AArchitecture 33

Consider architecture in a sensual form – a form made to seduce you, a form that is not concerned with physicality but potential. A form that arouses you from mere expectation. This is the pleasure of architecture and the architecture of desire. For this issue, AArchitecture presents the position of desire from within the blurred realms of art and architecture. Architecture historian Adrian Forty describes human desire as ‘a single idea, which comes across as so familiar that we find ourselves supposing it to be exactly what we ourselves had always thought’.→ 1 This suggests that with desirability comes intention. It takes a sense of feeling or experience to replicate a particular allegory within an object, building or artefact. Desire In ‘The Pleasure of Architecture’, Bernard Tschumi discusses the idea of pleasure through the 1951 filmA Streetcar Named Desire, writing that ‘desire was never seen. Yet it remained constant’. He characterises the presence of desire in this film as ‘the movement toward something constantly missing, toward absence. Each setting, each fragment, was aimed at seduction but always dissolved at the moment it was approached’. → 2 Tschumi is saying that the very essence of desire is that which cannot be attained. ‘To desire’ is to want or to anticipate, and therefore the moment of satisfaction is also the termination of desire. The ‘architecture of desire’ must then be a choreographed apparatus for anticipation, and the architect or artist becomes the erotic curator. In this issue Penelope Haralambidou writes about her analysis of Marcel Duchamp and her depiction of the architecture of desire through his work and her own drawing technique. She does this through three main themes: allegory, visuality and desire, which are drawn upon more extensively in her book, Marcel Duchamp and the Architecture of Desire. → 3 For AArchitecture, Haralambidou has focused on two works by Duchamp; Given, which she describes as ‘the construction of a daydream’, and Large Glass. Haralambidou tells us that, ‘Duchamp wasn’t necessarily interested in the built architecture; rather the philosophical potential of it’ – though she does explain how Duchamp was curating an intended gaze of the constructed nude. In the case of Given, Duchamp was creating physical and spatial work, but he was building it with an awareness of erotic anticipation, through the experience of the limited gaze. Therefore, his work was not designed through physical form, but through the phenomenological act of desire. On a similar note, in his essay ‘A Mahjong Table, a Façade and a Hotel Room’, James Mak deconstructs three scenes in Wong Kar Wai’s 2000 filmIn the Mood for Love. Mak tells us that the film, ‘is a story of two married couples who happen to rent rooms in adjacent homes. Gradually realising that their respective spouses are having an affair with each other’ – though of the four, it is ‘two people and two phantoms’ so that the two actual characters are haunted by their partners’ infidelity, and their own desire. Mak’s analysis of the film considers desire on an emotive scale, employing a metaphysical lexicon – through the terms such as ‘haunts’, ‘glance’, ‘erratic’ – to describe each setting in which desire is situated. This semantic field seems to resonate with Haralambidou’s understanding of the architecture of desire and further proves that in desire we find the sensual dimension of space. Following this, in ‘Genealogy, or Philosophising with a Hammer: Critique and Desire’, George Jepson writes on the genealogy of desire and desire production. Jepson first outlines the genealogical paradigm as ‘the origin of values’ and that it is through the ‘the particularities of formulations of subjectivity as manifested in usages of desire as a concept’, that we should understand the full extent of the term. This is where the nuances of ‘desire’ have the dynamism to influence spatial choreography as well as a social dynamic, or according to Jepson, ‘desire production’.

1 Adrian Forty, Objects of desire: design and society since 1750 (London: Thames and Hudson, 2012). 2 Bernard Tschumi, Architecture and Disjunction (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996) p 96. 3 Penelope Haralambidou, Marcel Duchamp and the Architecture of Desire (London: Routledge, 2017).

AArchitecture is a magazine Student Editorial Team: Design: Published by the edited by students of the Sensy Mania, Intermediate 5 Jan Blessing Architectural Association Architectural Association, Emily Priest, Diploma 14 36 Bedford Square, London published three times a year. Illustration: WC1B 3ES Editorial Board: Patricia de Souza Leão Müller, AArchitecture 33 Alex Lorente, Membership Diploma 12 Architectural Association (Inc) Term 1, 2017 – 18 Samantha Hardingham, Registered Charity No 311083 www.aaschool.ac.uk Interim AA School Director Printed by Blackmore, England Company limited by guarantee Registered in England No 171402 © 2017 All rights reserved Registered office as above Pete Jiadong Qiang Pete Jiadong Qiang is an artist and student at the AA (MPhil Media Practices). His work focuses on the specific investigation between architectural and pictorial space in terms of a new ideal of hyperisation and gamification. His current project, Architectural and Digital Material Cultural Probe (ADMCP), uses hybrid art and architectural approaches to create a hyperactive pictorial space filled with digital and physical tensions. The work interrogates hyperisation and gamification in reference to its architectural, digital, anthropological and material cultural significance. By frequently collaborating with maximalist artists, the new research ultimately reuses and reinterprets digital virtual tools to create a new interdisciplinary process through contemporary art, architectural, technological and anthropological boundaries.

For more information: www.admcp.online David Flook David is a fifth-year student at the AA (Diploma 1). He holds a BSc in Architecture from the Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL, where he led the lecture series ‘Arch Objects in 2015 – 2016’, based on the mediating fields around architecture. His work and interests lie between the realms of architecture, art and sculpture.

A Desire

Plate 36b Embroidered panel worked in silks and linen ground, possibly made from a ready-printed kit. Adapted from a design by Louisa Pesel c 1900.

AArchitecture 33 2 A Desire for Plenty curates a selection of Arts and Crafts publication. Their colour is not as found but has been textiles and finishings both well known and obscure. digitally altered. Their threads, already translated through Interspersed throughout this issue, these fragments pixels, are faded to infer the varying rates of decolouring continue to enact their role as backdrop, but no longer of natural pigments, or they are inversely oversaturated for the furniture and objects of a room. Rather, they to recall a futuristic and improbable past life – one that are the background for words and the articles in this hopefully remains desirous, plentiful, yet different. Pages: 2 – 3, 9, 13, 16 – 17, 20, 40 – 41

for Plenty

Plate 9 Sunfower hanging, embroidered in silks on a linen ground, designed by William Morris c 1876 and worked by Cathrine Holiday, one of the most accomplished craftswomen of the period, and who used designs by Morris and her husband, painter Henry Holiday.

Desire 3 Desire and the Unconscious

Ana Araujo

Ana Araujo is an architect and researcher interested in the crossover between architecture and subjectivity. She is Unit Master of Intermediate 2 at the AA and leads her own studio. She has published and exhibited internationally on the themes of Latin American design, interiors and craft and ornament in architecture.

AArchitecture 33 4 To Desire: performs by subtraction; the metaphor, by addition. If we think, for instance, of a difficult emotion to describe – love To want something, especially strongly – metonymy will lead us to find ‘definitions’ for it: love is To have a strong sexual attraction to someone. → 1 a perception, love is a sensation, and so on. We can go on In the last century, the word desire has been closely but the process will be endless as we know very well that tied to the world and culture of psychoanalysis. The idea these definitions will never account for what the idea of of a strong wish, charged with sexual undertones, aligns love really entails. Metaphor proceeds through a different with Sigmund Freud’s revolutionary ‘discovery’ of the route – that of analogy. We may say, for instance, that ‘love unconscious in the late nineteenth century: a repository is a pebble shining in the sun’, and we may even find this of forgotten experiences that defines, to a great degree, who quite satisfactory as an image, but, again, we know that we are, what we like, why we suffer and, most importantly it fails to grasp the emotion per se. All it does is get us perhaps, who we want to be. → 2 Desire may be defined as closer to it, by adding more meanings, more words, more a yearning that drives many of our actions in life, but it is evocations. This is analogous to the analytic process. something about which we know very little, even nothing. We bring a dream, and, with the help of the analyst, we Psychoanalysis supposedly offers the opportunity for a ‘interpret’ it: we may find explanations and analogies, patient to come to terms with these invisible forces and and we indeed get nearer to grasping its meaning. But we make better use of them. are always left with the feeling that something essential Freud’s theory of the unconscious is famously is missing. Analysis is always a frustrating process, articulated using spatial metaphors and perhaps for this highlights Brazilian psychoanalyst Antonio Quinet. It is a reason it is popular among architects. He talks about form of mental torture, of trying to grasp the ungraspable. rooms that correspond to different compartments in our However, Lacan contends, how else might we acknowledge minds, and about thresholds that keep some of our feelings the presence of the unconscious, empower it, and, through and experiences in spaces that are difficult to access. this empowerment, learn to give voice to our desire? Psychoanalytic work enables us to cross these thresholds In a new iteration of his theories, Lacan usefully so that we can achieve a more complete understanding redefines the unconscious as the ‘cause’ of the signifying of who we are. The method for doing so is primarily based chain – that is, as the element which triggers a movement on the reconstitution of our personal history. of interrogation, or a search for meaning. → 5 We might Jacques Lacan, a follower of Freud, presents us infer from this that what we call curiosity is a function of with a slightly different articulation of the processes of the unconscious. We ask, and we search, because we the unconscious, one which is perhaps more useful for desire. But where does this end? Where does it lead? It understanding this mysterious thing we call desire. ends when we ‘find’ it, not in explanations or metaphors, Lacan’s metaphor is not architectonic, but linguistic. but in a mode of being. To incorporate desire in our Also, importantly, his definition of the unconscious is everyday life is, very simply, to be who we really are. In a dynamic and evolving one. In one of its first iterations, some of Lacan’s latest formulations, it is to speak our own Lacan defines the unconscious as ‘the discourse of the ‘tongue’, our version of a shared language which includes Other’ → 3. He is referring to moments in our life or in the that which cannot be explained or understood. → 6 Lacan consulting room, when we say things that surprise us. refers to the work of James Joyce, who ‘cancelled his Freud had already identified these moments, or what he subscription to the unconscious’ once he found the called ‘slips’ (of the tongue, of the pen), but it is significant freedom to invent his own words. His oeuvre remains that in Lacan, these ‘lapses’ are given the status of enigmatic as contemporary audiences learn to access a discourse of their own, one professed by a powerful it through the aid of music, recitation, performance and and mysterious Other (much like in some horror films). digital technologies. → 7 It is this Other, we learn, that speaks of our desire. Freud suggests that the unconscious, although rooted in our past, is somehow always ahead of us. → 8 For those But How? working in the creative industries, a deeper connection to our unconscious might provide not only the path to a In a later text, Lacan elaborates a little further on how we happier and more fulfilled life, but also some hints at how might decipher this enigmatic ‘discourse’ of the Other, to produce truly innovative work. which, effectively, only manifests itself through the rather convoluted mediums of slips, lapses, dreams. → 4 He refers to two linguistic constructions that may be of help: the metonymy and the metaphor. The metonymy, he explains,

Desire 5 Genealogy, or Philosophising with a Hammer: Critique and Desire

George Jepson

George Jepson is a writer and researcher working at the intersection of political philosophy and spatial theory. He holds degrees in literature and cinema and is completing an MA in Cultural Studies at Goldsmiths College (UoL) exploring the efficacies of architecture in the production of subjectivity.

