What is wrong with these pictures? Start maybe by looking at them all. The landscapes that they show are beautiful and seem to be almost untouched by humans. The problem is that they are taken where Palestinian villages used to exist before 1948. Five days ago was the 65th anniversary of the Nakba (the catastrophe in Arabic), the day that hundreds of thousands of Palestinians had to flee from their land when the State of Israel was established. These photographs are from the website of the association Zochrot that attempts to familiarize Israeli people with the tragic consequences that their country originated, advocate for a Palestinian right to return (see past article about it) and, hope for a bi-national reconciliation. In this regard, Zochrot has established a map (in Hebrew only) giving an inventory of the Palestinian villages that were evacuated and those that have been destroyed after 1948.

Sometimes their destruction led space to the new Israeli towns but as these photographs reveal, it was a much more profound destruction than a “simple” take over. Palestinian villages have been purely annihilated to the very last stone. Such a clear act of negating the presence of a civilization before the existence of Israel is even more shocking and disturbing as it occurred only a few years after the industrialized Nazi death machine against the Jewish people – let us not forget the gypsies, homosexuals, handicapped and communists either. Ruins of these villages would have told a narrative involving the Palestinian existence prior to the state of Israel and would have implied their evacuation from it. This narrative was apparently not part of the newly born State that got rid of it through the violent erasing of this historical tracks. The ruin implies a tragic situation, but the negation to the right to the ruin goes even further: it is an absolute re-writing of history as it attempts to erase a part of it (it is understood here as the factual history, not the interpretation of it, also named history).

I usually do not want to mix the blog with my own design projects but one of the latter seems relevant enough about this right to the ruin to briefly write about it. The design project of Weaponized Architecture was dramatizing an architectural disobedience to the colonial law that prevents Palestinian construction in 63% of the West Bank. The project was functioning with various tactics of camouflage but was also incorporating the hypothesis of its own destruction by the Israeli army in case it would have been discovered. Its materiality and its ‘uneven geometry’ however, were partially designed in such a way that it would requires too much energy to be fully destroyed. The project would thus become a ruin that would still carry the narrative of its existence and continue the territorial resistance against the colonial law in the West Bank.

The following photographs – the second one was taken by Noga Kadman for her book Erased from Space and Consciousness (see this article on +972 about it) – through their captions and their collection also reconstitute the narrative that was destroyed with the villages themselves. They will never be able to replace the ruins that should have remained and carry this narrative by themselves, but hopefully they are able to translate the disturbing civilizational absence of the post-nakba landscapes.

The space beyond the walls: Defensive “a-legal” sanctuaries
(originally written for the Wheelwright Prize – failed)

Considered purely in the abstract, the law appears to be a tool which makes strict categorizations of human actions and behaviors as either legal or illegal, just or unjust. Concomitantly, the abstraction of the law corresponds with a similar spatial abstraction in which territories are defined diagrammatically. This is true as far as the sovereignty of states is concerned but also for all architectural plans; they diagrammatically organize space into distinct territories of jurisdiction. In each case, law and diagram are reduced to their abstract lines. Once manifested as physical architecture, however, such strict delineation becomes far more ambiguous. Which law is applied in the space of a wall, the space of a border or the space of a contested zone? These spaces are legal anomalies and may be understood as the architectural manifestation of what Legal Philosophy Professor Hans Lindahl calls a-legality. Such in-between spaces seem at once to underwrite the law as well as to contradict it. In this research project, I propose to investigate specific cases in which the architecture of such “a-legal zones” is strategically used as a space of sanctuary from coercive forces. My argument insists that an “a-legal architecture” is specifically a defensive one as it gives itself the means to preserve such a status.

This research will examine four of these legal anomalies. To some extent, they constitute a holdover of pre-modern ecclesiastical structures in which the right of asylum is transplanted onto modern geopolitical landscapes. In this regard, Greek universities have recently ended a thirty eight year period of asylum within their campuses where access by the Police and the Army was prohibited. This legal right had been granted has a form of acknowledgement of the students’ role in the overthrow of the junta dictatorship in 1974, but was recently considered as problematic by the authorities. The ‘inertia’ of this law is, however, still active and can still be examined. Within the context of such a legal status, architecture plays a fundamental role in influencing its application. Entrances and exits, for example, determine the way some students are able to ‘swarm’ in or out of the university when they are occasionally chased by riot police after a demonstration. Similarly, the way university buildings are being used cannot be neutral as the police often “siege” the campuses thus forcing fugitives to organize forms of “in-habitability” within them.

When many factories had to cease their activity after the economic crisis of 2001 in Argentina, similar processes of appropriation and defense began with workers taking control of their working place. Organized under the banner of the fábricas recuperadas (re-claimed factories), they have developed an alternative to the capitalist and hierarchical mode of production. The architecture of the Zanon ceramic tile factory (Neuquen), the Brukman textile factory and the Hotel Bauen (Buenos Aires) recounts such an alternative, as well as the survival and defensive means that needed to emerge in order to resist the various forces deployed against them.

The third case-study proposed for this research also exists through the means of expropriation, in this case, within the frame of colonial tactics. The Israeli settlements inhabited by over 500,000 civilians in the West Bank constitute a violation of Article 49 of the 1949 Fourth Geneva Convention which stipulates that “the Occupying Power shall not deport or transfer parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies.” However, through their de facto occupation of the Palestinian territory, as well as with their continuous territorial expansion, the status of a legal anomaly is gradually transferred to the land that they slowly but surely circumscribe. My analysis of this specific architectural example would be built on the bases of my previous research about the role of architecture in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict since 2008.

The last item of investigation globally questions the legal/architectural typology of the Embassy. Here again, the legal anomaly it constitutes makes the notion of national sovereignty more complex and ambiguous as embassies are effectively parts of a given country within another. The way such a relation is articulated between both territories is truly architectural. The American embassies in particular are interesting examples to study as the past few decades of antagonistic US foreign policy has only added fuel to the fire causing the diplomatic architectural paradigm to shift to a defensive strategy that shares many similarities with the strategies of Middle Age castles. The American embassy in Cairo, for example, carries such medieval defensive characteristics. The building, designed by Metcalf and Associates in the 1980’s, is a ten-story ‘dungeon’ that is required to withstand a potential force of 2,000 pounds of TNT. Such defensiveness surely played an important role during the management of the recent protest in which an angry crowd attempted to penetrate its perimeter last September.

