Editor’s Fore­word

Con­flu­ences form the con­text of expe­ri­ence. Con­flu­ence involves the inex­tri­ca­ble inter­twin­ing of arti­facts, con­cepts and per­cep­tions, with tem­po­ral­ly and phys­i­cal­ly dis­tant and prox­i­mate ori­gins, which are there­by made simul­ta­ne­ous­ly present in expe­ri­ence. Con­flu­ences can occur in a way that seems entire­ly nat­ur­al, as when the water of two rivers con­verges to form a new water­course that seam­less­ly merges the two trib­u­taries. Con­flu­ences can occur in a way that is entire­ly unex­pect­ed, as when two ideas pre­vi­ous­ly assumed to be mutu­al­ly exclu­sive are com­bined to form a new com­pound exhibit­ing the char­ac­ter­is­tics of nei­ther of its con­stituent ele­ments. As Vat­ti­mo sug­gests, con­flu­ences can inter­rupt the seem­ing­ly cease­less flow of time by con­struct­ing an event in the present moment that edi­fies and com­bines ​“the rec­ol­lec­tions of tra­di­tions, the traces of the past and the expec­ta­tions of mean­ing for the future.”

Every construction—painting, build­ing, city—is fun­da­men­tal­ly a con­flu­ence (adding/grafting/combining/intervening/laminating/reconstituting/intertwining/interweaving/layering/integrating/translating/transforming) of new arti­facts and pre-exist­ing con­cep­tu­al, spa­tial and mate­r­i­al con­texts. Con­flu­ence of the con­tem­po­rary with the lay­ers of the his­tor­i­cal (one thinks of Car­lo Scarpa’s lam­i­na­tions of ancient and local with mod­ern and uni­ver­sal in his con­struc­tions in Venice); con­flu­ence of con­cepts of space, order and per­cep­tion flow­ing from art and archi­tec­ture (one thinks of Alvar Aalto’s engage­ments in his works of George Braque’s idea of ​“tac­tile space”); con­flu­ence of the famil­iar and the unfa­mil­iar (one thinks of Ita­lo Calvino’s trans­la­tions of his city of Venice into all the cities of Kubla Khan’s empire); con­flu­ence of inti­mate and immense, pri­vate and pub­lic, domes­tic and urban (one thinks of Bern­hard Hoes­li and Col­in Rowe’s employ­ment of com­po­si­tion­al strate­gies drawn from Cubist paint­ing in urban design ped­a­gogy); con­flu­ence of ancient and mod­ern, time and place, near and far, abstract and con­crete, time­less and of its time, per­son­al insight and inspi­ra­tion and shared inher­i­tance and tradition—confluence as the mak­ing that allows all these streams to flow togeth­er, their inter­min­gled inter­play shap­ing our experience.

The poet and philoso­pher Paul Valéry defined all con­struc­tive work that involved mak­ing in the arts and archi­tec­ture as being fun­da­men­tal­ly a mat­ter of ​“find­ing the right com­bi­na­tion” of things or thoughts that already exist­ed, but which had nev­er been joined togeth­er in pre­cise­ly this way before. Each com­bi­na­tion is made to craft the solu­tion to a par­tic­u­lar problem—how to artic­u­late an idea, how to paint a for­mal struc­ture, how to span a space—in a way that simul­ta­ne­ous­ly con­strues and con­structs. Valéry’s con­cept was devel­oped in writ­ing his Cahiers (Note­books), a record of what he called his ​“morn­ing work,” which involved him wak­ing every morn­ing at 3:00am and sit­ting at his desk, con­fronting a sheet of white paper, on which he would write a sen­tence, and then spend how­ev­er long was nec­es­sary, from fif­teen min­utes to three hours, com­bin­ing and con­struct­ing words until the sen­tence achieved per­fec­tion, and could not be fur­ther refined. Valéry’s idea of com­bi­na­to­ry con­struc­tion is a way of mak­ing through con­flu­ence, through the bring­ing togeth­er of things not nor­mal­ly expect­ed to be related. 

