THRESHOLDS 40

JOURNAL OF THE MIT DEPARTMENT OF ARCHITECTURE

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Editorial PolicyThresholds, Journal of the MIT Department of Architecture, is an annual, blind peer-reviewed publication produced by student editors at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Opinions in Thresholds are those of the contributors and do not necessarily reect those of the editors, the Department of Architecture, or MIT.

CorrespondenceThresholdsMIT Architecture77 Massachusetts Ave, Room 7337Cambridge, MA 02139

thresholds@mit.eduhttp://thresholds.mit.edu

Published by SA+P PressMIT School of Architecture + Planning77 Massachusetts Avenue, Room 7231Cambridge, MA 02139

Copyright 2012 Massachusetts Institute of Technology.The individual contributions are copyright their respective authors.Figures and images are copyright their respective creators, as individually noted.

ISSN 1091-711XISBN 978-0-9835082-1-2

Book design and cover by Donnie Luuwww.donnieluu.com

Printed by Puritan Press, Hollis, NH

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Thresholds 40

ediTed by JonaThan Crisman

Cambridge, MA

Socio

5 Editorial: Socio-indEmnity and othEr motivES Jonathan criSman

11 conJuring utopiaS ghoSt rEinhold martin

21 lE corbuSiEr, thE briSE-SolEil, and thE Socio-climatic proJEct of modErn architEcturE, 1929-1963 daniEl a. barbEr

33 movE along! thErE iS nothing to SEE rania ghoSn

39 flowS Socio-Spatial formation nana laSt

47 collEctivE EquipmEntS of powEr: thE road and thE city SimonE brott

55 collEctivE form: thE StatuS of public architEcturE dana cuff

67 tuktoyaktuk: offShorE oil and a nEw arctic urbaniSm pamEla ritchot

75 boundary linE infraStructurE ronald raEl

83 diSSolving thE grEy pEriphEry nEEraJ bhatia and

alExandEr dhooghE

91 park aS philanthropy: bow-wowS rEdEvElopmEnt at miyaShita koEn yoShiharu tSukamoto

99 muSSElS in concrEtE: a Social architEctural practicE ESEn gkE zdamar

105 participation and/or criticality? thoughtS on an architEctural practicE for urban changE kEnny cupErS and

markuS miESSEn

113 thE SluipwEg and thE hiStory of dEath mark JarzombEk

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121 Extra room: what if wE livEd in a SociEty whErE our EvEry thought waS public? gunnar grEEn

and bErnhard hopfEngrtnEr

127 SculpturE fiEld: from thE Symbolic to thE tEctonic dan handEl

135 on radiation burn StEvE kurtz

163 cairo di Sopra in gi: pErSpEctivE, photography, and thE EvEryday chriStian a. hEdrick

175 huSh StEvEn bEckly and

Jonathan d. katz

189 norcS in nEw york intErboro partnErS

209 uncommon ground: aEthEr, body, and commonS ziSSiS kotioniS

217 EdEnS, iSlandS, roomS amrita mahindroo

225 thE princE: bJarkE ingElSS Social conSpiracy JuStin fowlEr

233 bEyond doing good: civil diSobEdiEncE aS dESign pEdagogy hannah roSE mEndoza

237 aid, capital, and thE humanitarian trap JoSEph m. watSon

245 thE End of civilization daniEl daou

255 toward a lakE ontario city dEpartmEnt of

unuSual cErtaintiES

263 SociopathS JimEnEz lai

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Socio-indEmnity

and othEr

motivESJonaThan Crisman

Editorial:

gonE arE thE dayS of black and whitE and hErE iS thE timE of grEy. aS Social linkagES havE bEcomE wildly complEx, thE normativE poSitionS that might bring thEm ordEr havE EvaporatEd. what if, for a momEnt, thE rulES wErE put on hold? what if you could Stand up for what you bEliEvE in without loSing your cool?

I opened the call for submissions for this issue of Thresholds by mentioning a certain set of rules. They are mostly unspoken and chiefly reside in architectural discourse, but they also rear their head in other forms of cultural practice. The rules say that you cannot really achieve social change through cultural media and to even talk about such a silly thing is tacky, taboo, toxic. A key strand of modernism operated with utopian aims andparticularly in the architectural realmhas been accused of failing spectacularly, ushering in a new era of postmodernism. What can form accomplish, anyway? This story, told by Charles Jenks and subsequently re-told so many times as to become a Truth, is itself ironic considering the supposed evacuation of big truths within postmodern thought. The smokescreen of cool inability, however, covers a more sinister fact: by denying the ability to operate on social terms, one is effectively indemnified from social responsibility at the onset. And so we happily went, right up until the economic crisis of the past few years, when most around the world realized that something had gone terribly wrong. As the age of the icon evaporates, modes of cultural production have scrambled to re-discover ways to operate on terms other than form. Agency is both a conceptual construct through which one can unearth non-formal tools (or re-learn how to use form in political

terms), as well as an oblique way of talking about cultural practice achieving social change. By interrogating what art and architecture can do, we hope to somehow expand our power in the world while simultaneously appearing objective, disinterested, and cool. If environmental determinism is out, well then we can at least figure out how far out it went. And this mode of operating is technically legal on the terms of postmodernitydespite an absence of Big Truths, cultural practice is still seen as capable of making little changes. So the quest for agency happily proceeds on decidedly small terms: performance, covert ops, and opportunism have become its buzzwords. But what if, rather than lingering on agency, we broke the rules and approached the social head on? The authors in Socio do so in a variety of ways, none of which are shy, tacky, or, most importantly, disinterested. If their motives have moved past a freedom from social responsibility, they have also moved beyond agencys subtle discursive claim that it operates without personal gain. As we deal with the possibility of a socially conscious project, we do so with an understanding that societys gain is our gain. My discussion with Reinhold Martin on the thoughts he lays out in his recent book Utopias Ghost serves as an apt introduction to this mode of thinking: it is one that simultaneously embraces the social while acknowledging our decidedly postmodern state of affairs; it is one, in Martins words, where the further inside you go the further outside you get. Grounding such a possibility in the history of modernism, Daniel A. Barber describes the social aspect of Le Corbusiers climatic project. Situating what has been thought to be a well-trodden history on this new basis, Barber demonstrates that there is more still that we might learn from modernisms foray into the social, a point especially pertinent in light of contemporary environmental concerns. Rania Ghosn, in an unpacking of Rancires writing on circulation,

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argues that the social project of architecture is bigger than service provider, be it technical or otherwise. Rather, in Ghosns words, it disturbs the socialized consensual order of solidified social categories by opening the domain of relevant spatial concerns, operating to reconfigure our very society. Nana Last expands this conversation on circulation, providing a heady rumination on the theory of flow, placing it within historical, political, and spatial terms. Ultimately, she presents flow as a tool through which we can mediate the social and allow architecture and design to act out on their critical instincts. And Simone Brott provides continues this interrogation through new scholarship on a heretofore little known group of French thinkers known as Le CERFI. In the minds of this group led by Felix Guattari, collective equipments are what offers potential in modulating social concernsnamely in todays context, this means infrastructure. This line of thinking is both prescient and relevant, and several authors in this issue rightly ground their foray into the social within infrastructural terms. Dana Cuff, writing on collective form, demonstrates how infrastructure is, in fact, a latter day res publica and pairs this argument with some of the ground-breaking work coming out of her cityLAB group at UCLA. Pamela Ritchot conjures a future-oriented scenario for the oil-oriented development in the Arctic, suggesting a particularly social solution for the often-overlooked confluence of crises in the farthest North. Moving southwards, Ronald Rael deliberates on a decidedly current issue within the US context: that of border security. Rather than take a theoretical and antagonistic approach toward such a contested problem, Rael jumps into propositions for a social architecture that embrace the dirty reality of border security while aiming to ameliorate some of its most harmful effects. And Neeraj Bhatia and Alexander DHooghe provide both a compelling argument for and design project of a plinthesisan

infrastructural object that itself mediates our fractured public. Participation is intrinsically linked to the social, and as such prompts further interrogation. An interview with Yoshiharu Tsukamoto of Atelier Bow-Wow by Casey Goodwin lays out a project that examines notions of participation in practice. Esen Gke zdamar, through examination of a project in Turkey by Arzu Kuaslan with Antoni Muntadas, presents a argument favorable to traditional notions of participation, particularly within contexts that lack even a basic understanding of this notion. Kenny Cupers and Markus Miessen, on the other hand, present a critique of conventional notions of participation and argue for a conflictual mode of participation. Diving further into art criticism, Mark Jarzombek examines a question that has haunted humankind since its inception: how we, as a society, deal with death and the afterlife. In his study of both the history of cemeteries within the Dutch context, and a striking work of art by Hans van Houwelingen composed of exhumed tombstones, he touches upon the subject of the citizen, UNESCO and its theater of the absurd, and, ultimately, the role of death within contemporary society. In a similarly uncanny speculative design project, Gunnar Green and Bernhard Hopfengrtner ask: What if we lived in a society where our every thought was public? Through a projective methodology, they suggest that by interrogating notions of publicity, we can begin to reflect with greater clarity on ourselves. And Dan Handels history of Israeli artist Ezra Orion reminds us of cultural productions capacity to reflect on society by placing itself outside our frame of reference and into environ- mental, geologic, and even galactic perspectives. The next four contributors cast the art tropes of fear, gaze, and sexuality in a fresh, social light. Steve Kurtz of Critical Art Ensemble discusses CAEs tactical performance art piece, Radiation Burn and, in doing so, provides a means through we can

