Becoming Architectural Practice

BECOMING ARCHITECTURAL PRACTICE Addressing Architecture’s Crisis of Relevance through a Rhizomatic Practice Architectural Theory Thesis AR2AT030 Final Thesis - June Submission William Priestley 4566521 Tutor: Stavros Kousoulas

1 A., Exhibition 'Site Under Construction' curated by Sima, M Trestian, A., Sabau, R., Timis, S., and Iancu, Romanian Pavilion at the 14th International Architecture Exhibition ‘la Biennale di Venezia’

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ABSTRACT

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INTRODUCTION

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REALMS OF ARCHITECTURE

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ARCHITECTURE’S RETREAT THE LIMITS OF MAJOR ARCHITECTURE ARCHITECTURE’S LIBERATION FROM THE BUILDING ARCHITECTURE’S TERRAIN VAGUE

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WAYS FORWARD: DE(RE)TERRITORIALISING ARCHITECTURE

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PRACTICE: MINOR ARCHITECTURE THE COMMONS: REVISING THE CLIENT/ARCHITECT RELATIONSHIP EDUCATION: RETHINKING THE ARCHITECTURAL STUDENT

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CONCLUDING TOWARDS A RHIZOMATIC ARCHITECTURE

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GILLANT AND ARCHITECTURAL ARCHIPELAGOS BIBLIOGRAPHY

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Acknowledgements

I would firstly like to thank Stavros Kousoulas for his advice in conducting this thesis and through helping guide me untangle (or embrace the entanglement) of Deleuzian thought.

I would also like to thank my family for their remote support from Australia and finally to Elleke Hageman for her incisive reviews of my drafts and consummate ability to identify areas of improvement and provide constructive criticism.

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Abstract The architectural discipline is experiencing an impotence of effect that has been described as a “crisis of relevance” (Hyde, Future Practice, pg.17). This crisis challenges the traditional notions of the architect and the place we presently occupy within society. This is not a new problem to our discipline but it is one that has become more apparent as the architecture’s presence in the city has become increasingly less prominent and the discourse of our profession more insular.

Criticism extends beyond practitioners and theorists from within the discipline to include politicians, public figures, even royalty as demonstrated in Prince Charles’ 1984 address to the RIBA suggesting architecture’s engagement in social, cultural and political arenas is of paramount importance.

The relevance of addressing this issue is self-evident as it calls into question the relevance of the very discipline of architecture. This is a deeply concerning issue, however at its heart it is intrinsically optimistic, for despite the spectacular failures of socially motivated urban projects through the mid 20th century, considerable potential does exist within the skill sets of architects to solve genuinely meaningful and significant problems. The critical issue relates to the manner and methodology of our intervention. As Bruce Mau states “ [Architects] have the capacity to make things compelling; what should we use that for?” (Mau in Hyde, pg.34).

Accepting that the act of building in a globalised world can never be divorced from its environmental, social and cultural impacts it is no longer tenable for architecture to claim its post-modern ‘autonomy of form’. What is clear though, is that architecture cannot return to previous modernist tropes where it did engage in the social, political and cultural.

It is hypothesised that the notion of the architect as the singular actor within built environment and design as their sole domain is an increasingly obsolete archetype – a shrinking ice-cap surrounded by other territories in which architecture is operating and being operated by other users. This thesis seeks to focus on what new ‘bodies’

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both inside and outside the present ‘territory’ of architecture can take the discipline forward to a position of increased relevance. This research will thus help identify new potential models for architectural practice, education and public discourse as well as de-territorialise the existing concept of architecture allowing architecture “to go where it is needed rather than waiting to be invited to act.” (De Graeff in Hyde, pg.59) Three key questions will be asked, being: •

Where has the major architectural discourse positioned us in the contemporary world?

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How might architecture reintroduce itself into prior fields of enquiry?

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How can the ‘traditional’ architectural practice and education evolve?

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What could a rhizomatic practicing of architecture do?

This thesis seeks to map these future potentials through a Deleuzian perspective, exploring notions of, the striated and the smooth, the major/minor and the rhizomatic as they relate to architectural practice. In doing so, this thesis will begin to outline the present arenas of architectural practice, education and presence in public discourse.

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Introduction “Empty, abandoned space…which I will denote by the French expression terrain vague, assumes the status of fascination, the most solvent sign with which to indicate what cities are and what our experience of them is…the aesthetic and ethical problems that they pose embrace the problematics of contemporary social life. What is to be done with these enormous voids, with their imprecise limits and vague definition?"

Ignasi de Sola-Morales, Terrain Vague, 1995

Sola Morales talks here of a city’s ‘gaps’, its abandoned territories. He could easily be speaking about the state of contemporary architectural practice. Architecture has been variously described as being in a “crisis of relevance” (Hyde, Future Practice, pg.17), its hermetic withdrawal to formal narcissism lambasted as “a thin skin increasingly stretched tighter and tighter of a skeleton of floor plates and programs driven by pragmatism (Pawley, Theory & Design in the 2nd Machine Age, pg.141).

Simultaneously, pre-eminent architectural critics have come to sobering conclusions of the architectural profession’s reduced influence in the contemporary world acknowledging “90% of what will be built in 20 years is already built.” (Frampton in Allan, Landform Buildings, pg.220). It appears that all we can see across the landscape of the architectural discipline are voids – a ‘terrain vague’ of arenas in which architects ‘should’ be present but aren’t. To our chagrin, we look on as forces of global capital and labour, instead of architects, raise the cities of the 21st century.

Yet Sola Morales’ terrain vague is far from a wasteland. Rather it is a Deleuzian space pregnant with multiplicities, an immanent realm of becoming. To distort Sola Morales’ words - what is to be done within the enormous voids of architectural practice? Reframing the architectural ‘crisis’ within a context of latent opportunity we should instead begin to be thinking ‘where to from here?’ to question and be optimistic about the opportunities the ‘imprecise limits’ and ‘vague definitions’ that the landscape we practice in possesses for the future forms and formats of architectural involvement.

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What begins to be revealed instead is a field of architectural practice full of such potentials, with new forms of architectural practice, vastly different from the present paradigm, involving skills outside the conventional trope of ‘architect’ which present as viable ways in which architecture can infiltrate once again into the previously abandoned fields of social, cultural and political relevance.

The image of a more multidisciplinary form of architect has been expressed for some decades. Buckminster Fuller, in 1963, describes the architect as a “synthesis of artist, inventor, mechanic, objective economist and evolutionary strategist.” (Zung (ed), , pg.48). Colin Rowe and Ireneè Scalbert both separately highlight a particular skillset of multidisciplinary opportunism in the ‘bricoleur’, whilst Cedric Price’s famous elucidation that “the answer to an architectural problem may not be a building”, all speak to a definition of the architect and architecture itself as an intrinsically multidisciplinary practice and as a legitimate agent of change.

If we are to believe these perspectives, the next and more complex question that arises, is ‘how?’ realizing that we are a profession with a unique set of skills that have the power to be ‘compelling’ (Mau in Hyde, Future Practice, pg.34). The intention of this thesis is to explore this question and in doing so, begin to illuminate what models of architectural practice, education and public discourse might arise in the current mileu to allow architecture to navigate towards new (or old) grounds of relevance.

