REPRESENTATION AND AGENCY
makes it possible to imagine a form of construction that advances from part to part, as opposed to one from whole to part. “[…] the joint or the detail is not an occasion to articulate the intersection of two materials […], but is instead the locus of an intensive design energy that proceeds outwards to condition the form of the whole.” (Allen 1997, p.227)
The concept of field should not be understood as a metaphor, but as an actual material
condition, where organization, matter, and making, abandons a conventional opposition between construction and form making. Rather, by searching for an exact and
repeatable connection between the operations of construction and the overall form
produced by the aggregation of parts, it becomes possible to bridge the gap between realization and form-making.
Allen suggests“[…] that architecture could profitably shift its attention from its traditional
top-down forms of control and begin to investigate the possibilities of a more fluid, bottomup approach. Field conditions offer a tentative opening in architecture to address the dynam-
ics of use, behavior of crowds and the complex geometries of masses in motion” (Allen 1997, p.238). The reference here is to phenomena operating at the edge of control such as
swarms. These are field occurrences “[…] defined by precise and simple local conditions, and relatively indifferent to overall form and extent” (Allen p.236).
Representation and the Mechanism of Agency
In a world filled with agency the journey of becoming, between architectural represen-
tation and build artefact, is charged with unpredictability – it is imprecise and does not proceed by resemblance but by difference. Consequently, attempting to produce repre-
sentations that seek to resemble or predict the precise outcome of a design process will fail. The use of an absolute and eidetic form of representation and the assumption of
linearity must give way to a vitalist and non-linear condition of becoming, to which we
require architectural representation to assume the form of a device for steering – that is, both as a vehicle of agency, and an observer of agency. As a collection of ideas, the
above elements suggest how such a device might appear relative to the framework for design proposed through the thesis.
In chapter four I quoted Lars Spuybroek for identifying a convergent phase of selec-
tion and a divergent phase of design as the two main stages by which a generative approach to design unfolds. Something similar is at play here. I see the cartography
of Corner and the field of Allen to describe two components of a single model for architectural representation – respectively addressing the initialization and unfolding
of a design process. The cartography relates to a gathering of both agency and the forms
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