On Engagement: A Conversation
From Objects Models Worlds (2021)
Marrikka Trotter and Tom Wiscombe
Tom Wiscombe: You and I often talk about engagement in architecture-- and how engagement is a non-literal, deep way of perceiving the world around us, in a time when architecture all too often tells us what to do, what it is made of, and in what category it belongs. I’ve sometimes talked about engagement in opposition to access-- access in the sense of things that signal they are ready to be known, ready to be consumed, and that they exist somehow “for us”. Obviously architecture needs to be physically accessible for people, and it needs to provide space for human social functions; no one is going to argue with that. However, I think that these criteria are baseline and don’t address the role of architecture as a disruptor and cultural artifact in the human story of awakening.
I want to suggest that truly engaging architecture -- both socially and intellectually -- needs to provoke by showing us things we cannot know or fully understand. Not knowing is maybe the most ecological and humble way of seeing the world. Not knowing puts us in a state of questioning and doubt, so that we may peer into the strange nature of reality, behind human dramas and ideologies that so enthrall us but which also are the source of so much narcissism and global warming and mass extinctions. We might open our eyes to the depth and wonder of the things around us, and their inner lives. Like a jaguar, or an iceberg, or dark matter. We might become aware, slowly, and only for brief moments, of how the construction of humanity is a shield against other scales and forms of existence.
So if access mirrors and serves an audience’s expectations, engagement provokes them. Now, recently, I’m hearing from some interested in the renewed social and political function of architecture that architecture today needs to identify specific audiences and speak more directly to them. Architecture attempting to do this will, according to this argument, become more accessible, and therefore more just. It sounds right at first, but when you remember that we do not control the changing cultural meaning of architecture over time, it doesn’t add up. I think trying to control meaning in any given moment is not something architecture is going to be very good at. I see it at its most powerful when it is operating across architectural history, and at deep cosmological and ecological scales where humans play only a part. I’ve always been very drawn to the idea that architecture should almost need to be renovated for human use-- that it would be receptive to many other things than just fleeting human expectations. Where do you stand on this?
Marrikka Trotter: I recently read a book with my daughter called Astrophysics for Young People in a Hurry, by Neil deGrasse Tyson; with her elastic imagination, I’m pretty sure she was able to understand more of its content than her mother! The closing chapter of the book ends with a series of meditations on what Tyson calls “the cosmic perspective” – the view of the universe and our microscopic place within it that astrophysics entails. Among other considerations, the cosmic perspective forces us to reckon with our true fragility and unlikeliness in “a cold, lonely, and dangerous place that’s quick to extinguish life with extreme emptiness and all manner of hazardous objects,” – a point of view that Tyson suggests ought to help us be more caring toward and thankful for our fellow life forms. That resonated with me. Engagement with the strange realities of the universe does not constitute a turning away from humanity or the concerns of earthly existence. Rather, it lights a path toward a radically creative ethics that takes full advantage of the human ability to imagine astonishingly different magnitudes and situations than the ones presented to us in daily life – and to consider them in detail, as fully fleshed out alternatives that could be brought into being on the planet we share. I have difficulty with architects that equate social value with modest ambitions. What good is our field, with its arcane and ridiculously rigorous training in inventing possible forms of newness, if we limit our contributions to minor adjustments to the known? Small moves today, in the context of global warming, are a bit like rearranging the Titanic’s proverbial deck chairs but with less innocence; surely the people on the deck didn’t know their ship was on a collision course with an iceberg. We know. Now’s not the time for giving people what they already think they want, unless we envision our discipline as a kind of global Make-A-Wish facilitator for the human species.
In this vein I’m truly excited by your Flat Out Large project. First of all, as its name implies, it’s made of gigantic pieces of architecture that are capable, on a purely programmatic level, of eradicating existing scarcities of housing, creative office space, and shaded public plazas. No more tiny batches of ADUs and wasteful, inadequate individual developments, or even worse, cynical publicity stunts! Second, I love that the projects are so massive in two dimensions but so thin in the third, allowing them to touch down in the existing city like a band of giant, benevolent monsters on tiptoe. The other day Timothy Morton remarked that they seemed caring of the city below them, and I agree. They act like enormous shelters over parts of LA, providing shade and density and an abundance of capacity that feels generous and liberating. Also, one enduring limit of urban design, so-called, is its dependence on the plan, as if cities were slightly nicer rat mazes populated by vector arrows. The Flat Out Large designs are very clearly architectural rather than urban -- they belong to the world of massing and rooflines rather than the world of paths and intersections. As such they cut astonishing figures! As silhouettes against the existing city, they would produce the kind of wonder or not-knowing you describe above. Encountering one of these projects, while driving into the city at dusk, say, would be very much like accessing the cosmic perspective.