AArchitecture 33 6 In his book Nietzsche and Philosophy, Gilles Deleuze which the value of values themselves derives.’ → 5 The explicates Friedrich Nietzsche’s conception of genealogy ‘baseness’ or ‘nobleness’ of the evaluation that allows for thusly: ‘Genealogy means both the value of origin and judgement is represented by the difference produced the origin of values. Genealogy is as opposed to absolute by these categories. Through this the value of values then values as it is to relative or utilitarian ones.’ → 1 This will reproduces the pertinence they have in a particular emerge as integral to the following essay and its aim epoch and which allows them to be the miraculated form to map a genealogy of the Deleuzo-Guattarian concept through which judgements are conducted. → 6 of desiring-production, as formulated in Anti-Oedipus: As we will come to see, the will of power is the operative Capitalism and Schizophrenia, via Nietzsche and Karl element of force, which is fundamental to the emergence Marx. Seeking to read the modes of thought that converge of particular epistemological value conditions. These within and upon desiring-production, the questioning concerns reveal themselves in Nietzsche’s philosophy in the of values, geneses and their usages is paramount to an form of ‘things,’ material or non-material bodies, which understanding of the non- or a-linear causalities at play. always emerge to perception with an ascribed value. For The point of this endeavour is of course not to simply Nietzsche, all concerns are residual to this understanding read influence, which would conflict with a non-linear of genealogy as a manifestation of the will to power: understanding of (philosophical) history, but to understand all objectives, all utilities are only signs that a will conceptual singularities of ideas and their subsequent of power has become master of something less immanent, repurposing. This forms the platform upon powerful and has imprinted upon it the sense of which we can explore of the particularities of formulations a function … the entire history of a ‘thing’, an organ, of subjectivity as manifested in usages of desire as a concept. a usage can in this way be a continuing chain Beginning with an exploration of approaches toward of signs of ever new interpretations whose causes a theory of history in both Marx and Nietzsche, and the themselves do not have to be connected with relevance of this to their emergent elements of critique, one another but rather in some cases merely follow this lays the groundwork for the second part, concerning and replace on another by chance. → 7 desire as a concept invoked by both thinkers in manifest This forms a broad genealogical conception of the ‘thing’; and multiform ways. that it is layer upon layer of meaning assignation which Both Nietzsche and Marx are often considered, and comes no closer to the deduction of an (impossible) origin, consider themselves, to be declaring and reacting to but rather propagates the normalcy of the thing itself, historical ruptures. This has implications for the potential its naturalness as an object of interpretation. This process of the genealogical form that provides a basis for an therefore always elides true genealogical critique in resting immanent theoretical understanding of the production, on an a priori value system. Here it is difference that development or (non) maintenance of subjectivity. emerges as productive. This disavows an a priori ontology Concurrent with their individual conceptions of history of ‘the thing’ in which it would have a fixed essence, is the stress on critique as the formative mode of approach irregardless of its approachability (or lack of, say, in the when developing philosophical theses; a mode which Heideggerian infinite recession of the thing) and allows Nietzsche termed ‘philosophising with a hammer’, and for Deleuze’s particular rendering of Nietzsche: that instead what Marx described as a ‘Ruthless Criticism of Everything of individuated forces (in their ontological specificity) Existing’. Both philosophers are seeking to slay the sacred meeting and being thus proven different, the meeting of cows of philosophical history and the a priori values upon forces is the process from which their difference is produced. which their philosophies of history rest. For Nietzsche, These aleatory progressions of the thing always come at ‘the magnitude of an ‘advance’ is even to be measured the expense of its ‘smaller powers’, which are subjugated, by the mass of things that had to be sacrificed to it’. → 2 to the more powerful and overarching general will to power. Deleuze, as we have seen, posits that ‘the problem Here we must bear in mind the positivity of Nietzsche’s of critique’ is not one that contents itself ‘with criticising critique, as is understood by Deleuze and appropriated in things in the name of established values’. → 3 This is the his (and Guattari’s) conceptualisation of desiring-production, form of critique that Nietzsche is rallying against – against and as it can come to be compared with Marx’s. It becomes those who ‘remove values from criticism’, particularly a question as to the importance of the productivity of Kant and Schopenhauer. → 4 It is the questioning rather critique, insofar as it is considered positive or negative. of the ‘value of values’ so as to source the genesis of their The positive form of critique is not solely operative on emergence, the place from which they emerge and come the existence of value tout court, or the existence of a certain to be solidified as valuestout court. As Deleuze postulates, set of values in a particular locale or epoch, but rather ‘this is the crucial point; high and low, noble and base are propagates the differential potentials manifested from not values, but represent the differential element from the production of action through the process of critique.

Desire 7 This is perhaps a point of contention between the two The similarities in Marx and Nietzsche’s mining below the models of critique – Marx and Nietzsche – as the surface critique which formulates itself on the grounds former’s critique is, while positing a mode of historicised of an a priori set of values, and which would (and does) understanding, often understood as rooted solely in subsequently provide a naturalised position of critique, the material conditions of that which seeks to dismantle. makes fundamental for both critics the notion of critique This rooting would thus undermine its potential as a as a processual. Turning then to Nietzsche’s ‘eternal model of critique that expands beyond its own contingency. return’, we can read concurrencies in the processual nature This can potentially lead then to its understanding as of both forms of historico-critical analysis. a negative, non-productive critique. The eternal return takes as its formative concern an Louis Althusser braces this problematic of understanding understood process of ‘pure becoming’. This becoming Marx’s conception of value (and its historicist inferences) is such that it has no start nor end point(s), its pureness in Reading Capital. In a rumination on difference, and lying in its eternality, its perpetuity, the foundation of the implications for the genesis of Marx’s own ideas, he which is the infinite nature of time. As Deleuze understands, writes, ‘[Marx] thought it partly in borrowed concepts, ‘we misinterpret the expression “eternal return” if we particularly Hegelian ones, introducing an effect of understand it as “return of the same”. It is not being that dislocation between the semantic field of origin from returns, but rather the returning itself that constitutes which he borrowed his concepts, and the field of conceptual being insofar as it is affirmed of becoming and of that which objects to which they were applied’. → 8 Althusser’s passes.’ → 12 The stress then becomes that of action. From understanding is that the often unacknowledged distinction this notion stem further layers of the concerns of the between the origin and use of Marx’s ideas allows for the historical element of Nietzsche’s philosophy. Genealogy common misconception that his history is teleological. This is not thus a series of concomitant influences that follow is revealed by Marx’s formulation of self-understanding on teleologically from one another, but rather refers to histories, rather than how he himself conceives of it: the entropic circularity of history in which all atomistic ‘historical development so-called generally depends on formulations, across the period of infinite time, will be the fact that the latest form treats the past forms as stages actualised. These forms are in a process of becoming, leading up to itself … And bourgeois economics first which is essentially endless and thus gives birth to all arrived at an understanding of the feudal, ancient and possibilities and their eternal recurrence. Only from oriental economies insofar as bourgeois society has begun the activity of forces, their mutual encounters, can this its self-criticism.’ → 9 Marx himself speaks of what Althusser actualisation occur. We must always consider then the calls ‘thinkers who have merely thought within the limits role of a Nietzschean genealogy in light of this. of their present’. → 10 Its process is not one simply of a retroactive It is in his early texts that Marx posits a notion of understanding of the development of ideas from one critique as the only position one can take in the parsing thinker to the next. It is rather the recognition and of the functioning and maintenance of, as is his case, exploration of different points of rupture in thought a particular economic system and the approach to pre- that are both interior and exterior to the ‘individual’ existing critiques. Fredric Jameson recognises these thoughts and ideas of particular thinkers themselves; analyses in Marx’s Capital: that a proper historical critique these are the moments of critical exposition that render is reliant on both a particular (acknowledged) analytical a genealogy of desire (expounding from Deleuze and perspective – that re-formulates narrative so as to create Guattari’s desiring-production) important in terms a model of the history of production – and a concurrent of the floating signifiers and cultural affectcirculating acknowledgement of this analysis as operating contingently around the notion. In our case, it is not to unpack on a particular history. As Jameson thus understands, desire itself and its various assigned meanings through integral to severing Marx from historicist bindings is to time, or its repurposing in various modes of thought stress the differential elements of his historical analyses: (psychoanalytic libidinal theory, for example). We explore Such synchronic models do not discredit History instead the efficacies of its employment that can be best in any absolute sense as an object of study and understood as extra to its understanding as a process representation, but rather determine a new and of teleological improvement or development. For Michel original form of historiography … It is this new Foucault, a genealogy ‘must record the singularity of antigenetic form, which Nietzsche will then events outside of any monotonous finality … not in order theorise as the genealogy (and Foucault as the to trace the gradual curve of their evolution, but to isolate archaeology), namely, the narrative reconstruction the different scenes where they engaged in different of the conditions of possibility of any full roles.’ → 13 That a Nietzschean genealogy challenges ‘the synchronic form. → 11 pursuit of origin’ is provocative in its rejection of linear

AArchitecture 33 8 Plate 76a Block-printed velveteen, manufactured c 1895. The floral design is similar to a pattern from ‘Atelier Willcock’ now in Mulhouse, which suggests that it was designed by Arthur Willcock.

Desire 9 continuities in the repeated appropriation of a concept in which the representations of the ‘thing’ formulate through time. → 14 But it is this very rejection of origins its appearance and, as we have seen in their quotation as parsing only ‘that which was already there’ – the of Kant earlier, cements a conception of the real that appearances of the idea – that allows for the reduction is simply a causal ‘psychic reality’ of a particular ‘socius’. of essence to para-historical categories. → 15 It is on these terms that they regard the limitation of Where Kant must be credited with effecting a critical conceiving desire as lack. Instead, unable to reject its revolution as regards the theory of desire, by attributing existence in entirety, for them lack becomes one of the to it ‘the faculty of being, through its representations, the many residues produced by desire itself in the relation cause of the reality of the object of these representations’, between willing and the socio-economic conditions of it is thus imperative to consider the understanding that its productivity. It is ‘created, planned, and organised ideas emerge from accidents and historical fallacy and in and through social production,’ and thus ‘propagates become naturalised in subsequent non-genealogical itself in accordance with the organisation of an already analyses. → 16 It is this break with a teleological conception existing organisation of production.’ → 17 This, they posit of history, as is commonly understood in Hegel’s philosophy in a subsequent footnote, concurs with Marx’s refusal of of history and the necessity of a perspective of hindsight the notion of scarcity, as this would be to posit as natural enabling a reverse view of history, that marks Nietzsche’s the basis of the surplus of production through which self-understood traversal into unchartered philosophical capitalism produces surplus capital. → 18 Rather, for Marx, territory. This also necessitates a consideration of Marx scarcity must be a produced historical condition that (as does Jameson) as a philosopher of difference; a subsequently produces the lacks found on its surface as consideration which provides ground for the delineation natural needs and desires: ‘The deliberate creation of lack of a genealogy of difference from a dialectical genealogy as function of market economy is the art of a dominant and to consider Marx’s contiguities with Nietzsche in class.’ → 19 It is this formulation that allows Deleuze to state this genealogical exploration of desire. The former has in his interviews with Claire Parnet that desire is never potential to break free from the dialectic in Deleuze for a thing but for a thing in a network of relations, and Guattari’s repurposing of the active elements of his an assemblage. → 20 A thing that is inseparable from these historical theoretic. Its use in desiring-production relations in the desiring process itself. A case in point complexifies the relation of desire to its productive would be the desire for a commodity, in Marxian terms, elements insofar as Marx insists on understanding the lack of which is produced by the socio-economic the immanence of (the appearance of) ‘organic’ production. conditions of its production. The object presupposes lack Desire itself then must be considered not a-historical, created by a miraculating-machine which reproduces but differential in that it develops in a simultaneous both its conditions of production and within them desire manner through internal and external difference(s). for the object itself. The miraculation here is integral Progression – in terms of technological progress – can given that it is the conditions themselves that are be denaturalized and understood as anticipatory, much determinant of the experience of the lack for the particular like an understanding of desire itself. This leads us then commodity, desire thus being its productive basis to the central discussion of desire as a machinic assemblage, emerging from the mechanisms of this capitalist socio- for Deleuze and Guattari, and the genealogy of their economic mode of production. ideas that, for our purposes, concerns a combination and Concurrent with the Marxian terms in which desire appropriation of both Marxian and Nietzschean concepts. is inverted in its appearance and appears as a cause of production, as opposed to contiguously produced by the Productive Desire: social-productive aspect of the mode of production the Forces of Will and Production itself, Nietzsche recognises the unreality of all but drives in terms of appearance. ‘Thinking’, he says, ‘is only the Beneath the conception of the productivity of desire as relationship of these drives to one another’. → 21 The internal understood by Deleuze and Guattari are the undercurrents logic of these drives thus constitutes the bases of thought of dual desiring forces. This amounts to: the Nietzschean itself. For Deleuze, the will to power is the ‘differential forces of will and the will of forces, and the Marxian element of forces’, and that ‘every force is thus essentially forces which express themselves through and emerge related to another force. The being of force is plural; it fundamentally from their modes of production. These would be absolutely absurd to think about force in the miraculations actualise the productiveness and produce singular. A force is domination, but also the object on of desire itself, and often work to shield their having been which domination is exercised’. → 22 Deleuze’s Nietzschean produced in the first instance. This functions as Deleuze understanding of power in terms of its differential forces and Guattari’s attempt to disavow a neo-Kantian approach necessitates a return to Nietzsche himself. We delve here

