Over 10 days in Tokyo, Alexander, Silvia, Carlos and I got into the city, its history, its tastes, its metabolism. It was a joy to work with two architects and a curator. Here is what we learned.

Alexander Novikov
Carlos Medellin
Silvia Franceschini
Adeola Enigbokan

Special Thanks to Juan Pablo Gomez for your patience and expertise in editing!

Like architecture, art is not only the movement of territorialization, the movement of joining the body to the chaos of the universe itself according to the body’s needs and interests; it is also the converse movement, that of deterritorialization, of cutting through territories, breaking up systems of enclosure and performance, traversing territory in order to retouch chaos, enabling something mad, asystematic, something of the chaotic outside to reassert and restore itself in and the through the body. If framing creates the very condition for the plane of composition and thus of any particular works of art, art itself is equally a project that disjars, distends and transforms frames, that focuses on the intervals and conjunctions between frames. In this sense the history of painting, and of art after painting, can be seen as the action of leaving the frame, of moving beyond, and pressing against the frame, the frame exploding through the movement it can no longer contain.

--Elizabeth Grosz, Chaos, Territory, Art: Deleuze and the framing of the earth

Below is an excerpt of a conversation I had with my friends, Maja Trudel (M), and Johann Reble (J), when they were guests in my home last spring. Maja and Johann are young Swiss architects, and it was pleasure to talk with them about building, cities, space and perception. Here’s the part about grids:

J: What I was thinking about for a long time is that there are very different scales of structures in the city. A building can be destroyed at any time when you don’t want it anymore. Maybe the structure didn’t fit anymore, maybe it’s the façade people don’t like anymore, and it’s just cheaper to tear down the whole building and build a new one. Look at New York. New York is a perfect example. The structure, the layout of the streets, and even the subway lines, can never be changed. It’s there forever. There would have to be a very [horrible event], like the worst war ever, to destroy the structure you have here. And it all began one day, when some guy drew some lines on a paper.

A: The grid.

J: So it’s there. You cannot change it. You can destroy all the houses and build new ones, but the structure is still there. These are the scales of structure, which are very important—the bigger the scale, the more time you need to destroy it, or change it. And the other thing I think is very important, is what is the order of the scale, who says what scale it is, and what it is about.

A: Yeah, I think about the grid a lot. I used to teach a course called, “We Built this City.” Students expected to learn about large scale structures like the Brooklyn Bridge, the Empire State Building, and other iconic structures of New York. But students are always surprised that I spend so much time at the beginning of the course on the grid. The reason we have to start there is exactly what you said before. The Empire State Building, the Chrysler Building—they don’t really matter as much as that grid.

Inside of that grid there are whole lives. Even small sections of the grid can be the space of a whole life. In that sense, there is this big structure, there is this scale, but it doesn’t matter, if you don’t experience life at that scale. Within that grid, there can be infinite variation.

M: Mmm

J: Yeah

A: Within that grid there can be so many different shapes and pathways, and layers and layers of life, going up and down. Of course, in the conventional way that I have to teach how things are built—giving the names of the architects, teaching accepted ideas of what is a city, and conventional methods for studying it—I begin with the grid, because I have to teach my students about structure, and I am oriented, in my training, towards what is stable. That’s what I’m supposed to teach. But secretly what I’d like to figure out is how we can look at anywhere in the grid, maybe a block, and see for ourselves how that space is really unlimited in actuality.

It makes a difference, whether you look at the stable, or you look at the moving, constantly changing things; whether you think that the structure is most important or movement is more important. This perspective makes a difference politically, and in you methods of working.

J: Take your “Archiving the city” project. Now we have this whole other layer of the internet, and virtuality. So this means there are new grids, right? Different grids. Have you studied them?

A: Oh! I have a book called “THE GRID BOOK”!

[We all laugh]

J: Do you think the patterns in grids can change over time? Like the form of the grid itself? Or is there some kind of universal human form that always [asserts itself] in the grid?