TW: Yes, Flat Out Large (FOL) buildings are to me like giant houses, dropped over the city from above. Not in a domestic kind of way, where we feel at home, but rather in the ancient sense of protection or gathering. They are so big that they create their own microclimate inside, a little bit like a snow globe. They define the city as a bounded space rather than as a plan or an infrastructure, both of which are forms of continuum as you mentioned. And the most important thing for me is that they represent a non-binary approach to the city. In other words, the existing city and the new building are treated with the same care and intelligence; neither subsumes the other. A new, third thing is created where they brush up against one another. The zone of interface is defined by the shadow the FOL buildings cast on the ground, almost as a trigger for amendments to that zone independent of the rest of the city. A zone of enchantment and co-existence maybe. There, existing buildings are curated, adaptively reused, expanded, and maybe connect with the FOL buildings via bridges and helical stairs from their rooftops or facades. Roadways, the defining organizational force in human cities today, are suppressed below grade or re-routed around the shadow-ground, creating pedestrian zones. The third object is a concrete new thing, possibly a new form of public square, something that indirectly resonates with post-COVID life -- protected but not fully enclosed.
Yesterday in that SCI-Arc studio discussion with Morton and Peter Trummer, OMA’s Hyperbuilding (1996) came up several times, and I also showed Stanley Tigerman’s Instant City (1966) and Superstudio’s Continuous Monument (1970) in my introduction to the work. While the FOL project owes a debt to these precedents, I want to repeat how important it is that FOL projects are architecture not infrastructure as you said, so aesthetics is crucial, and they can only exist in relation to the city and not separate from it. The Hyperbuilding, in Rem’s sketches, is shown as a way of lifting urban density up into the sky, so that the countryside can be left untouched or green; in a similar way, Tigerman’s hollow pyramids stand over urban infrastructure to allow the city to become pristine parkland. Both assume a basic separation between city and nature which just doesn’t carry much water today. I prefer the messy beauty of piling cities on top of cities, with urban elements we know set against things that border on fiction. This is what I like about Continuous Monument, which was ostensibly a critique of architecture in the form of a structure so large that it banded around the earth. It’s funny -- I always misread that image as a triangular-shaped, lifted mat building over New York City rather than as a continuity in forced perspective. In my opinion it’s much better as a building than a piece of infrastructure -- one that engages the existing city with an extreme shift in scale and articulation. The countryside is not really the countryside by the way. It’s not just farmers and sublime natural landscapes but increasingly, synthetic, crystalline landscapes. Massive solar fields, for instance, cover the deserts around Los Angeles now. Why can’t they be inside the city? I think it’s a failure of imagination. There is the legitimate concern of having too many low albedo surfaces, which radiate heat, inside city limits, but what about the lizards and foxes out there in the desert? The pain is merely exported. An FOL building, with its embedded solar skin, provides enough power for itself and all of the buildings and beings it protects and more, so much that you can blast the air conditioning all day and make up for that albedo problem and many others I’m sure. This is a wild inversion of how we were all taught to think of energy, as something finite rather than abundant. All we have to do is look up at the raw energy radiating down over us every second from the sun, and stop exporting pain, and we’ll start getting to a better definition of ecological thinking.
What is kind of creeping up on me here is that things are engaging one another, human things, building-things, animal things, things at radically different scales and modes of being, and that architecture shouldn’t just be a court jester trying to get humans to pay attention all the time. I’m not discounting architecture’s crucial aesthetic relationship with its human audiences, but I’m suggesting that it should evolve to address this wider audience of things.
