Grounds for Dispersal

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16: HARDSoft CoolWARM… Gender in Design, plus Classic Books Part II

Essay

Another big blue jug of tequila and triple sec arrives at the table, ice cubes clattering, vapor condensing over it like a weather front. Pete says how great to be in Texas now the margarita’s here. Natasha says where’s the warning sign? She says that everything in Texas has a warning sign! Anna raises her glass and says we must toast ourselves. If we do it loudly enough, she says, we might get famous.

Days with the New Generation

Why should we want to be famous? Has it become a reflex? For the last thirty minutes the four of us have been wisecracking about celebrity. We have identified something we call “deep celebrity,” which seems almost like feudalism. Remember Malvolio in Twelfth Night?¹ Deep celebrity is a state of being not unlike greatness, but unlike greatness, we aren’t born to it and we don’t achieve it. Celebrity is all thrust. And because we are architects sitting around this Texas barroom table, Rem Koolhaas is the lode of celebrity for us. We agree that his keen incandescence will be in history as influential as Corb’s bruising declamatory and Mies’s apocalyptic bankability. Koolhaas already carries the single syllable by which he will be known even when he is dead. Pete says Rem is an acronym for “reinvent every moment” as well as “rapid eye movement.” Anna says it’s for “random evil massacres.” And then Natasha, her innocent Dutch face tanned chestnut by her wanderings in the Big Bend State Park, asks, how will Rem die? Corb drowned, what happened to Mies? What will happen to Rem?

Perhaps a thrombosis from all those South East Asia long hauls, I suggest. But then Anna says he probably wears those special socks for circulation—which prompts a speculation so lurid I’ll have to spare you the details. Write the story! says Pete. Hey—we’ll put it on the web, says Natasha. They’re serious. They say they will set it up when they get back to Holland, and I will write it in episodes like Charles Dickens used to do, a few paragraphs a week. Publicity will be slivers of paper saying www.koolhaasisdead.nl depositied on evey café table in Rotterdam. What a great project, we agree in our tequila delirium. Limp Biskit explodes on the jukebox. And we call for another big blue jug.

Two days later, I get an email from Anna. The web name “www.koolhaasisdead.nl” is already taken by somebody else! What’s going on?

I am setting out here to describe something I’m not even sure I’ve seen. I think I have: through the clamor of contemporary architectural practice, I think I have glimpsed the despair of the Vietnam generation, my own, finally boiling itself off. The attempts to be heroic are evaporating. And there behind the steam are our sons and daughters, born just after the last helicopter lifted off that embassy roof in Saigon; there they are smiling and laughing, broken free of imperatives, camouflaged in nicknames, working the gift economy like new Athenians.

So what about celebrity? Is it market forces at work, or a confirmation of democracy? Democracy is our prime model of action, but when everyone’s equal, it’s hard to tell the difference between each other. The ancient Greeks, who invented the problem with their new technology of the majority vote, invented the answer as well. Competition is the way to illuminate difference. It’s Olympian—if you set up a race, you’ll get a winner.

Democracy is so simple in execution and so complicated in its ramifications. One moment the polls are stalled by the lowest turnout ever—is that apathy or abstention?—and the next the streets are full of demonstrators protesting against globalization—is that direct action or anarchy? One difficulty now, as we struggle to be multicultural, is that democracy is not a vehicle for representing minorities. Democracy is a majority thing. In colonial times the problem was how to give equal shares of a fixed commodity—hence the clockwork, hence the self-evident truth. In industrial times, the problem was how to manage unpredictable expansions and contractions of process, hence the combustion and the socialism. But now, in our automated condition, when everything is everything,² the problem is how not to trip each other up as we flash past the nodes of the networks.³ How do we enable our clumsy, representational, remotely activated version of democracy to handle the continuous ocean of automation technologies? Is that what the bubbles of celebrity breaking the surface are—navigational beacons?

