ISSUE 1.1 - MARCH 2014 What Do Cities Tell Us About Their Inhabitants’ Desire?
An Interview with Etienne Turpin founding editor of SCAPEGOAT
+ Imaginary interview with Bernard Tschumi, The pleasure of architecture (1977).
Tourette: Is it possible for a “magazine space” to replace an architectural space?
Etienne Turpin: I don’t think it is possible—or desirable, for that matter—for “magazine space” to replace architectural space; nor do I think it is possible for architectural space to replace social or political struggles. Let’s discuss this second aspect of the problem first. In a book I recently co-edited on Jakarta, we quote a passage by the French historian of thought Michel Foucault which is especially relevant for such a discussion. Foucault says the following: “I think it is somewhat arbitrary to try to dissociate the effective practice of freedom by people, the practice of social relations, and the spatial distributions in which they find themselves. If they are separated, they become impossible to understand. Each can only be understood through the other.” [1] As we explain in greater detail the book, Foucault’s assessment offers several important points of departure for architects who want to develop a practice that explores the political agency of “other-than-affluent” alliances, that is, practices committed to the full potential of non-dominant and non-dominating political economic realities. I think Foucault’s re-framing of the relationships among practices of liberty, social relationships, and spatial distributions is fundamental to the work of architecture today. So, to return to the first part of the question, I think “magazine space” can challenge the perspectives through which we understand practices of liberty, and social relationships, and in so doing—in the best cases—also challenge the normalized violence of contemporary spatial distributions; so, in my view, it is leveraging the power of collateral relationships that matters, not a substitution of one mode of production for another. In fact, this is precisely what I am trying to do with Anna-Sophie Springer, my co-editor for the new book series This Paginated Exhibition, published by K. Verlag in collaboration with the Synapse International Curators’ Network and the Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin, launching this Spring, 2014. Here we are not replacing the exhibition space of the gallery with a book, but exploring the leverage points of paginating the exhibition as a conceptual and collateral strategy for curatorial-editorial practice.
Bernard Tschumi: There is no way to perform architecture in a book. Words and drawings can only produce paper space and not the experience of real space. For those who do not build, it seems perfectly normal to satisfy oneself with the representation of those aspects of architecture which belong to mental constructs-to imagination. Such representations inevitably separate the sensual experience of a real space from the appreciation of rational concepts. It nevertheless seems strange that architects always have to castrate their architecture whenever they do not deal with real space.
T: Do you think it is possible to structure a discourse on architecture?
ET: Like architecture, the discourse on architecture in a given society is inherited from the previous generation, who worked hard to articulate their views against their own predecessors. Because of this, many thinkers and writers who started out with a radical perspective—as an attempt to reframe the structure of the discourse to address concerns that were either ignored or undervalued by the previous generation—end up as the most obstinate and conservative defenders of the status quo, precisely because they have invested so much (i.e. their “careers”) in establishing it. I am working on a book about Rem Koolhaas’s project Exodus, or the Voluntary Prisoners of Architecture. I think it is such an important work because it asks the question of inheritance so mercilessly. In Exodus, the real question, developed through the Baudelaire-inspired allegory of the Freedom Strip, is about inheritance, which is the fundamental question of modernity since Spinoza. How do we respect the work of the previous generation while adapting their insights to problems which they couldn’t have foreseen, and which they may not accept as significant? How do we adapt our practice through more careful intergenerational thinking and contestation? How do we avoid dismissing the work of previous generations while finding our own place and our own voice in design and in politics? These are challenging issues, and you see that they are close to the surface during any studio review in any architecture school. To learn and to respond to the world—to create—is to challenge the terms of one’s inheritance. The question, I think, is how to do it with respect, by using everything you can while realizing you’ll need to invent new connections, new perspectives, and new habits of mind that might not please your professors.
BT: The game of architecture is an intricate play with rules that one may accept or reject. Indifferently called Systeme des Beaux-Arts or Modern Movement precepts, this pervasive network of binding laws entangles architectural design. These rules, like so many knots that cannot be untied, are generally a paralyzing constraint. When manipulated, however, they have the erotic significance of bondage. There is no simple bondage technique: the more numerous and sophisticated the restraints, the greater the pleasure.
