Author: Rick Arellano | Category: #computation | Published: april 22, 2024
Five years ago, the architects were there, in one of the places to be, Harvard. Michael Hays presents them, and they start doing what they always do, same slides, same projects (they re-arrange them according to the occasion), and then time to answer some questions.
I’ve seen many interviews with Mauricio and Sofia, but no student before had the nerve to ask about computation, especially after they visited the Illinois Institute, last year. Kind of the place to relate with technology and architecture. But the student asked what we all wanted to know: “What are your thoughts about computation in architecture?”
I press pause.
My previous sense about this is that computation for them is about levers and moving pieces, predictable.
Then, they stay away from the overemphasis on tools these days.
Pezo is an architecture office located in Concepción, Chile. It’s a couple, plus some interns and external contractors. They do both art and architecture. In the art camp, they tend to do artisan series, which requires a concern for multiplying geometry. They can get away without much concern for tools, as shown in Chicago once with the inverted T, the 129 paintings variations.
I bet on that occasion they used a generator, but probably done by an external or intern who knew a bit more about how to do the array.
That’s enough?
I guess they are right.
So what is it?
If you can bring clients and outsource engineering and computation would be enough. And focus solely on architecture.
But why then have I always tried to dodge this fact and tried to show them this blind spot?
I resume the video of the lecture at the Harvard GSD.
He points out half-joking in his calm style.
Harvard is a university in Boston, the same city where the MIT hacker folklore was developed from the ground up, a culture so seductive for me, to the point of distracting me from architecture.
I did get attached to machinery somehow, now that I think of it.
The MIT hacker folklore is the story of the first hackers, the railroad model club, and the fascination for LISP (a programable programming language) and physics.
It’s like. Architects usually don’t preoccupy themselves with physics. Kind of the same answer. Yes, it’s true, and yet we outsource almost all of it (structural analysis).
I can try to read between the lines of Pezo’s essays, a series done in the earlier years of his practice. And I can’t find anything on computation.
In the 20s, Corbusier was taking the machinery age in. But his answers were the pilotis and a couple of other old-school executions.
There have been multiple tries to bring the hard sciences to architecture, without much success beyond technological facades and fancy equipment.
And yet, in the New Zealand project, a later development from the same architecture studio, they explored technical water systems and complex machinery details, to get an effect: wet columns every day. Which, I’m sure the outsourced team took it with great seriousness and professionalism.
On the other side. The very problem of search in architecture, like what we did with solar mansard with energy efficiency, or the work of Mendes with the test of sound halls, shows that architectural or model search can be useful, only to the extent that you don’t bring it down towards a heuristic, a shortcut. Once you have the shortcut, the power knowledge, we are set and computation is a throwaway. Kind of like the perfectly working TV screen (we don’t see the actual equipment).
I get back to the meat of the answer they give at the Harvard School of Design:
I get back to thinking it’s only the myth of computation in this era, maybe. Or maybe a selling point for me to get in and start collaborating with the office.
So I start thinking why Pezo’s office seems the place to be. Or at least it was.
Rationally, they have a neat resume and body of work. But I bet there’s a myth also. Of a two-person team pushing and questioning the very limits of the fields of art and architecture.
Wait a minute.
Let’s go slow here.
How do I get to know this?
I’ve read about them, and I’ve seen their projects. I’ve watched the institutions they relate to. But there is something else.
The only way I see them doing their projects is by treating architecture as machinery, kind of making architecture a device to transmit the points of view and self-assessments of the people behind them.
Now we are in the middle of something.
If that’s true, there is another kind of problem. As I reflect on this, I also start to second-guess this notion.
Architecture and atavistic buildings are not only machinery. They can be viewed as machinery, but that would be too dull. But let’s check that assumption.
There is a known art form in every project. Art is a big part of what they do.
If we detour and think about art, the realm of computation has also been explored by artists everywhere.
I consider that artists may be that shortcut to finding cool things and new takes into their practice. Maybe art is machinery for them?
We don’t know.
So, if architecture deals with reality and the struggle, that they mention is part of his practice, we are dealing with a crossfire between the whole art camp and the whole technological and machinery side. Kind of reflects the inner contradictions of any project.
I start thinking about James P Carse, an author who touches the finite play, the struggle of doing something is here closely related to forcing a specific outcome, otherwise would be nothing to resist.
What would James P. Carse have said to Pezo? Maybe he’s right. Dismiss machinery. Use it at a minimum. But we don’t know.
Robert M. Prisig would say the contrary in any case. I bet Loos knew something about this also.
