The book still hasn’t found its way into the ethereal realm of the digital media. There is vast stores of knowledge locked away in warehouses all around the world; the off site facilities of the major library’s that make up many large Universities collections. In fact there is a trend to off site management of collections, allowing only those most “useful” books to stay in the labyrinth of stacks at such libraries as Avery Library at Columbia University.

The Manhattan Archive and Library is just down the hill from Columbia University at the cross roads of 115th St. and Fredrick Douglass Boulevard (8th Ave.) in New York City. With the strong community of Harlem around it, the Archive serves as a nexus of information in the neighborhood. Part community center, part book digital archiving service, the Archive’s mission statement is about information conductivity. The Archive offers services to communities and universities alike; digitally scanning books and making them accessible via their client’s networks and sharing in each institutions book lending programs.

The Archive remains largely formally silent in its intentions, neither slickly minimal nor conceptually expressive; instead it remains a simple construction. Instead it is rather ordinary, not in the sense of normalcy or banality, but rather as in the ordinary and the singular. Where the singular serves as a defining focus of organization for a given field or system, the ordinary is the connective tissue of the field itself; diffuse yet defined. In this sense, the Archive is part of the neighborhood and the urban fabric, it maintains the street wall and building height of its neighbors, yet separate and defined as something different by its entrance courtyard and separation from the surrounding buildings, giving the building a almost cubic reading.

At the intersection of Hudson and Canal, the Holland Tunnel comes up on the Manhattan side. Just blocks away, the West Side Highway barrels down the side of the island, distributing cars all across Manhattan. On Canal between these two transportation networks at the top of Tribeca, is a small triangular block. On this site, a small building containing telecommunications switching equipment sits. It isn’t a billboard of some large corporations brand designed to be an image of that corporation’s power and influence, though it might become that. It isn’t a grand experiment designed to challenge the way we live. In fact it is mainly designed for the lives of the equipment that dwell there, humans only regurlarly occupy the top floor of offices and the roof garden. The building is more object than subject, more a construction than a creation, a construing of material rather than thought.

Both construe and construct come from the same Latin origin,¹ the word construo which in Latin means to pile up together or to arrange in a group.² From this definition one can see that a construct is an arrangement of pieces set in relation to each other in a joining to resist a force or forces. In the end, it is the joint between the pieces not the pieces themselves that constitute the construct, for it is in the act of joining that the assemblage gains its ability to resist the deteriorating forces of the world. Yet the pieces themselves have only certain kinds of capacities to join with each other. These capacities are immanent in the pieces themselves.

The process of construing – constructing is one of determining the capacities of pieces to join with each other and the actualization of the joint. Marco Frascari describes this double relationship as the “techne of logos” and the “logos of techne” or the craft of logic and the logic of craft.³ The craft of logic is the act of producing thought while the logic of craft is the act of actualizing that thought into a physical embodied construct, the joint. Both are acts of construction.

1. Jess Stein, ed., The Random House College Dictionary Revised Edition, (New York: Random House, Inc., 1988), pg. 288.
2. John C. Traupman, The New College Latin & English Dictionary, (New York: Bantam Books, 1995), pg. 115.
3. Marco Frascari, “The Tell-the-Tale Detail”, Via 7, MIT Press, pg. 23

Classical Space
Space and time are thought of as negative, empty medium in which events happen. Space is used to measure phenomenon but holds no affective power of its own. Space is the field of extension. Time is used similiarly to keep pace or measure the rhythm of events but is empty in its power to affect. Space frames the events and objects that occur within it. Framing space is the closest conception of space to our conscious perceptions of space.

Space and Time in Relativity
Einstien showed that all objects are in constant dynamic motion but split this motion between the four dimensions of spacetime. Certain objects like light (photons) only travel through space while matter travels in all four dimensions. Motion through spacetime warps and distorts extensive space and time. Extensive lengths and durations are relative to ones motion or energy. Ones energy can be thought of as ones affection on the shape of spacetime. Space and time are now united into a field that influences and is influenced by the motion of objects and events within it. The field of spacetime is conceived of as a set of relationships between objects in motion. That is space and time are now intensive. The spacetime field at this scale is how our pre-conscious bodies interact with space. This is what Merleau-Ponty called motor-intentionality.

