AArchitecture 42

AArchitecture 42

We combat and despise: 1.

2.

3.

4.

Eye contact.

116 cameras.

Anything less than 72 views.

Linear reading.

The constructed and the convincing. aarchitecture 42 puts forward a found image for closer inspection, taken from the haven of crispy shadows, reflections and backgrounds. In one image, it depicts the meeting of two different kinds of pixels. The light collected in one, shines for the other. The measurement of atmosphere - here inside a Russian cinema.

Info. author Sergej Majboroda (Сергей Майборода) dynamic range 14 EVs (very high), unclipped taken 27 December 2018 18:14 published 22 February 2019 (2 years ago) categories artificial light, indoor, medium contrast, urban tags bench, couch, fluorescent, seat downloads 11552 “Choose its rotator carefully because it enables to rotate the panoramic head from the number of degrees you need without looking through the viewfinder. Very convenient!”

“But unfortunately, books are not written as spheres…”

What is a magazine if the printed version is lying dormant in 36 Bedford Square behind, as of now, closed doors. Presence describes something being here and now; also in German (Gegenwart). Ultimately, what remains of the printed magazine, now that you can no longer flick through? The issue exists as a collection. Contributions are brought together; arranged to be seen side by side; though with the limitations of the printing press out of the window; higher resolution is encouraged. .pdf — .zip. We can now also present moving images.

Erratum: the title firmament, in retrospect, was a mistake.

AArchitecture is a magazine edited by students of the Architectural Association, published three times a year.

AArchitecture 42 Term 2, 2020– 21 www.aaschool.ac.uk

Student Editorial Team: Gabrielle Eglen, Theo Sykes, Paul Vecsei

Editorial Board: Alex Lorente, Membership Ryan Dillon, AA Print Studio Design: AA Communications Studio

Printed by Blackmore, England Published by the Architectural Association 36 Bedford Square, London WC1B 3ES

Architectural Association (Inc) Registered Charity No 311083 Company limited by guarantee Registered in England No 171402 Registered office as above

© 2020 All rights reserved

The Beauty of Shards Gustav Schörghofer SJ

I met Fridolin Koch for the first time in the autumn of 1990. He was lying in his hospital bed and unable to move, though he could speak a bit. About a year earlier, paralysis of the nerve tract, caused by the flu, had completely immobilised him. Fridolin Koch spoke of his second life, a life that was to begin now. I was amazed to see him regaining his strength, how he transferred his marvellous will to live to his body; how simple movements became possible again. Almost two years after the outbreak of the disease known as Guillain-Barré syndrome, while still in the hospital, he wrote the first of a long series of articles on his laptop.

In the following years I regularly met Fridolin.

We became friends. He often came to celebrate mass with me in the Viennese Jesuit Church, he visited performances in the Opera, concerts in the Musikverein.

He was in his wheelchair, navigating with slight movements of his hands, always surrounded by helpful people. Surely it would have been possible for Fridolin to bring the world into his room through technology, I wondered, why did he persistently go out to be present at operas, concerts and church services? It took him substantial effort. And yet, he took it upon himself to be physically present. I have never spoken with him about this. The places he went to visit on a special significance in his presence. Here was somebody determined to be physically present. Not societal

conventions, nor other external reasons were the reason for Fridolin, it was his own free will. In so doing, he participated in the emergence of a space of freedom in these places. Ultimately this is what concerts, the opera, the play or the mass are about, the creation of a space of freedom; through music, singing, prayer, language. All those present shape this place together.

Fridolin was always a protagonist in this.

A painting, attributed to Leonardo da Vinci, shows Christ portrayed in half length, holding a crystal orb in his left hand. This Sphaira, the world globe, is embodying the entire cosmos, the created world. Christ is shown as the emperor of the world, Christ is also the one who entered this world, who became man in vulnerable flesh and blood. In the Epistle to the Philippians, Paul says: ‘Who, being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be used to his own advantage; rather, he made himself nothing by taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness.’ Why does God become man, I ask myself? Because he does not wish to leave his people alone, because he wants to be bodily present in this world, because through his bodily presence he wants to create a space, in which healing, liberation, redemption can be experienced. Even the resilience, which eventually led to the crucifixion of Jesus Christ, can not change that this space of freedom had been

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created. For it to continue and widen, the participation of many, ultimately, all, is necessary. The rule of Christ over the cosmos embodied in the Sphaira requires the physical presence not just of man, but of all creatures, the entire creation. This rule is no exercise of Violence, it is an ever progressing space of freedom, initially created by Christ. Thus I return to Fridolin, who in his decision to be present at spaces, filled by music and singing, language and prayer, co-created freedom.

Our bodies are, in the words of the Austrian artist Barbara Kapusta, ‘leaky bodies’. They are holey, leaky, like a sieve. There’s an inside and an outside, both communicate in constant exchange. There are things exterior to the body, with connections impossible to loosen, machines within and outside our body. We are connected in manifold manners, embedded in larger networks. We communicate over great distances. All these remarkably widen our consciousness and our power in accessing the world. Perhaps it has become impossible for us to imagine a life without machines.

Yet there is a difference in communicating over a distance, enabled by machines, and in communicating from body-to-body, skin-to-skin; through touch, through immediate perception, hearing, smelling, tasting, feeling. There’s a difference between being assembled in the same room or partaking in a video conference. A mass, celebrated by the community in Church is different from one celebrated by the priest alone, watched in a livestream by the others. Where is the difference? In distance. The simultaneous gathering of people, experiencing each other as a community in one space is broken into an assembly of individuals, who can be manipulated separately from one another.

A community of people opens up its own horizon. The horizon of the isolated is given to him by the media.

It therefore makes a distinctive difference to assemble with others in one room to listen to music, read mass, hear an opera, watch a play or to celebrate. I step out of the space of manipulation through external guidelines, into a space of freedom granted to me by other humans. Certainly I can be manipulated in physical space just as much; though I have the ability to withdraw from this manipulation by going elsewhere. This space has to be experienced physically; it cannot be created virtually. It requires the physical presence, the presence of bodies in the same space. The shared celebration makes demands, but it’s a greater good that has to be cared for to make a space for freedom.

Therefore it is important for us to gather as individuals and find, through hearing, seeing, smelling, tasting and sensing, a community and a freedom, gifted to us and gifted by us to others.

The thought that freedom is gifted by God is by no means self-evident. Often God is associated with a threat, the suppression of other views, and the exclusion of other people. And yet, the experience of a liberating and redeeming God is deeply rooted in the experience of many people, out of this experience they are able to create rooms of freedom. However, this type of experience is by no means a requirement for the creation of this free space. The workings of freedom, the creation of free spaces is to be experienced in a variety of ways. In architecture perhaps through the design of accessible rooms, taken for granted today, though until very recently they were anything but the norm. The same can be said for orientation systems for the blind. To design free spaces means more than that.

There is architecture that has a manipulative effect, it influences the experience of the subject, submits to this experience and makes the subject subjugate.

This experience can be made in buildings of totalitarian regimes. It can also be found in architecture most concerned with the effect. This architecture lacks silence. It becomes loud and chatty. It doesn’t leave space for the subject, instead pushing it to the corner, overtaking it. This can be said of some churches just as much as of museums or other public buildings.

Silence is an essential quality of buildings creating free space.

Silence is playing an essential role in contemporary music. There’s very silent music and there’s the shaping of silence. John Cage has to be mentioned in this context, time and time again. This music is different from one wishing to subjugate the listener, be it through special effects or sweet melodies. Designed silence is an unmistakable sign that the freedom of the listener is being respected, indeed, that through music a space of freedom is opened up. In the fine arts there are a number of phenomenon which make clear that through them a space of freedom is being created.

In the 20th Century we see the development of monochrome painting; a phenomena in parallel to silence in music. Through turning away from grand, pregnant content, a new sensibility emerged, often to be found at the fringes of attention. The unsightly was discovered for the arts; garbage, dirt the seemingly useless. Parallel to the ever growing landfills of modern society, art was raising the thrown away to the dignity of new creation. Film and literature know similar phenomena.