I envision this research as a continuation of my personal work that deploys itself both through theoretical investigations and the practice of design. In this regard, the book I would like to produce through the Wheelwright Prize would include the collection of the case study analyses, as well as a personal architectural project informed by this research. Refusing the dichotomy of writing and designing is, for me, a way to accept the responsibility that each architect has towards society, as well as an opportunity to determine an architectural means to subvert the role that has been chosen for him or her by the establishment. Only under these circumstances can we think of an architecture that does not reinforce the dominant relationships of power but rather, that articulates a strategic response in order to resist them.

FIRST LETTER (New York on July 12^th 2012) ///

Dear Lucy,

I read your essay Archiving Burroughs: Interzone, Law, Self-Medication with attention and appreciated, as usual, the way you manage to link narrative, law and space all together. I do think however that we should keep this text for a little bit later in our conversation as its specificity might make us miss the bases of the discussion that we would like to have about law and architecture. In this regard, I would like to ingenuously start by stating some obvious facts which are always good to remember for such a discussion.

Law, understood as a human artifact, constitutes an ensemble of regulations which have been explicitly stated in order to categorize behaviors in two categories: legal and illegal. In order to do so, it expects from every individual subjected to its application a full knowledge of its content in order to moralize and held accountable attitudes that are either respectful or transgressive towards it.

Law is undeniably related to space as it requires a given territory with precise borders to be able to implement itself. Nothing easier to understand this fact than to observe in which space one is allowed to smoke and in which one is not. It also includes within this territory smaller zones of exclusion, from the corner of the class room to the penitentiary, in which another form of the law -supposedly a more restrictive one- is applied for individuals who, through an active refusal of specific parts of it, are to be separated from the rest of society. Those individuals, when captured by law enforcer instances, are brought within those zones of exclusion and are being held in them for a given period of time provisioned by law itself.

Many other spaces constitute territories on which law is also different but composed of layers of laws which do not contradict each other. Spaces like schools, offices, factories, hospitals, for example, apply a legal superimposition in order to complement the territorial law with set of rules specifically formulated to optimize their institutional function.

Space itself is not necessarily an artifact, although the designation of borders that delimit it certainly constitutes a human intervention, and probably the first legal gesture that is. Let us consider architecture as the ensemble of human physical modification of its environment. It would probably be useless to wonder whether law invented architecture or if it is precisely the opposite. What we can possibly affirm, however, is that architecture, through its physicality, embodies the immaterial law. This is clear in the case of the zones of exclusion that I was evoking above. The fundamental element of the law of exception applied in them consists in the ban for their subjects to exit their space. In order to implement such a ban, an impermeable architecture needed to be created: it is the invention of prison as a building.

Prisons are the extreme examples of how architecture embodies the law. We are nevertheless surrounded by more domestic cases of architectural enforcement of the law. During a curfew or quarantine, your own house, supposedly so neutral and innocent, can become your own prison. But was this house so innocent anyway? Isn’t the house the material embodiment of a law which integrates private property as one of its components? How to enforce property in a better way than to build impermeable walls on the lines that law abstractly constructed? Architecture, by using the universal “laws” of physics –nobody can cross a wall for example- insures the explicitation of the law which would need to be discursively enunciated otherwise in order to be acknowledged by its subjects.

This vision is however an articulation centered on architecture and I am wondering how the legal theory specialist that you are interprets this relationship. Do you think that there can be a law with no architecture or/and a lawless architecture? If architecture is really the embodiment of the law, can we possibly think of an architecture of illegality?

I very much look forward to reading you on those questions, and on the others that you probably have.

Cordially yours,

Léopold

SECOND LETTER (Exeter, UK, on August 17^th 2012) /// 

Dear Leopold,

Thank you for your letter dated 12^th August, I apologise for my tardy reply but I have been away as you know in India.  India, of course being a great example for the themes of architecture and law of which you speak, whereby not only are there plural legal levels of law as a result of the genealogies of colonialism, but so too there are those very clear architectures of law that reveal legal dichotomies, the insides and the outsides, those included and excluded (and of wrath of the common law in particular).  Nowhere else has there been such a use of law as a mechanism of legitimated dispossession than in colonial India, with the decentralised despotism of the Raj and their opulent palaces as reminders of their decentralised British power; the acceptance of customary law into a plural legal hierarchy of state law that put the common law as the pinnacle of all might.

When thinking of the role of land and law, and the wall as the boundary, the legal space in which all of the divisions and structures of hierarchy are analogised (or not even analogised, but actualised), there is a reason why one is so struck by architecture as the architect of law – or law as the architect of architecture.  Western individual property rights, are based on a presumption that ‘ownership’ of land, the right to design land as one sees fit (or hire a draftsman to follow design instructions), is the right to have exclusive access and possession to that particular geography of land.  Thus, and this is taking from the highly influential German jurist Carl Schmitt, law starts and ends with the earth, and is determined through the categorisation and enclosure of the earth where all other phenomenology resides.  This intrinsic link between law and architecture is the design of property rights, it is the manipulation of space which acts as a way of keeping something in, keeping a population out.  Therefore, architecture lends itself specifically as the embodiment of law, it is the dividing line, the juncture of liminality that is so easily described, and yet the most elusive thing in the world, that which is all order and chaos.  It comes together in one coordinate, the coordinate of legal design; the sketchings of the architect.

What struck me recently when I was away in India was how obvious the past, and indeed the future, was expressed within the buildings, and moreso within the constant construction going on within the megacityscape where each new wood and cement fixture became another limb of the great living organism that was growing and gurgling as I would veer past in my auto-rickshaw.  These were buildings that were not completed yet, that would most probably always remain incomplete as the years of bureaucratic procrastination and judicial protest halt the creation of the flyovers and office blocks.

What I would like to throw in here is a consideration of the role of entropy within law and architecture, and how this can offer a framework through which we can understand the role of law within architecture and architecture within law, and what you might think of this in relation to property, aesthetics as a whole, and law so too.

