Productive Congestion

The State of the Assembly

The fever pitched verbal slurry of an auction attempts to unseat reason through an onslaught of pure speed. Forced to bid quickly if they are interested, customers in an auction suffer a reduction in their ability to think matters through. Lacking the drag co-efficient of thought, the logic goes, sale prices will escalate unimpeded as buyers seek to secure their purchase.

A more plodding customer base favors the flea market- realm of perpetual bargain. With a collection of vendors spread out in space, the flea market is a microcosm of the market at large: a sea of buyers and sellers ready to negotiate a purchase price that's agreeable to both parties. Here in the market, time is essential to price. Waiting out and arguing down your opponent are two critical tactics of bargaining. From a buyer's perspective, near-by vendors offering similar products for better prices transforms the spatial disposition of the market into a token of temporal pressure which may be exerted upon the preferred seller: "if you don't give me a better price I'm going over there. Think quickly!"

Democracy, like the market, is a task of patience. If fixed consumer prices are the element of efficiency that tethers the chaos of the auction and the flea market, rules of order play a similar role in democratic governments. Debate, voting, motions, and general procedures are introduced as methods of structuring human-to-human interaction. Ostensibly to maintain "order" in the conversation, these rules actually serve to carefully extenuate the proceedings and prevent them from devolving into a legislative auction. Through the wordy scripts of government and the weighty requirements of documentation, waiting time is breathed into legislative proceedings. Fundamentally, this discursive padding allows the formulation of better arguments from opposing parties and furthers the atmosphere of trial-by-fire that typifies competitive, argumentative, democratic proceedings. If competition is the operative mode of capitalism and democracy both, congestion is their healthy fallout.

This "boisterous sea of liberty," as Jefferson called it (Bernstein p. 121), promises to delivery higher quality products by congesting the drive towards completion just long enough to allow actors to competitively develop the most favorable solution. Too much congestion slows all progress to a halt and too little allows a tyranny of the minority to progress towards self-interested goals. Efficiency can be too much of a good thing. Conversely, the counter-intuitive logic of congestion forces all parties involved to maintain a state of vigilance and thus to also conduct themselves carefully. To further congest the proceedings of government is to force politicians to "prove their assertions against other assertions and come to closure without thumping and kicking," in Bruno Latour's words.

Assertions, not facts: these abstract building blocks of argument require the development of cares and concerns, positions, and even armatures of rhetoric. When facts cease to be facts this is evidence of more than a single lie; it identifies a systemic failure of the decision making apparatus to usefully evaluate the issues at hand. Forced by a drive towards transparency, Powell's presentation to the UN was a comic parade of images aimed at the broader public rather than experts. The proof is in the Powerpoint. By holding government "accountable to the people" in the name of "transparency" the terms of discussion are necessarily dumbed down to a level that no longer benefits from expertise. Because "complicated proof-giving equipment" (Latour) demands expert level understanding and brings with it opaque dialog such equipment has been banned from our assemblies. Yet, contemporary issues are sufficiently complex that assemblies must serve public desire with the benefit of disciplinary expertise. The congestive power of expert arguments bides time for analysis in a way that is diametrically opposed to the hotting-up of legislative dialog by psuedo-factual statements.

The Contemporary Assembly (This is painful)

Now a sort of black box brimming with expertise, the public building must take the radical step of favoring its own efficiency over the efficacy of its representative character. The myth of empirical assessment being wiped from the required qualities of a public building, its mass and urban presence are given symbolic imperative and thus the happenings of the interior are divorced from the outside image of the building. Instead of being a machine open for all to inspect, specific avenues are provided for the public to perform diagnostics. A further public interiority is developed through the addition of other (mundane) programs which benefit the city, weave the building into its context, and brings potential agents of diagnostic sortition into the building.

If waiting time is the currency of democracy, the public building should be able to represent the ephemeral as well as the stable. Paired with the dual demands of security and flexibility of the interior, this quality of ephemerality is the sole thing that links the building's representative exterior to its functional interior. Sloterdijk suggests that the "polis is a reservoir for symbolic objects that are to be given a longer presence in the shared community" (Latour p. 948) and while public buildings will always lag behind media, they should nevertheless keep a loose pace with the public who erected them. A little literalness never hurt anyone.