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begin to inoculate ourselves from certain socially constructed untruthssuch as the common fear of the dirty bomb threat. Christian Hedrick examines the practice of photographer Randa Shaath with regard to protest in conventional verses everyday terms, as demonstrated in the Egyptian Revolution of 2011. His reading of Shaaths work and its unique perspective of di sopra in gi provides a way to reframe notions such as the gaze as once again socially relevant. Finally, photographer Steven Beckly shares with us his own revisionist history through a project titled Hush, with an insightful response by Jonathan D. Katz who operatively places the series within what could be called an LGBT socio-historiography. Initiating a discussion within the realm of socio-political concerns, Tobias Armborst, Georgeen Theodore, and Daniel DOca of Interboro Partners share their project NORCs in New York, calling our attention to a typology that already existsbut could be improved uponfor aging communities in New York. Zissis Kotionis provides a fascinating means through which one can unpack the nature of Athenian urban life, mathematically joining the built environment, the social, and what he terms the deterritorializing aether. Amrita Mahindroo gives both an alternative history of the Great Bombay Textile Strike and a typological study that effectively critiques neoliberal capital without straying from architectural discourse. Similarly, Justin Fowler reads the work of BIG, incriminating it with Palin-esque methodologies which, in the end, also offers a remarkable means of dealing with social issues on the terms given by cultural production. Finally, Hannah Rose Mendoza provides an unwavering call to arms for those involved with design pedagogy to take issue with social concerns while Joseph M. Watson tempers many of these vigorous arguments with a meta-critique on certain fallacies within what aims to be humanitarian cultural practice.

As one of three closing reflections, Daniel Daou places a timeline of what could be called limits theory in the direct path of sustainability, that straw man which has recently played such a prominent role in architecture and other modes of cultural production. Through asking what, precisely, humankinds ends are, he provides a background to the sustainability debate which must be dealt with before all else. Brendan Cormier and Christopher Pandolfi of Department of Unusual Certainties provide a hallucinatory look into what a new kind of socio-regional urbanism might be within the Great Lakes area, projecting into the future what seems like an uncomfortably plausible reality. And finally, as an apt closing, Jimenez Lai takes issue with the nature of this issue through Sociopaths, an architectural rumination, that begins to question our own perceptions of reality in relation to our fundamental capacity to do good. In the end, Socio is much like Ezra Orions use of holons: it is a reflection of society, a collective made up of individual pursuits. All of the contributors contained within this volume are artists in their own right, transforming messy realities of the social into poetics of their various media, be they scholarship, forms of art practice, or infrastructural propositions. In a moment where reality has become immaterial and where the horizon is all but grey, Thresholds aims to publish the work of contributors who perform this creative balancing act without equivocationindeed, the work of those who dare to find a path through the socio-.

Images are from Sculpture Field, 1968. Copyright Ezra Orion.

***Jonathan Crisman is editor for Thresholds, Journal of the MIT Department of Architecture, and has written for the Los Angeles Review of Books and PLAT Journal of the Rice School of Architecture. He has a background in architecture, geography, and urban planning from UCLA and MIT, and is executive director for 58-12 Design Lab, a Los Angeles-based non-profit organization.

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conJuring utopiaS ghoSt

inTerviewed by JonaThan Crisman

reinhold marTin

Book cover copyright Duke University Press.

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rEinhold martin

Book cover copyright Rizzoli.

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Jonathan criSman Your book Utopias Ghost1 builds on and, in some sense, attempts to supersede and re-synthesize much of what might be considered canonical scholarship on postmodernism within architectureIm thinking of Jameson, Jencks, and so forth. Does this re-working of existing scholarshipwhat some might perceive as a subtle attackcome out of a perceived need for a newly performative understanding of postmodernism, the desire to construct a contemporary project in a disciplinary landscape of post-criticality, or something else entirely?2

rEinhold martin Well, I would say that the books approach is fairly straightforward. It had always seemed to me that there was a distinction to be made between theories of cultural postmodernism and the architectural discourse gathered together under the same name. So first, we must differentiate emphatically between Jameson and Jencks. It is unfortunate that Jameson and others had to rely on Jencks as a source for postmodernist theory in architecture, though Jencks particularly suits Jamesons symptomal reading. The resulting character-ization of architectural works and writings from the 1970s and 1980s as clear-cut symptoms of postmodern dissolution remains quite revealing; nevertheless, it is somewhat premature.3

Historically, this has to do in part with the troubled afterlife of architectural modernism within many so-called postmodernist works. This is one of several intended meanings of the books title. Without belaboring the point, my overall argument implies that architecture has only belatedly become postmodern. Only today, when it is widely assumed that the affectations of that period have been left behind in favor of a more future-oriented perspective, can we say that architecture has acquired a full complement of properly postmodern characteristics. Especially in the sense that todays various modernist revivals have finally succeeded in exorcising Utopias ghostalmost. That is partly what I mean by insisting that postmodernism is not a style but a discursive formation: a way of speaking about the world and a way of acting in it that makes certain statements possible while excluding others by making them, in effect, unthinkable. Among the latter is Utopia not in the sense of an ideal world, but in the sense of systemic change. The books project is therefore trans-disciplinary. It is not merely about architecture and its endgames, or even ways out of those endgames. Instead, I argue that disciplinary knowledge, and the internal debates that structure this knowledge, offers a productive entry point into much more broadly defined problems. So the book offers an architectural theory that is also a form of theory qua theorythat is, a type of discourse that moves across the humanities and social sciences while retaining its particular referent, hence recognizing (indeed, requiring) the specificity of individual disciplines.

Jc So the idea of learning to live with Utopias ghostallowing the specter of systemic change to live among usis one you argue would be beneficial for not only architecture, but cultural practice in general and, perhaps, even society at large? If this is so, one such diviner might be the Yes Men and their art practice of large-scale pranks that imagine a different worldsay, one in which Dow would repair the damage done by Union Carbide in Bhopal,4 a topic also covered

1 Reinhold Martin, Utopias Ghost: Architecture and Postmodernism, Again (St. Paul, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2010).

2 This exchange between Reinhold Martin and Jonathan Crisman occurred via email over a period from January 25, 2011 to May 26, 2011 predating a variety of current events that could relate to notions of conjuring Utopias ghost, not the least of which is the Occupy Wall Street movement.

3 Postmodernism as a question has recently surfaced in other milieus as well. See Charles Jencks et al., eds., Radical

Post-Modernism, special issue, AD 81, no. 5 (Sept 2011); Institute of Classical Architecture & Art, Reconsidering Postmodernism, conference proceedings, November 11-12, 2011; and Glenn Adamson et al., eds., Postmodernism: Style and Subversion 1970-1990, London: Victoria & Albert Museum, 2011, exhibition catalog.

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in Utopias Ghost regarding the subject of postmodern architecture. Are there other such successful diviners that come to mind?

rm The chapter in the book that deals with the architecture of Union Carbide in relation to the biopolitics of the Bhopal event was meant to demonstrate certain types of discursive connections through which power flows. Though provocative, one unintended consequence of the intervention by the Yes Men was that some Bhopal victims and their relatives were misled into believing that their claims had been settled. After all, one does not simply speak on behalf of others in unproblematic ways. So yes, agit-prop art practice can be effective in identifying a crisis, pointing out hypocrisy, and even transforming expectations. But I dont think that any one approach adequately matches the scale of challenge. Systemic change is just thatsystemic. And in order to think it, you have to have something like a map of the system. That is what I have tried to provide. It is a truism to say that the contemporary world system is composed of linkages and connections. What might be less evident is the nature of the power networks that, in this case, connect Bhopal, India to Danbury, Connecticut. The relations are not causal or linear; the architecture of Union Carbides Danbury headquarters did not produce the gas leak. But it contributed to far-reaching networks of subject formation. These networks helped to maintain an international division of labor predicated on the unequal value of life in different but mutually dependent accounting regimes. That is why the chapter is about computation, in the end. To your question, then, of other resistant practicesyes, they abound. That is not the problem. The problem is that the fragile solidarities between regimes of knowledge and practice that would enable a scaling up of alternatives have become largely unthinkable. Imagine today demanding that the stateany stateadequately house its population. This kind of demand may seem hopelessly nave in a neoliberal age. Housing, one of modern architectures core problems, has become

almost the sole province of the markets, assisted by the state. Or, such a demand may seem pater-nalistic. After all, the welfare state, so well-serviced by architectural modernism, was also a laboratory for working out the sorts of biopolitical protocols and techniques that have since been taken over by multinational capital to administer the global lifeworld. And yet, what we need is the intelli-gence and imagination to work out systemic alternatives to the status quo. Architecture can help with that, rather directly, by demonstrating possibilities that operate on different premises than those operating a hegemonic system of systems in which life and death are variables in a great game.