A: Huh. That’s a tough one.

J: Obviously there’s a reason why the floors are flat, (our professor talks like this), and not tilted. It just kind of makes sense: we like to walk on flat surface.

[We all laugh]

J: So there are some kind of basic parameters in the form of the grid.

A: I guess that’s a version of the age-old question: Amongst all the phenomena on earth, all the variation, is there some common denominator? And I don’t know.

Archigram, Instant City (1969)

The concept of city-as-media is not new. Since at least the 1960s and 70s, with the explosion of cheap consumer electronics and the accessibility of telecommunication systems in urban centers around the world, artists and architects have been at the vanguard of creating images and theories that elaborate this reality of contemporary urban life. In the 1960′s, London-based architectural collective Archigram represented a new generation of students plugged in to popular culture and mass mediated urban living. Departing from the architect’s directive to produce plans for buildings, they began to create images (drawings, cartoons, collages) that mirrored the emerging spatial organization of the city, and reflected the realities of young urban dwellers.

In later projects, such as Instant City (1969), Archigram created plans and images for a mobile city, based upon the use of existing technologies and the imagination of future ones. As the project statement elaborates:

In the most civilized countries, localities and their local cultures remain slow moving, often undernourished and sometimes resentful of the more favoured metropolitan regions (such as New York, the West Coast of the United States, London and Paris). Whilst much is spoken of cultural links and about the effect of television as a window on the world (and the inevitable global village) people still feel frustrated. Younger people even have a suspicion that they are missing out on the things that could widen their horizons. They would like to be involved in aspects of life where their own experiences can be seen as part of what is happening. Against this is the reaction to the physical nature of the metropolis: and somehow there is this paradox—if only we could enjoy it but stay where we are.

The Instant City reacts to this with the idea of a ‘traveling metropolis’, a package that comes to a community, giving it a taste of the metropolitan dynamic—which is temporarily grafted on to the local centre—and whilst the community is still recovering from the shock, uses this catalyst as the first stage of a national hook-up. A network of information—education—entertainment—‘play-and-know-yourself’ facilities.

For more images of Archigram’s work, click here.

Brualitat in Stein [Brutality in Stone] (1961), a collaboration between Alexander Kluge (writer, filmmaker) and Peter Schamoni (filmmaker)
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W.G. Sebald, in his essay “Between History and Natural History: On the literary description of total destruction,” considers the work of West German writer, Alexander Kluge. Kluge’s book, New Stories. Nos 1-18 (1977) takes on the prodigious task of examining the aftermath of the destruction of German cities during World War II. Although it makes use of personal recollections of air attack, interviews with military officials and primary source documents, the book is neither a history in the traditional sense, nor is it a traditional novel. Sebald pays attention to Kluge’s method of presenting this diverse material, arguing that confronting catastrophic experience in writing requires the author to challenge and “break out” of the structure and form of the novel, which “owes its allegiance to bourgeois concepts.”

Here is what Sebald has to say about Kluge’s attempt to account for the experience of living in ruined cities:

Kluge’s way of providing his documentary material with vectors through his presentation of it transfers what he quotes into the context of our own present. Kluge does not allow the data to merely stand as an account of a past catastrophe… the most unmediated document… loses its unmediated character via the processes of reflection the text sets up. History is no longer the past but also the present in which the reader must act. The information Kluge’s style thus imparts to readers about the concrete circumstances of their present existence, and possible prospects for the future, marks him out as an author who, on the perimeter of a civilization to all appearances intent on its own end, is working to revive the collective memory of his contemporaries who “with the obviously inborn desire for narrative, have lost the psychological power to remember even within the destroyed city itself.”

The exhibition catalog for Automatic Cities: The architectural imaginary in contemporary art, which ran from Sept 29, 2009 – Jan. 31, 2010, at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, was written by curator Robin Clark, and contains an essay by Giuliana Bruno. Here is an excerpt from Bruno’s essay, “Construction Sites: Fabricating the Architectural Imaginary in Art.”

