Carlos Alberto Romay Vergara is architect.

He was born in La Paz, Bolivia in 1968

and studied at the Faculty of Architecture of the Universidad Mayor de San Andrés
in La Paz and in the Katholieke Universiteit of Leuven, Belgium, where he obtained
the Master in Architecture in Human Settlements in 2002. He has been professor of
History of Architecture at the U.M.S.A., La Paz and has held the position of lecturer
in the field of Morphology in Design in different universities. He has recently won a
place for a Master Course in Advanced Architectural Design at the Faculty of
Architecture of the Oxford Brookes University, Oxford, UK, and the John Henry
 Brookes scholarship in the same university for the year 2009.

HISTORIES=PLATEAUS by Carlos A. Romay Vergara.

0/5. INSTRUCTIONS.
Summary:

I) The Name of the Book.

II) Objectives.
III) Content.
1) Several Books in One.
2) Map of the Book.
IV) This Chapter's Bibliography.
V) General Bibliography of the Five Chapters.
VI) The Author.

I) The Name of the Book.

This book is on Architectural History. History is not merely a narration of the past in which the
historian justifies ideologies but a provision of non-restrictive views which establish a net of
connections among historical lines and plateaus of History. My view does not establish points but
continuities. History is a plateau, an unrestricted scenario of multiple combinations in which critical
connections are possible, as follows the theory of 'Rhizomes' by Deleuze and Guattari (depicted in
the book that has the same name).

The name of the book, ‘Histories=Plateaus’, alludes the relationship existent between both terms.
The ‘=’ sign opens a process in which one of the terms must move in order to become the other.
Hence, to keep the equivalence the relation has to be more than mimetic, as if the title were
‘History~Plateau’ (that would be read as ‘History similar to Plateau’, in which there is a partial
equivalence). The ‘=’ sign implies that one term of the equivalence has to move in order to
accomplish the identity of the other. The equivalence in this case denotes movement. History is
always in movement and in permanent transformation. Furthermore, the content of the book
discovers new relationships that have the capacity of influencing the present and the future.

The book supports the concept of Modern and Contemporary Architectural History as a transverse
rather than lineal field through references to the oeuvre of architectural practices whose thought is
quoted. Through comparison, the oeuvre of outstanding authors is mentioned as example of the
evolution of concepts in different times and spaces.

Writing a book that may be arranged in different sequences establishes a whole that precludes
rigidity and definition. Hence, the book suggests through configurations the connections in the
infinite plateau that History is. Being primordially social, History follows the trace of social
relationships as a plateau too. In this sense, I propose five essays (which constitute the chapters of
the book ) in which the definition of the concept of Rhizomatic History profiles through the book's
configurations, numeric and diagrammatic sequences of movements.

II) Objectives.
The objective of the book is to question the traditional view of History as a justified and orderly
sequence of events that have a linear structure. Numbers from one to five were attached to the
chapters of the book to identify each chapter through its numeric and individual diagrammatic
sequence.

Chapter One is ‘Concepts and Diagrams’.

Chapter Two is ‘Connections and Links in Time ’.
Chapter Three is ‘Questionings to Repetition’.
Chapter Four is ‘History Without Structures'.
Chapter Five is ‘The Architecture of Differences’.

Numbers attached are random; the order does not have any signification. Number one does not
mean that such a chapter is the beginning of the book. Chapter Two is neither the antecedent of
Chapter Three nor consequence of Chapter One. Occasionally some of the chapters may be used in
order to clarify others, but this connection is not decisive: a chapter is not requisite for other. As a
consequence, every chapter may be read independently.

The following matrix provides the number of the chapter, its name and its individual objective

Table 1:

Number
that Chapter's Name. Chapter's Objective.
Designates
To discover the transformation of meaning
1 Concepts and Diagrams.
in the work of art and architecture.
Connexion's and Links in To detect relationships among buildings in
2
Time. different times and spaces.
To criticize the role of tradition and
3 Questionings to Repetition.
domesticity in architecture.
To select a vocabulary of spatial concepts
4 History Without Structures.
through the analysis of buildings.
The Architecture of To classify lines of Architecture in the
5
Differences. present moment of Modernism.

Each chapter’s objective is the same cognitive level as the other chapters’ objective (Creative level),
so that they may be read in any order. If the chapters’ objective were inferior cognitive level (for
instance, informative, reproductive or productive level), some sequences would be mandatory,
establishing a forced link from the inferior to the superior level of cognition. On the other hand,
they are all the same level to provide liberty in the combination of chapters.

III) Content.

In this book various objects are comprised:

1) Several books according to the combinations of the chapters.

2) A map of the book.

1) Several Books in One:

What does writing a book imply? Are there other fields open when it is written?

Writing this book opens its own content but also the possibility of questioning the hierarchies and
rigorous reading order of a common book. Hence, this book proposes breaking lineation through a
process in which the content of the book is referred to its structure in order to establish a rhizome of
chapters.

On the other hand, some implications exist in questioning an established order, in this case the order
of common books. Furthermore, questioning may be extended to the destruction of dominant social
structures in the work of the book as a war machine that performs the consistent labor of extending
its image to society.

Is this book a mimesis of the destruction of dominant structures of society? The political
implication is inevitable... The book proposes a horizontal relationship of elements instead of the
verticality of beginnings and ends. The importance of hierarchies is thus defied. In this sense this
book is a mimesis, a critical metaphor. On the other hand, the book debates and questions certain
images of imago mundi, images of a traditional and linear world. In this point it is important to
establish this book as a box of tools. Moreover, Deleuze and Guattari wrote in ‘Rhizome’ that
books establish a rhizome when they proceed as demountable machines like shredded notebooks,
thus establishing the book as a pragmatic tool: “The book has stopped being a microcosm in the
classic or European trend. The book is not an image of the world and it is less a significant. It is not
a beautiful organic totality; neither is it a unity of sense. When Michel Foucault is asked what a
book is, he answers: a box of tools”. (Rhizome, p. 38-39). The book is not anymore the harmonious
image of the entire World, it is the image of one of the nets that composes that Word, a net of local
affiliations and potentialities.

This book precludes establishing an image of beginning and end. It proposes a vision of a non-
hierarchical world. This implies that my political vision is of a world that denies hierarchies and
proposes inclusion and communication (that is the reason why it is written in two different
languages). I suppose that Deleuze and Guattari refer more to avoid establishing the mimesis of the
traditional world of power and discrimination that is enhanced via the ‘tree’ configuration. Through
the many possibilities of assemblage, the book establishes connections that are rhizomes in which
any connection is possible and where the chosen sequence of reading derives in different
assimilations that are previewed neither by the author nor by the reader. Random connections refuse
the normative format of books, that is, an established sequence of beginning and end that extends to
a world regulated through discourses and master plans. The comprehension of reading this book
through the chapter’s random sequence varies; furthermore it is different from assuming another
sequence. On the other hand and independently, the reading of the book is important in itself and
provides an explanation of the activity developed in the plateau of History through historical
rhizomes and connections. The book provides non-sequential essays: a chapter is not the antecedent
of another, and at the same time no chapter is consequence of another. Furthermore, the possibility
of navigating from one chapter to another without the necessity of referring to a dominant structure
of reading exists. The book's map provides an image of the situation of contemporary architectural
History (and of a participative society by extension) through sequences composed of multiple
connections.

Consequently the theory of rhizomes is applied to the configuration of the book, producing
architecture of the book. I understand Architecture as organization and in that sense an architect-
author is capable of displaying architecture in a book as well. Moreover, the book turns into a
device for learning possibilities of combination. In this case, a flexible, negotiated and changeable
reading is capable of being complemented by the reader himself. Hence, this book as a physical
object is not finished. It is always in transformation. If compared to a common book, the pages
would not be glued to a hard cover but instead the five chapters would be reconfigured many times
with the aid of two matrixes provided. Physically, there would be five single booklets inside a
carton box plus a sheet of instructions to read the book. As a matter of fact, that was the original
intention.

Each sequence indicates the order of reading the chapters. The complete sequence of the five
numbers indicates in which order the chapters may be read. The sequence is optional according to
the interest of the reader in a specific target. Following the numeric sequences, the ‘0’ possibility is,
of course, not reading the book. There are also partial sequences of reading the book (Chart 1); for
instance, only the first chapter, only the second chapter, etc., or the first and second chapter, the
second and fifth chapter, or groups of three chapters, groups of four chapters, etc.
I have established that among the five essays which have History as a plateau (i.e., an unrestricted
scenario), there can be at least one hundred and twenty combinations of the order of the complete
five essays; that is, the factorial of five, which is one hundred and twenty (Chart 2).
5!=120
1x2x3x4x5= 120
These are complete sequences, and the possibilities of partial readings are forty two. That means
that there are 120 + 42 = 162 possibilities of reading this book.
The book is like a machine for reconfigurations that have the hard cover as ‘hardware’. The order of
the chapters may be recomposed, and in the combinations, different concepts discovered through
the order of the sequence. The matrix of the total and partial combination of the five chapters is
applied to two-types combinations:
-Numeric (table 2 and 3)
-Diagrammatic (tables 4 and 5).

The numeric sequences and the diagrams are sequences of the order of reading of the chapters. A
specific sequence and its correlative diagram indicate the same. On the other hand, the diagram’s
representation is random. Every diagram of sequences could have another representation, for
instance music, if we attached to each point a different note. The result would be one hundred and
sixty one short tunes (the ‘0’ partial tune of e not reading the book is silence). These diagrams could
also be extended to representations of points of light, colors, tactile sensations, etc. These
combinations are neither formal nor exclusively diagrammatic, but pretend to establish mental nets
that derive in determinate actions by part of the reader. In such a way a diagram is not merely visual
but audible, optical, tactile, olfactory, etc., since it depicts sequences and senses, possibilities of
movement and displacement. Furthermore these sequences may involve the action of an individual
or groups of individuals according to their intention. (The chapter entitled 'History Without
Structures' extends over the sensory nature of the diagrams and vectors through the Aymara vision
of the concept of History).

In this case, diagrams are lines traced over the five vertexes of a non-Euclidian anti-prism of
triangular base and line top (Figure 1). The lines constitute the movement of the sequence from one
vertex to the other. Each vertex from one to five represents the respective chapter. A line from 1 to
5 implies reading the first chapter and then the fifth or vice versa. A direction vector does not exist
so the election of directionality belongs to the reader. Hence the diagram contains five different size
and orientation lines which mimic the different configurations, movements and extension of the five
chapters.

Hence, I learned the comprehension of the diagrammatic object as a tool of multiple implications
which refer to the very internality of the social and the representational. I concluded that the
diagram provides multiple possibilities of combination which in turn are instructions for the use of
the book. In this case, the diagram does not resemble the book but the sequences and movements of
the reading order. Frequently we architects resort to analogical diagrams that imply the translation
 of the diagram to the plan thus precluding the potential of the sequence of instructions through
representation. To understand the diagram as a configuration of time and space opens the possibility
of virtualilty as a tool for movements and directions.

What happens when we break the analogical nexus between the architectonic project and its
diagram? Is it a vantage to propose a tri dimensional diagram that appears to be architecture? Is it
architecture? A plan may also be a diagram of movements, the same as a section. Nevertheless, both
are incomplete. They are icons of representation that obviate pieces of information that just schemes
or ideograms of movement and direction may rescue. On the other hand, a diagram does not
constitute architecture, it is pre-architecture. Its advantage and importance lies there. A diagram
does not foreclose but absorbs (includes). A plan, specially the section, imply pre concepts such as
gravity, location, tectonics, etc, that the diagram does not have to face. It is interesting to appreciate
in the diagrams of this book, and especially in its map, that the book’s image has turned obsolete
and irrelevant. Similar conclusion raises with the chapter entitled 'History Without Structures'. The
problem of Architecture is less representational but more material and organizational, comparable
to this book’s problems in planning different physical and electronic versions and formats.
Nevertheless the processing of the image is still important.

The mimesis between the book and its map is performed through organization, through activity,
through the work of rhizomes, not through their form (literal translations like a book on birds whose
formal mimesis takes the form of a bird demonstrates nothing. Nevertheless, let us remember that
the form of the book is ambiguous: digital books are circular as a CD or square as a diskette;
furthermore, through Internet this book does not have a physical form. In chapter Four I write of an
architecture in which information disperses and is recognizable as form and in chapter Five I write
of an architecture of constant mutation ('The Incomplete', or L’Inform).

Table 2: Matrix of Partial Possibilities of the Combination of Chapters.

0 12 23 34 123 234 345 1234 2345

1 13 24 35 124 235 543 1235 5432
2 14 25 43 125 432 4321
3 15 32 53 321 532 5321
4 21 42 421
5 31 52 521
41
51

Table 3: Matrix of Total Possibilities of the Combination of Chapters.

12345 12354 12453 12435 12543 12534 13245 13254 13452 13425 13524 13542 14235 14253 14325 14352 14532 14523 15234 15243 15324 15342 15432 15423
21345 21354 21453 21435 21543 21534 23145 23154 23415 23451 23514 23541 24135 24153 24315 24351 24531 24513 25431 25413 25314 25341 25134 25143
31245 31254 31452 31425 31524 31542 32145 32154 32451 32415 32541 32514 34125 34152 34215 34251 34512 34521 35124 35142 35214 35241 35412 35421
41235 41253 41325 41352 41523 41532 42135 42153 42315 42351 42513 42531 43125 43152 43215 43251 43512 43521 45123 45132 45213 45231 45312 45321
51234 51243 51324 51342 51423 51432 52134 52143 52314 52341 52413 52431 53124 53142 53214 53241 53412 53421 54123 54132 54213 54231 54312 54321
 Figure 1: Diagram of Five Points (Chapters).

Table 4: Diagrams of Partial Series.

Table 5: Diagrams of Complete Series.

 Video on the book's performance

Diagrams do not constitute a language. Their application is universal. What is important to envisage
is that through diagrams, the comprehension of the book as a tool of possibilities precludes seeing
the object (the book and architecture by extension) as static. No sequence produces the same effect
in the reader, so every time the book is read it is different.

2) Map of the Book:

Each chapter may be read independently; nevertheless chapters form a comprehensive group.
Furthermore, any chapter may be accessed whenever and wherever the reader needs. Navigating
among chapters in non-linear fashion provide the definition of rhizomes by Deleuze and Guattari.
The final diagram proposes a representation of this process of external reference (internal to the
book but external to the chapter). Every chapter is a line that has multiple entrances (represented by
adjoining lines, in Figure 2). The resulting ideogram could have infinite representations.
 Figure 2: Total Diagram (Map of the Book) with Multiple Accesses.

IV) Bibliography of this Chapter:

1)Deleuze, Gilles; Guattari, Félix: Rizoma; Ed. Coyoacán, Mexico; 1994.

2) Allen, Stan; Diagrams Matter; in ANY 23; Anyone Corp.; NY; 1998.
3) Heynen, Hilde; Architecture and Modernity. A Critique; Massachusetts Inst. of Technology;
1999; 3rd printing 2001
V) General Bibliography of the Five Essays.

1) 2G #2: Toyo Ito; Ed. Gustavo Gili; Barcelona 1997/II

2) 2G #6: Ushida Findlay; Ed. Gustavo Gili; Barcelona 1998/II
3) 2G # 16: Foreign Office Architects; Ed. Gustavo Gili; Barcelona 2000/IV.
4) Allen, Stan; Diagrams Matter; in ANY 23; Anyone Corp.; NY; 1998
5) Banham, Reyner; Teoría y Diseño Arquitectónico en la Era de la Máquina; Ed. Nueva Visión;
Buenos Aires; 1965.
6) Benjamin, Andrew; Architectural Philosophy; The Athlone Press; Londres, 2000
7) Branner, Robert, ed.; Chartres Cathedral; Norton & Company; Nueva York, 1969.
8) Broadbent, Geoffrey; Diseño Arquitectónico; Gustavo Gili; 2da Ed.; Barcelona; 1982
9) De Feo, Vittorio; La Arquitectura en la U.R.S.S. 1917-1936; Alianza Editorial; Madrid; 1979
10) Deleuze, Gilles; El Pliegue. Leibniz y el Barroco; Paidós Ibérica; Barcelona; 1989.
11) Deleuze, Gilles; Diferencia y Repetición; Amorrortu Editores; 1st. Ed.; Buenos Aires; 2002.
12. Deleuze, Gilles; Foucault; Paidos Iberica; Barcelona; 1987.
13) Deleuze, Gilles; Guattari, Félix: Rizoma; Ed. Coyoacán, México; 1994
14) El Croquis # 67. Gigantes/Zenghelis 1987-1994; El Croquis, Madrid, 1994.
15) El Croquis # 71. Toyo Ito 1986-1995; El Croquis, Madrid, 1994.
16) Croquis # 72(II) “Enric Miralles”, El Croquis Editorial, Madrid, España, 1995.
17) El Croquis.# 83 Peter Eisenman 1990-1997; El Croquis, Madrid, 1997.
18) El Croquis # 86 MVRDV 1991-1997; El Croquis Editorial; Madrid; 1999
19) Eisenman, Peter; Diagram: An Original Scene of Writing; in ANY 23; Anyone Corp.; NY;
1998
20) Frampton, Kenneth (ed.); Tadao Ando. Edificios. Proyectos. Escritos; GG; Madrid, 1987.
21) Hall, Peter; Cities of Tomorrow; Blackwell; Oxford; 1996.
22) Hertzberger, Herman; Space and the Architect; 010 Publishers; Amsterdam, 2001
23) Heynen, Hilde; Architecture and Modernity. A Critique; Massachusetts Institute of Technology;
1999; 3rd Ed., 2001
24) Häuser 5/92; Hamburgo, 1992.
25) Huizen van over de Hele Wereld; Köneman Ed., Colonia; 2000.
26) Jencks, Charles and Kropf, Karl; ‘A City is not a Tree’, in ‘Theories and Manifestoes of
Contemporary Architecture’, Academy Ed.; West Sussex; 1997.
27) Lootsma, Bart; SuperDutch; Thames and Hudson; Londres, 2001
28) Mansilla, Luis Moreno; Tuñon, Emilio; in ‘The Space of Optimism; in El Croquis # 86;
MVRDV 1991-1997; Ed. El Croquis, Madrid, España, 1999.
29) Muñoz Gutiérrez, Carlos; “Wittgenstein Arquitecto. El Pensamiento como Edificio” in
Astragalo # 18; September 2001, Espacios, Migraciones, Alteridades; Celeste Ed. S.A. Instituto
Español de Arquitectura de la Universidad de Alcalá; Alcalá de Henares; Madrid.
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Barcelona; 2da Ed; 1996.
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2001.
37) Waisman, Marina; El Interior de la Historia; Escala; Bogotá; 2nd Ed.; 1993
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40) ARTNET ; Archizoom (Associati); http://www.artnet.com/library/00/0039/T003901.ASP
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42) Buci-Glucksmann, Christine; in From the cartographical View to the Virtual;
http://www.medienkunstnetz.de/works/no-stop-city/
43) Reiser y Umemoto; www.reiser-umemoto.com
44) Varnelis, Kazys : Breve Historia de la Horizontalidad: 1968/1969 a 2001/2002; in ‘Pasajes de
Arquitectura y Crítica’, March 2003; http://www.varnelis.net/projects/horizontality/
45) Collins Dictionaries; Intense Educational Ltd; UK, 2003.(Versión Digital).
46) Diccionario Enciclopédico Sopena; Ed. Sopena; Barcelona; 1971.
47) Harvey, David; Urbanismo y Desigualdad Social, Siglo XXI de España Ed.; 3rd Ed., Madrid,
1985.
48) M.M. Rosental y P.F. Ludin, Diccionario de Filosofía; AKAL Ed., Madrid, 1975.
49) Castoriadis-Aulagnier, Piera; La Violencia de la Interpretación; Amorrortu Editores; Bs. As.,
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Ed.; Madrid, 1998.
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Architecturee; in Croquis # 88/89; Worlds One; El Croquis Editorial; Madrid, 1998.
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1/5. CONCEPTS AND DIAGRAMS.
by Carlos A. Romay Vergara
Summary:
1. Diagrams and Concepts.
2. The Origin and the Organization of Concepts: The Tree and the Rhizome.
A. The Origin of Concepts.
A.1. The Pictogram.
A.2. Fantasy.
A.3. The Idea or Enunciation.
A.4. The Representation.
A.5. The Diagram.
B. Organizations and Structure.
3. Representations: The ‘Tracing’ and the ‘Map’.
4. The Materiality of Rhizomes at the Architectonic and Urban Level.
5. The Map of History.
6. Bibliography
The objective of this essay is to evaluate the organization of concepts in plateaus and the
representation of concepts as ideograms. The hypothesis identifies the History of Architecture as a
plateau composed of concepts of the organization of Space.
1. Concepts and Diagrams.
The elements that compose the History of Architecture are lines of action produced by concepts on
space, whether architectural or urban space. The necessity of projecting these concepts into
materiality has produced a wide field for representation. Furthermore, materiality has led to the
evolution of the processes of design and representation.
Concepts and their representation may comprise different instances of time: the past and the future.
In both cases, the internality of the representation is different. Traditionally, in the representation of
concepts of the past, the proposition of space was precluded since in first instance what was
regarded was analysis. Nevertheless, futurity may be introduced in the formulation of timeless
concepts in the form of new concepts projected to future enterprises. The development of the
concepts analyzed may also derive in the difference as consequence of the analysis. Jean François
Lyotard wrote that the historian must reconstruct using concepts (Lyotard, Phenomenology; p.128).
Hence, historic analysis cannot be severed from proposition.
What is the importance of investigating the origin of concepts into architectonic practice? Is it
possible to re-orient the practice of Architecture from the social definition of concepts? As David
Harvey, professor of Geography and Environmental Engineering of the John Hopkins University if
Baltimore wrote, every discipline oriented thru society formulates concepts that are extensive to the
social relationships in practice: ‘…social sciences formulate concepts, categories, relationships and
methods that are not independent from the existent social relationships. As such, concepts are
product of the phenomenon they try to describe…Our task is to exercise the power of thinking in to
formulate applicable concepts and categories, theories and arguments to contribute to humanizing
social change. These concepts and categories cannot be formulated on the abstract. They must be
elaborated realistically in regard to events and actions that deploy around us…Nevertheless all these
actions and information do not mean unless we synthesize them into convincing models of
thinking’(Harvey, 130-151).
A model of thinking is a super-structure that regulates as well as transforms itself. This aspect is
fundamental to provide Architecture with purposes different to those of the strict reproduction of
capital. Only through the redefinition of Architecture within the social system of which it forms part
it might be possible to attain prototypes of application.
Harvey adds: “Marx established that the perception, elaboration and representation of concepts
happens through reflexive abstraction by the subject that observes…It is not possible to consider
that concepts and categories have an independent existence and that they are always truly universal
abstractions. The structure of knowledge may be transformed by its own internal laws of
transformation…Concepts are ‘produced’ occasionally (including a series of pre-existent concepts)
meanwhile they may be considered as producers of agents in a real situation. It is irrelevant asking
if concepts, categories and relationships are ‘true’ or ‘false’. Instead, we must ask ourselves what
produces them and what they produce…Hence there is the criteria that these theories cannot be used
if abstracted from an existent situation. On the other hand they must be applied through a study of
the modalities in which theories become a ‘material force’ in society and through their impact on
social action…The meaning of each concept is re-adjusted according to social relationships. In
order to perform this technique it is fundamental the criteria that categories and concepts establish
(or at least appear) a mutual relationship that reflects the condition of society itself’. (Harvey, p.
313-316).
Hence, the origins of the proposing of architectural concepts are social and material (non-
teleological). Nevertheless, what happens with the organization of concepts? As Hollander
architect Herman Hertzberger points out: “The researcher does not start anywhere, he does not
begin without an idea, a hypothesis, about what he expects to find, and where…” (Hertzberger,
p.115). The design starts with intention, with vectors that push the yet-not formed concepts into
specific directions. The vectors of a complex economy for the object include the relationships
among material, program and event, and of course, the economic tension that the object produces in
the city and the region, and among buildings as well. On the other hand, concepts related to the
applied investigation of historical lines establish other relationships, in a process that formulates
actions that take place in different times and spaces.
Ben van Berkel, Hollander architect, theoretician and critic, editor of the 23rd number of the
ANY magazine (number is devoted to diagrams in Architecture), extends on the ambiguity of the
concept: “Architecture still articulates its concepts, design decisions, and processes almost
exclusively by means of a posteriori rationalizations… The demand to present the ‘right’ solution,
even when the contents of that concept have become very uncertain, propagates architecture’s dual
claims of objectivity and rationality”. (Van Berkel, p.19).
Hertzberger compares the concept with an enduring structure for a more changeable ‘infill’. As
Hertzberger points, the concept allows interpretations since its description is ambiguous and open.
The concept as structure works as a frame, as a structure coated by layers stirring cohesion and
coherence on narrative basis. The master plan is a normative and mandatory representational device
that Hertzberger opposes to the concept. (Hertzberger, p.100). On the other hand, the selection of a
wrong concept for the analysis/proposal is not useless. A wrong concept may prove almost
immediately its flaws, and help point another direction: “The concept may be a compass, but is
hardly the final destination of the design process. The end product may be nothing other than a
development and interpretation of that concept, the way one might apply or render an overall vision.
Thinking in terms of concepts, models, strategies, etc.-deriving as this does from seeking out the
essence of what you are occupied with-does mean that there is a danger of that abstraction all too
quickly leading to simplification. The issue is how to couch complexity in simple formulas…you
have to know exactly where you are ahead: you have to have a concept…The concept contains the
conditions you wish to fulfill, it is a summary of your intentions; of what needs saying; it is
hypothesis, and premonition. There may be no quest without premonition; it is question of finding
and only then seeking”. (Hertzberger, p.101-117).
2. Organization of the Concepts: The Tree and the Rhizome.
A. The Origin of Concepts:
A. The Origin of Concepts:
Concepts are not produced from void. From the past, real and virtual experiences allow the
formation of a collection of ideas that are assembled in different configurations and that may be
important in order to propose the future or to unveil the past. Unveiling the origin of concepts is
important to understand that its is an evolved phase of thinking. This phase has had previous phases
in order to accomplish representation. Author Piera Castoriadis wrote over the definition of
representation: “The activity of representation is understood as the psychic equivalent of the work
of metabolizing characters of organic activity…This definition may be applied entirely to the work
that operates in psyche. Despite that, the absorbed and metabolized ‘element’ is not a physical body
but an informational element. If the activity of representation is considered as a task common to
psychic processes, we may tell that its goal is metabolizing an element of heterogeneous nature
converting it into a homogeneous element to the structure of each system… The representations
originated in its activity would be… the pictographic representation…the fantasized representation,
… (and) the idealized representation or enunciation. The instances originated in the reflection of
this activity would be designated as the representing, the fantasizing…, the enunciating or the Self
[Je]…The objective of the Self’s work is to forge an image of the world’s reality around it and on
whose existence it is informed in order to be coherent with its own structure…The concept of
reality for the subject is no more than the whole of definitions given by the cultural discourse’.
(Castoriadis, p.23-26).
(It is important the point where Castoriadis establishes that reality is nothing more than the
adequacy to cultural discourse. The ‘Self’ works in order to adequate information until it fits it in
the concept of reality that every individual has. We have then that reality is ambiguous for two
individuals proceeding from different cultures. This is particularly critical for the proposition of
public and semi-public spaces. Architecture and Urbanism must appeal to universal schemes of
integration and on the way attain processes of ‘exportation of local concepts’ that may have
universal basis. This process is attained though adaptation to different conditions).
The structure of these inferior and superior modalities of rationalization is important in order to
understand their consecution to the concept:
A1. The Pictogram:
‘The Psyche’s constant definition: nothing may appear in its field if it has not been previously
metabolized into pictographic representation. The pictographical representation of the phenomenon
constitutes a necessary condition for its psychical existence: this law is as universal and irreducible
as the law that decides the object’s audibility or visibility conditions…The conditions of
representation that objects must have in order to attain the material used by the Original may just be
reconstructed in later phases’. (Castoriadis, p. 42).
The pictogram is a universal image that derives from stimulus or information. It is the base for the
appearance of superior modalities of thinking. Its origin is involuntary and it constitutes a
concoction of sensations and different stages of thinking that must be rationalized a posteriori.
Castoriadis adds that using the term ‘information’ she refers to the role accomplished by sensorial
functions (Castoriadis, pg. 48).
A.2. Fantasy:
Castoriadis wrote that‘…what characterizes fantasized production is the mise-en-scène of the
representation of two spaces, one of which is subdued to the absolute power of one of them…
Fantasy and unconscious originate in the joint work…of the primary and of the primal judgment
imposed by the principle of reality. They regard the presence of an exterior and isolated space. This
first participation of the principle of reality in the work of the Psyche is responsible for the
heterogeneity between pictographical production and fantasized production’. (Castoriadis, p. 72).
Fantasy is then a first encounter with reality. It is the separation of the original and primary spaces.
Fantasy is not yet an absolutely rational space. In the transition from pictogram to fantasy the
individual decides the penetration into the space of reality. Fantasy differences from the simple
gathering of information through later phases of rationalization.
A3. The Idea or Enunciation.
‘Any source of excitement and any information accomplish access to the register of the Self only
providing the representation of an “idea”. Every activity of the Self translates into “thinking flux”
implicitly or explicitly. A truly “simultaneous translation” from any form of conscious experience
of the Self into “idea” occurs’. This translation represents a latent background that is habitually
silent but that generally the Self may make present through an act of reflection over its own
activity’. (Castoriadis, pg. 62)
Castoriadis adds that the Idea is function of ‘intellection’. As a new form of activity it is part of pre-
existent partial functions. Hence, the activity of thinking is a condition for the existence of the Self.
Furthermore, activity generates its own Topos. Castoriadis adds that every experience and every act
imply the co-presence of an ‘idea’ that allow its thinking and naming (Castoriadis, pg. 62-63). (The
appearance of a place, a ‘Topos’, is fundamental for the notion of Idea. In the same way that in
material life a ‘place’ emerges from an indifferent space through the will of delimitation, in the
same analogous way Idea differences from the space of fantasy and pictogram limiting its own
different and virtual space).
According to Harvey, social processes accept the possibility of combining superior and inferior
structures. As social totality is in relationship to all its parts (a posture assumed by Harvey), this
combination may be applied to all structures within totality: ‘Any structure of superior category
may be obtained from an inferior category through transformation. Under these conditions there
may emerge a hierarchy of structures through a process of internal difference. Hence, there may
coexist superior and inferior category structures’. (Harvey, pg. 306). The objective of the
combination of superior and inferior chains validate, preserve and criticize the structure where they
work (in this case, the structure of thinking). Harvey proposed the existence of theories (as part of
the process of intellection) that are revolutionary, counter-revolutionary and favorable to the status
quo (Harvey, pg. 314). This implies that concepts may assume these characteristics of resistance
and conformity as well.
On the other hand, the relationship between word and idea is fundamental for the expression of the
idea, according to Castoriadis: ‘The image of thing is the previous necessary condition for the
image of word to include itself: the primal scenic follows the pictographical and prepares the
spoken that follows…The real difference between an unconscious representation and a pre-
conscious representation (idea) consists in the fact the first relates to known materials, meanwhile…
the pre-conscious is associated with verbal representation…The hypotheses may be formulated as
follows: the representation of idea demands that the Psyche acquires the possibility of uniting the
representation of word to the representation of things through acoustic perception only when this
last may be converted into the perception of a signifimayce…’. (Castoriadis, p. 88-90).
A. 4. The representation:
In ‘Matière et Mémoire’, Henri Bergson divided the mix (Representation) in two divergent
directions: matter and memory, perception and remind, objective and subjective (Deleuze,
Bergsonism, pg. 53). Deleuze pointed out that experience grants us with mixes and that the status of
mix does not consist solely in joining elements that differ in nature, but in welding them in such
conditions that differences within them may not be divided since their constituent nature (Deleuze,
Bergsonism, pg. 32). Furthermore, Deleuze wrote that emotion is always linked and dependant on
representation: ‘In the mix of emotion and representation, emotion is the potency; we shall not
avoid seeing the nature of emotion as a pure element. Emotion truly precedes any representation: it
is generator of new ideas. Properly, it does not have object, only an essence that extends over
diverse objects: animals, plants, the whole nature…’ (Deleuze, Bergsonism, pg. 117). Hence,
Deleuze’s conception is mainly phenomenological and eidetical, referred to essences.
Representation for Deleuze is not objective, since it provokes emotions that generate new ideas. We
may talk then of representation and feed-backing, or rather feed-forwarding the future, since in this
conception the movement through time extends to a representation that might in turn modify the
representation of the object again, and so on endlessly. Time’s scale (and duration) is essential for
this Deleuzian conception based on the philosophical work of Bergson.
Coincidentally, Andrew Benjamin wrote over the ‘space of melancholy’ that is open in
representation. In ‘Representation-Melancholic Spaces’ (in Benjamin’s book ‘Architectural
Philosophy’), Benjamin wrote that what is represented, in the case of the ideogram or pictographic
representation of the future, is the non-existence of the represented object (this definition extends
even to the diagram). Futurity is essential in this conception: Absence unchains a sense of loss that
is called melancholy (‘Architectural Philosophy’, pg. 148-151). In consequence, representation is an
emotive space. This establishes a coincidence with Deleuze’s explanation on the origin and
representation and to its connection with essence.
On the other hand, there is a fundamental difference between an idea with verbal consequence and
an idea with graphical consequence. A phrase that cannot be articulated diminishes its potential for
comprehension. Nevertheless, graphical representation find a a great gamut; from pre-graphics as
the diagram to indexed and technical drafting that make use of syntax and symbols as languages. In
the last, the omission of a symbol may produce serious differences in the implementation of a
technical plan. On the other hand, the diagram is subject neither to rules nor syntax, and its verbal
equivalent is impossible. The diagram does not need the rules that word require for their
comprehension.
But, are Concept and Idea the same? Herman Hertzberger points out that there is a difference, and
that concepts are the communicational phase of the idea. The concept powers the idea at the
graphical level: “(The concept) …encapsulates all the essential features for conveying the idea,
arranged in layers as it were and distinguished from all future elaborations as, say, an urbanistic
idea, set down in a masterplan…the concept will be more layered, richer and abiding not only (to)
admit more interpretations but (to) incite them to. …Concepts, then, are ideas expressed as three-
dimensional ideograms”. (Hertzberger, p.100-101). Hertzberger states that the concept has ‘layers’
and ‘strata’. This is a almost geological vision that takes the concept to the category of tangible
‘material’. He does not specify how this combination of layers produces interpretations. Probably
ideas arrange in three-dimensional combinations of layers (and through time too). Being the order
of ideas and graphics critical for the determination and incitation of interpretations, a process of
mediation is necessary. Hertzberger adds that the concept may have graphical expression and that
this expression may be translated into a diagram. On the other hand, Rosental and Ludin equalize
the concept to Idea and center ts signifimayce in practical and syntactical function (Rosental and
Ludin, pg. 76 and 372).
In synthesis, the concept overcome previous instances of rationalization as a whole of ideas
assembled by affinity. Under certain degrees of difficulty, concepts have the possibility of being
implemented from easiness to extreme complexity. The concept may be affine or contradictory to
the super- structures where implemented. My hypothesis is that in the course from ideas to concepts
territorializing occurs. In this phase the Concept becomes excluding in relationship to others. A
proposal with two contradictory concepts cannot exist since one of them works in order to
invalidate the other. There must be a crisis of the Concept in order to attain its change, dissolution,
re-composition and re-structuring with ideas that are internal or external to the concept in crisis.
Therefore the crisis of Concept implies the crisis of a certain process of design.
On the other hand, is it possible to graphically represent a concept?
The apparent controversy emerges between authors like Hertzberger for whom the concepts are
already in position of originating ideograms and others like Karl Chu for whom the concepts cannot
yet be graphics. If they could, it would be just partially, as points in space to be connected. In Chu’s
essay, ‘The Cone of Immanenscendence’ (in ANY # 23, Pg. 39), he points that concepts are spatial
coordinates and that they require of diagrams in order to give birth to the representation of their
possibilities of configuration (please refer to the example of the connection of ordinates in the
chapter entitled ‘Instructions’). Chu refers to immanence as the plane of all universal existences in
the mind: ‘A renewal of the image of the plane would therefore affect the image of diagrammatic
features registered on the plane. The plane of immanence is an image of thought which is
constituted by the construction of concepts, according to Deleuze and Guattari. Concepts are events
defined as concrete assemblages analogous to the configurations of a machine, whereas the plane is
the abstract machine of the absolute horizon of events. Deleuze and Guattari interpret diagrams as
trackings of dynamic movements, while concepts function as intensive ordinates of these
movements in the plane’. (ANY #23, Pg. 39).
Furthermore, authors like Stan Allen point out a difference between the possibilities of the concept
and the potential of the diagram to absorb graphical configurations. Allen refers to the impossibility
of translating abstract texts into graphics in his essay ‘Diagrams Matter’ in ANY # 23: ‘…diagrams
are not “decoded” according to universal conventions, rather the internal relationships are
transposed, moved part by part from the graphic to the material or the spatial, by means of
operations that are always partial, arbitrary, and incomplete. The impersonal character of these
transpositions shifts attention away from the ambiguous, personal transpositions of translation and
its associations with the weighty institutions of literature, language, and hermeneutics. A diagram in
this sense is like a rebus. To cite Kittler again: “Interpretive techniques that treat texts as charades
or dreams as pictures have nothing to do with hermeneutics, because they do not translate”. (Allen
in Diagrams Matter, in ANY # 23, pg. 17, in reference to translation and transposition, please refer
to the essay entitled ‘ Connections and Links in Time’).
Hence, Allen assimilates the concepts to abstractions that are not yet in possibility of being
graphically transposed. The difference lies in the fact that both concept and diagram are in different
structures and in different systems of rationalization. The concept may be assimilated as
consequence of the last instance of rationalization that Castoriadis define as ‘idea or enunciation’
which attains mainly verbal expression.
Furthermore, in Gregg Lynn’s essay ‘Forms of Expression: The Proto-functional potential of
Diagrams in Architectural Design’, he points out that ‘…a not so subtle distinction should be made
between concepts; whose development is nascent and defined through possibilities, and ideas;
which imply not only points of origin but also teleological progression’. (Croquis #72, Ben Van
Berkel, p. 17).
If we understand the concepts as abstractions or charades, translating a concept would be, on one
hand, if not impossible at least incomplete as method. (According the Collins Ductionary, a charade
is ‘a game in which one team acts out each syllable of a word or phrase, which the other team has to
guess’. Concepts as ‘transparency’ and ‘lightness’ cannot be expressed out of a metaphorical level
(for instance, represented by ‘glass’ and ‘feather’ respectively) but only the level of form and
communicability would be solved. Important issues for Architecture like space and program cannot
be analogically represented through graphics (for instance perspectives) that depend on cultural
discourse and training in order to be understood. The representation of concepts directly would be
incomplete in this case.
Ben Van Berkel, wrote about the impossibility of the direct translation from concepts into
ideograms: “No condition will let itself be directly translated into a fitting or completely
corresponding conceptualization of that condition. There will always be a gap between the two. For
this same reason, concepts such as repression and liberation may never be directly applied to
architecture. There has to be a mediator…Previously, if the concepts of repression or liberation, for
example, were introduced into architecture, a complex formal expression of this concept would be
reduced to a sign with one clear meaning, which would subsequently be translated back into a
project. This reductive approach excludes many possibilities in architecture. While concepts are
formulated loud and clear, architecture itself waits passively, as it were, until it is pounced upon by
a concept”. (Van Berkel, in ‘Diagrams, Interactive Instruments in Operation; in ANY # 23, p.21).
The verbal expression of a diagram, on the other hand, would be impossible as well, since the
diagram is a map of multiple configurations, sometimes in astounding numbers. Please refer to the
map (diagram) that describes the present book in the essay ‘Instructions’. In order to found my
argument, I remind Castoriadis establishing the nexus between idea (concept) and word as
condition for its existence. Being the idea expressed in words, it creates a text which cannot be
translated into graphics but incompletely and ambiguously. (Combining words and graphics or
words and spaces is another possibility. Furthermore, the joint of signs and spaces is ambiguous,
since they both are in the same category of impossibility of direct communication. Nevertheless,
Architecture cannot communicate; it is not a vehicle of communication. If someone pretended so, it
is within a discourse where the elements accomplish ambiguous operations of expression).
If we follow the argument about the impossibility of direct translation of a concept into graphic
representation, we may speculate that the mental and spatial position of the diagram is mobile. It
may be found, for instance, half way between fantastic representation and idea, since it is properly
neither an enunciation nor a fantasy. Nevertheless, as the relationship that the diagram describes
occur through multiple connections in any space and time (in a plateau, as we shall see later), it is
not subject to rules and not even to physics (through vertical, horizontal, transversal connections,
leaps in time, travels of thousands of kilometers in seconds, etc.). The movement in these plateaus
may be assimilated more to movements in fluids where there is no mechanical resistance. The
diagram focuses more in possibilities of flux and configuration. This does not imply that a very
explicit diagram cannot be used as political instrument of resistance providing, for instance,
extreme degrees of representation of des-centralization or autonomy.
In consequence, the stage of rationalization that the diagram uses is displaced by its potential of
mimicking fluxes and configurations. This potential extends since the diagram has not foreclosed its
work as in the case of the ‘enunciation’. The diagram may also displace to inferior instances of
rationalization as the pictograms and information, fantasy, stimulus, etc. In other words, it may use
all sort of resources that language and words cannot. Hence, I conclude that the diagram does not
proceed from a concept, and that there is no linearity between process of intellection and graphical
representation. The diagram may appear in phases that are previous to the idea (enunciation), and
even mutate it. This divergence creates a conflictive relationship expressed by Castoriadis: ‘That is
why thought, the primal figuration and the pictogram preserve a more or less open conflictive
relationship’. (Castoriadis, p. 110)
In summary, the ideogram or diagram’s potential is in a level different from that of verbal
representation, since verbal expression contributes with narrative levels meanwhile diagrams
contribute with configurative levels. Verbal narration of a space may also incite fantasy and
produce ‘repetition and difference’ through the consecutive relation among people. This level of
ambiguity may be found in ideograms as well. Nevertheless, since architecture needs under certain
circumstances to be material, it requires the graphical document for its construction (other
architectures stay in an the immaterial plane where their potential lies, as the Ferriss’ s futurist
draws and Lebeus Woods’s inciting draws). The ideogram then assumes a phase of mimesis since it
imitates instructions and possible (and impossible) configurations. It cannot be restricted through
caesura. Its coherence is not questionable, since it does not work at the level of the intellect as
finished stage (the diagram constitutes a plane of immanence and totality which lies in a graphic of
potentialities. On the other hand, analogical diagrams are produced by the intellect as finished
configurations, as in Frank Lloyd’s transposition of diagrams and plans. Nevertheless, this last
instance precludes the possibilities of exploring and proposing configurations).
A. 5. The Diagram.
Zaera Polo and Farshid Moussavi write in ‘FOA Code Remix 2000’ that ‘…a diagram is essentially
a material organization that prescribes performance. It does not necessarily contain metric or
geometric information’ (2G # 16; p. 140). On the other hand, FOA explains that ‘…diagrams and
computers enable you to work at a very abstract level and to integrate changing or differentiated
conditions through the process while allowing local structures or contingencies to inform the final
result’ (2G # 16, FOA; p. 137).
Moreover, Peter Eisenman wrote on the definition of ideograms, which diagrams are part of:
“Generically, a diagram is graphic shorthand. Though it is an ideogram, it is not necessarily an
abstraction. It is a representation of something in that it is not the thing itself…It may never be
value-or meaning-free, even when it attempt to express relationships of formation and their
processes…Although it is often argued that the diagram is a post-representational form, in instances
of explanation and analysis the diagram is a form of representation”. (Eisenman in ‘Diagrams: An
Original Scene of Writing’; in ANY #23, p. 27)
In architectural magazine ANY # 23, Stan Allen wrote that diagrams are the best means to engage
the complexity of the real: “A diagram is a graphic assemblage that specifies relationships between
activity and form, organizing the structure and distribution of functions….The diagram does not
point towards architecture’s internal history as a discipline, but rather turns outward, signaling
possible relations of matter and information. But since nothing may enter architecture without
having been first converted into graphic form, the actual mechanism of graphic conversion is
fundamental.” (Allen, in Diagrams Matter, in ANY # 23, p.17). Furthermore, Allen wrote that the
diagram is more a productive device that a collection of graphics that only work in the narration of
the plot of design. Hence, diagrams may also work unveiling Historic connections and projecting
them into new possibilities.
Van Berkel extends on the features of the diagram: “More to the point is the general understanding
of the diagram as a statistical or schematic image…understood as reductive machines for the
compression of information…The condensation of knowledge that is incorporated into a diagram
may be extracted from it regardless of the significance with which the diagram was originally
invested….The diagram conveys an unspoken essence, disconnected from an ideal or an ideology,
that is random, intuitive, subjective, not bound to a linear logic that may be physical, structural,
spatial, or technical”. (Van Berkel, p.20). Van Berkel’s notion that the diagram is neither structural
nor ideological reminds the description of Guattari and Deleuze of the rhizome.
Moreover, as a representational device, the diagram has the potential of revealing new
organizations: “Although diagrams may serve an explanatory function, clarifying form, structure, or
program to the designer and to others, and notations map program in time and space, the primary
utility of the diagram is as an abstract means of thinking about organization...Unlike classical
theories based on imitation, diagrams do not map or represent already existing objects or systems
but anticipate new organizations and specify yet to be realized relationships”. (Allen, in Diagrams
Matter, in ANY # 23, p.16).
The diagram has two purposes. In Design, it has the potential of forecasting the yet to come, and in
Historical analysis, the diagram has the potential or assessing connections that have been
undiscovered and to project them into the future. Hence, a productive relationship exists between
the architectonic project and History: “The forward- looking tendency of diagrammatic practice is
an indispensable ingredient for understanding its function; it is about the ‘real that is yet to come’.
(Van Berkel, p.21). Deleuze wrote that thinking the past against the present (resisting the present) is
performed not for an identical return of the past, but (quoting Nietzsche), ‘in favor…of a future
time’. (Foucault, p.155).
Gregg Lynn, in his essay ‘Forms of Expression: The Proto-Functional Potential of Diagrams in
Architectural Design’, in Croquis #72; establishes a difference between from-the-beginning
concrete mechanical and technical assemblages and the abstract machines (diagrams), that are
conceptual statements (part of a discourse) with many possibilities for reconfiguration and
transformation. Lynn wrote that the effects of abstract machines trigger the formation of concrete
assemblages when their virtual diagrammatic relationships are actualized as a technical possibility.
Concrete assemblages (as technical details, scalar systems that extend to the whole project as in the
work of R+U, where a detail is fractal in its relationship to structure, etc), are realized only when a
new diagram may make them cross the technical threshold. Lynn wrote that ‘…it is the diagram that
select new techniques....These diagrams bring functions of structure, circulation, enclosure and
manufacturng into existence from an origin that is initially meaningless and useless. These
diagrams and this design method is proto-functional...The sites, programs and structures of these
projects are brought into existence through a proto-functional intuition...’ (Croquis #72, Ben van
Berkel, pg. 29).
Therefore, the concrete assemblage may work as a diagram too when it assumed such
characteristic. Herzog & de Meuron’s work, that of Gigon and Guyer and the firsts works of Van
Berkel make use of tectonic diagram as an explanation of the project. In this cases, materiality
displaces the abstraction of the diagram and represents reality, turning into analogical diagrams, that
is, without any mediation. Nevertheless, the potential of these kind of diagram is sometimes limited
to the envelope, being the architect’s responsibility to establish the relationship among programs,
forms and events. (William Curtis in his essay ‘The Unique and The Universal: A Historian's
Perspective on Recent Architecture’, wrote that ‘…so many of Herzog /de Meuron's recent projects
start out with an alluring facade idea exploring materiality, ambiguity, allusion, 'object-hood', etc.,
but the same intensity of perception is not sustained on interiors which sometimes end up being
quite ordinary and flat, as do the plans. The totality of the building is not always infused with the
generating ideas’. Croquis #88/89, pg. 15).
Furthermore, Zaera Polo, in his essay ‘A World Full of Wholes’, wrote that ‘Herzog & De Meuron's
work is conceptual and diagrammatic, and its material organization operates from a diagram that
controls the totality of the work (Croquis #88/89; pg. 319). To Zaera Polo, the Basel’s team design
is machinic since it ‘…posses an implacable order that keeps the project beyond authorial
expression, or even its powerful material presence. Buildings such as the Warehouse for Ricola, the
Signal Box and the Dominus Cellars may be explained by a diagram, in an order that automatically
structures the decisions of the project, almost without any need for involvement by the author. In
this sense, despite the powerful aesthetic thrust of the work, Herzog & De Meuron's production is
largely abstract and mechanistic, and is fundamentally determined by an initial material and
constructive concept which is capable of producing the project by pure repetition’ (Croquis #88/89;
pg. 319).

