The Collective Individual: Confronting Autonomy in an Urban Semiosphere

The Collective Individual: Confronting Autonomy in an Urban Semiosphere year five

AR50005

Thesis

K. Phillips

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“The Collective Individual: Confronting Autonomy in an Urban Semiosphere” A thesis presented to the School of Architecture Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design of the University of Dundee In partial fulfilment of the requirements of the degree: Master of Architecture

by Katie Phillips (May 2022) 150012296

word count: 6,382

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THE COLLECTIVE INDIVIDUAL: CON AUTONOMY IN AN SEMIOSPHERE

E NFRONTING N URBAN

( i m ag e :

typewrit code il ustarion, by Archiozm. Soucre: dawrinogum.ts/eird - n/)

Contents

001 Mission Statement 002 Abstract 003 Introduction 004 Pseudo-Public Space and the Commodity Form 005 The Radicals and Post-Political Architecture 006 Semiospheres 007 Synthesising a New Southbank 008 Bibliography

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Acknowledgements

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Mission Statement 001

This thesis will explore a non-object based architecture of “freedom” which confronts the paradox between economic libertarianism and collectivism.

Unfolded through the investigation of radical ‘paper projects’ and by using the biological theory of the semiosphere, the associated project, ‘The Southbank Art College’ spatialises what becomes both a fluid extension of, and a determinate resolution of, London’s Southbank Arts complex.

(fig. 001 Southbank , oLnd . Image form g le maps, overlay b ut.hoSre

Processbo k.)

fig. 001 Southbank Arts Centre

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(fig. 002 Pseudo-Public space map. Mapping: author’s own)

Abstract 002

As Marx and Engels predicted over 150 years ago, threads of consumption spread from the epicentres of industrial revolution and chased “the bourgeoisie over the whole surface of the globe”, intertwining nations and economies. The Information Age gave rise to communities that could transcend borders and oceans, and consequentially the concept of the “collective” as an idea receded as we found ourselves in an increasingly libertarian, globalised world. With regard to the city, Georg Simmel reflects on this anomaly of mass interconnection and subsequent alienation, asserting that “one never feels as lonely and as deserted as in this metropolitan crush of persons.”

Nowadays, the register of “urban” escapes even Archizoom and Yona Friedman’s radical projections of limitless, spontaneous and nomadic anti-forms in No-Stop City and Spatial City, becoming a theoretical condition closer to Timothy Morton’s “hyperobject.”

The hegemony of the urban as a limitless process, as described by urban theorist Neil Brenner, reaches far beyond the city in its traditional sense, consuming hinterlands and laying down supra-urban systems and infrastructure across the planet and beyond. The urban is now a condition that has “no outside”. Its central process, capital investment, is consuming the global city and privately owned public space is malignantly seeping through the remaining polis, precipitating into urban fields as conditions of extreme inequality and “uneven spatial development”.

The site of the proposition, London, is a hyperbole of these conditions. Yet there remains a zone - the assemblage of arts programmes that belong to the South Bank of the Thames - that stands as a quaint form of resistance to this power game, belonging as it does to the age of impossible dreams which considered the ideas of urban continuity latent in Archizoom’s vision as not the product of capitalism’s “supremacy of ‘tertiary’ activity over all other activities,” but as the potential for a true public landscape of dramaturgical activity for urban citizens.

The thesis project will extend this landscape, producing, in Andrea Branzi’s words, an “urban semiosphere” - a heterogeneous model for a continuous flow of information, markets, networks and people. It aims to expose and confront the paradox between complete individual liberty and ‘the people’ as a collective, bringing together the prescience of some of the radical paper-projects at the dawn of the postmodern era with the reality of the neoliberal city.

Can “the idea of the disappearance of architecture within the metropolis” - the centricity of a “nonarchitecture” of freedom - oppose the expropriation of public space and the dominance of the commodityform?

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“If design is merely an inducement to consume, then we must reject design; if architecture is merely the codifying of bourgeois model of ownership and society, then we must reject architecture; if architecture and town planning is merely the formalisation of present unjust social divisions, then we must reject town planning and its cities. Until all design activities are aimed towards meeting primary needs. Until then, design must disappear. We can live without architecture” Adolfo Natalini, Superstudio co-founder (from a lecture presented at London’s Architectural Association in 1971) 5

Introduction 003

Glamour, the crux of the studio’s discourse, was seminally defined as a “time-bound sort of beauty”

by Mildred Adams in an article for The New York Times in 1939. (Isenstadt, S., 2011) Beauty existed long before any attempts to document it, she explains, but Glamour exists only as a man-made phenomenon - “a consequence of media”. Beauty is timeless, like the soft, ethereal women depicted in Renaissance paintings (fig. 003), whereas Glamour is ephemeral and fleeting, like the flash of a camera on a red carpet. (fig. 004) It has a certain theatricality, magnetism and celebrity about it, states art historian Sandy Isenstadt.

