, as examined through the work of philosophers such as Andrew Benjamin, John Rajchman and Elizabeth Grosz. Foucault’s concept of the diagram has been very influential, as has Bergson’s philosophy of duration. Both fit well with the possibilities for motion and information that computational drawing and design technologies provide. Deleuze’s texts have shown to be particularly applicable. Deleuze describes the reconfiguration of the object, which can be used to describe this new way of making architecture:

The new status of the object no longer refers to its condition to a spatial mold in other words, to a relation of form-matter but to a temporal

198 modulation that implies as much the beginnings of a continuous variation of matter as a continuous development of form.254

Deleuze declares that object making can no longer the understood simply in terms of its final product. Instead, the entire process of it’s making must be considered, a process that is now based on continuous transformation.

5.2.1 The Diagram

The diagram can be understood as a method that encapsulates the way non- standard architecture is being worked through in the design process. A diagram represents how a thing works rather than what it looks like. In this sense it becomes ideal for use in a design methodology dedicated to process rather than an end form.

As previously discussed in Chapter Four, choreographic notations are graphical systems in which body movement can be imported into the architecture drawing. Techniques from dance notation and scores have the potential for breaking down the static nature of architectural form. They incorporate movement, interaction and embodiment into the architecture drawing. Alternative structures can also be seen in quantitative notation systems. While not a new addition to the design process, the diagram has recently become a key strategy in the use of digital architecture, both as a conceptual and practical tool. Here, data is abstracted into systems that can be integrated into the architecture drawing.

Abstraction is the key issue for diagrams, distilling information often to the point of detachment. Diagrams present spatial relations and systems without being

254 Gilles Deleuze, The Fold, Leibniz and the Baroque, trans. by Tom Conley, (University of Minnesota Press: Minneapolis and London, 1993), p.19.

199 held by the orthogonal projection of architecture drawings. Rather than presenting the purely tectonic elements of an environment, the diagram can incorporate movement, change, flows and rhythms. It can also present organizations and other kinds of physical or physiological issues. It is therefore possible to argue that diagrams propose a strategy for transcending Euclidean space and single-point perspective. Unlike the conventional architecture drawing, the diagram is a generative device rather than a representation of presence. In this way it has been called performative, rather than representational.255 By abstracting information, the diagram describes such issues as what people do, how they act or what they can do in a space, rather than describing what a space looks like.

Toyo Ito is considered the first to use the term ‘Diagram Architecture’ in 1996 to describe Kazuyo Sajima’s minimal architecture as a spatial diagram of function and movement.256 Subsequently the work of Lynn, Ben van Berkel and Caroline Bos, and Rem Koolhaas have all been described using the term. Eisenman particularly applied the diagram as a term to describe his process of thinking and working. 257

The diagram has traditionally been used as a schematic instrument, but not seen as integral to the design process. As Anthony Vidler notes, diagrammatic architecture has previously been ‘a term more of abuse than praise, signifying an object without depth, cultural or physical, one subjected to the supposed tyranny

255 As well as Deleuze and Guattari, architectural theorists Robert Somol, Stan Allen and Anthony Vidler have also described the diagram as performative. 256 Toyo Ito ‘Diagram Architecture’ El Croquis, 77, no.1,(1996), pp.18-24, referred to by Anthony Vidler, ‘Diagrams of Diagrams: Architectural Abstraction and Modern Representation’ in Representations, No. 72. (Autumn, 2000). JSTOR. Retrieved 09.01.2007 at < http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0734- 6018%28200023%290%3A72%3C1%3ADODAAA%3E2.0.CO%3B2-G> 257 Eisenman adopted the term to describe his work over the last twenty years, his monograph in 1999 was titled Diagram Diaries.

200 of geometry and economy’.258 The reason why it has been ignored in architectural drawings and why it has now become so popular is because the diagram has typically presented quantitative data. The last decade has seen a significant resurgence in interest within both the discourse and practice of architecture.259

The diagramming technique originally popularised in architectural practice by Christopher Alexander in the 70s was based on the abstraction of form into an authentic typology. 260 Alexander’s idea of the diagram was pictorial as opposed to the generative structure proposed by Deleuze and Guattari. Deleuze described the diagram as an “abstract machine” where information is produced.261 In Deleuze’s critique of Bentham’s panopticon he describes the diagram as that which brings together space and language. It makes visible the hidden structures of language, and therefore, power. From Deleuze and Guattari comes the understanding of the diagram as that which allows for transformation and continual becoming. The new generation of digital architects are using the diagram as based on these Deleuzian definitions, which Eisenman describes as ‘a supple set of relationships between forces [which] form unstable physical systems that are in a perpetual disequilibrium’.262 This instability is in direct contrast to the static, monumental nature of architecture as represented in the architecture drawing. Instead, Eisenman describes the diagram as a presentation of forces, regardless of gravity. In terms of the design process it allows for multiple, potential results. Rather than situating information in a stable

258 Anthony Vidler, ‘Diagrams of Diagrams: Architectural Abstraction and Modern Representation’ in Representations, p.8. 259 ‘Diagram Work: Data Mechanics for a Topological Age’ edition in ANY Magazine 23 (New York, 1998) and the ‘Diagrammania’ edition of Daidolos 74, 2000, were both dedicated to the growth in diagrams within architectural practice. 260 See Christoper Alexander, Pattern Language and Christopher Alexander, Notes on the Synthesis of Form (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1964). 261 See Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. 262 Peter Eisenman, ‘Diagram: An Original Scene of Writing’ in Peter Eisenman, Diagram Diaries (Thames & Hudson: London, 1999), p.29.

201 reality, the diagram is based in a state of flux. This suits its use in digital mediums, which actively promote these flows.

The architectural theorist R.M. Somol claims that the diagram has now become architecture’s foremost and final tool in both discourse and practise, serving as a subversive agent that acts between form and word.263 Somol argues that the diagram has been transformed from a graphic information system, to that which incorporates into architecture a variety of cultural, social, political and phenomenological forces. Diagrammatic processes, therefore, destabilize the architecture drawing by integrating these new systems. Somol contends that Eisenman’s use of the diagram as a dynamic, generative technique throughout the 80s and 90s prophesied the new digital architects use of 3D modelling tools.264

Typically, a key problem with the diagram as a technique for architectural creation has been that it too easily slips into pure abstraction. The diagram has often been connected to the modernist edict, which, breaking against previous forms of representation, positioned itself against past symbols and references. The new wave of diagram architects are not using it as a form of abstraction, but as a generative system. Nevertheless, in the same way that figural architecture used the body’s form as a blueprint upon which to extrude built forms, so too does the diagram easily lead to representative symbols. As drawings, they become a complex arrangement of symbols that are literally transferred into built environments. This can be seen in Bernard Tschumi’s design of Parc de Villette. By retaining traditional methods of drawing, albeit with new notational systems, the diagram remains static and stable throughout the process. Instead, digital architects such as Lynn, Novak and Spuybroek treat the diagram as a starting point to the design. In order to do so, alternative kinds of geometry are needed to construct these buildings

263 R.M Somol, introduction to Diagram Diaries, p.7. 264 R.M Somol, ibid, p.10

202 5.2.2 Alternative Geometries

When form is no longer determined by a prior field or ground given to an independent or overseeing eye, it starts to operate in other, less systematic or predictable ways.265

Possibly the most radical shift in the architectural design process has been the incorporation of chance. The above statement by John Rajchman describes how, by breaking away from conventional and historically constructed architectural design systems, new kinds of processes can be explored. Fundamental to these new architecture drawings is prioritising indeterminacy ahead of the certainty of a finished shape. This strategy is perpetuated through new digital design processes, but also highlights improvisation as a valid element in considering the design of built environments. Thinking of indeterminacy in new design processes is not restricted to simply these digital programs. It also impacts the way that bodies behave within architecture. Indeterminacy means losing control of the process and risking error. As a creative strategy, it is beginning to achieve acceptance in architectural practice. Mark Burry has written that it has reached the point where ‘emerging critical theory[…]has no embarrassment in accepting, or benignly accommodating or even celebrating the accident or error’.266 Several architects are looking to alternative non-linear systems, such as complexity, biological or evolutionary based theories.

Computers have opened design to new ways of bringing concepts and information into the process of making environments. Lynn claims that complex geometries and mathematics have always been accessible, but computers have enabled their usage to become commonplace. Responding to the inadequacies

265 John Rajchman, Constructions (MIT press: USA, 1998), p.107. 266 Mark Burry, ‘Paramorphe’ in Hypersurface Architecture II, AD Profile 139, (Academy Editions: London, 1999).

203 of the architecture drawing has led to a growing interest in alternative modes of geometry. This has meant a resurgence of interest in pos-Newtonian physics. Hyperbolic Geometry and Reimann’s Spherical Geometry provide two examples of different ways of seeing and creating objects in space.267 Rajchman looks at the impact of these other geometries in architecture, examining how to philosophize geometry and relate it to the construction of architecture.268

The discrepancy between Euclidean geometry and the material world was articulated by Edmund Husserl in his book ‘The Origin of Geometry’(1936). Husserl traces the replacement by this geometry of the material world with idealized objects. This results in what Husserl believed to be a turning away from lived space. Reflecting back on the primordial geometry proposed by ancient philosophers, Husserl notes that it is the same world today as it was then. Thus he describes the desire to return to this original state of geometry. This thesis is based on the argument that technology has changed the relationship between bodies and the world around them – that it is not the same world. Nonetheless Husserl’s assertion regarding the failures of Euclidean geometry has been recognized in the influx of support for non-Euclidean geometries. The architecture theorist Bernard Cache argues that, despite the inherent discrepancies between Euclidean geometry and real space, it is still the most useful for generating architecture in. Cache describes Euclidean space as ‘not true, but fittest’ of all geometries. 269 Cache argues that new processes such as topology present a methodology that provides multiple Euclidean possibilities, rather than unique non-Euclidean ones. They are mobile systems, but as soon as the process is stopped and the form is decided upon, it becomes a Euclidean object.

267 Grosz discusses these alternative geometries in Space, Time and Perversion, p.95. 268 See Rajchman’s essay ‘Other Geometries’ in John Rajchman, Constructions. 269 See Bernard Cache, ‘Plea for Euclid’ Architettura Supereva Website. Retrieved 12.04.2007 at

204 Rajchman is interested in the relationship between the spatial geometries of what he defines as the effective or affective.270 Affective is described by Rajchman as creating ‘operative space’, describing the potential and unanticipated movement and interaction of bodies. In the first, bodies are inserted into an existing spatial structure, while the second allows for unexpected movement and interaction. The former is the idea of static, dimensional space, while the latter encapsulates ‘the geometries of the living’.271 Rajchman sums up the importance of these two geometries for architecture in the provocation: ‘Which is more important for the geometries of building, Euclid or Virginia Woolf?’272 If one accepts the importance of these other geometries that delineate experience and interaction, how is possible to bring them into the architecture process?

Anexact geometry describes the way computers can now generate shapes previously impossible in architecture. Husserl invented the term to describe a type of geometry that was neither exact or inexact, but at the same time rigorous in its conception.273 It was to be between precision and its opposite, something that was not fixed. This geometry creates forms that cannot be flattened and cannot be reduced to the points and dimensions of Cartesian space. Instead, it is rather a three-dimensional form based on information. Lynn notes that the distinctions between exact, inexact and anexact have become critical to the rethinking of spatial design.274 This form is not constant, but one that is in continual transformation. Data is fed into the computer, whose interplay shape potential, unanticipated forms. It is the act of the architect to halt the transformation process and choose a particular form. Using new software it has

270 See Rajchman’s essay ‘Other Geometries’ in Constructions. 271 John Rajchman, Constructions, p.99. 272 John Rajchman, ibid, p.101. 273 See Jacques Derrida, Edmund Husserl’s Origin of Geometry: An Introduction, trans. by John P Leavey, Jr. (Lincoln, Nebraska, 1989) and Giles Deleuze, and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism And Schizophrenia. 274 See Greg Lynn, ‘Probable Geometries: The Architecture of Writing in Bodies’ Georgie Institute of Technology Website. Retrieved 14.05.2007 at

205 become possible for computers to generate not only scaled models from virtual images, as well as full scale building elements.

New design modeling programs are opening architecture up to unprecedented geometric forms. Lynn claims that these alternative mathematics supply architecture with the possibility to measure and therefore design and make using strategies of amorphousness and indeterminacy.275. The opportunities of computational capabilities now available to designers was made apparent in the continuing construction of Antonio Gaudi’s design of the Sagrada Familia in Barcelona. Burry designed and utilized digital programs that could replicate and continue the complex mathematical system that Gaudi had designed for the cathedral.276

One argument against tampering with conventionally accepted architectural notation systems regards its role as a source of accurate information between designers, builders and engineers in the construction process. Although suitable for theoretical projects, this issue of actuality becomes essential when dealing with the complex building of a project. This is the sticking point for many digital architects, whose end products, when rarely built, have been extremely expensive and difficult to manufacture. Until recently they have rarely lead to an impressive end product. With the inevitable computerization of the construction process however, comes the generation of buildings directly from the digital modelling program. Unlike earlier CAD programs, parametric and BIM design allows a smooth transition from designing in virtual environments, into construction and fabrication drawings. This fluidity of production, mirrored in the surfaces and forms of these designs, is what has been termed Liquid Architecture.

275 Greg Lynn, ‘Probable Geometries: The Architecture of Writing in Bodies’, ibid. 276 In the 1970s Marc Burry began working on Antonio Gaudi’s complex, compositional geometries in order to continue the construction of the Sagrada Familia in Barcelona, which lacked Gaudi’s finished construction drawings.

206 5.3. New Spatial structures

Liquid architecture is an architecture that breathes, pulses, leaps from one form and lands as another. Liquid architecture is an architecture whose form is contingent on the interests of the beholder; it is an architecture that opens to welcome me and closes to defend me; it is an architecture without doors or hallways, where the next room is always where I need to be it and what I need it to be. 277

This is how Marcus Novak described his use of the term in 1991. New design processes are creating new spatial structures. These processes are sited in spaces both virtual and actual, mediated and permeated by various technologies. Novak describes this as ‘Liquid Architecture’, where the architectural form has the fluidity and continuity of liquid. This image of liquidity encapsulates the aesthetics of this kind of architecture. UN Studio directors, Ben van Berkel and Caroline Bos describe the impact of digital design programs as turning architectural design ‘into a wave-like process dealing with dynamic fields of forces’.278 Space is conceived of radically different in this process as has been conventionally in the representation and design of the built environment. A self- proclaimed ‘Transarchitect’, Novak writes that cyberspace has created new architectures, constructed in different environmental fields based on programmable information.279 Both Perrella and Novak subscribe to a concept of space and architecture as malleable surfaces instigated by new digital programs.

277 Novak, Marcos, ‘Liquid Architectures in Cyberspace’ (1991), April 23, 2003. The Artmuseum Website. Retrieved 10.01.2007 at 278 Noted by Kari Jormakka, Flying Dutchmen: Motion in Architecture (Birkhauser: Basel, 2002), p.51. 279 Novak creates an architecture that exists only in the digital domain with no physical reality, calling it ‘Transarchitectural’.

207 The term ‘blob’ has become a general and usually pejorative term to describe digital architecture. It was however, initially used by Lynn to describe the idea of continuous surfaces. This directly relates to generative CAD programs and the ease in constructing these kinds of environments. But the term ‘Liquid Architecture’ is not only descriptive of form, but of an architecture based on experiences, movement and forces.

