RC11
The City, The Territory, The Planetary: Architecture after Monotheism Sam Jacoby, Adrian Lahoud with Samaneh Moafi
Students Ran Bi, Xin Bi, Shen-Chun Chi, Isabel Gutierrez Castillo, Jun Han, Xi Hu, Anna Jarkiewicz, Kwanghyun Ku, Alexandra Meyer, Phed Niyomsilp, Briallen Roberts, Chen Shao, Seokjae Song, Sunnam Won, Chunyan Wu, Xuan Zhao
The Bartlett School of Architecture 2014
Project teams Liquid Earth, Solid Sea Alexandra Meyer, Briallen Roberts, Sunnam Won, Xi Hu Camp to City/City to Camp Xin Bi, Seokjae Song, Chunyan Wu, Xuan Zhao Our Invisible Shore Isabel Gutierrez Castillo, Jun Han, Kwanghyun Ku, Chen Shao An Island for an Empire Ran Bi, Shen-Chun Chi, Anna Jarkiewicz, Phed Niyomsilp Thanks to our consultants and critics: Andrea Bagnato, Franco Cassano, Phillip Clemens, Mark Drury, Sherief Gaber, Mehran Gharleghi, Octavian Gheorghiu, Richard Goodwin, Manuel Herz, Adam Jasper, John Macarthur, Samar Maqusi, Bruno Moser, Daniel Fernández Pascual, Charles Rice, Amin Sadeghy, Alon Schwabe, Corrine Silva, Vicente Soler, Paulo Tavares, Richard Taylor, Elia Zenghelis
We need breaks that render impossible the reductionism of one regime of beings to another (life reduced to matter, mind to life etc.) Not a mono-pluralism, but a poly-dualism … The whole of the real … one suspects, is on the contrary fissured magnificently by differences in nature.1 One culture, multiple natures – one epistemology, multiple ontologies. Perspectivism implies multinaturalism, for a perspective is not a representation.2 Research Cluster 11 begins with a theoretical text on the idea of ‘difference’. For political reasons, this text never takes the form of a brief; instead it is a theoretical and philosophical provocation to think new thoughts together. This year, we explored the productive potential of conflict and contradiction following a rigorous design methodology that asked students to formulate their own research and a thesis project at four different scales. Large-scale projects of spatial and social reform in Libya, Algeria, Turkey and Lebanon mobilise urban design and architecture as critical tools of a new spatial and political imaginary. The ethos of Cluster 11 is non-reductive and polytheistic, meaning students must reconstruct a problematic social, environmental and economic conflict through their project. Urban design always involves a multiplicity of forces – we ask students to explore and formalise these tensions through their design projects, not in order to neutralise them, but rather to liberate their violent potential. This is ‘architecture after monotheism’. While the cities of the past could still turn conflict in space to conflict in time – each regime leaving its own mark alongside others in a dialectic of succession – the cities to come can do nothing more than hold an uneasy claim on the present. Furthermore, the old idea of a city as a space in which all ties dissolve in an anonymous and cosmopolitan sea of civic belonging, can no longer withstand the evidence that everywhere perforates the attempts to insulate inside from outside, that links the near and far, the weak and the strong. The question then is this: how to start? How to start without these despotic ideals: the public, the common, the city, the state, and the planet? Moreover, how to accomplish this without relying on concepts like participation, pluralism and multiculturalism that only serve to pacify difference? It is a formidable task. It is not for nothing that difference cannot be thought easily; difference is not diversity, difference is violence.
1. Quentin Meillassoux, Iteration, Reiteration, Repetition: A Speculative Analysis of the Meaningless Sign (Berlin: Freie Universitiit, 20 April 2012) 2. Eduardo Batalha Viveiros de Castro, Exchanging Perspectives: The Transformation of Objects into Subjects in Amerindian Ontologies (2004) 12