Despite today’s ever accelerating consumer culture, where information, networks, and services are instant, architecture has remained obstinate and steadfastly clings to traditional notions of beauty and permanence. (Stoane, A., 2021) The studio’s response is to capture and embrace the temporality that glamour begets, proposing new forms of dramaturgical urbanism, and will seek to “reclaim the ideas of glamour and spectacle from the tectonics of the static and deterministic commodity-form”. (ibid.)

As Coco Chanel once said, “fashion is made to become unfashionable”. (Mahall M., Serbest, A., 2009, 51) Our global consumer society under capitalism is designed in such a way that commodities obsolesce in order to generate the demand for new. For example, smartphones are constantly released with new features and technology rendering previous models obsolete, despite remaining in good working order.

Capitalism as an operation of creative destruction was first described by economist Joseph Schumpeter, citing “innovation and discovery as a constant driver of change.” (ibid.) The current construction industry seems to be imbued with a cyclical desire to tear down and rebuild bigger, better, and for primarily financial gain. Often, this is undertaken at the expense of buildings which were in a reasonable condition; a prime example being the Heygate and Aylesbury Estates in Elephant and Castle, the demolition of which was heavily aided by the media’s unfounded portrayal of it as a hotbed for crime and violence, to capitalise on its prime location.

( q u ot e :

Mahall M., Serbest, A., How Architecture e L arned to Speculate , 2009, pg. 51)

“fashion is made to become unfashionable”

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fig. 003 The Birth of Venus, late 1400’s, Botticelli.

fig. 004 Marilyn Monroe at the premiere of There’s No Business Like Show Business, 1954

This chapter’s opening quote, from a lecture presented at London’s Architectural Association in 1971 by Superstudio’s co-founder Adolfo Natalini, conveys the Italian radical design group’s contentious concepts which provoked discourse on alternative societies. Stating that “if design is merely an inducement to consume, then we must reject design”, he vehemently announced their departure from the mainstream practice. (Elfline, R., 2016) He implied that the current systems of architecture and design were complicit in upholding uneven spatial development and continuing to fragment society into individuals. Economic geographer David Harvey, in his article “The Right to the City” (an ode to urban sociologist Henri Lefebvre’s aspiration of the urban to function as a “meeting point for collective life”, where citizens have a “right to the city” (King, L., 2018), laments the increasing atomisation of the city through “fortified fragments, gated communities and privatized public spaces” due to the divisive hand of neoliberalism. (Harvey, D., 2008, 32) This is particularly true of present-day London where the disappearance of any form of pluralistic public realm, through a cancerous permeation of privately owned public space, is spearheaded by processes whose sole objective is capital accumulation and the increasing privatisation of infrastructure. This is exhausting the urban landscape and leaving little space for collective life. Has the city finally been lost to the clutches of the oligarchy? Or is there a chance to develop, through the spirit of Natalini and the radicals, a non-commodified architecture of the collective - a radical built form which reverses the social alienation that neoliberalism spawns, and defies the oppressive spread of central business districts and exclusive identitydriven communities?

conflicting political definitions of freedom and expose the antagonistic relationship between the individual and the collective.

Chapter 004 discusses the justification of a radical approach to combat the dominance of capital accumulation in the city and the expropriation of public space as the main objective of the development. It seeks to uncover two opposing definitions of freedom and uncover the contradiction between (neoliberal) individuality and the socialist pluralistic collective.

An exploration into the dense metropolis being paradoxically liberating, yet alienating and individuating, as described by philosopher Georg Simmel in the seminal essay ‘The Metropolis and Mental Life’, is set out in chapter 005. This idea is uncovered further through a reading, based on individuation, of a series of paper projects by the “Radicals” at the dawn of the postmodern era.

Chapter 006 explores the biological concept of the semiosphere and spatialises it within the field of architecture, with chapter 007 applying this as a vehicle to investigate a refutation of the capitalist commodity-form through ideas of freedom in a continuous theatrical landscape. The site is constellated around The Southbank Centre, which resists the encroachment of the capital-investment-led development around it while remaining a porous collective. A fluid, dramaturgical urban solution to the growing fragmentation of collective life will be explored through the project.

(fig. 003 (uf izare.tn/wo ks birth-veofnus, fig. 004 (vanityc.faomr/h l y wo d2 / 022/01/marilyn-mo re-hol y wod-master ind)

“the experience of our generation: that capitalism will not die a natural death” To quote Walter Benjamin - “the experience of our generation: that capitalism will not die a natural death”, indicates that it must be faced head on, rather than waiting meekly for it to relinquish its grip on society and our global urban landscapes. . (Osborne, P., Charles, M., 2021) I will argue through this thesis that one of our primary needs is freedom - to explore, play and engage with others in a pluralistic metropolis, and I aim to uncover the 7

Pseudo-Public Space and the Commodity-Form 004

“one is led almost automatically to the discovery of what may well be the “drama” of architecture today: that is, to see architecture obliged to return to pure architecture, to form without Utopia; in the best cases, to sublime uselessness.”

