reading

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own irreducible properties. For instance, water is not made of little waters; water is a whole object with irreducible properties, containing other whole objects (hydrogen and oxygen) with their own irreducible properties. The result is a conceptual surprise: whole things are made of other whole things and not of parts.

Object-oriented philosophy takes this idea one step further, by way of metaphysics. If everything is a whole object and not a part of something else, and everything exists equally but differently, then vertical stratification between parts and wholes becomes impos- sible.3 In this model, everything exists side by side, like a collection of treasures laid out on a table. The question then becomes: If we agree that things are made out of other things, how

can something simultaneously be a component of a thing and be a whole thing? The philosopher Tristan Garcia uses the analogy of a “sack” to address this conun- drum.4 A sack gathers things to- gether into a loosely coherent form without dissolving the things’ discreteness. For architecture, this presents unfamiliar ways of thinking about relations between containers and the things they contain. Instead of one of each, this theory suggests multiple out- sides and insides, and an infinite deferral of interiority, like drilling sideways through a set of Rus- sian dolls. Further, it substitutes the idea of “components” with

supercomponents, capturing the indeterminacy of being simultaneously “above” (super-) and “below” (component) in a relational structure, essentially flattening out any hierarchy. Rather than wholes with constituent parts, buildings become objects, wrapped in objects, wrapped in objects and so on.5 In that case, architecture

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object in “From Object to Field” (1997), Robert Somol favoring shape over form in “12 Reasons to get back into shape” (2004) and recently by Mario Carpo favoring voxel over spline in “Breaking the Curve.”2 At stake here is not only architectural aesthetics and what resonates at a particular moment but also a fundamental dispute about how things and groups of things exist in the world.

W h a t i s a F l a t O n t o l o g y ?

One of the most important advances in the dis- course of parts to wholes in architecture in the last century came through emergence theory, or the idea that the whole qualitatively exceeds

the sum of the parts. In that case, architecture could be coherent without recourse to classical composition. Despite often having been diluted by anemic computational exercises or obscured by jargon and scientism in architecture, emer- gence offers an explanation of how new things become manifest, as whole objects with their

If objects are viewed as nothing but blank screens onto which linguistic fantasies are pro- jected, we miss the tension in objects between their identity as one thing and their swirling manifold of spots and stripes where the connois- seur finds points of entry.

Graham Harman

The thing’s hollow—it goes on forever—and —oh my God!—it’s full of stars!

Arthur C. Clarke

Consider the orca. A biologist might tell you that orcas are, like

any other creature, the product of DNA muta- tion coupled with natural selection, as if that explained everything about the evocative thing right there in front of our eyes. In that world- view, the orca is simultaneously reduced to an outcome of interactions of atomic units and of enormous ecological systems. In a theoretical and popular world obsessed with networks, flows and processes, it seems like the orca must also be a network or a flow or a process; to a hammer everything looks like a nail. But this denies the specificity and discreteness of the orca: the depth of its slick black rubbery skin, the alien figuration of its white patches, its toy-like scalelessness. Rather than undermining the orca by attempting to justify or generalize it, why not instead embrace its specificity as an object, with all of its mysterious, irreducible character and inclinations?

In the architecture of the early 1990s, a revolution in digital design methods, the birth of the internet and the strong impact of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus prompted an urge to diffuse things into constellations of forces and relations. As read and absorbed by architecture, concepts of folding, becoming and the body without organs

transformed all things solid and singular into lines of flight, matters and speeds. At the time, this framework was an attractive alternative to the waning critical project of the 1980s, with its circular games of meaning and irony. This was a clear move away from the text as the center of discourse towards formal and material con- cerns. Sanford Kwinter’s discussion of Conrad Waddington’s “epigenetic landscape,” in which a warped surface (representing DNA expres- sion) is pictured as the extensive result of a network of intensive puppetry wires controlling it from beneath, set the stage for thinking about architecture in terms of sets of contingencies, as something in formation.1 In parallel, Jeffrey Kipnis began to promote qualities as a way to engage architecture immediately, without semi- otic reading, as a question of form and mood.

