Week 4: Programme, Event, Gesture

Key Readings:

Allen: Mapping the Unmappable - On Notation

de Certeau: Walking in the City

Koolhaas, Tschumi: 2 Architects, 10 Questions on Programme

This week, another set of texts which are very pertinent to the current design studio. Currently we are continuing our study of Cours Julien in Marseille, and some point soon will start to design pieces to test our ideas and the tectonic language that we are developing. As yet we have no idea as to what programme these will have, and may indeed be without programme. However, the ideas of Tschumi seem to us a good starting point for thinking about programme and event in our design. His belief that architects always have their own agenda is very relevant here, and when the time comes for us to think about the programme for our projects, we will not be able to have a passive attitude towards programme. Koolhaas' idea of the city as a programme is also of interest - does Marseille have a programme? It could be said with some certainty that areas of Marseille have a very distinct agenda - we recently found a French term for the inhabitants of our study area, Bobos - bourgeois bohemian - which describes the community's agenda quite well.

In the Manhattan Transcripts, ice skaters, tightrope walkers and military battalions overlap, creating a richly layered programmatic or event space. We believe that the nature of Cours Julien is heterotopic (using Lefebvre's definition of the term). This can already be seen in an investigation into the site's music scene, but its events and programmes also give weight to this argument. Some of those which we aim to record in our constructed site drawings:

- The first balloon ride across the Mediterranean, which took flight from La Pleine in 1899

- The collapse of a pioneering concrete bridge at Rue d'Aubagne in 1867

- The diurnal, weekly, and annual rhythms of Cours Julien

- Santa's sleigh meets a jazz trio, with cats sleeping on cars underground

Stan Allen's ideas on drawing and notation are very interesting in relation to our work as designers. The drawings below (and at the top of this blog) make attempts at temporal and anticipatory drawings of projects. I think that we can learn quite a lot from landscape architects, who have to consider the life and growth cycles of plants in their design work - it is an aim that I have had for a while now, to develop this multi-perspectival temporal drawing, moving through a landscape scheme across the seasons.

However, these drawings fail on several levels to be the kind of notation that Allen calls for - they are still very much analogue drawings, not the digital drawings where difference between reality and the image makes them more powerful. Similarly, they do not represent the invisible conditions of the projects - of particular interest to me of course is the sonic environment of a project. We will probably be working with a combination of analogue drawings and digital diagrams with our design projects, in order to convey different aspects of the scheme.

Allen's description of allographic and autographic arts is something that I had come across in my 2nd year music course, as well as in my research into Liszt last semester. The definitions are broadly speaking, very strong, however in relation to music, it is not as clear cut as Allen makes out. Can free improvised jazz really be considered to be allographic? This is further complicated with recording and editing technologies. Liszt was also one of the first musicians in the school of thought (against Schumann), who thought that the performance of music was much more important than the musical score, giving rise to the virtuoso performer.

De Certeau's chapter provides a good counterpoint to the grammatical view of architecture offered by Eisenman in last week's lecture and reviews. His and Tschumi's ideas of human activities creating space and performitivity interest Tom and I in our design work (mainly coming from Tom's house for Django Reinhardt - mine for Liszt was more about the construction of the piano than Liszt's performances). The text

provides an interesting (but complex) theoretical background to Tschumi's work. We are working at the moment mainly on the grammar and vocabulary of our architectural proposals, but soon we will need to consider the rhetoric, and for that, de Certeau and Tschumi will be good starting points. However, the big question is how to move on from the stage which both have brought us to today?

To end with a distortion of Tschumi's words:

To really appreciate architecture, you may even need to play music. Music in the Street differs from Music in the Cathedral in the same way as love in the Street differs from the Street of Love. Radically

Week 1: Fields, Diagrams, Mapping

Key readings:

James Corner - The agency of mapping

Deleuze and Guattari - Introduction: Rhizome

Ben van Berkel, Caroline Bos - Diagrams - Interactive instruments in operation

The ideas of each of the authors help focus the design studio work, where we are trying to map aspects of Marseille. The Deleuze and Guattari introduction on rhizomatic thinking in particular has been inspirational, whilst the Corner reminded us that mapping is actually an incredibly creative act. In addition, the examples of contemporary mapping strategies, whilst familiar, were explained in a clear way, which made them useful precedents. I found the van Berkel and Bos essay frustrating in its reductive style, making leaps between ideas which were not well explained (perhaps I need to look into the examples of Foucault, Bacon, and Proust more myself in order to get more out of it). The fairly literal transfer of diagram to building also feels a little contrived.

The challenge has been taking these ideas into design. I suspect that however much we try, our maps still stay to some extent tracings of what we found on the ground.

Back in week 1 (this is a retrospective upload...), I was working with Thom on mapping the aural architecture of Marseille (above). This could be a narrow field of interest, but attempting to think rhizomatically opens the potential to connect threads of ideas about sound to other fields of interest, social, political and infrastructural amongst others. Now a couple of weeks later, with hindsight we are looking at the one of the same geographic areas from that time, but looking at the 'casing' and 'voids' within the city (below, in progress). For me, the casing is a direct follow-on from the piano metaphor I used last semester, the term is useful on several levels, including on a sonic level. As a method of mapping, this already seems more productive. It is a much more critical creation of a field, onto which extracts, as existing and new interventions are being plotted (Corner's terms). As a result of this careful selection of voids and casing, we are coming to understand the meaning these terms have in Marseille (a point that is very relevant to week 3's readings on semiotics).

If, as Corner suggests, by the creation of this map we transfer agency from ourselves to it, then it will help direct our own design projects. This would combine an understanding of the field in which we are working (Marseille) and our own interests (the piano, fill in other blanks as I work out what they are...). At the moment, I don't envisage our study site being one for my final thesis project, but being able taking 'lines of flight' to other areas of the city might be a clue as to how to develop the project further.

"Music has always sent out lines of flight... musical form... is comparable to a weed, a rhizome." Deleuze & Guattari, p. 11-12

Later, in the 11th chapter of A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze & Guattari refer directly to the music of Pierre Boulez as an example of the rhizome in music. Another example would be the pure milieu of Ligeti's Clocks and Clouds, where the music oscillates between points and flows of sound, thus setting up a field condition in which no discernible cadences can be found, no beginning, or end.