Liminal Landscapes

LLiminal Landscapes

Liminal LandscapesPost-Humanist Heterotopian Urbanism

Richard Cotter

Master’s Degree Project

Completed in Partial Fulfilment of the Master of Architecture Degree in the Faculty of Environmental Design at the University of Calgary

Supervisor: Joshua M. Taron [Assistant Professor, Faculty of Environmental Design]

External Advisor: Thomas Debicki [Principal, Debicki Speta Design]

For Cattive, MoMo, and Luna. We can always meet again in dreams.

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Thank you Josh and Thomas for your guidance and support over the last twelve months and throughout this degree.

Thank you Mom, Dad, and Aylish for loving me unconditionally.

Thank you Adam, Alison, Anna, Chris, Kyle, Mike, Shalisha, and Tyler for joining me on the journey of a lifetime.

Thank you to all of my ‘civilian’ friends and family for your understanding. Sorry for disappearing for the past four years.

Thank you Craig and Chris for all of your help and sage advice.

Thank you (again) Adam for putting up with me on all of our joint projects over the years.

Sincerely,

Richard Cotter B.A., M.Arch.

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Abstract

‘Only Connect…’1

In the context of an increasingly autocratic society of control, architecture’s apocryphal

claims to the emancipation of life through the mechanism of public space must be challenged

if the discipline is to survive as a critically and politically relevant cultural apparatus.

Through a series of digitally-enabled investigations into the synaesthetically affective

capacity of horrific form (and its imaging), this Master’s Degree Project argues for a radical

reordering of architectural thought and practice, a reordering that would emancipate

architecture from the artificial strictures of reason and deliver it to a liminal space where

it might work to redistribute power through populations in order to resist the suppression

and subjugation of life itself.

In order to achieve such a shift, the project seeks to weaken the fallacious notion that the

individual human subject constitutes the most effective unit for navigating and intervening

in an incomprehensibly complex world.

The work is organized into a prologue, five ‘acts’, an epilogue, and a series of appendices that

‘flesh out’ the project proper. The limitations of documenting the project demand a somewhat

linear approach, but the work in this document consistently chases the temporal fluidity of

cinema as a means of cultivating ambiguity and ambivalence. Like a Francis Bacon portrait, it

is a narrative that tells no story.

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Bare Life, Biopolitics, Heterotopia, Identity, Post-Humanism, Liminality, Speculative Realism, Subjectivity, Sovereign Power, Vital Weakness

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Endnotes

1 ‘Only Connect…’ is the epigraph of E.M. Forster’s novel Howards End.

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001...........................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................Prologue

009.................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................Act 01: Contextual Introduction

023....................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................Act 02: Situating Heterotopia

031.........................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................Act 03: Precedents

041............................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................Act 04: Technique

067..........................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................Act 05: Case Study

087............................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................Epilogue

093......................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................Appendix A: Orthographic Drawings

105......................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................Appendix B: Site Evolution Diagrams

111......................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................Appendix C: Construction Techniques

117............................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................Appendix D: ARP Critique

121....................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................Appendix E: Outtakes

151..................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................Appendix F: Physical Modeling

153..................................................................................................................................................................................................................................Appendix G: 2012 MDP Show Gallery Exhibition

155....................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................Bibliography

159...............................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................Image Citations

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‘…It is this last cause of the grotesque which we have to finally consider; namely, the error

and wildness of mental impressions, caused by fear operating upon strong powers of

imagination, or by the failure of human faculties in the endeavor to grasp the highest truths…

The grotesque which comes to all men in a disturbed dream is the most intelligible example

of this kind, but also the most ignoble; the imagination, in this instance, being deprived of

all aid from reason, and incapable of self-government. I believe, however, that the noblest

forms of imaginative power are also in some sort ungovernable, and have in them something

of the character of dreams; so that the vision, of whatever kind, comes uncalled, and will not

submit itself to the seer, but conquers him, and forces him to speak as a prophet, having no

power over his words and thoughts. Only, if the whole man can be trained perfectly, and his

mind calm, consistent, and powerful, the vision which comes to him is seen in a perfect mirror,

serenely, and in consistence with the rational powers; but if the mind be imperfect and ill

trained, the vision is seen as a broken mirror, with strange distortions and discrepancies, all

the passions of the heart breathing upon it in cross ripples, till hardly a trace of it remains

unbroken.’

– John Ruskin1

Ridley Scott’s 1979 film Alien is often cited as one of the most innovative, genre-defying

movies of its time.2 Alien synthesizes elements of both science fiction and horror, producing

a terrifying hybrid that engages implicitly and explicitly with many of the same aspects of the

grotesque touched upon by Ruskin.

In the film, the crew of a deep space mining vessel touches down on an unidentified planet to

investigate a mysterious distress signal. During the investigation, an alien life form attaches

itself to the face of one of the crew members, only to fall off of its own accord once the team

returns to the landing craft. Later, the crew member convulses violently during a meal with

his colleagues and a small creature erupts violently from his chest and then disappears into

the labyrinthine bowels of the ship. The rest of the film is a terrifying game of cat and mouse

wherein all but one of the crew is annihilated by the alien.

The film is successful because it cultivates suspense and a sense of dread by rarely showing

the titular alien in full view (a time honoured tactic in the horror genre). When the creature

does make appearances, it is rendered almost illegible by the dark lighting and ornately

biomechanical claustrophobic passageways and chambers of the mining vessel. The film’s

affective quality is heightened by the fact that the crew is removed by both time and distance

from any conceivable source of assistance. The story unfolds deep in space, where, according

to the film’s byline, ‘no one can hear you scream’.3

Alien pits conventional notions of humanity against the limit condition of human knowledge.

In the film, the crew’s science officer (himself a ‘synthetic human’) expresses admiration for

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the ‘purity’ of the alien, whose complete lack of empathy makes any sort of relation between it

and the crew all but impossible.4 The alien’s impetus for destroying the crew is quite literally

beyond reason, and therefore, horrific.

Yet Alien does not merely confront the limits of what constitutes humanity; it purposefully

violates them. It is this violation of the distinction between the human and the non-human

that speaks to Ruskin’s understanding of the power of the grotesque. In transgressing

the boundaries of the human body through the ‘face hugger’, the ‘chest burster’, and the

gruesome dismemberment of the bodies themselves, Alien calls into question the notion

of an essentialized humanity (see 00.002). Indeed, it is no coincidence that the alien in the

film is a bipedal creature that bears some resemblance to a human body, yet simultaneously

functions as the grossly disfigured inversion of that body (see 00.003) that one might find in

the reflection of Ruskin’s ‘broken mirror’.

While Alien ultimately sides with ‘the human’ (the film’s protagonist blasts the creature out

of the ship’s escape shuttle and into the vacuum of space), it leaves lingering doubts about

the validity of ‘the human’ as a category at all.

Alien does not make any explicit reference to contemporary forms of power or governance,

but it does pose some pertinent questions about the position of life in relation to Ruskin’s

concept of the ‘ungovernable’. In the context of increasingly autocratic societies of

control, nostalgic visions of democracy are being eroded by insidious and diverse forms of

sovereignty5, namely those wherein power is redistributed from central sovereign bodies

and into broader populations. This diffusion of power through populations and into bodies

is simultaneously the mechanism by which those bodies are subjugated, and, paradoxically,

the potential means of their emancipation.

If resistance to asymmetric power structures has historically sided with an aspiration

centered on a desire to achieve a ‘perfect reflection’ of the individual subject in Ruskin’s

‘perfect mirror’, then perhaps the future of resistance lies in embracing Ruskin’s ‘broken

mirror’ and abandoning all claims to self governance. To return to the Alien vignette, perhaps

it is less about ‘the human’ conquering ‘the other’ and more about embracing the horrific

possibility that there is no essence of humanity, and that life itself is the basic category of

existence, or, more appropriately, of becoming.6 As paradoxical as it might seem, it is, perhaps,

only through the dissolution of our own identities through immersion in the unknown and

the horrific that we can ever make ourselves ungovernable.

But how does one embrace the grotesque reflection in the ‘broken mirror’ and remove

oneself from the political order altogether, so as to hasten its collapse?

This Master’s Degree Project (MDP) will examine the myriad of ways in which life7 itself

functions as the primary object of power, and by extension, of architecture. It is this struggle

over the control of life that underpins the governance of our entire species and it is only in

the tumult of this struggle that we have any hope of finding alternatives to hegemonic forms

of power.

In what follows, we will investigate the fundamental (paradoxical) problematic of attempting

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to subtract oneself from positions of oppression through ‘soft’ engagement with the

instruments of oppression themselves. Following the axiom that ‘problems cannot be solved

using the logics that created them’, this project seeks to reposition the logics that imprison

life in the name of power (and through architecture) in order to open the planet (and all life)

up to potential futures beyond those that are inscribed in the current global political order.

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Endnotes

1 Ruskin 1860, 165

2 Alien is ranked no. 7 on the American Film Institute’s ’Top 10 Sci-Fi Films’ and no. 33 on Empire Magazine’s ‘500 Greatest Movies of All Time’.

3 Scott 1979

4 Ibid.

5 In Political Theology Carl Schmitt defines sovereignty as the ability to decide on the exception. This form of power is no longer necessarily vested in a single body, but rather distributed

through populations.

6 Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari write extensively about ‘becoming’ in relation to ‘being’ in their work Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. They argue for an understanding

of life that is rooted not in the illusion of stability, but rather in the embrace of its volatile, transitory character.