The thesis is broken into two chapters: the first, seeking to outline and explain the trajectory architecture has taken since the seminal ‘end’ of Modernism. It posits that the vacation of architecture from many fields of social, cultural and political involvement it previously occupied has bereft it of the complex interrelationships that underpinned its agency. It is not suggested that architecture should adopt a retrograde position however, seeking to return to the paternalistic structures of high Modernism.

Rather it highlights an increasing marginalization of the architectural office and atrophying of the industry into exclusive celebritism. The chapter claims that the structures of power that form the dominant architectural paradigms (major architecture) are comprised of remarkably little ‘architecture’. Instead architecture’s

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‘will to form’ is now driven by the infinitely complex and ‘smooth’ forces of global capital, labour, regulation and geopolitics. The chapter concludes, that this realisation is an exciting proposition for architecture’s future practice. Even the sacred phylactery of architectural form, the building, has become contested ground, architecture desperately clawing to defend its territory. Yet this forced eviction deterritorialises architecture from the building, liberating it from its formal obsessions and begins to suggest the qualities of Deleuze’s ‘body without organs’. It invites an inversion of Koolhaas’ famous statement ‘fuck context’ to ‘fuck buildings’, allowing the rise of a multitude of minor architectures.

The second chapter concerns itself with identifying the characteristics and behaviours of minor architectures and how they are inherently important in catalyzing the redefinition and transformation of the presently stagnating major architecture. It is important to understand that the relationship between the major and the minor is not an oppositional binary despite being ‘opposite’. This is made clear by Deleuze and Guattari in a Thousand Plateaus (TP) that “what interests us in operations of striation and smoothing are precisely the passages or combinations” (TP, pg.500). Elemental’s Quinta Monroy (Chile), Nightingale Housing’s ‘The Commons’ (Australia) are examined and deconstructed as examples of architectural practices redefining their roles through actions and interactions in realms seen to be outside or transgressive of the major architecture. Positioning practice at one end, architectural education is examined, proposing how the teaching and conceptualization of architectural learning might be restructured to promote minor architectural thought, questioning the assumptions that underpin the image of the ‘architectural genius’ and the limitations of traditional architectural tools. Using the example of London AA’s Unknown Field Division, a minor architectural education suggests a highly fluid trans-disciplinary architect whose medium of expression shifts as necessary.

Finally, drawing these discussions together, the thesis broaches the notion of a rhizomatic architectural practice that minor architecture presents. Referencing the haptic and the archipellic thinking of Gillante, a theoretical map is constructed, evolving Kalliali & Park’s “New Architect’s Atlas’ to present a spatial diagram of future architectural practice.

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Realms of Architecture Architecture’s Retreat

A lot of unassailable assumptions and seemingly ‘known truths’ about society, and consequently architecture, have been torn down since the various deaths of modernist thought. The death of the author (Roland Barthes), the death of history (Fukuyama) and the death of Modern architecture (Pruitt-Igoe) are but a few in a long list of seeming casualties. As Ole Bouman succinctly describes “we attended a lot of funerals” in the formative throes of the post-modern era (Archis, The New Autonomy of Architecture, website). A lot of questions remain however over what rises from the ashes of so many deceased arenas.

The rejection of Modernism is a thoroughly well documented aspect of architectural history1. The shortcomings of a blinkered perspective of an objective ‘good’ that sought to place architecture as a transcendental force, able to influence, inform and in some forms, even compel, social, cultural and technological advancement resulted in the very public failures of mass housing such as the Smithson’s Robin Hood Gardens and Goldfinger’s Balfron Tower. Yet whilst the notions of perspectives such as Le Corbusier’s ‘city as machine’ and Ebenezar Howard’s ‘garden cities’ have an underpinning tone of paternalism and hubris, they were nevertheless “conceived with progressive-minded intentions” (Pasnik, Grimley & Kubo, pg. 7) by some of the world’s most influential designers, including Marcel Breuer, I. M. Pei and Josep Lluís Sert. Hydroelectric power and equal schooling for both genders were proposed under Tony Garnier’s 1917 plan of ‘Le Citte Industriale’ (Frampton, pg. 313). Frank Lloyd Wright’s Broadacre City is openly founded on ‘inherent’ rights to man and notions of democracy, including private land ownership and social credit (Wright in Architectural Record, pg.344). In this sense, architecture was at the forefront of proposing new ways of ‘doing’, aware of its intersections with many complex social, political and economic forces and actively involved in the ‘becoming’ of a new era.

This was halted however, by our growing awareness, that our architectural projects of heroic ideals had instead become the facilitators of social poverty, crime and

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See Frampton, Pawley and Jencks amongst many others for a thorough analysis of the rise and rejection of Modernism through to post-modernity within architecture.

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disenfranchisement. It prompted architecture to vacate the field of cultural endeavour with “the 1980s and 1990s [seeing] architects sheepishly retreat to the self-imposed exile of the drawing board.” (Hyde, pg.18) Yet over time, our withdrawal from this architectural hinterland to an increasingly hermetic pursuit of form finding has drawn its own litany of steady criticism.

This withdrawal was occurring prior to Modernism’s official ‘death’ with Josep Sert remarking in 1960 that “a divertimento mood seems to be lacking in architecture today. The majority of buildings we see around us are a result of careful and factual analysis.” (pg.173) This “sheer pragmatism” is echoed later in 2007 by Bouleman as editor of Volume Magazine who describes a profession plagued by ’architecturearchitecture’, architecture which first and foremost wants to be a statement about architecture. “ (www.volume.org, The New Autonomy of Architecture) Through concerning itself only with itself, architecture has increasingly become a victim of its own exclusivity, confining itself to an elite or luxury position in order to retain a sense of value whilst marginalizing its relevance.

As a result, the skyscrapers, shopping malls, highways, slums and industrial business parks of our megacities are, and will continue to be, less symbols of architectural innovation and progress than the physical manifestation of global forces of capital, labour and politics. Tellingly, Guattari describes a contemporary urban landscapes where even the colossal identities of Hausmann and Le Corbusier would be usurped by a countless army of politicians, technocrats and engineers (Architectural Enunciation trans. in Interstices, pg.119). More recently this is affirmed by Todd Reisz of Yale University in Rory Hyde’s book Future Practice that the economist is now a more vital figure in shaping the cities of the 21st century than the architect (Reisz in Hyde, pg.160).

Any vestige of the architect as ‘master builder’ is null when the palimpsest-like nature of the city defies authorship. Martin Pawley’s grim depiction of a thin skin of architecture dressing up a building formed by other purely pragmatic forces is also supported by Hans Ibeling’s 1998 essay ‘Supermodernism’ which articulates the growing prominence of an abstract neutralized architecture, a neo-International Style

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on the wings of globalization (pg.88). These accounts describe an architecture distinctly passive in nature, “devoid of any representative power to materialize true value” (Bouman, The New Autonomy of Architecture).

The Limits of Major Architecture “Around the world, followers of architecture with a capital A have focused so much of their attention on formal experiments, as if aesthetics and social activism, twin Modernist concerns, were mutually exclusive.”