Warehouse for the Ricola-

Laufen Factory, Switzerland, Signal Box 4 Auf Dem Wolf-Basel,
1987. Dominus Warehouses, Yountville, California; Switzerland, 1992-
1995.http://www.moma.org/expansio
(http://www.nai.nl/nl/extras 1997. (Zabalbescoa y Marcos; pg. 139). n/charette/architects/herzog_meuron/
/dossier_hdm/proj_038.htm selected_proj.html
l)
B. Organizations and Structure.
Concepts are organized into structures which are determined by the way in which they relate their
parts. These structures may also extend to the organization of diagrams. Furthermore, diagrams are
mimesis and image of the world. (Hence, the political origin of diagrams is crux for its proposing
since the diagram is anteceded by the discourse, which must be reviewed if the potential of the
diagram is not to be precluded). The importance in writing over structures is to define movements
inside them. These movements may be static or relational and determine the way in which we
perceive the totality and the way in which we interact with it. According to Harvey …’inside
totality separated structures exist and that it is possible to distinguish one from the other. Structures
are not “things” or “actions”. Therefore we cannot establish its existence through observation. To
define the elements relatively means to interpret them apart from direct observation. Defining the
elements relationally means interpreting them outside direct observation’. (Harvey, pg. 305).
Dealing with elements related with structures is important in order to extrapolate the vision of
connections to the vision of a connected and inclusive world. Harvey refers that relationships may
occur apart from the experience of observation. This means that the study of potential relationships
among the elements within a structure cannot be neither studied nor proposed through pragmatic
methodologies. (‘In pragmatism, objective reality is equaled to “experience” meanwhile division
between the subject and object of knowledge is established uniquely within experience’. Rosental
and Ludin, pg. 372).
Harvey adds that ‘…any structure must be defined as a system of internal relationships in processes
of structuring through the work of their own laws of transformation. Therefore structures may be
defined through the comprehension of the laws of transformation that model them…Structures may
be considered as separated and different entities when there is no transformation that might turn one
into another…To say that structures may be distinguished does not imply that they evolution in
autonomy without influencing one on the other. Marx… suggests that relationships among
structures are in turn structured inside totality…When we try to consider society as a totality, then
everything must be related in last terms to the economic basis of the structures of society’. (Harvey,
306).
Furthermore, Harvey adds that structures are transformed by internal and external relationships that
produce consequence among structures. Hence, he outlines a definition of totalitarian structures that
impose their discourse in favor of their own laws of integrity: ‘In other words, totality is about to be
structured by the elaboration of the relationships inside it…This concept is common to Marx and to
Piaget. Ollman…signals how such a point of view influences the way of conceiving relationships
among the elements and among the elements and totality. Totality tries modeling the parts so that
every one of them is useful in order to preserve the existence and general structure of the whole’.
(Harvey in pg. 303-304 makes reference to Piaget’s ‘Structuralism’, NY, 1970).
The manner in which structures are internally conceived provides with two different models of
thinking, one of multiple transversal relationships and another in which elements answer to vertical
hierarchies. In both models, their structures and elements provide with a gamut of scalar systems of
organization. Furthermore, it is possible to arrange combinations among hierarchical and transversal
structures.
The origin of vertical organizations is, according to Harvey, space itself. Any space of absolute
properties is a defined and unchangeable space that provides a discourse of exclusion and
segregation: ‘To say that space has absolute properties is to say that structures, people and lots
exclude mutually in Euclidian tri-dimensional space. This concept is not by itself an adequate
concept of space …’ (Harvey, pg. 175)
Since models and structures are extensive to societies, the hierarchical model is based mainly in
forced and imposed significations expressed in urban space, the space of differences and hierarchies
by excellence: ‘The general consequence of a hierarchical society is evident and produces tangible
results into urban spatial economy. Dominant organizations and institutions use space hierarchically
and symbolically. Sacred and profane spaces are created, focal points accentuated and, in general,
space is manipulated in order to attain status and prestige’. (Harvey, p. 292).
The (mental and physical) spatial configuration of hierarchical structures provides with typical
organizations. Some of these spatial experiences may be connected in a linear, consecutive fashion
in which an element is pre-condition for the next and antecedent of the previous; i.e. that an
individual admits an only active neighbor, its hierarchical superior. The individual may just occupy
a precise position (through a process of signification and subjectivation). In this case, the formation
of points that are central and pivotal produces a configuration with the form and structure of a tree.
On the other hand, the development of transversal structures produces another conception of the
space and of social practice from which concepts derive. Configurations are not necessarily
produced at the same dimension (neither in the same time nor in the same space). The connection of
two lines in this configuration is not sequential. In this case, an element is not pre-condition for the
other or antecedent of another. If we apply the notion of time in this case, the connection of two
random elements in this three-dimensional net may be produced anytime. For instance in History,
the connection of two random events in different times and spaces (like groups of ideas and
experiences) takes years in order to finally establish a concept of relationship, which may finally
occur in some other geographical point and in some other time which is not the original.
Respectively, these two types of organization may be regarded as the ‘tree’ configuration and the
‘rhizome’ configuration on which philosophers Guattari and Deleuze extended on. Furthermore,
there is a strong relationship established between the works of Christopher Alexander (1965, in “A
City is not a Tree”) and those of Guattari and Deleuze (of the possibilities of connecting different
elements in random fashion). Nevertheless the intentions and the consequences of the
aforementioned works were different. Alexander wrote his thesis in order compare the lack of
complexity the American cities of the 1960’s had in comparison to traditional cities where the
potential of connections was unlimited. (Harvey wrote that urban space is a space of multiple and
improvised connections that defies the hierarchy through relations: ‘The activity of any element in a
urban system may generate certain effects…over other elements of the system…Simple observation
of urban problems indicates that an enormous multitude of external effects must be taken into
account, a fact that is recognized implicitly by Lowry (in A Short Course in Model Design, Journal
of the American Institute of Planners # 31, pg. 158) …in his phrase “In the city, everything affects
everything”.’ (Harvey, 54, 55).
Moreover, Alexander wrote in ‘The City is not a Tree’ that “…both the tree and the semi-lattice are
ways of thinking about how a large collection of many small systems makes up a large complex
system. More generally, they are both names for structures of sets.”(Alexander in ‘A City is not a
Tree’, in Jencks and Kropf’s ‘Theories and Manifestoes of Contemporary Architecture’, p. 30).
Comparatively, Deleuze and Guattari assimilated the tree configuration to that of books and roots.
In the case of books, the tree configuration manifests materially because books have axis and pages
around (like trees have a trunk and branches around), and meta-physically because books are
reflections of reality (since they reproduce reality they produce the double of it, thus progressing
always in binary shape). As Deleuze and Guattari pointed out of the ‘tree’ configuration: “This
thought has never understood multiplicity: it requires a supposedly strong sense of primordial unity
in order to get two by a spiritual method. And from the side of the object, according to the natural
method, it is dubious to pass directly from one to three, four or five, but on the condition to have
always a strong primordial unity, that is, of the axis that holds the secondary roots”. (Rhizome,
p.10).
The definition of the tree configuration is provided through two theorems. On the one hand,
Alexander wrote that “A collection of sets forms a tree if and only if, for any two sets that belong to
the collection, either one is wholly contained in the other, or else they are wholly disjoint… The
enormity of this restriction is difficult to grasp. It is a little as though the members of a family were
not free to make friends outside the family, except when the family as a whole made a
friendship…” (Jencks, Op. Cit. 31). On the other hand, Guattari and Deleuze mentioned the
‘theorem of friendship’ that may be related with that of the tree: ‘If in a given society any two
individuals have exactly a common friend there is an individual that is friend to all the others”.
(Rhizome, p. 27).
Alexander proposed the semi-lattice in order to establish a critique of institutions and structures
(mainly of suburban cities) organized through the ‘tree’ configuration. Consequently, Guattari and
Deleuze extend on the critique to the concept of linearity that Modernity imposed: “The modern
methods, in their majority, are perfectly valid in order to proliferate the series or to favor the
development of multiplicity in one direction (for instance lineal direction) meanwhile a unity of
totalization affirms more in another dimension, that of a circle or of a cycle.” (Rhizome, p.11).
Moreover, Guattari and Deleuze affirmed that circularity does not resolve the issue of free
connections. Hence they proposed the solution as the rhizome.
The multiple, the rhizome, may be found in vegetables with multiple connections and even in the
groups that animals like rats produce. A den is a rhizome, a functional habitat that provides
modalities of prevision, displacement, evasion and capture. Furthermore, according to Guattari and
Deleuze, the rhizome works like a social device that denies language: “Rhizome in itself has very
diverse forms, from its superficial extension ramified in all directions, until its concretions in bulbs
and tubers...A rhizome does not stop connecting semiotic chains, power organizations, junctures
related to arts, sciences and social struggles. A semiotic chain is a tubercle that joins diverse acts,
whether they are linguistic, perceptual, mimic or cogent: There is neither language in itself nor
universality of language.” (Rhizome, p.12-13). Bertil Malmberg established the difference between
the power of official languages and the subversion of subterranean languages mentioning that the
universality of language proceeds as bulb, from a position of power in comparison to other
languages which evolution by ‘stems and subterranean flows, along fluvial valleys, or railways,
moving through oil spots’. (Bertil Malmberg is quoted in Rhizome p. 13-14, from ‘The New Paths
of Linguistic’, p. 72. Mexico, Siglo XXI Ed.)

Webcam to the lair of the mole rats at the Smithsonian National Zoological Park :
http://nationalzoo.si.edu/Animals/SmallMammals/default.cfm?cam=NMR

One of the most important characteristics of the rhizome is that it has multiple entrances. Another
important difference between the tree configuration and the rhizome is that the last has no points or
positions as may be found in a structure, in a tree or in a root. There are not more that lines that
proliferate the whole in dynamism, always in connection to the external, with “flat multiplicities of
n dimensions that are a-significant and a-subjective”. (Rizhome, p. 16). In some cases tubers, trees
and roots may be found at the end of the lines of a rhizome, but they do not have the primacy of
central tubers or trees. Moreover, Alexander’s definition of the semi-lattice establishes a
comparison with that of rhizome in the case of Deleuze and Guattari. For Alexander, the semi-
lattice axiom consists in the following definition: “A collection of sets forms a semi-lattice if and
only if, two overlapping sets belong to the collection, then the set of elements common to both also
belongs to the collection”. (Jencks, p. 31).
Although criticized by its focus on methodology, it is important to extend on Alexander’s work,
because it opens the comprehension of reality as an unlimited matrix of possibilities. For instance,
Geoffrey Broadbent wrote that “…according to Alexander, a tree based in 20 elements may contain
at the most 19 sub-ensembles of those 20 elements. On the other hand, a lattice, also based on those
20 elements, may contain more than a million of sub-ensembles”. (Broadbent, p. 273).
Nevertheless, the difference between the concepts of Alexander and those of Guattari and Deleuze
is that the last focus in the internality of the concept of a non-tree configuration, not specifically on
the mathematical possibilities.
According to Deleuze and Guattari, every rhizome is against the excessively signification of the
segments (for instance, the segments of History). Hence, the lines of segmentation that rhizomes
trace are stratified, territorialized and organized. On the other hand, the lines are also signified and
attributed, but the focus is not specially on these processes. Furthermore, the rhizome also provokes
processes of de-territorialization and re-territorialization that are relative; the rhizome constantly
joins one to the other. (Rhizome, p.17-18). The example of the orchid mimicking the wasp in order
to accomplish pollination is exemplary of the instance of territorialization and de-territorialization.
Deleuze and Guattari defined ‘plateau’ in order to establish the definition of a field where the
rhizomes are applied. This definition may be extended to the field of concepts: “We call plateau to
every multiplicity connectable with others by subterranean superficial stems in order to form and to
extend a rhizome…Every plateau may be read everywhere and may be related to everyone”.
(Rhizome, p. 34).
In this sense, I hold the hypothesis that the field of History (of Architecture) is a plateau formed by
rhizomes. These rhizomes are lines (not events, since events are points) of action that work together
in a-parallel trajectory, until selected by Historians in groups or associations in order to establish
which joint strategies these lines have in common. As the orchid and the wasp, these elements have
to wait until the moment of producing a common rhizomatic association in order to succeed. In
History, this lapse may take decades or centuries to be produced. This plateau is a topography
where concepts run in different and even contradictory directions, since by definition any
connection may be established between two elements. Fixed points constituted by discourse are
constantly re-defined and even eliminated.

A) B)
A) Alexander's diagrams on the city: Top, tree configuration. Below, the semi-lattice. (Broadbent, p. 274). B) The Klein
bottle,dDiagram by Ben Van Berkel's UN studio, (Verstegen, p. 72).

3. Representations of Diagrams: The ‘Tracing’ and the ‘Map’.

As aforementioned, the problem of representation arises for both tree and rhizome. The architect
has to represent for different purposes. One of them is in the elaboration of forms that embody
rhizomatic connections identified. Another is to structure the particularities of these connections.
As Hertzberger points, the difficulty lies in representing the ideas (and concepts) adequately: “A
particular difficulty is faced by the architect…he cannot represent his ideas in reality, but has to
resort to representing them by means of symbols, just as the composer only has his score with
which to render what he hears. While the composer may still more or less envisage what he has
created by checking to hear what his composition sounds like on the piano, the architect depends
entirely on the elusive world of drawings, which may never represent the space he envisages in its
entirety but may only represent separate aspects thereof (and even so the drawings are difficult to
read…This unsatisfactory state of affairs is maintained and even aggravated by the fact that the
drawing, irrespective of the meaning it seeks to communicate, evokes an independent aesthetic
image, which threatens to overshadow the architect’s original intentions and which may even be
interpreted by the maker himself in a different sense than initially foreseen)”. (Hertzberger, p.116).
Both tree and rhizome have a different representation. The rhizome does not answer to structural or
generative models which are mainly principles capable of being reproducible until the infinite under
the tree logic. On the other hand, the logic of the tree is that of ‘tracing’ and of reproduction and has
as finality the copy of something that is given totally finished from a structure that over-codifies
and from an axis that supports. This means that the logic of the representation of the tree is mainly
based on interpretations and significations. On the other hand, the rhizome produces a map.
Deleuze and Guattari assimilated the ‘tree configuration’ to that of psychoanalysis, linguistics and
structuralism, regenerations, reproductions, returns, hydras, medusas, and even informatics:
“Arborescent systems are hierarchical systems that comprise centers of signification and
subjectivation, central automats and organized memories.”(Rhizome, p. 27). Furthermore, Foucault
(alluded by Deleuze) referred to the opposition between History and structuralism when he wrote
that “…the essential debate has not mainly to do with structuralism as such, but with the existence
of models and realities denominated structures, as with the position and the statute that correspond
to the individual in dimensions that seemingly are not structured. So, as History is opposed directly
to structure, it may be thought that the subject conserves a sense of constituent, agglomerated,
unifying activity. But it does not happen the same when the ‘epochs’ of historic formations as
multiplicities are considered. Those escape the realm of the subject and of the structure as
well.”(Foucault, p. 40-41). For Foucault, the ethic of Power forbids the tracing of a structure in
History, since this tracing derives in interested interpretation.
(The field of History as a non-homogeneous plateau, is the result of post-structuralism in the
writings of authors like Deleuze; Foucault, Lyotard, Baudrillard, alluded in Josep Maria Montaner’s
book ‘Architecture and Critique’: ‘We have entered into a new period in which cultural multiplicity
prevails and in which the post-modern doubt has conduced to new scientific interpretations based
on the concept of a universe in non-equilibrium. Such a concept is expressed in fractal geometries
under the theory of chaos. Methods of thinking increase their critique and justify discontinuous,
fragmentary and provisional interpretations based on the emphasis of transformation and difference.
Scientific and philosophical activity are obliged to surrender their pretensions of neutrality and
objectivity to the will of universal knowledge and to its project of a unified science and totalizing
philosophy. Post-structuralism in architecture appears under the condition of perpetual crisis, in the
lost of faith in great interpretations and in doubts on the capacity of linguistic to explain
architecture' . (Montaner; Arquitectura y Crítica, GG Básicos; Barcelona, 1999; pg. 90).
Let us elaborate in the example of psychoanalysis, which Deleuze and Guattari identified with the
formation and consolidation of the tree as validation of organizations. In order to interpret
pathologies in the complex ‘net’ that human brain is (which understood in global terms is the map
of the potential of humankind) psychoanalysts proceeds coding and assigning interpretations
arbitrarily, thus precluding the understanding of political, material and proceedings that cannot be
explained solely with interested or discursive configurations, such as those of the tracing and the
tree. Tracing over the map of human mind is like trying to find figures over the tomography of a
patient and then using the figures as interpretations of pathologies. (Non-physiological)
explanations are to be found neither in the tomography nor in the interior of the person’s mind itself
but on the outside, in his relations and experiences.
The map cannot be understood if not taken as a global instrument associated with lines of action
and (social as well as geographical) ruptures. The map is a productive device that registers different
changing temperatures of social stability and instability. The tracing and dismembering of the map
into singular layers cannot but preclude the understanding of the place as a globality. In this sense,
Deleuze and Guattari depicted the ‘tracing’ as an instrument that lacks the operativity of the ‘map’.
The comparison of maps and the definition of globality of Deleuze and Guattari establish a link
with the 1905’s theory of Planning called ‘Survey before Plan’ by the Scot Patrick Geddes (theory
described by planner Peter Hall in his book ‘Cities of Tomorrow’). The point is the outstanding
similitude in the layering and the understanding of the relationship among intertwined phenomena
as described in the definition of rhizome and plateau: “Planning must start, for Geddes, with a
survey of the resources of such a natural region, of the human responses to it, and of the resulting
complexities of the cultural landscape…For this great work, Geddes constantly argued, the
planner’s ordinary maps were useless: you must start with the great globe…”(Hall, p. 142).
Geddes’s planning theory extends to the approach of rhizomes in fields called plateaus that have
relationships with other plateaus (thus implying the relationship among History, Sciences, Planning,
etc.) Geddes vision is truly ecological and refers to processes of symbiosis. The planner assimilates
natural and social phenomena through analysis (the survey) and establishes a relationship with other
intertwined plateaus. The similitude with Deleuze and Guattari’s theory of rhizomes is relevant for
Planning.
(Urban and regional planner Edward Soja, in his essay ‘Restructuring the Industrial Capitalist City,
in the book TransUrbanism, describes the relationship that the architect must have with the different
scales. A direct nexus may be established with the rhizomatic approach and the work on different
scales that characterized Patrick Geddes: ‘The…disagreement arises from the different scales and
concepts of urbanism that exist within architecture versus those in geography and planning…The
core architectural view…consists of streets, road and a built environment located within a vaguely
defined 'urban cloud'. In this vision, the city becomes a collection of separate cells with built
environments compacted together to form an urban mass. This view is radically different from the
larger-scale spatial or regional vision of the city as an expansive urban system of movements and
flows…and people living not just in built environments but in constructed geographies
characterized by different patterns of income, employment, educational levels, ethnic and racial
cultures, housing and job densities, etc... These constructed geographies get lost when the city is
reduced entirely to a collection of built forms. As a result, architects tend to see planning the city as
their exclusive domain, as specialists in built form, or else they dissociate themselves entirely from
the planning process, seen it only as imposing constraints on their creativity. The city that the
geographer looks at is much more than the built environment. What's being planned from the
geographer's point of view is a very different kind of city. The emphasis is not on the built
environment per se but on a more variegated and larger scale social environment…That is, …(try )
…to think on multiple scales- local, human and Regional -then to even larger regional, national
supra national and global scales. In the sense, the architect is being encouraged to think an little bit
more like the geographer, and specially to think regionally...). Edward Soja, in ‘Restructuring the
Industrial Capitalist City; op.cit. pg. 90).
On the other hand, the opposed model of work that relates to ‘tracings’ has been criticized by
Harvey for whom this method opposes complex reality: ‘Urban planning, which has always been
dominated by the primal work element of the drafting board and particularly by the process of
copying draws from the maps (a deceiving instrument as no other), was completely immerse in the
details concerning the human spatial organization on the terrain. In order to take a decision on a
concrete lot, the urban planner…painted it in red or green on a planning map, according to his own
intuitive evaluation of the spatial form…Webber…considers vital that the planner relinquishes “the
deeply rooted doctrine that seeks its method in models extracted from maps when, on the other
hand, it is hidden inside extremely complex social organizations”.’ (Harvey, in pg. 19, alludes M.
Webber in ‘Order in Diversity: Community without Propinquity’ in Wingo, L., comp., Cities and
Space: The Future Use Of Urban Land (Baltimore, 1963, pg. 54).
Alejandro Zaera Polo complements the definition of tracings and maps in reference to the work
of Rem Koolhaas and OMA in ‘Notes for a Topographic Survey’ (Croquis # 53, 1997): “Tracing is
the term used by Deleuze and Guattari in order to classify any ‘representation’ of reality operating
as an abstract system of codification with a tendency to establish rules, measures, or ‘compositions’.
‘Tracing’ opposes the ‘map’, which is an instrument of contact with reality, always in perpetual
modification, meant for experimentation. ‘Tracing’ is a tool for the determination of ‘competences’,
whereas the ‘map’ is an arm of ‘performances’. The almost purely graphical approach which
characterizes the work of (Zaha) Hadid and (Elia) Zenghelis, is almost immediately identifiable
with ‘tracing’ as a formal abstraction of reality”. (Croquis 53, p.35).
Guattari and Deleuze wrote that the map “is open, connectable in all its dimensions, demountable,
reversible, and capable of receiving constant modifications. It may be broken, inverted, adapted to
mountains of any nature, and commenced by an individual, group or social association”. (Rhizome,
p. 22). We may perform a tracing over a map, but the result is that the tracing has translated the
map, transforming the rhizome into roots: It has organized, stabilized and neutralized the rhizome.
The tracing only reproduces: “That is why it is so harmful. It injects redundancies and propagates
them. What the tracing reproduce of the rhizome is just the mires, the blockades, the germens of the
axis or the points of structure…When a rhizome is intercepted, arborified, it is over, nothing
happens with its desire; because it is always by desire that the rhizome moves and produces… the
rhizome operates on desire by external and productive impulses”. (Rhizome; p.23-24). According to
Deleuze, what proceeds from the outside are forces; Deleuze places this outside even further than
any form of exteriority. “At the same time, not only singularities of forces but singularities of
resistance exist as well. The last are capable of modifying and permuting those relationships,
changing the instable diagram”. (Foucault, p. 157).
Philosopher Christine Buci-Glucksmann in “From the Cartographical View to the Virtual” wrote
that “the map is…a space that is open to multiple entrances, a ‘plateau’ where the gaze becomes
nomadic.” For Buci-Glucksmann, the map is immediately both visible and readable: “The map
seizes the real, masters it, and allows a glimpse of an unconscious quality of vision with its folding
and unfolding, within a weightless plane. A map takes possession of the limits and the borders of
the unlimited… An abstraction such as the virtual presupposes a mental image of the world and an
abstract machine made of lines and of possibilities enabling one to ‘read a map’, as we say. This
involves a complex reading, because one needs to project oneself outside of oneself, to forget one’s
own position, in order to explore this cartography in rhizomes… From now on, the cartogram of
contemporary art is endless, since the map is the interface of the world, as in Archizoom’s ‘No-Stop
City’ (1969). And it is precisely this world-making quality of the map that generates all its
paradoxes and its multiple logics. Since, however utopic it may be, the map may also become a
highly effective machine of power. With the maps kept secret by totalitarian regimes, targeted
bombings of sites, indeed of populations, the map truly is ‘a portrait’, an image ‘in meaning and in
representation”.
Deleuze wrote in ‘Bergsonism’ that virtuality (of the maps, in this case) is ‘…the subjective, or the
duration, …the virtual. More precisely, the virtual, as actualization, cannot be separated from the
movement of its actualization since actualization is fulfilled by differentiation, by divergent lines,
and creates by its own movement many other differences of nature’ (Deleuze, Bergsonism’, pg. 41).
In this sense, the map is virtual, it actualizes itself. On the other hand, the tracing is defined by
generating actualizations only through discourse.
Deleuze continues that “…from a certain point of view, the possible is contrary to the real, it
opposes the real; furthermore the virtual opposes the actual, what is absolutely different…The
possible does not have reality (although it may have an actuality; inversely, the virtual is not actual,
nevertheless it has a reality). The best formula to define the states of virtuality is that of Proust: ‘
Real without being actual, ideal without being abstract’…And since not all possible fulfills,
fulfillment implies a limitation by which certain possibilities are considered rejected or prohibited,
meanwhile other ‘pass’ to the real. The virtual, on the other hand, does not have to fulfill, only
actualize and actualization yet does not have as rules similarity and limitation, but difference or
divergence and creation…since the virtual cannot proceed by elimination or limitation to actualize,
but it must create its own lines of actualization in positive acts…In summary, the characteristic of
the virtual is to exist in such a way that it is only actualized by difference: it is forced to difference,
to create lines of difference in order to fulfill actualization’. (Deleuze, Bergsonism; pg. 101)
Castoriadis coincides with Buci-Glucksman: producing a map requires projecting out of the own
discourse. Furthermore, Castoriadis establishes a critique to the repetition of the tracing scheme: ‘…
what characterizes each process of metabolizing determined by the encounter between the psychic
space and the space external to the psyche is defined by the specificity of the relational model
imposed to the elements of the represented. On the other hand, this model is the trace of the
representative’s own structural scheme’. (Castoriadis, p. 40)
Represented in ‘tracings’ or in ‘maps’, both tree and rhizome reproduce the image of the world
(imago mundi). The only possibility to escape to the image of the world that theory has proposed is
assimilating it with a box of tools, avoiding the discursive practice. As Miguel Morey wrote in the
prologue to the Spanish edition of ‘Foucault’: “As a ‘box of tools’, the book’s connection with a
domain of exteriority is what gives the book and theory their specific importance. At the same time
they surrender their pretensions of setting, proposing or imposing an imago mundi; the writing, the
theory, the book are tools altogether with other tools, standing all in order to be proved exteriorly to
themselves and in multiple, local and plural connection with other books, with other theories, with
other writings.” (Foucault, p. 13). Foucault established a critique to the systems and referred theory
as an instrument for the relations of power and the struggles around it. He compromised Historic
reflection (in certain dimensions) in the search of such a task. (Foucault p. 12).
In summary, the map is the mimesis of the world, an image of the world, an ‘imago mundi’.
Nevertheless, it is also a holistic and political device for representation. The maps of capitalism are
indeed different from the maps of socialism. They represent different positions and have different
intentions. The maps of performance are also political; they cannot take away themselves from the
modes of production. Furthermore, Christine Buci-Glucksmann establishes categories between the
map and the diagram. She wrote that “…the diagram is already in itself a map or an overlay of
maps, that allows one to explore movements…and virtual volumes…The diagram explores
continuous space, the constructed, within an abstract figurative which initiates an experience of
thought, through its allusive and schematic structure…(in) a kind of Leibnizian reasoning, that one
rediscovers in the new connections made between the numeric continuousness and the
morphogenesis that are so characteristic of architectures of the virtual. Seeing is to (construct,
build) and to know, to link… systems, arrangements made of lines, of forces and of vectorial points,
as in Paul Klee’s schemas, where the arrows are forces. The map combines the two space-times
distinguished by Boulez and developed by Deleuze and Guattari in ‘Mille Plateaus’.”
4. The Materiality of Rhizomes at the Architectonic and Urban Level
Architectural rhizomes find an example in the Agadir Congress Center of Rem Koolhaas, which is
in Zaera Polo’s essay ‘OMA 1986-1991. Notes for a Topographic Survey’ probably ‘…the most
astonishing example of this material corporeality, of the connectivity of smooth space. No more
segmentation between spaces, no more homogeneity: a continuous variation of form through space,
the generation of a vectorial, directional and anisotropic space. Agadir is a differential space rather
than an articulation of homogeneities. From the simple elimination of the structural grid, the setting
of spatial or metric references disappears and with them the possibility of a formal codification.
Space and material are treated in Agadir like dynamic flows rather than stable forms. (Croquis #53,
p. 45). Zaera Polo explains that topological, or projective geometries substitute Euclidian or metric
geometries in an epistemological difference; The Agadir Congress centre is a ‘…topograph(y)
where measure and proportion, the basic instruments of classical architecture, are replaced by
fundamentally topological relationships, geometries of connections, adjacencies or distances instead
of measurements, magnitudes or properties’. (Croquis #53, pg. 40).
The Agadir Congress Centre is a hotel and congress palace designed in 1990 by Koolhaas in
Morocco. It constitutes a project based on geology and topology, since it does not depart from top-
down typology as direct re-elaboration. On the other hand, it does not proceed strictly from
information as the bottom-up designs of FOA. Agadir’s concept establishes and promotes spatial
connections that derive in topological and geometrical super-impositions.
Agadir’s section reveals what Colin Rowe denominated ‘phenomenologic transparency’, a section
working as façade and establishing direct visual relationships with the content of the building. The
structure does not modulate the non-Cartesian space which is truly proto-functional (it is functional
but redefines the temporality of function through durations more than through standard measure).
Structural elements are not posed as indexes (as coded information in gridded space), but as a truly
topography or cartography, that is, according to topographic accidents or to the slope of the dunes,
etc. The building’s elevations break the rigid ruling geometry of composition but, on the other hand,
reveal the multiple relationships of space and function. This property is evident specially in the
vestibule, a topological space that consists in dunes. Hence, surfaces accomplish an heterogeneous
landscape within the building. The arrival of people at the great vestibule is entirely free,
rhizomatic. Furthermore, the vestibule accomplishes the property of being an open urban plaza
under the building.
In the upper floors, rooms lead to internal secluded patios in direct elaboration of the Muslim
traditional riyad. The corridors that structure the guest’s rooms accesses, act as the derbs (alleys) of
Moroccan cities (as in the Medina of Marrakech). Forming a urban space through connections, the
corridors establish a net of multiple paths that remind of ancient Moroccan cities that were not
accomplished through master plans but through historic super-impositions. Hence, Agadir’s
Congress Palace is contextual via the re-elaboration of the traditional space of the Moslim city, and
on the other hand, it is definitively modern. Nevertheless, the building has not been biased for the
easy copy or historic quotation. Its merit is the re-elaboration of the urban Moroccan condition.
It is interesting to note that the guest’s first floor has a diagonal at the scale of the floor, which is
significant if we compare that act with the urban trace of the Diagonal of the Cerdá Plan of
Barcelona (let us remember that Spain was Moslim domain for more than 700 years). In summary,
more than a floor in a building the stage is a miniature city (with Diagonal included). Koolhaas
incorporates a profound urban virtuality in his building, thus opening the space of melancholy,
since Agadir is located far from any urban environment (philosopher Andrew Benjamin proposed
the category of the ‘melancholic space’ open by a graphic that makes allusion to the missing, which
in this case is twofold: the never-realized building and the urban condition).