7 In this project, the term ‘life’ should be understood in terms of the concept of ‘whatever life’ articulated by Eugene Thacker in ‘Biological Sovereignty’.

‘Whatever life’ suggests that reductionist, biological ‘life itself’ or ‘specific life’ is, paradoxically, the mechanism that conditions and proliferates socially

constructed ‘general life’. Thacker suggests that the biological is more than biological because it is reductively biological.

008

Act 01Contextual Introduction + Theoretical Framework

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Preamble

‘... social sciences, sociology, urban studies, and architecture today are trying to conceive

and organize the public space of the world’s cities without any clear awareness that at their

very center lies the same bare life that defined the biopolitics of great totalitarian states of

the twentieth century’

-Giorgio Agamben1

At the ‘crepuscular dawn’2 of the twenty-first century architecture is faced with a decisive

ultimatum: evolve or die. The ‘twin fantasies of order and omnipotence’3 upon which

architectural practice has been predicated for at least the last five hundred years are no

longer (and never really were) viable models for engaging a world so deeply inscribed in

a fundamentally undemocratic regime of control. Architecture continues to shape the

communal spaces of our cities in the name of ‘the public’, but are its actions ever really in

the best interests of that public, or of those publics? Moreover, can we, as humans, continue

to assume hegemony over a planet whose complexity is so far beyond our own capacity for

understanding?

Facing the aforementioned ultimatum, this MDP proposes a revitalization of the speculative

project as a legitimate technique for shaping the discourse around the ‘actual’ built

environment. In projecting a future that does not yet exist (and might never exist), the

project seeks an end to causal reasoning as the basis for architectural intervention and

speculation. Working from a theoretical framework rooted in Speculative Realism, the project

understands that ‘the present is never pregnant with the future’.4

To some extent, this approach is not new. Archigram, Superstudio, Archizoom, Constant

Nieuwenhuys, and a host of other radical practitioners in the 1960’s and 1970’s offered

fantastical and highly critical perspectives on the role of architecture in a tumultuous

world. While their influence remains, the tradition of radical speculative projects has all but

evaporated in the contemporary context. True, speculative theoretical approaches remain,

but they are marginalized at the architectural periphery by an increasingly homogenous and

reactionary profession terrified by anything outside of its arbitrary institutional boundaries.

Throughout this project I challenge some of the fundamental assumptions that we, as

designers and as citizens, make on a daily basis about architecture and about its role in

shaping our cities and our lives, and even of shaping life itself. I do not level these challenges

because I hate architecture: far from it, in fact. At their core, the critiques and proposals

offered in this document stem from a deeply seated belief in architecture’s ability to allow

life some measure of sanctuary from the forces that would contain and stifle it. I do not

intend the contents of this document to be interpreted as my own personal vision of what

the future should look like. In fact, it is precisely that sort of myopic, subject-centric, and

arrogant approach that this project attempts to subtract from the design process. Instead,

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I hope that you will read this project as an experiment in the weakening of subjectivity and

the production of immanence.

Liminality

The world is a complex place. It is, in fact, unthinkably complex.5 While this complexity is

in itself nothing new, global scale meta-emergencies ranging from climate change to the

collapse of financial markets have, arguably for the first time, begun to reveal cracks in the

façade of the notion that the world exists for us as human beings, and that we can will the

astounding complexity that constitutes the planet into submission for our own ends.

Since the Enlightenment, architecture has been deeply embedded in a humanist worldview

(underwritten by a biopolitical paradigm) that has allowed our species to operate under the

erroneous assumption that we are in control, both of ourselves as individual subjects, and of

the planet as a collective whole. In so doing, architecture has assumed responsibilities that

it never really had any right to assume and for which it has never really had any means of

ever actually realizing.

In that it permeates our daily lives, architecture is one of the chief mechanisms through

which populations are governed and conditioned to accept the fallacy of hegemony over the

planet. This process is perhaps nowhere more evident than in the insidious erosion of the

nostalgic notion of public space as a forum for democratic participation. It is the aim of

this project to pry architecture from its position of imagined control in order to save the

discipline from the oblivion of irrelevance.

The term ‘liminality’ refers to the state that exists ‘in-between’ (and just beyond) the

limit conditions of (apparently) stable or static phenomena. It is a state of becoming that

possesses qualities of both its initial state and its terminal condition, but is itself neither of

these things. Instead, it is characterized by instability and indeterminacy; in fact, liminality

itself challenges the notion that the limit conditions it straddles are themselves concrete or

fixed.

Liminality appears in various forms in the writings of many prominent post-stucturalist

philosophers, notably in Gilles Deleuze’s ruminations on ‘becoming’, but it is perhaps

Elizabeth Grosz’s definition of the ‘in-between’ that resonates most deeply with the notion

of liminality explored in this MDP. The in-between ‘lacks a fundamental identity, lacks a form,

a givenness, a nature’.6 It is, by virtue of its ability to facilitate becoming, that which ‘makes

identity both possible and impossible’.7

To confront the notion of an uncontrollable and unknowable future is to confront the limit

conditions of human knowledge. It is something of a paradox to attempt to reconcile the

unknowable through the very means of knowing that the unknowable itself sits outside of.

We encounter the in-between at the point at which it ‘takes on, receives itself, its form, from

the outside, which is not its outside… but whose form is outside of the identity’.8

As a precedent for dealing with this condition, we turn to horror as a lens through which to

frame the problem of the asymptotic limit of human knowledge. The horror genre, both in

literature and film, has long dealt explicitly with this very problem through a very deliberate

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engagement with the enigmatic, the otherworldly, and the unknown.9 Horror rarely seeks

to define or account for any of these things; instead opting to use them as mechanisms

for inducing unease and even terror. Throughout this MDP, horror, in conjunction with the

overarching metanarrative of projecting a science fictive future, functions as a conceptual

framework and as an operative technique for dealing with formal and programmatic

recombinance in pursuit of liminal conditions.

Identity

Identity, in the conventional sense of the term, is understood as a set of traits inherent to a

given body that are indicative of essentialized qualities of that body. For the most part, we

believe ourselves to be human, members of a particular gender, ethnicity, socio-economic

class, etc. Deleuze is, unsurprisingly, highly critical of this facile understanding of identity

and the mechanisms that produce it and perpetuate it. For Deleuze, identity as described

above obfuscates the pure differences that underpin life (all life, not just human life) as a

potentially productive force.10 Deleuze is especially critical of the conflation of the perception

and representation of identity with the inherently unidentifiable forces that are always at

work beneath the superficial veil of conventional performances of identity.11

Judith Butler’s writings on feminism and gender politics offer an instructive complement

to Deleuze’s approach to the topic of identity. In Gender Trouble, she writes that ‘identity

is performatively constituted by the very ‘expressions’ that are said to be its ‘results,’’ To

paraphrase, we are, effectively, what we do. But why do we do what we do? Deleuze points

to a ‘self-destructive dependence’ on identity as a sort of crutch for coping with the

aforementioned un-communicable processes of production that constitute ‘reality’.12

Biopower, Biopolitics + Control Societies

If we peer deeper into the mechanisms that produce and enable identity, however, an even

more insidious set of processes emerges. Michel Foucault argues that the juridical forms of

power on which contemporary ‘democratic’ states are founded actively produce the subjects

that they subsequently represent and control.13 Foucault cites an ‘explosion of numerous

and diverse techniques for achieving the subjugations of bodies and the control of

populations’, specifically through the formal institutional structures of the state: the school,

the prison, and the clinic.14 Later, these implements of disciplinary societies are sublimated

into the diffuse and constantly operating mechanisms of surveillance and management that

characterize ‘societies of control’.15 This historical trajectory forms the basis of Foucault’s

understanding of ‘biopower’: literally the power over bodies for a particular productive end,

namely, control over life itself.16

Giorgio Agamben’s body of work expands on Foucault’s discourse on biopower and biopolitics

(biopower’s corresponding political manifestation). For Agamben, sovereign power (a model

of power wherein a single sovereign is vested with the power to decide to whom and when the

law applies) and biopower meet and (paradoxically) fuse in the model of the camp (exemplified

in its most extreme state by the Nazi concentration camps during World War II).17 According

to Agamben, the camp exemplifies the state of exception, an event wherein bare life (life

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exposed to death through a process of abandonment from the protective measures of the

law) is separated from politically meaningful life.18 Agamben goes on to suggest that the

state of exception exemplified by the camp is in fact no longer the exception at all, but rather

an indication of the ‘hidden matrix’ of modern politics. In fact ‘... social sciences, sociology,

urban studies, and architecture today are trying to conceive and organize the public space

of the world’s cities without any clear awareness that at their very center lies the same bare

life that defined the biopolitics of great totalitarian states of the twentieth century.’19 This

alarming ignorance is the territory that this MDP seeks to remediate.

Viewed from this perspective, the performance of identity becomes even more intrinsically

linked to the hegemony of state and economic power. If we are always already bound by the

strictures of identity and subjectivity, and subjugated by the mechanisms of the state and

capitalism, by what means can we ever really be free of them?