In Novak’s description ‘Liquid Architecture’ is itself animated and metamorphic. It reacts to the body in new and innovative ways, unbound by traditional ideas of form and function. The salient characteristics of this kind of architecture are fluidity (as the name suggests), but also interactivity. In this malleable world, the architecture transforms and responds to users. It is the antithesis to the traditional idea of architecture as permanent and characterized by stability and immobility – a stage set in front of whose façade the body moves. Lars Spuybroek describes Liquid Architecture as the liquidizing of the traditional solidity of architecture, through the infection of media.280 Media weaves and penetrates through built spaces, which must now incorporate a growing abundance of different media, from lighting and security through to interactive sensors. In this way liquid architecture acknowledges that the bodies of today are a hybrid of materiality and information. The way they move is very different and the way they inhabit spaces is very different. Liquid architects argue that virtual domains make possible new kinds of architecture, constructed in different environmental fields based on programmable information. In this malleable world, the architecture transforms and responds to users.

Novak is producing this kind of architecture solely within the digital realm, but Perrella is exploring the possibilities of physical, interactive environments. In doing so Perrella is brings this research directly into the contemporary practice of architecture. Intelligent or Smart Design is insinuating itself into daily life, from

280 Referred to by Gabriella Gianacchi in ‘Performing through the Hypersurface’ in Virtual Theatres: An Introduction (Routledge: UK,2004), p.99.

208 mobile phones to rooms that change temperature at each personal whim. This is making the interface of these augmented technologies into an important fiscal as well as design issue.

The possibilities for motion that these programs allow mean that architecture can be designed in terms of animation rather than stasis. Unlike a stable drawing or model, they are the first tools that allow architects to design a moving or transforming object. Lynn has focused his theory of architecture on these possibilities. He has been a distinguished proponent in architectural discourse for the new possibilities that computer software programs open up for architecture. Spuybroek follows a similar approach to Lynn, generating multiple visual digital prototypes that are fed with information. He focuses specifically on motion as a generate for built form. A key problem often articulated with his work is that despite this interest in movement, the buildings don’t move. This is an argument directed against ‘Blob Architecture’ as a whole. That once removed from the digital domain, in the solid, gravity-based practicalities of architecture, the design literally can’t stand up. Lynn answers this criticism by defining the difference between what he calls static or stable states. Stable is the usual state of architecture – unmoving. A static state, on the other hand, while still not moving, holds the possibility of mutation, giving the sense of animation.281 Lynn argues that the form encapsulates motion by way of the design process, however what results in his work is another abstracted idea of movement. Here the perception of movement is different from the experience of movement in space. This process is still about the form of a building. In getting away from form, three elements that Lynn acknowledges as integral to the contemporary design of architecture are time, topology and parameters. By presenting itself both as a design process and a conceptualization of space, topology could be seen as the amalgamation of motion and space into form

281 See Greg Lynn, Animate Forms (Princeton Architectural Press: USA, 1999).

209 5.4 Topological Architecture

The word topology comes from the Latin topos, which means place, implying a grounding in physicality. The word logos, describes the logic of place. Despite the logical relationship between design and place/landscape, in this case the term is derived from its mathematical meaning, describing ‘a branch of mathematics that investigates geometric configurations (as point set) that cannot be altered if subjected to one-to-one transformations by shrinking or enlargment’.282 The example often presented shows how a donut can digitally transform into a coffee cup, without disrupting the continuous mesh of its form, thereby making it, topologically speaking, the same object. What is important topologically is this continuous, transformative ability. Rather than describing an absolute and stable system, topology considers information as relative. To design topologically, the form evolves from the design process, rather than being transferred from the head of the architect into an image.

Architectural Design was one of the first architecture journals to rigorously present the theory and practice of architectural topology, Guiseppa de Christina describes it as follows:

Architectural topology means the dynamic variation of form facilitated by computer based technologies, computer-assisted design and animation software. The topologizing of architectural form according to dynamic and complex configurations leads architectural design to a renewed and often spectacular plasticity, in the wake of the baroque and of organic expression.283

282 Peter Zellner, introduction to Hybrid Spaces: New Forms in Digital Architecture (Thames and Hudson: UK, 1999), p.12. 283 Guiseppa De Christina, introduction to ‘Architecture and Science’, AD Profile (Wiley- Academy: USA, 2001), p.8.

210 Topology is a methodology for design that presents new opportunities for architectures in the digital arena. But it is also a conceptual approach to seeing environments. Deleuze and Guattari described space topologically in A Thousand Plateaus, whereby the nomadic possibilities of flux and multiplicity interweave with smooth and rough spatial structures. The philosopher Brian Massumi also advocates for a topological approach in designing the built environment. Following on from Husserl, Massumi proposes a detailed argument against Euclidean space as a useful site for making architecture. Reinstating the issue of indeterminacy, he argues that ‘to build in Euclidean space is to build in predictability’.284 Massumi makes the point that no single system is able to fully incorporate lived experience. In the manner of a co-dependant structure of variant data, he suggests the need for a ‘super modulatory’ approach, which operates between logics, interacting with various systems in order to reach a final product.

The provocative centre of Massumi’s argument is the suggestion that people live topologically. Massumi constructs a persuasive argument for the use of topological systems in architectural design, arguing for the relationship between qualitative and quantitative systems of orientation and spatialization to be understood as topological movement. Rather than the separation of space and time, topology, Massumi points out, presents them as co-dependant variables. He writes: ‘The space of experience is really, literally, physically a topological hyperspace of transformation’.285 Space is in flux and bodies are in continual states of becoming. If concrete experience is understood as topological, whose form is transformational and continuous, CAD programs using topological forms become the most suitable design tools. What is not clarified in the description of topology is how the living body interacts with this new environment.

284 Brian Massumi, ‘Strange Horizons: Buildings, Biograms, and the Body Topologic’ in Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation (Post-Contemporary Interventions) (Duke University Press (April 2002), p.204. 285 Brian Massumi, ibid, p.184.

211 5.5 Bodily interfaces

This thesis has specifically explored these digital design methodologies in terms of the sensorial body and it is important to emphasize that this has not been widely embraced by digital architects. The living body is as conspicuously absent in digital projects as it has been in the mediaeval church or modernist apartment. This thesis aims to explore the possibilities that these digital processes hold for incorporating the contemporary, sensual body into new kinds of spaces and environments. Where and how the body can relate to these porous, fluid environments becomes a question of the interface. An interface is the boundary of connection and communication between bodies and objects or places. This relationship is not optically specified in the same way as the original computer screen and abstracted keyboard and mouse, but one defined by inter- and trans- action. The reciprocal movements of bodies between different media, augmented through the everyday, make experience the key factor in this new interface. As mobile, wireless and networked systems free the body from conventional working environments, new kinds of architecture for these programs are needed.

Everyday spaces can now be considered interactive, containing integrated sensors and circuits, whose structure is interwoven with information and communication, a new ‘electrotecture’. ‘Electrotecture’ is a term coined by Mark Taylor in 1994, as an architectural reaction to the influx of virtual environments.286 In response to the virtualization of reality, Taylor aimed to theorize the electronic in order to place architecture within the contemporary electronic age. ‘Electrotecture’ defined a built space between materiality and immateriality, between the body and the mind, accepting the changes that digital media presented regarding the perception of virtual worlds. It was an architecture

286 See Mark C. Taylor, (guest ed.), ‘Electrotecture: Architecture and the Electronic Future’ in ANY, Nov./Dec. 1993. As a term ‘electrotecture’ failed to gain purchase in architectural discourse.

212 beyond the materiality of building or the laws of gravity, made possible by the digital world.

A term that has become popular for this kind of interface is Perrella’s description of the Hypersurface.287 Perrella writes that the body must now be seen as a hybrid between the historic, material body, and the new body constructed through information. Unlike Novak’s purely digital environments, Perrella is more interested in working in corporeal space interwoven with digital networks. For Perrella space is a web of interconnected variables.

Performance theorist Gabriella Gianacchi uses the hypersurface as a theory and practice through which to discuss virtual performances, whereby viewers can participate with artworks in this space between the real and representation, physicality and media. She describes this connection as:

Within the hypersurface, the relationship between the world of information and the real is subsequently exposed. When ‘performing’ the hypersurface, the viewer always confronts materiality and representation, inside and outside, information and fiction, to find that they also are always part of both worlds. As a hypersurface, viewers can be both materiality and representation, both inside and outside the work of art, transformed into artistic information that changes in real time. Within the world of the hypersurface, the viewer is both remediated and in the real; they are both alive and live.288

While Gianacchi is describing virtual performances, this is very applicable to quotidian relationship of bodies in the augmented spaces of today. The

287 Perrella is a professor at Columbia University, and founded Studio AEM (Architecture at the End of Metaphysics). His work explores how individuals respond to new digital environments, where the body’s role in the creation and dissemination of information is being constantly re- constructed. 288 Gabriella Giannachi, Performing through the Hypersurface in Virtual Theatres; An Introduction, p.103.

213 hypersurface can be seen as the skin between the actual and virtual. Like human skin, it is responsive and reliant on both the interior and exterior, demanding the co-presence of both. The hypersurface therefore designates a space that incorporates both states of multiple virtualities as well as physical actualities.

With these changes to spaces and their interface with bodies, arise the question as to how bodies can now be brought into the design process. This issue comes down to scale in the context of architecture. As previously discussed, scale has traditionally been insisted upon in relation to the anatomical body. Scale describes measurement. It is used as a comparative term to elucidate a relationship between two objects or an object and a body. It’s definition as measurement is also one of judgement and criterion. In this way it becomes a structuring system for the relationship of the body and the built environment. In architecture, scale typically describes how objects or environments relate in measurement to the human form. It encapsulates the importance of sizing spaces according to the body. The argument regularly pitted against digital architectures is the loss of scale which working in virtual space brings. However, the reality is that scale has been a problem throughout all architectural processes, which has meant working in mediums at vastly different scales to the finished objects.289 As previously discussed, previous methodologies that endeavoured to do this have created static representations of figures such as the Vitruvian Man. Since ancient Greece the form of the body became a tool of measurement, abstracted in the drawing process to create ordering systems. In the end though, the only way to understand true scale in architecture is to stand in it.

This is where performance can be used as a method for bringing the living body into the design process. The practise of performance scales not only the body,

289 As previously discussed in Chapter Two, see Robin Evan’s essay ‘Translations from Drawing to Building’ in Translations from Drawing to Building and Other Essays.

214 but the animate, moving body. By integrating performative practices into the design process, architects can rethink scale in terms of this body. Each of the case studies in Chapter Six, from the heavily structured Holocaust memorial designed by Peter Eisenman to the amorphous looking pavilion of NOX architecture, have endeavoured to do this in different ways. Libeskind uses the physical form to directly relate to the body on a phenomenological level, while Eisenman used scale in a purposely disproportionate and ultimately confronting way. Frederic Jameson sees Eisenman’s work as a critique of anthropocentricism, because it refuses to accept a humanist reading of architectural space. 290 Instead scale is read through the performance of bodies through the built spaces. The manipulation of scale becomes a strategy in which to refocus attention back onto the body in terms of immediate, lived experience.

In terms of digitally designed architecture, scale is also being transformed. Rather than the figural or the informational movement diagram, the moving body can be scaled into the design process itself using CAD programs. Rather than an overlayed image or symbol, the body is integrated into the design, becoming a critical element. Massumi defines this as a new kind of architecture, where rather than designing simply for function, architects become ‘experience engineers’, focusing on a bodily and neurological interaction of bodies and buildings.291 For Massumi what is interesting is how the active emergence of form in digital architecture can be carried over into embodied experience. He notes that Spuybroek is leading the way by designing forces, rather than forms for architecture. Spuybroek inputs the moving body into the matrix of the computer drawing system, thereby exploring new ways in which the body can be scaled into new architectures.

290 See Frederic Jameson, ‘Modernity versus Postmodernity in Peter Eisenman’ in The Cities of Artificial Excavation, The Work of Peter Eisenman 1978-1988. 291 Markussen Thomas & Birch, Thomas, ‘Transforming Digital Architecture from Virtual to Neuro: An Interview with Brian Massumi’, Intelligent Agent, vol 5, no2. Intelligent Agent Website. Retrieved 04.04.2007 at

215 5.6 Emergent Design Paradigms

This chapter has presented the implications of the ideas explored through the performative examples of Chapters Three and Four, in terms of architectural practice. Looking at how new digital design tools are effecting the design process, it has presented new formulations of the architectural drawing. What followed was an examination of new spatial structures in terms of these processes, showing how along with new design processes, they are fundamentally changing not only how to design buildings, but also how they look. The last section examined the interface between the body and digital spaces, reflecting on the issue of scale in these changes. In setting the context for contemporary architectural examples, I propose four paradigms in the design of performative architecture: Destabilization, Flux Architecture, Improvisation and Blurred Space. These four, salient areas, describe processes in which the body, movement and buildings can be incorporated into the contemporary design processes of architecture, within the contemporary context of technological innovation. Expanding from the projects based on phenomenological readings of the body and provocative analyses of spatial representations in the architecture drawing, this section aims to connect those essentially spatially and bodily based practises, into built environments.

5.6.1 Destabilisation

Destabilization is the art of imbalance. It is a strategy that highlights physical engagement with spaces, inciting active participation by pedestrians and inhabitants with their built environment. In this way it can be understood as a physical provocation of the phenomenological. It instigates a personal emphasis on the physical body.

216 Destabilization, imbalance and disequilibrium are strategies that have become prevalent in contemporary dance practises. Responding to the stable, symmetrical structures in Classical Western Ballet, modern dancer Doris Humphrey explored the possibilities of the fall and its recovery, while understanding walking as falling became important for several choreographers and performers from Laurie Anderson to Pina Bausch. As previously discussed, William Forsythe uses destabilization as a choreographic tool, exploring how the body ‘naturally’ and ‘unnaturally’ rights itself. Like Merleau-Ponty’s description of the living body, choreographers examining the limits of proprioception, understand it to be fundamentally connected to the body’s relationship with its surrounding environment. The strategy of destabilization must be understood in context of the growing passivity of the body toward the built environments. The dislocation that occurs through virtual technologies has led to the desire of many architects to highlight the actuality of the material body.

As a strategy, destabilization finds form in simply shifting the standard planes of the built environment. This was first proposed in 1963 by ‘Architecture Principe’, led by philosopher Paul Virilio and architect Claude Parent. ‘Architecture Principe’ was both the name of the design firm and the magazine they used to publish their manifesto of the oblique. 292 By tampering with the most basic of architectural forms – the floor – the world becomes unstuck and the body must work to realign itself. With this in mind they proposed ‘the function of the Oblique’, a new architectural condition and urban order, around the typology of the inclined plane. Reacting against the prevalence of Euclidean space, they proclaimed the end of the vertical as the axis of elevation. Virilio and Parent believed buildings had become barriers to movement, proposing sloping ground planes that multiplied usable spaces and promoted continuous, fluid movement.

292 The collaboration between Parent and Virilio lasted only five years and generated only one finished project, the striking Church of Saint Bernadette du Banlay, in France. At the time Virilio was researching World War II German bunkers, whose massive, concrete aesthetics can be seen in the church. The church is a mammoth concrete structure, whose curving, cantilevered ceiling heightens the sensation of instability

217 Virilio states the aim of their research as ‘to challenge outright the anthropomorphic precepts of the classical era – the idea of the body as an essentially static entity with an essentially static proprioception – in order to bring the human habitat into a dynamic age of the body in movement.’293 Inspired by Gestalt psychology and Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of perception, the Oblique was a way of bringing architecture back into an experiential relationship with the body. Far from simply another visionary 60s design, the oblique is returning as a form well-suited to digitally produced tectonics.294 Destabilization describes how the work creates an awareness of gravity, the tilted floors continually forcing one to physically realign.

