interior design office programming questionnaire

my name is colin gardner,research associate at the gsd. tonight marks the thirdinstallment of the all that is solid seriesof the harvard symposium on architecture. this event continues thesymposium's tradition of treating problemsof importance for contemporaryarchitectural culture, exploring questions thatdesigners face as they design. tonight, the seriescelebrates a shift

to the question of organization. but before beginning,i'd like to thank all of the symposium'ssupporters and collaborators, the harvard center for greenbuildings and cities, a plus t architectural publishers, andeach member of the harvard symposium on architecturecommittee, inaki abalos, [inaudible] sharon johnston,mark lee, aurora fernandez, javier moses, carla [inaudible],antoine picon, shantel blakely, myself, and mariana ibanez, theorganizer of tonight's topic.

as a result ofmany deliberations on which forum bestsuits an introduction to the topic oforganization, tonight, we have a manifold andmulti-scalar introduction disassembled into threedistinct yet related elements. first, the director ofthe symposium's committee, co-founder of abalos +sentkiewicz architects, and chair of the department ofarchitecture at the gsd, inaki abalos, will tracethe overall trajectory

of topics in this series andlocate organization therein. second, the organizerof tonight's topic, architect, co-founderof ik studio, and associate professorof architecture at the gsd, marianaibanez will frame the symposium's new topic. and third, our distinguishedguest and moderator tonight, architect, cofounderof sio2 arch, former assistant professorin architecture at gsd,

and current associateprofessor at iit, luis ortega, will tailor an inquiryinto organization for tonight's eventin particular, and introduce ourpanel of speakers. for my part, it's apleasure to welcome our speakers and our audiencehere in piper tonight-- also, our audience online,both now and later in time-- to the harvardsymposium on architecture, all that is solid,organization or design?

here now to set ourevents in motion, please join me in welcominginaki abalos to the podium. [applause] thank you, colin. thank you, everyone,for being here. i promise you that ifyou want to come here, it will be much more attractivefor you, the whole symposium. so you are still in themoment, you can come. so i'm here presenting verybriefly what we have produced,

and showing my gratitude toespecially all the committee that colin hasmentioned, but also to aurora and javier of aplus d for doing possible this monograph that resumesand contains in wonderful ways the two symposia thatwe celebrated last year, and that was dedicatedto design techniques. the cover is-- i mean, i'm superhappy to see that the cover was decided by them tohave this thesis project of [inaudible],a student that

shows the interest of includingthe students in this symposium actively. these are theparticipants that we had. i haven't counted them, but ithink there are 30 something. and all of them withsome links-- direct links or indirect links--links with the gsd. and in a way, it's avery collective work. and what we aregoing to see today is the preparation of the secondvolume of this series dedicated

to organization or design? these were the postersthat we had then, and those are the onesthat we have this time, trying to give a sense ofcontinuity and differentiation from one of the other. but i was trying todecide what image could show the links amongthe first and second volume of the symposium. and i'm sorry forbeing so pretentious,

but i think that thisone is a very good one, because, i mean, the or ofthe organization or design? seems to be negatingthe right to design. but i think that thisis exactly the opposite. we in the school haveseveral issues that we really are interested in, and thenall of them are complementary, and all of themare in conversation and in deep conversation. and this is happeninghere with-- i mean,

i'm sure that you know thisbeautiful painting of raphael-- not rafael moneo, raphaelthe italian painter. plato and aristotlewalking to academia and having aconversation, and clearly one pointing out sothe sky to the place where all the logic, allrationale of the cosmos can be discovered. the other, standing[inaudible] showing clearly his interestin the realities

of their everyday life. one is having the [inaudible],a very difficult and abstract book. the other is havingthe [inaudible], so is trying to explainhow the quality of life or the good life has to benegotiated among human beings. and it's in relationshipwith every single second we have in our life. so i think that this is image isimportant to retain this image,

because thediscussion, in a way, will be relative to thetechniques of design, again, but now emphasizing therole that information has increasingly had inthe processes of design, at least from the momentwhere the theory of system became more and more extended. these are the four topicsthat we expect to cover. so we are now in the second,interior, matter, and tradition and change will be the next one.

so i hope that you all will beparticipating more actively, and will be enjoyingthis symposium. thank you so much. mariana? hello. good evening, everybody. i also want to thank inakiand the architecture symposium committee. also shantel and colin forthe support, and all the work

to making this event happened. and of course to our guestsand panelists for tonight. inaki talked aboutthe publication that a plus d has produced forthe design technique symposium, and for this symposium,there will be also a companion publicationthat will be compiling the proceedings oftonight's event, tomorrow's event as asymposium discussion, and some other articlesthat would expand

on the topic of organization. for that publication,i wrote an article that all of our participantsreceived in advance to tonight's event. and that article was producedas a means to frame the topic and to lay out afew provocations. so the third introductionto the introduction today will be very brief,and is an attempt to share with you a few keyideas from that article.

everything needsto be organized, yet is a universaltheory of organization possible, or even productivein architectural terms? secondly, as a resultof the prevalence of digital designin architecture, many of today's debatescenter on the issue of data. but data by itselfputs no pressure on the architectural project. it is how data is acquired,quantified, manipulated,

and evaluated thatdifferentiates outcomes from one another. in other words, data,before it can lay claim to boundlessefficacy and agency, is first a problemof organization. the attempt todefine organization has been present in everyarchitectural period, and it is still present today. yet organization isnot a generic term.

it is a term thatgets actualized by the contemporary condition. the idea of part towhole at the center of the tectonic discourse isredefined within organization as a problem ofelements and relations, a fundamentalontological shift that begins to negotiate preand post digital pressures. the idea of a wholeexists in both discourses, but in the latter,the whole is defined

as a part of a larger system. every whole at somelevel is a sub-whole, converting the whole intoa pattern-- a pattern made of elements and relations. computation isalso at the center of architectural debates, butcomputation is too generic a term to encapsulatethe diversity of operative frameworks presentin architectural practice and discourse.

all design is now digitalin one form or another. it is in this multiplicitythat strategies do not depart fromcomputation so much as that they each add a particularspin to the computational act. despite their divergenceand dissimilarity, each strategy may be takingus in answer to the question that we have placed at the coreof the symposium, which is, how do we put things together? where the part to wholeaims for timelessness,

their relational andcontrast technology is the issue of time. qualities ofincompleteness, becoming, and time dependent relationshipsare intrinsic aspects of our contemporarydesign reality. ultimately, thissymposium investigates the way in which theoriesand systems of organization are conceived and enactedtoday, their outcomes, and disciplinary implications.

finally, you may be askedwhether the symposium takes the side of organization in aposition to design, or design in a position to organization. and we should resolutelyanswer that we take the side ofarchitecture in a position to the choice of eitherone or the other. this is why this symposiumis framed as a question such that we don't need the resultto occupy one or the other side, but the result to occupythe question itself.

and now, i willwelcome to the podium luis ortega, ourmoderator for tonight. thank you. well, thanks. thanks for invitingme for being here. it's always a pleasureto be back gsd, and more so tointroduce and moderate a group of extremelytalented thinkers, designers, architects,peers that i'm

sure will make our debatevivid and provocative. before launching a verybrief set of questions, please let me introduceour panelists today. i'm going to introduce themin order of presentation. our first panelistwill be ciro najle. he's an architect,researcher, and educator. he studied architecture at theuniversity of buenos aires. master of science andadvanced architectural design at columbia university,he's currently

the dean of the school ofarchitecture and urban studies at universidad detorcuato in buenos aires and visiting here at gsd. he's co-founder and formerdirector of the landscape urbanism graduate anddiploma unit master of the architecturalassociation in london, and he has taught at variousarchitectural institutions, including cornell,columbia, berlage instituut, and universidad federicosanta maria in valparaiso.

he's a director ofgeneral design bureau, and architectural office andmultidisciplinary laboratory of research in buenosaires, and his work has been exhibitedat cultural venues, including the museum ofcontemporary art in denver, le laboratoire in paris,the prague biennale of art, and he was curator of thelondon pavilion of the beijing biennale of architecture. his theoretical and professionalwork has been widely published,

and his last book supraruralarchitecture-- atlas of rural protocols ofthe american midwest and the argentinian pampas,which with it together-- that's an advertisement-- willbe released next month by actar publishers. he's currently working onthe book the generic sublime, to be published byharvard university gsd. our second presenterwill be chuck hoberman. he's the founder ofhoberman associates,

a multidisciplinarypractice that uses transformableprinciples for a wide range of applications, includingconsumer products, deployable shelters, andstructures for aerospace. examples of hiscommissioned work include transforming videoscreens for the u2 world tour, the arch installedas the centerpiece for the winterolympic games in 2002, as well as exhibits at anumber of major museums.

in 2008, he co-founded andup-to-date building initiative with the global engineering firmburo happold, which has since built a series of dynamicfacets and operable roofs in the us, japan,and the mideast. chuck has over 20 patents forhis transformable inventions, and has won numerousawards for his designs. he's a visiting scholarat harvard university with institute of biologicallyinspired engineering, and teaches at the harvardgraduate school of design.

our third panelistis andrew witt. he's a designer currently basedin los angeles, california, if i'm wrong. not anymore. sorry. that's what happens when youget a website not updated. ok, i'm going try again. he's a designer, and he hasworked in paris, in france. that's right.

yeah. where he has consultedparametric design, geometric approaches,new technologies, and integratedpractice for clients, including gehry partners,ateliers jean nouvel, un studio, andcoop himmelb(l)au. trained as both anarchitect and mathematician, he has particularinterest in technically synthetic and logicallyrigorous approach to form.

his work and research have beenpublished in surface, space, linear algebra andits applications and many otherworld-renowned publications. he received an march and msfrom gsd, and mdes from gsd. our last panelist, beforei introduce our respondent, is pierre belanger. he's a registered landscapearchitect, urban planner, and director of opsys, a designresearch organization based in toronto and bostonwith [inaudible] in tokyo.

he's associate professorof landscape architecture and co-director of mdespostgraduate design research program at gsd. and pierre teaches andcoordinates graduate courses on the convergence of ecology,infrastructure, media, and urbanism in inter-relatedfields of design, communications, planning,and engineering. he's the author of numerousbooks and essays and peer publications, and he hasreceived international praises

in design andplanning competitions, and he's the onlylandscape architect to have received theprofessional prix de rome in architecture awardby the canada council for the arts. our respondent tonightwill be sanford kwinter he's a new york based writeron architectural theories and co-founder of theinfluential zone books publishers.

sanford currently servesas professor of theory and criticism atthe pratt institute. he formerly served asan associate professor at rice university,houston, texas, and also mit, columbia university,cornell, and gsd. having received a doctoratein comparative literature from columbiauniversity, sanford lectured at harvard university,angewandte, berlage institute, architectural association,and many other institutions.

and over the past 20years, his publications have pioneered new ideas inart, architecture, science, and the humanities. he has written widely onphilosophical issues related to design, architecture,and urbanism, and he was involved in a seriesof comprehensive publications convened by any magazinebetween 1991 and 2000. so to discussorganization is, for me, a challenge for diverse reasons.

the first one ispersonal, because i'm extremely disorganized. in fact, i'm systematicallydisorganized. and i will comeback later to that as not as an axiombut as an agency. the provocation of the title,as marina has pointed out, has to assume thatthere is-- i mean, it seems that these, it occurredto me, among the two terms. design and organizationare placed as opposites,

or at least as differentand discrete enough to have to choose among them. i thought that inthat assumption, there was an opportunityto start a discussion. and to do so, byquestioning the question or by disorganizingthe organization. the first question-- i don'tknow how to move this forward. this arrow-- which one? the big one?

this one? oh, that was easy. ok. ok, so the first question ithink i would like to launch will be about order orthe problem history. there is a perpetual anxiety byarchitects to reset the system. what if there is no suchbreak between design and organization, butrather an intensification of the certain historical modes?