Post-Humanism

Before attempting to answer such a loaded question, we must first more firmly establish the

design contexts in which this project operates. If architecture is ignorant of the foundational

basis of political modernity, then it is equally unaware of the degree to which ‘the human’ is

no longer a relevant basis for the creation or evaluation of politically meaningful space. If

we return briefly to Agamben’s thesis that ‘Western politics is a biopolitics from the very

beginning’, then ‘every attempt to found political liberties in the rights of the citizen is in

vain’. The stable, coherent subject (or at least the illusion of that entity) is, in the context of

a biopolitical landscape, subsumed by the population at large as the relevant unit of political

engagement and design intervention. The design problem then, is one of moving past the

‘vestigial remains’ of humanism in pursuit of ‘the deterritorialization of the human animal,

and the specific diagram of the Human as a format that has been shuttled forward from the

Enlightenment’.20

‘The innovation of the diagram is much more interesting than the innovation of humans,

and much more so than any particular individual, but not as interesting in turn than the

innovation of forces which form the diagram. In fact, let me be blunt, the focus of post-

humanism on the innovation of a particular individual is a sad diversion. You are not the

100th monkey, they are a dying mammal with a narcissistic personality disorder.’21

In place of ‘the human’, as most relevant constituent of societies of control, this project turns

to the concept of ‘the multitude’, which, as with liminality, presents itself (with slight variations)

in the work of many contemporary theorists. Hardt and Negri articulate the multitude as a

‘set of singularities’ (which we might liken to Deleuze’s ‘dividuals’)22 that together form a

plurality that ‘stand[s] in contrast to the undifferentiated unity of the people’.23

Ethics + Aesthetics

Challenges to normative assumptions about the validity of subject categories and moral

absolutes bring into focus a debate about the tension between ethics and aesthetics in

relation to the governance of social behaviour. While we may operate under a belief in the

possibility of sacrosanct ethical frameworks, our ‘lives are lived aesthetically before anything

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else… whatever we do, we do for aesthetic reasons’.24 Put another way:

‘Aesthetic common sense does not represent an objective accord of the faculties, but a pure

subjective harmony where imagination and understanding are exercised spontaneously,

each on its own account. Consequently aesthetic common sense does not complete the two

others (reason and imagination); it provides them with a basis and makes them possible...

But is it sufficient to assume this free accord, to suppose it a priori? Must it not be, on the

contrary, produced in us?... The sublime thus confronts us with a direct subjective relation-

ship between imagination and reason...’25

If we adopt such a radically different understanding of the role of aesthetics in design,

what are the implications for design itself? This project posits that aesthetic engagement,

mediated through form, has the capacity to subvert the political and ethical strictures that

produce and reproduce normative identities and in so doing to produce new bodies and new

species of space.

Accordingly, this project understands the process of imaging not as an issue of

representation, but of production. Writing about the distinction between art and architecture,

Walter Benjamin observes that in the case of architectural images, ‘one cannot say that they

re-produce architecture. They produce it in the first place...’26 Buildings are not pieces of

architecture. They are the residue of an architectural process, but buildings themselves

do not constitute architecture. It is the performative architectural image that, following

Benjamin’s observation, must be considered as the central component of the architectural

project. Accordingly, this project embraces the speculative potential of the architectural

image without (wholly) subordinating it to the demands of physical built form.

Lines of Flight

The philosophical positions explored above problematize conventional approaches to design

and raise a number of critically important questions about the implications of these positions

on the practice of architecture in a post-human world. Perhaps chief among these questions

is how do we, as human artifacts,27 remove ourselves from the design decision making

processes where we have no claim to the authority to decide? Similarly, what things must be

fixed in order to deliver architecture to a space of liminality? How might the weakening of

identity and the hegemony of the individual subject alter the socio-political landscapes of the

planet? How might such things come about?

This MDP rejects the notion that architecture projects as they are currently conceived of

and executed have the capacity to achieve the kinds of change that they claim to effect.

This project makes no claims to offering a coherent ‘solution’ (or even a singular designed

entity) as a panacea for the biopolitical prison that is the contemporary city. Instead, the

work takes the form of a series of investigations that attempt to manifest an alternative

theoretical framework for answering the aforementioned questions (and others) through

the development of techniques of disfigurement and effacement of multiple ‘bodies’ at

multiple scales.

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This investigation is guided, in large part, by an approach rooted in the emerging

philosophical tradition of Speculative Realism. Speculative Realism holds that reason and

rationality must be abandoned (as they currently exist) as part of a larger ontological problem

centering on the inability of the Principle of Sufficient Reason28 to explain or even mediate

the way in which we inhabit the planet. Instead, Speculative Realism argues for a new sort of

rationality, one that understands that an entirely rational world would be ‘entirely chaotic’.29

Accordingly, the project assumes an ethical stance that refuses to accept that the world as it

is determines the world as it might be in the future and pursues design accordingly.

Endnotes

1 Agamben 1998, 181

2 Virilio 2002. Paul Virilio’s invocation of a paradoxical ‘crepuscular dawn’

resonates with the many apparently contradictory philosophical conceits explored

in this project

3 Koolhaas 1998, 969

4 Meillessoux 2011, 232

5 Thacker 2011, 8

6 Grosz, 2001, 91

7 Ibid.

8 Ibid.

9 Thacker 2011, 8

10 Williams 2005, 124

11 Ibid. at 125

12 Ibid.

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14 Ibid. at 140

15 Deleuze 1990, 7

16 Ibid.

17 Agamben 1998, 171

18 Ibid. at 88

19 Ibid. at 181

20 Bratton 2011

21 Ibid.

22 Deleuze 1990, 6

23 Hardt and Negri 2004, 99

24 Spuybroek 2008, 168

25 Deleuze 1984, 92

26 Benjamin 1988, 89

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27 Bratton 2011

28 Meillessoux 2011, 226. The Principle of Sufficient Reason holds that everything that happens does so for a particular reason.

29 Ibid.

022

Act 02Situating Heterotopia: Towards a New Communal Realm

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Heterotopia

Architecture’s assumed ability to foster democratic participation though the mechanism of

‘open’ public space is always already undone by the foundations of biopolitical modernity

and the social superstructures that characterize contemporary control societies.

This incapacity for action is expressed quite dramatically in the spectacle of the ‘Occupy’

movement currently sweeping the cities of the global north. ‘Occupy’ assumes the veracity of

the nostalgic (and apocryphal) notion that public space is indeed that: ‘free’ territory where

the expression of opposition to the hegemonic order of Empire1 has some force in terms of

effecting change. In fact, the opposite is true; public spaces are programmed to foster very

specific uses, uses that tend to condition and discipline populations towards docility.

In the context of an increasingly securitized public realm, the public plaza has all but lost

its intended utopian performativity and has instead been subsumed by the operative

techniques of martial security program. Public plazas are now little more than sites for the

performance and social reproduction of normative (i.e. predictable and controllable) values.

The fact that ‘Occupy’ camps can be disbanded by a simple court order, or that police can

legally pepper spray peaceful protestors on a university campus (see 02.002), reaffirms that

public space is intended for use only by very specific members of a very specific ‘public’ and

that outright resistance to the forms and means of power that order public space is always

already a lost cause. Still, even as it secures populations, stratified public space cannot help

but pit these same populations against themselves, simultaneously advancing life as ‘threat,

threatened, and response’, though the response is always the same.2 This asymmetrical

balance of power speaks to the looming presence of a different kind of ‘camp’ than the ones

created by ‘Occupy’ protestors.

Giorgio Agamben identifies the Nazi concentration camp as the paradoxical point at which

two opposite forms of governance (sovereign power and biopower) meet and fuse.3 He

suggests that the camp (and the state of exception it embodies) is no longer an exception

at all, but rather the paradigmatic model of all modern politics.4 In such a model, ‘public’

spaces become territories where the threat of potential exceptional violence is omnipresent.

In a sense, the polis itself is the spatial manifestation of this state of exception; a menacing

biopolitical prison wherein we are all virtually homines sacri.5

If architectural program is ill equipped to produce ‘open’ conditions because of its deep

structural ties to the mechanisms and instruments of biopolitical power, what are the

possibilities of pursuing architecture not with a utopian impulse, but with a heterotopian

one?

Michel Foucault introduced the term ‘Heterotopia’ to the architectural lexicon in his 1967

lecture, ‘Of Other Spaces’. ‘Heterotopia’, which literally means ‘other places’, comprises those

elements that must be evacuated or cleared away to make utopia possible.6 Heterotopia is

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the space of otherness, a territory in which the distinction between public and private is

suspended. Heterotopian space exists in the contemporary city in the form of shopping

malls, parking lots, leisure centers, and the myriad of terrains vagues that populate the

urban realm.7

If the failed utopianism of contemporary public space is best characterized by the camp, then

heterotopian space is best described by the model of the sanctuary. The sanctuary is the

camp’s opposite: a site of refuge for Agamben’s homines sacri from the unmediated violence

of sovereign power.

Despite their polar conceptual differences, the camp and the sanctuary are not so easily

disentangled in the context of the contemporary city. Generally, though, it is the influence

of the camp that permeates and pollutes the conceptual model of the sanctuary and not

vice versa. Indeed, the shopping arcade, famously advanced by Walter Benjamin as a liminal

space between the public and private spheres8 is simultaneously one of the most visible

instances of the influences of the camp as paradigm of the modern.

The intent of this project is not to propagate heterotopian spaces as discrete sanctuaries that

function as binary opposites to the myriad of camp spaces that comprise the contemporary

public realm. Rather, the impulse driving the project is to merge and recombine the camp

and the sanctuary in pursuit of a new species of space, one that defies programmatic

concretization (paradoxically) through the introduction of programmatic elements that foster

liminality through their own mutability and in so doing provide alternatives to the perpetual

insidious infiltration of the camp into all spaces. Heterotopia can thus be understood as the

‘sphere of a pure mediality without end intended as the field of human action and of human

thought’9 wherein bare life and political life collapse into one another to the extent that it

becomes impossible to separate the two, effectively negating the possibility of the state of

exception upon which the current biopolitical system of control is founded.