The Austrian artist turned architect Freidensriech Hundertwasser famously said, ‘the straight line is godless’ and pursued a dedication to undulating floor planes and unevenly spaced fenestration.295 His belief was that orthogonal architecture failed to connect spiritually with natural inhabitation. Without debating the spiritual significance of Hundertwasser’s claims, his projects present the retrieval of a specifically embodied focus when moving through built environments. As previously discussed, more recently Vito Acconci folded an interior into itself at the MAK centre, where the sense of environmental unsteadiness evoked the uncanny. Unlike Hundertwasser’s aim to spiritual connectivity with the earth, here the architecture acts against the body to provoke dis-ease. In this way the designers took on the role of choreographers, where the visitors become dancers. Whether they aim for the vertigo induced imbalance of Spuybroek’s projects or the physical and resulting emotional disorientation of Libeskind’s, the body is forced to deal very intimately with the architecture.

293 Pamela Johnston (ed.), The Function of the Oblique, AA Documents 3 (AA Publications: UK, 1996), p.13. 294 An example can be seen in ‘Fractal Techtonics: inhabiting Oblique Office Platforms’, program at the AA DRL, in Steele, Brett (ed.) Corporate Fields: New Office Environments by the AA DRL, (AA Pub: UK, 2005). 295 Austrian artist Freidensriech Hundertwasser was a popular artist during the 60’s and 70’s, who developed a philosophy of art and design based on an environmental poetic that demanded the rights of individuals to live in harmony and beauty with nature.

218 5.6.2 Flux Architecture

Flux is about movement, where space and bodies are read as flows. The name is reminiscent of the Fluxus group of artists, emphasizing the importance of collaboration, intermediality and connections.296 Flux space sites itself in the contemporary questioning of all things stable and fixed in the Information Age. It has become popularised in media theory through the discourse of ‘mobilities’, concerned with the new spatio-temporal world of flows.297 This research pairs the term with architecture in order to emphasize the physicalizing of these issues in the built environment. The digital design firm Asymptote called their first monograph ‘Asymptote: Flux’, in recognition of its suitability in terms of contemporary digital practice.298 In architectures dedicated to flux, fluidity becomes a key quality of both virtual and corporeal kinds. In this sense it embraces the hybrid body as a construction of both. Flux Architecture and Blurred Space converge with the idea of dissolving the assumed stable and fixed elements in a space.

While it is easy to assume that flux as a spatial characteristic has come from virtual modelling programs, the notion of ‘continuous space’ appeared in the 1950s in the work of Frederick Kiesler.299 Kiesler is most renowned for his biomorphic design of ‘The Endless House’ (1958-60). The house design was reminiscent of giant bubbles or insects built up in plaster models. The egg or

296 Fluxus was an international network of artists, dedicated to international, intermedial collaborations who worked in the intersections of different media. Their nomadic structure privileged exchange and connection above making finished works. 297 Mobilities theory evolved out of urbanism, new media and sociology, describing the emerging paradigm of mobility in understanding modern society. A leading proponent is John Urry, who recently edited with Mimi Sheller, Mobile Technologies of the City, (Routledge: UK, 2006). 298 See Lisa Ann Couture & Hani Rashid, Asymptote: Flux (Phaidon: USA, 2002). 299 Kiesler was an Austrian architect who worked in a variety of fields from stage and exhibition design to furniture and architecture. Despite designing the Abstract Gallery room of Peggy Guggenheim’s Art of This Century art salon in 1942, and his various publications and manifestos, Kiesler has only recently begun to be again considered, usually due to the relationship between his theories of continuous form and contemporary digital architecture forms.

219 womb-like forms maintained the structure without columns or framing, thereby questioning the conventional need for the separation of floors, walls and ceiling. Kiesler described it himself as follows:

The Endless House is not amorphous, not a free-for-all form. On the contrary its construction has strict boundaries according to the scale of our living, its shape and form are determined by inherent life forces, not be building code standards or the vagaries of décor fads. Space in the Endless House is continuous; all living areas can be unified into a single continuum.300

While many still see in Kiesler’s work the mid 20th century futurist, architectural aesthetic, Kiesler always specified that the spaces were generated through bodily practise. Rather than looking to the future, Kiesler wanted to focus on the immediate present. He disregarded prevailing traditions of orthogonal architectural design, which he felt unnecessarily limited and divided space. Continuous space meant architecture that reacted to bodily practice. Kiesler’s designs were not purely spatial, but based on an overall conceptualisation of the body and the world. He theorized an idea he termed ‘Design Correalism and Biotechnique’, which, in contrast to the prevailing functionalism of the early 20th century European architecture, focused on the correlation between human beings and nature.301

The notion of flux can be seen in Piranesi’s etchings, representations of environments that can morphe suddenly when one’s back is turned. It can also be perceived in New Babylon’s interconnected platforms, creating passages and plateaux for transition and temporary habitation. The previous example of Liquid Architecture presents the formal characteristics of Flux Architecture. The present

300 Frederick Kiesler, The Endless House (Thames and Hudson: London, 1985). 301 These ideas have also been taken by digital architects interested in alternative, biological based systems.

220 infatuation with fluid design in architecture was articulated by Marcus Novak’s ‘Liquid Architecture’ in mid 90s, describing digital environments responding to the new CAD programs. By privileging flux over stasis, this strategy produces new kinds of built environments. This does not have to be in the curvaceous style perpetuated by CAD programs, but as a basis for reconsidering the design process in favour of fluid body movement and interaction.

Both flux space and improvisation is based on motion and interaction. The difference is that the former relates to how those issues find form in architecture, while the latter is based on how certain kinds of behaviour can be dictated and made by the surrounding environment. Flux architecture presents physical forms for architecture that incorporate the multiple, new kinds of spaces that permeate the built environment.

5.6.3 Improvisation

From the theatrical script we can borrow the concept of improvisation in order to rethink the way in which we move through built environments. The term improvisation describes a state of acting and reacting in the moment to one’s environment. Improvisation demands both self-awareness and a heightened awareness of others. In this way it is not focused on the individual body as with destabilization, but equally on the interaction between other bodies. Improvisation demands creativity, it incites action. It has a similar goal to that of destabilization, but where that strategy is directly focused on the living body, improvisation bases itself in the more collective issues of interaction. In terms of the built environment, improvisation is played out in the flexibility of scripting. It relates most clearly to a performative reading of environments, where bodies enact cultural and social ideologies in certain spaces.

221 A tactic used to provoke improvisation is the glitch or the lag. These are disruptions in the smooth running of action, corruptions or impairments that show up the system as faulty. The result of the glitch or fault is improvisation; when the unexpected occurs the normal scripts that one follows are made obsolete and one must make one’s own way. Diller and Scofidio like to work in this space between technological expectation and error, as if short-circuiting their own work. In their interior of the Seagram building a series of televisions placed above the bar showcase the people entering from the street level above. While this appears to be in real time, it is actually captured several moments later, creating a slight disjunction in experience and image. In the Blur Building, which will be discussed in the following chapter, making a building out of the weather made unpredictability unavoidable.

Performative spaces cannot be scripted only improvised. What is essential is that the spaces propose possibilities, rather than define singular actions. Indeterminate design practices can therefore be considered improvisational. The following architectural examples explore how to do this based on blurring and rearranging the assumed script. When people move through built spaces, they are used to reading the script and acting accordingly. When we are in a supermarket we understand moving up and down the rows of goods, the collection in shopping carts, negotiating other and so on, as opposed to when we enter a bank. We also know that we are meant to act in different ways, to interact with others in different ways – the nightclub conversations in contrast to the insurance agency. But when the script can no longer be easily read, we must make our own way, write our own script and improvise. This does not mean that people are forced to always follow prescribed actions in architectures that fulfil the expectations of movement, but that it is much easier in these spaces to simply follow expectations. When that is no longer possible, we are forced to start actively engaging with the space and making our own way. We must be creative. We must start thinking how to negotiate the space, how to navigate it and how to interact with others in it. A wheelchair or a skateboarder may

222 therefore negotiate a modernist apartment block with great difficulty but a building like Spuybroek’s H2O pavilion with ease.

Drawing potentiality into architecture means releasing it from the dictates of the designers, whether that is the architect, planner or governing body. The shaping of body movement fundamentally describes how the built environment acts upon bodies. In this way improvisational tactics are essentially political – they demand freedom of access. Through the strategy of improvisation, the individual is empowered to create their own performances through places. Like the dynamic markings across the Situationist maps, bodies are given the opportunity to be creative, to interpret the world around them and negotiate new interactions.

5.6.4 Blurred Space

To blur is to smudge the distinct. Rather than simply imprecision, it implies an initial clarity followed by action. Indeterminacy, vagueness, unpredictability and chance are all words situated in a state of in-between, whereby definitions become blurred. This thesis designates blur in terms of location, where in this liminal siting, new opportunities are made possible.

Two theories of blurring have appeared in architectural discourse in the last decade. Diller and Scofidio use it to critique the process of seeing. Blurring stands in opposition to what Elizabeth Diller describes as today’s ‘high definition’ culture, which places the act of ‘seeing’ above experience.302 Diller and Scofidio enjoy the regression back to television static. It becomes a play on perception and assumptions. In today’s age where ‘user control’ has become a consumerist sales mantra, the ideal is provided in exchange for the illusion of choice. In

302 Noted by Edward Dimendberg, ‘Blurring Genres’ in Scanning: Aberrant Architectures, p.44.

223 contrast, blur is about purposely instigating the indistinct. It is no longer about choice, but about potentiality.

Eisenman sees blurring as creating what he calls an ‘interstitial’ state, which creates new opportunities for a new relationship between the body and architecture. The Interstitial, as described in Chapter One, is a destabilizing element that produces alternative modes of thinking and doing. This is a liminal space, creating a site for new actions and interactions. For Eisenman it forms ‘a condition where architecture is neither dependant on its former narratives nor devoid of meaning but resides between the two, where other forms of meaning, and meaningful situations, can occur’.303 Blurring is a strategy of dislocation, breaking down the stability and solidity of architecture in favour of new and ambiguous opportunities.

Unpredictability is becoming an important tactic in digital design modelling, where systems are now premised on providing possibilities rather than answers. In this process the designer’s role is now one of defining limits and halting that process. This new ‘Post-heroic Architecture’ no longer relies purely on human creativity, thereby allowing the possibility of entirely new, unexpected forms.

This can be seen in the example of Spuybroek’s design of the D Tower in Doetchim, Holland. The building can be described as a multi-mediated, permanent piece of art-architecture. The design started on computer with a digital pulsating sphere, which alternated between inflating and deflating. Spuybroek then used a technique, which Gaudi used in the Sagrada Familia, which contends that that which hangs in tension, will also stand in compression, an idea explored further by Frei Otto. To do this Spuybroek inverted the object and with the use of a balloon and lots of tape a structure was formed. The bag handles became the spindly legs, which after manifold experimentation made a

303 Peter Eisenman, introduction to Blurred Zones Investigations of the Interstitial: Eisenman Architects 1988-1998, p.7.

224 twisted tripod. This process was halted creating the design of a 12-meter high structure. It has the look of bloody entrails or an alien creature. It’s form is composed of computer-generated, moulded panels, which allow from a continuous shaper, where the structure becomes surface.304

To bring blur into architectural form can be related to what Spuybroek calls ‘vague form’. It’s ‘vagueness’ points to an inability to clearly comprehend it, to define it. The structural system looks like segments of dinosaur skeletons, vast rigid structures around cavernous, curving spaces. This is reminiscent of Diller and Scofidio’s ‘Blur Building’, an architecture of the indistinct, in direct contrast to the clarity of form to which Modernism was dedicated. Spuybroek also uses the phrase ‘plastically interactive’, because one cannot gather a complete understanding of its form from a single angle. Even walking around its peripheries it refuses to disclose its entire shape, yet on repeated turns it’s continuous form becomes understandable as a structural object.

In the D Tower the ambiguity is not only in the shape, it is the form, the meaning and the function. It sits in the urban landscape, a glowing alien that cannot be entered physically, only virtually. The public can ‘enter’ the architecture through the Internet. In collaboration with the artist Q.S Serefijn, it integrates a questionnaire, website and urban scale structure. The people of the city log onto the website and answer a questionnaire of their emotional state. The results are transmitted to the structure sited in the middle of the city, whose entire colour daily changes according to the answers of the questionnaire. The object of the D Tower performs daily what people wish to be perceived as their cities emotional state.

304 The D Tower is made of CNC-milled Styrofoam for the mould and hand-laid epoxy with a glass fibre laminate. The curves have been derived from boat building, allowing for non-standard elements of double curved surfaces. Epoxy panels are glued with flanges so it doesn’t need a substructure to hold it up.

225 Blurred space endeavours to describe how certain architectures are breaking away from the desire for clarity and authenticity, and embracing alternative, performative-based practises. The results of doing so highlight an interactive and pro-active relationship between bodies and the environments in which they move.

In this chapter I have aimed to provide an overview of the effects of new design tools and processes on the way the living body is considered in architecture. Understanding the workings of media on the conceptualization as well as the experience of emerging architectural practice, it is essential to exploring how to bring the sensorial body into contemporary built environments. In this context, it is possible to consider the strategies that have become apparent in the performative examples. These patterns of destabilization, flux architecture, improvisation and blurred spaces, are all examples of how performativity can be used to rethink the relationship between bodies and buildings. The following chapter traces the emerging design paradigms in four very different examples of contemporary architecture. Only the final project by NOX architects has been generated through new digital processes. The aim is to show how new technologies are shaping the thinking and experiencing of built environments. Drawing on qualitative research of the chosen buildings, they are performatively written in order to present a phenomenological and performative analysis of the environment. Each propose new ways of bringing corporeal bodies and virtual spaces into architectural practice. These results present an architecture that is performative, open to new technologies and future inhabitations.

226 ChapterSIX Performative Architecture

227 Fig.15 Daniel Libeskind, Extension to the Jewish Museum, 2001. Photograph by Ben Hewett.

228 6.0 Chapter Six introduces four architectural case studies that each incorporate the performative practices outlined in the last chapter; destabilization, flux architecture, improvisation and blurred spaces. Each study begins by describing my personal approach and initial interpretation of the building. It follows with a discussion of the design process taken by the architect and important aspects of its location and context. The main body of each examination is presented as a form of performative writing, in order to show how these different paradigms can be physically understood throughout these different architectures.

6.1 case study Extension to the Jewish Museum, Berlin Daniel Libeskind

Cycling around Kreuzburg on my first day in Berlin, reading maps upside down, battling with cars on the wrong side of the road and only ever seeming to reach the same street juncture. The summer light is a glare that blurs and rebounds in lines around me. It comes as a complete surprise when I reach the museum. In my mind I had imagined a barren plane from which this gleaming monolith would pierce. Instead I almost cycle past its glittering geometry, cradled amongst the landscaping and the shops and houses of the district. I cycle around it, but nearly fall off my bicycle while staring upwards.

6.1.1 Design Process

When Daniel Libeskind won the design for the Jewish Museum in 1989, it was his first large-scale commission. Libeskind had spent over twenty years teaching, writing theoretical texts and producing very detailed, abstract, architectural

229 propositions. Libeskind generated the form of the museum through a rigorously theorized and unique creative process that he developed over these decades. It combined techniques of mapping, drawing and model making, in a poetic examination of the place of Jewish bodies and history in the urban fabric of Berlin.

To give an account of the design process of the museum is to describe Libeskind’s philosophical examination of what a Jewish museum could mean in this specific context of a reunified Berlin. He characterized the design as a fourfold structure:

"The first is the invisible and irrationally connected star which shines with absent light of individual address. The second is the cut-off of Act 2 of Moses and Aaron which culminates with the not musical fulfilment of the word. The third is the ever-present dimension of the deported and missing Berliners; the fourth is Walter Benjamin's urban apocalypse along the One Way Street.305

In order to begin a form making process that embraced these core issues of the project Libeskind began with the drawing. He believed that the core issue was the way Germans and Jews have related to each other across the time and space of Germany. He began the design therefore with a series of urban mappings that connected people who Libeskind viewed as significant figures in Jewish history and general philosophy through the site of the museum. In this way the museum would be a nodal point that connected the Germans and Jews of Berlin. The result of combining these bodies was a matrix similar in appearance to his drawings discussed in chapter two. This formed the blueprint for the building, over which was unfurled the iconic Jewish image of the Star of David.