Model ofn the Urban Plaza (Croquis #53, p. Plan of the Hotel, h. 20 mts. (Croquis Urban Plaza, h.4-18 mts. (Croquis
201). #53, p.196). #53, p.196).
 Quartier Riad Zitoun Kedim, derb Jdid; Marrakech;
Urban Plaza from Reception; (Croquis #53, p.195).
1987 (Wilbaux, pg. 80).
Rem Koolhaas's project for the Agadir Congress Center, Morocco, 1990.
Furthermore, rhizomes find an example in Koolhaas’ s Melun-Sénart remodelling, which is a
project at the urban scale that assumes the definition of connections. In an interview entitled ‘OMA
1986-1991. Notes for a Topographic Survey’, Zaera Polo wrote that OMA’s oeuvre replaces the
ideas or the essences by relations or performances, liberating from linguistic procedures that found
in de-constructivism the terminal phase of the representative paradigm, through ‘…indifference
towards form as linguistic codification which enables us to typify the latest Office production as
rhizomatic, i.e. , fundamentally constructed on its operativity’. (Croquis #53, pg. 36)

http://architecture.mit.edu/~elos/4.297/KOOLHAAS/FINISHED%20PAGES/NEW%20TOWN%20OF%20MELUN-
SENART.htm

Model of Koolhaas's project for the Revitalization of Melun Sènart; 1987.

First matrix of Feedback/Determinations

In the Melun-Sénart Project, the strategy ‘…consists in the generation of a system apt for
development, rather than the determination of formal results. The aims of the proposal are
summarized in the accessibility of urban services and the preservation of certain aesthetics qualities
of the place. An initial distinction between urban project and development project may define the
areas of control and indetermination. The explicit rejection of nay urban ideology as a determinant
of the plan implies the acceptance of the impossibility of exercising absolute determination over the
materialization of the city. The detonator for Melun-Sénart is directly functional, without
compositive preconceptions. The urban system is developed around a series of belts associated with
different activities and at different speeds at which the energy of the design is concentrated,
minimalizing the determinations of the developable areas. In Melun-Sénart, the need for a formal
determination of the city is dissolved in a strategy of control over the developable/undevelopable
areas. Again, an operative rather than a linguistic logic. The Melun-Sénart system is made of lines
which intersect at structurally asignifying points: the points of articulation do not necessarily
influence the materialization of the lines. It is a type of structure that may be perfectly associated
with the principle of connection and diversity used by Deleuze and Guattari to characterize the
rhizomatic systems: 'Any point of the rhizome might and should be connected to nay other'.
(Deleuze and Guattari). The urban topography of Melun-Sénart is organized in lines or vectors
instead of points, centers or positions, each line having a particular determination in terms of speed,
direction or activity: a multiplicity of measures and directions. There is no single spatial reference
in orientation or measure. It is a disorganized topography which does not impose regulations on the
correspondences between elements and positions, in perfect fulfillment of the rhizomatic principle
of multiplicity: 'In a rhizome there are no points or positions like in a tree, simply lines. There are
no units of measure, only multiplicities or varieties of measurement'. (Deleuze and Guattari). The
lines structuring Melun-Sénart are extendable, able to grow, given that their boundaries are neither
significant, dimensional, syntactic nor semantic: there are no formal codifications of ties or ends.
Here we find the third principle of the rhizome, that of the a-signifying rupture: 'A rhizome may be
broken, shattered at any spot, but it will start up again from one of its old lines or on new lines. It
will not have the oversignificant breaks separating structures or cutting across a single structure'.
(Zaera Polo en Croquis #53, pg 37-38).
The second matrix has in the horizontal scale the Instruments of architectural practice that Zaera
Polo classify into external and internal. The first require knowledge from other discourses in order
to make the architectural discourse comprehensible, among them culture, styles, traditions, codes,
etc. Philosophy may be added to this list of external instruments if applied as detached from
architectural practice and if it becomes only abstract discourse. On the other hand, the internal
instruments of architecture are inherent to its practice and are not necessarily understood in
reference to a exterior discourse. In reference to the category of Formalists/Linguistics, they use an
internal discourse of the practice although the origin of this knowledge comes from other fields
such as literature (that is the case of deconstruction).
Vertical reading of the effects relates architectural practice with the productive elements of the
architecture. Pragmatics is related more to the kind of practice of FOA, for instance. Practices with
Internal effects are those that not work directly with architectural productivity and that have
elaborated their own discourse that isolate them. Their discourse presumably has been overcome in
a moment of historic shifts (the Post-Moderns and Deconstructivists may enter this list).
The third matrix refers to the implementation and organization of materiality and the program.
Referred to materiality, Zaera Polo divides it between Integration and Differentiation. In the first
list he includes practices such as those of Miralles and Pinós (material and topographic multiplicity
with bottom-up implementation of design, that is, inFORMing design with the conditions of site,
views, topography, etc., instead of imposing the idea. Please refer to Croquis 88/89. p. 321). Among
the seconds Zaera Polo includes Gehry and his Guggenheim Museum, although Zaera Polo does not
clarify why this building is an example in material integration, and this doubt grows in the internal
path of the museum, since there is a divorce between the exuberant exterior and its interior except
for the high-ceilinged spaces associated to the external glass façades. The material integration
alluded by Zaera Polo may consist to the fact that the museum is titanium-coated, a material that
reacts to the conditions of light and that changes its effect constantly. On the other hand, the
museum integrates the economic conditions of a formerly-decaying city like Bilbao in order to
enhance its effects to the whole city. In this sense, the Museum rejoins the city and its projects.

Second Matrix of Instruments/Effects

Zaera Polo refers to Nouvel’s Tokyo Opera and to the H & dM Signal Box as a process of material
difference since the implementation of a top-down or authorial design approach where forms are
neatly differenced from those of their environment. For instance, the Opera is produced by a
process of Morphing (that Philippe Starck defines as a ‘whale that swallowed the Kaaba, in Croquis
65/66 in ‘Jean Nouvel. Intensifying the Real, by Zaera Polo) which provides the fact that the
process comes clearly defined by the election of a concept that is separated from others (a concept
that precludes others) and not by the influence of information in architecture as in FOA or OMA’s
practice. On the other hand, H & dM’ s oeuvre differences from its impersonal environment of train
rails and infrastructures in order to acquire a neatly sculptured and minimal character as strategy of
difference.
In reference to the program, Zaera Polo also divides it into Integration and Difference. In reference
to the integration of the program, he propose Koolhaas’s Kunsthall as an example in which the
architect integrates the Exposition Center in Rotterdam with the infrastructure of roads that cross
the building. The same commentary could have been made to the Congrexpo in Lille. In both cases
the infrastructure supports with affluence but are due also to the condition of the buildings as new
elements in the re-organization and density of programs that otherwise could have ended in only
road infrastructure. Koolhaas takes advantage of the position of the new buildings in relation to flux
and the necessity of peripheral sites of superimposition of programs.
In reference to the Difference of the program, Zaera Polo includes the baths at Vals by Zumthor
probably because its materiality (and function) provide new approaches to the definition of the
thermal bath. The pools occupy the entire dimensions of the precincts: in fact, the pools are the
precincts and not just containers of water in depressed or abutted surfaces. This redefinition
provides an integral approach of sensations and materials for the baths. The walls, ceilings and
transitions between different pools are part of the thermal baths and not a detached experience (as a
matter of fact, Zumthor collapses the scale of the pool and provides a prototype which has walls,
ceilings and continuity with other pools. The exterior is just the envelope). William Curtis wrote
that the materiality of Zumthor’s Baths at Vals ‘becomes a sort of release mechanism for the free
associations of the imagination’ (Curtis in ‘The Unique and the Universal. A Historian’s
Perspective on Recent Architecture, in Croquis 88/89, pg. 16).

Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao, by
Frank Gehry, 1991-1997
Photo by Luan Shing
Baths at Vals, by Peter Zumthor;
1996
http://www.archinform.net/medien/0 Nouvel, Contest, 1986.(El Croquis (El Croquis #65/66; p. 16)
0009065.htm?
ID=a0a8c6b5f6c3459e6f011c1075c
5f028
Third Matrix, Matter/Program
Kunsthal, Rotterdam, Rem Koolhaas; 1987-1992.
Igualada, Cemetery, by Pinos y
Miralles, Concurso, 1985.
http://architecture.mit.edu/~elos/4.297/KOOLHAAS/
FINISHED%20PAGES/KUNSTHAL-
Photo by Hafizur Rahaman
%20ROTTERDAM.htm
Tokyo Opera Section, by Jean
Tokyo Opera Section, by Jean Nouvel, Contest, 1986.
#65/66; p. 16)
6. Bibliography. (Notes make reference to the following texts):
1. Hertzberger, Herman; Space and the Architect; 010 Publishers; Amsterdam, 2001.
2. Van Berkel, Ben; Diagrams-Interactive Instruments in Operation; en ANY 23; Anyone Corp.;
NY; 1998
3. Jencks, Charles y Kropf, Karl; ‘A City is not a Tree’, en ‘Theories and Manifestoes of
Contemporary Architecture’, Academy Ed.; West Sussex; 1997.
4. Deleuze, Gilles; Guattari, Félix: Rizoma; Ed. Coyoacán, México; 1994
5. Broadbent, Geoffrey; Diseño Arquitectónico; Gustavo Gili; 2da Ed.; Barcelona; 1982
6. Eisenman, Peter; Diagram: An Original Scene of Writing; en ANY 23; Anyone Corp.; NY; 1998
7. Allen, Stan; Diagrams Matter; en ANY 23; Anyone Corp.; NY; 1998
8. Zaera Polo; Notas para un Levantamiento Topográfico; en Croquis 53 OMA/Rem Koolhaas; Ed.
Croquis; 1997).
9. Sirefman, Susana, The name game, en Architecture, Dec. 1999, p. 49.
10. Solà Morales; Ignasi; Diferencias. Topografía de la Arquitectura Contemporánea; Ed. GG;
Barcelona; 2da Ed; 1996.
11. Hall, Peter; Cities of Tomorrow; Blackwell; Oxford; 1996.
12. Deleuze, Gilles; Foucault; Paidos Iberica; Barcelona; 1987.
13. Buci-Glucksmann, Christine; en ‘From the cartographical view to the Virtual’; http://www.
medienkunstnetz.de/works/no-stop-city/
14. 2G #2, 1997/2, Toyo Ito ; Yiuchi Suzuki Ed; GG; 1997
15. Harvey, David; Urbanismo y Desigualdad Social, Siglo XXI de España Editores; 3ra Ed, Ma-
drid, 1985.
16. Castoriadis-Aulagnier, Piera; La Violencia de la Interpretación; Amorrortu Editores; Bs. As.,
1977.
17. M.M. Rosental y P. F. Ludin; Diccionario de Filosofía; AKAL Editor; Madrid, 1975.
18. Collins Dictionaries; Intense Educational Ltd; UK; Digital Edition; 2003.
19. Lyotard, Jean François, La fenomenología, Ediciones Paidós; Barcelona, Buenos Aires, 1989.
20. Deleuze, Gilles, El Bergsonismo, Ediciones Cátedra, Colección Teorema; Madrid, 1996.
21. Benjamin, Andrew; Architectural Philosophy, The Athlone Press, Londres, 2000.
22. Croquis #72, Ben Van Berkel, El Croquis Editorial, Madrid, 1995.
23. 2G #16, FOA; Editorial Gustavo Gili; Barcelona; 2000.
24. Croquis # 88/89; Worlds One; El Croquis Editorial; Madrid, 1998.
25. Wilbaux, Quentin; La Médina de Marrakech. Formation des Spaces Urbains d'une Ancienne
Capitale du Maroc; L'Harmattan; Paris, 2001.
26. Zabalbescoa, Anatxu; Rodriguez Marcos, Javier; Minimalismos; Ed. GG; Barcelona, 2000.
27. Croquis #65/66; Jean Nouvel; El Croquis Editorial; Madrid; 1998.
28. Montaner, Joseph María; Arquitectura y Crítica, GG Básicos; Barcelona, 1999.
HISTORIES=PLATEAUS by Carlos A. Romay Vergara
2/5. CONNEXIONS AND LINKS IN TIME.
Summary:
1. The Theatre of Quotidian Life.
2. Loos: Limits and Irruption.
3. The Destruction of the Relationship Between Interior and Exterior in Loos’s Oeuvre.
4. Activity. The Portrait in Movement.
5. How Difference evolves.
6. Bibliography.
Two lines of History may be linked though separated by time and space. As a matter of fact, this
connexion may be established between different spatial and temporal historic lines that have
similarities or that influence one on the other. Hence, what is the link between a house by Adolf
Loos in 1928’s Vienna and, through a leap in time and space, a house by Japanese-Scottish
office Ushida Findlay built in Tokyo, 1993? If there is such a relationship, what is its consequence
for Architecture?
Firstly, it must be highlighted that Adolf Loos’s (1870-1933) career is ampler than his celebrated
article ‘Ornament and Crime’. Loos was an architect that argued for a separation between the
proposition of space and the respect for tradition. He did not want to define ‘inhabiting’ through
given architectural definitions that he considered stylistic and determinist (especially those of the
Viennese Sezession Group). To Loos, lifestyles, habits and furniture were not properties and objects
modifiable according to styles, but important part of the existence of the people. Nevertheless, Loos
introduced determinism as part of his ambiguous discourse on mobility. He proposed the movement
and control through the Raumplan spatial configuration and, on the other hand, he precluded the
introduction of the notion of movement into the building. Furthermore, his discourse established
differences with that of the first dogmatic and formal Modernists.
In Hilde Heynen’s book ‘Architecture and Modernity’, Loos’s architecture “…did not immediately
win him the same recognition as his writings. This was largely because it was fundamentally at
variance with the ideals of the modern movement and was therefore incompatible with the
historiography of Gideon and Pevsner. The attitude adopted toward him was often ambivalent. He
was respected and celebrated as a pioneer of ‘modern architecture’ with repeated reference to
‘Ornament und Verbrechen’-the only article he wrote that became really famous. His other articles
and the buildings that he actually built remained largely unnoticed and undiscussed for a long time.
In particular, his invention of the Raumplan, the three dimensional design, met with little response
from his contemporaries”. (Heynen, p.75)
The topic of the relationship between interior and exterior is fundamental in Loos’s oeuvre. Loos’s
vision on modernity was influenced by its positive and negative qualities, thus influencing his work.
In this point, we may ask some questions in order to relate Loos’s work with that of Ushida Findlay:
How was the evolution of the relationship between interior and exterior since the Viennese
bourgeoisie days of the 1920’s to the time of consumerism of modern Japan? How has the notion of
Modernity changed more than seventy years between one building and the other?
1. The Theatre of Quotidian Life.
The first information in order to establish a relationship between Loos and Ushida Findlay is that in
the year of 1974 Eisaku Ushida presented a thesis on a house that Loos planned for actress, singer
and dancer Josephine Baker. Ushida proposed a methodology derived from the Poetics of Space by
Gaston Bachelard for the study of the mentioned house. In this thesis Ushida surely assimilated
concepts and ideas that were important for the development of Loos’s oeuvre (in this case the
notion of Raumplan).
The Raumplan (German word where Raum=space) designates a spatial configuration where the
multi-level plan consists of a strongly oriented unique space in which points of observation and
control are established. It is characterized by the tri-dimensional orientation of the spatial layout and
by the incorporation of syntactical elements such as stairs, half levels, voids, fills and in general, by
the proposition of a flexible and multi-purpose space. It is neither a functionalist nor structuralist
space, even more, it constitutes a diagram.

A)
B)
C) D)

A) Adolf Loos, Moller House, Axonometry of Interior. (Heynen, p.83); B) A.Loos, Moller House; Vienna, 1928, front
façade (Heynen, p. 81). C) A. Loos; Moller House, The ladies' Lounge (http://www.geocities.com/
darq_estudio/lecorbu/lo02.jpg); D) A. Loos, interior of Moller House, (Häuser 6/94; Hamburgo; pg. 10).

In Loos’s oeuvre, and especially in the Moller House, the architect attributes different areas to the
control of different members of the family. Hilde Heynen defines and comments over the
Raumplan’s characteristics in the work of Loos: “His houses get their very specific character due to
the alternation of different atmospheres and to the contrast between light and dark, high and low,
small and large, intimate and formal. And yet this plurality of spatial experiences is unified in a
certain sense, since the experiences are brought together by the Raumplan, a technique of designing
in three dimensions that Loos regarded as his most important contribution to architecture.
Designing for Loos involves a complex three dimensional activity: it is like a jigsaw puzzle with
spatial units of different heights that have to be defined first and fitted into a single volume
afterward”. (Heynen, p.80)
Furthermore, the word ‘complex’ designates the interplay of two apparently opposed notions that in
the case of the Moller House are control and liberty. Control exists because Loos locates certain
points that dominate the observation of the course of the guests along the house, especially in the
stairs and levels connected visually in the lounge areas. Liberty exists since the Raumplan is not a
functionalist space that forces directionality; on the other hand it enhances constant exploration and
unexpected journeys. In Loos’s Moller House this traced itineraries are multiple and ever-changing,
labyrinthine.
In the aforementioned house (Vienna, 1928) the sequence of living areas is built around a central
hall. Once entering the small entrance, the visitor must turn left and mount a flight of six steps to
the cloakroom. After the somewhat suffocating feeling of the entrance, this feels like a first
breathing space. The route continues: once again the visitor climbs a flight of stairs-this time with a
bend in it; only then one arrive in the huge hall that comprises the heart of the house. The rooms
with a specific function are grouped around the periphery of the high-ceilinged salon which is a
‘ladies’ lounge’ (Damenzimmer) abutting on the front façade and built a few steps higher than the
level of the hall. The music room is in the same level as the hall and abuts on the rear façade.
Immediately adjoining it and four steps higher we find the dining room, which also abuts on the
rear façade. (Heynen, p. 83-84). Hence, the trajectory is a theatre of flows where one is always
observed by those who know the strategic points. The notion of theatricality, typical of Loos’s
houses and of the Raumplan, is depicted by Beatriz Colomina in Heynen’s book: “The house is the
stage for the theater of the family, a place where people are born and live and die.”(Heynen, p. 80,
quoting Beatriz Colomina’s essay “The Split Wall: Domestic Voyeurism” in Colomina’s book
“Sexuality and Space”).
Heynen extends on the notion of theatricality in the Moller House by Loos: “This theatricality may
be seen in the way Loos creates a choreography of arrivals and departures: through the frequent
shifts in direction that oblige one to pause for a moment, and through the transition between the
dark entrance and the light living area, one gets a sense of deliberately entering a stage set-the stage
of everyday life”.(Heynen, p. 82-83).
On the other hand, in the Chiaroscuro House in Tokyo, the Ushida Findlay team proposes the
Raumplan in the house project of an artist who wanted to live with his family in a ‘bright and
colorful’ house. That is the rationale of the exploration of the chiaroscuro, the technique of the
emphatic treatment of light and shadows in painting. The house evolves through different heights
and through intermediate levels and points of observation of space that facilitate the comprehension
of the whole, as in the Moller House by Loos.
Apparently in the Chiaroscuro House, the architects succeeded in obtaining a more quotidian and
open space than in the Moller House by Loos, nevertheless, this affirmation is relative since the
notion of the ‘quotidian’ may have changed since the 1930’s. Chiaroscuro House’s atmosphere is
more illuminated and relaxed than the Moller House, and the materials and colors help attaining this
sensation. The penetration of light is outstanding and inviting. The materials chosen by Ushida
Findlay establish a sharp contrast with the sobriety of Loos’s Moller House. Nevertheless, the
theatricality has not been postponed. The high space of the Raumplan in Chiaroscuro is a scenario
for various imaginary journeys in a theatrical play, proposed for the repetition of quotidian acts not
deprived of expectation as space has been designed for observation.
Paul Carter writes in his essay ‘Introduction to Ushida Findlay Works’ (in architectural magazine
2G #6), that this theatricality refers to the play of drama that characterizes the Japanese-Scottish
office: “It is this subconscious architecture of transitory noises, ephemeral faces and out-of-focus
shadows which supplies the mise-en-scène of a dire emotional renegotiation, one that admits back
in the madness, and renders the meander, sometimes the headlong flight, essential furniture of the
soul’s future living place”. (2G Ushida Findlay #6, p. 9)
Both houses, Moller and Chiaroscuro, exploit the dynamic movement that constitutes the ‘Idea of a
Scenario’ for life and for quotidian emotions. In both houses, theatricality as action and the image
proposed as photography, root them deeply with art, with moving scenes whose ground is
architecture and the space formed by intentionally redundant elements (the stairs) which incite
continuous movement. Theatre (movement) and painting (architecture as backdrop), are related
through the construction of a scenario where in effect there are stage boxes for the contemplation of
the repetition of the quotidian and every day’s activity: In the Moller house the stage box is the
“ladies’ lounge’ and in the Chiaroscuro House, two rooms that dominate the space of double height
located at each side of the final fly of stairs. Moreover, in the Moller House by Loos, the similarity
of the flight of stairs with a painting is interesting. Like in a Modern play, we find flights of stairs
with different directions that overlay like the scenery of a play in which the movement of characters
expressed the rupture with the modern that Loos worried greatly.
Deleuze wrote in ‘Le Pli’ (pg. 51) that Loos follows baroque architecture, in the sense of the tacit
division between interior and exterior, as the diagram of the baroque of a house of two stages where
the base is the body and the first floor is the mind. Both floors are not connected directly, and such
is the caesura of the relationship between exterior and interior: “Such is the baroque feature: an
exterior always in the exterior, an interior always in the interior. An infinite ‘receptivity’, an infinite
‘spontaneity’: the external façade for the reception and the internal chambers for the action. Until
now, Baroque architecture will not cease facing two principles, one of sustentation and the other as
principle of coating (sometimes Gropius and others Loos)”. (Deleuze quotes Bernard Cache’s book
L'Ameublement du Territoire).
2. Loos: Limits and Irruption.
In general terms, the exclusion of exteriority in the Moller House is performed by the reinforcement
of limits. Walls take charge of delimitation, working as impermeable, solid, impenetrable elements,
capable of defending the family’s precious intimacy in the midst of an ever changing and
unpredictable situation: “This duality of inside and outside is achieved by providing a good design
for the boundary-that is, for the walls. It is here, according to Loos, in the distinction between
outside and outside, that architecture comes to its own…In Loos’s view, the important thing was to
draw clear distinctions between different areas in the house, and to set up definite boundaries
between them. The architectural quality of a building lay in the way that this interplay of
demarcation and transitions was handled, in the structuring of the different areas, and in defining
their relationship.” (Heynen, p. 76)
Loos reinforced the differences of the hard limit of exterior-interior through the opening of gaps in
strategic positions for the interior. The openings are never in random position; furthermore, the
house, as a heavy box of filtration of light and the exterior absorbs only what is useful in order to
reinforce the internal control system of the spaces in the Raumplan. Internal organization does not
appear to the exterior (neither will it in Ushida Findlay’s house except for the large windows of the
street façade).
Beatriz Colomina refers to the particularity of the exclusion of the exterior in Loos’s house in these
terms: “…with Loos, windows are not normally designed to be looked out of. They function in the
first instance as a source of light; what is more, they are often opaque or are situated above eye
level…All this means that the interior is experienced as a secluded and intimate area. Nowhere does
the space outside penetrate the house. While partition walls are often absent in the interior, replaced
by large openings between two spaces, every transition to the outside is very clearly defined as a
door and not as an opening in the wall. The transition between inside and outside is often modified
by a flight of steps, a terrace, a verandah”. (Heynen, p. 88).
Loos proposed the Raumplan in order to perform a synthesis of different types of space, but in
certain places in the Moller house he reversed the effect dissolving the walls with reflecting
surfaces or mirrors, which he used as elements which interrupted the fixed hard limits. In this way,
he amplified even more the interiority, since walls reflect the own interior of the house, which turns
even more self-referential: Spaces within other spaces, not as in the case of paintings, which
transport to other landscapes and situations, but as a circularly-defined space, always referred to
itself. Interiority was exacerbated.

A) B) C)
A) Ushida Findlay, Chiaroscuro House, view of street façade. (2G #6; p.42). B) Ushida Findlay, Chiaroscuro House, view of
the space of the Raumplan (2G #6; p. 48). C) Adolf Loos, Moller House, view of the ladies' lounge (Heynen; p. 46). D)
Adolf Loos, Moller House; View of the stairs. (http://www.via-arquitectura.net/13/13-024.htm)
 D) E) F)
E) Ushida Findlay, Chiaroscuro House, view of the rooms that comprise the Raumplan. F) Ushida Findlay, Chiaroscuro
House, view of the system of stairs. (2G # 6; p. 47-49)

Hilde Heynen refers to the strong notion of limits and the topic of materials on the oeuvre of Loos:
“The most striking thing in Loos’s houses is the unique way that the experience of domesticity and
bourgeois comfort is combined with disruptive effects. The different rooms that contrast so sharply
with each other are linked together and kept in balance by the sheer force of the Raumplan; one
does, however, constantly encounter influences that make for disunity…Sometimes mirrors or
reflecting surfaces are combined with windows, serving to undermine the role of the walls, because
their unambiguous function as partitions between indoors and outdoors is threatened. There is a
distinct interplay between the openness of the Raumplan that coordinates all the rooms and the
completely individual spatial definition that distinguishes each room separately, due to the materials
used and details such as ceiling surrounds, floor patterns, and wall coverings…This, too, makes for
an ambiguous experience of space; on the one hand one feels these are well-defined spaces, with
clear protective boundaries, but on the other hand one is aware it is quite possible that one is under
the gaze of an unseen person elsewhere in the house. The sense of comfort is not unqualified, but is
upset at regular intervals by disruptive effects.”(Heynen, p. 89)
For Loos, the richness of the play of domestic powers (spaces for the observation and control)
cannot be neither penetrated nor questioned by occasional pedestrians that walk in front of the
house, who are not able to imagine what the closed volumes of the Moller House hide. This type of
organization of space is indeed representative of the negative relationship that Loos thought existed
between interior (domesticity) and exterior (irruption).
Consequently, is the Raumplan a diagram of Power? In this sense, philosopher Gilles Deleuze
wrote that it is possible to speak of a diagram of power that extends itself though qualified
knowledge, furthermore mentioning Foucault when he wrote that “ensuring one self’s direction,
exercising the direction of his own house and participating in the city government are three
practices of the same type”. (Foucault, p. 131). Hence, in itself the Raumplan is a diagram of power,
since it has been designed for the observation and control on others. The possibility of exercising
the power is, in this case, optional but always present.
3. The Destruction of the Relationship Between Interior and Exterior in Loos's Oeuvre.
The Raumplan in the Moller House allows the attainment of the critical void for a rich articulation
of the space to the interior. Moreover, the Raumplan’s void was, especially for Loos, the void of
traditional life allocating its memories and precluding them from external references. The privilege
of the interior over the exterior was an unquestionable concept for Loos: In the Moller House, there
was a rupture between interior and exterior that the house signified. In Loos’s own words, the
preeminence of interior over exterior must be represented: “The house should be discrete in the
outside; its entire richness should be disclosed in the inside”. (Heynen, p. 76). The Moller House is
neither transparent nor proclaims an extreme originality in the exterior, thus isolating itself to the
interior. The characteristic that puts accent on the external mass of the house of clad masonry are
small openings in the simple volume. According to the same historic period, the house established a
contrast with other houses where interiority was revealed by means of exposed glass and structure,
as in the pieces of work of pioneers of modern architecture like Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and
Walter Gropius.

Adolf Loos, Moller House, Plans and Section. (Heynen, p. 82).

Why did Loos forbid the relationship with exteriority over the influence of modernity? For Loos, in
words of Hilde Heynen, “…dwelling may only happen if it is insulated from the metropolis, not in
relation to it. Anonimity and concealment are essential conditions if dwelling is to survive within
the modern world-this is the implication of an analysis of Loos’s houses….Dwelling has to be
entrusted to the interior: only there do the conditions exist for an unquestioning garnering of
memories; only there may one’s personal history take on form. Only through this retreating
movement may dwelling realize itself and achieve authenticity. (Heynen, p. 94)
Loos established a reticence in his connection with the exterior. Carlos Muñoz Gutierrez, professor
of Philosophy in the Universidad Complutense de Madrid, in his essay entitled “Wittgenstein
Architect: The Thought as a Building”, establishes a link between Loos and the thought of
philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, friend Loos’s benefactor. Muñoz refers especially to the
influence of constructive experience on Wittgenstein’s philosophy. In English2 magazine
Astrágalo, Muñoz Gutierrez compared Loos’s rupture with the exterior with the experience of
building the Kundmanngasse, a house that Wittgenstein planned and built between 1926 and 1928
in Vienna. Through his constructive experience, Wittgenstein realized the linguistic translation of
the project from the concept to the building was impossible, although he recognized this
impossibility simultaneously through his philosophy and through constructive process.
It is important to trace the influences over Loos in order to determine the trajectory of his thought
and interests on his oeuvre. The thesis I propose is that Loos reduced the inherent potential of the
Moller House trying to translate his negative thought on Modernity, betraying the relationship with
the exterior. I propose that the analogy of thought and concretion led Loos to isolate the building
(the Moller House) from its environment, thus precluding its external possibilities. This relationship
was finally accomplished by Ushida Findlay (through the Raumplan) almost seventy years later in
another part of the globe.
Carlos Muñoz Gutierrez synthesizes the aversion that Loos felt to modern interference in his
architecture, establishing a difference with Wittgenstein’s oeuvre: “Effectively, we see the
difference between Loos, the architect, and Wittgenstein, the philosopher. Loos (or Architecture in
general) insisted in constructing buildings that constituted fortresses that prevented us from its
perils. But Wittgenstein necessarily had to confront the perils of the world, hitting again and again
against the walls that he eagerly wanted to trespass. Wittgenstein knew another solution to the
unstoppable chain of exact representations that the building of thought is: to come out to the
exterior, not to build oneself but to dilute in the whole, to fuse in the mesh and to contemplate the
world as a whole, ‘sub specie aeterni’. This is the mystic, perhaps the program of his austere and
minimalist life, that in the end he did not succeed to achieve or, if he did, it could not be expressed
with language as he knew.” (Astrágalo, p. 126-127)
As a matter of fact, Wittgenstein’s thought initially resembled that of Loos’s. Muñoz Gutierrez
explains that “programmatic and stylistic coincidences between Loos and Wittgenstein, in a first
glance, should assure an evident communion. Nevertheless, there is a dire difference that will
appear as the paths of architect and philosopher profile neatly”. (Astrágalo, p. 121). The wealthy
bourgeois origin of Wittgenstein was initially in contradiction with the deep social and
organizational changes that Modernism brought. Muñoz Gutierrez writes that “…for
Wittgenstein…ethic and aesthetic hold a special equivalence-and they should maintain this
equivalence; Wittgenstein’s functional style (maybe minimal) should alleviate him from the evil,
the excess, the fright that produced on him quotidian life. Against the Loosian device, ‘Das
Praktische ist Schön’ (functional is beautiful), Wittgenstein could have produced ‘Nothing that
distracts me, nothing that take me away from what is important’. (Astrágalo, p. 121). Wittgenstein’s
translation of his thought (ethic) into aesthetic determined his inclination to intervening in
architecture, as a means of constructing the building of his thought.
(In this point I differ from Muñoz Gutierrez, who translates the German word Praktische as
functional; probably the translation may be reduced to ‘practical’ (Collins German Dictionary,
Grijalbo, 1997; Mexico; pg. 138), so that Loos’s relationship with functionalism is less evident. We
may change the notion of ‘practical’ to ‘the pragmatic’, which assumes another sense, the sense of
the immediate, of non-speculative. But again Loos falls in the dogma of denying the sense of
pragmatism in order to prevail his aversion to exterior. Exterior could have assumed the role of the
pragmatic, in this case. Ushida Findlay proposes a less discursive relationship for the understanding
of the environment in their Chiaroscuro House.
Wittgenstein’s Kundmangasse House and Loos’s Moller House belong to the same year (1928) in
their concretion, but they produce as a result two totally different visions from the building of the
concepts. This fact produced tensions and resentment between Loos and Wittgenstein, especially
because the first thought that the intervention of a philosopher into architecture was an intermission.
Muñoz Gutierrez tells the differences in an misfortunate encounter between both architect and
philosopher nine years prior to the building of the mentioned houses. In a letter that Wittgenstein
wrote to P. Engelmann, Loos’s pupil before the war of 1919, Wittgenstein described the encounter
he had with the architect: “Days before I met Loos…¡He has been infected with the most pretended
virulent intellectualism¡ He gave me a pamphlet over a proposed ‘Office for the Beaux Arts’, in
which he writes of a sin against the Holy Spirit. ¡This is enough¡ I was a little depressed when I met
Loos, but this was too much for me.” (Astrágalo, p. 122).
Muñoz Gutierrez adds that in 1921, Loos dedicated Wittgenstein his article ‘Written in the Void’
that he wrote for the Neue Freie Presse paper, in which he warmly thanked his inspiration, hoping
that Wittgenstein devoted the same feeling. (Astrágalo, p. 122). This demonstrates that friendship
and intellectual interchange between Loos and Wittgenstein existed and that the last thought that
Loos had at least deceived their intellectual relationship in order to enclose in a different proposal.
In his aforementioned essay Muñoz Gutierrez proposes that Wittgenstein undertakes the search for
a theory of knowledge based on representation, but that in the end he realizes that the path is wrong:
“Thinking produces a scaled construction of the building of the world but the tragedy lies here:
when we start to build our thought with the bricks that only provides us, we are doing it from the
inside, so that in the end, the building shows us what we enclosed in its interior cannot contemplate.
The shape of the building would be an exact rejoinder of the world, but from inside we may just
follow our existence as we did before building it…This is probably the most inadmissible
consequence that Wittgenstein struggled against eagerly, although it is true that the solution is
conditioned to a reconsideration of the language that stops being the vehicle of thought and
representation…In that sense he believed to have found a mediating element that might have been
the link. Then he elaborated his theory of knowledge thinking that an exact representation of the
world might contain the adequate model of our wishes, but certainly, at the end, he understood that
this was a misconception.”(Astrágalo, p. 124-125, p. 134).
M.M. Rosental and P.F. Ludin wrote that ‘logical atomism’ is a conception formulated among
others by Wittgenstein in his Logical-Philosophical treatise: ‘According to logic atomism, the
whole World forms a whole of non-related atomic facts…Philosophy of logic atomism…asserts the
existence of a multiplicity of singular things and deny that such things form a unity, a totality…All
knowledge is interpreted as a whole of “atomic” propositions related through logic operations. The
structure of the world is inferred, analogically, through the logic structure of knowledge’.(Rosental
and Ludin, pg. 28-29). Wittgenstein as well as Loos proposed a building that was the image of the
world according to their own vision. From the Kundmangasse, Wittgenstein extrapolated the
conclusions that took him to think that there is no coherent totality but a whole of structured facts in
different systems among which there is no relationship.
A)

B)
C)

Ludwig Wittgenstein, the Kundmangasse House; A) Plan; B) Façades; C) Volume. (Astragalo, p. 116).