Take the seething urban mass of Bangalore, a city that only 30 years ago was a quaint retirement destination for local Karnatakan residents and its surrounding states, which since then has become the size of London, with no public transport infrastructure – and is still growing, with an air of toddlerishness that hints to only being a tenth of its potential size.  The population has matured its foundations, and the job of producing new living spaces and working spaces have not kept up.  There are two types of design, those of the massive land acquisitions and re-mappings that allow for colossal new speedways and airports; and then there are the designs of the slums – both of these architectures of law rely on unplanning, as opposed to planning, and are reactive and emergent in their convergences.  This, I would argue, is the entropy of architecture, and therefore entropy of law.

Specifically in relation to land law, there is little in the way of actual planning law, and when there is, it is planned with a certain group of elites in mind.  The majority of those who live in Bangalore cannot afford to buy cars or motorcycles, and yet there are apparently 1,000 vehicles added to the road day in the city.  These are the upwardly mobile Bangalorians who work within IT and are making the most of the burgeoning city and it being known as the ‘Singapore of the South’.  Huge land acquisitions are undertaken in order to build in the name of the swelling bourgeoisie.  Land acquisition is a common law inheritance and is known in India as ‘eminent domain’.  It exists as a stop valve for the state to acquire land for ‘public purposes’, without the permission of those who already live on the land and have rights and attachments to the land.  Those who are moved are by and large the architects of law from below, the slum dwellers and impoverished who own little or no legal rights to the land on which they reside.  A complex web of common law legacy gives way to a situation whereby land is acquired and new building schemes begin, whilst at the same time architects from below utilise the notoriously slow, but most certainly relevant litigation processes of the courts to try and halt the taking of their homes and the construction of new hegemonies.

These two unplanned movements of law and architecture, the state land acquisition and the litigious rigour of Bangalore’s civil society, operates in an emergent coagulation and one that is realised in the half built pillars and cement covered children on the roadside.  These are not complete spaces, but half spaces, spaces that are not aware of how they will end up as a result of the intersection of law in design.

So what does this have to do with entropy?  At a very basic level, and one that takes from a traditional thermodynamic view, entropy is the amount of usable energy within a system.  The more complex a system becomes, the more energy it uses, and the more it strives towards order, the more disordered it becomes simultaneously.   Entropy exists in all systems, those that are alive and those not, as long as they possess enough energy to do work, and even theories on entropy themselves are part of the emergent systems of burgeoning theories on thermodynamism and complexity.  Entropy is thus the contradictory premise that the world is rapidly becoming more intricate, requiring more energy to be used within its systemic bounds, marching onwards on a treadmill of a Darwinian perfection and evolution, whilst at the same time, the more complex it becomes, the quicker it moves towards a finality of heat-death.   Entropy is therefore the juxtapositioning of order and chaos, which arguably conjures an aesthetics of symmetry, dissymmetry, design and architecture.

Seemingly, order as something that is necessary for the human mind to understand anything.  There are those systems that appear ordered, and yet they rely on the dismemberedness of their interior, their genealogy, to exist and continue, considering Michael Buor’s depiction of the structure of New York in the 1950s:

“…marvellous walls of glass with their delicate screens of horizontals and verticals, in which the sky reflects itself; but inside those buildings all the scraps of Europe are piled up in confusion … The magnificent grid is artificially imposed upon a continent that has not produced it; it is a law one endures.” 

What does this description of the underbelly of New York tell us of how law affects architecture, and the same vice versa?  What can entropy tell us about the seemingly out-of-control cityscape of Bangalore, the planned unplanning and unplanned planning of the architects of law from below and those of the law from above?  What is the role of property in this, and indeed aesthetics itself?

At this juncture I am going to go and have some lunch and leave it for yourself to ponder dear Leopold.

Yours,

Lucy

THIRD LETTER (New York, on May 2^nd 2013) ///

Dear Lucy,

It has been (too) long since we last sent each other a letter to think together of the way architecture and the law interact with each other. I apologize for that as it was “my turn” to write to you.

In your last letter, you were reflecting on the strange collision of the Indian eminent domain with what I would slyly call immanent domain that is developed by the slums. You were talking about this collision in Bangalore; I happen to know Mumbai much more as I lived there for a little while but I assume that the two situations are relatively similar for that matter. Both eminent and immanent domains constitute a form of violence towards the law as they both “break” a traditional understanding of what property is about.  In the first case, the municipality or the State expropriates a group of people, while in the second one, a group of people claims a piece of territory that does not belong to them to build their dwelling. Two things ought to be noted in this matter. The first one is that, on the contrary of the immanent domain, the eminent domain somehow registers within the legal system even though it seems to contradict the law at first “sight”. The second thing to note is that, while eminent domain unfolds itself on an inhabited territory/building, the immanent domain exists on a land/structure that is either the object of estate speculation or that does not receive enough financial founds to be developed. I know that you are very interested in how the various squats of the world are questioning the legitimacy of our definition of property and I am sure that you have already thought extensively about those two notes.

It is interesting to observe how the eminent domain implements itself in a country like India as it reproduces part of the process of colonization: something from the outside that imposes itself as the new law upon the bodies that happen to be present on the concerned territory. The reminiscence of the colonial era is something that really questioned me when I was living there. Many of the administrative buildings of Mumbai are still the same that were used by the British. I am still wondering today if the continuity it creates is strictly symbolical or if it actively shapes the way this administration is operating. The same question goes for the Rashtrapati Bhavan in New Delhi, the Viceroy Palace that Gandhi wanted to transform into a hospital and that Nehru attributed as the Presidential Palace of the newly independent India. I suppose that there are a multitude of laws that were similarly elaborated during the colonial era and that remained afterward. You are interested in the entropy of law, I suppose that we could remain in the field of physics and talk about its resilience.

What interests us however, is not so much architecture and the law considered separately, even when they are intricate in similar processes of existence, but rather as both part of the same strategy in the organization of a society; I want therefore to go back to this notion of immanent domain as its relationship to the law might be more complex than the one I was describing earlier. In Turkey for example, I read that the police cannot immediately destroy an unauthorized dwelling whose construction has been finished; this kind of dispute has to go to court to be settled. This scenario, because it involves the inertia (some more physics) of the administration that goes with it, is likely to require enough time for the dwelling’s inhabitants to use it for a while. There are therefore strategies to build a home in one night to avoid a potential destruction the following day as the construction would have not been completed. I find this example fascinating as it interprets the practice of the law in a different way that we traditionally do it. It is a form of negotiation with the inertia of the system rather than a strict reading of the law that would indubitably establish each behavior in the two categories of legal and illegal.