Walter Benjamin’s opinions on ‘the modern’ have been described as his most significant theoretical contribution to the historical study of cultural forms.

(Osborne, P., Charles, M., 2021) His work to uncover the “transformation of historical time by the commodity form” (ibid.) was underpinned by his research into the shopping arcades of Paris, full of colonial goods, where imperialism had given rise to commodity production. The consumer culture that the arcades heralded has grown exponentially since the 19th century and has since permeated through society

(qufoter:i,Ta M.

Architecture and Utopia Design and Capitalist Development , 1976, ix)

In the Middle Ages, the skyline of London was a sea of spires, extolling the church above all else. During the industrial revolution, chimney stacks rose among the steeples, enshrouding the city in the smog of mechanical production. The ambition and advancement of man was now tantamount to the importance of faith. In the aftermath of the war and the subsequent Welfare state, the Barbican’s three residential towers and the Tower Wing of Guy’s Hospital dominated the skyline in the late 1960’s and early 70s, symbolising the value society placed on primary needs of people within the city – housing and healthcare. Towards the end of the 20th Century however, under Thatcher’s advocation for neoliberal policies, London’s corporate skyscraper culture rocketed (literally), producing the landscape present today. (Harvey, D., 2007) Predominantly, the image of the city is now one of finance.

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like an epidemic. What Benjamin identified as commodified goods within the confines of the arcades, has grown and consumed the architecture which once contained it.

As the Venetian historian, Manfredo Tafuri predicted in the late 1960s, architecture would exist without social substance or ideological prefiguration and become relegated to, at best, “sublime uselessness”. (Tafuri, M., 1976, ix) On the same vein, Douglas Spencer, in his book “The Architecture of Neoliberalism”, maintains that architecture’s role in the city is simply to “accommodate itself to the present-day pragmatics of doing business”. (Spencer, D., 2016, 47) Europe’s financial capital, London, is saturated with the commodity-form: architecture which serves no other purpose than accommodating its workers and serving as patriarchal symbols of capital investment.

(Brush, S., 2021) Office buildings such as the Gherkin, the Walkie-Talkie and the Cheesegrater are all signifiers of this statement. There is little public interaction with these buildings, and to many they do not provide any meaningful engagement other than to serve as provocative landmarks. These symbols of capital investment rapidly springing up around the city tend to replace the out of fashion and therefore unwanted real estate, and existing populations are displaced to less valuable areas of the city. (Moss, S., 2011) The indifferent, excess driven machine of capital investment maniacally hurtles on, filling today’s cityscapes with what Rem Koolhaas astutely describes as ‘junkspace’, “a seamless patchwork of the permanently disjointed” which “sheds architectures like a reptile sheds skins” and “reinvents itself every Monday morning”. (Koolhaas, R., 2000, citing Mies V.D.R.) A chaotic ensemble of commodity-forms creates an endless interior which promotes disorientation by polished surface, mirrored glass and echoing atrium. “Instead of design”, he writes, “there is calculation: the more erratic the path the more eccentric the loops, the more efficient the exposure, the more inevitable the transaction.” (ibid.)

The individual forms are fighting for our attention, while the neoliberal city surveys us all, creates uncertainty and under the

fig. 005 A private security guard stands watch in Granary Square, Kings Cross.

(fig. 005: theguadri nc.otmi/es2017/jul2 / 5/squaers- ngr-yp ivat s ion-public-spa e)

Junkspace or the commodity-form, as Koolhaas writes, now does not only exist within singular buildings and interior spaces. It has escaped from its shiny containers and spilled out on to the streets, creating luxurious plazas and sanitised squares.

Public space has now become a viable commodity in the capital accumulation game, with large swathes of seemingly public parks, thoroughfares and squares actually belonging to and being operated by private corporations who draft up their own laws and restrictions on “acceptable behaviour” and enforce these by means of private security companies. (Shenker, J., 2017) They are not under obligation to make these rules

The “pseudo-public space” map (fig. 002) illustrates the location of 18 “public” sites in the City of London and surrounding boroughs. (Shenker, J., 2017) This quietly growing privatisation of public space in London echoes the once gated communities in Belgravia, Marylebone and Pimlico in the 19th century which were closed to the masses, although public demonstration and protest towards the 20th century ensured that local authorities gained control over these areas and opened them to all. (ibid.) Nowadays however, if the right to protest is not permitted in the rapidly growing number of pseudo-public spaces, (and in fact the right to protest at all is endangered by new authoritarian sections of the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts bill), it could mean that no matter where you are, your democratic right to staging a peaceful protest against privatisation of space is severely oppressed. (Garret, B., 2017) These public places are, in a way, a spatial representation of our freedom in societymany important protests and reformist movements began in parks and squares as they are natural gathering points in the city.