AArchitecture 33 10 then to Nietzsche’s formulation of domination, which self-consciousness, but the consciousness of an ego in is active in all force-encounters as there is nothing that relation to a self which is not itself conscious’. → 25 While is ‘given’ but the relationality of these drives and their the relation of every force to another is one of domination, productive surplus: ‘we can take only that as real which the issue at hand is the self-understanding of the genesis is the relationship of our drives to one another.’ → 23 of ones own contradictory, multiform desires, and The predicate of willing then, for Nietzsche, is its how they are manifested in ‘action’ and subsequently dominative element. This is always manifested in the reinterpreted by the actors themselves. As Daniel Smith meeting of forces, which seek domination over the other. understands, ‘for Nietzsche, it is our drives that interpret Possessive of their own logic, – shown when Nietzsche the world, that are perspectival’ and which thus provide concedes that ‘“will” can of course only operate on “will” the basis of experience in its most fundamental terms. → 26 and not on “matter’’’ → 24 – these wills are not in fact The always-already in the Nietzschean formulation manifestations of a particular human willing. This would of drives emerges concurrently in the anti-oedipal be to afford to greater agency to the willing subject than understanding that ‘social production is purely and is due, positing them as having natural or inherent desires simply desiring-production itself’, as they maintain which they strive towards and beget in the causal process that ‘the social field is immediately invested by desire, of willing. The will of the ‘will to power’ is in fact the that it is the historically determined product of desire’. → 27 willing element of power itself, which is in turn productive Evidently then, the genealogy of desire must be mapped of the drives that are understood as being the essential from the singularity of the term’s appropriation and element driving conscious human action. The drives appear investment within the two different philosophies; the causal and thus necessitate no further unpacking in the consequence of this propagation being that not only eyes of the desiring subject. This miraculating process does desire have no fixed essence, and is contingent on undermines the processual nature of the will to power the conditions that it produces and by which it is produced, itself, its constant repetitive willing. As we will more fully but that it is the productive element of force for both broach later, in fact it is also the impossibility of a contained Nietzsche, and Deleuze and Guattari. This is concretised, and non-contradictory desiring subject that provokes as rudimentary as it may seem, in two eerily similar Nietzsche to understand through these drives a disavowal proclamations: ‘This world is will to power – and nothing of the I that is finite. Rather, when stressing that while besides’, and, ‘there is only desire and the social, and the will is taken as that which ‘suffices for action,’ that nothing else’. → 28 Both have as the additive to the forces, which is causal (both misconceptions), it is this which they understand as the bases of any socius, a understanding that is in fact a distortion of the process conception of desire, which is sunken beyond the social of productive action itself. Will is rather made up as it emerges to the level of perception. Desire is for both of multiform ‘ingredients’ and is not the fundament of the active element of force that engenders actualisation. action. The will to power – the willing element of power Nietzsche’s forces have the will to power as their – is that which constructs this understanding of man’s inner, which is itself productive of the drives which are actions as being a direct causal effect of their willing them contiguous to the productivity of desire. It forms, as into existence. In Beyond Good and Evil, he explicates, Deleuze understands, the ‘genealogical element of force, He who wills believes … that will and action are both differential and genetic’ which situates each will somehow one – he attributes the success, the within a force as operating as will within a historically carrying out of willing, to the will itself … ‘Freedom specific network of values; thus is always evaluated by of will’ – is the expression for that complex condition theses selfsame values as a means of contemporaneous of pleasure of the person who wills, who commands understanding. → 29 The Deleuzo-Guattarian extension and at the same time identifies himself with the is the machinic element, which renders the specificity of executor of the command. each force. These machinic forces are themselves active There is thus no simple divide between the I and the on a recording surface, variously termed the ‘Body without other, as in the Hegelian dialectical form that necessitates Organs’ or a ‘plane of immanence,’ which allows for the an overcoming, or a binary form of domination between conditions by which a particular set of value judgments the two bodies as a means of gaining ‘satisfaction’. Instead and their contiguous production of desiring wills emerge. the will is that interpretive framework through which It is understood in Anti-Oedipus that ‘capitalism a commanding subject attempts to deduce a causal institutes or restores all sorts of residual and artificial, understanding manifested through their actions. It puts imaginary, or symbolic territorialities, thereby attempting, stress on will as always confronting will in the form as best it can, to recode, to rechannel persons who have of force that is prior to the formation of an experiencing been defined in terms of abstract qualities.’ → 30 In this subject or, as Deleuze posits, ‘consciousness is never there is a reformulation of the subject as in a process

Desire 11 of constant, quasi-repetitive becoming. Identitarian categories thus encounter the ontological gap between the identity itself and the difference that Deleuze and Guattari understand produces it in perpetua, and therefore continually encounters the limits of formulation within the bounds of a capitalist mode of production. In coagulating a Nietzschean will to power as the differential element of force with a Marxian immanent critique of modes of production, Deleuze and Guattari arrive at a historicist theory whose universal element, desiring-production, provides the formulative basis of the production of a subject within their immanent conditions of emergence. Returning to the Janus faces of the will to power, insofar as it is a will towards power and the will of power, its element of recurrence is that which allows for a subject in a repetitive, albeit immanent, process of becoming. The expanse of the eternal recurrence allows for a containment of a differential reading of Marx whose critical process must be elementally genealogical given its questioning of not simply surface production, but the mode through which production operates.

Claire Potter

Claire Potter is author of the poetry books Swallow (Five Islands Press), N’ombre (Vagabond) and In Front of a Comma (Poets Union). She teaches on the AA Foundation Course.

AArchitecture 33 Footnote to a Miracle 12 Plate 95b Woven rag rug (cotton warp; silk and cotton woven fabric weft) used in Candace Wheeler’s summer home in Onteora, New York, late nineteenth century. Candace Wheeler wrote about tacking (sewing) the strips of woven fabric (rags) together as the weaving progressed according to the desired colour.

Desire There you go, sketching a room 13 Ruth Oldham studied architecture at the Glasgow School of Art and the Ecole d’Architecture de Paris Belleville, before graduating from Ruth Oldham the Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL, with an MA in Architecture. She lives in Paris, where she works as an architect, and writes about architecture, the city, landscape and man-made mountains.

Clemence Florence Elegance Appearance

Clemence / Florence / Elegance / Appearance

Rue Sedaine, 2003 If, on a weekday morning in Paris, you head down the rue Popincourt, a narrow street in the 11th district that veers south off the boulevard Voltaire at St Ambroise metro station, you will find yourself in a bustling environment. Permanent traffic jams and the beeps, shouts and fume- laden air that accompany them. White vans parked half on the pavement, hazard lights flashing, the back doors open revealing piles of clothing: synthetic, shiny fabrics. The pavements teeming with men lugging enormous cardboard boxes on trolleys. Every available ground floor unit open for business, receiving the boxes, piling them high. Cheap plastic mannequins staring gauntly into the street, hastily dressed, perhaps with an arm missing, or propped against a wall as if drowsy or drunk.

Beauty Mode / Jacqueline Mode / Culture Mod’ / Rue Popincourt, 2003 Lady Mode / Mode Fafa

If you walk down the same street at the weekend it is eerily calm. Nobody around. Endless horizontal grey stripes of steel shutters. Every now and then a shutter might be blocked, not able to reach the ground, revealing a pair of smooth tapering plastic legs perched on pointy feet, or a pile of half opened boxes. Sometimes the shutters are behind the window, and a leopard print t-shirt might be pressed up against the glass. But the overall effect is of grey uniformity. In the calm, without the distraction of the incessant activity, the names of the shops, written in large plastic letters, seem to gain in presence.

AArchitecture 33 14 making something of the remnants that cling Lady Belle / Superbelle / Belle Luxe / H Deluxe / Luxe City

The mythical city collides with the real city.

Yves Diffusion / Paris Styl / Parda / Fabuleux

The myth of Paris is in large part founded upon the industries of desire that have been established in the city since the beginning of the twentieth century. The original haute couturiers have evolved into empires of luxury goods. Clothes, shoes, bags, jewels, perfume, champagne, chocolates: all porters of painstakingly constructed auras that fuel desire across the world. The myth is connected to physical reality. The objects that carry it are designed, made, marketed, displayed and consumed – a process that employs many people and takes up visible pace. But when you live in the city the presence of this luxury world is not necessarily a fundamental part of everyday life. It is just one more facet of a big, noisy, dirty city.

Attraction / Seduction / Frou

Rue du Chemin Vert, 2003 The wholesale retailers (over 500 of them!) that operate in this micro neighbourhood of about five streets, position themselves firmly alongside this myth. But, as far I can see, they do so entirely with language. The window displays aren’t playing the game of seduction. There’s no need. The buyers are sellers, business people; the transactions are often carried out online. The clothes are mass produced, in cheap fabrics, destined for markets and discount stores. But the shop names seem curiously important, considered. Perhaps because the names travel: on orders and invoice slips, emails, websites. Each hoping to evoke that hard-to- grasp Parisian aura.

Charmante / Camille / Envy Me / Elodie

Rue Popincourt, 2003 The names are a jumbled mix of French and English, naïvely alluding to cosmopolitanism, beauty, elegance. To femininity. There are a lot of sweet girl’s names. I think of Simone de Beauvoir, writing in The Second Sex about the mysterious and hard to define concept of femininity, ‘Although some women try zealously to incarnate this essence it is hardly patentable. It is frequently described in vague and dazzling terms that seem to have been borrowed from the vocabulary of the seers …’ Somehow, the language of the shop names, created by the retailers who are almost entirely from the Chinese province of Wenzhou, whilst being jumbled and naïve, and vague and dazzling, is also strangely poetic. Particularly when walking through the silent streets on a grey Sunday morning. The myth of the city in which I live is suddenly overwhelmingly present.

Desire powder-like to your hands 15 Plate 30 Lancaster Frieze block-printed wallpaper. Designed by William James Neatby and manufactured by Jeffrey & Co. from 1904. Neatby was chief designer for the wallpaper manufacturer, John Line & Sons, from 1907 and also designed tiles for Harrods’ Food Hall.

AArchitecture 33 16 Photographs line the walls, they spread Desire 17 across the white paint like black support structures Max Worrell is a graduate of the Bartlett School of Architecture and is undertaking an MA in Philosophy at the University of London. Max Worrell He is interested in the history and possible futures of housing and is currently planning a film exploring Britain’s ongoing ‘housing crisis’. The project focuses on the nationwide admiration, or rather the ubiquitous ‘desire’, of individual homeownership as not only a major symptom but as the primary cause of the predicament we are in. Max is also co-editor of 500, a student publication launching in early 2019 that believes architecture should be a force for common good. It welcomes submissions.

Only Fools and Houses

In a 1989 BBC episode of Only Fools and Horses called into the atomised ‘nuclear’ unit, a burgeoning white ‘Yuppy Love’, Del Boy announces his desire to purchase middle-class family, headed by an honest, hardworking, and sell-on his council flat in Peckham. His younger heterosexual patriarch. Trade unions were brutally brother, Rodney, quickly reproves the idea and protests suppressed and state intervention was curbed to liberate that ‘council homes are not made for profit’. Having just the market economy, propagating self-reliance and finished watchingWall Street, however, Del’s idolisation of eclipsing any vestige of esprit de corps. the self-made Gordon Gecko means his brother’s protests A new common sense was thus constructed and fall on deaf ears. Eventually, Rodney himself comes round ruthlessly reinforced. → 2 The ‘electoral masterstroke’ → 3 to the idea after meeting a lady named Cassandra, and of 1979 not only adhered to the dream of the ‘Englishman the shame attached to residing in a council flat forces him and his castle’, an end in itself, but also prepared the to pretend he lives in a mansion on the Kings Avenue. means in order to necessitate that goal. Those that bought Like many others of their ilk, the Trotter brothers’ only their council homes could now leverage unprecedented means to social mobility is property speculation, allowing sums of credit, their home acting as an asset in which to them to shrug off the social stigma attached to anyone provide collateral. The supply of ever-cheapening forms of who doesn’t own a home and move somewhere that credit such as mortgages (a long-term loan you use to materially represents their new place in society. buy a house, which etymologically translates as ‘death grip’) A decade before the airing of that episode, Margaret subsequently caused levels of homeownership to Thatcher’s newly elected Conservative government continually rise for the next 30 years. This figure peaked implemented the Right to Buy and Britain was proclaimed at 71 per cent in 2003 → 4, one of the highest in the world, a ‘property-owning democracy’. Prior to this landmark in comparison to countries like Switzerland, which had event, almost half of the population lived in rented (and still does) one of the lowest levels of homeownership accommodation. → 1 The Conservatives offered aspirational at 33.6 per cent. → 5 This also caused a tendency towards council tenants the right to buy their house or flat at price inflation, imbued with a zeal to help it overcome rates 30 – 50 per cent below market value. For the first two major economic downturns and duly return to time in the UK’s history of housing, the majority of the pre-2007 – 08 figures; → 6 the average price for a house is population had achieved their lifelong dream of becoming now £211,000, compared to 1979 when it was £21,966. → 7 individual homeowners. If the same rate of inflation affected every day commodities Since then, the inculcation of homeownership in like food, you would be paying £50 each Sunday for a Britain has enshrined a prima facie desire for autonomy, roast chicken. → 8 self-flourishing and, to an extent, freedom. Households What we are now experiencing is an affordability became the loci of the self and the material reincarnation crisis, with levels of owner-occupation at the lowest they of nineteenth-century (neo)liberalism. The collectivist have been since the middle of Thatcher’s premiership. → 9 paradigm of the postwar welfare state soon disintegrated In their book Inventing the Future, Alex Williams and