Wherein lies their meaning? The Salvator Mundi steps in front of us as a representative of a closed system, so does his Sphaira, his crystal orb, as a closed system. We stepped out of these closed systems, we left them behind. We therefore became homeless in

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this world, things lost their frame of reference. They surround us, now meaningless or are given new meanings arbitrarily. The crystal orb in the hand of the Salvator Mundi today is nothing more than a fascinating glass object. The appearance of the depicted man has something calming, the aura of somebody at peace with himself. We like to experience this aura.

What’s working more than the aura of the painting itself, is the aura of the enormous sum spent on it. We float freely in space, exposed to all sorts of influences, thrown back and forth. What lends stability? How do things find their place again, their meaning? The attempts of the last century to create closed systems once more have shown devastating results. Totalitarian systems have brought murder and destruction. The danger of new attempts to find meaning in closed systems is by no means banished. The old Sphaira is broken to shards. The world has not ended with it, but just one of many world-drafts created by man. The shards remain, perhaps there is a beauty not yet found within them.

One way to establish new areas of meaning lies in designing zones of dense experience. What I’m referring to is Fridolin Koch, the man in the wheelchair in the opera. He makes it clear that his presence, to a large extent, is a deliberate decision, the collaboration of many and the will to be part of a physical community; in him an experience can be condensed to be shared with others. It is not unlike the presence of seemingly worthless objects, garbage even, in the museum. It is made clear that precious things can be found in what society deems worthless. When in contemporary music, noise is given a place which

would have formerly never been associated with music, we are pointed in a similar direction. In the everyday, the disturbing, the utterly ugly, something can be discovered to reveal Power, Magic and Beauty.

This creates places of condensed experience that radiate into everyday life and can change our perception. This has consequences in the economy, in politics, in the design of normal life. In this way – without moral warnings, cautionary gestures, apocalyptic images of horror and doomsday scenarios – an understanding of the relation of everything to everything is cultivated. The manner of our handling of nature, in general, has consequences upon our personal life and conversely small decisions we take have an effect on our life at large.

We need houses to house us, food to feed us and free spaces of education to develop us. The free-space we take advantage of has to be granted to others, to ensure that their needs and aspirations aren’t repressed by ours. This could lead to an exchange of the best forces around the world. In many places areas for condensed experience of meaning would arise, free spaces for life to unfold. Politics can enable this; to then be designed and created by architecture, art, poetry, music and also by the belief in an all encompassing carrying love. With the help of a speaking cannula, for the first time after 230 days, my friend Fridolin Koch could speak again. Asked by the doctor to say a few words, he replied: ‘Thank you for the good care. I will be happy to recommend you.’ This is also a way to speak, Fridolin Koch created a place of condensed experience, one with an impact.

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Found this on Pinterest.

"Project of Columns which, when enlarged, will support the arch of the firmament” Constantin Brâncuși

AArchitecture 42 6

Images of Clouds Ana Nicolaescu

In 1985 Geoffrey Y Gardner proposed a new cloud model. Until then, the history of computer graphics had developed in a constant push and pull between two forces: first, computational costs and second, the necessity for scene simulations to compete with reality. First came the terrains, trees, shadows and reflections, yet clouds were left behind – the reality, as it were, was that clouds were too complex to be described mathematically and ultimately, to codify into pixels on screens.

Instead of offering a solution that attempted to accurately apply real world cloud physics, Gardner, then working at the Grumman Corporate Research Centre, developed what was termed a ‘cost-effective scene simulation technology’. For Gardner, a cloud was made of a sky plane, a sphere and a mathematical texturing function. In other words, it was an approximation of its real-world counterpart: a texture, and a play with light and mathematics.

The images here are produced with trueSKY in a game engine. They reflect on this history in a time where computer graphics, at first glance, appear to have surpassed reality. These images of clouds are equally images of technology, of maths and light and the sky plane that make up reality as a texture, at the centre of a sphere.

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Eisenstein, the Glass House and the Spherical Book Oksana Bulgakowa

In 1851, visitors to the Great Exhibition in London saw an architectural sensation: Joseph Paxton’s Crystal Palace. Enthusiasm and scepticism accompanied the invention of this Glass House. In 1863, Nikolai Chernyshevsky took the Crystal Palace as inspiration for the house of the future that the heroine of his novel What Is To Be Done? saw in a dream, a materialisation of a utopian vision of a Socialist community. But already, only one year later in 1864, Fedor Dostoevsky published a response to the euphoric reception of the Glass House in Notes from the Underground, where the main character is repulsed by, and mocks, the building as a glass chicken coop. But the real question was: could we deal with transparency?

The symbolic vocabulary of transparency was developed in the 18th and 19th centuries and correlated with light, glass, crystal, water and nakedness; in contrast to stone, veiling and deception. The transparency of nature was seen in contrast to the opacity of the social world; but it was unclear where to place a human being. Modernity was fascinated with the idea of transparency. According to German architect Bruno Taut, a glass building would establish other relationships between people and the universe, modifying their visual perception and habits. The Constructivists hoped a transparent building would help in the creation of transparent relationships and destroy the distinction between public and private. Walter Benjamin wrote in his 1929 essay on Surrealism:

‘(In Moscow I lived in a hotel, in which almost all the rooms were occupied by Tibetan Lamas who had come to Moscow for a congress of Buddhist churches. I was struck by the number of doors in the corridors which were always left ajar. What had at first seemed accidental began to disturb me. I found out that in these rooms lived members of a sect who had sworn never to occupy closed rooms. The shock I had then must be felt by the reader of Nadja.)

To live in a glass house is a revolutionary virtue par excellence. It is also an intoxication, a moral exhibitionism, that we badly need.’ ¹ Meanwhile, different architects – German Mystics, Italian Fascists, American Rationalists, French Constructivists and Russian Communists – were creating their glass buildings and discovering that this material could support conflicting ideologies. Like the architects, some film directors were inspired by the possibilities of glass. This brings us to Sergei Eisenstein’s unrealised film project, The Glass House.

Eisenstein visited Fritz Lang on the Metropolis set – Eternal Gardens, a glass dome. Eisenstein discussed the advantages of an ‘unchained’, mobile camera with the cameramen Karl Freund and Gunther Rittau.

While they explained its advantages, Thea von Harbou, Lang’s wife and the film’s scriptwriter, explained to him its central concept. Metropolis, a vision of a city in the year 2000, inspired Eisenstein to create a film about a glass tower.

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The Glass House was intended as a polemical response not only to Lang’s film 2, but also to Bruno Taut and Mies van der Rohe’s glass architecture. Van der Rohe proposed to build a glass tower on Berlin’s Friedrichstraße in 1921. Eisenstein envisioned his own glass palace as an architectonic image of America.

He thought an American author like Upton Sinclair might write the script 3. When Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks arrived in Moscow on July 1926 and invited Eisenstein to direct for United Artists, (a company they had started with DW Griffith and Charlie Chaplin), Eisenstein offered them his project about new forms of architecture, life and art – The Glass House. He asked Albert Williams, an American journalist in Moscow, to contact Sinclair – who expressed in a letter to Williams his doubts that Fairbanks would ever produce such a film.

Eisenstein spoke about the idea to Le Corbusier, who arrived in Moscow in the autumn of 1928 to erect a new building there. Eisenstein showed him around forty minutes of the unfinished film, The General Line, that included in certain scenes an experimental farm built by the Constructivist architect Andrej Burov, who was influenced by Le Corbusier’s architectural style. Martha sees this modernist farm in a dream, like the heroine of Chernyshevsky’s novel. Eisenstein recounted his conversation with Le Corbusier in an article: ‘Le Corbusier is a great fan of cinema, which he considers to be the only contemporary art along with architecture.’ Le Corbusier said, ‘It seems to me that in my creative work I am thinking the way Eisenstein is thinking as he creates his movies.’ 4 The Glass House developed as an architectural project based on two mythologies: that of the skyscraper, with its hierarchical structure, and of transparency, bound to the material of glass.