305 Daniel Libeskind, Studio Daniel Libeskind Website. Retrieved 09.11.2007 at

230 6.1.2 Site

The exterior shell of the museum is clad in polished grey zinc, which has slowly begun to wear and oxidise. Incisions are cut across and through this metal skin, angrily scarring the façade and punctuating it with broken crosses. Based on the last memory of light that Jewish victims remember cutting through the boards of the cattle trucks, Libeskind named the project Between the Lines. The ground plan of the museum comes from a set of maps that Libeskind made of Berlin, connecting unknown Jewish families with well-known Berlin philosophers and artists across time and through the site of the existing museum. Over these drawings he inserted a shattered Star of David, whose form can still be visually untangled from the air above. Berlin is a city in which the urban landscape itself is a kind of museum through which the average pedestrian negotiates the country’s shattered history. In the museum it is through this fractured star that visitors must negotiate the intertwined Jewish and German history.

Libeskind was a student and close colleague of John Hejduk. In many ways his architecture captures the mysteries inscribed in Hejduk’s theatrical scores. Walking through these spaces this absence, at times angry, sometimes melancholy, pervades all movement. On a sensorial level the building is constantly manipulating the emotions of visitors. The phenomenological body is continually addressed: each part of the building focuses on a very intimate, physical perspective. The spaces lift the body, slice it, press it down. Physical sensation always occurs when a person moves through any built environment. Libeskind’s strategy is to amplify the architecture and thereby the experience. One feels the built environment actively participating in the spatial experience. It demands to be heard and interacted with. Throughout the museum you are

231 accosted with these sensory transactions, making it difficult to separate yourself emotionally from the information you are given in the exhibition rooms.

To diagram the Jewish museum is to draw three axes: the Axis of Emigration, the Axis of the Holocaust and the Axis of Continuity. Instead of a clear description of linear movement through the museum, they end abruptly, forcing visitors to turn and backtrack. In this diagram, it is not easy to place oneself, nor direct one’s movements through the museum. Libeskind describes these axes as ‘voids’, cutting lines through Jewish history.306 The visitor enters through the original Jewish museum building, performing the interlinking of the new with the old. This entry provides the typical grandeur expected of a museum: high ceilings, white walls, ornamentation decorating the columns and along the cornices. After moving through ticketing and security the passage leads you to a blackened stairwell that plummets into the depths of the earth. Libeskind’s journey begins.

6.1.3 Absent Space/ Absent Bodies

Thirty percent of the building is empty void. In an age when floor ratios determine funding for a new building, this amount of unusable space is extraordinary. Twenty-meter high negative volumes, shaped in off-form concrete, dissect the museum with shafts of light and shadow. It is however the intense dark spaces that are so affective. Libeskind originally wanted to rub the internal walls with black graphite to expel any possibility of light. He describes the voids as ‘that which can never be exhibited when it comes to Jewish Berlin history: humanity reduced to ashes.’307 The void is a recurring theme in the museum. It

306 From a lecture by Daniel Libeskind at Hannover University, December 5, 1989 as quoted in Freireiss, Kristin (ed.), Jewish Museum (Ernst & Sohn: Germany, 1992), p.3. 307 Daniel Libeskind, 2000, quoted by Reid, Susanna, ‘The Jewish Museum Berlin’ (review) Virtual Library Museum Website. Retrieved 12.04.2007 at

232 is reminiscent of the sense of loss, what has been erased and destroyed – the lives, the words, the objects. These voids articulate the mammoth loss, not only to the Jewish community, but to society as a whole, through the systematic cultural and social destruction the Nazi regime inflicted. The result is absent space, a void that speaks of what has been taken and what has been lost. 308

The strength of the museum is not its description of Events of the Holocaust; there are few photos of the camps or images of the personal devastation that one typically associates with this history. The strength of the museum is not in the exhibition halls that are continually being publicly disparaged.309 Instead, the museum takes the risky route down the experiential in order to convey the message. In this way it could be argued that Libeskind employs the theatrical, but not by creating stage sets in which to view events. He is creating spaces for the personal performances of these events. The psychological intensity of the museum is most palpable in the Holocaust Tower. It is winter when I walk into the tower and the heavy door closes behind me. The heating of the museum abruptly ends. I am not reading or seeing an image of how Jewish people felt in the cattle trains or in the camps. I am experiencing a sense, a hint of what it would have been like – the claustrophobic darkness, the hollow cold and only a sliver of light slicing through the emptiness. I must perform this experience, allow myself to fall into the feeling. To talk only creates uncanny echoes that multiply and reverberate strangely.

308 Perhaps the most telling presentation of artifacts in the Jewish Museum can be heard in Gallery of the Missing, a commissioned artwork by Via Lewandowsky. It is an installation of black glass structures, with audio lists of possessions which were taken and lost or destroyed during the Holocaust. This piece emotively presents the destruction of so many cultural artefacts during the time of National Socialism. 309 The public debates over the exhibition halls have been ongoing ever since the museum originally opened in 1999 as an empty shell. There is a marked difference in the spatial experience of the museum as one leaves the main part of the building to enter the exhibition halls, and then returns to the Libeskind-designed spaces.

233 6.1.4 Keeping Upright

The event of the Holocaust Tower emphasizes the primary experience of the museum – imbalance. From the initial sighting of the museum, craning my neck in order to take in the jagged form, the impact of the architecture upon my body is foremost. Despite the distinctive form of the building, it is the physical sensation that endures after my visit, not what it looks like. Destabilization is a key strategy throughout the museum, the art of catching the visitor unaware. It is as if when the visitor is physically off guard, they are also emotionally off-guard. The imbalances of the building disorientate and confuse, creating a feeling of being lost and alone. This forces an affective response. In this state visitors are compelled toward reflection. The architecture actively works against the body to extract an emotional reaction. It does this through physical trans-actions, moulding the body as it moves through the space, demanding responses. Despite its angular forms, there is a fluidity that draws you through the museum, created by the extended volumes and use of light. The body’s movement through the building becomes a performance of history, where the program of the museum is physically experienced rather than simply read or perceived.

On my first visit I walk initially to the end of the Axis of Emigration, where I reach the Garden of Exiles. To enter the garden is to leave the building. I walk out of the dark intensity of the interior and into the day. But this reprieve is very brief. I have the sudden sensation that the building has been turned inside out, the solid walls becoming open space. In fact the plan of the garden is a rigid grid contrasting the complicated diagram of the museum building. Forty-nine concrete columns are situated on a square grid, from which Oleaster plants are abundantly sprouting. But I am finding it difficult to ascertain this, because of the

234 ground, which is tilted twelve degrees, creating surprisingly intense waves of nausea.

The form of the garden bares obvious resemblance to Eisenman’s design of the Memorial. Libeskind, who was a student of Eisenmen’s, publicly noted the suspicious similarities between the two works. Like the Holocaust Tower, the garden evokes an intense, physical response. While the tower provides a space in which to reflect upon this bodily reaction, the garden allows no respite from vertiginous distress. Libeskind aimed to recreate the feeling of disorientation experienced by Jews driven out of Germany. The visitor cannot know this without reading the attached plaque. The physical agitation however is almost impossible to ignore. The garden doesn’t allow for alternative thoughts. In desperation to stay upright, I move mechanically up and down through the grid and escape to the edges to breathe deeply.

6.1.5 Scripting

The script of the museum is the navigation of an ordering system. The museum is a space through which the visitor physically negotiates a way of understanding the world. Its classificatory structure has changed over history, from the three- dimensional encyclopaedias of the Renaissance Wunderkammers, to the Enlightenment storehouses of knowledge. In order to incite the passive visitor to thought, the postmodern museum has sought to incorporate multi-media, interaction and play. The question the museum presents is essentially a performative one: How does one physically negotiate a taxonomy? The classification systems of a museum are tied to the objects it contains. In the case of the Jewish Museum, however, the objects have become secondary to the building itself. In this unique situation, the Jewish Museum initially opened in 1999 and remained devoid of artefacts for nearly two years. In the first year over

235 three hundred thousand visitors came to see it, prompting calls for the building to become a memorial and remain without objects. In the same way that the horrors of the Holocaust is not an easy history to present or to learn, this is not an easy building to navigate. The power of experiencing the space was extolled at great length, as well as the many fears that it would be impossible to exhibit within. As one journalist wrote, ‘with critics eager to see whether the building would overpower the artefacts displayed with it…Or… whether Daniel Libeskind’s deconstructivist building would deconstruct even the exhibition itself.’310

The opposition of the exhibition against the architecture has been a source of regular criticism, as it has been in the case of other iconic buildings.311 The exhibition areas in the Jewish Museum have continually proved difficult, resulting in the main exhibition space being placed above ground and defining a linear progress in contrast to Libeskind’s overall design.312 There is a strong focus on presenting these ideas through different identities, which give a personal aspect to the information. But what I notice most when moving through the narrow galleries are the voids, many levelled empty spaces that take you out of the consciousness of the typical museum and plunge you back into the visceral experience of Libeskind’s space.

Historian Kevin Walsh describes the Postmodern condition of flux as enforcing the memorialisation of the past.313 In this way the museum as a typology becomes a stable site, fixed in time and space in contrast to the constant transformation of history. But in contrast, because it is not yet (and possibly never

310 Susanna Reid, ‘The Jewish Museum Berlin’, review in Virtual Library Museum. Retrieved 12.04.2007 at 311 This kind of controversy is of course familiar, for example Frank Loyd Wright’s design for the Guggenheim in New York in 1956, which created the original furor of impressive architectural form over riding the functional requirements of specified buildings. 312 The galleries take you through chonologically from Beginnings, Religious Life, Families, Middle Class Life, the Modern age and Urbanity, Completion and Collapse of Emancipation and After 1945. 313 Kevin Walsh, The Represention of the Past: museums and heritage in the post-modern world (Routledge; USA, 1992).

236 will be) primarily about the objects within it, the Jewish Museum can base itself in motion. Despite the monolithic nature of the museum’s form, movement shapes the experience of the building.

In this example of flux architecture, the Jewish Museum focuses primarily on stillness. It often feels as if Libeskind has considered the architecture primarily in these moments, such as when pausing at the bottom of the Stairway of Continuity, looking upward at the dramatic cuts of light splicing space or alone in the Holocaust tower. But in order to pause there must be movement, and stillness is often found when situated against its opposite. Though the layout seems initially very irregular, with intersecting axes that cut across each other and end abruptly, there is an undeniable pull with which the spaces draw you through the building. Visitors tend to give up visualizing how the building works, giving in to the spaces and allowing them to dictate movement. Although the Jewish Museum does not initially appear to be based on ideas of continuous space, with its jagged shapes in plan and elevation, experientially it is extremely fluid. Long, extended walls pull you into claustrophobic corners, but these walls also draw you up and outward. It is a building that proposes that perhaps the spaces of the future need not be in the ‘Blob’ forms supported by CAD programs: that curves are not necessarily more fluid that straight lines.314

Flux becomes a three-dimensional process. In contrast to the planimetry nature of movement diagrams, the museum is more reminiscent of Schlemmer’s Slat Dance, where prosthetic rods articulated the body’s geometries in space. Here the fluid body creates oblique edges to the surrounding environment, dramatic dissections and punctures of space, reminiscent of the harsh lines of the museum. In both projects, the animate body is central to this creative act, transforming the forms of space with each gesture and movement. In the Jewish

314 This can also be argued in reference to the architecture of Zaha Hadid. In the Phaeno Science Centre and the BMW building, both in Germany, the spaces flow and sometime flood from one area to the next, while remaining held in the angular aesthetics of Hadid’s drawings.

237 Museum the slats become not only delineations of invisible forces of intent and action, but solidify into corporeal forms. Multiplying the oblique planes of Architecture Principe, the museum engages with this condition relating to different aspects of the body, the joints and edges of limbs delineate the body’s rotations and turns, the curve and bend of a person’s vision.

6.1.6 Choice

When moving through the museum, I do not view the performance in these spaces. This is not theatre. Nor can I choose to participate in the performances. It is too late for participation. The body is already a part of the production, playing out roles and acting out gestures prescribed by the spaces. The museum is not a flexibly scripted space. Libeskind defines movement and interaction from general directions to minute emotional responses. But Libeskind also insists on engagement, and in this sense the museum enforces active perception implied by the strategy of improvisation. The strategy of improvisation is thereby played out in a different way in the museum. Rather than promoting flexibility of movement, the Jewish museum provokes disorientation.

Disorientation occurs in the bodily sense of imbalance and in the macro form of a central intersection dividing into three axes. The three axes present three options for passage. The corridors are more like blades of white and black space that thrust through the earth, cut with lines of fluorescent light. The walls of these blades are embedded with display cases showing small personal items, accompanied by short texts. This entire area of the museum is disconcertingly underground. Directions in public spaces are typically very prescriptive, allowing pedestrians to succumb to defined patterns of movement and action. Libeskind’s design refuses such lethargy at every turn. It demands engagement. It is this engagement which has been criticized, a kind of funhouse mentality,

238 ‘disneyfication’, choose-your-own-adventure style that can be considered specifically demeaning to both the audience and the subject matter. The nomenclature used in several criticisms reference kitsch popularism, with its relation to theme parks and funfairs. This is a key argument for performative architecture. The line between active transaction with environments and simply overly enforced interactions can be difficult to define. This is particularly relevant in terms of such emotive programs as a Jewish museum or memorial. But I argue that by focusing on the living body, that architecture can be both affective and effective. In contrast to simply an over surplus of imagery and gadgets, performative architecture emphasizes the body and its transactive relationship to built environments.

The extension to the Jewish Museum emphasizes that history is most powerful when it can be experienced. By creating a built environment that acts upon the body, destabilizing its natural state, the affective impact on visitors are opened to the ethical and emotional implications of the museum.

239 Fig.16 Peter Eisenman, Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, Berlin, 2005. Photograph by Ben Hewett.

240 6.2 case study The Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, Berlin Peter Eisenman

I cycle past the Memorial several times before venturing inside. I am interested in how my understanding of the new Holocaust memorial is being built on glossy publicity photos and an exterior viewpoint - flat, grey planes reflecting skies and shadows. From this position the most striking aspect is the repetition of forms, the mass of concrete geometry, impressive in its sheer quantity. It provides a perfect photo opportunity for architecture students and mathematicians. The metaphor of the graveyard is a lasting impression, the concrete blocks are a perfect size for a reclining corpse. It comes as a surprise when I eventually experience the memorial from the inside that it is not simply an architecture of form. In my memory of this first visit, the architecture dissolves against a series of thoughts and interactions, the lonely movement through interruptions of sound, bodies and far away views. I realise this new memorial to the Holocaust by Peter Eisenman is more than a game of geometry and volumes or the expected post structuralist abstraction.

The program of the Memorial for the Murdered Jews of Europe is dedicated to the nebulous area of memory, rather than pragmatic issues of inhabitation or function. Its austere form is reminiscent of a minimalist sculpture. It appears to sit in the space between solid and insubstantial. In its role as a monument it aims to conquer time, its foundations are firmly held in the earth. What it wills to achieve is also a solid thing, the weight of the Holocaust felt in the spaces between the stones. Despite the arresting form what endures is the feeling of moving through the space - stillness is difficult, one is continuously drawn through and around the blocks. The heaviness of the concrete blocks provokes the sense of moving through a negative, a continuous winding of voids. It relies on the performance of bodies in order to make its architecture.

241 6.2.1 Design Process

The memorial is designed through the superimposition, warping and slippage of two grided, topological surfaces.315 This slippage that occurs in the varying relationships of changing pillar heights and shifting ground planes, create indeterminate spaces unscripted by the architect. Eisenman purposely gave up control of these spatial moments in order for the architecture itself to form them. In this way the design process of the memorial arises from the manipulation of formal elements.

