dowding james

between performance and architecture

On the Politics of A Performative Production of Space

This Major Study is presented to the School of Architecture, Oxford Brookes University in part fulfilment of

the regulations for the Diploma in Architecture.

Statement of Originality: This Major Study is an original piece of work which is made available for copying

with permission of the Head of the School of Architecture.

Signed

between performance and architecture

On the Politics of A Performative Production of Space

James Dowding

Contents

On the Politics of a Performative Architecture

IntroductionOn the Production of SpaceThe Politics of Design OperationsA Process of PerformanceAdvancing a Project of CritiqueConclusion: Towards a New Project

Appendices

REX: ApproachElaborating On PerformanceAristotle’s SyllogismList of IllustrationsBibliography

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112114117118120

Introduction‘At the sidewalk the library turns its back on the city’

Projects for Public Spaces

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On 23rd May 2004, the Seattle Central Library, Seattle, designed by architects REX, New

York, was opened to widespread critical acclaim. In the New Yorker Paul Goldberger (2006) declared the library ‘the most important new library to be built in a generation’ while the architecture critic for the New York Times, Herbert Muschamp (2006), went further, writing that the library was ‘a blazing chandelier to swing your dreams upon’. Yet praise from architectural critics was in no way unanimous. In July of that year, barely two months after the library’s official opening, Benjamin Fried writing for Projects for Public Spaces—a not-for-profit planning, design and educational organisation ‘dedicated to helping people create and sustain public spaces and strong communities throughout the USA’ (2010)—published ‘Mixing with the Kool Crowd’ (2006), an article expressing grave doubts about the holistic success of the project and its architectural merit. Indeed, the article went so far as to suggest that, as a piece of civic architecture, the project had fundamentally failed in its understanding of and engagement with the surrounding city. These apparent failings were manifest despite REX’s claims for an architecture of ‘performance’,

a term that expresses the importance of agency and the ‘doing’ of architecture in order to exceed ‘mere representation’ (TED xSMU, 2009). The design approach of the architects was supposed to prevent these failings. The pursuit of performance is undertaken through a highly specific design process that necessitates the architect’s engagement with the project from a position that is uninfected by presumption and prior conceptions of a solution. From an ‘a-critical’ situation REX extensively interrogate data, existing spatial conditions and convention in conjunction with the client–and user –in order to calibrate a definition of performance specifically to a given project (Monitor, 2010). Taking positions on the conclusions resulting from this examination, REX extrapolate an ‘underlying argumentation’ (Monitor) from which a design solution is drawn. The architectural manifestation is the final deduction of an ‘unassailable argument’ explicitly diagrammed by the premises, suppositions and analyses of the design process in service to the collaboratively defined definition of performance. Yet despite this explicit process the criticism remained. Fried considers the library ‘sealed away from the sidewalks and streets around it’,

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citing patrons bemoaning its lack of accessibility and considering it to be ‘a missed opportunity to bring new life to the area surrounding the library’, before concluding, that when the hype surrounding the project’s opening finally ebbs away ‘what will remain is another self contained architectural object that adds little to the public life around it’ (Fried, 2010). Further, Fried is not alone in publishing opinion in opposition to the flow of critical zeitgeist that sang the library’s praises. What these, seemingly rogue, commentators share is a position outside the established architectural critic milieu and a common collective opinion on the source of the library’s principal failings; its apparent social ignorance and refusal to acknowledge its surroundings. At the time of the library’s opening architecture critic Lawrence Cheek was effusive in his praise in an article in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, ‘On Architecture: New library is defining Seattle’s urban vitality’ (2006). In March 2007 he penned a now much discussed follow-up piece dramatically reconsidering his earlier expressions of an architectural triumph; suggesting instead that, though the Seattle Central Library’s ‘provocation has influenced us with new thinking about the possibilities of architecture and urbanism’, ultimately his earlier praise was misplaced, concluding that ‘a mistake has been made’. These criticisms of the library’s failure to engage the urban centre of Seattle are particularly glaring when contrasted with the financial and political conditions of the Seattle Public Libraries (SPL) Bond through which the project was

commissioned. Seattle during the 1990s was a city renowned for an engagement with public process (Mattern, 2003). On 3 November 1998, a $196.4 million public-funded bond measure, among the largest ever put forward for an American urban library programme, was passed by public vote with a 72 per cent landslide majority. In addition to the enlargement of existing branch libraries, the SPL bond measure provided for $120 million capital cost for the design and construction of a new Central Library upon the site of the previous downtown Carnegie Library between Fourth and Fifth Avenue, and Madison and Spring Street. Founded and maintained upon the ideals of free and universal access for all members of the public and facilitated in conjunction with public contribution, Carnegie Library tradition and the values it promulgated were a central tenet of the SPL’s project aspirations; this would be a ‘special civic place’ that would reflect Seattle’s civic values, engaging and reflecting the cultural and public persona of Seattle. Former Los Angeles Times architecture critic John Pastier, suggests that an urban library’s architecture ‘should announce that this is the city’s prime public building, a place that celebrates knowledge, imagination and self improvement’ (1999). Pastier asserts that it is the city that produces great buildings rather than an architect or the city elites. Making great buildings is a citywide enterprise; since everyone is a potential user, everyone is equally entitled to participate (Mattern). This consideration and engagement with the user and the everyday is similarly borne out

introduction


in REX’s manifesto and their foregrounding of performance. In 2006 Joshua Prince-Ramus established REX, divorcing the practice from their prior affiliations with Koolhaas’s Office of Metropolitan Architecture, though REX retained many of the staff trained under Koolhaas at OMA Rotterdam, most notably the joint partners Erez Ella and Prince-Ramus himself. Until this separation REX had practised as OMA-New York, founded in 2000 in the Tribeca area of downtown New York with Prince-Ramus as Managing Principal. Functioning as a satellite of OMA provided OMA-NY with the creative freedom to further develop conceptual notions of design practice and philosophy the genesis of which is evidenced in the creative and intellectual output of Rotterdam. REX’s manifesto is the product of a hard-line critique of the architecture and processes of design of the last hundred years; adhering to the opinion that ‘the creation of a false tension between form and function’ and its continued proliferation by the modernist and post-modernist movements respectively, has led to the ‘critical failure’ of architecture to exceed representation (Icon 065, Nov 2008):

“[The modernists] put forward an agenda that architecture should not just be representational but that it should do things . . . after about fifty years it became widely recognised that they had failed and had made a lot of sterile inflexible architecture. At the end of the recession during the seventies, at the perfect opportunity to stitch back form and function, [architecture] swung

all the way over to formalism and, with the rise of postmodernism, we saw the emergence of architecture as a very autonomous, very self-referential language.” (http://vimeo.com/22332017, 2011)

Indeed, REX’s wholesale rejection of modernism and postmodernism is worth critical and theoretical consideration in conjunction with their practice’s genesis as OMA-NY and Prince-Ramus and Ella’s tenure at OMA, Rotterdam. Koolhaas’s 1970s notions of force and effect address the vagaries of an ever-changing world and a constantly fluctuating urbanism in an effort to uncover new cultural and formal possibilities within the existing environment. Emerging issues such as American consumerism provided the potential for affirmative action on the part of the architect in seeking an architecture of ‘new forms, events and behaviours’ (Beatty pp.65). In S,M,L,XL Koolhaas refers to the situationist manifesto of Attila Kotanyi and Raoul Vaneigem:

‘Architecture really exists, like Coca-Cola: Though coated with ideology it is a real production, falsely satisfying a falsified need: Urbanism is comparable to the advertising propaganda around Coca-Cola: - pure spectacular ideology.’ (1961, cited in Koolhaas and Mau, 1995, p.1248)

While Koolhaas accepts this social critique he considers that the ensuing erosion of identity and individuation in urban landscapes need not be

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understood as a negative occurrence suggesting that this newly prescribed ‘blankness’ maintains a condition of freedom contrary to the imprisonment of identity that is so resistant to interpretation, expansion and renewal (Koolhaas and Mau, 1995, p.1248). Despite the acceptance of Kotanyi and Vaneigem’s consideration of social evolution Koolhaas contends that such a consideration of architecture need not produce less hospitable environments: ‘People can inhabit anything. And they can be miserable in anything and ecstatic in anything. More and more I think that architecture has nothing to do with it’ (Koolhaas in: Heron 1996). For Koolhaas it appears that the best course for an architect is to extract architecture from consideration as a corrective to that critique; to disregard architectures of nostalgia and embrace the directions afforded by new technologies. Thus, the rapid proliferation of ‘generic’ landscapes presupposes ‘a global liberation movement’ (Koolhaas, 1995, p.1250) that is informed by a Darwinian architectural culture that considers engagement with technology as adaptation and commercial markets as criteria for determining success. Though Koolhaas strikes an undoubtedly pessimistic tone, it is the affirmative and direct engagement of existing conditions within a given environment and the absence of negative or analytical critique that are of note when considered in conjunction with REX and their theoretical positioning. Koolhaas’s stance appears to be ‘a-critical’, if ‘critical’ is understood in the sense developed by

K Michael Hays, whereby the relation between the social and the architectural is cut with an axis of formal autonomy and criticality (1984). It is this subscription to the ‘empowerment of theory’ and critical autonomy that Koolhaas avoids as an un-aloof impartial observer of American consumerism (Alejandro Zaera-Polo 1993). To some degree REX have inherited Koolhaas’s position, engaging the realities of a constantly changing world in the hope of uncovering new formal and cultural possibilities. The appropriation and situation of this understanding is partly expressed in their manifesto which countenances the ‘discovery of uncharted territory’ and ‘rediscovery of forgotten territory that has renewed usefulness’ through the advocacy of a practice ‘unprejudiced by convention’. REX’s dismissals of analytical and negative critique outline a theoretical position analogous with Koolhaas’s emphasis on realism, of ‘tough-mindedly finding out what is’ (Saunders, 2007, p.xii) and directly engaging with those settings. In the seminal work on this position, Somol and Whiting’s ‘Notes around the Doppler Effect and Other Moods’ (Notes, 2002), Koolhaas’s detachment in works such as ‘Delirious New York’ becomes one of the earliest representations of the emerging archetype of the postcritical. Somol and Whiting advance an architecture ‘linked to the diagrammatic, the atmospheric and cool performance’, an alternative to the ‘indexical’, ‘dialectical’ ‘hot performance’ of the critical project. Their position is founded in an outright rejection of ‘a disciplinarity that is autonomous and a dialectic


that is oppositional’ (Rendell, 2007, p.4) and the desire to detonate the rigid dialectical framework that positions architecture between these two antinomies. It is in the advocacy of an architecture that dismisses ‘the stunted creativity, retrogression . . . and fruitless social critique’ (Sirowy, 2010, p.64) of criticality for architectural investigations of ‘intelligence, projection and innovation’ that follow the ‘criticality of the marketplace’ (Somol and Whiting, 2002, p.75), that REX can be considered as closely analogous with the postcritical. Innovation, realism and performativity are central tenets of postcritical doctrine and strikingly evident throughout REX’s manifesto and the public appearances of Prince-Ramus. The drafting and positioning of REX’s manifesto as a consequence of the perceived failing of modernism and postmodernism’s efforts to exceed representation, apes that of the postcritical denouncing of criticality evidenced in David Solomon’s consideration of the abject failure of ‘modernism’s dual stance of formal autonomy and political earnestness . . . to make architecture better or relevant’ (2005, p.82). Somol and Whiting’s advancing of the field of architecture through architectural values and operations that seek to engage and exploit global commercialisation, coupled with a reliance on ‘intelligent’ problem-solving rather than intellectualised, ‘academised’ critique (Gardner, 2006) is entirely congruent with REX’s hyper-rational design process and tactile consideration of constraints as opportunities (http://www.rex-ny.com/approach#, 2006).

It is in the context of the ‘postcritical’ in East Coast North American architectural culture that REX have emerged. This theoretical correlation is further evident in the everyday operations of design they mobilise to bear out their theoretical situation. From a rejection of theorised design criticality and autonomy REX mobilise their specific definition of the term performance in an effort to eschew any tacit engagement with the functions of criticality and the burden of its architectural discourse. The aspiration to approach a given project free from ‘infected thesis’ and to question ‘pre-digested solutions’ (http://www.rex-ny.com/approach#, 2006) with a view to overturning convention draws direct comparison to Lucy Bullivant’s consideration of the postcritical architect as working ‘openly, without fixed and dictatorial ideas’ (Bullivant, 2007, p.78). It is perhaps in REX’s most unorthodox architectural characteristic, their highly specific process of design and its particular operations, that the greatest and most progressive resemblance to the postcritical agenda is observed. REX’s process of ‘productively losing control’ and its constituent stages of core issues, joint positions and manifestations, and their operations, seemingly question the mechanisms of power and the abstractions of the architect from the user with which architectural design and highly academised critical theory participates:

‘In our experience a team with enough intelligence and perseverance may not be able to foresee the final result, but will always arrive at something highly functional and aesthetically

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unique . . . How do you remove the hand of the architect? Isn’t it actually more interesting when the architect can create a tool from which he or she then steps away, allowing the user to project their own possible future onto it . . .’ (Icon 065, Nov 2008)

Discussing the nature of what it is that the postcritical architect is striving to achieve in his introduction to The New Architectural Pragmatism, William S. Saunders hypothesises by drawing several quotes from throughout the collection together:

‘This notion [postcritical architecture’s aspirations] is constantly echoed in phrases and sentences from this collection: ‘allowing the process of production to transform the initial idea for the project’ (Bullivant); ‘by systematically researching reality as found with the help of diagrams and other analytic measures’ all kinds of latent beauties, forces and possibilities can, projective architects maintain, be brought to the surface’ (Roemer van Toorn).’ (Saunders, 2007, p.xii)

Koolhaas’s peripheral acquaintance, but lack of direct engagement, with architectural operations consonant with the postcritical position is indicative of the divorcing of what was then OMA-New York from OMA, Rotterdam in 2006. Prince-Ramus advances that this separation was the consequence of REX’s doctrinaire operative engagement with process. The evolution of REX’s

project through specific issues and positions advances a design rationale that ‘gets stronger, tighter, and grows into something you simply could not imagine . . . [and which] generates unassailable arguments’ (Monitor). This practice appeared to cause Koolhaas discomfort, being unable to impose his own character upon the designs REX promulgated; ‘because of the airtightness of our approach and argumentation, he couldn’t insert himself by showing up a year into the process and saying he wanted it done differently’ (Azure, 2010). Where much of Koolhaas’s theorising and design operated on the fringes of postcritical architecture, the adherence to principles of process - productively losing control and hyper-rational design - saw REX embrace analogous theoretic considerations unreservedly in an effort to avoid criticality. Rather than addressing the ‘tired’ debate and ‘preferencing’ of form or function and engaging the project of criticality, REX refer to a pragmatic definition of performance as ‘the calibration of form and function in service to the best success of a given project’ (Monitor). REX mobilise a predetermined process of design that defines and subsequently strives to realise the definition of performance within the conditions of the given project as a means of avoiding the antinomies of critical and formal autonomy. They begin the design process not by drawing assumptions on the spatial engagement of the user, conceiving of, or accepting abstract ideas about urban space and spatial practice, but returning to first principles, identifying ‘root problems and doggedly explor[ing]


them with critical naiveté’ (http://www.rex-ny.com/approach#, 2008). This un-theorised, empirical operation can be understood as a product of REX’s origins as OMA-NY and the senior partners’ architectural inaugurations as the wards of Rem Koolhaas in Rotterdam, in conjunction with Joshua Prince-Ramus’ philosophical education in the traditions of Socratic method at Yale. REX engage with the principal concerns of the brief without assumptions and unencumbered by the presumption of solution. Free from the prescriptive design responses imposed upon client and architect by convention, institution and one another, REX afford themselves the opportunity to overturn those conventions and develop anew the manner in which an issue is resolved. Having identified the core issues REX return to the client and in concurrence with the client establish ‘joint positions’ on the issues identified. These joint positions are rooted in a pragmatic architectural performance that engages the everyday, viewing site-imposed ‘constraints as opportunities’ to arrive ‘at a solution that is highly functional and aesthetically unique’ (Monitor):

“This is the moment when we as architects can encourage our clients to reintroduce agenda, agency, back in to architecture . . . only once we have established clear architectural positions with our client do we begin to posit architectural manifestations.” (http://vimeo.com/22332017, 2010)

A critical issue in regarding an architectural

practice of performance that is purportedly calibrated according to client and user requirements is the consideration of a phenomenological understanding of space. If ‘architecture is about shaping our physical habitat to suit human purposes’ it is imperative to reflect upon the way in which we engage with space and the subsequent lived experience of the ‘everyday’ (Wasserman 2000 pp.13). The architectural exploration of space is closely related to the intellectual projects of Henri Lefebvre who positioned his theory of the everyday firmly in relation to the consequences of spatial production with which architecture engages:

‘Everyday life is sustenance, clothing, furnishing, homes, neighbourhoods, environment . . . Call it material culture if you like, but do not confuse the issue.’ (Critique of Everyday Life, Vol.1, 2002, p.12)