in that sense, theorder is important, and maybe organizationcould be understood as design intensification. with the digitalturn came a change in visual cultureand aesthetics that reaches far beyondinstrumental impact that is generally associatedwith introduction of computers into disciplinary practice. this term has the potentialfor historical [inaudible]

construction in the discipline,which can lend value to projects that up to nowhave only been interpreted in mechanical design terms. three examples. there is a use ofmaterials that move away from the motherlanguage of efficiency, and places emphasis on thesearch for an effect that is not tied into modernrational mediation, but is directlylinked to the impact

of [inaudible] formalorganizations on the senses. it is not a questionof reclaiming a phenomenological discourse onarchitecture, but of harnessing the whole potentialof the utilization in order to export complexformer articulations, some of which have clearprecedence in the traditions of craftsmanship thatwere lost during the rise of mechanical culture, and whichare richer and more diverse experiences to the more austere,modern, special experience.

second examplecould be the shift by the introductionof redundancy as a productive value withinthe material organization. whereas redundancywas considered to be somethingnegative according to the mechanicallogic of optimization, in the digital logic, it createsa valuable information-rich scenario that allows forsimultaneity, multiplicity, and a variety of updates.

these, of course, at all levelsfrom instructional assistant to programmatic organizations. third term has todo with control. the mechanical era articulatedtectonic investigation and the interestin detail through a particularunderstanding of control, restoring it throughamplificatory design logics. [inaudible] a cleardefinition of tolerance, with respect to assembly andmaterials, into its evaluation.

in the digital era, there is amore complex idea of control, and extremes havebecome radicalized. control is subject to avery high level of position and rigor in constructionand a reduction of tolerance. at the other extreme, however,a whole series of new projects have emerged that arecentered into the introduction of soft control over geometrybased on hybridization of digital techniqueswith low resolution analog manufacturing.

the second question couldbe called the question of discipline of mastership. gordon pask in '75 wrote"the architectural relevance of cybernetics." in his article, he arguedthe potential of cybernetics in architecture. he does it by defending theimpact of cybernetics not only as an instrumentalscience, but as a new theoretic frame fromwhich to think and to design.

the new architect is presentedas a designer of systems with his interests centered intothe organizational properties of the systems of development,communication, and control. cybernetics is presentedas a meta language that allowsaddressing critically the role of the new architect. the capacity of computersto mediate between designer and the designconverts the architect in control of controls.

a catalyzer, a metasystematizer. design shifts from beinga teleological process of deduction into inductiveprocess of systematic approach based on loops thatfeedbacks and gives priority to the performative in frontof the purely descriptive. the third question is aquestion of manipulation or the question of authorship. the modification of certaincanonical differences from the mechanical agelike visual culture based

on identity and introduction ofnew frameworks for production and categorization have changedthe definition of authorship. furthermore, the authorrecognizes himself an original, the primitive. the same was reproducedin an original design that was repeated or reproduced. we have moved towardan author model where an original,a primitive design, is actualized indifferent ways based

on the ranges and thecapacities of the system design. new processes ofcollectivization, automatation, or deviation from theoriginal design of structures become possible. a new dynamic has also emergedin which representation disappears as an intermediatestage between the author and the work. we used to have the capacityof the documenting authorship as a result ofdigital manufacturing.

in this case, thereis no representation to mediate between design andproduction of fabrication. none of these changes questionthe fear author as such. it is not at all true thatthe author disappears. but on the contrary, thedefinition of authorship is relevant and qualifiedwith new potential. whereas before the [inaudible]was limited to author work, it now opens up toauthor system process. therefore the digitalterm offers a possibility

of [inaudible] thepostmodern tradition that attack the modernarchitect associated with a controllingfigure, restudying it through amplificatorydesign logics. whereas part of post modernityattack the architect author by introducing the powerof the receiver of the work into authority of process. the digital architectreclaims the figure of the total architect.

this total architectis not the architect of modern control or thepost modern antiarchitect, but a metasystematizerof a design that prioritizes circular logicsthat incorporate feedback. the new architect works inan open systemic manner, designing the protocols thatdetermine the rational systems to allow forconnections and positing ways of negotiating betweengeneric personal subjectivity and up to datecollective subjectivity.

while organization talksabout means towards an end, system refers to pressesof intensification. the last questioni wanted to ask is a question of culture,the question of play. the impact of the digital,technical in origin, has mainly developed in termsof theory and epistemology. it is most powerful oncontemporary variation. the digital does develop itswork in technological terms, but it uses [inaudible] onthe foundation for play.

it rejects a modernoptimization tradition and the post modern formalautonomy and complexifies relationships. its aesthetic is based onits [inaudible] capability, and is not concernedwith ensuring that its products are thereflection of its processes. with [inaudible] formalizations,rather those products should construct anddevelop sensibilities and play that promotes theevolution of the theses

in an open cultural manner. the formalizationdoes not respond to an [inaudible] position. it is a result of a disciplinaryagenda in which the status quo is displace in orderto provide structure for indeterminate guessesand open up closed systems. after all thosequestions, you are starting to foresee thepower of this organization. i leave the war and themess to the panelists

to now yes please organizeor design sign what i'm sure will be a goodconversation about how to organize our lives. please join me welcomingour first speaker. thank you for the invitation. thank you, inaki andmariana in particular. it's a pleasure to be herewith these colleagues. for a long time, ihave been searching for a new title for thearchitectural project

and one that doesnot seclude self in uncomfortableautonomous conditions but also one thatdoes not merely respond to externalforms or agents, that is a self-standing statusthat acknowledges and promotes reciprocities withexternal conditions. it also defines its ownconditions of existence and throughpass system. it is in this context tothe question of organization

or design which icould answer or respond in a more sophisticated way. i prefer to saydefinitely organization. and what an inspiringprolific and tempting concept organization is. if the notion of the sign--when regarded with smartphones-- involves the understandingof architecture as an act of embellishmentof the environment to make it agreeable, pleasant,visually amicable, and mild--

to make it perform well underallegedly good intentions, domesticating what we see forthe purpose of softening out it's sharp edges and thereforemaking itself livable. i would rather say that suchgood intentions are usually perverse and that thenotion of organization, as harsh as it sounds, confrontsthe rawness of the conditions of our practice muchmore directly and taking a behemoth stance towhat's this rawness. the idea of beautynaturally associated

to apollonian perfectionhas long been consumed. and it was preciselyby this same perfection that it became its opposite,the sublime-- that deep vertigo that before it throughaesthetic experience sucks us into the unknown,the threatening, the blurry, the unpredictable,the horrifying. since kant, the ideaof classical beauty was opposed to that of thesublime which opened up a whole other aspectof the aesthetic,

promising to achieve a moreenduring and active form. since then, theaesthetic experience was consciously forced togo through a negative term, every time higherand more farfetched-- always pushing us downinto the perplexing depths of the unknown, tothen elevate us straight up into the realm of suddensynthetic thinking. this idea is not only inevitablefor any artistic practice today, but it will benaive to disregard it,

as it is also much morerobust both at the culture level and a politicalone because it disrupts the basic gapbetween the sensible and the intelligibleand makes them vibrate with eachother paradoxically overcoming the sensibleto then recreate it at the higher levelthat can be experienced as a strong form of thought. i will inscribe theidea of organization

within this register and saythat not only architecture is a building of organization,that not only it it's duty to organize stuffand turn chaos into order, but more importantly,it is to create the conditions to surpassitself in that process-- that is to surpass the conditionsof the sensitive through organization. this means organizationis not a given. it is not merely the realmof orderliness, neatness,

ubiquitous control, or harmony. far from being a given conditionand far from this condition tending to put things at rest,killing life and crystallizing it into fixed, stable problems. organization, already becauseof its intrinsic implausibility, is an engine-- thesource of energy. and instead of being applied,it must be first constructed. and what architecturedoes is to determine on the way to the making theforms by which organization

is constructed. organization constructsforms of organization while it organizes,delivering at least two levels of outcomes. on the one hand,architecture makes things correspond to oneanother and get together into a higher form. and on the other, it makes thishigher form go beyond itself, betraying its ownconditions of existence

and thus creating thenew-- the artistic new. for this purpose, anyform for organization configures on its waya model without which there is no theory, orbetter-- without which any theory belongs toanother model confirming it. models are the condition ofexistence of organizations-- the frame, their ground,their plane of consistency. and it would be problematic tosay that the model is something that architecturesimply adheres to.

so these are notgeneral methods, not predefined systems,not scientific laws, but intenselysingular procedures that precisely because oftheir systematicity, construct the form of artisticitywhose irascibility is capable to transcendthe contingent condition of the project-- it's sitespecificity, its relevance to conditions, it's perfect fit. these systematic singularitiesachieve a general projection,

but they first involvethat the act of organizing implies a parallelroute of constructing the form for organizing. so i will go through aseries of student projects that were developed here atthe hgsd in the past few years and share these. this one is called[inaudible], and it's what i frame as afantasy landscape model. and it's a synthetic[inaudible] construct

that sits on stable ground atthe front of congested city centers, it constitutes a modelfor the management of expansion of cities into untouched landsright next to their core, and consequently, aspace for the projection of metropolitan desires. the integration of [inaudible]geomorphologies and palace typologies sets up therules and constraints of a network of public parks. the first [inaudible]of topography modulation

defines the geometry[inaudible]. a second order regulateswater distribution. a third one managesthe organization of housing and vegetation. the fourth determinesthe circulation network. the interconnected lagoonsexploit the fragility of environmental equilibrium sothat their contained condition accelerates the flourishingof anomalous ecosystems. from an environmentalstandpoint,

the model generatesa broad spectrum of watersheds challengingthe possibility of ecological diversity. from a social one, it bringsdirect access to nature to the inner city. this next model iscalled [inaudible], and it's constructed througha project called [inaudible], which is anevolutionary platform departing from the antiurbanlineage of hollow buildings.

standing on its ownself-constructed tradition, the model integratesvarious [inaudible] of other buildings,those driven to construct inner spectacles,[inaudible] organize space through the profusemandating of circulation, those that anchor the atriumto a tight relationship with infrastructureand those that construct poignanticonic figures at the scale of the city.

the model works through asystem of vertical bifurcation of internal voids, circulationsystems, and shared problems. the system is controlledthrough horizontal strata that depart from a virtual[inaudible] located in the middle of the building. through the managementof these proportions, the atrium and its localeffects on the [inaudible] becomes a laboratoryof forms and scales of interiorizedurbanity from the

monumental to the domesticbuilding singularity and managing the site'ssystematic diversification of the [inaudible] interior. the next model is calledthe big data model, and it's based on ana project called data form, which weavesmixed used islands in a mixed use ofthe archipelago to create bundles ofcommercial activity within a matrix that transcendsurban disconnectedness in favor

of new city forms. the mixed use buildingunderstood here as a city within a city, an island ofhighly determined [inaudible] and a machine of generation oftotally unnecessary information so unique and irresistiblethat it effortlessly attracts inhabitants,as if in distraction, to not let them go, engendersa feel of appealing adequacy and numbness that hidesthe extreme vulnerability of the user and the revolutionof his or her overpowering

by this shear driveof consumption. in turn, the mixeduse manifold acts as an infrastructuralspine that integrates independent commercialmasses in a singularity. the more congested, theamalgamated the interior, the higher itsinternal connectivity. the plan for [inaudible]of information creates the basis for thismega form which systematically and allegorically piles upthe informational debris

of exchanges in aresolutely indifferent mass. the next model is calledthe surface enclave model, and it defines its [inaudible]through the enclosing of a plot and the cropping of a surface. the square frame of the[inaudible] piece of land and the homogeneousgrade geometry that incarnates its density providea radical and indifferentiated endless subdivision thatdescribes equidistant arrays of private houses andamenities, golf course, park

spaces, and others. the distribution yields novariation, not relationship, no hierarchy, and no distinctionin principle except quantity. the gated community turnsinto its own environment. as each monotonous distributionoperates as a force field in respect to the others. locally it's placingcomponents to achieve proximity and/or privacy. the sequence creates each timea different arrangement ranging

from well balanced hamletsto intermittent enclaves that [inaudible] services. the distribution ofamenities in turn creates topographic variationcompensating for imbalances and bringing back proximitynow as a frontal condition and generating unexpectedforms of promiscuity. the next model is calledthe open source model, and it's from a projectcalled [inaudible], which was developedas an open source

of primary architecturalterritorial models based on the codinginterference of recoding of concepts from[inaudible] understood both as a theoretical precedentand as a material repertoire be transformed undercross fertilization with contemporarydevelopmental culture. a series of concepts fromthe retroactive manifesto were used paradoxical statementsproliferated as finer grain formulations confrontedwith a spectrum

of extra large extracts tolarge building and territory typologies and turned into a[inaudible] relation of logics in the system. without letting gotheir humor or edge. these logics are claimedfor us updated mechanisms for contemporarydevelopment differentiating the polemical characterof the sources as precise yet openended organization of the instruments.