There is also a dimension of illegality that I would like to address. When does an illegal behaviour can be legitimately called “civil disobedience” to use Thoreau’s well known idea? My theory about it would probably deserve more work on it, but I have the intuition that one has the right to disobey a law when, through this action, one is primarily questioning the legitimacy of the law itself. I will use a comparison I made in the past to illustrate what I mean. When someone assassinates someone else, the chances are that this first person is not contesting the fact that one is prevented by law to kill another person; however, when Rosa Parks decided to go seating in the white people section in the bus in 1955, sitting was not primarily what she wanted to do, she wanted to deeply contest the very essence of the segregationist legal system. Of course, there might be some more complex and less extreme examples but this distinction allows us to make a difference between a selfish disobedience to the law from a political one. I suppose that the slums we were talking about are a mix of these two dimensions as they claim a territory opportunistically, not to be relegated to the outskirts of the city, but also as a manifestation of their existence and their right to the city.

Do these peregrinations of my mind resonate in any way for you? I look forward to hearing from you as I am sure that you will know how to challenge and articulate my intuitions.

Yours,

Léopold

FOURTH LETTER (Exeter, UK, on a rainy Tuesday May 14^th 2013) /// 

Dearest Leopold,

Well, thank you for your last correspondence, and as I read through our previous meanderings into law and architecture, I am transported back to the sultry heat of India, the free flow of writing in the summer months of a soporific, verdant Devon last year.  Perhaps any hints to a summer heat do not ring quite true here in the UK, but you get the picture!  Not only has it been a while since writing to you dear Leopold, but it has been a while since writing full stop.  The almost robotic practises of teaching – reading, reformulating, copying, altering, presenting, speaking, reproducing, shaking – are almost the inside-out of writing, the catharsis of mind that allows for ponderings on an aesthetics of law.  But I am sure my six months of vocal not written engagement will be contributing and inspiring my thoughts nevertheless.

I am back in India with your immanent domain, quite a metaphor for the emergent and by no means inert scientific allegories we are sharing in relation to property, both that requisitioned by the state and that performed by the slums.  The immanence of the Indian geography speaks to this kinetic energy, a city in flux through its response to legal and illegal planning regimes.  It is interesting that you refer to the dichotomy of legal and illegal, as what has always been of interest to myself has in fact been this space in between, the point and threshold at which a constituent creates the constitution, the resistance becomes law.  This is the immanency of law and resistance, the energy and metabolism whereby from one heartbeat to the next there is something that resembles a juridical formulation.  Locating this moment is akin to imposing a rigid grammar of prescription to a work of art; to the ephemeral the resides as a sapphire in coal dust, because it does just that.  But this liminal space in between the non-institutional and institutional still fascinates and allows for what is legal and what is illegal, within and external to law, like a Kafka-esque gate keeper, patrolling the door to the stomach of the law.  By trying to understand these movements, the idea is to understand any foundation of law.

I also want to draw on your mentioning of disobedience, as this is something that I have been working (sadly more confined to within the academy than so much outside these days!) of late in relation to the concept and practice of ‘naughtiness’.  Thoreau places the justification for disobeying law as that which rests as a duty, ‘If (an injustice) is of such a nature that it requires you to be the agent of injustice to another, then, I say, break the law.  Let your body be a counter friction to stop the machine’^[1]; Arendt would say this is ‘testing the statute’ whereby to be civilly disobedient is to counter a law in order to change a law.  The institutional character and limits of law comes up again in Arendt’s understanding of civil disobedience and its role in constitutionalism, whereby to be civilly disobedient is to effect and affect law through extra-legal action, ‘… the law can indeed stabilise and legalise change once it has occurred, but the change itself is always the result of extra-legal action’^[2].  Thus, this division between the exterior and interior of law assumes the foundation of law, as therefore being innovated from an outside source.  The legal, illegal, alegal, extra-legal, or infra-legal even, are all a motion of legitimation and structuration and where can it be better expressed than in architecture itself, in a seething urbanity, in a reconfiguration of law whereby slums rest on the grid of colonial property rights in a stasis of illegitimacy.  And yet without them, property itself would not exist, nor indeed the pre-eminence of the Common law.  Slums are the extra-legal to the right to exclude.

As you know I have focused my research for the last few years on squatting, a way of performing architecture in both an appearance and legal loophole of transiency, and yet the performance can last in a temporality much longer than that anticipated by either the squatter or the state.  This inertia in which you wonderfully place our discussion of bureaucracy and the techné of law, is as you say, both a source of frustration and also a procrastination that results in the expedient re-appropriation of land.  Returning to physics here allows for the role of time to be understood, or space-time more precisely, as a motor for resistance, as a means of testing the statute, whether the disrupt it and change its course or otherwise.  Entropy is the arrow of time, and so in this inertia is an aesthetics of dilapidation and decomposition, an inevitability that the half-built speedway or giant-like pillar of a flyover will eventually shift from being built – to becoming ruins.  That plateau of architecture and law – between construction and destruction – where entropy curlicues.

Once again dear Leopold, I shall leave it at that for you to ponder upon and will return to my teaching duties.

Yours,

Lucy

Explosions are so ubiquitous in Hollywood Cinema, and the emotion is so intense when one torn-down reality that we do not quite seem to realize what they really are. In 2007, Mike Davis was trying to historicize the car bomb and its urban consequences in his book Buda’s Wagon: A Brief History of the Car Bomb (Verso, 2007) but his analysis was legitimately anthropocentric, which I want to avoid in this specific article. “Leaving the human” can sometimes be risky as it potentially leads to the depoliticization of things – depolitics being a form of politics too and a rather totalitarian one – but it also allows to think of a better understanding of the material world in which we live, and from which we exist as a body.

What is an explosion at the pure physics level? A bomb is an apparatus that contains folded within itself the potential liberation of an important volume of energy in the form of an exothermic reaction. Such a volume of energy and the speed with which it gets released provoke a sudden disaggregation of the material bodies (animate or inanimate) that surrounds its center. Insisting on the suddenness or the violence of the explosion would be another anthropocentric way to consider it as it would necessarily associate the scale of time in which it occurs to the scale of time of human perception. In other words, the Big Bang could be considered as a sudden explosion at a certain scale of time even though, 14 billions years later, the universe is still affected by its original release of energy. In a materialist interpretation, the speed to which an explosion is effectuated is therefore irrelevant and such an “event” can be compared to any other modification of matter like erosion or entropy. If we define destruction by the operation in which physical bodies are being “broken down” into smaller material assemblages, we can however define an explosion as a destructive transformation of matter without being anthropocentric.

