1 John Biln This Essay Considers the Significance of a Body of Early Work

L INES OF E NCOUNTER John Biln

This is an unpublished combination of two articles which appeared separately in print form. Biln, John. "Translating Tactility.” Azero 1 (1998); Biln, John. "Lines of Encounter.” In Ben van Berkel: Mobile Forces, edited by Kristin Feireiss. Berlin: Ernst and Sohn, 1994.

This essay considers the significance of a body of early work by the Dutch architectural firm of Ben van Berkel and Caroline Bos, known now as UN Studio. Their design program is positioned squarely within the complex and shifting field of contemporary urban culture. Here, the architectural work is subject to conflicting and mutable economic, social, regulatory, technical, and programmatic demands.

Van Berkel and Bos acknowledge that architectural works can no longer claim any sweeping powers to enact social change. Although architects cannot be entirely sure of the social effects their works may produce, Van Berkel and Bos neither despair over lost visions of social effect, nor appear willing to abandon a direct engagement with the various human uses, activities and practices that situate the architectural object. In part, their design program derives from a critique of the apparent unwillingness within architectural culture to seriously address human activity and lived experience.

The work of Van Berkel and Bos suggests that the power of architecture lies in very real, but perhaps necessarily unstable, social impacts of the architectural object. The investigative agenda set out by Van Berkel and Bos – firmly rooted in form-making – begins to open a space for reconceiving the relationships, and related design strategies, by which architectural forms and social practices may once again be linked.

In reflective distance and cautious optimism, the architectural writings, projects, and built works of Ben van Berkel and Caroline Bos have begun to suggest some new directions and some interesting questions for the discipline of architecture. Van Berkel and Bos are thoughtful, flexible, engaged, and genuinely hopeful without at the same time being blind to the difficulties of building in the contemporary city. Their resilient and productive approach stands in contrast to much debate and discussion taking place elsewhere in architecture. flexible realism

Recently, architectural thought has displayed a disturbing oscillation in its attitudes toward prevailing political and economic realities, and toward cultural conditions in general. Available options have rather too frequently and artificially been reduced either to those that are openly critical of, or resistant to emerging realities, on the one hand, or to those that are widely complicit with, or affirmative of these conditions, on the other. And this division is no longer drawn along the lines suggested by simple aestheticist dualities such as high culture/low culture or theory/practice, nor for that matter can it unproblematically be produced along political axes suggested by oppositions such as left/right or progressive/conservative. Rather this division cuts through a variety of architectural orientations and practices in a rather uneven fashion. The logics of contemporary capital or global culture are as often and as enthusiastically embraced by the so-called critical theorist as by the transnational corporation. Equally, even the most disparate of radical or reactionary voices in architectural theory and practice have found themselves uncomfortably united in resistance to at least some of these same forces.

In urbanism, while apparently traditional notions of the responsibilities of architecture to contribute to the collective "good of the city" continue to be articulated in various ways, these have vigorously (if sometimes nostalgically) been challenged by architectural imperatives to oppose power asymmetries realized in established or emerging urban patterns. It is quite possible to identify some consensual ethic of continuity or collective adjustment at the same time that one might discern a fragmentary and divisive politics of partisan intervention in the urban field. And although these camps can no longer be broken out along strictly political or ideological lines, there is still ample evidence of alliances and coalitions of convenience, however unlikely or uneasy, in the pursuit of various "visions" of the urban. Often these alliances are believed to indicate a "politics of conjuncture" or to suggest the beginning of some radical democracy or progressive multi-culturalism.1

Recently, a number of architects have begun to approach contemporary urban and cultural conditions with a somewhat different attitude. No longer content simply to construct either critical or affirmative positions, visions, or missions from which to empower or justify their design work, architects as diverse as Baram Shirdel, Jacques Herzog & Pierre de Meuron, Hani Rashid & Lise Anne Couture, among others, have begun to collectively outline an alternative approach. Since there are very substantial differences among their attitudes and pronouncements, the works and writings of these architects cannot be considered a coherent movement. However, these architects are part of a generation of designers influenced by Rem Koolhaas, Bernard Tschumi, and Jean Nouvel. And although these younger architects differ in their attitudes about the architectural culture they have inherited, they apparently share number of concerns which taken together suggest the beginning of a new approach. Among the indices of this emerging sensibility about design might be counted a commitment to open programs, a thematic interest in non- specific or residual spaces, a tendency toward highly flexible or dynamic project processes, an increasing level of comfort with unforeseen or opportunistic branchings, discontinuities and reversals in a project's direction, and a pervasively non-judgmental attitude with respect to the full range of uncertainties and vicissitudes in a project's external terms and conditions. In general, it would seem that the work of these architects signals an accommodation with the radical fluidity of the urban and cultural fields in which they operate. The work suggests not only that the architects tend for the most part to refuse ideological, polemical, or theoretical positions, but that this new pragmatism, if it can be called that, while grounded in the facts and conditions of contemporary life, owes something to a wider disciplinary skepticism about the transformative power of the architectural object.2 While these architects have hardly lost faith in the social or cultural value of architecture, they recognize that assertions of its power can no longer be founded on deterministic myths of direct and unmediated social or cultural effect. This evolving approach is flexible and realistic, without despair over lost visions.

1 For a recent discussion of these topics, see October 61, a special issue entitled "The Identity in Question" (Summer 1992). 2 Pragmatism, however, may also be treated as a theoretical position. For a debate on the topic, see W. J. T. Mitchell, ed., Against Theory: Literary Studies and the New Pragmatism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985).

tactile form

For some time now the work of Van Berkel and Bos has involved a difficult struggle to accommodate two trajectories that on first sight appear impossibly divergent. On the one hand, Ben van Berkel and his partner Caroline Bos recognize that architectural work today must accommodate the dynamic cultural currents of the urban fields in which it is produced. They have repeatedly written about the complex social, political, and material circumstances that condition the pre-design and early development of a building project. They have also paid considerable attention to the human uses, activities, and practices that situate the post-design and public appropriation of this work. On the other hand, Van Berkel and Bos’s work suggests a long apprenticeship to formalist design strategies, and it is quite clear that the success of this work owes much to an extraordinary control over composition, configuration, texture, material, and “abstract” processes of form-making. To the extent that formalism tends to bracket precisely those wider situations and contexts with which Van Berkel and Bos are concerned, these two trajectories, which might be called “realist” and “formalist” respectively, appear especially difficult to reconcile. This is all the more so since each has undeniably strong, and, at certain moments, almost exclusive presence in the firm’s work. However, it is by orientation to these two trajectories that the architects’ work is best understood.