Kimmelmann, Michael “A City Rises, Along With Its Hopes” in New York Times May 18 2012

The Deleuzian concepts of the major and the minor are particularly useful in mapping the dominant architectural paradigms of contemporary practice, the capital ‘A’ architecture, that Kimmelman refers to. In doing so, we will begin to lay the ground for where alternative forms of architectural practice (minor architectures) can manifest.

Jennifer Bloomer & Jill Stoner have both previously translated the notions of the major and minor to the architectural in their respective books “Architecture and the Text: The (S)crypts of Joyce and Piranesi” and “Toward a Minor Architecture”. Both espouse an evolution of architecture through a ‘criticism from within’ and an understanding of the power structures in which architecture complicitly acts both consciously and unconsciously. These texts focus primarily on Deleuze’s points surrounding a major and minor literature, Stoner’s particular interpretation remaining rooted quite literally, in the passages of 20th century fiction2. Similarly, whilst Stoner’s observation that “powerful forces arise in response to vacancy” (pg.2) is a pertinent one, that aligns with conceptualizing major architecture as positioned within a ‘terrain vague’ awaiting repopulation, it’s focus remains distinctly spatial. Examples of the reappropriation of ornate theatres and car parks (Ibid, op cit.) continue the major architectural syntax of internal-external and remain inherently related to the building. In contemplating a future architectural practice, this thesis seeks to query the necessity of that link to the building and hence seeks to adopt a more holistic

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conception of the notion of ‘minor architecture’. Noting Stoner’s own proposition that “there can be no official language of architecture” (italics original, Ibid pg.13), this thesis seeks to utilise a number of Deleuze’s & Guattari’s writings spanning the royal and nomad sciences, the oscillating tensions between the axiomatic (major) and the problematic (minor) and smooth and striated space.

Notiwthstanding this Stoner and Bloomer’s work remain highly relevant in helping enunciate the characteristics of major and minor architectures. “As much as any art, [architecture] relies on languages of masters for momentum.” (Ibid, pg.1, italics original). This is nowhere more evident than in the increasing infiltration of celebritism into the realm of architecture; the culture of the ‘star-chitect’. The feting of individual personalities such as REM Koolhaas, Renzo Piano, Norman Foster, Frank Gehry, Moshe Safdie, Jeanne Gang and the late Zaha Hadid have had the detrimental effect of further crystallizing architecture and architectural practice as an upper echelon of (primarily aged white male) elite exclusivity.3 The actions of these prominent figures increasingly stratify territories of inquiry and have a defining role in determining what is and isn’t architecture. When Zaha Hadid became embroiled in matters of worker welfare in Qatar, stating “I cannot do anything about it because I have no power to do anything about it” (BBC Radio 24/09/2015), her comments unavoidably reinforced the prevailing tendency of major architecture to define and striate itself in order to reinforce its existing power structures.

This reduction of architecture and consolidation of its boundaries heightens the importance of authorship in defining architecture. Authorship plays a central role within the major architecture becoming a characteristic equal in importance to the architecture itself. “There is an obsession with authorship, to the point that it breaks down the potential of an architectural or urban plan” (Reisz in Hyde, pg.158). In this condition, where the ‘who’ becomes of greater importance as the ‘why’, architecture is diminished to the status of vehicle: deployed rather than designed it becomes inherently reactive rather than proactive. Utilised to meet the needs (rather than

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The void left by the sad passing of Zaha Hadid, the highest profile female (and non-white) architect in recent times, only highlights how singular and thin the veneer of gender equality and racial equality at the top of architecture actually is. Few female architects approach the level of peer in this regard, Jeanne Gang being a notable example.

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desires) of development industries or address regulation and zoning codes. As Bouman states “Architecture, whether designed by agents in the real estate market or the small elite of star architects, is giving up its utopian impulse, only to become a modest player among many in the average building process.”(The Autonomy of Architecture) The tools of major architecture are also a structure of control, the stagnation of architectural expression through the plan, elevation and section inhibiting the articulation of an architecture other than itself. These three key figures have resulted in a fundamental change in the role of the architect from ‘master builder’ to ‘consultant’ as a specialist within a larger production cycle, the act of drawing and representation replacing the immanent experience of the Gothic builder (Sheil, pg.7).

Only in more recent times, has technology begun to see architects begin to revisit the role of maker.

An example of the limits of major architectural tools to engage in issues outside its conventional boundaries lies in the recent controversy surrounding the ‘Building the Border Wall?’ design competition established by the Third Mind Foundation. First appearing on the popular architectural website, ArchDaily, the competition received broad criticism including calls for it to be boycotted for its perceived support for a structure that promoted racial and cultural division (Hong, www.newrepublic.com).

The competition and the nature of the conversation that surrounds it reveals the clumsiness major architecture exhibits when it inevitably comes into contact with socio-political realms it once retreated from. Firstly, the emphatic assurances of ‘political neutrality’ from the competition organisers are parlous in the face of one of the most divisive campaign proposals of the 2016 U.S. presidential nominations. It displays a bi-polar condition of major architecture which displays the torturous process by which major architecture seeks to be involved in the relevant discussions of the day, whilst simultaneously seeking to remain autonomous from the ‘messy’ and ‘non-architectural’ realms of socio-cultural and political tensions the architectural object will necessarily embody and enforce. This appearance of autonomy will unavoidably unravel in the process of the design competition, the notion of a jury, and a competition winner, necessarily requiring a values judgement to be made at some

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point. Secondly, is how the design competition is presented as the only ‘theoretical’ format through which architectural practice can be involved in the discussion. I utilise the term form deliberately here because the design competition privileges the form and image, contriving the problem to the building (or rather wall). This contrivance takes it dangerously close to the self-assured modernist notions that design can ‘solve’ anything. The troubling conclusion to this is succinctly put by the director of the New Mexico Regional Center for Border Rights, Vicki Gaubeca “Why improve on a bad idea? With all the accoutrements that you want to put on that wall, it’s still a wall, and it’s not a bridge” (Hong, The Problem with Designing Trump’s Border Wall, www.thenewrepublic.com). The medium of the design competition plays into this, the notion of a jury and a winner unavoidably requiring a values judgement to be made at some point.

Finally, the discussion surrounding the competition represents a polarized binary, the boundaries of major architecture allowing little room for architects to engage in distinct, nonpartisan debate. The dominant conversation appears to present only two unattractive positions with no middle ground - either choosing to participate in a design competition that entrenches the dominant major paradigm of architecture or to exile yourself from the discussion entirely in protest.

Architecture’s Liberation from the Building Having vacated cultural endeavour, wrapped itself in exclusivity, hamstrung by its limited tools and drawn itself down into the sordid reality of operating as a cog in the larger machine of the development industry, the dislocated position of major architecture raises an interesting proposition. That major architecture is largely comprised of – things other than ‘architecture’, at least in the conventional sense.