In his five hundred square feet of West Village floor space, which accounts for sixty percent of his salary as an architect, my young-enough-to-be-my-son friend Robert lives out a struggling artist scenario, his New York life wallpapered by magazines. His position is minimalism plus—plus irony. He shows me his El Croquis of Sejima/Nishizawa—“Jap beauty merchants” he calls them—and his book of Baumshlager & Eberle— “glaring Austrian rectangle meanies”—and those funny little picture books put out by Future Systems of Jetson-like experiments. Gigon and Guyer, Shigeru Ban—he is up to his ears in this stuff. His ambition is to be up there, to do it himself. I assume this is just another case of corruption by celebrity. I try to tell him I think the images are just so much smoke, that he won’t find himself by sniffing at other men’s flowers, but his reply makes me feel like an old hippie. “Everything’s an image. Images are not mirages in our heads—images are constantly acting and reacting on each other, producing and consuming. There’s no difference between images, things, and motion.”

The limbs of the Walking City are full of the dead bodies of children who’ve fallen through rips in the gaskets, I think to myself.⁴ What he just said is a paraphrase of Deleuze, and I’ve heard it used this way before.⁵ The first time, it reminded me of Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons,⁶ but this time, because of the stern way it’s put to me, it reminds me of the incident that made me recognize this new architectural culture in the first place. It was in Austin, at the University of Texas School of Architecture: a lecture by an eminence on the prickly subject of Peter Zumthor. The eminence said that minimalism was the true descendant of modernism, and that Zumthor, by pursuing an additive construction in his bath house, had proved himself to be a superficial stylist and unworthy compared to Herzog & de Meuron, who stripped things down to their constructional essence and were therefore the true torch carriers. Then one of the students said, with the measured breath of a sniper training a rifle, that reductive procedures didn’t just stop, they went on stripping down until there was nothing left—H & de M were good not because they had refined the essence of modernism, but because they were figurative artists. That’s why they are minimalists—“Their buildings are figurative of Nothing.” I swear the eminence’s head fell off, in front of the whole crew. He picked it up and put it back on again, but it went on crooked. I just stood and gaped. This simple observation erased half a century of tortured argument about style and function like Agent Orange did leaves in the jungle.

So what is the new torture? As usual with architecture, I think, a trip to Italy would be revealing. As Fanny Burney put it, back in 18th-century, neo-Palladian England, “Travel is the ruin of all happiness! There’s no looking at a building here after seeing Italy.”⁷

A student trip to Milan. Among our number was the sniper. It rained the entire five days we were there. We arrived on a late October afternoon having flown across the Swiss Alps in bright sunshine. We saw the blue crescent of Lake Geneva with its little tiny smudge of a fountain, and we saw Mont Blanc slide past the window lit up like a postcard, its deep shadowed flanks looking as grand as the Andes. I remember thinking that somewhere down there Herzog and de Meuron, and Peter Zumthor as well, were all laboring to compress the dust of the world. But then everything changed as we descended into a torrential gray murk that obliterated the plain of the Po. The little Alitalia 320 bucked around like a fishing boat as we hit the clouds, and when we landed we aquaplaned to the jetway in a confusion of spray. We shared a double-decker railcar into the city with a pair of lovers who couldn’t wait to get home, over bridges spanning swollen rivers full of rampaging mud that looked like cinematic metaphors for their passion. We trudged through the rain to the hotel and I sat dripping in my shorts in the sanctuary of my room, listening to the roar of the rain cascading into the courtyard, with a man on the TV news sitting in front of images of fields and villages underwater. Did it ever rain!

We were in Milan to meet Stefano Boeri, the planner and proponent of the elusive subject of “nondeterministic planning.” He is not of this younger generation of whom I write—but as he describes it, when he came to practice his ideas, he found few of his own age who wanted to join him. Perhaps it is simply that he is extremely collaborative, and collaboration is the thief of authorship. Every project he does spins vast webs of cooperation across Europe. In these experiments, for which scores of people come together temporarily and engage in short-term projects, though you have had the best and most instructive experience of your working life, your name is just part of the alphabet in the bottom right-hand corner. How do you make a career out of that?

I should say that by “short term” I don’t mean “lightweight.” If the crest of a wave is short term, what of the deep ocean currents that drove it? What of the shifting demographics, the nomadism, the clang of capital and the rush of war? Europe has it all. Non-deterministic planning of the kind that Boeri does is an attempt to track such currents through their short-term manifestations and to try and engage with them. Hence the collaboration, and the involvement of people who are not professionals; hence the attempt to be architecturally inclusive—the money and the planning and the building and the landscape and the art are all part of the same study. It is the opposite of compressing the dust, if you’ll accommodate my metaphor. And there is nothing minimal about it. This is not Nothing. This is Everything.