Van Berkel and Bos’s preoccupation with what they have referred to as a “tactile programme”, that is, a careful recouping of the various “physical” aspects of architecture, must be understood within the space marked out by these two concerns. Indeed, it appears that this tactile program allows the architects to negotiate in a novel and potentially powerful way the space that lies between formalist and realist impulses in a design work. At its most basic, this tactile program involves a renewed interest in the “physical side” of architecture, and a careful recouping of the architectural work’s sensual and material possibilities.3 Van Berkel and Bos’s recent work focuses on finding original and affirmative ways of translating their tactile program into architecture, although from the beginning this recovery of “tactility” has been based on a far-reaching critique of the discipline’s failure to address issues of human activity and lived experience. Indeed, the architects’ dissatisfaction with contemporary work in architecture has served to sustain and develop their “tactile” alternative. As Van Berkel and Bos see it, recent movements in architecture neglect these important material concerns, tending toward rather uncritical appropriations of philosophical thought and conceptualization, toward self-affirming appeals to formalism and formalist design strategies, and toward other parasitic and usually uncritical misuses of the very activities and practices architecture is normally thought to enable or support.

Van Berkel and Bos have identified a pervasive tendency in architecture to offer up traditional typologies and formal innovations as solutions either to real demands or to perceived difficulties arising from outside the "proper” domain

3 See the introduction to Kristen Feireiss, ed. Ben van Berkel: Mobile Forces (Berlin: Ernst and Sohn, 1994).

of the field. Even more typical is a tendency to employ such strategies in order to avoid these "extrinsic" forces in a retreat to some imaginary architectural autonomy. Van Berkel and Bos point out that a symptom of this resistance to architecture’s “outside” can be glimpsed in the discipline's refusal to address seriously even pragmatic and fundamentally material notions such as the architectural detail, a topic that "cannot be discussed".4 In their writings they remind us that strategies of aesthetic formalism have a long history characterized by ever narrower interpretations of the possibilities of form as the essential armature of the architectural work.5 Van Berkel and Bos seem to suggest that careful attention be given to the distinction between form, which must be recognized as a necessary configurative feature of architectural production, and formalism, which they acknowledge to be a particularly reductive strategy among a range of possible approaches to producing architecture.

However, reflecting on Van Berkel and Bos's observations would suggest that the problems of formalism ultimately involve more than reduction alone. By assigning to form a narrowly "figurative" responsibility, a double loss is initiated. First, important urban and cultural conditions that might otherwise be substantively addressed by architecture "beyond form", so to speak, are effectively left untouched and made static or safe through "formal expression". The effects of this would include the premature closure of careful investigations into the possibilities of form’s “entailments” as examined through architectural signification, narrative description or explanation, and by way of the tools and strategies of design process and political negotiation. Second, unexplored possibilities for alternative modes of engagement in and through form are foreclosed or otherwise made "unthinkable". Such avenues of approach that might otherwise be available involve substantial re-thinking of the social and cultural implications of material, configurative, and rhetorical moves produced by way of form, as form.

In this sense, crudely formalist tendencies share something in common with tendencies in architecture to over- privilege the literal and the linguistic. Van Berkel and Bos are critical of recent "textualizations" of architecture. They suggest that modernist tendencies to express design principles and values in texts and manifestoes have recently devolved into a wide and debilitating reliance on philosophical discourses to ground and legitimize architectural work.6 Van Berkel and Bos have been quick to recognize that this reliance on textual theory has meant losing sight of part of what is fundamental to built work. Swept up in the fervor of the more linguistic and textual preoccupations of poststructuralism, the discipline of architecture has increasingly lost interest in human perception, in sensation, and in a lived experience of the built environment. It would seem that this turning away from sensation and experience in favor of a reductive view of philosophical discourse also signals a peculiarly desperate attempt in

4 Ben van Berkel and Caroline Bos, "Storing the Detail" in Ben van Berkel: Mobile Forces. 5 Ben van Berkel and Caroline Bos, "Architecture as Topography of the Ritual", Ben van Berkel, Architect (Amsterdam: 010 Publishers, 1990). 6 Ben van Berkel and Caroline Bos, "How Modern is Dutch Architecture?", and "Delinquent Visionaries", in Delinquent Visionaries, trans. Michael O'Loughlin, ed. Donald Gardner (Rotterdam: 010 Publishers, 1993).

the discipline of architecture to control non-linguistic experience, subsuming it under an unnecessarily narrow definition of work-as-text.

And so Van Berkel and Bos are particularly critical of what they view as an objectionable form of appropriation effected by architecture. They identify as a form of "colonization" this architectural propensity to seek out the "other", the unfamiliar and the exotic, for the purpose of extracting something of value to the tasks of architectural production.7 Ben van Berkel's and Caroline Bos's critical comments have been directed largely at unreflective appropriations of philosophical work, but they also note the tendency of many contemporary architects to identify concrete social and cultural conditions (we might think here of placelessness or anomie) and to turn these into aesthetic "themes" around which an architectural project might be structured.8

I would suggest that this strategy is finally at the heart of tendencies within the discipline of architecture to retreat to formalism and to uncritically transfer “discourse” into project work. These two moves might best be understood as compensatory strategies meant to soothe the fear of a perpetual disruption by practice itself, if practice is broadly understood to include the full range of cultural, social, political, and economic programs and activities enacted and realized in and through space. It is clear that architecture as a discipline tends to fabricate "versions" of its others as substitutional controls on what continually and constitutively escapes its grasp. This is evident even in the way that complex and differential lived activities of all sorts are reduced and collapsed onto narrowly conceived notions of "program function", and in the way that cultural fragmentations and divergent social practices have become metaphors for collage-like strategies of formal dissociation and reassembly. As the variability, mutability, and sheer proliferation of contemporary practices and activities become clearer, the effects of architectural works on human activity are thrown into further doubt. Architecture as a discipline has reacted with a denial of the importance of social practices, political and economic programs, human activities and various modes of reception and use. At the same time, however, the discipline has offered up notions of formal autonomy, strategies of "expression" or "representation", and weak appropriations of ostensibly prestigious discursive formulations in order to produce an illusion of control over these same forces.