On the other hand and architecturally, the conclusion of an analysis of both Moller and
Kundmangasse houses by Loos and Wittgenstein respectively reveals that the last is less original,
especially because of the traditional spatial layout and organization of the rooms, possibly
attributable to Wittgenstein’s social experience. In that sense, he did not propose a radical rupture
with the traditional Viennese bourgeoisie house. He devoted more to exhaustive constructive details
because of his formation as mechanic engineer.
Wittgenstein’s purpose was obtaining a correct analogy between construction and philosophy, a
purpose that he finally did not attain concluding his building. As a whole, the building is still very
unitary to be translated into independent and non related-among-them parts. This could have
implied a re-elaboration of the house social relationships that Wittgenstein did not accomplish. The
ground floor reveals an undifferentiated vast free space. Wittgenstein rejects hierarchies and in
place he proposed an ample, fluid space without territories. Externally the atomization cannot be
inferred as well. Hence, I conclude that Wittgenstein did not accomplish the house as image of his
thought. Finally he could not change his image of what social relationships were. (Please refer to
the essay ‘Questionings to Repetition’ and Descartes’s reticence to change his philosophical project
to alter domesticity).
On the other hand, Loos’s realization constituted a truly social negative critique to discursive
Modernism and proportioned a contribution to new spatial configurations. For Loos, the Raumplan
constituted a paradigm of configuration that he initiated in a commercial house for the Goldman and
Salatsch tailors in the Michaelerplatz in Vienna (1909-1911). (Heynen, p. 89-91). His design also
produced the rupture between exterior and interior. The difference between Loos and Wittgenstein
is that, at the end of the constructive process, both extracted differently two conclusions. For
Wittgenstein, the translation of ethics to philosophy was impossible, meanwhile for Loos there was
no conflict between ethic and aesthetic: furthermore, architecture was a vehicle of the expression of
thought. On the other hand, Loos’s Raumplan is not only a spatial rupture but alters human and
social relationship within the building. Loos proposed what Wittgenstein did not: social alterity and
its analogy with thought are given through the proposing of new spatial configurations.
Although arguable, Loos’s aversion to change and to the intrusion of the exterior over interior is
what characterized his oeuvre and what he expressed firmly and with optimism, since from the first
to the second Raumplan there is a difference of seventeen years, time in which Loos matured his
conception that places the inhabitant as observer of his own dwelling’s interior, thus legalizing
observation and control. (Loos is pessimistic over the exterior but optimistic over the interior). On
the other hand, for Wittgenstein, the analog observation from the inside fails and hence it is not
licit. Wittgenstein concluded that the only possibility was observing the building (of philosophy)
from the outside, since from the inside it might not be understood properly.
The great difference between Loos’s and Wittgenstein’s buildings is given through the explanation
of centripetal and centrifugal forces that act over the interior. Centripetal observation, in Loos’s
case, did not escape the strong magnetism of interior life. Furthermore, Loos rejected the
magnetism of exteriority in not pretending to attract anything from the outside. On the other hand,
in Wittgenstein’s house, the tension is centrifugal since the interior the concept outside, at the risk
of not understanding the truly nature of the house for the involvement in the building’s interior.
Proposing Loos’s same centripetal strategy, the Chiaroscuro house by Ushida Findlay exercises
magnetism that powers the house’s interior: the interior is strong enough to concentrate the interest
of quotidian life. Consequently, the exterior has been attenuated in order to avoid resting
importance to the centripetal way in which the house works.
After Wittgenstein’s attempts of representation, and at the end of the state of confusion in which he
fell since his construction of philosophical and architectural reality led him to a circular
metaphorical process (where all elements refer to themselves), finally he adumbrated the possibility
of activity being a way out of the representational dilemma: “Wittgenstein astoundingly seemed to
discover that the idea of representation, in which he based his attempts of answering the problems
that philosophy and life propose, is unfound, since it seems that human knowledge, which the
concept of simulation resumes, may only be established on the own stable ground that it constructs.
If required, grammar has the concept of simulation, capable of questioning every other, but it also
constitutes a condition for possibility of conceptualizing and of representing…Wittgenstein
distrusted and felt insecure of the possibilities of the concept. He felt the necessity of limiting these
possibilities…Effectively, the concept lies on a type of history, on an intention…Forsaken the idea
of an ideal privileged, private or at least unique language and forsaken the idea that we access to the
world through the language it represents, we enter a moment of indetermination. Language
multiplies itself; there is no more a unique language that we understand…Then, we have to resort to
something external…but this last resource leads us to the exigency of interpretation…(which is) an
endless metaphorical process…This is the interest in finding…the thought…,to use it in life, to
convert it into activity.” (Astrágalo, p. 138-139, p. 141).
The concept of simulation is what Wittgenstein assimilates as the failure of representation. Isn’t
simulation a metaphor, the a-critical mimesis that Enric Miralles rejected as a valid method for
design? The critical mimesis of activity and the work of the concept is what Wittgenstein finally
accepted as a way out of the labyrinth of representation.
4. Activity: The Portrait in Movement.
Ushida Findlay’s oeuvre rises as an interesting opposition to the forced interiority of Loos’s oeuvre.
As Ushida Findlay write: “We are in dire need of a means of creating residential space based on the
relationships between the body/perception and space that transcend cultural difference…rather than
reinforce the shells that protect us, we must think of ourselves as open systems, taking in
information from the outside while venturing outside ourselves-always in the interest of self-
reform”. (Ushida Findlay, in Paul Carter’s essay ‘Translating. Towards a Sub-Conscious
Architecture’; 2G #6, p. 5).

B)

A) C)
A) Ushida Findlay, Chiaroscuro House, view of the dining room located South with views of the garden.(2G #6; Ushida
Findlay; p. 45). B) Adolf Loos, Moller House, garden facade.( Heynen, p. 88). C) Ushida Findlay, Chiaroscuro House,
main volume in model. (2G#6; Ushida Findlay, P. 43).

In Leo van Schaik’s essay ‘Introduction to Ushida Findlay Works’, Ushida Findlay’s oeuvre is
defined as dynamic and sensorial: “The evolving diagram of their development reveals again and
again the reflective coil of an enveloping spiral of space that enfolds the inhabitant in reverie, while
the raw in the materiality throws the imagination back to the tactility of our sense awarenesses. (2G
#6, p. 15). In Ushida Findlay’s own words, this determination remises to three basic aspects that
characterize their projects. On the one hand, metaphors and representations are omitted, and on the
other hand, action (activity), the ephemeral and the self-referential (references in the site) are
enhanced: “We summarize the three threads of this genealogy of spatial exploration like this:
-Spatial topology emerging from the morphology of action,
-Constructed ephemerality creating the perspective experience.
-Geometry distilled from natural structures.
In our work, each of these three preoccupations operates independently or becomes synthesized into
a hybrid form, capable of receiving a further array of constructional and material characteristics, as
we work towards the embodiment of a full architectural existence for each project”. (Ushida
Findlay, p. 131-133).
In Paul Carter’s essay ‘Translating. Towards a Sub-Conscious Architecture’, the author extends on
the important issue of the ephemerality, as a new demanding requirement of modernity that Ushida
Findlay have elected to face: “In what they describe as the third strand of the genealogy of their
buildings Ushida Findlay talk of framing the ephemeral-in effect using detail to notate the
subconscious, fluctuating environment of the chiaroscuro-.But chiaroscuro is also the real of the
photograph when the overlooked details it faithfully records, that polyphony of incidentals, is
allowed back in”. (2G #6, p. 10). In this sense, Chiaroscuro is a diagrammatical and open
construction that reveals but not isolates, even though its appearance reminds somehow of the
relatively hermetical volume of Loos’s Moller House.
The shape of Chiaroscuro is that of a cubic volume with a slightly curved metal roof. The sensation
it inspires is that of a massive thick-walled body, even though the sensation of heaviness is minor
than in the Moller House because of the wide transparent windows. Ushida Findlay remit to the
exterior, inter-acting with the ephemeral and the ever-changing as with the Raumplan as an open
diagram.
For Ushida Findlay, the Raumplan in the Chiaroscuro House allows the creation of a vast space rich
in spatial articulations, in trajectories and in spontaneous fluxes. (Deleuze wrote in ‘Le Pli’ that the
actualization is always different, as we never perceive ‘…the same green, the same degree of
twilight’). (Deleuze, Le Pli, pg. 117). It is a building that finds antecedents in the Moller House and
that at the same time it constitutes a point of departure for other projects. It accomplishes the
evolution from Loos’s piece of work in order to re-interpret the relation and inter-dependence with
exteriority. It is as if Chiaroscuro did not want to loose notion of the reality that surrounds it and of
what it may see, feel and perceive (the lights, the movements of the trees’ leaves in front of the light
filtrating walls, the heat of the sun, etc.). It is important to understand the strategy by which the
ephemeral is introduced to the house (through activity, light and movement filtrated by the
openings, etc.). Moreover, the notion of inter-action is key in order to understand the difference
between both schemes of Raumplan.
We have to remark the self-referential properties of Ushida Findlay’s projects to understand the
way in which openings and windows work in Chiaroscuro. The site is geometrically interpreted
meanwhile projects are based in natural configurations which determine a system of references that
uses data of previous states of the project by fractality, thus allowing the extension of the system to
complex urban levels. As Reiser and Umemoto, Ushida Findlay propose scalar systems that work in
order to consider the different project’s scales with a single conception.
In this specific case, Chiaroscuro windows introduce light in order to inform the interior over the
changes in luminosity and character of the exterior, referencing the Raumplan’s spatiality. Leo Van
Schaik defines in the following terms the work of the openings in the Chiaroscuro House: “…Site
conditions forged their idea into a ‘camera obscura’ or ’light-intaking machine, in which changes in
lighting conditions outside are magnified and dramatized on the inside... as if they had drawn the
light envelopes as slimy drawings and made a box around them. (2G #6, p. 16)
Ushida Findlay proposes diverse degrees of permeability through the external skin constituted by
thick walls. Glass blocks and window openings allow the exploration of different lighting
modalities: lateral and filtrated through openings in the walls, direct through wide windows, and
zenithal though geometric-shaped skylights. Compared to the Moller House by Loos, the issue of
permeability is explored in deepness. The house of the painter in Chiaroscuro works as a sponge
that absorbs external phenomena, creating a porous constructive tissue by which external views and
(pure and filtrated) light penetrate into the building, creating a multiplicity of effects over the
internal surfaces.
Furthermore, the structure is comprised into the built mass of the whole, avoiding its expression in
the form of relevant constructive elements. The triangular elements that protrude from the walls
contacting the leftover ceiling are structural buttress that work as slab bearings against the walls.
The buttress’ closeness and profusion may occasionally be mistaken with decoration, even though it
is not. Ushida Findlay do not make use of decoration in the Chiaroscuro House, even though it
looks like they did. The cuts in the stucco walls have all a non-decorative specific function, which is
regulating the pass of light and hiding the electric system that works when light diminishes.

Finally in Chiaroscuro, the issue of texture re-joins exterior with interior. A strong spatula cladding
applied against the walls unifies the whole house and eliminates the rupture of interiority and
exteriority. A continuous surface that is typical of Ushida Findlay’s oeuvre is created. This feature
has relationship with other of their buildings that have very different morphology. In summary,
Chiaroscuro is a synthesis of reconciled elements. For Ushida Findlay, the notion of exteriority is
not to be fight against, as dangerous for the familiar life and its memories. On the other hand, in
Loos’s view, exterior and interior were irreconcilable antithesis.
5. How Difference Evolves.
“No translation would be possible if in its ultimate essence it strove for likeliness to the original”.
(Walter Benjamin, quoted by Paul Carter in ‘Translating. Towards a Sub-Conscious Architecture’;
2G #6, p.4).
Friedrich Kittler, wrote on the ambiguous character of mediation. Kittler wrote that in a discourse
network, transposition takes the place of translation. This implies that every translation is to a
certain degree incomplete, and that must invoke the essence of what is being translated: “Because
the number of elements…and the rules of association are hardly ever identical, every transposition
is to a degree arbitrary, a manipulation. It may appeal to nothing universal and must therefore leave
gaps.” (Allen, p. 17).
In summary, once understood by Ushida Findlay that the issue of the representation of the concept
may only derive in an impossible labor, it is comprehensible that the differences between both
houses is mainly internal. Ushida Findlay accomplished a dynamic space fundamentally through the
operations of change and movement. Referentiality in the case of the Moller House is always
internal and based on the cohesion of unity. In the case of Chiaroscuro the references are external,
even though the Raumplan joins all the organization of space. The notion of illumination and
penetration of the external into the internal is fundamental in order to differentiate both schemes of
Raumplan. The Moller House is notoriously centripetal since it privileges interior life and on
purpose it closes to the exterior. This symbolic aspect is supported by Loos’s negative vision on
Modernity, which he understands as the ‘lack of…’, so notorious of the rupture of Modernity and
tradition.
Gilles Deleuze wrote a paragraph in his book ‘Difference and Repetition’that might be applied to
the labor of difference that Ushida Findlay accomplished in Chiaroscuro: “The difference may be
internal and nevertheless non-conceptual...There are internal differences that dramatize the Idea,
before representing the object. The difference here is interior to the Idea, even when it is exterior to
the concept as representation of the object”. (Difference and Repetition, p. 57). The concept of
Raumplan is maintained in reference to Loos’s oeuvre, nevertheless, the Idea of establishing the
building as something hermetical mutates in favor of converting it into something porous.

Furthermore, Guattari and Deleuze wrote in ‘Rhizome’ that there is the possibility of denying the
image establishing an exterior that does not have neither image, nor signification, nor subjectivity
(Rhizome, p. 35), in the search for different conditions from those of the ‘tree’ organization,
hierarchical in itself and always appealing to its self logic. In this sense, the idea of closing the
building in Loos’s Moller house constitutes a hierarchical purpose: a ‘tree’ configuration, a
‘tracing’ over complexity. In the Chiaroscuro House, its configuration reminds a rhizome for it is
open, receptive and establisher of different types of connections that the house does not forbid.
B)
A)

C)
A) Ushida Findlay, Chiaroscuro House; Second Floor. B) Ushida Findlay, Chiaroscuro House; First Floor; C) Ushida
Findlay, Chiaroscuro House; Ground Floor. (2G # 6; p. 46).

Deleuze, in ‘Difference and Repetition’ outstood the importance of movement over the copy of
concept (confronting Nietzsche with Hegel in reference to theatre), arguing for a return to the
movement and to the repetition with difference: “Theatre is real movement, and from all the arts
that it comprises, it extracts real movement. They say: …the essence and interiority of movement, is
repetition, neither opposition nor mediation. Hegel is denounced as he proposes the movement of
the abstract concept instead of the movement of Physis and Psyché…He represents concepts instead
of dramatic ideas: he performs a false theatre, a false drama and a false movement. It is outstanding
to note how Hegel betrays and de-naturalizes what is immediate in order to found his dialectic over
this incomprehension, and introduces mediation in a movement that is not more than his own
thought and the generalities of this thought…The theatre of repetition opposes the theatre of
representation, as movement opposes concept and the representation that relates to concept. In the
theatre of repetition, what is experienced are pure forces, dynamic traces in space that act over the
spirit without intermediaries and that join it directly with nature and history; a language that speaks
before it say words, gestures that are elaborated before organized bodies, masks prior to bodies,
ghosts and phantoms prior to the characters; all the apparatus of repetition as a ‘terrible potency’”.
(Deleuze, p. 33-35).
In the previous paragraph, Deleuze established a subtle difference between the ‘abstract concept’
(that we may equalize to the ‘Idea’, as ruling concept) and the ‘concept’ properly. It is presumable
that ‘the static’ (the Idea, the Abstract) is against the pragmatic, the concept, ‘the moving’. Deleuze
equalized “the performing of movement” with the accomplishing of repetition with difference.
Repetition is achieved in both Moller and Chiaroscuro houses twofold: Firstly, through the internal
movement of the characters: The repetition of every day’s domestic life. Secondly, through the
movement of the Raumplan’s closed and abstract concept to another concept which is more open
and permeable. The difference lies in that a new type of movement is introduced into Ushida
Findlay’s Chiaroscuro: the external movement of the surrounds, of the ever-changing that repeats
every day but that is never equal. The movement of external theatre is introduced into the internal
theatre in order to modify it.
In the Moller House, Loos introduced the diagram he created, i.e., the Raumplan. It is a diagram
since it is a configuration of universal order –in the same way that the Le Corbusier’s Domino is a
diagram of configuration and production. The Raumplan is neither a critique nor a commentary,
nevertheless, Loos in the Moller house introduced the Idea as a ruling and hierarchical notion of a
caesura with the exterior. Furthermore, Loos proposed a critique and a commentary in which he
attenuated the abstract but pragmatic concept. Hence, Loos privileged the Idea over the Concept.
According to the Collins Dictionaries, the Idea is in Plato’s philosophy, a universal model of which
all things in the same class are only imperfect imitations. The Moller House is an imperfect
imitation of the Idea of caesura. On the other hand, Ushida Findlay attenuates the Idea of caesura
and rather approaches the proper Concept of Raumplan, i.e., observation and control, but inclusion
and movement as well as pragmatic application. What is dramatized is the Concept in the
Chiaroscuro House. Furthermore, Chiaroscuro moves History and constitutes a redefinition of the
Moller House, thus attaining a different and productive potential.
In order to establish a relationship between the Moller House and Chiaroscuro, Ushida Findlay
neither copy nor translate Loos’s original, even more, they empower it, diffusing the Idea and
assuming the Concept of the Raumplan as a porous open diagram. This is their architecture’s.
virtue. Furthermore, the fulfillment of the Moller House is more abstract (by the Idea); nevertheless
it is not deprived of drama.
In order to represent their oeuvre, the Ushida Findlay office proposed a diagram constituted by an
irregular volume, in which Chiaroscuro has at least three important features which the diagram
represents. They qualify it as a building in which a) Psycho-Geography, b) Field and c) Perception,
are outstanding.
a) Psycho-Geography refers to the production of a relationship between the site and its topology.
Topology, according to the Collins Dictionaries, is a branch of geometry that describes the
properties of a figure that are unaffected by continuous distortion. According to the Sopena
Encyclopedic Dictionary, Topology refers to the knowledge of the place. It constitutes a mnemonic
method based in the association of ideas with places. Quantitative aspects are discarded in favor of
Qualitative aspects. This means that for Topology, certain architectural features that are capital to
the building are not directly affected by its materiality, namely, light, shadows, and movement on
the exterior.
b) Field. In order to clarify the meaning of Field, Wiel Arets’s essay “Thoughts Regarding the
Condition of Fields” will be introduced. Arets writes that we create a mental seal that changes
constantly as it is contrasted with new events through sensorial experience. Arets mentions that it is
more appropriate to relate our perception of architecture and the strategy of design with a realm less
closed that form. (Cuadernos iAZ; p. 1).This realm is the Field. Three concepts that pertain to the
‘Field’ are described by Arets. These concepts are common to Chiaroscuro:
1. Arets writes: “Dealing with the conditions of a Field, it is important to establish a position by
which architecture does not establishes a dialogue with the city, but maintain with it a sufficient
distance. As distance between inhabitant and architecture exists, there is established a relationship
with the immediate”. (Cuadernos iAZ, p. 2). (This caesura of the ‘dialogue’, reminds us of the
collapse of structuralist methods in Architecture and proposes the enhancement of the potential of
phenomenology as an immediate element in the relationship of architecture and its environment).
2. Arets writes that the Fields are loaded with information, possible scenarios, events and forces of
risk. They are always in state of transformation. In the case of Chiaroscuro, the information is
transmitted to the house’s interior and produces a change of sceneries. (iAz; p. 2)
3. “The Fields are always in movement, in constant development, they are never reconstructed.
They are anonymous and complex”. (Cuadernos iAZ; p.3). The movement of people in the street,
the sun in the sky and the leaves in the trees surrounding Chiaroscuro introduce the movement into
the house. The issue of the movement of the Concept against the drama of the Idea has been
mentioned before.
c) Perception. Herman Hertzberger defines it as “…the ability to extricate certain aspects from
within their context so as to be able to place them in a new context”. (Hertzberger, p. 38-39). In the
case of Chiaroscuro, the building works exactly as a photographic machine capable of working in
changing scenarios: its physical characteristics do not depend on the context but on the work it
achieves.
Stan Allen writes that diagrammatic architecture bridges the gap of associations and mediation of
representation, and remarks the possibilities of local potential and immediacy that must be revealed
by the project. Immediacy and diagram refer directly to Chiaroscuro: “The result is immediate, and
the sense clear, a way out of the abyss of associative meaning. Further, inasmuch as these
operations cannot be performed in translation, no overriding, universal sense is claimed, only the
local and specific possibilities of manipulation…A diagram architecture does not justify itself on
the basis of embedded content, but by its ability to multiply effects and scenarios. Diagrams
function through matter/matter relationships, not matter/content relationships. They turn away from
questions of meaning and interpretation, and reassert function as a legitimate problem, without the
dogmas of Functionalism. The shift from translation to transposition does not so much function to
shut down meaning as to collapse the process of interpretation. Meaning is located in the surface of
things and in the materiality of discourse”. (Allen; ANY #23; P.17-18).
A) B) C) D)

A) and B) Ushida Findlay, Chiaroscuro House, structural elements and sources of light. (2G #6, p. 46-47); C), D) ;
Ushida Findlay, Chiaroscuro House, the infiltration of light is fined by vertical and horizontal sources. (2G#6, p. 44-
49).

Moreover, the issue of transposition is important in order to understand the evolution of the
Raumplan from Loos work to that of Ushida Findlay. Hence, Allen appeals to Friedrich Kittler’s
definition in order to define transposition: “Whereas translation excludes all particulars in favor of a
general equivalent, the transposition of media is accomplished serially, at discrete points”. (Allen,
quoting Kittler in ANY 23; p. 17). The transposition from Loos’s Moller House to Ushida Findlay’s
Chiaroscuro is attained via the movement, even though in this case it must be admitted that only a
term of the equation may move: the one that is developed later in time. It is not a two-way
transposition, from Moller House to Chiaroscuro House and vice versa: only from Moller House to
Chiaroscuro. The original, the Moller House, might move or ascribe to the Concept, but the house
would be destroyed in its rich contradiction). Allen extends that what is lost in the deepness of
representation and the superficiality of significance is gained in immediacy (of the ephemeral, of
the ever changing, of movement, of the geometry of the site, etc). A good example of what Allen
describes is Ushida Findlay’s Chiaroscuro House.
In summary, both Loos and Ushida Findlay proposed the Raumplan as a diagram, as an open,
flexible, modifiable, expansible configuration that may change according to vectors such as those of
economy (usage, necessities, organization, fluxes, etc.), in the same way that the configuration of
the Le Corbusier’s Maison Domino is a diagram. Nevertheless, the diagram of the Raumplan was
used in both cases with different purposes: In Loos’s case, in order to prevent; in Ushida Findlay’s,
to reveal.
(For R. E Somol, in ‘The Diagrams of Matter’, in ANY #23, p. 23, a list of diagrams of the XXth century includes the
“nine square and the panopticon, the domino and the skyscraper, the face/ vase and duck/shed, the paranoid-critical
diagrams and the fold, dance notation and cinematic storyboards, maternal bodies and bachelor machines”. Possibly the
Raumplan may be added to the list).

The diagram is neither critical nor political, but on the other hand,
architecture is. There is a social compromise in Architecture. The
notion of development and evolution of Modernity through time
evidence its change; it has introduced into our lives, not in the sense
that Loos or Wittgenstein feared. Modernity must be accepted, even
if we do not want. Resistance is futile. It is indeed: the second
Modernity is an important moment in time for its radical social and
political changes that Architecture cannot ignore. Moreover,
Herman Hertzberger argues to stay attentive to social changes
around design: “As an architect you must be attuned to what goes
on around you; open yourself to the shifts of attention in thinking
that bring certain values into view and exclude others. The extent to
which you allow yourself to be influenced by these shifts is a
question of vitality…Capitalize…shifts in society and in the
thinking of society, and the new concepts that are discovered as a
result. Architects must react to the world, not to each other.”
(Hertzberger, p. 53)
The information of the ephemeral and of the site is an option in
order to preclude the misunderstandings of representation. The
Ushida Findlay, diagram of oeuvre influence of immediacy is material and organizational. As Christine
with Chiaroscuro high lightened. Buci-Glucksmann points, “that is why the ephemeral is not a
(2G #6, p. 134).
passive acceptance of the present, but rather a way of capturing the
modulations of beings and things, their unity and their differences”.
6. Bibliography (Notes make reference to the following texts):
1. Heynen, Hilde; Architecture and Modernity. A Critique; Massachusetts Institute of Technology;
1999; 3rd Printing; 2001
2. Deleuze, Gilles; Diferencia y Repetición; Amorrortu Editores; 1st Ed.; Buenos Aires; 2002.
3. 2G # 6: Ushida Findlay; Editorial Gustavo Gili; Barcelona 1998/II.
4. Muñoz Gutiérrez, Carlos; "Wittgenstein Arquitecto. El pensamiento como Edificio" en Astrágalo
# 18; September 2001, Espacios, Migraciones, Alteridades; Celeste Ediciones S.A. Instituto
Español de Arquitectura de la Universidad de Alcalá; Alcalá de Henares; Madrid.
5. van Berkel, Ben; Bos Caroline; in Diagrams-Interactive Instruments en Operation; in ANY # 23;
Cynthia Davidson Ed.; Anyone Corp.; New York; 1998.
6. Hertberger, Herman; Space and the Architect; 010 Publishers, Amsterdam, 2001.
7. Deleuze, Gilles; Foucault; Paidos Iberica; Barcelona; 1987.
8. Cuadernos iAZ: Pensamientos, Wiel Arets; http://www.iaz.com/cuadernos/4bis/10.html (Cuaderno
4, 1997)
9. Somol, R. E.; in The Diagrams of Matter; in ANY # 23; Cynthia Davidson Ed.; Anyone Corp.;
New York; 1998.
10. Buci-Glucksmann, Christine; From the cartographical View to the Virtual;
http://www.medienkunstnetz.de/works/no-stop-city/
11. Boesiger, Willy; Le Corbusier; Estudio Paperback; Ed. Gustavo Gili; Barcelona; 1980.
12. Collins Dictionaries; Intense Educational Ltd. (UK); 2003.
13. Enciclopedia Universal Sopena; Ed. Sopena; Barcelona; 1971.
14. Harvey, David; Urbanismo y Desigualdad Social, Siglo XXI de España Editores; 3ra Ed,
Madrid, 1985. (Social Justice and the City, Edward Arnold Publishers, London, 1973).
15. M.M. Rosental y P.F. Ludin, Diccionario de Filosofía; AKAL Editor, Madrid, 1975.
16. Deleuze, Gilles; El Pliegue; Paidós Básica; Barcelona 1989
HISTORIES=PLATEAUS by Carlos A. Romay Vergara
3/5. QUESTIONINGS TO REPETITION.
Summary:
1.- The Accelerated And Des-Accelerated Time Of The Primitive Human Refuge.
2.- Alterity and Domesticity.
3. Alterity and Program: Two cases.
4. Negotiation as a Form of Establishing the Pact of Domesticity.
5. Bibliography.
In this chapter, the author analyzes historically the space of the house and the way its inalterable
territory has been changing, always attached to constant transformation and debate.
1.- The Accelerated And Des-Accelerated Time Of The Primitive Human Refuge.
Men as well as animals have the faculty of exercising their permanence and appropriation of place
and of developing spatial notions where they think they belong. Hence, people and animals produce
a nest or a refuge, and they both have the faculty of sensing the passing time. For instance, old
animals know that their faculties are limited as they avoid displacing long distances and making
excessive efforts.
The primitive and the evolved hominids managed to reach every place they could in order to
overcome adverse conditions and to manage reproduction. Man’s systematic approach consisted in
displacing great distances supported by a group with whom he developed cooperation and
protective techniques. Later permanence in a site derived in territorialization and the development
of the sense of pertinence and identity with topos, a place. The group with which man based his
relationships formed society.
Delimitation of a space in the woods or in the savanna marked a beacon in the production of human
space by the use of the branches of trees or by the use of animal skins over stacks. Since in this
limitation dangerous animals and adverse weather were excluded, primitive man established a
selective space. The areas around the primitive hut, previously an open field of dangers, derived
into controlled and conditioned space with the conquest of fire. The artificial space of the nomad
became portable, assembled, disposable, recyclable, tectonic and related to the art of construction
and reproduction. Nevertheless, the notion of space was not complete without the notion of time.
Time des-accelerated for the primitive man in the portable refuges where he found protection and
shelter; he did not have to escape or fear any more. On the other hand, time accelerated in open
fields, where man had to be alert. Time appeared in its virtuality, in its essence. Primitive man
learned how to evoke time and space in the image of the beloved being dead by a fierce animal.
Furthermore, he learned how to limit a refuge through building techniques in continuous perfection
as he acquainted materials according to particular conditions of place. Representation and language
introduced a complex notion of time.
In summary, the early time and space of primitive man deployed under non controlled conditions.
On the other hand, the space and time of modern man accelerates and des-accelerates under
controlled and surveyed conditions. Nevertheless, experience has been resigned: representation has
been privileged over experience. The current field of domesticity is the field of image, of
representation. In its static appearance the potential of the modern material (understood in an ample
range) is precluded.
2.- Alterity and Domesticity.
In Andrew Benjamin’s “Descartes and the Architecture of Change”, essay on philosophy and
domesticity (in Benjamin’s book “Architectural Philosophy”), Descartes argues (in “Ouevres
Philosofiques”) over the possibility of a change in the project of philosophy. In a comfortable room
with a chimney on, he proposed the change of the given, of urbanism, of the city. Nevertheless,
curiously he never made any reference to the change of the room and the comfort of the house
where he was lodged. In other words, he left domesticity untouched for it was something so related
to every day’s life that its change was unconceivable.

Descartes established a caesura in working with a different philosophy, hence the difficult
reconsideration of a city whose buildings have been produced by others: “…The project of a new
philosophy, as with that which would pertain to a new house or a new city, is not to have to work on
‘what others have produced’. A real departure-be it architectural or philosophical-must involve the
interplay of destruction and the new. The former being the precondition for the latter. In other
words, the presence of the new is premised upon the destruction of the old”. (Benjamin, p.170). For
Descartes, the author of such a change in Philosophy and in the city should be an only author, since
‘what is produced by many does not have the consistency of the work of unity’: “…Moreover about
this situation must be the work of a solitary individual: the philosopher architect.” (Benjamin, p.
172).
In Architecture, the change and the new allow reflecting on the possibility of involving domesticity
as a licit field for intervention: “As Architecture was in the end left untouched within Descartes
argument, this opens up the need to search for ways in which it may be incorporated into the
possibility of thinking change. Architecture may be included once it is understood as being both the
locus and agent of change rather than the neutral place of being ‘lodged happily’. In fact once it
becomes impossible to avoid an analysis of what this state involves, what would then emerge is that
the most sustained critique of forms of human activity-critiques that envisage the possibility of a
type of transformation- would be critical engagements with the architecture that sustained the
particular forms of activity in question.” (Benjamin,p.174).
How should the critique to the ‘untouchable’ be in Modern architecture? It is among these terms,
new, old, untouchable and some others like destruction and production that the work of
Architecture is called to question the domestic. It is in this dialogue that the necessity of the concept
of alterity be proposed as rupture of the repetition of domesticity as the dominant subject of the
house. Benjamin points that “…Even operating within the province of the architectural or the urban,
thinking alterity must allow the question of the other to endure as a question and thus for that
questioning to be sustained as a task. What this means here is that alterity must always be linked to
the specific; the particular generic repetition. Alterity becomes the other possibility for the museum,
for the memorial, for the domestic house, etc. Alterity is defined in relation to that which is given
and yet because of the centrality of the conflict-identity as identity in conflict, conflict naming as
the affirmed recognition of the impossibility of the essence. Alterity does not have only one
determination and thus one formal presence…Alterity is defined in relation to the repetition of
dominance”. (Benjamin, p. 183).
The dominating presence is questioned by evoking what is missing, the “non-present”. What is not
present is the possibility of a different program, different functions, different times, different forms.
Finality as an expression of domesticity is what has to be resisted in the case of domestic
architecture. Benjamin adds: “Architecture is determined by the formula that form follows function.
However, this formulation loses its monolithic quality once it is recognized that function does not
have a direct formal expression since it is already the site of potential or actual conflict. That this
always appears to be resolved in only one direction does no more than evidence the way dominant
traditions work within architecture. The function and notion of the domestic, for example, remains
untouched because its site of repetition-the domestic house-is for the most part the same. It is
articulated within the logic of the Same. Again, it is essential to be precise. The logic of the Same
does not entail that each house is identical, or that they appear identical. Rather, each house is the
same insofar as the architecture of any one house allows for the repetition of the already existent
structure of the domestic. Interventions-to the extent that interventions are possible-may only occur
within these repetitions. If there is an architectural critique of the domestic and its related
patriarchal structure then the locus of intervention-the site of judgement-is within the work of
specific repetitions. Consequently, it is within this structure that the question of the primordial need
to be posed….What is primordially present could be the inscription of a desire for completion. It
could be the attempt to close the question of function by giving it an exact form…architecture
resists this possibility. It resists it for at least two reasons. In the first instance because of what is
involved is the experience of architecture. And in the second because of the practices within which
architecture takes place. Completion and finality are more than mere possibilities within
Architecture.”(Benjamin, p. 194-195).
Hence, could domesticity be altered through program of forms?
C)
A) B)

A)Eames House; Interior with joists; B) Eames House; Interior with belongings; C) Eames House; Exterior. (Hertzberger,
p.31)
F)
D) E)

D) OMA; Villa dall’Ava; View of pool on the terrace, (Häuser, 5/92, p. 45); E) OMA; Villa dall’Ava; Interior. (Häuser,
5/92, p. 45). F) OMA; Villa dall’Ava; View from the street.(Croquis # 53, p. 146).

For instance, the Eameses House in Los Angeles, 1946, is described by Hollander critic and
architect Herman Hertzberger as a factory-type structure house that in spite of its typology has been
able to retain the notion of domesticity: “The story goes that in 1946, when Charles and Ray Eames
decided to build themselves a house and studio, they were forced to restrict themselves to steel
beams and columns standardized for assembly parts and obtainable from a firm of structural
engineers, as material was scarce so soon after the war. And if this were indeed true, you might
wonder if they really felt restricted by the thus imposed reduction of their house to a pair of box-
shaped factory sheds, which they placed on the highest part of their eucalyptus-strewn site in a line
along the property boundary….Rather than feeling limited by having only those means at their
disposal that industry allowed at the time, they were inspired by the possibilities this situation
brought. And so it was that the factory shed was transformed into a house with a form unknown
before then. The point is that they saw the opportunity to look beyond the factory-building forms
such as the prominent open-web steel joists and suppress those associations with others closer to the
domestic ambiance….The basic, even bare, container aspect of the building is equaled only by the
opulence of its infill collection of objects and artifacts from all over the world, brought back by the
Eameses from their travels-fascinated as they were by everything made by human hand the world
over in a never-ending diversity….When Ray Eames laid the table for her guests, it was not with
the obligatory tea or dinner service of so many pieces and accessories to match, but …finding for
each guest a set deriving from differing services but combined to meet other criteria-a beautifully
conceived combination of pieces chosen to match their user. ..like a miniature musée imaginaire , of
a new homogeneity, be it more complex and full of surprises…This example shows that old values,
however interesting historically, are all too easily clung to against one’s better judgment; and that
suppressing and replacing such preconceptions creates new space, new room to move.”
(Hertzberger, p.31-32).
Domesticity still will remain no matter how much its properties be altered; nevertheless the subject
shifts to attain new and unexpected results. Tradition and context may be re-introduced not merely
through form, but through daily use, multiple tasks and programs that “colonize” the architectonic
object. Hence, the possibility for the exploration of new forms, new programs and new events is
open. Domesticity is flexible enough to allow the incorporation of alterities and innovations.
3. Alterity and Program: Two cases.
The introduction of alterity into domesticity may be traced in the oeuvre of some paradigmatic
practices such as that of OMA. Bart Lootsma, Hollander critic writes that OMA has been
experimenting with the issue of domesticity: “Like many of the architects from the heroic period of
modern architecture in the 1920s and 1930s, OMA has experimented widely with dwelling
typologies, which has applied not only to larger residential projects, such as the one designed for
Fukuoka in 1991, but to a series of private house designs. The Villa dall’Ava (1991) in Paris and
the Villa Bordeaux (1998) make especially clear what OMA is after. In both houses, the living area
left as free as possible to allow the occupants change arrangements of furniture and curtains. The
walls of these levels are completely transparent and may be slid partly or wholly open. The ground
plan blends seamlessly into the landscape, as in the Villa dall’Ava, or offers uninterrupted vista of
the surroundings, as in the Bordeaux house, while the living level is sandwiched between two floors
containing individual bedrooms, studies and other rooms, which are separated much as possible. In
the Villa dall’Ava, for example, a swimming pool was placed between the parents’ bedroom and
that of their daughter; there is a private study in the basement. The family is thus fragmented and
individual members may regroup freely in the flexible space on the intermediate floor. Ingenious
systems of staircases and ramps connect the individual rooms with the collective space…The
structure of OMA’s private houses makes them act as condensers, both literally, through the form
and the force-field they exert, and figuratively, in the tradition of the social condensers of the
Russian Constructivists.” (Lootsma, p.181).
A) OMA; Villa dall’Ava. upper floor plan; B) OMA; Villa dall’Ava; Main Floor Plan; C) OMA; Villa dall’Ava; Access
floor Plan. (Croquis# 53, p. 148).