The intersection of Lefebvre’s theories of societal spatial production and the critique of the everyday in the ‘sea shell’ metaphor advanced in ‘Notes on a New Town’ (Introduction to Modernity, 1961) signals the movement towards the notions of the ‘urban’, and ‘space’ that formed the later subjects of enquiry in The Production of Space (1974). The necessary response of Lefebvre’s Critique to the situation encountered in ‘Notes On A New Town’ is to ‘produce’ everyday life through new forms of urban space that ‘try to find the crack for freedom to slip through, silently filling up the empty spaces’ (p.124) rather than ‘reproduce’ the latent spaces of

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Figure 1.1 View northeast from the corner of 4th Avenue and Madison Street.


capitalist fragmentation. As Steven Harris writes, ‘the consideration of everyday life as a critical political construct [in architecture] represents an attempt to suggest an architecture resistant to the commodification/consumption paradigm’ (Everyday Architecture, 1997, p.3). Mobilising a Lefebvrian model of socio-political spatial practice, allows for consideration of the political inferences that can be understood through an analysis of REX’s highly particular and historically critical mode of design and its ancillary operations. The deploying of these operations by REX in an effort to move architecture out of the antinomies of criticality and the autonomous project was not the only route available to them. Where REX have engaged notions of postcritical architecture toward facilitating their interpretation of performance, Jonathan Hill has similarly, mobilised an agenda that corresponds with much of the postcritical program in Actions of Architecture (2003), his critique of architects’ professional autonomy in the United Kingdom. Comparable to REX, Hill cites the disconnection of practice from broad social ‘use’ and experience’; the result of the self-referential, self-legitimatising mechanisms architects employ. While Hill counters the aesthetic autonomy of architecture, he retains the critical possibilities of architectural projects, offering an alternative agenda to REX in the explicit desire to challenge the professional autonomy of the architect by taking architectural practice outside, the ‘normalising forces of autonomy’ and endeavouring to sever the producer from the regulatory conditions of the institution. Practising

critique through design, Hill questions the political values of the normalising, controlling forces of legitimation and ‘signature’ of authorship that are immanent within architectural practice (Sirowy). Hill distinguishes between the ‘discipline’ of architecture and the ‘profession’ launching his criticism chiefly at the RIBA and the ARB through theoretical critique, considering the artistic autonomy of architecture to be compromised by the demands of the RIBA for professional autonomy. In essence advocating, like Lefebvre, an architecture undertaken ‘on the model of art’ (1991, p.9), Hill posits a subsequent counter design for an ‘Institute of Illegal Architects’ that seeks to subvert and usurp the power hierarchies propounded by those two bodies of professionalism (Hill). The theoretical foundation for Hill’s stance is based in a variety of key ideas ranging across Lefebvre’s socio-political philosophy, art criticism and architectural critical theory, of which the most prevalent is that of the socially generative performances promulgated by Koolhaas and Tschumi. The mode of design practised by REX promulgates the prior conception of process, rather than object or aesthetic design and it is this process towards performance that provokes the greatest interest for the author. The consideration of REX’s practice as analogous to that of the postcritical provides an enhanced understanding of the positioning and subsequent critique that their practice and manifesto are subject to and a wider context for their situation within architectural discourse. The highly charged critique of modern architectural design theory that REX advance lends

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itself to an inherently political reading of their definition of ‘performance’ and its implications in spatial practice. Further, as the product of a specific design process, it lends that process and the architectural operations that facilitate it to a similar political interpretation. The consideration of the term ‘performance’ has prompted limited but detailed discussion within architectural discourse since its establishment within the discipline in the late 1960’s. Following in the wake of the poststructuralists, the majority of the writing and experiments on performative architecture have focused on the generative processes conducive to social performance: Coop Himmelb(l)au’s ‘open architecture’ (The Cloud, 2006, p.55) formed by explosive sketching and spontaneous, intuitive performances; Tschumi’s event cities that are carved with voids in which performances can happen; and Koolhaas’s ‘operative’ topographies (Zaera, Notes for A Topographic Survey, p.35) that allow for fluid programmes that can change throughout the course of a day. In stark contrast to these understandings, the definition of performance advanced by REX in their manifesto is not engaged to refine or enhance the definitions that have gone before. Employed within a different context and from a contrasting position to the definitions outlined above, REX mobilise the term performance in an effort to transcend the perceived failings of the form and function schism that has flourished in architectural discourse since the inception of modernism. The critique of architectural convention

inherent within this definition and the intrinsic politicising that such a reading of the term engenders has received comparatively little critical appraisal and little or no academic consideration. This is largely due to the relatively recent emergence of REX as an autonomous practice (in 2006). Though their ‘hyper-rational design process’ has received press interest in relation to the completion of specific buildings, there is a substantial gap in existing knowledge regarding an adequate critical appraisal of the practice’s methodologies and their use of the term performance in the wider socio-political context of spatial production that this Major Study will seek to redress (TED, 2009). Framing the dialogue of the social and political implications of REX’s spatial practice within the circumference of the philosopher Lefebvre provides a fertile ground for such discourse. The volume of discourse on Lefebvre, particularly outside the field of architecture, has been prolific within disciplines that deal with issues of space and in particular geography; David Harvey’s political-economic geographical writings since the 1970s (Social Justice and the City) and Ed Soja’s spatial-cultural interpretations within social sciences are of note (Keeping Spaces Open, pp.348-353). It was only in 2011 with the publication of Lukasz Stanek’s Henri Lefebvre on Space: Architecture, Urban Research and the Production of Theory that architecture was explicitly engaged on a level of intellectual critique. The book discusses in some detail the development of Lefebvre’s theory of spatial production in conjunction with the


every day practices of living, and his encounters with architects and planners in post-war France, addressing ‘the encounter[s] between sociology, architecture, urbanism and philosophy’ (p.11). While it develops a comprehensive understanding of Lefebvre in this framework, it is not within the book’s scope to consider the implications of a term such as performance. Similarly, in several articles and subsequent volumes of articles such as Event Cities 1 & 2 (1994 and 2001), Bernard Tschumi specifically addresses the notion of performance within a trialectical structure informed by Lefebvre, though his definition of performance is again rooted in that of generative processes and not strictly relevant to the pragmatic definition being researched. The Production of Space itself is at times notoriously opaque and difficult to penetrate; terms share similarities of language so synonymous as to risk losing clear distinctions, as Tim Unwin notes ‘reading The Production of Space can be compared to walking across quicksand or trying to find the end of the rainbow’ (1999, p.25). In his review following the publication of the English translation, Harvey Molotch states simply, ‘he wrote terribly’ (The Space of Lefebvre: Review, p.894). Despite this seemingly impenetrable prose, an understanding of Lefebvre’s spatialised dialectic provides a prolific framework for the socio-political engagement of space insofar as it endeavours to surmount the Cartesian dualistic conceptions of capitalist spatiality and the binary antinomies of form and function. Assessing these spatial practices within the

circumference of Lefebvre’s seminal work on space will afford consideration of the elements of practice that REX engage such as diagrams and contractual clauses as inherently political; an intricately detailed assessment of REX’s internal operations will develop a broader understanding of their architectural practice. This will allow for the consideration of those ancillary operations as inherently maintaining the socio-political agenda of an architecture practice as explored by Katie Lloyd Thomas in Material Matters: Architecture and Material Practice (2007). Lloyd Thomas considers how the ‘crucial description’ of the building ‘the specification’ can be read as a deconstructive ‘tactic’ in its own right (pp.278-283). Further, consideration will be given to the political and philosophical value of architectural operations that are conceived as being of ‘secondary status’ to the ‘conceptual and high minded questions of architectural form’ advanced in the sketches of the creative act and subsequent technical drawings (2004). This discussion will be undertaken in conjunction with the works of Jonathan Hill, specifically Actions of Architecture, which considers the historical derivations and philosophical import of the ‘tools of abstraction’ employed by the architect and the socio-political implications of their continued engagement (2003, pp.25-32). This Major Study will explore the political readings of everyday architectural operations to provide an intellectual analysis and critique of the emerging practice REX. This will not be viewed in terms of relative success or failure to manifest

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an architecture of performance in line with their manifesto, but rather, as a rich starting point towards the development of a further research project. By engaging with the issues outlined above, the Major Study intends to question the implications of REX’s mode of performance and in doing so prompt debate at the interface of architecture and socio-political theory, particularly concerning the political reading of performative architectural operations in spatial practice. This Major Study will seek to answer: what are the political consequences of the claims REX make for the importance of the design process and further, how might a design process be developed to transcend the limits of performance imposed by REX themselves?

On the Production of Space‘There is a politics of space because space is political’

Henri Lefebvre


The notion of space being socially produced has become a founding tenet of contemporary

social and cultural discourse regarding space. Predominantly discussed by social geographers, the implications of Henri Lefebvre’s societal production of space has inherently strong resonances within architectural discourse, lent further critical value by the range of subjects considered within Lefebvre’s philosophy; the engagement with urbanism, the proliferation of capitalism and the ‘everyday’. This exploration of the everyday, the interaction of the user within space and the socio-political conditions of spatial production resonate with the long established contention that space constitutes the defining element of modern architecture: ‘Thus architecture’s discovery of Lefebvre following the publication of The Production of Space helped to rehabilitate space after a quarter century of the post-modern elevation of representation and language over space and materiality’ (Upton, 2002, p.708). This entry into widespread architectural discourse coincided, or arguably helped precipitate, the inception of the postcritical reaction to postmodernism. Lefebvre’s interest in space and the everyday is framed within a broader, lifelong,

intellectual interrogation of modernity and its positioning in relation to the nature of the urban, the role of space and the significance of everyday life in the expansive reproduction and perpetuation of capitalist production. In contrast to the geographers or sociologists who study the actions of people in and with space at an intellectually maintained distance, the architect directly and routinely intervenes in the everyday and the societal production of space. The concept of modernity and what constitutes an architecture of modernity is similarly observed as a central strand in the architectural discourse surrounding form and function. Lefebvre explicitly engages the role of the architect in producing space and specific architectures, from the ‘Roman state-city-empire’ (The Production of Space, 1991, p.252) to the architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright, and from the spaces of medieval Christendom to the French Revolution. The discussion of the everyday in contemporary architectural history, theory and practice operates at the intersection of architecture and Architecture, ‘between the study of the material settings of human life’, and the ‘narrower concerns of professional design’ and the realm of intellectual theory (Upton, p.709).

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The consequences of the architect’s engagement with the user afford socio-political consideration at an operative level and in a wider context that acknowledges the relation of the architect and their designed space to the urban capitalist city.

The Production of Space

The translation of The Production of Space into English in 1991 represented a widespread shift in the intellectual conception of space in English speaking countries which had previously remained largely removed from the sustained influence of Lefebvre’s consideration of space that burgeoned in much of European academia. The titular terms accurately outline his analytical intentions; ‘production’ and ‘space’ are both steeped with connotations. For Lefebvre, the term ‘production’ denotes the human creation of space in which we act out our lives, produced and reproduced through the agendas of the individual ‘even as space constrains and influences those producing it’ (1991, p.33). ‘Production’ further implies the consideration of space as being comparable to other economic goods. The consequence of a mode of production, space is a product and therefore subject to the same conditions of any other commodity: space can be bought and sold. In addition to producing goods and services, economies produce space. Consequently space is not merely the neutral terrain where the social practices of life – enjoyment, consumption, self-identification, tradition and spatial reproduction

– transpire; space is not benignly inherited from the past, neither is it instigated by the motivations of sets of authorities and professionals or other ‘contending forces’ (1991, p.42).

‘Architecture, human densities, and locational relations are a force in structuring what can be done in space itself. Walls and roads obviously privilege certain kinds of activity and inhibit others, support the projects of one type of actor and deter the goals of another.’ (Molotch, 1993, p.888)

A space is therefore neither a mode nor a catalogue of constituent elements. Rather it is a dialectical interconnection of geographical landscape, built environment, symbolic understandings and actions of everyday life. All social organisations implicitly produce a space that is the product of its societal relations and ideologies; space is both a precondition for and a product of action. It is about the type of reality that a given space constitutes that leads to the conflicts and contest of space. In addition to these material constructs are the symbols and styles that flourish through culture and affect one’s behaviour; ‘elements of monumental grandeur that disempower, varieties of suburban architecture (house “models”) that falsely imply real choice, monotonous cubes and towers that stultify rewarding forms of sociability’ (1993, p.888). The wide ranging, detailed consideration of modernity and space that Lefebvre sets up and the discourse it has provoked, provides a

on the production of space


fertile framework within which to interrogate the practical and the socio-political conditions of REX’s architecture and its operations towards an architecture of performance.

Architecture as Conceived Space

Lefebvre’s conception of space strives to ‘reconnect elements that have long been separated . . . [and] to re-join the severed and reanalyse the intermingled’ (1991, p.413) by implementing a ‘unity theory’ of space that moves to ‘detonate’ the Cartesian binary antinomies that prevail in Western intellectual discourse.

‘Lefebvre strove for a unity theory of space, a rapprochement between physical space (nature), mental space (formal abstractions about space) and social space (the space occupied by ‘sensory phenomena, including products of the imagination such as projects and projections, symbols and utopias’ (1991, p.12)’ (Merrifield, 1994, p.523).

For Lefebvre, combining these modes of space within a single dialectical theory would ‘expose’, ‘decode’ and ‘read’ space; acts possible only in considering the fashion in which they are brought together as a ‘conflictual’ process of production. To transition from this position of the conception of ‘things in space’ to the ‘actual production of space’ (1991, p.37) Lefebvre advances a conceptual triad of the generative process of space.

Spatial practices ‘secrete that society’s space; propound[ing] and presuppose[ing] it in a dialectical interaction; it produces it slowly and surely as it masters and appropriates it’ (1991, p.38). Spatial practice encompasses the activities of people in and with space, maintaining a close affinity with perceived space; that is, people’s perceptions govern their daily interactions with space through ‘routes, networks [and] patterns of interaction that link places set aside for work, play and leisure’ (Merrifield, p.524). In privileging spatial practice as the imperative moment of spatial production, Lefebvre privileges the city’s use value over exchange value.

Spaces of representation are the spaces of everyday life experienced through the images and symbols associated with the everyday that ‘overlay physical space, making symbolic use of objects’ (1991, p.39). An elusive conceived space that requires the imagination to interpret and appropriate what ‘tends towards a more or less coherent system of non-verbal symbols and signs’ (1991, p.39). Spaces of representation conceives of the understanding of qualities of space by those who use it - users, inhabitants – and those who endeavour to describe it – writers, philosophers and artists – without engaging it as an operative tool in the transformation of space.

Representations of space refer to the conceptualised spaces of ‘technocratic subdividers and social engineers’ working with spatial transformation. It is the space of planners, architects, geographers

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and scientists and consequently comprises the operative abstractions those agents engage: maps, statistics and objectified representations. For Lefebvre ‘maps of space influence professionals in their operational abstractions in the professional production of space’ (Milgrom, 2008, p.65) reflecting the conception of urban space in relation to what is considered continuous or changeable. These conceptions of space are inhibited only by what it is deemed possible to represent through their operative systems: numerical, statistical or cartographic. It is always a conceived and inherently abstract space since it ‘subsumes ideology and knowledge within its practice’ (Merrifield, 1994, p.323). As the dominant moment of spatial production in any society, the ‘conceived’ space of the architect is intimately ‘tied to the relations of production and to the ‘order’ which those relations impose and hence to knowledge, to signs, to codes and to ‘frontal’ relations’ (1991, p.33). The pre-eminent mode of architectural representation of space is the architectural drawing. Engaging the division of labour in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, drawing became associated with abstract thought; the drawn geometry of perspective removing the architect from the role of occupier and creating a division of status between intellectual and manual labour (1991, p.342). The realm of the architectural drawing is predominantly the plan and the section; their principle purpose being to depict an object that can be manifested in the real world. Referring to highly specific elements of the real world they innately afford only a limited understanding of use.

Lefebvre writes:

‘Within the spatial practice of modern society, the architect ensconces himself in his own space. He has a representation of this space, one which is bound to graphic elements . . . This conceived space is thought by those who make use of it to be true, despite the fact – or perhaps because of the fact – that it is geometrical: because it is a medium of objects, an object in itself, and a locus of the objectification of plans.’ (1991, p.361)

Accordingly the output of representations of space is directly related to the contextual understanding that affects the works of the architect or the urban designer, that is, the programmatic pursuit of solution to a conceived problem:

‘By contrast, the only products of representational spaces are symbolic works. These are often unique; sometimes they set in train ‘aesthetic’ trends and, after a time having provoked a series of manifestations and incursions into the imaginary, run out of steam.’ (1991, p.42)

Lefebvre’s conceptual triad and its consequences for architectural practice afford the potential for a critique of REX’s understanding of ‘performance’ and its implications for the spatial practice of the user. Moreover, it countenances the possibility of a further critical development for an alternative mode of design practice drawn from the relative


Figure 2.1 Operating within capitalist conditions and abstract space: View southeast of the Dee and Charles Wyly Theatre, Dallas (left)

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success and failings of REX’s operations and architectural manifestations.