Rather global forces of capital, labour and governance are the striating lines which form the boundaries of a major architecture. Even the building, the very reliquary into which ‘architecture’ is understood to reside, is contested ground. This requires architecture to think critically of itself and opens the door to a radical rethinking of architectural practice. “The intrigue and uncertainty that often surround the possible conjunctions between philosophy and architecture…may stem from the assumption

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that what constitutes architecture belongs solely in the domain of built projects. “ (Loo & Frichot, pg.4.) The opportunity presents itself to “think about an architecture liberated from building” (Bouman, www.volumeproject.org) which opens up a wide arena for architecture to reintroduce itself into fields it had previously retracted from in new, minor forms.

Freeing architecture from the notion of the building, the post-modern ‘autonomy of form’ can be seen to link architecture too heavily to the act of building rather than to the broader and diverse skill sets to which architects possess. In ‘Bigness’ Koolhaas outlines what he sees as a critical gap in the ‘normal’ laws of architecture, indicating a point, where the scale of a building distorts the normal rules of context, “bigness is no longer part of any urban tissue…its subcontext is fuck context.” (Koolhaas, Bigness, pg.4) Whilst the building succeeds in escaping its immediate urban context, it is impossible for a building to divorce itself from the global tissue of international linkages of labour, economics and capital that brought it into being. Koolhaas’ context refers to the context considered by a major architecture, not the smooth space context, of these macro-scale forces. Koolhaas’ idiom of ‘fuck context’ can be adapted in light of this.

The building is not making the city in the way it made Koolhaas’ Manhattan. The building is irrelevant.

Major architecture suffers because it cannot acknowledge the non-essentialism of the building. Koolhaas’ own work demonstrates an awareness of architecture’s need to detach from this assumption. To “ escape from the architecture ghetto is one of the major drivers and has been from the very beginning” (Koolhaas, Delirious New York, pg.48) Searching for a place beyond the building, Deleuze and Guatari’s concept of the minor can allow architecture “to express another possible community and to forge the means for another consciousness and another sensibility” (Colebrook, pg.ix) This ‘another’ has already been posited as one less tethered to the building, with “Morris’s use of Deleuze and Guattari situat[ing] architecture in the broader context of the city, well beyond the boundary lot of the down-town tower.“ Burns in Loos & Frichot, pg.23)

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Architecture’s Terrain Vague “It (architecture) is no longer constrained by the scale of the building. Having made this jump, the whole world becomes available as a subject.”

De Graeff in Hyde, pg.59

De Graef’s revelation of the ‘whole world’ as architectural subject is not dissimilar to the scope of high Modernism so with architecture disembodied from the building the critical concern turns to the manner in which architecture might navigate this new (rediscovered) terrain. In galvanizing architecture to a sense of self-belief, some contemporary theorists have optimistically presented that “everything has an architecture” (Jenson, pg.27). Whilst inspiring, its lack of criticality is problematic in illuminating how we might re-engage with ‘everything’. This requires an understanding of what makes architects and architecture important and how our skills can best be applied, and not just from within the existing parameters of the major.

To assist in this “Deleuze’s concepts have provided architecture with lines of flight or the conditions of possibility of thinking otherwise” (Loos & Frichot, pg.1). Stoner’s notions of vacancy can now return, released from the constraints of the building.

Architecture can and should ‘go anywhere’ and ‘be where it is required’.

As identified in the introduction of this thesis, this theoretical landscape shares characteristics with the Sola Morales’ physical landscapes of the ‘terrain vague’ that can help us conceive of new forms of architectural practice. Alan Berger’s ‘drosscape’ also describe urban conditions that share similarities to Deleuzian smooth space in their liminal qualities. Pertinently, Berger identifies that “dross is a natural component of every dynamically evolving city” (Berger, pg.38) which is “always determinately nonlinear” (Ibid, op cit). The emphasis on component links to the position of Deleuze and Guattari’s minor or nomad within the major, whilst the notion of non-linearity speaks of smooth spaces emphasis on direction rather than point.

(Deleuze & Guattari, pg.478). Consequently, we might anticipate that the broad range of skills architects possess offer the opportunity for forays into other related fields in order to achieve its goals. Film, science, art, technology, planning. This is consistent with what the science writings of Stuart Kaufmann describe as “adjacent possibilities” (Edge Foundation, 2003). Similarly, we may imagine an architecture where the built

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form is merely a product of the architect’s inquiry into more pertinent issues, “The architecture of systems rather than the architecture of brick buildings” – (Inyo J in Hyde), pg.50 The second part of this thesis explores what these might be through the lens of practice, education and media.

Ways Forward: De(re)territorialising Architecture Practice: Minor Architecture

In a Deleuzian framework of multiplicities, the divergent and the haptic it is evident “‘minor architecture [has] no singular definition” (Burns in Loo & Frichot, pg.18).

Just as Deleuze describes the inherent tension but “perpetual need” between the royal and nomad sciences (TP, pg.486) so too are any definitions of a major and a minor architecture perpetually challenged, dissolved and reconstituted by the movements of the other. Consequently, this thesis instead seeks to explore permutations of a minor architecture rather than provide an exhaustive list - lines of flight that cut at tangents across the major and begin to outline some of the characteristics that minor architectural practice might display.

Deleuze and Guattari’s identification of the architect as philosopher, participating in ‘forming, inventing and fabricating concepts’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 2) assists in outlining two key avenues along which minor architecture can be pursued. The present condition of major architecture preferences the literal fabrication of concepts, it’s manifestation as the architectural object. The minor instead preferences the formation and invention of new architectural paradigms, disrupting the major’s definition and forcing its recalibration.

Liam Young’s Singing Sentinels maps a complex flashpoint between the environmental, technological and spatial. Accompained by the text “A Field Guide to Singing Sentinels”, demonstrates the non-building applications of the “spatial, temporal, corporeal and affectual abilities” (TP, 1994:2) they view architects possessing. Projecting a future of genetic modification, bio-engineered canaries have been adapted to serve as barometers of our anthropocenic world, fundamentally altered by human activity. In doing so, their movements give corporeality to the

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unseen lines of data becoming spectacular birdwatching events blurring nature and technology and manifesting architectural spatial effects intrinsically linked to the urban completely freed from the architectural object. “Late night file sharing porn flocks” and “Christmas sales rush in the download nests on Amazon Server Roosts.”

A transposition of nature and ideas of purity into a corollary to human impact.

Responding to the dominance of a language of masters, minor architecture “may tend to obscure their architects from view. (Stoner, pg.3) The diminishment of authorship suggests different relationships of practice, that break down the traditional role of architect as ‘consultant’ and open up more horizontal, formations of development and participation. A participatory form of authorship is suggested by Deleuze’s royal/nomad science referencing the ‘Gothic journeyman’s inhabitance of the immanent ground plane as nomadic versus the ‘royal’ striation of space by the metric plane of the architect. This raises notions of the ‘haptic space’ where, the architect is unable to step back to look in a transcendental sense at what has been created (TP.493) because of the immanent quality of their engagement.

The buildings of Antoni Gaudi display an immanent quality in their making. The few architectural drawings made for Casa Batllo hint at the limitation that orthogonal architectural representation displayed in realizing the façade of the building.

Ultimately, this resulted in Gaudi’s near constant presence on-site directing the craftsman on the resolution of the design in an immanent fashion where the act of building was not crystallized into creating a reproduction of a 2d drawing but rather was in a state of becoming oscillating between the directions of the architect and the hands of the craftsman.

