Spatial Note Book

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BRUEGEL’S PRESENCE

(above) The two Tower of Babel paintings by Pieter Bruegel. In the earliest version, the Tower rises optimistically skyward, still under construction at the top. In the later version, it rises no m…

“Umberto Eco, the theorist, novelist, and Medievalist, has claimed that globalization and the sometimes abrasive melding of peoples and cultures in our time have not yielded a new Classical age in the Enlightenment mode, but rather a new Medieval age, negotiating between chaos and order, seeking a complex, ever-changing balance of competing forces. The emergence of the internet, with its anti-hierarchical form, certainly bears out this point of view. Pieter Bruegel’s paintings are more alive today than at any time since he made them. In many ways, he was one of us.“

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AUTHENTICITY

On its face, the concept of authenticity is a simple one. A thing or a person is authentic if they emerge from a source of originality. The source might be a unique way of making, in the case of a …

“Benjamin’s viewpoint was radically socialist or communist. He hoped for the advent of an egalitarian society where the people would control the means of production and each would benefit accordingly. In such a society, everyone would have equal access to art, that is, the art made common by mass production—it would be woven into the everyday fabric of living. The Bauhaus had a similar idea and goal. However, Benjamin, and the Bauhaus founder, Walter Gropius, overestimated the ability of socialism and communism to create such a society, but also underestimated the adaptability of capitalism—its ability to co-opt any idea, including radical egalitarianism, for its own purposes. What Benjamin foresaw without knowing it, and inadvertently contributed to bringing about, was a capitalist society of mass culture that we call consumer society, where everyone who plays the capitalist game has access to products of every kind, including art. The public museum of today is a retail store of art for consumption by the masses of consumers, as much as movie theaters, television, and the internet. The irony is, of course, that elites remain in power, still brandishing their control of original art, not least through the museums (“look but don’t touch”). Capitalism has succeeded in creating radical egalitarianism of its particular kind and at the same time reinforced the power of ruling elites.”

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"Art, be it painting, literature, or architecture, is the remaining shell of thought. Actual thought is of no substance. We cannot actually see thought, we can see only its remains. Thought manifests itself by its shucking or shedding of itself; it is beyond its confinement.“ ─John Hejduk, "Evening in Liano,” in Elizabeth Diller, Diane Lewis, and Kim Shkapich, eds.,Education of an Architect (New York : Rizzoli International, 1988), pp.340-341

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“…the word ‘modern’ designates two sets of entirely different practices which must remain distinct if they are to remain effective, but have recently begun to be confused. The first set of practices, by 'translation’, creates mixtures between entirely new types of beings, hybrids of nature and culture. The second, by 'purification’, creates two entirely distinct ontological zones: that of human beings on the one hand; that nonhumans on the other. Without the first set, the practices of purification would be fruitless or pointless. Without the second, the work of translation would be slowed down, limited, or even ruled out. The first set corresponds to what I have called networks; the second to what I shall call the modern critical stance.

…As soon as we direct our attention simultaneously to the work of purification and the work of hybridization , we immediately stop being wholly modern, and our future begins to change.” ─Bruno Latour, “We Have Never Been Modern” (1991), In 1.5 What Does it Mean To Be a Modern, (Massachusetts : Harvard University Press, 1993), pp.10-11

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“Since he cannot limit himself to talk about what he knows, the Expert pronounces on the basis of the place that his specialty has won for him. In that way he inscribes himself and is inscribed in a common order where specialization, as the rule and hierarchically ordering practice of the productivist economy, has the value of initiation. Because he has successfully submitted himself to this initiatory practice, he can, on questions foreign to his technical competence but not to the power he has acquired through it, pronounce with authority a discourse which is no longer a function of knowledge, but rather a function of the socio-economic order. He speaks as an ordinary man, who can receive authority in exchange for knowledge as one receives a paycheck in exchange for work. He inscribes himself in the common language of practices, where an overproduction of authority leads to the devaluation of authority, since one always gets more in exchange for an equal or inferior amount of competence. But when he continues to believe, or make others believe, that he is acting as a scientist, he confuses social place with technical discourse. He takes one for the other: it is a simple case of mistaken identity.” ─Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (1988), in The Expert and the Philosopher, p.8.

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“If your eyes could penetrate the opaque masses of the facades, they would see an incredible spectacle: three hundred thousand, five hundred thousand men and woman─perhaps more─at work in a pool of space at the same time. A humanity having broken its millenary destiny which was to be attached to the ground, which is suspended between heaven and earth, going up and down at high speed in clusters of twenty and in sheaves of two hundred. Is it a new scene in purgatory?” ─Le Corbusier, When the Cathedrals Were White, trans. Francis Hyslop (New York: Reynal & Hitchcock, 1947), p.68

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The paradigmatic (or ‘significant’) opposition between exchange and use, between global networks and the determinant locations of production and consumption, is transformed here into a dialectical contradiction, and in the process becomes spatial. Space thus understood is both abstract and concrete in character: abstract inasmuch as it has no existence save by virtue of the exchange-ability of all its component parts, and concrete inasmuch as it is socially real and as such localized. This is a space, therefore, that is homogeneous yet at the same time broken into fragments. ─Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space (1991), pp. 341–342

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“Though modern society does not recompense its intellectuals judiciously, it still tolerates the old arrangements as to property which are a serious barrier in the way of transforming the town or the house. Established property rests on inheritance and its highest aim is a state of inertia, of no change and of maintaing the status quo. Although every other sort of human enterprise is subject to the rough warfare of competition, the landlord, ensconced in his property, escape the common law in a princely fashion: he is a king. On the existing principle of property, it is impossible to establish a constructional programme which will hold together. And so the necessary building is not done. But if existing property arrangements were changed, and they are changing, it would be possible to build; there would be an enthusiasm for building, and we should avoid Revolution.” —Le Corbusier, “Towards a  New Architecture” (1931), In Architecture or Revolution, (London: J.Rodker, 1931), pp.280-281

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“You could say that my whole story is about the splits. From the beginning up to this point: first between Europe and America, then between Europe and China. And a split position always has these elements: you feed from both sides, you make a bridge, or a schizophrenia. Those are the three models of the splits that all happen sometime, but with which you can develop a dynamic position.I really hope you have written this down correctly, because I have never formulated this so precisely, you’re the first one to hear it.”