Rights have been fought for in these public gathering spaces, through protest, reform and revolution by countless groups throughout history; Palace Square in St. Petersburg remains associated with the 9

JUNKSPACE, 2000,)

“Intended for the interior, junkspace can easily engulf a whole city in the form of Public Space.™ First, it escapes from its containers/ephemera that needed hot house protection, emerging with surprising robustness, then the outside itself is converted: danger eliminated, the street paved more luxuriously, traffic calmed. Then junkspace spreads, consuming nature like a forest fire in California.”

public, meaning citizens have no way of knowing what they are permitted to do at some of London’s largest and most popular outdoor spaces, and can be removed for holding protests, taking photographs, or simply looking untidy. (ibid.)

This sterilisation of public space is disconsonant with the importance of an “agonistic” public realm that political theorist Hannah Arendt discussed in The Human Condition. In her words, the public was not a peaceful, comfortable place to share only with those with the same views, language and backgrounds. It was a place to appear before others, to judge and be judged from a multitude of perspectives.

(Arendt, H., 1958) These pluralistic public spaces are what Chantal Mouffe describes as necessary to bring about social change in resistance to the hegemony of the “post-political oligarchy”, and in achieving an alternative, non-atomised society.

(Stoane, A., 2021) Following Arendt in agreement, political scientist Marion Iris Young wrote that “a conception of publicity that requires its members to put aside their differences in order to uncover their common good destroys the very meaning of publicity because it aims to turn the many into one.” (Iris Young, M, 2000) This statement emphasizes the importance of individuation to a degree, where individuals with different opinions, views, backgrounds and experiences are considered beneficial to the public realm and the functioning of a democratic society.

( q u ot e : K l h a s , R .

guise of uniting it only fractures us into “brooding consumers”. (ibid.)

October Revolution that brought Lenin and the Bolsheviks to power in 1917, The Place de la Concorde was the site of the student riots in Paris in 1968, and some of the most prolific protests in modern Britain were over Thatcher’s poll tax, where hundreds of thousands of people descended on Trafalgar Square in 1990.

These spaces are not just landmarks or places to meet with others, they are vehicles for social change and public expression. The erosion of these is arguably reflecting an erosion of our rights.

Though some of these groups throughout history may have had opposing views and ambitions, the majority were united in the goal that freedom meant collective control over government. Conversely, over the past few hundred years, freedom has been used by conservatives to protect individualism and to covet the “private enjoyment of one’s life and goods.” (De Dijn, A., 2020) Thus, today the word ‘freedom’ can mean two very different things. When conservatives talk of liberty, usually they believe in the importance of protecting individual property rights to the point of obstructing democracy, whereas when socialists use the term they believe in working towards a democratic, egalitarian society. (ibid.) However, must the individual perpetually be in opposition to the collective?

Sociologist and philosopher Georg Simmel opens his 1903 essay The Metropolis and Mental Life, by stating that the largest issues of modern life stem from “the attempt of the individual to maintain the independence and individuality of his existence against the sovereign powers of society”. However, as per the above conservative definition of freedom, neoliberal theorists maintain that any common body, (with a corresponding set of both public and private, positive and negative rules and restrictions) profoundly undermines individual freedom. (Queiroz, R., 2018) Conversely, Arendt states that freedom is “participation in public affairs or admission to the public realm”, (Arendt, H., 1958) placing emphasis on a collective society as being conducive to a holistic and full life, as she viewed that non-participation in the public realm was akin to the experience of social outcasts

( q u ot e : I r u i n s g , Y M .

Inclusion and Democracy , 2000)

“the public is not a comfortable place of conversation among those who share language, assumptions, and ways of looking at issues.”

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such as slaves, outlaws or barbarians in the Ancient Greek polis. Being deprived of the public realm, or the “people as a sovereign body”, can expose individuals to “despotic power” and violate freedoms, causing political inequality and can lead to what Doctor of Philosophy Regina Queiroz describes as “the utter disappearance of certain citizens”, who live as “stateless or lawless persons”, (Queiroz, R., 2018) echoing Arendt’s analogy of Ancient Greek outcasts. Neoliberalism, “under the veil of full liberty” actually leads to the absolute exclusion of some individuals. (Queiroz, R., 2018) Through this, we uncover a dialectic between the individual and the collective; with Arendt and Iris Young pointing to the importance of individuals and their differences participating within a pluralistic realm, and Simmel stating that a person maintaining individuality is unconducive to the concept of “the people” and society.

This paradox of complete individual liberty (which neoliberalism seeks), and ‘the people’ as a collective has been explored through many architectural projects, however, it can arguably be seen most clearly through the radicals at the dawn of the postmodern era.

In studying the “Radicals”, who deeply politicized architecture, possibly an alternative architecture can exist for our post political age, and therefore architecture can perhaps be a vehicle for the re-politicization of society.

The Radicals and Post-Political Architecture 005

“An architect does not create a city, only an accumulation of objects. It is the inhabitant who ‘invents’ the city”

(fig. 006: frieac.zomt/delay-orn )

In 1956, architect and urban theorist Yona Friedman presented to the tenth International CIAM (Congress of Modern Architecture) a radical form for city building. Growing up during the Second World War, cities, to him, had become adaptable tools of survival, and this seemingly necessary autonomy, mobility and improvisation in structure became his focus during the “feverish culture of postwar modernism” that swept across the globe. (Harris, W., 2016) Spatial City is a unit which can be repeated infinitely, with only the “spatial infrastructure”, the multi-layered structural form, as fixed and determinate.