An urban image is created by the work of history and the flow of memory. This is because the city of images comprises in its space all of its past histories, with their intricate layers of stories. The urban imaginary is a palimpsest of mutable fictions floating in space and residing in time. Mnemonic narratives condense in space, and their material residue seeps into the imaginative construction of a place. The density of historical and mnemonic interactions builds up the architectural imaginary of a city. The process becomes visible in the visual arts, which are capable of capturing temporality and memory. Artworks can fabricate traces of existence and exhibit the sedimentation of time.  In art we can feel the texture of an image and the substance of a place when layered forms come to be visible on the surface and mnemonic coatings become palpable to our sensing. The actual folds of history and the fabric of memory can thus be “architected” in art, which can expose the density of time that becomes space.

Wow! I know, right? But wait, there’s more…

In this sense an architectural imaginary is a visual repository that is active: it is an archive open to the activities of digging, re-viewing, and re-visioning in art. In this urban archive, doors are always unlocked to the possibility of re-imagining spaces, and archaeology here is not simply about going back into the past; rather it enables us to look in other directions, and especially forward into the future, in active retrospective motion. This is because the urban archive contains more than what has actually occurred or already happened. It is made up of trajectories of image-making that are varied, some not yet existing or materialized, others not even achievable.  This construct contains even the unbuilt or the unrealized. In other words, the urban imaginary contains all kinds of potentialities and projections, which are creative forms of imagination. It is this potentially projective form of imagining that creates new urban archaeologies in art and makes the visual matrix that is the city a moving one.

My friend Jana just reminded me of Archigram. I love their graphic technique. Like this manifesto written in the language of fifties space comics. I find their take on the city as media very interesting. For more of this groovy sixties avant-garde “architecture without architecture,” check out these scans, mostly from Simon Sadler’s book about Archigram.

“How would you archive mobile buildings? Buildings that (dis)assemble like Legos…”

She is referring to the work of Alberto Mozó, an architect based in Santiago, Chile.

Mozó has the idea that pre-fab mobile architecture–buildings which can be assembled and disassembled with ease, or the parts re-purposed at will–has great value for Architecture and Urbanism today. The architect’s statement about the office building pictured above introduces the theme of “Transitividad” or transitivity to describe the quality of in-betweeness, or openness to disassembly, that the building embodies.

To get back to Barbara’s question, if the building embodies transitivity then how could it be archived? Well my first suggestion is that the method of archiving, the archival practice, must also have a transitive quality.

To be transitive is to be characterized by transition, to be intermediate, to pass over to or affect, or be affected by something else. Transitivity refers to relations, usually (in mathematics, logic and grammar) relations between three things, a first, second and third. In which the three elements are implicated, or linked, or involved, by way of the second, as in a triangular or circular relation, not a linear one.

So what could a transitive archival practice be? One which, like Mozo’s building, tries to link things in relations of mutal becoming. The first, via the second, becoming implicated in a third, and on and on.

I think collecting things creates these sorts of relations between disparate objects. Also telling stories, especially orally, creates close transitive links. I think dancing, moving through different shapes and forms in time and space might be an archival practice that matches Mozo’s architecture.

What do you think?

I grew up in Lagos, Nigeria during the oil boom of the 1970′s and 80′s. Fashion reflected the city’s exuberant modernism and futurism. There were great hairstyles, which all the fancy ladies wore. The city was changing and growing fast. New structures seemed to be going up everyday. The new hairstles were intended to simulate the forms of the urban structures they were named after. Like the hairstyle pictured above was called “Eko Bridge,” after the new bridges built to link the city’s islands. There were also styles like the skyscraper, the stadium, etc.

As you can probably tell, hair for Lagosians, and many other Africans, is a big deal. Look here for more about the significance of hair and the head in West Africa.

I think hair done like this could be a way of archiving the city, don’t you?