This approach acknowledges the historical integration of violence and architectural design

and discourse, but seeks to shift the focus of this violence away from repression and order

and towards emancipation and multiplicity. After all, ‘there is no architecture without

violence’.10

If architecture is to have any relevance or productive force in the contemporary world (and

particularly the contemporary polis), it must reposition itself relative to the unknowable

and the horrific; it must embrace the heterotopian project and discard its utopian impulses.

It is only through heterotopian program that architecture can ever ‘aspire to revel in the

sheer thrill of the unknown’ and in so doing reposition itself in relative to prevailing power

relations and structures of governance.11

On the surface, this position might seem itself to be just another utopian vision, but for one

crucial distinction: utopian projects tend to assume an idealized end state that stretches

on ad infinitum. Moreover, utopian visionaries tend to assume that they themselves are

qualified to prognosticate about the value sets required to achieve such an end. That is not

the case here. Instead, we might reconsider the aspirations that drive the utopian impulse

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and redirect them to more ambivalent ends, recognizing our own inability to reconcile the

complexity of the planet and embracing this fact not as a limitation, but as an ability to

facilitate not one specific future, but rather induce a set of possible futures to which no

value can be assigned a priori.

In the following act we will consider a few precedents that have guided the development of

the project, both conceptually and formally, before delving more explicitly into the means

and methods by which the project seeks to develop novel forms of (immanent) (bio)political

governance in later acts.

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Endnotes

1 Hardt and Negri 2000, xii. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri suggest that ‘sovereignty has taken a new form, composed of a series of national and supranational organisms united under

a single logic of rule. This new global form of sovereignty is what we call Empire.’

2 Thacker 2006, 20

3 Agamben 1998 171.

4 Ibid.

5 Ibid. Agamben uses the figure of Homo Sacer (a figure in Roman Law who could be killed but not sacrificed) to elucidate his concept of bare life, or life exposed to death through a

process of abandonment by the law.

6 Dehaene and De Cauter, 2008, 3

7 Ibid.

8 Benjamin 2002, 4

9 Agamben 2000, 117

10 Tschumi, 1996, 44

11 Grosz, 2001, 105

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Preamble

Precedent studies are a time-honored component of architectural projects. Recently,

however, the use of precedent has shifted fundamentally away from direct engagement

with architecture’s own history and has begun to engage more avant garde fare. While

architecture must continue to reach outside of itself in order to ensure its own relevance in

an increasingly complex world, it must also resist the temptation to fall into the trap of using

gimmicks to justify its own existence. The use of ever more absurd ‘precedents’ in projects

both academic and professional is lamentable.

This project is interested in the use of precedents from within art and architectural historical

canons. It is not, however, as interested in quotation of historical form as it is in using history

operatively, that is to say reactivating historical trajectories of thought and practice in order

to effect change now and in the future.

To that end, the aim here is an integrative synthesis of various approaches to (dis)figuration

and subjectivity as they relate to the body and the city. The project engages three chief

precedents: Art Nouveau, the portraiture of Francis Bacon, and Horror. In what follows we

will examine each of these precedents in greater detail before moving on to an explanation

of how they influenced the development of a particular set of techniques in the following act.

Art Nouveau

Art Nouveau (also known as Jugendstil in Germany, The Viennese Secession in Austria, and

Modernismo in Spain) was active as a critical architectural practice for only a short time

at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th centuries, before being subsumed by

Art Deco and receding into obscurity as a mere style. Still, Art Nouveau’s impact on art and

architectural-historical discourses is significant. For Walter Benjamin it marked a decisive

break: a caesura between the ‘new and the always the same’.1 In fact, Benjamin claimed that

the entire idea of Modernity should be understood as commencing with Jugendstil.2

Benjamin’s claim can be traced to Art Nouveau’s attempt to rid art and architecture of the

baggage of the historical quotation that characterized much of the late 19th Century. Art

Nouveau embodied an attempt to pursue a new sort of rationality and logical form enabled

and emboldened by emerging technologies and material systems that forever altered

construction methods and practices. The introduction of glass and iron in particular enabled

new means of spatial separation and codification.

It was precisely this formal and material quality of Art Nouveau/Jugendstil that prompted

Benjamin to label the movement ‘dangerous’.3 For Benjamin, the introduction of the cold,

hard, transparency of glass and iron constituted a subversive threat to the plush, closed

interior of the bourgeois Victorian domestic sphere. Whereas the Victorian interior had

hitherto been characterized by its ‘cocoon-like’ opacity, Jugendstil sought to work through

the surfaces that concealed the dwelling in order to open it up to connections with the

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(exterior) public realm. Plush, velvet-draped walls gave way to the undulating ‘whiplash’

lines of wrought iron screens. The materials employed by Art Nouveau practitioners such as

Victor Horta, Hector Guimard, and Henry Van De Velde permitted no trace of occupation to

accrue in the dwelling. Art Nouveau, then, posited the possibility of an untraceable future, a

future not bound to the logics or conditions of the present.

Art Nouveau is also noteworthy for its embrace of the concept of Gesamtkunstwerk, or the

‘total work of art’, which ‘rendered the work of art superfluous’ through the integration of

art, architecture, and life down to the smallest detail.4 This obsessive tendency to design

literally everything from structural members to jewelry collapsed the distinction between

art and life threatened the boundary between the anesthetic built environment and the

exuberance of life itself.

In rendering indistinct the division between interior and exterior, Jugendstil also threatened

the division between observed and observer, casting the Bourgeoisie out from his privileged

position of voyeuristic surveillance over the street and effectively folding the public realm

into the sanctity of the domestic sphere.

Art Nouveau differs fundamentally from Modernism proper (and all subsequent architectural

‘isms’, with the possible exception of emerging trends in digitally-enabled design) because

its constitutive basis is not the grid, but the curvilinear figure. Unlike the grid, where ‘lines

are subordinated to higher order of the surface, where lines repeatedly find each other in

the same manner, solely by crossing’, curvilinear figures deploy a multitude of connective

agencies: they can slide along each other, or bounce, or even lock into each other’.5 Horta’s

merging ‘S’ curves intertwine to form railings in one instance and columns in the next.

Similarly, Guimard’s versions bundle and bounce to articulate entranceways, windows, and

even light fixtures.

What relevance does a one hundred years dead architectural movement have in the context of

the contemporary polis? Surprisingly, a great deal. The political conditions that precipitated

Art Nouveau are not so different from those of today. Haussmann’s Paris, whose monotonous,

militarized urban fabric Hector Guimard’s serpentine stonework subtly subverts, is not all

that different than the securitized and closed circuit television-surveyed public realm of

virtually any contemporary city today. As a corollary to the question of relevance, we must

also ask why Art Nouveau failed and simultaneously imagine what might have happened if

it had not evaporated. It is into this alternate reality that we must place ourselves if we are

to properly excise useful operative techniques for the reactivation of Nouveau’s zeitgeist in

the name of reclaiming the public sphere from the paradigmatic model of Agamben’s camp.

Francis Bacon

The work of Irish painter Francis Bacon constitutes this project’s second chief precedent.

Bacon’s portraiture and figural paintings confound conventional notions of subjectivity and

identity and in so doing stake out a claim for the affective capacity of imagery to induce

violent change in the self awareness of the observer; a central theme in this project. Through

the lens of post-structural perspectives on schizophrenia as a ‘decentered existence’ or a

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‘split subject’, we can begin to read Bacon’s paintings as hyper-reflexive mechanisms for the

dissolution of human subjectivity in favour of more nomadic notions of identity in keeping

with Judith Butler’s understanding of the term (which we previously addressed in the first

act) as a mutable, unstable, and always socially constructed veil of coherence that masks

the teeming complexity and contradiction that characterizes human social interaction.6

Bacon’s figures are never in control of ‘their’ own perceptions, which are always mediated by

external means. Thus, instead of perception leading representation, representation leads

perception, reducing the role of the subject to a scene of action, ‘rendering senseless the

modernist conflation of the subject with the eye’.7 The ‘mind’s eye’ is replaced by ‘the body’s

spasm’.8 One does not so much look at a Bacon painting as devour it. His work is visceral and

synaesthetically arresting.

This emphasis on Bacon’s work as a more than visual experience is well documented. Gilles

Deleuze’s Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation examines the quality of Bacon’s figures that

allows them to bypass figuration and yet remain as figures. Deleuze identifies this quality as

‘sensation’, which must be understood as the opposite of both figuration and abstraction.9

For Deleuze, the figure is ‘not simply the isolated body, but the deformed body that escapes

from itself.’10 Bacon’s paintings work through a process of disfiguration, of undermining

accepted norms of representation in order to open them up to new and explicitly unsettling

ways of becoming. While Bacon’s works include qualities of narrative, they tell no story and

allude to no transcendent higher order.

Bacon’s figure’s ‘faces’ droop, sag, twist, and melt. They are horrific, not so much in the sense

that they induce fear or terror (though also that), but in the sense that they confront the

limit condition of the perception of reality and blur the figure’s position relative to life and

death. In so doing, they induce doubt as to whether the subject and his or her body are really

indivisible and moreover, whether that subject’s identity is really all that well tied to anything

inherent to that body.

In that it falls outside of architectural history, Bacon’s portraiture raises even more

questions than Art Nouveau as to its applicability as a mechanism of architectural subversion.

How does art transgress its own disciplinary boundaries in order to corrupt (or augment)

architecture? Is there that much of a difference between one of Bacon’s paintings and an

architectural rendering? How does one disfigure architecture, and how much of the original

figure must remain for disfiguration to achieve its full, nightmarish potential?

