On Models: Reiser + Wiscombe
From Objects Models Worlds (2021)
Peter Trummer and Tom Wiscombe
Tom Wiscombe: I think we both have a dream of making architecture like planets. Planetary things contain a lot of other things. They also have no “Z-up,” which means they land (can a planet land?) with orientations different than our human ground.
One of the things I like best about Ledoux’s House of the Gardener is that you enter the sphere at mid-level instead of at grade. The bridge across the moat/hole removes you from the human frame and puts you into a new world on a new ground. We are not talking about floating buildings above a modernist social plane here . . . I think that actually reinforces land-fundamentalism. We are really talking about buildings that defer their own landing through a broken relation with the world.
Peter Trummer: I have always liked our debates on architecture, since we agree that it can not be taken apart and seen just from one particularity only — whether form, content, function, material, tectonics, space, or politics. Architecture is a unity and cannot be reduced to isolated dogmas. As such, the ground on which a building lands, stands, or is placed, or a ground that is generated by architecture or from which a piece of architecture unfolds will always also be architecture.
I think what makes Ledoux’s project so important as a reference today is that the ground comes to the foreground. It is suddenly there. It jumps into our attention. It’s true that all of his work was given to him by the state, and remember that the nation-state as an institution emerged after the 17th century in Europe, but I always like to place his work in the transition from the pre-capitalist city of the middle ages and the Baroque to the capitalist city of the 19th century: the transition from the ground being a kind of common, given territory to the ground becoming a capitalist asset within the liberal city.
TW: Yes we do share the notion that a strong architectural theory should be able to contend with many different, and sometimes contradictory forces and scales, and not wither in front of them. I’ve always been suspicious of theories that don’t contain within them ideas about very big things like cities, and also very little things like mullion details. If you stay in the middle scale, satisfied by crafty achievements in form or representation, you might make a good academic for a while, but it will not last. Another part of that is history, which is crucial not as a foundation for architecture, but rather as a deep reserve of weird things and ideas that live alongside reality, in a kind of parallel universe.
So yes, I’m game to talk about the history of ground. Maybe we can start with land. One way I always think about land is through real estate ownership, and all of the strange definitions there are out there, from lines that represent property boundaries and existing structures on the earth’s surface that in some cases legally extend downward to the core of the earth and upward to space, to complex definitions involving, for instance, land held in trust on behalf of the Queen, with certain rights to certain materials above ground, no rights to the stuff below, and a rental agreement or easement to use as if owned. So on the one hand, you have real ownership of a part of the planet, and on the other you have been lent something upon which to build concrete things, which you may or may not be entitled to. Of course neither condition is really that simple, because first, how can you really own a piece of the earth when it is really just a crispy crust floating around on a ball of bubbling magma, and second, almost all federal governments retain a power such as eminent domain that supersedes any trust or agreement or covenant, so it becomes quickly clear your holding is much more precarious than “real estate” seems to imply.
As we know, the feudal system of kings gifting land to lords who in turn rented to serfs constructed a world of microstates that were loosely held together by the trickle of power down through the hierarchy and the control of labor. These holdings could disappear or be reconfigured if the power dynamic changed, with the land encircling castles always in flux and defended by roving armies. In the medieval era, the population still couldn’t own real estate, but the inward-oriented feudal castle typology was stretched or unfolded outward, to include whole defensible territories, with explicit physical boundaries — “city-states” are a clear example. So the model had shifted from country to city, from castles scattered across agrarian lands to cities as little worlds. The farmland was still there, but imagination was changed forever. The city was not just a relatively more dense area of inhabitation, but an object with its own inner life.
What is so wild is that today, after a period of expansion of those little worlds into megacities — there are now 38 cities with populations of over 10M people — we are seeing a kind of retraction back into the city-state. Trump’s election. Brexit. They point to a world where nationalism and the hard boundaries it implies are at odds with the international free-market land exchange we’ve created. Land as an asset becomes a problem — what happens if we start substituting “by-right” (legal entitlement of the individual) for “for us” (for the benefit of the nation)? That is why I like to think of ground as separate from land. If ground is never beholden to land and its real estate dilemmas, and no one really owns it, then we can use it for the purposes of architecture.
PT: I imagine that the city was our first world-maker. We didn’t just make walls as protection from the outside world; we made walls to encapsulate a world inside. We cut a world out from the WORLD (as Heidegger would call it). Over time, the city ceded its place as a world-maker to architecture. The city has endlessly grown because of the attraction of capital, and it is no longer the preeminent enclosure. We have gone from walling in a group of buildings to world-making within buildings themselves. Just think of the Bonaventure in downtown Los Angeles, which, as Frederick Jameson remarked, is a city within a city. This becomes our contemporary idea of the city: the linked interiors of hotels, shopping malls, airports, casinos, and cruise ships. The Hudson Yards development in New York, or the New South China Mall, the largest building in China at the time of this writing at 500 by 500 by 100 meters, are both signals of the building interior moving towards the scale of the city. Superstudio’s Continuous Monument is real today. After all, the full title of that project is Continuous Monument: An Architectural Model for Total Urbanization! Anthony Giddens first brought the idea to my mind that we live in bubbles of temporary collectives. That is why I became fascinated with the thesis of Raymond Hood and his idea of “the city under a single roof.” He proposed that large capital investments by multiple corporations be coordinated to construct the new capitalist city — something which has now actually happened.
