Constructions (Writing Architecture) by John Rajchman

Writing Architecture #4

by John Rajchman

foreword by Paul Virilio In this series of overlapping essays onarchitecture and art, John Rajchman attempts to do theory in a new way that takesoff from the philosophy of the late Gilles Deleuze. Starting from notions offolding, lightness, ground, abstraction, and future cities, he embarks on aconceptual voyage whose aim is to help "construct" a new space of connections, to"build" a new idiom, perhaps even to suggest a new architecture. Along the way, headdresses questions of the new abstraction, operative form, other geometries, newtechnologies, global cities, ideas of the virtual and the formless, andpossibilities for critical theory after utopia and transgression.

Genres: Architecture, Art

Paperback

First published February 6, 1998

Reviews

[Andrew]

Perhaps Rajchman thinks he’s doing philosophy. He isn’t. I’ve spent enough time in the art world to know my way around the post-whatever logorrhea surrounding the visual arts masquerading as philosophy – the other week I saw some massive painted sign on a window promoting concepts like “AI and social justice” at the Parsons School of Design and began questioning whether stochastic violence was really such a bad thing.

Rajchman is, rather, writing some very fun provocations about architecture and art. It’s not serious philosophy, but it is like hanging out with a particularly smart stoner buddy. And for that I have to say I enjoyed reading Constructions immensely, even if I believe – and this is where Rajchman and I depart -- I believe that Deleuzean ideas are better understood as provocations, because if they become bases, you’re just post-hoc justifying the worst tendencies of the particular rhizome we call late capitalism.

[Luke · Rating 5 out of 5]

“it is not so much that there exists a nice grounded, phenomenological everyday experience or lived spatiality as the source of ideal geometric figures, or that the languages of scientific and ordinary geometries are learned and applied according to different rules or within different forms of life. It is rather that there exist other unnoticed, less determinate, structured or systematic spatializations, which may be explored at once through specific scientific and artistic investigation. The rule of the relation between the two is that neither is privileged and that translations are only worth the effects they have within the specific domain into which translation is made. But what might this mean for the specific domain of built or tectonic space?”

“world is in the first instance a grounded world. We find this picture in the great divisions that the sociology of the last century associated with the emergence of the nation-state— the divisions between modernity and tradition, individual and community. Thus one was said to be
"grounded" in tradition or community, "ungrounded" in modernity or as an individual. One was offered the unattractive alternative of being either an individual atom moving about in a Cartesian social space or an integral member of an organic whole, fitting together in an Aristotelian social place.“

“Virilio had come under the influence of Maurice Merleau-Ponty at the time. His idea of a new "ground" for architectural space was to be part of a more general rediscovery of the body or "the flesh" —part of a more general phenomenological critique of the abstract Cartesian space that was supposed to have led "European science" into a state of crisis.
Virilio was drawn to Gestalt theory and the attempt to derive figure/ground relations from upright posture and frontal vision, thus rediscovering a topic central to Wölfflin-the relations between ground and form, gravity and vision.
But for Virilio the events of '68 in Paris meant a break with this group and its project or manifesto. As he puts it: "I dropped the issue of space completely to focus on topics like time, speed, dromology ... time and politics."10 Instead of a new urban order with more grounded spatial possibilities for architecture, he saw the emergence and global spread of an ungrounded media civilization, eventually moving in real-time transmission, which abolished the phenomenological sense of ground edness, proximity, and gravity or at least introduced a new sense of "dislocation" into it. Thus there is a certain tension in his thought between a grounded lived space and an ungrounded "live" time;“

“Kandinsky-nongeometric or nonrectilinear, prior to the
"simulation" of things. Info devices don't have to be used to assist smart weapons or to imagine what it was like to walk about in the Egyptian pyramids. There are other
"abstract" uses.
The situation of our postindustrial info devices today is thus something like that in which Deleuze sees the new "industrial art" of cinema at the turn of the cen-tury, when Bergson proposed his own critique of abstrac-tions. Bergson feared a "cinematographic illusion" of continuity, but already the real problem of cinema was not that of image and reality any more than of medium and message (or medium being the message). It was a problem of time and movement in the composition of space, and so of other, more diverging and bifurcating conceptions of continuity, taken up in Bergson's own philosophy. And it was just when cinema made such
"abstract" connections in its new industrial "material" that it discovered its most intense relations with abstraction in the other materials, in architecture and dance as well as painting and sculpture. 24 Such were then the abstract virtualities in the medium, irreducible to messages, which unfolded within particular sociopolitical situations, punctuated by the experience of the war; such were the abstract forces in the medium that would figure in larger abstract machines, connected to an outside, exposing things unthought in our ways of being, seeing,
and doing.”

“abstraction first, see it as first, and so take narration as only "an indirect consequence that flows from movement and time, rather than the other way around." 16 For film is not a code of which abstraction would be the self-reference; it is an abstract machine that has movement and time as specific abstract virtualities, which then get effectuated in particular social and political conditions; narrative is only one restricted possibility of film. Thus what Deleuze counts as most specific to film- the forces of its time and movement images-is at the same time what opens original connections with other mediums, for example, with architecture, which Deleuze then sees as closer to film than is theater.”

“Deleuze then brings this second sense of "abstract" to his discussion of modern art—for example, to Jean-Luc Godard. For if Deleuze sees Godard films as abstract, it is not because they remove all narrative or diegesis and retreat into pure filmic self-reference but because they take singular elements from all over, past and present, and reassemble them, mixing them up in the strange nonnarrative continuity of an "abstract machine."15 The motivation is thus not the removal or absence of narrative but an attempt to attain an outside of other odd connections through a free, abstract "and," which takes over the movement and time of the film.
That is one source of Deleuze's quarrel with the film semiology of Christian Metz.“

“one can argue that postmodern art remains, as it were, haunted by the spirit of the abstract painting; it only repeats this game as farce”

“if you want to get an idea of a New World space so "smooth" that all particular qualities slip off it, go take another look at the World Trade Center or the RCA Building in New York City. For there in a business setting is to be found something more akin to Melville's loose, uncemented incomplete wall than the endless corridors of Kafka's Castle or the off-on switches of Godard's Alphaville—a space of "no one" yet not a space of anomie. For many eyes such typical-plan buildings are the very epitome of reductive minimalism in architecture, of abstract Euclidean space. In asking us to see them instead as "formless," Koolhaas touches on the problem of an operative abstraction that departs from decoration and sculpture in another way than through reduction or purification- one that asks what can be done through form when it is free to move within a looser, more flexible, less predicable sort of arrange-ment, once it starts to move in an affective space.”

[Jason · Rating 5 out of 5]

Definitely one of the best books on architectural theory.

[Anna]

It is astonishing to find my current studio practice to eloquently explicated.