Space-Time at the Quantum Level
As the scale of spacetime gets smaller, space time starts to fluctuate and with each shift of scale the fluctuations become more and more violent till the Planck Length at which point any conception of spacetime as a continuous field breaks apart into what has been called the quantum foam. Objects no longer have a definite motion or location but exist across areas of potentialities in a fashion known as wave-particle duality. Wave-particle duality is the behavior of matter-energy to show characteristics of both a wave field (interference patterns) and a quantized, discrete object. At the quantum scale spacetime is indistinct and constantly fluctuating yet the frame and the field become united in a new hybrid.

Space-Time in String Theory
All four major forces and the composition of matter is now thought of as being due to the resonant vibrations of tiny strings the average size of the Planck length. The strings vibrate in 10 space dimensions and 1 time dimension. These vibrations cause electromagnetism, the strong force, the weak force and gravity. So like gravity, motion produces and affects matter energy. Other space dimensions are curled up and very tiny.
String theory says that spacetime is a complex multi-dimensional place where events happen in multiple asynchronous ways.

Space in the Work of Jackson Pollock
Jackson Pollock’s work seems to hover between a classical framed space and the field & layered spaces of modern physics. The liquid consistancy of the paint carried the force of Pollock’s action, transfering that force onto the canvas. This act of preservation transforms the intensive, spacetime motion, into a extensive spatial object effectively collapsing the spacetime field. Pollock very carefully composed his paintings within the frame of the canvas, yet the frame had to grow to contain the high energy motions involved. A line, drip or spatter’s identity is only understood in its relative motion to the other lines, drips, or splatters and the space of the canvas between. The observer, in turn, re-expands the flat frame of the canvas into the spatial movements involved, thus the painting tends to hover between the flatness of it materiality and the spatial depth of the movements involved in its creation.

Construction
The process of construction becomes the process of defining space, with the joint as its primary expression. But the joint is never complete, the two or more objects are always held apart, always in the process of coming together, always becoming. Like the Pollock’s critique of the canvas, the building becomes broken apart, with the ever changing field of human behavior spilling out between the cracks. Yet, like the canvas, the framing mechanism of the building persists, not entirely lost. For the building isn’t the figure in this story, but remains just a influencing intensive space from which the figure emerges as the human body and its field of interaction.

As Karatani explains, architecture comes from the ancient Greek word architectonicé, which means the techne of the architecton.  Literally, this means the craft of the principal craftsman.  Yet techne does not mean craft or technology in the simple sense that we understand today, but the act of making in its most general sense. ² So let us continue in laying out the field in which the problem is to be constructed.  For as Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari describe in their book What is Philosophy?, every problem has a history or becoming in time and the problem must be contextualized to the given time and circumstances.³

To practice architecture is to construct, to intervene in the flows of matter-energy and produce a thing that can react back on those flows of matter-energy.  Such a thing constitutes a complex system.  Yet what do we mean when we say something is complex or simple?  What is complexity?  The Santa Fe Institute was created to study just this question and Murray Gell-Mann, a Nobel laureate and co-founder of the Santa Fe Institute, describes current conceptions of the simple and complex in his book The Quark and the Jaguar.  Gell-Mann explains that complexity can be roughly measured by the shortest possible description of the system under consideration.  The length of this description is some relative measurement of the systems complexity.  Yet a totally random system, one in which there are no regularities, can not be said to be complex in the sense we usually mean.  For example, a string of 32 words can have many meanings in a language, but a random string of 32 words probably has very little meaning.  The random string does not behave in a complex way.  Yet the same could be said of a string of words made up of a single repeated word.  Only the regularities or relationships within the description are effective.  This means that the structure or relationships between the components of the system, is what constitutes its effective complexity.  Gell-Mann goes on to explain that the effective complexity tends to increase as a system moves from its most regular to more disorderly, yet on the other had the most disorderly systems gains more effective complexity as it becomes more orderly.  Gell-Mann says that the greatest effective complexity lies somewhere between the most ordered system and the most disordered system.⁴ Yet this structure can only be said to be virtual.  It influences the behaviors, capacities and affordances of the system but is not the system itself.  The actual system includes the irregularities that do not affect the behavior.  In this concept of effective complexity, we already have an idea of how to understand a problem.  For the act of describing the effective complexity of a system is an act of distributing what is important and what is trivial; what is singular and what is ordinary.  It is an act of construction or perhaps construing is a better term.