Horror

The third and final conceptual precedent that we will consider for the purposes of this

MDP is horror. Horror is, admittedly, an extremely broad term and one that carries with it a

significant amount of preordained meaning. Before proceeding with an explication of horror

as it relates to this project, some disambiguation is in order. Horror, for the purposes of this

project, is best understood as product of confrontation with the unknown.11

In In the Dust of This Planet, Eugene Thacker provides a framework for using horror as

a conceptual tool for navigating the paradoxical problematic of attempting to think non-

anthropocentrically12. Thacker’s approach centers on an attempt to engage the unknown

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not from a position of philosophical strength, but from one of what we might call ‘vital

weakness’.13 Rather than attempting to find reasoned connections between things, horror

exploits the sheer inexplicability of certain phenomena as a tactic for dealing with the fact

that some things are simply beyond the realm of human comprehension and attempting to

assign meaning to them usually does more harm than good.

In a way, horror provides a means of emancipating action and decision-making from the

Principle of Sufficient Reason, thus aligning it (as an operative mechanism) with the ethos

of Speculative Realism.

The mechanisms by which horror operates (in film especially) advance some questions

about how they might integrate with architecture in order to facilitate or induce unsettling

negotiations with the unknown. What, for instance, are the implications for architectural

imaging with respect to the cultivation of suspense (a technique common to virtually every

horror film)? If architectural images typically strive for legibility and accuracy, how might

horror pollute these tendencies and allow architectural imaging to become subtler and more

suggestive?

The project strives for the integration of the horrific as a means of liberating architecture

from the biopolitical foundations of modernity through the weakening of liberal subjectivity.

If Art Nouveau can be understood as ‘dreaming that one is awake’, then the folding in

of horror makes the dream a sort of nightmare in which the world is always just beyond

comprehension, and therefore beyond the stifling oppression of the camp.14

Conclusion

The precedents presented here constitute the core bases of an aesthetic model centered

on the notion of synaesthetic activation. All three case studies employ form and imagery

in a manner that challenges conventional distinctions between different mechanisms of

sensory perception, on the one hand, and sensation itself versus intellectual cognition on

the other. All three precedents exploit the liminal space produced through the erosion of

these normative boundaries in order to produce new sensational hybrids. At the same time,

these precedents open up various lines of inquiry that problematize their integration with

the architectural project. This MDP seeks to instrumentalize the approaches embedded

in these precedents in the name of architecture in order to explore the questions raised

by the precedents themselves. In the following act we will examine the means by which

these approaches are sublimated into architectural techniques, before addressing their

deployment as a case study in the final act.

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1 De Cauter 1996, 13

2 Ibid.


4 De Cauter 1996, 22


6 van Alphen 1992, 77

7 Ibid.

8 Ibid. at 81

9 Deleuze 2004, 27

10 Ibid. at 19

11 Thacker 2011, 8

12 Ibid.

13 Vattimo 1988, 85

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14 De Cauter 1996, 24

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Preamble

Technique and methodology are closely related in that they are both means of achieving

particular ends, but they are not synonymous. Whereas ‘methodology’ tends to imply the

application of external logics to a given problem, ‘technique’ implies a more complex

relationship. Logics and means developed as modes of investigation are (at least in the case

of this project) closely tied to the thematic content of the project itself. In keeping with the

project’s valuing of immanence over transcendence, the techniques developed here are

indivisible from the work itself.

Such an approach may appear as academic heresy to those who believe that architectural

research (or any research) ought to be ‘objective’ and dispassionate. Still, it is this project’s

position that objectivity and the disembodied gaze it implies are absurd and, indeed,

undesirable aspirations of any research project. The techniques explained and explored in

this act are wildly paradoxical, yet they are ultimately no less valid and no less provable than

any other mechanism of inquiry.

Designing [in] a Dissociative State

How does one weaken one’s own (perception of) authorship over the design process? One

of the chief themes of this project is the extraction (or at least the dilution) of individual

subjectivity in the formulation and execution of decisions concerning the production of

‘public’ space in the contemporary city. Currently, the avant garde trajectory in architectural

discourse centers on the role of dissolving authorship through techniques rooted in

generative algorithm-driven software and other digitally ‘autonomous’ approaches. It is by

no means the intention of this MDP to discredit or even criticize this line of exploration.

Nevertheless, this project, while in many respects enabled by digital techniques, has

not employed explicitly parametric methods of realizing itself. Instead, it has flirted with

autonomy through an approach (paradoxically) integrated with what in some respects might

be considered highly conventional means of architectural production.

With the exception of a few lines in the first prologue, ‘I’, has not appeared as a pronoun

anywhere in this document. The reason being, of course, that the ‘author’ of the project does

not really consider himself to be its creator in the traditional sense of the term. Instead, he

prefers to think of himself as one of the facilitators of the project; it’s ‘mere supporter’.1

The projections about the future presented on these pages are not his per se, but rather

the amalgamation of a lifetime worth of cultural consumption (of both the high and low

variety) regurgitated and reassembled in the images you find on these pages. Childhood

obsessions with science fictive ‘creature’ films are folded into the myriad of other aesthetic

cues gleaned from literature, music, film, television, and other means of relating to the world

and then worked through a filter of digital polygon modeling. The resultant formal moves

are thus less the result of precalculated intent executed with rigorous precision and more

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the manifestation of a million idiosyncratic tweaks performed compulsively over too many

late nights. The human male whose name is on the front of this document is thus no more of

a tool in the development of this project than Maya, Photoshop, Rhino, InDesign, Illustrator,

ZPrint, or TrotecJobControl. His body (or is it really his?) is just part or a material network

whose integration made the work you see here possible.

This perspective and approach owes greatly to the concept of positionality and situated

knowledge found in canonical works of feminist theory.2 Still, such approaches do not go far

enough in destabilizing the core of our ‘self destructive dependence on identity’, nor do they

challenge the fundamental assumption that even in recognizing our own positionality or the

situated nature of our knowledge, we remain ill equipped to ever really understand the full

implications of such realizations.3

Many of the design techniques explored in this MDP are rigorously unrigorous. Their

success is judged not on some external performance metric, but on their own agreement

within the topology of the technique itself. Things that have no meaning or identity of their

own gradually begin to accrue both of these things, before eventually divesting themselves

of all meaning through their mindless (but not thoughtless) multiplication and combination.

This MDP can thus be read (in part) as an experiment in using the same faculties that

supposedly afford dominion over the realm of inanimate material self reflexively and,

ultimately, self destructively in the pursuit of a method of making that is divorced from all

ends4; a technique that approaches the limit conditions of ‘pure mediality’5, by conceding

from the outset that pure means do not really exist.

Landscape

We have thus far addressed notions of liminality, heterotopia, and post-humanism as they

relate to the project. We have not, however, discussed the concept of landscape. As a design

motif, landscape has lengthy history in the annals of art and architectural history. In a sense,

much of the Romantic movement in art and literature concerned itself with landscape, often

in reference to the concept of the picturesque, an aesthetic model founded on the integration

of nature and culture through the rendering of idealized depictions of the former using the

technical capacities of the latter.6 The resultant relationship helps to discredit the notion

that nature and culture are somehow discrete categories. If we pursue this line of reasoning

further, we find Slavoj Zizek’s claim that ‘nature is not a balanced totality which then we

humans disturb. Nature is a big series of unimaginable catastrophes.’7

As a tactic, a landscape-oriented approach seeks out opportunities for integration across,

between, and through existing boundaries. It exploits existing distinctions in order to

cultivate new entities through cross breeding and recombination.

Curvilinearity

If we take the grid as the paradigmatic organizing schema of the contemporary city, then the

curved line serves as its antithesis. Whereas lines in the grid invariably meet in the same

way – by crossing – the curved line presents a wealth of different options for conjunction.

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It is in this capacity for variety that the curved line proves most useful in challenging the

predictable performance of orthogonal space.

In many respects, Art Nouveau was an architecture of the curved line. Guimard, Horta, Van

de Velde and others exploited the capacity of the curve to combine in a multitude of different

ways and for a myriad of different ends. Guimard’s twisted metal serpentine lines stretch to

become light fixtures, or interweave to become screens, all within the same topological family

of curves.

Despite the decades that have elapsed since Art Nouveau first threatened the predictability

of orthogonal space, not much has fundamentally changed in the way that buildings are

conceived of or executed. Therefore, the extraction and redeployment of logics of connection

from works of Art Nouveau art and architecture remain relevant to contemporary conditions.

Whereas Nouveau appropriated new means of fabrication to realize its otherworldly forms,

this project capitalizes on digital modeling and animation software to produce varieties of

involute connections that defy predictably uniform patterns of arrangement.

Subdivision Modeling

Following from the connective logics enabled through the curve, the project engages

explicitly with the use of subdivision modeling techniques as a means of spatializing the

curvilinear connective logics that define the project.

In many respects subdivision modeling is the digital equivalent of Guimard’s analog, intensely

sculptural treatment of iron and stone. The polygon models employed in this project allow for

virtually limitless possibilities of extrusion, elongation, reconnection, and division.

This method of modeling resonates with the self-effacing intentions of the project

outlined in the introduction to this act. The modeling process does not necessarily rely on

a predetermined volumetric manifold as a guide for developing formal territories. Instead,

the process is driven more by a series of small moves, which are more concerned with their

relationships with their immediate predecessors and successors than with any sort of overall

compositional quality. Faces are pulled, scaled, rotated, pinched, extruded, offset, puckered,

and otherwise deformed in a process that is more visceral than intellectual, fueled by that

same accrued database of science fictive imagery imprinted on the ‘designer’s’ subconscious

described earlier. The resultant forms are simultaneously recognizable and foreign. They

cohere from certain vantages points, but become intelligible from others. This flickering

from figure to oblivion reifies the project’s desire to defy reduction into a single, coherent

reading.

