Week 6: Technology, Infrastructure, Hardware

Key readings:

Latour - Mixing Humans and Nonhumans together: The Sociology of a Door-Closer

Zaera Polo - The Politics of the Envelope: A Political Critique of Materialism

Graham & Marvin - Splintering Urbanism: Introduction

Latour's essay on 'the sociology of a door-closer' seems to affirm the position of the course here at Edinburgh, where architecture is seen as a social product (although as Zaera Polo reminds us, also political, economic, technical...). His argument wittily shows how studying social relations purely between humans is a false idea, since it grossly oversimplifies the complex relations between humans and non-humans. For us, we can look at it from the other perspective - to study the relations between spaces and (non-humans) without looking at the social relations that occur around and within them would be false, since it ignores the fact that social relations are written into the architecture that we create.

Zaera Polo's opening gambit got me interested, but I found his way of writing convoluted and perhaps as a result, many of the ideas seemed unconvincing. He claims to be investigating the politics in architecture, but then constructs an argument entirely around the envelope, which he claims gives us the most potential. However, the reduction to 4 different types of envelope and the different political battlegrounds they come with seemed a little too simplistic (although perhaps it was necessarily so). Especially in light of Tschumi's approach, Zaera Polo seemed to take a very uncritical approach to programme, simply equating function with a formal typology. As a result I felt that he really missed an opportunity to engage with something that could be strongly political - if we don't question the programme, can we really design critically for it?

At this stage of the design process, Splintering Urbanism is the easiest text to relate to. We have been looking at the development of our site over time (below right), trying to discover what its 'agenda' is. Part of this has involved looking the transport links of the site (See below left. As yet, we do not come close to Graham & Marvin's aspiration that architects involve all kinds of infrastructure in their analysis). Our site has gained significance through strong transport links (Part of the first 'ring road,' early tram connections, metro, and underground car parking). It might be an interesting study to see which areas have been detrimentally affected by the changes which strengthened our site.

As we start to design fragments of our projects, the ideas of Latour (and perhaps Zaera Polo) become more relevant. We are looking at the interface between a 19th Century axis and the Cours Julien area of Marseille, trying to understand how we can design for this condition of a strongly independent area in contrast to a large scale urban strategy. Understanding the social and political relations embedded in the space will be key to the success of any design moves.

The combination of Latour's deconstruction of human and non human relations with the ideas of networks and urbanism reminded me of this news story from September. Clearly in this case, the delegation of a task from human messenger to non-human carrier pigeon (via computer, memory stick etc.) is more effective than to an unreliable network...

In the tutorial we had an interesting discussion following on from Grimshaw's lecture on Monday. His architecture references machines throughout, exposing the structure of the building, and in the FT printworks showing the mechanism of printing the papers. However, in an age where technology is compact and hidden behind an ipod case, the machine reference is no longer relevant. To what references can we design, or does this new technological era lead even more towards bubble architecture?