C)

A)OMA; Villa dall’Ava.; facade from the East; B) OMA; Villa dall’Ava. Cross section through the children's room. C)
OMA; Villa dall’Ava; model of the volume. (Croquis 53; p. 149-152).
D)
E) F)

D) OMA; Villa dall’Ava.; view of internal ramp (Croquis # 53, p. 164). E) and F) OMA; Villa dall’Ava; View of the
kitchen and kitchen's interior. (Häuser 5/92; p. 47).
The antecedents that Lootsma provides in SuperDutch, establish a relationship between Villa
dall’Ava and constructivism. These antecedents takes us back to the constructivist “planita”, a
construction proper to the spirit of the Russian Movement of beginnings of XXth century. Vittorio
de Feo writes that in planita “…the inhabitant must be able to be inside or on top. The ‘planita’ is
simple as a toy and must be accessible from all sides. The inhabitant might, if the weather is good,
be seated and live on its surface. The “planita”, thanks to its construction and the time deployed on
it, allows an easy hygienic maintenance: it may be washed every day, it does not present difficulties
and because it is low, it is not dangerous…Made by Melnikov, of the Asnova group, the little
provisional construction avoids all rhetoric. The transformation of spatial statics into movement and
the breaking of the volume in unexpected perspectives is absolutely fulfilled; contribution is made
by the interplay of stairs, by the sincerely exposed light wooden structure and by the pure colours.”
(De Feo, p.55).
Coincidentally, the house in which Koolhaas plans the family life is coated in washable aluminum
metallic sheet. It is a descendant of the ‘social condensers’ where people were educated to live in
group with other families as well. De Feo continues: “The most authentic inheritance of the first
constructivism: the most meaningful value of the history of modern architecture is the idea of a
purely objective experimental architecture as dissolution of all ideology in the qualification of the
product.” (De Feo, p.107). In Villa dall’Ava, the subject of significance has been minimized in a
suburban bourgeoisie environment. Decisively proposing a modern building, with modern materials
and programs, Koolhaas integrates Villa dall’Ava more by height than by formal resemblance.
Alterity in Dall’ Ava is introduced with the family’s fragmentation, an agreed option between the
client and the architect, thus modifying radically human relationships in the architectonic object.
The family is re-joined only by certain activities, such as dining or recreating in the terrace. On the
other hand, the daughter is just integrated into the house as a guest. The dwelling limits the field of
action between parents and sons: it is the house that teaches.
The house that Koolhaas designed forces division introducing a form of immediate culture for the
family. Nevertheless this culture still can be inscribed in the super-structure of the individualism of
the current modernism and capitalism. Through its detached character the house produces a caesura
between its materials, forms with the environment. The house is produced as an isolate, individual
and specific fact. It is an object and its design has been objective. In ‘Notes for a Topographical
Survey’, Zaera Polo agrees on his impression of Villa D’al Ava as an object: ‘…after attaining a
certain critical mass, there (is) a liquefaction of the internal spatial articulations. The latest
generation of OMA buildings is probably explained better as a collection of containers of gel or
hydropneumatic mechanisms rather than a series of geological formations or piles. This liquefaction
of space also occurs in domestic projects: …shapeless bodies which float without geological or
urban linkage…There is no articulation with nature or city, but floatations and dissolutions; relative
densities. In the Dall'Ava...villa, similar dissolutions of space with water and light take place.
(Croquis #53, OMA/Rem Koolhaas; p. 43).
The objectivity of the materials chosen and the pure form of the container produced an isolated
object. On the other hand, the interior has not been object of this rationale, at least not to an extreme
degree. Interiors are minimal but not to the extreme; they count with a discrete and restricted palette
of materials that have been combined in order to break the hard and cold objectivity of the exterior.
Timber, stone, different classes of glass have been used in the interior. On the other hand, the
dissolution of some curtain walls through sliding mechanisms produces de-materialization of the
volume and ephemeral integration with its surroundings (the gardens and the encroachment).
Koolhaas relates to Corbusier in the house as a ‘machine for living’, although this relationship is
established by the operation ‘repetition with difference’. According to this strategy, Koolhaas re-
elaborates the notion of materiality counteracting his sliding curtain walls to the hard walls of the
Corbusean materiality. On the other hand, the house accomplishes free horizontal circulations
through open plans and vertical circulations through stairs and ramps, the last proper to Le
Corbusier’s syntax.
In summary, Koolhaas’s objective technique is taken to a limit but it does not overflow the house; it
is maintained in a level that is close to total detachment, but it does not exceed it, just goes along
the edge, playing with it, approaching it dangerously. As a whole it may be summarized as a
modern re-elaboration of a collective container. The container turns bourgeoisie but preserves its
level of simplicity and introduces a certain repertoire of materials.
In the same trend of a fragmented house, the Tadao Ando’s Sumiyoshi row-house (Azuma House,
Osaka, Japan, 1976) is another example of a dwelling where the program produced fragmentation.
In this case a bridge divides the house over an internal patio. Nevertheless, it is an only family that
the building allows. The sons are still part of the family, not as in Villa D’al Ava. It is remarkable
the integration of the house with the street profile without appealing to the traditional machiya
house’s materials but to others such as concrete or slate. Ando is seeking the relationship with the
material:”These materials, in contact with light, air, rain and several natural agents, ease the kind of
connexion yet lost in the modern cities of Japan.” (Frampton, p.20). The reduced lot permitted the
house be centripetal, hence the patio an outstanding element: “Together with the function of
providing light and being the focal point of the family’s life, this small patio becomes an spatial
entity that pretends to compensate the scarcity of physical space.” (Frampton, p.20). The patio may
be understood as a negative volume that generates its own space while enclosed into walls. In this
case, alterity is applied as an irruption into the urban fabric: Another possibility, another space,
another layout for the family, forever divided the positive and the negative volumes (the buildings
and the patio respectively). The family rejoins in the social areas and in the patio. In both cases, in
the Sumiyoshi house and in the Villa dall’Ava, alterity is agreed with the planner, otherwise its
presence is artificial.

B) C)

A)

E)

D) F)

Tadao Ando, Sumiyoshi House. A) View from street. B) Street Elevation. C) Axonometry. D) Interior of second floor with
views of the bridge. E) The bridge and the patio. F) Upper floor plan. (Frampton; p. 26-29).

4.- Negotiation as a Form of Establishing the Pact of Domesticity.

The house as finished object prevents the possibility of invoking futurity, hence, the possibility of
change. Although definite form allows the possibility of a certain program(s), its final form
prevents the potential of the productivity of realizing, of becoming, of constantly transforming and
returning to the project’s larval (virtual, transformative) state. Then it is important the necessity of
the introduction of alterity and the distancing of the specific function of the house. Thus the themes
that domesticity repress are rescued in order to achieve the “other” (alter) that enriches the notion of
domesticity.

A B C D
MVRDV; Double House in Utrecht; A ) Interior View with stairs; in the background, the square in front of the house;
(Huizen; p. 33). B) View of the rear elevation. C) Section in perspective. (B+C; Croquis #86; MVRD, p.122-126). D)
Interior with stairs. ( Huizen; p. 33).

Andrew Benjamin writes that the potential for conflict remains in the repression, in the resistance of
a certain and deterministic function: “In other words, within the setting itself there is the potential
for the actualization of the tensions that the successful reproduction of dominant functions has to
preclude. The potential for conflict, and thus the pathology occurring with its repression are in-
eliminable elements within the setting that the determination of function demands and that the
architecture in question works to hold in place….The resistance of finality is the work of the
inscribed presence of spacing. Spacing, as that which resists finality, is inextricably linked to
distancing. With the distancing of a particular functional determination, the functional is still
retained. “(Benjamín, p. 195-196). What Benjamin states is that in introducing alterity and
distancing (the distancing of the specific function) as a process, the vital question of the in-
eliminability of function works productively in the interior of the object. Only in the blurring of a
specific function, the functional may be retained. It cannot be eliminated, just differed, since the
presence of function is inherent to architecture as form is as well. On the other hand, there is
potential in the inter-relation of different programmatic realms, in alterity. Alterity, in the case of
domesticity, has to be negotiated.

In the case of alterities introduced by negotiation, it is interesting the example of the Villa KBWW
by the Hollander office MVRDV in Utrecht, Holland 1995-1997, defined by Lootsma as : “…an
extensive experiment (which) was carried out to gauge, through negotiations with prospective
occupants and the authorities, how extremely divergent wishes could be accommodated within the
available planning envelope.” (SuperDutch, p. 123). In this house the process of evolution is
fundamental through the various stages of architects-clients’ negotiation which resulted in two
different families living in a saw-like section. The origin of the form is not merely morphological
but the result of conversations undertaken with the clients. The form that works in this case is not a
product of the architect’s originality but subject to productive tensions where transformations
become inter-active.

Another example of alterity may be Zaera Polo and Farshid Moussavi’s London loft designed by
themselves. The loft is over a remodeled Victorian building, in the former office of Thomas Cubitt,
responsible for the neighborhood’s expansion at the end of the XIX century. It is an iron column
duplex for which FOA produced the expansion of an attic using the almost five meter height of the
apartment. (2G # 16, FOA, pg. 78; ‘London Apartments’, pg. 32).

A)
B)
C)

MVRDV, Double House in Utrecht. A) View from the square in front of the house. B) Interior with stairs. C) Diagrams
of the process of negotiation; D)Volume of the house; E) Interior. (A+B+C;Lootsma, p. 130-131; D+E, Huizen. P. 32).

O.K. Apartment,
interior by
Loft in Pimlico, FOA ( London Apartments; Diagramas of continuity, O.K. Apartment,
Kolatan/McDonald
teNeues; Barcelona, 2001, pg. 36-37) Kolatan/McDonald (INDEX Architecture, pg. 33)
(INDEX Architecture,
pg. 33)

How this loft re-elaborates domesticity? Through a strategy of work in the void, the architects
accomplish a vast extension where singularities (the rounded furniture) are found. Photos reveal the
almost empty space of the loft where the extension is constituted by the timber floor and the
furniture as singularities, almost like a flat landscape whit topographical accidents. A strategy of
des-territorialization occurs in the vast extension of the timber surface in the suppression of borders
and limits. The transposition of a multiple living room to a landscape may only be understood
through a collapse in the scale and the re-dimension of concept. This association does not pretend to
be metaphorical. On the other hand, temporality and instability are introduced through the
projection of non-permanent photographs. These projections comprise the double-height space of
the extension of the attic.
FOA write: ‘There is no clear functional structure of public/private or day/night. Instead, the
functions are set in relation to the possibilities of the existing container as a single open space
which, rather than accommodating the conventions of domestic life, produces their short-
circuiting’. (2G #16, p.78).
Alteration of domesticity is subtle, a truly alterity (diversity) that is minimal. In summary: The void
is worked as material. Proliferation is avoided. A void, that maybe despairing for some, is
produced. One may ask how it works acoustically, if the reverberations does not make of this
almost-empty-of-furniture space (but not of associations) a truly echo-chamber…
Furthermore, the topic of experience is fundamental for dwelling. What do we live and how do we
live in a house? Issues such as materiality, space and program are fundamental in order to achieve
new configurations and organizations yet not seen in the midst of radical social and political
changes.
Deleuze wrote that ‘…there is an actual that still remains possible, and that is not forcibly real. The
actual does not constitutes the real, it itself must be accomplished, and the problem of
accomplishment of the world is added to its actualization’ (Le Pli, pg. 135, Deleuze). The problem
of domesticity still is its actualization and its confrontation with tradition as dominant element. In
this sense, Evan Douglis writes that ‘…the house, often posited as a paradigm of beauty in popular
culture, is on the contrary a concealed site for social practices. Inflective patterns of daily routine
found within the domestic offer evidence toward the creation of new programs of dwelling’
(Douglis, INDEX Architecture. A Columbia book of Architecture, MIT Press Edition, 2003, 70-
80).
These new programs establish tension between tradition and culture, although not necessarily
contradiction, once understood that modernity is not forcibly a caesura with the daily conviviality of
the family. New technologies are constantly inserted in the house: Televisions and microwaves may
be found all around the Globe. Nevertheless TV programs have assumed diverse facets, from un-
refrained consumerism orientation to inter-activity and education. On the other hand, the house
typology has changed the less culturally. Workers’ houses in Tony Garnier’s Quartier des Etats-
Unis, Lyon, 1922-1923, were one of the first developed modern plans that separated the house from
the industry. Almost one century after, the westerner middle-class house is remarkably similar.
Hence, the penetration of modernity into the house has been slow and gradual, if not tangential.
Technology and machines still have not modify the schema of the house as a whole of rooms and
the separation among serving and served spaces. The level of assimilation of profound changes in
the organization of society still has not been assumed in the house.
Architect Laurie Hawkinson, partner in Smith-Miller +Hawkinson, poses important questions in
relation to the house as a product defined by modernity: ‘…(we)…are interested in pursuing
investigations in terms of contemporary culture. It is not the stylistic or the modernist object per se,
but an interest and curiosity about the edges, thresholds, and moments of the closure of a finite,
discrete, poched space. If the subject of investigation is the house, then what is the house today?
How might culture along with material, production, methodology and economy have an effect on
the house? what would the manifestation of that effect be?’ (Hawkinson; INDEX Architecture. A
Columbia book of Architecture, MIT Press Edition, 2003; 134).
Aspects like the mere functionality must be collapsed. The functional figure of the house as the
extrusion of the plan is questioned by Frederick Kiesler, theatre director and designer, who wrote
that “…the floor plan is no more than the footprint of a house. From a flat impression of this sort it
is difficult to conceive the actual form and content of the building. If God had begun the creation of
man with a footprint, a monster all heels and toes would probably have grown up from it, not man.
[...] Fortunately the creation proceeded otherwise, growing out of a nuclear conception. Out of a
single germ cell which contained the whole and which slowly developed into the separate floors and
rooms of man’ (Kiesler in ‘Pseudo-Funcionalism in Modern Architecture’, in Partisan Review, xvi,
7th of July, 1949, New York, cited in Croquis #64, Rafael Moneo; pg. 35).
The fluid and morphogenetic form of the house may attain changes in domesticity. The body may
adapt to the forms, thus attaining new uses for new configurations. With the upcoming of new
materials easily molded by the temperature of the body (as polyurethane), the use of floors and
niches in walls may constitute places for rest. In this example the significance of private resting
chambers may collapse. Through a natural ecological environment a comfortable regular
temperature may be accomplished in the entire house, giving the possibility of extending the
activity to de-territorialized and continuous space. The current experiments on screens may also
include its notion as trans-lucid envelope: Media screens might be extended to the entire house in
order to access information in non-singular and determinate points. Thus information may be
extended to the internal and external surface of the house. As a result, there would be no more
specific meeting rooms but a multi-purpose space colonized with programs.
Furthermore, the house massive production as a strategy might be accomplished distancing from
culture and attaining a less discursive productivity. Individualized massive production implies a
shift from the cultural tectonic to performative activity. In this sense, Sulan Kolatan describes the
use of strategies that apart themselves from standardization (as a discrete set of repeated and
assembled parts) to fabrication of individualized massive-produced houses: “We began with
normativity. The possibility, both conceptual and literal, of working with ideas of houses that are
globally normative but locally experimental, or globally experimental and locally normative, is
interesting. It is also a way of experimenting with mass customization-one could customize by
analyzing certain aspects of the house, but have much more liberty with others. In housings, we
took a normative building structure from a normative design-your-own home computer program
and targeted conditions of desire that we could find from real estate pages in different areas of the
country. We then develop ranges according to the particular attributes and characteristics that we
found in these real estate ads. While retaining the original information from the normative house we
applied degrees of influence on these kernel of information. At that point it began to yield new
identities and relationships that we developed into architectural responses. In our case we're striving
for mass customization, meaning multiple and unique, but not multiple as a kind of standardization”
(Sulan Kolatan in INDEX Architecture. A Columbia book of Architecture, MIT Press Edition,
2003, pg. 130).
Kolatan continues in reference to the pre-fabrication of houses that ‘…the difference between
existing notions of customization or prefabrication and our notion is the idea of exchangeable parts,
the more customization you offer, the more pots you have to produce. Contemporary software
programs permit structural changes and transformations that allow each piece its own mold through
CAD/CAM interfacing. The idea of producing a typical, or prototypical mold, which is reproduced
en masse, as well as the idea of customization through the creation of extra parts, is in question. The
potential of the new technology haven't been conceptualized. It's similar to Henry Ford's initial
horseless carriages that contained all of the left over pieces of carriages- the car hadn't really been
conceptualized. Prefabrication is in a similar phase right now’ (Sulan Kolatan in INDEX, op. cit.
pg. 216).
Kolatan has been experimenting with synthetic materials deprived of the category of traditional. In
the O.K. apartment, he has undertaken the investigation of continuous forms and programs related
to the adjacency and form of furniture. The bedroom, for instance, comprises a unity of
bed/tub/lounge that is also a material and formal continuity. The tub separates from the bedroom’s
lounge just ´through a glass and the floor derives into bed and tub. On the other hand the bedroom’s
texture as a whole is continuous without separations or differences. Individuality is given through
color in a gamut that reminds of the colors of the 70’s with the introduction of plastic: “We do not
attach a truthfulness to materials anymore and materials can be understood to represent more than
just their physical properties. We discovered molded fiberglass when we were looking for a
material to build the O.K. apartment, and we loved it because it has all off the associations at once
and no association whatsoever. Theme parks use it extensively to make forests and animals, so it's a
material that stimulates other materials very well” (Sulan Kolatan in INDEX Architecture. A
Columbia Book of Architecture, MIT Press Edition, 2003, pg. 130).
Furthermore, Gregg Lynn writes that ‘the shift from determinism to directed indeterminacy is
central to the development of a dynamic design method. Rather than being designed as stationary
inert forms, space is highly plastic, flexible, and mutable in its dynamic evolution through motion
and transformation’ (Lynn in INDEX Architecture, op. cit. pg. 221). For the house, Lynn proposes
an undifferentiated space where the generation of form produces a distancing with the owner’s
personality through combinations mainly articulated through matrices of operations such as
puncture, plunged, torque, etc. For instance, Lynn’s ‘Embriological Houses’ were accomplished by
a computer-designed process of manufacturing (CAD/CAM). Through this technique, the concept
of tectonics was re-developed and a difference from origin, culture and traditional modes of
construction was proposed. The subject of the owner’s ‘personality’ is retaken more as a series of
decisions that affect the lot in relation to the house. It is not that the owner’s images are nullified,
but it is he himself that chooses determinate processes rather than finished forms.
Lynn writes that “…in the history of modern architecture, especially regarding housing, building
has been conceived as the assembly of independent parts, or a kit. In this study, a surface of over
3000 panels is networked so that a change in any individual panel (‘or part’) is transmitted
throughout the whole, that is, throughout every other and panel. A set of controlling points is
organized across the surface so that groups of these generic panels may be effected to bud into more
specific forms or what we call nodules. In every instance of this surface there is always a constant
number of panels with a consistent relationship to their neighboring panels. In this way no element
is ever added or subtracted. In addition, every element is inevitably mutated so that no two panels
are ever the same in any single or multiple configuration. These panels, with their limits and
tolerances of mutation, have been linked to fabrication techniques involving computer controlled
robotic processes. These include the high-speed water jet cutting of metal and rubber, stereo-
lithography resin prototyping through computer controlled lasers, and three-axis C.N.C. milling of
wood composite boards. In this way the limits and numerical constraints of computer controlled
robots are also built into the software, giving the panels their limits of size and shape” (Gregg Lynn
in ‘Embryological Housing’, in ANY # 23; pg. 47).

'"Variations of the surface showing the budding and elaboration of the surface in specific regions. This study includes a
strategy of opening the surface without the punching or cutting of windows. Instead, openings are either 'torn', generating a
series of 'shredded openings' in the surface, or the surface is 'offset', generating a series of 'louvered openings' in the
surface".Lyyn in ANY # 23; Pg. 47

The use of materials not traditionally associated to dwelling is an important feature that establishes
alterity. The O.K. apartment designed by the Sulan Kolatan, of Kolatan/McDonald’s studio, is an
experiment in which synthetic materials produce a re-interpretation of generic materials that were
free of associations to the traditional house: “We do not attach a truthfulness to materials anymore
and materials may be understood to represent more than just their physical properties. We
discovered molded fiberglass when we were looking for a material to build the O.K. apartment, and
we loved it because it has all of the associations at once and no association whatsoever. Theme
parks use it extensively to make forests and animals, so it's a material that stimulates other materials
very well’ (Sulan Kolatan in INDEX Architecture; op. cit. pg. 130).
5. Bibliography (Notes make reference to the following books):
1. Benjamin, Andrew; “Architectural Philosophy; The Athlone Press; London, 2000
2. Lootsma, Bart; “SuperDutch”; Thames and Hudson; London, 2001
3. Hertzberger, Herman; “Space and the Architect”; 010 Publishers; Amsterdam, 2001
4. De Feo, Vittorio; Original Title :“U.R.S.S.:Architettura 1917-1936”, Ed. Riuniti, dic. 1963;
English2 Version :“La Arq. En la U.R.S.S. 1917-1936”; Alianza Editorial; Madrid; 1979
5. Frampton, Kenneth (ed.); “Tadao Ando. Edificios. Proyectos. Escritos”; GG; Madrid, 1987.
6. Huizen van over de Hele Wereld; Köneman Ed., Cologne, 2000.
7. El Croquis # 86 MVRDV 1991-1997; Ed. El Croquis; Madrid; 1999.
8. 2G # 16; FOA; Ed. Gustavo Gili, Barcelona, 2000.
9. London Apartments; teNeues; Barcelona; 2001.
10. Lynn, Gregg, in ‘Embryological Housing’, in ANY # 23; Anyone Corp.; NY; 1998; pg. 47.
11. INDEX Architecture. A Columbia book of Architecture, MIT Press Edition, 2003.
HISTORIES=PLATEAUS by Carlos A. Romay Vergara
4/5. HISTORY AND STRUCTURES.
Summary:
1. History as Signification and the Weak Meaning.
2. The Shift Out From Signification.
3. Time.
4. Hypothesis: The Method of Comparing History to Theatre.
5. The Aymara Conception of History.
5a. Pacha in the Aymara Thought.
5b. The Return of Non-Identical History: Pachakuti.
6. Bibliography.

“Everything is repetition in the series of Time…Past itself is repetition by default since it prepares
other repetitions constituted by metamorphose in the present. The historian searches for empiric
correspondences between the present and the past…Past itself is repetition and so is the present in
two different modes that repeat one on another. There are no events of repetition in History but
repetition itself is the historic condition under which something new is produced effectively.”
(Deleuze, Gilles; ‘Difference and Repetition’, p.147).

“According to Engels, every historical process ‘contains uncountable forces that intertwine
through a infinite parallelogram of forces from which the resultant emerges as the historical
event’.” (Harvey, p. 210 quotes Marx-Engels in ‘Selected Correspondence’, Moscow, Progress
Publishers, V. II. p. 484-486, 1955).

Two different historic lines of action unite without an only axis thus discarding unique
methodologies of interpretation of History. Furthermore, two non-sequential segments of time may
be related evolving in a-parallel form. Thus the historian establishes the relationships of spatial,
organizational and political processes of differentiation.
Marina Waisman, Argentine Historian of Architecture, differenced between ‘History’ and
‘Historiography’: “Historic problems are those which concern the self existence of the historic fact,
its veracity or verisimilitude, its age or, in the case of architectonic or artistic oeuvre, its author,
client, the circumstance of its production, etc. Historiography problems, on the other hand, are those
which regard to the interpretation or characterization of the historic fact-its inclusion under
determinate historic unity, its causal relationship with other facts or circumstances, the very reasons
of its selection as object of analysis, its connection with general systems, etc. - that might lead, in
definitive, to the historic fact, to the meaning that the historian assigns to it.” (Waisman, p. 14). The
issue of meaning for Waisman was key to understand a series of historical facts related. At the same
time, it is important to mention that the meaning assigned to a historic line is always arbitrary as
that it forms part of the historian’s discourse.
Significance acts like mediator between the historic event and reality. Mediation imposes, distorts
and finally becomes official. Piera Castoriadis- Aulagnier writes in ‘La Violence de l’interprétation’
that mediation of significance is a modality of ‘violence’ that lies in the interested transmission of
the discourse: ‘Through the concept of violence, we name primal violence to the imposition of an
election, a thought or an action motivated by the wish of the one who imposes on other’s psyche.
This action is supported in an object that may be categorized as necessary by the other’.
(Castoriadis, p. 36). Castoriadis establishes that the discourse is necessary at the cultural level in
order to accomplish subsistence. A manner of continuity is accomplished by direct and indirect
communicational transmission: ‘… the concept of primal violence (is) exercised through a
discourse that anticipates every possible understanding. Nevertheless, this violence is necessary to
allow the access of the subject to Human’s order. A pre-existent discourse anticipates the birth of
the subject in much. This discourse acts like a spoken shadow…’ (Castoriadis, p. 117).
Furthermore, philosopher Jean François Lyotard questions historic interpretation posing the doubt if
it is adequate in order to interpret the real because the cause for this definitive interpretation would
be realized according to the model of cause of nature science (as simple economy, for instance) in
an interpretation that would not be able to grasp the historic reality or be applied to a total
becoming. In summary, it follows a course that imposes this or that ‘factor’. According to Lyotard,
historic interpretation realizes following the model of comprehension, appropriation of past through
the grasp of its sense, but ‘it happens that the sense is not given in a transparent manner. Causality
and comprehension have their limits as each. In order to surpass them it is precise to forge a
hypothesis on the total becoming’. The hypothesis should not only retake the past but apprehends
the present of the historian as past, i.e., the profiling of a future; it is precise to establish the
‘philosophy of history’. (Lyotard, La Fenomenología, pg. 130).
Hence, it is not the real fact that ultimately reveals the veracity of a historic line but a whole of
social interests that transform the version of reality according to parameters previously established.
David Harvey, in his book ‘Social Justice and the City’, alludes German social theoretician
Friedrich Engels:‘…According to the materialist conception of History, the factors that ultimately
determine History are production and reproduction of real life…Economy is the base, but diverse
factors of the super-structure above it –political forms of the clash of classes and their results;
Constitutions written by the winners of a battle; the juridical forms and even the image of these real
clashes in the mind of the parties; political, juridical, philosophical theories, religious ideas and
their internal development until its consequence into dogmas- exercise also their influence over the
course of historical struggle and determine predominantly their form…’( Harvey, p. 208 quotes
Marx-Engels in ‘Selected Correspondence’, Moscow, Progress Publishers, V. II. p. 484-486, 1955).
Furthermore, History cannot be understood without a relational image of historic lines. Historic
lines are non-isolated events originated in connection with previous and later facts that provide a
global image within a plateau. For instance, Harvey writes that the history of Urbanism must deal
with the relationships among cities rather than focusing on the History of a particular city isolated:
‘Urbanism as a general phenomenon cannot be considered as the story of the cities particularly
considered, but as the History of the system of cities among which and around which circulates the
surplus. When Florence decayed, Nuremberg and Augsburg became important; when Antwerp
decayed, Amsterdam grew and when Amsterdam decayed, London emerged as main referee of the
circulation of surplus. Hence, the History of cities must be understood according to the circulation
of surplus in a moment of History within the system of cities’. (Harvey, p. 261).
Harvey adds that ‘…from Marx’s ontology it is deducible that investigation should direct to the
discovery of the transformation laws by which society is continuously re-structured rather than to
the detection of “causes” in the isolated sense. Causes must not be deduced from a supposedly
atomistic association or by the identification of ‘stages’ or ‘descriptive laws’ that govern the
evolution of totalities with independent parts’. (Harvey, pg. 305).
Herman Hertzberger, Hollander architect and critic, writes that the History of architecture should be
focused in the changes that directly affect our lives and that give the chance for new spatial
discoveries: “…the History of Architecture should concern itself more with changes in thinking and
the changing possibilities and circumstances influenced by those changes, and that directly and
indirectly form both the need and the inducement for ever different methods of building, forms,
techniques and thus repeatedly provided the impetus for spatial discoveries. (Hertzberger, p.50). In
other words, History projects the future since it is a live matter.
Furthermore, Lyotard refers the progressive re-elaboration of historic development as the cause by
which History ‘…properly does not have a definitive sense but a development that never ends’.
1. History as Signification and the Weak Meaning.
Herman Hertzberger writes that an object’s assignment of a unique signification may lead to
misconceptions thus closing the possibility of other associations: “Making space and leaving space
are inseparable bound; there must always be that openness to new interpretations. The dilemma here
is that the more suitable and right you make something, the stronger one particular signification will
clamp to it. This signification then leads to stubborn life of its own. The more riveted space is to
signification, the less space there remains for other significations and experiences… Thus we see
the emphasis shift from the certainties of an established order entrenched in forms as fixed
meanings, to the perpetual dependence of each form on the context in which it figures.
(Hertzberger, p. 25-37).
In this sense, an event’s assigned meaning (as a project which opens futurity, and as historical
oeuvre which opens the past and projects the future) is inevitably linked to context and time.
Nevertheless, Gilles Deleuze wrote that ‘…the context explains nothing since it does not have the
same nature as the discursive formation of the family of considered enunciates’. (Foucault, p. 37).
Hertzberger mentions the change of context as a possibility of un-found the signification and create
new associations: “The more doubt you have about the fixed meaning and established truths
imprisoning you, the easier it is to put these in perspective and the more curious you need to
become about other possibilities, other aspects… Perceiving is the ability to extricate certain
aspects from within their context so as to be able to place them in a new context. You see things
differently, or you see different things, depending on your intentions in perceiving…Focusing on
certain related aspects infinitely increases your powers of discernment vis-à-vis that relationship,
yet it seems as though you can only focus on one area of it at a time. Fixated on that one idea, you
are blind to everything else which, though potentially perceivable, fails to get through to you…It is
not merely that we can only see things as part of a context (system of significations, field,
paradigm), for a thing only has meaning and value when placed in the context of the relationship in
which it performs, the situation, the environment it occupies”. (Hertzberger, p. 38-40)
Coincidentally, Ignasi de Solà Morales proposed the term ‘weak architecture’ in ‘Differences.
Topography of Modern Architecture’ along with that of ‘weak thought’ or ‘weak ontology’ to
interpret the ‘intellectual and especially particularly aesthetic situation of contemporary culture’.
(Solà Morales, p. 65). For Solà, signification has turned weak since in the present situation of
architecture it is hard to establish single associations for objects and meanings. Solà Morales wrote
that the interpretation of the crisis of the Modern Project can only be done from what Friedrich-
Wilhelm Nietzsche called the ‘death of God’ or the ‘disappearance of any system of reference that
in some way coordinates and closes the system of our knowledge and values at the time of
articulating them into the global vision of our reality”. (Solà Morales, p. 66)
Furthermore, on page twenty of British writer Neil Spiller’s provocative book ‘Digital Dreams’ we
can read that “…the meaning in Architecture is dead”. Spiller assimilates the meaning in
architecture with the dead God of Nietzsche. Certainly, we must move in this new topography of
valleys and peaks in which the History and theory of Architecture has turned.
2. The Shift Out From Signification.
“Wouldn’t it be that in searching for references, the conditions of proximity prevail over those of
critical distance, once History looses its condition of structure to become the gathering of
experiences, in cause-effect…?” (Zaera Polo in Croquis #64 Rafael Moneo, pg. 25).
To liberate architecture (History, design and theory) from the mechanisms of the superficial and
assigned signification that tie the concept to a unique and fixed perspective, we must look for new
possibilities in the internality of the object. For Hertzberger, these new mechanisms decompose and
re-assemble objects into new ones, with new references and antecedents that open associations:
“This is the lesson we can learn from it: new mechanisms can ensue from another assemblage of
parts freed from their original context by taking them up in a new chain of associations”.
(Hertzberger, p.36)
In this point it is important to establish the difference between two words that are sometimes
equaled but that for the purpose of this book have been differentiated. Those words are ‘meaning’
and ‘signification’. According to the Collins Dictionaries, to Signify means to indicate or suggest;
to stand as a symbol or sign for; to be important. Signification means the effect something is likely
to have on other things. Hence, ‘Signification’ is more an effect, the effect something is likely to
have on the surface of other things. Meaning is the sense or signification of a word, sentence, or
symbol, its inner, symbolic, or true interpretation or message. The word ‘Meaning’ has a more
vectorial use; it denotes the intention, the direction, the essence of the object, its ‘sense’, the inmost
purpose of the object.
Miguel Morey writes over the sense in the prologue to Gilles Deleuze’s book ‘Foucault’: “…the
sense is neither beginning nor origin but a product. It is not to be discovered, restored or re-used,
but produced through a new machinery…Producing the sense is the task today.” (Foucault, p. 14).
Morey extends: “…the discourse must be a machine that produce effects of sense with specific
truths translated into events in connection with the exterior: production of sense in the philosophical
domain, through the reorganization of beings and concepts, by the re-articulation of the non-sense
itself, as in Deleuze; or production of sense in the historical and political domains, through the
construction of fictions and settings in contact with reality, as in Foucault”. (‘Foucault’; p. 14).
The signification is more questionable than the sense. Historically, antecedents of the transposition
of significations demonstrate that they have at least a transitory and weak (if not invented and
inexistent) character, depending upon the associations they produce until reversed into something
new: “A bicycle wheel or urinal it seems can lose its original purpose and meaning and take on
another. This process of transformation evidently enacted in our minds is nowhere more clearly
than in the art of the twentieth century. By being able to perceive a thing differently, our view of
things changes and the world changes with it. A mental clear-out, making space in our minds by
ridding them of so much ballast that once meant something to us. And if someone was familiar with
disassembling and clearing out associations, meanings and values, it was Picasso…Picasso’s 1942
combination of a bicycle’s handlebars and a saddle as a bull’s head is, after Duchamp’s ready-
mades, one of the most miraculous and meaningful art works of the twentieth century…The
pioneering responses of a typical twentieth-century architect like Le Corbusier ensue from the fact
that the images absorbed everywhere and from every age are not applied lock, stock and barrel but
transformed by being confronted with each other, and so stripped of their original meaning that they
are free to accept new ones. (Hertzberger, p. 35-36-43)
Luis Rojo de Castro, in his essay entitled ‘Forms of Indetermination’, en Croquis #73 on Zaha
Hadid, refers to Marcel Duchamp’s subversion of the significance: ‘Once the notions of similitude
and causality are annulled as tools of analysis, the order of the object no longer resides in its
internal structure- in its content. The object is no longer the synthesis of the material and conceptual
forces that converge in it. With the externalization of its structural logic, experience shifts from an
inner, ideal space to the visible, external surface. As a consequence, both Lyotard and Duchamp
find interpretation a futile task. Any interpretation empties the object from within, exposing what it
presumably encloses to the light. So what can be done with those objects removed from this concept
of 'interiority', those objects whose content is 'external'? Duchamp made both the concept of
stability of the signified and the identity disappear from his work. Each object, each action defines a
terrain in which it controls the variables of its surroundings, each one having to be accompanied by
the rules of the game. The space is patterned for each act, for each 'performance'. This is the most
radical result of the activity of the avant-gardes: the starting point from which each work produced
is a commencement from cero. (Croquis #73, Zaha Hadid, p. 23).
On the other hand, opposed to the ephemeral of significance, timeless conditions establish a more
permanent life and supersede the context. Hertzberger writes that History unveils these unchanging
conditions by comparison. Associative structures open the movement of the internality of the
objects through the depiction of differences and similarities: “It is the timeless that we seek…You
need history not just to see what happened when and where and how different and unique it was and
if there are breaks in the thinking, but also to establish what it is that is unchanging, to recognize the
underlying structure of similarities that we can merely piece together, like a pot unearthed shard by
shard. History keeps unearthing different aspects of an unchanging structure under changing
conditions”. (Hertzberger, p. 45-46)
As Guattari and Deleuze wrote, the field of associative structures is a ‘plateau’ of rhizomatic
connections performed exactly in the same way in society two individuals whoever establish a
relationship under unforeseen conditions, thus opening unlimited possibilities.

A) B) C)
A) Pablo Picasso, 1942, 'Tête de Toreau’. B) Preparation for the actual fight with bicycle and bull. The bicycle mimics
the bull. C) Marcel Duchamp, Fountain, 1917. (A+B+C; Hertberger, p. 35-36).