Jc Lets return to housing. In the final chapter of your book, you begin by calling for the revisiting of the housing question.5 Similarly, in a recent lecture,6 you called for the reinsertion of the public in public housing. Though the notion of demanding the state to adequately house its population is ridiculous in that it illuminates the states inability to do so and, simultaneously, hopelessly nave within a neoliberal framework, it appears to be precisely the type of unthinkable thought that the conjuring of Utopias ghost entails. In a parallel train of thought, on the topic of mapping power flows in relation to Union Carbide, your larger narrative appeared to be about the shift from a modern population subject toward a postmodern mass

4 The Yes Men, posing as representatives from Dow Chemical in 2004, distributed a fictitious press release that took responsibility for the disaster in Bhopal and offered reparations for the damage done by Union Carbide. This caused a subsequent $2 billion dip in Dows stock, forcing the company to rescind the press release, emphatically stating that they did not take any responsibility for the disaster and would have no part in reparations. See http://theyesmen.org/hijinks/bbcbhopal.

5 Martin, Utopias Ghost, 147. See also, Frederick Engels, The Housing Question (New York: International Publishers, n.d.).

6 Reinhold Martin and Jeffrey Kipnis, What Good Can Architecture Do? The Harvard GSD Symposia on Architecture, Nov 16, 2010.

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customized individual subject. Could you elaborate on whoor whatmight compose the public in a newly conceived visit to public housing and map its topology in relation to the shifting form of the subject?

rm It would not be too much of an exaggeration to say that public or social housing and the programs and policies supporting it were a sine qua non of modern architecture in Europe, Latin America, parts of Asia, and to a lesser extent, the United States. That is one reason why the demolition of the Pruitt-Igoe public housing complex in St. Louis in 1972 was received so symbolically by postmodernists. Yes, there were massive, complex problems. But the seemingly incessant repetition of that image, of a publics housing being demolished, and the smug pleasure so many have covertly derived from it, is one of the aesthetic obscenities of our time. It even became national policy in the HOPE VI public housing demolition program, which reflects the influence of the New Urbanism. Still, even in 1972, it did not seem at all ridiculous to expect the state to take responsibility for housing its population, despite the evident failures. That thought only became widely accepted later, with the definitive waning of the welfare state, as the narratives driving privatization were naturalized. I am not suggesting that the modern welfare state was some kind of utopia. On the contrary, as so much critical social thought has demonstrated, state-based programs for the care and management of populations were notorious disciplinary sites. From housing to prisons to schools to hospitals, such sites were recognized as arenas for the reproduction of institutionalized norms that managed desire, suppressed dissent, and propagated a whole host of unfreedoms. Still all of these institutions, distant progeny of the Western Enlightenment, remain contested sites for the enactment of social justice, as the debates over universal health coverage in the United States have testified. So in that sense, public, or social, housing is fraught with ambivalence and contradiction.

Most notably, this architectural type, one of the greatif problematicinnovations of modernism, is haunted by a utopian aspiration that is not reducible to neoliberal shibboleths like public-private partnerships, which is an oxymoron when viewed from a perspective that emphasizes conflicts between nominally public and private interests rather than some mystical synthesis. The terms public and private are themselves artifacts of a modernist sensibility that is clearly inadequate to describe contemporary realities. Yet such apparently outmoded terminology highlights the cultural narratives and norms that are inseparable from these realities. To insist on reimagining public housing is therefore to insist on retaining the category of the public, and with it of collectivity more generally (others speak of a commons), as a locus for the development of counternarratives and with them, new mixtures of politics and practice. Which brings us to the second part of your question. Rather than being outmoded under postmodernity, the modernist public, with its connotations of universality and standardization, has been multiplied, made plural. But this new plurality brings its own dilemmas, not the least of which is its proximity to the forms of life elicited by mass-customized consumerism. Here, the standardization of the modernist masses is replaced by a sort of micro-individuation, whereby subjectivity is divided internally along potentially conflicting lines of desire. Rather than being liberating, the ever-expanding rainbow of choices enabled by mass customization represents a new turn of the historical screw. Its corporate master signifier is Apple instead of IBM. Which, again, is not to say that liberation cannot be sought in digitally produced forms of differentiation, only that these techniques tend to reproduce hegemonic narratives and practices, such as those that oppose the individual to the collective rather than seeing individuality as a function of collectivity. It would be quite different to think of the hyper-individuated postmodern subject as inherently collective, bound by solidarities of various kinds, rather than as a sort of

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Book cover copyright University of Minnesota Press.

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meta-consumer. Imagined as a new public for public housing, this collective would emphatically include those who do not live there, as well as those who do.

Jc The hegemonic narratives and practices that you mention are curious in that they oppose the individual to the collective while simultaneously espousing ideals of individualism at the expense of the collective. As Dolores Hayden is fond of pointing out, every owner of a single family home is, in fact, a recipient of government-subsidized housingthe subsidy is simply once removed through tax credits rather than the directly provided through housing projects.7 The notion of imagining a new public as part and parcel of rethinking public housing seems to be crucial for moving beyond the narratives that perpetuate these sorts of practices. Now, in Utopias Ghost, you discuss the mirror in depthas a feedback loop, as a medium for revealing and obscuring the specters of Utopia, and, perhaps most importantly, as the paradigmatic object of postmodern architecture. Similarly, you discuss the liberation found in seeing the mirror, itself, rather than the image that it contains. Can we facilitate this act of seeing or should we, in fact, eschew the mirror altogether? rm It is ironic to think that one can discuss mirrors in depth, as you say, but that is indeed what I have tried to do. But I dont really want to suggest to architects what they should or should not do with mirrors. I only want to suggest that this eminently enigmatic material (thinking of a mirror more as material than as object) deserves a closer look. So the question becomes: how to look at a mirror, rather than in it. The mirror also poses certain historical questions that double back onto the present. Utopias Ghost does not narrate a history; instead, it asks us to think and work historically when we write our history books or, for that matter, when we do anything else. In part, it is addressed to those

scholars who have now begun to rewrite the history of architectural postmodernism in its many aspects. It urges them to find ways of taking into account their own historical position. I know that some already have. But what will it take for postmodern architecture to be historicized in a way that thoroughly denaturalizes the cavalier attitude toward history that is among its defining characteristics? It will be insufficient to demystify its misnamed historicism. Nor will it be adequate to apologize for its supposed formalism. Nor, finally, will it be convincing to break it down into its constituent parts and deal with them one by one without reference to larger processes, or simply to ignore the whole thing entirely in favor of some supposedly less treacherous alternative. I deliberately refer to postmoder-nism as something like a monolith here, not because anything like that has ever actually existed, but as a way of naming its hegemonic character as a discourse. Postmodernism, understood as a discursive formation, was and remains the name we can givewith all due apology for its reductivenessto the congeries of cultural practices that step outside of history in order to evade its challenges. By stepping outside of history, I mean backing oneself into a corner, stripped of political agency and left only with a historical imagination grasping at straws, scouring the recent past for overlooked clues, underappreciated precedents, rather than looking right there on the surface of things. And, again ironically, sometimes the best way to evade the challenges of history is to write history books. Among the questions posed by the mirror is that of writing a materialist history of so-called dematerialization, including the dematerialization of the public, which is one of postmodernisms alleged hallmarks. I have tried to suggest that, though this question can return into the chambers of historical materialism through the back door, it also