Which brings us to the point of the ground. If you ask a layperson what ground means, they would say, it is the skin of the earth. And as such it was always a given for any city or architecture. But as Jeffrey Kipnis has observed, there is no such thing as an abstract notion of ground. Ground always comes as a thing: as wilderness, as land, as a datum, as urban morphology, as infrastructure, etc. So once ground is an Object, it has by definition the properties to become an asset. I would argue that in the ground lies the potential of all possible worlds. So ground moves from some kind of background to world-making.
TW: Yes, I agree ground cannot be background. It is not a stage or a foundation. It is a distinct thing. Many years ago I started talking about “ground objects” in my work and I always felt misunderstood because people thought I was trying to reinvent the plinth! While a plinth is a form of ground apart from land, it is often a weak one because it reinforces the land datum. To establish a new world, you need separation and you need to change the known relation of the human to the planet. So a ground object is more like a sphere than a surface. It lands on the earth and contains a new reality inside. While a line or a surface can always connect to other lines and surfaces, spheres can only be adjacent. Imagine a pile of plastic snow globes, a pile of worlds!
Now, by sphere I don’t literally mean spherical constructions — except maybe the Ledoux. I mean things that radiate from a point not on the earth, and that do not operate on the X,Y,Z axis where Z is gravity. Ninety-nine percent of architecture is stacked up against gravity, like a tree. A tree has a foundation and desires the sun, but architecture is not nature. And anyway, if it were anything of the earth, I’d align it with its caverns or maybe its outer space. The vast, the nested, the oblique, the hyper-dense, the involuted, and the upside-down — these are the types of sphericality I mean. A spherical entity contains an infinite regress of other entities, an idea I’m borrowing from object-oriented ontology. A sphere is loose and not attached to the land. It can roll or maybe nestle into a hole, but it won’t permanently fuse with the earth. There is always a gap. Piranesi was an early spherologist, as was Claude Parent later, followed by Koolhaas. And maybe I should mention the philosopher Peter Sloterdijk here, although his goal seems to be to unify the world in a self-structured totality rather than to let the spheres of the world exist as discrete entities like multiverses. I do like his approach to allowing spheres to connect distinct things together by enveloping them and creating a new object, but sometimes it reminds me too much of a bubble diagram where everything is connected to everything else, which then equals nothing at all.
A sphere for architecture is a discrete container filled up with things with their own scales, orientations, and grounds. Ground ceases to roll out like a map in all directions, and instead offsets and stutters inward, appearing on top of or inside a variety of nested things. Nouvel’s Tokyo Opera is a great early example of this. In that project, though, a differentiated collection of things is captured inside a mute container. I’m more interested in a misfit box of toys. MVRDV’s recent Ku.Be project starts to do this. For sure, all of this diversity and nesting points to the spatiality of discrete things, like a world or a city landed on earth.
So the sphere is a driving concept of my work. It has no up. It lands. And it contains an ecology of things, including its own ground(s). It’s part of my larger project of architecture as flat ontology, maybe even the primary model of it. I disagree with those who seek to make architecture a problem of image as if the voracious appetite of the image culture we find ourselves in must simply be fed and we’re done. This kind of statement is sometimes played out in terms of “sectional” versus “elevational” architecture, but that seems anachronistic at this point. We are in a time when the realist environment of the fully articulated computer model and it’s continuous sectioning is becoming a primary space of invention. The abstraction of orthographic projection that has been so productive for architecture becomes outmoded when architectural elements can be manipulated using discrete transformations in real-time, more like a playset or model kit than a composed and finessed totality.
PT: I am glad you say that. It makes me aware of what we agree on, but perhaps also of where we differ in productive ways. What you call “discrete” I call “autonomous:” autonomous architectural objects. If the city cuts out a world from the WORLD, it is also already made out of worlds through architecture, like that pile of snow globes you ask us to imagine. So if we zoom into the section of our cities, we would see architecture as a myriad of autonomous worlds withdrawing from the city. It is also not like Peter Sloterdijk’s “foam,” since such a foam would still suggest that the bubble is part of many bubbles being held together by some material construct.
For me architecture exists as autonomous entities that contain autarkic worlds which are indifferent to their context. This comes from Emil Kaufmann, for whom architecture starts by extracting itself from its surroundings and becoming an individual, free-standing object. Therefore my city diagram is an aggregate or pile of worlds, loosely jumbled together. Here’s perhaps where our thinking diverges in an interesting way: for you, nested interiors and terminals suggest worlds within worlds. This is too relational for me; even if every snowflake in the snowglobe is unique, and is understood as an independent object, each one is still contained in an absolute way by the globe. My metaphor of architecture would be more like a pile. Within the pile, the individual object is neither purely homogeneous nor purely autonomous, but both at the same time. This means that if you take one part away, the whole changes, because while each remains autonomous, all have to change their position. Within the pile, architecture is background and figure at the same time. That’s why my recent architectural explorations seek to upend the traditional disciplinary understanding of figures and ground and poché. These things either have to vanish or lose their customary significance.
