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Form and Informality (how do you do?)

by Pia Ednie-Brown and Paul Minifie

"Composition is less a critical thought project than an integrally experienced emergence. It is a creative event."1 Brian Massumi

“A life that cannot be separated from its form is a life for which what is at stake in its way of living is living itself.”2 Giorgio Agamben

informality one Not long ago, when people wanted to meet (for a drink, for instance) they would always have to agree on a place and time and stick to that plan. Now, it is possible to nominate a general time and area and, knowing that they will be heading in each others general spatio-temporal vicinity, can use mobile communication devices to meander toward the desired intersection. Enmeshed connective possibilities makes the physical space of the city somehow more indeterminate, elastic.

informality two For those of us old enough to remember, the process of writing has been transformed since the personal computer. No more scribbling out and rewriting. No more typing up and formatting only after it’s been written. On the one hand we can more easily rewrite, over write, recompose, polish. On the other hand when writing and making it public happens in the same set of gestures (sms, email, wiki, blogging etc) there is an intensified informality. The ‘properness’ of the text breaks down as writing tends toward the immediacy of speaking. Graffiti and notes passed furtively during class gave us these qualities, but information technology allowed it to spread like a contagion. The gap between composition and exposure folds inward.

These two micro-examples are indicative of bigger cultural sensibilities that move away from the need to fix things rigidly in place. Fluid and shifting negotiations increasingly define the doing of most things. How you get to the desired destination requires less pre-assumed relations, less readymade associations, less pre-fixed arrangements. Process and outcome have fallen into one another with heightened powers of malleability. As part of this, contemporary accounts of how-the-world-works are framed around systems with emergent, living properties: responsive, decentralised, self-perpetuating networks demonstrating activity to which no simple cause and effect relations can be attributed. Amidst broad cultural movements, designing is one activity increasingly infused with these qualities.

For architecture it is not simply the act of designing that begins to embody different degrees and kinds of variation, it is also that which is designed. Informality, or a sense of the in-process, becomes more intensively poised within the ‘finished’. This issue is at work in the experiential, proprioceptive dimensions of curvilinear architectures. The affective operations of form are not discussed enough. In 1886 Heinrich Wölfflin expressed surprise that this issue had been so little explored. We now have reason to be even more surprised.

Formalism has become something of a dirty word, tending to mean a facile or empty focus on ‘shaping’ things. It is true that empty gestures are quite common. But there is a radical difference between a gesture that only mimics a surface appearance and one which gathers and synthesises a myriad of concerns and intentions, sensations and implusions into an idiosyncratic moment of coming into being. Such a wave of movement is full with affective thickness, with “integrally experienced emergence”. Form is an expression of relations and these relations are nothing if not experiential. New architectures struggle with new relations. They are striving to express, somehow coherently, the “global reordering of the whole of culture, in its relation to nature”.

It is where and how architecture poignantly engages with these contemporary tendencies that interest us. In a general sense, this defines our SIAL stream: research into the conditions and properties of design practice in relation to the current reorientations of the world.

Technique

“Artistic and architectural technique do not just fabricate forms. They re-compose the relation of form to space to colour to movement; of vision to tactility to proprioception. ... ...They compose a variation on the world: on its relationality, or manner of holding, processually, together. Technique carries transformative force. The successful introduction of a new technological medium triggers a global reordering of the whole of culture, in its relation to nature."3 Brian Massumi

Technique refers to particular methods of execution or procedure in achieving a given outcome or manipulating an artistic medium. Foregrounding architectural technique is a way of establishing what moves are made in order to create a work. It de-emphasises evaluations of the legitimacy of particular outcomes, or the values certain architectures have come to acquire.

Particular techniques make a kind of sense in a given building. It is through the ways of making that the concerns of the project are made apparent.

Technique is not the same as discourse or critique. Technique can only refer to things that reside within the project. It is only through techniques that a concern can come to be expressed by the project. They establish relationships between different kinds of things. These relationships describe what might be thought of as a design space. A project represents one possible outcome within this space.

It is easy to recognise a project produced within a well established architectural design space, and to value it for the skill with which it composes relations within that space. It’s not so easy to comfortably recognise the ‘being-established’. Rather than remain in the comfort zone of the known, we are interested in projects that struggle with establishing the dimensions and contents of design space itself. An exploration of technique is a primary way of both establishing new relations and navigating the struggle.

Only certain things can be bought into relation by a given technique. Other things just can’t enter into the logic of those relations. Across the breadth of a project, multiple techniques are required. Relations between techniques become as important as relations within them. Composition is the art of relations, technique is the science of them.

Through apprehending a project one grasps the relations that comprise the design space from which it emerged. It is possible to imagine other projects that use that same space of relations. It is also possible to assess the clarity with which a given project establishes the key aspects of that particular design space. This clarity is established by the way particular techniques have been deployed.

The Character of Relations

"The single ways, acts and processes of living are never simply facts but always and above all possibilities of life... Each behaviour and each form ... always retain the character of a possibility: that is, it always puts at stake living itself."4 Giorgio Agamben, ‘Forms of Life’

All tools, techniques and media provide the productive resistances, disjunctions, translation problems, gaps and bumps through which ‘the how’ improvises. This improvisation is how ‘the how’ becomes (emergently) generative.

Of key importance is the manner with which things are performed, rather than simply the act of performing something. One doesn’t just act, one acts with attitude and direction. That attitude and that direction become clearer as they are performed, and their effects calibrated through interact with the world. Practice doesn’t make perfect, it makes sense of the imperfections. In other words, it builds character.

As Peter Ryan’s project wryly commented (repeatedly), doing one’s major project is “a character building experience”. It emerges through process - a process of repeated acts of formal output. This output occurs through experiments with techniques and their compositional relations. The manner of the techniques and compositional tendencies is integral to the character that emerges. You can only develop character for a project by not being afraid to put out (or expand the design space). Character building is to elaborate tendencies of variation, through variations upon a refrain. Character is sensed quality or when qualities ‘make sense’. Certain arrangements of qualities are more vivid, more sensible, than others. Apprehending and interrelating qualities is the real ‘object’ of designing.

Given the conditions in which design is here being situated, analytical techniques and methodologies can’t be pre-design activities. You can’t do a character analysis until you’re performing that character. Analysis is inseparably folded into process and technique. There are no assumed bed rock foundations or deterministic precursors. As such, there is an acute need for design guides that are heuristic, vague or indeterminate which, via technique and an apprehension of an emergent configuration of relations, become increasingly discernable and sensible.

Making Sense

“A crucial term here is "sense of", as distinct from "concept of" or "knowledge of" or "awareness of" a self or other. The emphasis is on the palpable experiential realities of substance, action, sensation, affect and time. Sense of self is not a cognitive construct. It is an experiential integration."5 Daniel Stern

Projects can be more or less coherent. Degrees and kinds of coherence are related to degrees and kinds of composition. Composition is an act of forging coherent articulations of relational configurations. Composing makes sense of significant relations. Once formed, one has a sense of the composition of something.

Design practice doesn’t follow straight lines of action, even if partially streamed by them. At some stage we asked this question: how do you offer students a structure through which to work, or at least begin developing a project, when we don’t believe in ready-made structures, pre-defined limits or methodologies? How do you encourage and foster emergent, relationally acute approaches while also providing some tangible ground?

Amidst questions like these, we began discussing the idea of a ‘sense map’: a kind of design space or field within which to construct relations. We asked students to gradually, through various modes of research, generate the following clusters of influences, parameters and qualities:

Design projects take on a life of their own when, and only when, they manifestly embody a density of relations both within and between the clusters in a way that generates a tensile, vibrant sense of coherence (or a sense of the project’s self). When this happens, projects ‘make sense’ in a way that is more fulsome than any words can apparently encompass.

Like smoke curlicues rising from a cigarette in still air, the pattern of movement all ‘makes sense’ as a set of interrelated gestures that momentarily signal a coherence. You can just feel it. By having lived successfully in the world, you can directly apprehend, discern the relations between a myriad of movements. Without that feeling, you can’t think it through clearly (as has been argued by Lakoff and others, this is how mathematics was developed). Thinking and feeling assemble each other. Developing a convincing thesis in the creative arts requires this interlacing.

Pre-major is the time in which the ‘sense map’ or ‘design space’ is developed, but this is should not be a pre-design activity. It can only successfully gather depth through repeated acts of formal output directed towards producing a coherent project. As the project emerges out of it, the design space/field continues to build up throughout the duration of the thesis. We draw in and out of it. This field changes as we move along, as the project develops. It is an atmosphere that is subject to weather changes.

Delimiting the Conditions of Emergence

The SIAL stream explores ways of doing-thinking-feeling as part of design practices. In a world where the emergent qualities of events are recognized as a kind of order (out of chaos), computers can’t ‘cause’ anything on their own (eg. nurbs software doesn’t cause curvilinear form). They are, however, an indisputably crucial parameter. Digital computation is too significant a part of contemporary cultural activities, operations, capabilities and conceptual schemas to be left out of the general foreground of our research equations. Similar digital techniques underlie production across media, and the operational infrastructures of the world. This commonality of technique draws together the relations through which we increasingly understand the world and live our lives. By deploying these techniques within a project these underlying relations are apprehended.

This, however, doesn’t mean that all projects actively research the potential of digital computation as part of design techniques. Some students in our stream use computers very minimally, or as little more than a representational-presentation tool for which they are conventionally used. It all depends on each student’s particular entanglements in the eddies of SIAL’s non-linear streaming.

Because of the ‘mystery’ and newness of many digital techniques, the past decade has seen many groping, fumbling and blind statements regarding their value and deployment. Often ‘the digital’ has operated as a kind of mask - a mute face that conceals a series of disjunctive or blindly composed relations (or non-relations). Masks are often used in conditions of uncertainty, anxiety and insensitivity. The history of architectural discourse teems with maskings.

There are those who see these masks as improper departures from the proper limits of architectural discourse, being external, false props rather than internally true supports. They see these external props as a gesture of false legitimisation. While this may sometimes be approximately true, this complaint only touches upon secondary or derivative issues and is itself a mask and masks the important questions.

That which tends not be recognised in the above claims is that techniques enable integrative (rather than disjunctive) moves beyond discursive boundaries. Geometry, for instance, describes the limits of relationships between building components. It can also describe the limits of relationships between components in any other kind of artefact. The rules of geometry do not function as an external discursive field bought in to ‘legimate’ a project, they simply do what geometry does anywhere: provide a system of coherence for the articulation of relations; as a way of organising and relating material. It is not a calling down of authority unless you are not using it for what it does. How the articulations of a particular geometrical technique meets with other techniques and concerns of other techniques is crucial. The deployment of relations between techniques involves a careful weighing of the way certain relationships may be emphasised. This is an issue of composition. We would argue that for composition to escape being a thin, stiff mask concealing poignantly incoherent, insensitive or loose relations, it must work on a level of relationality that cannot be necessarily fixed to any specific discursive field.

A key issue is that questions regarding the authorisation or legitimisation of architectural projects are far less interesting, pertinent or useful to the problem of design than asking to what degree has a project become a discernible thing. This ability to be coherently discerned (to be felt or clearly sensed) resides necessarily, but not completely, within the object. That which is embodied in the object is it’s sensibility - it’s ability to sense or engage with ‘the world’. That which is, by necessity, not contained in the object is the very engagement that it virtually embodies; it’s potential and the character of its relations.

Buildings that we consider exemplary usually establish new relations (ie. establish a design space from which new relations are possible) and express them in a particularly vivid way. They have a viability (a capacity to live) within the conditions of their emergence.

A pool of exemplary buildings often function to define that which is understood to constitute the limits of architecture at some point in time or from some point of view. Like law, precedent can be seen to define the limits of action. The fact that something already exists gives it an additional quality, the ability to be a model or referent. We imagine that at some point it established a viability without this quality being present. Models and referents did not always exist, but at some stage came into being. We are interested in exploring these conditions of emergence. By insisting on restricting action to those pre-defined limits we are required to work continually within the design spaces already established, and as that space becomes more and more populated by other projects, the possibility of vital expressions within that space decline.

Instead of emphasising the inertia of pre-defined design space, we propose that the conditions (the design space) from which exemplary projects emerged can be reactivated through other emergent design spaces. By experimenting with techniques and their composed actions we can explore the potential for architecture to forge generative engagements with contemporary reorientations.

/Giorgio Agamben, Means Without End. Notes on Politics, Vincenzo Binetti and Cesare Casarino (trans), Theory Out Of Bounds, Vol 20, University of Minnesota Press, 2000, p 4./

/Daniel Stern, The Interpersonal World of the Infant. A View from Psychoanalysis and Developmental Psychology, Basic Books, 2000, p. 71./