Subtraction

While the project operates in one sense in a proliferative manner, exploring new formal

languages and their capacity for fostering new terms of social relation, it simultaneously

(and complementarily) works through subtractive means, removing those things that

perpetuate the camp as the paradigm of public space in the contemporary city.

Such an approach embraces Gianni Vattimo’s approach to a ‘weak ontology’ concerned with

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blurring the boundaries between discrete entities in order to open those entities up to

radically new mean of connection, and thus performance.8

In the context of this project, these ‘entities’ tend to be synonymous with ‘programs’ (and

their attendant formal manifestations). These programmatic entities vary from the diffuse

and general (circulation, for instance) to the specific and localized (performing arts center,

civic building, hotel, etc.).

Subtraction and erasure have long been taboo subjects in architectural discourse. A return

to the tabula rasa of Modernism, which, perhaps naively, assumed that architecture could

‘make things better’ if only it could scrape away the messy complexity of the city, is not the aim

of this MDP. Instead, the aim of subtraction in this case is precisely to avoid the kind of sterile

monotony fetishized by (for instance) Le Corbusier in his Plan Voisin and Ville Radiuese.

At the same time, the intention is not to take the opposite approach and get caught up in

the cult of collective memory which mindlessly dictates that every old building be treated as

though it were hallowed ground.

Instead, the project works from the middle outwards, weakening and subtracting from

programs not to replace them with equally definite ones, but to induce them to perpetually

unstable relationships with each other and with themselves. In such a system (as we will see

in the case study act), sidewalks mix with hotel floorplates and walls invert themselves into

apertures and everywhere the old boundaries between things are replaced by new, diffuse

‘divisions’ (if they can even be called that) which, through their heightened interdependence,

are continually co-evolving into new programmatic hybrids, ones which are difficult to name,

let alone control.

Conclusion

Taken together, these techniques manage the formation and dissolution of bodily and

subjective identity that is so central to the overarching ambitions of the project. They provide

the means by which, in the spirit of Meillassoux’s call to arms, the Principle of Sufficient

Reason may be abandoned without abandoning rational thought itself.

The remainder of this act is devoted to a direct explanation of the formal manifestations of the

techniques explored here.. In the final act, we will consider the exploration of the techniques

introduced here in a case study focused on a site in Calgary whose particular characteristics

are particularly symptomatic of the urban camp condition described previously.

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1 Koolhaas 1998, 971

2 Haraway 1988

3 Williams 2005, 125

4 Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 24

5 Agamben 2000, 117


7 Zizek 2008

8 Vattimo 1988, 85

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Act 05Case Study: Imaging a New Agora for Calgary

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Preamble

By now we have firmly established the theoretical bases of the project as well as its ambitions

and aspirations. The intent of this act, then, is to address and hopefully reify some of these

desires in a concise manner. This case study is by no means meant to be taken as the projection

of an idealized end state or terminal condition for the city. Indeed, such a suggestion would

run contrary to everything that we have advocated for thus far in this project. Instead, one

might consider this case study as a crystallization of a relatively brief series of moments: a

transitional (perhaps even liminal) phase between an existing paradigm of thought about

the city and a new one where the very idea of a single, coherent ‘paradigm’ no longer applies.

Site Overview

Because this project is highly speculative, and because it seeks to distance itself from

normative approaches to architectural thought and practice, it should come as no surprise

that the process of site selection and site analysis for this project has been an unorthodox

one. Whereas site selection is traditionally approached with deep reverence to existing

conditions, the chief conceit behind this project is that the spatial and programmatic logic

of the contemporary polis is (apparently unbeknownst to architects and urbanists) always

already defined by the paradigm of the camp. Accordingly, the project has little regard for

respecting things that tend to be considered ‘valuable’ attributes of the public sphere. Why

then, give the project a site at all?

The decision to site the project in a ‘real’ location, rather than to keep it abstractly siteless,

stems from a desire to engage its audience in a sensational way; sensational here meaning

tangible and visceral. By relying on bodily – and embodied – reactions to its own content, the

project sidesteps the potential for intellectual paralysis that accompanies purely abstract

speculation. This approach brings with it a host of complications, particularly with respect

to what might be perceived as arrogant historical erasure. Certainly, the project makes some

severe moves in terms of subtracting elements of the city’s fabric, but it does so only to excise

those spurious conventions that anchor the future to the past.

While the general character of the contemporary urban public realm is homogenous, not

all sites are equally thus. The site for this case study encompasses the four blocks between

First and Fifth Streets SE and Seventh and Ninth Avenues SE in Calgary. The criteria for

site selection focused mainly on the character of existing programmatic relationships in

and around public plaza conditions. The selection of this particular site was based on its

identification as a potentially fecund locus of intervention because it presented the most

pronounced gap between its claims to programmatic ‘openness’ and the reality of its failure

to function as a violently productive piece of architectural infrastructure.

The site is currently home to Olympic Plaza, the city’s de facto public square, much derided for

its inhospitable ‘public’ spaces, as well as Calgary’s City Hall/Municipal Building, the Epcor

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Center for the Performing Arts, and the King Edward Hotel. In the broader urban context,

the site marks the dividing line between an affluent consumer culture embodied by Stephen

Avenue’s upscale outdoor shopping mall and the markedly less affluent community of the

East Village. In fact, the East Village is highly symptomatic of the progressive abandonment

of the population from the protection of the state. It is, in effect, a camp quarantined from

the rest of the city. The Municipal Building quite literally turns its back to the East Village: a

telling gesture that underscores the degree to which architecture functions at the mercy of

insidious mechanisms of Empire.

The East Village Area Redevelopment Plan as Nostalgic Regression

The site also provides an interesting opportunity for speculation because of its implication

with the East Village Area Redevelopment Plan (ARP) and the Calgary Municipal Land

Corporation (CMLC) (See Appendix D). The ARP/CLMC scheme, like many master planning

projects of its kind, sets out a highly nostalgic vision of the future. The conceptual renderings

produced as part of the document project a future saturated with faux historical buildings

fronting onto quaint, pedestrian filled sidewalks. The ARP speaks vaguely of ‘great streets’,

yet offers little in the way of explicit explanation of what constitutes a ‘great street’ or how

one might go about making such a thing.1 Ultimately, of course, this project suggests that

such an aspiration amounts to an impossible folly in an increasingly ethically ambivalent

world where distinctions between ‘good and bad’, ‘right and wrong’, and so on are becoming

ever more difficult to discern, let alone control.

Why then, does the ARP (and documents like it) propose such anachronistic futures?

Returning again to Deleuze’s observation of a ‘self destructive dependence’ on identity (an

identity formed through habit) we can begin to unveil some of the mechanisms that enable

the perpetuation of sameness in the built environment.2

In architectural terms, these mechanisms tend to present themselves as a synthetic

combination of program and form. Architectural programs become those scripts by which

Empire is able to construct a veil of order and omnipotence over the contemporary city and

the bodies that constitute it. Fixed, rigid programs condition behaviour in extremely specific

ways and for very particular ends (namely the control of life itself). Public space has not

been a space for ‘free’ use by members of the public for some time. Use of ‘public’ space is

everywhere conditioned by a myriad of devices, laws, and spatial logics that limit its range. We

are reminded to keep off the grass, that we are not welcome in Olympic Plaza after 10pm, and

that we are not allowed to sleep (or do any number of other things) in ‘public’ space.

These programmatic cues are both enabled and enforced by their formal manifestations.

Circulation networks are fixed by material boundaries and surveyed via closed circuit

television cameras. Spaces for seating are made distinct from spaces for working and those

for sleeping or eating. We accept this reality because its repetition has made it seem perfectly

natural, and yet nature itself is something of an abstract and arbitrary category developed

specifically to delimit and differentiate human control from the horrific complexity of the

world ‘out there’. 056

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A Modest Proposal

Instead of prescribing a ‘cure’ full of discrete and orderly programmatic entities working

happily towards a ‘sustainable’ future for the East Village, this project proposes a

progressive weakening of existing programmatic relationships in order to produce a terrain

of flexible opportunity where expectations about programmatic and formal relationships are

continually confounded by a violently involute landscape.

Currently, the site is comprised of a civic building (the Calgary Municipal Building), a

performing arts venue (The Epcor Center for the Performing Arts), a ‘public’ square (Olympic

Plaza), an LRT switching yard, and a few (allegedly) historically significant former hotels (the

King Edward and the St. Louis). The site also sits adjacent to the Calgary Public Library,

which is slated for demolition and is to be replaced by a new building on the lot behind the

Municipal building.3

With the exception of some residential units, the project does not change much in terms

of the programmatic composition of the site. Instead, it works to warp and twist existing

programmatic entities until they are all but unrecognizable as their former selves. The ‘all

but’ qualification of this process is important because the intent here is not to completely

eradicate the identity of the site or the programs on it, but rather to push them far enough

from their original, stable incarnations in order to open them up to new means of occupation

and engagement.