Abstract Space

While effectively constituting the space of capital, conceived space has a ‘substantial role and a specific influence in the production of space’ (1991, p.42) finding its ‘objective expression’ in the ‘bureaucratic and political authoritarianism immanent to a repressive space’ (1991, p.49) of factories, monuments and towers. In illustrating how this competition over the reality that a space constitutes unfolds, Lefebvre establishes a distinction between a space of domination, where the production of space is in service of an ‘abstract’ purpose, and a space of ‘appropriation’, where the production of space is in service of human need. The dominated space is ‘a space transformed – and mediated – by technology, by practice’ characterised as ‘closed, sterile or emptied out’, only attaining full meaning when ‘contrasted with the opposite and inseparable concept of appropriation’ (1991, pp.164-5). The proliferation of abstract space is evidenced in the space of capitalism, in the facilitation of state power or the pervasive reproduction of capital; the carving of space into real estate packages for market exchange as commodities and multiplied by the vast networks of banks and business institutions founded in the world of commodities. Comparable to Marx’s fetishism of commodities, Lefebvre considers capitalism to proliferate the

fetishism of space ‘we come to think of spatiality, and so fetishise space in a way reminiscent of the old fetishism of commodities, where the trap lay in exchange, and the error was to consider ‘things’ in isolation, as ‘things in themselves’ (1991, p.90). Where abstract space is analogous with space produced for exchange value, ‘absolute space’ can be equated to use value; the satisfactions found in livelihood, family and personal gratification that pursues a ‘logic of the senses’ and fashions its own compatible space (1991, p.158). Consequently there is an integral contradiction between the pursuit of values of use and exchange. The city and urban life are portrayed as a dynamic dialectical process of potentials and happenstances. The dialectical process of the development of the city and everyday life are described by Lefebvre as different modes of space production; spatialisation – between mental and ‘real’ space. The societal space within which REX operate is accordingly, almost entirely, the abstract space of capitalism. Lefebvre considers abstract space to elevate homogeneity as it endeavours to institute the commodification of space and globalise the capitalist trinity of land-capital-labour that ‘is not homogenous; it simply has homogeneity as its goal’ (1991, p.304). In The Death and Life of Great American Cities Jane Jacobs also demonstrates the destructive capacities of this space ‘and specifically how urban space, using the very means apparently intended to create or re-create it, effects its own self destruction’ (1991, p.363). Abstraction of space is intrinsically destructive, mobilising the



Figure 2.2 Urban space and difference: Looking up at the Seattle Central Library from the corner of 4th Avenue and Madison Street.

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expertise of the professional in order to perpetuate itself. Lefebvre refers to a divorce between the engagement of micro and macro levels of city space by professional specialists who intervene directly in spatial production. Where the separation between architects and urbanists ought to lead to increased social and spatial diversity, Lefebvre finds that everywhere ‘repetition has defeated uniqueness, that the artificial and contrived [abstract space] have driven all spontaneity and naturalness from the field, and, in short that products have vanquished works’ (1991 p.85). This consideration of the capitalist city as a machine that emphasises repetition is redolent of Koolhaas’s observations and conception of the ‘Generic City’, though Koolhaas saw the propagation of ubiquity as an operation that presupposed a ‘global liberation movement’ (S,M,L,XL, p.1254) utilising globalisation to maintain a freedom outside the constraints of identity. The ‘triumph of homogeneity’ is further explored in Lefebvre’s earlier ‘Notes On A New Town’ (1962) in which he refers to the ‘machines for living’ that constitute a developing suburban housing project and ‘act as a mediator between nature and human beings, both as the individual and as groups’, a stark contrast to the ‘unmediated connections between people and nature and intra-community’. Indeed, in ‘Notes On A New Town Lefebvre’ identifies two of the tropes that form significant elements in The Production of Space, these are: the fragmentation and homogenisation of space ‘under the low of the reproducible and the repetitive’ and the reduction of the New

Town’s constituent elements to pure functions; an outcome of omnipresent intelligibility in the conception and planning of space that led to the exclusion of possibility and surprise. Lefebvre’s development of the category of abstract space brooks consideration of the possibilities and inherent limitations for REX’s design operations in engaging with, and operating from, a position of abstract space in the design of the Seattle Central Library, advancing a further interrogation of the consequences of REX’s practice for the city of Seattle and the spatial practice of its users.

Urban and Differential Space

The engagement with, and operations and processes of, the professional architect intervening within abstract space are ‘inherently violent’, threatening to pulverise the body, the spirit and the social urge like any tool of abstraction (1991, p.387). Despite recognising benign intentions, Lefebvre denounces Le Corbusier, and the modernist movement in its entirety, for using the ‘pretext that he was exposing [people] to open air and sunshine’ (1991, p.337) to conceal a design mode of prescriptive arrogance in the service of capital. Representations of space are intrinsically the space of the architect, designs expressed through technical drawings, an architect’s interventions in space occur ‘as a project embedded in a spatial context and texture which calls for representations that will not vanish into the symbolic or


imaginary realms’ (1991, p.42). Designs suggest how inhabitants might live, thus the architect’s programme or design mode is a representation of space; a prescription that identifies what is lived and what is perceived with what is conceived. Consequently the architect’s conception or positioning of a project and the processes that govern that position are similarly representations of space, a directive for the arrangement of built environment form that inherently makes assumptions regarding the spatial practice of its users, their perceiving of space and the ‘codifications’ and symbols that convey the architect’s intents. Although the space of the architect is in representations of space the dialectical nature of Lefebvre’s triad affords further consideration of the architect’s operations in spatial production. The professional operations of the architect are influenced by the spatial practices that surround them and their own consideration of lived representational spaces. The design process and the practice of architecture are intrinsically influenced by the interpretations and engagement with ‘social formations’ and spatial practices. When considering the engagement of the architect with the user within the wider context of the production of space Lefebvre’s assertion of representational space as the realm of the user suggests that it is the interpretation of the architect’s choices in design that is of crucial importance. The failure of criticality to clearly communicate the intentions of the architect and the manifestation of spaces founded in the

‘high theory’ of form and function has further compounded the collapse of communication and engagement with the space of the user. Lefebvre advances that ‘architects seem to have established and dogmatised an ensemble of significations, as such poorly developed and variously labelled as . . . functionalism, formalism and structuralism. They elaborate them not from the significations perceived and lived by those who inhabit but from their own interpretation of inhabiting’ (The Right to the City, 1996, p.152). In response to the fragmentation of the town Lefebvre advances the notion of differential space as a corrective to the ‘vast machine, an automaton, capturing natural energies and consuming them productively’, instead ‘appropriating [the city] to a certain use – to the use of a social group’ (1991, p.345). Lefebvre outlines an important distinction between the spaces of minimal or maximal difference. The induced or minimal difference functions as a formal identity that tends towards the increased fragmentation of the everyday, divorcing and exiling social groups to the periphery of everyday life. In contrast, maximal difference constitutes the production of a new mode of space in reaction to the pervasive spread of abstract space, providing a condition for fundamental social transformation. Lefebvre suggests that ‘inasmuch as abstract space tends towards homogeneity, towards the elimination of differences or peculiarities, a new space cannot be born (produced) unless it accentuates differences’ (1991, p.42). Differential space would embrace and

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propagate difference though, as David Harvey observes in Spaces of Hope (2000), Lefebvre leaves little understanding of how this space may be realised beyond a consequence of the contradictions of use and exchange value, and the production of objects in space as commodities and the production of space itself in abstract space. The development of the theoretical understanding of differential space by Merrifield and McCormack et al, has focused on the conditions it establishes, ‘celebrate[ing] the bodily and experiential particularity, as well as the non-negotiable right to difference’ (Merrifield, 2006, p.113) and ‘acknowledg[ing] the centrality of embodied experience to the production, reproduction and contestation of urban space’ (Latham et al, 2009, p.111) through the forging of its own appropriated space. This conception of a future space effecting positive social change through the engagement of the inherent contradictions of capitalist realities prompts consideration for an alternative design proposal which in turn advances the possibility of ecological and social urban diversity.


The Politics of Design Operations‘We embrace responsibility in order to implement vision . . . To execute vision and retain the insight that facilitates architectural invention, REX re-engages responsibility. Processes, including contractual relationships, project schedules, and procurement strategies, are the things with which we design.

REX: Approach


The operations of the architect inherently lend themselves to socio-political consideration. The

perceived failure of criticality and its antagonistic confrontations of systemic norms are founded in a language of autonomy. The inception of post criticality and its championing and articulation in Somol and Whiting’s ‘Notes Around the Doppler Effect’ exposes the failings of past modes of critical architecture and their operations. REX’s specific operations and the operations of postcriticality need to be seen in context with the culture and theory of practice dominated by the ‘critical’ potential of formal operations (Barber, 2007, p.58). The reactions of Bernard Tschumi and Rem Koolhaas are pre-eminent within such consideration, drawing explicit consideration in Notes. Both Koolhaas and Tschumi formulated their positions in reaction to Manfredo Tafuri’s position of ‘pure criticism’ and his intellectual challenge to architects in the late 1960s to 1970s. Tafuri questioned the capacity of architecture to effect a positive change in the everyday life of the user amidst the constraints of capitalist hegemony and its prevalence for exploitation through the follies of ‘anachronistic hopes in design’ (Architecture and Utopia, 1976). Tschumi

and Koolhaas proposed projects framed within a mode that recognised and operated within those constraints. As Tschumi elaborated:

Architects act as mediators between authoritarian power, or capitalist power, and some sort of humanistic aspiration . . . We cannot block them but we can use another tactic, which I call the tactic of judo, that is, to use the force of one’s opponent in order to defeat it and transform it into something else. (Tschumi in Cynthia Davidson (ed.), Any Place, 2002).

Fraser contends that since then, both these architects have seemed to stagnate in their theorising; Tschumi having ‘fully articulated his counter position in the late 1980’s . . . has added little of substance to his initial polemic’ while Koolhaas’s ‘fount of inspiration has notably dried up as well’ (Fraser, p.333). Indeed Fraser suggests ‘the tactic of blending into the corporate world has clipped both their wings, eroding their ability now to be critical’ (2007, p.334). Somol and Whiting similarly acknowledge these perceived failings; Koolhaas’s practice ultimately being ‘absorbed and exhausted by the project of criticality’ while

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Tschumi is held up as an example of critical commentary that eschews an effortful search for alternatives within the existing conditions of capitalism. Despite the totalising space of domination threatening ever more pervasive homogeneity, Lefebvre’s observations regarding the internal contradictions of capitalist space, reflected in ‘the irreconcilable disjunctions born in a post industrial city full of anachronistic interstices’ (2007, p.58) make it difficult to consider modernisation as a purely negative condition. Michel de Certeau further established the unlikeliness of late capitalism to colonise all aspects of everyday life, stressing the ever present availability of alternatives afforded by individuals and institutions in arranging resources and choosing methods through particular creative arrangements. The estrangement of the user through the alienation and commodification of capitalism lends itself as a position from which to engage design practice rather than an obstacle which design practice must overcome. This understanding of a prospective architectural practice draws immediate comparison to REX’s stated rejection of traditional architectural notions of authorship (although this reclaiming of power through process is not apparent in their manifesto):

“We [architects] need to stitch back creation and execution, and we need to start authoring processes again instead of authoring objects. If we can do this I believe we can go back 50

years and start re-injecting agency and social engineering back into architecture.” (TED, 2009)

While Lefebvre considers architectural authorship and the documenting of the user as symptomatic of the professional abstraction, REX’s advancing of the collective authoring of processes and their operations serves to remove their design practice from strict consideration as a representation of space. REX’s drawings do not conform to the inherently prescriptive functions of an architectural drawing. Though undeniably abstractions, they are the product of a pragmatic, scientific inquiry into the ‘root problems’ and ontological nature of a project, articulating the conclusions drawn from analysis of issues and constraints. Operating from the position of Lefebvre’s ‘scientists, planners, urbanists, technocratic subdividers and social engineers’ as a representation of fact, they do not convey the same inflected politics of the architectural drawing. Predicated upon the explicit exposition of process, and the development of a logical underlying argumentation, the diagram is a fundamental operation of REX’s architectural practice, conveying to the user and client the premises and rationale of the argument that underpins the architecture. It represents a specific disengagement from the traditional tools of the architect’s abstraction–the technical drawing and explicitly for REX the ‘myth’ of the genius sketch–in favour of an alternate method of visual representation. The diagrammatic graphic (see

the politics of design operations


figures 3.8 & 3.9) demonstrates REX’s use of the diagram in formulating the argument and subsequent architectural manifestation of the Seattle Central Library through data. These diagrams are typically minimalist in their form, conveying pared down information and data sets in a manner that seemingly invites legibility by professional and non-professional alike. They are diagrams that appear to belie the ‘ego and whim’ (Icon, 2008) of the architect in favour of a rational process that manifests an architecture consistent with the ‘surprising plausibilities’ offered by the organising of ‘effects and exchanges’ (2002, p.74) of a Doppler architecture. While REX’s diagrams function in a manner analogous to the ‘cool’ projective practice of postcriticality it is at this juncture that their design operations appear notably divergent from the operations outlined by Somol and Whiting. In defining the relationships generated between architecture and the social aspects of the everyday user (Barber, 2007, p.59), Somol and Whiting offer a veiled glimpse of the operative effects of the diagram in a projective postcritical architecture, conveying ‘qualities of sensibility, such as effect, ambiance, and atmosphere’ (2002, p.74). This conception of the diagram aligns it with the definition advanced in Ellen Yi-Luen Do and Mark D. Gross’s paper ‘Thinking with Diagrams in Architectural Design’ which draws a distinction between the diagrams of the architectural profession and those from other disciplinary domains, evidenced in the range of graphical indicators employed to represent space and the

correspondence between those elements and physical spatial relations. Such a conception draws firm consideration of the diagrams of Somol and Whiting within Lefebvre’s representations of space, as tools of professional abstraction and presents potential concerns for the postcritical project. In lieu of the dissolution of critical architectural autonomy, post critical architecture is allowed to be beautiful without ‘the tortured worrying over accompanying dangers of superficiality or slickness’ (van Toorn, 2007, p.56). For Somol this establishes a practice where architects no longer have to say they’re ‘sorry’. The postcritical diagram propagates the designer’s submission to reality and reverts to an operational abstraction. This is substantiated in the analysis of Evonne Levy and Robert Levit of the diagrams and graphics of Bruce Mau in the Massive Change book and exhibition. Where Mau’s ‘bold, wild graphics’ and diagrams in Koolhaas’s S,M,L,XL were explicitly disciplined to the service of content, Levit and Levy contend that now ‘seductions of form have left content far behind’, ‘design becomes a mode of liberation from communicative purpose’ while the graphics and diagrams ‘revel in a purely visual excess’ (2007, p.170) that slips in and out of Mau’s politics and faith in the redemption afforded by technology to resolve global political issues. Mau and Somol propound ‘the fantasy of effortless (ie politics-free) agency’ (Levit and Levy, 2007, p.173). The architectural operation of the diagram offers further consequences for the socio-political positioning of the postcritical architect. In the

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Figure 3.1 Issues in designing the Seattle Central Library: ‘The book is a technology.’

Figure 3.2 Issues in designing the Seattle Central Library: ‘The library has a responsibility for social roles.’


design of the Yokohama Ferry Terminal, Zaera-Polo simultaneously expressed the post critical rejection of a priori ideas and confrontations and an abdication of the designer’s necessary responsibility to govern a project towards intentions of worth and merit. Zaera-Polo writes that the project was: ‘surprising us at every moment with how the technical requirements were organising themselves into arrangements . . . Yokohama was an experiment in how to evolve a systematic, rigorous, alienated and technical approach to produce the most outrageous architecture’ (2007, p.15). Despite the aspiration to generate new relationships between architecture and the user, post criticality risks the increased development of its own autonomy, further proliferating the abstraction of the user. The utilising of the diagram in the generation of new relationships and the ‘eruption of the unexpected’ are reduced to a pretext for the discovery of ‘external fields that could at last become excuses for new architectural effect’ (Zaera-Polo, 2007, p.12). This condition of ‘newness’ is not an inherent prerequisite for value, social or otherwise, as Saunders elaborates:

‘It seems to me that this obsession with newness results from tentativeness or uncertainty or embarrassment about the articulation of less sexy goals like durability, energy efficiency and a meeting of deeper human needs.’ (2007, p.xiv).