Sagrada Familia is also particularly important showing a struggle between noting the veritable pantheon of architects who have each overseen part of its construction since Gaudi’s passing early in its construction it has become an unintentional palimpsest. It is a rare example where the sheer audacity of Gaudi’s plan, and his unfortunate death have foisted an architectural feat that has been borne out of Gaudi’s immanent style onto a major architecture that operates in a manner utterly incompatible with Gaudi’s ways of doing. One can almost see the exertion required by a major architecture in

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trying to digest the Sagrada Familia into a format compatible with its boundaries established by modes of production. Seeking to convert hyperbolic columns into precast concrete forms more familiar, ordering the patterns of reinforcement that go into it. Departing from Gaudi’s style of on-site direction to a highly elaborate and removed procedure of 3d mapping, visualization and constructing.

The attribution of the building to Gaudi, arguably his most well known work also shows the force of major architecture to attribute the building to a singular person, subscribing to the language of masters, and subsuming the toiling architects who worked on it after his passing. Finally, it is the success of it as an icon of Barcelona which is paradoxically not finished, in a seemingly perpetual state of ‘becoming’, its image was one defined by a permanent wreath of cranes – it will appear intangibly diminished once its final, fixed glory is achieved.

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Quinta Monroy- Immanent Architecture Minor architectures in their tensions with the major, present an inextricable link to the notions of activism. “Minor architectures are precisely (if perversely) concerned with the privilege and the circumstances of major architecture, the architecture of State and economic authority” (Stoner, pg.7). This invites the opportunity for architecture to reterritorialise the arena of political and social relevance in response to our selfdescribed crisis of relevance. To be, as desired by Jensen, “directly engaged in the chaos of the larger economic, political and social spheres of a globalizing world” (pg.i) Elemental’s Quinta Monroy housing project in Chile’s northern coastal city of Iquique is a particularly pertinent example to help illustrate minor architecture’s ability to engage sensitively in such realms, as well as display a number of other characteristics of minor architecture. Constructed in 2004, Quinta Monroy is a social housing project of 100 dwellings within the city-centre. The first project of Elemental, a conglomerate practice, that consists of the architect Alejandro Arvena, the Universidad Catolica de Santiago and Chilean oil company COPEC. Needing to rehouse 100 squatter families on the same plot of land with a government allocated budget of US$7,500 the design process took the unorthodox approach of retaining the expensive inner city location for its associated work, educational, transportation and health benefits in contrast to purchasing cheaper land on the urban periphery. With a remaining budget insufficient to construct conventional housing for 100 families, but aware of the implications of the Chilean ‘extended family’ and the culture of ownerconstructed extensions, Elemental focused on a design outcome essentially provides ‘half-houses’, concentrating on providing the essential services of kitchens and bathroom area within the structural frame of a fully-fledged dwelling which caters for the organic expansion of the house through the tradition of self-building by the squatter families themselves. The project has received widespread acclaim4 and is

4 Directly referenced by the Pritzker Prize Jury, Incremental Housing Units have been replicated across numerous further projects for Elemental, indicating their wider appeal as a potential solution for social housing. They are also the subject of a new publication by Alejandro Aravena titled Elemental: Incremental Housing and Participatory Design Manual due September 2016.

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generally seen as a success in providing social housing, generally seen as a negative return on investment due to poor siting and ghettoisation, into a positive housing typology whose value will increase over time and be a source of financial capital for its occupants, actively seeking to break a cycle of poverty entrenched through poor housing.

Firstly, Quinta Monroy’s ‘architectural skeleton’ (dubbed ‘incremental housing’ by Elemental), assumes its future adaptation and mutation by the user and challenges the conventional depiction of architecture as the complete and total architectural object.

Architectural practice assumes an architectural project concludes with a ‘finished product’, the Corbusian notions of the ‘masterly’, ‘correct’ and the ‘magnificent’ (Le Corbusier, Vers une architecture 1923, pg.246): major architecture’s defining effect.

Instead, what has been provided is a building more akin to Rem Koolhaas’ comments “irrigated with potential” (Koolhaas, S,M,L,XL pg.963) they express a Deleuzian state of ‘becoming’ - these structures are inherently dynamic. The frame also maximizes flexibility and provides freedom for the expansion of the dwelling to take the desired form of its creater, as a result, the Quinta Monroy module displays the traits of a Deleuzian rhizome, allowing for a multiplicity of diverging connections (indeed expansions) to occur independently from one another, (under different ownership) at speeds independent of one another (as desired). The development anticipates its own mutation from a homogenous architectural space to heterogenous.

Secondly, this anticipated mutation by the inhabitants is a relinquishment of the typical level of control normally held by the architect. Through providing a project that is inherently ‘incomplete’, requiring active colonization and improvement by the inhabitants, the clear and singular authorship of a building that pervades a major architecture is disrupted. The ‘full potential’ of the development becomes unbounded, its future configuration uncertain and in flux, as the prediliction of continual extension, expansion and replacement that traditionally occurred in squatter settlements makes a final, fixed state for the project unlikely. The success of the project Quinta Monroy presents a different conceptualization of ‘design integrity’ where the cross-pollination of actions between the architect and users enriches the design in contrast to the prevailing view of major architecture where the actions of

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other agents (developers, value-managers, builders, end-users) within the development process are often viewed as diluting the architectural integrity of the project.

Thirdly, through having to make decisions about what is included and excluded within the Quinta Monroy project, the design process begins to drive to the heart of the critical skills and services architects and architecture can provide in our contemporary context. “A key decision in the design process was the decision of what elements of the ‘house’ would be constructed in the ‘half’ that Elemental were to build. (reference)”. Elementals decision to spend the remaining funds to construct the bathroom, kitchen and larger structural frame of each ‘house’, reveal the relevance of the architect within the project. In constructing the “half that a family individually will never be able to achieve on its own, no matter how much money, energy or time they spend (reference)”, Quinta Monroy positions the architect as specialist and enabler, providing the critical elements of the building to ‘bridge the gap’ between the bricoleur-like skills of the former squatter inhabitants.

Consistent with Deleuze’s major-minor discourse, Quinta Monroy’s does not oppose the major architectural discourse so much as subvert it, opening up the possibility for innovative new models of architecture and development in the process. It’s financial model, rigorously linked to the government housing subsidy, and its site selection and design process, which prioritise the retention and appreciation of land values actively align with the prevailing flows of capital, labour and services. By taking an immanent position within these politico-economic landscapes however Quinta Monroy is able to become a formal commentary on existing subsidy regulation and on the pervasive issue of poverty in social housing in Chile. The meager housing subsidy is manipulated into a tool which can genuinely be used to address the country’s huge housing deficit (spatial agency, pg.i) and the project brief becomes inherently aspirational – an incomplete design for a middle-income 72m2 house rather than a small 30m2 social housing unit. Such an approach exhibits many of the optimistic ethical concerns of the town plans of high Modernism whilst moderating its paternalism through a design process that inherently relies upon the agency of its users. From a Deleuzian sense, the project stresses an emphasis on trajectories of

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architecture associated with smooth space, rather than points, or end-states, associated with striated space.