the models displace atoolbox of these instruments in the form generic definitions,procedures, variations, and applications. the next model is called thevalue proliferation model and synthesizesorganizational principles from manhattan skyscrapers intoa series of stacking modalities consisting of cause effectrelationships between levels one to one of a vertical systemproliferating until exhaustion. out of a series of buildingproliferations in height,

the model formulatesproofs of propagation of land value responding tothe surface area of plots and growing land in a selffueling community of logic of terraces and masses. rather than seeing the buildingas a poignant object that installs itself as an icononto fixed conditions, the model is based on theliteralist understanding of [inaudible] theory by whicharchitecture is no longer the art of designingbuildings as

much as the brutal skywardgrowth of whatever side the developermanages to assemble. under these amoralsetup, the model looks for the criticalthreshold where the developmentalcapacity of plots, when subjected to expansivepressure of capital, paradoxically rendersits own premise obsolete. the next one is calledthe universal node model and integrates housingbars and car infrastructure

in a single urban suburbanbuilding gradient. the subsequent versions ofle corbusier's skyscraper and corridor buildings barsfor algiers are reverse engineered into ascientific model that manages the repetition andvariation of units, the depth of floor plans, the numberand internal splitting wing, the height of an extensionof the free plan, and so on. connecting attributesto one another to cascade down theaffect resulting

of the insertion of[inaudible] boxes at the core of an interstatehighway interchange. here, a three-dimensionalroundabout. this model assumes that havingsprawl taken over nature at the scale of region. so urban culturemust be incorporated in the high density building andproposes that the highway node is the key to articulatenetworks freeing the territory and rendering all around spaceevaluation of the driving.

the differentiatedmatrix model awkwardly unifies the geneology of[inaudible], spatial matrix projects in a singledifferentiated model. it differentiates thegeneology in a system that manages the massingdensity and directionality of a spatial grid, theorientation and diffusion of its spatial units, andthe degree of independence between the two of [inaudible]in a synthetic lineage. the model overcomes theself-mystifying dichotomization

between the rich and the free,the orderly and the contingent, the total and the particular,the generic and the re-usable, by transitioningone into the other. the neutral ideaof mega structure is evolved by a sensitivestructural collective that indexes changeswithin its organization. rather its inevitableburned, its agent to freedom, it's unpredictable threator its monstrous opponent. complexity is turned hereinto the ultimate condition

of the ubiquitous,the very grain of the desire ofarchitecture towards being everywhere and over anything. finally, the worldsystem model is a model of lushoriental landscape and environmentalengineering based on bruno taut'salpine architecture's expressionistic utopianvision of the alps. here, regarded as an artificialconstruct and sophisticated

form of infrastructure. the model integrateswithin a continuous system a series of unique artworksand unique statements whose poignant imagery andwisely assorted allegorical forms project an expansive,dreamy ambivalence that build up the nurturingground for a high emotions whose content stillremains uncertain. the vibrant, apparentlyreusable panels are going down into minororganizational relationships

and attributes whichhave obstructed a set of interconnected values. obscured behind the autonomousiconic format of the book pages while participatingconsecutively in the escalating narrativeof the tale like manifesto, these rules aredescribed through a set of interdependent protocolsand formal evaluations and integrated backin a world book model for the configuration ofan athletically driven

organization of the territory. my point today would bethrough these singular models that the point oforganization is not merely about the capabilityof architecture to organize, but to hold thecapability of architecture to organize its ownform of organization. the second registerof the notion overcomes by definitionthe dichotomy between disciplinaryautonomy and heteronomy.

and thus so by assuming thatany organization implicitly involves theconstruction of a model that operates as its groundwhich architecture necessarily affirms and finally challenges. [side conversation] i've got 10 secondsbefore it comes up. it's really an enormouspleasure to be here. i'd like to thank inaki,mariana, shantel, and all the organizers for giving methe opportunity to participate.

i will be speaking about mytake on this design organization theme from thestandpoint of an inventor and also about the processesof invention themselves. so i took as my kindof starting hook the question that inthe brief of-- what is designed relying onsystematic processes and scientific methodsas one compared to one or contrasted with onethat focuses on issues of subjectivity and creativity?

and to me, that reallybrings up the way that i see inventionas a kind of midpoint on spectrums of creativitylocated kind of precisely in the middle between theobjective and the expressive, between art and science. and in terms ofunderstanding what invention is like from asubjective viewpoint, it's good to listento inventors. and henri poincare, the 19thcentury french mathematician,

was an enormously insightfulreader into his own thought processes and generalizingthem out to other inventors. and these are two quotes thati both love and are actually very salient to my ownprocesses-- "thought is only a flash between two long nights,but this flash is everything." so that's sort of the lightbulb moment, the aha moment, the mysteriousappearing of an idea that seems to comefrom nothingness. but then he goes onto say, "invention

consists in constructing theuseful combinations, which are in the infinite minority." so the flash doesn'treally come from nothing. it comes from constructingthe useful combinations, and he aptly points out,they're pretty hard to find. my own specialty is inthe mechanisms design, which is kinematics,synthesizing, linkages, and machines. and i love mechanisms.

i love their physicality,their tactile nature. but there's always somethingbeyond the physical when you hold themand handle them, which is of coursethe motion itself. but another way of lookingat it is that motion is about relationships. it's about relationships asembodied in the physical object itself. so in 1988, i hada kind of a flash.

it was an important one interms of a lot of the work that i did later, andi'm going to explain it to you in about 30 seconds. it's a scissor pair. two straight linksconnected by a midpoint give two straight parallellines to their end points, but people also were playingwith moving that connection point so that youhave a changing angle as it folds and unfolds.

and my insight with itby bending or angulation the links, those linesdidn't change their angle. it became an invarianteven as the mechanism moved which allowed meto create, in this case, connecting it with others ofits type-- an expanding ring. now, this through anumber of conceptual steps was developed intoa design methodology to make expanding threedimensional structures. and what happened wasi was able to take

that very specificgeometric artifact, which is the invariant angle,and extrapolate it into an invariantshape-- in other words, where you can more or lesstake as an input any surface or shape and translate itinto a mechanical linkage that expands and contracts, thatkeeps its overall profile, its topology, its form. those types of objects generatetheir own internal organization which comes out as a kindof a form of behavior.

any expanding shape--if it's consistent-- if you track any givenpoint on the shape, it's going to movein straight line trajectories out fromthe center, which is something that's beenvery much part of the ability to construct theseat large scale where those straight linetrajectories become lines for cables, tracksupports, things like that. another aspect of theorganization of invention

has to do withintellectual property. so what you're trying to dowith your claims in a patent is to find themost reduced object within your inventionthat still describes all the critical featuresthat are novel and original. so i defined this thingcalled a loop-assembly which is made up of scissor pairs. that's what we justsaw on the animation. which are in turn, made ofangulated strut elements--

hence the bend-- and thenyou can construct those into loop-assemblies. and as i worked through thiskind of language portrait of the invention, itthen calls out something called normal lines-- normal inthe sense of orthogonal-- which are the movementtrajectory which is the really key geometricfeature of the actual behavior of the mechanism. and finally, theultimate goal, which

is to define a methodsto make reversibly expandable three-dimensionaltrust structures. there are differenttransformable behaviors or configurations thatcould come out of this. so whereas myoriginal insight was to make expanding structureswhere all the movement lines are radiatingout from the center, i discovered acouple years later that there was anotherembodiment of this which

are retractable structures,which rather than collapsing to a point, retract out to anedge, and where the movement lines, rather than lyingorthogonal to the surface of the overall shape, liewithin the surface of the shape. and this you cankind of generalize to maybe a morebroader condition which is to look at transformableobjects that can be either contained or uncontained. how do they relate totheir boundary conditions?

and then zooming out-- kindwe're abstracting out-- a little bit more is, as i'vebeen developing the methodology for making and building thesethings on a systems level, what i'm thinking about ishow do these actually inhabit our surroundings? how do they inhabitthe built environment? they're always are goingto-- no matter what you make and all of itsbehaviors-- always is going to be within more ofother objects-- many of which

are fixed in the builtenvironment-- and then how they're aggregatedand an integrated so that they can move around. and then you add people,and that's very much part of my thinking as well. i'm always extremelyinterested in the kinesthetic and the proprioceptive inthe actual physical response of working with these objects. and this actually goes back towhen i started as a sculptor

student at cooper union. i built machines. this was a kind of a peoplemover that reoriented the body and in some sense was supposedto reorient your viewpoint as well. and we can look atother kind of options. this is much more interms of dynamics, and it's this absolutely--i love this movie. it's an absolutely legiblephysics equation-- weight

of the body, expansionof the sphere, momentum, all of these thingshappening at once. and this has in factsaliency for a very functional and practical uses. this is a 700 square foottent that i designed and is distributed worldwide thatgoes up in about three minutes by four operators without allthe intricacy and elegance of some of the otherstructures, but taking the lessons of how the bodyrelates to the mechanism.

so i'm going to speakbriefly about any inventor likes to speak about, which iswhat i've been doing lately. i'm always most excited by themost recent things i'm doing, and i'll talk abouta couple of them to sort round outthis view of invention as a kind of a generatorof organization. now one thing is-- i had akind of conceptual project that's kind of beenpercolating in my mind probably for a few decades,which is that i had come up

with this general system tomake expanding structures, but i thought it would bevery, very cool if you could rather than specifyingjust a size change, you could actuallyspecify different shapes-- how could we make somethingthat would morph from one shape to another? and then a coupleof years ago, i started to work on a kind ofa morphing algorithm which is based on an extremelysimple mechanism, which is just

a series of spinningtubes-- tubes that are arranged in acircular configuration and they all spinaround their own axes. but the actual morphingor shape change occurs because they'rebent into different forms, and then they make an overallshape that transforms. so you can actually use this tomake for example, a cube that turns into a sphere. the methodology conceptuallyis that the curves of the tube

all lie within theplanes of the cube, but when theyrotate, they present an orthogonal face,which then creates the curves of the sphere itself. can we do this to make moregeneral shapes less purely platonic and geometric? so i was invited toparticipate in a competition for a sculpture, butthis was for kids. it was for a pediatric hospital.