T: Imagine unveiling a building: what do you expect to find?
ET: I can now only think of the sculpture of Isis, created in 1899 by Louis-Ernest Barrias, called La Nature se dévoilant à la Science [Nature Unveiling Herself Before Science]. In this allegorical work, the female personification of Nature is depicted as if provocatively luring the viewer to more completely strip her. She is suggestively posed, as if she is taking pleasure in being opened by and to science. If we turn from this image of Nature to the image of Architecture, what would it mean for a building to unveil itself to me? If we wanted to play out a psychoanalytic reading, just for the fun of playing the analyst, it is a question of the desire of the Other’s desire: what does the building want from me? How can I be adequate to the desire materialized in the architecture? Because the desire for the Other’s desire is, by definition, unattainable, it cannot be discovered, and thus I cannot know it, I can only approach it. This might go a long way in explaining the interminable fantasy of “critical architecture” pushed so in American architecture schools. I am less inclined than both the American architecture boosters and the psychoanalytic cultural critics to celebrate these speculative relations of desire and architecture. Instead, I would follow, perhaps even more playfully, and thus more seriously, the line of Abdou Maliq Simone, who suggests that architecture is a form of materialized effort. [2] Such efforts involve desire, ideology, convenience, and many other matters of concern. To suggest that these matters can all be captured by some procedural psychoanalytical formalism would be an especially cynical view of both reality and creativity.
BT: Architecture resembles a masked figure. It cannot be easily unveiled. It is always hiding : behind drawings, behind words, behind precepts, behind habits, behind technical constraints. Yet it is the very difficult of uncovering architecture that makes it intensely desirable. This unveiling is part of the pleasure of architecture. Architecture is the ultimate erotic act. Carry it to the excess and it will reveal both the traces of reason and the sensual experience of space. Simultaneously
T: Where does pleasure lie in architecture?
ET: I can’t say because I haven’t found it yet; at least, not in architecture! My pleasure in working as a urban researcher in Southeast Asia tends to come from the surprises afforded by the cities were I live and work. Again, to borrow from Simone’s vocabulary, it is the “cityness” of the city that is most pleasurable, and most frustrating; of course, sometimes pleasure and frustration are quite difficult to separate. [3] So, it is really a matter of control. For some architects, the control of the process, the control of the design, the control of the situation, gives a feeling of power. It is a pleasure for architects to be in control. But, beyond these petty microfascisms, what is architecture? What is a city? It is so much more than we can control, understand, or design! It is an excess of pleasure, an excess of frustration, and it defies control nearly all of the time. I think architects are the least likely to enjoy the city, to give in to it and revel in its cityness. Perhaps I have some pleasure, then, in trying to reintroduce architects, and more recently, engineers, to the cityness of the city. It is a minor perversion—to take pleasure in witnessing the pleasure of the Other—which is called compersion. Maybe I have a comperse relation toward architects and engineers, and I enjoy rediscovering the pleasures of the city with them as we research the city together. For this, we need to get out of the studio and back into the streets.
BT: The pleasure of architecture may lie both inside and outside the opposition between: architecture as a thing of the mind, a de-materialized or conceptual discipline, with its typological and morphological variations, and on the other hand, architecture as an empirical event that concentrates on the senses, on the experience of space. For three generations, any architect who aimed for or attempted to experience pleasure in architecture has been considered decadent. The idea that architecture could exist without either moral or functional justification has been considered distasteful.
T: Which is the most erotic component of an urban environment?