Floating around my head while writing this: The Federalist Papers (esp. 1-15, 85), R. B. Bernstein's Thomas Jefferson, Bruno Latour's Making Things Public, Sarah Whiting's dissertation The Jungle In The Clearing, and Rem Koolhaas' Delirious New York.

Immunology, Filtration, & Deception

Splenda uses shape to deceive your body. The tongue's surface is a vast landscape of taste buds, each one a bundle of individual receptors programed to respond to one of the five tastes. Incoming molecules bind to these receptors which dissolve them and subsequently allow a neuron to be fired which creates the sensation of taste in the brain. The success of this binding (and thus the power of the flavor) is dictated by the shape and chemical properties of the incoming molecule but an entirely separate criteria are used elsewhere in the body to determine whether this material is metabolized or expelled. Splenda, the popular productized version of sucralose, effectively has the same shape as sucrose but is chemically distinct which results in an almost identical flavor without the caloric intake. Shape (flavor) has been separated from effect, as Somol and Whiting (and Rem!) would remind us.

The power of shape for the Projectivists is its clear identity yet ambiguous potential. Freed from the shackles of explicit reference, shapes may mean multiple things to multiple people leaving the architect as a "gambler" hoping that their bets pay off. The problem with betting is that it's singular. You make one bet and you hope for the best. This is why those who gamble at night manage their diversified portfolios during the day. As an overall strategy shape may be problematic, but on a finer grain level it can yield the same "informal potential" yet still contribute to a synthetic project.

Sloterdijk proposes the immune system as a more mature, if slightly menacing, metaphor for architecture (immunology is foam). An immune system works through defensive filtration and offensive antigenic response. That an immune system as we know it works concurrently on multiple scales with cooperation at different levels is obviously productive in Sloterdijk's adoption of the term, but he fetishizes the will towards isolation that bodies exhibit as an act of defense. In fact, an immune system primarily acts as a filter and it is this question of filtration which deserves more attention. (We're still wondering if this model is more productive than Tschumi's distinction between use and program. TDB.)

Leaving behind physically transgressive acts which allow new communications but do so by altering the material reality of a building (broken locks, demolished walls), we find that the physical components of a building allow an entire spectrum of communications. Furthermore, this variety of communicative intensities is important to the health of urban life where there are as many levels of interpersonal relationships as there are individuals.

The popular television show Home Improvement, for instance, featured a character by the name of Wilson who gave advice over the fence to his neighbor without either ever seeing the other. This heard-but-not-seen interaction was the result of an impulse towards isolation (the suburban dream) crossed with a deeply human need for communication (the main character was always seeking answers from wise Wilson) mediated by the physical reality of the fence. Without the fence these neighbors must confront each other face to face, an overwhelming breech of their isolation that would make it untenable.

On the other end of the spectrum, windows put their occupants on display often without allowing any verbal communication. Definitive aspects of private life are communicated to the outside world as the details of private interiors and private acts are exposed, as any Peeping Tom knows well. One may call this the ostrich effect: a feeling of privacy- of isolation- created when not being able to see/hear others, regardless of their ability to see/hear you. Without windows a room is uninhabitable but a feeling of enclosure may overcome these openings to provide an overall condition of privacy.

In each of these examples individuals are filtering their experience of the world by re-functioning parts of buildings, but the act is not without connotation. Shape and effect are loosely bound, but they're still bound. The representative quality of the fence and the window in these two examples are operative even if their communicative potential has been altered: the Peeping Tom is gratified by looking the wrong way through windows and Wilson's fence makes him wise because he remains unseen. Even if the operative elements of the building are important to their users, they are rarely a source of identity.

If Splenda creates representation without the expected effect, a new synthetic project would seek to create effects while holding open the possibility of a developed representative identity. Rather than deception, this would be an architecture of strategic nuance and pragmatic schizophrenia: each facet of the building allowed to contribute what it is capable of contributing without an obligation to be painfully consistent or the desire to be actively counter-intuitive.