i thought it would be somethingthat would be a nice idea to turn a moon into a star. and that wasbasically my program, and i went a little bitdeeper into the geometry. and what became clear tome is that to generate the spines of the tubes,what you were really doing was taking the intersectionbetween the surface of two shapes which we generatea three-dimensional spine. and that three-dimensionalspine basically

has to be manipulated sothat at certain points it lies on thesurface of the moon and at certain points lieson the surface of the star. and this animation isby way of explanation. so what you're seeinghere is a single bent three-dimensional splined tubespinning around a single axis. the next thing that ido is i combine in with, in this case 35 othertubes, which are 36 total. and you'll see as all the tubesspin around their own axis,

the form of the moonwill coalesce and appear. then there's one more step wherethis entire assembly is then spun as an object. so there are two axes at motion. so we're spinning themoon and spinning the rods at the same time sothat it basically presents kind of the puremorph from moon to star. and then back again. as a general solution to theproblem of morphing shapes,

it's got certain aspectsof generality to it, but i think there are probablybetter ways to do it as well. i'll talk about onemore recent invention, which is a little different. rather than starting from thissort of more conceptual program and how do i actually come upwith a solution to a problem i invented myself,this one was one where i made adiscovery which is of this sort of cubicfolding structure--

kind of a cuboid--that is flattenable, foldable, takes ondifferent configurations. and i said, ok. this is interesting. what do i do with this? the first thingthat i noticed was that you could generalizethis idea to say, rather than a cube,you could basically choose any polyhedral designand create prisms or extrusions

from the faces,hinge them together, and it would fold and unfold. and once you could makea single polyhedra fold, you can start to think abouthow you might aggregate them into space filling arrays. so this is showing kind of acrystal lattice of the units you saw beforefolding and unfolding into its differentconfigurations. and you can see here howthe different symmetries

can be seen. and here's one more. so these are actually quitestraightforward to build once you get the techniqueand very structural and very responsive. i've been working with someresearchers at the wyss institute-- katia bertoldi,james weaver, and johannes overvelde-- to develop theseideas in different areas. one thing that we'revery interested in

is transformable meta materials. so this is kind of showingas part of the paper that's been submitted howyou would basically aggregate these units. and basically almost insort of a carving process create a shape that thenwould transform along its different modes. and then additionally this isa kind of little walking robot that we made as well.

thanks very much. this is like my nightmarescenario-- going after chuck-- but anyway, we'll make do. so this evening i wantedto share two projects. in the school ofathens situation, i think i'm going to be a littlebit on the aristotelian side tonight. two projects at scalarantipodes but intimately related by method--they consider the edge

as a limit condition ofform, an atomic encoder of both intrinsic andextrinsic relationships. edge case is also a term ofart in algorithmic engineering. it's the limital conditionof a general algorithm case whose solutionmay be particularly ambiguous or problematicbut often holds the key to truly scalableand generalizable solution. so i press italmost axiomatically from the small scale to large.

and i begin with two experimentsin architectural surface which take as their departurea defined if arbitrary boundary or a chain of boundaries. the surface structuresthat i'm describing are polyvalent in thesense that though they span specific curves,they also have fundamental andindividual tectonic logics which reciprocallydefine and determine final form. so although we have ageometric condition,

we also have some specificarchitectural conditions which are ascribed tothese situations as well. so the first system is a novelmethod for patterning surfaces with plainer quadrilaterals. so it originates with a pointsampling of an edge curve. so given thisinitial edge curve, you can begin to takesuccessive averages of these sequentialpartial sums of points. and these perimeterpoints actually

form the corners of concentricrings of planar quads. so you can kind ofsee these sequences of concentric averagessort of converging in the top set of diagrams. thus any arbitraryboundary be concentrically patterned withthese planar quads in a simple and deductive way. but for such a direct method,it has a curious qualitative implication.

so in effect, the eccentricityof the boundary of the curve induces a rippleor a standing wave on the interiorquad network, which you can see clearlyin these models as they convergetowards the center. so this project,which is a negotiation of interstitialspaces, essentially a series of stitchedspaces which converge throughvarious boundary curves,

applies this methodto the wrapping of several adjacent volumes byinterlocking chains of curves. the undulationproject are in fact a deterministic and amplifiedshadow of the boundary itself, each cascading oscillationrecorded in the initial edge and propagated through thisplanar concentric method. the second surfacemethod also proceeds from an initial boundaryto a tectonic surface. but instead of being apurely active surface that

is assuming all of thestructural requirements in the surface itself,it's a frame system of nodes and members withina stressed skin cladding. so the system isentirely flat packable and relies on customsoftware tools to ensure thestructural modules are as uniform as possiblewhile allowing maximum geometric freedom. so the structural systemitself, as you can kind of

see on the right, isan alternating packing of both hexagons andtriangles calculated to be as homogeneous as possible. the hexagons provideformal flexibility while the triangleprovide rigidity. and so in order to calibratethe stiffness of the frame, the area or proportion oftriangles relative to hexagons can be enlarged or reduced. so these slats whichencompass the outer sort

of stress skin ofthe surface are calculated as polardevelopables of geodesics in order to maximize or inorder to minimize material bending strain. so the surface effect ofsuch an assembly of slats is a fuzzy, sort of frayed edge. the slat's structure respondsto the natural anticlastic curvature of the undulatingunderlying frame. in this project, the shellswrap back on themselves

essentially tocreate tubular beam sections enhancethe active surface quality of the structure. so we constructed a verysmall part of the structure, one mobius halfflip essentially, is supporting and freestanding. and each piece was cutwithout miters or oblique intersections. and so every nodeintersects every bar

at exactly 90 degrees. so this ensures that thecladding is not supported only at points, but instead alongthe entire length of a bar or full face of a node. and the subdivisionitself is designed to support developablecladding and is to be as even as possible. this is actually in thebackyard of 42 kirkland. for any of you whoare curious, it'll

be up for anothercouple of days. the bolted connections createa fairly rigid moment frame, but it's actually a very lightstructure and very easily portable. so while the pattern itselfappears uniform, in fact, it's necessary toreverse engineer an optimal sequenceof construction from an implied hierarchyof network dependencies. so this animation shows a littlebit of that process-- part

network analysis, partphysical simulation, which can take anarbitrary assemblage and automatically reverseengineer the assembly process. so essentially what this doesis use some specific network methods to deconstructan arbitrary form and give its optimalreassembly sequence. so both of these systemsrequire fairly extensive statisticaloptimization in order to make their high part countvariation feasible in practice.

and so what we began to dois to use machine vision methods to map thereplaceability of one part with another. so how interchangeable, say,is one shape with another? that is, withincertain tolerances, how similar is one part toa family of other parts? here you can seeall the bar members in this particular installationwith links to their closest associated replacements.

and just as we canunroll a surface, we can unroll the network,unpack this network, to reveal clusteredfamilies of forms and the proportionaldominance of these forms in the compositionof the assembly. so we've organized theserelative to a single piece. so in effect that you havea geneological diagram where the root element isat left, and then you have a sequence of ascendingdissimilarity from that root.

there's also some additionalclassification by color. so you can begin to groupand classify certain kinds of very similar families. a couple partingshots of the mock up. so we begin to wonderactually if this technique of classification,if you will, could flip the script on theproblem of building type. instead of working from casesin our understanding of type, was it possible to workfrom this vast trove

of empirical data? and we begin byconsidering 1,000 buildings in central london on thesouth bank of the thames. so the boundaries of eachof these buildings-- just as we sort of applied thismethod to our installation assembly-- can beassociated with buildings which are their closestfit or their most sort of replaceabledoppelganger, creating a similarity networkexactly analogous to the one we

showed before. so using a 40-dimensionalsimilarity metric, we constructed a sort offuzzy affinity network which allowed us to classifyall of the shapes in this area and group them taxonomically. and so just as we unrolled thissort of relationship network or sort of affinity networkwith the installation, we can do the same thingactually with cities. so we can restructurethis also in a form that

shows relative similarity,clustered affinity, and overall categoricaldistribution of form. we're calling colin rowe's workin creating metric association to classify typology inessays like the mathematics of the ideal villa. we affectionately calledthis tool the robot. so of course we can scale thisup, say to 10,000 buildings, a much larger section of london. and at this scale, one begins torecognize the gradient effects

that are a consequenceof dense shapes grouping with dense and sparseshapes grouping with sparse. that is, there's a qualitythat we might intrinsically identify with parametricvariation, which is in fact a natural consequenceof the intrinsic demands of combinatorial variationof architecture itself. so the larger thesample population, the closer we come toactually a continuous gradient that exhaustively mapsthe possible architectural

permutations of form. so it's not entirely obvious. this literally eachone of the building outlines scaled andclassified in their closest associated groups. so here, you see a detail ofthe distribution of buildings and their relationship to thegestalt order of this form map. so of course, differentpopulations of buildings may display markedlydifferent metaforms

leading the way to a kindof [inaudible] approach to architectural form. so extrapolations of thistechnique are fairly clear, and i'll close by showinga series of snapshots of a variety ofmetaforms from 40 different sections of london. so here the root nodeis at the bottom, and the tree isoriented vertically. but it's essentiallyexactly the same approach.

these metaforms ofcourse themselves have shape and arethemselves amenable to the same kind of analysis. thus we can begin to talk aboutan engine to generate insight into the buildingforms of cities and into the structureof precedent itself. so finally, if thissimilarity network is constructed on all billionbuildings on the planet, then the robot actuallybecomes a search engine

for architectural form. it allows a designer tocomprehensive and exhaustively answer questions like,what are the precedents? how original is aparticular scheme? where has it been done before? how similar isthis plan to others in the city or the world? and ultimately, what isthe form of form itself? thanks.

i assure you this is a simpleand platonic presentation. don't get your hopes up. thank you so much forthe invitation, inaki. so thank you verymuch mariana, inaki, colin, for theorganization and also the challenge to present aspart of an incredible group of people. thanks andrew, forplaying defense chuck. you played the card.

i'll play the platonic one. what i'd like to dois essentially just speak very briefly about thepotential for understanding how in many respectsthere's a kind of [french] inarchitecture to try to understand how onecan move beyond order through an organizational turn. in fact, what i thinkit does is actually make both architecture and theproliferation of multiple forms

of architectures as we're seeingtoday at different skills very possible. what i'm particularlyinterested in presenting-- and it's kind of in two parts. first sort of adlib part of being able to present somebackground to an idea of being able to understandthat in many respects, one needs to understand that theorganizational turn must happen through the notion of ecology.

and i would argue that asopposed to presenting vanguard perspective, i'm going topresent a perspective that's now two decades old butthat we've potentially kind of skipped over as a resultof a number of wrong turns that we've made, whichthankfully we're correcting this evening as part of thework here, also at the school, and our presenters. what i'd also like to dois at the second level, to be able to try to understandhow one takes this turn

and tries to adapttowards harnessing ecology as a form of organization, isthe particular aspect of time. i'm particularly interestedin also understanding how time itself is territorialas much as it is temporal, and that in manyrespects, it provides a kind of middle groundbetween territory and speed. i'm going to present notonly a synthetic but also a photosynthetic perspectivegiven my background as a landscape architect.