Columns support the frame at 40-60 metre intervals which house access and network facilities. The result is suspended planes of indeterminate space in both horizontal and fig. 006 Spatial City, 1959, Yona Friedman. vertical directions,

occupied and arranged by the individual using modular units developed in program called the ‘Flatwriter’. (ibid.) This was a sophisticated machine which allowed for self-planning, where the user would input their needs for their living space and the Flatwriter would configure units accordingly. It could issue warnings concerning “projected use patterns”, or whether the site chosen would conflict with other user’s space. (Friedman, Y., 1971) The autonomy afforded over the individual resident of the location, size, design and cost of their living space ‘within a collective public realm’ was decided by primitive AI, removing the architect or urban planner from the equation. Friedman attacked architects at the CIAM conference, declaring that the user, not the architect, should design the internal layout. His ideas championed individual freedom, however there were still boundaries to this radical system of indeterminate spatial selfprogramming, and users had to respect one another’s space. (Harris, W., 2016) The “Radicals” in the post war years were pushing for individual freedom, which ironically became the eventual prevail of the right – individual “liberty”. Self-planning and autonomy are important notions in another prominent conceptual project by an Italian Radical group 15 years later, however Friedman’s quest for expression of individual freedom is contrasted with Archizoom’s critique through their ‘per absurdum’ projection.

No-Stop City, developed by Archizoom between 1970-71, is not a unitary or clearly defined project, but instead multiple iterations of a concept due to different stages of development, research, competition entries and journal publications. The nature of the project as a constellation of ideas can be grouped under No-Stop City, but it is important to recognise the pluralistic nature of the proposals. (Zuddas, F., 2020) Archizoom submitted a “political reference” to the congress Utopia e/o Rivoluzione held in Turin in 1969, which stated their Marxist position in the fierce debate about architecture and politics underway in Italy. Their statement outlined their ideas about architecture being limited to natural lighting and ventilation, income 11

( q u ot e : r F i d m .a ,n crY h p a . o em tr/ g y n a - f r i e d m a n )

Art has long been used to hold a mirror to society. Andy Warhol in the 1960’s brought consumerism culture to the foreground and further popularised using art as social commentary, using everyday items and the theatricality of the celebrity to convey mass production and consumption. In the late 1960’s, architects were beginning to experiment with ‘paper-project’ revisions of the city, labour and capitalism, and how radical architecture could potentially enable alternative societies to form.

(Pearson, L.C., 2019)

and economic conditions which they declared as needing “blown to pieces” and sought to imagine utopia as being “performed only in quantitative terms”.

(Archizoom, 1969, 100) Inspired by Pop Art and the technification of new typologies such as factories, car parks and supermarkets, Archizoom sought to extend the new massproduction culture to subsume the entirety of the built environment. (Capdevilla, P., 2013) Published for the first time in the Casabella magazine in 1970 under the title ‘City, Assembly Line of Social Issues.

Ideology and Theory of the Metropolis’, the project is founded on an extreme extrapolation of Capitalism, pushing it to its ultimate radical form.

( q u ot e : B ar n z i , A .

No-Stop Cityes ay with n

Weak and Diffuse Modernity , 2006)

The image is similar to that of a factory or supermarket, which the group described as “optimal urban structures” [Branzi, A., et al, 2006, 148], existing almost without limit, where human functions are arranged extemporaneously in a uniform free plan made possible by the uniform distribution of networks of information and services.

The project, with its homogeneous isotropic grid, shows landscape elements interrupting the floor slabs - large rock formations and rivers occasionally emerging to remind us of its seemingly limitless extents. (Capdevilla, P., 2013)

“this was a city seen as a conglomerate of habitable parking lots, as a system of typological storages and free residential forests... where the city corresponds to the dimension of the global market and the system of networks spread across the land” Andrea Branzi, founder of the group, described the project as “a liberating architecture, corresponding to mass democracy, devoid of demos and devoid of cratos (people and power), and both centreless and imageless”. [Branzi, A., et al, 2006, 148] Instead of presenting a capitalist future however, I argue that Archizoom inadvertently presented the exact opposite of present-day capitalism. Their description of the project as “centreless and imageless” is at odds with the formdriven individuality of capitalism. As 12

outlined in chapter 004 through Koolhaas’ assertion of the city as individualistic buildings vying for our attention within a chaotic ensemble of disjointed forms, Archizoom in contrast imagined an “imageless” landscape, devoid of centres of capital and commodity form structures.