Implicit in the construing – constructing relationship is a production or becoming of a body.  This body is not a whole but a population of pieces arranged in such a way to create capacities to affect other bodies or be affected by other bodies.  The process of construing – constructing is one of determining the capacities of pieces to join with each other and the actualization of the joint.  Marco Frascari describes this double relationship as the “techne of logos” and the “logos of techne” or the craft of logic and the logic of craft.⁵ The craft of logic is the act of producing thought while the logic of craft is the act of actualizing that thought into a physical embodied construct, the joint.  Both are acts of construction.  Due to the fact that the joint or relationship between the pieces is what determines the becoming of the construct in the world, the joint is of great interest in any construing – construction process.  Yet the body that emerges from the event of the joint constitutes the lived reality of our world and the embodied nature of things and ourselves in the world and in the end the problem of architecture is to address this lived reality including the way human beings live in the world.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy is primarily concerned with bodies and perception.  During the course of his career, Merleau-Ponty became less concerned with how we gain knowledge through our perceptual field (epistemology) and became more concerned with how the perceptual field is our condition for being in the world (ontology).⁶ Throughout his career, Merleau-Ponty described our consciousness as being embodied in our flesh and that we can only know the world around us through the active engagement of our bodies with the world.  Our bodies are not just a package of physical matter but constitute our phenomenal field and exist with a kind of pre-conscious knowledge of the world which he calls motor-intentionality.  It is from this motor-intentionality that our consciousness emerges from and constitutes the ground on which we make conscious choices. ⁷ Gilles Deleuze describes this ability to interact with other bodies as an affect or percept.  Deleuze discusses how the body can form certain assemblages with other bodies and these assemblages form the affects and percepts that make up the lived world.⁸ The affects and percepts of our bodies with its environment make up what Merleau-Ponty describes as the flesh or that which makes us embodied in the world.  So our being in the world is the same as our ability to perceive the world which in turn is an ability to affect or be affected by the world.  Yet this knowledge or assemblage is only virtual.  It encloses the field of possibilities without being those possibilities.  Only through a process of actualization do these affects and percepts come to be our actual lived experience, yet they are not this experience.

This process of becoming actual of the virtual is at the core of Deleuze’s philosophy and can not be separated from time.  Deleuze uses Bergson’s idea of Duration in saying that the present and the past coexist at the same time:
… Not only does the past coexist with the present that has been, but, as it preserves itself in itself (while the present passes), it is the whole, integral past; it is all our past, which coexists with each present.⁹ That is to say that the entire past exists virtually in the present and can be actualized in the present (the becoming of memory).  But the virtual is not limited to the past, though the past is part of the virtual and affects it.  The virtual is just that which is immanent in things and that affects the field of possibilities.  This means the virtual does not resemble that which is actualized but is that which influences the process of actualization or becoming.  In this way an affect or percept is virtual and can be actualized in our lived experience through the flesh.  But it must be done through time and space, which is to say through movement.  Both Deleuze and Merleau-Ponty give a special significance to movement.  For Deleuze movement is the act of becoming of the virtual and it is only through movement do things become actualized.¹⁰ In a similar fashion, Merleau-Ponty says that motor-intentionality is the self-motivating movement of the body and only through this movement does perception and our lived reality exist.¹¹ In this way the becoming of the affect is an event coexisting in the past and present and constituting a movement in that which it affects, bodies; a becoming that is constantly unfolding.  This is just to say that the affect is constructed.

As we have seen it is through the act of joining that the system gains a structure.  It is this structure that influences the behaviors of the system.  For the structure influences the field of possibilities of the system.  Yet the joint as an actual tangible construct in architecture carries additional importance beyond its role as a purely virtual construct.  Frascari says that the joint or detail is the basic unit of signification in architecture.¹² Yet I would say it is more than a linguistic signification, but rather an affect, of which signification is one type.  These affects emerge from the event of joining and can also influence the pre-conscious or our motor-intentionality not just our conscious thought.  For affects influence the way we behave.  In the joining of tangible materials, affects emerge, for architecture is always doubled, it is both actual structure and virtual structure.  Architecture must always be construed and constructed.  The construed includes such disparate matter-energy flows as gravity, wind, light, heat, human behavior & experience, economics, vegetation, ecology of a place, and the physical structure of the building to name just a few.  Though the constructed is part of the construed, it is only through the constructed that all the rest of the construed can be actualized.  This means that the process of actually constructing the physical intervention in the flow of matter-energy is critical to the behavior of that physical construct in the world.  In effect, the physical construct affects the field of possibilities within it, the physical construct joins itself with the larger matter-energy flows that move through it and influence their behavior.