Eisenman hasn’t designed this performative space from the position of the phenomenological body. His approach is very unlike Tschumi’s examinations of movement through mappings and choreography. But the result is never the less an environment that affects the body in extreme ways. It has been greatly publicized that Eisenman has said that the memorial has no specific meaning, that it can be read in multiple ways and be sited in multiple places. But the memorial is a not simply a context-less tabula rasa as was intimated in the media with his statement. Understanding Eisenman’s previous work brings a different level of appreciation to the Holocaust Memorial.

Eisenman’s early work during the late 70s and 80s, focused on the cube to critique composition through what he termed ‘decomposition’. The emphasis was not on the final product, but the process, which he explored through drawings and models. These House designs purposely denied their given site. As mentioned in respect to John Hejduk’s theatrical location of the masque, a method Eisenman used was the ‘graft’, which he described as a genetic insertion

315 Peter Eisenman, Barfuss Auf Weiss Gluhenden Mauern/Barefoot on White-Hot Walls (Hatje Cantz: Austria, 2005), p.156.

242 into an alien body.316 The graft was a way in which a building could free itself from the bonds of context and therefore tradition. This early work was designed on arbitrary or invented sites. This ‘nowhere’ is the somewhere of liminal space. By demanding that the memorial’s form does not comply with its surrounding context, places it into an inbetween site. As with Hejduk’s ‘Berlin Masque’ project, the site becomes problematized through the distinction of its program. While the masque is dedicated to the performance of the theatrical, the memorial is dedicated to the performance of memory. To script this performance, based on individual histories, knowledge, thoughts, is impossible. Instead Eisenman makes room for memory. He carves out space for the possibility of remembrance in the memorial and instead of prescribing the experience, Eisenman allows for personal improvisation. You are given the option to ignore the program, to imagine history or reflect on entirely other issues.

6.2.2 Location

The memorial sits like a ruined city in the heart of Berlin, between the triumphant sandstone of the Brandenburg Gate and the glass towers of the rebuilt Postdammerplatz. The concrete blocks assume both an ancient, monolithic quality, whilst also presenting the precise clarity of the new, rebuilt Berlin. The location is both a tourist and political centre, around the corner from the Reichstag, across the road from Tiergarten, next door to what will be the new US Embassy. It is also situated across the road from the unmarked site of Hitler’s bunker. Arguments were made against building what resembles a graveyard in the centre of the city, but the program for this 19,000sqm site would always prove controversial, bringing forward debates on public space as well as history and commemoration.

316 Quotation by Jean-François Bédard introduction to The Cities of Artificial Excavation, The Work of Peter Eisenman 1978-1988 ed. (Rizzoli International Pub.; Canada, 1994), p.14

243 The memorial is made up of 2711 pillars, which Eisenman calls stellae, after the Greek name for grave markers. Each stellae is 950 by 2980 mm, varying in height from 500 to 4700 mm high, of a steel frame and concrete construction. The surface is smooth and glossy. Collectively the stellae create a wave diagonally across the site, through differing heights and a slight, gradual tilt. The precision in its construction is astounding when seen from aloft, a rippling sea of concrete planes. But this can only be understood from the sky; on ground there is only the incomprehensible and subtle tilting and variations of the stellae, creating a feeling of slight disjunction, of unease. Despite the dense form, the memorial therefore ripples and flows across the site, performing flux in concrete. Like Libeskind’s angular forms, what initially appears to be strict orthogonal geometry, is made fluid through movement and the subtle subversion of each tilt. There is thus an interplay between its status as a solid form and the shifting movement created by shadows, planes and bodies. The memorial is dedicated to transition over inhabitation. At night, strips of fluorescents recessed into the ground along the east to west axis provide the only light source, creating fluid bands into the distance. The pathways between the blocks are just wide enough to move through. The spaces between each stellae become pathways, alleys, freeways, networks of motion. To stop is to create blockage, the possibility of being hemmed in, of being caught. It was described by Luis Fernandez-Galiano as;

Here, clothed bodies are invited to bare their symbolic skins by slipping between concrete blocks that shape a maddening labyrinth of order, fluid like a gridded field of cold Volcanic lava, and making their descent into a clean, precise, and oppressive underworld.317

317 Luis Fernandez-Galiano, ‘Germania Remember: Berlin’s Memorial or Eisenman’s Danteum' in Blurred Zones Investigations of the Interstitial: Eisenman Architects 1988-1998.

244 The memorial denies representation. The stellae have often been connected with Jewish graveyards or simply tombs, but their repeated bleak forms repulse a ‘concrete’ definition. In this way, despite their striking appearance, the architecture seems to disappear, allowing for multiple readings. Throughout Eisenman’s work he has struggled against the idea of an absolute truth, aiming toward freeing architecture from tradition and controversially in terms of this memorial: history. To do this he has tried to push architecture to its most artificial limits, aiming to erase authorial presence and paring his forms down to create autonomous, Euclidean solids.

6.2.3 Experiencing Environments

Eisenman is not looking to the past for the basis of this memorial, but to the present. The argument is that it is impossible to show people the horrors of what it was like during the Holocaust. Like Libeskind’s extension of the Jewish Museum, Eisenman looks to a present, physical and performative approach. The basis of the project is not to be read or perceived, but to be experienced. Both architects employ architectural form to directly act upon the body and emote a reaction. Libeskind focuses on destabilizing the individual body, but Eisenman presents the Holocaust by making space for improvised movement. It is an essential ‘live’ and individual performance. This is similar to Maya Lin’s famous Vietnam War memorial in Washington because Eisenman’s memorial also demands personal interaction.318 Without the body weaving through the space, it is simply a collection of concrete blocks. I watch other people enter the space and literally disappear into it in the same way that so many Jews disappeared from German streets. When I cease to be a voyeur on the outside of the

318 Maya Lin won the competition to design the Vietnam Memorial in Washington in 1981. As a non-representational, sculptural memorial, it was highly controversial during its construction process, described as a ‘black hole’ and a ‘scar’. Despite this initial reaction it has emerged as one of the most popular memorials in America.

245 architecture and follow them, I am swallowed by it, both physically and emotionally. Through this process I become part of the memorial.

Eisenman uses the grid to propose a basic principal of order. He then proceeds to undermine that perception of order. The rationality of the grid becomes a stage for the complete irrationality and incomprehensibility of the Holocaust. Through this structure Eisenman manages to make the body perform a series of disruptions. One of the ways that this is achieved is through the stark but gradual changes in the ground level. These changes result in the viewer’s disorientation, imbalance and unease. Walking into the memorial the first thing lost is a sense of distance. I had seen it from the outside many times and cycled its length and breadth. Walking down a chosen path, I quickly found myself immersed in the structure. It is the depth that one cannot gauge from the outside, the fact that at its deepest point the ground falls to over two metres below the surrounding pavement level. The ground beneath my feet literally gave way.

Dread-locked backpackers lounge with ipods along one row, while opposite a group of clean-cut army cadets smoke cigarettes in another. The memorial does not prescribe behaviour and therefore children play and scream, people can yawn and look at watches, while others daydream.

Readability is a central concern for a memorial, yet the Memorial for the Murdered Jews is unashamedly mute. The absence of signage and explanatory texts is a continuing source of criticism. A memorial always presents history from a certain viewpoint and therefore always from a position of power. Within the sensitive context of the Holocaust, clarity of memory is specifically controversial. As James E. Young writes, ‘once we assign monumental form to memory, we have to some degree divested ourselves of the obligation to remember’.319 By

319 James E. Young, ‘Memory, Counter-Memory, and End of the Monument: The Holocaust and Historical Trauma in Contemporary Visual Culture’ 30.01.2000. Lunds University Website. Retrieved 10.01.2007 at

246 subverting the Memorial’s status as a monument, Eisenman denies single and simple definitions. He specifically strips the memorial of any kinds of symbols, signs, indications or clues to meaning. In doing so he endeavours to remove it from this didactic position. In this way it may be argued that in the space that is made between, is the opportunity for dissent and creativity.

When the solidity of architecture is allowed to blur and dissolve, people are given the freedom to perform their own scripts. He allows the visitor to create their own answers and questions. To do this, though is also to allow for acceptance and denial of to entering into its discourse. While many have argued that the memorial is overly dictatorial and austere, in fact its concrete blandness allows for multiple interactions and performances. In this sense the usual script that dictates how people move in a built space is given over to improvisation. The allowance for a flexibility or variance of interpretation implies a flexibility of the truth.

6.2.4 Scale

Scale has been a recurring issue in Eisenman’s projects, with many critics feeling that he dehumanises the built space. K. Michael Hays writes that Eisenman has been known for seeking a kind of architecture separate from the sensual and the built.320 His dedication to diagrammatic abstraction has created environments notably disinterested with the living body. To look purely at images of his projects though is to miss the focus of Eisenman’s consideration of the body in architecture. Eisenman uses scale in order to ‘subvert the notion of the human

320 K. Michael Hays, ‘Allegory unto Death, An Etiology of Eisenman’s Repetition’ in The Cities of Artificial Excavation, The Work of Peter Eisenman 1978-1988, p.104.

247 body as the source-authority of scale’.321 By dislodging the body from its centralized Virtruvian status, the emphasis can turn to the built environment. Eisenman is not thereby denying the importance of the body; the issue becomes one of scale, of measurement. Removing the body from this process is about removing the figure of the body. The result is a focus on the relationship between form and experience.

Hays writes that Eisenman’s early work has focused on ‘distancing, defamiliarization, and deployment of alienation effects to reorient our apprehension of architectural form away from standard perceptual conventions’.322 Visitors are forced to reconsider their interactions with the built environment because they cannot rely on what they already know. They are forced to deal with the space in an immediate and sensorial way. The soundscape that is created in the memorial is a source of disquiet. The concrete stellae create an exaggerated acoustic space. Echoes bounce off the surface, while the exterior world is muffled; footsteps, children’s cries, conversations, mutterings. It creates the sense of being apart from the rest of society, separated from both place and people, while in the centre of the city and potentially surrounded by others.

Besides the usual group of children running through the memorial, my journey through the memorial is necessarily solitary, because the distance between each stellae is sized for single file. Conversation is therefore severely limited and people tend to recoil into their own thoughts. Large groups dissipate, allowing individuals to experience the space. Movement through the environment becomes a private performance, where each person plays out his or her journey through the monument. A key disruption is my inability to easily judge where people are. The design denies seeing if someone is coming perpendicularly

321 Peter Eisenman ‘La Villette: Project for a Garden’ in The Cities of Artificial Excavation, The Work of Peter Eisenman 1978-1988, p.187. 322 K. Michael Hays The Cities of Artificial Excavation, The Work of Peter Eisenman 1978-1988, p.105.

248 toward me. Interactions become sudden and discomfortingly close, literally colliding with people at the corners, or sudden close eye contact. When I do see people it is always a single figure, framed, with the outside world a receding backdrop behind them. Again I like to imagine the memorial from aloft again, perhaps as seen from the hot air balloon in nearby Potsdammerplatz, watching the movement of bodies, predicting the sudden collisions, the flow of children swarming from one corner, a lone figure weeping in another.

The memorial is structured around the idea of how far the visitor is willing to go emotionally in the site. This is their choice. The built environment creates an atmosphere of loss and disorientation in which to ponder individual readings. However both agendas are specific and bounded within certain parameters of phenomenological performances. The performance of the Holocaust memorial, like the performance of the Jewish Museum, is predicated on a single goal – the memory of the Holocaust. Despite the desire of both architects to approach this using improvisational tactics, it still means there is a specific affective focus. While this is very successful in terms of the museum and memorial’s brief, the question arises as to how these spaces can infect conventional architectures. In this way Diller and Scofidio and NOX are opening spaces up, rather than limiting them to varied spatial performances.

249 Fig.19 Diller + Scofidio, Blur Building, Switzerland, 2002. Diller, Elizabeth and Scofidio, Ricardo, Blur: The Making of Nothing, (Harry N. Abrams: New York, 2002) p. 371.

250 6.3 case study The Blur Building, Swiss Exposition, 2002. Diller + Scofidio

The image of the Blur Building is a cloud hung low on the lake water’s edge. It is as if someone had smudged the picturesque photo of a lakeside idyll and left a trace of that action - an accident or trick of the light. The effect is produced by over 30,000 tiny jets spraying water, enough to create a cumulous the size and shape of a two-storey building. To enter the building the visitor leaves terra firma across an open platform. Moving toward it, perception begins to blur as you become engulfed in a fine mist. In this theatrical setting one’s interactions with the environments and other visitors become uncanny. Not only sight becomes indistinct, but one’s physical experience of space is also confounded.

The Blur Building needed to accommodate a wide range of visitors who would be visiting the exposition. The astonishing form of the Blur Building and the potential scripting written into it are not separate entities, but must be seen holistically as integrated into the project. In this way the themes of blur, which can be viewed in its form, are also performed in the experience of it. The themes of ambiguity and formlessness are translated phenomenologically into disorientation and anonymity.

In the World Exposition of 1853 in London, Joseph Paxton built the Crystal Palace, a majestic feat of architectural innovation and materiality in steel and glass. For the Swiss Exposition in 2002, Diller and Scofidio designed what they called the Blur Building, a cloud floating on a large body of water; a construction of weather. In doing so, Diller and Scofidio created an icon for the new millennium. In response to an age saturated with high definition, precise and novel technologies, capitalist consumption and media spectacle, the Blur Building is a building made of nothing. Key terms from the onset of the project were

251 atmosphere, scotoma, nothing, disorientation, artificial, nature, formless, white, noise, art, the sublime.323

The Blur Building is an exposition pavilion, which means that it is not held by many of the usual building restrictions. It is more like a folly, from a distance it appears as a sculptural object, but the experience of it is pure theatre. This creates two performative modes, where the architecture is visually performative and where the experience of the architecture is another kind of performance. In the first performance, the image of it is constantly shifting like a series of cinematic frames. At times it looks indeed like a fluffy cloud, at other times a fine fog or mist hovering above the water, a translucent space ship about to land or take off. In the second mode the performance is all about the experience of the architecture, a process of trans-action with technology, others and one’s physical body.

Diller and Scofido’s understanding of performance has been cultivated in collaboration with various choreographers, writers and directors in the realm of performance. Roselee Goldberg writes that ‘Diller and Scofidio’s diverse and innovative theatre projects seemed not only as full-scale working models for their ideas about architecture, they also provided a laboratory for the concepts that would give their buildings their most distinctive qualities’.324 In this way the boundaries between architecture and performance are also blurred.

6.3.1 Design Process

The process in which the Blur pavilion was designed presents a more conventional architectural narrative. A key concept evolves and is shaped and

323 Diller and Scofidio, Blur: the making of nothing (Harry N.Abrahms: NY, 2002), p.33. 324 Roselee Goldberg ‘Dancing About Architecture’ in Scanning: Aberrant Architectures, p.45.

252 re-shaped by factors such as client and colleague discussions, site conditions and in this case the important challenges of available technology. The project began as the collaboration between Dutch landscape architects West 8 and Swiss architects Vehovar and Jauslin. The guiding concept was to create a ‘media landscape’, in which the architecture itself would disappear.325 The publication of this process in Blur: The Making of Nothing, documents the inherent difficulties in first designing and then building this paradoxical challenge. Throughout its pages are reproductions of the typical architectural sketches on napkins, and faxes to and from the group across the globe, showing how designs slowly gain their reality through constant re-interpretations of spatial ideas. The early explorations of a building in which the architecture is absent, included a large tilted platform in the lake, whereby the water was shaped into an architectural form. In the end the solution was developed by Diller and Scofidio in conjunction with West 8, who fought for the importance of making a building out of water and air. Instead of a metaphor for these ideas, they wanted the concepts to be understood in the building itself, and through the experience of it.