The recognition and acclaim that Alejandro Aravena, the creative director of Elemental, has received for this project and many others that follows the same principle of ‘incremental housing’5 illustrates how minor architectures allows meaningful opportunities for the major to reform and redefine itself around new multiplicities. Aravena’s appointment as Director of the Architectural Bienalle de Venezia 2016 and recent winning of the 2016 Pritzker Prize does tend towards architecture’s bias for clear authorship, ignoring the significance of Elemental’s transdisciplinary partnership, however it also demonstrates the clear ability for a architecture to increase its boundaries of relevance, his selection being a “refreshing choice for the Pritzker, usually awarded to later-career architects whose portfolios brim with grand cultural monuments.” (Wainwright in The Guardian, 13 January 2016,. This is also reflected in the statements of the Jury itself noting that Arevana “has meaningfully expanded the role of the architect.” (Pritzker Architectural Prize, http://www.pritzkerprize.com/)

5 See Villa Verde (Chile), Monterrey (Mexico), Make It Right (New Orleans), Lo Espejo (Chile) and Renca (Chile) amongst others.

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The Commons: Revising the Client/Architect Relationship Across the other side of the Pacific Ocean, in the markedly more affluent country of Australia, another residential project known as The Commons shares traits of minor architecture, demonstrating a capacity for pro-active architectural practice to revolt against their passive position within larger development process and actively tackle issues of housing affordability and rampant land speculation. Located in the rapidly gentrifying suburb of Brunswick, in the city of Melbourne, The Commons constitutes a 6-storey mixed-use building of 24 apartments, ground floor retail and communal rooftop garden. Whilst its typology is nothing remarkable, it is pertinent, in a housing market where the average house size exceeds 243m2 (Victorian Building Commission 2008, pg.42) and where, up until 2012, less apartments were built than houses.

(Australian Bureau of Statistics, cat.no 8731.0). The Commons consequently forms part of a wider shift in Melbourne’s development from the suburban to the urban.

This shift has forced structural reform to the fore of public debate, as the efficacy of planning regulations in handling larger and more dense forms of development are called into question by the media and industry bodies6. Significant concerns have been laid towards the quality of housing product being provided in Melbourne which have led to its characteristation as a ‘crisis’, defined by a characterization of poor quality apartment stock driven by developer demands coupled with issues of housing affordability and the highest levels of household debt amongst developed countries.7 (The Australian Population Research Institute, March 2016, pg.iv), one of the highest levels of household debt in the developed world. Despite, the work of architectural organisations, in the facilitation of public forums and the release of the Victorian Government’s Better Apartments discussion paper the debate in the media polarizes around housing affordability and improved apartment quality being portrayed as mutually exclusive goals only attainable at the cost of the other.

6 See “Melbourne's high-­‐rises riddled with bad apartments”, The Age, June 14, 2014, “Melbourne's 'appalling legacy' of poor apartments”, The Age, March 19, 2015 and the Australian Institute of Architects Conference 2015: Exemplary Apartments Open Day Guide 7 Average household debt in Melbourne is approximated at an equivalent to 160% of the mean annual income

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Within this mileu of mediocrity, The Commons is an example of an architect-led enterprise to demonstrate that the marriage of good urban design outcomes and financial returns is not a falsehood. It achieves an high build quality sustainably, with an average NatHERS rating of 8.5 stars, locationally, adjacent to a railway station and tram in an inner urban location and architecturally, receiving no less than 13 architectural awards. The development methodology which has achieved this outcome represents a minor architecture disrupting the dominant development paradigm and showing ways in which architecture can become an active agent rather than ‘consultant’.

The Commons is the prototype of a development model now branded the ‘Nightingale model’ which have continued to secure sites with high access to amenities and transport nodes within Melbourne’s inner urban areas. Formed by a conglomerate of separately practicing architectural offices, the architects have usurped the role of developers, utilizing their skills to identify suitable sites on the basis of urban design merit rather than speculative development yield. Negotiating with the owners of sites as part of the procurement process, the agency afforded them by collectivization has freed Nightingale Project from the negatively minded ‘waiting behind an office desk for a client with a problem’ to the positive ‘finding a solution before finding a client’.

It has also returned a level of agency to a part of the architectural process normally beyond the architect’s influence, that of the site itself, allowing for architecture to become more deliberate in its presence, deciding where it intervenes rather than being dependent on the happenstance of the client.

Without the financial emphasis of the developer, the Commons has been freed of an economic imperative and able to achieve a number of radical results which demonstrate how architecture can reterritorialise fields as unrelated to ‘architecture’ as value management. Most critically has been its achievement of Melbourne’s first zero-car apartment building, a significant attribute in a city with 71% car dependency (ABS, cat 4102.0) and saving AUD$750,000 on construction costs. Further, the design of the apartment modules was driven by a collaborative process with the prospective buyers, providing them with an ability to modify the make-up of their

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apartments from the outset. Described as a “deliberative development model where the purchasers (the future residents) have agency in decision-making” (Nightingale Projects), potential buyers were not presented a glossy render but rather thoroughly interviewed for living preferences and investment spend (Radical Apartments: After the Commons) Legal agreements in place on land titles cap resell value to perturb speculative investment and help ensure a high level of owner occupiers. This shifted the architect’s role as design ‘expert’ to one of collaborator and facilitator. The future occupants have had a tangible impact on designing The Commons at an affordable price for all stakeholders. Approximately AUD$800,000 was saved on the project by eliminating advertising/display suite and real estate agent costs through this collaborative method. Consultation also resulted in the breaking of a number of assumed ‘golden rules’ of Australian real estate. Occupants decided upon no second bathrooms to the 24 dwellings, saving $200,000 dollars. Further, individual laundries were eliminated, by universal decision of the future occupants, in favour of a communal laundry on the roof and increasing living room areas by 2.5m2, saving another $150,000 (Radical Apartments: After the Commons). This participatory approach is important on two levels, one creating a shared authorship, similar to Quinta Monroy but more importantly refuting the major view “that architecture is in a bind between wanting to be socially, politically and culturally relevant, and being totally strung up by the need to deliver outcomes within standard forms of capitalist funding.” (MUF in Hyde, pg. 80) The Commons presents an incredibly in-depth and nuanced interweaving of architecture into the capital flows of the development market. Operating within, but not accepting the status quo its architectural outcome, as a minor architecture, challenges the conventional notion of architecture as ‘art’, morally separated from the messy and dirty realms of financial returns. It is a powerful demonstration of how the skills and knowledge of architect’s can be used proactively and imaginatively to be involved in the arenas of value management normally associated with the economist and accountant. In this way, The Commons is an example of reterritorialisation of local capital markets and the development process. Whilst the physical contexts of each development are different, The Commons shares two key attributes to Quinta Monroy. Firstly, is an active engagement and critique of the existing social and policy

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structures. Quinta Monroy addressing issues of poverty and the effectiveness of state subsidies, The Commons dealing with housing affordability and rampant land speculation whilst secondly, the projects share a respect for the end user in the generation of the design. However, The Commons as the architecture of the brick building is less important than the ‘architecture of systems’ it represents. The Nightingale’s model of ‘architect as activist’, the open-source nature of its floor plans all speak to a socially-minded aspirational architecture which remains achievable within a capitalist structure of land investment and procurement.