Annie weighs in with an astute observation on the work of SANAA:

Nishizawa used the term 'atmosphere' over and over again. Maybe it was just a coincidence of misaligned translation, but between his use of that term and the inescapable figure of the bubble in every project I couldn't help but think about Peter Sloterdijk's whole the-future-of-architecture-is-foam position.

To extend this observation, the materiality of the recent SANAA, Nishizawa, and Sejima projects enforces a 'connected-isolation' in some subtle ways. When not literally foaming in plan like the Toledo Pavilion or bubbling in elevation such as Zollervein, cells of space are made ambiguous through the use of material and light to dissolve spatial boundaries. Sloterdijk suggests the importance of architecture in the formation of a foam by noting, "no dough without a vessel to form it in; no mass without a hand that knows the purpose of its kneading" (Log 9). In SANAA's architecture we've found a vessel.

House A in Tokyo uses a combination of loose curtains and taut, scrim-like curtains to allow the inhabitants of the house to parcel the space according to their whims. Nishizawa spoke about this in very pragmatic terms: sometimes you go to the bathroom to go, but sometimes you use the room for any number of things that actually don't require as much privacy. In contrast to the bombastic re-building of rooms proposed by Cedric Price's Fun Palace, Nishizawa leaves the rooms intact but uses curtains (and the privacy they afford) to alter the effective definition of a space. This acknowledgment of the life of the rooms in a home actually frees the space that the room contains, as if dislocating it from its socket, and allows for slippage between the spatial and programmatic definition of each room/space in the house. Here, the figure may be mutable but the figure/ground relationship is clear at all times due to a rather small and narrow plan.

Quite the opposite, the Toledo Glass Pavilion is a radical play in composition where the academic fluctuation of figure/ground in plan is mirrored experientially by a constant dissolving and re-constitution of the vertical surfaces as reflections are caught between the multiple layers of glass. Curiously, although this building in its completed state is much more literally transparent than previous SANAA projects, and so employs reflection effects on an almost unprecedented level, the renderings were consistent with other SANAA projects.



The architects consistently choose to represent their world as a whitewashed wonderland of planar ambiguity where light pours in through openings to melt the contents of the model into a single whole. One knows that the thing in front of them is comprised of multiple spaces and planes, that forms are articulated, that difference exists, and yet this is drowned out by the mediating medium of light. So while Sejima describes the New Museum in NYC as "pearly-gray volumes piled with artful carelessness, each off-center to the one below," what she shows is a single volume of ambiguous definition.

The buildings of SANAA are the cap of a bone-dry cappuccino: foam existing without its progenitor. Whereas Koolhaas produces a destabilizing atmosphere by actively opposing his architecture to a known trope, SANAA avoids reference to prototypes. Rather than being destabilized or agitated by a constant variability in the way that we perceive the buildings, this ontological churning becomes the default mode for SANAA's architecture. This is an architecture of vacillation, of multiplicity, of foam.

In Toledo, the New Museum, and House A (as well as much of their other work), Sejima & Nishizawa develop a planning strategy that positions the building as an insulating medium for a foaming, active use and re-use, seeing and re-seeing of the building. At the same time, this academic understanding of the building is bolstered by the development of a rich experience with the careful use of materials to produce ambiguity through effects of light and reflection.

If Sloterdijk claims that an architecture of foam should allow for "both the isolation of individuals, and the concentration of isolated entities into collective ensembles of cooperation and contemplation" (Log 9), we've found the hint of such a condition in the work of SANAA. However, the question of agency remains. While these buildings produce the effects that Sloterdijk calls for, they do so in a way that is largely out of the control of the inhabitants, uncalibrated. Now then, where's that hand for kneading?

