Control | Power | Flow: Imagination or Insurrection
Architecture - Institution - Infrastructure
Critic: Ed Keller Visiting professor: Douglas Diaz TA: Ezio Blasetti
Summer 2006 GSAPP AAD Design Studio

"[in the summer of 68], Foucault ...had been invited to become the chairman of a philosophy department, to be located at a new experimental campus in Vincennes, near Paris. DeGaulle's minister of education, Edgar Faure, had launched a bold series of reforms, aimed to streamline the educational system, - and also to defuse the student movement. Vincennes was to be Faure's showcase. A model institution, it was to be democratic, interdisciplinary, on the cutting edge of current research. At the same time, it was to be a magnet for dissidents: by drawing radical students out of the Latin Quarter, to a campus located outside of the city limits, the disruptive impact of the militants could be isolated- this at least, was the gambit."
The Passion of Michel Foucault, Miller

This studio will critically engage architecture's potential to deliver the agency necessary to move beyond merely potential constructions, and develop truly alternative conditions of reality. As a set of control points to begin, we will investigate the line between starting, stopping or facilitating an insurrection. This is to say, that given a certain political stance one could stop an insurrection [as the French in Algeria in the 1950s] or facilitate one [students and radicals worldwide in 1968]. Insurrections should be understood as moments of actualized agency, albeit varying in intensities (violent, passive, dormant, permanent), scales (individual, collective, or crowds) and sites of action (infrastructure, architecture, culture, economy or dogmas), that have the capacity to crystallize systems of control or freedom. In as much as cities have been designed as places of fortification, they have also been places of great escape.

We will address the tension between documentary (the real) and narrative (fiction) in the studio and test the differences that can exist between landscapes of the imagination (potential realities) and imaginary landscapes (alternative realities). There is a great need to bootstrap the imaginary onto the imagination, which is to say the alternative onto the potential, which is the process of architecture in as much as we can bring things (cities, systems, buildings, destinies, etc) into being. Implied in the program is a consideration of multiple scales in the design process, ranging from the physical and architectural, up thru the infrastructural and the socioeconomic. We will address the problems of design, site, and larger geopolitical context.

Contemporary problems of the institution
Historically unprecedented relationships begin to emerge as the centuries old idea of a 'state of exception' finds new and ever more global channels to operate through. The contemporary boundaries of global institutions create utterly new forms of territory, and these require a different range of urban and architectural solutions. Societies of control compel subjects to repeat a given set of (social, economic, political or cultural) values and norms that institutions uphold. On the other hand, alternative practices of freedom entail the transformation of restrictive mandates into a free play of the imaginary and intellectual opportunity.

Today an emerging space of freedom and agency may have a chance to install the sociopolitical intensities envisioned by Constant in his New Babylon schemes; finally activated and responsive to a general economy on a physical level, for better or worse. This economy, in Georges Bataille’s sense, uncovers unexpected transitive relationships in the world system of politics, culture, money, energy and information. As the nation-state truly vanishes as a meaningful construct, the tectonic plates of sociopolitical Drift govern all systems, behaviors and interactions.

Previously our consciousness as a global culture has evolved in the computational processes in cities and in the living bodies that pass through them, interacting through elaborate instruction sets for use: zoning, political and economic borders, aesthetic systems, and the fury of daily life: cultural exchange, genetic intermingling, and what Julio Cortazar calls, quite simply ‘…Invention, high challenge of the phoenix.’

In one version of the world system, this ‘game’ [we use the term 'game' as a near abstraction] requires rigid codifications to make an impact in everyday life and in the hardware practices of the city. Zoning, construction techniques, military maneuvers: these definitions of action are a prerequisite to turn the city into a gameboard. And substantial time, energy, and capital is required for this.

An alternate set of possibilities however, may lie within the hardware of the city and the glacial political/socio/economic systems we all inhabit. Urbanity, architecture, and cultural structures in general are vast, responsive external memory systems contemporary technologies are an evolving nervous system for the storage and retrieval process. This might be the place where freedom emerges, mixing wild energy, passive and subtle resistances, and love, with Julio Cortazar’s concept of ‘invention’.

"Nonviolence is the answer to the crucial political and moral questions of our time; the need for mankind to overcome oppression and violence without resorting to oppression and violence. Mankind must evolve for all human conflict a method which rejects revenge, aggression, and retaliation. The foundation of such a method is love."
Martin Luther King Jr., December 11, 1964