I get back to the next part of the answer.
Hayes, a professor known for knowing a lot about Hegel and other philosophical concepts, nods at this point. Pezo closes with: “So it’s more conceptual than technical”.
If we put some time into this. Is more nuanced than my current abilities allow. And yet, a set of tentative axioms can be relevant for later.
computation is the ability to construct without needing other people, using levers to assemble an interactive product that can generate images and forms from a series of how’s, rather than being just like physics concerned with the what and their simplifications.
- Architecture as a construction in the material realm, that can provide dwellings for humans inside or beside, generated by cultural associations that transmit something beyond the very dwelling.
- Hacker myth as the cultural current generated in the US that portrays young men in control and a high sense of play about computation.
- Pezo’s architecture shows a high degree of concern with architecture as an object, placed there as if were there for a long time.
- My contribution as a gamble between art, architecture, and computation, including philosophical questions that address the need for the machine and the way of being in a state of surprise, thus opening possibilities in architecture.
——
I rest a bit, and I start to remember that for this office, there are perfect machines, like the bull ring. A construction so ingrained as an archetypical yet useful object becomes a working building without much care for the building part nor the exact measures, but even then, is a pure transmission of cultural affairs that gets constructed in multiple ways and sizes. Plus, is circular, a shape that gets praise here and there, and, is a theater in some form for a defined audience, coming from the Spanish tradition.
Kind of what would be an archetypical figure in the hero’s journey, represented by many forms and types of characters? A myth, again.
What about art? Pezo mentions in one of his essays the cardboard constructions of Bruno Munari, which worked so well as a gift, dedicated to showing balances and three-dimensional relations in time in a simple way. And yet, their purpose was completely achieved as only that. The hateful comparisons are there, of course (Calder). But that doesn’t even faze Munari’s aim.
Pezo called these constructions art, an object done with this usefulness-other. With meaning, but not practical in any other way.
Carse also touches on this idea of usefulness, when speaking about his Death and Existence book as the most useless book ever.
There is something here.
If we follow that architecture is machinery, Carse would point out that is machinery for power over each other. Certainly, corridors can lead us in specific ways, but also against clients themselves, who plan out dwelling for themselves and planning a way of moving beforehand, so with an end in mind, thus a finite game.
Spatial explorations can be infinite, but the case-by-case considerations for the inhabitant are a finite result, of course.
So, for Pezo, I bet computational machines may be so small and deal only with binary flops that are irrelevant to their practice. Computational machines seem to be only a representation of the scale of human beings, thus the scale of architecture, which includes institutional relations and value exchanges. Kind of the comparison of an account as in accounting, alongside real monetary transactions.
If there exists any interest in the origins of architecture, we can attest to a serious mystery also around the origins of computation. We can try to trace it to math, the abacus to the war deciphers, or we can speak only post-transistor era, which includes the computer for personal uses, thus associated with home. Those were the predictions of one of the major brands in modern computing, which proved to be lucrative.
But there is a missing link I guess. There is a golden era represented by autoLisp, the core language behind earlier versions of AutoCAD that troubles me.
I see what the book on computational architecture has to say, so I pick the book named: the Codewritting Workbook by an Illinois professor.
I search and I found something on the advantages of the computational approach:
- They expose the parameters controlling a concept, making it easier for them to be evaluated, reviewed, and understood.
- The code within a given procedure could specify the essential properties of an artifact.
And on limitation:
- They require some initial knowledge or intent to determine the best parameters controlling a design.
What seems to be here is that computation, aside from the concerns about the advances in the micro-computer, is a way to make things easier, find the essence, and be able to store procedures (a way of doing things).
But the problem seems to be that there’s more about the tool than about architecture and culture. At least for now. There is some emphasis on fabrication, but kind of put in a way only to give a certain materiality to the linear designs. Fabrication does not equal construction, right?
What I see, for now, it’s that is another tool for the craftsman, and yet the book is very hard to use in my experience. Due to the current state of the software, the commercial and arbitrary limitations of AutoCAD leave the core of auto lisp for a C-based compilation. Thus, making AutoLISP a mere fun thing. Not fundamentally necessary, not for the main player at least. But, as Paul Graham, an author who gives praise and detail to certain strengths of Lisp, points out, there is something on Lisp, that even when being a loser language (not very popular, not very practical), maybe the hundred-year language. This may not be relevant to design in architecture, but longevity could still play in the cultural sense, that influences architecture in some, yet to determine ways.
