2020
The Line Notes on Politics
Abstracts
Following Gregory’s Line into the Interior
Keywords: F. T. Gregory, Puutu Kunti Kurrama, Royal Geographical Society, Gilles Deleuze, Line of Flight, Latitude and Longitude
The explorer apprehends the horizon line toward which he intrepidly treks. Emerging out of the vast landscape there are many lines that can be drawn around things, rivers never before apprehended by European eyes, mountain ranges and sandy plains, unfamiliar flora and fauna. All seeming to await discovery and documentation. Sometimes, the lines are clear, sometimes obscure and shimmering with distance. The explorer trail blazes his and his company’s own course, leaving in his wake a territorialising line that can be taken up again by reading the measured documentation of longitude and latitude that he has noted in his prosaic report. This essay looks to retrace the line left behind by the explorer Mr F. T. Gregory in 1861 on his two forays into the Australian interior, proceeding from a sheltered bay on the north-western coast. Funded by the Governor of Western Australia, and by members of the Royal Geographical Society, F. T. Gregory went in search of arable land to colonise, but failed when it came to the greater prize, the verification of the myth of a wondrous inland sea. What is at stake here is the violence embedded in lines of colonisation that in making their mark thereby erase other lines, specifically, the songlines of other forms of inhabitation of Country enacted for millennia by indigenous Australians. Lines of claiming the land as distinct from lines of living with the land are brought into sharp relief when considering the current controversies erupting in the iron ore rich territories F. T. Gregory once ‘discovered’. Today, the interests of the mining giant Rio Tinto have been pitched against the original custodians of the land, the Puutu Kunti Kurrama and Pinikura peoples, a controversy that can be dramatized in reference to the line and its conflicting, entangled stories.
Drawing Time: Making the Rio Meander Map
Keywords: Meander map, Rio Bravo, Rio Grande, Ciudad Juarez, El Paso, Gulf of Mexico, Land Art, Harold Fisk, Border River, Border
Unfolding the layered narratives interbedded in making the Rio Meander Map this essay will situate the ambitions and operations of the Land Arts 2020 ADAPTATION that became an immersive non-traveling studio and seminar to conduct the deep multi-lingual / multi-cultural research necessary to collectively create a meander map of the Rio Bravo / Rio Grande from Ciudad Juarez / El Paso to the Gulf of Mexico that describes the undulating and shifting course and character of the river over time. The map will be part of a publication by the artist Zoe Leonard and poet Tim Johnson to accompany Leonard’s exhibition Al Rio / To the River. Both as form and moment this effort brings together multiple histories, authors, voices, agencies and ecologies with over fifty contributing participants and advisors. Inspired by maps Harold Fisk and team produced in 1944 of The Alluvial Valley of the Lower Mississippi, this map tells time——as a living portrait of a persistently changing rio——in an effort to draw out new models extending beyond imperial and colonial conquest, subjugation, and control. As a living map it will have an afterlife beyond 2020 at the new Border Consortium established by POST (Project for Operative Spatial Technologies) at the Texas Tech University College of Architecture in El Paso. This collective production extends from a desire to honor the ethos, aspirations, and complexities of Land Arts of the American West, an academic program dedicated to expanding awareness of the intersection of human construction and the evolving nature of our planet.
Blowing Dust off the Trails: An Itinerary Through Trans-Saharan Lines.
Keywords: Trans-Saharan, desert, Le Corbusier, Agadez, cosmopolitan desert
Further than a blank canvas, the Sahara desert is a landscape that accumulates enduring lines that build on top of each other. Two paradigmatic lines entered in confrontation throughout the first half of the 20th century: the nomadic line vs. the imperial line. Departing from them, the article enquires into colonial projects that have made use of nomadic trajectories to expand European influence in the African continent. They build up a palimpsest in which lines are traced over and appropriated. The two paradigms were not always in opposition but rather formed certain moments in which the two merge, one becoming the other. These hybrid lines of exchange were not erased by the independence of the African countries; they are re-drawn in new trans-Saharan contemporary conflicts which —like migration— negotiate new forms of post-colonial power.