ET: A urban environment is a wonderland of erotic potential, isn’t it? And not just for people who enjoy public sex and salacious encounters! Living in Jakarta, I enjoy the interminable erotic play of bodies. Bodies touch, bodies slide past each other, and bodies, whether on foot or motorized, are in a constant play negotiating common space. It is amazing to see how reserved and territorial people are in Europe and America, where they have so much more space! In Asia, but in Jakarta especially, the dense commonness of space means that bodies are not repelled from each other so quickly. They can’t move out of the way. They can’t be indignant about being in common. They have to touch. They have to interact. They have to laugh together, and get wet together in the monsoon, and eat and rest together in much closer quarters. It makes me wonder about the extreme feelings of isolation that people suffer from in Europe. Even if one is “alone in the crowd” in Jakarta, the real, physical presence of other bodies, of bodies in a common condition, radically changes one’s experience of the space. Architects have been so afraid of these realities, treating them procedurally and programmatically. As Francois Roche says in our recent interview, architects have impoverished their image of desire and contagion, but, inevitably, bodies desire. [4] This has to be the most erotic component of the urban environment, the density, the contact, the friction created by desiring bodies sharing a necessarily common space. [5]
BT: Garden are like the earliest experiments in that part of architecture that is so difficult to express with words or drawings: pleasure and eroticism. Whether romantic or classic, gardens merge the sensual pleasure of space with the the pleasure of reason, in a most useless manner.” Behind every great city there’s a garden”.
T: Do you feel that uselessness is a quality that strengthens or weakens architecture? Is uselessness an integral part of what you call excess?
ET: I suspect you are thinking here about the traditional definition of architecture as “more than mere building.” We all know it quite well, but, remember, that if architecture is “more than mere building” for Pevsner, for Reyner Banham, such distinctions are much less clear cut. I would even say that for Banham the question of function and utility, posed as they are in much of his writing, undermine the form/function discussion by turning to more relational problems and the social implications of design in context. That said, Banham is one of the greatest critics of in the history of architecture; I am not even a critic, so, I am not in the habit of evaluating the strength or weakness of architecture. But I am quite interested in the question of the “uselessness.” In the “Excess” issue of Scapegoat which I recently edited, I wanted to ask how these distinctions—between utility and waste, or propriety and excess—take on material, territorial and formal realities. [6] Drawing on the philosophies of Georges Bataille and Jean Baudrillard, the journal attempts to look at how the normalized violence of the status quo can be read in reverse, so to speak, by attending to the excesses which it produces, and which, at the same time, undermine the terms of distinction.
BT: Uselessness is reluctantly associated with architectural matters. Even at a time when pleasure found some theoretical backing, utility always provided a practical justification. Architecture will save its peculiar nature, but only wherever it negates itself, wherever it negates or disrupts the form that conservative society expects of it. For if architecture is useless, and radically so, this very uselessness will mean strength in any society where pro t is prevalent. The necessity of architecture may well be its non-necessity.
T: When you feel attracted by a real space or a virtual environment, how do you think architecture is engaging its technique of seduction?
ET: I must admit that when I feel attracted by a real space it tends to be because it frames the possibility of an encounter, or the play of desire, but never just in and of itself. I can’t understand or respond to architecture in isolation from the social relations and practices of liberty it makes possible—maybe that is why I couldn’t go to architecture school! If you think of, for example, the role of a dungeon in a BDSM scene, nothing could be less interesting that its architecture. It might have a cold tone, or some quality suggestive of captivity, but these are really superficial aspects. The importance is the location of the hooks and ties, the consideration of the apparatus for restraint, the instruments for physical control and excitation. The pleasure one feels, for example, as the restraint begins to tighten is certainly proper to the object (i.e. the type of restraint), but this property is indistinguishable from the capacity for pleasure that is unfolded in the mental and physical sub-space made possible by the form of restraint. One responds to the object because it anticipates pain and pleasure, because it primes the body to receive its stimulation without reserve. Scaling back up to the architecture, we could say, following Brian Massumi, that a brick is just a brick: “it can be used to build the courthouse of reason, or it can be thrown through the window.” I hope that, with so much unemployment and such a pervasive angst in the discipline today, at least a few other architects might rediscover the enjoyment of the city and its dungeons, which are so much more compelling than the facile construction of trendy new courtrooms.
BT: Architecture constantly plays the seducer. Its disguises are numerous: facades, arcades, squares, even architectural concepts become the artifacts of seduction. Like masks, they place a veil between what is assumed to be reality and its participants. The literal aspect of the disguise (the facade, the street) indicates other systems of knowledge, other ways to read the city: formal masks hide socioeconomic ones, while literal masks hide metaphorical ones. Consciously aimed at seduction, masks simultaneously veil and unveil, simulate and dissimulate. Behind all masks lie dark and unconscious streams that cannot be dissociated from the pleasure of architecture. Yet by its very presence, it says that, in the background, there is something else.