TW: I like your distinction — nesting and infinite regress vs. piling. They are both types of collections, although one goes inward and is a composite multiplicity, while the other is expressed outwardly. They are like two sides of the same coin in my mind. Now, to the question of which is more relational, I think that’s worth drilling into further. I don’t think that there is such a thing as no relations. Even if we could prove it true philosophically
(and I do enjoy trying), I think it would leave us with a world of things that cannot communicate or regard one another, which is a dead world. How could you have art or mountains or robots if there were no relations? I think you can still have ecology without nature, as in Tim Morton’s book of the same name. An ecology of things is about collections of separate, specific, aesthetic objects that signal to one another; they are not constituted by their relations but that does not mean they don’t have relations. Now,
“nature” is a vagueness that we parade around as if it were a concrete thing — it’s really just a linguistic signifier. Ecology is an entanglement of things that we are a part-of, while “nature” is out there beyond, surrounding our bodies and cities and sustaining our lives. I’m sure you read that great NY Times piece a while back that asked the question: in the rhetoric of “sustainability,” what are we sustaining, exactly? And the answer was: our human selves. So sustainability — if you believe in the idea that nature is “out there” — is really another form of anthropocentrism and subjugation.
Relational thinking in architecture has also produced all kinds of similar conundrums that place humans and their knowledge of the world at the center of the world. I think that an ecological model for architecture is one that contains weird entanglements of things that are nonetheless separate, and that there is no smoothness or relational web that can ever exceed the unique parts of the ecology. I think these kinds of entanglements can happen through either nesting or piling, as long as the parts don’t fuse or otherwise lose their identity. A box full of toys is not subjugated by the box, because the box lives in a house, which lives in a city and so on. Each is radically different and not less than the other. You can unpack each and set them next to each other on a flat plane, or nest them inside one another — yet their identity is not degraded.
Now, I like your argument for the pile as a figure and a background at the same time, but I’m not convinced that it would work. I think that drawing literally from the architecture of the city and piling it up pulls it automatically into the foreground. And I don’t see that as a problem. That which is foreground always becomes a background in a city, eventually, like the Roman Colosseum or the Empire State Building. I like thinking about a future city where there exists a radically different set of figures and backgrounds than we are familiar with today — imagine a city of your mega-piles where the piles have become background to a new foreground layer of super-towers and mega-mat buildings! I think all things in the world are figures, and that “background” is really a feature of particularly alluring figures, figures that are withdrawn from our ability to know or categorize them.
One final thing I want to bring up here is this deep disinterest in software that you and I share at this point. We both come from the great time of the digital in architecture, which began in the mid 90’s and ended abruptly 25 years later, and we are even known for some of our digital work during that time. However, we’ve now both shifted to working on our disciplinary contribution to architecture. For me, the best architecture is never about how it was made but rather what it does. That is why I am so turned off by projects that express the tools that were used to make them. At the beginning of the digital era, it was more difficult to discern because the tools were new, but now traces of tools block the reception of the underlying architectural content, if any.
In my own work I use software as a matter of convenience not ideology. My raw, chunky approach of “throwing things down” is no doubt tempered by the fact that it still mostly occurs in the environment of a computer, but the point is that the computer is no longer really the medium or center. The medium is architecture. In your work, I’ve followed how you’ve moved from a reliance on computational aggregations to talk about your aggregate city to a raw technique of selecting, as if with giant hands, buildings from a city and piling them up to make something new. You freed the architectural content from its technique.
PT: My Pile-City-Projects were a form of research into what architecture can do, or better, an attempt to unfold a new diagram in which a building begins to embody novel qualities. It was based on the idea of a field of buildings that becomes a figure. As you said, the idea came first and the technique came after. So yes, while it can be seen as a project based on a digital technique, it was pure architecture to me. It was also my acknowledgment of how tired I had become with the digital project — and especially the work of our friend Patric Schumacher. I felt like I would be literally sick if I had to see one more blobby, eggy, slurpy, mushroom-like, white, rendered Zaha project. I was done. This is also the time I learned about Graham Harman’s OOO philosophy, which made it impossible to continue to work on the digital.
I remember when I was a child, and I asked my father about what was happening when an early software programmer sat in front of a black screen with C: blinking in the left top corner: what was the computer doing? His answer was, “what do you want the computer to do?” I felt the same emptiness that that question/answer provoked later, when I studied architecture, and I had to face a blank piece of white paper or an empty screen precisely at the moment when what I actually needed was an idea. I remember when I first opened a piece of drawing software: the question still remained, not what did I want the software to do, but what should I draw? People pretended that software opened up new geometries, like the ability to draw splines, but of course splines existed before software, before all computers. The projectile line of Galileo and the differential geometry of Gauss predate all digital tools. Mario Carpo writes about this.
I think it was Heidegger who commented in his essay on “the question of technology” that technology doesn’t think. Softwares don’t think. What we are left with, and always will be left with, is the question of what we should do with something once we know it exists.