Education: Rethinking the Architectural Student

“Architecture is the masterly, correct and magnificent play of masses brought together in light.”

Le Corbusier, trans. Vers une architecture (1923)

“Architects are the designers of the building project and have the difficult task of translating their client’s ideas into an acceptable design and then into working drawings. “ Chappell, D., & Willis, A., (2010), ‘The Architect in Practice, tenth edition, Wiley-Blackwell, UK

It is indicative of architecture’s present existential torment that two such contrasting explanations of the architect and architecture can be laid next to each other on the same page. It is doubtful many architects would be content with the rather pragmatic territory Chappell and Willis mark out for them instead gravitating towards Le Corbusier’s beautifully poetic description. Yet, an architect’s skills necessarily oscillate between the technical and the sublime. This is suggested by Jenson’s belief that “the architect’s greatest ability is the power to envision, analyze, and communicate strategies that manifest organizational structures from the highly abstract to the most concrete” (pg.26). The previous chapter on a minor practice of architecture elucidated how a minor architecture tends to demonstrate the relevance of an architect’s skills in fields outside the territory of major architecture. This chapter turns to the matter of acquiring those skills, the notions of architectural education and how they contribute or limit the profession of architect.

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Major architecture offers a rather stark definition of the architect striated along two major and contradictory lines. The first emphasizes a demand for technical proficiency in traditional architectural conventions consistent with Chappell & Willis’ description. This can be confirmed by the job descriptions of the vast majority of architectural offices bearing a string of required software knowledge. The acronyms and odd titles of AutoCAD, Adobe, 3dsMax, Revit, Rhino and Grasshopper have become the barometer of architectural proficiency and talent. At the other end of the scale, the ‘star-architect’ adopts the persona of the ‘artistic genius’, where architectural skill is perceived as intuitive and unconscious, romantically stereotyped as the hastily drawn sketch on the bank of a napkin, or the scrunched up piece of rubbish that becomes the point of inspiration. The failure of both these narratives is that neither engage in what Deleuze describes as ‘haptic space’, instead seeking to reinforce the major view of the core skills of architecture as somehow transcendental and independent with respect to social, political and economic forces. A minor architectural education consequently seeks to re-engage with these forces in a haptic fashion, demonstrating that architecture is more than the instantaneous revelation of the genius or the methodical application of a set of architectural drawing tools.

The Architectural Association School of Architecture traveling studio ‘Unknown Fields’ is an example of a minor architectural education that embraces the haptic position of architecture within the world’s global streams. Described as a “nomadic design research studio” seeking to ”re-imagine the complex and contradictory realities of the present as a site of strange and extraordinary futures” (Architectural Association, Unknown Fields), the studio takes participants on various expeditions seeking to unravel the complex relationships in contemporary society that produce some of the world’s most invisible and immense systems networks. With subject matter seeking to gain a handle on economic, political and environmental relationships created through Chinese international shipping networks, or the diamond mining industry of Mozambique, the scope of Unknown Fields completely eclipses preconceived architectural notions of site, envelope and building. Eliminating these architectural ‘waypoints’ the studio places an emphasis on revealing and uncovering that draws a direct line of reference to Deleuzian‘mapping’.

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Pertinently, the traveling studio is open to students beyond the architectural, inviting fashion designers, filmmakers, writers, artists and philosophers into their midst. The presence of non-architect’s within Unknown Fields immediately deterritorialises a fundamental canon of architectural education, the sanctum of the architectural school’s design studio. This is not a dilution of architecture’s agency however, for the relationship is reciprocal, inviting a reterritorialisation of non-architectural mediums and arenas, confirmed by Young’s insistence that “these forms are not departures away from the profession but are about expanding what we think of as being the profession” (Young in Hyde, pg.238) As a result, the privileged status of the plan, section and elevation are dissolved and the products that emerge from these studios hint at the diversity of ways in which architectural knowledge can be expressed through traditionally non-architectural mediums including film, literature and technology. These begin to form an image of the future architect as ‘the trans-media guru” (Ibid, op cit) wedded not to a particular medium (the building) but to a critical methodology and engagement in issues of the urban. In this context projects such as ‘Rare Earthernware’8 which present radioactive ceramics from the technological waste dumped into the lakes of Inner Mongolia and presented as part of the ‘What is Luxury?’ exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum present not just a symbolic protest against environmental degradation but a critical mapping of global flows intrinsically linked to the making of the city.

8 Molded from the exact quantities of toxic byproduct created from the manufacture of the cell phone, the laptop and the solar car battery "The vases are a way to talk about ideas around luxury and desire” as described by Kate Davies (Dezeen, 28th April 2015), bearing parallels to the status of architecture itself as luxury and the hidden costs of building and manufacture.

The reintroduction of the radioactive material into the world of commodities as vases after their ‘expulsion" also invites unsettling juxtapositions. Young indicates that “once they have left the Victoria and Albert Museum exhibition we like the idea that the vase might sit in the home next to someone's smartphone, the latest gadget sitting next to its shadow." (Ibid op cit)

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It is not surprising that many of the qualities of the subject matter that become the focus of Unknown Fields also align with Deleuze and Guattari’s characterisations of ‘smooth’ space”. The most immediate parallel is with Deleuze and Guattari’s “smooth space par excellence”; the sea (TP,pg.47) in their upcoming field trip along Chinese shipping networks. Variously, the impacts of global warming (Greenland Expedition), radiation (Chernobyl) and gold standard trading (Kalgoorlie) are each difficult to striate, nebulous and difficult to quantify. These traits further stress the need for an equally ‘smooth’ skillset in order for the architect to effectively engage with them, one which moves beyond the limited practices we employ in the acquisitional process of building. Faced with the enormity of such issues it is easier to comprehend how architects appear ill-equipped to engage in larger scale issues when the conventional architectural tools are not those best suited to begin to represent, understand and interpret them. By encompassing a broader arena of architectural education, Unknown Fields begins to provide the outline for the future architectural student by empowering them with such a broader skill set, not through the advancement of existing architectural tools but through the cross-pollination of architecture with other disciplines to create an educational atmosphere energised with a process of constant re- and de-territorialisation.

Interestingly, despite engaging on scales that appear to make the traditional role of the architect insignificant, the engagement of Unknown Fields with such global forces and its resultant products display an inherently heroic quality. With a multidisciplinary cadre of students and a focus that places no preference to the built, the conscious engagement of the projects that emerge from these studios dwarf the ambitions of even the largest skyscraper or urban plan. These question the culture of speculative projects being as Young puts it, seen as “some kind of weaker version of it (built practice)” (Young in Hyde, pg.230). They do not share the transcendental and messianic overtones of High Modernism but instead begin to show the potential future for architects to act as ‘guides’, occupying a more haptic position of searching, negotiating and interrogating ways through some of the most pertinent global issues “exploring alternative worlds which exist in the present as a way of understanding the world in a new way” (Young in Hyde, pg.231). Unknown Fields is a viable example

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of ways in which reterritorialisation of vast fields of environment, social, technological and economic inquiry, legitimizing the architect’s presence in seeking to grapple with the outcomes and consequences of neo-liberal market forces.