Eisenstein saw it as a response to Metropolis, which presented a symbolic vision of social hierarchy. That is why he wanted to work with Sinclair, who became famous for his studies of class stratification. But, during the same period, Eisenstein referred to the experiments with glass architecture in different circles: the German Expressionist architects from the Glass Chain around Bruno Taut, and Constructivists like El Lissitzky.

Eisenstein pasted a clipping from the New York Magazine from June 1930 of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Glass Tower into his diary and wrote: ‘This is a glass skyscraper that I invented in Berlin.’ In his project, Eisenstein’s perception of America merges with his perception of Germany. In his notes, he referred to the project both by its English and German titles; alternating between Das Glashaus and The Glass House.

The Glass House was the very first project Eisenstein proposed to Paramount when he signed the contract with Jesse L Lasky and came to Hollywood. Here, he worked on the script until May 1930. He discussed the idea with Chaplin and the Paramount boss B P Schulberg (a great admirer of Dostoevsky). A glass factory in Pittsburgh would produce the glass structures for the film. The studio assigned the gangster movie writer Oliver H P Garrett (City Streets [1931], Scandal Sheet [1931], Manhattan Melodrama [1934]) to the job but he, too, had little luck developing Eisenstein’s idea.

Like all of his other projects in Hollywood, The Glass House remained on the drawing boards – but, unlike all the others, not because of the objections of producers. Eisenstein himself could not explain what happened, or why his work on the script stopped.

He had to turn to a psychoanalyst, Gregory Stragnell (whom he had met at Chaplin’s house), and spend a large amount of money trying to understand what was keeping him from finishing the script. These psychoanalytic sessions upset Eisenstein’s collaborator Ivor Montagu, who managed Eisenstein’s money like a thrifty housewife. On June 17 1930, Eisenstein wrote to Pera Atasheva: ‘I’ve spent ten days being depressed. Now I’m starting to get better. It seems that I may be liquidating a whole bunch of my neuroses forever.

For three days I have sat through high-speed psychoanalysis with one of the most renowned doctors in the States (the editor of The Psychoanalytic Review), my good friend Dr Stragnell. Very interesting. We have uncovered fifty per cent of my ‘doubt’ complex – this is, of course, my sore spot. We have been applying a scientific method – this isn’t the usual quack treatment. The latest hysterical depression (during my present fortunate circumstances!) upset me so much that I decided to root out the guilty group of neuroses (without touching the others). My decision happened to coincide with Dr Stragnell’s arrival (sometimes I’m lucky). It’s very interesting to see how my doubt obsession developed and who and what are guilty.

Imagine, Pearl! I will no longer need constant affirmation! To hell with it all! I will be able to do everything! ’5 Eisenstein’s enthusiasm for psychoanalysis was also reflected in the screenplay but, despite this, the script was never finished. It exists as a storyboard in Eisenstein’s archive in Moscow. The idea is parallel

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Fritz Schleifer, Untitled, 1928.

Van Nelle Factory

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to similar utopian projects that Eisenstein developed at the end of the 1920s: the filming of Karl Marx’s Das Kapital, the adaptation of James Joyce’s Ulysses, and the writing of The Spherical book in which he aspired to change film history.

The first version of the script (1926-7) unfolds a drawn storyboard of an experimental abstract movie, with the mobile camera and an elevator serving as the protagonists: the elevator moves between planes, floors and ceilings, modifying the view of the observer (i.e., the camera). The camera alone is capable of seeing this building, with its blind inhabitants. The transparency of the structure, the change and changeability of viewpoints, creates the basic principle of visual dramaturgy, which becomes the narrative structure. Eisenstein defined it as a comedy of situations that are treated literally as various positions of the camera and its constantly changing points of view.

Eisenstein’s notes attest to his great interest in working with glass as a material. Various possible optical effects appearing within a glass cube or glass sphere are mentioned in these notes: frosted glass; driving a nail into the glass with the resulting cracks; water games reflected in the glass; the testing of different lenses and glass textures. Eisenstein experimented with abolishing the sensation of hardness and weight.

He wanted light to dissolve the materiality of glass.

This is akin to the experimental photographs of the Bauhaus, André Kertész’s Distortions (published in 1928), László Moholy-Nagy kinetic installations or a series of pictures with glass objects taken by the Soviet artist Alexander Rodchenko.

In the first version of the script, only the camera (unlike the characters) was able to ‘see’. Inside, a husband was incapable of seeing his wife’s lover; well-fed people could not see those who were starving. In other words, vision and the possibility of looking at things from different angles were the prerogatives of the mechanical camera. Eisenstein defined this genre as the ‘comedy of and for the eye’. He wanted to blur the lines between up and down, inside and outside. The Glass House became a kind of outlet for his theoretical rumination about camera and film in general. The camera as an eye, as an X-ray machine; the house as model for a new cinematic space. The Glass House blows up the system of cinematic representation, liberating objects from the force of gravity. Objects and bodies float in this glass space. The logic of a space that does not have fixed points of reference recalls the space of Lissitzky’s proun (Project for the Affirmation of the New); where shifting axis’ and multiple perspectives convey the idea of rotation in space. The space of Eisenstein’s The Glass House is

non-hierarchical; distance and the sensation of time are abolished (night becomes day, as in a green house).

Eisenstein takes this as a challenge. He conceived polycentric pictures with polyfocal perspectives that are presented simultaneously because – due to the transparency of the building – all views are present at the same time (from the front, above, below), and all figures are caught in various views. The director confronts the spectators with all these views; now, cinematic space is not assembled as a montage space bridging the breaks and gaps. The experimental space is naturalised, acentric – with rotating figures, figures that are floating in space – without the force of gravity. Windows, walls, ceilings, floors do not limit the image; the distinction between above and below, near and far, inside and outside are removed and the view is open. This destroys the centred form, with perspective and symmetry that is assigned to a fixed viewer. The opaque materials such as carpets and doors limit the transparency, but float in space as fragments of Suprematist constructions, as Eisenstein defined them.

However, as soon as the capacity of sight is tied not to a machine but to a human being, the comedy is transformed into drama. In 1927-8, Eisenstein changed the story and personalised the vision. He assigned different characters with different ways of seeing. A clash of these different ways of seeing leads to the unfolding of the narrative. The first character endowed with this the gift of vision is the Poet, whom Eisenstein sees as a kind of Messiah. The Poet’s willingness to pass his ability to see onto other people (in order to render opaque relationships transparent) leads inevitably to a series of crimes (blackmail, murder and suicide). All these horrors – which result from the sudden discovery of the transparency of walls – are paradoxically predicated upon the opacity of relationships (adultery, denunciation, slander and spying). The gift of vision turns out to be dangerous, invariably leading to disaster.

The Poet becomes insane. The comedy of the eye is overshadowed by the theme of recovery of sight, and thus the comedy of the eye is transformed into a ‘drama of enlightenment’.

Once in Hollywood, Eisenstein conceived his idea as a three-way conflict between an Architect (the building’s creator), a crazy Poet and a Robot (a new figure introduced into the script). He placed this Robot between the characters of the Architect and Poet.

This results in a radical re-evaluation of the plot. The Architect constructs the glass house and gives it to humanity – but the inhabitants are not able to see it.

The Poet opens people’s eyes and perishes from his own gift. The Robot, perfect citizen of the new civilisation,

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destroys the house. When, at the end, he removes his mask, we see that the destroyer is the Architect himself.