inaki, where's the big arrow? i got it. they flipped the script on me. that's a kind of small arrow. so what i'd like to do isactually present two things. first of all, i'm going to tryto put a few ideas together in order to try to understandhow in fact one engages not only ecology as aformer of organization, but then how we canrender the work of ecology

as actually thework of urbanization to be able to addresscontemporary challenges of our time. i think we really can'tadopt this perspective without passing itthrough two people. first, paul virilio-- thisis a text translated in 1986 from 1977 during theheight of the oil crisis and a turbulentperiod in europe. "the loss of material spaceleads to the government

of nothing but time." so this is a classicunderstanding that capitalism is not aboutthe control of capital, but rather aboutthe control of time. and i'll try to make that case. "the violence ofspeed has become both the location and thelaw, the world's destiny and its destination." so therefore, thecontrol of capital

actually is a preconditionby the control of time by vast bureaucracies whichwe still live in today, and we'll try to make thecase of-- how do we undesign our way out of this. i think it's also important thatif paul virilio was potentially one of the most importanturban thinkers of our time-- is one of the most importanturban thinkers of our time-- i think there'sanother urbanist, but you might not recognizewho she is because she's

more like an ocean urbanist. her name is lynne cox. and approximatelyat the same time that the text was translatedby paul virilio in 1986, within the same year,lynne cox was essentially undertaking the two anda half mile open water swim across the bering straitat the period of probably the coldest periodof the cold war thanks to a loosening,a temporary slackening,

of the border regulationsbetween the us and the ussr-- thanks to the reformistpresident mikhail gorbachev. the water was 40degrees fahrenheit. so it was near freezing,and it took her just under two and a half hours. it's a tremendous feat. what i think isparticularly interesting-- and why i'd like topropose her as an urbanist and why we shouldn't beable to sort of revisit

the work of paul virilioand his proclamation about paying attentionto not only speed but time and territory-- isthat in many respects, the one thing that actuallycontrols all of us and arguably in systemof multiple systems-- as mariana very eloquentlyput at the very beginning of the conference-- isthat in many respects, we live in time zoneswithin time zones. and in fact ifanything, i would like

to argue that the work ofdesign moving into the future is actually the formulistwork of actually undoing the bureaucraticstructures of time that actually conditions us. i'm specifically going totry to make the case that we do that not through enclosingsystems, but rather opening systems, and specificallythrough living systems. i'm going to reference backand forth kind of like a period of time between themid 1980s as you

saw with paul virilioand lynne cox-- around the time of the fallof berlin wall 1989, 1986, 1987-- the meltdown of thechernobyl nuclear plant. and then also, mid 1990s, thefall of the south african, or apartheid, regime. in many respects, icharacterize that as a kind of era of postmodernmeltdown where literally i think most of you inthis room are actually probably born in the late1980s or early 1990s.

you're born in a world in whichall structures essentially can be taken down. and for that reason, i loveworking with this crowd. but what i think isparticularly special is that we're essentiallychanging orders of magnitude. and not only are we workingat different scales, but i would arguethat we're working on a number ofdifferent time scales. so i'm going to try to referencetwo ways of seeing time, which

is i'm privileging sectionalperspective-- one that is longitudinal. some of you may call ita diachronic perspective where you see change overlong periods of time. some historians refer to itlike jo guldi in her history manifesto as [french],a way of seeing time over long periods oftime, sometimes centuries, even longer. the second one is tobe able to see time

in a synchronic way, in whichmultiple forms of change happen simultaneously. it's a world in which we live innow, in which we can understand that in fact timeis not a container or something to partition,something to quantify. but rather where there'ssimultaneous events occurring at the same time. and i think forthat reason, it's useful to understand theenvironment in which we

live in. i bring this up because boththe longitudinal perspective as well as thealtitudinal perspective allows us to locate ourselvesin the world in section. this is where i would arguethat the next generation will no longer be concernedwith plans or planning, but rather will beinvolved in drawing sections where the plans canbe whatever they want to be. i think key towardsunderstanding

this kind of period oftime between the mid 1980s and mid 1990s isessentially also the work of essentiallytaking a wrong turn and misunderstanding thedeconstructivist era. and i'm sorry if i'm soundinglike i'm dating myself and i'm soundinglike an old man here. in terms of returning tothe work of mark wigley, in terms of his work on derrida. but in many respects,i think we essentially

attributed deconstruction toa form as opposed to a time. and i'm literally plagiarizingsanford kwinter at the moment, given the fact that hementioned this very fact in his architectures of time. but i think what'sparticularly interesting is this idea that everythingwhich is living today lives through deconstruction. we are not constantly advancingthrough formation, but rather what if we flipped itaround towards understanding

that we're constantlydeforming and constantly deconstructing structuresthat are already built the moment that we're born? and so for that reason, ihave to both watch my time and understand that weare working out of time. and i'm going to contrastthat in many respects, given the era in which we livein limits, limits of time, limits of resources,limits of capacities, and i'm going to try to flipthis and turn it inside out

to try to understand how in factdesign or undesigning is really something that we make,construct, undo out of time. so don't read this asbeing out of time as opposed to the very opposite wework with and design with time. of course, beforeadvancing, i think there's somethingkey to understanding the notion of livingin systems of systems. i want you to kindof postpone this idea that we live in anurban world as opposed

to an industrial world,a world of industrialized systems within systems. and one of the preeminentthinkers about this is john kenneth galbraith inhis book, 1967, the industrial state. he spoke about therise of the corporation as being one of the mostimportant entities moving into the late 20th centuryand early 21st century, which is true today.

you have corporations thatare larger than nations. yet we spend very littletime studying them. and he also spoke about the riseof the professional engineer. he also spoke about the spatialenvironmental territorial effects of economies of scale. so he was tryingto chronicle what those special effects work. what's particularly importantas part of this sort of assembly of a different dimensionsfrom the invention of credit

to the building ofresource inventories, is this notion ofscientific management. in fact, it'sscientific management that actually constructedthe notion of industrial time in which we stilllive in today-- or you could also callit bureaucratic time. i would like to argue that notonly studying or understanding ecologies of time isunderstanding and recalling the ground and the systemsin which we live in,

the living systems inwhich we're made of. but also at thesame time, i think to study time isalso to study power. one other person who's spokenabout this, gareth morgan, in a book called imagesof organization-- essentially spoke about eightdifferent metaphors associated with how we organize space. you may recognize the sort ofcentral hierarchical methods of organization ofcertain corporations,

but he essentially attributedeight different formats of organization bywhich we can essentially understand systems of systemsin which we live in today. what i would like topropose and add to this is this kind of ninth one,which is this idea of not just organization astime, but potentially understanding that timeis in fact organization. and i may flip back and forthtowards understanding speaking about organization and program.

to study organization isto also study equipment. and to study equipment,is to study power. this is one of the only booksthat has spoken about that. and one of thepeople that i have to reference as partof this conversation is that not only dowe study equipment which is a trope forinfrastructure to be able to understand power andstates of power, but ultimately we begin to understand thattime is not just simply linear.

it is a flow. it is fluid, andi'm going to try to present this ideathat we should see time as a field that has a numberof different dimensions. what's particularlyimportant as part of the work of rosalindwilliams in her characterization of equipment and infrastructureas being vectors, they are expressionsof power that are moving that both include andconnect as much as they divide.

that's particularlyimportant in any form of study of equipment andinfrastructural organization. now, last thing i just wantto mention just before i get into this sortof mini manifesto and start reelingsome slides here-- there's this workof-- not an urbanist, but actually whatthe new york times called an urbanologist, an urbansociologist-- william white. and this is where i'm kind ofdating myself even more here,

but i don't think we couldhave this conversation without speaking aboutone of the wrong turns that we took was essentiallyrendering the city a problem number one, renderingthe city second, a sociological problem. and i would argue thatactually any conversations about urbanizationas being a problem are in fact an institutionaland social crisis. they're in fact not aspatial problem at all.

i think we'reshamelessly always boring from a sociologicaldiscourse, which in fact we need to literally put to an endby taking the organizational and what i'm proposinga temporal turn. william white is importantbecause of his work that you may alsorecognize as being the social lifeof a small spaces and-- i don't know ifthis is working or not. maybe you may recognize thework that he did as part

of his stop motion study. but what was interesting isthat rather than spending time on looking at livingsystems, he was actually looking at themovement of people and also theconstruction of benches. this is the study that he didas part of the seagram building. i thought it'd be moreinteresting to take a look at and revisit william whitethrough understanding light and the sunlightthat actually programs.

he also wrote this books,the exploding metropolis. and what'sparticularly important is that he essentiallytook these observations that he had about thesociological problematization of urban spaces and essentiallyalso attributed them to metropolitan conditionstowards essentially promoting notions of urban sprawl. now, he's importantbecause there would be no life anddeath of great american

cities without william white,who essentially invited jane jacobs in the late1950s to contribute an essay, downtown is forpeople, by jane jacobs that then led to the life anddeath of great american cities. i think it'sparticularly important because if we begin tounderstand organization itself beyond closedsystems and open systems, we have to look for newmodels-- new models which allow us to kind of connectthe dots between architecture,

organization, and ecology. and i'm like halfway, like15 minutes down already. incredible. all right. well, maybe i'll justmake it to halfway, and we'll keep it at that. so one other pieceof evidence that i'd like to bring in as partof this conversation is essentially a course thatwas taught by james corner.

and he started thisin the mid 1990s and essentially inviteda host of people moving into the late 1990s,which essentially started to form ideas around how thestudy of urbanization and city centers need to be debunked. and one had to approachthe work of ecology as being the work of spatialterritorial organization. and so this coursethat-- this is a syllabus that waskindly scanned and sent

to me by thaddeus pawlowski,a former loeb fellow. in conversation, itbecame quite important towards understandingthat in fact we had roots in termsof understanding the relationship betweenecology and organization. but what's particularlyinteresting, as you can see from the numberof guests that were invited from dilip da cunha, to lynnmargulis, jeff kipnis, sanford kwinter, manuel delanda,stuart kauffman, stan alen--

that in many respects,one was trying to address the kind ofnon-linear dynamic conditions of urbanization andtrying to develop new forms associated with them. and so there's a seriesof different projects that he was engaging in termsof trying to both represent and tackle the issuesof how different competing constituenciescould be addressed through differentalternative forms of mapping.

one of the important things thatjames corner's work offers us is the adoption,raising the question of whether or not we could considerecologists as urbanists. and one of the importantproposals that we could make is whether or not we couldget out of the formal, not necessarily physical,but the formal nature of systems of organizationthat we know-- whether or not they're centralized,decentralized, or networked-- and all of a suddengo live with them

where one could begin tosee less points and lines, and we could seevectors and flows. and so what we'rejuxtaposing beside a kind of canonical, classic diagramof forms of organization from centralizedto distributed-- we're proposing puttinghoward odom and his diagram of open systems ecology besideit as a kind of proposal, whether or not onecould see and understand that special conditions are opensystems and that in fact when

we see them through vectors,through flows, that divide as well as connect and enclosesimultaneously over time, we can begin to also proposehow one could essentially adopt the representationas different strategies and patterns of design. now, before moving forward,i think the aspect of scale is actually absolutely essentialas part of this conversation. and so howard odum's workwas highly influenced then. the diagram that i just showedyou was some of the later work

that he did as partof the early 1980s. the work of jamesmiller's important, dating from the early1970s because it proposes a way in which we cansee telescopically through ecology at a seriesof different scales-- and i'm just rendering a kind ofrepresentation of the paragraph at the bottom-- towardsunderstanding that maybe our work in many respects,what if it included the level of the cellular,the organic, the group,

the organization, society,and the state level as well? would it be possible thatwe could achieve that? well, what's interesting aspart of the work of howard odum is that essentially he did itthrough the study of power. yes, to a certain extenthe was essentially mapping energythrough the diagrams and trying to understandenvironments through energy. but also at thesame time, he was including not justthermodynamic energy, but also

political energy power. and key to this isthe relationship at the very bottom along thearrow of notions of territory, time, and transformation. so in many respects, howcould we accomplish this? and this is wherei'd like to propose-- this is where i startdating myself even more-- the kind of proposalof landscape itself as being a media and mediumin which one could accelerate

and decelerate time itself--literally working with trees, daylight, and dirt. a very, very simple thing. and so what i'll do is--and fact that i'm halfway, i'm just going to wrap thisup in one minute then-- is i'd just like to show you howtime itself can be programmatic and temporalities infact have patterns, that all we have to do isstart to notice them and begin to see things differently.