The Rules Of Foamspace

There is an almost cute resonance between Sloterdijk's choice of foam as the metaphor for the globalized world and the block-by-block caffeine-drip infiltration of cappuccino urbanism that globalization has spawned. Still, in place of the word "society," foam offers us a way to conceptualize the configuration of individuals in the contemporary world that captures some of the ambiguities and contradictions thriving today. Gone is the air of Hopper's Nighthawks, thick with smoke and mechanical loneliness, to be replaced by a clearer medium, more personal and pervasive but less physical. This vacuum insulates individuals from casual contact but paradoxically creates the need for more invasive means of communication. One may no longer feel so willing to chat up a stranger in a bar, but they also shouldn't be surprised to suffer the ring of their cellphone in the middle of a tryst. This 'connected isolation' assumes a condition of multiplicity wherein individuals are "always co-isolated islands that are momentarily, or chronically, connected to a network of adjacent islands constituting mid-sized or larger structures."

Paralleling Foucault's transition from punishment of the body to discipline of the mind, individuals in contemporary society increasingly rely on mediated means of communicating their concerns to one another. Discipline no longer remains solely in the halls of institutions like schools and prisons, but leaks into smaller, supposedly more casual structures like condominium associations, hobby organizations, or online chatrooms, as each develop their own constellations of power to govern their subjects. This proliferation of subjectivity necessarily plays itself out in space rather than time, resulting in an increased importance of place. There is, in some sense, a real seat for each of these multiplied powers (even if it's not where we expect it to be) and the physical reality of these loci help to define how their power is exerted. Architecture, to summarize Sumrell and Varnelis, assists in creating these groupings by "articulating moods and milieus" that differentiate the city (p. 129).

If we accept that there is a networked public, to use the term of Sumrell & Varnelis, or Foam the question remains, what role does architecture play in this organization of individuals? Sloterdijk's own reading of the French Revolution becomes instructive as he articulates the demands that a new political body put on architecture and vice versa. Specifically, the celebration at Champ de Mar on July 14th, 1790 diffused architecture into the very identity of the national body by becoming a vessel to contain Sloterdijk's foam and allow its internal pressures and tensions to play out. Importantly, the architecture in question is not a temple or monument that wields the overwhelming over of an icon, but instead a careful development of the physical environment of the festival to create a milieu that generates its own mythology and persistent visual images.

Informal versions of this festival had occurred on a smaller scale across France in the year leading up to the fete, but this celebration outside Paris marked the culmination of the revolution. Champ de Mar was thus the site of a synechdotal celebration: both a lasting visual that would contribute to a burgeoning national identity and, through the dissemination of those visuals, become a stand-in celebration for all those who were not able to attend. The fete had to break with both the Ancien Regieme, for obvious reasons, but also with the festivals of the ancients which brought with them a conception of society too divided to satisfy the fraternal desires of the revolutionaries. An appropriate newness was achieved through manipulations to the proportion and scale of known types such as the ampitheatre and triumphal arch as well as the redefinition of existing formal tropes described by Etlin: "This altar rose, no longer to dominate men, but to approach the sky" (p.29).

Interpreting his analysis of the French Revolution in Foam City, we can glean from Sloterdijk a few important lessons about the architecture of foam:

1. Foamspace must "enable both the isolation of individuals, and the concentration of isolated entites into collective ensembles of cooperation and contemplation." It is both/and.
2. Foamspace is the recapitulation of previous spaces, rinsed and washed of their former structures but never completely evading them. It is historical.
3. Foamspace must allow "occasional assembly" even if society is so large that this assembly must always function as a synechdote. It is representational.
4. Foamspace creates the largest structures ("the masses", "the nation", or "the people") only when the physical assembly is elaborate. It requires affect.
5. Foamspace must degrade gracefully: it should make sense to those who can read it, entertain those who simply look at it, and command the attention of those who may only gaze. It is layered.

References:
Etlin, Richard. Architecture and the Festival of Federation, 1970. link
Funcke, Bettina. Against Gravity. link
Sumrell, Robert & Varnelis, Kazys. Blue Monday. link

Sloterdijk in Log 9 calls for an architecture of Foams:

Considering the comparatively looser aggregation of their symbionts, modern collectives are confronted with the challenge of creating spatial conditions that enable both the isolation of individuals, and the concentration of isolated entities into collective ensembles of cooperation and contemplation. This calls for a new commitment on the part of architecture.