MT: This is reminding me of a false dichotomy that architectural theory inherited from the Frankfurt School. In The Aesthetic Dimension, which is a kind of capstone for the group’s thinking on aesthetics, Herbert Marcuse argued that artistic detachment is the only way for art to go beyond reflecting the current state of what exists and start functioning as an act of resistance. This position was taken up by New Left architectural theorists in the US, and, although it’s been challenged many times since the 1970s, it still seems to undergird much of the disciplinary posture today. We act as though we believe that pointing to problems or possibilities from an aesthetic remove -- court jestery, as you say -- is the best we can do. This may very well be the case in literature or painting, but it’s manifestly not true for architecture. Even Alberti recognized that ours is an amphibious discipline: half fine art, half make-it-work pragmatism, and as such it seems a bit silly to think that all we can do is signal toward change rather than also identifying what it could be and implementing it. Perhaps here it’s helpful to recall the etymology of the word engage, which for most of its long transmogrification from proto-Germanic through Frankish into old French, etc., has meant to take up a bet, to pawn, or to wager (no doubt this reveals a kind of deep linguistic acknowledgement of the liability involved in the recent and specific meaning, in English, of a pledge to marry). There’s something risky and real about the optimism that betting and pawning imply -- both are concrete modes of putting skin in the game. This is quite different than detachment, which comes from the same root languages and literally means “to pull up stakes.” One of the most important realizations of our time is that there is no “out there” to which we might decamp: no true wilderness or countryside, as you say, to which we might either export our pain or import ourselves. In this context, detachment starts to seem very temporary and partial, like jumping. Your feet leave the planet for a minute, sure, but you’re coming right back down. This is not to say that the insouciance of the jester isn’t valuable -- my sense is that it’s essential, particularly in relationships with clients. If we leave the fine art part of architecture behind we’re hobbling ourselves in an equal and opposite way. But architecture is capable of being both the jester (who gets to ridicule the king, by the way) and the knight, who pledges allegiances and acts directly.
TW: Yes, we really do need to rethink these roles right now, don’t we. The time for maintaining the split between the subversive academic “project” and the subservient professional “practice” is over. I was just talking to Mark Gage the other day about how architects are always trying to justify their project in the language of practice, giving cover to their most zany ideas through diagrams, narratives, and dumb metaphors. It’s really an old idea at this point-- remember that discussion in Quaderns between Jeff Kipnis and Alejandro Zaera-Polo back in the 90s? It glorified the approach of cloaking the new in the known to make it palatable. I think that position assumes a very small role for the architect in society, where we are operating in an intellectual space that is so arcane that we literally have to denigrate our ideas to make them engaging for others. I prefer the power of authenticity, where we not only communicate what actually moves us and how we see the world, but where our ideas are linked to the way they land in the world. To land is to produce discoveries and consequences outside the discipline. These are things that a much larger audience can appreciate. I am not calling for interdisciplinarity here -- this is all too often lived as design-by-committee, which I am against-- but rather a new era of big, public ideas beyond the personal project. I don’t mean that architects should become developers or write policy or otherwise undertake things that divest us of our core competencies. The opposite really. I’m suggesting that architects use all spatial and aesthetic means at their disposal to address the issues of our time and create wonder and doubt and a sense of possibility. These would not be visionary projects which will never land because they either contain impossible elements or an impossibly unified environment, but rather parallel-universe projects that are capable of invading reality as it is. The word “parallel” is important here because it points to a world where some things are familiar and others are alien-- imagine competing scales, levels of detail, types, and histories. A totally alien world is not an engaging one!
MT: Yes! In my opinion the opposition between the architects who claim to engage the world through direct action: green roofs, carbon-neutrality, “livability,” etc., and the architects who maintain that the visual shock of newness is a better and more powerful form of intervention in the world should be thrown out. Rudolf Arnheim has this great paragraph on the limits of static form in and of itself. He writes of the superior power of “things that approach as helpers or enemies, things that perform... their actions are more impelling than their thingness. Before you know what hit you, you know you are being hit.” The Flat Out Large project, with its giant benevolent beings roaming Los Angeles on our behalf and on behalf of all the city’s entities, is a great example of architectural things performing way beyond the unexciting minimum of self-regulation or self-justification. Like Arnheim’s punch, their muscular capacity for meeting existing lack with excess -- excess housing, excess energy, excess shade, excess public space -- would reverberate in the city even before they could be identified and understood as the source of that capacity. This is real engagement: architecture that draws you in aesthetically but has agency beyond its superficial qualities.