In the final version, the heroes are presented as opposites and projected onto Old and New Testament prototypes: the Poet is viewed both as a virtual Adam and as a new Jesus. The old Architect becomes imbued with the features of God the Father, the Poet acquires the features of God the Son, and the Robot turns out to be a kind of Holy Ghost. Since the Robot turns out to be the Architect in disguise, Eisenstein dissolves the Trinity of Father, Son and Holy Ghost, tracing this Trinity back to a dichotomy (God the Father versus God the Son) that held an autobiographical significance. Eisenstein himself was a failed architect who created a doubled Oedipal self-portrait.

He identified both with the Architect and the Poet (the son who rejects his father’s creation). Eisenstein’s father was an architect whose Art Nouveau buildings the son mocked. Eisenstein tellingly called The Glass House his own private ‘Mystery Play’. In his final version of the screenplay, the comedy of the eye and the drama of recovered sight were subsumed by the tragedy of two utopian dreamers. One is the Architect who designs an ideal house, the other the Poet who doubts the validity of that functional model.

This conflict should firstly be understood within the context of the clash between two architectural utopias of Eisenstein’s age, both of glass architecture.

One was advanced by the German architect Bruno Taut and his group ‘Die gläserne Kette’ (The Glass Chain). Taut’s ideas about glass architecture were inspired by the writings of Paul Scheerbart, a German science fiction author. The members of the Glass Chain group aimed at bringing inhabitants of the glass buildings closer to the cosmos. In contrast to the traditional static and restricted view in conventional buildings, the inhabitants of the glass houses would be spectators of the infinite, cosmic panorama and the gigantic theatre of nature, due to the transparent character of glass walls with no limits.

Architecture was, for Taut and his followers, a kind of new religion. Mikhail Iampolski attributes the genealogy of Eisenstein’s project to this source, and interprets the script as a comment on Taut’s glass cosmogony. 6 God the Father designs the house like a Paradise (that is why the image of a Glass House is that of a greenhouse). Afterwards, the myth is transferred to its spiritual phase: the Messiah transmits his vision to the others and it releases hate, intrigue and murder. The disaster is completed by the Architect, who destroys the Glass Cathedral – and thus the utopia. The project could be considered as a response to this concept. The dwellers of this Glass House are

by no means such good spectators as those conceived

by Taut. Eisenstein’s heroes are initially blind but, when they recover sight, the result is horror.

At the same time, Eisenstein’s project was also a sarcastic response to the utopian glass house theories of Constructivist and Functionalist architects. Both groups dreamed of placing the biological instincts of individuals under strict control by means of rational organisation of architectural space. Nikolai Ladovsky’s laboratory in Russia analysed the perception of architecture as a dynamic interaction between space and its users. The Bauhaus theoreticians involved Gestalt psychologists in the discussion of these issues. 7 Le Corbusier suggested the notion of synchronic perception: the optical perception called forth by visual phenomena was overshadowed by what he called biological factors. However, it had nothing to do with biology; it referred to sociology and behavioral models. The very term biology was taken by Le Corbusier from his friend, sociologist Hyacinthe Dubreuil, who had studied Ford’s factories, as well as those of the Czech industrialist Tomáš Bat’a. 8 According to Dubreuil, all the worker’s movements in a building are prescribed and determined by the way the architect has organised space.

Le Corbusier, who was fascinated by the timeand-motion studies at Ford’s factories, wanted to achieve the same goal in an individual space: private apartments, houses and hotels. La machine à habiter, Le Corbusier’s ‘machine for living’, is a first step on the road to prescribing certain movements and behaviour to human beings. Life is organised by the architect in an authoritarian way. By the late 1920s, this authoritarian approach to spatial structure was abolished; psychological studies discovered that Ford’s system was not sufficiently effective, because it eliminated the individual’s creative drive and initiative. It turned out that factory labour should be viewed as a process of play and interplay, whereby the worker faces constantly changing goals. The architect had to take this variability of decisions and the relative autonomy of an individual into his calculations.

Organising space became a politically important issue. The Dutch architect Mart Stam constructed a tobacco factory in Rotterdam with glass walls. It was understood as the way of creating social transparency: everything is transparent, everyone can be seen and can see; the office of the director is transparent and can be seen by the workers, and vice versa. Le Corbusier commented: ‘No more proletarians or bourgeois, only the hierarchical scale wonderfully organised!’ The European Constructivists firmly believed that glass walls would simplify

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communication and render structures transparent – that social upheavals could and should be replaced by a revolution in architecture.

In his Glass House project, Eisenstein clearly refers to these ideas of correct spatial organisation of social behaviour. His protagonist, the Architect, attempts to regulate biological processes by means of spatial forms, whereas his antagonist, the Poet, symbolises the anarchical nature of the Individual. The wall does not teach people to see, nor does it make the existing social hierarchy any more harmonious. His heroes destroy the new visual space into which they have been placed. When Eisenstein unfolds the drama of revolt within the ideal glass building, he subjects the utopian ideas of Constructivist theoreticians to a skeptical treatment. The Constructivists thought they could convert people into submissive participants, or actors in the theatre of modern life. The Glass Chain architects hoped to equip people with a new vision in an attempt to create intelligent, sophisticated spectators. Eisenstein lets his heroes destroy this ideal building. They are not prepared for the new roles of either spectators or participants in the spectacle of modern life. Primordial instincts prevail over the new architectural space.

The final result is neither a cosmic spectacle nor regulated behaviour, what remains is a psychoanalytical drama of a son’s rebellion against his father; it is not just an autobiographical scenario and does not only refer to utopian spatial concepts. It may also be a commentary on the larger Soviet project: Socialism.

The paradigm works on a number of levels, from the personal to the philosophical, psychological, political and ideological. It strongly recalls Dostoevsky’s ‘Legend of the Grand Inquisitor’ and Notes from the Underground, or Leon Trotsky’s Utopia to make not only the social structure, but also the human unconscious transparent. In a broader sense, Eisenstein’s project could be seen as a comment on the project of the Enlightenment, or of modernity.

The Glass House took vision as its central theme – both the perfect vision of the film medium, as well as the voyeurism of humans. At the final script stage, Eisenstein returned to the ancient tradition of inner vision by allowing only the Poet to ‘see’. He thereby destroyed his own film, since film was the medium of ‘new vision’ par excellence! If the film’s plot was based on the danger of vision and on the value of inner enlightenment, then how was the medium itself supposed to be effective? It may have been inevitable that Eisenstein would eventually abandon the project.

But, at the same time, the project enabled Eisenstein to conceptualise a totally new approach to

the creation of film theory: his Spherical Book. He refused to utilise a traditional form for producing theoretical texts such as the manifesto, book or scriptwriting/filmmaking manual. He intended to write not a two-dimensional but a spherical book: his ideal reader would not simply read one essay after another, following a linear narrative, but instead perceive the whole book simultaneously. The essays were to be arranged in clusters, each oriented in a different direction, but circling around one common theme – in this case, montage. Only the shape of a sphere could assure this mutual reversibility. Eisenstein wrote in his diary on August 5, 1929: It is very hard to write a book. Because each book is two-dimensional. I wanted this book to be characterised by a feature that does not fit under any circumstances into the two-dimensionality of a printing element. This demand has two aspects. First, it supposes that the bundle of these essays is not to be regarded successively. In any case, I wish that one could perceive them all at the same time, simultaneously, because they finally represent a set of sectors, which are arranged around a general, determining viewpoint, aligned to different areas. On the other hand, I want to create a spatial form that would make it possible to step from each contribution directly into another and to make apparent their interconnection … Such a synchronic manner of circulation and mutual penetration of the essays can be carried out only in the form (…) of a sphere. But unfortunately, books are not written as spheres … I can only hope that they will be read according to the method of mutual reversibility, a spherical method – in expectation that we will learn to write books like rotating balls. Now we have only books like soap-bubbles.

Particularly on art. 9 Some sections of the book were written, but published as separate articles. What then was lost?

Montage is analysed in this cluster of essays in the context of different systems: music, Japanese theatre and hieroglyphics, linguistics, reflexology and dialectics. As a consequence of the linear process of publishing and reading these texts, however, we can no longer perceive the permanent change in viewpoint and the framework of discussion-and-analysis that seemed so important to Eisenstein at the end of the 1920s – in other words, the most essential characteristic of the project.