6.3.2 Presence

The Blur building demands a shift in one’s perception of materiality. Walking across the platform toward the building, the visitor enacts the gradual breakdown in perception. Moving into this liminal space is an optical obfuscation, physically destabilizing the body. Perception is no longer reliable, both through sight and through the physical experience.

325 Diller and Scofidio, Blur: the making of nothing, p.14.

253 Elizabeth Diller and Ricardo Scofidio met at the Architecture School, Cooper Union in the 1970s, forming the design firm ‘Diller and Scofidio in 1979.326 The question of seeing recurs throughout Diller and Scofidio’s work.327 They use it as a deliberate response to the growing reliance on the visual throughout the twentieth century. Architecture’s role in the perpetuation of prevailing governmentality is well known, but Diller and Scofidio see this as problematized by the contemporary desire to be seen. They endeavour to refrain from judgement in their excess of cameras and screens, tracking and exposing the movements of visitors to their installations and environments. Implicit in their usage of these technologies is the contemporary debate on social control, but through the performance of bodies interacting with these technologies, they instigate the seduction inherent in both states of watching and being watched. In this mediated environment, perception is political.

6.3.2 Vague Materiality

What else is there to say about the materiality of the Blur Building, besides that it is a cloud? It can be described by its technology, the thousands of tiny waterspouts, the complex engineering and plumbing. For a period of five months, the Blur Building was 100 meters wide by 65 meters deep, at a height of 25 metres. The tensegrity structure created a spatial network of steel rods, which made an ovoid skeleton around which the cloud shape formed. What makes this building interesting though, is the fact that it is not really there.

326 Their work incorporates exhibition design, installation, performances, public art, planning, books, web projects and in the last five years, architecture. Since winning and completing the Blur Building for the Swiss Exposition in 2003, they have won several important architecture projects including the Eyebeam Museum of Art and Technology in New York, the Lincoln Centre for Performing Arts in New York and the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston. 327 Optical devices and materials pervade their early projects, from the surreal magnifying apparatus in the performance the Rotary Notary Stripped Bare to the floating screen across the façade of the Muscone Centre in San Francisco.

254 To write about the materiality of this building is thus to write about absence. It is built around the moment of encounter, of viewing the building from afar as a cloud floating on the lake. As it is a temporary structure for an exposition, it’s presence is now only in mediatised reproductions. The concept is (as the names suggests) to blur, making it an obvious built reality of blurred space. Diller and Scofidio describe it as ‘[f]eatureless, depthless, scaleless, spaceless, mass less, surface less, and context less’.328 It is an architecture based on flux. At times it was simply a series of naked platforms stripped of a membrane, the cloud having completely moved elsewhere. In this state of flux, the architecture is animated, as if the digital form was made real.

Like many of the great architectures of our time, the Blur Building is emblematic: its image is unforgettable and unimaginable. What makes Diller and Scofidio’s design so original is that unlike the fashionable forms that constitute our understanding of such iconic buildings (such as the Gehry icons), the Blur Building literally dissolves form - an architecture without walls. In the making of monuments and icons, a building without recognisable shape tends to dissolve in the memory. In an age when almost everything can be bought and consumed, the Blur Building is pure performance. Never the less in the case of the Blur Building this is somewhat paradoxical. The strength and clarity of the idea (in this case a large cloud) has made it in fact extremely iconic as can be seen in the plethora of consumable goods from matchboxes to T-shirts, branded with the Blur Building image.

Diller and Scofidio refuse to accept either architecture or the body as passive, proposing instead architecture that works against itself. Dissolving the building’s solidity allows for the interactions of bodies within. The physical body is highlighted and exaggerated by the surreal environment. In this theatrical

328 Diller and Scofidio quoted by Ashley Schafer ‘Designing Inefficiences’ in Scanning: Aberrant Architectures, p.45

255 setting, interaction with the environment and other visitors become uncanny. This is emphasized by the ‘braincoat’ costumes (which will be later examined) that draw the visitor into the building’s performance and produce unthought-of improvisations.

6.3.3 Data Cloud

Uniting their plans was a conception of blur as an open set of experiences admitting no privileged viewing position or single message, whose employment of multiple media (architectural, visual images, landscape design, literary narrative, sound art, and interactive digital technology) suggests a post-modern revision of the nineteenth-century ideal of the Gesamtkunstwerk for the digitised twenty-first century.329

For this all encapsulating total work of art, Diller and Scofidio wanted to create a building that was itself a kind of static resonance, a ‘data cloud’, where virtual networks connecting the Braincoats to the physical movements of bodies, interweaving with LED (Light Emitting Diode) screens of text. Three-dimensional chat-rooms on the website would allow communication across the globe connecting to visitors to the international public through the Braincoats. These networks combined to create what they called a ‘technological sublime’.

By creating a building of made of nothing, Diller and Scofidio refuse to abide by the myth of technology as a productive force.330 They use new technologies not to create romanticized visions of the future, but performatively, in order to critique real-time situations. Throughout their projects, they have used technology and

329 Edward Dimendberg explores this issue in his essay ‘Blurring Genres’ in Scanning: Aberrant Architectures, p.79 330 Edward Dimendberg ibid, p.209

256 media as creative working principals, exploring the possibilities and implications of their usage as they permeate the everyday.

6.3.5 Indeterminate Systems

By choosing to focus on weather and making a building out of water, Diller and Scofidio risked the theme of unpredictability. Diller and Scofidio have used this theme to create a sense of disjunction between expectation and reality. Ashley Schafer points out that they implement technologies to deliberately institute delay.331 Technology has focused on making that as easy and comfortable as possible, whether through communication networks or through simply controlled environments. The facilitation by technology of fluid transitions through spaces and actions is reliant on the passivity of bodies to ‘go with the flow’. While Situationist constructions of the ‘push and pull’ of urban forces was dependant on people’s openness to their own personal and often aberrant desires in the psychogeographic relationship, the ‘user control’ society is built on collective dependence on technology. It is only when something breaks that people are forced to reassess what they are doing. The idea of technology as smooth and constant is subverted by the glitch, the impairment or the fault. Diller and Scofidio like to work in this space between technological expectation and error. In the Blur Building, unpredictability was unavoidable, but it was also seen as essential to the project. Every eight minutes the Blur Building would monitor the temperature conditions and adjust itself accordingly. Because the weather can easily shift in that time, this was not fast enough to keep the cloud’s shape and density. This created a failure of perfection, a fault that exposed the building to uncontrollable change and movement.

331 Ashley Schafer in Diller & Scofidio, Flesh: Architectural Probes, (Princeton Architectural Press:1996), p.100.

257 The disintegration of architecture’s solidity has resulted in buildings which in themselves become performative. In contrast to the post-modern architecture of layered representation, this building performs, changes, instigates and implicates relationships with their inhabitants. By making an architecture without walls, Diller and Scofidio have undone this principal of architecture. Having realised this, they can focus on playing with the experiential element. The most curious example of this is the interaction constructed between people.

6.3.6 Moving in Blurred Space

Walking into the Blur Building feels different. One walked from the Swiss summer into a completely artificial environment of damp mist. The air temperature drops as one walks toward and into the cloud, it is like stepping into another world. Aaron Betsky describes Diller and Scofidio’s strategy of blurring as ‘an ambition to use techniques of blur to make constructions in which one is never quite sure what one is experiencing, where one is, or how one should behave’.332 Blurring becomes an instigator for improvisation. In the same way that Spuybroek reconfigures normative arrangements of interiors, by blurring both the physical and metaphoric expectations, Diller and Scofidio provoke aberrant interactions.

Diller and Scofidio are interested in how technology has changed the way people interact. Their script for the Blur Building plays with ideas of technology, distance and interaction. The ‘blur’ is an effect throughout the design, the blurring of boundaries of inside and outside, but also the boundaries that people have

332 Aaron Betsky, ‘Display Engineers’ in Scanning: Aberrant Architectures, p.35.

258 between each other. In this way they play with the accepted parameters of public and private space, literally and personally.

Beyond the visual wonder of its form, the interaction between blur and its users is in constant play - from the actual experience of being in a cloud, to water vapour on the skin. Diller and Scofidio focus on the body without resorting to figural architectonics. Like Spuybroek, they refuse to dictate movement, instead exploring and instigating potential choreographies. Instead, the ‘blur’ is used against assumed scripts, presenting different pathways. The body itself in their work is never stable, instead Diller and Scofidio describe its ‘new plasticity’ in relation to technology and media.333 In the contemporary age of interactive multi- media and cosmetic surgery, they see the body as attaining a new flexibility that can be moulded, moved and transformed by other forces. Rather than debate the ethics of this issue Diller and Scofidio explore what this means for architecture.

Diller and Scofidio have said they were drawn to the two paradoxical elements of weather: its mundaneness and its incontestable force. It’s inherent unpredictability that has such an important effect on everyday life. Architecture has typically set itself against elemental forces, aiming to create constant, sheltered environments for human habitation. The Blur Building sits somewhere between the natural and artificial, it provides elements of control that are never absolute. Part of its very ordinariness is through the social nicety of talking about the weather with strangers. In this way the weather, Diller and Scofidio point out, brings people together.

333 Diller & Scofidio, Flesh: Architectural Probes (Princeton Architectural Press:1996), p.38.

259 6.3.7 Improvisational Apparel

The Braincoats originally devised for the Blur Building were unfortunately not used during the expo, due to funding. For the purposes of this case study though, it is useful to imagine how they may have worked. Entering the precinct of the Blur building, the visitor is asked to fill out a questionnaire, the results of which are programmed into the plastic raincoat you are given. Walking toward the pavilion, the coat’s importance as a sheltering device is juxtaposed against it own, as yet unknown agency. The act of getting into costume turns the performative building into a personal performance, incorporating the visitor into the scene. The problem is, one is not quite sure of the script. When things are no longer clear, it’s possible to create new opportunities – to improvise. The questionnaire creates a personal account, which relates emotionally to other visitors. The results of this information is the coat’s glowing from green to red, defining one’s compatibility to distaste, through the vicinity of other people’s data.

Having taken away the expected sensory tools for navigation, Diller and Scofidio supply the visitor with new ones. Technology equips visitors with an alternative in the form of the Braincoat, described by Diller and Scofidio as a sixth sense. The Braincoat not only provided shelter from the water, it provoked interaction between people. The anonymity of the strange, surroundings is also heightened by everyone wearing the same kind of coat. The Braincoat therefore masks identity while at the same time revealing individuality. In their first monograph ‘Flesh’, Diller and Scofidio described how the skin was a frontier of communication with the exterior world. Blushing, perspiring and temperature changes make the internal emotions sensually visible. Diller and Scofidio believe that wireless technologies have changed the way we communicate. They take this idea to the extreme by transmitting emotions using new technologies, pointing the way to a new kind of ‘body language’. The society of relationships through the internet are made both mobile and transparent. The Braincoats

260 function as tracking devices, integrating each visitor into the larger system of the Blur Building. By exposing one’s personal inclinations through the questionnaire, it is as if technology is betraying ones secrets.

Technology equips the body with the ability to negotiate the existing environment. Within the fog there is a notable lack of vision, so the coat takes over from the eyes to create social interaction. It responds by literally blushing when close to a like-minded person, becoming brighter the closer one gets. In this way the entire building becomes a performance space, with the pedestrians acting roles as yet unwritten. The script which the designer write is one of interaction, the coats re- enforce it, whether you like it or not, taking it out of your hands. Once this contract with the performance is accepted, it frees visitors into allowing the technology to take you into new relationship with people, whether based on the premise of compatibility or such visible incompatibility.

Seeing blurred space as a questioning of architectural form is physically realised in how we must negotiate the space itself. Diller and Scofidio’s remove the expected clues for the negotiation. One’s sight so blurred, it is difficult to estimate distances and often impossible to see what is directly in front of you. In the following case study, Spuybroek used the same techniques of removing the horizon line and smoothing and curving the expected delineations between floor, wall and ceiling. Diller and Scofidio do this and take it much further by diffusing each vestige of traditional Cartesian space. As in the H2O pavilion this creates disequilibrium, a need to refocus on your own body and hold yourself back from vertigo. While Spuybroek wants you to rely on your other senses to do this, Diller and Scofidio’s have other ideas. Acoustic clues are also masked by the sound scape. Rather than creating an obviously disjunctive artwork, the sound artist Christian MarClay, used dripping water, squeaking steel and hissing nozzles. The result refuses to situate the visitor, ambiguously merging expectations and art.

261 In their reaction against the focus on spectacle ingrained in the architectural brief of world expos, Diller and Scofidio created a piece of anti-architecture. The Blur Building is one of the most exciting designs of the new millennium because it encapsulates on a public scale, in built form, the cultural concerns of the age. Diller and Scofidio have brought together their previous explorations of spatial design and performance, utilizing the themes of mass media, surveillance, consumption, disorientation and contemporary forms of interaction. It demands an experiential rather than visual understanding, dissolving the built form into an interactive, performative architecture.

262 Figs.17 & 18 NOX Architecture H2O Pavilion, The Netherlands Photographs by Toby Winton-Brown

263 6.4 case study The H20 Pavilion, The Netherlands. Lars Spuybroek

The H2O pavilion is situated in a water park in Northern Holland. As I drive along the coastal road, the theme park emerges incongruously from a flat, sandy shore and I can just make out the building – a glittering, slug-like form beached on the North Sea. While novel architecture is so often presented in the media as solitary forms framed dramatically by its environs, the reality is more often much more subtle. It strikes me as I park the car how these new architectural forms will change the built landscape, transforming even such already surreal places as a theme park sited along an empty coastline.

The form of the pavilion is both extraordinarily unattractive and strangely seductive. Though I have seen it reproduced in drawings, three-dimensional models and photos, it only becomes comprehensible in the experience of it. There are no horizontal planes, no right angles, each surface curves fluidly into another. The concept is meant to be experienced – visitors move through the building like water molecules, their motion taking on the property of H20. By Dutch architect Lars Spuybroek of NOX Architects, the pavilion incorporates in different ways, each of the strategies that have emerged from the performance examples.

Spuybroek explores architecture from the position of technology and movement.334 He has become a prominent figure in the innovative use of architectural design programs, advocating a generative, systems theory approach to design. Following on from Frederick Kiesler, Spuybroek aims to create ‘an architecture that refrains from framing events through perspective and

334 Lars Spuybroek teaches at the University of Delft and the University of Atlanta, Georgia. He has written several articles detailing his theoretical stance on technology and design. NOX architects have designed many art projects, exhibition designs and hypothetical architectural projects, as well as several small, built works.

264 tectonics in order to have a direct, unfiltered and intimate connection with smells, bodies and images’.335 Spuybroek is insistent on the need for the practice of architecture to change its very basis of design. By incorporating the tactile relationship of the body as well as technology into architecture, Spuybroek is perpetuating a new way of thinking it and making built environments.

Phenomenology and neurological studies provide the framework for Spuybroek’s design process. ‘Motor Geometry’ is his way of bringing them into architecture, which he describes as ‘the abstract movement in buildings, with its transformative geometry, that relates directly to real movement of the body’.336 Rather then the usual representational-based architecture systems, Spuybroek’s design methodology is drawn from evolutionary theory. This methodology is ideally suited for use in the computer, extending new technologies to their limits. Movement animation programs are used to create systems that are in flux and transformation, in order to create new notations and geometries. This is similar to the work being done by other architects such as Greg Lynn and Winy Maas, pioneers of what has become known as ‘Blob Architecture’ due to the resulting globulus forms. What differentiates NOX from other digitally focused architecture firms is their emphasis on bringing the information back into embodied perception. Spuybroek uses digital technologies to engage with perception and the body in new ways. He defines the difference as one of critical interaction between information and form making.