Now that we read explosion at a materialist level, we can go back to what our bodies make us, humans, and maybe for some of us even, designers. What does such a materialist knowledge (only very briefly sketched here) mean in terms of design. The bomb, as we know it, is an artifact and a very precisely designed one. In his Entretien sur la mécanologie (Interview about Mechanology, 1968) about which I will write much more some other day, Gilbert Simondon explains that a machine, in order to exist, needs to be stable i.e. that it does not have any self-destructive characteristics – he refers to the very first engines that often tended to explode. The design of a bomb, a grenade, or any other explosive apparatuses does not apply this definition as it needs to control the precise moment of its self-destruction. The latter is likely to trigger the destruction of the other material bodies around it and therefore accomplish the goal that its creator has imagined for it.

The design of such apparatuses therefore involves its precise assemblage in such a way that its moment of self-destruction can be controlled; that is the design of the object’s actuality, but there is a second dimension of design to observe; one that addresses the object’s virtuality. What I mean by virtuality is the volume of energy that will be release by it and that requires to be precisely designed as well. Of course, in the case of terror, this part of design is not as much considered as the impact wanted is simply maximum; but in the case of military or para-military operations such a design is fundamental. In his lecture, Forensic Architecture (2009), Eyal Weizman describes (see past article about the notion of urbicide) how the American and Israeli Army uses the services of people, who we could call “energy designers”, that carefully elaborate the assassination of targeted individuals or groups through the design of bombs in relationship to the built environment. What is interesting here is that the virtual volumes of energy that are designed are not so much targeting these same individuals’ bodies directly but rather, the physical structure that host them. The building and the failure of its structural integrity are literally used as a weapon against them. Just like “normal” architects design schemes to ultimately have them built, these military technicians are designing schemes to ultimately have them destroyed. In this case, the volume of energy is wanted to be controlled to limit the destruction to a level where only the targeted individuals’ bodies would be affected and destroyed by it. Of course this is only theoretical and E. Weizman reveals that each operation has a specific amount of tolerated civilian deaths that would occurs at the same time than the targeted individual’s one.

This article is, of course, not written to suggest that we might ever be designing such “volumes of energy”, but rather that each modification of matter that we design and orchestrate has (at least) two levels of reading that cannot be considered individually: a non-anthropocentric physical one and a political one. Practicing architecture should consist in the skillful and informed articulation of these two dimensions.

I have been evoking the work of Beatriz Preciado a few times in the last year, the most notably reference being the wonderful text she wrote for LOG 25 (see past article), entitled Architecture as a Practice of Biopolitical Disobedience in which she was exposing the theoretical bases for a deep analysis of the society of control that she decided to call (and therefore orient) Pharmaco-pornographic society. The latter is implementing its control by the elaboration of apparatuses that modify and normalize sexuality within the context of biopolitics and capitalist strategies. The contraceptive pill is for her, the paradigmatic (designed) object of this society: a product elaborated by the pharmaceutic industry – which, for her, constitute the climax of capitalism – that is voluntarily ingested by millions of women (often in ignorance of their secondary effects) and that, by modifying their internal biology is able to construct a politics of demographic control as well as a normalization of sexuality by the hegemonic heterosexual imaginary that it implements.

Of course, just like Judith Butler (see recent article about this topic), Beatriz Preciado is not interested in merely bringing two more genders (gay and lesbians) to the level of normalization: there is a strong will to absolutely undo gender by subverting it through its very mechanisms of production. This is the topic of her book, Testo Junkie: Sex, Drugs, and Biopolitics in the Pharmacopornographic Era (already exists in Spanish and French, soon to be published in English). In it, B. Preciado articulates a theoretical time cartography of the formation of this pharmacopornographic society with autobiographical experiences including the main object of the book: her daily ingestion of doses of testosterone during eight months and the observation of her body getting modified by it. Along the chapters, she insists on the fact that she does not accomplish this experiment in the goal of changing her sex/gender but rather in order to develop a micropolitics of ambiguity, a zone in which she would be neither man nor woman, nor straight, nor gay, nor a lesbian, an unrecognizable body in a society that bases its control on principles of recognition.

B. Preciado uses Spinozist philosophy (see this past article to understand it well) to invent a concept to define the object that is being controlled by the pharmacopornographic. She calls it potentia gaudendi or organic strength, the power [potentia] (actual or virtual) of (total) excitation of a body (my translation). The right ‘alchemy’ of synthetic hormones and pornography (under whichever form it might take) guarantees the normalization of the sexualized society. The capitalist object that such a potentia represents is fantastic for its industry (the pharmaceutic industry at its head) as it requires a relatively light labor and its applies directly on the bodies: “They want to transform your ass and mine, my desire and yours into abstract profits” (my translation)

For B. Preciado, the surveillance apparatuses are no more external to the bodies as they were in the disciplinary society described by Michel Foucault through its paradigmatic diagram, the panopticon. These apparatuses are now internal to the body, they take the shape of it until they become inseparable of it (my translation). Of course, I am personally convinced that the external apparatuses are still very well here and architecture is still the most common instrument of control of a body but the point developed by Beatriz Preciado is extremely important for its viscerality and the technological context in which it is embedded.  For Judith Butler, gender is inscribed in our flesh (see same article referred to above) similarly than Kafka’s Penal Colony machine (see recent article about it) traces the prisoner’s sentence into his flesh. For B. Preciado, however, gender is inscribed directly from within our bodies and the penal colony machine is multiplied by millions at a microscopic level.