Eisenstein’s Spherical Book project responded to the fragmentation of sciences into separate fields of study – one of the consequences of modernity. His book was a radical attempt to locate a non-existent unity in the shifting from one level to the next,

AArchitecture 42 18

reinterpreting the incompatible segments and using them in diverse ways.

The most productive moment in the script for me is Eisenstein’s ‘story of the eye’. Different concepts of the paradigm of perception, from Walter Benjamin and Georges Bataille to Wolfgang Schivelbusch and Jonathan Crary, have tried to conceptualise the new vision of a new subject of modernity, problematising how the subject can be made more adequate to a constellation of new events, institutions, apparatuses.

What is striking in Eisenstein’s story of the eye is its radicalism. On the one hand, he doubts that the modern subject is ready for this reconfigured perception but, on the other hand, his film suggests – in its first stage as a high comedy – a more sublime version of the apparatus’ vision, going far beyond the new constellations connected to mobility, panoramic or kaleidoscopic vision, and so forth. He adds rotation and floatation in space, a loss of gravity. He naturalises the Cubist pattern.

Eisenstein’s comment on the project of modernity and a Soviet utopia has a strong autobiographical inclination. Does he see himself as a Poet who is afraid of his inner vision, or as an Architect who is afraid of his creation? There would always be at least two different interpretations of his role in the landscape of Stalinist culture.

The production story associated with the script shows us, in an ideal way, the problematic relationship between literacy and visuality. The ‘sublime vision’ collapses at the moment when Eisenstein had to adapt it to narrative. Narrative is a linear construction that could not be brought together with the materialised multilayered-ness of the visual space.

Only hypertext would be an appropriate form for this; such a text would reconfigure the reader, forcing him to follow the cross connections. From this point on, Eisenstein starts to write his texts as hypertexts, thus making them extremely difficult to publish.

In the beginning of the century, the idyllic world of holistic systems had broken down. Fundamental transformations in the natural sciences led to a fragmentation into single sciences. Totality is dismissed as utopia. The variety of different types of discourse describes the work of art in all its aspects. Eisenstein’s Spherical Book was a product of its time, one which tried to overcome this discursiveness. His model is the most radical attempt to find a totality which does not exist, and can only be achieved in permanent change from one level to another, based on reinterpretation and a variable use of incompatible sectors. It is also a possible suggestion for an interdisciplinary approach, integrating sociology, psychology, anthropology, linguistics, communication theory, musicology and other disciplines into film studies.

This text is an abridged and modified version of a chapter from Oksana’s book: Sergej Eisenstein. Drei Utopien – Architekturentwurfe zur Filmtheorie, Berlin: Potemkin Press, 1996.

1 2 3 4 5 6

7

8

9

Walter Benjamin, ‘Surrealism’, in Selected Writings Vol 2, Harvard University Press, 2003, p. 209.

Eisenstein’s project was not intended to be a film version of Yevgeny Zamyatin’s novel, as some scholars have suggested.

Diary, January 13, 1927; cf. O Bulgakowa (ed), Eisenstein und Deutschland [Eisenstein and Germany], Berlin: Henschel, 1998, p. 17.

VS [Sergei Eisenstein], Novaia klientura gospodina Korb’zu’e’, Sovjetskii ekran, No 46, 1928, p. 5.

Kinovedcheskie zapiski, No 36/37, 1997–98, p 229.

Mikhail Iampolski. ‘Mifologiia stekla v novoevropeiskoj kul’ture’, Sovetskoe iskusstvoznanie. Moskva: Sovetskii khudozhnik, vypusk 24, 1988, pp. 314–348.

His English essay on the topic is different from the Russian version; cf.

‘Transparency Painting: from Myth to Theatre’, in Alla Efimova and Lev Manovich (eds), Tekstura: Russian Essays on Visual Culture, Chicago University Press, 1993.

HM Wingler, Das Bauhaus, Weimar – Dessau – Berlin und die Nachfolge in Chicago seit 1937, Berlin: Verlag Gebr. Rasch & Co und DuMont Schauberg, Auflage, 1975, pp. 166–177.

Hyacinthe Dubreuil, Standards, Paris: Editions Bernard Grasset, 1929; L’example de Bata. La libération des initiatives individuelles dans une entreprise géante (Paris: Editions Bernard Grasset, 1936). Cf. Thilo Hilpert, Die funktionelle Stadt.

Le Corbusier’s Stadtvision. Bedingungen, Motive, Hintergründe (Braunschweig: Vieweg 1978 [Bauwelt Fundamente 48]), pp. 263.

Cf Sergej Eisenstein, Drei Utopien – Architekturentwurfe zur Filmtheorie, pp. 31–32.

On the Spherical Book, pp. 31–108.

Firmament 19

In biblical cultures, the firmament is at the very beginning of a genealogy of separation. It is through this celestial dome being put into existence that an initial qualitative difference between the waters of above and the waters of beneath is produced. The immediate consequence is the emergence of dry land, or earth – our plane of existence. This first separation produces the conditions of humanity’s roaming. It is no surprise then, that architects would take an interest in the topic. When faced with a dead-end on the critical theory front, theological concepts have a tendency to creep in. If architecture is the labour through which space is transformed, if a new partition is the product of this transformation then, separation and union are the fundamental operations of our discipline. But these operations have nothing symbolic. They do not represent anything. They break and make space – space as a commodity, social and physical space. → UHO (Federico Coricelli and Max Turnheim)

AArchitecture 42 20

Worldviews drawings Ammara Asdar text Space Popular

If you ask a person under nine years old to draw their home or another familiar environment they will often use a representation technique which might take an architecture student months or even years to achieve and master. The imprints of crayons line up family members, buildings, pets and even celestial bodies in a flat orthogonal projection or perhaps elevation oblique in an abstract representation that compresses time and viewpoints in a completely subjective manner.

A child drawing from memory seems to naturally invoke a kind of superimposition of visual imprints over time and collide them into an abstract collage where scale and distance matter less than the meaning and relationship between objects and people. The ability to understand the world is limited by one’s point of view, the abstract elevations drawn by young children seem to demonstrate an urge to overcome that limitation.

Children rarely attempt representations of the world they experience as they actually visually perceive it, until what is referred to as the ‘Pseudo-Naturalistic stage’ 1 (11–13 years old), when attempts at accurate perspectives with more realistic human figures are made. Representing a three-dimensional world in two dimensions to mimic our visual perception involves mechanical operations, which require training and tools. These perspective attempts during adolescence are for many people the last drawings they’ll ever draw, whether by hand or on a computer, as drawing practice is rarely carried on throughout adulthood if it is not for professional purposes. The strict rules of perspective drawing require dedication and precision, leading to the possibility of a drawing being right or wrong. This would only be stimulating during the

developmental phase of the technique, when the challenge of getting it right is still ongoing, as was the case in the 15th century when parts of the world saw a proliferation of perspective and render practices.

However, once the rules are set and the path towards mastering the technique is strenuous, few adults would make use of it as an everyday form of expression as opposed to, for example, photography. The tools to achieve a good photograph continue to evolve to make it easier for people without training to achieve a good picture, which has led to photographs becoming a widespread form of expression and a way of understanding and documenting our experience of the world over time.

As personal portable devices equipped with sophisticated hardware and software for image capture, editing and sharing become more affordable and widespread, we gain eloquence and fluency in our visual languages. The meme, the story, or the TikTok, convey messages that only the best of writers could put into words. The editing and captioning of our front and rear camera captures has little to do with truthfully portraying the world around us (arguably an unattainable task) and much more to do with the crayon drawings of that eight year old that so masterfully convey the complexity of their experience. As we pick filters, stitch our videos or enhance our boomerangs we transform our smartphones into the crayons of adulthood that enable more complex world views such as Ammara Asdar’s, whose drawings collapse a space and experience into projections where time is not linear and perspective is not singular.