——-
I keep reading.
If ‘The Codewritting Workbook’ spans the idea of controlling design, even design choices. Carse, the author who revises finite and infinite games would point out that:
- To use the machine for control is being controlled by the machine.
This is akin to the saying of Greg Simmel about money.
- Whoever serves money is ‘his slave’s slave’.
The relationship between those two is quite extraordinary.
In a way, money is the physical representation of the relationship between objects, and people using them to do something they cannot do by themselves.
Machinery is a way to cut corners similarly, by allowing rationality to enter, thus diverting ourselves from the vitality we have within, and considering it as fuel for the very artifact at our disposal, that ends up shaping the way we do things.
I cannot claim yet to be precise in this, but as we preoccupy with rationality, even if it’s for the creation of organic programs that include part of the vitality, as in lisp, it’s always the fuel for a defined goal, thus serious and not playful, as stated.
If architecture serves more than societal goals, the delta between cultural relations and societal aims is what interests us here.
As with money, we are not concerned only with consumption and power plays, but with relationships between people, and their way of extending a tradition (doing things we cannot do by ourselves).
But objects, as well as artifacts, including architectural ‘objects’ are valued and priced consequently.
Today is especially easier to price artifacts that have some kind of high-end design embedded, thus, as Carse points out, obtaining some genius by giving away ours (By the way, one of the pitfalls of displaying a style).
The dangers of design are quite an issue for the lone craftsman, who prefers simple tools and mastery of their tedious use.
But If we review and take architecture as a simple machine, included in a place to serve the garden and the vitality of its inhabitants, we are set.
But I want, on the other side reach a cultural or strict societal role, that can be an instrument for something else, thus no longer serving vitality only.
So it’s a razor edge. It cannot be mere construction, and a sort of basic warehouse, but neither be a technological device in which we find ourselves. Or at least, it wouldn’t serve the human or collective that intended it.
But where is computation here?
Lisp is hard. To immerse on Lisp is to give way too much emphasis to machinery. Thus, keeping us off-balance toward an architectural aim. We are not sure of this yet. But at least we are in the poiesis of it.
But let’s check.
Architecture that is not vitality may be akin to death and predictability, thus, explicitly being what Loos describes when it says: ‘that is architecture!’. There may be tokens here and then of death in architecture, kind of like the death of the author. But marketing keywords aside, there is something here.
By its atavistic position that stays, even when the players are no longer there. It’s continued play. Kind of allowing after-play.
In the crossfire mentioned earlier, architecture may be the resulting emblem of peace or the token of defeat in the very struggle. If this is a finite artifact. But what if this tends to be an infinite artifact like the bull ring? An archetype.
Computation may play a role in directing us towards the machine, with the danger of being in style, thus no longer serving us. But what if we are about to play with it in a long-term fashion?
Computation may be a discipline in itself, that has a particular set of traditions, even young traditions. That might influence the struggle towards the habitant’s side if we can call it like that.
There is again something very convoluted. But the aim here is to find the relation between machinery and perfect machines like the archetypical bull ring.
——
In a way, original or not, Pezo’s office has always represented the same. A practice.
With the art installations (instant operations), 120 doors, Rivo, and Poli they have already won (in a social ranking sense). The question is how far they go in increasing awareness and resistance of the same idea, thus reaffirming the initial win (the one-hit wonder, even if they claim there’s nothing to hit).
Maybe, as winners have to prove over and over they are winners. I’m sure this is a finite game in which these players open to surprise and vitality engage in a game.
I can’t prove this, but they got into the hearts of students and envious colleagues, by the use of rigor and admitting that the conversation just starts when there is rigor, thus the intention is showcased clearly and without bluff.
Material elements like plastic bags and balloons, or architectural elements are used as a language, even if nobody seems to care, as stated in their public art essays and lectures. But we do.
It is certainly a question of clarity, value, reality, and institutions, in play with the elements chosen to transmit those cultural ideas, be a series of doors that act like a wall, or a balcony wide enough to act like a bedroom, or an exterior enclosed enough to act like an interior, or a path and choice point that acts as a gamble, to show the equivalence, thus diminishing the meaning of the very choice (a way of control the mode of habitation, thus maybe controlled by this very idea, following Carse’s rule).
Maybe that’s their core, that cannot be reduced further, that shows that some decisions are pointless, others pointless as art and gardening, and others at the level of social choice.
The nature of things may say another thing, but that’s part of what they want.
Learn more about computation & architecture:
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https://github.com/rarellanoc/questionoforigins
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