To this biopolitics of normalization of the body, she proposes micropolitical strategies that subverts the mechanisms of control: “First motto for a feminism that is worth of the pornopunk modernity: your body, the body of the multitude and the pharmacopornographic matrix that constitute them are political laboratories” (my translation) That is how she undertakes the ingestion of testosterone as well as describes other processes of undoing gender like  drag king workshops for example, that allow women to experience society ‘in the body’ of the dominant gender. She goes as far as describing a gender bioterrorism within these same strategies. She does not link it to another piece of text earlier in the book but that made me think of it: the ‘contagiousness’ of her testosterone dose that get applied through the skin and that can therefore potentially pass from body to another when it has been freshly applied: “How can one control the traffic, survey the microdiffusion of small drops of sweat, importation and exportation of steams, counterfeit of exhalation, how can one prevent the contact of crystalline vapors, how can one control the transparent devil that slides from an other’s skin to mine?” (my translation)

Testo Junkie (and what I would call, its updated appendix, the LOG essay) is very important as it insists on a micro-biological scale of design – that we can compare with macro scales – and its place within a global political, social and economic context and strategies. The resistance and subversion to these same strategies have therefore to understand this context as well as elaborate their own tactics at the various scales that capture the bodies. As always, there is no outside and therefore, any of these tactics have to be thought and accomplished from within.

The recent manhunt of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev in Boston was probably quite shocking to many non-Americans – and probably some Americans too -, for the anachronism it constituted. The latter was caused by the ability for a Police to empty an entire city and therefore implements a sort of state of emergency, as well as the “march of the heroes”, the multitude of police officers acclaimed by the crowd after they arrested their prey. There is a profound feudalism in such absoluteness and one has the right to wonder what motivates this disturbing joy.

Let us focus on the urban condition that contextualize this manhunt. I have been repeatedly writing in the past, each house through its impermeability due to the implementation of private property is susceptible to become a prison for the bodies living inside of it in the sudden legal implementation of a quarantine. For an important part of Boston, the quarantine was not implemented stricto sensu but it was highly recommend to each resident to stay inside and the context of fear created by the ubiquitous media made such a recommendation a quasi-order. In the areas of Boston where the police and army was actually deployed, the quarantine was very much effectuated as this article illustrates: Looking through the windows seems to have been prohibited and enforced through the threats of weapons.

While this event was unfolding I was thinking of the descriptions that Michel Foucault makes in his seminar Abnormal (Les Anormaux) at the College de France (1975) of a Medieval/Renaissance city when contaminated by the Plague. Foucault distinguishes two things historically: the negative reaction to cases of leprosy in the same city that consists in the effective exclusion of the sick bodies from it, to the point that they are declared socially dead; and the positive (in the sense that there is an inclusion) reaction to the Plague that provokes a state of emergency and the absolute reorganization of the city according to a quadrillage which has been not so well translated into partitioning. Quadrillage involves indeed a sort of physical or virtual partitioning of a space, but it also implies a detailed, systematic and extensive examination of this same space by a controlling entity. Such an action is thoroughly described by Foucault in his class of January 15th 1975 in this same seminar:

[…] the practice with regard to plague was very different from the practice with regard to lepers, because the territory was not the vague territory into which one cast the population of which one had to be purified. It was a territory that was the object of a fine and detailed analysis, of a meticulous spatial partitioning (quadrillage).

The plague town-and here I refer to a series of regulations, all  absolutely identical, moreover, that were published from the end of the Middle Ages until the beginning of the eighteenth century-was divided up into districts, the districts were divided into quarters, and then the streets within these quarters were isolated. In each street there were overseers, in each quarter inspectors, in each district someone in charge of the district, and in the town itself either someone was nominated as governor or the deputy mayor was given supplementary powers when plague broke out. There is, then, an analysis of the territory into its smallest elements and across this territory the organization of a power that is continuous in two senses. First of all, it is continuous due to this pyramid of control. From the sentries who kept watch over the doors of the houses from the end of the street, up to those responsible for the quarters, those responsible for the districts and those responsible for the town, there is a kind of pyramid of uninterrupted power. It was a power that was continuous not only in this pyramidal, hierarchical structure, but also in its exercise, since surveillance had to be exercised uninterruptedly. The sentries had to be constantly on watch at the end of the streets, and twice a day the inspectors of the quarters and districts had to make their inspection in such a way that nothing that happened in the town could escape their gaze. And everything thus observed had to be permanently recorded by means of this kind of visual examination and by entering all information in big registers. At the start of the quarantine, in fact, all citizens present in the town had to give their name. The names were entered in a series of registers. The local inspectors held some of these registers, and others were kept by the town’s central administration. Every day the inspectors had to visit every house, stopping outside and summoning the occupants. Each individual was assigned a window in which he had to appear, and when his name was called he had to present himself at the window, it being understood that if he failed to appear it had to be because he was in bed, and if he was in bed he was ill, and if he was ill he was dangerous and so intervention was called for. It was at this point that individuals were sorted into those who were ill and those who were not. All the information gathered through the twice-daily visits, through this kind of review or parade of the living and the dead by the inspector, all the information recorded in the register, was then collated with the central register held by the deputy mayors in the town’s central administration.

[…]
There is a literature of plague that is a literature of the decomposition of individuality; a kind of orgiastic dream in which plague is the moment when individuals come apart and when the law is forgotten. As soon as plague breaks out, the town’s forms of lawfulness disappear. Plague overcomes the law just as it overcomes the body. Such, at least, is the literary dream of the plague. But you can see that there was another dream of the plague: a political dream in which the plague is rather the marvelous moment when political power is exercised to the full. Plague is the moment when the spatial partitioning and subdivision (quadrillage) of a population is taken to its extreme point, where dangerous communications, disorderly communities, and forbidden contacts can no longer appear. The moment of the plague is one of an exhaustive sectioning (quadrillage) of the population by political power, the capillary ramifications of which constantly reach the grain of individuals themselves, their time, habitat, localization, and bodies. Perhaps plague brings with it the literary or theatrical dream of the great orgiastic moment. But plague also brings the political dream of an exhaustive, unobstructed power that is completely transparent to its object and exercised to the full.
Michel Foucault, Abnormal, Lectures at the College de France 1974-1975, translated by Graham Burchell, New York: Verso 2003.