Lines of Architectural Potency
Keywords: Agamben, architectural theory, Aristotle, contingency, dynamis, potentiality, power, virtue, virtuality
It could be said that architecture encounters its end through its self-extraction from its original existential potential –its power of creativity– when at some point it replaces this experience of loss by procuring a self-validation for itself as a techne, an art and end in itself; and, perhaps, even more depressingly today when thought as near-exclusively along the axis of production and commodity circulation. How are we to think of this power, this potentia, other than by appreciating its key formulation, in the western tradition, as dynamis in Aristotle (Metaphysics 1069b19-20)? A paradoxical definition of potentiality (dynamis), perhaps, given that a potentiality, by definition, is, to put it in a modern sense, a possibility that exists. Such a definition posits a line of what could be called an existent (and not merely possible or probable) potentialization in the creative act. By definition, historically, existence has been subject to an understandable logical scission (a dividing line) between ‘what is actual’ and ‘what is potential’, which however as an ontological motor of truth production, including political truth production, leads to a misunderstanding of potentiality as something that once actualized belongs to the past and which crucially thus remains exhausted. Yet in the original formulation in Aristotle, potentiality as a philosophical problem is precisely that of a potentiality which is not reducible to actuality –and this becomes the kernel of Aristotle’s Metaphysics. From this point a remarkable and complex series of consequent medieval formulations came to define potentiality as the problem of sovereign power (whether earthly or divine) and all the way to our time. Giorgio Agamben is of course the thinker who has shed more recent light to Aristotle’s link between power (potere) and potentiality (potenza) throughout his work; and who has centered his critique of the forgetting of its most crucial element (impotentiality); a forgetting that intentionally aimed at capturing the birth of the subject in the form of an alleged sovereignty of a self-grounding being. A self-grounding, an autonomy, justified historically through the political theology of a self-grounding power (Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Trans. D. Heller-Roazen. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press [1995]1998: 47). Thus, as Agamben shows, we have mostly thought of impotentiality as an incapacity, an absence or a negation. Instead, for Agamben, potentiality indicates in a particular way “the existence of non-Being” (Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy. Ed. and Trans. D. Heller-Roazen. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press 1999: 178). But how are we to think of such a paradoxical existence of non-Being or of the unthought, that seemingly has, through a politically conscious misunderstanding, crippled our politics of creativity, including, one may venture to suggest as a hypothesis, that of the existential creativity of architecture? How are we to avoid being impoverished by our “estrangement from impotentiality”? (Agamben, What is an Apparatus? and Other Essays. Trans. D. Kishik, S. Pedatella. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009: 45). I would like to propose that we can first attempt to do that, as a preliminary theoretical step, by exploring further what Aristotle thought.
A View on Nature: Leon Battista Alberti’s Legacy
Keywords: Culture, Nature, History, Ecological issues
In considering contemporary ecological challenges, critical thinkers such as Bruno Latour, Timothy Morton, Graham Harman, and Philippe Descola make a strong case that the idea of Nature has changed, requiring a new perspective that does not just involve its phenomenal sides but also ways of thinking about it, with implications for the theory of architecture and the production of the built environment. Building on these arguments, this essay investigates the history of architecture focusing on Leon Battista Alberti’s works, read as a complete body, to demonstrate his unique research trajectory within the theory of architecture and the city, and his relevance to the contemporary issues mentioned above. On the one hand, Alberti contrived new and revolutionary tools and precise geometrical techniques to describe the environment – the normae and the finitorium. These tools, based on the human body in his view, recorded the environmental static and dynamic dimensions in maps and drawings, bringing the natural beauty into the arts.