The nov­el­ist Arthur Koestler, in his book, The Act of Cre­ation, pro­pos­es a sim­i­lar inter­pre­ta­tion of con­struc­tion, which argues that dis­cov­er­ies and inven­tions in art, humor and sci­ence all involve the bring­ing togeth­er of two ideas usu­al­ly con­sid­ered entire­ly unre­lat­ed and even mutu­al­ly exclu­sive, and that the sud­den rev­e­la­tion of their mutu­al impli­ca­tions results in an entire­ly new con­cep­tion. Because we find it dif­fi­cult if not impos­si­ble to con­scious­ly put two mutu­al­ly exclu­sive propo­si­tions togeth­er, Koestler demon­strates how these break­throughs almost always involve lat­er­al or even dis­tract­ed think­ing. One of his many exam­ples is the math­e­mati­cian Hen­ri Poin­caré, who spent fif­teen days seat­ed at his desk strug­gling unsuc­cess­ful­ly to resolve the Fuch­sian func­tions. When he was forced to inter­rupt his math­e­mat­i­cal work to par­tic­i­pate in a geo­log­i­cal excur­sion, at the moment Poin­caré put his foot on the step of the bus, all the equa­tions sud­den­ly came clear in his mind. This same con­cept of con­struc­tive inspi­ra­tion led Jonas Salk to tell Louis Kahn that he want­ed the Salk Insti­tute to be a place where he ​“could invite Picas­so to meet with my sci­en­tists,” so that in their time away from the bio­log­i­cal lab­o­ra­to­ries the Nobel-win­ning sci­en­tists would have to con­front the entire­ly dif­fer­ent world view of the artist.

But ​“con­flu­ence” should also be under­stood to have oth­er, less opti­mistic and con­struc­tive impli­ca­tions. In this we think of Wal­ter Benjamin’s inter­pre­ta­tion of the Paul Klee mono-print, Angelus Novus, which, ​“shows an angel look­ing as though he is about to move away from some­thing he is fixed­ly con­tem­plat­ing. His eyes are star­ing, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pic­tures the angel of his­to­ry. His face is turned toward the past. Where we per­ceive a chain of events, he sees one sin­gle cat­a­stro­phe which keeps pil­ing wreck­age upon wreck­age and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awak­en the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blow­ing from Par­adise; it has got caught in his wings with such vio­lence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irre­sistibly pro­pels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows sky­ward. The storm is what we call progress.”2

The con­flu­ence of forces form­ing the winds of his­to­ry and progress, push­ing the angel for­ward into the future, while he remains fac­ing back­ward, into the past. There is a melan­choly asso­ci­at­ed with the Ben­jamin essay that may be under­stood as a dis­turb­ing coun­ter­point to the opti­mism of high mod­ernism and the pro­duc­tion of archi­tec­ture after both world wars. Archi­tects have always been very opti­mistic about their work. While it requires opti­mism, and a good bit of luck, to get any­thing built at all—and there­fore archi­tects tend to inher­ent­ly be opti­mistic in their approach to their discipline—can we not also detect a melan­choly like Benjamin’s, a sense of long­ing in the con­struc­tions of our era?

Regard­ing the impli­ca­tions of Benjamin’s Angelus Novus, there is def­i­nite­ly some­thing to be said for the cau­tion­ary, not to say pes­simistic, but rather real­is­tic inter­pre­ta­tion of the for­ward-mov­ing impe­tus implied by the term ​“con­flu­ence,” in which one imag­ines being swept for­ward, but also back­wards, sometimes—it is good to recall that tides go both in and out. The opti­mism nec­es­sary to be a mak­er of places and things, to get any­thing built in our con­tem­po­rary world, should not be con­fused with an over­ly opti­mistic out­look as regards the con­text and cul­ture in which one works.

On the oth­er hand, there are archi­tects prac­tic­ing today who are opti­mistic not only about the poten­tial for their build­ings to make the world a bet­ter place, but even for the angels of our col­lec­tive bet­ter natures to pre­vail in the larg­er world. Grant­ed, it is hard to see this as being entire­ly real­is­tic when, as Wil­fried Wang recent­ly wrote, we are with­out ques­tion liv­ing in ​“the age of cli­mate change.” But there is no ques­tion that if one is not opti­mistic, one can nev­er get any­thing built. How to square this essen­tial aspect of the prac­tice of our dis­ci­plines with the need to be skep­ti­cal, and in some cas­es overt­ly pes­simistic, about the motives and inten­tions of those who pay for our works?