these are imagesthat i took when i graduated from thegraduate school of design about 15 years ago now. i made it a point to photographall the work by george hargreaves to seewhat became or what came of the prototypes andessentially the canonical work. what i found is was actuallyprojects that were destroyed but interesting in thefact that-- in this case, this is byxbee parkin san francisco--

is actually the tidethat actually eroded it. so all of sudden, tidalcycles were in fact the work and agents of undesign. in fact, once you visit a lotof the canonical work that was done in theearly 1990s, in fact it was being dismantled,deconstructed, through these differentagents of time. yes, some environmentalprocesses but all some of them also anthroprocentric--for example, just

pure, sheer neglect. now, it's aninteresting proposal, and i know it's alittle bit tenuous also. and i'm hoping that thedean is not in the room right now in termsof the proposition of a graduateschool of undesign. but in many respects, perhapswhat we can begin to see is understanding and takinglongitudinal prospective on sites topotentially understand

how the work could beradically simple when viewed over a long period of time. and what i'm showingyou is essentially one of the largestwilderness parks in north america, the leslie streetspit, or lake ontario park, that was essentially taken upas part of the work of james corner field operations. and the simpleproject was simply accessing differentareas of the site itself,

which the site today issimply a large dump site. it operates as a parkfor five million people during weekends and evenings. and also at the sametime during the day, it essentially operatesas this active dump site. it's kind of anincredible thing. all they do is leave the gateopen for five million people to rollerblade across thisfive kilometer long spit. so ultimately, what i'dlike to sort of leave you

with is just a series ofimages that essentially speak to potentially howone could harness programmatically spatially andterritorially notions of time through a series of strategiesthat could loosely be organized around notions of neglect,abandonment, reservation, migration, and weakening. and one couldbegin to understand how one would have togo live with systems that we're working with today,how our work would essentially

be about the openingof territories, and all we haveto do is recognize the temporal structures and thebureaucratic structures that are essentially preventingthe opening of those systems themselves-- not unlike the workof lynne cox who essentially penetrated through a borderbetween the us and ussr. useful to also remember thatthe border between the two countries during the coldwar were also separated by a 21 hour time zone.

so to potentiallylocate the work of the design of thesetemporary territories as the design of newtime zones-- ultimately, perhaps what we could proposeis and reshape and retweak our thinking thatnot only do we design with time-- it would beunfortunate to just layout projects over a period of time--but rather that we understand that we design time itself. thank you very much.

is that the green arrow? yes. well, it is a greatpleasure as well to be back in thisgodforsaken room that you know is the mostfeared and loved room on the academic circuit. though i do commend you forthe attempt to reconfigure it with this table. it feels pretty good.

and i still rememberthe day when it was filled with pastriesand tea very fondly. so i responded directly to theprompts that were sent to us, and i'll say it in advancein case there's any doubt. my job tonight isto defend or come to the defense of organization. there you go. so you're probablythinking why did kwinter spell "organization" that way.

it's because he's canadian. no, that's not the reason. the reason of course--well, not really of course-- the reason is tomake it feel fresh and foreign and also because the term thati'm going to try to revive is actually ofenglish and really german and austrian origin. whenever in doubt aboutthe soul of an idea, i tell my students--and i practice this

myself-- is go back tothe origin and redepart. organization has aprovenance, an origin, as well as a prehistoryboth of which matter or indeed shouldbe made to matter or could be made to matteras a means of inventing a graceful exit fromthe digital anomy that we consider tobe our discipline's current state of the art. each touch point in thishistory it bears noting,

represents a firm episodein the development of a materialist modernity. the prehistory can besaid to date to 1770, the year more or less whendenis diderot elaborates in his conversationwith d'alembert the idea that the faculty ofgeneralizable purposiveness found in natural thingsderives nowhere else than from uncertain"organizacion" inherent to sensitive matter.

in sum, it is the capacityto receive a signal but also to send and storeone-- in other words, memory. at almost the exactsame time in germany, johann goethe proposesa theory of plant growth and differentiation mechanics. another example ofgoethe's astoundingly powerful algorithmic intuition--as a product of three morphological impetuses,a flexible form, a cycle, and a gradient managed withinan environmental framework

of factors to produceendless variations from the possiblemixtures, yet always subject to both internal andexternal control and forever-- and this is important--linked to them. form in both cases isendowed with a new feature. it becomes at oncethe memory of events and a progenitor of new ones. these have been referredto as genetic ideas. the direct history--that was the prehistory--

refers to somethingmore proximate. this is organizationwith my little s-- in its contemporarysense, it was worked out in the late 19th andearly 20th centuries, particularly in the1920s, as a means to resolve the centurieslong mechanist vitalist debate, short ofwhich resolution the study of livingform could not emerge as a legitimateconcern of science.

the form problemas it was called, was not a concern, or ratherwas not a concern, of biology, but it's central one. and it consisted principallyof the question-- where does form come from? the answer one knew, wasa mysterious composite of internal andexternal factors, but the epistemologicalneed was to identify the mechanism through whichthe convergent and magically

expressive process tookplace without recourse to metaphysical invocationsand all while acknowledging the fatal deficits of thechemical physical explanation that the contemporary dogmaof the time and its narrowness seemed to dictate. more than any other, thenew notion of organism dictated an entirelynew spirit of inquiry. it implicated all thefollowing principles-- wholeness, integration,emergence, stability,

self-directedness, development,control and regulation, pattern, symmetry, andsymmetry-breaking, interaction, system, hierarchy, information,and so on-- or and on and on. it does go on. it's astounding even thoughit is an exclusive domain if you like ofthe actual world-- all to be included underthe cover term which is also its cognate, thatof organization. it's not widely seen todayto be that the organism

and organization are actuallyin a way from the same kin. in the 1960s, aseveryone knows, arose the marvelous and powerfulconceptual program known as general systemstheory, a literal composite of organismalbiology of the 1930s and the 1950s cyberneticsciences that's studied regulatory controland increasingly confident generalization of organizationprinciples in fluid domains. and increasingly, ofcourse what cybernetics did

is that it saw everythingas a fluid domain. quickly followed by therefocusing of the life and information scienceswithin non-linear modalities such as chaos theory, dynamicalsystems theory, catastrophe theory, and so on. correlation wasincreasingly seen as possessing certainspontaneous capacities and products. that's my best tryat spontaneous.

i struggled last nightwith my powerpoint program to come up with somethingmore fun than that. but the idea of a spontaneousuniverse of course is largely lost in contemporarydesign ethos, if you like. and yet, it's thefoundation of all that is. the organism idea, no longerexplicitly invoking the wholism principle always atits root, continues to assert it nonethelessthrough formulations of unbroken continuumsof action and influence.

what we know today inboth science and design is generative field theories. mathematician renethom liked to refer to all design in naturalmilieus most pointedly to that of even inanimatethings as embryologies and supplied both geometricand algebraic descriptions to support many examples. i'm running through this. some of you of acertain age are going

to be totally boardwith this deja vu. others will be totally shockedat its pedantic nature. and that's whati decided-- today the pedant--because the point is that the foundation of so muchthat is taking place today has its roots, if you like, inthis organization theory which emerged in biology. and the shift from physicsto biology-- as it took place in the 19th centuryand into the 20tg--

as the dominantform of explanation is a significant one,and it is not one that we can escapein architecture. rarely mentioned and rarelyunderstood in design milieus today is the profound basisserved by the field concept from electromagnetism--clerk maxwell to mach to einstein-- in the elaborationof thermodynamic principles and their always exciting andoften paradoxical outcomes. the shifting ever refiningconcept of organization

also lies at the origin of oneof the greatest modern design positions we have-- dearto materialists, composers of music, and [inaudible]alike, the presumption of a logical and formalcontinuity from the chemical level through thestructural, functional, and macroformallevels of design. this insight--today often thought to be woefully lost--nonetheless was prominently posited beginning in the 1970swith the foucault and then

throughout the 1990swithin design milieus as the theory of the diagramwhose effects are said to propagate acrossdisparate scales and milieus and in differentmaterials and forms-- very similar to the goetheaninsight from plants. in other scientific fields,some of these behaviors have found expressionthrough the term and concept of modularity. yet if thesehistorical developments

can be said to have a naturaldestination in the present, it is in the richpostures and concepts used to grasp the interconnectedbut indeterminate causalities that animate ecologicalthought and it's great cousin, evolutionary theory. now, i lost the slide thatshould've had-- i mean, for me, it's a great failing not to haveevolutionary theory plastered really large therein front of you. you can imagine it.

in some ways, organizationis but another way of understanding the conceptof imminent and distributed control, or even more simply,of what happens-- in a way to invoke pierre's idea-- whathappens when time supervenes in matter. none of this addressesthe disquiet, widely felt todayafter two generations of digitalpreoccupation in design and the philosophicalabdications

that they appearto have required-- i know people willwant to take issue with that-- and in the face ofthe social and economic data deluge, manifestly onits way toward us today. none of the terms so far invokedhave elicited serious objection from designers,and note that i've so far avoided the kitschierterm of self-organization. in the life sciences,form and information-- particularly afterthe second world war--

found a mutuality that hadenormous explanatory power, not to mention, aconversion algorithm of incredible elegance-- onebeing converted into the other. yet as ibanez's symposiumprompt points out, this convertibilitypaves the way for considerable misdirectionsince theorists of organization and designers can withthe same terms easily be talking about verydifferent things. and that bifurcation is reallywhat got us into trouble.

and there is anundoubted romantic appeal to a modern hylozoism--if in fact, this is what that is-- thatsuggestively invokes reenchanted architecturalobjects possessing the charismatic appeal ofactive and richly behaving living things. the poverty for example, of thespeculative realist bloggers consists in their inabilityto think their way through to this desire.

but the deflationary effectof the digital product has more to do with theone-dimensional culture of optimization and the fetishquality of automatic process that is tantamount to aroutinization of invention, the distancing of large-scalespeculative concepts that within both the scienceand the design of yesteryear, handily directed imaginationtoward plastic, substantial, and concrete ideas. that is clearly a criticismthat does not apply to the work

that we've seen today. that's not a cowardlything to say. what i mean is clearlywe saw some things that had an extraordinary ability,if you like, to engage, if you like, the mechanical,the concrete, et cetera. what is occurring around us--to use the formulation of alfred north whitehead with respectsto the rise of scientific method in the 17th century, isthat an implicit doctrine, an implicit doctrine of simplelocation, which is really

measurement based onabstract coordinates, here design as a theaterof numerical management and descriptionhas progressively come to replace thephilosophical predilection for real concretenesswhich is nothing other than the sum ofevents and processes, the actual palpable incidences,that constitute experience. in a sum, nothingis simply located. notably, whitehead'scorrective was

to posit the world as a rhythmof organisms constituted-- i must have missed a slidetoo-- constituted by relations and expressed through occasions. he called themprehensive occasions to underscore howthey grasped in a way and engage one another. architecture is acomposite more so today than ever of active entities,what used to be called space. whitehead in the wake oforganismal philosophy--

what the hell am i saying here? what used to be calledspace, whitehead-- in the wake of organismalphilosophy-- called processes. whitehead's famousdictum, some of you know, is that biology is thestudy of larger organisms. and physics, he declared, wasthe study of smaller organisms. today i would argue the hopeand obligation of design consists in the refusal todivide the world into concerns of mind on the one hand andthose of matter on the other.

but for this, a studiouslycultivated mental posture is required, not thedigital one to be sure, but not either onethat excludes it, rather a posturethat acknowledges the temporal and spatialextensions of everything or place that makes up eachentity's mode of presentation to us as well as its actionon other places and things. it's kind of acomplicated but pure way of arguing about the logicaland philosophical foundations,

the ontologicalinterconnectedness of things, whichis what makes up the organismal, or theorganicist, if you like, or the organizationalview of the world. the idea that substance ismore truly composed of events with a logic of unfolding andinterpenetration proper to them is the endowment of early 20thcentury organismal thought. and it is grasped fully andadequately by the principle of organize which may bedefined as the setting

into relation of processes. though perhaps whati should've said there was thecoordination of processes. this is what design would be. the contemporary spaceof informatics-- today's universe-- has bewilderedarchitects particularly among designers because itseems to negate or supersede the primacy ofbuildings and rooms as the basis of structuredspatial experience.