On the other hand, Alberti was aware that the same Nature was not just a “Machina Orbis” governed by numbers to copy, but an immanent realm, a maternal receptacle with an inner ability to heal itself. For this reason, he was concerned by the incomparable damage to Nature by human beings and the crucial role of architecture within this process. In this sense, all his intellectual activity is an attempt to resolve the conflictual relationship between Nature and the transformations introduced by human beings, leading him to assign to architecture the key role in shaping a harmonious and peaceful society.
Home/Studio: Rosa Bonheur and The Plein Air Artist
Keywords: Interior/Exterior, Live/Work, Home/Studio, Codification, Studioification
The artist is currently understood as a curious figure. Their sites of living and working typically extend beyond a singular fixed location such as the house, towards the studio, the street, the cafe, and the landscape beyond. Their lives are rarely organised around conventional task divisions or family structures and as a result, their practices presage contemporary society’s embrace of the nomadic freelancer: a figure who is supposedly no longer bound by the nuclear family or their continuous fixed employment. We may refer to this condition as the studioification of the home, or the process by which the home is transformed into the studio. This paper will thereby study the relationship between the two concepts - home and studio – and define their significance to the nineteenth century artist.
While the historic events that led traditional artistic practice towards a precarious existence precede the nineteenth century, this paper will focus on the period from the late eighteenth century to the end of the nineteenth century and on the specific region between Paris and the Forest of Fontainebleau in France. It is in this precise location that the idea of the home and studio were institutionalised by the state and the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture.
In 1806 artists were evicted from their studios in the Louvre and in the same year, these salons were opened to the general public. These particular events, coupled with the aftermath of the French Revolution and the abolition of the guilds in 1791, produced profound ramifications for the life and work of artists. As such, the figure of the artist endured a paradigm shift and underwent a process of class re-articulation and individualisation: a freelance actor made precarious by the state.
In parallel to these events, individuals and spaces altogether were going through a process of codification that were consolidated in the Civil Code (Napoleon Code). This code reorganised society around principles of private property, class and gender. As such, it extended government from the territory to its subjects. Artists were set against their subjectification and the categorisation of their spaces according to factors such as their routines, activities and gender. In this context, the plein air artists and the particular case of artist, Rosa Bonheur can be seen as two distinct forms of artistic practice that emerged out of a very particular idea of the artist and citizen at this time. Through their life, circumstance and practice, both cases present an example of how certain distinctions or categorisations established by the Napoleon Code may have been enforced or transgressed. The plein air artist enlivened a peculiar use of the exterior and introduced the possibility of maintaining a peripatetic existence removed from property and formal training. In contrast, Rosa Bonheur, having been not only an artist but a woman, was conditions to use the studio as her creative site. Her life and work was therefore bound by an interior and constrained to the social expectations of her gender, whilst the Plein Air artists continued to roam free of such restraint.
Party Line/Line of Flight
Keywords: Italian Communist Party, Indiani Metropolitani, L’Ordine Nuovo, Istituto Universitario di Architettura di Venezia (IUAV), Capitalisme et schizophrénie, Massimo Cacciari, Franco Rella, Manfredo Tafuri, Georges Teyssot
“Imminent danger. Be careful, the slightest line of flight can cause everything to explode.”. Thus began Félix Guattari’s account of the closing of Radio Alice, the free antenna of Bologna, outlawed in 1977 by the mayor of the city, Renato Zangheri. In banning the radio, Zangheri, a member of the Italian Communist Party (PCI), governing one of the prominent “red” cities of Italy, was loyally toeing the party line, and actively contributing to the repression of the diverse “autonomies” emerged after the 1972 crisis of the extreme-left. “Autonomies” in the Italian political vocabulary of the time designated the independent mobilization of women, youths, immigrants, homosexuals, and marginals of various kind, groups that refused assimilation and identification in the “class struggle” controlled by the autocratic/bureaucratic machinery of the communist party and the unions. The volatile Italian situation and the dramatic clashes between militants and leaders of the PCI and autonomous assemblages searching for new forms of revolt and resistance were closely monitored by European thinkers and politicians. Leading French intellectuals including Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, and Félix Guattari, actively intervened provoking a number of exchanges and confrontations with prominent figures of the Italian left on the questions of power and revolutionary practices. The paper retraces one of such confrontations.