In ‘The Muses Are Not Amused’, Jorge Silvetti expounds that to abdicate this responsibility is to

become a ‘dazed observer of seductive wonders’:

‘Nobody involved in these attempts seems to want to be responsible for the outcome and its authorship in so far as form is concerned . . . they all relegate architecture to the role of the intermediary - the midwife.’ (2007, p.129)

This conception of the diagram in architectural practice ultimately collapses into the production and reproduction of Lefebvre’s category of abstract space. This negation of formal direction of design operations is increasingly troublesome when juxtaposed with the capitalist socio-political environments it manoeuvres in, risking benignly complying with–and perpetuating–those conditions. As Hal Foster notes in ‘Stocktaking 2004’, ‘what is the difference, politically, between . . . post critical affirmation [of whatever is] and the dominant neo-conservatism?’ (2007, p.126). This position is further elaborated by the scathing political criticism on postcriticality forwarded by Reinhold Martin who considers the December 2003 architectural submissions for the regeneration of Ground Zero, and particularly the involvement of Zaera-Polo in the United Architects’ proposal as a complicit surrender to the imperialism, militarism and jingoism of America’s corporate politics: ‘since by responding obediently to the call for architectural ‘vision’ while remaining utterly blind to the violence of the package they served up, these architects and others put themselves in a position of docile compliance with

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the imperatives of a nation at war’ (2007, p.158). REX’s mobilising of a process that seeks to ‘remove the hand of the architect’ (Azure) and emerge with a conclusion that is ‘highly functional and aesthetically unique’ (Monitor) draws strong comparison with the writings of Somol and works of Zaera-Polo, threatening to relinquish direction of a design process that pursues a humanly worthy ambition. While Prince-Ramus has publically acknowledged and embraced the notion of a design team unable to foresee the result of a design process, the conditions from which REX advance their operations are significantly altered by their subscription to performance, establishing parameters for REX to operate within and mobilise their design operations towards. Prince-Ramus’s background in philosophy at Yale, which privileges a strong tradition in Socratic method, advances this operative practice, maintaining the engagement of a subject within the relatively defined boundaries of the discourse, while also allowing free-flowing debate unimpeded by conventional instruction. Socrates’s contention was that in allowing the unfolding of such a discussion, a “group of people with enough intellect, and enough passion and energy will always come to the right solution” (http://vimeo.com/22332017, 2011). The parameters established by REX’s mobilisation of the term performance and the engagement of their processes through Socratic interrogation allows their design process to transcend the limitations of postcritical indifferent inclusiveness that precipitates ‘the passive ratification of the status quo’ (Silvetti, 2007, p.188) and production

of abstract space. Manifesting the issues and positions of REX’s design process in pursuit of performance, REX’s operation of the diagram is similarly prevented from sliding into the apparent ubiquity of Mau’s Massive Change. Indeed the development and increased articulation by REX of their design methodology has seen the progressive stripping of the volume of information presented in any one diagram and the graphic, stylistic complexity of presentation that could be considered as abstracting the user. This is apparent in the gradual removal of diagrammatic references employed to elaborate a given diagram’s meaning; the inclusion of Da Vinci’s The Last Supper (figure 3.3) in the demonstrations of high modernist and compartmentalised flexibility have not been repeated since the Seattle Central Library. Similarly the key diagram that conveys a project’s parti employs no more aesthetic flair of the formalised position than a figure-ground reversal (figures 3.6 & 3.9). The aesthetic of REX’s recent proposal for the V&A Museum in Dundee demonstrates the almost total negation of stylistic tropes, allowing the diagrams to unequivocally convey their intents to user and professional alike, uninfected by the self referencing symbols of professional abstraction. REX’s design process hinges on their operative engagement and capacity to clearly communicate with the client. This is made further apparent when considered in conjunction with a socio-political reading of the contractual operations REX marshal to facilitate the on-going progression of the design process. In response to a question at



Figure 3.3 Issues and Position: ‘High modernist’ vs ‘Compartmentalised’ flexibility

Figure 3.4 Issues and Position: Combing the Library’s programme.

Figure 3.5 The final image.

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the Scholz and Volkmer conference concerning a client’s desire to change the posited architectural manifestation, Prince-Ramus outlined a highly specific and unorthodox contractual clause:

“We write into our contracts that if, after we have agreed on the issue and position [in conjunction with the client], if the client wants to back track and undo the issue or position they can but since the manifestation is directly that, they must hire us to go all the way back to the beginning and design again.” (http://vimeo.com/22332017, 2011)

While not political in itself this clause and its consequences for the architect, client and development of the architecture lend themselves to inherently political consideration. The mobilising of this clause within the design process is consistent with Prince-Ramus’s espousal of the need for architects to regain the power ceded by the architectural profession. Indeed the clause functions precisely upon a relative transfer of authority from the client to the legal retention of REX and REX’s retaining of the intellectual property rights for the design and its process. This clause was first engaged in the commission for the AT&T, Dee and Charles Wyly Theatre, Dallas. The theatre was to provide a new house for the Dallas Theatre Company which had established a national reputation for innovation and performance excellence outside the recognised theatre triumvirate of New York, Chicago and Seattle that traditionally attracted the finest of

the industry’s creative talent. On interrogating the issues necessary to define their positions, REX established that this success was in fact an architectural issue. The industrial warehouse that the Theatre Company had previously occupied allowed for creative freedoms found nowhere else in the United States subsequently attracting the same high calibre of professional as the established theatres:

“For instance in A Streetcar Named Desire they blew a hole in the side of the building and just drove motorcycles right onto the side of the stage. Another time they did The Cherry Orchard and they brought in a backhoe and dug a 30 foot deep hole down through the centre of the building so that the actors could come up out of the ground.” (TED, 2009)

To actors, directors and scene-designers this offered an opportunity to stage productions that could not be performed anywhere else in the United States. The first issue, and position, identified became the design of a manifestation that would continue the traditions and philosophy of the existing building, “we did not want to conceive of a sacred design that could not be touched and would kill this highly unique theatre company” (TED, 2009). The second issue was that the Dallas Theatre Company was a ‘multi-form’ theatre company. The lack of a fixed stage in their appropriated warehouse meant that they were free to give performances uninhibited by a single stage



configuration and could tailor the layout of the stage to the production being performed. With progressively rising costs of labour and materials, the creative freedom of transforming the stage configurations became financially unviable and the theatre was forced to adopt a single layout. The second position established was an informed derivation of the first; in the same way the architects could not hinder the freedom of expression of the theatre company by imposing a design devoid of creative flexibility, neither could they impose a design that ignored the requisite infrastructure for stage configuration necessitated by dwindling operational budgets. In order to establish these positions REX convened with the theatre’s Stage Director and Consultant and over a period of three days, diagrammed all of the various elements required for the theatre chamber to function within the parameters of its users. Following this action, both parties signed the diagram forming an accord, which maintained that ‘from that moment on, whatever we proposed, no matter how crazy it seemed, the theatre consultant consented if it clearly achieved what was diagrammed’ (Monitor). This action established a contractual positioning of the definition of performance that the design was required to attain. The client providing the financial backing for the project subsequently expressed doubts about the practical merit of such extensive provision for architectural flexibility. In response REX reiterated, through their diagrams and graphics the imperatives of flexibility for the performative success of the architecture but

similarly:

“Remind[ed] them that . . . if they wanted to take that flexibility out that was fine but they couldn’t use the project as is, we own the intellectual property, and we would have to go back to the beginning. It is going to be a year and a half more and probably two million dollars.” (http://vimeo.com/22332017, 2011).

The ceding of power by the client in this clause affords a potentially hostile and problematic reading that appears to propagate the architect’s continued autonomy and subjugation of the user through professional operations. In spite of this, the value lent through the active engagement of the client and user in defining the position in conjunction with REX would seem to weigh against such an outright dismissal of these operations as abstraction. Indeed, employing such a contractual accord can be considered as preventing the retreat of the client to a position of convention in service to the best success of the given project. The development of the glass acoustic enclosure of the Wyly Theatre’s performance chamber was a direct consequence of the accord allowing the architect to resolve an issue in a manner that contributed, and has come to define, the performance of the theatre’s architecture that, without the accord, would have been subject to the client’s own appraisal and whim as to the merit of such a solution; ‘by suspending design until we agreed on the exact performance criteria, we


Figure 3.6 The Wyly Theatre parti.A figure-ground reversal.

Figure 3.7 The Wyly Theatre manifested diagram.


solved the problem in an unorthodox and exciting way without convention hampering the process’ (Monitor). The combined mobilisation of diagrams and the contractual accord undoubtedly facilitated the adoption of the proposal’s process and the argument it advanced in service to the definition of performance, though to ignore the financial imperatives of this reading is to ignore the realities of the architect instigated weakness of the user’s situation. Mobilising a design process that explicitly engages with the social activity of individuals in space and considers this spatial practice in conjunction with the spaces of representation of the client affords REX the opportunity to produce a space that is not formulated upon mere assumptions and can operate outside Lefebvre’s observation that:

‘Architects seem to have established and dogmatised an ensemble of significations, as such poorly developed and variously labeled as . . . functionalism, formalism and structuralism. They elaborate them not from the significations perceived and lived by those who inhabit, but from their own interpretation of inhabiting.’ (1996, p.152)

The process strives for performance by supplanting the hand of the architect with the hand of the user, as Prince-Ramus elaborates ‘allowing the user to project their own possible future on to it’ (Icon, 2008). By emphasising the ensuing spatial practices within the design, REX can engender the

same privileging of use value over exchange value that Lefebvre privileges by emphasising spatial practice as the pre-eminent moment of spatial production. What is evident in the design operations of the Wyly Theatre is the symbiotic relationship that the engagement of diagrams and REX’s contractual accord achieves. The inception of contractually binding joint positions necessarily relies on the transparent and explicit detailing of process in service to performance that REX’s diagrams provide, and without which the theatre consultant would not have consented. Similarly, the mobilising of the contractual accord maintains the internal logic of the underlying rationale as developed and expressed through the diagrams against the pervasive desire to resort to convention when confronted with the unorthodox by those other than the architect. The underlying assumption of these operative processes is that in addition to being ‘highly functional and aesthetically unique’ (Monitor), the manifestation of the design process is the consequence of an argument that is logically true and correct when considered as an argument on its own terms rather than an argument towards a specific outcome. Interrogation of REX’s design argument on the terms of an argument subject to the conditions of critical thinking advances an alternative understanding of the tools of REX’s process and the manner of their engagement. The only parameters that are commonly defined at the outset of an architectural project are that of client, site, programme and budget. It is


Maxim 1 Maxim 2 Proposition

Refutative Enthymeme

Contrasting of two incompatible positions in favour of

compartmentalised flexibility as protecting ‘the responsibilities for

social roles for the library’(TED, 2006)

High Modernist Flexibility vs ‘Compartmentalised’ Flexibility

Social Responsibility of Libraries

Books as a Technology

‘Books are a technology . . . that will have to share its dominance with any other form of truly potent technology or media.’ (TED, 2006)

‘Libraries . . . have a second responsibility and that is for social roles.’

‘Ultimately in this form of flexibiliy, the Library strangles its own attractions . . . A more plausible strategy divides the building into spatial compartments . . . Flexibility can exist within each section.’ (TED, 2006)

Core Issues(Joint) Positions

Figure 3.8 Critically analysing the diagrams and design argument of the Seattle Central Library (i)


Diagrammatic ReasoningDirection of argument through representation

The choice for a certain image is not based on a rational argument. Reading the barchart as a section conflates

the representations of space with spaces of representation.

Final ImageFigure-Ground ReversalRecombined Library Program

‘Only one third of your own program is dedicated to media and books . . . the third diagram recombined everything . . . on the right of that diagram you’ll see a series of five combed platforms with the indeterminate spaces between.’ (TED 2006)

‘We came back a week later and presented them this.’ (TED, 2006)

(Joint) Positions Architectural Manifestations

Figure 3.9 Critically analysing the diagrams and design argument of the Seattle Central Library (ii)


from these criteria that architects must extrapolate and construct an argument for their actions, exploiting perceived and meticulously selected conditions to posit an architectural manifestation. In ‘Reasoning with Waves and Diagrams’, Edwin Gardener considers the role of the designer as comparable to Aristotle’s Orator, and architectural product and process akin to rhetoric (see appendix 3). Aristotle considers rhetoric as being morally neutral, predisposed toward persuasion rather than truth, lodging appeals through ethos, the speaker’s personal character evincing the credibility of their argument, pathos, an appeal to the audience’s emotion, and logos, the power of proving a truth or an apparent truth through persuasive argument. As Aristotle considers rhetoric to be morally neutral, equally employable for moral or immoral means, Gardner considers architecture subject to claims of neither truth nor fabrication, only more or less persuasive (Gardner, 2008). In the case of The Seattle Central Library, Prince-Ramus establishes the first issue of the argument in maxim one (fig 3.6 as books being a form of technology that will have to share its dominance with any other form of truly potent technology. The second maxim is that libraries have the responsibility to take on social roles. In this premise, the portrayal of the argument in REX’s diagram juxtaposes two lines of reasoning in an effort to emphasis the positive value of one position at the expense of the other, forwarding that line of argument as the correct solution. This is what Aristotle refers to in Ars Rhetorica as a refutative enthymeme, formed

by the comparison and contrasting of two incompatible propositions. In this instance it is the ‘compartmentalised flexibility’ advanced by REX that is marshalled in order to advocate the protecting of “the responsibilities for social roles of the library” (TED, 2006) against the high modernist position. The Librarians’ lack of conviction in this position led to the further development of the design, ultimately resulting in the finished architectural manifestation and its realisation. While the progression of the argument that Prince-Ramus expounds is undeniably explicit, it is open to a highly critical interpretation of the conclusion that it draws. Far from being an unassailable conclusion, it is apparent that the resulting manifestation could almost certainly have been different from that which was proposed within REX’s frame of the terms of the argument. That the diagram of the combed programme exactly manifests into programmatic boxes with unpredictable programme elements placed on their roofs appears obvious in its diagrammatic representation. This apparent obviousness is, however, wholly contingent upon the mode and manner of that representation and the method in which it is mobilised within the argument. As Gardener suggests, were the diagram to represent the programme in another mathematical graphic form, such as a pie chart, would the library’s programmatic composition necessarily resemble a pie? Moreover, assuming the combed bar chart diagram is retained ‘why would one read it as section, and not as a plan, since the bar surface represents square footage floor surface not volume


or wall surface?’ (2008). This reading renders the construction and unfolding of the Seattle Central Library’s argumentation as one of rhetorical success rather than the hyper-rational sequence of logic that is claimed for it. The critical moment of this situation is the subjective decision made by REX in determining the mode of diagram or image to represent the propositions and empirical data put forward. While the selection of a bar chart to represent the library’s existing and prospective programmes was undoubtedly effective with regard the suitable graphic portrayal of the relevant information, there were modes of data representation equally valid in adequately conveying the necessary information. REX’s selection of the bar chart for their diagrams implicitly determines a given direction for the argument and manifestation and similarly precludes alternate directions. This choice, seemingly without rational explanation–certainly none is outlined in any presentation to date–relegates the diagram from consideration as a premise within a rationally progressing and cohesively logical argument, to an instance of diagrammatic reasoning consistent with the representations of spaces of a technical drawing. The mobilising of the term performance in the design of the Seattle Central Library affords REX’s progress and design operations the potential to transcend the abdication of responsibility to direct design that has led to the retreat of certain post critical architectural operations to a position of ‘dazed observer’ (Silvetti, 2007) complicit in the continued production of abstract space. Failing to

maintain the internal logic of their argumentation for the library, lends a reading of REX as subsiding into an analogous position, albeit from a more advanced and directed outset. The ‘seductive wonders’ of the final manifestation, uncovered by an operative privileging of process, subvert the logic and rationale of those same operations, fetishising the newness of the aesthetically unique solution at the expense of the architect’s compromise of process and abstraction. REX’s argument for the design of the Seattle Central Library appears to move towards dissolving the architectural abstraction of the user. The retreat of their diagramming of the design’s underlying argumentation from illustration of logical process to rhetorical device advances a far more subversive reading of their architectural practice. In their designing of the library, REX are complicit with the machinations of abstract space and professional autonomy, but in operating under the guise of a process that appeals as removing those abstractions, REX forward consideration of the user as indirectly sharing that complicity. In ‘Stocktaking 2004’, Allen praises the operative potential of post criticality in a commentary entirely consummate with the processes of REX as ‘a practice open to innovation and play, capable of confronting the complexities of realisation without facile compromise . . . such a practice would find material for experimentation, critique and theoretical speculation in the methods and procedures of day to day architectural practices’ (2007, p.128). Similarly, he tellingly warns of the potential dangers of practice which

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are all too redolent with the consequences of REX’s operations in designing the Seattle Central Library, ‘architecture which is nothing if not a social art form, loses effectiveness precisely to the degree that it becomes exclusively a cultural phenomenon’ (2007, p.134).


A Process of Performance‘We design collaborations rather than dictate solutions. REX believes architects should guide collaboration rather than impose solutions. We replace the traditional notion of authorship: “I created this object,” with a new one: “We nurtured this process.”