1

W Lambert Brittam and Viktor Lowenfeld, Creative and Mental Growth, 1949.

Firmament 21

NOT AN ADVERTISEMENT

Barapullah Randhir Singh

New Delhi has an extensive network of streams and water bodies, most of which have been encroached upon by development or have withered away in neglect. Named after a crumbling 400 year old Mughal era stone bridge that crosses it, the Barapullah canal is a small tributary feeding into the Yamuna river. Today, across the road from the densely populated neighbourhood of Khanpur, this canal appears from under a parking lot. It winds its way past the government built modernist social housing projects of Pushp Vihar, skirting past the 18th century urban village of Chirag Dilli and then through the Hauz Khas Forest. Heading North, it crosses under the Ring Road before disappearing under a recently built (and illegal) park in the post-partition neighbourhood of Defence Colony. It reappears from under the train tracks just South of the Jawaharlal Nehru Stadium before veering East, squeezing between the 16th Century pilgrimage centre of Nizamuddin and the 20th century refugee colony of Jangpura. A recently completed elevated expressway runs along the canal here, following its route as it winds its way into the Yamuna River. This series of photographs are part of my investigations along the canal and are accompanied by notes detailing the exposure and depth of field that I used for each frame.

AArchitecture 42 28

Firmament 33

Dear Editor Javier Castañón

Here I am writing to you again. Your call for submissions came as I was looking at the horizon, where heaven and earth meet. I was thinking that heaven, the celestial sky, sometimes looks beautiful. This is probably why I feel so disappointed when I wake up to a blue sky, not a cloud to be seen; minutes later the first aeroplane leaves a trail across that beautiful neatness. By evening time, the sky is scarred. As if, it were not enough to destroy the earth, we must also destroy the firmament.

Yes, I admitted long ago that architects have to take the blame for the larger share of destruction that we see on the face of the earth. This realisation for a long time made me react, I would not say in anger, but with an urgency that demanded action, only to be frustrated by the lack of support all around me.

This had gone on for years, until last Autumn when a group of students in the aa organised a Climate Summit, the event that made me realise that there are people around me with the same urgency. This is it! We start this very instant, from now on it is not going to be like this anymore – ‘From Now On’ became a battle cry.

Architects of my generation, knowingly or not, have continued destroying this planet by taking for granted that many wrongs were right, but ‘From Now On’ this is not going to be so anymore. My generation will not be here in 2050, but in the same way we have caused so much destruction by pract­ icing our profession irresponsibly we can aim to

repair all that destruction; all we need is the will and the necessary knowledge.

To work with nature is good, but for me it is not enough – we are nature, in fact we are the rational part of nature. Looking at nature makes me feel optimistic because it shows a beautiful, fine balance of design between all its constituents. This is clear proof that this balance is possible, and therefore, if it is possible, we should be able to maintain it. We are not doomed, by any means. It is only a matter of getting together and agreeing how we can maintain this beautiful balance.

The fascinating part of it all, is, that all beings in this planet fulfil a specific role. They contribute on several layers, with many of these relationships rather obvious to us, such as how larger fish feed on smaller ones, with others far less apparent and yet to be discovered. Varying between lifelong dependencies and seasonal necessity these relationships constitute fascinating chains of cause and effect that are all directed towards producing the right conditions for an ulterior effect to emerge. The constituent parts are, in a way, all the existing elements in nature. We all have a mission, even if we still have a long way to go in understanding all the layers involved, to move forward with what we do know and mend this planet. This is why I am filled with optimism.

Humans are the servomechanism to nature, with the ability to think and make rational adjustments to the planet, every now and then. Whilst all other

AArchitecture 42 34

constituents are programmed to behave in a particular way, humans have an intelligence that allows us to be aware of-, and adjust what is going on. It could be said that to some extent all other constituents are also gifted with ways to adjust to stimuli, but what I am referring to here are adjustments not only of our immediate environment but also to the habitat of others. We are responsible for the good of the entirety of nature.

Humans not only have a curatorial role, but an obligation – a curatorial obligation. I once read that zoologists in Australia observed that a number of mammal species over a large area were dying in considerable numbers, decimated and nearing extinction.

It was clear something need to be done to address the issue. After studying the mammal autopsies the scientists found the culprit – the poison produced in the small glands on the toad’s back. While the mammals thought of the toad as food to eat they were unaware that this feast was indeed poisoning them. With this discovery the curatorial process began, and the zoologists collected a few mammals and fed them with food contaminated with a small amount of the poison, causing the poor little blighters to become as sick as can be, but eventually survived the ordeal. The mammals were then tagged and monitored over a period of time and subsequent generations would run in the opposite direction and miles away when they came near these types of toads. This example – this curatorial obligation – saved the mammals from extinction and ultimately effects all human action.

The illustration of ‘Man as the ‘microcosm’ in the centre of the celestial spheres’, from a 13th century edition of Hildegard of Bingen’s Liber divinorum operum, is very aptly expressing this curatorial role. Today, we dismiss the problem before we even take the time to think about it. The notion that human beings in the Middle Ages may have got some things right, such as Adam being placed in the Garden of Eden to tend and care for it, is seldom accepted. The fact that most religions place man in the centre of celestial spheres is beside the point: one only needs to think rationally in order to reach the same conclusion. (That man is on earth to tend and care for it).

I would like to invite anyone and everyone in the aa to join me in creating a seedbed of knowledgeable, committed, discerning and forward-thinking architects and designers. The battle cry ‘From Now On’ can unite us more than ever before to make common cause.

Once again, I find myself saying the same as I did a year ago. Enough! This is getting too long for a letter.

I look forward to seeing you physically once again.

My very best wishes for you and your co-editors, this time from the centre of the celestial spheres, Javier

Firmament 35

“My soul goes out. It’s not that I feel I die, but I’m part of them.”

AArchitecture 42 36

November Sabrina Morreale and Lorenzo Perri

The first week of November is a moment of transition between the day of all saints and the day of the Ñatitas – who dies and who lives. Seen from the cableway, the Cementerio General in the centre of La Paz, Bolivia, becomes almost unrecognisable with people gathering in the narrow alleys, reaching every corner and feasting in the streets with friends and relatives.

The cemetery is shared by the Catholics and the Aymara, an aboriginal group from the Altiplano region of the Andes. The Aymara regard death as a transition into another phase of existence – ‘for Aymara, death means life.’

Tombs are stacked four to seven high on top of each other, many objects are placed in these small boxes; from coke bottles and miniature toys to sweets and watches. When one dwells on these oculi between the earthly world and the world of the afterlife, one approaches those who’ve passed.

A few days later there is a redemption and exchange between those who live and those who have died. On 8 November is Día de las Ñatitas, when thousands of devotees carry skulls in cabinets from shrines in their homes to their loved ones. These skulls are usually extracted from forgotten tombs in the same cemetery or are the remains of relatives, passed from generation to generation. The moment they are exchanged a rebirth occurs.

The celebration ends with the symbolic burial of Pepino, marking the end of winter, the season in which spirits dominate man. The firmament in Bolivia is this moment of transition, in between; celebrating our earthly life through remembering who was there.

Firmament 37

AArchitecture 42 38

Firmament

Wilson Oryema

Have you been watching closely?

There is much afoot But also at hand.

The great law states One can simply be Or prepare to become Not everything you can believe Through which the eyes you see.

The wheel rotates in all directions At varying speeds As such A true sense of orientation has long since been lost from we Even now Above our heads Can we truly say which sits Is it sky or sea?

The waters above Are they a metaphor Or out in space is there truly beach?

Were it dolphins or angels Whom descended onto me?

Was it day for which we were born to sleep?

Night which we were meant to see?

Much time has passed since our inception The phase of decay is upon us With growth in tow For whom…

Such a question is not ours to know.