Boeri is the mentor to two groups of Italian architects who met as students under his tutelage at Genoa and Turin in the mid 1990s; Boeri himself dislikes the term “mentor”— but as one of these young men explained to me, the fact of Italy’s free university education meant architecture schools of thousands and a pedagogy yelled at the top of the lecturer’s voice to halls packed to the rafters. What a student has to do to survive those conditions is to swim through the chaos and attach himself to a tutor he respects; and so Boeri had found himself the focus of several such souls. They coalesced into two groups that remain in affiliation, once again collaborative to the extent that their projects are anonymously authored; indeed anonymity and collaboration are so much part of the character of what I am trying to describe that I think I should use no names here myself. Except to say that the group from Genoa is called A12, because in the beginning there were twelve of them; the group from Turin is called Cliostraat, after the street in Amsterdam where Duiker’s open-air university building stands.

So there we were in rain-soaked Milan, splashing through the fabulous cemetery and skidding across the marble roof of the cathedral and sheltering in the high-toned splendor of the Galleria. Boeri had arranged for the historian Lucca Molinari to show us the rich vein of postwar buildings in the city. As with most Milanese of a certain age, his cell phone was in frequent action, which interrupted his stride not one jot—he could start a sentence, answer a phone call, and then finish the sentence as though he was surfing the plane of immanence itself. When I mentioned Cliostraat and the possibility of our going to Turin, this gracious, urbane man pulled out the little machine, punched in a number and held it out to me, saying, Here they are! I put the phone to my ear like someone who’s picked up a shell on the beach to listen for the echo of the oceans. Hello, says a voice. This is Cliostraat. And the next morning, with the gray sky still emptying the aftermath of El Niño all over us, we took the train to Turin.

The rain had now so drenched the Alpine valleys to the north that huge mudslides were burying the villages and smashing up the bridges. But the clouds lifted when we pulled into Turin, and it stayed bright while we toured the city with the Cliostraat people who met us off the train. The mysterious xerox of Christ they call the Turin Shroud was on display that week, and the city was packed with pilgrims. In one piazza, the Northern League were putting on a show of peasant songs to monger the Piedmont heritage; above their heads Cliostraat pointed out a huge chrome nipple ring that had been pierced through the wall of a building. This, it turned out, was one of their first “cultural interventions,” from back in 1996. Since then they had been entering and winning competitions with process-oriented projects, and playing ginger to Torinese culture. They are apostolic of professionalism, and call their part-time jobs in architecture offices “dishwashing.”

They took us back to the row of shops they used as a studio. This is important to the collaborative groups in Italy, they explained—they all have a strong relation to the people, hence to the street, hence to the city. In Genoa, A12 had started out as students occupying a disused masonry hulk in the center city and turning it into a cultural event. There is a third group in Rome called Stalker, after the hollow-faced guide in the Tarkovsky movie of that name. They say “Stal-ker,” pronouncing the “l.” Stalker is involved in extra-architectural activity, as all these groups are, but especially in the voice of marginalized people. It has led them to set up occupation in a disused abattoir in Rome called the Campo Boario, right in there among the immigrants and gypsies whose champions they are. They plan a nomadic university that will travel the world. They work with immigrant communities on cultural practices that cannot be translated into the mainstream of spatial discourse because of their strangeness.

At first, while we talked to Cliostraat in their energetic studio full of past and current projects and plywood mock-ups and strings of postcards hanging like cheeses in a deli, this emphasis on location seemed part of the Italian regional impulse, the one where when in Tuscany you drink Chianti and in Piedmont you eat risotto and in Rome you do as the Romans do. But it slowly emerged as something bigger: as an educated response to globalism. You concentrate on your locality, trusting that other people are concentrating on theirs. You count yourself as global, not globalized.

If you took the Earth and skinned it like a bear and laid the skin on the floor, you’d have a map. Is that one thing? Look closer at the bearskin rug. Get down on your hands and knees and you’ll see the wriggling exotica that fill its every follicle. That is not “one thing” down there. That is “everything.”⁸

The only train out of Turin that night sits for three hours in the station, gradually filling up with bedraggled souls until we all feel like refugees. It is the perfect condition for a discussion of fundamentals. We are impressed with the vigor of Cliostraat and these other Italian groups, who have been driven to do what they do to make work for themselves, and in doing so, have discovered what seems like a new way of practice. Their self-generated, uncommissioned, antihegemonic moves that concentrate on the partial, their “not globalized but global,” seem to me a big step forward, but I am told off by the others who point out that we are no longer to speak of steps forward. Things come into being from the symbiosis of collision perhaps, but there is no progress forward. No teleology. No solution to the problems of the world. More than that—solutions are themselves hegemonic, an attempt to curtail movement and limit opportunities for change. Even a change for the better is not about change but about a new stasis.