If architecture as a practice is the process of construing – constructing physical intervention in the world from which affects emerge that influence the behavior of the world, then to make decisions and judgments one must address the process of actualization of the construct (actual-virtual structure) in a way that produces complexity that is effective in nourishing the capacities of the bodies involved in the architectural system, i.e. human bodies, flora, fauna, the weather, etc.  In effect, the building is to nourish an ecology of bodies.  This means that the building itself does not have to be a complex construction, though it might be.  What the construction needs to be is robust.  Its physical joints must have the capacity to join in many ways with other bodies.  These bodies can include cultural images, the human body, other buildings, networks of communication, etc.  The key is to understand that the image of complexity isn’t what matters for it is just one body among many; one joint in the system.  The physical embodiment of an Architecture of complexity does not need to carry with it complexity within itself for it joins itself with other bodies in a virtual system that will in itself produce complexity in its behaviors.

1. Kojin Karatani, Architecture as Metaphor, (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1995), pg. 6.
2. Ibid, pg. 6-7
3. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, What is Philosophy?, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell, (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), pg. 27
4. Murry Gell-Mann, The Quark and the Jaguar: Adventures in the Simple and the Complex, (New York: W.H. Freeman and Company, 1994), pg. 23-41
5. Marco Frascari, “The Tell-the-Tale Detail”, Via 7, (MIT Press), pg. 23
6. Taylor Carmen and Mark B.N. Hansen, “Introduction,” in The Cambridge Companion to Merleau-Ponty, ed. Taylor Carmen and Mark B.N. Hansen, (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2005), pg. 1-23
7. Taylor Carmen, “Sensation, Judgment, and the Phenomenal Field,” in The Cambridge Companion to Merleau-Ponty, ed. Taylor Carmen and Mark B.N. Hansen, (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2005), pg. 50-73
8. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, What is Philosophy?, trans. Graham Burchell and Hugh Tomlinson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), pg. 178-179
9. Gilles Deleuze, Bergsonism, trans. Barbara Habberjam and Hugh Tomlinson (New York: Zone Books, 1991), pg. 59.  Emphasis in original text.
10. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987).  Differences giving rise to movements as the process of becoming is a basic premise behind many of Deleuze’s texts.
11. Mark B.N. Hansen, “The Embryology of the (In)visible,” in The Cambridge Companion to Merleau-Ponty, ed. Taylor Carmen and Mark B.N. Hansen, (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2005), pg. 231-264
12. Marco Frascari, “The Tell-the-Tale Detail,” pg. 23

DeLanda describes quite convincingly in his book Intensive Science & Virtual Philosophy, that extensive properties are produced by the process of symmetry breaking from intensive properties, which in turn were produced from virtual differences. A symmetry break happens when an “object” becomes no longer invariant to a transformation or behavior. For example a sphere is invariant to all rotations about its central axis, but if the sphere where stretched into a cube, only rotations of 90° would be invariant. A symmetry breaking process is said to have occurred. DeLanda’s most common example of a symmetry breaking process is the phase transitions of water from gas to liquid to solid.

So an intensive field is one of temperatures, pressures, densities, etc. Differences across a field will drive the becoming of the extensive. Like heat flowing from a hot object to a cool, energy and matter will flow from intensive differences and produce the behaviors and capacities of extensive reality in which we live. The weather is an excellent example of a highly intensive process. Yet within an intensive field exist certain singularities called attractors and repellers. These singular points don’t actually exist but are virtual. By virtual, I mean that these points can not be occupied as actual states of the system, but they have a profound actual effect on all the states around them. These special singular points in turn change over time. Allowing the system to adapt and evolve. As the intensive field changes and additional energy and matter flows are added, additional singularities unfold from the old ones. This is what DeLanda refers to as a bifurcation. It is at these bifurcations that symmetry breaking will occur.