[1] Quoted in Etienne Turpin, Adam Bobbette, and Meredith Miller, editors. Jakarta: Architecture + Adaptation (Depok: Universitas Indonesia Press, 2013), 2.
[2] See AbdouMaliq Simone, “Urban Water Politics in Jakarta,” in Jakarta: Architecture + Adaptation, 61-101.
[3] AbdouMaliq Simone, City Life from Jakarta to Dakar: Movements at the Crossroads (New York: Routledge, 2010).
[4] François Roche in Conversation with Etienne Turpin, “Matters of Fabulation: On the Construction of Realities in the Anthropocene,” in Architecture in the Anthropocene: Encounters Among Design, Deep Time, Science and Philosophy, edited by Etienne Turpin (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Publishing/Open Humanities Press, 2013), 197-208.
[5] On desiring bodies, my views are especially influenced by John Paul Ricco, The Logic of the Lure (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002).
[6] Etienne Turpin, editor. Scapegoat: Architecture | Landscape | Political Economy Issue 05 - “Excess” (Summer/Fall 2013).
Etienne Turpin is the director of anexact office, a design research practice committed to multidisciplinary urban activism, artistic and curatorial experimentation, and applied philosophical inquiry. Etienne is a Vice-Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Research Fellow with the SMART Infrastructure Facility, Faculty of Engineering & Information Sciences, and an Associate Research Fellow with the Institute for Social Transformation Research, Faculty of Law, Humanities, and The Arts, University of Wollongong, Australia. With the support of this joint appointment, Etienne lives and works in Jakarta, Indonesia, where his research helps produce strategies for community resistance and resilience among informal settlements of the urban poor facing the combined violence of climate change and rapid development. As director of the SMART Research Group on Urban Livability, Sustainability, and Resilience, he is developing a GeoSocial Intelligence framework for community-driven data collection that facilitates the co-management of civic infrastructure and resources. He is the editor of Architecture in the Anthropocene: Encounters Among Design, Deep Time, Science and Philosophy (Ann Arbor: Michigan Publishing/Open Humanities Press, 2013), and co-editor of Jakarta: Architecture + Adaptation [English and Bahasa Indonesian bilingual publication] (Depok: Universitas Indonesia Press, 2013). From 2009-2013, he was a contributing editor of the journal Scapegoat: Architecture | Landscape | Political Economy, where he co-edited issues on “Property” (00–Winter/Spring 2010) and “Service” (01–Summer/Fall 2010), and edited the most recent issue on “Excess” (05–Summer/Fall 2013). He left the journal’s Editorial Board at the end of 2013 to begin editing a new book series for the Open Humanities Press, entitled Contested Territories, which addresses the spatial politics of environment and design within the context of contemporary political conflict and social struggle. Etienne’s background is in applied philosophy and visual culture; he completed his Ph.D. (Philosophy) in the Department of Theory and Policy Studies at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education of the University of Toronto. Prior to his work in Jakarta, Etienne was a Research Fellow with the Center for Southeast Asian Studies, University of Michigan, where he also taught advanced design research, architecture and design theory, and coordinated international research-based studios for the Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning. He has also taught in the architecture and landscape architecture graduate programs for the Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design, University of Toronto, and in the art history and visual culture programs for the Department of Visual Studies, University of Toronto-Mississauga. He is currently writing a book about the place of the geological sciences within the human ethogram, titled Terrible is the Earth, as well as co-editing the collection Art in the Anthropocene: Encounters Among Aesthetics, Politics, Environments and Epistemologies (forthcoming November 2014) with Heather Davis. As a member of the Synapse International Curators’ Network, he is the co-editor of the book-as-exhibition series This Paginated Exhibition, and is currently co-curating the touring exhibition 125,660 Specimens of Natural History with Anna-Sophie Springer for Komunitas Salihara in Jakarta.
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