A pertinent signal that the foundations of an architectural education need to be reconsidered and broadened can be seen in the example of Renew Newcastle which demonstrates that even problems seen to be clearly within the territory of the ‘architectural’ are not necessarily best solved through architectural means, or even by architects themselves. Renew Newcastle relates to the former declining Hunter Street Mall of the town of Newcastle, Australia. Struggling with vacancy, vandalism and arson it has now become a thriving and eclectic street of local artist, craftsman and entrepeneurs. This about-face was not seeded from any form of spatial enhancement despite millions of dollars spent on the new paving, landscaping and seating of built solutions but rather through local resident Marcus Westbury with a background in art festival identified the issue as one contrived of economic, social and regulatory barriers (Westbury in Hyde, pg.171) Through acting as broker for negotiating shortterm leases between local artists and building owners, small businesses unable to afford the outlay of a commercial premises were able to occupy the vacant shops whilst landowners looked for longer term occupiers and mark the reversal of a nondescript shopping strip into an internationally recognized model. Westbury stresses the importance of local knowledge in the success of Renew Newcastle however critical failures can also be seen in the initial forays by designers to address the issue as a solely spatial one. In this example, an architectural knowledge constricts the view of the problem, suggesting a need to broaden our scope of the architectural. As suggested by Hyde in his interview, ”I can’t see an architect thinking in this way in response to a brief to revive an ageing commercial strip… and in any case, they’re not” (Hyde, pg.174) it can be construed as a threat to architecture. Conversely, I posit that it instead represents not a reason for ‘why architects aren’t needed’ but the more flexible qualities of ‘where architects need to be’, ie. to incorporate non-architectural skill sets into their thinking, even in addressing what would seemingly be manifestly architectural problems, such as high street revitalization projects.

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Concluding towards a Rhizomatic Architecture Gillant and Architectural Archipelagos

This thesis has established that across time and place there have, and will continue to be, a myriad of examples where the major architectural paradigm is inevitably challenged by minor architectures. These challenges at once highlight the limitations of the existing territory inhabited by architecture as well as break its boundaries allowing for the gradual transformation of major architecture towards a newer, more relevant ground of inquiry. It is important to distinguish that the two do not stand in opposition to one another, although their characteristics would indicate as such, rather they exist in a symbiotic relationship where there evolution and transformation is only possible through their constant interaction. As described by Deleuze and Guattari they “exist only in mixture (TP, pg 474), having an additive and positive affect upon one another.

Focussing primarily on contemporary examples however, the express purpose of this thesis has been to seek to elicit what characteristics future architectural practice will need to possess. Consistent with this identification of a minor architecture operating within and reacting with the major, the qualities of practice and education; of flexibility, multidisciplinarity, re- and de-territorialisation of social, political and environmental forces all suggest a future architectural practice less defined by the professional canon of an architect and his building. The case studies anticipate nonarchitectural solutions to architectural problems just as much as the inverse destabilising any singular definition of an ‘architect’. This at once diminishes the relevance of institutions such as architectural boards who seek to define the ‘architect’ through a inflexible medium of demonstrated skills, registration and ultimately liability, whilst empowering ‘architecture’ to occur far from any traditional territory it once inhabited. Even the building has been detached from architecture. This fluid and footloose portrayal of future architectural practice speaks of the Deleuzian ‘rhizome’, A decentralized, omni-directional relationship of architecture to its surrounds as and where it is needed, rather than along striated lines of association defined by the major.

If we turn towards a rhizomatic understanding of architecture’s involvement in the surrounding world, then we need not be vexed by the crisis of relevance submitted at the beginning of this thesis. “A rhizome may be broken, shattered at a given spot, but

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it will start up again on one of its old lines, or on new lines (Deleuze & Guattari, TP, pg.9). The case studies already point to these points of reemergence; old lines - the meaningful engagement in political, social and environmental discourse of modernism revisited in a dramatically altered fashion through the projects of Elemental and the Nightingale model whilst the trans-disciplinary alignment of architectural education under Unknown Fields look to an altogether new component of the architect.

Whilst this thesis has previously pointed out the answer to an architectural problem is not necessarily spatial, Edouard Gillant’s ‘Archipelagic thinking’ corresponds to a particular mode of thought helpfully in generating a visual landscape for a rhizomatic architecture. It is tentative and intuitive, privileging the process of knowing over static knowledge (Obrist, On Curating, pg. xi). Through this definition we can see a corollary to haptic space of Deleuzian thought. Similarly, homogenous-inducing ‘continental thinking’ of Gillant references the royal and the major.

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Kalliali & Park’s “New Architect’s Atlas’ incisively depict the contemporary condition of architectural practice, showing it as the diminishing ice cap of a changing architectural world. However, it’s diagrammatic representation of an occupied land and vacant sea prescribe clear territories demarcated by aquatic boundaries. It’s ‘continental thought still reflects perceptions of roles through the major architectural paradigm with relationships and adjacencies between disciplines assuming a procedural and hierarchical journey across this diagrammatic architectural landscape.

In this depiction one, disciplines are bundled together in, landlocked by other professional spheres and must inevitably pass through certain other spheres in order to reach and influence another. This does not reflect the spontaneous nature of rhizomatic practice. Instead a further development of the map is presented on the right which expresses a more rhizomatic field where both land and sea are in equal parity, representing the mixture of striated and smooth, territory and interstice with shifting dominance. Taking on the characteristics of archipelagos, one identifies this architectural field both as a collective entity, recognising a loose ‘region’ of architecture, whilst simultaneously acknowledging almost endless differentiation, comprised of far flung and seemingly disparate elements. The sea, representing the interstice, or minor architecture, becomes fundamental to the accessibility of these other territories, but also allows the freedom to navigate freely between the different territories within the architectural field without constraint, hierarchy or the need for prior passages through previous disciplines.

“By thinking differently we create ourselves anew, no longer accepting already created and accepted values and assumptions. We destroy common sense and who we are in order to become” (Colebrooke, pg. xvii) The prior examples of architectural projects cited in this thesis all, in some manner, demonstrate acts of architectural practice creating itself anew once more demonstrating an agency our profession is increasingly taking up which straddles both the traditional arena of buildings whilst variously suggesting the architect as public commentator, philosopher and even the economist. From Elemental’s daring to engage in social and economic issues and relaxation of the grasp of architectural

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authorship and inviting non-architectural public input as a positive element in design.

To Nightingale’s model of new architectural conglomerates to counter market forces and collaborative based model of dwelling design, they point convincingly towards richer and more diverse architectural pastures than those we presently inhabit. Yet this rhizomatic practice of architecture does not present a singular point or destination for architecture to arrive at. Rather it is a direction to turn towards through which our ‘crisis of relevance’ isn’t so much solved as embraced, confident in the knowledge that future architectural practices will not be immune to crises of their own, prompting further acts of recreation we cannot hope to predict. What stays constant however is a need for architects and architectural practice to refuse stagnation and incessantly inquire at the edges, revisit the old and present radical news, to constantly reappear. As Deleuze & Guattari know, “you can never get rid of ants” (TP, pg.9). In the future, we should be like ants.

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