Non-Aligned Third Way: A Chronological Line of Ideological Shifts
Keywords: Plain Architecture, Historiography, George Kubler, Álvaro Siza
The title of this paper is an homage to the essay “Non Aligned Architecture” (2001), by the Portuguese architectural historian Paulo Varela Gomes, a text in which he describes the reception of George Kubler’s book Portuguese Plain Architecture: Between Spices and Diamonds, 1521-1706 (1972) by the architectural field in Portugal. According to Varela Gomes, Kubler’s book satisfied an ideological desire in post-revolutionary Portugal, that allowed the appreciation of an architectural tradition that was not included in the art historiography canon and, furthermore, seemed to be detached from the traditionalist revivalism of the former dictatorial regime — Estado Novo or New State (1933-1974).
Taking Varela Gomes’s essay as a point of departure, this paper will follow the chronological line that extends from the mid 1970s to the present, a period which established the international recognition of a group of Portuguese architects — such as the well known Pritzker prize winners Álvaro Siza and Eduardo Souto de Moura. This international recognition occurred simultaneously with the emergence of Third Way and Neo-liberal politics in Europe and the United States in the 1980s and 1990s. If in the mid 1970s, a large share of architectural practices in Portugal were essentially working in social housing projects, the development of practices also mirror the path of the Neo-liberal wave until the present.
Lines of Action and Readymade Stones: Lev Rudnev’s Monument to the Victims of the Revolution
Keywords: Soviet Union, Peterburg, Modernism, Revolution, Lev Rudnev
The article analyses the monument to the Victims of the Revolution in St. Petersburg and the history of its conception and construction in 1917–1919 in the context of the history of Russian revolution and its myths, the city of St. Petersburg and its myths, and the debates between "left" and "right" artists. It shows how the monuments simple classicism proposes a modern architecture in tune with and actively participating in processes of revolution and modernity. The article analyses the transformative and instrumental qualities of art and architecture in revolutionary processes. It looks at the many ways from massive performances to symbolic dedications and marking and delineating space through which the monument – and art and architecture beyond it – not only reflected, but actively took part in forging and enforcing the myths and future visions of the revolution and modernity.
Re-drawing Javanese Building Practice
Keywords: Invented tradition, Epistemic Imposition, Architectural Appropriation
From the beginning, the conditions of the Dutch East Indies (present Indonesia) was utterly different from that of the Netherlands. Climate wise, the Dutch East Indies was a tropical archipelago. Geographically, besides 70% of the archipelago consisting of water, the place was of volcanic mountains and valleys, the extreme opposite to the flatness of the Netherlands. Due to this huge difference, it was unlikely for the Dutch to merely implement the customs and systems they wanted to introduce in the colony. A new setup was required; new lines had to be drawn in the colony.
This process manifests in various forms, from the political domination and social demarcation to technological and epistemic imposition. Each of these sought to construct a territory to carry out the colonization agenda. This essay aims to discuss specific practices by Dutch architects after the enactment of Ethical Policy in 1901. In their endeavour to invent a form of architectural practice in the context of the Dutch East Indies, Dutch architects engaged with indigenous building practices in various ways.
The essay examines the ideas and thoughts of two Dutch architects in particular; Henri Maclaine Pont (1884 – 1971) and Herman Thomas Karsten (1884 – 1945), in the way they interpreted and reconstructed Javanese building technologies and forms to suit their needs. While Maclaine Pont sought to establish a new typology based on Javanese tectonic system, Karsten experimented with programmatic and spatial arrangements of the Javanese house. Numerous colonial architecture scholars have studied the works and biographies of Pont and Karsten. To avoid reiterating existing studies, the essay will specifically discuss their views through their literary works and the recourse of to two main theoretical references, The Invention of Tradition by Eric Hobsbawm & Terrence Ranger (1983) and Seeing Like A State by James C. Scott (1998).