7 See Dolores Hayden, Building Suburbia: Green Fields and Urban Growth, 1820-2000 (New York: Pantheon, 2003).

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opens onto other, perhaps less teleological, pathways. Consider the mirrors materiality, its manipulation of light, as a sort of archetypal feedback loop. Interpreting such a loop as a paradigm of historicity, of this-then-that-then-this-then-that, would mean overturning (or transvaluing) the whole set of values associated with transparencywhether optical, cognitive, or spatialthat channel the historical imagination down a one way street, from here to there, from this to that, and replacing them with a new set. One way to see this is to look at materiality itself. Glass is not exactly transparent. Nor is its materiality restricted to what is actually visible. Likewise for mirrors, which are not entirely opaque. Similarly, I have tried to show that what we call oil is also an elusive complex of material relationships, some of which interact with supposedly more architectural materials like mirrored glass. We can extend such an inquiry further, into the historical afterlife of transparent glass, by asking: What does transparency do today? It divides, repels, excludes just as often as it welcomes, opens out, or includes. That is, it mirrors. Think of all the borderlines that are marked with transparent glass or something like it, as if to say, welcome even as the actual message to those defined as non-belonging, conveyed by microphysical control mechanisms like passwords, card readers, or surveillance cameras, is unambiguously keep out. Such double binds are basic to the type of historical experience we call postmodern. Mirrored glass enacts transparency as a sort of paradox. Like the whole host of postmodern architectural devices with which it combines, mirrored glass does not hide anything. Nor does it mislead, except in helping to produce what I would call the illusion that there is an illusionthe illusion that what youre looking at or thinking about is not real. But it is real, as real as the resulting double bind, which collapses reality and illusion, and with these, freedom and unfreedom, into a single surface, a sort of closed loop. Unraveling such binds is the principal challenge faced by historical work on the recent past today.

Jc As a final question, I wonder if you could relate this materialityand, indeed, the paradoxical historical construction of postmodernismback to the notion of a plural public. It seems as though this concept may shed light on one means to unravel these problematic loops. rm Yes, we should certainly avoid idealizing the public. We are all split, inside and out. And setting aside such idealizations can certainly mean multiplying the body politic or pluralizing the public. But neither is postmodern pluralismto each their ownan acceptable alternative. Not only are material resources unevenly distributed across any such plurality. As I have tried to show by recontextualizing mass customization, apparently benign pluralism or multi-culturalism is often configured around power differentials that, for many, are matters of life and death. So the more urgent question may be one of how to form solidarities across such divides without presuming the a priori existence of something like shared values or even shared interests. This is quite a burden to place on architecture. It may even be too much to ask of the historical interpretation of architecture, or of any other cultural processes for that matter. But architecture is an important mediator; you can look at any building and learn something about the world that it imagines, so to speak. In other words, architecture helps to structure the social imagination. That means that we should be able to analyze any building in terms of the publics, counterpublics, or other collectivities that it anticipates or makes visible, as well as those that it implicitly brackets out. So when we speak about architectures materiality, we are actually speaking about a set of mediating infrastructures, artifacts, and processes. These include but are not limited to the materials from which a building is assembled, the economic factors and systems of production that shape it, the social bodies that pass through it, and so on. But I want to end on what may seem a counterintuitive

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note, by emphasizing the need to take formal properties into account as well. Form is not a matter of ideology, as is so often said of architectural postmodernisms language games. Nor does it reflect the autonomy of aesthetic practices. On the contrary, in architecture, form is a precondition for politico-economic immanence; it is among architectures ways of being in the world. As a discourse, architecture mediates social and economic relations by translating or transcoding them into formal equivalents. Analyze these forms and you are analyzing the world.

***Reinhold Martin is an architect and Associate Professor of Architecture at Columbia University, where he directs the Temple Hoyne Buell Center for the Study of American Architecture, and the PhD program in Architecture. He holds a PhD from Princeton University, as well as degrees from the Architectural Association and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. A founding co-editor of the journal Grey Room, he is also the author of The Organizational Comple: Architecture, Media, and Corporate Space.

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daniel a. barber

lE corbuSiEr, thE briSE-SolEil,

and thE Socio-climatic

proJEct of modErn

architEcturE, 19291963

Le Corbusiers vernacular turn in the 1930s has been a point of much discussion for architectural historians. Why the shift away from purism? Concerns about the climatic performance of a building, it turns out, were paramountnot only to Le Corbusiers shift, but also to the direction modern architecture would take in subsequent decades. By empha-sizing the place of climate in the historiogra-phy of Le Corbusiers turn, we can also indi-cate that climate-based design methodologies, addressed to problems of shading, ventilation, and interior comfort, are an important and under-recognized aspect of the reception of modern architecture as a social project. In order to analyze these developments, the historical significance of the brise-soleil will be tracedfirst, locating it in relationship to the historiography of Le Corbusiers vernacular turn, second, connecting this discourse to interactions between architectural and climatic sciences in 1930s Brazil, and third, placing the brise-soleil and shading strategies in relationship to the bioclimatic regionalisms and tropical architectures of the 1950s. From this perspective, Le Corbusiers vernacular turn initiated an important moment both in the interaction of architectural design with the expanding technological demands of modern living, and also in the contribution of design strategies to the cultural, technological, and bureaucratic regime of global environmental managementa socio-climatic project of modern architecture that has had long-lasting and multivalent effects.

concEptual conStantS In his essay The Vernacular, Modernism, and Le Corbusier, Francesco Passanti argues that the strength of early architectural modernism was its potential to integrate traditional design concepts with the new forms and materials emerging from the processes of industrialization. Tracing Le Corbusiers

formative yearsfrom the influence of the regionalist painter Charles LEplattenier, through his 1911 travels in the Balkans and direct experience of a pre-modern culture, to his engagement with the German Werkbund in the late teens and twentiesPassanti writes:

hE had bEgun within a movEmEnt SEEking to invEnt a rEgionaliSt StylE, and hE had EndEd by arguing, with looS and muthESiuS, that modErn culturE iS bESt dEScribEd by thE work of thoSE anonymouS pEoplE, notably EnginEErS, who dont try to invEnt a nEw aESthEtic.1

The integration of found, or vernacular, knowledge and of the practices of anonymous engineers, Passanti continues, was central to the modern architectural project:

aS a concEptual modEl thiS notion of thE vErnacular waS important, bEcauSE it could opEn architEcturE to rEdEfinition. ... thE vErnacular modEl inSiStEd on connEcting architEcturE to SomEthing ExtErnal to it, thE idEntity of SociEty; and it furthEr inSiStEd that Such a connEction bE not invEntEd but found. ... in thE caSE of lE corbuSiEr, thE vErnacular modEl providEd a concEptual StructurE for intEgrating thE nEw inputS into thE diSciplinE of architEcturE and for broadEning itS vocabulary and rESponSibilitiES.2

Passanti proposes that the conceptual model of the vernacular was a constant, articulating the persistent hope for a natural and organic modern society, and for a natural relationship of modern society and architecture; a constant, Passanti insists, because it persisted through his turn from purism.3

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The structure of this vernacular model is also significant to our understanding of the conceptual and methodological importance of the brise-soleil. The emergence of modern architectural shading techniques can be mapped onto Passantis model in three ways. First, the brise-soleil was a vernacular object insofar that it followed on the use of overhangs and other methods of shading in folk or so-called primitive architecturesincluding, significantly, the pre-modern architecture of Brazil. Second, it was found by Le Corbusier in Brazil and in other regions peripheral to the western European discourse as a native response to the twentieth-century problem of building multi-story concrete structures with glazed facades. Third, the quasi-scientific architectural and sociological discourse generated by the proliferation of the brise-soleil after World War II operated on Passantis termsas a form of architectural integration of new inputs. Such inputs developed in concert with other concerns over climate, providing a mechanism for both the dynamic expansion of architectural vocabulary and for the delicate insertion of architectural methods into the new responsibilities of the economic, industrial, and environmental management of the post-colonial global South. If the vernacular model is a constant in the development of modern architecture chez Le Corbusier, so is a general concern for interior climatic comfort. The development of the brise-soleil and the broader dissemination of shading techniques can be seen as part of a general concern with ventilation, light and air, and other health-related issues that framed the theories and practices of the early modern movement.4 Colin Porteous has recently emphasized that at least three of Le Corbusiers Five Points of 1926 relate directly to producing a salutary relationship between internal and external climatic conditions.5 Porteous reads the Villa Savoye (1928) as central to Le Corbusiers inter-war production because it realized his climatic as much as his formal and constructive

ambitions. At the same time, Porteous sees the contemporaneous Immeuble Wanner (1928-1929), an unbuilt project for Geneva, as even more innovative and transformative in this regard, organizing the five points in creative combination to productively address climatic impacts. The Wanner project led to a different design for the same client in the Immeuble Clart (19321933), to which I will return.

climatE and thE vErnacular turn

Amidst these conceptual constantsof climate and the vernacularthere is nonetheless a significant shift in the treatment of form, materials, and building processes evident in Le Corbusiers work of the 1929-1936 period. Kenneth Frampton proposes that the turn away from purism and the crystallization of a new direction was first evident in the unbuilt Maisons Loucher (1929). The Loucher project had a combined structural system of pilotis, a steel frame, and a local rubble-stone party wall, intended to be built by local masons. The trend continued in the Maison Errazuris (1930), a project for a coastal site in Argentina, which is cited by

1 Francesco Passanti, The Modern, the Vernacular, Le Corbusier in Vernacular Modernism: Heimat, Globalization, and the Built Environment, ed. Maiken Umbach and Bernd Huppauf (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005), 153.