As the train inches through the night, making long stops at tiny places deep in the center of Italy on its diversionary circuit toward Milan, we young and we quasi-young assert many other things. “Paradise is to ecology what hegemony is to action” is one subject. The world—nature, that is, or the Spinozan plane—does not maintain in a delicate state of balance but in a state of violent rupture, whose apparent balance is an illusion arising out of our own comparative speed. Conservation ecologists are closet creationists, talking about a perfect world that has never existed and will never exist. “Global warming?” we cry, gesturing at the deluge outside the window. It’s just another acceleration, another opportunity for things to change.

Talking to youth is like breathing mountain air. I find the naïveté of it is not a problem, it is enabling. It means they can take for granted what agonizes my contemporaries and me. Multidisciplinary action, information technologies and being global are all second nature to them. They don’t get exercised about the relevance of contemporary art—for them, history is now. They are not partisan about suburbs and city centers—they say cities are going to be complex any way you look at them. And one more thing—it is no longer an issue what things look like. The world is too accumulative to worry about that.

We sit there on the train talking out the possibility of how such groups as Stalker or Cliostraat could survive in the United States, where political culture is far more individuated—far more dispersed and mobile. Perhaps it is, as the sniper suggests, that they will be like the spores of a mushroom. Something like it has already started, they tell me. They call it “Spurse.” They are connected not by location but by group internet mail. Upon graduation they will disperse their separate ways and whoever lights on fertile ground will summon the others for collaboration.

The next day, cruising toward Amsterdam with the pollution trail of the airplane fanning out behind us, the idea that global warming is just another acceleration comes back to haunt me. It was I who said that, not they. It is my own terrible simplification of what this generation has to deal with. I feel irresponsible. There I was, jumping up and down like a puritan intent on rooting out hypocrisy, while these new pragmatists set to work with nail guns and spot welders on reason and material to hold the complexity of the world together. I make the mistake of apologizing, attempting to temper my remarks, but what I get is—relax, man, it’s funny what you say, no one thinks it’s the truth. Let gravity hold complexity together, someone says. He means that it will hold because it’s galactic: everything in outer space—including us—is falling, and nothing can escape the pull of everything. What’s important to someone from planet Spurse, or planet Cliostraat, is to keep moving, so that your action can become part of the change and not a bulwark against it. This is not a belief born of reason but an attitude born of emotion: and it can be added to the anonymity, the collaboration, the inclusiveness and the partiality I mentioned before.

In Amsterdam we visit a planning and architecture practice called MUST. Like most Dutch, they are acronym merchants, but in this case, the name they have chosen—M-U-S-T—is a four-letter acronym without content. It can be whatever you want. “Masters of the Universe, Space and Time,” I suggest, which makes them all laugh. They are Dutch. Everything you say makes them laugh. On their computer screens, they are tracking the movements of contemporary nomads. There are softly tanned surfers who range up and down the Atlantic coast of Europe from Den Haag to Cadiz in fleets of minivans. There are hairy, lip-studded new age travelers trucking down the lay-lines with their canny little children and their ferocious dogs. There are businessmen packing the fifty-seater airliners hopping from city to city in a cloud of cologne. These people are all carrying their architecture with them, MUST tells me. Because down here on the ground, it is neither country nor suburb nor city, but a landscape of voices, in some places more complex than others by virtue of the character and density of the choir. I am bought to a halt by this musical image of the landscape—among the other planar images of architecture, like Rem’s “plane of tarmac with hotspots of urban intensity,” or all those projects with folded plane roofs, it seems to be a picture of plenty. It reminds me of the Celtic musical picture of the world described by David Toop in Ocean of Sound—the islands, the ocean, the birdsong, and the dreams.