These two threads, one towards the inten- sive world and formation, and one towards the extensive world and new subjectivity, continue to support a rich dialogue in architecture today, twenty years later. Recently, however, this discussion has become in part radicalized by voices calling for total coherence between nature, city, infrastructure and building, versus others calling to recoup disciplinary expertise and engagement of the specifics of the archi- tectural object. These positions seem to exist in parallel universes: a world of surfaces, which goes on forever in all directions like a sheet, and a world of discrete chunks, consisting of things that can be held up and closely exam- ined like diamonds. In the former, difference is drawn out from a neutral state or expressed as continuous variation, while in the latter, there is no neutral condition, and difference exists within the things themselves. Coherence is not achieved through literal continuity, but rather by way of discrete things acting upon one an- other. The profound difference in ethos between these two contemporary positions underlies a long thread of debate in architecture, articulat- ed for instance by Stan Allen favoring field over

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Tom Wiscombe

D i s c r e t e n e s s , o r To w a r d s a F l a t O n t o l o g y o f A r c h i t e c t u r e

1. Sanford Kwinter, “Landscapes of Change: Boccioni’s ‘Stati

d’animo’ as a General Theory of Models,” Assemblage 19

(December 1992): 62.

2. See Stan Allen, “From Object to Field,” Architectural Design 67

(1997): 24-31; Robert Somol, “12 Reasons to Get Back into

Shape” in Content, eds. OMA and Rem Koolhaas, (Köln:

Taschen, 2004), 86-87; and Mario Carpo, “Breaking the Curve:

Big Data and Design,” Artforum (February 2014).

3. Levi Bryant, The Democracy of Objects (Ann Arbor: Open

Humanities Press, 2011), 19. He notes that “all objects, as Ian

Bogost has so nicely put it, equally exist while they do not

exist equally.”

4. Graham Harman, “Object Oriented France: The Philosophy of

Tristan Garcia,” Continent 5.1 (2012): 10. On Tristan Garcia:

“Instead, a thing is comparable to a sack that is immaterial and

without thickness: it is nothing other than the difference between

that which is this thing and that which the thing is, between

content and container.” See also Levi Bryant,“Parts and Wholes:

The Strange Mereology of Object-oriented Ontology” in The

Democracy of Objects. Deleuze and Guattari, in a similar way,

insisted that “the wolf is also the pack” in Giles Deleuze and

Félix Guattari, “1914: One or Several Wolves,” in A Thousand

Plateaus (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1987) 26-38.

5. Graham Harman writes that “we have a universe made up of

objects wrapped in objects wrapped in objects.” Harman,

Bart Hess, Mutants, 2013. Video still.

3 6 P R O J E C T 37I s s u e 3

character that they do not become immediately subsumed by other elements and fall back into a default hierarchy. For this reason, at my of- fice we often work with collections of chunky pseudo-primitives such as crystals or jacks, which have strong silhouettes but no privileged Z-axis orientation. Techniques of development include sacking, stuffing, shrink-wrapping, in-laying, over-molding, figural slicing and other operations that produce synthetic material effects and celebrate the resilience of whole objects and their interactions. Instead of a milkshake, in which parts dissolve into a homogeneous unity, this is more like a Korean seafood pancake, in which different animals and vegetables are pressed together but left whole in unexpected arrangements.

O b j e c t s W r a p p e d i n O b j e c t s

Within the framework of a flat ontology, the “sectional object,” from Jeffrey Kipnis’s 1993 essay “Towards a New Architecture,” becomes newly relevant.8 Particularly after a decade of work focused on the subject of surface and deal- ing with issues of superficiality, refinement and tessellation, we may now return to concerns of mass and interiority, and importantly, the mystery and surprise of hiding and revealing

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becomes an act of staging and characterizing the spaces of these deferrals, as well as charac- terizing each unique object.

Now, when all architectural “elements”6— such as mass, interior, surface articulation and ground—are treated equally but differently, strange and productive architectural conse- quences arise. Interior objects, as noted above, gain formal independence from the outer mass, potentially pushing into and inflecting it or even transgressing the boundaries of the outer mass to exist on equal terms. Next, mass is no longer contingent upon literal ground. Resisting harmonious alignments with the constructed “essence” of physical context, ground and mass are separated, to be dealt with as equally impor- tant but independent architectural problems. One does not erase or assimilate the other, but the two may anticipate one another. Finally, surface articulation is given its own identifi- able objecthood, embedded into the architec- ture loosely rather than being subsumed. For instance, patches (as in a calico cat), which have distinct figuration and independence from the surface they are on, would be favored over panelization, which is necessarily beholden to underlying surface geometry. This same logic of objects could be applied to any number of other architectural features as well—apertures, construction joints and so on—which have been undermined by a now exhausted will towards smoothness over the last decade.