The machinic phylum is a broad group of “abstract machines” that drive processes of becoming. Becoming is the engine of space-time. It is the act of emergence, the act of evolution, the process of being driven by abstract machines. For DeLanda, Delueze & Guattari there is no just being there is only becoming. Everything is changing; this is to say objects in this world exist far from static equilibrium. These machines have several requirements for their definition. They must be concrete, abstract, and universal. To be concrete, the abstract machine must be able to be “found” in world around this. In this way, Delueze’s philosophy can be said to be empirical. To be abstract, the machinic process must be constructed as a pre-individual. This means that the process must exist without the intervention of specific context. DeLanda’s example of oscillators in Non-Organic Life is an example. The mechanics of the process exist without the need to bring up specific chemical reactions. The machine is said to drive all chemical oscillators, even though the actualization of the process will differ in each specific historical circumstance. Finally, the intensive engine is said to be universal in that it exist across a wide range of actualized processes. By being concrete, abstract and universal, abstract machines are said to be immanent in the material world. They arise from the differences between objects and behaviors. They can be thought to drive differentiation and be driven by difference. Because of the fact that abstract machines are inherent (immanent) in the world, this outlook is said to be materialist. It is through the processes of material and energetic flows (difference) that becoming (emergence) happens.

On an urban scale a similar spatial realignment is called for. Spatial mismatch is a term used by urban planners to describe a situation where a population is physically or culturally separated from resources that can help them advance economically or socially. Brownsville is one such community, where spatial mismatches are extreme. The services that exist in Brownsville are geared toward the ‘helping’ of the population in their day to day existence. Very little is provided to help them improve their lives, in fact such improvement would preclude them from the social and economic networks which they need to sustain themselves. Their advancement leaves them at a disadvantage. Because of this circumstance, poverty has become institutionalized in Brownsville.

Laminates are a class of materials that produce composite performances by layering lamina or sheets together. The composite performance is only produced through the difference between the lamina. This model of productive difference through lamination is not one of forming boundaries or thresholds between the sheets but rather of connecting the sheets forming conductivity between the lamina. Conductivity is the quality of the connection between the lamina and is what forms the composite performance.

Laminates are a way of spatially organizing materials, both physical materials and cultural materials, and can provide a model for redistributing the services of Brownsville and the production of housing in the service and under the direction of the residents so as to not just help, not just prevent but to form composite performance of progression and changes.

RESEARCH.services
Common Ground
A New York based non-profit housing and community development organization whose mission is to solve homelessness

Community Service Society
New York City based community support services, programs and research.

Urban Institute
A nonpartisan economic and social policy research organization

RESEARCH.material
Hexcel
Honeycomb sandwich panel manufacturer

Kennedy & Violich Architecture

Material System Organization
Master’s Thesis Project for the Architecture Association’s Emergent Technology Program

Panelite
Light translucent honeycomb panel manufacturer.

Priva-lite
Electrified liquid crystal laminated glass

Transmaterial
Material index of innovative materials

Transalpin
Wood.e: electrified bent plywood furniture

The study took the nexus that is to become the Fulton Transit Center and through a series of experiments, looked at how one could propose an ever changing yet qualitatively charged series of programs on the site. It looked at Architecture more as a set of qualitative performances that shape our lives.

The basic strategy for the project was to pick a tactic for approaching the site, then through an abstract study mechanics of that tactic, place the performative model on the site that would generate a potential program, form, and structure. This would then be interpreted into a basic building proposal.



Tactic

• Disruptive Infiltration
  Through the disruption of the system, a foreign agent can infiltrate and gain influence over the system.

Qualitative Performance

• Disruptive Flux
  The affect of the system to quickly move from a semi-stable, sedentary state to a state of transience characterized by a high degree of energy.

Yield

• Conductivity
  The ability of a energetic flow to overcome resistance in a material substrate.

Modes of Operation

• Sedation
  The tendency of the system to lower its energy state. The system becomes more stable, and shows less degrees of freedom.
• Disruption
  A transient state between sedation and excitation showing bifurcations of energy states.
• Excitation
  The tendency of the system or parts of the system to achieve a highly energetic state. The system shows a high degree of freedom.

Materials of Conduction

• Sedentary
  Material that has few degrees of freedom (ordered material). Characterized by a strong disruption and a sedate, yet clear excitation.
• Transient
  Material with many degrees of freedom (fluid). Characterized by strong disruption, clear excitation, and strong sedation.
• Expectant
  Material with no degrees of freedom (blockage). Characterized by a strong sedate distruption, disruptive excitation, and strong sedation.

This blog is intended to be a repository for my personal musings on Architecture.  That said, questions and comments are appreciated.  I hope you enjoy everything.