AArchitecture 33 Your reasons are blank as doilies 18 Nick Srnicek state that ‘capitalism demands that people becoming progressively outdated, as one in two young work in order to make a living, yet it is increasingly unable people now sexually identify themselves beyond this to generate enough jobs’. → 10 Indeed, the number of workers orthodox ideal. → 15 As the model of the nuclear family is on zero-hour contracts has increased from 166,000 in dismantled, so to is its spatial manifestation. What was 2007 to the current figure of 905,000. → 11 Only eight per once a key component in the reproduction of labour could cent of mortgage owners are in part-time work. In now be profoundly undermined by the liberalisation of negotiating new mortgages, banks typically require not sexuality, a phenomenon that was routinely suppressed in only an initial down payment, but proof of job security the bygone era of free love. How will Taylor-Whimpey to guarantee future repayments are met. The vast majority or Persimmons satisfy new desires of romance in their of private renters and one-third of social-renters desire standard three-bedroom semi-detached? to own a home at some point in the future → 12, yet precarity If the hegemony of individual homeownership is not (in the negative sense), or rather the casualisation of yet forsaken, the knell must soon chime. The desire for labour, means that the majority of people in those forms one’s own space for autonomy and self-determination, or of accommodation – those aged 25 – 34 → 13 – remain what David Madden relays as ‘ontological security’, is an economically incarcerated. existential one with which we all empathise. → 16 But these Conversely, the fluidity of labour transcends the underlying ambitions have been conflated with an traditional desire for homeownership, which invariably insidious economic project that has awarded a few and requires long-term financial commitments. There are excluded the rest. Indeed, what succeeds it should currently two million freelancers in the UK, a figure that embrace these very human desires and protect them from has doubled in the last decade. They are ‘the fastest the wanting encroachment of property speculation. growing occupational group’ on the labour market. → 14 A pertinent example of this proposition is a radical project The contractual nature of their employment usually by this year’s RIBA Gold Medal winner, Neave Brown, demands a flexible lifestyle. With regards to housing, this who designed and lived with his peers in a modernist might mean an inclination for short-term private rented housing co-op in 1960s North London. Innumerable accommodation to mitigate the insecurity of their projects of this spirit already exist and are proliferating in future income. This raises questions on the future of number, such as those by RUSS, StART and REAL homeownership and its relationship to labour, and how Foundation to name a few. As the isolated private mode of the traditional configuration of a household – one that ownership and its reliance to interminable debt becomes accommodates one or two full time workers – might adapt increasingly unfeasible and thus undesired for many, to the evolving nature of the future workforce. an avenue widens for a collective mode of ownership and Historically, the desire for homeownership has been a renewed reliance on one another. predicated on the image of the nuclear family. However, this narrative of a lifetime devoted to heterosexuality is

Desire 19 militant as the lichen we brushed on the rocks Plate 59 Rose and Acanthus a pencil, ink and watercolour design by Sidney Mawson, manufactured as a block-printed linen by G P & J Baker c 1900.

AArchitecture 33 just before the tide came in 20 Christian Parreno is assistant professor of Theory and History of Architecture at Universidad San Francisco de Quito, Ecuador. In his Christian Parreno PhD (from Oslo School of Architecture and Design) he explored the interrelation between boredom, space and modern architecture. He also holds an MA in Histories and Theories from the AA.

Boredom and Desire

Roland Barthes wrote of boredom as being ‘not far from the individual is and where the individual wants to be could bliss; it is bliss seen from the shores of pleasure’. → 1 In this be bridged. Complaining of the impossibility of this task formulation, the condition is not located in one limit or – a year before his death – Barthes described a scene with another but in between; configuring a space of separation a young lover: as well as of concatenation. By establishing doubt in I asked him to come and sit beside me on the bed the determination of desire, boredom turns into undefined during my nap; he came willingly enough, sat desire – the desire for desire that forces the involuntary on the edge of the bed, looked at an art book; his dwelling in a realm of absence, without an object of body was very far away – if I stretched out an arm fixation and in an eternal present. The consequent toward him, he didn’t move … he soon went into awareness of yearning immobilises, begetting a circular the other room. A sort of despair overcame me … and endless trajectory from the disaffection with the old How clearly I saw that I would have to give up to the consumption of the new, characterised by a deficit boys, because none of them felt any desire for of meaning. me, and I was either too scrupulous or too clumsy The space mediating boredom and desire resonates to impose my desire on them; that this is an with metaphors of voids in antiquity, equally related to the unavoidable fact, averred by all my efforts of experience of love and to the origins of life. In the account flirting, that I have melancholy life, that, finally, of the creation of the world, Plato affirmed that earth I’m bored to death by it. → 4 and sky are separated by a space that Eros tries to fill, defining inhabitation by the compulsion to attain what is not possessed. With the same conviction, Diotima of Mantinea remarked that ‘desire is a b*****d got by Wealth on Poverty and ever at home in a life of want’, and Sappho described unrequited love as ‘a hole is being gnawed in [my] vitals’. → 2 To both circumstances, Archilochus retorted, ‘you have snatched the lungs out of my chest’, ‘pierced me tight through the bones’, ‘devoured my flesh’, ‘mowed off my genitals’. → 3 The mutilating expropriation of Eros resonates with boredom as a space of uncertainty and therefore of latency, simultaneously denying definite representations but permitting the ideation of alternative forms. At their worst, boredom and desire escape alleviation and demand existential transcendence, as if the gap between where

Desire 21 I’ll hold a doily to my mouth and breathe Penelope Haralambidou Penelope Haralambidou is a Senior Lecturer at the Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London. Her research lies between architectural design and theory – with a focus on drawing as a research method and the relationship between architecture and film – and has been published and exhibited internationally. She is the author of Marcel Duchamp and the Architecture of Desire (Routledge, 2013) and has contributed writing on themes such allegory, figural theory, stereoscopy and film in architecture to a wide range of publications.

Eroticism, Architecture and the Desire to Grasp the World Visually in the Work of Marcel Duchamp

the chloroform in, I’ll carry your bags silently While much has been written on Marcel Duchamp – one eroticism that often remain hidden. → 5 Indisputably, of the twentieth century’s most beguiling artists – the Duchamp’s use of eroticism and double-entendres subject of his flirtation with architecture seems to have has added to the notoriety of his works and their impact been largely overlooked. Yet, in the carefully arranged on twentieth-century art. → 6 plans and sections organising the blueprint of desire in the However, French linguist and art historian Marc Large Glass, his numerous pieces replicating architectural Décimo suggests that although Duchamp often spoke fragments, and his involvement in designing exhibitions, about ‘eroticism’, the term remained ‘a vague notion Duchamp’s fascination with architectural design is clearly that Duchamp never defined’. In his introduction to evident. As his unconventional architectural influences the edited anthology, Marcel Duchamp and Eroticism, – Jean-François Niceron, Jean-Jacques Lequeu and Décimo understands Duchamp’s undefined eroticism as Frederick Kiesler – and diverse legacy – Bernard Tschumi, ‘dynamic thought that adapts and creates’ or ‘the very OMA, Michael Webb, Diller + Scofidio and Ben Nicholson instant when the “click” takes place, the rendezvous, the – indicate, Duchamp was not so much interested in moment when our vision changes and approaches what is ‘built’ architecture as he was in the architecture of desire, there, before our eyes, in a new way’. → 7 re-constructing the imagination through drawing and Duchamp’s work provides an opportunity to focus testing the boundaries between reality and its aesthetic on the infinitely erotic-dynamic functioning of and philosophical possibilities. thought, on its physiology; which consists in My book Marcel Duchamp and the Architecture of appreciating, through the intervention of the eye, Desire examines the link between architectural thinking what lies beyond the screen of memory and and Duchamp’s work.’ → 1 By employing design, drawing prejudice and being filled with wonder by the and making – the tools of the architect – I perform much more meaningful shadowy side, illuminated an architectural analysis of Duchamp’s final enigmatic by the seduction of a revealed truth. If only we work Given: 1. The Waterfall,’ 2. The Illuminating Gas … take the trouble to look. → 8 (1946 – 66), demonstrating an innovative research This lack of definition of eroticism by Duchamp led methodology able to grasp meaning beyond textual to many different interpretations. For instance in analysis. This novel reading of his ideas and methods adds Duchamp’s Eroticism: A Mathematical Analysis American to, but also challenges, other art-historical interpretations. art historian Craig Adcock poignantly observes that Through three main themes (allegory, visuality and desire) Duchamp’s eroticism can be linked with his interest in my work performs, defines and theorises an alternative ideas concerning four-dimensional geometry and more drawing practice positioned between art and architecture specifically the work of French mathematician Esprit that predates and includes Duchamp. Pascal Jouffret. He compares the new geometrical In the following two excerpts, I discuss Duchamp’s principles, including the notions of reversal and expansion, use of eroticism and my definition of the term ‘architecture with examples of Duchamp’s works, for instance his of desire’. → 2 The excerpts are accompanied by a series gender reversals in Rrose Sélavy and L.H.O.O.Q., of drawings, spanning the long duration of my practice-led the topological rotations of his ‘readymades’ and what research on Duchamp, with the most recent dating from he calls his ‘geometrical’ nudes in the Large Glass and earlier this year.’ → 3 Given. → 9 Adcock argues that, beyond its role in seducing the viewer, eroticism informed by mathematics Architecture of Desire and geometry becomes a method for philosophical and scientific pursuit. He concludes: I believe in eroticism a lot, because it is truly The eroticism … is first funny and then ironic and a rather widespread thing throughout the world, then epistemic. Duchamp’s bizarre erotic games a thing that everyone understands. It replaces, are intermeshed with other systems of thought, if you wish, what other literary schools call with mathematics and epistemology, and at those Symbolism, Romanticism. It could be another levels they are profound → 10 ‘ism’, so to speak. → 4 But even if Duchamp’s eroticism is connected with In his interviews with French art critic Pierre Cabanne, four-dimensional geometry and an expanded visuality, Duchamp often states the importance of eroticism in his how does it relate with architecture? work: everyone understands it without speaking of it, Eroticism in Duchamp’s work is primarily connected which means that it is possible to address issues through with the architecture of the gaze, and both the Large Glass and Given are ‘Bachelor’ machines for looking at the coveted image of an unattainable ‘Bride’. → 11 Duchamp Penelope Haralambidou, landscape, 2004 Thread, steel and nickel silver on board, photograph Andy Keate, 2009 arranges the constituent parts of these optical machines to