D) E) F)
Associations and new configurations: D) Air shafts of a wine cellar, Ischia, Italy. E) Ventilation shafts in an old vessel; F)
Le Corbusier, Notre Dame du Haut; Ronchamp; France; 1950-1955. Le Corbusier used forms placed in a new context,
transforming them utterly. (D+E+F; Hertzberger, p. 29).

3. Time.
The transposition of space would not be complete without the transposition of time. According to
the Collins Dictionary, transposition is (in Maths) to move a term from one side of an equation to
the other with a corresponding reversal in sign. By comparison, transposition implies the
observation of History from different positions in space and from different times.
Similarly, Neil Spiller questions the urgency of time: “Philosophically and ethically we are in a
time of flux. The pseudo-dynamics of architectural modernism have left us ill-prepared for the
physical and spatial changes that are daily rocketing towards us. The potential difference between
now and soon is huge; the shock could be massive, and many aspects of society will change or die.”
(Spiller, p. 7). Furthermore, David Harvey also refers to society as a groups of structure under a
continuous process of transformation. (Harvey, pg. 310).
The preoccupation with time leads us to ask the question: What is time in architecture? Time is
fundamental in History since it is the given material of the work of History itself.
Philosopher Andrew Benjamin envisages the answer: “While a concern with space may, at least
initially, be unproblematic, time is more demanding. Indeed, if there is a question that complicates
architecture then it concerns architecture’s relation to time…Answering this question hinges on
how this relation is thought. The question does not pertain to the relationship between time and
architecture…What is of concern is time ’in’ architecture; answering this question therefore
demands paying particular attention to how this ‘in’ is understood…What these initial
considerations delimit is the presence of a series of relations between time, function and form that
resist any straightforward attempt to identify each as a single concern. The resistance, in this
context, is due to the relations being as much interconnections as they are independent definitions.
(Benjamin, p. 6-7).
Philosopher Henri Bergson, in Deleuze’s ‘Bergsonism’, wrote over the association of fluxes,
contraction and distension of time: ‘A unique and same time exists as its own condition: the same
duration grasps the events of the totality of the material world along its route’. Deleuze extended
that ‘…we might then eliminate human consciences as relays in the movement of our thought: there
would just be impersonal time in which things flow. So there would be triple fluxes, being our
duration (the duration of the viewer) necessary as flux and as representation of the time in which all
fluxes fall. In this sense Bergson’s diverse texts reconcile perfectly and do not present any
contradiction: there is no more than one time (monism), even though there is an infinity of current
fluxes (general pluralism) that necessarily participate of the same virtual whole (restricted
pluralism)…In summary: not only spiritual multiplicity imply an only time, but duration as virtual
multiplicity is the same and unique Time’. (Deleuze, Bergsonism, pg. 86).
Bergson denounces the combination of space and time in a wrongly-analyzed mix, “…in which
space is considered as already done and in which time, in consequence, is posed as a fourth
dimension of space” (Deleuze, Bergsonism, pg. 90). In consequence, Bergson rejects the
qualification of time as a property of dimensions and privileges it as a difference of nature and not
of degree. Deleuze follows on Bergson: “Spatialization of time is doubtless inseparable in science,
but it is proper of relativity to take this spatialization to extremes, to have welded the mix in a
completely new form, since in the pre-relativist science of time it was assimilated to a certain
dimension of space but as an independent and distinct variable. Meanwhile in relativity the
assimilation of time to space is necessary to express the non-variation of distance, in such a way
that it is introduced explicitly in calculus and does not let subsist the real dimension. In summary,
relativity has elaborated a particularly welded blend that falls under Bergson critique of the ‘mix’ in
general”. (Bergsonism, pg. 90-91).
The association of time and duration is another of Bergson’s contribution to the subject of Time.
Deleuze asked about the sense in proclaiming a number of durations: “…If things endure or if there
is enduring of the things, it would be precise that the question of space be taken on new basis, since
space would not be just a form of exteriority, a kind of screen that de-naturalizes duration, an
imperfection that stains pureness, a relative that opposes the absolute. It would be precise that it
were founded in things, in the relationship among things and among durations, that it belonged to
the absolute, that it held its ‘purity’. This would be the double progression of Bergson’s
philosophy”. (Bergsonism, pg. 48). Bergson’s purity clearly establishes the distinction between
Time and Space and not as a mix. On the other hand, Deleuze wrote in ‘Le Pli’ that “…space-time
gives up being pure data in order to become the whole or the nexus of the differential relationship
of the subject, and the object gives up being empirical data in order to become the product of such
relationships in conscious perception” (El Pliegue, pg. 116). A difference exists between Deleuze
(that considers time-space as a mix) and Bergson that regards the pureness of time. Nevertheless a
similitude exists between both philosophers in the influence of time in subject and object.
Deleuze established a vital relationship between duration and movement as a whole (mix) in one or
several given moments. He did not dissociated movement from time, but he associated it with the
work realized (into activity): “Since movement is defined as the successive existence of the mobile
in diverse places, we only capture a given movement and not the internal unity that remits when
performing. Movement in action remits to a unity of the instant (in the sense that the following state
must emerge ‘from itself and from the present by a natural force’) and to an internal unity for the
whole of its structure (as physical criteria of its substance)” (Le Pli, pg. 75). The relationship
between movement and time is important for History: Segmental, transversal, discontinuous, a-
significant, inclusive, rhizomatic movements in the plateau of History (circular movements as in the
Aymara conception of History).
Deleuze wrote in ‘Le Pli’ (pg.95) that Bergson, “…is very close to Leibniz, and in Leibniz we
constantly find the formula: the present pregnant of future and loaded with past”. Deleuze added
that the vectorial nature of the movements of Time displace between past and future (through an
effort). This statement places the plateau of History in the fields of Materiality and Physics through
displacements and a-dimensional movements: “Note: Nouveaux Essais, De La Nature En Elle
Même, pg. 13: The body is not only in the present moment of its movement occupying an space
equal to itself, but also comprising an effort of push to change its site so that the next stage stems
from itself by a natural force” (Le Pli, pg. 95). History is in consequence, nothing else than a body
linked to its own Physics. It relates operations such as those of penetration, permeability, a-
signification, un-gravity, etc.
On the other hand, Andrew Benjamin writes that keeping the architectonic object isolated from
others with which to establish relationships of time, function and form produces resistance. This
concept is extrapolated to History. The task of repetition is the analysis that must be done once and
over from different angles and with different readings, thus regarding a repetition of the analysis of
History. The built domain is already temporalized in the complex movement of Historical time:
Andrew Benjamin writes that the interruption of repetition (of History, or of the plot) brings a
productive game of continuity and discontinuity that is presented by time. (Benjamin, p. 6)
Following Benjamin, we conclude that the ontology of the built domain (and of the architectural
project) is repeated several times when History is open. In performing the analysis the ontology
remains open; sometimes in the comparison with other domains and projects. Always in company
and never alone, the option that sets ontology in movement is the comparison.
4. Hypothesis: The Method of Comparing History to Theatre.
Establishing History as a productive field in architecture has two purposes:
a. The production of the New through ‘repetition and difference’.
b. The discovering of links between historic lines.
a) “Actors, agents of History, can just create under the condition of identifying with characters of
the past; in this sense, History is a theatre…” (Difference and Repetition, p.149).
According to Deleuze, creation may be based in History. Nevertheless it is necessary the movement
of the given as a change of context in order to accomplish the New (as in Enric Miralles’s methods
of transposition). History as a school of the future opens for architecture the possibility of not
repeating itself identically. Consequently, Deleuze wrote that for Foucault, “History was a fold of
becoming”. (Foucault, p.130).
Deleuze wrote that for Marx, the repetition is comical when it remains untouched, when instead of
conducing to metamorphose and to the production of the new, it “forms a species of involution, the
opposed to an authentic production.” (Difference and Repetition, p.149). Hence, the content of the
theatre of History must be powered by critique and by the possibility of the evolution of the
concept. This alternative means that repetition and production (through difference), are dynamic
with respect to one or various superposed centers. No more figure/ground would be distinguished,
moreover ground/ground. On the other hand, it is ironic that the past projects the future.
Deleuze called displacement to the possibility of movement in time (‘Difference and Repetition’, p.
166), a concern that interest us whenever past is brought to present or vice versa, as co-existent and
latent times that fuse into a single one. Past and present are in themselves past (being elaborated
previously are past: the present never accomplishes the category of present, only of past, thus
implying the notion of an immediate past and opening for History an ample field of the
contemporary), capable through comparison of generating the future and of changing it. The
possibility of influencing the future and thus of changing History is material (paradoxically, History
changes History).
Searching for the hidden traces that have been outlined over History, referring them to different
disciplines external to architecture and attempting a more rhizomatic approach constitute new shifts
and new movements to appeal to in order to project the future History. In this Historic vision that is
territorial but not traditional (non-narrative), the implementation of a device that is immanent to the
History of Architecture is important: the pre-graphic (the diagram) which itself does not carry the
mediation of the finished drawing (representation).
The establishment of connections in the net of History via the diagram may lead to propose
configurations and a-significant matrices in which the order may be repeated in different sequences
(please refer to the chapter of Introduction), thus establishing a map of relationships and
adjacencies. On the other hand, drawing a ‘tree’ over the net of History only diminishes its potential
since a tracing is established through hierarchical significances, beginnings and ends, narratives and
justifications.
b) Hence, the possibility of not presenting History as consecutive lines of action that are requisite
for others exists. For instance, the influence of historical events is non-linear but discontinuous. Its
movements can be measured in decades and even centuries. Hence, the analysis of an only historic
line has as its only product representation, mimesis of an already written and anticipated script with
clearly established objectives. Furthermore, if the objective of structuring movements is obliterated,
the representation (of History) lacks meaning; it might turn into tragic or comical repetition, devoid
of content. On the other hand, the repetition and difference through comparison produces internal
and external movements from the historic lines themselves (in the comparison of History to
Theatre, historic lines would be theatrical plays). Following Deleuze, this comparison lies on a
single or on multiple axes: “Movement itself implies a plurality of centers, a superimposing of
perspectives, a mess of points of view, co-existence of moments that essentially deform the
representation.” (Difference and Repetition, p. 100)
Mediation of figure/ground is given in the explanation, in the justification of a single Historic
line/theatrical play. It acts as an ambiguous monolog where forced internal movements are
produced. Being artificial and sterile, its internality lies in the script of the director; this is, neither
representation nor repetition alones open for theatre the chance of escaping mediation. Deleuze
affirms that “…representation has an only centre, an only and fleeing perspective; that is why it
attains a false deepness; it mediates everything, but does not move anything.” (‘Difference and
Repetition’, p. 100). On the other hand, the comparison of two historic lines related by the concept
works by setting into scene two characters that in turn are the same but acting in different times.
The motivation for both characters is in origin the same but it has been transformed through local
conditions: the (sociological, time-related, etc.) conditions of the Theatre of History. In this new
theatre, the given dialogues are established among the character and his projection in another time,
a past time (nevertheless the actuation of a third party is involved in the future time that arises from
the elaboration of the conditions of the past feed-forwarded by the Concept. Please refer to the
Chapter entitled ‘History Without Structures’ and the re-elaboration of the Concept of surface in the
work of Archizoom, MVRDV and FOA). Being their lines of actuation and their evolution a-
parallel, past and future open simultaneously. Thus, the character (the historic line) interplays with
another character on scene: it is he himself, modified, redeemed, evolved and momentarily free of
the defects and passions that tortured him once: he has escaped to the context.
Nevertheless, searching the rhizomatic connections that the History of Architecture and Urbanism
find in other times and spaces, it is unavoidable to refer that both the built project and the projected
object (which in a certain way attain greater influence in not being built as in Tatlin’s Monument to
the Third International andKoolhaas’s Sea Trade Center in Zeebrugge) are given by specific
economic and social conditions that their alter egos cannot repeat. The ‘others’ contain their own
irreproducible conditions themselves. Hence, it is the Concept that is repeated, not the conditions.
The possibility of comparing movements is open in the Repetition and later Difference of the
original evolved character: From an original character to another (that is himself evolved). The
difference is a process of individualization, of self-being. It is Hamlet, talking of his past actions
and passions with his own repented ghost, capable of accomplishing a new fate. It is the 1928’s
Vienna Moller House by Adolf Loos sharing scene with the 1993’s Tokyo Chiaroscuro House
by Ushida Findlay (Please refer to the chapter entitled ‘Connections and Links in Time’).
In the mise-in-scene (set in play), there is a gap between the labor of mediation and that of
‘Repetition and Difference’ of the same character and his liberated self. Mediation consists in
interpretation, in explanation without confrontation: it constitutes a justification. On the other hand,
‘Difference and Repetition’ of historic lines is neither a mediating nor symbolizing nor signifying
character. On the other hand, characters assume the immediacy of their possibilities denied in first
instance.
History as ‘Repetition with Difference’ is stated, for instance, in the work of Winy Maas, Jacob van
Rijs and Nathalie de Vries’s Hollander office MVRDV. In the essay entitled “The Space of
Optimism”, in architectural magazine El Croquis, Luis Moreno Mansilla and Emilio Tuñon write
over the productive relationship of MVRDV’s projects with History. Mansilla and Tuñon ask the
following question to their interviewees: “In the descriptions of your projects, you speak of
questions related to a personal re-description of History, with a particular way of seeing what is
built. For instance, in VPRO you speak about the technique being organized as in Ancient Rome, in
The Hague Housing you quote Molensloot’s Memory of Pompeii and the podium from where the
monument emerges as the Phoenix rebuilt, the Nolli Map, etc. Is history like a library where you
can pick a book, or is it like a landscape without time?” (Mansilla and Tuñon, p. 12) MVRDV
answers: “Yes, history can be seen as a collective tool to explain the found reality. So if we are
using Pompeii, it covers its loads as a tool to speak about the relativity of architecture in situ. But it
is not only a tool but also a reference appearing in the texts to clarify and intensify certain ideas”.
(Mansilla and Tuñon, p. 12).
MVRDV finally poses a question: “Can elements of history be used as a ‘chest of words’?” The
answer to the question of History’s ‘chest of words’ is provided by MVRDV themselves with an
example in which they re-elaborate on the Archizoom’s concept of surface using the modified
surface’s concept in the Double House in Utrecht: “’Surface’ is a very hip word lately although it
can be seen as a reinterpretation of the vocabulary of the Archizoom era. ‘Surface’ provides a
possible continuation and looseness. It literally makes space for the things which are not planned or
filled in yet. This is a very optimistic thought. But ‘surface’ is also a tool for disconnecting, like in
the Double House in Utrecht: it’s a kind of membrane between two forces, two families. It’s the
moment where the plane ‘freezes’, ‘petrifies’ and therefore the seemingly endless optimism actually
end and the generic becomes specific.” (Mansilla and Tuñon, p. 13).
The generic is the element provided by History; in this case, by the ‘chest of words’ that provides
the element repeated and differentiated. The ‘surface’ (a word possibly found in the ‘chest for
words’) is for MVRDV permeable, elastic, capable of being manipulated. The Double House in
Utrecht can be defined as a work in the surface rather than in the volume. The concept of ‘surface’
connects MVRDV’s oeuvre with that of Archizoom. In the comparison lies the reason for the
‘repetition and difference’ of the original concept of ‘surface’ (and in MVRDV’s acknowledging
the work of Archizoom situated in the past but influencing the future).

Rome, the Quirinale and its environs. 1748,

according to the plan of Nolli.(Rowe, p. 81).
Figure-ground: In white, map of public spaces. .

A)
 C) D)

B)
B) MVRDV, exterior of Double House in Utrecht.(Huizen, p. 31); C) MVRDV, Interior Villa VPRO. (Croquis #86;
MVRDV, p. 99); D) MVRDV, exterior Villa VPRO. (Croquis # 86; MVRDV, p. 88).

In ‘A Brief History of Horizontality: 1968/1969 to 2001/2002’ (in ‘Pasajes de Arquitectura y

Crítica’, March 2003), Kazys Varnelis writes that the concept of surface has been crucial in the
urban oeuvre of Archizoom. Varnelis explains that Archizoom’s elaboration on the concept of
‘surface’ leads to a critique to the impersonal capitalist cities of the 1960’s for their rejection to
historical centers and their focus on peripheries with supermarkets occupying the place of
cathedrals in urban order.
According to ARTNET, Archizoom is an Italian architectural and design partnership formed in
1966 by Andrea Branzi, Gilberto Corretti, Paolo Deganello and Massimo Morozzi. In 1969 they
developed their architectural project ‘No-Stop City’ which constituted “…an extrapolation of the
post-metropolitan urban condition that was simultaneously utopian and dystopian. By pushing
Branzi's diagnosis of the post-urban condition to a limit, No-Stop-City became amoral and without
qualities. Modeled on the supermarket, the factory, and the horizontal plans of Büro Landschaft,
No-Stop-City was envisioned as a ‘well-equipped residential parking lot’ composed of ‘large floors,
micro-climatized and artificially lighted interiors’. Without an exterior, these ‘potentially limitless
urban structures’ would be ‘made uniform through climate control and made optimal by
information links’. Rather than serving to identify a place, No-Stop-City would be a neutral field in
which the creation of identity through consumption could be unfettered”. (Varnelis quotes
Archizoom Associates’ "No-Stop City. Residential Parkings. Climatic Universal System" in Domus
496, March 1971, p. 49-55).
On the other hand, FOA member Zaera Polo writes in ‘A World Full of Holes’ (in Croquis 88/89,
pg. 314) that groups like Archigram or Archizoom attempted the liberation from cause-effects
relations where ‘…a certain change of perspective from the architects of orthodox modernism
proposed the need to maintain a degree of non-determination within the design process, so as to be
able to operate by integration rather than exclusion’.
Furthermore, Varnelis implies that Archizoom ironically proposed based-on-commercial
exploitation of the surface and negation of the traditional city, alluding to a specific feature which is
the surface without a third dimension, i.e. the non-identifiable image of the homogeneity: “The
result would be a proliferation of sublimely useless objects connoting status and ‘architecturalness’
through the applied façades of postmodernism and the spectacular fragments of supermodernism”.
Varnelis traces a link between 1969 Archizoom’s No-Stop City and the Yokohama Port Terminal,
completed in 2002 by FOA: “Two architectural projects, Archizoom's No-Stop City of 1969 and
Foreign Office Architects' Yokohoma Terminal…will help us in uncovering the relation of
architecture, capital, and the city today”. The relationship Varnelis traces is that of a world in which
the capital has made the image unviable, unnecessary, thus suppressing the importance of the icon
(and of the façade) as an obsolete phase of capitalism. For instance, he mentions that following the
destruction of the World Trade Center in 2001, the recovery of the enterprises lodged there was as
fast as a week in duration and that in all modern cities, the trend for the invention of a fast, efficient
building has gained the surface, the horizontality. The sign of the power of companies is now
obsolete since it is too predictable (and attackable). More and more companies are leaving their
high towers in search of mobility and sub-urbanity (except in the Asian generic cities).
A)

B) C)

A) and B): Archizoom's No Stop City; A) Plan and Section of the superblock. (http://www.varnelis.net/projects/
horizontality). B) Archizoom's No Stop City; Model (http://www.varnelis.net/projects/horizontality). C) Foreign
Office Architects, Yokohama Port Terminal, Interior. (http://www.archined.nl/oem/ reportages/yokohama-
terminal/ yokohama_shipterminal_foa.html).

Destruction of the iconic image and the surface homogeneity is for Varnelis an Archizoom’s legacy
that FOA has retaken: “Archizoom's predictions: it is the invisible, placeless world of the network
and the database, now indistinguishable from capital itself, which characterizes this second phase of
late capitalism. If Archizoom's No-Stop-City was a prophecy for the future, our current period
seems to be singularly averse to such thoughts. In hopes of better understanding our contemporary
condition, however, we could turn to one architectural prophecy of the present that specifically sets
out to deal with the relationship of architecture and late capitalism, Foreign Office Architects'
Yokohama Terminal”. Varnelis extends on the relationship of the Yokohama Port Terminal to
surface: “Shrinking down and away onto the water, the structure pulls the observer out onto the
surface. But these are the qualities of a bridge or highway, not a building! The Yokohama Terminal
distinctly fails to develop a façade or any kind of iconographic quality. Far from being a shining
exemplar of the new, Maya-driven era of the blob – if that era will ever arrive - the project is anti-
formal, indeed, anti-appearance, infrastructural rather than architectural”.

Foreign Office Architects, Yokohama Port Terminal. A) interior rendered.(2G# 16; p. 103) ; B) + C) Foreign Office
Architects, Yokohama Port Terminal, interior; D) Foreign Office Architects, Yokohama Port Terminal, arrival .(B+C+D:
Http://www.varnelis.net/ projects/horizontality/).
Being both different but related, the treatment of surface and the relationship between city and
infrastructure seems to be part of the historical net that can be traced between oeuvres such as those
of Archizoom, FOA’s and MVRDV’s. Varnelis points that “FOA's Yokohama Terminal announces
the emergence of an immaterial age in which we come to reject our frustrated world of objects for
programming, much as Archizoom suggested we would a generation ago”.
In summary, the conditions that made possible the work on the surface in three cases are,
nevertheless, irreproducible. Archizoom’s work is given in the midst of the acid and utopian urban
critique of the 60’s and 70’s and as a reaction to the depreciation of the traditional cores; the use of
the surface by MVRDV is given as a re-elaboration of lots with reduced fronts in a country like
Holland that has drastically diminished its capacity for subsidized state dwelling in the 90’s: under
that scenario both pieces of work provide the resources to accomplish autonomy and independence.
Finally at the end of the XXth century, FOA’s use of the surface as public extension connects it
with a work that Archizoom undertakes partially in the roof of their ‘No-Stop City’. Nevertheless,
FOA’s building is a pragmatic piece of work, not a critique as in Archizoom’s. Yokohama’s Port
Terminal does not face but organizes and moves fluidly in a scenario of capitalism.
In the three cases, the concept is ‘the elaboration on the surface’. Metaphorically, it is an only actor
that shares scene with himself in different times and spaces, although his characteristics are
different in each of the cases. The scene is non-linear, the ‘lines of dialogue’ are a-synchronic and
a-parallel. The three characters speak at the same time (and in certain moments they may
interchange their lines of dialogue): it is an scene neither concerted nor pastoral. Caesura among the
three avoids harmony; furthermore it conserves tension as productive feature. This dialogue allows
proposing matrices of characteristics that later may be confronted and extrapolated in applied
investigation. For instance, FOA’s work initially derives from constant academic investigation in
London’s Architectural Association. Then it finds opportunity in architectural practice.
A possibility is proposing hypothetical scenarios of discussion, a kind of chimerical (continuous)
scenario of hybridism and grafts that pretend to be productive. In this case, grafts are not iconic or
assemblies of discrete parts but concepts that power (and inFORM) the objects in order to introduce
them into fields where the vectors are definitively social and economic. History strips off its context
and turns into an actor.
Condicion for the Three Elements (Matrix by C. Romay):

Piece of
Element Milieu Concept Medium Effect Section Plan
Work

-Ambiguous
Surface.-The
Non-Stop Pure and Caesura with
Superblock Earth Roof as Repetitive Regular
City raised prism street
segregated urban
plaza

Double Surface as fold Flexible Interior

Block Earth Sawed Changing
House of conviviality Membrane discontinuity

Yokohama Earth- Surface as urban Walkable Continuity of

Patio-Roof Sequential Morfogenetic
Terminal Water extension Membrane Terminal-city

Interpolations of the Three Elements (Matriz by C. Romay):

Piece of
Element Milieu Concept Medium Effect Section Plan
Work

Surface as Constitutes Continuity

Non-Stop Earth- Individual
Superblock urban internal street- Changing
City Water Membrane
extension streets building

Earth- Continuity of
Double Public Membrane
Block Under city- Sequential Changing
House membranes and space
Earth membrane

Chimerical
Yokohama Water- Non-Stop- Inclusive Continuous
Patio-Roof Sequential. without closing
Terminal Air City Membrane umbrella
its development

An interpolation allows the exploration of the potentials of action (and of actors) in a changing
milieu. In the matrix proposed, just quoting the conditions would constitute investigation without
application; on the other hand what is pretended is Applied Investigation; in this case, on the
possibilities of ‘surface’. The preceding graphic is a matrix of transformations of concepts among
the three elaborations of surface depicted previously.

Diagram of transpositions among concepts- Diagram of transpositions of concepts among surface

materials (diagram by r C. Romay ) paradigms (diagram by C. Romay)

A) Archizoom’s Superblock is transformed via an operation of folding (influenced by the Double

Utrecht House) and by a later operation of segmentation. It integrates the city in continuity
(influenced by the concept of the Yokohama terminal). Internal streets are configured and
intersticial space appears. The Superblock turns into various blocks assuming different material
(vegetal envelope, electronic media as envelope, glass as transparent envelope, etc).
B) MVRDV’s block extends its membrane to forms part of the street (influenced by the concept of
the Yokohama Terminal). Just the membrane remains, the envelope is redundant.
C) FOA’s patio-roof extends into the city and into the sea comprising other smaller elements as the
Double House of Utrecht, membranes, superblocks, streets, interstices, etc.
The objective of this exercise is to attain a creative-productive level as it overcomes the
informational phase: To develop a vocabulary of spatial concepts through the study of architectural
pieces of work through the analysis of antecedents and the projection of indeterminate consequents
(as in the chest of History that proposes MVRDV). The sense of the matrix of combinations is to
generate a virtual urban space of opportunities. Archizoom’s critique weld the pragmatic
accomplishments of FOA and MVRDV to attain an ample gamut waiting to deploy.
On the other hand, a characteristic of History is to influence History (as an in-differentiated field of
transversal and segmental movements). An antecedent exists in the Aymara non-linear notion of
History.
5. The Aymara Conception of History.
“If one allows an intense flow of energy in and out of a system (that is, if one pushes it far from
equilibrium), the number and type of possible historical outcomes greatly increases. Instead of a
unique and simple form off stability, we now have multiple co-existing forms of varying
complexity (static, periodic, and chaotic attractors). Moreover, when a system switches from one
stable state to another at a critical point called a bifurcation, minor fluctuations may play a crucial
role in deciding the outcome... Attractors and bifurcations are features of any system in which the
dynamics are not only far from equilibrium but also non-linear, that is, in which there are strong
mutual interactions (or feedback) between complements”. (Manuel de Landa, in ‘1000 years of
Nonlinear History; quoted in ‘INDEX Architecture. A Columbia book of Architecture’, MIT Press
Edition, 2003, pg. 143).
In this point I shall introduce another rhizomatic conception that speaks of the comparison of
History with its alter ego: it is the Aymara conception of History. Based on linguistic and
etymological studies, Fernando Untoja Choque and Ana Mamani Espejo, in their book ‘Pacha in the
Aymara Thought”, write over the Aymara conception of History. The Aymara is an ethnic group
located mainly in Bolivia and Peru, but that extends to Chile and Argentina. The importance of the
aforementioned conception of History lies in its rhizomatic approach. The projection of the past
over the future is similar to what I describe in this chapter. The incorporation of metaphysics
produces a complex conception on the indigenous concept of space and History and to its processes
of formation as intertwined fields.
For Untoja and Mamani, the Aymara rhizomatic focus on History has not been interrupted by the
process of Spanish colonization. Furthermore, according to both authors, the Aymara historical
conception is different to the occidental linear conception of History. (Untoja, p. 19). Both authors
affirm that the aforementioned focus is valid and constantly updated by the trend of modernization.
Comparatively in the Occidental World, antecedents of previous incorporations of metaphysics and
religion into philosophical and historical conceptions exist; for instance the work of philosophers
Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno who established a strong relationship between their religion
and their contributions to the field of philosophy. Described by Hilde Heynen, this relationship
consists in the fusion of religious elements into the interior of a version of Modernism that is neither
discursive nor normative but inclusive. Heynen describes the thought of Adorno in these terms:
“The…force in Adorno’s field comes from his being part Jewish. A large number of his friends and
intellectual colleagues were Jews, including Walter Benjamin…The course of Adorno’s own life
was deeply influenced by his Jewish identity…His Jewishness did not only influenced the course of
his life. Traces of some motifs from Jewish philosophy also can be found in Adorno’s thought.
Sometimes these themes emerge due to the influence of Benjamin, whose notion of language as
mimesis, for instance, was clearly influenced by the Jewish Kabbala; sometimes, however, their
origin was more direct, as with the theme of the ban on images. (Heynen, p. 176).
In consequence, the Aymara conception of History is comparative and remits the present to the
comparison with the past. In this scope, a historic line is capable of being compared with itself, with
a similar alter ego. Untoja and Mamani write that the projection of this rhizomatic focus extends to
the realm of the quotidian life: “The Aymara has an experience of himself that is double and single
at the same time. On the one hand, he lives as a subject devoted to egocentrism, and on the other
hand, he recognizes himself objectively in an image that is his own double: this double is not just
his image reflected or revealed by shadows; it is himself, real in his alterity as at the same time he
stands co-substantial to himself”. (Untoja, p. 36). Let us remember the notion of the comparison
with oneself that Deleuze called displacement (in ‘Difference and Repetition’, p. 166), motive of
hypothesis in this chapter. This modality of comparison with an alter ego can be extended to the
comparison of different related historic lines projected over the future, and even to the comparison
of entire fields (as the rhizomatic fields of History) with themselves in different times. Not merely
conceptual, this definition is conveyed into the Aymara quotidian life: “It can be easily stated that
the Aymara thought does not separate objectivity from subjectivity in knowledge…This unique
circuit is a generative loop…”. (Untoja, p. 107-108).
5a. Pacha in the Aymara Thought.
The essence of Untoja and Mamani’s study lies in the investigation of the linguistic particle
‘Pacha’. (Let us compare the use of particles in Aymara to the use of particles in the Japanese
language. Particles change the sense of the phrase and of the word depending in the place of the
sentence where located). Aymara language uses these particles according to their polisemic use and
performs functions according to the position which they occupy in the morphology and syntax of
the phrase, whether at the beginning, at the intermediate or at the end. (Untoja, p. 8).
Hence, ‘Pacha’ is a particle that denotes time and space depending on its position in the word or in
its position in the sentence. ‘Pacha’ is then an indefinable word, but it is definitively vectorial, since
it is used according to the signal of the forces and the potentialities of what it designates. The
application of ‘Pacha” depends on the object of its action in order to articulate itself as a linguistic
particle. That is why its meaning changes and moves: The notion of ‘Pacha’ is un-definable and
extensive. It can be compared to the performing of vectors and motivations. Trying to close the
definition of Pacha precludes the influence of its meaning over other concepts.
Untoja and Mamani write on the individual character of the vectors, the Pacha, stating that they are
individual and differentiated. According to the Aymara definition there are not two equal vectors
since they vary according to time and space: “…There is just individual Pacha…in the sense that…
they refer to some place, to a given moment and its duration; then, there is not two similar Pacha.
The fact that a specific Pacha is the same in a place has its fundament in space; the fact that a
specific Pacha is the same in a given moment has its fundament in time”. (Untoja, p. 86). The
transcendence of this definition is that it comprises aspects complementary to occidental philosophy
referred to the texture and sensation of the vectorial fields where the ‘forces’ or vectors (Pacha) are
located. Untoja and Mamani write that “…the origin of the morpheme Pacha is the force of
roughness, or the roughness of force”. (Untoja, p. 57). This notion of real, tangible and tactile
vectors is important since it can be extended to the use of a diagram conformed by forces and
vectors. The diagram can be considered (via the extension of Aymara metaphysics) alive, with
roughness, texture, noise, color, etc; and capable of being experienced. It is not particularly abstract
but applicable to the real life. The intertwining of the real and the abstract is the Aymara
contribution to the concept of rhizomatic fields and the diagrams: the tangible united to the
conceptual. The diagram, conformed by alive forces, ‘lives’, and is applied to spaces that by
definition are in movement: “Pacha preserves its original meaning in spite of the changes in the
Aymara speaking people; what refers to force, power, and noise do not disappear…Pacha expresses
time, space, force, chaotic state, totality, etc….We are not capable of defining in concepts what
Pacha means”. (Untoja, p.76-77-79). It is conclusive that for the Aymara, rhizomes in the fields and
vectors in the diagrams have texture and noise as well. It is a phenomenological conception of a
diagrammatic field full of potentialities. The vectors in themselves have definite and tangible
physical characteristics as situated in the real world.
Gilles Deleuze, in ‘The Fold’, found a connection that links the physical and mechanical
characteristics of the vectors. Leibniz’s definition of the monads and of the forces envisages them
as corporeal and tangible entities, provided of specific and material qualities: “The derivative forces
are nothing but primitive forces differing from them in their statute and in their aspect. The
primitive forces are monads or substances by themselves and for themselves. The derivative are the
same, but according to a link or to an instant: in some cases are included in multitudes and become
plastic, in the other case, they are included in cumulus and become elastic; since the cumulus
change in every instant (they do not pass from one instant to the other without reconstitution)
….they can be called mechanical or material…”. (‘The Fold’, p. 151). Walter Benjamin alludes to
the relationship existent among History and Leiniz’s monads. According to Benjamin the monads
have ‘form’ since they can change it. Extending on the concept of the monad’s form, Walter
Benjamin proposed “an alternative to the ‘history of the victors’ in the form of a history of not
causally connected moments but rather as a constellation of monads in which the entire reality of
history, with all its virtual revolutionary possibilities and hidden connections, crystallizes constantly
in different form in each occasion.”(Heynen, p. 146). The coincidence between Benjamin’s concept
of History and the Aymara conception of History is that of the mutability and circularity of the
elements of History. As we see, Walter Benjamin alludes the relationship existent between History
and its constituent Leibniz’s monads. Moreover, according to Benjamin monads have form, since
they can change it.
(According to David Harvey, the monads are in relationship to the totality they form, being this
concept extensive to society. Harvey’s definition of society is counter-pastoral, under permanent
transformation, contradiction and overcome: ‘Therefore, relationships within totality can be
interpreted according to the way in which they contribute to preserve and reproduce it. Another
additional consequence is that each element- in a certain way as Leibniz’s monads- reflects in itself
all the totality’s characteristics since it is the center of a series of relationships within such
totality…These relationships do not find themselves necessarily in mutual harmony. Frequently
they produce contradiction, and from this contradiction the conflict emerges. Transformations are
produced through the resolution of these conflicts and with each transformation the totality is re-
structured. In turn, this re-structuring alters the definition, the meaning and the function of the
elements and relationships within the whole. New conflicts and contradictions emerge in order to
replace the old ones’. (Harvey, 304-305).