2 Ibid., 156.3 Passanti continued: As Mary McLeod has shown, what

changed was the sense of where to seek the fulfillment of such a hope. During the 1920s, Le Corbusier sought it in the rationalist and abstract organization of industry and its products; later, disillusioned by them, he sought it in a more direct and holistic connection of people with people, and people and techniques. Ibid., 155.

4 See Paul Overy, Light, Air and Openness: Modern Architecture Between the Wars (London: Thames and Hudson, 2008), which discusses the importance of these concerns to the Central European developments of modernism.

5 Colin Porteous, The New Eco-Architecture: Alternatives from the Modern Movement (London: Taylor and Francis, 2002), 51-55. For Porteous, the plan libre and faade libre enable spatial configurations that promote routes for natural thermo-circulation; the fenetre en longeur and the related pan de verre allow for deep light penetration. The fourth point, the jardins suspendu, further amplified the salubrious effects of these various elements.

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Frampton as the point in which Le Corbusier made a total break with the Purist machine aesthetic in that the double-height volume of the house was to be covered by monopitched roofs sloping inwards toward a central gutter.6 As Frampton describes it, through these and other examples, Le Corbusiers turn was conditioned by the possibility of integrating traditional practices and materials with modern methods and designs FIG. 1.7

Historians have also looked to the parallel emergence of the brise-soleil to understand the origins and significance of Le Corbusiers turn. At issue is the purported climatic efficiency of the sealed glass curtain wall. The Immeuble Clart in particular, as Frampton notes, was designed right after Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneretaccustomed, as Frampton puts it, to over-reaching themselves technicallyhad come closest to realizing their technocratic vision. At both the Cit des Refuge (1929-1933) in Paris and the Centrosoyuz (1928-1936) in Moscow, that vision relied on the power of public agencies

to harness the materials, resources, and sites necessary to further the project of the modern office building as a climatic management object FIG. 2.8 In both of these projects, Le Corbusiers vision was focused on an active climatic strategy he called respiration exacte, one of the more prominent early proposals for a complete system of heating, ventilation, and air conditioning. As Frampton described it:

a building waS SuppoSEd to bE hEatEd

and coolEd by tEmpErEd air bEing

diStributEd throughout via an all-

EnvEloping plEnum, intEgral with

itS outEr Skin. thESE nEutralizing

wallS, aS [lE corbuSiEr] callEd thEm,

wErE to bE madE up of an innEr and

outEr glaSS mEmbranE, with an air-

SpacE in bEtwEEn, conStituting a

JackEt through which EithEr warmEd

or coolEd air would bE paSSEd

through according to thE SEaSon

of thE yEar.9

Such a system was proposed in both Paris and Moscow, though bureaucratic budget cutting frustrated both attempts. The insulating curtain walls were built, hermetically sealing the buildings, but little or no mechanical ventilation or air conditioning was employed. The result was in both cases a greenhouse box, cold in the winter and unbearably hot in the summer. Frampton proposes that the technological and bureaucratic barriers that prevented Le

FIG. 1 Le Corbusier, Maison Errazuriz, Argentina, 1930 (unbuilt) and Maison de Weekend, Paris, 1934.

FIG. 2 Le Corbusier, Cit des Refuges, Paris, 1933 (model).

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Corbusier from successfully implementing the respiration exacte system led to a life-changing loss of faith in the manifest destiny of the machine age, and thus to a new approach to climate that would first develop at Immeuble Clart.10 Reyner Banham is somewhat more ambivalent in summarizing these events, indicating that Le Corbusiers obstinate environmental misapprehensions at the Cit des Refuges led to the invention of the brise-soleil, while conceding that there can be no doubt that, however desperate its motivations, the brise-soleil is one of [Le Corbusiers] most masterly inventions, and one of the last structural innovations in the field of environmental management.11

At the Immeuble Clart, Le Corbusier did not attempt a mechanically sophisticated system. The building deployed a collection of low cost, user intensive, and formally dynamic sun-shading devicesbalconies, external blinds, retractable awnings, and interior shutters blocked and modulated solar incidence FIG. 3.12 Though much more than a brise-soleil, the basic principle was established: as part of the turn away from his faith in the machine age, Le Corbusier proposed architectural elements to manage those interior climatic conditions that the mechanical systems approach had proven unable to engage.

thE briSE-SolEil in brazil

As Banham also pointed out, Le Corbusier had an explicit internationalist program for the respiration exacte, intending to produce one single building for all nations and climates.13 From the 30s to the 50s, before the widespread use of mechanical HVAC systems, the brise-soleil operated on these termsas a techno-cultural object able to mediate a variety of climatic conditions. Following the Clart experiment, the brise-soleil was proposed for the Maison Locative (1933) at Algiers. This project, a 12-story hillside tower, also called for the misconceived respiration exacte, but included a concrete

6 Kenneth Frampton, Le Corbusier and Oscar Niemeyer: Influence and Counterinfluence, 1929-1965, in Latin American Architecture, 1929-1960: Contemporary Reflections, ed. Carlos Brillembourg (New York: Monacelli Press, 2004), 37.

7 Other relevant examples include the Maison de Weekend (1935), the first Maison Jaoul project (1937), the projected Roq et Rob vacation houses (1949), and the second Maison Jaoul (1952-54). See Kenneth Frampton, Modern Architecture: A Critical History (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1986), 224; and Kenneth Frampton, Le Corbusier (New York: Thames and Hudson, 2001), 130-149.

8 Frampton, Le Corbusier, 101.9 Frampton, Le Corbusier and Oscar Niemeyer, 101. See also

Porteous, The New Eco-Architecture, 67.10 Frampton, Le Corbusier, 101.11 Reyner Banham, Architecture of the Well-Tempered Environ-

ment (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969), 158.12 Porteous, The New Eco-Architecture, 62.13 Banham, Architecture of the Well-Tempered Environment,

quoting Le Corbusier in Precisions (1930).

FIG. 3 Le Corbusier, Immeuble Clart, Geneva, 1930-32. From Le Corbusier, Oeuvre Complete, 1910-69.

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grid of protruding shading elements on the sun exposed facades.14

This basic formula was reproduced by a number of Corbusier-influenced architects in Brazil: by early 1936, MMM Robertos Associao Brasileira de Imprensa (ABI) and Oscar Niemeyers Obra do Bero, both in Rio de Janeiro, established the use of varied brise-soleil facades to manage internal climate.15 Whereas the ABI, like the Maison Locative, had uniform fixed diagonal slabs on the north and west facades, the more sophisticated Obra do Bero had independent, operable brise-soleil on each floor. This operability, as well as the capacity for different treatments for different orientation or programmatic conditions, established the model for sun-shading FIG. 4. The Ministerio da Educao e da Sade (MES) building (19361943), also in Rio, was the culmination of this early period.

Designed by a team of Brazilian architects including Lucio Costa, Oscar Niemeyer, Alfonso Reidy, and othersand with extensive consultation by Le Corbusierit established the international model for a climatically sensitive modern office building FIG. 5. The north (sun-facing) facade has three-fin modules of operable louvers in egg-crate frames, suspended from a balcony for heat dispersion. The south facade is unshaded glass, and the blind walls at each end are sheathed in pink marble. In plan, the design proposed a simple rectangle for the tower, offset by a more organic volume for the theater. Brazil in the 1940s, isolated from the world at war, saw what was likely the largest

FIG. 4 Oscar Neimeyer, Obra do Bero, Rio de Janeiro, 1937. From Heinrich Mindlin, Modern Architecture in Brazil, 1955.

FIG. 5 Oscar Neimeyer, Lucio Costa, Alfonso Reidy, et al., Ministry of Education and Health, Rio de Janeiro, 1936-1943. From Victor and Aladar Olgyay, Solar Control and Shading Devices, 1957.