Van Berkel and Bos are not content simply to produce a diagnosis of architecture's obsessive fascination with contemporary philosophies, cultural conditions, social activities, and modes of urban practice. They have further attempted to reflect on some of the implications of architecture's relationships with its others without relying on simple appropriation, and have recently begun to sketch out an alternative. In working their way forward Van Berkel and Bos have focused primarily on the city as the traditional material site of architecture's moral and figurative responsibility to its "contexts", and they have paid attention to the manifold activities, functions, and practices

7 Ben van Berkel and Caroline Bos, "Delinquent Visionaries", p.48. 8 Ben van Berkel and Caroline Bos, "Delinquent Visionaries", p.53.

usually construed to be the founding "causes" for architecture as a useful art. Rather than turning away and effecting a necessarily rhetorical abandonment of the discipline and its possibilities, Van Berkel and Bos have attempted to look "within" architecture and its relationships with city, life, and practice in order to find viable and productive openings for their “tactile programme”.

This program involves a careful recovery of materiality and sensate experience in architecture. As a "prioritization of physical reality" it proceeds without any denial or abandonment of conceptualization, cognition, or imagination in the receptive fields of the architectural work.9 In this, Van Berkel and Bos’s approach shares a common interest with the critical philosophy of thinkers such as Henri Lefebvre. Lefebvre proposes that the realities of space as produced in actual social practice always involve relationships among physical and sensual "perceptions", mental or intellectual "conceptions", and lived and imaginative "experiences" of what space is or might be.10 David Harvey points out that Lefebvre's general schema brings together spatial references from a number of different arenas and fields of production. Lefebvre’s "representations of space" and "spaces of representation" are thus broad categories within which one might find elements as diverse as maps, narratives, legal instruments, public and private rituals, imaginary territories - indeed, a whole range of social and cultural productions.11 No matter how far the construction of "space" might extend across intellectual disciplines, material practices, and various modes of operation, however, I would suggest that the architectural work is the quintessential locus of these dimensions in space.

Van Berkel and Bos point out that physical movements in space are fundamental to the ways we are able to perceive architecture,12 and they note that the construction of place is predicated upon the bringing together of thoughts and perceptions.13 As architects, Van Berkel and Bos are "concerned with a spatial phenomenon, to be fully experienced with the senses as well as being conceptually consumable."14 Michel de Certeau has suggested that it is precisely the reception of represented meanings and the production of physical movements and spatial experience, along with their various misappropriations and subversions, over which the "sieve order" of architecture has never had much control.15 Van Berkel and Bos’s attitude toward recouping the sensual and the physical in architecture suggests that the architectural work is more properly the place where something like this Lefebvrean triad of perception, conception, and experience might be loosely "assembled", rather than the place where it would be "unified" in a vision controlled by the architect. This accords well with an interpretation of Lefebvre’s schema that would

9 Ben van Berkel and Caroline Bos, "Delinquent Visionaries", p.55. 10 Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1991). 11 David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989). 12 Ben van Berkel and Caroline Bos, "Flights of Science", in Delinquent Visionaries, p.62. 13 Ben van Berkel and Caroline Bos, "Ambidextrous Images", in Delinquent Visionaries, p.108. 14 Ben van Berkel and Caroline Bos, "Crossing Points" in Ben van Berkel: Mobile Forces. 15 Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984).

characterize “practices” as individually lived and productive “higher-level” resolutions of users manifold and differential perceptions, conceptions, and experiences in and of space.16

The projects of Van Berkel and Bos suggest that the value and power of architectural work lies in the unstable and mutable impacts of the object rather than in any simple and reductive "expression" it might purport to make, and in the fragile "self-containment" of the work rather than in the suggestion of close fit with the various "uses" it might sustain.17 On one level, the firm's interest in the details of a project can be understood as a further moment in a strategy of sensual recovery as much as a validation of technical excellence in construction itself. For Van Berkel it must be through careful uses of materials and building details that the individual is engaged personally, directly, and idiosyncratically in the contexts of his own practices and activities. Ultimately, Van Berkel and Bos’s work suggests that it is time for architecture to relinquish illusions of control over reception and practice, leaving various "resolutions" of the object to be made outside the architectural object itself.18 Van Berkel and Bos make no apologies for a constitutive lack of closure in the architectural object. Indeed, their work indicates a sustained interest in exploring hitherto undeveloped potentials of the condition itself.

ambivalent objects

For Van Berkel and Bos it will no longer do to assert an architectural autonomy rooted in operations on form. But neither will it suffice to found an architecture on naive presumptions about human uses, activities, and practices. This does not suggest that the architects refuse to be responsible to these concerns. Rather, the form this responsibility takes has been substantially refigured in the “sense” of the work. To understand how this is accomplished, it will be helpful to consider the notion of "crossing points" as outlined by the architect. Van Berkel and Bos consider the concept to be a specific, architectural recognition of the unavoidable "simultaneity" of events, conditions, and activities in the spatial field. In accepting this "pluriform presence", as the architects calls it, the crossing point would bring it to light in experience. While Van Berkel and Bos note that the crossing point strategy is interpretive and yet not predicated upon any specific expectation of human activity, they propose that this strategy can be distinguished from formalism in that it goes "beyond a preoccupation with form as [it] cover[s] the objective realm of the city including all its material and immaterial aspects".19 The crossing point would acknowledge the simultaneity and

16 Although David Harvey’s inspired reading of Lefebvre’s tripartite schema has been very productive, Harvey’s interpretation appears to collapse and reassign certain terms, for example “experience” and “practice”, that in Lefebvre’s work are usually kept distinct. I believe that the schema assumed in the present essay better captures the intent of Lefebvre’s work, although Lefebvre’s writing is not consistent on this point. See David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity, especially Table 3.1, pp. 220-221; and Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, passim., but especially p.230. 17 See the essays by Ben van Berkel and Caroline Bos in Ben van Berkel: Mobile Forces, especially "Storing the Detail" and "Crossing Points". 18 See "Storing the Detail" in Ben van Berkel: Mobile Forces. For the suggestion that the factors required for the development of coherence in a situation are "external" to architecture, see "A magical metropolitan effect" in Delinquent Visionaries. 19 See Ben van Berkel, Caroline Bos, "Crossing Points", in Kristen Feireiss, ed. Ben van Berkel: Mobile Forces (Berlin: Ernst and Sohn, 1994).

imbrication of events, conditions, and experiences in the city. It would register, repeat, and clarify these without attempting to control them.

For Van Berkel and Bos, the crossing point is the locus of an unnatural place-making, a transformation that any linear or narrative "description" can only fail to register adequately. As Michel de Certeau writes, in the fabric of any place "opaque and stubborn places remain. The revolutions of history, economic mutations, demographic mixtures lie in layers within it, and remain there, hidden in customs, rites, and spatial practices". Each place is "a piling up of heterogeneous places. Each one, like the deteriorating page of a book, refers to a different mode of territorial unity, of socio-economic distribution, of political conflicts and of identifying symbolism".20 For Van Berkel and Bos it is not only the multiple traces of history and sedimented practices that are stubbornly present in any place, but also the many active, differential, and conflicting programs, perceptions, and agenda that spontaneously irrupt and fluidly traverse the urban field.

If Van Berkel and Bos’s tactile programme might initially be understood with reference to the wide range of human movement, perception, and use, it cannot be fully appreciated without considering their claim that this program is at the same time “dictated by the process of making”.21 A key to understanding this claim can perhaps be found in the architects’ belief that although certain of their works such as the Erasmus Bridge may support vehicular or occupant movements, the parallel “movements” of the works are necessarily outside the logic of use and are in no sense mimetic of these larger urban flows.22

In fact, Van Berkel and Bos’s unique negotiation of the “formalist/realist” dichotomy in the project work hinges upon a careful shifting and pulling of the formal processes of design such that they fall into the orbit of the urban conditions with which the work must contend. This operation is accomplished without any simple “reflection” or “mimesis” of these programmatic or experiential demands. In speaking of the Erasmus bridge work, the architects acknowledge that "[h]owever one approaches the project, ambiguities, transformations and combinations of forces keep coming to the fore."23 The work’s elegant span, structure, and abutment configurations respond to these various political, technical, regulatory, perceptual, and circulatory pressures, but they do not simply reflect them. In the end, the project marks the impossibility of definitively isolating, identifying, and recording the various forces present in and upon the work. The Erasmus bridge project suggests that heterogeneous and mobile networks comprising material demands, urban programs, and local events, and user perceptions insistently traverse a work, sometimes leaving their imprints, sometimes disappearing without trace, but finally escaping architectural control. This

20 Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, p.201. 21 Ben van Berkel and Caroline Bos, "Architecture as Topography of the Ritual", in Ben van Berkel, Architect, p.11. 22 Ben van Berkel and Caroline Bos, "Architecture as Topography of the Ritual", in Ben van Berkel, Architect, p.11. 23 Ben van Berkel, Caroline Bos, "Mobile Forces", in Kristen Feireiss, ed. Ben van Berkel: Mobile Forces (Berlin: Ernst and Sohn, 1994).

approach begins to distinguish this work from other architectural work that also claims interest in “tactility”, “experience”, and “perception”.

Van Berkel and Bos have expressed admiration for those approaches to the construction of place which bring "various thoughts and perceptions together", and where a "multiple, layered approach ... leads to an intertwining of the actual and the illusionary".24 In the Jollenpad office complex, these general notions are realized in a way that certainly does attend to and engage with urban experiences and practices but that does not seek to express or control them in any conventional sense. The architects note that "[e]ncounters between spaces are enacted round an angle in the plans." Far from suggesting an arid formalism, the reference to spatial rather than human "encounters" can be understood as a key to the complex, experiential dimensions of this project as a work of architecture. The office project involves the grouping together on a single site a number of buildings that share a plan configuration roughly in form of a "vee". This planimetric repetition, perceivable in elevation and in non-orthographic "views" from around the site, serves to undermine any notion of a simple form-to-program mapping. The architects point out that these "vees" only seem to draw the building elements together in an "imaginary center of gravity". In fact, the structural centers of the buildings are located in the concrete cores, and the service centers of the project are found grouped together in the ground level plinths. Additionally, the repetition of the "vees" initially supports expectations of similarity among interior arrangements. However, even within virtually identical shells, the interior configurations of the various floors differ substantially from one another. And along with these configurative differences will doubtless come a wide variety of activities, events, practices, and lived experiences. The plastic treatments of the buildings are constantly in tension with material, programmatic, and spatial resolutions of the work, and absolutely no authority is vested in the uniqueness, readability, or operative efficacy of physical form. Even where surfaces appear to render depth, this is produced by differences in surface treatments rather than by any "transparency" of outer surface to space behind. Throughout the project, treatments of shape and form reinforce suspicions that architecture is reliable neither in expressing the truth of its own constitution, nor in producing, containing or directing human activities, practices, and encounters. These conditions and occurrences appear to take place in the margins or residua of plastic expression rather than at the sites of its apparent strength.

In the Amersfoort substation project, something similar occurs. Since the building's "utility" is almost entirely reduced to the housing of several electrical transformers, the functional program essentially brackets internal occupation. As a condition of the brief, the work can no longer "contain" the lived practices that underwrite those dominant visions of architecture with which Van Berkel and Bos have become increasingly uncomfortable. Even though they are almost entirely external to the building and are strictly peripheral to its operations, these human experiences are insistently if obliquely referenced throughout the project. The Amersfoort work serves to re-open the repressed rift between architecture and activity and to forcefully re-mark it along the surface of the building itself.

24 Ben van Berkel, Caroline Bos, "Ambidextrous Images", in Delinquent Visionaries, pp. 108, 112.

Here, the differential facade treatments reflect not internal functions and human uses but rather perceptions from a variety of locations always literally outside the work. In fact, these sites in the urban field are the only places where substantial and ongoing human occupation can occur. The sensate use of wood to clad and detail openings and grilles, elements supporting machine functions and maintenance access, serve to further re-mark the "loss" of human activity in the building and to produce an ambivalent awareness of this loss in the occupied urban field outside the building. In the end, the facade refuses the programmatic purposes of the building and embraces activities fundamentally beyond the building's material domain. In so doing, the work both emblematically and experientially suggests a severing of the implicit, ideological bonds between spaces and practices in works of architecture. Lived experiences and practices are acknowledged and engaged in the Amersfoort substation, but they are not contained or expressed in the spatial fabric of the work itself. Indeed, these occupations and activities are emphatically (re)positioned (back) in the external field, and this (re)insertion is itself the dominant subject of the work. experience and its translation

Architectural work which posits a return to or a valorization of lived experience and bodily sensation in the built environment is sometimes called “phenomenological”, and in architectural writing tends to draw heavily upon the work of philosophers such as Husserl, Merleau-Ponty and Heidegger. Frequently such formulations of the lived relation between self and world in architectural writing have been politically and formally conservative, sometimes grounding typological or classicist polemics, while at other times they have tended to left leaning political critiques of contemporary culture and arguments for vernacular or regionalist responses.25 This work has left relatively undeveloped any treatment of the phenomena of experience in terms of concrete and particular individuals, in terms of distinct classes or categories of individuals, and in terms of the social and intersubjective dimensions of these experiences.

There is a justifiable tendency, then, to view phenomenology, particularly in its more reductively Hegelian and Husserlian formulations, as favoring an idealization and essentialization of experience. When taken up in applied aesthetics, this approach tends to posit a neutral and universal perceiving subject. Typically, proponents of this approach conceptualize an aesthetic experience, frequently with a strong visual bias, that must be assumed ”adequate” to this idealized individual. In the end, such efforts serve to reproduce a highly reductive and ideological conception of the “perceiving subject”. It is in response to such approaches, then, that Van Berkel and Bos have attempted to resist ”mimetic” architectural strategies. They have no interest in undertakings that would simply reflect existing experiences or uncritically accept reductive understandings of those experiences. Unfortunately, much

25 For a range of positions, see Christian Norberg-Schulz, The Concept of Dwelling: On the Way to Figurative Architecture (New York: Electa/Rizzoli, 1985), Alberto Perez-Gomez, Architecture and the Crisis of Modern Science (Cambridge: M.I.T. Press, 1983), Demitri Porphirios, ed., Classicism is not a Style (London: AD Editions, 1982), and Kenneth Frampton, "Towards a Critical Regionalism: Six Points for an Architecture of Resistance", in Hal Foster, ed., The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture (Port Townsend, Washington: Bay Press, 1983). See also the collection by Scott Marble, et al, eds., Architecture and Body (New York: Rizzoli, 1988).

architectural writing which claims phenomenology as its tradition leans heavily in this interpretive direction. Most of these efforts, which we might call “essentialist” phenomenologies in architecture, have been produced in the years subsequent to those in which various strains of contemporary philosophy felt compelled to undertake a close and critical reassessment of phenomenology's basic formulations and principles. It is perhaps unfortunate that architectural interpretations of phenomenology have remained largely undisturbed by even the most powerful of these critiques.26 There are certainly possibilities in them for an experiential understanding of architecture that might avoid the limitations of a crude essentialism without repeating the radical particularism of some nominalist positions. In largely neglecting these issues, architectural phenomenology has perhaps unwittingly deflected attention away from important practical and theoretical opportunities in architecture. In particular, these approaches tend to turn away from practical concerns of a type many architects would positively associate with the social and ethical project of architectural modernism and with those movements and projects “after” modernism that share such concerns.27

Van Berkel and Bos’s tactile program, however, does attempt to address these issues. Their work begins to suggest a variety of possible relationships and experiences situated between the sensual and the social in architecture. This work consciously embraces some of the basic concerns of phenomenology, but it also remains sensitive to the social, symbolic, and potentially "political" dimensions of the architectural work.28 Indeed, in its tempered anti-essentialism, this approach comes closer to the non-positivist side of Hegel’s project and to the anti-positivist intent of post- Hegelian phenomenology than do the more conservative approaches usually seen in architectural writing. In discussing the phenomenological grounds of political struggle, Jay Stone reminds us that “Hegel’s phenomenological epistemology sought to situate perception contextually in the phenomena it observes such that no totally detached and objective perspective on these phenomena is possible. Rather, perception was taken as a starting point for an analysis of phenomena and was analyzed from within, so to speak, while suspending all dogmatic metaphysical

26 These critiques have largely attended to phenomenology's "passive" model of perception and to its ahistorical and politically conservative treatment of man's "essence". For a brief history of these developments, especially as they involve the development of semiotics, structuralism, and psychoanalysis, see Vincent Descombes, Modern French Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980). Additionally, substantial critiques of early phenomenology have been produced by writers close to the phenomenological tradition. For work which introduces some of these problems in the context of literary aesthetics see Robert Holub, Reception Theory: A Critical Introduction (London and New York: Methuen, 1984), especially the sections on the work of Wolfgang Iser and Hans-Robert Jauss. 27 I am not suggesting here that concerns such social reform, ethical responsibility, and open politicality in any way exhaust the interests of an exceeding diverse modernism in architecture; nor am I suggesting that architectural modernism has ever been innocent of universalist, anti-historical, apolitical and positivist tendencies. Here, as always, the interpretive project involves a careful but necessarily selective reading of that which “must” be reclaimed. 28 A similar argument might be made in Steven Holl’s case, but Holl’s work appears to be contradictory on this point. Holl's commentators have usually focused on issues of so-called “general perception” and of a “free” individual experience in the work. However, Holl’s interest in the social and the particular have been mentioned by several writers including Kenneth Frampton and Kevin Lippert. When Holl speaks of a Heideggerian "revealing" which may act not to confirm appearance but rather to interrupt "habitual ways of seeing" (Anchoring, p.9), he does seem to recognize the possibility of opening up a critical or disruptive space in the “perceptual” field. This tension between conserving and disrupting moments in Holl’s approach deserves closer attention, especially since Holl has become something of a spokesman for the phenomenological tradition in architecture. See Steven Holl, Anchoring: Steven Holl, Selected Projects 1975-1988 (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1989); see also Steven Holl, "Within the City: Phenomena of Relations", Design Quarterly, 139 (1988), especially his comments on the Porta Vittoria project.

assumptions regarding the status of the perceiving subject and the perceived world.”29 This non-instrumental dimension of Hegel’s phenomenology was taken up and further developed by philosophers from Husserl to Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty, as they devised approaches to human experience that rejected claims to certainty and absolute foundation. As Stone notes, this work culminated in Merleau-Ponty’s insight that perception always involves the play of sensuality and ideality. The implication of this understanding from within the phenomenological tradition is that human experience must always be partial, contingent and intersubjective.30

On this point Stone is very clear: “The heart of phenomenology ... consists of the recognition that the mind and matter mutually and reciprocally shape perception and what we are given in perception is all we have with respect to truth, since no final, clear, certain, or universal knowledge of the world of phenomena ‘out there’ is ever possible for a perception that is phenomenologically situated in a particular body, history, and culture, as human perception is.”31

Van Berkel and Bos would appear to be more comfortable with such a rendering of the phenomenological tradition than with the more conservative versions normally reproduced in architectural writing. Rather than presume a stable, pre-existing perceiver open to universal forms of "experience", Van Berkel and Bos seem to assume a socius composed of concrete and highly differentiated individuals capable of hitherto unknown or culturally prohibited experiences and actions, some of which might well appear in new forms of engagement with works of architecture. Van Berkel and Bos have not been willing to bracket the social, the particular, the contingent, and the constructed nature of the self and its "understandings" in developing their tactile program and in translating it into built work. This approach optimistically posits an architecture of new social and experiential possibilities. However, Van Berkel and Bos’s translation of this tactile program suggests that some caution is in order as well.

If Van Berkel and Bos hope to open up new forms of relationship between the sensual and the social in architecture, then the practical implications of this renewed interest in “tactility” are important. The architects stress that their belief in an architecture of the tactile program “forms the underlying central assumption of the assembled work”, but that “the real question it deals with are the potential new ways of translating this into architecture.”32 The architects’ rejection of any leveling of human practices and experiences to a “universal” ground of some type suggests that different actions, experiences and meanings cannot be quietly reduced to an overarching “explanation”, nor can they be exchanged one for the other on a model of mechanical commensurability. For Van Berkel and Bos, as we have

29 Jay Stone, “The Phenomenological Roots of the Radical Democracy/Marxism Debate”, in Rethinking Marxism, v.7. n.1 (1994), p.101. 30 The phenomenological tradition admits to more ambiguity than this rendering suggests. However, there is more than enough evidence in the literature to suggest that simple appeals to a “universal subject” in phenomenology are not warranted. 31 Jay Stone, “Phenomenological Roots”, p.105. 32 See the comments of Ben van Berkel and Caroline Bos in Kristen Feireiss, ed. Ben van Berkel: Mobile Forces (Berlin: Ernst and Sohn, 1994).

seen, uses, peoples and programs have become something rigorously disjunct from, or at least not reducible to, spaces, projects and buildings. If they are finally incommensurable, however, how can the realm of the experiential be “translated” into that of the architectural? Since the lived experiences of these various moments are thought to be always discontinuous and differential, perpetually outside the “control” of the architect, in what way can the ”translation” discussed by Van Berkel and Bos proceed?

In commenting on their tactile program, Van Berkel and Bos mention a “Derridaesque marginal jotting” that occurs “in response to the original text” creating a “a haphazard system of transformed interpretations.”33 These rather cryptic comments might be filled in with reference to Derrida’s own discussion of the translation process. In The Ear of the Other, Derrida suggests that the result of a translation is a work in which two “voices”, broadly understood, are brought together in such a way that the final articulation is neither one nor the other, but rather something new that owes its existence to both. Such a process “augments and modifies the original, which insofar as it is living on, never ceases to be transformed and to grow.” This operation also alters the “translating language” itself.34 Given Van Berkel and Bos’s position, one might expect that user experiences and activities (“tactility”) would be somehow bound to the peculiarity of material space and design process (“architecture”) in such a way that the resulting work (“building”) is neither one nor the other, but not something wholly “outside” these two either. By way of their tactile process, then, Van Berkel and Bos’s work might be expected to effect a transformation of both user experiences or “tactility”, on the one hand, and “architecture”, on the other. Such a “tactile programme” might bring together the discipline of architecture and the experiences of users in new and mutually transformative ways.

Van Berkel and Bos are concerned both with new ways of translating their “tactile program” into built work, and with firmly rejecting any notion of human experience that brackets its social, particular, contingent, and “constructed” dimensions. It is interesting, then, that the architects have devoted most of their project-specific discussion and other commentaries on their own work to the issue of disciplinary tools and methods. They have stressed that their current concern is to outline “several radically different ways of structuring”. These involve “new mediation techniques” and “new, fluid ways of structuring mass” rooted in “a process-based approach to architecture”.35 Van Berkel and Bos have carefully developed this “methods” side of their tactile program. Despite possible reservations about its narrow focus, the architects’ interest in design tools and approaches must be seen as both timely and appropriate.

33 Ben van Berkel and Caroline Bos, "Architecture as Topography of the Ritual", in Ben van Berkel, Architect. 34 Jacques Derrida, The Ear of the Other: Otobiography, Transference, Translation (New York: Schocken Books, 1982), p.122. 35 See the comments of Ben van Berkel and Caroline Bos in Kristen Feireiss, ed. Ben van Berkel: Mobile Forces (Berlin: Ernst and Sohn, 1994).

It has been pointed out frequently, after Lacan and Derrida, that thinking translation implies acknowledging that what remains untranslated and untranslatable is perhaps what is most valuable in a work. This “residue”, as De Certeau calls it, always has the latent power to make us strangers to ourselves, to disturb and displace our certitudes. The importance that Van Berkel and Bos place on design tools and approaches can be understood as a strategy of sustaining an indefinite margin along which the untranslatable “tactility” of the user realm might disrupt the architectural process and keep it off-balance, while the impossible residue of this other remains “uncolonized”, as Van Berkel and Bos put it. At the same time, however, this residue is re-marked as such at the margins of architectural production. That is to say, Van Berkel and Bos both re-mark the trace of the other as ex-centric and acknowledge the complex ways this ex-centricity might induce shifts in their own architectural practices. This exploration of multiple and idiosyncratic, but nonetheless discipline specific, “tactile tools” can be read as a re- marking of the impossibility of translating “all” of the tactile program, and a reminder that architects must simultaneously put at risk, and put into their work, their disciplinary and personal singularities. In a limited sense, at least, this is crucial if the discipline and its fields of effects are to shift and transform in response to “external” practices.

This notion of unspecified shifts and transformations of “internal” or “disciplinary” methods suggests the possibility of equally unspecified and unpredictable disruptions in the fields of use, practice and experience. Thus, Van Berkel and Bos’s focus on design strategies might indirectly provoke what is sometimes called “an othering of the other”. New architectures might suggest new “tactilities” and possibilities in the fields of reception. In fact, the architects’ Möbius House is instructive in this regard. This project suggests how a particular fiction, while still situated within the confines of existing conditions, or “actuality”, could open onto a space in which users might re-conceive their “given” world, imagine change, and practice differently.

Lefebvre has argued that the existing ordering of space in contemporary society tends to inscribe those activities and events that are on the whole conducive to the maintenance of existing structures of dominance.36 The quality of contemporary space that contributes to this dominance, and to the disempowerment of its opposition, is its abstraction. Produced in part by way of the private property relation itself, this abstraction or "pulverization" of space results in a suppression or negation of individual and concrete differences which, under conditions of relative "freedom", would generate a heterogeneous "space of differences" supporting a life-world of unalienated individual and group practice.37

36 Most important are those structures that work to maintain the hegemony of capital. For Lefebvre, a socialist economic reorganization, along with the reappropriation of space for "unalienated" practice, are preconditions for the production of a society of differences. 37 Lefebvre understands the abstraction of space to be a result, first, of capital's need for private property, the control of which ensures dominance over the spatial means of production and consumption, and, second, of a bureaucratization of space in which the controlled and repetitive reproduction of the social relations of production is facilitated and expanded. This production and ordering of space is intrinsically social, since it involves decisions about the localization, separation, facilitation or restriction of activities and events that are attempted or undertaken by individuals and groups.

Van Berkel and Bos’s Möbius House may not offer any concrete alternative to existing spaces. Certainly it cannot be taken as a “model” of differential space. However, at the very least it suggests questions about certain ideas already subsumed in the social reproduction and social identities involved in home ownership and in the extreme abstraction of the private property relation. Lefebvre notes that commodities, however interchangeable, become increasingly particular the longer they remain fixed at a site.38 Architecture represents perhaps the maximal fixity of the contemporary commodity partly because of the inescapable specificity of its “surrounds”—climate, site, materials, local labor, bodily occupation, contingent practices, frictions of distance, and so on. The Möbius House takes great advantage of this intrinsic specificity of the architectural object. The project is organized around a spatial and circulatory loop similar to the famous “single-sided” strip named after 19th-century mathematician August Möbius. The project arrays a loose set of program functions along a continuous path that sustains a 24-hour cycle of sleeping, working and living. Materials and finishes that are initially read as primary or secondary, as “exterior” or “interior”, exchange places as the spatial loop twists inside out. As the architects point out, concrete construction, initially unquestioned as a choice for the project’s exterior surfaces, gradually moves inside as the means and material of realizing artifacts such as tables and stairs. Glazing, initially infill, moves from a local detail role to one that appears more substantial and structural in partition walls.

In its simple twisted loop organization, the house admits no simple separations between inside and outside, between cultural space and landscape, between social times and the times of nature. The project brings forward the cyclical and periodic events of the natural world, as evident in the landscape within and without, and interweaves these with the rhythmic and gestural times of the human world, present but normally unremarked in the routines of daily life. This rhetorical operation is necessarily rehearsed “in the flesh”, in every act and practice that engages the house. As a continuous strip-dwelling in which inside and outside, and their associated rhythms and cycles, cannot be easily disentangled, occupation and site are radically interwoven in a gesture that re-marks the singularity of site and the inseparability of context and action. If understood as an opening onto a lived-through disturbance of a social identity that might otherwise unreflectively accept the “interchangeability” of real space, the project can be seen to both utilize and move beyond the simple formal gesture of “intertwining” that Van Berkel and Bos count as one of their basic structuring tactics.39

In discussing their work, however, Van Berkel and Bos are almost completely silent with respect to the particularities of the “user” side of the tactile program. Since “tactility” is the architects’ code word for a broad program of recouping “the physical side of architecture”, in the context of Van Berkel and Bos’s writing it must be understood to

38 Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, p.341 39 See the comments of Ben van Berkel and Caroline Bos in Kristen Feireiss, ed. Ben van Berkel: Mobile Forces (Berlin: Ernst and Sohn, 1994).

include the concrete experiences of those who engage buildings, and not only the materiality of the buildings themselves. The architects’ focused interest in structuring, and their reluctance to speak of particular experiences in specific buildings, however, suggests a tendency to bring “tactility” uncomfortably close to simple “composition” or “technique”. Despite tentative moves “outward” from form, and despite the architects’ vehement polemicizing against formalist strategies of design in other contexts, Van Berkel and Bos’s “tactile” approach appears very close to ”classic” formalism. This dilemma is hardly Van Berkel and Bos’s alone. Indeed, it is precisely in the context of their extraordinary work that this important problem has become so clearly visible.

I would suggest at this point that the care the architects have taken in developing and articulating a far-ranging critique of “appropriative” strategies in architecture has ironically set a limit on the radical potential of their own program. For very good reasons, they have been reluctant to take user practices and experiences for granted, but this caution has resulted in what can only be read as an unstated skepticism about ever being able to put into practice specific and conjunctural social interventions, however partial and open such programs must remain. Although projects such as the Möbius House begin to move in this direction, Van Berkel and Bos’s well-founded reluctance to move still further has had the effect of bringing a careful regard for user “tactility” unfortunately close to a silent neglect of those local and specific social and personal experiences and practices that necessarily operate within larger political, social and cultural fields. Such a situation, for which no easy answer is forthcoming, must be more than a little troubling for the socially or politically concerned architect. In the end, at least some of the concrete effects of an engaged and “tactile” work must be measured against specific circumstances, aspirations, and experiences so that local adjustments might be made. It would seem that a fully “tactile program” demands a careful gauging of such effects, knowing that although they can be neither “neutral” nor “universal”, they may well be substantial and operative—in specific situations, at distinct moments, and in particular conjunctures.

betrayal and becoming

Van Berkel and Bos have positioned their work in a tenuous middle, one that suggests powerful new openings, but that in practice can easily collapse back into technique and formal manipulation. The architects believe that architecture is always “open” and cannot by itself direct the manifold practices that literally “take place” within it. However, this same understanding can easily and quickly lead to an inability to engage the specifics of the various practices that will and do take place. To agree with De Certeau that space is a sieve constitutively unable to “contain” user’s practices and experiences is not sufficient justification to retreat from the demand to do “architecturally” what can be done to engage those practices. This certainly includes the ethical demand to overturn such injustices as are both played out in the spaces of architecture and in some way amenable to architectural intervention. Seen in this light, the real problem involves exploring possible modes of architectural effect while neither despairing over the architectural work’s inadequacy nor making extravagant claims for its social power.

In the sense that Van Berkel and Bos’s recent work actively investigates possibilities and strategies of form-making, it may well be that Van Berkel and Bos’s work is better characterized as a cautious step toward local engagement rather than a premature foreclosure of it. On this view, their preoccupation with what might appear to be largely a formalist exploration of design strategies and tools can be taken instead as a working demonstration of the belief that architects need to know how they might accomplish social and practice-oriented interventions as much as they need to determine what those interventions might be. That is, despite Van Berkel and Bos’s reticence to speak to this issue, it is possible to understand their work as comprising a sustained program of investigation into refined tools and careful strategies as might be prerequisite to effective project intervention.

Indeed, the Möbius House project, if affirmatively read as a site for possible disruptions to normative ideas involving private property and ownership identity, suggests a tentative engagement of “identity” that operates neither as radical singularity, in a nominalist sense, nor so generally as to be crudely essentialist. Architectural works attentive to, and building upon, projects like the Möbius House might begin to engage what Laclau and Mouffe call “nodal points” or “partial concentrations of power existing in every concrete social formation.” Jay Stone comments that such a nodal point analysis may work to save “the political terrain from discursive relativism by granting a relatively unified identity to class, gender, and race subject positions in spite of the phenomenological rejection of essentialist definitions of these phenomena.”40 The implication for architecture is obvious—it might be possible to work critically with a “typological” notion of identity, rather than abandon all hope of architectural intervention in the face of the radical singularity of individual users. Here, in other words, is an opening that preserves Van Berkel and Bos’s skepticism about essentializing users and “colonizing” their experiences, while still holding open the possibility of directed architectural intervention with respect to certain “contingent” groups and classes to which individuals always partially belong.