Nevertheless, the project does propose a future realisation of the demise of capitalism through its absurdity. According to Archizoom, capitalism, when freed of internal resistance, will be catapulted into a highly accelerated state which then prevents the manufacture of new commodities, therefore leaving it without new markets to subjugate. The system of capitalism is so dependent on continuous growth, writes architectural historian Mary Louise Lobsinger, that when the city expands to its global limits and a state of stasis were enacted, “the seeds of failure would be found from within the very mechanisms of capitalism’s success”.

(Lobsinger, M., 2012) Self-planning and autonomous organisation within the super-structure is made possible due to the vast homogeneous grid allowing for various internal elements to be assembled and disassembled at will, with people moulding the space to their needs. Some elements are shown as partition walls, straight or curved, with objects and furniture like tents and chairs spontaneously and temporarily laid out to delineate vague boundaries of programme. As with Spatial City, architecture had been reduced to the bare minimum, a simple background for human processes and functions. Like Warhol, Archizoom sought to point a finger at the world, and ask the viewer to think about it.

Warhol neither denounced consumerism, nor particularly celebrated it. He simply portrayed it through his chosen medium and exhibited it back at society, which Archizoom achieved with ‘No-Stop’. The project was not purely negative, simply a reflection and a future prediction of an irrational system. (Lobsinger, M., 2012) Archizoom’s language was capitalism, as Warhol’s was consumption.

The hegemony of the non-figurative structure and its components was described by Branzi to represent the urban territory as a single surface, crossed by “varying flows of information” that fosters a city as “experiential, rather than formal”. (Branzi, A., 2006) This idea of the city as an experience can be explored further through a concept conceived by the Situationist International, a European social revolutionary collective founded in the late 1950’s. (Wollen, P., 2001)

(images; fig. 007: sock-studic.om2 / 011/04/19/acrhiozm-as ociat -no stp-city ner al- ndsc ap1 es- 970/, fig. 008: Acrhiozm,

fig. 007 No-Stop City interior landscape illustrating temporal elements and mass produced commodities, 1970, Archizoom.

eW ak and Diffuse Modernity , 2006, pg. 76. )

fig. 008 No-Stop City plan and section, 1971, Archizoom.

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The Situationists were characterised by Marxist perspectives on intertwining art and politics, and their central argument of capitalism as a force which diminished people’s lives. (Wollen, P., 2001) Situationist thinking began in Paris in the early 1950’s, when Guy Debord and other members of the Lettrists, a “tiny, postwar neo-dada movement of anti-art intellectuals and students”, (Marcus, G., 2002, 4) dedicated days, weeks and even months of their time to “dérives”. (ibid.)

“Throughout the next decade, the situationists argued that the alienation which in the nineteenth century was rooted in production had, in the twentieth century, become rooted in consumption.

Consumption had come to define happiness and to suppress all other possibilities of freedom and selfhood.”

(quote: Macrus, G. “ The oLngalWk of the Situa onist Iner ation l”, with n “Guy Debodr an the Situa onist Iner atioxns la:dTe Documen”ts, by McDon ug.h, 2002) T

Translated from the French as ‘drifting’, Debord described it in December 1958 in the ‘Internationale Situationniste’, as “a technique of transient passage through varied ambiences”. (Wollen, P., 2001) His theory of the Dérive fixated on the concept of free movement through the city, echoing Benjamin’s work in the 1930’s, where a person could playfully meander through the urban landscape, unregulated and unhindered by the forces of capitalism.

(Stoane, A., 2021) To perform a dérive, one must embark on a spontaneous and unplanned wander through the city, embracing uncertainty and impulse as new discoveries of the urban environment are made.

The concept of the dérive can be extrapolated into a proposition for the Southbank; where much of the existing theatrical waterfront promenade is already an unprescribed space where people flow through, interacting with street performers, vendors and artists in a whimsical landscape. Porosity, continuity and fluidity in the landscape is essential to a dérive, the characteristics of which are further unpicked in the following chapter through the research of a biological theory, 14

mentioned by Branzi, to describe No-Stop City.

Semiospheres 006

Semiotics is defined as “the study of sign processes, which are any activity, conduct, or process that involves signs, where a sign is defined as anything that communicates something, usually called a meaning, to the sign’s interpreter.”

(Prior, P., 2014) While the biosphere is the totality of living organisms and life processes, literary scholar and semiotician Juri Lotman proposed in 1984 that the semiosphere is the totality of interconnected semiotic relations and transfer of information, and without the semiosphere, language, sign systems and other communications cannot exist. The global semiosphere, as a whole, contains levels of interconnected semiospheres, each of them simultaneously existing as both participant in the dialogue and as the space of the dialogue. (Lotman, J., 2005) While the biosphere relates to tangible and three-dimensional material space, Lotman explains, “the space of the semiosphere carries an abstract character”. (Lotman, J., 2005, 207) It can be described as an imaginary or metaphorical space, a national culture, a literary trend or as a single piece of prose, such as Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita. (Noth, W., 2014) This isn’t to say however, that the semiosphere cannot be conceived as a physical space. A semiosphere must have boundary, for the system is only able to engage in dialogic processes if structural identity is established.