away. Desire 23 form complex spatial constructs. Moreover, he uses observer and the nude ‘is tense and unbridgeable and architectural drawing conventions to describe the lower yet … it is a space of participation’. → 15 In the Large Glass part of the Large Glass – plotting the Bachelors’ and Given, ‘the space of participation is activated domain from a plan and a section – and directly using through eros’. architectural elements – the door and wall in Given. Thus the term ‘architecture of desire’ in the title of In Surreal House (2010), an exhibition exploring my book, Marcel Duchamp and the Architecture of Desire, Surrealism in architecture, two works by Duchamp were refers to Duchamp’s Given, which is the primary focus the first pieces introducing the main theme of desire and subject matter of my research. In harmony with the at the gallery entrance. In her introductory text to the views by Alison, Tschumi and Pérez Gómez, I too perceive exhibition catalogue, curator Jane Alison points out: the piece as a space pointing to the erotic potential ‘We can say with some certainty … that eroticism and in architecture. architecture were the mainstays of Duchamp’s decidedly Secret during his lifetime – but as is widely known non-retinal practice.’ → 12 today – the model for the nude figure inGiven was In his article ‘Architecture and Its Double’, Duchamp’s lover, Brazilian sculptor Maria Martins. Given, which appeared in the special Architectural Design therefore, is literally the structure Duchamp designed and issue on surrealism and architecture assembled by physically constructed to house Martin’s coveted image Czech architectural theorist Dalibor Vesely in 1978, on the verge of losing her: the architecture of ‘his’ desire. French architect Bernard Tschumi discusses Drawing out Desire Duchamp’s Given as a ‘space of desire’. → 13 He observes Beyond simply signifying Duchamp’s ‘antiretinal’ Given, however, I see the choice of ‘mechanical term ‘architecture of desire’ drawing’ for the Large connected with the Glass, while he sees Given mechanics of technical as the culmination of drawing in architecture Duchamp’s fascination with and its ironic appropriation erotic machines. Describing by Duchamp. the relationship of the Drawing in architecture viewer with Duchamp’s new is in anticipation of the thing assemblage, he refers to it describes: the construction a space ‘of tension, of of the building. The lack of empathy, of desire’. For the projected object, the Tschumi the implicit, future building, which is allegorical erotic content missing at the time of the in the Large Glass becomes act of drawing, is a source explicit in Given, but at the of an imbedded desire in the same time the nude figure process of design. is just a signifier of any Training in architectural erotic exchange between design promotes the Penelope Haralambidou, The Act of Looking, 2007, abstract full-scale drawing of Duchamp’s Given object and viewer, or even in steel, perspex, waxed twine and nickel silver, photograph Andy Keate, 2009 development of a between idea and object. sophisticated spatial In Built upon Love: Architectural Longing after imagination capable of grasping complex three- Ethics and Aesthetics (2006), Alberto Pérez Gómez dimensional configurations intellectually. The uncovers the relationship between love and architecture. consummation of this intense imagination, however, is He divides love into eros, relating to erotic desire, disproportionately slow. Unlike art, where the drawing is seduction and poetics; and philia, relating to friendship single, immediate, and an art object in itself – therefore, and ethics. Speaking of his Polyphilo or The Dark Forest offering the potential for instant pleasure – in architecture, Revisited (1992) he asserts that ‘to the primary reality the object referred to by the drawing is ‘delayed’. → 16 of embodied consciousness, architecture speaks in the Architectural design, therefore, involves a suspension medium of the erotic, as poetic image’. → 14 Discussing of pleasure that produces desire. I suggest, however, Duchamp’s Given as part of the architectural poetic image that desire exists in the execution and appreciation of in modernity, he suggests that the space between the architectural drawing, irrespective of the building.

AArchitecture 33 24 The pleasure derives from the close ‘reading’ of drawings, with excess, differences, and left-overs’ – but a creative combining information from the plan and the section, position to secure the preservation of the ‘erotic capacity which leads to the blossoming of the designed structure of architecture’. → 22 in the mind. As a result there is no need for the delayed This love of rules, combined with a compulsive desire existence of a physical spatial structure to produce desire to break or exceed them, is not a characteristic of all in architectural design. Perhaps a stronger desire can architectural drawings; it is, however, a trait that links be locked into speculative and ‘surreal’ drawn projects all the work presented in Marcel Duchamp and the that are never intended to be built. Architecture of Desire. Architectural drawing, irreversibly In Architecture’s Desire: Reading the Late Avant- disengaged from building and employed for seduction, garde, American architectural historian K Michael Hays construction of allegorical narratives, or for interrogating examines architecture as a way of ‘negotiating the real’ the limits of visual representation, is paradigmatic of: and as a ‘socially symbolic production whose primary task Duchamp’s artistic pursuit; my empathetic review of his is the construction of concepts and subject positions work in search of hidden dimensions; as well as my rather than the making of things’. → 17 He discusses French selection of his influences and legacy in architecture. architect Bernard Tschumi’s Advertisements for Duchamp’s work is exemplary of the paradox of Architecture (1975 – 76), a series of postcard-sized montages constructing rules combined with a desire to break them. of disparate images accompanied by text as a ‘notational His oeuvre includes meticulous and precisely drawn device to “trigger” the desire for architecture’. According compositions, as in the Large Glass and Given, as well as to Hays, Tschumi attempts to establish an architectural audacious and ironical attacks of the rule systems in art, notation that ‘is not secondary to some building it denotes for instance in his readymades. → 23 (as are conventional These attacks seek to contest architectural drawings)’ but not only the underlying still contains ‘a gap – syntax of accepted norms a desire that must be in the production of art, performed by each reader but also challenge the of these works’. → 18 In one foundation of his own taste of his Advertisements for and artistic language by Architecture Tschumi using chance as a method discusses another type and purposely reinventing of desire deriving from his modus operandi. architectural drawing: My research, into what Ropes and rules. I see as Duchamp’s The most excessive appropriation, but also passion always transgression of involves a set of architectural drawing rules. Look at it this practice, also originates way: The game of in a personal quest to Penelope Haralambidou, Before the Looking Door, 2017, digital projection on skin architecture is an review and transgress intricate play with the underlying syntax of rules that you may break or accept. These rules, architectural representation. like so many knots that cannot be untied, have Frustrated by the fact that even in its contemporary the erotic significance of bondage: the more digital phase architectural drawing relies on orthographic numerous and sophisticated the restraints, the projection and a Cartesian understanding of homogeneous greater the pleasure. → 19 space, I seek to unravel its foundation. This Cartesian So for Tschumi, architecture and architectural drawing schema is closely connected to the ‘invention’ of perspective involves an appreciation of the pleasure of rules, geometry construction during the Renaissance, which in turn and order, compounded by a compulsive desire for their derives from a monocular understanding of vision. French ‘irrational’ excess and dissolution. → 20 He suggests that philosopher Jean-François Lyotard in his Les transformateurs ‘the ultimate pleasure of architecture lies in the most Duchamp (Duchamp’s Trans/formers), (1977) sees Given forbidden parts of the architectural act; where limits are as an incarnation – a fleshing out on an architectural scale perverted and prohibitions transgressed’. → 21 He stresses, – of the system of Renaissance perspective, while at however, that this not a purely nihilistic or subversive the same time ‘maliciously at work to lay bare that system’s stance – ‘we are not dealing with destruction here, but hidden assumptions’. → 24

Desire 25 Penelope Haralambidou, Stereoscopic Pair of Given, 2000

AArchitecture 33 26 Desire 27 Inspired by Lyotard’s analysis – including his expounding The Locus of Desire sketch of Given’s interior – my research examines Duchamp’s work as an inversion or expansion of the A question I often receive, when presenting my work on rules of linear perspective in search of an alternative Given and my analysis of Duchamp’s construction of understanding of visual space. → 25 To develop this expanded the nude, concerns my stance towards the pornographic perspective, I draw on Duchamp’s term ‘blossoming’, subject matter of the assemblage, which is often perceived which describes the Bride’s desire, but can also be linked as shocking and distasteful, if not offensive. to Duchamp’s fascination with non-Euclidean geometries Furthermore, although inspired by Duchamp’s work, and stereoscopy. Stereoscopy, a popular illusory technique my drawings although portraying desire could not be seen infamously linked to pornography, transgresses as conveying the same ‘eroticism’ and by being deliberately perspective by isolating and revealing binocular depth and non-figurative, my reworking ofGiven in The Act of allowing an image to ‘blossom’ in space. My analysis of Looking eliminates the pornographic iconography. → 27 Given identifies stereoscopy as its central and intentional As a female viewer, critic and architectural analyst, how theme, influencing its intellectual content and guiding do I negotiate entering a construct representing an its manufacturing process. Consequently, I read Duchamp’s apparent male desire? Is my resistance to addressing the inversion or expansion of perspective in Given as a explicit subject matter of Given a repression? physically constructed stereoscopic drawing, attempting to My position is that I read Given primarily as unlock the erotic potential of architectural representation, a meticulous drawing of an alternative desirous way what I have called a ‘blossoming of perspective’. of looking. Transgression and excess of architectural drawing My recollection of the first encounter with the conventions links all the practitioners I present in the photographic representation of the scene behind the doors concluding chapter entitled ‘Defrocked Cartesians’, where in Given is vague and, by the time I visited the installation I attempt to formulate Duchamp’s influences and legacy at the Philadelphia Museum of Art for the first time, in architectural design. → 26 Jean-François Niceron exceeds I did not perceive the scene shocking. If anything, I found perspective through anamorphosis, Jean-Jacques Lequeu its expansion in three dimensions and the near blinding transgresses the boundaries of decency in architectural brightness of the internal lighting nothing short representation through excessive eroticism, while Frederick of transcendent. Kiesler denounces drawing on a flat plane and builds the Prompted by the careful and detailed explanation model of the endless house as an extension of the body. of its construction in his Manual of Instructions, I had Conversely, Michael Webb devises drawing techniques already developed a way of looking at Duchamp’s to picture the imperceptible nature of memory and assemblage as a deliberate exposition of the act of looking, Nat Chard constructs meticulous drawing machines that a staging of the visual process. → 28 Furthermore, I saw the violate their own structure in their mission to capture combination of Given and the document of the Manual indeterminacy. Entirely atypical, they all exceed the primary as Duchamp’s attempt to create a built treatise in spatial role of architectural drawing as geometric instructions perception, concealed behind the provocative and to build and employ it as an investigatory tool in a titillating subject matter. → 29 In deliberate opposition to sometimes refreshingly indulgent, philosophical pursuit. sensationalist reviews of the work – some have seen it as In Marcel Duchamp and the Architecture of Desire the scene of a violent crime, for instance – I was determined architectural drawing is both the subject matter and the to bypass the overt lurid subject matter, in order to unveil method. Although ‘written’, most concepts and discoveries the hidden structure of this ‘architecture of desire’. → 30 in the book originated as drawings: large ambitious Thus, I perceive the pornographic mise en scène of final drawings; three-dimensional drawings and models; the work ‘allegorically’: as subterfuge – dazzling the viewer collages; animated drawings; stereoscopic drawings; away from the clandestine significance ofGiven – but also, sketches in loose pages and sketchbooks that I keep safe; as allusion – pornography as a signifier for stereoscopy, perishable sketches now lost; but also ephemeral the work’s underlying theme and a representation technique drawing-like ideas forming in the mind which are difficult which during Duchamp’s early life became infamously to fully translate into either physical drawings or connected with the presentation of lewd subject matter. words. Furthermore, I use drawing as a method not only Duchamp states in his notes for the Large Glass that of developing new ideas but also of closely ‘reading’ there are two appearances of the Bride, one by the other drawings. Bachelors and another by the Bride imagining herself naked. → 31 I am not alone in arguing that although portraying a female nude, the scene in Given cannot be simply identified as a construction from a solely

AArchitecture 33 28 male point of view. The direction of the nude’s gaze is who animates the field of discourse around his life inaccessible as her head is hidden behind the edge of the and work’. → 40 breach on the wall, but as Thierry de Duve has suggested My long, unwavering preoccupation with his this creates a strange topology for the viewer. → 32 When methods and ideas is an undeniable testimony of being looking through the peepholes on the door, it is as if her under his spell: I am clearly a victim of Duchamp’s gaze goes around and traps you from behind. The viewer powerful charm. However, most seductive I find his is caught within the space created by the Bride looking proposing of creativity as the architecture of a love affair, at herself: within a female gaze. an internal game of seduction. In this game, the author Furthermore, Given’s immediacy and lyrical beauty, oscillates between two roles: the seducer and the seduced, as well as perhaps its covert violence, has a potentially the Bachelor and the Bride, the artist and the viewer/ female origin, influenced by Duchamp’s lover, Maria spectator, or voyeur. Requiring a constructed notion of Martins, a woman with an allegedly predatory sexuality. → 33 innocence – of not knowing or an enigma – this internal Martins’ temperament is evident in her sculptural work, game of seduction can take the author turned viewer which as curator Michael R. Taylor observes, in the 1940s and vice versa by surprise. became ‘animated with a writhing, baroque exuberance Given’s enigma invites diverse interpretations, and that accentuated her themes of fertility, desire and sexual each interpretation reveals more about the interpreter/ cruelty’. → 34 Describing some of Martins’ sculptures, Taylor spectator, rather than about Duchamp’s actual intentions. often refers to them as ‘terrifying’. → 35 Combining the I believe that his work operates in a similar way to a darker sides of surrealist imagery and her native Brazilian mathematical equation, as a robust structure of variables culture – especially the myths and legends of the Amazon and constants, able to render different but consistently River – the snake goddess in her Cobra Grande, 1942, plausible results for each viewer/analyst/voyeur. has ‘the cruelty of a monster and the sweetness of wild Throughout my study, my interpretation of Given remains fruit’, according to Martins. → 36 Furthermore, Taylor sees more or less the same: I see it as an irreducibly fascinating her work The Impossible III (1946)– depicting a male and drawing representing the desire to grasp the world female figure caught in a deadlock of desire and repulsion visually. In Marcel Duchamp and the Architecture of Desire and using sexual imagery relating to predatory animal I describe, from an autobiographical point of view, and plant forms – as a direct reference to her relationship how this ‘architecture of desire’ has the ability to mould with Duchamp. If the Large Glass is a portrayal of the itself into different types of longing: from sexual desire amorous exchange between the Bride and the Bachelors to maternal love and to a nostalgia for the shattered locus from the Bachelors’ technologist point of view in of female creativity. Always at the back of my mind, perspective, then Given is the portrayal of the same Given still keeps its secrets, while retaining its potential exchange, this time in stereoscopy from the point of view to take me completely by surprise. of the Bride: Maria. As we have seen, Duchamp’s concept of eroticism was a central driving force guiding many of his projects; he saw it as an underlying philosophy, a matrix, but also as a material like a ‘tube of paint, so to speak’. → 37 Here Duchamp’s definition of eroticism resonates with Australian philosopher Elizabeth Grosz’s definition of the creative impulse as a sublimation of sexual selection and seduction. → 38 His work has often been criticized by feminist critics, but American art historian and feminist Amelia Jones reconstructs Duchamp as an ‘indeterminably gendered author’ negotiating contradictory notions of sexual difference and subjectivity. → 39 For instance, in an attempt to blur gendered boundaries, he famously adopted a female creative persona Rrose Sélavy. Jones poignantly also discusses Duchamp’s methods of seduction, on a personal level during his life, as well as the continuing allure that his work effects on viewers and critics alike until today. She sees Duchamp as ‘the quintessential desired object but also the actively titillating subject

Desire 29 A Mahjong Table, a Façade and a Hotel Room

James Mak

James Mak graduated from the AA in 2017 (Diploma 1). In 2008 he and 14 fellow students co-founded Project Little Dream, a charity based in Hong Kong and Cambodia that designs, builds and maintains village schools in Takeo, Cambodia.

Set in the 1960s of Hong Kong, In the Mood for Love is a story of two married couples who happen to rent rooms in adjacent homes. Gradually realising that their respective spouses are having an affair with each other, they too are unable to resist their forbidden desire for each other. While dialogue and plot was forsaken in that delicate era of Hong Kong, director Wong Kar Wai uses composition to capture the asphyxiating social norms that haunt the two victims of infidelity. The narrative skips and jumps forward through time at an erratic speed, sometimes leaving the viewer initially confused as to how much time has passed between scenes. Even though filming took a long 15 months – during which time the script and individual scenes were written with the actors on-set – you feel that you’re in the hands of somebody in complete visual and emotional control. The film is cleverly restrained. It is so self-contained that it is only limited to a handful of locations, each filmed from the same angle – a cyclical experience of returning again and again to the same frames. Against the fixed backdrop, the only things that change are the inner lives and wordless encounters (every posture, glance and touch) of the two protagonists, Mr Chow and Mrs Chan. The uncomfortable yet consistent framing echoes 1960s Hong Kong where the two characters are constantly observed. It represents a time when the city’s population was rapidly increasing. People were living closer and closer together, and gossip became a form of social surveillance. Hence, most of the scenes featuring the two leads are doubly framed – either through obstructive objects or more explicitly through windows and doorframes. The two characters are constantly observed by their community, the audience and in turn by each other – they reveal what we desire from others, and what others desire from us.

Desire 33 A Mahjong Table A Hotel Room

Merry chitchats and clattering of the ivory tiles are the To avoid gossip, Mr Chow insists that they should rent usual cacophony of mahjong – a four-person gambling a hotel room in order for Mrs Chan to help him write at game common in a domestic Chinese setting. However, night. By never consummating their own love for each Wong Kar Wai does not let us hear these sounds. Instead, other, Mr. Chow and Mrs. Chan can infinitely suspend music follows Mrs Chan, reflecting her state of mind reality and their feelings by staying in character. In as if time has been suspended. Camera positioned just a confined refuge where social surveillance is suspended, outside the living room, the door frames the space where repetitive scenarios of their absent spouses continues. the games table is set up. We, the audience, remain Instead of seducing each other, Mr Chow pretends to be curious voyeurs. The mahjong table was the integral Mrs Chan’s husband, admitting his affair. Mrs Chan’s first meeting between Mr Chow and Mrs Chan. Still colourful cheongsam now blends with the richly patterned enjoying their respective marital bliss, we watch as they wallpaper. The modernist decor of the room introduces carefully tiptoe in and out of the game, exchanging a new spatial dynamic through a triple-planed vanity cautious glances. The film focuses on the two leads to mirror. Not to misguide or to misdirect, the mirror looks the extreme – never showing the faces of their spouses. into a purer, more honest reflection of the two. The mirror As the story progresses, the mahjong table is filled once now momentarily catches his longing gaze. Forbidden again. With the same music and camera framing, we find desire can only be trapped in their reflection. that this time Mrs Chan is a reluctant participant. She Of course, their twisted fantasy was never meant has been chastised by her landlady for going out alone to last forever. The long repetitive strolls along red- too often at night. She is trapped, both inside the curtained hotel corridors can only be a suspended conservative social construct of her time and within the transition. When Mr. Chow finally admits his love for physical enclosure of walls and frames. her, their fantasy ruptures; their wave of consciousness hits. They are everything that they despise. Within both A Facade of these imaginary and architectural frames are the fragile and fleeting episodes that express the Chinese title of the The most excruciating element of the film is what is movie, Hua Yang Nian Hua (Years that Pass like Blooming introduced after the two main characters admit to each Flowers). Wong Kar Wai cleverly demonstrates restraint in other that their spouses are having an affair. Instead giving the audience just enough introspection to construct of confronting them head-on, they endure the social their own truth. But more importantly, the specificity of convention of unspoken encounters. Once complex the film’s spaces strategically links unrelated and non- and perverse they try to understand their spouses by chronological events. In the Mood for Love is a quiet and reenacting the seduction of their spouses. ‘Would you painful exploration of what happens when the fantasy you like to come up to my place?’ said Mr Chow. Just when desire for yourself is both a common and perverse one. we think the pair has finally succumbed to the inevitable, ‘No, he wouldn’t say it like that’, says Mrs Chan. As the two leads try to embody the spouse of the other, they also coach each other on what they think their spouse would really do. Along a back alleyway of a colonial building, the lengthy facade is punctuated by a series of identically barred windows. We are always aware that four people are involved in this story, but it is not four real people; it is two people and two phantoms. Gazing into the street through intervals of aperture, the confined barred window blurs the difference between seduction and the guise of the spouse. The attempt to seduce their own spouse in the form of the other’s becomes a facade of a masochistic fantasy – an irresistible desire to eventually fall for each other.

For More: Simone Shu-Yeng Chung, ‘Reading Perspective and Architecture through the Film In the Mood for Love’, thesis, Wissenschaftliche Zeitschrift der Bauhaus-Universität Weimar (2003), pp 196 – 202.

AArchitecture 33 34

Kanyaphorn Kaewprasert This is a project by Kanyaphorn Kaewprasert with Gaia Scagnetti Hwang. Kaewprasert is a PhD student at the AA and co-founder of adeofTwo, a multidisciplinary design, research and fabrication practice. Desire Grammar Totem is a visualising machine that reifies your desire into a totem. The machine uses additive technology as a means to generate tangible three-dimensional form as a symbol of human desire. The object becomes a totem of desire and an incarnation of our own personal secrets. It offers an immediate tangible response to a personal reflection. Moreover, it allows infinite explorations of human desire, geometrical representation and symbolism.

Desire Grammar Totem Speculative Text The Totem is framed in a glass bell jar; it functions as a memento to our belief that desires can come true. We believe in desire as a fluid, multiple and dynamic force, something positive and productive. As a force, desire Technical Description renders worlds of transformation, destruction and construction. Desire dictates priorities; priorities shape The question we asked our users was What is your choices; choices determine actions. Desire returns the dearest desire? most powerful of the intentions. It extends beyond the An unlimited character input text field constitutes individual and it is in action always: there is no life without the first interaction with the system interface. desire, there is no quiet moment for the desiring mind. To inform the design of Desire Grammar Totem, we Desire is a function of the properties we attribute conducted a qualitative analysis of more than 100 user- to objects; those attributions actually evolve. The generated answers to this question. The study was aimed designation of value to objects (and the social exchange at exploring the variation in these answers to create of it) stimulates desire. a functional Grammar. The Grammar defines the rules This project, Desire Grammar Totem, discusses translating users’ answers in three dimensional forms. undervalued and tacit desires. The research provided useful insights. It indicated Once an individual desire is expressed and that linguistic sentence structures cannot be described communicated into the by interpreting single words system, the message needs – almost half of the given to be encoded and reified. answers were multi-clause A body of rules, a Grammar, sentences. Contributor was set as a translator. The responses varied in length Grammar transforms and complexity. Many users words into forms. This expressed desires that grammar is not concerned went beyond self-concern; with meaning but with the many addressed their formal expression of the relationship with others desire. The system or sensitive social issues. performs semantic analysis, Positive feelings were sentiment analysis, expressed using significantly key-word detections and different text structures a series of numerical than negative ones. operations on the input. The conceptual form It uses the results of of a sphere – as symbolic this analysis to generate representation of the origin a three-dimensional – was used as a leading model. This form is only metaphor to represent meaningful to its author. a user’s answer in three For everybody else it is dimensions. The perfection an abstract object. of the sphere has been Totem in Normal Life In the third part of the regarded as a symbol of project we use additive technology to generate a Totem wisdom without beginning or ending, just being. If your – a three-dimensional printed visualisation of your answer to the question What is your dearest desire? desire. Totem demonstrates how human belief can is wisdom, your Totem is a sphere. be transposed into a tangible form. The belief in the The body of Grammar has six rules working inherent power of a totem requires a new understanding dialectically on data analysis written in PHP and three of our cultural connotations of 3D-printed object: not dimensional models in Grasshopper, Rhinoceros. The an unfinished and temporary prototype, but a quasi- six Grammars, consisting of three compulsory, two religious representation of our inner selves. In this addition, one exception, are designated to extract values. project, additive technology makes an invisible desire Grammar I: the number of facets shaping the initial not only visible but also tangible. Desire Grammar sphere are decided by word count. If the value is between Totem underlines the contrast between the sacredness 1 and 6 then it is converted to a decimal fraction. If there of totems and the secularity of additive technology. are 0 – 6 words, divide by 1. If there are 7 – 12 words,

AArchitecture 33 38 divide by 2. If there are 13 – 18 words, divide by 3. If there fraction. The value indicates the sequence order that will are 19 – 24 words, divide by 4. If there are 25 – 30 words, be queued two order behind. divide by 5. If there are 31 – 36 words, divide by 6. If there Grammar V: desire for others conveys intentions. are 37 – 42 words, divide by 7. If there are 43 – 48 words, Originator will be given a special treat; special material. divide by 8. If there are 49 – 54 words, divide by 9. If there Detecting the preposition accompanied by Noun(s) or are 55 – 60 words divide by 10. If the answer is; Pronoun identified by WordNet lexical semantics resource. 1 then convert to decimal 1.73959 Grammar VI: the only exceptional grammar 2 then convert to decimal 2.98125 hacked its own rules of all stated Grammars by replacing 3 then convert to decimal 2.45399 symbolic meaning. If the word wisdom is detected, 4 then convert to decimal 1.316126 create a perfect sphere. 5 then convert to decimal 0.86334 Through a translation process, desire is encoded into 6 then convert to decimal 0.61461 values. The values to be filled in variables are in a given Grammar II: the divisions of the facets are decided by file to progress via Grasshopper, Rhinoceros. A Totem is English alphabetical order of the first letter of the last originated from sixty millimetre diameter in x axis sphere. word. The research sample study showed the presence Variable of facets and divisions of curved components are of a common pattern. In a simple sentence structure, the dictated by encoded values. Basic forms and structures answer (your dearest desire) is often expressed in the last were assigned. The finishing process refines the surface word. Other patterns were identified: in sentences starting combining all joints by plug-in Weaverbird mesh edges with a first-person pronoun, this is often followed by and Exoskeleton. When the calculation is finished, virtual a verbs expressing desire (want, hope, desire, crave, etc) representations of totems will be automatically uploaded and lastly by a desired object noun. In clauses starting to Sketchfab under account desiregrammartotem with verbs, objects noun are stated last. In one word or www.sketchfab.com/desiregrammartotem/models. answers, the words themselves are desired objects. And again the visualisations are uploaded back to an Grammar III (a): numbers of the chosen words are embedded platform on interface. Three dimensional rigidly related to decimal fraction values of Grammar I. printing is the final process of objectification. The printed If Grammar I is valued as; 1.73959 then convert to integer Totem is encapsulated in a glass bell jar with a white 3. 2.98125 then convert to integer 3. 2.45399 then convert marble base and copper plate internal surface. Each to integer 3. 1.36126 then convert to integer 4. 0.86334 object has a unique identification number printed on then convert to integer 5. 0.61461 then convert to integer every marble base. 6. x coordinates are related to the order in linguistic Design Grammar Totem is here: structure starting the first order from 0. Variable of value www.madeoftwo.com/desiregrammartotem/main.php is between 0 to 5. Grammar III (b): y coordinates portray symbolic meaning to form. Sentiment analysis labelling defines positive or neutral as convex forms, negative as concave forms. If positive or neutral is labelled; Count how many letters of the chosen words sequentially. The given value will be mathematically mode with number of divisions or the answer from Grammar II. If negative is labelled; Count how many letters of the chosen words sequentially then add half amount of division numbers to the value. The given value will be mathematically mode with number of divisions or the answer from Grammar II. Then, connect the x–y coordinates together sequentially. Grammar IV: additional grammar for well- regarded explanation of desire. Detected subordinative conjunctions adds another layer of complexity to the form by rearranging sequence of x–y coordinates connection. If subordinative conjunction(s) is/are detected; count how many of the conjunctions then to be mathematically mode with numbers of contours or the answer of Grammar I before converted to decimal

Desire 39 AArchitecture 33 40 Plate 99 Painted fabric (block-printed plain-weave cotton), designed and produced by Associated Artists New York, 1890s. Five colours, each one requiring its own set of printing blocks, were used to produce the daylily design, making this one of Associated Artists more unusual and ambitious efforts.

Desire 41 All we want is a room somewhere darting back to their unit. The ones who hang around use Far away from the cold night air AALAWuN as an alternative base camp, a place from With one enormous chair which to get support to launch personal research that Oh, wouldn’t it be lovely? includes working with other students from across the school. But all steps, however large or small are vital. They *Not sure anyone will get the Eliza Doolittle/Pygmalion demonstrate an indefinable and unquantifiable curiosity reference. Although a simple want is still a desire. that’s needed now more than ever. The itinerant LAWuN, *began 1969 currently working As a world bemoans its inadequate leaders, it’s as AALAWuN, started off 2017 – 18 by entering a small inability to care and the increasing capability to room at the very top of 32 Bedford Square. With having, slaughter, few have the time to even question the apparently failed to meet the requirements of the AA structure, composition and architecture that enables it. Prospectus, *What you sent is very interesting but wasn’t The poor who struggle from day to day to eat and what I had asked for at all, with our painted call for pay bills have no time to seriously question the powerful more mutineers and escapees from students and staff infrastructures that author their lot and those better *all escapees are welcome; potential pirates raiding the off, for fear of falling into poverty are far to caught up conventions of the institution? We were also faced with in gaining accreditations to bite the hand that feeds. the further prospect of being inert (with fireplace) at the *not a good way to get tenure – John Taylor Gatto – outer reaches of the AA’s buildings.*32m3 volume of air author of Weapons of Mass Instruction. Now AALAWuN shenanigans *Is the word In Term 1, AALAWuN detached the carpet from our shenanigans a bit frivolous? Now AALAWuN’s work can room. With a fair amount of effort it can be carried and be traced back, *without GPS or heat sensor, to a single unrolled in any location, enabling AALAWuN to remain doorway; Just go to the top of the *Northernmost part of a transitory and fluid proposition – a channel pavilion. building and you can’t miss, two old blokes sitting in their There are a lot of questions we all need to work on enormous chair stuffing themselves with cake.not * very together – come and join us on the carpet. keen on two old blokes, one of us is not old anyway and *Have made some suggestions … any use … it’s very one of us never sits down for long! political, need to get it onto the carpet But less about the room. It’s the students and the staff that AALAWuN is all about and an initiative: Oh, so lovely sittin’ *A new school-wide initiative that will encourage, Abso-bloomin’-lutely still stir up and ignite cross-unit, studio and programme We would never budge till spring collaborations in a way never attempted or expected before Crept over our window sill Fine words, but how to make it happen? How do you get a student to step out from their unit fiefdom after paying for and understanding it to be the key for an ambitious pursuit of a designer comfort future peppered with both peer respect and sports cars. Not that the unit is a restrictive structure in which to learn, quite the opposite but perhaps the lure of professional status within flexible parameters is what keep students fearful of ever straying too far. The idiom, getting value for your buck is as popular today as ever. In this context, a student’s time in Unit learning might be cynically translated as, endlessly assessed, high-end-exercise-deadlines, transformed into marketable data for job applications. From such an obvious and seamless loop of reward why would a student step out into a seemingly chaotic situation of unassessed and devised work with others, who are more than likely singing from a different hymn sheet? It would be like shooting yourself in the foot. Utter Madness! But some do come; some walk in and sit down and start work, others sniff gingerly on the threshold before

AALAWuN AArchitecture 33 David Greene and Eddie Farrell 42 Desire 43 AA Bookshop Recommendation

Seven shelf- and stocking-fillers, hand-picked by the editors and designers of AA Publications with AA Bookshop staff.

All titles are available to purchase, in person from the AA Bookshop at 32 Bedford Square, WC1B 3ES, or online at www.aabookshop.net.

AA Files 75

Edited by Thomas Weaver AA Files 75 features essays by Ross Anderson on Adolphe Appia, Claire Zimmerman on Albert Kahn, Salomon Frausto on Theo Crosby, Victor Plahte Tschudi on Piranesi, Joanna Merwood-Salisbury on Helmut Jahn, Freya Wigzell on Paul Rudolph, watercolours and an oral history by Nigel Coates, and a conversation between Thomas Daniell and Japanese architect Shin Takamatsu.

AA Publications, December 2017 172 pp, col & b/w ills 978-1-907896-94-1 £ 15

The Coming Insurrection Taking a Line for a Walk, Assignments in Design Education

The Invisible Committee Edited by Nina Paim and Emilia Bergmark Part handbook for a boiling revolution, part supporting evidence in Drawing its title from a quote by Paul Klee, Taking a Line for a Walk focuses a controversial trial for sabotage and terrorist conspiracy, The Coming on the assignment as a pedagogical element and verbal artefact of design Insurrection was first published in French in 2007 by the anonymous education. This book is a compendium of 224 assignments – by people including collective, The Invisible Committee. The book serves as a psychoanalysis Kandinsky, Josef Albers, Johannes Itten, Lazio Moholy-Nagy, Paul Rand, of today’s late-stage capitalistic society now on its social democratic death Bruno Munari and Walter Crane. A reference book for educators, researchers bed, and it considers the future in the perspectives of autonomy, political and students alike, it offers a space for different lines of pedagogy to converge activism and joy. The Coming Insurrection is the first in a series translated and converse. An accompanying essay by Corinne Gisel takes a closer look and published by Semiotext(e). Translations may vary depending on the at the various forms assignments can take and the educational contexts they version, but ‘Everyone agrees. It’s about to explode.’ exist within.

Semiotext(e), 2009 135 pp Spector Books, June 2017 272 pp 978-1-584350-80-4 Paperback, £ 9.95 978-3-959050-81-4 Ringbound, c £ 33

AArchitecture 33 44 Everything one invents is true Cedric Price Works 1952 – 2013

Edited by Pamela Johnston Published in conjunction with the Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA), Conceived as a ‘book of ideas’ rather than a conventional architectural this anthology brings together for the first time all of the projects, articles monograph, Everything one invents is true sets out the thinking behind and talks by British architect Cedric Price (1934–2003). Content material a selection of the Swiss architect Peter Märkli’s projects from the past 15 is drawn from the original work, now largely held in the Cedric Price Fonds years. A follow up to the 2002 AA Publication, Approximations: The at the CCA, to present the munificence of Price: thinker, philosopher, artist Architecture of Peter Märkli, and ‘an ideal gift for all lovers of beautiful and unparalleled raconteur. books’, in the words of the Neue Zürcher Zeitung. Winner Jury Prize, 2017 Art Book Awards Winner 2017 Colvin Prize, Society of Architectural Historians

Quart Verlag, March 2017 242 pp, extensive col & b/w ills AA Publications, 2016 Two vols (912 pp and 528 pp), col & b/w ills 978-3-03761-138-8 Hardcover, £ 108 978-1-907896-43-9 Hardcover & Paperback in slipcase, £ 150

The Surreal House Rituals and Walls: The Architecture of Sacred Space

By Jane Alison Edited by Pier Vittorio Aureli and Maria Shéhérazade Giudici Through a unique blend of art, photography, film, and architecture, The This book is the result of a year-long investigation on the nature of sacred Surreal House presents the individual dwelling as a place of mystery and space and its manifestation developed in the AA’s Diploma Unit 14. It consists wonder. Fusing house and dream, it probes the relationship between interior of design proposals – ranging from a Jesuit monastery in Detroit to an Islamic and shell, object and space, and it elaborates ‘the marvellous’ and ‘compulsive women’s centre in Paris – and essays that focus on the relationship between beauty’ as espoused by André Breton. The haunted house, the cabinet of forms of worship and architecture, arguing that within sacred space form curiosities, the ruined castle, the cage, the cave, the box, the labyrinth, the must follow function. In other words, architectural space must adhere to the bell jar and the womb are among the uniquely surreal habitats explored. rituals through which the sacred is enacted. The meaning of sacred space goes far beyond the stereotypes of contemplation and spirituality and instead aligns with the political and social ethos of the city.

Yale University Press, 2010 336 pp, illustrated AA Publications, 2016 240 pp, illustrated 978-0-300165-76-0 Hardcover, £ 40 978-1-907896-63-7 Paperback, £ 30

Desire 45 Ana Araujo 15 Ibid. 12 English Housing Survey 2015 – 16: In 16 Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, 2015 – 16, 59 per cent of private renters (2.6 1 http://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/ Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, million households) and 27 per cent of social english/desire, accessed 3 Oct 17. trans Robert Hurley, Mark Seem and Helen renters (one million households) stated that 2 Freud did not exactly ‘discover’ the unconscious, R. Lane (Minneapolis, MN: University of they expected to buy a property at some point although this is usually attributed to him. Minnesota Press, 1983) 25. in the future. Report by EHS. For more information on this topic, see his 17 Deleuze and Guattari, 28. 13 Nearly half of employed 25 – 34-year-olds are ‘Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis’, 18 Ibid. on zero-hour contracts. See Above. in Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund 19 Ibid. 14 Exploring the UK Freelance Workforce 2016, Freud, vol 15. 20 Pierre-Andre Boutang, Gilles Deleuze from A report by IPSE. 3 See Jacques Lacan, ‘The Function and Field of to Z, with Claire Parnet, DVD (Cambridge: 15 One in two young people say they’re not 100 Speech and Language’ (1953). My description Semiotext(e), 2011) heterosexual 2015, survey, Yougov. of Lacan’s theories is largely based on Luca 21 Friedrich Nietzsche, ‘Beyond Good and Evil 16 David Madden and Peter Marcuse, In Defense Bosetti’s lecture ‘The unconscious in §36’ in A Nietzsche Reader, 228. of Housing (New York, NY: Verso, 2015). Lacan’s work’, delivered as part of the Public 22 Deleuze (1983) 6. Programme of the Centre for Freudian 23 Nietzsche, ‘Beyond Good and Evil §36’ in A Analysis and Research (London, 30 Sep 2017). Nietzsche Reader, 228. Christian Parreno 4 See Jacques Lacan, ‘The Instance of the 24 Ibid. 229. Letter in the Unconscious’ (1957). 25 Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, 36. 1 Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text 5 See Jacques Lacan, ‘Position of the 26 Daniel W Smith, ‘Deleuze and the Question (New York, NY: Hill & Wang, 1975) 26. Unconscious’ (1960). of Desire: Toward an Immanent Theory of 2 In Anne Carson, Eros the Bittersweet 6 See Jacques Lacan, ‘Encore’ Ethics’, Parrhesia 2 (2007) 69. (London: Dalkey Archive Press, 1998) 10. (Seminar XX, 1973). 27 Deleuze and Guattari, 29. 3 Ibid., 51. 7 See Jacques Lacan, ‘Joyce, the Symptom’ 28 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, trans 4 Roland Barthes, Incidents, trans (1975). See also Billy Mills, ‘Finnegans Wake Walter Kaufman & R J Hollingdale (New Richard Howard (Berkeley, CA: – the book the web was invented for’ (https:// York, NY: Vintage Books, 1968) 550, and University of California Press, 1992) 79. www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2015/ Deleuze and Guattari, 29. apr/28/finnegans-wake-james-joyce-modern- 29 Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, 46. interpretations, accessed 9 Oct 17). 30 Deleuze and Guattari, 34. Penelope Haralambidou 8 See Sigmund Freud, ‘The Handling of Dream- Interpretation in Psycho-Analysis’ (1911). 1 Penelope Haralambidou, Marcel Duchamp Max Worrell and the Architecture of Desire (London: Routledge, 2013). George Jepson 1 Housing Tenure, Shelter Factsheet: https:// 2 The first reworked excerpt is from the england.shelter.org.uk/__data/assets/pdf_ introduction and the second is found in ‘Desire: 1 Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, file/0005/166532/Factsheet_Housing_ Female Nude Drawing’, see Haralambidou, trans. Hugh Tomlinson (Bloomsbury tenure.pdf Architecture of Desire, 8 – 14, 229 – 30. Academic; London, 1983) 2. 2 Alex Williams and Nick Srnicek, Inventing 3 Before the Looking Door, digital projection 2 Friedrich Nietzsche, ‘On the Genealogy of the Future (New York, NY: Verso, 2015) 58. on skin, 2017, is a ‘drawing’ I created Morals §12’ in A Nietzsche Reader, trans R J 3 James Meeks, ‘Where will we live?’, London specifically for the Canadian journalPublic , Hollingdale (London: Penguin, 1977) 231. Review of Books 36 (2014) issue 56, entitled Attendant A to Z, and 3 Deleuze (1983) 2. 4 English Housing Survey 2015 – 16, edited by Serkan Ozkaya and Robert 4 Ibid. report by ONS. Fitterman. See Penelope Haralambidou, 5 Ibid. 5 S Bourassa et al, Housing Finance, Prices and ‘C for Camera Obscura (Reversed)’, Public 6 D/G’s miraculating-machine, which engenders Tenure in Switzerland (Geneva: University of 56, (2017): 22 – 31. the process of miraculation, is that which Geneva, 2010). 4 Pierre Cabanne, Dialogues with Marcel produces the conditions for the perception 6 Dominic Frisby, ‘Why young people can’t Duchamp, trans Ron Padgett (New York, NY: of a thing within a particular experiential afford to buy a house; money became too Da Capo Press, 1987) 88. mode. The example taken is that of capital, cheap’, Guardian (April 2016). 5 Craig Adcock, ‘Duchamp’s Eroticism: which within a particular mode of production, 7 House prices since 1952, Nationwide Bank. This A Mathematical Analysis’, in Marcel miraculates everything so as to appear as the figure is significantly greater within London. Duchamp: Artist of the Century, eds causal element of production. 8 The Housing Market is Rigged, video Rudolf Kuenzli and Francis M. Naumann, 7 Friedrich Nietzsche, ‘On the Genealogy of by Novara Media. (Cambridge, MA: MIT, 1989) 149. Morals §12’ in A Nietzsche Reader, trans R J 9 Of the estimated 22.8 million households in 6 Adcock, ‘Duchamp’s Eroticism’, 149. Hollingdale (London: Penguin, 1977) 230. England, 14.3 million or 63 per cent were 7 Marc Décimo, ‘Preliminaries’ in Marcel 8 Louis Althusser, Reading Capital, trans. Ben owner-occupiers. The proportion of Duchamp and Eroticism, ed Marc Brewster (London: New Left Books 1970) 121. households in owner occupation increased Décimo (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars 9 Karl Marx, ‘1857 Introduction’ to the steadily from the 1980s – 2003 when it Publishing, 2007) 2. The book is the ‘Grundrisse’ quoted in Reading Capital, 123. reached its peak of 71 per cent. Since then, result of a colloquium that took place 10 Althusser, 123. owner occupation gradually declined to its in December 2005 at the University of 11 Jameson, 49. current level. However, the rate of owner Orléans and the Musée des Beaux-Arts 12 Deleuze (1983) 45. occupation has not changed since 2013 – 14. in Orléans, France, in relation to an 13 Michel Foucault,. ‘Nietzsche, Genealogy, ONS English Housing Survey 2015 – 16. exhibition entitled ‘Marcel Duchamp History’ in Language, Counter-Memory, 10 Alex Williams and Nick Srnicek, Inventing Rrose Sélavy’ (28 November 2005 – 29 practice (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, the Future (New York, NY: Verso, 2015) 126. January 2006). 1977) 76. 11 People in employment on a zero-hour 8 Décimo, ‘Preliminaries’, 2. 14 Foucault, 78. contract: Mar 2017, report by ONS. 9 Duchamp’s readymades are ordinary

AArchitecture 33 46 manufactured objects that the artist Haven, CT: Yale University Press with selected and modified, as an antidote Philadelphia Museum of Art, 2009). to what he called ‘retinal art’. 29 The Manual of Instructions resembles 10 Adcock, ‘Duchamp’s Eroticism’, 165. the treatise by Jean-François Niceron, see 11 For more on Duchamp, architecture and Jean-François Niceron, La Perspective desire, see Penelope Haralambidou, ‘On the curieuse, avec L’optique et la catoptrique Architecture of Looking’, an interview by du RP Mersenne (Paris, 1952). Victoria Watson, filmed by Mobile Studio, 30 Given has been linked to the unresolved Black when I discuss the devices that structure our Dahlia murder case, 1947. See Mark Nelson experience of Duchamp’s Given. The film was and Sarah Hudson Bayliss, Exquisite Corpse: presented at ‘The Fractured Body: The House Surrealism and the Black Dahlia Murder as Body’, an evening event organized and (New York, NY: Bulfinch, 2006) and Michael curated by Mobile Studio as part of The R Taylor, Marcel Duchamp: Étant donnés Surreal House exhibition at Barbican Art (Philadelphia, PA: Philadelphia Museum of Gallery, 2010. [accessed 21 Press, 2009), 194 – 97. October 2017]. 31 See Haralambidou ‘Occupying a Daydream’ 12 Jane Alison, ‘The Surreal House’, in The Surreal in Haralambidou, Architecture of Desire, 117, House, ed Jane Alison (New Haven and and Marcel Duchamp, The Bride Stripped London: Barbican Art Gallery in association Bare by her Bachelors, Even, a typographic with Yale University Press, 2010), 26. version by Richard Hamilton, trans George 13 Bernard Tschumi, ‘Architecture and its Heard Hamilton (Stuttgart: Hansjörg Mayer Double’, Architectural Design 48, 2 – 3 and New York: J Rietman, 1976). (1978) 111 – 16. 32 See Haralambidou ‘Occupying a Daydream’ 14 Alberto Pérez-Gómez, Built upon Love: in Haralambidou, Architecture of Desire, 117 Architectural Longing after Ethics and and Thierry de Duve, ed The Definitively Aesthetics, (Cambridge, MA: MIT, 2008) 101. Unfinished Marcel Duchamp (Cambridge, 15 Pérez-Gómez, Built upon Love, 103 – 04. MA: MIT, 1991) 475. 16 ‘Delay’ or ‘retard’ in French is a term that 33 In addition to a short analysis of her work, Duchamp uses to describe his Large Glass: Taylor gives a detailed account of her alleged ‘verre en retard’ or ‘delay in glass’. relationship with the sculptor and her teacher 17 K Michael Hays, Architecture’s Desire: Jacques Lipchitz prior to Duchamp. See Taylor, Reading the Late Avant-Garde (Cambridge, Marcel Duchamp: Étant donnés, 26 – 32. MA: MIT, 2009), 1. 34 Taylor, Marcel Duchamp: Étant donnés, 30. 18 Hays, Architecture’s Desire, 145. 35 Ibid., 29. 19 Bernard Tschumi, Advertisements for 36 Maria Martins, ‘Cobra Grande’, in Amazonia Architecture. [accessed 21 October 2017]. Taylor, Marcel Duchamp: Étant donnés, 28. 20 Tschumi, ‘The Pleasure of Architecture’, in 37 Duchamp describes his views on eroticism in What is Architecture?, ed. Andrew Ballantyne conversation with Richard Hamilton, BBC, (New York: Routledge, 2001) 178. 1959. Richard Hamilton and George Heard 21 Tschumi, ‘The Pleasure of Architecture’, 180. Hamilton, ‘Marcel Duchamp’, interview, 22 Ibid. 1959, Audio Arts Magazine, 2, 4 (1975), 23 Molly Nesbit analyses the significance of 38 mins approx. Duchamp’s training in mechanical drawing in 38 Elizabeth Grosz, ‘Sensation: The Earth, Molly Nesbit, Their Common Sense (London: a People, Art’, in Gilles Deleuze: Image and Black Dog, 1999). Text, eds. Eugene W. Holland, Daniel W 24 Jean-François Lyotard, Duchamp’s TRANS/ Smith, and Charles J. Stivale (London and formers, trans. Ian McLeod (Venice, CA: New York, NY: Continuum, 2009) 82. Lapis, 1990) and quoted in Rosalind Krauss, 39 Amelia Jones, Postmodernism and the The Optical Unconscious (Cambridge, MA: En-Gendering of Marcel Duchamp MIT, 1994), 113. (Cambridge; New York, NY: Cambridge 25 See Haralambidou, ‘Defrocked Cartesians: University Press, 1994), 205. Duchamp’s Influences and Legacy’ in 40 Amelia Jones, The Duchampian Phallus, Haralambidou, Architecture of Desire, figure transcript of 1994 lecture at the Walker Art 6.14, 259. Center. [accessed Duchamp’s Influences and Legacy’ in 21 October 2017] Haralambidou, Architecture of Desire, 237 – 291. 27 See Haralambidou, ‘The Act of Looking’ in Haralambidou, Architecture of Desire, 204 – 25. 28 Duchamp prepared a ring-bound folder of instructions, a manual for taking Given apart and reassembling it. See Marcel Duchamp, Étant donnés: Manual of Instructions (New

Desire 47 Patricia de Souza Leão Müller AArchitecture 33 To Want Something 48 Issue 34 Collision

Collision is the encounter between multiple subjects that distort under the impact of each other, resulting in an exchange of energy. If one looks at the city as the totality of connections between public and private spaces and paths that are activated only through movement, then collision is the essential event that charges the city. A continuously prolific movement depends on the possibility of the city to experience collision. Unpredictable occurrences, accidents, ruptures, discontinuities come from another place of which one is not already aware. Collision is a natural event since its physical constitution is what drives itself. Once affected by a collision, the city has a continuous need to relocate and associate the subjects based on both previous experience and current perception of its inhabitants. Finally, everything falls in place, but in a different way each time, since the unpredictable cannot be entirely controlled.

Please submit your interpretation, essay, drawing, image by Sunday 4 February 2018 to [email protected] The gaze is made digital by Pete Jiadong Qiang Page 1 whilst David Flook has revived The Desire for Plenty Page 2 by recolouring William Morris tapestries while Ana Araujo describes the attraction through Desire and Unconscious Page 4 to introduce an extensive study of the Genealogy of desire and desire-production where George Jepson is examining or Philosophising with a Hammer: Critique and Desire Page 6 above Claire Potter’s Footnote to a Miracle Page 14 next to a Parisian street throughout Clemence Florence Elegance Appearance Page 14 captured by Ruth Oldham the Only Fools and Houses Page 18 exposé told to us by Max Worrell not to mention the Boredom and Desire Page 21 for Christian Parreño or the Eroticism, Architecture and the Desire to Grasp the World Visually in the Work of Marcel Duchamp Page 22 where the architecture of desire and the gaze is reasoned through Marcel Duchamp and Penelope Haralambidou 12 minutes in and another gaze is taken from A Mahjong Table, a Façade and a Hotel Room Page 30 via the haunting figures of phantoms and lovers andJames Mak at an erratic pace of the Desire Grammar Totem Page 36 machine of desire invented by Kanyaphorn Kaewprasert and a final call to get it on the table from David Greene and AALAWuN Page 42 with a wanting creature created by Patricia de Souza Leão Müller.Page 48

Edited by students at the Architectural Association