REX: Approach


REX mobilise this tenet of their manifesto in order to define performance in relation to a

given project, affording a direct engagement with the client and/or user to determine the measure of high performance relative to aspirations and constraints. The consideration of collaboration is in accordance with REX’s foregrounding of the processes of forming architecture, ‘replacing the traditional notion of authorship “I created this object”, with a new one: “we nurtured this process”’ (http://www.rex-ny.com/approach, 2006). REX’s processes and subscription to an architecture of performance are predicated in the removal of the architect’s traditional virtuosity, abstraction of the architect from the user and prescription of design rooted in critical autonomy. Where the previous chapter interrogated the actions of REX’s operations within their design process, this chapter will consider the wider socio-political consequences of implementing that process in urban space through an understanding of the Seattle Central Library. The failure of the Library to engage the spatial practices of its users, outlined in the introduction does not necessarily equate it to a reading of the failure of REX in manifesting their project-

calibrated definition of performance. Rather, it lends itself to the failure to integrate or provide for an alternate definition of performance, understood as a generative architecture conducive to social performance. The contention is that the implementation of the ideals of REX’s manifesto and its provisory processes constituted a failing to fully realise their design process as promulgated that lends the engagement of those processes to an inherently political reading. Fried’s assertion of the library’s failure is not grounded in an outright negation of the library providing spaces of generative social performance; he concedes that the interior public spaces of the library ‘considered in a vacuum . . . do function quite well’ and are even ‘visually stunning’ (2004). The process of argumentation that informed the design placed significant import upon the social responsibilities of the modern day library and indeed, the significance of a design that provides for the continued unpredictable evolution of those responsibilities. Fried’s argument is predicated on the library’s social responsibilities functioning well, but only in isolation; considered in a vacuum ‘situated above street level without any relation to the sidewalk below, they relate to the city in a

‘We design collaborations rather than dictate solutions’

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purely visual fashion’ and offer no connection to the ‘spirit’ of Seattle, negating the history and context of their situation almost entirely (Fried 2004). This failure is symptomatic of a wider criticism that REX’s operations are subject to, that the library is performative purely within its own terms. Operating from and within the confines of its own definition of performance, within the calibration of form and function defined by REX, the library is undeniably a success when considered in a vacuum. It can be advanced that ultimately the Seattle Central Library failed the wider context of its users because, despite claims to the contrary for its process, there is little evidence to suggest that it engaged them in a meaningful fashion that bore significant consequences for the underlying argumentation of the design. A product of that neglect, the Library represents ‘a missed opportunity’ to bring new life to the area around it:

‘When it comes to actual human activity - the kind that brings real benefits to a city by encouraging people to stay and explore downtown - the spaces around the library are dead zones.’ (Fried, 2004)

Speaking at TED 2006 Joshua Prince-Ramus outlined the two core positions, held in conjunction with the library staff and the library board that REX’s design was developed from, detailing the maxims that books are a technology and that libraries have a responsibility for social roles (TED, 2006). Following the analysis of contemporary libraries and their programmatic arrangements

REX found that they predominantly utilised the concept of ‘high modernist flexibility’, allowing for the action of any activity in any given space. REX considered this spatial programme to be a ‘shotgun’ solution, ‘turn our head and point over there, we’re bound to kill something’ that resulted in architecture that was:

‘Very generic. Worse . . . it meant that whatever issue was troubling the library at that moment was starting to engulf every other activity that was happening in it. In this case what was getting engulfed was the [library’s] social responsibility by the expansion of the book’ (TED, 2006).

The solution to this was to compartmentalise the elements, the future of which could be predicted ‘with some degree of certainty’ (TED, 2006)(figure 3.3 & 3.8). This is not to assume that the architects were identifying specific future perfects for those elements, rather, that some modicum of certainty in the spectrum of their future allowed for an informed decision to be taken. The compartmentalised elements were placed in programmatic boxes ‘designed specifically to them while on the roofs of the boxes were placed the programmatic elements, the futures of which could not be accurately predicted’ (TED, 2006). This formed the ‘core idea’ around which the library’s argument was constructed. Following this initial argumentation, the librarians remained unconvinced of the position REX had taken regarding the equal importance of

a process of performance


social roles to media. In response REX advanced a series of four diagrams beginning with the library’s own identified programme requirements and the area of square footage required for that element represented in bar chart form (figure 3.4 & 3.9). This data set and its accompanying diagrams formed the foundation for the second strand of REX’s design argumentation. By evaluating and reconstituting the identified programme-requirement data around the twin parameters of social and media responsibility and book space, REX were able to demonstrate that the library’s own program already dedicated sixty-eight per cent of its total floor area to social function.

‘Once we had presented this back to them they agreed that this core concept [of compartmentalising programme elements] could work, we got the right to go back to first principles, reconfigured everything [to display those programme elements] and then we started making new decisions. What you’re seeing [in the fourth diagram] is the design of the library specifically in terms of square footage. On the left of the diagram you’ll see the series of 5 platforms, combs of collective programs and on the right are the more indeterminate spaces, things like reading rooms, whose space’s evolution in twenty, thirty or forty years time we can’t predict.’ (TED 2006)

The Library’s Seattle Design Commission signed off this diagram and one week later REX returned and presented the final image of their design

process. This perspective conceptualisation of the design argument manifested the solidifying of the five ‘predictable’ compartmentalised combs into physical boxes that were;

‘Pushed . . . around on the site to make very literal contextual relationships; the reading room should be able to see the water; the main entrance should have a public plaza to abide by the zoning code and so forth’ (TED, 2006).

After the presentation of the first design concept at which REX unveiled their ‘final image’ following the process of the design argumentation, Glenn Weiss of the Seattle Times suggested that the public had expected to see a rough outline proposal that would be subject to revision pending their and the library’s collective input. By contrast what was presented was a ‘whole vision very early and all at once’ (Glowing Lantern cited in Mattern, 2003). The critical issue of what defined the prospective library’s calibration of performance was defined by the design team in isolation from the public. REX’s questioning of the assumptions regarding the institution of the library can be considered as redolent of an empirical, post critical line that dealt in pragmatic, quantifiable outcomes, questioning “what does a library do and how does a library work?” rather than the more critically defined, ontological questioning of “what is a library and what is a library to Seattle?” REX’s pre-emptive engagement with the design processes meant that the crucial moments of REX’s design process–the calibration of performance, core issues and

/49a process of performance

Figure 4.1 4th Avenue main entrance to the Library.


positions –that demanded public contribution to accurately define them and determine the direction of the manifested architectural output had already been engaged by the architect prior to the involvement of the users. What this apparently failed to consider was that logically correct progressions do not necessitate the assumptions on which they are predicated and thus the conclusions themselves as being correct or appropriate to the project. Similar to the construction industry’s failure to resolve the issues of leaks in the 1960’s post-war reconstruction of Britain, discussed by Katherine Shonfield in Why Does Your Flat Leak? (2000), REX’s resolutions to their issues and positions operated within predetermined conditions. In the design of the Seattle Central Library, by advancing the design process from issues and positions established by the architects themselves, REX inevitably limited the potential spectrum of resolution to the confines of their own professional practice and understanding of what constitutes a library. All argument and design discourse including the logicality of the design argumentation operates within the confinement of a series of premises determined by the architect and assumed to be valid in relation to the question from which they are derived.

‘The terms of the dispute are set, and any alternative approach . . . is proscribed from the outset.’ (Shonfield, 2000, p.37)

In neglecting to involve the perceived

representational understanding of what constitutes a library in Seattle for the user, REX’s formulation of the parameters of their argument were erroneous. Positioned by their own professional representation of the space of a library, REX’s interrogation of that position inevitably led to an inconsistent situation of the principles on which the design process was founded enforcing their professional abstraction from the spatial practice of the user and precipitating a design process that culminated in an ‘unassailable’ but fatally flawed solution. Theoretically the design process afforded the possibility of the architect and the user reaching a joint resolution on the issues and position of the project from which the architect could draw a manifestation that resolved those issues and positions. This mode of engagement would allow for a degree of reconciliation between the architect and the archetypal abstraction of the user facilitated by REX’s mobilising of specific architectural operations. In contrast to the Seattle Central Library, this was REX’s explicit modus operandi for the design of the Dee and Charles Wyly Theatre, Dallas completed in 2009. In his second presentation to TED at TED xSMU (2009), Prince-Ramus, in explaining the theatre’s underlying argumentation, stressed repeatedly the role of actively engaging, and reaching a resolution in accordance with, the client and the user. This was evidenced in Prince-Ramus’s promulgation of the ‘lost art of productively losing control’, REX’s implementation of core issues and–importantly–joint positions, mobilised specifically in order to

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‘supplant the hand of the architect with the hand of the user’ to enable the architecture manifested to perform. In contrast, in presenting the Seattle Central Library in 2006, the key process identified was ‘hyper-rational’ design, corroborated by the presentation’s accompanying online abstract. Hyper-rational design conveys a wholly different understanding of the ethos of the design team, grounding it in logicality and design conclusions drawn from an ingrained process of the interrogation of data sets and other modes of quantifiable, empirical evidence. This understanding precludes the inherent integration of the user in the process of design. In contrast, the understanding advanced by productively losing control in the design of the Wyly Theatre forwards an alternate mode of practice that demands the integration of the user as a prerequisite for success in achieving performance. Jonathan Hill notes that users are rarely clients and are therefore distinct from client-users. Detached from the commissioning, ownership, design and management of a space, they have little or no influence over the design process (Hill, 2003, pp.58-69). While an owner-user has the potential to effect change in the design of a space, the removal of the user is more likely to result in the initiation of unexpected and unplanned spatial practices (2003, p.65). The sole user in the Wyly Theatre was the Dallas Theatre Company. The desire of the project’s clients and financial backers to implicitly involve the Company’s Stage Director and Theatre Consultant represented the direct

engagement of the users in the design process. This offers a revising of Lefebvre’s consideration of the relationship between the architect and user as pure abstraction in the embodiment of the everyday spatial practices of the user rather than the spaces of representation of the client within the design process prior to the positing of an architectural manifestation. The Theatre Company’s requirements for the new theatre defined the calibration of performance from which the architectural design was manifested. The founding principles of productively losing control, core issues and positions are made apparent in the presentation of the design process at TED 2006. By negating joint positions prior to the positing of an architectural manifestation, REX disengage the user and the inherent understanding of spatial practice that that their involvement brings. Consequently REX advance an entirely different understanding of the Seattle Central Library manifestation and its design operations. Shifting the engagement of their design operations significantly affects the understanding of the position from which those operations are utilised and consequently offers a different reading of the outcomes of those processes. In the case of the Seattle Central Library the operations of the design process were mobilised to develop a highly rational architecture that would perform to its project-specific calibration. This process and its progression are expressed through diagrams that function outside the traditional operational abstractions of the architect’s technical drawings and do not conform to typical representations of



Figure 4.2 Some workspaces appear isolated and impersonal.

Figure 4.3 The childrens reading area was relocated following user input.

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space. The engagement of the user and the client provides the possibility of an intersection of the values of use and exchange that are a condition for the production of a space of maximal difference that operates from within the contradictions of capitalist space. In contrast to the Wyly Theatre where these operations were executed accordingly, it can be considered that REX’s implementation of process usurped and subverted the intentions laid out in their manifesto from which the process was derived. Where REX strive to disengage the traditional conception of the autonomy and ‘virtuosity’ of the architect, this autonomy was re-engaged and repositioned by the manner of implementation of the design process. The engagement of process and operations in the design of the Wyly Theatre established an unassailable argument predicated upon the involvement of the user in the formulation of issues and joint positions, demonstrating their direct involvement in the process and removing the ‘traditional virtuosity’ of the architect from the design. The denial of user involvement in the formulation of the Library’s underlying argumentation re-engages the notion of the architect’s virtuosity and autonomy and couples it with an ‘unassailable argument’ (Monitor, 2010). The logical progression of the design’s rationale is undermined and becomes a conduit for the virtuosity of the process that leads to the critical disengagement and abstraction of the user. The issue of the architect’s virtuosity had already crept into the public consciousness prior to the positing of the ‘final image design’ in May

2000. In April that year Koolhaas was awarded the Pritzker Prize, followed in November by an award from the American Institute of Architects for the design of the Seattle Central Library despite the fact that the design was still subject to revisions at the end of the development stage (Library Receives AIA Award, 2000). This had bred a certain climate of suspicion among many Seattleites:

‘Mr Koolhaas is clearly one of the most dazzling luminaries in the architectural heavens . . . But it is for that same reason that I am concerned . . . their work often fails to capture the “feel” of simple humanity, beauty, and common sense that makes great architecture livable . . . But, hey, why am I worrying? He’s a Pritzker Prize winner: how can he go wrong?’ (Email to the Library, 2000)

The impact of this is further evident in considering the consequences for the operations of the design process amidst a highly public discourse between the proponents of the library’s design–the architects, the librarians and the Seattle Design Commission–and the general public. In his notes ‘On Starck Speaks’ K. Michael Hays propounds the consumption of ideals within a culture defined by its consumerism, considering the potential for anything and everything to be subject to commercial pressures, open to commodification and consumable.

‘The Body Shop has famously made a chubby Barbie and not hurting the eyes of lab rabbits



into a global profit churning enterprise.’ (2007, p.51.)

In this instance the diagrams intended to function as tools for dissolving the abstraction of the user and for communicating and expressing an explicit engagement with process became consumables, reproduced en masse, and distributed to the public through the media to market the design through the virtuosity of the design process and its rationale. The commodity became the notion of the argumentation through process legitimising the design and demonstrating that the manifestation was, contrary to certain public perceptions, “not about the whim and ego of the architect” (TED, 2006). Diagrams become operations of indirect abstraction, instruments for the vindication of the design through a demonstration of its process. Writing for the Seattle Times, Matthew Stadler noted that ‘OMA[-NY] generates this metaphysical face in something that they call data’ (Stadler, 2002). As Mattern continues:

‘Their graphs and charts and diagrams imply that their research has “objectively directed them toward some spatial organisation.” Timelines, flowcharts, and bar graphs, with their precise spatial organisation and their implied linearity and logic become “natural[ised] expressions of data,” which consequently naturalise their proposed designs and “anchors their design arguments in the graphical presentation of research data.”’ (Mattern, pp.12)

The diagrammatic representations of data ‘became yet another rhetorical device’ (Mattern pp.12) that proliferated the abstraction of the user. Mattern’s rhetoric in this instance is employed at a remove from the rhetoric discussed in the previous chapter that considered diagrammatic reasoning as rhetorical within the confines of the argument, portraying REX’s propositions and refutative enthymeme as inherently rational. The related but crucially different rhetoric to which Mattern refers is located in the rhetorical advancing of the design process mobilising diagrams as a supporting example that renders them ‘rhetorical devices’ (and which happen to include diagrams that are rhetorical in and of themselves). This understanding runs in direct opposition to the aspirations of REX’s manifesto and the public suggestion of Seattle Times journalist David Brewster that ‘with other projects there never seems to be time for input but the library has a genuine rhythm of proposal-counterproposal’ (2000). Further, there is the suggestion that, political considerations aside, not all the diagrammatic graphics employed were successful on their own terms. The inherent complexity of translating an ambitious program for the management of library services in the twenty-first century inevitably cast the architects as experts with the general public unable to actively enter the debate on technical details and the minutiae of service provision due to a recognisable lack of knowledge. Rather than move toward transcending this abstraction Mattern

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contends that:

‘The graphical analysis of the problem Koolhaas presented to the public [had] the combined qualities of legibility at an abstract level, and indecipherability, at a concrete level. In this way, graphics were marshalled to buttress a particular solution rather than to make informed debate possible.’ (Mattern, pp.13.)

This public lack of comprehension regarding the design’s rationale was at its most vociferous in the first half of 2000. Public reaction to the positing of REX’s ‘final design image’ incited a ‘deluge of angry correspondence’ that drove the library into crisis management, ‘they assumed that the building was a dominant architectural concept at the expense of function’ (Stadler, 2000). Responding to each and every correspondence having first passed it to the design team, the library’s reaction was to direct people to newspaper articles of positive press and to a section of the library’s website that displayed REX’s diagrams of the design’s argumentation. The systematic logic of the ‘unassailable’ argument coupled with the library’s active but benign response led many formerly enraged patrons to promise to educate themselves further, often leading to follow up correspondence suggesting a revised position. ‘I opened the Seattle Times to an article by Matthew Stadler and concluded that many of my fears might be totally unfounded’ confessed one correspondent. ‘Now I’m thinking I may be totally incorrect and it may be quite a nice library’

(Letter to the Library, 2000). The commodification of the design process and its operations was clearly an effective method of engaging public process and many of the concerns that were raised, though it represented a further abstraction and containment of the user. Directed to a series of logically progressing premises that reflected many of the issues of the librarians and without sufficient education to engage the debates, such as they were, on which those assumptions were based, much of the public’s input was drastically reduced in the scope of its questioning of the design. The Seattle Times columnist Susan Nielsen intimated that the public’s voice was nullified to the extent that it was collectively ‘too timid to do anything but ask small questions such as, how much Windex do you need to clean the glass? Can you see up a woman’s dress through the translucent floors?’ (Shhh, My Little Parakeets, 2000). Further consideration to the concept of the virtuosity of the design process as a marketable commodity at the expense of the user’s involvement is evident in the comments of Jacobs and the Capitol Program Director Alexandra Harris. Jacobs stated that much of the public process was analogous to ‘a political campaign where you just explain things to people’ (Jacobs interview cited in Mattern, 2003) while public criticism appears to have been considered a ‘public relations problem’ to be resolved rather than an indication of the architect neglecting to fully incorporate the user or countenance a revision of their initial positions that dictated the direction and process of the design.