(Kotov, K., Kull, K., 2011) In semiotics, this is defined as the outer

limit of a first-person form. In the field of architecture however, semiospheres are often categorised as buildings, such as universities, locations such as distinct enclaves, or even whole cities, as Lotman described St. Petersburg as a semiosphere. (Lotman, J., 2005)

(fig. 009: authosr ’il ustarion)

Through the reading of the Radicals in chapter 005, a biological term was uncovered which influenced ways of conceptualising a new form to combat urban atomisation. Branzi, in ‘For a NonFigurative Architecture’, describes ‘NoStop City’ as a ‘semiosphere’. (Branzi, A., 2006)

Lotman instils the semiosphere with neutrality, characterising it as an inert, entropic absorber of semiotic energy.

Energy is generated outside, which then penetrates the semiosphere, causing “excitation” of the original data, which then “rearranges its constituent elements to give birth to new meanings”. (Mandelker, A., 1994) Functionally, a semiosphere is a thinking system which is able to transmit available information, create new information, and to preserve or reproduce information. (Kotov, K., Kull, K., 2011) In a simple way, the semiosphere connects, creates, and distributes energy (fig. 009).

‘No-Stop City’ was described by Branzi in several publications as a semiosphere, a space of continuous networks and information, where the inhabitants were generating new configurations and “rearranging”, as Lotman states, giving rise to new meanings and forms.

‘Spatial City’ can also be categorised as a semiosphere due to its fluid and porous nature – with the

fig. 009 Author’s interpretation of the semiosphere as a diagram

15

framework penetrated by additional units and constantly creating new forms. The ‘Flatwriter’ was subsequently a microsemiosphere within a semiosphere, accurately embodying Lotman’s definition, as stated previously, by transmitting available information, creating new information and reproducing it.

However, perhaps neither project is a true semiosphere, as Lotman asserts the importance of a clear boundary in order to function. ‘No-Stop’ was characterised as a limitless anti-form, whereas for it to be a true semiosphere, as Branzi described it, its limits would need to be clearly defined.

“One of the most important categories in the semiosphere is that of boundary.

The system is able to engage in dialogic processes only if its structural identity is established.”

(quote,: Kv. ul , K. “Semiospher Is the R lation l Biosph”er[witadhsn To Semiot c Biol gy], 2011.)

The nature of the space seems to emulate the form of microorga nims, or the anatomy of a cell.

With the prescience of the two aforementioned projects, the proposition aims to use the semiosphere as a device to combat the increasing alienation and atomisation of the city, while weaving a balance between people’s individual liberty and a collective body.

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Synthesising a New Southbank 007

Both the Barbican

“An architecture that is less composite and more enzymatic, meaning an architecture capable of inserting itself in the processes of the territory’s transformation”

Weak and Diffuse Modernity , 2006)

fig. 010 “Enzymatic” No-Stop City diagram by Archizoom.

A catalogue of organs was compiled, and from this biological reading of Southbank as a living entity, new ideas began to emerge. Pieces of blunt strata on the periphery of Southbank’s main body, once integral in a vision for a continuous landscape, lie like severed limbs, awkward and problematic. These extremities have the potential to regenerate however, synthesising a continuation of the strata towards Jubilee Park and the London Eye.

No-Stop City es ay with n

The studio’s research began by visiting two such sites within London – The Barbican Estate and the Southbank Arts Centre, which were then utilised to highlight a promenade through the city, and a set of maps were produced to portray a series of dramaturgical elements along the route, from auditoria to urban foyers, landmarks to oligarchic symbols of investment. The promenade identified between these two nodes sparked an individual study into urban continuity and how Southbank’s fluid landscape might extend.

An analytical reading of ‘objects within foyers’ was applied to Southbank’s theatrical buildings, where event spaces were understood as organs, and the internal and external strata of foyers that surround them were understood as connective tissue.

Weak and Diffuse Modernity , 2006, pg. 75, quote: Barnzi,

Today’s built environment, on which capitalism imprints, is described by Michel Foucault as “messy, ill constructed, and jumbled”, (Foucault, M., 1986) and by Koolhaas as “permanently disjointed”.

(Koolhaas, R., 2000) The optimistic age of the welfare state in Britain however produced architecture which sought to connect people and provide high quality public space.

and Southbank were conceptualised and built during the post-war era of public investment, where their forms were conceived not simply as autonomous buildings separated by streets, but as spaces that might be considered as ‘foyers’.

(fig. 010: Acrhiozm,

Spectacle, in the architectural sphere, is understood as an evolving term; continuing on the vein of semiotics, etymologising it from Old French ‘to look’ suggests notions of public, something appearing in the public eye as entertaining or of interest, but towards the end of the 20th century, the word began to be associated with Debord and the Situationists as a diagnosis of society under capitalism. The studio’s focus is directed towards reclaiming notions of glamour and spectacle from the “deterministic commodity-form” (Stoane, A., 2021), the increase of which furthers the fragmentation of our urban landscapes.