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sustained production of modern buildings up to that point. The brise-soleil was a necessary component of the work of Niemeyer, MMM Roberto, Luiz Nues, Paulo Antunes Ribeiro, and many others working in Brazil and gaining international attention FIG. 6. Brazilian architect and historian Henrique E. Mindlin, in his Modern Architecture in Brazil (1955), is matter of fact about the centrality of both the brise-soleil and of Le Corbusier to the proliferation of modern architecture in Brazil from the mid-30s. The brise-soleil, Mindlin wrote, (in Portuguese quebra-sol or sun-breaker, but that the French expression is commonly used indicates its direct derivation from Le Corbusier) has been applied in Brazil in the greatest variety of ways.16 Mindlin argued for the importance of the brise-soleil according to three main factors. First, he described the importance of research into the functions of sunlight in So Paulo engineering schools at the turn of the century, and the consequent development of a scientific basis for the orientation and sun-lighting of buildings in architecture schools by the mid-20s. As Mindlin summarized, easily handled sunlight graphs and tables, in general use by architects for decades now,

make it possible to calculate accurately and solve any sunlight problem.17

Mindlins second factor was the development of an advanced technique for the use of reinforced concrete. The industrial infrastructure of Brazil, he noted, already allowed for widespread use of concrete; additional concrete for the brise-soleil was thus an exceptionally efficient means to manage internal climate. Mindlins third factor touches on Passantis conceptual constant: Reminiscences of and variations on the traditional colonial screens and shutters are frequently found in the details of the brise-soleil, [leading to] expressions of the past re-occurring in the vernacular now being formed. This integration of the vernacular with contemporary demands of climatic management suggest how a formal approach could connect design methodology to economic and political concerns.18

14 The Greek-Brazilian architect Stamo Papadaki is seen by Jeffrey Aronin, Porteous, and others as the first to use the brise-soleil in his proposed Christopher Columbus Memorial Lighthouse of 1928. See Jeffrey Aronin, Climate and Architecture (New York: Reinhold, 1953).

15 Costa was appointed director of the Esquela Nacional de Bellas Artes in 1930, right after Le Corbusiers first trip to Brazil, largely as a result of his allegiance to Corbusian modernism.

16 Mindlin, Modern Architecture in Brazil, 11. Mindlin initially wrote the bookwith an introduction by Sigfried Giedeonto accompany the 1943 Brazil Builds exhibition at MoMA.

17 Ibid., 11.

FIG. 6 MMM Roberto, Seguradoras Building, Rio de Janeiro, 1949. From Victor and Aladar Olgyay, Solar Control and Shading Devices, 1957.

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Beyond Mindlins mid-century analysis, the MES has been regarded recently as central to another conceptual constant that weathered the vernacular turn: Le Corbusiers investment in the bureaucratic elite as the ideal client for modern architecture. In the post-war period, this tendency allows for connections to be drawn to the then-emergent bureaucracy of global environmental management. Le Corbusier had always been interested in engaging figures of authoritypoliticians, technocrats and bureaucrats, engineers, and civic leaderson his travels. Yonnis Tsiomis has recently proposed that this was especially the case during the 1936 visit to Brazil, due in large part to Le Corbusiers frustration with the conditions in Europe.19 Such interest was no doubt encouraged by the near-direct invitation to Brazil extended by the client of the MES, the Minister of Education and Health Gustavo Campanema. Much like Raoul Dautry and Eugene Claudius-Petit, Ministers of Reconstruction et Urbanisme in France right after the war and Le Corbusiers clients on the well known Unite dHabitation (1952), among other buildings, Capanema was a high-ranking official devoted to modern architecture on cultural terms, and supportive of it as a public representation of his own modernization initiatives and strategies. If Le Corbusier had lost faith in the manifest destiny of the machine age, he had not lost his interest in architecture as a techno-bureaucratic device for managing industrial growth and shaping social conditions. In this context, the brise-soleil came to be a provocative formal and technological response to the climatic, political, and economic pressures encountered by architects working in tropical regions.

poSt-war prolifErationS

After the war, the brise-soleil was central to two innovations of the modern architectural discourse: the bio-climactic

regionalism codified by Victor and Aladar Olgyay, and the tropical architecture approach summarized by Maxwell Fry and Jane Drew. Both developments were modeled on the Corbusian use of the brise-soleil. The Olgyays summarized their method through a comparative analysis of Miess 1951 Lake Shore Apartments (reliant on a large mechanical ventilation system); Harrison & Abramowitzs 1954 Republic Bank in Dallas (an aluminum breathing wall); Skidmore, Owings, and Merrills 1952 Lever House (with custom tinted glass effective for deflecting summer radiation but not for keeping winter heat in); and finally, Le Corbusiers 1953 Unit dHabitation. As the Olgyays explained, The last example illustrates a radiation control solution with shading devices. The method is fundamentally sound. Interception of the energy happens at the right placebefore it attacks the building. ... Here, by shaping the devices according to the changing seasonal sun-path, both summer shading and utilization of winter energies can be performed.20 Noting that Le Corbusierat least at the Unitdid not carefully consider all of these climatic elements, especially as regards the buildings orientation, they nonetheless saw themselves following Le Corbusier by using the brise-soleil as an architectural solution to climatic challenges. The Olgyays method was based on using diverse shading devices on different facades in combination with operable louvers to provide heating, cooling, and ventilation amidst numerous climatic conditions. A bioclimatic building, they proposed, organized an interlocking field of balance between regional climate, technological possibility, biological knowledge, and architectural technique.21 Their method involved analyzing sun-charts to identify potential overheated and

.18 Ibid.19 Yonnis Tsiomis, Introduction, in Le Corbusier,

Conferences de Rio: Le Corbusier au Bresil, 1936 (Paris: Flammarion, 2006), 67.

20 Victor Olgyay and Aladar Olgyay, Solar Control & Shading Devices (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1957), 7.

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underheated periods; testing site-orientation against sunlight modeling systems; determining the contextual sky-vault conditions of existing shading elements; and calibrating it all to determine an appropriate sun-mask shape which correlated to a specific shading device strategy FIG. 7.22 Through this complex system, the Olgyays participated in a dramatic re-conception of the internal environment of a building, directing their efforts towards producing an optimum zone for human activity. Somewhat ironically, their careful method to determine thermal comfort would be rescripted to fit the specification parameters for mechanical HVAC systems as the 50s progressed FIG. 8. Maxwell Fry and Jane Drews Tropical Architecture in the Dry and Humid Zones (1956), the 1953 conference it summarized, their 1947 Village Housing in the Tropics, and their involvement with the planning of Chandigarh in the 1950s also reflected the influence of Le Corbusier and of the brise-soleil on the post-war discourse of climate and architecture. Their work is also explicit about how the climatic facility of modern architecture led to a regional approach of managing industrialdevelopment after the collapse of colonial regimes. The argument in Tropical Architecture in the Dry and Humid Zones is tied to narratives of economic development. Following the dissolution of direct British control of former West African colonies, Fry and Drew advocated for design principles that facilitate economic and infrastructural management FIG. 9. The act of building, Fry and Drew wrote, must probe deeply into the productive possibilities of a country... leading to a more complete and more secure mastery over circumstances.23 Passive climate mitigation, they argued, provided better conditions for economic growth in areas removed from infrastructure: it both improved the living conditions of the worker and provided comfortable accommodations for western agents of industry and government. Tropical architectures innovations can be seen as attempts to use architecture to

mediate betweenpolitical, social, and climatic complications. In conclusion, it is important to note that the globalization of the environmental discourse, occurring in this same period, also depended heavily on the conceptual formulation of the tropics on the part of Western European and American industrial-ists and bureaucrats.24 The Olgyays interest in climate converges with a broader inter-disciplinary effort, involving the natural and social sciences, to articulate a socio-political concept of the environment. The tropical architecture discourse further suggests an intertwining of formal, technological, and bureau- cratic histories in managing the ecological and economic conditions of industrial development. The point here is not to invest architectural strategies with explicit political import, but rather to indicate the continuing impact of the architectural discourse on tropes of modernity and modernizaton. At the limit, an expanded history of modern architecture can engage the socio-climatic legacy of inter-war innovations for their implicationsintentional or otherwisein the production of cultural, technological, and bureaucratic regimes of global environmental management. This brief history of the brise-soleil suggests a vital connection between the formal implications of Le Corbusiers vernacular turn, and the geopolitical and geoeconomic significance of climatic managementone that is inflected anew amid the current concern over a warming climate.

21 Victor Olgyay and Aladar Olgyay, Design with Climate: Bioclimatic Approach to Architectural Regionalism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1963), 12.

22 The contemporary building performance modeling software Autodesk Ecotect appears to be based directly on the Olgyays method.

23 Ibid., 25.24 Although tropical rainforest deforestation is only a small piece

of the environmental crisis, the rainforest connection has since the 1950s been central in the scientific and popular construction of global-change knowledge. See Peter J. Taylor and Frederick H. Buttel, How Do We Know We Have Environmental Problems? Science and the Globalization of the Environmental Discourse, Geoforum 23, no. 3 (1992): 410.