this is not thecase, for example, with graphic orindustrial designers who are used to working inthe space of the interface. but i would suggest thatthis is where we are moving and where we ought to move butwith more self-consciousness than we currently have. datascapes andartificial media no doubt transform ambientmateriality and the social and sensoryrelations that make it up.

was architecture ever reallymore about the reified object building than the way in whichthe organization of material reality transformedor gave shape to perception and toits relationships, to feelings, ideas, andthe sense of a world? this is why, in a way--from the point of view of a writer or atheorist-- the challenge with any building or anyoeuvre of an architect is to understand what thatuniverse that is being posited

is, what its implicationsare, et cetera. more than ever, what is changingin contemporary experience today are the modalities ofaccess to our ambient surround and the syntactic andcombinatorial principles that regulate and determine them. that is the shift thatis taking place today. or that is a way of describingit that in my opinion, opens up a much greater accessof architects to engage it. what are the modalitiesthrough which

we both sense andtransform our environment and participate in it? these are the internalquestions of architecture, but the terms of response wemust acknowledge have changed. more than ever and asa deliberate effort of disciplinaryupdating, we must think more broadlythan the building unit itself and consider the moregeneral environmental surround as it presentsitself to experience

as the legitimatescope of operation for architectural thought. two importantimplications of this idea here include a,finding an analog for what jj gibson called theambient optical array that replaced the receivednotion of vision as the operation through whichinformation about the world was understood to bepicked up by the perceiver. for architects, this mustbe rather not just vision,

but a multi-dimensionalarray that would include acoustic, haptic,psychic, and atmospheric pick up and would include theanalysis of affordances of all types, particularly thosestructured within signaling environments likewe sit opposite of every day at our desks,be they archaic material or digital. the second implication,b, has to do with the more familiarapplication of the word

environment which would referto the processes around us that we habitually callnature but which can simply be described for thenature deny among us-- and i know they're out there--as those processes that unfold independently andindifferently to us but whose fate wenecessarily share. on the one hand, we mustaspire to a new kind of environmental phenomenologyin which our nervous systems are seen as deeply bound upwith the organizational cues

around us and subject evento flamboyant transformations and reinvigoration by design. and on the other, to a sincereengagement with the broader surround in whichwe are embedded and which is and doesnot merely masquerade as a living transformingmetabolic entity-- the natural world andthe manifold interactions of its triple ecology. the shapes andforms and behaviors

that are the productof design speculation, particularly when freed--at least in part-- from the narrow confinesof the cpu and the screen, have an infinitudeand an openness that is not diminishedby either the principal or action of organization. the robustness anddiversity of nature whose fecundity is always aproduct of its constraints is its testimony.

but unlike forms inthe system of nature, only humans havecontinuous access to the free hypothesisand the experiment to the structured imagination. for that is our politicaland our poetic heritage and right, always therefor the reclaiming-- it's not one of the thingsthat one does lose in history-- and which no theory or practicecould ever have the legitimacy to proscribe.

in sum, organizationposes no threat to design, but design-- especiallyin the 21st century-- can ignore its bequestsonly at its peril. really? wow. so this is anexhausting evening here, and apparently you'renot allowed to leave yet. i wrote some questions. i don't know howwe're doing this.

i wrote some questionsin the hotel just in case i couldn't think ofanything when i got here because i would be so bored. and of course, i'm overwhelmedwith what i saw today, but i still feel like i shouldreturn to one of my questions which is a challengeto everybody here. give me a second here. there is an importantterm, important even if it's substantiallymisunderstood

for most of its short historyand that is noticeably missing. it actually gotmentioned once today, but it's pretty noticeablymissing in the last 10 years of architecturalpedagogy and theorization-- generally inarchitectural discourse. despite the obsessivefocus our culture has on identity andin architecture-- especially on sensibilityand on mood-- and that term is subjectivity.

the term i was never notan organizational problem, and it is arguably the essenceof every style, every politic, every ethos, every projectin architecture and design. you all tacitly deal with it. and you really all produce it. so the question i'dlike to ask you. and i know it takes a minute tojust step back and think about is-- how do you connect yourmaterial work, the worlds you create, with the questionof the contemporary subject?

now, of course, what's atstake here is everything about our politicalexistence, our existential, let's say lives, etcetera, et cetera. we just simply have a tendency. we have become far too in a waybureaucratic in the way we draw boundaries around the formationof an architectural project today. but i want you to acknowledgein a certain sense this problem thatyou're creating

a universe with a moral. i'm just wondering if anybodyhas anything to say about that. in a way, it's anaggressive question. we are connected witha contemporary subject. as much as i wouldthink of the work, as being the medium in whicha near future subject is constructed. so instead ofthinking of the work as incarnating or expressinga relationship with what

i wouldrepresentationally present as the contemporarysubject, i would think of the work as ameans of construction. and in that sense, i tendnot to think of the mechanics of the work as being aliento the idea of the subject, but rather as being itself thesubject that is being created/ well, let me intervenehere for a second. looking at the work that youshowed today, which i would not have normally said to beyour typical modus operandi,

but you hack. in a certain sense, you takea certain existing logic, or let's say existing objectsand projects, and in a way, you re-engineered their dna. you kind of set themback into a motion in a different environment anddirect them to different goals. or you ask yourselfwhat else existed in their dna that remainedlatent or unexpressed that could be forcedinto expression today?

so how does the hackerlabel sit with you? can elaborate on the-- no. let me ask you something. what political position--well, what do i mean? it's simply you take aproject, an existing-- i mean, it's clearly apedagogical exercise, but we all use thesepedagogical exercises where you take an existing precedent.

though in your case, itwas a kind of attempt to draw on existing latenciesand force them into expressions that were-- there's aexpression in french that's circulated a lotin the humanities because of its terriblemistranslations so i won't give you themistranslation, but it was [speaks french]. which basically was whena woman, for example, has a baby with a guywithout telling him.

it's a way of courseof using an existing project to produce a bastard. i feel well about it actuallywith the description. it's nice to have alot of children, right? a lot of bastards out there. not that literally. no, i mean, it's literally done. it has nothing todo with reference. nothing.

it's literally done asa process of-- i mean, you could call itfascination or propensity to engage withtalent and take it by a means of systematizingit or by a means of purifying or exaggerating it, takingit to further extremes. and perhaps those extremes-- you give me a technical answer. i want to push. well, i want to push foran ethical position here.

look, there'ssomething profoundly oedipal in what you're doing. yes and no. clearly there is. you're messing with history. you doing that on purpose? yeah, i mean, whatelse otherwise, no? well, that's what i mean, buti'm not giving the answers. you are.

it's the position. well, i tell you what. finish off. i think it would be good. at this point, everyoneelse has figured out what they wish-- no no. well-- who else would like to addressthat ethical basis that lies behind implicitlyin only apparently purely

technical work? i'm the worst questionasker there is. you guys should know thatfrom my history at the gsd. i always did thesethings, and nobody ever answered my questions. i could try another one. go ahead. why don't we mentiona few things here, which is i thinkin many respects

to your comment about the sortof inheritance of bureaucracies of space which keep on gettinginherited over and over again. in many respects, apartfrom i think chuck, there's been no mentionreally of standards. in fact, the valuesand the bureaucracies are essentially inheritedthrough the standards and dimensions. and in many respects,you're proposing a call towards understandingthat unless we address

the inheritance of thosepatterns of bureaucracy within standardsand guidelines-- and one could argue-- thepaperwork of architecture, then ultimately all we'redoing is essentially producing either exceptional work i.e. we're only producingexceptions, which i think you've mentioned this before. or ultimately we'reonly chipping away at a very, very large block.

and what i think is particularlyinteresting is maybe going to the core orif there's a [french] is towards understanding in factthat the patterns of standards and dimensions,inherently as part of any kind ofbureaucratized design work, is in fact the politicalrevolution occurs there, which is ironic thatwe haven't really touched on it that much exceptfor the role of patents, i think which is key.

i think it's interestingon some level that the only mentionof intersubjectivity is actually through thisoppositional relationship to bureaucracy. i mean, i thoughtwas interesting that if eventssort of structuring plays a key role in theprocess of design today, why is the subjectivity onlyof the designer involved in its construction?

this is one thing that wasa little bit surprising. wait. to look at the workyou do for example, assuming you do it yourself,and i'm pretty sure you do. there is something aboutthe emerging latency that occurs on the screen andthe way your next key stroke embraces it, guidesit, or pushes it away. there is, if youlike, without a doubt a whole ethos ofsomething happening.

you're respondingcontinuously to something that is happening, toincidents that occur in time. that's the nature i would sayof-- i mean, your level of work is beyond frankly anythingi've ever seen or can imagine. but i'm assuming that ithas a real time component and that your ownsubjectivity for example, is largely conditioned by it. and in fact, i mytalk suggests that you are in fact interactingwith something

that is of the order of a newkind of technical subjectivity. the datasphere. there's another bad questionthat can't be answered. well, i mean it is kind ofan interesting reframing of the way that i hadthought about that because the way that youcharacterized-- the way that i immediately sort of respondedto your characterization of this transformation of designwas really more around a sort of tangible event space.

and so transforming or sortof transcribing those events into data structures whichcould themselves be reacted to. that's genuinelydifferent than the way that i had understood yourdescription or your sort of-- architects are so good attalking and being interesting but not reallyanswering the question. somebody mentioned that tome as i walked into the room when i almost refusedto sign the waiver to allow this to be broadcast.

they said something about wordsthat should never be said, and i realize that there'sa certain sense here that the architects-- thereare certain words that i'm not going to be ableto make you say. so let me ask you-- letme pose this question. it does feel a little bitlike a carefully laid trap in certain way. i'm not trapping anybody. what i'm really saying is, look.

everybody knows it's a problem. [interposing voices] is the digital agecoming to an end? and what i mean bythat is i'm talking about the firstdigital age, let's say. aren't we in the fourth by now? i don't know. where do you see? the greek atomistswould be first?

i'm not sure where we're at. but in any case, i think weknow that the crises that are emerging today are probablygoing to take precedence over the culture that wehave cultivated in our design milieus in schools overthe last few decades. let's talk aboutthe tool problem. it's not going to goaway in architecture be it the real time screeninterface, the parametric mesh, or the big data active archive.

my understanding is that there'sa marvelous sensation when working with these elementsof an interactive immersion in a living andresponding system. the painful truthhowever, is that these are all forms of technicalrationality engineered with a bias-- and this has beenpointed out already a few times today-- with a biasto optimization and that as tools, theyare no longer elements we incorporate into our ownroutines but the other way

around. we operate as thetools ourselves with, in their ecology of constraints. so how do you imaginea designer can escape this new type of bureaucracy? and when i ask thisquestion, i wish to put on the table maxweber's own formulation, once heroically asserted at thehistorically analogous moment when economic rationalizationwas threatening

the conduct of everydaylife just as rationalization is imposing itsethos now on design, where he evoked the ideaof a faustian subject, a [inaudible], to bring backthat idea of the spontaneous. you see? because the anxietytoday is the design is somehow ghettoizedif you like in a culture of organization. i may be wrong,but that's what i

understood to be the anxietythat prompted this event. so the faustian onone side versus, let's say the miserable,diminished [inaudible] of rules who was the vocational-- i mean, the first part of thequestion, which as you know, a lot of it isn'texactly a question. but i kind of agree with alot of what you're saying. i think the point that sortof counteracts it somewhat is that tools are alsonow have become very much

about physical naming. and i think in that sense,there's a kind of a corrective that occurs to being kind of inthis-- as i understood what you were saying-- kind of beingencased in this closed system, bureaucratic if you will, thatthrough the making side of it, it touches back to these morelonger lineage of making. but the tools are actuallyquite extraordinary and i think have an openended quality as well. i think there's alsoa sense in which today

these-- the fundamentalfunction of many of these tools have changed in the sensethat they've become conduits for the channeling ofcollective intelligence which extends well beyondthe design community and allows access toepistemic frameworks which were inaccessible before. it changes theorganization of knowledge, and i think there's a differencebetween accessing these broader epistemic frameworks and thetechnical limitations that

may have been inherent inmany of the first generation of tools. there's a process of collectiveknowledge organization, which i think surpasses someof those limitations and fundamentally changs-- co-chairing, are we talkingabout pooling information in an open source environment? this type of thing, whichextends beyond the design community, and allowsdesigners to access

sort of more systematicapproaches from the sciences, for example, that weresimply inaccessible. and i think it changesthe scope of design obviously because it importsall the sciences directly into design, but i think italso changes the emphasis in how tools are consumed. they more honestly appearas knowledge repositories as opposed to skill repositories. let me try to answer thequestion about the digital age.