The Aymara mythology has deeply influenced the concept of violence in the rhizomatic field. The
origin of the Aymara universe (as that of the Semitic universe as well) is chaos, violence: “…this
thought proceeds under the form of rhizomes, where everything is articulated and where man is
receptacle of undetermined noise, but at the same time he greatly configures violence…Pacha rules
the structure of territorial and social order marking always an individuality…in the organization of
territory. (Untoja, p. 122-123).
The violence alluded by Untoja and by Mamani may be understood as the process of the
configuration of vectors (Pacha) in a rhizomatic field and as its truly morphogenesis. A moment of
indetermination and chaos exists in the absence of relationships and connections among vectors.
Besides, the Aymara focus is transcendent since it extends to the notion of territory and spatiality.
Rather than limit space through physical elements, this notion works through knowledge and the
difference of space. Furthermore, the Aymara notion of space has been imperceptible for the ruling
classes who have ignored it.
The essence of the formation of the vectorial fields (made of vectors or ‘Pacha’) is morphogenetic,
and derived from a process, a method: “…Pacha is a thought of simultaneity, hence properly a
method of investigation”. (Untoja, p.95). Even though authors Untoja and Mamani do not extend on
how the definition of the Aymara Pacha derives in method, it can be inferred that it is not through
sequence (linearity) but through simultaneity, through the treatment of problems from diverse
aspects all in simultaneous trend and as a system in which all parts influence the others adjusting
mutually and displacing the fundament (solution) constantly. This constitutes a symbiotic and
ecological relationship of the concept of ‘Pacha’ (the vector) and of the vectorial fields.
This aspect constitutes another important Aymara contribution to the subject of rhizomatic fields
related in symbiotic trend: Even though the fields are individual and highly differentiated, they are
narrowly connected among them, so that an important change in one produces a change in the
others transcendentally: “…We infer that the changes in History that affect the ecosystem (drama,
war, misery,)…affect the original register of Pacha causing deterioration or improvement in the
memory successively”. (Untoja, p. 123). This implies the existence of a chain of simultaneities that
‘successively’ occur when there is a change in a vector (Pacha). The entropy (the degree of
unbalance of the system) is the condition for constant movement. This focus does not point to a
single center (as in religion or technology) but on the other hand is multi- central and mobile. It can
be referred as a nomadic focus since it is constantly in displacement, without a fixed or constant
centre.
Furthermore, Untoja and Mamani write that every vector (Pacha) can be concretely sited in its own
time and space. Being in a precise segment of time-space, Pacha constitutes particularity and
individuality: “The result is the propriety of the things that have been nominated, propriety of being
always the same, of being every time the same. This propriety is found in the connection of time
and space. According to the spatial and temporal position of every Pacha, it is always the same and
not another”. (Untoja, p. 88).
5b. The Return of Non-Identical History: Pachakuti.
Movements of time that influence the notion of present exist both for the rural and the urban
Aymara, even though for the later in symbiosis with occidental thought. Being ‘Pacha’ suffix (the
vector), ‘global and numerating root, it is also the resolutions, the reflexes, the mentalities, the
actions of History…that renovates as Pachakuti”. (Untoja, p. 83). The Aymaras call ‘Pachakuti’ the
projection of a time into another. For the Aymara, this notion is not abstract but real and ever
present: ‘Pachakuti, in a double sense, means to occur periodically in cycles, to get lost in the old
time and to renovate in the new time. It means revolution of the time. Then, Pachakuti means
revolving time-space and the revolving of time-space”. (Untoja, p. 23).
The concept of returning History is depicted by Aimee Sullivan in her article entitled ‘Pachakuti.
An Andean Concept’: “In this critical feature of the ideology of many indigenous rebellions which
had stopped to overturn the European or Criollo social order, the non-linearity of the Andean
worldview must be taking into consideration. To discuss an Aymara philosophy of history in terms
of linear progress and advance would be incorrect; as observed C.M. Condori, ‘The past is not inert,
it is not dead or left behind. It is precisely from these past that the hoping of a free future can be
nourished, so that the past can be regenerated in the future’. Thus, the indigenous Andean concept
of history involves looking at the past and the future simultaneously, with the future seen as holding
an eventual restoration of balance to the Andean world. Rather than historical regression or
stagnation, however, the idea of a return to the past implies a future renovation of old values within
new and changing contexts…As studied in by C. M. Condori, two vital concepts in the Andean
philosophy of history are expressed as nayrapacha and pachakuti…Nayra is an Aymara word
meaning ‘past’; ‘anterior’. Nayrapacha thus refers to past or ancient times, to everything pre-
Hispanic. Nayra also means ‘eye’. As an opposite, the Aymara word ‘qhipu’, meaning afterwards,
the future, also means ‘back’ in the anatomical sense of the word. Thus we arrive at a conception in
which the future is at our backs and the past is in front of us. Aymara sociologist Silvia Rivera
Cusicanqui defines nayrapacha as the restoration of the Andean cosmic order through a past capable
of redeeming the future’. (Aimee Sullivan, in ‘Pachakuti, An Andean Concept’, in Bolivian Times,
10th December, 1993).
Untoja and Mamani clarify the sense of the Aymara word Pachakuti writing that it has the sense of
‘eternal return, revolution, political connotation, revolving, time of war, return to the chaos…In
resume History, as a conjugation of time-space, is directed from chaos to order”. (Untoja, p. 61-
100). For both writers, Pachakuti is the time of return (Untoja, p. 71) that has similitude to the
subject of Nietzsche’s ‘return’ in Nietzsche’s ‘Genealogy of Moral’.(Untoja, p. 15).
Moreover, it is impossible to dissociate ‘Pachakuti’ from a mythological essence that constitutes
part of its reality, even part of its political reality. It is an essence of time and space that devours (as
Khronos, the god of time, devours his sons), but that orders the others and at the same time it orders
itself: “…Pachakuti is the culmination or the rupture…that devours, revolves, destroys, is ordered
and orders”. (Untoja, p. 76).
In summary, for Untoja and Mamani, the ‘plateau’ of History initially may be found in chaos and
then it derives in order. In the rhizomatic connections of the plateau, order perhaps does not appear
but it is such. The processes of connection and association lie in order: in the process of producing
rhizomes. Since the conglomerate of History is a plateau, the process of association among historic
lines derives in order.
6. Bibliography (Notes make reference to the following texts):
1. Benjamin, Andrew; Architectural Philosophy; Athlone Press; New Jersey; 2000.
2. Solà Morales, Ignasi; Diferencias. Topografía de la Arquitectura Contemporánea; GG; 1995;
Barcelona; 1995.
3. Waisman, Marina; El Interior de la Historia; Escala; Bogota; 2nd Edition; 1993
4. Banham, Reyner; Teoría y Diseño Arq. En la era de la Maquina; Nueva Visión, Buenos Aires.
1965.
5. Allen, Stan; Diagrams Matter; in ANY 23; Anyone Corp.; NY; 1998.
6. Deleuze, Gilles; Guattari, Félix; “Rizoma”; Ed. Coyoacán, Mexico; 1994.
7. Deleuze, Gilles; Diferencia y Repetición; Amorrortu; Buenos Aires; 2002.
8. Zaera Polo, Alejandro; A Conversation with Enric Miralles; Croquis # 72(II) “Enric Miralles”, El
Croquis; Ed. El Croquis, Madrid, España, 1995.
9. Spiller, Neil; Digital Dreams; Ellipsis; London; 1998.
10. Deleuze, Gilles; Foucault; Paidos Iberica; Barcelona; 1987
11. Mansilla, Luis Moreno; Tuñon, Emilio; in ‘The Space of Optimism; in El Croquis # 86; MVRDV
1991-1997; Ed. El Croquis, Madrid, España, 1999.
12. Huizen van Over de Hele Wereld; Könemann Ed.; Cologne; 2000.
13. Varnelis, Kazys : Breve Historia de la Horizontalidad: 1968/1969 a 2001/2002; in ‘Pasajes de
Arquitectura y Crítica’, March 2003;http://www.varnelis.net/projects/horizontality/
14. ARTNET ; Archizoom (Associati); http://www.artnet.com/library/00/0039/T003901.ASP
15. Untoja Choque, Fernando; Mamani Espejo, Ana A.; Pacha en el Pensamiento Aymará; Fondo
Editorial de los Diputados; 1st ed.; August 2000; La Paz; Bolivia.
16. Deleuze, Gilles; El Pliegue. Leibiz y el Barroco; Paidós Ibérica; Barcelona; 1989.
17. Heynen, Hilde; Architecture and Modernity. A Critique; Massachusetts Institute of Technology;
1999; 3rd Printing, 2001.
18. Collins Dictionaries, Intense Educational Ltd. (UK), 2003.
19. Castoriadis-Aulagnier, Piera; La Violencia de la Interpretación; Amorrortu Editores; Buenos
Aires, 1977. (La violence de l’interprétation. Du pictogramme a l’ ‘enoncé, Presses Universitaires
de France, 1975).
20. Harvey, David; Urbanismo y Desigualdad Social, Siglo XXI de España Ed.; 3rd. Ed, Madrid,
1985. (Social Justice and the City, Edward Arnold Publishers, London, 1973).
21. Lyotard, Jean François, La fenomenología, Ed. Paidós; Barcelona, Buenos Aires, 1989.
22. Croquis #73, Zaha Hadid, El Croquis Ed., Madrid, 1995.
23. Croquis # 88/89; Worlds One; El Croquis Ed.; Madrid, 1998.
24. Zaera Polo, Alejandro, in ‘Conversations with Rafael Moneo’, in Croquis #64, Rafael Moneo,
El Croquis Ed., Madrid, 1994, pg. 25).
25. Sullivan, Aimee; in ‘Pachakuti, An Andean Concept’, in the journal ‘Bolivian Times’, 10th of
Dec. 1993; Published by Peter McFarren; pg. 4.
26. De Landa, Manuel, in ‘1000 Years of Non-Linear History’, quoted in ‘INDEX Architecture. A
Columbia book of Architecture’, MIT Press Edition, 2003, pg. 143.
HISTORIES=PLATEAUS by Carlos A. Romay Vergara
5/5. THE ARCHITECTURE OF DIFFERENCES.
1. Alterity.
2. Mimesis and Criticality.
2a. Mimesis.
2b. Metaphors and Metaphorical Animation.
2b.1. Metaphors.
2b.2. Metaphorical Animation.
3. Forms of alienation.
4. The incomplete and L’Informe.
4a. The Incomplete.
4b. L’Informe.
5. Bibliography.
“There is too much complexity in Reality and ideologies are too homogeneous to handle this.
Besides, you do not affront reality. Reality affronts you. You live it and you contribute to it. (Elia
Zhengelis; El Croquis # 67, p. 132)

¿Which are the strategies Architecture select in order to avoid being uniquely a reflex of technique
and function? In this chapter the strategies of incorporation of “productive interferences” in the
project are described. The nature of these incorporations is diverse and informs the project in
order to achieve a controlled but unsuspected development.
…Altogether with its own aesthetics, the architectonic Modernism established a rigid discourse in
order to mediate between authors and their public. Modernism justified itself through its own critics
who took the task of presenting a vision of the whole Architecture as a proposed “project”, capable
of changing society and people for a time that finally did not arrive. Its modern vision was
“pastoral”, free of contradictions and tensions. ¿But what is a vision of Project, a “pastoral” vision
of the task of Modern Architecture?
Hilde Heynen, Belgian historian and critic of architecture, writes that “a pastoral view denies the
contradictions, dissonances, and tensions that are specific to the modern and sees modernity as a
concerted struggle for progress, uniting workers, industrialists, and artists around a common goal…
Progress is seen as harmonious and continuous, as though it developed to the advantage of everyone
and without any significant interruptions.” (Heynen, p.13).
Philosopher Andrew Benjamin affirms that “an architecture of Project can be defined as oscillating
between the form-follows- function of conventional modernism and the apparent indifference
between form and function characterizing much post-modernist architecture”. (Benjamin, p.26).
¿Was this pastoral vision (the Project) applied to Modern architecture? As a matter of fact, it was,
validating Modernism especially through critique and theory. For instance, renowned critics and
theoreticians such as Sigfried Gideon or Reyner Banham supported Modernism as a coherent and
unitary movement. The point is that this closed vision set apart the incorporation of a critical vision
vis-à-vis the development of society. For Banham, for instance, the problem of the architect’s
participation in society was mainly technical and a-cultural; once overcome the technological
aspect, society had to achieve a current of innovation at the risk of not keeping pace: “The architect
that pretends to follow technology’s march knows by now that he will have a fast companion and
that if he pretends to stay with it without staying behind, he will have to imitate the futurists and
leave aside any cultural load, including the professional garments by which everybody recognize
him as an architect. Otherwise, if he decides not to do so, perhaps he will discover that
technological culture decided to go on without him.” (Banham, p. 316). As “the Age of the
Machine” ended (as Reyner Banham entitled the project of the first masters of the architecture of
the beginnings of the XXth Century) the momentary possibility of the investigation of the ever-
changing social spaces of reality arrived.
The Dutch author Bart Lootsma defines the uprising of Architecture’s Second Modernity in these
terms: “It has become increasingly clear that the foundations for a second phase of modernity that
would largely dictate the course of architecture in the 1990s were laid in the 1970s and 1980s. This
second modernity is, according to sociologists Ulrich Beck and Anthony Giddens, a product of
global economic and political developments, of the rise of international media networks, of new
forms of democracy based on systems of expertise and the political involvement of individual
citizens and, not least, of congestion. While the first phase of modernity was largely shaped by the
industrial revolution and its consequences, the second phase is an outcome of the rise of electronics
and communications technology.”(Lootsma, p.21)

A) B) C) D)

A) PAO 2, Vivienda para una mujer nómada de Tokio, Bruselas, 1989. B), C) y D): PAO 1: B) Premobiliario para la
moda; C) Premobiliario para el aperitivo; D)Premobiliario para la inteligencia. (Croquis # 71 Ito; A) p. 11; B)+C)
+D); p. 34).
A) B) C)

Organizaciones Materiales en arquitectura: A) UN Studio, Servicio de Te y Café Alessi; B) R+U: Rutas Turísticas
Alishan; Taiwan, China;2003; C) R+U; Flux Room; NY; USA; 2002.

The apology to a sensible and reactive architecture in the age of communications and electronics is
described by Toyo Ito, for whom architecture must be a transparent media-suit for a digitalized and
transparent body. For Ito, people settle in virtual nature, in the forest of media. Ito calls them
Tarzans in the media forest. (2G #2, p. 142). Is Ito’s vision related to Banham’s pastoral vision that
the problem to overcome is mainly technical? Certainly it is not. Ito is an acute critic of the void in
which people of the current society of consume live: “Today, our environment is filled with vacant
brightness. Just like commodities filling the shelves of a convenience store, our cities have dried up
and become bleak…Although we are surrounded with a variety of goods, we are living a
thoroughly homogenous atmosphere. Our affluence is supported only by a piece of Saran-wrap
film.” (Croquis # 71; Toyo Ito, 13). Ito’s preoccupation with new forms of urban conviviality is
expressed in his installations Pao1 and Pao 2 on urban nomadism.
This vision, that by opposition may be called counter-pastoral, can be defined “as characterized by
irreconcilable fissures and insoluble contradictions, by divisions and fragmentation, by the collapse
of an integrated experience of life, and by the irreversible emergence of autonomy in various
domains that are incapable of regaining their common foundation.” (Heynen, p.13). In the middle of
the fragmented pieces of reality and through the project, Architecture counts with several strategies
in order to incorporate changing realities. All these strategies are related in the incorporation of
overlapped and layered realities to the project. They are: Alterity, mimesis and metaphorical
animation, alienation and incompleteness.
1. Alterity.
Andrew Benjamin writes over alterity in these terms: “…Alterity has to be thought in terms of time
and thus not in relation to the intrusion of an absolute other. Alterity is that other possibility
splitting the singular…and in so doing demanding what could be provisionally understood as the
housing of a form of interruption; a time which in unsettling the determinations of tradition
nonetheless allows for another settlement and therefore another habitation. Time and alterity are
interconnected.” (Benjamin, p.11) Following Benjamin, alterity (from the Latin word alter=
another) can just be understood in relation to the interplay of form and function that puts in
movement the affected integrity. Alterity is neither another form nor another function imposed over
nor just the determination of a given function. It is the critical possibility of incorporating other
programs, configurations and flexibilities that are not traditionally associated with the object
alluded. Thus the object is always questioned in relationship with an immediate environment of
conditions and in relationship with other persons that do not necessarily have the same origin and
culture. Since the parallel origin of form and function are intertwined, the issue of their generation
is vital. As this process of continuous evolution contains a high degree of compromise of function
and form together, it must be understood as an integral and not separated process.
Following generation and evolution, spatial organizations become material organizations through
the relationship with (as Foreign Office Architects, FOA writes) “complex natural organizations,
generated through the negotiation of multiple orders: the geological, the biological, and climatic, in
a morphogenetic process.” (2G/ FOA, 124). Furthermore, FOA adds that the material organizations
that derive from diagrams, factual data, statistics, are “much more ambiguous than images or texts,
and more potent as vehicles of trans-cultural communication”. (2G/ FOA, p.127).
Zaera Polo defines Morphogenesis as the ‘…approach to form in its fluid state, rather than in its
eternal or ideal state, form as temporarily stable configuration within a process of entropy, rather
than an unvariant or solid idea. Reality as an unstable composite of flows rather than a series of
objects: a collection of topographies rather than significant’. (Zaera Polo in ‘Notes for a
Topographic Survey, OMA 1986-1991’, in Croquis #53, pg. 49). Furthermore, Zaera Polo adds, in
‘Exploiting Foreigness’, in Croquis #76, Modernism, Avant Garde and Neo-Avant Garde, 1995, pg.
34, that his office has been studying ‘…Thom’s Structural Stability and Morphogenesis, as a
science which, originating from topology, operates with maps and formal transformations as a way
of modeling the behaviour of certain systems, and more importantly, engineering and engaging with
generative processes of form. Since the accumulation of knowledge that produces types is no longer
valid in our rapidly changing environment, we believe that the revision of the processes of formal
genesis becomes crucial for material practices’.
Moreover, Morphogenetics appeals to the immediacy of conditions that are inherent to the object
and that affect directly its interiority. In order to generate the object, the process of symbolization is
not primordial but everything that objectively and directly affects the object. (The object is
privileged over the subject). The importance of alterity is that it works with the forces and processes
immanent to the commission of the architectonic project. Hence, it works with social forces within
the realm of architecture and urbanism, not in the outside.
Andrew Benjamin mentions two paradigmatic architectural offices in the implementation of
alterity: R+U’s (the office of Jesse Reyser and Nanako Umemoto) and Peter Eisenman’s, and I would
add that Foreign’s Office Architects as well. In the second case alterity is mainly formal and
discursive, meanwhile in the first and third it is mainly operative and productive, with the
incorporation of material organizations in the constitution of architectonic objects. (For instance, in
Eisenman’s Columbus Convention Centre, a problem arouse when the visitors felt dizzy because of
the tipped grids that the architect used as a product of his “architecture of the architecture”.
Eisenman had to change the orientation of the grids. It seems that in that in the middle of the
process the notion of human nature is lost). On the other hand, R+U’s entry for the Port Terminal in
Yokohama is a project in which alterity is introduced inserting difference and repetition in the
organization and in the structure (so defying the immediate reduction to a dominant constitutive and
organizational tradition). Andrew Benjamin describes the project of Reiser and Umemoto in these
terms: “Concerns with elegance and beauty intermingled with what would emerge as a spurious
conception of safety would take the place of an affirmation of alterity and distance”. (Benjamin,
p.70). R+U’s architecture turns mainly organizational as the process of determining new flows
originates fractality and productive repetition of structures. As the main structure is originated by
flows, thus creating momentary spaces and structures, the building is constantly redefining itself.
R+U’s entry to the Yokohama Maritime Terminal opens the incorporation of alterity into
architecture at the structural, organizational and urban level: Alterity is introduced via the
simultaneity of programs and activities and by defying symbolisms by the introduction of a building
that does not work at the level of image but at the level of productivity. The building’s definition at
the level of a single and unitary image is impossible because its architecture is always defining
itself.

A) B) C) D) E)
Reiser y Umemoto (R+U): Terminal marítima de Yokohama, 1995. A)Vista del muelle. B)Vista debajo del techo. C) y D)
Vista del techo-parqueo y estructura. E) Planta con sistema de pasos . [A)Benjamin, p. 80; B)C)D)E)http://www. Reiser-
umemoto.com

F) G) H)
Peter Eisenman: Centro de Convenciónes de Columbus, 1988/1993. F)Perspectivas del volumen. G) Vista Aerea; H)Interior
con la trama desplazada. (Croquis # 83; Peter Eisenman 1990-1997; p. 80-86).

Another type of alterity has to be pointed: the over-layering of two or more programs. For instance,
if we apply the possibility of the existence of programmatic alterity to the work of architecture, for
instance in a school, alterity should work against the common definition of school, a definition that
closes other possibilities. According to the Collins Dictionaries, a school is a place where children
are educated, a faculty or department specializing in a particular subject, a place or sphere of
activity that instructs. The redefinition of those terms, from “place” to “places” and from
“specialization” to “generalization”, over-layers the programs of schools to those of public spaces.
New broad experiences and situations that pertain to the realm of spatiality, urbanity, society and
education can be layered, allowing the appearance of several activities, over-imposed programs and
the emergence of several possible forms intertwined with function, so that the influence of one
realm over the other produce a particular object with a high degree of indetermination and
flexibility.
Programmatic alterity is paradigmatic in De Polygoon school realized in Almere, Holland between
1990 and 1992 by Hollander architect Herman Hertzberger. The concept of education is taken in its
broader context, educating the pupil in urban development through the incorporation of mainly
urban configurations and interactions between different-race mates. De Polygoon’s differs from the
typical one-corridor organization of the basic education schools since its main features are
elongated street-like space with classrooms on both side and an open full-length strip in the middle
comprising supplementary facilities (open plaza-like islands for group activities) (Hertzberger,
p.62-65). All classrooms have bay window-like zones that open almost their entire length to the
‘central street’, like shops with large display windows. Some other features of the school are the
cloakroom recesses, the central and elevated stage and bar, the meeting points and the outdoor
shelters that are described by Hertzberger as “oasis of certainty in the vast expanse of playground”.
The walls are regularly a point of application for activities and places.
Hertzberger writes that “…although inviting a more informal use educationally speaking than inside
the strict confines of the classroom, this high-street-like zone can still be described as a ‘learning
street’”. (Hertzberger, p.62-65). Hertzberger points out to the introduction of alterity in order to
enrich daily experience: “An increasing need is emerging for a multiplicity of places where ever
new groups of children can concentrate on ever new subjects. This requires new subjects and these
have to come from somewhere, though not necessarily from school building.” (Hertzberger, p.65).
In definitive, a flexible and ever-changing space for enhancing conviviality and imagination:
Hertzberger proves the validity of the issue of persons living in society and in an environment
which is the purpose of finding these new configurations and organizations. Otherwise, we shall
still be discussing another discursive body, another “Project” closed to social and communitarian
interests.

A) B), C) D)

E) F)
Herman Hertzberger; Escuela primaria De Polygoon, Almere, Holanda. (1990-1992). A)Vista del vestíbulo central. B)
Vista de las aulas con la ‘calle de aprendizaje’. C) Diagramas de la posición de los elementos centrales multi-propósito.
D) Vista de los elementos centrales multi-propósito. E) Diagrama de la sección. F) Planta. (Hertzberger, p. 62-65).
On the other hand, the introduction of “the other” as an apparently a-critical element of architectural
practice is typical of the oeuvre of Peter Eisenman, who has undertaken the formal aspect of alterity
as his main characteristic in order to devote himself to spatial exploration and experimentation.
Nevertheless, although his work maybe cannot be deprived of the qualification of “critical” the core
seems to be the formal and spatial manipulation. His architecture’s autonomy seems to reside in
these aspects.
2. Mimesis and Criticality.
2a. Mimesis
Hilde Heynen writes that “…mimesis refers to certain patterns of similarity or resemblance. It has to
do with copying, but a specific form of copying that implies a critical moment.” (Heynen, p.6).
Furthermore, Heynen explains the role of mimesis adding that “…in architecture, too, forms are
constructed and buildings designed on the basis of processes of correspondence, similarity and
difference. The reference points here are extremely varied in character: the program of demands, the
physical context, a typological series, a particular formal idiom, a historical connotation. All these
elements lend themselves to being treated mimetically and thus to being translated in design.”
(Heynen, p.193).
How can mimesis as a process be open?
In their book Rhizome, philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari provided an example of
mimesis in the double process of an orchid imitating the image of a wasp in order to attract it to be
pollinated (producing a rhizome in the process): “The wasp and the orchid, being heterogeneous,
establish rhizome. The orchid imitates the wasp, of which it reproduces its image significantly
(mimesis, mimetism, etc.)…On the other hand, what is regarded is something absolutely distinct:
nothing that resembles imitation, but capture of the code, surplus of the code, increase in the value,
truly becoming, wasp-becoming of the orchid, orchid-becoming of the wasp, each becoming
assuring the de-territorializing of one of the terms and the re-territorializing of the other, both
intertwining and interchanging according to a circulation of intensities that enhance de-
territorializing every time further. There is no imitation, no resemblance, but explosion of two
heterogeneous series in the perspective line composed by a common rhizome…Rémy Chauvin says
it clearly: A-paralell evolution of two beings that absolutely have nothing in common.” (Deleuze,
Guattari, Rhizome. p. 18).
Deleuze and Guattari established that in order to fulfill mimesis, neither resemblance nor similarity
are enough, but an internal relationship that has to be undertaken by both elements. The capture of
the code is key to the process, as its elaboration as surplus value. Even performing a momentary
stratagem, transformation of one into the other (in the case of the orchid) is vital in order to
accomplish mimesis through an evolution that is not parallel. Thus, the moment of internal
coherence of one object being the other is accomplished via criticality, since criticality challenges
and excludes other features that are not vital and that preclude the potential mimesis (as the orchid
excludes other insects). Nevertheless, Deleuze and Guattari warn that mimesis is a very wrong
concept for phenomena of very distinct nature because it depends in binary logic.
Criticality in architecture is based in a moment of mimesis in which the architectural oeuvre
imitates reality in order to stress differences, alterations and ruptures. Following the definition of a
critical architecture, Heynen writes that the recognition of the work of spaciality in architecture is
necessary but by no means sufficient requirement for a critical architecture: “In every built work of
architecture, social interests are also at stake. A critical treatment of social reality therefore
inevitably operates at various levels simultaneously and cannot be reduced to the packaging aspects
of the building.” (Heynen, p.200).
The incorporation of ‘criticality’ into the project produces the confrontation with the established
order (the one that is meant to be changed) and constitutes a strategy for the project’s evolution.
Philosopher Andrew Benjamin describes the characteristics of the role of the forbidden and the
challenging in a project: “Criticality emerges therefore in the complex set up in which the
differences given within oppositions are retained, though with the possibility that what had been
precluded may be sanctioned and that the hierarchies that were to be expected are challenged”.
(Benjamin, p.9). Allowing in the same Project what has been precluded opens a gate for the co-
existence of two realities: The one that is allowed and the one that is forbidden, both in the same
project. This ‘machine for desiring’ (the forbidden) opens up the possibility of ‘the other’, of what
otherwise would have never existed. In the incorporation of ‘the other’, alterity is introduced and
with it the productive tension of the negative, of what is missing, of what intermingles with what is
allowed in order to produce a hybrid that is neither allowed nor forbidden, but a particular
individual with a high degree of potential: the critical.
A) B)
C) D)

E) G)
F) H)

Enric Miralles, Extensión del Museo de las Rosas en Steinfurth, Bad- Nauheim;Frankfurt del Meno; Alemania;
1995;A)Vista del emplazamiento urbano; B) C) D) E) Vistas de la maqueta; F) Diagrama; G) Sección; H) Fachada;
(Croquis#72; Enric Miralles; p. 53-57).

For instance, Heynen describes the extension of the Berlin Museum with the Jewish Museum as a
project in which Polish architect Daniel Libeskind establishes a mimesis of the enormous void of the
absence of thousands of besieged Berliner Jews who died in the Second World War. Through the
internal voids of the building, in addition to the metaphorical positioning of the museum in a net
with the form of the Jewish star, the building establishes a critical imitation of the sensation of lost
of many valuable existences. Expressing with broken forms the brusque rupture produced in the
Berliner society, reality is mimicked in the extension to Libeskind’s Jewish Memorial. (Heynen,
p.200-208).
On the other hand, the English2 architect Enric Miralles opposed the term ‘movement’ to the
mimetic concept of classic architecture of imitating forms: “In…recent works, I have tried to
prevent some of the projects from ever being alone, to continue what was necessary to create a
Project, to never understand projects as terminated pieces. That is why I am increasingly interested
in movements as a technique. In essence it is a technique to break off from mimesis as the
fundamental operative basis of traditional architecture. Accepting the mimetic or repetitive
condition of things as a value is hard to sustain today. Maybe mimesis is a fantastic learning
mechanism, but it can never be a valuable mechanism. (Zaera Polo on Miralles, p.11-12). Miralles
implies that mimesis opens repetition, arguing against the type of mimesis that constitutes a copy;
certainly the value of the a-critical copy cannot be taken as such.
Moreover, the displacement to which Miralles referred provokes a change in the context (and
collapse it) in order to make evident tautological mimetic associations and to denote the weak ones:
“That is something I have been experimenting recently with my students at the Staedelschule in
Frankfurt. I asked them to build a project on a given site, and move it to another in the middle of the
project, so that the object they began to build would serve as an instrument to reveal a whole range
of problems that exist somewhere else. That is how we avoid the type of tautologies between the
hypothesis and the results that we architects often perpetrate”. (Zaera Polo on Miralles; p.12).
Miralles consistently mentioned the issue of repetition when he referred to tautologies. Mimesis
repeats because the mimetic project repeats the conditions (of the place, of the object invoked, etc).
In this sense, Miralles preferred to allude the productivity of the design’s party. For instance, in the
extension to the Rosenmuseum in Steinfurth, Frankfurt, Miralles did not appeal to the formal
imitation of roses, but to its organization, to the ‘incredible growth capacity of the creeper roses
aided by auxiliary construction elements’ in order to define a party where the building creeps
around the irregular site. (Croquis #72, p. 52).
Thus, Miralles appealed to selective features for performing mimesis, i.e. he favored organization
over the copy of image. Miralles performed movements twofold: through the movement of the
project around the site (the immediate conditions) and through the change of a traditional historic
environment to an abstract plateau where he produced the collapse of the context as an important
factor of the project. Miralles stated through this project that neither the metaphor of the roses nor
the context’s image were capital to its proposition; on the other hand, critical mimesis (which
selects organization, fluxes and events) is.
2b. Metaphors and Metaphorical Animation.
2b.1. Metaphors.
Neil Spiller, in his book ‘Digital Dreams’ refers to the etymology of the word memory, suggesting
that people have performed memories as the necessity of the reference to pieces of information.
Spiller extends the notion of ‘pieces of information’ to Richard Dawkins’s theory of the memes, in
which man’s historical baggage impels him to reproduce objects that his ancestors considered
essential to impose over the environment: “Memes were first posited by Richard Dawkins, in his
book The Selfish Gene, as a ‘unit of cultural transmission’. Their etymology links them to the
Greek mimeme, that is, the imitational fragment, memory. Dawkins cites ‘tunes, ideas, catch-
phrases, clothes, fashion, and ways of making pots or building arches’ as examples of memes.”
(Spiller, p.15). Hence, the artificial necessity of the creation of memories and objects that remind of
others produces the metaphor and the mimesis.
Since mimesis and metaphors carry the idea and the concept, there is a relationship between both.
In order to compare them, it is fundamental to define the type of metaphor that works in
Architecture. Ton Verstegen, Hollander writer, refers to metaphors in his book ‘Tropisms’. He writes
on the linguistic tropes that are the metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, and irony. Mentioned by
Verstegen, metaphor in the definition of the Oxford Dictionary is “a figure of speech which consists
in the use of a word or phrase in a sense other than that which is proper to it. Tropistic statements
are the subjective distortion of a truth, or rather, of a certainty, custom or tradition”. (Verstegen,
p.24-27) Verstegen points out that no language, even the language of natural science, can escape
forms of figurative language. He calls Tropism the impossibility of escaping a strong attractor
(mainly forces, such as gravitation, light, magnetism, etc.). Thus, Verstegen defines trope as a “fatal
attraction” or something that cannot be avoided, a compulsive movement that has a vector of
direction and of force. Therefore, Verstegen criticizes linguistics and structuralism and proposes
computer as the medium for design and for the pathway into space. (Verstegen, p. 10).
Two concepts are intertwined here: The concepts of trope and of metaphor, as the most used
linguistic trope. Moreover, Verstegen places metaphors in a “vectorial field that bends the instincts
to bearers of meaning in a process of sublimation. The instincts are subject to a process of abjection
and repression, and of return and acceptance”. (Verstegen, p.28). Verstegen mentions that
metaphors as a creative process can be found in the work of Julia Kristeva: ”She situates the human
instincts in the Chora, a rhythmic, non geometric space, the refuge of the unnamable and at the
same time movement towards the nameable. This character of a place and a vectorial force is
expressed in the French word ‘sense’, which means both direction and sense”. (Verstegen, p.28).
Furthermore, Verstegen mentions that metaphors are in crisis nowadays because of its exclusion
from Modern Architecture:”Architects today are not very charmed by metaphors. They associate
them with postmodern symbolism and allusions. Supermodern architecture can get by without
metaphors too. The neutral and transparent boxes are silent and are intended to appeal directly to
the senses. The same is true of the flowing architectural forms designed on the computer. They are
supposed primarily to animate the senses and the bodies, not the mind” (Verstegen, p.13). In the last
point Verstegen establishes by opposition that metaphors are a vehicle that appeals directly to the
mind, since mind is required to decipher what the sense of the metaphor is. On the other hand, what
is directly perceived by the senses avoids the mind in the process (does not need to be deciphered).
Materiality as a single conception unites its extremes (morphogenetic bodies and neutral boxes
respectively) through sensations and senses.
Metaphors may be understood as a pre-project ideal condition imposed by the designer, but also as
a consequence of its presentation, whether in the phase of drawing or execution or when it is
adopted by the public as assigned posteriori-significations.
Furthermore, Michel Foucault, French philosopher, wrote that in the metaphors the message is
mistaken through the word and that syntaxes command through metaphors: “…even though you say
what you seen, what is seen never appears in what you have said, and even though you let see
through images, metaphors and comparisons what you have said, the place in which they shine is
not the place observed by the eyes, but what is defined by successions of syntaxes”. (Foucault,
p.95). Foucault (alluded by Deleuze), added that the metaphor traces a battlefield, an exchange of
ambiguous significances since “…between the figure and the text there must be admitted a whole
series of inter-crossings, even more, of attacks between one and the other, of arrows directed
against the opposed aim, of labors of undermining and destruction, of spears and wounds, of
battles…” (Foucault, p.95).
On the other hand, the limitation of metaphors and linguistic metaphors through discursive effects is
characteristics of certain practices such as that of Zaera Polo and Farshid Moussavi’s FOA:
”Metaphors as well as analogies are prohibited. In order to distance ourselves from common
architectural practices and references, we have taken this to the extreme, especially within the
academic environment. The problem that this form of work has is that it is difficult to communicate
the product. Finally, the products are pieces of intelligible material and therein also lies their
interest…It is very difficult to explain them to anyone. It is difficult to give them meaning or
judgment. This is the limitation of this method when operating in certain contexts. This does not
invalidate the method; on the contrary, it demonstrates its experimental and investigatory nature,
but it shows the impossibility of effectively communicating the result.” (2G # 16, Foreign Office
Architects; p. 127).
The condition that lies in the impossibility of communication defies the notion of architecture as a
vehicle for communication that uses external-to-its-field discourses, may these be semantic or
semiotic resources (anyway syntax can only be produced inscribed within a certain determinism and
not freely as in writing). Closing this possibility, at least as a-priori condition, the conception of any
architecture turns into productive aphasia. Jean François Lyotard, in his book ‘Phenomenology’,
refers to the classical definition of aphasia as ‘…total or partial lack of any function of language;
lack of reception of written or spoken language (verbal deafness and muteness), lack of the action
of speaking or writing, though not originated in any motor disturbance or from peripheral
reception’. (Phenomenology, Lyotard, pg. 86-98). Lyotard outlines that a closer exam of aphasia
reveals that ‘…the aphasic is not a pure and simple aphasic. He knows, for instance, how to name
the red color by means of a strawberry, though he does not know how to name the colors in general.
In resume, he knows how to use the language as a finished being, the one that allows us to go
through an ‘idea’ to another without mediation; but when it is necessary speak using mediating
categories, the aphasic reveals himself as such…because it can be defined as degradation of
language and fall into its automatic level…he only apprehends his current situation, and every
imaginary significance is un-provided of signification’.
Probably the association of the oeuvre of FOA or R+U with aphasia is a radical description of the
collapse of significant methods in the development of architectural design, but it is valid in the
sense of loss of homogeneity of the understanding of significance, which was more a pastoral
pretension of the modern architecture of early XXth century. Technology and the ‘aesthetics of the
machine’ were taken as icons of comprehension and universal assimilation. Conscious election in
the loss of the capacity of a-priori communication as a method allows the project to become into
diagrammatical fluidity.
The contradiction between linguistic metaphor and the building’s work creates a limitation in
communication that foresees a crisis of representation in the future. This crisis can lead to the re-
evaluation of graphical instruments and their comprehension at the level of generality.
2b.2 Metaphorical Animation.
In the way that criticality is a conscious movement that filters the mimesis, the metaphorical
animation is the metaphor’s vector, its innermost quality. Verstegen refers to metaphorical
animation, as “a phenomenon that faithfully accompanies spatial animation”. (Verstegen, p.8): “To
animate is to set in motion, but also to bring to life, or rather to invoke life…What is set in motion
creates the suggestion of having a life of its own. Metaphorical animation expresses this suggestion
by establishing a link between the external cause of the motion (an attractor or repellor, that is, a
push or pull factor), and an imaginary internal motive force…This sense, this orientation, is its
motive force. A vector is motivated, like a gesture is motivated (as all knowing actors know), as a
relational complex of motivation”. (Verstegen, p.8). As Miralles, Verstegen appeals to the mimetic
movement of not copying just the image but the original movement, its motivation, its vectorial
force.
Foucault extended in the nature of force, directly relating it with power. Nevertheless, Foucault
realized that force did not get through the mimesis of form but through the critical selection of
certain features of force (singular, discrete points), thus implying that force needs of criticality in
order to select its features: “…power does not get through forms, only by forces…Power…is
diagrammatic: moves functions and not layered matters; it uses a very flexible set of segments. In
effect, it does not get by forms, but by points, singular points that always indicate the application of
a force, the action or the reaction of a force in relation to the others, that is, an affect as a ‘state of
power always local and instable’.”(Deleuze, ‘Foucault’, p.102).
Thus, any building’s accomplishment of forces may imply the use of forces in two instances:
Firstly, through the diagram (which is a set of forces in movement); secondly through the work of
the forces within the mass of the own building. For instance, Verstegen mentions Viollet-le-Duc
when he described the forces that act in the construction of a gothic cathedral, describing them as
resistant, flexible and dynamically stable. For Violet-le-Duc, “the stone lives, acts, fulfills a
function, is never an inert mass”(Verstegen, 9); for instance, the Gothic church that works through
its flying buttresses. If it did not, it would not be Gothic. As Violet-le-Duc wrote in 1875 over the
Chartres Cathedral: “To want a Gothic church without flying butresses is to want a boat without a
rudder; for church as well as for a boat, it is a question of being or not being”. (Branner, p.122).
Thus, the incorporation of the critical is primordial in attaining a productive and not formal mimesis
of force.
Verstegen suggests that architects should act like writers in the description and the traversing of
space, as an alternative to “movement in space that merely goes from sensation to sensation in its
flight from the routines.”(Verstegen, p.10). The point that Verstegen proposes is that motivational
vectors (forces) should act not from the exterior (from creativity or from the discursive context) of
the building but rather from inside, from the critical: “Buildings bend not only to the surplus (of
information) in the outside world, but also in their own internal world (the patterns of behaviour and
movement of their users).”(Verstegen, p.29).
Verstegen implies a non-discursive relationship between material metaphorical animation and the
context, mentioning Toyo Ito’s Tower of Winds in Tokyo, a sort of shell with neon lights circling
around it at a speed that varies depending on the amount of noise heard from the city, as a building
that “derives its expression not from its form or ornamentation, but from its interaction with the
environment, it is conceivable that buildings which are in interaction with their environment
become transparent or closed, large or small, agitated or peaceful. It is also conceivable that they
change colour, display emotions, or express their character in their environments.”(Verstegen,
p.75).