This is a basis for a flat ontology of architec- ture.7 Architectural elements are pulled apart and de-stratified so they can be reassembled to produce a refreshing chunkiness and tension. In order to achieve this effect, architectural elements must interact—empathize with one another—rather than remaining fully autono- mous. Things can nestle, squish, or envelop other things, as long as they do not fuse to- gether or damage one another. Elements in play must therefore have enough resilience and

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Guerilla Metaphysics (Chicago: Open Court Publishing

Company, 2005), 85.

6. The word “element” is problematic here (but difficult to find

a substitute for) because it connotes that things can be

broken down into subdivisions or located in a hierarchy. See

Gottfried Semper’s The Four Elements of Architecture (1851),

which argues that plinth, hearth, roof, and wall constitute all

architectural discourse. This problem of language is also why

I choose ‘whole-to-whole’ relations and not ‘part-to-part

relations’ in this discussion of a flat ontology.

7. Manuel De Landa is considered the source of the term “flat

ontology” in philosophy: “While an ontology based on relations

between general types and particular instances is hierarchical,

each level representing a different ontological category (organism,

species, genera), an approach in terms of interacting parts and

emergent wholes leads to a flat ontology, one made exclusively

of unique, singular individuals, differing in spatio-temporal

scale but not ontological status.” Manuel De Landa, Intensive

Science and Virtual Philosophy (New York: Continuum, 2002), 41.

8. Jeffrey Kipnis, “Towards a New Architecture,” in Architectural

Design: Folding in Architecture (1993), 41-49.

3 8 P R O J E C T 3 9I s s u e 3

one pushing up and one pushing down into a shroud, creating the effect of three independent objects nesting into one another without fusing. Shaped infill glazing jumps between figure and shroud, creating enclosed but seemingly exte- rior interstitial spaces.

Finally, the supercomponent model is a variation of the figure in a sack, in which objects are instead pressed into an enclosure from the outside. As if vacuformed together and then re- leased, objects can be nestled into one another, implying a coherent new object without produc- ing a fused monolith. Gaps and other disconti- nuities resulting from this technique are criti- cal, since they reinforce the supercomponents’ autonomy; supercomponents can be tight-fit, loose-fit and even mis-fit for different effect. By pressing some objects more or less deeply into others, involutions are produced which appear on the interior as inside-out figures. We proposed this model in our Maribor project for the 2012 Venice Biennale, which features deep, inhabitable crevices between form-fit objects.

H o v e r i n g a n d G r o u n d O b j e c t s

In the same way that discreteness and affili- ation characterizes the relation of inner and outer objects, it also characterizes the relation between building mass and ground. Building mass does not fuse or otherwise disappear into ground, but rather maintains distinction from it. Strategies include hovering, nestling or deferring landing by way of a ground object,

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Top. National Center for Contemporary Art. Moscow, Russia, 2013. Aerial Rendering and diagram. Above and left. Taichung City Cultural Center. Taichung, Taiwan, 2013. Aerial Rendering and diagram.

interior objects. The term “objects wrapped in objects,” borrowed from Graham Harman, is intentionally open-ended in order to include many different models of affiliation includ- ing, but not limited to, things that are actually inside of other buildings.9

Three examples of models that push this project forward include the figure in a sack, the implied outer shell and the supercomponent. The figure in a sack is an attempt to create plas- tic relations between container and contained, in which hints are given as to the contents of the “sack,” but the contents are never revealed in full. Inner objects push out like a fist through a rubber sheet, creating strange formal inflec- tions in the sack, and a strange simultaneity of inner and outer silhouettes. The work of Bart Hess, in which human figures are wrapped in engineered polymers, produces similar effects: sack and figure are independent, but each restrains and affects the other. An interior liner, tucked between and around figures as if blown full of air, can create poché space with which to conceal circulation systems and organize functions in a non-stratified way. The liner also allows for a baroque-like independence of ex- terior and interior form, where mirrored zones of loose-fitting can create vast and unexpected interstitial spaces. This is the strategy for our design for the National Center for Contempo- rary Art, Moscow (2013). In this project, objects are never fully visible but their shape is implied; sometimes objects are entirely removed, and their impressions are left on sack and liner as a kind of visual subterfuge.