Foucault’s style, as always, reinforces what he is saying: “Plague overcomes the law just as it overcomes the body.” (“La peste franchit la loi, comme la peste franchit les corps”), “a political dream in which the plague is rather the marvelous moment when political power is exercised to the full.” (“un reve politique de la peste, ou celle-ci est au contraire le moment merveilleux ou le pouvoir s’exerce a son plein”)… This dream was fully expressed on April 19th 2013 in Boston when the Police and the Army were occupying alone the public realm, quadrilling (I apologize for this neologism) the city and searching houses one by one. Without falling into a sort of paranoid interpretation of what happened then, we can suppose that the Police was not only searching for a man that day, but was also re-establishing a new administrative cartography, at least of the city in ideal conditions that will not reproduce for another long time. I am not necessarily suggesting that there was a deliberate plan for such a cartography but the thousand of pages that have probably been filed in the form of administrative reports have very similar characteristics than a more organized data collection and it would be surprising that they would not be used as such.

This voluntary and involuntary construction of an institutionalized knowledge is precisely what Foucault describes as being the foundation of a positive form of power that implements itself through the technique of the norm.:

The reaction to plague is a positive reaction; it is a reaction of inclusion, observation, the formation of knowledge, the multiplication of effects of power on the basis of the accumulation of observations and knowledge.

In this regard, the city of Boston and its police can be said to have reinforced its power through this exception-al reorganization of the city and constructed this knowledge in a more effective way in one day than what had probably been done in the few last years. When this political dream, that Foucault evokes, ended, Boston inhabitants thought that they were going back to a normal life when actually the norm had changed and the normal life would be more asserted as a normed life.

I am not quite sure to know the reasons that made me take so much time to write this article, three years after my last trip in Palestine; better late than never as one says so here it is: a majority of the photographs (see below) I took when I was there of the Israeli settlements in the West Bank. It seemed important here that I include only my own photographs in order to reduce the “degree of separation” between the readers and them.

Those photographs are important to me as they give another approach to the multitude of maps that have been traced to ‘cartograph’ the situation in Palestinian territories. The latter are effectively fundamental to understand the legal implications of the occupation but it also tends to desincarnate any discourse one might have about it. It is therefore extremely important to add to them a more subjective approach, not so much for emotion to emerge, but rather to trigger a clear understanding of the physicality of the occupation on the field. Without this understanding, everything remains abstract and in the realms of territories, thus forgetting that these territories are actually physical and host physical bodies on it.

I want to stress the fact that approaching the problem in a more incarnate and subjective way does not mean in any way that we should focus on the ‘news items’ however tragic they may be. What I mean by that is that what requires all our attention is what systematize the colonial organization of space and the bodies, what affects them on a daily basis. That might be less spectacular than the “news items” I was just evoking; however, there lies the real and durable condition of occupation. In this regard, I would like to link this article with another I wrote a bit more than a year ago entitled The Ordinary Violence of the Colonial Apparatuses in the West Bank that was addressing a similar dimension of the occupation through the various devices that control and hurt the Palestinian bodies on a daily basis.

This notion of ordinary violence, in opposition to the more spectacular/news one, is fundamental here as it involves a coldly thought strategy of power registered within the colonial organization of life. Of course, this ordinary violence is also the one that architecture takes care to provide thanks to its weight and non-penetrability. The settlements, in their own way, participate actively to this ordinary violence at several levels. The level of their very illegal existence of course, but also in the way they redirect the (restricted) flows of movement (by their location, but also by the private roads that link them to Israel) in the West Bank and finally in the sheltering of a population that sometimes – it is not true for all settlements – storm out of their base to attack the local population before storming back in immediately after.

The following documents allow to a certain extent to comprehend this ordinary violence. The map indicates where the photographed settlements are located in relation to the Area A & B on which the Palestinian Authority has a relative power. Further, each settlement is illustrated with its aerial view and my own photographs on the field.

Location of the Settlements on the Palestinian Archipelago Map: (all map and photographs except google earth are by the author 2010)

PESAGOT (Ramallah Region):

RIMMONIM (Ramallah Region):

MA’ALE ADUMMIM (East Jerusalem Region):

Hebron Region:

HAR HOMA (Bethlehem Region):

PISGAT ZE’EV (East Jerusalem Region):

GEVA BINYAMIN (East Jerusalem Region):

KOCHAV YA’AKOV (East Jerusalem Region):

SHILO & ELI (Nablus Region):

ARIEL (Salfit Region):

ENAV (Tulkarm Region):

About a week ago, the website of WNYC (a New York radio broadcast part of the National Public Radio) published a news according to which “The NYPD [New York Police Department] and a national laboratory will be studying how chemical weapons could spread in the air and throughout the subway system this summer in what is the first study of its kind in such a large urban environment.” The rest of the article is short enough for me to copy it here:

A few days ago, I visited the exhibition Gutai: Splendid Playground at New York Guggenheim Museum. That gave me the opportunity to get to know an artistic movement I was not familiar with beforehand. Although I was not necessarily fascinated by all the artwork presented (the two reasons being that it is somehow odd to put in an institutionalized museum a movement that was frankly against the idea of institutionalization of art, and that rather than showing the artwork itself, we would have gained from having access to the creative process itself as it is the real artistic production of Gutai), some of them compelled me for their relation of the body to the matter.

First of all, let us look at the very name of Gutai in its original Japanese writing: 具体 (as currently learning how to write in Japanese, I became obsessed with characters!) associates 具, the tool with 体, the body/substance, forming together the idea of embodiment or concrete. Let us then look to the Gutai Manifesto written by Jirō Yoshihara in 1956. In it, he explicits this relationship of their art with the matter:

Gutai Art does not alter matter. Gutai Art imparts life to matter. Gutai Art does not distort matter.
In Gutai Art, the human spirit and matter shake hands with each other while keeping their distance. Matter never compromises itself with the spirit; the spirit never dominates matter. When matter remains intact and exposes its characteristics, it starts telling a story and even cries out. To make the fullest use of matter is to make use of the spirit. By enhancing the spirit, matter is brought to the height of the spirit.
[...]
We believe that by merging human qualities and material properties, we can concretely comprehend abstract space.

Now that we have the tools (具!) to approach the two art works I would like to introduce here, we can proceed to present them within this broader context of an art movement. The first one, Challenging Mud (see photos below) is a documented performance of Kazuo Shiraga who put his naked body in a large puddle of mud and slowly interacted with it in a sort of physical struggle with the matter. It is said that his body was then bruised and ached from the effort, materializing and serving as a witness of this encounter of two material assemblages.