6.4.1 Design Process

Spuybroek uses an iterative design process that develops form through multiple replications of a given object, with slight variations at each stage. The form of the

335 Lars Spuybroek, NOX: Machining Architecture (Thames & Hudson: UK 2004), p.46. 336 Lars Spuybroek, NOX: Machining Architecture, p.36.

265 H2O Pavilion began with a simple series of ellipses making a tubular volume. It was then twisted by exterior forces and inserted into the ground. At the ground plane it was then put through a series of deformations based on site and programmatic considerations.

Spuybroek’s design process transposes movement into flexibility. He begins a project by first building a matrix in his computer and collecting empirical data for the specific project. This matrix has a set of relations, but the co-ordinates are not fixed. When this diagrammatic system is constructed, Spuybroek inputs information and generates form. Each co-ordinate is bound in a virtual whole, creating repercussions throughout the matrix. The minute one object is tampered with, all the coordinates shift. Therefore there is not an immediate end result but a flexible system. This system can be manipulated in consideration of phenomenological issues. In this way the information is continually looped back through the system, and through other information threads, creating indefinite, ‘vague’ forms that are flexible enough to keep transforming with other information.

Following the discussion of non-standard architectural processes in Chapter Five, the H20 pavilion is one of the earliest examples of a building constructed from the emerging digital CAD processes, processes based not only on representation or construction, but on the generation of the design itself. As such, the way in which the pavilion was designed is continuously interwoven with how it was made and experienced.

6.4.2 Vertiginous Spaces

Spuybroek draws on Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological account of the body- subject, exploring the relationship between movement and perception. He

266 regularly cites the kitten experiment carried out by Richard Held and Alan Hein in 1963. In this experiment two groups of kittens are raised in the dark. The first group were allowed in the light only when pulling a basket with an immobile kitten from the second group. After several weeks the kittens were released from their bondage. The ones that had pulled the baskets behaved normally, having continued the connection between perception and movement, but the kittens that were unable to move properly, behaved as if they were blind. It was as if they could not understand how the world was, having only perceived it without physically moving through it.

Spuybroek uses this experiment to show the intrinsic relationship between how people see the world and how their bodies move through it. The repercussions for architecture in this experiment are that the traditional process of designing a ground plane that is moved across and then extruding it upwards, is no longer tenable. This continues Schlemmer’s argument of the disjunction between the planimetry of the dance score with the stereometry of body movement. If movement and perception are fluidly meshed together, the natural assumption is that the spatial environment should relate in a likewise manner. Breaking from the orthogonal plane means looking to the oblique. The H20 pavilion takes these shifted planes, extended in Libeskind’s design of the Jewish Museum, to incorporate walls and ceilings, and morphs them further in pursuit of an architecture of flux. In the pavilion, continuity and fluidity combine to create intensely destabilizing environments. The process generates curves and torsions. There are no slopes of the same gradient. Lighting, unexpected shifting in walls, ceiling and floors, the hypnotic sound scape, all combine to create an immersive, interactive environment. Like walking through a cloud, as I enter the pavilion, I can no longer trust what I see but must rely on the combination of my other senses.

The result of destabilizing these constants is vertigo – the visitors to the pavilion become the kittens in the Held and Heine experiment, physically struggling for

267 spatial orientation. I find myself continually pausing in order to re-orientate my body in space. Spuybroek has described the pavilion as designed for the ‘wrong foot’.337 In the confusion between walking and falling, visitors must engage with their own bodies in order to negotiate the unfolding spaces. Rather than designing environments for harmony and balance, Spuybroek focuses on the opposite. It is a method of exploring and highlighting the way in which movement and perception are conjoined. The coherence and co-ordination needed for the body to navigate itself comfortably through space is over-turned in the pavilion. Visitors have to rely on their motor balance skills simply to realign the most basic of human actions – walking. As I move through the pavilion my interest is continually directed by the surroundings and I am regularly surprised by unexpected changes in floor levels that abruptly returns my focus to my body. I must endeavour to constantly remain alert.

Because there are no windows in the H20 pavilion, there is no horizon to align myself to. The horizon presents a perspective, which the body can use to orient itself upright. Relating the body to the external world is about alignment. The horizon creates a horizontal constant that the body can physically relate to through optical perception – this is why the sailor tells the seasick passenger to focus on the horizon line. Erasing the horizon means disengaging the interior from the buildings external surroundings. In doing so, Spuybroek also brings the built form closer to a virtual model. The building is therefore immersed in its own interiority. This process of dislocation follows from Eisenman’s argument against focusing on site.

337 Lars Spuybroek, ‘Motor Geometry’ 01.01.1997 – 31.12.1997. V2 Website. Retrieved 09.10.2007 at

268 6.4.3 Wet Architecture

The H2O pavilion is made up of the Freshwater Pavilion, designed by NOX architects, which physically interlocks with the Seawater Pavilion designed by another Dutch, digital architect Kas Oosterhuis. The concept behind both buildings was that of a water experience pavilion, which would take the visitor through a series of spaces exploring the differing properties of H20. It is an ideal brief for a style of architecture that has become known as ‘Liquid Architecture’. Moving through the pavilion I am struck by this fluidity, the seamless flow of spaces instead of dedicated rooms. Water is literally all around me – real water, ‘fake’ water (in the forms of images and projections), mist sprays, frozen water, deep pools.338

Spuybroek has said that he sees architecture and movement in terms of a process of rhythms and flows. Continuity is essential, because when people move, they perceive and understand space fluidly, as a combination of continuous images and experiences. The spaces constructed by NOX draw on fluid practises such as surfing and skateboarding, but also take account of pragmatic issues like wheelchair access. These take the design process beyond static representations of movement. This follows from Edmund Husserl’s concept of kaleidoscopic space, where the fragmented images of the world are made whole through the act of walking. The built environment actively supports this process in the same way as Kiesler’s ‘Endless House’. Building elements move fluidity into each other, rather than being designed and produced as separate entities. It means bringing architecture in line with how we actually move through space. This proposes the idea of ‘continuous space’. Continuous space for Keisler was a fundamental element of his designs and indeed the form of Keisler’s Endless House bares resemblance to many NOX projects. The

338 The original design incorporated a glacier tunnel of real ice and an illuminated well of rainwater.

269 walls, floors and ceilings are continuous and devoid of right angles. The experience is one of transactive immersion, not simply presentation. There are no windows to orient your movements. Visual projections cover the walls, creating a virtual form within the material one. These images heighten the shifting surface and what is perceived as flat or angled is manipulated further by the wire frame.

The idea of continuous surfaces between ground, walls and ceiling is easy to achieve on a computer screen. Using programs made for industrial design means that morphing geometries in three-dimensions is easily done, allowing vast spaces to be manipulated as if they were small objects. When these forms are constructed, the suitability of such indistinct segregations between spaces becomes questionable.

6.4.4 Movement and Potentiality

The integration of movement into the materiality of the building, is a key element in NOX projects. The design of the pavilion is premised on change, on movement. This information is ingrained into the solidity itself Spuybroek writes: ‘Movement must be viewed as information, as pure difference, because we all know when ‘information’ does not cause any change it is superfluous.’339 The result is an extraordinary shape, as if it had just arisen from the primordial slime. The organic quality of the building captures the potential movement Spuybroek is interested in throughout his projects. The H2O pavilion seems to pulsate and breathe. This animated quality can be seen in NOX’s competition design for the new world trade centre site, which looks like giant roots of a mangrove tree inching its way toward the sky. In the V2 Lab, the interior seems about to slither

339 Lars Spuybroek, NOX: Machining Architecture, p.355.

270 across the buildings surface, while the D Tower is like a long limbed creature, ungainly and unsure, propped up on new supports and about to fall, turn or leap. It creates a different status for the built form and the space around it from our typically held assumptions of stability.

The pavilion is full of spatial illusions. Originally a wire frame structure was projected onto the walls, which creates a virtual form that morphs separately from the solid architecture. Through infrared sensors this structure ripples and transforms, giving one the impression that you are literally shifting the structural form, and that this form is more liquid than solid. This is another way of playing with the relationship between what one sees and the ground upon which one moves. The projections are not simply fluid images attached to an orthogonal architecture, because the ground itself is also fluid so that it becomes almost impossible to judge the gradients.

Movement in understood in these projects in terms of data. Spuybroek draws his definition of spatiality from the writings of the Chilean biologists Francisco Varela and Humberto Maturana.340 Varela and Maturama saw the space around bodies and objects as unstructured information. This information would only gain structure in the interaction of bodies, which was the space of true experience. The world can thus never be considered simply objectively, there is no absolute, pre-existing thing called space; rather, spaces are formed continuously through the interior of the body. Spuybroek quotes Varela and Maturana: ‘there is no structured information on the outside, it becomes only information by forming it

340 Varela and Maturama became famous in the 1970s for their term ‘autopoiesis’ which literally means self-production. They saw living beings as structures that were constructed through their interaction and connection with other structural systems. This becomes a process of continuous self-production. This concept can be understood socially in the same way as phenomenology, as experience being central to how we perceive the world. Their work has been drawn out of its original biological world and into the human sciences and can be seen as a kind of a biological phenomenology.

271 through my body, by transforming my body, which is called action.’341 This intermeshed relationship between bodies and environments is embedded into the design process. Understanding these issues in terms of information and structure show its applicability to CAD processes.

The importance of motion in the relationship between bodies and buildings has been explored in a variety of ways throughout this thesis. Tschumi used cinematic techniques of framing, sequence and montage as central to his proposed notational form. Spuybroek also has a new notational form, which uses information and systems within a computerized space, rather than Tschumi’s two-dimensional paperspace. What is important in order to truly integrate motion into spatial design, is to go beyond simplistic representations of movement, whose abstractions take the project too far from the basic principal of movement. In order for it to be an essential part of the process of designing architecture, Spuybroek believes that he solves this dilemma by starting with movement.

The movement of bodies is the premise of NOX projects, which are then abstracted into the design system. Diagrams of motion information are formulated into the design process. Other artists and architects have traditionally used movement diagrams, seeing them as information around which the solid walls are constructed. Spuybroek puts the information directly into the system, so that it actually generates the form itself, rather than being a separate addition to the design process. The movement is what comes from the ordering system. Movement is related initially to order and then to structure. Movement however is a very open concept, and this is the problem Tschumi ran into; whose movement, and where to? Tschumi acknowledged the power relations that architecture is a party to, how built spaces can instigate, sanction or muffle ideologies and politics. That is the reason he chose such extreme events that

341 H. Maturana and F. Varela, "The Tree of Knowledge," Shambhala, 1987, Quoted by Spuybroek in his essay ‘Motor Geometry’ chapter 7, last viewed 12.03.2007 at http://framework.v2.nl/archive/archive/node/text/.xslt/nodenr-70081

272 ran against accepted norms. However when people simply want to walk the dog in the Park de Villette or play soccer, these extremes becomes decidedly un- useful.

The problem with using the event to bring movement into architecture is the delineation of a specific and single moment. Modernism explored the photographic frame and later the filmic frame by frame series of still and animated moments. This meant freezing movement into moments, usually creating representations of past movement, rather than focusing on the potential movement of users. Spuybroek isn’t interested in a single event but an architecture of flux, of continual flows of events, transforming and changing. These do not become specified pathways of movement; they are used to propose possibilities, and to be flexible to change. In contrast to Tschumi’s Eventmental Architecture, Spuybroek is more interested in the idea of the ‘accident’, writing:

For too long architecture was a tool to control life by seeing Events as the repetition of older Events, and every new Event was an ‘accident’, something acting against the ‘substance’ of architecture. The new doesn’t come from the future, it comes from the past, that is what potentiality is, it is a mating of old existing Events patterning into tendencies, an unfolding of Events.342

Seeing events in terms of action and buildings as stasis, describes what can be controlled and what must be left to chance. The accident is the alternative to the designated human habits and functional requirements that architecture typically accommodates. In stark contrast to the ergonomic drawings of androgynous figures at desks showing leg length to desk height, arm span to drawer level, the

342 Sik, Cho Im, ‘Diagramming; Lars Spuybroek’ interview, Sarai Reader 02, ‘The Cities of Everyday LIfe’. Sarai Website. Retrieved 10.01.2007 at

273 Event as accidence allows for multiple possible actions. It subverts the conventions of solid form as stability and movement as accidence. Spuybroek negotiates the difficulty in designing architecture based on patterns of actions (thereby spatially defining how people should move) through the use of potentiality. This allows for the unfolding of events, rather than the categorical defining of them. Spuybroek defines events as that which can only be used when related to potentiality, ‘to open up the concept of the possible’.343 Spuybroek wants to make clear that just because buildings don’t move, doesn’t mean that architecture can’t.

Tracing the potentialities of the animate body becomes a core element of the design process. Movement is not another idea to be conceptually explored and then abstracted into a design. Spuybroek is against the traditional architectural practise of extruding walls around pathways of hypothetical movement patterns. Instead, these movement patterns directly generate the buildings. Spuybroek is adamant about this: ‘There is always a direct relationship between the system of motion and the internal mapping of the movements in the body’344 – that they are completely enmeshed within the process of making the architecture, the abstraction of movement is nothing but the building.345 Benjamin describes this process as creating a relationship between architecture and bodies, which no longer relies on analogy and metaphor.346 The singular, figural body is replaced by multiple, changing, experiencing inhabitants. By having body movement as an entity within the design process that literally forms the architecture, the possibilities for the moving body are no longer separate from the design. The translation from movement into structure is not literal, but transposed into the paper model, which creates the form. Movement is first related to the system using the diagram and from there into the structure itself.

343 Lars Spuybroek, NOX: Machining Architecture, p.357. 344 Lars Spuybroek, ibid, p.357. 345 Introduction Lars Spuybroek, ibid, p.13. 346 Andrew Benjamin, ‘Notes on Surfacing of Walls: NOX, Kiesler, Semper’ in Lars Spuybroek, NOX: Machining Architecture, p.349.

274 6.4.5 Flexible Scripts

The difference between flexibility and indeterminacy is the active desire for multiple options and simply allowing for them. Flexibility in the H20 pavilion in built into the script of the design and results in a flexibility of experiences. Spuybroek uses flexibility as a translation for movement. In this way movement becomes flexibility and visa versa. The more flexibility there is built into a design, the more opportunity for movement. Flexibility means that there is no single answer. It accepts that bodies interact with built environments in unpredictable ways, from the mundane to extravagant. In this way flexibility means providing for improvisation. The flexibility of a design is based on defining limits to that flexibility. Spuybroek therefore addresses the difficulties in Tschumi’s architecture of the Event, which is built on extreme Events such as the murder or the fall. Spuybroek allows for shifts in judgement, the capricious changes in directions that people have moving through space and seeks an architecture that can accommodate that uncertainty.347 The resulting environments are not simply open and empty spaces for any actions, but sculpted from the myriad of potential movements.

Improvisation is the allowance to interact in different ways in built environments. Buildings promote unusual interactions by creating unusual spaces – we act according to prescribed scripts, and when those scripts can no longer be read we are given the freedom to improvise. This does not mean we can’t freely act in architecture that fulfils our expectations of movement, only that it is much easier in these spaces simply to follow expectations. When that is simply no longer possible, we are forced to start actively engaging with the environment. We must start thinking about how to negotiate the space and how to navigate it. This is

347 Spuybroek argues that this process is far more direct conceptually from the traditional abstractions. Where objects or ideas become representations and images that later are translated into forms.

275 from simply looking at the floor because we’re afraid it might at any moment give way, to contorting our bodies in order to look at artworks hung at changing and difficult angles. This kind of improvisation takes on a different form from Eisenman and Libeskind’s specifically emotive environments. That the H20 building was also the product of a programmatic brief for a water education pavilion, allows this improvisational strategy to permeate the forms of its architecture.