Where the figure in a sack model has as its precedents Jean Nouvel and Philippe Starck’s unbuilt Tokyo Opera (a container with incon- gruous figures) and Coop Himmelb(l)au’s UFA Cinema Center (an aquarium of “scattered objects”),10 the implied outer shell model finds its precedents in Bernard Tschumi’s Le Fresnoy and Le Corbusier’s Heidi Weber Museum. Both of those projects deal with the spatial effects of a partial secondary enclosure, which shrouds but does not completely obscure inner objects. Our design for the Taichung City Cultural Center (2013) was based on two vertical figures,

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9. Graham Harman, Guerilla Metaphysics (Chicago: Open Court

Publishing Company, 2005), 85.

10. Referring to Coop Himmelb(l)au’s UFA Cinema project, Kipnis

writes: “a diaphanous membrane that envelops independent

objects scattered in its interior amid circuitous paths of

circulation.” Jeffrey Kipnis, “Exile on Ringstrasse; Excitations

on Main Street,” in A Question of Qualities, ed. Alexander

Maymind (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2012), 45.

4 0 P R O J E C T 41I s s u e 3

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all of which create intensive coherence rather than literal continuity. A good analogy is the Russian Ground-Effect Vehicle from the late 1980s, which flies over water at a height of one meter, producing a tense, magnetic relation between ground and mass. This approach of detaching buildings from the ground is dif- ferent than lifting up building masses by Le Corbusier, which was based on an idea of al- lowing landscape to flow underneath.11 Instead, the goal here is to emphasize and re-invent the break between world and building as well as exterior and interior, two of fundamental architectural problems.

An opposite approach to the ground would be the “landscape-building” from the 1990s, which assumes little distinction between the architecture and the rest of the world, often ap- pearing in lump or hill-like formations. At that time, concepts of “becoming” and “the other,” as in Deleuze’s musings on werewolves, often pushed architecture outside of its disciplinary boundaries into the indistinct realms of context and site.12 Architecture became a surrogate for the ground and, as David Ruy has noted, buildings were often reduced to an “outcome” of real or imagined contextual forces.13 This denigration of the building object by defining it as a trickle-down effect of context is happily rectified with a flat ontology.

A ground object is the total objectification of the land underneath a building. Ground is re-cast as mass rather than surface. In classical architecture, the pedestal or plinth is extruded from the land, and hence is still a type of sur- face. In contrast, a strong ground object would be characterized by undercuts to the landscape, would appear dug-up and loose and would empathize actively with the building mass. Like a bird in a nest, where the bird and nest relate but have different characters, the ground object requires some degree of architectural autono- my. This autonomy can be further emphasized by way of trenches, joints, level changes, bridges or other sleights of hand. One recent example of this strategy can be seen in the Perot Museum of Nature and Science by Morphosis, in which

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the main building mass nestles into a ground object, which itself maintains a clear separation from the land.

Another kind of ground object is a hole. In this case, the ground object is not a mass but an articulated void. This strategy can be seen in both Claude-Nicolas Ledoux’s house of the agricultural guard for Chaux as well as Marcel Breuer’s Whitney Museum. A hole has the benefit of both obscuring the foot of the build- ing on approach, and forcing entry at mid-level. The act of entry becomes a leap from one world into another.

Ta t t o o s

As opposed to meshes and panelization sys- tems, which are everywhere, all the time on a building skin, a tattoo is an objectification of surface articulation. Tattoos are not orna- ment, in the sense that they do no hang off of architecture.14 They are also distinct from the supergraphics of Venturi, which float on the surface of architecture. Architectural tattoos are instead embedded in the building mass, without losing their elemental autonomy. They are clicked-in, over-molded onto or pressed into surfaces loosely, as if they might later be removed and examined as independent objects. Like tattoos on the body, architectural tattoos may sometimes track underlying form, but they often deviate from it to become free-form or figural. Instead of being subservient to edges or

11. Jeffrey Kipnis, “Thesis Prep,” lecture, Southern California

Institute of Architecture, Los Angeles, CA, January 20, 2011,

http://sma.sciarc.edu/video/jeff-kipnis-part-two-thesis-prep-

talk-part-two-of-two/.

12. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 241-275.

13. In his Spring 2013 SCI-Arc Lecture, David Ruy discusses

the problem of context and nature vis-à-vis the object. David

Ruy, “Returning to (Strange) Objects,” lecture, Southern

California Institute of Architecture, Los Angeles, CA,

January 30, 2013, http://sma.sciarc.edu/video/david-ruy-

returning-to-strange-objects/.

14. Jeffrey Kipnis, “The Cunning of Cosmetics,” El Croquis 84 (1997).

Left. Collider Activity Center, Bulgaria, 2013. Aerial rendering. Below. Diamond City. Adelaide, Australia, 2013.Aerial rendering. Bottom Left. Pop Music Center. Kaohsiung, Taiwan, 2010. Aerial rendering. Bottom Right. Russian Ground- Effect Vehicle.

4 2 P R O J E C T 43I s s u e 3

material a human can fabricate or carry and rethought in these terms, scale comes into question. Architecture can cease to register the human form and instead move toward strange, alien effects we can only begin to imagine.

* * *

Whether or not a flat ontology is enough of a basis for a new architecture remains to be seen. While recent history suggests that literal importations of philosophy into architecture can be problematic, the framework for a flat ontology to some extent already exists inside architecture: it provides a contemporary update to the discourse of part-to-whole relations and problems of composition. A flat ontology con- fronts the possibility of radically de-stratifying architecture without resorting to smoothing on the one hand or disjunction on the other. Instead, it offers a refreshing model of coher- ence based on constellations of whole objects engaged in magnetic and empathetic relations.

Top. Chinese University of Hong Kong Arena. Shenzhen, China, 2012. Aerial rendering. Above Right. National Center for Contemporary Art. Moscow, Russia, 2013. Diagram. Above Left. Chinese University of Hong Kong Arena. Shenzhen, China, 2012. Diagram. Left. National Center for Contemporary Art. Moscow, Russia, 2013. Aerial rendering.

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other formal inflections of the building mass, tattoos are patchy and discontinuous. Accord- ing to Owen Jones, who may have been the first to make an analogy between tattoos and architecture, a tattoo is “an impress or a stamp” that is “derived less from the ‘body’ it covers than from the graphic interests and pictorial imagination of its maker.”15

The contemporary tattoo is not a sign, but an autonomous formal system. According to Mark Taylor’s descriptions of “dermagraphics,” a tattoo “is always duplicitous.”16 Architectural tattoos inhabit the duplicitous realm between two- and three-dimensionality, sometimes with the effect of flattening; in other instances they create the illusion of depth where there is none. While tattoos may often become associ- ated with tasks such as organizing apertures or joints on a surface, their primary architec- tural role is to produce mysterious cross-grain formal effects, which can emphasize or obscure the discreteness of the objects into which they are inscribed. This can mean that they feather edges, emphasize silhouettes or transitions, or virtually connect disconnected masses. The tat- toos of our NCCA project, for example, some- times bridge between discrete masses to create the appearance of a larger unified object, but other times create the illusion that the masses are separate when in fact they are not.

Finally, it is important to note that tattoos derive not only from a new formal sensibility, but from the possibilities inherent in compos- ite construction. Suddenly it is possible, and imperative, to rethink what constitutes surface articulation when the age of tectonic articula- tion based on bricks, sticks and panels is past. In composite monocoque construction, for instance, the site of the joint may no longer be the site of articulation; one may have nothing to do with the other. Joints and seams may be suppressed or emphasized or altogether faked for effect, as in our project for the Taichung City Cultural Center. Also, the sheer number of functional seams may be significantly reduced, pointing to the possibility of buildings made from massive interlocking chunks. As construc- tion is de-coupled from the size of pieces of

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15. Owen Jones, “The Grammar of Ornament” (1856), in

Surface Architecture, eds. Mohsen Mostafavi and David

Leatherbarrow (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002), 101.

16. “Lines on the body are never univocal but always duplicitous

[…] drawing opens as much as it closes, to create seams that

are as fragile as the bodies they demarcate”. Mark Taylor, Hiding

(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 129.