The paper will comprise of five parts. The first and second part will depict the connection between colonization and epistemic imposition. The third and fourth part aims to elaborate on how Karsten and Pont ‘drew’ new lines over the Javanese building practice. The last part, the concluding remarks, will discuss the appropriation executed by both architects in two layers; as examples of Hobsbawm’s invented tradition and secondly, as the demonstration of how epistemic imposition was exercised through the dissemination of architectural knowledge and practice.
Bus-Aula
Keywords: School, Classroom, Shantytown, Camp, Education
A hundred buses, no longer in use, were employed as classrooms (‘aulas’) in an unprecedented educational and social experiment that transformed the outskirts of Santiago, Chile into an open school program within a few years at the beginning of the 1970s. Capturing interest both locally and abroad, Nueva La Habana, one of the 22 shantytowns that employed the buses, received many visitors - from university students to educators, politicians, photographers and filmmakers. The experiment captures a moment in Chilean history that triggered a critical view of the educational system, and at the same time brought forth new questions on the status of the classroom as the ultimate building block of the school, both as an institution and a building. The bus-aula dissolved the boundary of the educational facility, blending it into the streets of Santiago’s peripheral neighborhoods; and between the bus-aulas the city itself became a school and the precarious infrastructures created a sense of possibility.
This was an urgent program carried out by the Sociedad Constructora de Establecimientos Educacionales (SCEE)—a public-private entity in charge of public schools’ research, design, maintenance and administration, throughout the whole country. The SCEE operated in Chile from 1937 until its dissolution five decades later in 1987, along with the eventual dismantling of public education in Chile. The buses became the solution to face the educational deficit (and sometimes total lack of any educational facility) in the new neighborhoods organized by the state as a housing solution. The experience embodied a specific social reality of their time and place: autonomous schools for temporary housing in times of economic scarcity and political optimism. The converted buses became one of the most radical educational interventions in the history of the country, if not of the world.
After taking root in a specific place, the buses became one star in a constellation that articulated political and social forces, triggering larger systemic shifts in the community. The schools indexically extended lines in the territory, diluting the physical and temporal limits of their teaching. The ready-made classroom—even one as precarious as a dismantled bus—became a device capable of irrigating an urban and social system, surpassing expectations as an atomized school and becoming a part of the social infrastructure. The history of the bus-aula demonstrates the relevance of the classroom as a space of activation within a neighborhood, and these imaginary lines that were created can be traced further.
Boundary-Work: Scale, Fragment, and Totality
Keywords: Scale, Megastructure, Tafuri, Political Economy
This paper will highlight the material and disciplinary stakes of architectural scale through a reading of “radical” architectural projects from the 1960s and 1970s. It begins from the Tafurian premise that architecture is not only an ideal disciplinary category, but a concrete institution within a society’s mode and relations of production. Read in this light, the works of architectural practices, even the most apparently exceptional, reveal continuous “boundary work”—repeated efforts to construct, expand, and protect the discipline’s position and “market” within society. Particularly instructive is the “boundary” character of scale itself.
The essay will examine a series of speculative projects exemplified by Metabolism, Archigram, and Archizoom, which sought to solve the problem of architecture’s scale of intervention once and for all by extrapolating and schematising market tendencies. In pursuit of the ideal commodity form—the mass producible and reproducible dwelling unit—these projects invested enormous importance into the other end of the scale: the megastructure. This paradox is perfectly illustrated by Archigram’s “Plug-in City”, in which architecture’s full integration into modern consumer culture—a far from revolutionary proposition—required an infrastructural transformation hardly imagined by the most ardent socialist planners. Such projects demonstrate that within capitalist market relations, the scale of architectural production is caught uncomfortably between two extremes—the individual commodity and the overall commodity market—neither of which submit easily to architectural design.
The paper will suggest that the dichotomy between commodity and market represents the unconscious ideological significance of “scale” in general, and a crucial material cause of architecture’s ongoing disciplinary anxiety.