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FIG

. 9

Max

wel

l Fry

and

Jan

e D

rew

, Bri

tish

Pet

role

um B

uild

ing,

Lag

os, 1

960.

Fro

m M

axw

ell F

ry a

nd J

ane

Dre

w, T

ropi

cal A

rchi

tect

ure

in t

he D

ry a

nd H

umid

Zon

es, 1

964.

FIG. 8 Victor and Aladar Olgyay, Schematic Bioclimatic Index. From Victor and Aladar Olgyay, Solar Control and Shading Devices, 1957.

FIG. 7 Victor and Aladar Olgyay, Vocabulary of Shading Devices. From Victor and Aladar Olgyay, Solar Control and Shading Devices, 1957.

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***Daniel A. Barber is an architectural historian analyzing affinities between the history of architecture and the emergence of environmentalism in the 20th century. Daniel received a BA in Comparative History of Ideas from the University of Washington, and a PhD in Architecture (History and Theory) from Columbia University. He also holds a Master of Environmental Design from the Yale School of Architecture, and an MFA in Studio Art from Mills College.

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movE along! thErE iS nothing

to SEErania Ghosn

thE policE Say thErE iS nothing to SEE, nothing happEning, nothing to bE donE, but to kEEp moving, circulating; thEy Say that thE SpacE of circulation iS nothing but thE SpacE of circulation. politicS conSiStS in tranSforming that SpacE of circulation into thE SpacE of thE manifEStation of a SubJEct: bE it thE pEoplE, workErS, citizEnS. it conSiStS in rEconfiguring that SpacE, what thErE iS to do thErE, what thErE iS to SEE or namE. it iS a diSputE about thE diviSion of what iS pErcEptiblE

to thE SEnSES.

JacquES rancirE1

In a meditation on the French revolt of May 1968, the philosopher Jacques Rancire established a theoretical framework, presenting the political as an unremitting confrontation in the name of equality between police and politics. Rancire defines the notion of police as a symbolic constitution of the social, which defines society as parts by naming an order of intelligible bodies and sensory experiences. Politics, on the other hand, is distinguished from this notion as the partaking in the common. It is the manifestation of dissensus from those who have no part in the polices distribution of the sensible, and the subsequent rupture of the normal distribution of roles, places, and occupations within. What is the significance of space in the unremitting confrontation between police and politics? The distinctive spatiality of Rancires thought makes it compelling for addressing the politics of the socially conscious project, and distinguishing between a police project, which reproduces a consensual space of communitarian interests, and a project that constantly interrogates already-defined social projects

in the name of equity. According to Rancire, the police operate to reproduce consensus by the adulation of communitarianism, which reduces the social to the closure of identity politics. The police further contain politics by defining and appropriating a space of flows, which inherently prohibits a subject-position. The verbal intervention to break up demonstrations, Move along! There is nothing to see, illustrates how the organization of space operates toward the consolidation of police order. For Rancire, the police intervention is less about interpellating individual demonstrators in public space (i.e., the hey, you there of the interpellating cop in Louis Althussers staging2 of how ideology functions). Rather, the police seek to parcel out places and forms of participation in a common world. They are concerned with the definition of a domain of the sensible, a partition between what is visible and what is not, what is say-able and what is not, within that order.3 Move along! There is nothing to see seeks to control the sensible by establishing certain modalities and ranges of perception while denying others. The impossibility of the witness is a necessary apparatus of the police. Political beings whose politic the police do not wish to acknowledge are denied a voice by not understanding what they say, by not hearing that it is an utterance coming out of their mouths.4 Similarly, political spaces whose politic the police do not wish to address are externalized to the banlieue, the hinterland, or the underground. They are dropped into black holes of representation or blurred by the speed of moving along. Rancires thought provides a reading of the social as an anti-political apparatus of

1 Jacques Rancire, Ten Thesis on Politics, Theory and Event 5, no. 3 (2001).

2 Louis Althusser, Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses, in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays (New York: New Left Books, 1971), 163.

3 Jacques Rancire, The Politics of Aesthetics (London: Continuum, 2004), 84. See also, Jacques Rancire, Politics, Identity and Subjectivization, October 61 (1992): 58-64.

4 Rancire, Ten Thesis on Politics, 8.23.

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rule that disciplines disagreement in terms commensurate with an order of intelligible bodies, a distribution and counting of the parts of society. The police, according to Rancire, is the structured embodiment of the common through the process of identification, which, in the name of consensus, categorizes every individual into specific identifiable profilessuch as populations, or communities. Identification is further reinforced with the conflation of social and spatial formations, which tames and naturalizes difference to reinforce consensus. Henri Lefebvre, another protagonist of the 68 events, emphasizes the spatiality of the police by arguing that the exercise of the social is fundamentally a spatial project, for what is an ideology without a space to which it refers, a space which it describes, whose vocabulary and links it makes use of, and whose code it embodies?5 The space of the police, or what Lefebvre refers to as abstract space, dissimulates the violence of its ordering behind a homogeneous appearance which subsumes distinctions into specialized spaces, subdivided into spaces for work and spaces for leisure, into daytime and nighttime spaces.6 The dead end of the political lies precisely in the identification of politics with the body of the community as consensus becomes the suppression of the litigiousness constitutive of the political and identitarianism the flip side of this suppression.7

Move along! There is nothing to see is the assertion that the space of circulating is nothing other than the space of circulation.8 The police parcel out the common in terms of social groups and their respective identities and places. This act, and the carving out of the space of circulation, are an exclusive domain for the polices reinforcement of the distribution of parts. The space of circulation divides into the dynamic and static, into the moving and the still, to ensure a continuous flow. When William Harvey promulgated his ideas on the double circulation of blood in the vascular system of the human body in 1628, the concept began to permeate and infiltrate urbanism and intellectual thought.9 The ideology of circulation associated the modern city with efficient organization and

unimpeded growth of complex networks of flows. To favor the predominance of a frictionless space of circulation, urbanization implied a contract of non-violence, which tended toward the reinforcement of consensus. However, denial by the police of a surplus of community parts inevitably produces remainders from within, against which politics arise. The contours of disagreement, for Rancire, emerge as those who are denied a part in a given order embark in a process of de-classification as a function of an injustice that needs to be addressed. Whereas identification is a reproducible difference at the service of consensus, subjectivization is the process by which the part-with-no-part extracts itself from the dominant categories of identification and classification.10 This struggle necessarily entails a clash between two partitions of the sensible, a noise that the unacknowledged part makes in an embodiment of a capacity of enunciation that was not previously articulated.11 Such political action is neither conflict between one who says white and another who says black, nor a transformation of the processes of exclusion to include those who are discriminated against. Disagreement, for Rancire, is the conflict between one who says white and another who says white but does not understand the same thing by it or does not understand that the other is saying the same things in the name of whiteness.12 The politics of subjectivization is thus less resistance within particular divisions, and more dissensus around the partitioning and control of the sensible.

5 Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space (Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1991), 41.

6 Ibid., 319.7 Jacques Rancire, Dissenting Words: A Conversation with

Jacques Rancire, Diactrics 30, no. 2 (Summer 2000): 113-126.8 Rancire, Ten Thesis on Politics, 8.22.9 Erik Swyngedouw, Circulations and Metabolisms: (Hybrid)

Natures and (Cyborg) Cities, Science as Culture 15, no. 2 (2006): 105-121; Matthew Gandy, Rethinking Urban Metabolism: Water, Space and the Modern City, City 8, no. 3 (2004): 363-379.

10 Rancire, Politics of Aesthetics, 92.11 Rancire, Ten Thesis on Politics, 8.25.12 Jacques Rancire, Dis-agreement: Politics and Philosophy, trans.

Julie Rose (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999).

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Published by Duke University Libraries, in The Emergence of Advertising in America: 1850 1920, 1913.

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Published by Duke University Libraries, in The Emergence of Advertising in America: 1850 1920, 1912.

