MILLIØNS MIT exhibition pamphlet

MILLIØNS —

New Massings for New Masses Collectivity After Orthography MIT Keller Gallery & MIT Architecture On View 05/15 — 08/31 Opening Reception, 05/15 Thursday, 6:30pm

New Massings for New Masses Collectivity After Orthography — There once was an architectural dream

We expend our energy pushing things

any architect who dared wander into its

a kind of technical substrate for our in-

called Housing, which demanded from

dream-shadow a complete rejection of

existing culture. Housing was, during its early and most radical period, the first

legitimate architectural counterculture.

It was also a possible path towards career suicide.

Housing is no longer possible—in

part because all of the historical and

socio-political conditions that made it a sensible concept have been swept away: Socialism and Liberalism have given

way to Neoliberalism; the State has been swallowed by the Market; sociality has

dissolved into interactivity; the city has

been erased by urbanism; etc. This much we know.

More importantly, however, for our pur-

poses: the architectural spirit of experimen-

across surfaces. Those surfaces constitute tuition—for how we think about our objects and their relation to our world. We

once imagined architectural possibilities by pushing ink and graphite across me-

chanical surfaces. We called that process “orthographic drawing.” We now push

buttons and keys on electronic surfaces to produce “models.” These models do

not contain drawings, but rather simulations of all possible drawings, because

“cutting” through an electro-topological model—“making 2D”— bears no relation to the task of hand-mechanically drawing an orthographic plan. The

pushing of buttons is neither better nor worse than orthographic drawing, but

despite all visual similarities the two are separated by a techno-epistemic chasm that cannot be crossed.

tation that motivated Housing has ceased to

Just like writing, architectural orthogra-

surface from which it emerged—the or-

system of geometric marks that made

exist because the technical-representational thographic architectural drawing—has disappeared. Architecture has not yet

discovered ways of experimenting with collective forms of life within its new technical regimes.

phy was a hand-mechanical, rule-bound possible certain historical ways of think-

ing. History and orthography are inseparable not merely because texts and lines allowed for the recording and archiving of events, but more profoundly because

the capacity for orthographic recording

“instantaneously” relates an electrical

repetitious organizations were even more

talized around the concept of collective

sensibility in which ideas and dreams

possible futures (or at least as many as

logic thinks that efficient repetition is

available to formal experimentation

and archiving gave birth to an entire

about the future were bound to a graphic description of the past (

: -graphia:

scratch, carve, draw, write). Orthography constantly subjected the present

to the past, exposing it to lost ways of

living and thinking. It also presented the present with an open choice between continuity or revolution.

The technical substrate of orthographic

reasoning has now disappeared from the world, and cannot be brought back as

anything other than historical reenact-

representation of the present (data) to all can be counted and computed). Ortho-

graphic time was historical; it enmeshed architectural reasoning in a technics of

historical precedent. Real time is statisti-

The “Real Time” analysis of all possible future states is a very different imaginative

framework than orthography, for which

“thinking” meant using the past to make sense of the future.

It would be senseless to consider one

boring that most schools of architecture

of the collective, the first and most

legitimize architectural objects, architectural culture now uses the imagery and language of Real Time data to justify its activities: performance, efficiency, fidelity, etc.

our working surfaces are, at pres-

concerns—“managerial” concerns—that canalize and smooth-over architectural experimentation in favor of prediction

and control. Management is efficient and effective, but we should wonder whether those twinned principles constitute a sufficient platform for imagining the

possible resonances between architecture and lived life.

simulating housing has become so

have dropped it from their instructional curriculum. +++ Lost in the yawning academic gap

between affective fabrications and territorial ambitions, the lonely architec-

tural object has lost all appeal. No one believes any longer in the idea that

architecture might be enough; that it

might contain within itself the capac-

was concerned to always relate pres-

ent and future to the past, Real Time

aggregation were laborious and timely operations; step-wise deviations from

ity. From that stage forward, all efforts

grind towards the articulation of those

initial carvings and divisions, which are, in a sense, proto-architectural gestures,

containing and constraining architec-

tural possibilities without determining specificities.

cultural speculations on possible forms

word.

moment—before diagrams or “discipli-

Orthographic repetition and spatial

themselves on an imagined multiplic-

found in the reductive precision of the

nonetheless contains a potency not

stacking, distribution, superimposi-

time. Unlike Historical Time, which

formal metastrategies begin to impose

What emerged at the outset of the

language and thought by describing

tion, and difference-within-repetition.

the technics of massing, where spatial and

its “agency,” the architectural object

We would like to express a somber

differences between two regimes of

decisive architectural gestures involve

+++

despite its inability to discursively justify

Housing was a delicate dream of

novel techniques concerning circulation,

“architectural collectivity.” At the scale

ity to stimulate experimental lives; that,

kind of time “better” than another:

the aim is always to orient one’s own

ferently, together.