AArchitecture 42 40

The great structure which binds our souls, The heavens and also the soil Is held together by a substance Most are also not bound to know Just as those unaware of the sinews which hold our bones Or the capillaries through which blood goes They may know it by name But can they feel it…

How is one to know If it is here for me to feast Or am i here for it to swallow me whole Or is this duality the foundation for a substrate On top of which all things can grow Of course questions like these May riddle our minds From birth to our final night.

But take care And again I would like to ask Are you watching closely?

As many have mistaken a large tree in a small field For Yggdrasil Which spans the cosmos Binding Heaven with its branches Holding Hell with its roots Also that in-between With a vice-grip which will never slip loose So Can we truly say with confidence We are the concrete which forms the road Or Are we simply just a tiny stone That obscures attention for a brief moment But has little impact on the majority Of the journey Down this long and winding road?

Firmament 41

SMS to Eternity, Peter Wilson.

Monument to Mark Claire Potter

Whether the

Abyss

whitened slackened furious

beneath a tilt desperately

flat

winged

of its own

accord too

early fallen in struggle to trim its flight

and overcoming the currents

cut at the edge of the leaps Mallarmé

Because I want to travel carefully. From far to near.

Elegy to proximity. I wish to start with Ruskin where he writes in Modern Painters about the experience of standing on a hilltop in Highgate on ‘a clear summer morning at 5 o’clock’ looking towards London.

Westminister Abbey stands in the distance as a blot, the viewer squints, they are unable to discern anything more than an impression. Ruskin tells his reader to draw a blackened square and circle on a piece of white paper. Walking away from these two shapes, we cannot tell which is the square and which is the circle. In fact, coherent recognition is not

possible until there is a shift in vision, a shift akin to something that happens when we perceive an enigma and wish to confront rather than shun it. Or when from ‘a confusion of lines, a something which you know from experience to be indicative of a face’ comes into close-up. We recognise these elements because we want to be part of the world of objects – we are impelled, very much since infancy, to be part of a coherence. The encounter that is blurred becomes, then, an encounter – one not about details but a picture inclusive of viewer and view. As Ruskin puts it, ‘you always see something, but you never see all.’

AArchitecture 42 44

In the middle distance of the aa Lecture Hall sits an audience. At the back of the room, there hangs a clock. At the front of the room there is Mark Cousins and the lectern, the lectern in brown walnut and Mark often in bold colour, pattern or stripe. Like butterfly wings carrying extraordinary colours and design, Mark’s outfits, like the insect’s, were his coloured designs. Like the patterned eyes drawn upon butterfly wings that replicated not simply eyes but magnificent ocelli, Mark’s face had multiple ocelli of its own – he would remove his glasses to look at the clock in the distance, he would peer into the first rows of his audience, he would reposition his glasses to occasionally peruse his notes and he would ever so momentarily glance down as if he had said too much. Without the finitude of the room, the face of the clock, Mark would not have given his talks. Without the room of devoted ocelli before him, without the colours and patterns of butterfly wings and without a love for masks and the artifice of the façade, he would not have spoken about praying mantises, Mona Lisa’s lashless, browless eyes, phantom limbs, the middle voice, Odysseus’s salty hair and the face.

On 2 March, 2018, Mark gave the final lecture of his Friday lecture series. The topic for the year comprised six lectures on the Face. A week later, I gave a seminar on Mark’s final lecture for aa Foundation students gathered around a table in the school’s South Jury Room. During my talk, which took the form of a letter, I read a text by Mark that I had made, or to be precise, remade. To have remade this text seemed very normal at the time and for reasons I can’t recall now, I was impelled to stitch together in one piece, two paragraphs from the Face series. In other words, I attached the end of Mark’s Friday 2 March, 2018 lecture to the beginning of his Friday 27 October, 2017 lecture. To my students I read the excerpt from the last lecture first and the excerpt from the first lecture second.

After writing the previous paragraph, I went to look for these seminar notes in a file called ‘Foundation’, and going through a few transcripts I found the pages I was looking for. It surprised me, because I had forgotten that there were three parts to the Foundation seminar. First there was a mini­ lecture entitled ‘Friday 9 March 2018’ beginning with the epistolary words, ‘Dear All …’, then there was a page entitled ‘Samuel Beckett’ divided in two sections, one with lines from Beckett’s Worstward Ho and the other from Mark’s lectures. On a third sheet entitled ‘Lecture Workshop aa Foundation – Friday 9 March 2018’ there were three subheadings ‘Indoor – Outdoor – Indoor’ next to which I had

written instructions to myself about how to structure the workshop.

Once I had read through these pages again and reminded myself what I had been doing, I was able to recall why I had wanted to link words from Mark’s last lecture to his first: the idea had come from Mark.

It was ‘with the implication of Beckett’, as he put it, that Mark concluded that final Friday lecture with a quote from Worstward Ho. The quoted words belonged to the famous lines: ‘All of old. Nothing else ever. Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.’

It struck me at the time of the lecture, although I did not understand why, that Mark brought Beckett’s words into his final lecture at a moment that seemed like an ending but felt like a summit. That is to say, Mark delivered Beckett’s words precisely at the moment when, in his most characteristic way, he knew there was little else to say. At such moments of aporia who else to quote except the writer for whom saying anything at all was always saying too much. I wondered after Mark’s lecture if Worstward Ho held a clue to what was going on and upon rereading the text was reminded that the very last and very first word of Beckett’s novella were the same. Beckett’s last phrase ‘Said nohow’ on is a temporal reply to the opening phrase ‘On. Say on’, making what comes last in effect anterior to what comes first. As if the syllables ‘on’ and ‘no’ sharing the same two letters were the same whichever way you approached them, westward, eastward, worstward … Upon finishing Worstward Ho, the reader is returned to the beginning, marking a return that makes the entire text not simply circular but a permanent play between present and past, what is said and unsaid, and all that remains unclosed, ‘On. Say on. Be said on. Somehow on.

Til nohow on …

Enough … One pinhole … Nohow less. Nohow worse. Nohow naught. Nohow on. Said nohow on.’

I wondered if perhaps Mark’s final and first words were likewise in echo. In 2017 Mark was, as he hints in the first lecture of the Face series, ‘All of old’, and his pinhole vision which he applied to everything he did and everyone he met, including his self-professed failed self-collaborations, was coming into close-up.

If he wished to speak on the face it was by way of return to the first face, his mother’s made-up face, the face that offered a maternal snapshot that from his

Firmament 45

psychoanalytic training, Mark differentiated as both separate and profoundly implicated within his own.

However original and primary this face was to him, or however important questions concerning the invention of the face were to his thinking, a single return to this site of origin never became what the 2017–18 lecture series was about, despite this return and this question ‘of the return’ being the anchors to which his thinking were inextricably tied. In its made-upness the maternal face was all ready, already removed. In its faciality the face was already said and lost and refracted into a million different objects, a million different close-ups and pin-ups and mechanical clocks, for example, in which we do not simply read the time but project expressions so consequential, as Mark explained, that the clock face qua face never revealed anything as simple as mere time.

If the implication of Beckett offered a path into Mark’s final lecture series, Worstward Ho played on my mind because the path out was not so straight forward: Mark obviously knew Beckett’s work very well. The subject of things falling apart, bodies and minds becoming old and plodding not westward but worstward towards a worst possible condition – Legs gone say better worse kneeling – suggests, as Beckett wrote in his 1957 one-act play Endgame, that ‘The end is in the beginning and yet you go on.’ By falling apart things come together again. I held a picture in my mind, because Mark told the story, of a beleaguered child standing outside his mother’s bedroom door calling to come in as she made up her face. In order to have a face there must be a face to present.

A loss of face is a terrible thing. A face can be metabolised and shifted somewhere else, but to lose face is something entirely different. Was this topology present in Mark’s lectures such that his final Face lecture called to his first and turned our own faces in the audience not simply towards an illusory beginning, but towards an illusory answer? As I suggested to my students, Mark tells us himself.