Southbank’s landscape yearns to extend and grow infinitely along the Thames riverbank and beyond, however this is not realistically possible, and it must stop eventually. In order for Southbank to realise its fully evolved potential and to become a true pluralistic semiosphere, it needs to be stopped and a clear boundary must be defined, similar to the way that Pier Vittorio Aureli’s project ‘Stop City’ (fig.

011) forms a resistance to the surrounding forces of urbanisation. (Lucarelli, F., 2011) 17

The project identified areas of growth in order to improve both porosity and continuity, while delineating the extents of the landscape through reclamation and addition of new forms and programmes.

Southbank is synthesised into an urban semiosphere, its boundary clearly delineated but remaining penetrable. (fig.

00X) It is a dramaturgical enclave within the city, a constellation of non-buildings and fluid thresholds within a city of buildings and streets.

The proposed urban scale plan synthesises an extension of the connective tissue and captures several new organs identified as missing from the existing landscape; an art school, a theatre school and a residential strata. The existing IBM building to the north of the Southbank Centre is to be reclaimed and deep retrofitted as housing, bookended in the south by a new housing stratum adjacent to the London Eye. These will provide housing for transient populations of actors, artists and students working and studying in the enclave, and this integration of a residential element combats the capital investment driven displacement of residents from more lucrative areas discussed in chapter 004.

One ‘organ’ was developed in detail, and during the development process, the previous reading of ‘organs and tissue’ was used again to analyse normative art schools. It showed that art is hermetic, with many functions enclosed and hidden in

18

the main body as organs when they could function better as connective tissue. Studios should no longer be isolated rooms, but instead a vast, shared space where students can work collaboratively and cross-discipline.

A studio space was conceptualised based on the needs of an individual, then extrapolated to become an interconnected network of spaces in which a collective can operate. The structure of the proposition, a concrete waffle slab, reflects the concept of The Collective fig. 011 ‘Stop City’ by Dogma, 2007. (Pier Vittorio Individual; singular cells Aureli and Martino Tattara) combined into one unit, dependent on every cell for its integrity and performance.

Each three by three waffle slab ‘unit’ is occupied by two students, each with their own desk, access to power outlets suspended from services above, ventilation and lighting. Sliding partitions operate on runners on the underside of each unit’s boundary, compartmentalising spaces as and when students need them, providing pin up spaces, acoustic shelter and privacy.

Students have the autonomy to move their

(fig. 011: sock-studic.o m2 / 011/07/10/stop-citybdogma-2007-08/)

The Southbank Art School’s studio space acts as a micro-semiosphere within a macro-semiosphere. Art is no longer hermetic and compartmentalised; it flows freely throughout the disciplines within the open plan space. It can be observed by the public as a form of performance and is accessible to them, at the discretion and under the control of the student collective, by the turn of a wheel. Within the studio, varying degrees of public and private are afforded by the internal pivoting doors which further separate the space as required. The student collective (or artist collective during the summer months) have democratic control over when and for how long the public is permitted to engage with the space and their work.

the proliferation of pseudo-public spaces in London, dictating their behaviour.

People can exercise their right to selfexpression, free speech, debate and protest on a neutral platform, irrigated with all the potential energies emanating from its contiguous organs.

Southbank, with the addition of new organs and an extension of its connective tissue, now operates as a fully realised semiosphere. Penetrated by students, actors, artists and the public, it creates a stage which allows new ideas to form through spaces unhindered by capital forces.

The new connective tissue creates a genuinely public space where people are free from hidden private laws, as found in fig. 012 The New Southbank (nts)

19

(fig. 012: authosr ’il ustarion)

desks anywhere in studio and configure layouts with the partitions to suit their needs as frequently as they desire. The result is a highly flexible, self-planned space which allows for individuals to chose where and with who they want to work.

(fig. 013: authosr ’il ustarion)

fig. 013 Pluralistic public foyer.

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(fig. 014: authosr ’il ustarion)

fig. 014 Collaborative, autonomous studio space.

21

(fig. 015: authosr ’il ustarion)

fig. 015 Performing public interaction (nts).

22

(fig. 016: authosr ’il ustarion)

fig. 016 Porous and penetrable thresholds in a fluid landscape.

23

(fig. 017: authosr ’il ustarion)

fig. 017 Southbank Art School building as a micro-semiosphere, producing and communicating information.

24

25

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Acknowledgements -

I would like to thank Rob, Beth and Ali from the MakeLab for all their help and patience over the years, Lyle and team in the workshop, who so kindly made my plinths this year, the ladies in the art shop for always having time for a friendly chat and all of my tutors for their hard work and dedication throughout my time at the school. I’m especially grateful to Andy who has been so committed to all of us and has often gone above and beyond to help during the past two years.

I’d like to thank my amazing parents and sister for their love and support throughout this journey. I couldn’t have done it without them.

Lastly, I’d like to thank Mairi, for everything.

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The Glamour Unit Year 5 University of Dundee Tutor: Andy Stoane 2021/22