Yet there is also a con­trast­ing, con­struc­tive inter­pre­ta­tion of Benjamin’s appar­ent rever­sal of the nor­mal inter­pre­ta­tion of past and future ori­en­ta­tion, which orig­i­nat­ed not in the tur­bu­lent times in which he lived, but, as Bernard Knox has point­ed out, dates back at least to the ancient Greeks: ​“The ear­ly Greek imag­i­na­tion envis­aged the past and present as in front of us—we can see them. The future, invis­i­ble, is behind us. Only [the blind prophets] can see what is behind them. The rest of us, though we have our eyes, are walk­ing blind, back­wards into the future.”3 This image of the archi­tect, employ­ing their dis­ci­pli­nary past, as it is embod­ied in the his­tor­i­cal build­ings and land­forms inher­it­ed from pre­vi­ous gen­er­a­tions, in order to con­struct the present that will house its inhab­i­tants as they move into the unfore­see­able future, is the key to under­stand­ing the work of the best archi­tects work­ing today.

This lit­er­al­ly ret­ro­spec­tive point of view regard­ing the rela­tion of present events and acts to the past, and its con­comi­tant prospec­tive blind­ness towards the future, has been con­strued in a con­struc­tive way by the archi­tec­tur­al his­to­ri­an and crit­ic Ken­neth Framp­ton. Framp­ton has argued that, rather than con­tin­ue the avant-garde pos­ture, with the destruc­tion of local cul­ture through glob­al­iza­tion that inevitably accom­pa­nies it, con­tem­po­rary prac­ti­tion­ers would bet­ter serve the dis­ci­pline by assum­ing the posi­tion of an arriere-garde: the rear guard, who turn and face the past, and the dis­ci­pli­nary his­to­ry and prin­ci­ples it embod­ies: ​“Archi­tec­ture can only be sus­tained today as a crit­i­cal prac­tice if it assumes an arriere-garde posi­tion… only an arriere-garde has the capac­i­ty to cul­ti­vate a resis­tant, iden­ti­ty-giv­ing cul­ture while at the same time hav­ing dis­creet recourse to uni­ver­sal tech­nique.”4 Thus it may be said that rear-guard archi­tects, who turn and face the past, there­by pro­tect and con­serve both shared dis­ci­pli­nary prin­ci­ples and the par­tic­u­lar qual­i­ties of their place in the world, act­ing in a way that is appro­pri­ate and careful—full of care. 

The edi­tors of AR/Architecture Research 2019 have sought writ­ings that engage and exam­ine the theme of con­flu­ences between, with­in and among the wide­ly vary­ing ter­ri­to­ries encom­passed in and around the dis­ci­plines of archi­tec­ture and art. Essays range from philo­soph­i­cal dia­logues regard­ing the dual nature of being in the con­text of the syn­chro­nous com­mu­ni­ca­tion net­work; to the inter­twined def­i­n­i­tions of real­i­ty in sci­ence and art; to the trans­for­ma­tive and spon­ta­neous nature of poet­ic expe­ri­ence; to the explo­ration of recent inter­pre­ta­tions of metaphor and dia­gram employed to con­strue design and expe­ri­ence; to the con­flu­ence of struc­ture and mate­r­i­al in com­pos­ite and syn­thet­ic con­struc­tions; to the rela­tions between light and dark as con­struct­ed in the phe­nom­e­non of penum­bra; to the piv­otal nature of the con­cept of the thresh­old or in-between in recon­ceiv­ing mod­ern archi­tec­ture; to the rela­tions between appear­ance and phe­nom­e­na in the rep­re­sen­ta­tion of inhab­it­ed space; to the gen­er­a­tive poten­tial of con­cepts of col­lec­tive form in the rein­ter­pre­ta­tion and trans­for­ma­tion of cities; to the increas­ing impor­tance of slow­ness in the ges­ta­tion of con­struc­tions that last; and all of which engage the com­ple­men­tary inter­weav­ing of con­cep­tions of art and archi­tec­ture in the con­stru­ing and con­struct­ing of the life­world. The bind­ing con­cept for AR 2019 is the explo­ration of the mul­ti­va­lent mean­ings to be dis­cov­ered in con­tem­po­rary con­flu­ences.