In such a landscape, behaviour is no longer so tightly governed by the familiar programmatic

and formal cues on which we rely on a daily basis to navigate our lives. The consequences

of engaging such an alien vision of the city are at once disorienting and liberating. The

project invokes Bernard Tschumi’s notion of ‘programmatic violence’ or ‘those uses, actions,

events, and programs that, by accident or by design, are specifically evil and destructive’ in

articulating its programmatic intentions.4 Programmatic violence, in the context of a post-

human (and perhaps post-ethical) world, can no longer necessarily be labeled as ‘evil’, but

can perhaps be reconsidered as violently productive. Tschumi himself points to violence as

‘the possibility of change, of renewal’.5

The imaging and modeling of the project depart from the conventional approach to such

techniques as typified by the East Village ARP and the CMLC masterplan. The images are

not necessarily immediately recognizable as architecture and they do not project the same

cheerful outlook as conventional architectural renderings. They are dark, dirty, dangerous

and perhaps even offensive. Yet it is precisely this ability to violate conventional sensibilities

that allows the project to engage audiences and (perhaps) alter those sensibilities in such

a way that opens them up to new possibilities of sensation. To return to Walter Benjamin’s

suggestion that, ‘as regards the images themselves, one cannot say that they reproduce

architecture. They produce it in the first place.’6

Heterotopia and the New Agora

In the Greek city-state, the agora (public market) constituted the locus of bios politikos, or

politically meaningful life (i.e. that form of life that is defined by its ability to exert dominance

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over the sphere of the oikos, or the private home).7 It is the foundational model for modern

democracy and thus also the basis of the paradigmatic state of exception cited by Agamben

as the cornerstone of political modernity.

The aim of this case study is not a revitalization of some romanticized, nostalgic vision of

public life, but rather a critical evisceration of that fundamental division between public and

private that makes the agora and the political order it supports possible.

Just as Art Nouveau renders the work of art superfluous and sensationalizes everyday

objects, Constant Nieuwenhuys’s New Babylon projects a future - a ‘utopian infrastructure’

- where citizens ‘no longer make art, but create everyday life’.8 Truly democratic space cannot

exist in a capitalist society. At the same time, capitalism, and the mechanisms of Empire

that constitute it, cannot be stopped but through the same media that presently enable

it. We are once again faced with Vattimo’s embrace of nihilism and vital weakness as the

only way forward. Only through devaluing those things (identity, subjectivity, individuality)

that underwrite the current biopolitical model of power upon which capitalism is founded

can we ever hope to truly autonomous (ironically, of course, by relinquishing all claims to

individuality and autonomy).

This prospect of an authentically democratic public realm; one beyond the ‘perpetual

training’ of Deleuze’s ‘Societies of Control’ rests firmly in our ability to think outside of our

own habits, customs, and reactionary tendencies.9 These habits can only be subverted by

perpetual engagement with the new. The digital means of imaging and, to an extent, physically

realizing this project offer such subversive abilities, but they will not always be sufficient.

The future will demand more and new means of challenging convention and destabilizing

static conditions.

The vignettes and projections of alternative futures presented in the rest of this act cannot

and should not be interpreted as ‘good’ or ‘bad’. Instead, what is important is that they are

different. It is only through this continual engagement with the horrific and the unknown

(yet vaguely familiar) that we can ever hope to give life a fighting chance against those forces

that would stifle it.

The new agora takes the form of the camp whose violence is turned in on itself; a heterotopian

sanctuary from the control instruments of biopolitical modernity achieved, paradoxically,

through those instruments themselves. The new agora is not an open public space flanked

by private program, but rather a field of varying programmatic intensity, where the usual

markers of programmatic division are replaced by a synthetic formal language of topological

continuity. Conventional divisions between public and private spaces are rendered indistinct

through weakened boundaries. Spaces flow into on another and programs coexist in an

awkward and uncomfortable union that resists the separation of life into discrete categories.

Conclusion

In the pages that follow we will examine a few vignettes that investigate, at various scales, the

possibilities of conceiving of and imaging form and program in this way. At the urban scale, we

look broadly at the site and register the impact of reconstituting its programmatic elements

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in alien (yet simultaneously endogenous) formal articulations. At the architectural scale

we examine the effects of programmatic weakening through a redefinition of architectural

terms such as partition, aperture, and circulation. Finally, at the scale of the body itself, we

scrutinize the potential(s) of integrating furniture, utensils, and various other objects into

broader aesthetic systems. In short, the goal of this aspect of the project is the resurrection

of the concept of Gesamtkunstwerk through digital means of imaging and fabrication.

Endnotes

1 City of Calgary Land Use Policy and Planning, Development and Assessment

Department 2005

2 Williams 2005, 125

3 Calgary Public Library Board 2012

4 Tschumi 1996, 134

5 Ibid. at 132

6 Benjamin 1988, 89

7 Habermas 1991, 3

8 Wark 2008, 21

9 Deleuze 1990, 7

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‘Oh, a storm is threat’ning/My very life today/If I don’t get some

shelter/Oh yeah, I’m gonna fade away’

-Mick Jagger + Keith Richards1

On Inhabiting a Post-Human Planet [Gimme Shelter]

The world is once again at war, only this time, according to Hardt and Negri, the terms of

engagement are quite different.2 No longer are the primary combatants sovereign nations.

Instead, the battles being waged today are between life and life itself.3 Life is simultaneously

‘the threat, the threatened, and the response’.4

It is in this tumult that architecture finds itself caught at present. In the voided shell of

‘the human diagram’5 architecture is left with the opportunity to design the future, but

what might that future look like? And what side of the war between life and itself should

architecture take if it is to seize this opportunity?

This project has argued that for architecture to continue on its present course as a blunt

instrument of Empire and biopolitics is suicide for the discipline and quite literally death (or

at least bare life) for those same subjects architecture claims to champion. Yet the alternative

paths are difficult to navigate and offer no certainty of salvation. Ultimately, of course, it is

not possible to forecast the future through the lens of humanity or humanism. In fact, it is

precisely this nostalgic addiction to the apocryphal notion that the world exists for us as

human beings that stands in the way of change. The question, then, is not ‘what do we have to

do to make things better?’ but rather, ‘how to we overcome our own obsession with ourselves

long enough to allow things to change, and to change us?’

This project has proposed that architecture ought to engage aggressively with the new and

the unknown as one way to allow life itself to flourish. Though horror is typically viewed in

a negative light, this MDP sees it as a fecund catalyst for the evolution of the discipline.

The project has also advocated for the weakening of disciplinary boundaries through the

collapsing of nature into culture and culture into nature and the collapsing of all of it into

architecture.

Exposure to the unknown, though, is not enough. Architecture, and architects, must once

again be incautiously ambitious in speculating about the future. These speculations must

overreach the limits of mere projection and achieve full immersion in new sensations, new

effects, and new affects. These new sensations, and specifically more intensely productive

sensations, are possible explicitly through the use of new technologies and new means of

imaging futures we cannot yet fathom. These technologies will, of course, change in the

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still for too long. To borrow one last time from Deleuze, ‘Make rhizomes, not roots, never

plant! Don’t sow, grow off shoots! Don’t be one or multiple, be multiplicities! Run lines, never

plot a point! Speed turns the point into a line! Be quick, even when standing still!’6

In this restless liminality, architecture must take up Thacker’s problematic and simultaneously

advance ‘life as the threat, the threatened, and the response’.7 In so doing architecture must

rediscover its foundational relationship with violence and exploit this relationship as a

means of resistance and subterfuge.

And yet, while the future has no reason to resemble the past, there is no reason that

history cannot be treated operatively and its logics and techniques imported and translated

into new means of designing the future. Even as architecture reaches outside of itself to

establish new relationships in order to preserve its own autonomy, it moves inwards, forming

new bonds within itself and within its own trajectories of growth. In both cases, though, the

impetus is the same: ‘Only Connect…’8

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Endnotes

1 Jagger and Richards, 1969

2 Hardt and Negri 2004, 3

3 Thacker 2006, 20. Eugene Thacker’s ‘Biological Sovereignty’ augments Agamben’s thesis on the nature of bare life in the contemporary biopolitical context

through a characterization of the supposed ‘zone of indistinction’ as anything but indistinct. He suggests that the new frontier of biopolitics is life in

perpetual conflict with itself and posits that it is this new problematic that sovereignty must confront and reconcile.

4 Ibid.

5 Bratton 2011

6 Deleuze and Guattari 1988, 24

7 Thacker 2008, 20

8 Forster 2000

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CC [AA.004/096] CC [AA.004/096] CC [AA.004/096] CC [AA.004/096]

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AA.012 King Edward Hotel South Elevation

+4.4m

+0m

+8.8m

+13.1m

+17.5m

+21.9m

+26.3m

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0m 5m2.5m

AA.013 King Edward East Elevation

+4.4m

+0m

+8.8m

+13.1m

+17.5m

+21.9m

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SCENE: AB.001DATE: 2075.03.14CAMERA: 01 FPS: 29.97

TAKE: 01[Site Evolution]

[Appendix B: Site Evolution][M


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Performance Venue

Theater

Hotel Tower

Residential Tower

Arcade

Civic Building

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Circulation Civic Building Park Auditorium Stage Arcade Tower Awning

Archetype 02: Landscape/GatheringArchetype 01: Exoskeleton Archetype 03: Cell [A] Archetype 04: Bridge Archetype 05: Cell [B]

107


TAKE: 01[Formal Archetypes]



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Hotel Suites

Residences

Council Chamber

Theater

Arcade

Park/Arts Venue

Cell Type [A]/Exoskeleton

Cell Type [B]/Exoskeleton

Landscape/Exoskeleton/Bridge

Circulation Landscape/Bridge

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SCENE: AC.001DATE: 2012.01.01CAMERA: 01 FPS: 29.97

TAKE: 01[Construction Techniques]

[Appendix C: Construction][M


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The project imagines a future wherein emerging fused deposition modeling techniques have

been deployed at the scale of the urban and architectural interventions explored in this

document.