B) C)

E)

G)
F)
A) Catedral de Chartres; Siglo XIII; seccion transversal; (Branner;p. 14) B) y C) Toyo Ito, Tokyo, 1986;Torre de los
Vientos; D)Sección; E) Sitio Urbano; F) Planos; (Croquis#71;P. 50-55); G) Torre de los Vientos, exterior; (Verstegen, p.
74).

Furthermore, Zaera Polo, in his essay entitled ‘A World Full of Holes’ in Croquis 88/89, writes that
‘Toyo Ito…has explored the idea of contingency as an architectural effect, not so much as a
subversion of structural determinations (transgression, violence) but rather as a phenomenic faculty.
The use of the ephemeral or temporal as an argument for producing architectural indetermination is
one of the best exploited resources by Ito, especially in projects like the Tower of the Winds, the
Dwelling for the Nomad Girl...Time as a factor of indetermination arises again in these projects on
a different scale from the palimpsest or event, and probably has a more direct sculptural
correlation’. (Croquis 88/89, Worlds (I); p. 315). In this building, Toyo Ito searches a temporal
effect, an event that the body receives momentarily and that is related to the perception of color,
movement, and noise. He inscribes his building in the field of phenomenology and the subject. The
tower establishes a metaphor with the surrounding world and carries that concept through temporal
a-significant situations that do not depend on an external discourse for its comprehension.
Another example is the ‘D-Tower’ by Q. S. Serafijn and NOX (Lars Spuybroek, Chaowakul, Yoo
and Palz), who in 1998-2003 proposed a tower in the Hollander city of Doetinchem as a ‘coherent
hybrid of different media in which architecture is part of a larger interactive system of relationships.
It is a project in which the intensive (feelings and qualia) and the extensive (space and numbers)
start exchanging roles, in which human actions, color, money, value and feelings all become
networked entitites’. ((TransUrbanism, pg. 78). Basically it comprises two elements:
-A website (http://www.doetinchem.nl/toren/) in which interactive lists of multiple selection
provide questions on generic statements related to love, hate, happiness and fear; then questions
stem in order to identify the objects that generate these feelings. In general the questions are trivial
but some imply strong affects like the family, assets, etc.
-An amorphous twelve-meters-high building (rather an sculpture) made of polyester and high-
lightened with light color beams in blue (happiness), red (love), yellow (fear), and green (hate)
according to the dominating feeling prevailing in a certain district in the city. Citizens participating
may win 10.000 euros to the most prominent feelings evaluated.
The tower constitutes basically a solid ‘datascape’ that measures affects and archives them as data.
NOX does not mention in the book ‘TransUrbanism’ the consequences of a constant monitoring of
this survey, although one may infer that institutions as well as the govern may worry when the
tower turns constantly green…
On the other hand, NOX’s ‘D-Tower’ is described by Bart Lootsma as an experiment in planning
and inter-activity that uses architecture and sculpture as means: “It is no longer necessary for a
NOX project to manifest itself by traditional means, which liberates architecture to control and
influence all possible systems. For example, a recent competition design for a ‘tower’ in
Doetinchem, which NOX produced together with the artist Q.S. Serafijn, is conceived as an
interactive website where a virtual form (the tower) materializes above the city in reaction to such
variables as electricity consumption or telephone activity in certain neighborhoods, patterns of
material consumption; or information provided by the inhabitants themselves. All the data is
compiled and represented in twelve three-dimensional maps above the normal city street plan,
allowing inhabitants to check what is happening at their home address whenever they like. To some
extent they can influence that situation by changing their behaviour or by entering new information.
Each of the twelve maps has its own centre of gravity, which is continually recalculated and thus
constantly changes position above the city. The combined centre of gravity, which becomes the
apex of the ‘tower’, migrates above the city accordingly. The residents of the plot above which the
apex of the tower is located on 31 December of each year receive a prize of 10.000 Euros. The
project can be followed on the internet, but there is also a house one can visit. The overall result is
an improbable composite of art, architecture, urban planning, new media and TV game-show”
(Lootsma in ‘SuperDutch; pg. 165-167).
Complementarily, Verstegen’s thesis is that “with the introduction of movement into space, the
poetics of traversing can be given new life too”. Arguing for direct experience, he warns of the
difficulty of communicating the results of this type of selective-vectorial architecture:” It cannot be
expressed in words, you have to feel it. Poetics try precisely to find the words for the
experience.”(Verstegen, p.108). Finally Verstegen refers to the role of the architect in the process:
”The architect is one of the directors of the experiences, but cannot claim to be the ultimate director.
The modern ideal is for the user to move freely through the space…to make up his or her own route
and story.” (Verstegen, p.109). The vector of internal direction is what Verstegen argues for:
Direction and a process of conscious involvement of the mind: what he calls the poetry of space.
The metaphorical vectorial, conscious, purposeful animation (motivation, movement) is not to be
misunderstood with linguistic metaphor.
In both cases, Wind Tower as well as D-Tower, and very specially in the second, the citizen’s
participation use of media is vital. Nevertheless, both physical and urban levels are also cause of
hypothesis. It is presumable that once this light be the vectorial resultant of public’s affect, it may
constitute (at least momentarily), focus of attention of the assistance of sectors of the population. As
urban icon it constitutes in attractor. Kevin Lynch’s theory of landmarks is de-stabilized in a
strategy of object-subject that changes constantly and that congregates different strata of population.
Entropy as unbalance of the stable system (the collapse of the stable, moral, photogenic and
invariable landmark) announces the interactivity of environment. Probably buildings with photo-
cromatic and reactive glasses be the commercial variance of the relationship between architecture
and environment.
Conclusively, the connection between mimesis and metaphorical animation seems to be the critical,
selective and conscious movements that both processes choose in order to imitate the original.
Verstegen mentions that empathy and exuberance in language form the two sides of metaphorical
animation: “The empathy is responsible for the correspondence between the movements in the
object and in the mind”. (Verstegen, p 9). Mimesis is never unambiguous. In both cases, the
characteristics of the original are carefully selected (critically) in order to stress movements that
produce new objects that reveal, denounce and propose the difference.

a) 'La Torre toma el color de la sensación más sentida ese día...' (TransUrbanism, NOX; pag. 86). b)Amor:
http://www.arcspace.com/index.shtml c) http://www.banquete.org/banquete05/index.php?acts=no&menos=1.
Webcam: http://www.d-toren.nl/webcam/

3. Forms of Alienation.
According to the Collins Dictionary, an alien is a person who does not seem to fit in with his or her
environment. According to Sopena Universal Encyclopedia, alienation is to occasion intellectual
disturbance, and the alienated is he who exaggerates and ponders. (Sopena, 1st. Volume, p. 354).
Furthermore, alienation depends on cultural factors and on the custom on a strange object.
According to Piera Castoriadis-Aulagnier, ‘…the theory of Psychoanalysis has contributed with
precious data in this field: the radical strangeness of the alienated has been substituted by the
disturbing strangeness of something familiar, successively too close and too far…’ (Castoriadis, pg.
19). Then, the productive features of alienation are the incorporation of the ‘other’ and the capacity
of exaggeration (the features of exaggeration are selected through criticality).
Alterity and criticality are connected via the introduction of ‘the other’ and of the challenging. On
the other hand, they are separated by banality and by creativity (by alienation). What I mean on the
last term refers to a kind of reductive creativity based mainly in information non capital to the
project and in profuse displays of imagination. Creativity produces a kind of alienation that is not
productive. On the other hand; there are strategies for turning alienation productive.
Alejandro Zaera writes in ‘FOA Code Remix 2000’ that some of the didactic methods they use are
directed at producing a state of alienation with respect to the project, to terminate the creativity of
the students. The objective here is to liberate the project from the subject, in such a way that the
project begins to create for itself. FOA is more interested in using practices that in some way lead to
distancing, to a position of alienation with respect to the project: to let the project speak, simply
because this is the position that will probably allow to be freer and more productive: “Being ‘smart’
is only possible through a closed framework of operation, from the deep knowledge of a territory or
a language. When this frame does not exist, the only thing that can be done is to attempt to
recognize patterns of very primitive operations. Like aliens…” (2G/FOA, p. 130).
FOA continues defining alienation as “…a powerful instrument for producing new architectural
conditions. Alienation provides the capacity for constant displacement from a closed state of
conventions or orders, and the possibility to trigger virtualities in a project, which are generally
excluded by a historical construction of tools and responses. This is interesting as a tool. It can
produce something that, even if we know how it is constructed, we do not know what it will
produce…Icons, symbols and representations are usually constructed within a certain cultural
context and they become entirely irrelevant outside that context…Architecture is a great vehicle of
subversion…Spatial organization has the virtue that it can be understood and used immediately by
people coming from different cultures. As a language, it is more suited to deal with the
contemporary city than representations or iconographies. (2G/FOA, p. 128-129). The alienated as
disturbance is taken in a broad sense here. FOA impel to block all the non-essential information of
the project in order to disturb (to alienate) the discursive and to exaggerate (another form of
alienation) the essential.
Moreover, Deleuze wrote that the Alienated blocks and is blocked by the concepts of nature: “The
concept of nature lacks, naturally, of memory; it is alienated, out of itself…In any case, what
supposes repetition in this case is insufficiency of concept and of its concomitant representatives
(memory and conscience of itself, remembrance and recognition).” (Difference and Repetition, p.
42). Comparing Deleuze’s affirmation of nature’s ‘lack of memory’ with FOA’s primitive
operations of alienation, both relate to the potential of suppressing historic elaboration as a tool for
the project. As FOA and Deleuze conclude, the historic quotation is particularly negative for the
project’s productivity, and both appeal to immediate History (through organization and
morphogenesis) as productive features for the project. In the suppression of Historic copy and of
discursive memory, the field for the intervention is open for other types of more immediate
information.
Ciro Najle, Argentinean architect and critic writes on FOA’s productive features for the architectonic
project: “It acts by producing and following opportunities; production rather than solution or
immediate alienation; attraction rather than compensation or opposition. This deviation is
productive even according to the initial parameters of efficiency and not only if considered in the
context of its anesthetized becomings. Aesthetics and pragmatics collaborate in the production of
the potential. “(2G/FOA, p. 14). Najle refers specifically to a kind of alienation that FOA has
particularly avoided which is the immediate alienation (the metaphor), meaning the easy or fast
fundament. On the other hand, FOA’s trend has been the consistent and conscious gathering of
information immediate and necessary for the development of the project. Discursive historic or
discursive cultural information has been discarded.
Two connections have to be established here in reference to the preceding paragraph: On the
fundament (solution) and on opposition. FOA’ architecture and all those architectures of the
difference avoid immediate resolution, the fundament; they avoid closing the project and moreover
they seek for a must-be-delayed potential. The potential is constituted by a plurality which is related
with power (the power of the singularity turning into plurality, not exclusively through the presence
of the many possibilities of form, but through the inclusion of the many possibilities of
economy). Christine Buci-Glucksmann, French philosopher, points out that the definition of
‘potential’ is related to that of ethic. Opening the possibility of potential is thus invoking virtuality:
“To readdress Hannah Arendt’s distinction, the ‘potentia’ as a potentiality that creates a common
space interwoven with ‘the plural-oneness’ is radically distinct from the ‘potestas’ as a logic of
power. Since there can be a politic of the fluxes characteristic of the ‘potestas’, there can also be an
esthetic, indeed an ethic, of potency, in which virtuality is a force that transforms the real and is not
merely a universe of semblances”. Moreover, the immediate fundament manifests itself as an image
of power, i.e., of the power of the image and of the power of the metaphor commanding the
development of the project and establishing strong points of formal and functional control. The
ethic of potency, in the case of the imposition of a hard fundament, is via the subduing. On the other
hand, the fundament that opens the virtual (the real essence and the ontology) of the architectural
commission is for the ethic of potency, for the ethic of power.
Deleuze wrote in ‘Le Pli’, that potential surpasses mere functionality. The expression of Potential
allows constant actualization. On the other hand, to become real is not a condition for the Potential.
Potential may also be actualized in virtuality, since it implies activity. At the same time it implies a
certain level of primitivism mainly through the forces or vectors that act within: “…there are always
individual beings that not just merely function, but that never cease to ‘form themselves’…Truly or
absolute forms are primitive forces; essentially individual and active primary units that actualize
their virtuality or potential; they harmonize one with another without being determined by
contiguity”. (Deleuze, Le Pli, pg. 133).

Deleuze referred to the fundament (to the solution, as a form of power) as an enigma, something
that although being formulated leave questions. Hence it cannot be considered as definitive, but in
movement:”But what exactly does fundament consist on? Myth tells us: Always a task to be
resolved. The oracle is interrogated, but the oracle’s answer is in itself a problem. Dialectic is irony,
but irony is the art of the problems and of the questions. Irony consists in handling things and
beings as answers to hidden questions, as problem cases to be resolved”. (Difference and
Repetition, p.111). In any case, from all the possible and innumerable solutions to a request, how do
we know if the formulated solution is the best? At the time of formulating the fundament, aren’t we
allowing a series of better-implemented solutions?
The second connexion to Najle’s quoted paragraph refers to opposition, which is not the same as
difference. Deleuze wrote: “It is not the difference that supposes opposition, but opposition that
supposes the difference, and far from resolving it, that is, conducting it to a fundament, opposition
betrays and de-naturalizes the difference. We say that difference in itself is not contradiction, but
that it cannot be reduced and taken to the contradiction, because it is less profound and no more
profound that the other.” (Difference and Repetition, p.94). On the other hand, Deleuze in
‘Bergsonism’ wrote that ‘the combination of opposites does not tell us anything, since it forms such
an un-tight net that lets everything flow. (Deleuze, Bergsonism, pg. 44). Simple opposition (by
extension, resistance), produces a difference of degree, not of nature. Let us remind that for Deleuze
differences of degree are the lowest grade of the Difference and that difference of nature are the
highest grade of the Difference. (Deleuze, Bergsonism, pg. 97). According to Najle, this implies
that ‘attraction’ is over simple opposition as productive strategy of FOA, as in the incorporation of
opportunities and extended programs taken to a ‘critical mass’ that may then operate. It may be
concluded that, together with the program, the materiality of the proposal dissolves the limits
between architecture and urbanism, as the hard limits between public and private space.
At FOA’s Yokohama Maritime Terminal, the folded and continuous matter of structure alienates
itself in its solution as a whole where there are neither individual parts nor coded indexes (as
columns, walls, etc). On the other hand, the built project is an integral being that depends on its
materiality. Even spaces must be redefined not as spaces of cultural use but as extensions of the
structural and material solution. For instance, low-ceilinged lounges due to the material solution are
not discarded as residual spaces. People using them must redefine this spaces according to the
possibilities that their bodies offer them (for instance, laying down, assuming intermediate positions
between vertical and horizontal, etc; in fact, colonizing the structure). Let us remind that resting
does not necessarily imply seating in a chair as westerners do. Orientals and indigenous peoples
make use of space in other positions. FOA redefines the use of lounge space according to the
possibilities of the body more than in relation to cultural discourses in this case. Furthermore, the
alienation discourse is ambiguous, since the mere action of seating may constitute an act of
alienation if understood as an act that is strange to our customs. Under these circumstances, the act
of seating in a chair is displaced to laying on the structure. Probably this may be an extreme of the
discourse of foreignness, but in a terminal visited by persons from all around the world, the
occidental code of seating in a chair appears more as an imposition. That is why the architects bring
the possibility of choosing more than just one modality. The incorporation of these spaces to the
program is a decision more than an accident, and is part of FOA’s strategy related to productivity.

http://www.arcspace.com/index.sht
http://www.arcspace.com/index.shtml http://www.arcspace.com/index.shtml
ml

Foreign Office Architects, Terminal Portuaria de Yokohama, Yokohama, 1996-2002

Furthermore, the absence of historic memory leads the project to self-referencing (for instance, in
the site), to seeking and unveiling the project’s internal organizations, and in summary to remain
self-alienated. For instance, Ushida Findlay’s incorporation of natural and organic geometries in the
project and its connection to the site in Kaizankyo, a villa that works as refuge for the president of a
Japanese corporation and his guests. Ushida Findlay write that “…the design symbolizes a
geometrical derivation of the natural world returning to it, …a series of shapes repeat in infinite
reduction along a spiral armature. While working on this we found that the threads had become a
set of interchangeable generators of form, leading off, informing and fusing with each other
according to site and project specifics.” (2G/Ushida; p.63 and p. 131).
Michael J. Oswald writes in reference to Kaizankyo: “In the work of Ushida Findlay, an early step
away from the symbolic use of fractal geometry towards a more literal use is seen in their designs
for the Kaizankyo House…The Kaizankyo House is formed in plan around a central spiral trace that
is used as a generating line, or geometric armature, to locate a series of leaf-shaped (or ship-shaped)
forms. These leaf-shaped objects, which are repeated at four different scales, fulfill various
functional roles as buildings and covered pavilions…This development is intriguing because it
departs from the purely symbolic power of the Golden Section to include representational elements
(the leaves) that gesture towards the development of more literal fractal forms…This design…
works simultaneously with spiral geometric transformations and self-referentiality”. (2G/Ushida,
p.140-141). On the other hand, the project does not set apart the Japanese tradition of interiority and
materiality. Nevertheless these aspects have not been the most determining, but the location of the
whole project in a geometry inserted in the site that finds explanation in it.
Alienation and self-referentiality avoid previous states of the Project and fundaments that impose
themselves as pre-project truths: the discourse and the historic quotation. On the other hand, the
productive historic connection into the project allows the work of concepts that evolution.
4. The incomplete and L’Informe.
4a. The Incomplete.
Hilde Heynen refers to the opposition and tension in the architectonic oeuvre and in art characterized
by protest. She quotes German philosopher Theodor Adorno (of the first generation of the
Frankfurter Schule), who wrote in 1965 that “…beauty today can have no other measure except the
depth to which a work resolves contradictions. A work must cut through the contradictions and
overcome them, not by covering them, but by pursuing them.”(Heynen, p.148). Furthermore,
Heynen writes that in the work of Adorno, truth has always had a twofold content: “On the one
hand it refers to the actual situation…; on the other hand-and this is certainly no less
important-‘truth’ refers to something that is always out of reach, to a utopian content. For Adorno
‘truth’ corresponds not only to the world ‘as it is’, but also to the world ‘as it might be’. (Heynen,
p.177). Hence, Adorno appeals to the incomplete, to the becoming.
Let me introduce in this point the limits in which this transformation and movement occur: The
place. Moreover, the notion of “khora” will be introduced (the platonic site of all existences, in
general terms). Philosopher Andrew Benjamin asks if khora, understood as the plural of place, does
not open the possibility of invoking a place over a different given place, a place ‘outside’ of the
first, that allows the existence of “what is to become” and in so doing producing an elusive notion
of un-completeness. (Benjamin, p.21). The ‘place’ in consequence would never be complete but
incomplete, since other ‘places’ can be opened within one that is determined.
For Derrida the khora (or chora) refers to a “completely neutral, purely receptive void…Derrida
uses this Platonic term to refer to the idea of a non-anthropological, non-theological space that
should be understood as a precondition for the existence of any void”. (Heynen, p. 207). Derrida
asks if the aforementioned Libeskind’s Jewish Memorial does not constitute a monument because
of its “clearly fixed defined meaning that may give our memories an excuse for forgetting rather
than instigating an unending chain of shifts of meaning.”(Heynen, p.208) This affirmation is
rejected by Libeskind and by Heynen as a critic. For Heynen, the experience of the Museum is still
so ambiguous that it is no subject to a single interpretation: “The over-determined character means
that the voids escape any simple definition …Additional meanings continue to resound, and as long
as this process continues, one does not incur any risk of a hasty ‘monumentalizing’ of the
Holocaust.”(Heynen, p.208). It is outstanding that Heynen refers to terms such as ‘continuous
process’ and ‘ambiguity’. The ‘incomplete’ is thus dynamic, always in continuous movement in
order to avoid being complete. It must work to validate itself.
A) B) C)

D) F)
E)

Ushida Findlay; Kaizankyo; Wakayama, Japan; 1993-1994. A) Sitio y geometría en espiral. B) Maqueta del complejo. C)
Vista del sitio. (2G # 6; Ushida Findlay. P. 62-63); D)Techo de la piscina; E) El estilo vernacular de la casa con postes y
vigas en construccion; F) Plan y secciones de la Villa.(2G#6; p. 66-71).
Moreover, Benjamin asks: What does it mean to describe a building as active, as having activity
and thus as having its own economy? (Economy is referred by Benjamin as the always-in-
movement activity of the ontology of the object, not just to its surplus). Benjamin answers that the
opposition between quiescent and active does not suppose that a building be this or that, but that
dynamism be the process in which the object acts in order to have its own project. In the case of the
“quiescence” of the project, the field to be investigated is the meaning that places the object in the
field of the visual; on the other hand, production relates to the ‘work’ of its architecture. Defining
activity and movement in relation to the ‘work’ of the object (and to the object on consequence) is
defining the object in terms of its ontology of ‘becoming’. As Benjamin writes, the symbolic
dimension of an object is not questioned, but that the symbolic were equaled to the ontological.
In the case of the Holocaust Memorial, the subject of incompleteness is fundamental. ¿Why is it
important that the Jewish Memorial does not end with a definitive meaning, and thus be
incomplete? Benjamin clarifies the answer when he mentions that it is “important to add that
memorials usually work in terms of an activity that allows for the reconstruction of the whole and,
therefore, while the memorial always has a regional force it is, for the most part, enacted in the
name of unity.”(Benjamin, p.182). Derrida’s accusation can be understood in terms of his
preoccupation with the limiting of the meaning of the Memorial to a single issue and not to the
whole. The potential of incompleteness has the general result of resisting the closure that defines
alterity with a singular form: “Specifically, in regards to the memorial, retaining the incomplete is
to hold open the work of memory, insofar as the incomplete allows memory’s work an opening and
thus a form of continuity…It is precisely the interplay of work and continuity held by maintaining
the effective presence of the incomplete that can be defined as present remembrance”. (Benjamin, p.
184). In other words, only the presence of the incomplete assures the work of memory for the
memorial.
William Curtis, in his essay ‘The Unique and the Universal: A Historian’s Perspective on Recent
Architecture’, writes that Daniel Libeskind’s Jewish Memorial in Berlin (1988-95), is “…an
incision into European historical consciousness, evoking a universal abstraction through 'absence'; a
complex spatial idea with many layers suggesting, among other things, the 'one way street' of the
Holocaust. Now, there was a time when such visual devices as these were discussed in terms of a
retreat from conviction of any kind; here we find cases of them being brought fully alive in the
context of belief, and of problems related to ritual and the sacral; in fact, in relation to issues of life
and death”. (Croquis 88/89. p. 14). The missing, the absence that Curtis alludes, is Libeskind’s
strategy that uses void as a material. It is a paradox that the virtuality of materiality is performed
through void, the non-presence of materiality.
By extension, the work of the incomplete can also be applied to the production of tension (the
tension of avoiding completeness) in functions, programs and forms, and every one of those
categories may influence the other in order to avoid an in-operant, definitive and rigid completion.
What we are talking in Libeskind’s Jewish Memorial is about the problem of the representation of a
void, the form of the void. Over the formal aspects of the incomplete, it is foreseeable that in the
following years, in representing forms that work, new architectures will arise, moreover if we think
that what they represent, the fissures of Modernism, are hardly a matter of agreement.
Alluding the form of the incomplete, Benjamin writes that the “…incomplete in Architecture
invokes a formal presence. Moreover, the incomplete-in architecture- will have become a temporal
as well as a formal term precisely because the incomplete has to be explained in relation to what has
already been defined as the yet-to-come.” (Benjamin, p.22). For an architectural object ‘to become’
means to be in constant transformation.
On the other hand, Zaera Polo writes that in Libeskind’s Jewish Memorial the author “…tries to
attack the cause-effect relationship from a different way of reading time. The 'happening' of the
ephemeral, unpredictable programme is replaced in this case by the palimpsest or register of a series
of spatial facts or materials in a single space over a long period of time, in order to display the
contingent and accidental nature of this archaeological overlap”. (Zaera Polo in ‘A World Full of
Holes, Croquis 88/89; p. 315).
On the other hand, what does it mean to talk about forms that become? The platonic ideal shapes,
that have closed their evolution per se, are in opposition to more complex shapes transformed by
processes of self movement. Andrew Benjamin implies that the forms-that-become, are in constant
movement and transformation. And that in a certain way, rationalism is absent from them: “In many
ways this is the standard Platonic distinction between the externality of the forms (or ideas) on the
one hand, and the ephemeral nature of pure particularity on the other. The eternal forms must, of
necessity, involve a different temporality and ontology proper to mere particularity…while the
particular, on the other hand, is continually subject to the movement and the process of becoming.
There is, moreover, a mode of perception proper to each element within the distinction. The
eternally existent is apprehended by ‘thought’ (or reason) while the subject of becoming is
apprehended ‘with the aid of an unreasoning sensation’”. (Benjamin, p.16).
C)
B)
A) D)

E) F) G)
H)

Daniel Libeskind, Berlin, 1993-1997. Extension Berlin Museum; A) Exterior;(http://enterprise.is.tcu.edu/

~bplale/relcult_files/libeskind.htm; B) Volume (Heynen,P. 200); C) Garden Paul Celan;D) Exterior; E) E. T. A.
Hoffmann Garden; F) Interior; G) Exterior;H) E. T. A. Hoffmann Garden;(http://fcit.usf.Edu/holocaust/resource
/gallery/BJMI.Html)

Probably this unreasoning sensation may be called intuition. As Deleuze wrote in ‘Bergsonism’, ‘…
intuition is not duration in itself. Intuition is more the movement by which we come out of our own
duration to affirm and recognize immediately the existence of other durations above or below us…
Without intuition as a method, duration would remain as a simple psychological experience. On the
other hand, without its coincidence with duration, intuition would not be capable of fulfilling the
correspondent program to the preceding rules: determination of the truly problems or the authentic
differences of nature’. (Deleuze, Bergsonism, p. 31). The level of consciousness that Libeskind
pretends requires intuition as a method, as developed by Bergson. The Memorial’s virtuality, or the
many virtualities that the hollow form encloses, are perceived through the notion of the differences
of nature of the different gardens and voids that Libeskind evokes…
The forms that ‘become’ are not found in the Platonic universe of pure geometrical forms. On the
other hand, they can be found in the complex geometries of architectures such as those of FOA’s
and R+U’s entries for the Yokohama Port Terminal. The rationale of these forms is not merely
discursive but performative, purposely, operative. They have privileged a non-facial architecture
that cannot be qualified for its image but for the operations and processes they develop. Moreover,
they are far from being merely functional. Being in constant transformation and redefinition, they
are in the process of becoming, functionally, formally, and even structurally. Becoming is attained
through processes of actualization. Deleuze wrote that ‘…differentiation is always the actualization
of a virtuality that persists through its divergent current lines. (Deleuze, Bergsonism, p. 100). (The
difference from thought and intuition, opens a profound division between idea and matter, and
between deciphering and feeling).
4b. L’Informe.
Opening up the possibility of incompletion and thus opening the complexity that defines the object
will be approached here within French author Bataille term ‘l’informe’.” ¿How are these notions of
alterity and of l’informe related? Both touch the same subject of in-completeness, of the
incorporation of alterity, of “the other”. In the first case this possibility is only potential; meanwhile
in the second it is operative, productive. Especially in the second case, l’informe’s activity applied
to an architectonic object “…becomes a way of describing both the presence of a building as well as
the presence of an urban field.”(Benjamin, p.72).
Bataille, in his book L’Experience Interieure, defined ‘poetry’ as the movement from what is
known to what is unknown. Sacrifice and poetry are equated by Bataille in counterposition with
what would be ‘the project’ of moral and law. The moral vision from which Bataille differed can be
defined as ‘pastoral’, which derives in a closed project that pretends to be concerted but that is
clearly interested. Against this vision, Bataille opposes terms such as sacrifice, ecstasy and nudity.
Bataille understands poetry as the ‘negative’, something that has the power of the unknown,
demanding to be maintained as unknown and therefore to be defined. In the middle of this lack of
uniformity to trace the expected destiny of any system of power, Bataille proposes the term
‘l’inform’ as the capacity that the incomplete has of interfering the definition of something
“complete”. L’inform must not be misunderstood with the ‘amorphous’ (an anomaly of the
‘complete’) but moreover as the potential of the incomplete working within the complete.
Bataille’s term ‘l’informe’ brings us the possibility of proposing an alterity (another presence)
within the process form-function: Bataille describes ‘l’ informe’ in his Dictionnaire Critique as ”…a
term working to undo/disturb/rearrange, demanding generally that each thing has its form/the form
proper to it”. (Benjamin, p.28). Benjamin extends on the concept of l’inform: “Given that the
incomplete works with the complete, since both occur simultaneously, then what this entails is the
copresence of a material condition -the complete- that is always working with that which is
inmaterially present namely the continual condition and conditioning of the incomplete. They are
present in their difference generating a complex architecture. Complexity in architecture therefore
has to be consequence of the work of the ‘l’informe’.” (Benjamin, p.30). It is relevant that Bataille’s
mentioned book constitutes a critical dictionary. Bataille argues that the dictionary begins in the
moment that it does not bring any more the meaning of the words but its work. (Benjamin, p.31).
L’informe opens the possibility of a life of its own for what is defined. Does this remind of Zaera
Polo writing on material life? He writes that ”…the ultimate creative act is to produce something
that has its own life and produces for itself…The relation that interests us between the artificial and
the natural is the creation of a project itself as something that evolves and that starting from a
certain moment becomes independent of our will, critical judgment and circumstances”. (2G/FOA,
p.123).
Therefore, Bataille grants the definition of things in his Philosophical Dictionary at the level of the
work they perform, that is, at the level of their virtuality, at the level of their essence. The definition
is granted according to the relationship of the object and its economy. This definition provides new
possibilities for the object to find new programs, new spaces and new events.
But, what are the characteristics that power new architectural and urban definitions? In any case,
which is their origin? The development of new technologies of transport, communication and
congestion occasioned by crowds of people displacing fluidly (all part of a new super-structure)
allow the emergence of landscapes and artificial unprecedented architectures. Projects become real
urban ‘hypertexts’ granting nets that relate dispersed fragments through a process of negotiation
among their composing systems. According to the definition of the Institute of Investigation
and Urbanism LAB[au] of Brussels, in their essay ‘Hypertextu(R)Al Environments’, the urban
hypertext is ‘…the city as a system saturated of information…conceived from processes of
combinations and superimpositions of the social matrix specifically to the city, with the new
condition of reality transmissible from the space of information. Translating a new possible
representation of this range, urban model is produced with the fix image of animation as a field of
information superimposed with different sequences of film with the simulated space of the axis.
These sequences suggest varied environments and activities connected to the tempo-spatial
context’.
These new definitions find the possibility of attaining ‘confederations’ of dispersed objects in
residual industrial landscapes. For instance, a project that self-defines is the Congress and
Convention Centre, Congrexpo, in Lille. In Croquis #53 on OMA/Koolhaas, Zaera Polo asks Rem
Koolhaas which are the causes of his sustained interest in huge structures and urban planning.
Koolhaas answers that he has always been interested in large-scale projects and in everything they
imply, ‘…in the artificiality and the fragmentation it produces, and how, in a way, the very bigness
turns into an antidote against fragmentation. Each of those entities acquires the pretension and
sometimes the reality of a completely enveloping reality, and an absolute autonomy’. (Croquis #53,
OMA/Koolhaas; p. 20). Koolhaas describes the potential of huge and comprehensive projects in his
manifesto for Bigness in his book ‘SM, M, L, XL ‘.
The project connects with its local and regional environment and attains its own economy (local and
regional). Its size may be motive of finding new organizations at the level of program and
relationships. It works as an architecture of mega-program, uniting diverse events in the same
envelope and having as context the dispersed fragments of the urbanism of a decaying industrial
city after the collapse of its economy following its past based in textile production. The sizes of the
architectural project, its link to the urban hypertext make the project define itself. Lille founds
precedent or referent maybe only in the project that Gehry performed for rescuing the diminished
industrial city of Bilbao.
Basically, the Congrexpo is about a mix of palace of congresses and hall for expositions that counts
with theatres, lounges for conferences, parking lots and even a road penetrating the ellipsoid body.
The road confers the building infrastructural character. Nevertheless, Koolhaas’s project does not
attain a rhizomatic immediate environment, but as a concept it does with the multiple connections
of the dispersed elements of the context, which are the TGV station (which connects Lille to Paris,
Brussels, London and Cologne), the plaza François Miterrand, its proximity to the mega-shopping
Euralille by Jean Nouvel, hotels, plazas that perform the concept of topographical landscape, etc.:
All that program, all that congestion of functions produces densification and a ‘critical mass’ that
derives from agglomeration.
Architecturally, the Congrexpo is composed of non-homogeneous parts that work as a whole. Its
purpose is to attain advantage of congregation, a truly ‘pastoral’ mission that reflects its faith in the
power of architecture and urbanism of redeeming and redefining themselves and their products.
Where Congrexpo fails is in the surrounding urban part that it cannot succeed to cohesion. Hence,
the definition of the building at the level of its operativity could have been taken to the urban part
that suffered successive fragmentation. In other words, the project could be more comprehensive,
more inclusive, bigger…LAB[au]’s project that unites the dispersed parts around the Congrexpo
(roads, landscape, topography that separates it from Euralille) works through a grid of columns that
extends as a tapestry between the architectural dispersed and unconnected objects. The plan
succeeds in proposing the project as a comprehensive whole. The dimensionality of the proposal is
reduced to the projection of points over the interstitial areas of the architecture of Nouvel and
Koolhaas.
The winning entry for the Jussieu Library, by Koolhaas as well, is another example of a project that
self-defines (as philosopher Bataille wrote on the work of the objects) through violence and post-
structural transgression. Zaera Polo writes that “…the disestablishing design of Jussieu severs the
library from a history in which the institution has sedimented into an unyielding building type. In
this alternative, library functions are loosely inserted as provisional program in an infrastructural
setting whose event-structure is not only incongruent with the library's program, but exceeds it to
the point of interference. Liberty is staged at Jussieu as a permissiveness attained by lifting the
burdens of convention-institutional, historic, even moral. A 'Quiet, Please', sign would seem merely
comic as one searched in vain for a proper place to hang it”. (Croquis #79, OMA/Rem Koolhaas,
pg. 30).

Lootsma, Bart; Super Dutch;

Lootsma, Bart; Super Dutch; Thames and Lootsma, Bart; Super Dutch; Thames and
Thames and Hudson; London;
Hudson; London; 2000; pg. 193. Hudson; London; 2000; pg. 196.
2000; pg. 191.

Rem Koolhaas, Centro de Congresos y Exposiciones de Lille, Francia; 1990-1994

Rem Koolhaas, Proyecto ganador del Concurso para la Biblioteca de Jussieu, modelo; París, Francia; 1992, en Lootsma,
SuperDutch, pg. 180,

Jussieu is a building that re-elaborates the diagrammatical scheme of Le Corbusier’s Domino house
in order to lodge several programmatic elements that appear to float among the slabs. Floors fold,
introducing a continuous circulation that varies from the segmented circulation of libraries. In
summary, Koolhaas accomplishes to extend the street into the building. Circulation is free, thus the
building acquires more an infrastructural than a restrictive character. Un-inhabitable spaces granted
under the folded spaces are left untreated, maybe a quality that FOA accomplishes better in
Yokohama’s Terminal.
Koolhaas re-elaboration of the ‘library’ as institution submits it to an irreversible condition:
informatics and democracy de-stabilize the refined and mute institution to an apparatus that breaks
the codes of aesthetics and context. Nevertheless the elements components are not a collage of
geometrical systems but rather a comprehensive whole that goes further the mere functionality in
order to chain a complete structure of events.
Colophon to the Chapter of Differences:
‘…It is enough to set the current terms into the movement that produce them and relate them to
virtuality produced within them, to see that difference is not negation but a creation and that
difference is never negative but essentially positive and creative’. (Deleuze, Bergsonism, pg. 107).
In Croquis 115/116, FOA writes that “…after several years when 'difference' has been the
predominant word in the architectural debate, we feel that now is the time to start theorising
'sameness' again: the ability to identify the constants in reality is increasingly necessary in order to
produce knowledge. This is the reason for our interest in the idea of phylogenesis as a form of
analysis, and possibly production... Our phylogenetic tree is about finding a way to classify projects
into a series of different spatial organizations, mainly spatial formal organizations. The aim is to
never repeat or replicate them exactly but to identify spatial characteristics out of the individual
projects that one could possible grow or cultivate in other ecosystems”. (Croquis 115/116, pg. 20).
Phylogenetic, alluded by FOA, is a term from genetic biology by which species and origins are
classified according to similitude. In FOA’s oeuvre this is done by induction, where one or several
individuals are classified according to outstanding characteristics, and made extensible to the whole
group. Philosopher François Lyotard , in his book ‘Phenomenology’, writes that such an explicative
process passes necessarily by induction: ‘…to have faith in empiricist methodology consists in
inferring from observation of facts a constant relationship of succession or simultaneity among
some of them. The relative constant of observation would be then universalized into absolute
constant, until it were refuted eventually by observation’. (Lyotard, pg. 94).
According to FOA, finally the design process ends in the synthesis of projects and their
classification, being this an efficient tool for comparison and for the production of typologies.
Typologies in FOA’s previous essays had been postponed for the production of prototypes.
5. Bibliography: (Notes make reference to the following books):
1. Benjamin, Andrew; “Architectural Philosophy; The Athlone Press; London, New Jersey, 2000
2. Hertzberger, Herman; “Space and the Architect”; 010 Publishers; Amsterdam, 2001
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4. 2G #2: Toyo Ito; Ed. Gustavo Gili; Barcelona 1997/II
5. El Croquis.# 83 Peter Eisenman 1990-1997; El Croquis, Madrid, 1997.
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2001.
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http://www.lab-au.com/v1/files/doc/parpartc.htm
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