Transcript from Friday 2 March 2018 and Friday 27 October 2017. Asterisks show the ending and the beginning of the two texts. To be read as one. ‘… So you think of close-ups … elsewhere – and that’s really what I’ll kind of leave you with – [Deleuze] extends the faciality really to the question of the icon. I mean it’s not only that the face of Jesus is normally something of a close-up, it’s that he says Jesus is the face. I mean … it’s not just that Jesus like other humans has a face and you can look at it very carefully, it’s the way in which we treat … the prayer, the interrogation,

the not knowing … what we bring to that image … is what we always bring in part to something which doesn’t pretend to be an icon, but is in some sense a face.

For this reason we’ll never solve this problem, there isn’t going to be a form of painting which kind of cracks it, but when you are dealing with communication or even questions of perception which involve projection, our fundamental ambivalence is always there, is always in play and that’s why we’ll be differentiated as between what we understand, what we see, what we think we see … it isn’t that there is a real account somewhere … there are just the accounts that you hear in exchange … and perhaps learn … you’re always going to fail at this but you can in Beckett’s terms fail better.

And with the implication of Beckett, I’ll end …* * … because these [lectures] are thirty years now, they’ve become something of a kind of institution … it sort of has that feeling of an institution closing or dying or just walking off …

It’s been a wish for a long time to do something on the face … but it’s one of those topics you think yes that will enable me to do various things and then you get this kind of odd feeling coming back, Yeah like what? What exactly is the problem of the face? I was a bit downhearted to see that Lacan said, Ooooh the face, that’s very complicated, and left it wisely at that. I think it’s an interesting question, I don’t have the answer, but I still think it’s an interesting question as to when the face was invented? It sounds like an absurd question we assume human beings have a face whatever, but it’s not clear to me that it’s as obvious as that …’

If there is an outer firmament to any of this, to Mark and Beckett – to beginnings and endings, it might be found in Genesis 1.2 where it is written that: ‘In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters … And God said, Let there be firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters.’

AArchitecture 42 46

In the face of the deep, in the face of water, do we find a persona more than a likeness? Do we find the invention of a face that exchanges a watery glance with our own? An angel-blue firmament that curiously divides ‘the waters from the waters’. And a face that divides faces from faces like Narcissus endlessly peering into a watery version of himself. Perhaps it is this invisible

and exchangeable vault of the skies that vertically, from top to bottom, from ceiling to floor, divides the first book with its parchments of words and lines (from words and lines) into fragments of life that so indelibly pivot on the spaces between and, in memoriam, cut at the edge of the leaps.

A wax cross.

A magician in a sphere.

A glass globe

in the hand

illuminating a close up of the most dear.

References Authorised King James Bible. Genesis 1.2 Mark Cousins, 2017 – 2018 Friday Night Lecture Series on the Face, Architectural Association Samuel Beckett, 1957. Endgame Samuel Beckett, 1983. Worstward Ho Stephen Mallarme, 1897. An extract from Un Coup de Des jamais n’abolira le Hasard, my translation Auguste Rodin, 1898. Monument to Balzac, carrefour Vavin, sixième arrondissement, Paris

Firmament 47

aarchitecture 42 – Biographies

GUSTAV SCHÖRGHOFER born in 1953 in Salzburg, studied history of arts and classical archaeology in Salzburg. In 1981 he entered the Society of Jesus. He studied Philosophy and Theology in Munich and Rome. His ordination was in 1998; and until 2013 he was Rector of the Jesuit Church in Central Vienna. From 2013 onwards he has been Priest in Lainz-Speising.

AMMARA ASDAR grew up in the ordered disordered port city of Karachi, Pakistan. She spent the last few years in London studying at the AA and currently works in the city. She loves to be in the kitchen cooking or in the ocean on a surfboard, there’s no in between.

It’s just the perfect balance.

SPACE POPULAR create physical and virtual architecture, concentrating on how the two will fuse in the near future. Founded by architects Lara Lesmes and Fredrik Hellberg, the studio has since completed buildings, exhibitions, public artworks, furniture collections, interiors and virtual architecture for the Immersive Internet. They teach at the AA and the University of Toronto.

UHO is an architecture studio and consultancy founded in 2013.

It operates out of London, Paris and Torino. Its permanent members are Federico Coricelli and Max Turnheim.

CLAIRE POTTER is author of three books of poetry. She teaches at the AA in History and Theory Studies and in Foundation and she runs the AA Writing Centre.

ANA MARIA NICOLAESCU is an artist and researcher based in London. She uses game engine technologies and algorithmic processes to produce computer generated images and films that explore the complexities of digital worlds, particularly aspects of simulation and gamification.

Her research and teaching focus on the global production and circulation of images, video game worlds and centrally programmed infrastructures.

LUDVIG HOLMEN has done a series of projects making use of CGI technology to investigate popular culture and how it is affected by the Internet after completing the Intermediate School at the AA. He makes use of pre-modern form merged with modern technology to create innovative imagery.

WILSON ORYEMA is an artist, writer and co-founder of the social change initiative, Regenerative Futures. His work primarily focuses on the theme of human consumption and the different ways it impacts humans and the environment. A strong advocate for sustainability, he’s a consultant and frequent speaker in this area.

PETER WILSON graduated from the AA in 1974 and subsequently was a teaching assistant to Rem Koolhaas and Elia Zenghelis.

Thereafter he ran an Intermediate Unit and was a Diploma Unit Master from 1982 to 1987. He is currently a partner in the German based office of BOLLES+WILSON who have recently completed the New National Library of Luxemburg.

JAVIER CASTAÑÓN is the founder and director of Castañón Associates London and Castañón Avocados Madrid. Javier also teaches at the AA, where he is currently the Head of Enviornmental and Technical Studies.

SABRINA MORREALE co-founded Lemonot, a London-based practice operating between architecture and performative arts, with Lorenzo Perri in 2016. Programme Heads of the AA Visiting School El Alto, they teach in the AA Foundation Year and at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna.

SERGEJ MAJBORODA has worked with CG since 1999. He became interested in the HDR technique as soon as it appeared.

For him, it was not only a way to illuminate a computer scene, but also a way to get good 8-bit panoramas and ordinary photos.

OKSANA BULGAKOWA is Professor Emeritus of Film Studies at the Gutenberg University in Mayans, is a Moscow-born scholar who lives in Berlin. She has extensively published on Russian and German cinema, curated exhibits and developed multimedia projects.

She taught at the Humboldt University and Free University Berlin, Stanford University, the University of California, Berkeley and the International Film School in Cologne.

RANDHIR SINGH is an architectural photographer based in New Delhi, India. With a BArch from RPI in New York and 15 years of work experience as an architect, his photography practice is focused on architecture, modernism and the urban landscape.

Next issue

For AArchitecture 43 we ask for responses to this archive of images. The images were bought in a fleamarket in Vienna, and show the life of a family from St.Corona am Schöpfl in the years 1964 to 1969. They show weddings, funerals, the building of a house, trips and processions. Please visit aarchitecture.aaschool.ac.uk to view the entire image collection.

In this issue Gustav Schörghofer SJ on how we became homeless in this world. Page 3 Ana Nicolaescu looks up. Page 7 The extreme difficulty in publishing Eisenstein’s hypertexts

by Oksana Bulgakowa. Page 13 UHO discuss the relevance of theology for architecture, once more, in a rendered image under the HDRi. Page 20 Ammara Asdar draws a Russian cinema. From the Stands, Space Popular.

(Live) Page 21 Ludvig Holmen, We thank our official global lead partner. Page 24 Randhir Singh walks us along the Barapullah canal. Page 28 Javier Castanon on the curatorial obligation of man. Page 34 Sabrina Morreale looks down, from the cable car above. Page 37 Dolphins or angels, in the waters above with Wilson Oryema. Page 39 Peter Wilson (typing…). Page 42 A Monument to Mark Cousins by Claire Potter. Page 44

Edited by students at the Architectural Association