Recent advancements in 3D printing technologies allow large scale forms to be printed using

a mixture of epoxy resin, sand, and an inorganic ink binding agent. This process is up to four

times faster than conventional construction techniques (using elaborate concrete formwork,

etc.) and is considerably more efficient in terms of both energy usage and CO2 emissions.

Where the project interfaces with the existing urban fabric, these new fabrication methods

are combined with conventional construction techniques in order to provide a bridge between

‘the new’ and ‘the always the-same’.

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Medium Extrusion Cable

Medium Mixing Manifold

Medium Deposition Nozzle

Deposition Mechanism Gantry

Deposition Mechanism Track

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06_48 Wall Section Detail [Typical]

Weatherproof Nylon Shell

HSS Tubing

Printed ‘Honeycomb’ Core

Utilities Chase06_47 Fabrication Detail

Brick Veneer

Steel Bracket

Steel Column

Steel Beam

Rigid Insulation

Sprayed Concrete

0m 1.0m0.5m

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Anchor

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Epoxy Bonded Honeycomb

0m 0.5m0.25m

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Epoxy Bonded Honeycomb

Rebar Reinforcement

HSS Core

Weatherproof Coating

0m 0.5m0.25m

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SCENE: AD.001DATE: 2012.03.26CAMERA: 01 FPS: 29.97

TAKE: 01[Critiquing Regressive Nostalgia]

[Appendix D: ARP Critique][M


T]

The ARP is symptomatic of the endemic ignorance of the biopolitical foundations of political

and urban modernity in that it betrays a self-destructive addiction to the Principle of

Sufficient Reason as the basis for design decisions. In so doing it removes the possibility of

imagining a truly different future, subjugating its own (well intentioned) desires to make a

better world to the dictates of destructive and unproductive design habits.

The ARP rests on the assumption that it is possible, and indeed desirable, to project and

realize a vision of the city based firmly on the observation of past and current conditions.

This case study rejects that approach. The remainder of this document is devoted to imaging

a perspective of the future that embraces the impossibility of knowing or controlling said

future. The case study challenges normative means of imaging architecture in order to

dissolve the bonds that tie us to the perpetuation of an inherently undemocratic regime of

control (Empire).

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TAKE: 01[ARP: Apocryphal Prognostication]

[Appendix D: ARP Critique][M


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Perimeter Block

Ground Floor Commercial/Residential AboveUrban Public Open SpaceGround Floor Commercial/Residential/Institutional AboveCommercial/Residential/Institutional

Ground Floor Commercial/Residential/Institutional/Commercial Above

Residential/Commercial at Grade

Linear Blocks Townhouses Courtyard Block Live/Work Units Linear Block

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SCENE: AE.001DATE: 2011.03.26CAMERA: 01 FPS: 29.97

TAKE: 01[Iteration 01]

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TAKE: 01[Formal Evolution]



T]

What is the form of resistance? Should form respond to the instruments of power, or should

it provoke them? At first glance this project would seem to offer up an ‘other’ to the rigidly

orthogonal geometry of the contemporary society of control. While this is in part true, the

project is actually interested in the indeterminate, liminal zone between the two aesthetic

models it examines. Just as life is controlled at the moment of its abandonment1, so too is

power grasped when its formal instruments are evacuated.

The formal evolution of the project has not followed any linear path (or even a logical one)

outside of its adherence to its endogenous aesthetic sensibilities. Over the course of twelve

iterations, the project has evolved into its own self referential formal language via the

integration of techniques of curvilinear means of conjunction through subtractive design

mechanisms enabled by subdivision modeling.

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The manner in which the geometry of the project integrates with its context has evolved

over the course of the investigation. Whereas the initial approach centers on a desire to

establish a clear distinction between new and existing conditions, later iterations focus

on the indistinct zone of interaction between the material systems. As geometries cross

contaminate they begin to weaken one another, and, by extension, begin to weaken their

programmatic respective responsibilities. It is this formal/programmatic ‘grey area’ that the

project seeks to exploit in its latter stages.

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In this project, imaging is much more than a mere means of representation. The perspectival

image in particular is exploited for its affective potential for the actualization of space. The

techniques explored in the project pursue images beyond the optical. The strategy aspires to

the synaesthetically arresting affect achieved by Francis Bacon’s portraiture.

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In pursuit of a contemporary Gesamtkunstwerk, or ‘total work’ of art, the project has

explored the integration of form making and imaging techniques at multiple scales. This

approach weakens the disciplinary distinctions between art and architecture and allows

for direct engagement with the body at the most intimate of scales. In challenging the

conventional notion that different scales ought to be legibly different, the project opens up

an uncomfortable territory of scalar uncertainty that works to decenter the human subject

from his or her position of (imagined) stability.

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SCENE: AF.001DATE: 2012.03.26CAMERA: 01 FPS: 29.97

TAKE: 01[Physical Modeling Specimens]

[Appendix F: Physical Modeling]


ENT]

The issue of physical modeling is of critical importance to the viability of the project as

a whole. The negotiation between advanced digital modeling techniques and available

fabrication technologies exerted pressures on both the former and the latter. The project

produced geometries that stretched the capacity of the fabrication technology to its limit,

and this limit in turn helped to (literally) shape the project itself.

Physical modeling is more than mere representation in this project; in many respects it is

a proof of concept, albeit on a very small scale. The language and materiality of the models

suggests that they are fossilized artifacts from a future that never was. A fictive future that

might condition our own very real future(s).

152

SCENE: AF.002DATE: 2012.03.26CAMERA: 01 FPS: 29.97

TAKE: 01[Physical Modeling Strategies]

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[Appendix G: 2012 MDP Show]


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SCENE: AG.001

DATE: 2012.04.20

CAMERA: 01

FPS: 29.97

TAKE: 01

[2012 MDP Show Exhibition at Art Central]

Bibliography

155

SCENE: B.001DATE: 1968.05.15CAMERA: 01 FPS: 29.97TAKE: 01[Paris, May 1968]


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Image Citations

159

SCENE: I.001DATE: 1992.05.15CAMERA: 01 FPS: 29.97TAKE: 01[Scene from Aliens]


All uncredited images by the author.

00.000 Still from Fight Club. http://www.daftblogger.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/blow-up-scene-after-explosion.jpg

00.001 Still from Alien. http://popscorn.s3.amazonaws.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/alien-prequel-space-jockey2.jpg

00.002 Still from Alien. http://media.comicvine.com/uploads/10/109340/2154563-chestburster.jpg

00.003 Still from Alien. http://static.guim.co.uk/sys-images/Guardian/Archive/Search/2011/9/30/1317378647295/Alien-1979-007.jpg

00.004 Still from Alien. http://static.guim.co.uk/sys-images/Guardian/Archive/Search/2011/9/30/1317378647295/Alien-1979-007.jpg

01.001 Guantanomo Bay Detention Center. http://www.tunisia-live.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/Guantanamo-Camp.jpg

01.002. New Babylon. http://fromztoa.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/12/newbabylon-1.jpg

01.003. The Continuous Monument. http://www.spaceinvading.com/bookmarklet/Images/2701091233096716superstudio_monument_1_kl.jpg

01.004. The Walking City. http://mikkoselin.files.wordpress.com/2010/12/01.jpg

01.005. Walls of Change. http://lebbeuswoods.wordpress.com/2010/05/28/walls-of-change/

01.006. Walls. http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lyc6zltIMO1qk9swjo1_1280.jpg

160

[Imag

e Ci

tatio

ns]

[MAS

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T] 02.002. UC Davis Protest. http://i.i.com.com/cnwk.1d/i/tim/2011/11/21/occupy_pepper_spray_AP111118053177_fullwidth_620x350.jpg

02.003. Occupy Calgary Protest. http://www.cbc.ca/gfx/images/news/topstories/2011/11/07/li-occupy-monday-620.jpg

02.004. Anti-Coalition Protest. http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f2/Calgary_anti-coaltion_protest_2.JPG

03.003. Pope Innocent X. http://www.askyfilledwithshootingstars.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2009/06/06_francis-bacon_head-vi_1949.jpg

03.004. Still from The Thing. http://www.dvdbeaver.com/film2/DVDReviews41/the%20thing%20blu-ray/large%20the%20thing%20blu-ray5.jpg

06.001. Still from Fight Club. http://www.daftblogger.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/blow-up-scene-after-explosion.jpg

AC.001. 3D Printer. http://www.inhabitat.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/printer1.jpg

AD.001. Conceptual Site Plan. http://www.calgary.ca/_layouts/cocis/DirectDownload.aspx?target=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.calgary.ca%2FPDA%2FLUPP%2FDocuments%2FPublications%2Fe

ast-village-arp.pdf&noredirect=1

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Feast-village-arp.pdf&noredirect=1

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ns%2Feast-village-arp.pdf&noredirect=1

06.001. Still from Fight Club. http://www.daftblogger.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/blow-up-scene-after-explosion.jpg

B.001. Sous Les Paves, La Plage. http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_RBOY6FSVz0w/S9wiSzbqhNI/AAAAAAAAARw/ZsNzf3Gg9wA/s1600/France-01.jpg

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ENT]

I.001. Still from Aliens. http://image.toutlecine.com/photos/a/l/i/aliens-le-retour-1986-10-g.jpg

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Liminal Landscapes

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