NOX projects are never easy to inhabit; Spuybroek makes you work for it. At times it is simply carefully negotiation, such as walking across the shifting, wet (or seemingly wet) floor of the H2O pavilion. In ‘WetGrid’, the exhibition design for ‘Vision Machines’ at the Musee des Beaux Arts, to view the artworks one must bend, crane, turn, even sit or lie on the floor. The artworks are presented following the flows of the walls, which follow their own force-generated system. The built environment actively interacts with the body, sculpting it into a kind of dance. The scripting is therefore not simply written into the plan, but three- dimensionally. In their monograph NOX; Machining Architecture, Spuybroek shows small sectional drawings of the exhibition space. These show various physical positions that must be taken up in order to view the various artworks for specific angles. The drawings present the plethora of poses taken up by visitors, but not how the body deals with NOX’s notion of continuous flow. This shows the difference between using movement in the design process as a series of still frames. Spuybroek uses this idea of continuous flow to create fluid, dance like scripts. The visitors see the works therefore not only with their eyes, but also with their bodies.

Transaction means demanding that the body actively participate in the construction of that space, that it must participate in order for the building to become animated. Without bodily interaction, the architecture of the H20 pavilion does not exist; it is simply a building’s shell, a representation of itself. While interactivity can also be said to pervade the entire project in various ways,

276 Spuybroek uses it in a very direct way through technology. The interactive system is made up of an interrelated combination of the wireframe, light, movement and sound. The building is fully interactive, as people move through it, lighting, projections and sound in various combinations continually change the space.348 It is a completely interwoven system – a matrix, which Spuybroek contends has so many possible combinations that it, is impossible to predict results. Whether the visitors are actively or passively interacting with the system, it uses their actions to continually reshape the space. The building becomes a living organism, which feeds off the people who enter it, transforming and changing.

The projects developed by NOX propose a radically new way of making architecture, one where the body is brought back into architecture in provocative and performative ways. It is not so much the resulting forms that are of interest as the design process that integrates new technologies with the animate body in order to re-imagine built space. For this reason these projects are unique amongst the plethora of digitally-produced designs.

By focusing on embodied perception as essential to designing built spaces from the very beginning of the design process, the body is made central to the thinking and making of architecture. In addition to this, Spuybroek has developed a new process of incorporating his theory of movement and perception. His work utilizes the most innovative technology, but it is how he uses that technology that is so unique. Evolutionary theory and systems design have become fashionable phrases in architecture, but instead of using them to justify exotic, virtual forms, Spuybroek is leading the way in bringing these ideas firmly back into built, felt space. By opening up the design process to the unpredictable and the possible of embodied interaction, he is opening architecture itself to future, undefined, but interactive forms. NOX’s work is an acknowledgement of how space has

348 Unfortunately however, now the interactive elements are no longer active.

277 changed through technology and how the built environment can take on the challenges which that brings.

278 ChapterCONCLUSION

279 Fig.21 Phaeno Science Centre, Wolfsburg Germany Photograph by Ben Hewett

Fig.22 Mercedes Museum, Stuttgart, Germany Photograph by Ben Hewett

Fig.23 Digital image, World Millennium Tower, Busan Korea

280 As the research for this thesis has been completed, so too have several new examples of radical, digitally generated architecture. An inspirational example is the dynamic form of the recently completed Phaeno Science Centre in Germany.349(Fig. 21) Walking across the public square in front of the building, the structure presents as visual blur, of motion set in concrete. Situated directly against the tracks of the intercity train it is also designed to be seen in motion. Entering the building’s scalloped underbelly, the ceiling is a pattern of space age globes, a concrete weight that hovers and illuminates. I stop to watch two men working on a construction platform. It is a scene from science fiction, the last touches on the space ship to facilitate the return trip home. Upon an insect-like machine, the workmen wield torches and spray guns to smooth the difficult curve between formwork and ceiling. Despite the computational advances to manufacturing and assembly that have made a building such as this possible, there are still workmen up a ladder with tools, fixing details. The stark concrete surfaces and vast open spaces in front and below the centre ask for new kinds of bodily interactions. Whether this will be as successful as the building is visually stimulating is yet to be seen.

The digital images of novel, tectonic forms are no longer visionary drawings, but are appearing across the urban landscape – particularly in wealthy, developing cities such as Dubai and Beijing. This research ended with the case study of the H2O pavilion. This building presents not only the most novel form of performative architecture, but also the most novel design process. I have argued that developing projects through design systems based on chance and new spatial structures, dramatically departs from the conventional use of the figural body in architecture. In this way, the thesis can be read as the prologue for an examination of living bodies specifically in the context of digital architecture.

349 The Phaeno Science Centre is an interactive science centre in Wolfsburg, Germany. The international competition for the centre was won by Zaha Hadid and Mayer Bährle architects, and was completed in 2006. Beside the radical form of the building, essential to the design is it’s porosity, connecting the different parts of the city underneath and through the architecture.

281 Completed in 1999, the H20 pavilion is one of the earliest built examples of architecture generated by these new computational processes. In 2006 however, the extraordinary, fluid spaces of UN Studio’s design of the Mercedes Museum in Stuttgart (Fig.22) were completed, along with Hadid’s design of the Phaeno Centre. By next year, construction should be underway on Asymptote’s sensual, glass curves for the Millennium World Business Tower in Busan, South Korea. (Fig.23) These examples are only a few of the multiplying buildings demanding attention in the quotidian landscape. Instead of temporary follies or theme park pavilions, digitally generated architectures are now commercial projects, expanding into urban complexes.

If a sense of urgency is pervasive in this thesis, it is due to this accelerating transformation of our built environment. My argument has been that the greatest risk in the innovative acrobatics of digital design processes is the loss of the living body. The social changes that are taking place between bodies and spaces, and in the digital technology of architectural drawing, will continue to transform the built environment. In parallel to the development of architectural design techniques and manufacturing, the key question is how to incorporate the living body into these new digital and digitised spaces. This thesis has argued that to understand the grounds for this question we must first come to an understanding of how to relate the living body and the architecture drawing.

Chapter One sited this examination within the architectural condition. It traced how the issues of motion, embodiment and performativity have been previously examined and incorporated in the practice and discourse of architecture. It aimed at revealing how the assumed ‘truths’ of spaces and bodies can be unpicked to reveal their historically constructed systems. Clarifying the existing field made the specificity of a theoretical framework to the thesis possible in the following chapter.

282 To construct this framework, Chapter Two formulated the relations between two key spatial principals of this research: bodies and drawings. The body was conceived using Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of perception combined with contemporary definitions of performativity. This created a definition of the body as interconnected with the world through action and experience.

In terms of architecture however, it is not enough to conceptualise the living body but to examine how to bring these ideas into the design process. Chapter Two showed how contemporary understandings of space have impacted on the systems of architectural representation. In order to do this, it traced the architecture drawing’s history from its inception in Renaissance Italy, showing how this process is necessarily specific to a particular age and way of thinking.

The analysis of these two spatial states of the body and the drawing became the basis for exploring the architectural performances and performative drawings in the following two chapters.

Chapter Three examined architectural performances. The examples were performances that innovatively explored architectural concerns. In these works, phenomenological and performative practises became the impetus for building spaces. The chapter traced the interdisciplinary nature of this exploration, importing strategies from the fields of performance, cartography and fine art. These examples provided alternative ways of thinking and making built spaces that allow for the living body to take a key role in the design process.

I have argued that the body as a force that works interactively with it’s surrounding environment, finds explicit, expressive form in dance and installation art. These works proposed a shift in thinking from the figural toward new possibilities for the body and architecture. The projects of Oskar Schlemmer and

283 Vito Acconci presented performances that exposed the spatial machinations of this relationship between bodies and buildings.

By way of the drawing, Chapter Four brought the issues raised by the architectural performances into the design process. Titled Performative Drawings, it was dedicated to architectural drawings that incorporated performative actions. This could be seen both in the drawings themselves and in how they were viewed. This chapter argued that to integrate living bodies into the design of architecture involves seeing the architectural drawing not as a fixed representation of reality, but as a map, a musical score or a diagram. Bernard Tschumi and John Hejduk’s re-interpretations of the drawing presented the connection between spatial conceptions and the design process. By breaking away from the conventional structure and format of the architecture drawing, this chapter showed that alternative issues such as motion, improvisation and potentiality could be incorporated. My argument was that it is through the drawing that conceptions of space shape environments. This understanding sheds light on new possibilities for designing architecture in a contemporary, spatially diverse context.

The fifth chapter was where these ideas were brought into the practice of architecture. It placed the performative and creative strategies presented in chapters Three and Four into the contemporary context of innovative architectural design. The architecture drawing was shown as infiltrated by new geometries, new tools and new spaces. In this context, unprecedented spatial forms based on information and fluidity emerge. This is where the impact of new processes such as parametric design, and new technologies such as Catia modelling become apparent on both the building and the design process. In collating the spatial strategies uncovered in the architectural performances and performative drawings, this chapter set the framework for examining built projects. In order to provide a way of defining performative architecture in these

284 examples, a series of strategies were drawn from the preceding research: destabilization, flux architecture, improvisation and blurred space.

The final chapter presented four case studies of performative architecture. These were specific examples of buildings that utilize phenomenological and performative strategies throughout the design process, tracing their similarities. The Jewish Museum and the Memorial to the Murdered Jews both in Berlin, the Blur Building at the Swiss Exposition and the H20 pavilion in the Netherlands, provided a range of examples of performative architecture. In these case studies the emergent paradigms were manifested in built forms. Destabilization, flux architecture, improvisation and blurred space were shown to be recurring strategies, sometimes consciously applied by the architects, but more importantly enacted by visitors. These case studies were presented through the performance of my own body, presenting a personal analysis of how new building forms can include and incorporate living bodies.

The Case Studies

There is no specific solution or ultimate built example that achieves the aim of bringing the living body into the design of contemporary architecture. Instead, this thesis has aimed at clarifying why the body as an active, creative entity is so important to the design of architecture and how performative practises provide strategies that bring that body into the design process. The paradigms, from destabilization through to blurred space are not definitive. They emerge from the research as strategies through which contemporary performative architecture may be designed.

The architectural case studies were not generalized to encapsulate specific paradigms, but showed how several of these strategies weave through each project. These examples are embedded with the original examinations of

285 contemporary spatial relations and living bodies in the first two chapters. For example the thesis began by questioning the new relationships between bodies and spaces that have been instigated by technology. The Blur Building presents a response to this physical environment that explores these new relationships between bodies and media. Rather than seeing the permeation of media through everyday experiences as making architecture obsolete, the answers may be considered as simply ‘blurred’. This allows architecture the freedom to take on atypical roles. Inhabitations based on flux have become a common condition in the everyday life of the Information Age. These new lifestyles propose new ways of understanding built environments. In contrast to the traditionally fixed state of architecture, these spaces are concerned with motion and transformation. Flux architecture may find logical form in the liquid walls of the H20 pavilion, but it is also experienced in the extreme, angular push and pull of the Jewish Museum.

By understanding how the sensorial body has become dislocated from its surrounding environment, whether through capitalism as expressed by the Situationists, or technology as constructed by Oskar Schlemmer’s ballets, destabilization becomes a key process in highlighting physical awareness. The examples of the Jewish Museum and the Memorial show the affective potential of environments on bodies. Rather than specifying a particular form for buildings to emulate, they showed how the performance of bodies could be powerfully instructive in the design process. They show how architecture is not finished after construction is completed, but is continually created through the bodies that move through it. This process of transformation is palpable in the fluid curves of the H2O pavilion and the fog of the Blur Building, which resists conventional definitions of behaviour and program. This provision for improvisation means an active relationship between bodies and buildings. By provoking alternative public performances, whether quiet reflection or ludic play, these environments describe architecture for individual, active bodies. They suggest that the built environment can be innovative and exciting, both to look at and to experience.

286 The idea of multiple public spaces acting upon the pedestrian body in the aggressive manner of the Jewish museum is a disconcerting thought. Constant Nieuwenhuis’s design of New Babylon looks like fun for a weekend, but being forced into continual nomadic negotiation, clambering up ladders and constant play, could easily become tedious in the long term. However this would misread their purpose. They are not the encapsulations of a performative manifesto in which to design future architectures. Instead, they are proposals for how contemporary embodiment can be brought into new forms of architecture.

The case studies each deal with this new condition of bodies and spaces in different ways, focusing on the corporeal and affective, as with the Museum and Memorial, or the multi-mediated space between, like the two pavilions. Through their basis in the performance of bodies, rather than the form of buildings, performative architecture proposes future environments of myriad shapes and sizes, freed from the dictates of conventional design and manufacturing.

Alternative Approaches to Performative Architecture

This thesis risked becoming too broad, incorporating too many of the different aspects of the expansive topic of living bodies and contemporary spaces. For this reason it has continually referred back to it’s aim of providing a conceptualization of performative architecture and proposing strategies for its design. There are therefore a number of related areas of research that could not finally be contained within the scope of this thesis. Two such areas are the way the body has changed through technology and the performative architecture of the city.

The hybrid element of new bodies was referred to in my initial formulation of the contemporary body in the Information Age. This dual status of material flesh and virtual mobility is an area that could be further expanded into case studies.

287 Accepting the changes that innovations in technology have made to contemporary bodies and spaces, emphasizes the need to look more closely at how the body has been reshaped by these technologies. This would mean expanding Chapter Three to investigate the performance of bodies in the interface with digital technologies. The examples could incorporate the varied prosthetics of the cyborg body: Stelarc’s amplified bodyworks, Krzysztof Wodiczko nomadic structures and Acconci’s Exoskeleton. From these machinic appendages, could follow the performances situated between the realms of real time and the virtual, connecting across physical distances and cyber ones. These might include the interactive, large-scale performances of Japanese group ‘Dumb Type’, the spatial investigations of Danish company ‘Hotel Proforma’ and the telematic explorations by such dance groups as ‘Company in Space’.

The approach that was taken by this thesis is dedicated to the physical, living body. Using such strategies as destabilization or working with the possibilities of improvisation in architecture is not defined by the technology used, though it is changed by it. For this reason the emphasis of the initial research on architectural performances was on physical bodies, leaving this further research to another study.

Another area of this analysis not yet addressed is the implication on an urban scale for a performative reading of architecture. Having understood flux architecture as indicative not simply of curvaceous shapes, but as a strategy of movement and flexibility, lends itself well to the design of the metropolis. Here, the impact is not only on new buildings generated by these technologies and thinking, but new kinds of transportation flows, public and private spatial delineations and security and surveillance boundaries. These bodies must be understood in terms of the individual and the collective. The hypersurface between virtual and actual is now commonplace in the public realm and growing denser as digital networks and systems connect and divide the corporeal and digital hybrids of today’s bodies. Performances groups such as Dutch group

288 Waag would constitute interesting case studies with this approach.350 Waag utilize communication technologies such as global positioning systems and mobiles phones to critique geography, communication and civic mobilities. The discourse of cities has become an extensive area of research, which for this reason takes it beyond the scope of this thesis. It would mean a more in depth analysis of the political ramifications between bodies and environments. This area of architecture is currently being analysized very effectively by Iain Borden and the ‘Strangely Familiar’ group of theorists.

As the surrounding environment transforms around us, both physically and virtually, the opportunities for architecture are becoming more varied and complex. The new building forms that can now be experienced across the world are testament to this changing state. This thesis is premised on the belief that phenomenological readings of the body can, and need, to be brought into the new design processes being developed in architecture. As the tools and systems for these processes change, it is here that performative practises can instigate built environments that are innovative and exciting, both to look at, and to experience. The extreme changes in the design and construction of buildings are resulting in extraordinary forms, the challenge is for these forms to impact and connect to living bodies, as well as to the images on the screen.

350 See their performance project ‘Diary and Traces’ set in Amsterdam at ‘Amsterdam Realtime’ Waag Society Website. Retrieved 05.06.2007 at

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