The second art work is also a documented performance. It was created and accomplished by Saburo Murakami in 1956 under the name Passing Through and it consisted in his body penetrating a series of craft paper screens at high speed. The photographs documenting this performance (see above and at the end of this article) are highly illustrative of the violence of such a material encounter. The decrease of speed of the body is manifest as it crosses more screen to a point that the viewer is allowed to wonder if it will reach the end of the series. Of course, what I am particularly interested in this specific work is the possibility for a body to gather enough energy to actually cross what I have been often describing as a unpenetrable barrier: a wall. Of course, the material is important here and what is possible with paper might not be with bricks (let us not forget that the traditional Japanese partition is made in paper); what is really important here is the visual report of the violence of a body affronting a wall: the pain is readable and the whole left in the same wall is a testimony to the latter’s own form of pain. Somehow, both bodies seems diminished from this encounter (that is what allows us to truly call it “violent”); nevertheless, the joy of the body who “vanquished” the physical assemblage that the wall constituted and the joy of the wall to acquire a sort of artistic uniqueness that celebrates its encounter with the body, sublime this violence to make of it a powerful work of art.

Challenging Mud by Kazuo Shiraga (1955)

Passing Through by Saburo Murakami (1956)

Few days ago, Daniel Fernandez Pascual posted a very interesting project on his fantastic Deconcrete. Entittled Closed Architecture, this book created by Jonas Staal is exploring in a very interesting way the architecture thesis project of a woman called Fleur Agema, who since became a member of the Dutch Parliament on the list of a party that is unfortunately illustrative of what the right wing looks like in Europe currently (neo-liberal economic policies, conservative immigration and mores policies). J. Staal simply studied F. Agema’s thesis text and project and re-interpreted them visually according to what such a project would actually looks like if implemented by governmental policies. The images below are part of a much larger book that Jonas Staal proposes to download on his website.

Before analyzing what that might tell us about practicing architecture, I would like to introduce briefly the project (I highly recommend to read the whole book). As an architecture student, Fleur Agema imagines a prison whose prisoner population is spread into four different buildings corresponding each with a phase of incarceration. Quoting J. Staal’s book directly here:

The model that Agema has developed focuses on the reconditioning of prisoners by means of four phases. In the first version they are called, “The Bunker – The Habituation – The Wait – The Light” (see p. 33), and in the final version, “The Fort – The Encampment – The Artillery Installation – The Neighborhood” (see p. 99). “The Fort” is modeled after the ancient design of the dungeon, and is meant to break the prisoner’s resistance; “The Encampment” is a camp with vegetable gardens to stimulate independence; “The Artillery Installation” is a type of commune in which the prisoners have to learn to operate collectively; and “The Neighborhood” is essentially a reconstruction of a residential neighborhood filled with hidden cameras, where the prisoners live a simulated life in order to verify whether they are yet fully capable of functioning within society.

The images that follow this article are the visualizations that J. Staal did to illustrate F. Agema’s ideas, I chose to include each times three perspectives (outside/inside/room) to make the comparison easier to observe.

One could write an extensive article about the fact that the system of punishments and rewards thought by F. Agema, although based on what I suppose are “good intentions”, is profoundly problematic for the vision of society it represents. That is something I will do only at a limited level here as my point is elsewhere. Firstly, there is this very problematic question that I have been repeatedly asking myself along the lines of this blog’s articles many times: Should I, as an architect, accept to design a prison? And if not as the easy answer seems to be suggested, what about a bank, a retail store, a shopping mall, a police office, a factory? all these buildings that I would probably have ideas to ameliorate a tiny bit, but that remain profoundly productive of a model of society that I do not approve. To this question, F. Agema seems to have a very clear answer: yes she would certainly design a prison. On the other hand, it seems only fair as her ethics seems to have a bigger issue with the prisons as they currently are (who wouldn’t ?) than with the prisons as what they are intrinsically: an instrument of absolute capture of one’s body as a form of punishment and example to the rest of the bodies.

For the sake of the argument then, let us look closer to the model she proposes. It is true that phasing (a theoretical popular idea) seems to be potentially helpful for the reconversion of a prisoner into society as current prisons and their conditions of life almost always make people “worse” (again, I am thinking within the argument that prisons are legitimate) than when they entered them. The idea of phasing seems then appropriate. However, in this specific case, the phasing is not based on time but rather, on merit. The lowest level of incarceration is even worse than the current carceral conditions in order to force prisoners to be part of this system. The politics of the carrot and the stick are known to be completely counter-emancipative as in both cases of the reward and the punishment, the body is “granted” something from a transcendental entity and therefore never gives it the chance to inscribe itself in an immanent condition in which it will acts for itself and not for what will be given to it “from above”. Such a societal scheme is symptomatic of the meritocracy valued by the capitalist ideology that always redirect the object of desire in such a long chain that the absurdity of it is lost in its process: “I want to work, because I want to get money, because I want to be able to go to vacations because I want to rest etc.”

The argument I wanted to make here however, is different. Oftentimes I go to attend jurys in Architecture school, assignment that I must admit I usually enjoy even though I can see how much its traditional performative version would need a serious makeover. Very often during these jurys, I am compelled by the fact that many students do not seem to quite fathom the subject that they are engaging. The problem is not really to know who is to blame for that here (students, teachers, schools or the system itself) as it is probably a bit everything; rather we should think of ways to make sure that it does not happen. The great interest I have for Jonas Staal’s book here is that it gives a very credible vision of the way passionate, yet naive ideas developed by a student can materialize in reality. In that specific case, these same ideas seem to have caught back the student as she became a politician and a more and more conservative one. Nevertheless, in other cases, one’s ideas, when considered lightly for whichever reasons, might manifest in reality in a very different way (usually in a bad way!) than the one originally intentioned. I know that I usually mean the notion of “weaponized architecture” in an oppressive or empowering way, but here I would like to stress that this weapon should not be taken lightly. I am in no way calling for a serious, pure and austere practice of architecture like the moderns used to, on the contrary, I think that the playful and joyful practice of architecture can be deeply rigorous and politically active. My text seemed addressed to students earlier as the prison project here was made in school, but this really applies to all architects and actors of the other creative disciplines: We are responsible for the ideas we “put on the table” and that includes the unthought consequences that might emerge from them.

Closed Architecture (excerpts) by Jonas Staal:

Next renderings were produced directly by Fleur Agema for her project in 1999: