Plectic Architecture

Professor Neil Spiller of the AVATAR (Advanced Virtual and Technological Architectural Research) group at the Bartlett University College, London talks about his conception of post-digital architecture and his design team’s exploration of architecture from realms as varied as psychogeography, ecology, mnemonics, looking at how all these elements may be taken into account while designing spaces.

Author: Professor Neil Spiller

The practice of architectural design has in the twentieth century been seduced by this impersonal way of documenting and describing science - denying the “I”. Architectural discourse camouflages this lacuna with the myth of the hero architect, visionary genius and beneficent form giver. This approach has throughout the years fostered a Modernist mistrust of narrative, decoration, symbolism and anyone or anything seen to be “self–indulgent” or of expressionist personality. When I design, I make space by putting things together, creating void from mass and mass from void. When I put things together, I like them to do more than one job – to be multivalent. I might like an element to be structural, decorated and change in position related to a predetermined algorithm and that algorithm might be able to fluctuate in time changing its criteria and optimisation logistics. I might construct narratives about the whole or the pieces that allow me to develop deeper and more resonantly complex semiotics. I might like to take the view that my work is part of the “Modernist Project” and that its functionalism includes its symbolic nuances. The conversation between my work and the user/viewer of it (and the ability/inability of the observer to understand and decode my intentions) should be able to evolve in all manner of associations and hierarchies, some considered by me and others not.

Every designer is different and feels that they have something original to bring to their world, solving a problem in an original or idiosyncratic way. No two designers are the same, no two designs the same, no two sites are the same and no two observers or users are the same (and all change over time and have varying durations). These facts have led me to view the world as exceptional, as particular, as a series of cybernetic personal and conversational mnemonic events. My design work within this blooming tapestry should do nothing more than exploit this systematic paradigm and create poetic moments in its interstitial spaces.

So post-digital design must attempt to be immune to sophist arguments of style and good taste. It should rejoice in the particular and the “I” who and whatever is the “I” (We must remember that objects can now become “I” to a growing extent).

Above all, post-digital design is relativistic, glocal, ascalar and constructed from a genius loci that does not just include anthropomorphic site conditions but also includes deep ecological pathways, mnemonics, psychogeography and narrative.

The Continuums of Architectural Composition at the beginning of the twenty-first century

The experience of contemporary designers is one of positioning their work in relation to seven continua. These are:

1. Space – there is a continuum of space that stretches from “treacle” space standing in a field, no computer, no mobile phone, no connectivity whatsoever to full bodily immersion in cyberspace, along the way between these two extremes are all manner of mixed and augmented spaces.

2. Technology - Like space, technology ranges from simple prosthetics (the stone axe) via the Victorian cog and cam, to the valve, capacitor, logic gate, the integrated circuit, the central processing unit, the quantum computer, the stem cell, the nanobot and a million states and applications between and beyond.

3. Narrative, Semiotics and Performance - An architect or designer can choose whether their work operates along a continuum that ranges from minimal engagement in quotation or mnemonic nuance in relation to the history of culture or the contemporary world or embraces the multiplicity of the complex and emergent universes of discourse that we inhabit and engage with daily. A design might conjure new conjunctions of semiotics as a way of re-reading them. It also might integrate itself with human and cultural memory and it might be reflexive and performative (in real time or retrospectively.

4. Cyborgian Geography - A designer now can posit work, which operates in all manner of mixed and augmented terrains that are subject to all manner of geomorphic and cybermorphic factors and drivers.

5. Scopic Regimes - Architecture can exist at all scales, it all depends on the resolution of the scope that one chooses to use - continents, oceans, cities, streets, rooms, carpets, micro landscapes and medico landscape are all part of this continuum.

6. Sensitivity - A designer might decide to make objects, spaces or buildings whose parts are sensitive that pick up environmental variations or receive information. These sensors therefore can make objects and buildings that are influenced by events elsewhere or indeed are influential elsewhere.

7. Time – Time is the most important of these continua. All the above six continua can be time dependant. Therefore, designers can ‘mix’ the movement of their spaces buildings and objects up and down the other six continua. So a design might oscillate the spaces within itself with varying elements of virtuality over time. A design might use different technologies at different times in its existence. A design might perform complex mnemonic tableaux at certain points in its life cycle. A design might demand of its occupants the use of different lens with which to see other than anthropocentric phenomena or spaces. A design might coerce the occupant to be aware of environmental conditions in other locations that change. A design might change the sensitivity of objects over time, dulling them sometimes, making them hypersensitive other times.

In other words, it is the negotiation and understanding of these continua that will give us the opportunity mentally, physically and virtually to create post-digital Plectic architectures. Whilst the description of the continua is necessarily relatively simple, the manifestations of post-digital Plectic architecture are extraordinary and infinite. It is important to illustrate some of its spatial potential.

It is also important to note that I do not include sustainable criteria in my continua for two reasons, any design work done in the twenty–first century must be sustainable in some way and secondly that sustainability should be embedded in all the seven continua – they cannot exist without issues of sustainability and indeed ethics.

For millennia the simple act of building has been in essence one of destruction or at very least ecological truncation and rearticulating. Things and relationships are lost and others formed. A post digital Plectic Architecture needs to buck the entropic trend and it needs to be smart enough to comprehend and respond, if required, to the myriad of natural and artificial ecologies within which it sits. Architects need to also understand that architecture must be bedded into a landscape of ecology that far exceeds the boundaries of any specific site, country, and continent and it is the spatial manipulation of the relationships in these ecologies that their architecture resides. Architects must understand, appreciate and design within the subumption imperative of flora, fauna, machines and networks and their architecture capable of husbanding the forces of bio- chemistry, virtuality, movement patterns, the seasonal and diurnal and even millennial perturbations, accommodate and rearticulate slow and abrupt phase changes of sites and landscapes.

The following projects are a knot of positions utilising the continua described above and are gleaned from work conducted by the AVATAR (Advanced Virtual and Technological Architectural Research) group at the Bartlett, University College London. I present them here as harbingers of the future for Plectic Architecture.

Rebooting Natural Ecologies

Since the Industrial Revolution bulk manufacturing processes have polluted and torn the delicate inter-relationships of the natural world. Those natural relationships set in particular fitness landscapes, geomorphic and economic conditions can create local rituals, cuisine and indigenous variations of animals and plants. Massimo Minale’s project is situated in the French Carmarque and aims to optimise the indigenous fish populations. He does this by using four differently scaled sonic devices, each type used in varying clusters to guide fish to various aquatic environments that suit the various stages of their life cycle - all within the water bodies of the Carmarque. The project has diurnal, seasonal and yearly time cycles. It was inspired by Minale’s earlier research into micro sound. Under the skin of the musical note lies the realm of micro sound, of sound particles lasting less than one-tenth of a second. Recent technological advances allow us to probe and manipulate these pinpoints of sound, dissolving the traditional building blocks of both music and more importantly architecture into a more fluid and supple medium. Whole sites, from the rasping drone of a car's exhaust to the flicker of a fly's wing, can be granulated down into points, pulses, lines and surfaces. Particle densities evaporate and mutate into one another giving birth to fluid landscapes, spanning across continents.

Harnessing the Growth Imperative

Christian Kerrigan’s work is predicated on the fact that if one puts metal corsets around growing trees it encourages timber to grow that has a higher density and therefore it can be more effectively used to construct things. This extreme bonsai technique can utilise other technologies such as nanotechnology that can create within sections of trees, a sort of Purist composition of objects growing and harvestable as yet unseen. In short, the project harvests the growth imperative of trees, particularly a yew tree copse (the subject of an extensive technical treatise), to grow a ship. This was a project that had a two hundred year life span as the copse/ship/launching pier grew. This achieved, he then sought to understand and choreograph the effect that a radical brief change would have on his system. So, if we said around year one hundred and fifty, the ships use became of no use but we needed to harness our system to excavate an obelisk, how might this be achieved, using the partially formed ship’s timbers? How would the system rearticulate itself to achieve new ends? So, from a theoretical point this project is about a synthesis of the natural and the artificial and the potential of an architecture of parts that makes another architecture - An architecture before an architecture fuelled by the natural power of growth.

Mnemonics and the Ghost in the Machine

Lena Anderson’s work attempts to create an architecture resonating with memory utilising the Art of Memory and the second order cybernetics of memory. It also utilises a range of technology to create its allusions, ambiences and minute vibrations. Her family owns a very dilapidated, empty house in Sweden. But it has had a rich and varied history as farmhouse, doctor’s house and granny’s house. Anderson set about designing a series of small, subtle architectures that hint at past events and interactions. The pieces were composed of simple domestic utensils, spoons, bowls and bottles or pieces of plough or a doctor’s ancient blood transfusion unit. All the arrangements of pieces were given a little power by wind catchers in the adjacent wood. This enables them to subtly change position over long periods of time. These mnemonic micro architectures exist in Rembrantian shadow until occasionally highlighted by a redirected sun’s ray.

Nano Re:creation

Glen Tomlin’s research was interested in the myriad vectors and spaces that are never seen or appreciated that are generated as a side effect of the creation of a recognised masterpiece, in this case of Picasso’s ‘Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1909). To do this he utilised nanotechnological implants at an artist’s wrists, elbow and shoulder. So as the work was in progress three other nested “paintings” were generated. Simultaneously, such nanotechnological devices could also act as preventative medical sensors, sensing the health of the user’s bone marrow, blood constitution, muscle fibre and nervous system. The project, again backed up with extensive technical and medical analysis, reveals a series of architectural spaces that could be provoked, interacted with or used to drive other architectures.

Anamorphism and Hypertext

Melissa Clinch uses ideas of architectural anamorphosis to create a series of spaces and semiotics that inhabit that great exposition of anamorphic painting, the Ignatius of Loyola Church in Rome. The church has an anamorphic painted ceiling and an extraordinary painted anamorphic dome. From certain positions in the nave the dome looks perfectly real in others is reveals it for what it is a distorted painted form on the ceiling. Clinch positioned three-dimensional forms within the church that create fluctuating architectural spaces according to the dynamics of the observer. These spaces open and collapse as one moves and help the viewer understand the science of anamorphic projection and also the rituals and history of the church. These objects operate like four-dimensional hypertexts.

The Biotechnology of Breakfast

Sacha Leong polemic project focuses on the potential of bioengineering to become ubiquitous and everyday. His project is an artful mix of the scientific with the quotidian domestic. Basically, Leong explores a near architectural future where the technologies of biochemistry are as common and unremarkable as making breakfast. Breakfast after all, is a biotechnological experiment practised time and time again. Leong then creates a lexicon of elements that can function as breakfast utensils and biotechnical laboratory equipment. The project asks what is unusual anymore? Are we not indistinguishable from the advanced processes we manage to manipulate? What is normal for humanity now? Are we all not biotechnological engineers?

The spaces of Literature

Martha Markopoulou’s research project focuses on the inquiry of the possible relations between language and architecture and it is based on the novel “Salammbô” by Gustave Flaubert (1862). It is research on how an architectural system could embody a novel’s narrative and syntax and how we could construct a physical reality out it. It is an attempt to conceive architecture as the physical body of a “fluid text”. The project consists of a series of softly oscillating devices that translate in space and time the conditions found in the narrative, concerning points of view, change of direction, speed, perspective and scale. The barbaric aesthetic aims to reveal the exotic beauty that exists in Salammbo’s world of literature.