This is not to insinuate that the design and construction process excluded public input in its entirety or that the assumptions questioned and the desire to overturn convention did not produce moments of architectural innovation. The ‘continuous Dewey run’ (TED, 2006) of the book spiral that loops across four stories and the length of a city block underwent extensive testing and revisions that explicitly mobilised the feedback of the public and library staff; also, integration of spaces for subject specific areas, workspaces interspersed throughout the book stacks and more extensive provision for an ever expanding collection. The original position of the children’s area in a subterranean space situated adjacent to the recycling areas, print shop and car park was revised, following extended consultation and comment by parents, and later plans indicate its existing position alongside the south façade on the first floor where it can receive maximum sunlight.

‘Through a series of design revisions, programmatic elements moved between floors, floor layouts metamorphosed, additional circulation routes appeared, entrances became more grand and accessible, public spaces became visible at street level, spatial characters were defined and refined - all in response to public and staff comments.’ (Mattern p.16)

Despite the implementation of these public suggestions and refinements made through discourse with the user, the principal design scheme as posited in May 2000 remained the

same through to the library’s official opening in early 2004. The criticism levelled at the Library is one of context. An argument can undoubtedly be made for the Library capturing as much daylight as possible amongst its high rise surroundings, celebrating the ‘Seattle sunshine’ drizzle that pervades for much of the year and providing sweeping panoramas of the city and Puget Sound. Similarly REX’s engagement with this project was officially carried out under the brand of OMA as OMA-NY, Mattern’s article ‘Just How Public is the Seattle Central Library?’ refers only to Koolhaas or OMA when discussing the project’s architect. Equally the Library is discussed and considered by REX as a product of their practice and a manifestation of their tenets and agenda. While it is important to bear in mind the influence Koolhaas may have exerted throughout the project, Joshua Prince-Ramus was lead architect and with this understanding the project should be considered in conjunction with REX’s position and values accordingly, albeit an early iteration of those values. The commodification of design process rather than object suggests the possibility of a contradiction arising from within the conditions of capitalism. The promulgation of a design process that privileges everyday social processes and the spatial practices of the user, rather than suppressing the diversity of populations lends consideration as moving toward Lefebvre’s outline of maximal difference. The subsequent success of the Wyly Theatre and by implication its process of design can be understood as an evolution of the

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Figure 4.4 ‘Living Room’ 1st floor


Seattle Central Library’s process and operations, core issues and unequivocally joint positions formulated with the explicit engagement of the user, resulting in an architecture that is the embodiment of socially generative performance and aesthetic and social integration with its surroundings. The juxtaposing failure of the Library’s process to overtly engage the users at the outset of the design process inevitably led to the ratification of the architect’s autonomy and abstraction of the user that ends in furthering the production of urban abstract space through the subdual of social diversity. Furthermore, the theoretical strengths of REX’s process, diagramming the underlying argumentation to make it accessible and producing a logically derived unassailable conclusion, became weaknesses, serving only to proliferate the user’s abstraction through the commodification of REX’s diagrams and the privileging of the design process’s virtuosity. The library undoubtedly achieved success as an architecture of performance within its own terms but ultimately the preconditions of its process determined the conclusion of its argumentation; an inward facing library that ignores its surroundings and precludes the possibility of engendering socially generative performance in its surroundings. The library turned its back upon the city.

/59a process of performance

Figure 4.5 Rem Koolhaas, Deborah Jacobs and Joshua Prince-Ramus.

Advancing a Project of Critique‘Liberty is a practice . . . it can never be inherent in the structure of things to guarantee freedom. Architecture can and does produce positive effects when the liberating intentions of the architect coincide with the real practice of people . . .’

Michel Foucault


In I Mean to Be Critical But… Kim Dovey considers that when someone begins a

statement: ‘I don’t mean to be critical but…’ then we are forewarned that they do mean to be critical and they will be. In contrast, ‘in the practice of architecture . . . the reverse is often the case’ (2007, p.252). Architecture operating from a position of practicality is invariably complicit with the prevailing economic, political and social conditions from which it is advanced, ‘the ‘ever-the-same’ returns in the guise of the critical’ (2007, p.252). As detailed previously, this understanding forms the initial stance from which Somol and Whiting forward the project of post criticality. While the operative processes of certain post critical architectures have already been considered to some degree in this work–exposing potential failings and giving cause for concern with regard the claims made for post criticality–the philosophical and theoretical tenets of this project have so far remained largely unexamined. Despite the apparent divergence of REX from the attempted realisation of a projective architecture by designers such as Zaera-Polo, the established correlation in the situations from which their arguments are couched warrants further consideration concerning

the theoretical consequences that post criticality sets up for the ensuing design proposal.

As Jason Nguyen remarks: ‘amidst the on-going flurry surrounding critical and post critical architectures we must pause to evaluate the recent proposals. Must ‘projective architectures jettison all traces of critical thought in their effort to accelerate the discipline?’ (Nguyen, 2007)

In Critical of What? Reinhold Martin identifies a conflation in the context of the discourse on criticality between the political critique of architecture and the aesthetic critique that is a prerequisite of the project of autonomy. This amalgamation arises from the primacy granted to the ‘negative’ critical thought of Tafuri that formed the ground on which Hayes and Eisenman constructed their respective arguments for criticality and in opposition to which Somol and Whiting establish the situation of post criticality. In marshalling their arguments against this reading of criticality, the proponents of post criticality negate the currents of critical thought predicated upon the potential for positive change

/63advancing a project of critique

as a product of criticism, foregrounding instead the arguments of Hayes and Eisenman in a manner that suggests an acceptance of their conflation. Subsequently the pursuit of a critical architecture at a formal level corresponds to a critique of architecture’s complicity and collaboration with the aforementioned external forces of capitalism. As Dovey elaborates, Somol and Whiting’s post critical stance appears to be that; ‘by getting rid of the idea that a continued testing and reinvention of architectural techniques must supposedly take place as a critique of ‘real conditions’, architecture is free to engage with the world again, without any loss of specificity or what Robert Somol and Sarah Whiting term the ‘particular expertise of architects’’ (2007, p.252). This interpretation of critical theory, based solely in aesthetic considerations functions as a form of reductionism, provokes concerns for the utility and vitality of the post critical perspective (Sirowy). In retaining the spirit of the aesthetic critique of autonomy at the expense of the false political critique which is removed, the post critical embraces Tafuri’s assertion that: ‘the mass of architects shouldn’t worry, they should just do architecture’ (Tafuri, 1986, p.11). The propagation of post critical architectural practices’ specificity through the engagement of conditions of reality and analysis of data is made to the exclusion of an understanding of architecture as a spatial intervention that maintains certain socio-political conditions that affect their spaces beyond ‘self expression and some form of effete cultural commentary’ (Ghirado, 1991, p.10).

REX’s engagement of performance allows the possibility of their design process to transcend the proliferation of aesthetic effects that threaten to emerge from post criticality. The definition of performance is limited in its scope for affecting spatial production by its positioning as a project specific operation of design. While the instigation of joint positions affords the potential engagement of the users’ perceiving of space and integration of the everyday into an architectural manifestation, its dependence on the actions of the client and REX in implementing the process appropriately means it is equally likely to be precluded. In considering the failures of post criticality to tolerate the continued spatial production of architecture in Revising Practice: Strategies and Attitudes for Architecture in the Next Century, Gardner considers the role of critique rather than overt criticism in assessing the position of architecture in relation to societal spatial production. The definition of critique mobilised is consistent with that of Rendell and David Cunnigham who locate critique in accordance with Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason (1781) ‘denot[ing] a specific reflection on the essential conditions and limits of possible knowledge’, contra the positioning of critique as a subset and social form of criticism (Rendell, 2007, p.4). Rendell continues, juxtaposing Cunnigham’s consideration of critique as self-reflection in Hegel’s reworking of Kant with Peg Rawes’s appraisal of Kantian critique as embodied, allowing for the emergence of a definition that is both self-reflective and embodied; bridging the divide


between the material, subjective and embodied process of design, and the abstract, objective and distanced process of criticism that ‘comes close to practice’ (Rendell, 2007, p.4). Dovey’s forwarding of a new understanding of critical theory readily lends itself to consideration constant with this definition and in interrogating the necessary conditions for this new reading rejects the criticality of Hayes and Eisenman for a practice that specifically engages the inherent practices of power and the socio-political issues of the everyday. Dovey outlines a practice that conceives of the social critique of architecture operating within the confines of two closely associated but distinguishable conceptions of representations and spatial practices. First is the manner in which built form conveys social imperatives as a ‘form of discourse or text’ (2007, p.253). Drawing on discursive social theory an architect will invariably operate within the circumference of the conditions that determine societal identities–gender, ethnicity and class. Consequently the question is not whether an architect’s spatial production produces identities and solidifies meanings, but how and in the interests of whom. ‘An architect of social critique will be critical of the thoughtless reproduction of identities and will accept the responsibility the inevitable production of identities–nations, cities, corporations, communities, families and selves through architecture’ (Dovey, 2007, p.253). The second conception of social critique attends the architectural framing of spatial practice and spaces of representation through spatial

programmes. An architecture of social critique might therefore address the boundaries and mechanisms of power that govern social encounter and mediate issues of identity and the everyday through spatial segregation and permeability. To this end, an architectural response might ‘engage creatively with architectural programmes and will resist the mindless reproduction of socio-spatial practice . . . [and] power invested in programmed border control observed by Lefebvre in the violence of dominated space (Dovey, 2007, p.254). These twin conceptions of architecture as text and programme are connected through the meanings and mediation of spatial flows in constructed buildings; architecture’s spatial structures frame representations that are subsequently lent narrative interpretations. The spatial structure of pathways into and through architectures frame and mediate the discourse of the architecture producing meaning through the user’s mode of encounter. Although these representations and spatial practices are assimilated within the domain of everyday life, in the consideration of previous forms of architectural critique they are largely divorced. Dovey contends that it is this ‘separation of architecture as text that has facilitated the appropriation and neutralisation of ‘critical’ architecture’ (Dovey, p.254). The necessary reintegration of text and programme is the result of the method in which meanings are constructed through engagement, a position apparent in the writing of Wittgenstein in the forwarding of the conception of language as a ‘game’ that generates the definitions of words


in accordance with the manner in which they are used. This is not to reductively suggest the explicit extraction of architectural meaning from function, rather that certain principal meanings can be derived from what and who a building is ‘for’. As Walter Benjamin advances ‘architecture is a social art that is consummated by a collectivity in a state of depression’ (Illuminations, 1968, p. 232). The theoretical conception of architecture has been largely assembled around the reading of architecture as a formal innovation, privileging the autonomy of the architect in direct opposition to that which is common. Yet architecture is also a field of engagement for everyday life. An architecture of critique, or Dovey’s new critical project, cannot be practised in isolation or opposition to ideas of community and collectivity. It is in these spaces that spaces of collective action are produced and collective identities are forged. While an architecture of critique may manifest in a practice that is ‘unsettling’ for the architect and the collective user, the role of this mode of practice is to question the field of architecture, to test its boundaries and interrogate its formations of identity; as Dovey furthers ‘while a partial autonomy of architecture is useful for critical purpose [it] must remain the subject of a critique’ (2007, p.255). In order to warrant consideration as ‘architecture’ it is imperative to maintain a vision for the future direction of the built environment as a condition from which architectural critique can advance the project in service to an improved future.

‘The architectural imagination, at its best, produces the desire for a better future; it contains the potency of the possible. The potency of architecture, its politics and its power, lies in keeping the future of the built environment always at stake.’ (Dovey, p. 259).

It is from this position of architectural social critique that the following design proposal is advanced.


The Urban Bibliography is situated in Seattle, an architectural intervention into the spatial

structure of the Seattle Central Library and the urban conditions of spatial production of the city surrounding it. The proposal was initially developed as a follow up design exercise to the Seattle Central Library Performative Intervention Project (see appendix 4) that sought to address the criticism by Benjamin Fried of the library sealed away from the street through an architecture that manipulated the existing realities of the site and REX’s architecture to construct a performative resolution. The Urban Bibliography proposal gradually expanded in scale and scope as it sought to reconcile and advance many of the spatial and theoretical situations, positions and readings that the research for this work has mobilised and engaged with. In the guise in which it is presented here, the Urban Bibliography is conceived as an architectural intervention into the pre-existing spatial conditions of both the library and its urban environment. REX mobilise a highly specific design process in an effort to achieve a similarly specific definition of performance. The stated pursuit of rationality and logic and the engagement with the individual

realities of that project’s constraints resulted in an architecture that, as the realisation of the design process, demands consideration of the execution and implementation of that process; the architecture constitutes a manifestation of that process and its practice. Consequently, a fault or failing of the architectural manifestation represents a fault of failing of the internal logic or rationality of the design process or its execution. Accordingly a critique on such a failing represents a wider critique of the design process and its implementation in its entirety. Forwarded from the aforementioned position of social critique, the proposal comprises two strands of design that address specific considerations and operate in conjunction with one another to constitute the Urban Bibliography Intervention. These considerations are principally the criticisms of the Seattle Central Library by Fried and Lawrence Cheek of an architecture that ‘turns its back to the city’ and is confusing and dislocated to negotiate from floor to floor respectively, and an engagement of the socio-political conditions that the spaces surrounding the library proliferate. Attending the first of these strands through interaction with the library, the


intervention strives to operate as a corrective to these criticisms, allowing the existing building to attain the definition of performance demanded by the users who funded it. In doing so, the proposal accentuates the failure of REX to establish a definition of performance and design an architecture that is constant with the definition of performance required by the users, highlighting the disjunction between the architect and the user in the building’s design. The second strand manifests in the reopening and partial gentrification of the Seattle Underground tunnel network. Commonly just below the existing pavement level of Seattle’s streets, the network is the result of state legislation following the Great Fire of Seattle in 1889 which razed thirty-one blocks of the predominantly wood constructed town to the ground. The Klondike Gold Rush in 1897-1899 provided a financial boom for Seattle affording the opportunity for the citywide implementation of a stone–based infrastructure that raised the city above the Pacific tide–line and clear of flood risk. The incorporation of glass bricks into the new pavement ensured daylight and the Seattle Underground was in perpetual use prior to a forced exodus of all citizens by the Washington State Government in 1936. In 2012 large tracts of the Seattle Underground remain in disrepair and forgotten by all except city infrastructure engineers who utilise the pre-existing tunnels as conduits and maintenance access for essential city infrastructure. The tunnels mirror much of the modern streetscape of Seattle.


The Great Seattle Fire razes 31 city blocks to the ground.

The advent of the Klondike Gold Rush provides a financial boom for Seattle, affording the oppurtunity for a city wide stone based infrastructure regrading to raise the city above the tide line and clear of flood risk.

The Seattle Underground was in perpetual use prior to a forced exodus of all citizens by the Washington State Government in 1936. The incorporation of glass bricks into the new pavement ensured daylight.

Large tracts of the Seattle Underground remain in disrepair and forgotten by all except city infrastructure engineers who use the pre-existing tunnels as conduits for essential infrastructure.


A visit to part of the site exposed a wealth of largely preserved shop fronts and artefacts discarded following the State instituted exodus from these spaces. In doing so a physical and metaphorical connection between the library and the city is advanced through the explicit integration of the library’s and city’s infrastructures with an on-going project of recording, study and contemplation of Seattle’s urbanism. In these instances the presence of the Intervention’s tower and its single programmatic function as a corridor of clearly defined vertical circulation provokes consideration of why this corridor was required at all. Similarly the evocation of Seattle’s history through materiality is designed to elicit contemplation of the library’s context and relationship to its surroundings.


Addressing the Seattle Central Library

Principally a service and access conduit sited on the southeast façade of the library and fronting onto the corner of Fifth Avenue and Madison Street, the Intervention’s tower forges a readily apparent connection between the library and the history and urban context of the Urban Bibliography Project beneath. Cutting through the library’s building envelope to provide improved vertical circulation through a single consistent run of stairs and twin elevators, removes the beleaguered issues of disjointed vertical access routes. A strong aesthetic presence that juxtaposes with the ‘machinic aesthetic’ of the library, in conjunction with the intervention’s external exposure between levels three and eleven as the library cuts away from and back towards Madison Street, marks the Intervention’s presence and provision of service, in contrast to the disjunction between existing escalator and lift access points. The materiality of the tower is drawn from consideration of Seattle’s industrial heritage and the boom and bust cycles that have dictated its urban evolution. The tower’s materiality extends this consideration into the interior of the library while maintaining the contrast between the performative service provision of REX’s architecture and the raising of questions regarding the relationship of a library to Seattle and its population.

Right: View south-west along Madison Street.


The considered choice of materials is marshalled not from a position of ideological antagonism, analogous with Hays’s critical project, but from a consideration of architecture as social critique.