Let us recall that social reproduction relies very considerably on determining both what we can think and what we can do.41 Lefebvre notes that "there is no thought without utopia, without exploration of the possible" and "there is no thought without reference to a practice".42 Because architectural works participate in the social positioning of the individual by means of his own corporeality and gestural practice as well as by way of imagination and cognition, the architectural work is uniquely placed among cultural productions. Indeed, such works participate directly and materially in what Pierre Bourdieu calls an "em-bodying of the structures of the world".43 Necessarily always a “partial fiction”, such a work may effectively comment upon and disruptively rehearse actual conditions in a way

40 Jay Stone, “Phenomenological Roots”, p.109. See Ernesto Laclau and Chantel Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (New York: Verso Press, 1985), p.142. 41 Obviously these are not unrelated, but there are clearly differences between physical and conceptual constraints. 42 Henri Lefebvre, La Revolution Urbaine (Paris, 1970). Cited and translated in Mark Gottdiener, The Social Production of Urban Space (University of Texas: Austin, 1985), p.157. 43 Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977).

that puts into play both the work’s presence within actuality and its own material modifications of it. The architectural work, as architects have always known, is never simply real or unreal, but always something of both, always a subtle negotiation between the actual and the possible. This puts such works in a unique position with respect to the very large grain and pragmatic construction of what physicists, in a rather different context, have come to call “possible worlds”. If Van Berkel and Bos do not seem ready to offer specific proposals for these possible worlds, they have certainly provided us with a better sense of the range of tools architects have at their disposal. They have also reminded us about the dangers of using those tools without careful reflection, and they have pointed toward a “nodal” mode of intervention lying between singularity and generality. Van Berkel and Bos’s reticence to finally close the gap between their “realist” and “formalist” trajectories should be read as a cautious challenge to architects to take up these disciplinary tools and use them in local negotiations of that space of doubt that must always exist between affect and effect, between actuality and possibility: between the present moments that seem so real and the range of futures that can be desired, imagined, and produced.

And we should be careful not let the limitations of their project work take away from the suggestive power of their overall agenda. The architecture of Van Berkel and Bos is very ambitious. Notions such as "crossing point" or "mobile forces" are complex and suggestive, at once evocative, contingent, and resistant to precise definition. As we have seen, the designed and built work of Van Berkel and Bos manages at times to powerfully harness the concepts offered to explain and situate it. At various moments the work may seem to fall short. At times it exceeds these notions. The "reticence" in this work, its tendency to drift from the discourses that might anchor it at the same time that it seeks to realize them, might also be seen as a useful gauge of its potential to inform the discipline. The most suggestive and fruitful of formulations are often "unutterable" in any conventional sense when first produced. Unlike pre-established or rigidly defined "positions", the flexible concepts and silent forms characteristic of Van Berkel and Bos’s work suggest a certain "excess" that would enable productive movement while avoiding any overly narrow constraints on the direction that movement might take.

It would seem, in the terminology of Gilles Deleuze, that Van Berkel and Bos have attempted to outline a programme not only for their own work but also for the discipline of architecture. This loose grip on "visions" and "positions" in the work of Van Berkel and Bos suggests with Deleuze a sense that the crucial task of cultural work is to experiment with possibilities, to make "programmes" for life. As Deleuze notes, such "[p]rogrammes are not manifestoes - still less are they phantasms, but means of providing points for an experiment which exceeds our capacities to foresee".44 In Van Berkel and Bos’s work, the crucial points in this experiment have been those suggested by the disciplinary tactics of denial and repression identified by the architects. "Rhetoric", "formalism", and "colonialism", understood by the architects as attempts to control the "others" of architecture, can also be understood as markers for those points where a programme might begin. For the architecture-to-come suggested by

44 Gilles Deleuze and Claire Parnet, Dialogues, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987), p.48; emphasis in original.

Van Berkel and Bos, such a beginning will take root with experiences, sensations, perceptions, and those manifold practices "beyond" architecture, while preserving the importance of the material form of the architectural work.

This opportunity for movement is created by a qualified refusal of the very operations most closely identified with disciplinary practice. It is not only a turning away from "architecture", however, but also a turning toward its other. Van Berkel and Bos have chosen the very forces that incessantly haunt the "architecture" they refuse. This new- architecture seeks to give up those illusions of control upon which its discipline's strategies were founded. "It renounces its claim to any territory, any end which would reside in itself".45 Ultimately, this is a powerfully enabling act of betrayal. As Deleuze notes, "it is difficult to be a traitor; it is to create. One has to lose one's identity, one's face, in it. One has to disappear ... "46 But this disappearance is not without direction. In fact, it is directed toward the other in a "mutual-becoming" where each becomes a stranger to his own language, where architecture moves toward life, toward human practices, experiences and sensations, and where these others move toward architecture. "This is assembling, being in the middle, on the line of encounter between an internal world and the external world. Being in the middle".47

Notions such as the "crossing point" gesture to just this middle. Van Berkel and Bos note that they have been "more formed by television, music, shopping centers, air travel, the first moon landing, Heidegger, the telephone, Non- Aristotelian philosophy, the art of the last twenty years, automobiles and freeways, and all those important things which have no place in an outline of architecture".48 And this is the point, after all. There is certainly a place for all this, but there is no place for it in "architecture". For Van Berkel and Bos these forces will come to rest in a tenuous middle, in an architecture-becoming, in what Deleuze calls an assemblage, "a multiplicity which is made up of many heterogeneous terms and which establishes liaisons, relations between them, across ages, sexes and reigns - different natures. Thus, the assemblage's only unity is that of co-functioning: it is a symbiosis, a 'sympathy' ".49 The work of Van Berkel and Bos opens onto an architecture sympathetic to city and citizenry, to life, to manifold and heterogeneous experience. The work may be problematic in some respects, but these architects have set out on a "line of flight" to something other. “To flee is to produce the real, to create life, to find a weapon".50 Van Berkel and Bos have glimpsed this for themselves, and their gestures can suggest as much to us: an architecture beyond itself, an architecture (of) beginning, an architecture-becoming.

45 Gilles Deleuze and Claire Parnet, Dialogues, p.50. 46 Gilles Deleuze and Claire Parnet, Dialogues, p.44. 47 Gilles Deleuze and Claire Parnet, Dialogues, p.52, emphasis added. 48 Ben van Berkel, Caroline Bos, "How Modern is Dutch Architecture?", in Delinquent Visionaries, p.30. 49 Gilles Deleuze and Claire Parnet, Dialogues, p.69. 50 Gilles Deleuze and Claire Parnet, Dialogues, p.49.