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Politics consist of transforming the space of circulation into a space for the manifestation of a subject.13 In a divided, streamlined space, bodies move away from their designated parts. The part-with-no-part stands still to assert multiple possible meanings of whiteness. In the process, space is no longer the domain for the reinforcement of a social order but, rather, the apparatus through which politics are engaged. While the space of flows requires protestors to clear the streets, to move along, the act of standing still refigures what there is to do in the streets, what there is to see or to name. The demonstration of rights opens up the politics of the formations of the common, away from the closure of defined social categories. If the social is, above all, a certitude about what is not there, then May 68 was, above all, a massive refusal to see in the social what we usually see: nothing more than the narrowest of identity categories and the reproduction of consensus. In May 68 and its Afterlives, Kristen Ross argues that the identification of the events with the identity or interests of the students, obscures the broader political significance of the uprisings: the events were only loosely tied to a youth revolt and were more concerned with displacements that took people outside of their social identifications, with a disjunction, that is, between political subjectivity and the social group.14 The protestors refused the closure of assigned categoriesbe it based on generation, class, or nationalityand their identification with spatial spheres. So how can Rancires reconfiguration of the political be significant to architectures political project? Can architecture disrupt the closure of social symbols by interrogating the construction of solid social concepts and of fixed or defined subject positions? Can it look precisely into where there is nothing to see to differently represent the common? Michael Hays proposes architecture as a socially symbolic production whose primary task is the construction of concepts and subject positions, a way of negotiating the real, [of] intervening in the realm of symbols and signifying processes at the limit of the social order itself.15 In his call for the science of

the imaginary, Reinhold Martin presents two particularly urgent tasks of the aesthetic and the territorial: the first, which makes the invisible visible, the second which breaks open the enclosure and enclaves that disposes these outside or inside of both political and cultural representation.16 As the propositions by Rancire, Hays, and Martin suggest, architecture can be a process of declassification that disrupts the social significance of places and their correspondence with identity-communities. Architecture can interrogate the assumptions and representations that sustain circulatory flow. Thus, a socially conscious project does not seek to solve inequalities or promote a social character for spaces. It is not caught in the socially relevant categories as defined and reproduced in political circles. Rather, it seeks to challenge existing categories as a process of continuous intervention in the name of equality. This project is fundamentally political at the moment it disturbs the socialized consensual order of solidified social categories by opening the domain of relevant spatial concerns. It brings spaces that were previously erased as insignificant matters of fact into focus as matters of concern.17 Architecture is political when it engages in a quarrel on perceptible givens, calling into question nothing less than the spatial and perceptual organization of our world.

13 Rancire, Dis-agreement, 30.14 Kristin Ross, May 68 and its Afterlives (Chicago: University of

Chicago Press, 2002), 3.15 K. Michael Hays, Architectures Desire: Reading the Late

Avant-Garde (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010): 1. 16 Reinhold Martin, Moment of Truth, Log 7 (Winter/Spring

2006): 15-20. 17 Bruno Latour, Why has Critique run out of Steam? From

Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern, Critical Inquiry 30, no. 2 (Spring 2004): 225-248.

***Rania Ghosn is an architect, geographer, and currently Assistant Professor of Architecture at the University of Michigan. She completed a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship at Boston University, and holds degrees from American University of Beirut, University College London, and Harvard University. She has taught at a number of schools and has written for a variety of journals, including New Geographies where she is Founding Editor. Her research explores nature, technology, and power, highlighting the territorial domain of infrastructure, particularly that of energy.

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Emerging at the confluence of order, agency, and socio-spatial formation is the architectural question of flow. Invoked from the genetic and molecular levels to wide-scale socio-economic processes, material logics, and natural formations, flow is at once formal, material, operational, environmental, and ex-periential. It is seen to arise in various forma-tions and systems, ranging from building and climatic to environmental and informational. In the dictionary, flow is defined as a continuous stream of something, or as a being swept along according to some set of forces. In discussions of capitalisms operations, flow is invoked to describe the movement of informa-tion, money, and trade. In psychology, flow is defined as an energized focus, or the mental state of operation in which the person is fully immersed in what he or she is doing. In a state of flow, the emotions are not simply contained and channeled, but positive, energized, and aligned with the task at hand.1 In architecture, flow is described in opposition to rationalized or stable forms, producing, instead, non-stable geometries that are difficult to pin down or solidify. Following this thinking, flow is in-voked in a range of architecture practices as overcoming entrenched dichotomies including those between object/field, container/con-tained, and nature/culture. Whereas psychology has clearly defined flow as a mental state, the complex position-ing of architecture as process, design, material manifestation, spatial organizer, form of inhab-itation, and so on, compounds the ambiguities in flows architectural use. To begin, what is it that flows? Is it the material or the inhabitants that are flowing? Is it that which directs and structures space or the space itself? Or is it the experience of the space? These unanswered questions arising around the construct of flow leave it unclear whether architectures materi-ality forms flows, or forms channels and mark-ers of flows.

frEE SpEEch

To unpack these issues, consider an idea that became apparent during an architecture review where the concept of flow was in-voked pertaining to people, space, buildings, and landforms. Much of the discussion hinged upon the projects constructing, enacting, and order-ing flows. However, people do not necessarily flow in accordance with designs, and further-more, beyond the specific disciplinary concerns of architecture, there are important instances where flows spatial or architectural applica-tion was invoked, yet unrecognized. For ex-ample, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmess 1919 Supreme Court opinion in which by declaring that the most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man falsely shout-ing fire in a theatre and causing panic,2

he implicitly tied together the limits of free speech to spatial ordering and human behavior. Flow enters here as at the seat of Hol-mess thinking is the image of an ordered mass audience who upon hearing the call fire do not necessarily proceed to flow smoothly and orderly out of the rows of seating. Instead, they potentially erupt in all directions, perhaps crushing others on the way. In this example, the architectural space imagined as a prop for the decision combines with the issue at stakethat of the limits of free speechto define associations between action and space of action. This is not merely coincidental as, along with the Holmes decisions reliance on flow and architectural space, one of the hallmarks

1 Proposed by Mihly Cskszentmihlyi, the positive psychology concept has been widely referenced across a variety of fields.

2 In this case, the limitation on free speech was employed to deny the petition of John Schenck who had been arrested for distributing pamphlets disputing the legality of the draft during the First World War.

3 See Jesse Reiser and Nanako Umemoto, Atlas of Novel Tectonics (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2006). They are not alone in this, as other architecture practices that employ flow insist on maintaining such distinctions by contending that architecture isand needs to beengaged in real material flows and not what are deemed to be mere representations of them.

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of it and other free speech decisions is the distinction drawn between speech and con-duct, or action. Into this the decision, Holmes tacitlybut fundamentallyadds space, trans-forming the speech-action dichotomy into a speech-action-space trichotomy. Approached this way, the Holmes exam-ple brings to the fore architectural construc-tions that have been collapsed within practice. In particular, it highlights distinctions between the understanding of architecture as physical form or material presence, and architecture as container and director of space and action. This duality becomes apparent in two strate-gies repeatedly used by architecture practices that develop flow. In both strategies, the con-struct of flow aspires toward the development of order. The first strategy entails importing outside models of flowfrequently from nature and the sciencesinto architectural design. In addition to the transfer of materials and disciplines, the imported models harbor complex dialogs between physical and social processes. While such dialogs are inherent to architecture, when articulated through the interchange with outside models, they provide an explicit basis for architectures critical rela-tions to society. This is to say that by explicitly incorporating outside models of flow, architec-ture makes manifest social and epistemological formations along with material and spatial ones. This occurs, for example, in the work of Zaha Hadid when parametricism is related to natural systems such as swarms and avant-garde styles are seen as analogous to scientific paradigms. The second strategy frequently imple-mented is to employ flow to turn back on architecture and dismantle its own entrenched dichotomies. While flows channeling of ma-terials and energies suggests containment, its ability to transmute and transform boundaries (i.e., to make boundaries fluid) simultane-ously harbors the potential to dismantle the strict boundaries constitutive to dichotomies. Flow achieves this dismantling by connecting components of architectural space: its forma-

tion, ordering, occupation, and experience. In order to rethink how boundaries are formed, navigated, and functioning, architectural mod-els of flow oscillate seamlessly between what had been previously conceived as dichoto-mous positions, as between being container and contained, between director of space and operations, and being directed and operated. In Atlas of Novel Tectonics, Jesse Reiser and Nanako Umemoto highlight this potential by pointing to a series of dichotomies tradition-ally germane to the definition of architecture that are dismantled through flow, including that between container and contained, and between object and field. Yet while Reiser and Umemoto employ flow to subvert this set of dichotomies, they uphold associated onesnotably that between the real and the meta-phorical.3 This, however, opposes the thrust of flows processes by locating and delimiting architecture to previously conceived, clear compartments that hide or suppress inherent contradictions. If unleashed, such dismantling brings with it the potential to mix material-ity with form, materiality with behavior, and materiality with representation. Consequences of this intermixing are apparentif not always acknowledgedin the past decades preoc-cupation with new forms of mass production, hybrid categories, and monsters. Through such processes, flow sets the stage for archi-tecture to enter into a range of broader socio-epistemological constructs that follow in and through its spatial and systematic ones.

Spatial formationS The Holmes opinion was rendered during the same period in which the rise of the mass-es began to be theorized in terms of their spa-tial, aesthetic, and socio-political implications. Holmess issuance itself codifies and responds to the development of the masses within a so-cio-spatial system. Socio-spatial images appear in