View from the American Civil Liberties Union rooftop plaza.

Right: Section A-A looking southwest along Madison Street to the Puget Sound, illustrating the tower cutting through and connecting the library to itself and the Seattle Underground.

Ninth FloorLevel 12

Roof

Eigth FloorLevel 11

Administration

Seventh FloorLevel 10

Reading Room

Sixth FloorLevel 9

Book Spiral

Fifth FloorLevel 8

Book Spiral

Fourth FloorLevel 7

Book Spiral

Third FloorLevel 6

Book Spiral

First FloorLevel 4

Assembly Floor

Second FloorLevel 5

Mixing Chamber

Ground FloorLevel 3

Living Room

Level 2Staff Floor & Plant

Level 1Fourth Avenue Entrance

Seattle UndergroundUrban Bibliography


The tower’s very existence is suggestive of a critique of the library, the materiality an extension of the project’s holistic aspiration for social engagement rather than a purposefully antagonistic series of design considerations grounded in aesthetic confrontation. The vertical access tower represents the physical connection and intervention into the library of the wider Urban Bibliography Project, sited in the currently abandoned and derelict Seattle Underground tunnel network of Fifth Avenue and Madison Street.

Right: The Tower Intervention facade. Conceptual view of the Tower Intervention, portraying the grading of the urban and histroically contextual reclaimed materials.


The forced exit from the tunnels has rendered them a realm of dominated space but crucially retaining many of the entrances and exits of the original buildings that have been predominantly blocked up and forgotten along with the tunnels themselves. These entrances and exits were originally constructed to allow shopkeepers access to their subterranean stores and later cellars.


SkykomishLibrary

Virginia Mason Private Medical Care

CorrectionsDepartment

Bakke Graduate University

King CountyCourthouse

Seattle Town Hall

Seattle MunicipalTower

Seattle First Presbyterian Church

Bank ofAmerica

United States Appeals Court

Seattle CentralLibrary

Union Bankof CaliforniaCenter

IBM Building

DriversLicense Office

MitsubishiInternational Corporation

US Bank Center

Banner Bank

Washington University

Puget SoundRegional Council

Golden Gate University

Right: Axonometric looking southwest; sites of abstract space in Downtown Seattle that the Urban Bibliography will usurp.


The evolution of Seattle as a major city of America’s Pacific seaboard has seen the occupying of these plots by the forces of capitalism that flourish in contemporary downtown Seattle: the financial district, state institutions and private corporations that proliferate abstract space. Reopening these access points transforms the Seattle Underground into a network of intercity connection that allows the user to enter the Seattle Central Library and emerge onto the street through the cellars and service entrances of those same corporations and institutions that exert power through the control and regulation of space. In considering an alternative position for architecture in the wake of the perceived abandonment of the post critical stance, Fraser Murray reflects on the work and positioning of Peter Barber as offering a new direction for architecture analogous with social critique. Reasserting the import of the pedestrian street within advanced capitalist space as a form of social critique that endorses the human need for participation in a shared urban environment: ‘we are social animals, and no amount of the privatisation of wealth can erode the basic need for visual and physical interaction [of the everyday]’ (Murray, 2007, p.335). Pushed underground and forced to gentrify the discarded space of capitalist hegemony, the subterranean streets of the Urban Bibliography may appear complicit or indeed dominated by these mechanisms of power. In reclaiming discarded space to forge a tangible connection with the history of the city’s urbanism, the project operates as a subversive

contradiction to the existing fragmentation of downtown space by corporations and the zoning decree that initiated the abandonment of the tunnels by state institutions. Re-appropriating these existing spaces of exile allows the user to eschew Lefebvre’s consideration of the user as a negative abstraction and transform their spatial practice to that of appropriator, actively engaging the Intervention with the machinations of the abstract spaces of domination. The user, emerging from behind the ‘no unauthorised access’ door, is implicitly aware of where they ought and ought not be allowed to move, their spatial practice becomes an inherent form of critique of the fragmentation of spatial practice by capitalist operations.


Cherry Street

4th Avenue

6th Avenue

5th Avenue

3rd Avenue

Columbia Street

Marion Street

Spring Street

Madison Street

Daniels Recital Hall

Seattle Central Library

Connections and Underground Access.

Diagrammatic, isometric demonstrating the subterranean connection between the Seattle Central Library, the Urban Bibliography and an alternative route of urban navigation through the Daniels Recital Hall.


1889

The Great Fire of Seattle destroyed the previous City Library.

1891 - 1906

New library institute founded 1891. Forced to move repeatedly; above the two remaining locations.

Marion Street

5th Avenue

Seattle Underground

The UrbanBibliography

Union Bank of Califronia Center American Civil Liberties Union

The History of the Public Library in Seattle (right)

Section B-B: The 5th Avenue Urban Bibliography (below)Section taken through the 5th Avenue pavement showing the passage of the enquirer through the preserved shopfronts and the increased floor to pavement height of the Seattle Underground surrounding the library.

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1906

Seattle’s Carnegie Library completed 1906. Part funded by the city, it advocated free access to all.

Madison Street Tower Intervention Seattle Central Library

1929

Wall St. Stock Market crash led to the decline of public and civic spending.

1930s - 1950s

Fallout from WWI, WWII and the Great Depression caused the stagnation of the library and its resources.

1956

Passing of the $4.2m Library Bond. New International style library on the Carnegie site.

1998

Total $196m public ‘Libraries For All’ passed with 69% approval. New design process begun.


Alongside the remnant debris of past building works are symbols of the previous uses of space by former occupants. These objects inform the observer’s perception, shaping the notion and understanding of perceived space before the imposition of its abandonment by the State Government. As RomanyWG elaborates in Beauty in Decay:

‘The artefacts scattered in the ruin . . . give glimpses of the life of the place, and the life of the place means the people who used it and how they did so . . . this other life is suddenly revealed in an immediate and exceedingly intimate way. It is history unmediated, in its raw pure form.’ (2011, n/a)


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The connection of the library to the Seattle Underground provides the user with a direct connection to, and engagement with, a tactile, tangible experience of Seattle’s history. RomanyWG continues:

‘These are modern ruins and that is the key to understanding their historical fascination. They are not dead fragments of a previous way of life; they are glimpses of our current way of life as if it were already gone. History in this sense . . . allows us to feel an intimate human connection with the people immediately before us but also begs us to think about where we are going next. (2011, n/a)

Such a reading of tangible and intangible history and context is particularly prevalent in considering the Urban Bibliography project itself.

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Urban Bibliography PlanPlan of the Tower Intervention’s connection to the Urban Bibliography Project and the project’s categories of urban study.

1. Tower Intervention2. Tower Intervention twin lift3. Seattle Urbanism and the Klondike4. Seattle Urbanism and the Port5. Seattle Urbanism and Concrete6. Seattle Urbanism and the Railway7. Central Access8. Bibliography source stacks9. Dynamic bookstack tracks10. Rear access11. External accest to the Union Bank of California Center12. External access to the US State Appeals Court13. Meeting space14.a&b Lecture and study spaces


Ranged against the blank retaining wall of concrete that formed the re-graded streets of Fifth Avenue and Madison Street, stacks of shelves contain the assorted sources and references of the Urban Bibliography, an extensive analytical bibliography of Seattle’s urbanism. Drawing inspiration from Walter Benjamin’s ‘Arcades Project’ and the early 20th century works of archivist and historian Marcel Poëte, the Urban Bibliography is an ever expanding, on-going catalogue of inter-disciplinary sources, references and artefacts pertaining to Seattle’s historical development. The Urban Bibliography’s categories for organisation are informed by the dominant forces of Seattle’s urban development, Port, Railway, The Klondike and Concrete provide the overarching historical drivers of Seattle’s urban development and are organised around the axis of the intersection of the Intervention and the Seattle Central Library: Port runs southwest from the library along Madison Street to the Puget Sound and the Pacific Ocean; Klondike runs northwest along Fifth Avenue towards the Canadian border; Railway runs south from the library along Fifth Avenue parallel to the great Pacific railroad; and Concrete follows Madison Street inland east-northeast towards the Interstate Freeway.


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Use of the Underground for City InfrastructureThe Urban Bibliography, view south-east underneath 5th Avenue

1. Downtown Seattle LED streetlight conduit. Runs the length of 5th Avenue with elctrical tributariy conduits serving the east to west running streets including Madison and Spring Street. Owned by Seattle City Light the publicly owned electrical utilites service provider for Seattle and its suburban areas. Supplying 740,00 residents, 91% of Seattle City Light is provided by hydro electricity follwing a public vote to develop hydroelectric power in 1910. Installed in 1982 this conduit is owned by the residents of Seattle.

2. Former electricity conduit for Downtown Seattle. Decommisioned in 1951 after the purchase by the city of the competing private electricity companies operations. Seattle City Light is the sole electricity provider.


In discussing Poëte’s works Diane Periton considers how Poetë divides written documentary sources into different classes that will form the initial conception for the bibliography’s gathering and organising of material:

‘They range from archive pieces, the ‘solid foundation of history’, its basis the facts that have not been moulded or fashioned; through histories or chronicles in which an intermediary intervenes, and from which facts must be extracted and verified; to literary sources, the written documents that yield the least in terms of facts and which are primarily a source of impressions.’ (2006, p.427)

To these written sources are added objects, buildings and works of art, impressionistic works that require considered deciphering for their ‘text’ and information to be made apparent and rendered suitable for inclusion. In 1906 Poëte introduced a further category of historical source in the ‘topographical document’ be it geological, archaeological or architectural (2006, p.427). This category is essential for inclusion within the Urban Bibliography Project for it allows consideration of the geographical and geological conditions of time and place, in which the spatial production of its inhabitants leads to the transformation of both, the spatial topography is physically altered by its users whose possibilities and expectations are changed accordingly. Poëte considers how the beginning of such a project might commence with the establishment of the topography through geological


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Public Urban Bibliography Engagement (i)Perspective section of a part of the Railway section of the Urban Biliography

Bust of Abraham Lincoln - Currently in the Seattle Museum of History and Industry.Tribal Statue by sculptor of the Coast Salish peoples.Soapstone Buffalo Sculpture - Carved by Sandy Cline 1984.Contemporary map showing urban growth of Seattle in relation to its railway connections.Collection of railroad construction worker journals 1884.Maps and technical drawings for the Great Northern Railway.Accounts and ledgers for the Northern Pacific Railway Company.

Lincoln signed the Pacific Railroad Bill in July 1862 to construct a railway to link Seattle to the west coast of the United State.sThe indigenous population of Seattle’s prior to white settlement.The indigenous Buffalo were wiped by mass migration.The city expanded prolifically following railway links to the rest of the USA allowing competition for freight and transport. Thomas Ballard worked on the Great Northern Railway.Drafted by Clark Durrant owner of Union Pacific Railroad Co.Clark Durrant’s early accounts and ledgers.


surveys, archaeological digs and historical maps. To this might be added the chronicles and archives detailing economic and artistic activity that generated new urban conditions and with them, new urban forms. These forms, illustrated and described in engravings, memoirs and, where preserved, the architectures themselves constitute the space that is the condition for, and result of, spatial production. Added to these sources are documentary witnesses of current events, whether incidental or of great import, that develop the necessary link from past to present. Paul Otlet’s ‘Universal Bibliographic Repertory’ begun in Brussels 1895, advanced how the:

‘Carefully observed, analysed and catalogued facts have subsequently been integrated into sequences, and the combination of these sequences has naturally led to the annunciation of laws, partial at first, general later.’ (1891, in International Organisation of Knowledge, 1990, p.11)


Assuming the desired biliography source is available for public engagement that does not require specialist handling, the bookcase containing the selected item slides forward. The material selection gantry slides laterally into position and the horizontal arm retrieves the source from the back of the book case. The gantry can display material on its horizontal arm or allow it to be withdrawn to a reading room or to the user’s home if the selected material is permitted to be removed from the bibliography on a temporary basis, prior to its return.

Public Urban Bibliography Engagement (ii)Perspective section plan illustrating public selection of Urban Bibliography source

This process ensures that the material is suitably protected within the air, temperature and humidity controlled, artficial climates of the bookcases and that the public do not risk inadvertenly damaging ancient or delicate sources that may suffer from uneducated specialist treatment. The moving forward of the bookcase mimics the active drawing out and transition of material from the realm of the Urban Bibliography into the realm of the user that is found in traditional Carnegie Libraries.


The bibliographic record would systematically render knowledge from multiple disciplines to items of information and interpretation, enabling the disentangling of objective from subjective, and the methodical from the conjectural, in order that areas with insufficient facts may be identified and patterns and laws extrapolated from them (1990, p.10).


Public Urban Bibliography Engagement (iii)Perspective section plan illustrating return of Urban Bibliography source selection

The source in this instance is read at the bookcase on the selection gantry. When finished with, the source is returned to its index position in the bookcase’s artificial climate. The bookcase withdraws back into line and the gantry returns to its waiting point at either end of the bookcase.


In addition the Urban Bibliography will not merely function as an indexed catalogue of information but also a project of continued historical enquiry that invites and thrives on the engagement of the user. In the reclaimed spaces of the Seattle Underground, the Urban Bibliography Project offers the user the opportunity to study and advance the Project through knowledge of how to handle historic artefacts and documents, collate and cross-reference sources, curate collections and add their own sources and accounts, dynamic moving book stacks allow the continued accommodation of new material at any position in the catalogue.

(i) New source material for the Urban Bibliography

arrives.

The material catalogued and archived by the citizens of

Seattle moves into place on a newly fabricated bookcase. The bookcases shift on rails embedded in the floor of the

Underground.

(ii) End bookcase retreats.

To make space for the insertion of the new sources

the bookcase at the most historically recent end of the

row retreats.

(iii) Remaining bookcases slide laterally.

The remaining bookcases shift sideways to accomodate

the new material.

(iv) The new material is ensconced.

The extraneous bookcase moves laterally behind the rows to be reinserted in the subsequent partition. The

bookcase containing the new material moves into the space created until it too is required to move to accomodate more

material.


The project is furthered by and for the user, promoting an increased awareness and understanding of Seattle’s current urban conditions and transforming a network of subversive spatial connectivity into a teaching and research institute dedicated to the study of Seattle’s urban spatial transformation.

Shuttle canopy rotation (top)Diagrams illustrating the rotating canopy that allows access and safe transport of source material.

The source material shuttle in motion (right page)Partial section demontrating the Urban Bibliograhy’s internal material transport system.


To paraphrase Poëte in accordance with Benjamin: the Urban Bibliography engages the user in a living centre of Seattle’s history that looks to demonstrate the continuing evolution that ‘is the great historical law of our city’ (Benjamin, 1999, pp.82-3). In doing so it proliferates a consideration by the user of Seattle’s existing spatial production and the socio-political nature of their own perceptions of space and spatial practice, and aspires to provoke contemplation of the future vision for architecture, consistent with the aims of social critique.

Service access to back of bookstacks.


The Urban Bibliography attempts not only to engage existing socio political spatial conditions through a common awareness of what constitutes prohibited space and what does not, but to advance contemplation through an understanding of the laws and conditions that have shaped Seattle’s urbanism. Seeking to exploit contradictions in capitalist space, engaging previous spaces of domination in order to usurp existing spaces of domination by establishing an alternative downtown wide network of pedestrian movement and connection centred on the Seattle Central Library. This network goes far beyond the ‘at best, isolated symbol of critique’ of the public right of way that snakes through Koolhaas’s Chinese Central TV Quarters. Utilising the pre-existing conditions of the city in a manner analogous to Tschumi’s ‘judo’, the Urban Bibliography enables the everyday actions of the user to critique the machinations of power. The proposal’s critique is explored not only in what it manifests as, but also in whom it manifests for. In combining these elements in a state-evicted, capitalist-industrial-boom-financed space, the proposal strives to avoid the content-less collapse into stylistic effects of the projects of criticality, post criticality and the retreat of REX’s architectural operations observed in the design of the Seattle Central Library. Propagating an understanding of Seattle’s spatial production in the mediation of everyday life through spatial permeability and segregation, transparency and opacity, and the consequences for the space of the future (Dovey, 2007, p.254). The Urban Bibliography integrates library and city through the

merging of infrastructures in service to a project of understanding and engagement with Seattle’s urbanism. Privileging neither library nor city, the intervention aspires for library to become city and city to become library.


Exiting the Urban Bibliography and usurping dominated space.