When I get back to England, things are not so clear. Culture there is still so weighed down with the residue of the English 19th-century hugeness that everybody, especially the nation’s youth, has to lubricate their movements with irony. Spending time with confident Americans and with freethinking Italians and with laughing Dutchmen has made me feel that I want more than I can have. But then I bump into a young man dressed like a Nazi, with big boots, short trousers, and a shaved head, who is as gentle and thoughtful as anyone in the world I’ve come across. The style of dress is ironic. They call it a London-Thing. But this man is animated and enthusiastic, a European, without a trace of the deadpan that characterized English cultural life twenty years ago. He tells me about his architectural practice; and building is but a fragment of it. Dance promotion, fashion shows, auctions of cult objects, record covers—he is off to L.A. the next day to photograph boys on the streets for a reissue of Cotton Club jazz recordings. It’s a then-and-now idea—Harlem and Watts morphed together. I say it sounds exploitative, not to mention risky, and he laughs and explains that people love having their picture taken. These men will understand that he is one of them, he says. It’s multicultural, he explains, which doesn’t mean ethnic groups living side by side, it means ethnic groups living together. “Don’t look so worried, man. I’ll explain what I’m doing to them and they’ll understand. Did I say living together? Try ‘Coming into Being.’”

It’s more of what you might call “plane speaking.” Yet again, I feel the sloth of the old-fashioned, color-blind liberal democrat in me. Correct politics are simply not fast enough for the world anymore. And his version of multicultural suddenly makes me think about something else—that interdisciplinary vision that some academics have. Is it any more than a way of protecting their departmental funding—their hegemony? What you want to be is multidisciplinary, I say to this young man, and he says, “No, what you want is to have no discipline at all—at Manilow White, we’ll do anything anyone asks us to.” Manilow White? “That’s the name of our outfit,” he says. “It’s the two Barrys.”

Anonymity does not mean without deep contact, it means that the contact has no preempting ceremony. Collaboration, likewise, is the proof of itself. It exists neither before nor after the moment it takes place, except in how it inflects your character. Inclusiveness and partiality are symbiotic, too. If partial is a move taken to outflank hegemony, the inclusive works to recombine differences. The paradoxes implicit in such terms are part of what makes them interesting. I’m trying to elucidate a kind of thinking that is not dialectical, no longer dependent on oppositions, not looking for the right way. As one of the directors of Themepark, a London-based fashion-architecture-photography-landscape combine, said to me: “We are interested in showing content in its pure form.” At first I thought it was a joke, more of that London-Thing irony, but then I thought, what else is the material world but content in its pure form? Today’s photographers, who mistrust the Magnum generation’s point-and-shoot realities, who set up every shot elaborately, who treat landscape, portrait, action and spectacle as the same thing, are not being minimalist. They are positing the velocity of the image.

Back in the Wild West, a peculiar structure appears, a one-brick-thick wall just a few courses high. Overnight and every night some of the bricks are realigned; and as the month goes by, this masonry snake creeps around the Austin campus moved by an invisible hand. The temptation to call it “self-organizing” is great. It seems to be a model of the potential these men and women are looking for. But when they stop, it stops.

The mutations of evolutionary processes are captured at conception—what species mutation that you are has already occurred in you back when you were an egg. After that your poor body has nowhere to go but where you take it. The duration of your life is a model not of change but of commitment. Which brings me back to my beginning. Democracy, that ancient model of action, is an imitation of life, positioned in a universe stricken by the arbitrariness of the gods. It is a way for human societies to sustain themselves through commitment in times of change, acting like an immune system in a body. But it all depends on a society seeing itself as organically whole. The processes that influence these new groups are not bound by such an analogy. Their models of change—their infections, their self organizing systems, their machinic phylum, their plane of immanence—are not of commitment and sustainability but of disjunction and expansion and unrecognizable new forms. The politics they need still needs to be thought up. Is there an artificial democracy to go with artificial life? Or are we looking for maintenance schedules?

Whether any of the people I’m writing about could answer that question is another matter. On the wall of MUST’s studio in Amsterdam is a photograph of the missing member of their group, Alies, whose pregnant naked belly has been exposed to the camera. In black marker, she has written on her skin another solution to the acronym—Making Urban sup.er Talent. She is still part of the group, but she has gone temporarily missing to raise children, and when I heard that at first I thought—how old-fashioned. But look at the politics. What more profound abstention, and what more profound direct action, is there than that?