logic of historical precedent was used to

in the technics of data. If previously the

ent, coalescing around a narrow set of

costs, energy consumption metrics, etc.

architectural reasoning?).

an intense political desire to live life dif-

We began with the vague notion of

scenarios; not just formal possibilities, tions, construction and maintenance

ton constitutes a fundamental rupture in

seemingly aligned, however briefly, with

At this point, the exercise of electro-

Under the new pressures of Real Time,

but increasingly also tectonic specifica-

Housing (can we say that the “copy” but-

life, and when the technical possibilities

cal; it enmeshes architectural reasoning

ment. Post-orthographic models contain an analysis of all possible future object-

painstaking undertakings. Managerial

nostalgia for a long-forgotten historical narity;” before autonomy or “criticality;” before the culture of popularity prizes

and Young Architect Parties—when a

small architectural counterculture crys-

twentieth century as protracted counterof life has devolved into a faux-architectural form of financial speculation

(condos, townhouses, apartments): ex-

truded spreadhseets for co-isolating the

Creative Class. Sincere dreams of living with and for one another have been de-

voured and regurgitated by an ongoing

project towards “spacious open-concept layouts,” with “plenty of storage,” and

“an array of modern, stylish, high-quality

The questions today: how can nonmodern

countertops.”

of Orthography? What would a post-

finishes for everything from flooring to

Living Together: Haven’t we already

tried that? Didn’t those naïve experi-

ments dissolve into either Stalinism or Psilocybin? Only by telling ourselves

different stories about modernity will we find release from its orbit. What if we

collectives be drawn together after the Age

orthographic material philosophy of collectivity even look like? And if one were able to somehow propose legitimately

new architectural collectives—even presently impossible ones—would anyone want to live in them?

were only able to dream of living togeth-

To the skeptics, for whom those ques-

What if Housing was once possible only

us another story, over which irony or

er because we had been drawn together? because architecture had gradually dis-

covered, within its own (non-discursive) orthographics, an immense platform

for drawing things together—materials, bodies, politics, concepts, friendships,

desires, reveries —as architectural objects?

Not as “theses” or “arguments,” but as object manifestos.

Housing and Drawing: two long, mod-

ern shadows whose dark spaces conceals the fact that each no longer exists. Were they in fact the same shadowed surface, illuminated by a single dying light

that modernity had twisted back upon itself, so as to appear two-sided? If so, architectural reasoning must come to

terms with a reality in which technics

and politics are simply two names given to the very same primal impulse: to live together rather than merely survive on one’s own.

tions hold no weight, we say fine, tell

anachronism do not hang like a luminous haze…

The Keller Gallery —

The Keller Gallery was established in the

Located in MIT Building 7, Room 408,

materials and labor in kind from Shawn

through Saturday from 9 to 6. Exhibi-

fall of 2011 with a generous donation of Keller, principal with C.W. Keller &

Associates. At about 200 square feet, the gallery shows a steady stream of faculty, student and experimental work, including work from alumni and friends.

MILLIØNS —

it is free and open to the public Monday tions are coordinated by Irene Hwang.

For more information on the current

exhibit or for general inquiries, send an email to kellergallery@mit.edu. Mailer design by Kyle Barker.

Events —

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05/05, 6:00

05/15, All Day

05/22, 1:30

Sumayah Al-Solaiman

Options Reviews

Final Review

MILLIØNS is a Los Angeles-based design practice with projects in

AKPIA Lecture

MIT Architecture

Arch 4.115

May and Zeina Koreitem.

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05/07, 6:30

05/16, All Day

05/23, 1:30

Team: Elliott Sturtevant, Ehran Holm, Victoria Walker, Luke Duross,

Hiroto Kobayashi

Thesis Presentations

Final Review

MIT Special Lecture

SMArchS, MArch, BSA

Thesis Prep (MArch)

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05/12, 12:30

05/19, All Day

Please visit www.sap.

Sinead C. MacNamara

Final Reviews

mit.edu/news_events

BT Special Lecture

ACT

for descriptions,

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05/13, All Day

05/20, 1:30

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Options Reviews

Final Review

www.millionsofmovingparts.org

MIT Architecture

Arch 4.111

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05/14, All Day

05/21, 1:30

Scan QR Code for more information

Core 2 Reviews

Final Review

about the work in this exhibtion.

MIT Architecture

Arch 4.113

California, New York and Beirut. MILLIØNS is directed by John

Peter Osborne and Venessa Heddle.

Thanks to Nader Tehrani and the MIT Department of Architecture.

Special thanks to Irene Hwang, Michael Smith, Ultan Byrne, and

Nicholas Hoban. We remain grateful for the generous and continued support of Richard Sommer, and the John H. Daniels Faculty of

Architecture, Landscape, and Design at the University of Toronto

location, and details.

Event information correct at time of printing.

77 Massachusetts Ave / Cambridge, MA 02139

The Keller Gallery / Building 7, Room 408

MIT Department of Architecture

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