Conclusion: Towards a New Project

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REX’s development of their architectural operations presents the possibility of

differential space. The discourse above details the importance of including the perceptions of space of individuals in architectural practice. The implicit involvement of the user in constituting the definition of performance and therefore the parameters that determine the relative successes of a project, affords REX’s design process the potential to provide a condition for societal transformation that arises from the immanent contradictions of capitalism. The mobilising of performance transcends the operative failings of the post critical project while maintaining the essence of pragmatic engagement with the realities of existing socio-political, capitalist constraints within which Western architects must necessarily practise. Their methods provide for an architecture that seeks and accentuates difference as a consequence of the rigorous pursuit of data but which is inescapably governed by the subscription towards performance. Yet the potential for this condition to develop is far from assured, relying on REX and the client to prompt the involvement of the user, to engage and bear out their considerations in a manner that does not

threaten to collapse into a position of architectural abstraction and professional autonomy complicit with Lefebvre’s rendering of abstract space that is evidenced in the interrogation of the design process for the Seattle Central Library. From this understanding, the architectural mode of critique is advanced as a ground for the continued architectural interaction with issues relating to social sustainability, technology and globalisation. This position meaningfully articulates the relationship between universal human values and the contingent conditions of existing realities through the perspective of the lived-experience of the everyday rather than recourse to the hidden, ‘would-be ‘fifth columnist’’ agendas of Koolhaas and Tschumi (Murray, 2007, p.328). The fragmentation and homogeneity of space can be observed as an issue to be resolved through the development of architectures that ‘keep at stake’ (Dovey, 2007, p.259) the future possibilities of spatial production through the analysis and understanding of users framed by their past and present cultural settings (Bhabha, 2004). It is the context of these cultural settings that provides the location for an architectural practice of difference.

conlcusion towards a new project

Appendices


We challenge and advance typologies.REX feels it’s time for Architecture to do things again, not just represent things.

We design collaborations rather than dictate solutions.The media sells simple, catchy ideas; it reduces teams to individuals and their collaborative work to genius sketches. The proliferation of this false notion of “starchitecture” diminishes the real teamwork that drives celebrated architecture. REX believes architects should guide collaboration rather than impose solutions. We replace the traditional notion of authorship: “I created this object,” with a new one: “We nurtured this process.”

We embrace responsibility in order to implement vision.The implementation of good ideas demands as much, if not more, creativity than their conceptualization. Increasingly reluctant to assume liability, architects have retreated from the accountability (and productivity) of Master Builders to the safety (and impotence) of stylists. To execute vision and retain the insight that

facilitates architectural invention, REX re-engages responsibility. Processes, including contractual relationships, project schedules, and procurement strategies, are the things with which we design.

We don’t rush to architectural conclusions.The largest obstacle facing clients and architects is their failure to speak a common language. By taking adequate time to think with our clients before commencing the traditional design process, it is our proven experience that we can provide solutions of greater clarity and quality. With our clients, we identify the core questions they face, and establish shared positions from which we collectively evaluate the architectural proposals that follow.

We side with neither form nor function.REX believes that the struggle between form and function is superficial and unproductive. By emphasizing performance instead—a hybrid that does not discriminate between program, organization, and form—we free architecture from the tired debate over whether it is an art or a tool. Art performs; tools perform. The measure of high performance is relative to each client’s aspirations

Appendix IREX: Approach

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and each project’s constraints.

We reach for the unexpected by exposing root problems.We don’t innovate for innovation’s sake. Nor do we accept predigested solutions. We return to root problems and doggedly explore them with a critical naiveté. Unprejudiced by convention, we expose solutions that transcend those we could have initially or individually imagined. Sometimes we discover uncharted territory; sometimes we rediscover forgotten territory that has renewed usefulness; sometimes we reaffirm conventions with assured conviction.

We view constraints as opportunities.Engaged intelligently, project challenges such as site conditions, budgets, schedules, codes, and politics are opportunities that can catalyze the most innovative solutions. Architectural concepts that capitalize on our clients’ constraints will surpass any vision that resists intractable realities. We produce specific designs that are highly effective, not universals diluted in application.

We advance new strategies for flexibility.Despite an increased need to accommodate change, contemporary design still relies on an antiquated version of flexibility: one size fits all. The promise of a blank slate upon which any activity can occur has produced sterile, unresponsive architecture. REX advocates delimiting activities and addressing the possible evolutions of each on its own terms. With this strategy, one activity can evolve without

sacrificing another, and collisions between activities unleash surprising potentials.

We love the banal.REX dares to be dumb.

rex: approach


Appendix IIElaborating on Performance

The consideration of the term ‘performance’ has prompted limited but detailed

discussion within architectural discourse since its establishment within the discipline in the late 1960’s. Following in the wake of the poststructuralists, the majority of the writing and experiments on have focused on this understanding of performative architecture as being generative of social performances. Coop Himmelb(l)au’s ‘open architecture’, a postmodern critical response to the ‘fragmentary’ development of the urban landscape in capitalist cities, was designed to generate socially performative spaces by engendering creative social interaction between users. Formed through a design process involving explosive sketching and spontaneous, intuitive performances1 Coop Himmelblau strive to practice a ‘critical architecture, . . . a response, which set[s] out to violently . . . dismantle the forms of capitalist hegemony in architectural production’; a stark contrast to the closed networks of power that proliferate in corporate architectures. Coop Himmelblau’s advancing of the roles of globalisation and commodification in spatial production provides an interesting starting point

for considering performance as generative of social interaction and couched in opposition to the socio-political spread of capitalism and commerce. Rem Koolhaas and his practice OMA, Rotterdam, similarly explore these notions, though in greater detail and a manner that offers a wider sociological interpretation of performance. As Murray Fraser suggests in assessing Coop Himmelblau’s Get Off of My Cloud: Texts 1968 – 2005, ‘Prix [Managing Principal of Coop Himmelblau] began to take on board the issues of globalisation and commodification which Koolhaas thrives on, but lacks the social insights and intellectual breadth to talk this talk’.2 Analogous to Coop Himmelblau, Koolhaas endeavours to inspire spaces generative of social performance. Where Koolhaas differentiates his works from Coop Himmelblau is in the highly considered programmatic layouts that inform the trajectories of movement within his architecture.3 The ‘open architectures’ of Coop Himmelblau have been previously criticised for operating as mere expanses of space; un-programmed stretches of architecture that, practically, offer little chance for being socially performative.4 By contrast, Koolhaas seeks to defy the ‘social logic of

/115elaborating on performance

space’, to free up the programmatic imperatives that ‘lock architecture into the service of a highly choreographed and ritualistic reproduction of social life’, by manifesting these freedoms in the introduction of architectural programmatic innovations. The forming of ‘fields of social encounter’ and spatial segmentation introduce new, functional, juxtapositions of spatial programme. These were designed to actively draw individuals into social performances with one another; to ‘resist the role of architecture in reproducing social roles and structures to enable certain freedoms’.11 Koolhaas’s architecture is one of potential and active social performance; a process in which the user can experience ‘space [as] a performative zone unencumbered by the [usual] physical impediments of structure, order or boundary.’5 The interrelation of spaces and events are also explored in the later works of Bernard Tschumi chronicled in Event Cities 1 & 2. These are most evident in the ‘unclassifiable’ or ‘unprogrammed’ spaces found in the ‘carved voids’ 13 that afford the possibility of disjunctions between spaces and events:

‘Places in which an infinite number of unplanned events could take place, where life is not exhaustively determined by a functionalist architecture dedicated to the proposition that there is only one set of appropriate behaviours for a specific space.’ 6

Tschumi contended that in a society gripped by

accumulation and consumption that it is only in the ‘abstract’, the imaginary or unreal project, that architecture can transcend the boundaries placed on it by the social systems of land ownership, wealth and power. The reading of the term performance promulgated by REX in their manifesto, takes an altogether different meaning from the generative processes outlined above. Employed in a different context, and from a contrasting position, it does not seek to supplant or usurp those definitions. Rather it is proposed as an ontological resolution to the artificial antinomies of form and function, achieved by preferring neither in favour of ‘performance’, a third term that advances a pragmatic process of design to enable architecture to ‘exceed representation’.7 The fundamental distinction from the aforementioned definitions of performance can be observed in the term’s operation when considered as a function of language:

The architecture of REX should perform.The architecture of Tschumi should enable performance/s.

The operative function of language in REX’s definition of ‘performance’ is as a verb, as shown in the sentence above, it is the architecture itself that should perform. By contrast, the operative function of ‘performance’ within the definition of ‘generative social performance’ is as a noun. The building should enable a condition that allows the action of a performance to occur; by example,


the architecture of Tschumi can be considered conducive to performance/s, though not itself performing. In the definitions of generative social performance above, performance is conceived as an interaction or event that can be facilitated by architecture, whereas for REX, performance is regarded as being operative of the architecture.This understanding of the inherent distinctions within the couching of these definitions of performance, affords an understanding of REX’s architectural operation of the term performance that is central to their manifesto. In seeking to enable a performance to occur, the architect engages a theoretical notion of how this may be achieved, such as the ‘carved voids’ of Tschumi’s Event Cities.8 The architect begins the design process with specific preconceptions that inform the direction of that process towards specific, congruent outcomes. The performances of Coop Himmelblau, Koolhaas and Tschumi are actively engendered in their architectural manifestations through predetermined notions of how to enable performance that become embedded in their respective design processes. In contrast, the pragmatic performance of REX is a moving definition predicated upon defining performance in relation to a specific project, mobilising a predetermined process of design to realise a definition of what constitutes performance in relation to the given project, rather than incorporating a predetermined space or philosophy.

Coop Himmelb(l)au, ‘TheCloud’ [2006] Ostfildern-Ruit, p.56.

Fraser, Murray [2006] Cloud Texts: Book Review, RIBA

Journal, Aug, v.113, n.8, p.18.

Dovey, Kim, Dickson, Scott [2002] Programmatic Innovation

in the Work of Koolhaas/OMA, Journal of Architectural

Education, p.7.

Pass/fail for L.A.’s new arts school [2009].

Dovey, Kim, Dickson, Scott [2002] p.11.

McGaw, Janet [2010] Performative Spatial Practices in

the Urban Realm: A ‘Tactic’ for Transcendence, Time

Transcendence Performance; Monash University, p.7.

McGaw, Janet [2009] Reciprocal Performances: the (un)

making of an architecture; The Journal of Architecture, vol.14,

no. 2, p.220.

Tschumi, Bernard [1994] Event-Cities, The MIT Press;

Cambridge, p.46.

1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

8.

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Appendix IIIAristotle’s Syllogism

A syllogism is a form of logical argument that is a founding tenet of deductive reasoning,

inferring a proposition (or conclusion) from two other propositions (or premises). The Enthymeme is a mode of rhetorical syllogism that:

‘Must consist of few propositions, fewer often than those which make up the normal syllogism. For if any of these propositions is familiar fact, there is no need even to mention it; the hearer adds it himself.’ (Aristotle, 1969)

‘Deductive reasoning in rhetoric is a performative form of reasoning’ (Gardner, 2008) that is tailored for effect and aimed at a specific audience. By way of example, an architect will explain his project differently in a conference given to similar professionals than in a pitch delivered to a client. Accordingly propositions or steps of argumentation may be omitted or included as necessary, in order to ensure that the argument is adequately conveyed to a certain audience. To the concrete realities that must necessarily be engaged–commonly site, brief and consideration of the conditions in which the design will be manifested– the architect can add

propositions and constructions of argument that advance why the design takes one direction or another.

‘The propositions used to make an enthymeme, have a special character, for they are not necessarily true, but they are generally true, commonplace or accepted truths for a specific audience.’ (Gardner, 2008)

aristotle’s syllogism


Appendix IVList of Illustrations

Swimmer, Lara [2004] Process: Seattle Central Library, Documentary Media Llc; Seattle; p.18.

Swimmer, Lara [2004] p.26.


[2010] Wyly Theatre at Dusk [online image]. Available at:< http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_Wrb3lqG-P9oc/TTIlBJUlAeI/AAAAAAAAAnA/UZhRYrt4mT0/s1600/2614_2_wyly-theatre-0587.jpg

[2009] Up at Seattle Library [online image]. Available at:< http://farm4.staticflickr.com/3312/3583690433_da8fab8165_b.jpg






[2010] Wyly What If? [online image]. Available at:< http://ad009cdnb.archdaily.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/01/495545295_wyly-what-if-diagram-rex.jpg

[2010] Wyly Performance Chamber [online image]. Available at:< http://ad009cdnb.archdaily.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/10/1255525764-wyly-theatre-02-photo-by-iwan-baan-1000x660.jpg


p.6

1.1

p.14

2.1

2.2

p.26

3.1

3.2

3.3

3.4

3.6

3.7

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p.44

4.1

4.2

4.3

4.4

4.5

p.60

p.106

p.110

p.116




[2011] Seattle Library Living Room [online image]. Available at:< http://mandescendingv2.files.wordpress.com/2011/04/img_1135.jpg

[2003] Design Meeting [online image]. Available at:< http://farm1.staticflickr.com/27/46119475_656fe464b6_o.jpg





All other images are the work of the author.

list of illustrations


Books

Allen, Stan [2000] Practice: Architecture, Technique and Representation, Routledge; London.

Aristotle [2010] ARS Rhetorica, Harper; London.

Benjamin, Walter [1999} Illuminations, Pimlico; London.

Borden, Iain; Rüedi, Ray [2006] 2nd ed. The Dissertation: An Architecture Student’s Handbook, Architectural Press; Oxford.

Benjamin, Walter [2008] The work of art in the age of its technological reproducibility, and other writings on media, Harvard University Press; Cambridge.

Capra, F [1982] The turning point – science, society and the rising culture, Flamingo; London.

Cacciari, Massimo [1993] Architecture and Nihilism: On the Philosophy of Modern Architecture; translated by Stephen Sartarelli, Yale University Press; London.

Careri, Francesco [2002] Walkscapes (Land & Scape Series), Editorial Gustavo Gili SL.

de Certeau, Michel [1997] The Practice of Everyday Life, University of California Press; London.

Coop Himmelb(l)au, ‘TheCloud’ [2006] Get Off of My Cloud: Texts 1968–2005, Hatje Cantz Verlag; Ostfildern-Ruit.

Appendix VBibliography

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Kaye, Nick [2000] Site Specific Art: Performance, Place and Documentation, Routledge; London.

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Lefebvre, Henri [1970] Reflections on the Politics of Space : Lefebvre, Henri; Brenner, Neil; Elden, Stuart [2009] State, space, world: selected essays, University of Minnesota Press; Minneapolis.

Lefebvre, Henri [1991] The Production of Space, 1st ed. Wiley-Blackwell; London.

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Anon, Joshua Prince-Ramus Interview [2011] Joshua Prince-Ramus: The Lost Art of Productively Losing Control, Interview; Monitor, vol 62.

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Koolhaas, Rem and Whiting, Sarah [1999] A Conversation between Rem Koolhaas and Sarah Whiting; Assemblage, no. 40.

Koolhaas, Rem [1997] Writing on Cities: Poetic Perception and Gnomic Fantasy; Journal of Architectural Education, vol. 51, No. 1.

Koolhaas, Rem [1997] Generic Cities, S,M,L,XL. Ed. Rem Koolhaas and Bruce Mau. Köln, Benedikt Taschen Verlag p.1248

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McGaw, Janet [2009] Reciprocal Performances: the (un)making of an architecture; The Journal of Architecture, vol.14, no. 2.

McGaw, Janet [2010] Performative Spatial Practices in the Urban Realm: A ‘Tactic’ for Transcendence, Time Transcendence Performance; Monash University, p. 1-17.

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Journal Articles and Articles Online

Conversation between Joshua Prince-Ramus and Jonathan Raban [2008] Available athttp://www.iconeye.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&catid=421:icon-065--november-2008&id=3848:conversation-between-joshua-prince-ramus-and-jonathan-raban&Itemid=64.

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Gianluca Cosci Statement [2006] Available at http://www.gianlucacosci.com/page12.htm

Intellectuals & Power: A conversation between Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze [1972] Available at http://libcom.org/library/intellectuals-power-a-conversation-between-michel-foucault-and-gilles-deleuze

Mixing with the Kool Crowd [2006] Available at http://www.pps.org/articles/mixing-with-the-kool-crowd/

On Architecture: On How the Seattle Central Library Really Holds Up [2007] Available at http://www.seattlepi.com/ae/article/On-Architecture-How-the-new-Central-Library-1232303.php?source=mypi

Pass/fail for L.A.’s new arts school [2009] Available athttp://www.latimes.com/entertainment/news/arts/la-ca-art-school31-2009may31,0,4081776.story

REX-NY Approach [2011] Available at http://www.rex-ny.com/approach.

REX-NY Press [2011] Available at http://www.rex-ny.com/press.

Performance/Architecture: An Interview with Bernard Tschumi [2008] Available at http://web.ebscohost.com/ehost/pdfviewer/pdfviewer?sid=e7e41838-9e00-4c28-803f-b02dd87d1dfc%40sessionmgr114&vid=2&hid=104

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Scholz & Volkmer Conference 6 [2011] Joshua Prince-Ramus, Online Video: http://vimeo.com/22332017.

TED Talk [2006] Joshua Prince-Ramus: Seattle Central Library, Online Video: http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/en/joshua_prince_ramus_on_seattle_s_library.html.

TED Talk [2009] Joshua Prince-Ramus: Building a theatre that remakes itself, Online Video:http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/en/joshua_prince_ramus_building_a_theater_that_remakes_itself.html.

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dowding james

Documents

architecture of performance

school of architecture

architecture critic

important new library

design solution

definition of performance

signedbetween performance

pursuit of performance