i think what's reallyclear is actually our incapability of actuallyanswering your questions is because data is designing us. we're not doing the design. and actually i would argue thatthe proliferation of the word design across the universityand across the city and across america atthe moment is essentially leaving by the wayside theprofessionalization of capital a architecture,capital l a landscape

architecture, and theindustrialization design disciplines. i would actually argue thatthe kind of organizational turn that needs to happen is, forlack of a better word, that these kind of undesignersthat are particularly interested in understandinghow to be able to kind of work in complex environments andecologies of information. and what i think thatmeans if we acknowledge the very important questionof the end of the digital age

essentially occurred 911. the moment at which we nolonger could control the data and no longer wehad to acknowledge. that, in fact, we couldnot use numbers or data to essentially plan, control,or even guide the future. in fact it was themoment at which irreversibly that we had toacknowledge an age of risk, an age of indeterminacy,an age of uncertainty-- not an age of chaos--but also at the same time

an age of probability. and what i'm particularlyinterested in trying to answer your question, whichi think is both a challenge and it's a revolution. in many respects, yourquestion could also have been asked 10 yearsbefore or 20 years before based on your proclamationof the digital age being-- it's not a new question. what's amazing aboutit is that it is not

asked anymore or thought about. and i would simply arguethat if we acknowledge that the digital ageis sort of foregone, that ultimately thedigital age is not about the quantification orthe transformation of value through quantityof very high level complex environmentalinformation, which the designers loveworking on a screen, kind of controlling informationthrough numbers,

and they thinkthey're in control. when in fact, whatthey need to do is understand how to be able toleave things open, unfinished, and to borrow the word,incomplete, from mariana's proposal. and i think the key isto try to understand how to be able to kind ofwork in live, in real time, and literally try to understandhow to work with other living systems such as other people.

and i would just arguethat in an environment where we're trying tocontrol-- design has actually become a trope forcontrol and planning. one would argue wheredo you go then if you want to learn how to improvise? because improvisation's probablymore important than actually learning how to plan right now. while we hearlouise's question, i'd just like to ask the audience ifyou have any questions to raise

your hand. and then someone willbring a microphone to you so you can jump in hereas we sort of continue. i just wanted to makea brief commentary. at the beginning, i thoughtwhile i was listening all the presentations that we cannotdiscuss anything that we will agree because apparently we'retalking about organization and kind of engaging conditions. and now through thesekind of first non-question

from sanford-- orsecond or third. i realize that i disagreewith a lot of the things. i mean, i don't see aproblem with calling for more digitalizationtoday than 10 years ago. i think that is basicallystarting in the sense that the problem withbureaucracy for me is addressed withmore bureaucracy. i think it's intensifying the[inaudible] in the sense that the designer has to be claim--

i agree in the politicalambition towards dismantle or the status quosof the pressure towards data-driven processes. but in the sense, idon't see a problem with engaging the materialityof that kind of world with more of that asa personal deviation. because if not,we're immediately falling into the trap oftrying to optimize something. there's is some sortof sense or in the tone

of some of the conversation thathas to deal with about guilty. i mean, i don't see a problemwith loss of subjectivity. there is no loss ofsubjectivity in our work. these are kind of like[inaudible] question about what is the problem with thedigital, and i don't see any problem in digital. if i can put myself in between. i think there is a loss ofsubjectivity in the sense that there is no more aurain anything that is happening

for more than 20 years. and one has to goback to the '80s to find something that magicallyand one doesn't understand how it preserves asort of intrinsic value that is completely reducible andis not just a nostalgic value. so in that sense, i wouldagree with that part. on the other hand,i think that i do agree with whatyou're saying in terms of the question ofthe digital being

just starting andprobably being among us for a good kind of periodof time that is coming. only that perhaps what isseen as a sort of iconic stage is mostly a questionof how embedded it's getting into anythingthat we are doing. and that is i think what flipsthe relationship of control between us as architectsand information as controlling how we operate. to that, i prefer not to reactwith fear or with-- i mean,

i prefer not bereactionary about it. i would prefer to take thestance of saying, yes, fine. and get embedded morewithin the digital. to your questionbefore, i would say what has to be exercisedis more perversion in how one gets embeddedand more twisting or humanistic attitudes. even for the sake of them. it doesn't need tohave a clear agenda.

but it doesn't need to be partof an exercise of corruption-- of an exercise ofintensification to the point of corruption. that's where ithink one can find new forms of such subjectivity. is that more or lesswhat you were suggesting? i'm just encouragingthe notion of play into the game asa way of turning the problematic intobasically a nonproblem issue.

is just like a game that we havebeen playing for the last 15 years, and it changes its rules. but there is also like a knowhow that has been developed. and within that, itbecomes kind of a subject of new cultural emergencythat is happening from there. there is the tendencyto kill things, like to kill the digital era. i mean, it's an anxietyto what's kind of novelty that i don't feel in thesense of pure kind of claim.

i think that it has toemerge through preserving intensification. in that sense, i don'tthink that the digital era is a problem. i mean, i actuallythink the identification of the digital asa polemic actor or the continuingidentification of the digital as a polemic actor is justkind of like fundamentally wrong-headed.

i think it's something thatdoesn't exist as a-- i mean it's not something that can beidentified the monolithically and unequivocally. i mean, sanford, youyourself mentioned the number of terms over which we havesome ambiguous and equivocal relationship to and the digitalhas to be prime among them. it's something that no longercan be identified as something with a sort of coherent andconsistent set of qualities in the way that it couldbe in the '80s where

there was one digital culture. there's no more one digitalculture that there's one design culture today. i just feel like it's a mismatchor a sort of miscategorization actually. let's hear from theaudience a question first. first of all, i justwanted to-- maybe this has already beendone, but acknowledge today is the birthday of bothmichel foucault and friedrich

nietzsche. and given that historicalastrological facts, we could perhapsconsider that nietzsche was someone who wascapable of recognizing the extraordinary uncanninessof the human thought as organism and as subject and so forth. and so i suppose i would thenpropose a challenge to actually just sort of deletethe word subject from your lecture, sanford.

and i think it becomesimmediately clear that there's a kind of metaphysicsthere that is i believe-- it's a metaphysicsof the will essentially in whitehead. and whitehead isvery medieval too. what i'm trying to get at isthe origin of the human being is not really subjectivity, butit's something that i like to call obscure in light of eric[inaudible] and the metaphor of opening the lightthe-- sort of ocular--

man, let's have a conversation. meet me after this. i mean, i'm sorry to ramble. it's cool man. it's all right. is see your line. any other questions forany of our panelists. i wait this out. so don't think you're goingto beat me at this, ok?

i'm alex. it's probably aquestion to ciro. you mentioned corruption. i wonder whether thegoal of corruption would be to escapeor to augment-- augment in a kind ofaccelerationist sense. and in any case, is thisthrough error, through chance, through extreme rigour, orthrough suspension of judgment? i mean, i use theword corruption,

which i actually rarely use. but i was meaning i like the word corruption. i was meaning to constructfissures and breakdowns in how systems tendto kind of manipulate what we do with them. but to your question, i wouldrephrase what i was saying, and i would still think thatthose forms of corrupting those systems from within shouldeventually not just produce

destructive character,but rather have a will to construct higherforms of intelligence with them that perhaps wouldbecome again dangerous. but i think thatas an architect, one has to have a kindof [inaudible] practice in the end. so in that sense, i will thinkof those moments of corruption as ways of constructinghigher levels of order, not lower ones.

just as not a responseor a question. it's a comment, or maybe it'sa response to a known question. it's just an observationon the lexicon that you have been usingalong the-- a little bit cryptic, enigmatic aroundthe table in general terms in relationship-- comparingto the other symposium-- the design technique symposiumthat we're completely focusing very i would say down to earthin questions, questions that were essentially subjectivehow each one of the panelists

were able to dealwith decisions, how they made decisions. completely-- objectivity. the discussion was about thepossibility of some objectivity in designing. in this case, it'sexactly the reverse-- the possibility ofsome subjectivity. i think that it's verysimple what i want to say. but in a way, there'sa kind of two ways.

the scheme thatchuck hoberman had about the invention, science,art are two ways processes. in the previoussymposium, i think that we were privileging thesubjectivity and the access to invention through pureliving as express our instance as active entities, to useyour word, the need a pleasure, game, violins, all these thingsthat every living entity needs. and in this case ithink that the panel is [inaudible] in theaim of finding a way

to deal with politicalissues and ethical issues inside a world that in away is forcing all of us to work as bureaucrats. this is my impression. bureaucrats. bureaucrats, no. the big data, forexample, i mean, you are being absolutelycreative and amazingly creative inside a system that is drivingall of us to become automats.

and think this-- our twospheres, if you want, the effort thatthis panel is making to find the kind ofplace for subjectivity and the mechanic process of thisdigitalization of our society. [inaudible] amen. it's late, but we'll take onemore comment/question/response. ok? hi, i'm [inaudible].

i don't have a question. this is just a provocationand i'm totally shooting in the dark. i was hoping that i can createa conversation between pierre and sanford recordingdesign of time and also-- you should see our emails. it's like-- the design of time andcreating relationships between simultaneousprocesses in ecologies.

since time is not aline, it's not linear. it has depth. so can you talk aboutdesign of time in real time? as they say, this is yours. actually i'll just providea very simple example which renders essentiallyprofessional designers irrelevant in givenany city when there's flooding and people tweet toeach other instant information about where thefloods are occurring.

people react immediately, andessentially collective behavior takes place. it is literallysimultaneity if we don't pay attention,which i think is a really important issue. if we don't payattention it's actually going to make us completelyirrelevant because we can't respond fast enough. i think to the issueof tools, we just

have to radically rethinkthe tools we're using. i'm not going to giveyou a satisfying answer, but i can only tellyou this is i agree. i've been thinking about thisfor a very, very long time. the responsible answeris to remind you that designing intime brings along with it a whole set of shiftsin how one understands just about every aspectof our being here. even the latenciesand potentials

that we are ableto sense around us, which are always thetrigger points for anything that is created, forany emergence of a form, utterly changes. there are cultures,civilizations, and coherentphilosophies which are based on this inwhich we usually in some kind of a shorthandrefer to as eastern ones. but you'll find thatwhen the problems, let's

say when the foundation-- whennature is seen as something which is continuouslychanging and continuously throwing up newthings that it implies an entirely different universe. and there is a conceptin chinese for example-- ancient chinese philosophy--called [non-english]. there's an excellent bookon the subject called on the propensity of things. you know it.

it's a beautifulbook which describes how an entire civilization--from their aesthetic practice to their marshal practice,the way they war-- is all based onthe understanding that in everystructure, there is a tendency for thatstructure to evolve in a particular waybecause of its occurrence at that particular momentin that particular place. and they sense, if youlike, the entire universe

is either in motion or it isdirected toward a future moment in motion. it changes everything. and the culture is rich,and it's all out there. and you probably know more aboutit than us already i can see. so thank you for your patience. are we're going toget a book like this? this is beautiful. jesus!

you guys! there's a magicianin the room obviously who turns this stuffinto beautiful coherent-- so thank you. good night.

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