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‘Valéry, who had a fine eye for the cluster of symptoms called “civilization,” has characterized one of the pertinent facts. “The inhabitant of the great urban centers,” he writes, “reverts to a state of savagery—that is, of isolation. The feeling of being dependent on others, which used to be kept alive by need, is gradually blunted in the smooth functioning of the social mechanism. Any improvement of this mechanism eliminates certain modes of behaviour and emotions.” Comfort isolates; on the other hand, it brings those enjoying it closer to mechanisation.’ —Walter Benjamin, “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire”, Illuminations. Ed. Hannah Arendt. (1968). p.174

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“Baudelaire speaks of a man who plunges into the crowd as into a reservoir of electric energy. Circumscribing the experience of the shock, he calls this man "a kaleidoscope equipped with consciousness.” —Walter Benjamin, “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire”, Illuminations. Ed. Hannah Arendt. (1968). p.175

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Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, At the Moulin Rouge (1892-95) “The crowd—no subject was more entitled to the attention of nineteenth-century writers. It was getting ready to take shape as a public in broad strata who had acquired facility in reading. It became a customer; it wished to find itself portrayed in the contemporary novel, as the patrons did in the paintings of the Middle Ages. The must successful author of the century met this demand out of inner necessity. To him, crowd meant—almost in the ancient sense—the crowd of the clients, the public.” —Walter Benjamin, “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire”, Illuminations. Ed. Hannah Arendt. (1968). p.166

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“A city born of the spirit of speculation will be always an artificial, never a necessary product. And everything artificial awaits an imminent downfall. According to Henry Ford the modern metropolis has been wasteful. It is bankrupt today and will tomorrow cease to exist because its lifespan is determined solely by its functionality and profitability. When both fail, decline will set in. So the end of the metropolis? NO! But an end to the metropolis that is based on the principle of speculation and whose very organism cannot free itself from the model of the city of the past despite all the modifications it has experienced─an end to the metropolis that has yet to discover its own laws.”

—Luwig Hilberseimier, Großstadtarchitektur (1927; Stuttgart: Julius Hoffmann, 1978)

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John Cage - Fontana Mix (1958) “Notations always describe a work that is yet to be realised. Even if already performed, the work it describes is open to interpretation and change in the course of future performance. In this sense, notation is optimistic and anticipatory. Unlike classical theories of mimeses, notations do not map or represent exisiting objects or systems but anticipate new organisations and specify yet to be realised relationships…Notations special properties can be exploited by the urban designer to produce a kind of “directed indeterminacy”: proposals that are robust and specific enough to sustain change over time, yet open enough to support multiple interpretations.” —Stan Allen, Practice: Architecture, Technique and Representation (2000)

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Paul Rudolph, Barcelona Pavilion study drawing, 1986. “Since there are no other architects who have been as faithful to the use of steel and glass as Mies, his building are unquestionably transparent. But the transparency of the Barcelona Pavilion is not that of clear air. Rather, it makes us feel as if we are looking at things deep underwater, and would better be described as translucent. The infinite fluidity we sense in the pavilion must arise from this translucent, liquid-like space. What we experience here is not the flow of air but the sense of wandering and drifting gently underwater.   —Toyo Ito, “Tarzans in the Media Forest” (1997), in Tarzans in the Media Forest & Other Essays (London: AA Publications 2011), p.116

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“With a conventional map printed on a sheet of paper, our physical bodies existed on a different plane, outside the map. The space on the map was abstract and we had to translate it into a three-dimensional space in our minds in order to learn the actual location by comparing it with reality. With the new system (car navigation system), the location of a car on the display overlaps with reality. We no longer have to dislocate our physical bodies to a different plane from that of the real world. … Our isolated self is linked with the outside world by means of electronic media whether we like it or not. The concept of inside and outside is deeply rooted in the autonomy of the self. The emergence of new media obscures the boundary between the inside and the outside with out our realising it. When viewed from that angle, we have to admit that the real, physical body and the virtual one no longer contradict one another but overlap completely.” —Toyo Ito, “Tarzans in the Media Forest” (1997), in Tarzans in the Media Forest & Other Essays (London: AA Publications 2011), pp. 121-122

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Josef Hoffmann, Stoclet Palace, Brussels, 1911

“Photography was born at almost the same time as the railway. The two evolve hand in hand─the world of tourism is the world of the camera─because they share a conception of the world. The railway transforms the world into a commodity. It makes places into objects of consumption and, in doing so, deprives them of their quality as places. Oceans, mountains, and cities float in the world just like the objects of the universal exhibitions. "Photographed images,” says Susan Sontag, “do not seem to be statements about the world"─unlike what is written,or hand-made visual statement─"so much as pieces of it, miniatures of reality that anyone can make or acquire.” Photography does for architecture what the railway did for cities, transforming it into merchandise and conveying it through the magazines for it to be consumed by the masses. This adds a new context to the production of architecture, to which corresponds an independent cycle of usage, one superimposed upon that of the built space.“

—Beatriz Colomina, Privacy and Publicity: Modern Architecture as Mass Media, p.47