extending practice beyond object form

free: architecture on the loose, bi publications, 2013

in keller easterling’s first two major publications, organization space and enduring innocence, they present readers with an exhaustive body of evidence cataloging dynamic spatial products, or what they terms active forms—‘resorts, information technology campuses, retail chains, golf courses, ports and other enclave formations’.[1] these are products that are not merely objects in the landscape, buildings in the traditional sense of bricks and mortar, or what keller terms object forms, but are also plugged into and influence larger political, economic and cultural systems. they are architecture as information. while the rich, and often times mythical, narratives that surround these spatial products implicate the built environment, keller rightly acknowledges that ‘architects often treat them as banal or unresponsive to recognized systems of architectural language’.[2] while ‘rogue nations, cults, diplomats and other impresarios’[3] have up until now been the protagonists within these active form narratives, keller, in their upcoming publication, extrastatecraft: the powers of matrix space, aims to gift this role to the professionals that already know so much about space: architects.

towards this end, keller would like to extend the powers of architects beyond object form and into the register of active form, essentially freeing them from the accepted limits of contemporary practice. but what is the qualitative distinction between object form and active form? in the action is the form: victor hugo’s ted talk, keller distinguishes between these two types of practice through the analogy of the stone in the water: ‘if architects are often making a stone in the water while the world makes the water, the stone is an object form while the water is what might be called the active form’.[4] while architects are very well versed at using all of the tools of architecture— geometric manipulation, volume, materiality—to shape the stone, they are less adept at getting that stone to part the water, to control its flow or to alter its currents. keller would like architects to get better at this.

what are some of the difficulties in communicating the concepts of object form and active form?

recently i gave the first two lectures for a course called globalization space, at yale, and they seemed to go well. the idea that there is some kind of matrix space —an infrastructural matrix of spatial products—was well understood by all kinds of students from different parts of the university.

the social and political sciences are now looking to spatial studies—to the special knowledge of architecture and urbanism. i usually present a long strobe through all of the spaces that we are swimming in—things like turning radii, parking spaces, skyscrapers, malls, suburbs or resorts. that soupy space of repeatable details is our test bed.

still, just a few days after these lectures, i went to croatia to give a talk at a conference hosted by some very cool architects that are producing complex digital formalism. their work is beautiful and sophisticated and they are interesting people. they also want to make these forms reach out to the political. so they put on a conference about global politics. i have been to so many of these conferences where the people who focus on politics scold the formalists saying, ‘you don’t know anything about politics or human rights or whatever and what you’re doing is disengaged’. i really can’t stand that divide. it’s not fair and it’s not productive. so i thought i had the perfect solution, by saying that this sort of soupy-matrix space is good news. it’s actually a kind of magical and powerful space that we can use, but in order to do so we need to be able to extend the powers of object form with active form. the minute i said that, some people walked out of the lecture hall, because what it seemed to them was that i had questioned the validity of object form when i was really building a bridge. i was trying to eliminate the binary opposition between object form and active form. active form does not struggle against or duel with object form. it partners with object form. pretty tricky.

you do seem to avoid the binary relationship even in the naming of these terms. active form is described in relation to object form, rather than to inactive form.

that’s right. what i am trying to say in the action is the form: victor hugo's ted talk is that these forms are on a continuum, that one becomes the other, and that we might learn how to extend some of the powers of object form. in the analogy of the stone in the water, sometimes we are just making the stone—an object form— without any intention of diverting the water. that is a completely reasonable artistic choice. i am obsessed with object form as any architect would be, but i am also curious about the water—something very powerful that we might also engage. we don’t think that our training has anything to do with the water. we consider it as the artless world of monetized spaces that has nothing to do with us. but i see a way that we might engage it artistically.

can you give some examples of what active forms might be?

in my lectures at yale, i’m trying now to figure out how to broach these theoretical topics. i think the best thing is not to­ make such a big deal out of it. it is better to say that this idea is pretty simple and we already know how to make active forms. i often show an image of a levittown-like suburb, a mass-produced community of suburban houses, and say that we already know about the active forms within its landscape. for example, there are multipliers,[5] such as the repeated houses in this example, which extend beyond a single object form. if you were going to operate on this landscape, rather than fixing up a single house, you might design an intervention that would multiply within that field. the object form is one approach, but an active form approach might extend your powers. you would use that landscape as a carrier.

to give some other examples of what active forms might be: they could be switches. they could be remotes. they could be governors that establish a relationship between interdependent spatial variables—a means to generate not only a single object but also a flow of objects.

you describe the modification of a single house in levittown as an exercise in object form. is it possible to institute change at the scale of the neighborhood, or suburb, or even larger, by attacking the problem from its minutia? that something as basic as a material choice, at the micro level, could have a profound effect on houses, neighborhoods, or cities at a macro level when multiplied within these larger landscapes?

yes. take for instance the example of materials. in that levittown landscape they were using sheet goods—four by eight foot sheet goods. you could have stacked three of them horizontally to achieve a twelve foot ceiling, but they were turned vertically to make eight foot ceilings. that one move formats millions of spaces and millions of acres of square footage. the power of that small decision as a multiplier is incredible. these kinds of choices, made by all kinds of practitioners, might be made by architects. we, who know something about volume and space and domesticity and all of the rest of it. we know things that impact on those multipliers.

does an architect lose their standing if they enter the realm of the multiplier, versus devoting themselves to object form?

i don’t know why one doesn’t just do both. i have been testing this question for a few years now. in a course at yale about architectural entrepreneurialism, we have been looking at a kind of unorthodox form of practice that shifts authority in our hierarchical discipline. some of my former students are pursuing these kinds of practices—practices calling on all of our abilities to design an object, as well as the way that object will play in culture. it means designing not only the shape of the game piece, but also how the game piece moves. i want my students to be good at that because there is so much rigor, so much creativity, so much maturity and muscle in what architectural students make, and yet this intelligence is often neglected. so thinking like an entrepreneur, you are not just designing a product. that is secondary. you are designing the way it’s going to catch on in the world, why it’s going to be contagious. you are designing its epidemiology and we just need to get better at that. i want us to get better at that.

as an educator, how does one test ideas about active form inside of a studio environment that is shut off from the rest of the world?

it is an important question. i have done a couple of studios at yale where the intention is to rehearse our abilities to cultivate active form. i always think that if it were drama school you would take classes where you would learn to perform hamlet’s soliloquy, and then you would take some classes where you would learn improvisation. the kinds of studios that i am teaching are ones in which you learn improvisation. so rehearsing your reactivity as well as your ability to make a masterpiece building or to do a single soliloquy. i’ve done a couple studios where you start your project, and then you get an envelope—a message announcing new circumstances and forks in the road.

part of the invention is also about what kinds of documents are necessary to talk about these ideas. in typical studios, we work from the master plan down to the detail. in these experimental studios we have started with the detail, which is then proliferated or multiplied in different master plans, or scenarios. so the details are quite explicit and drawn using all of our conventional tools, but they are also multipliers. they act as a germ in several different landscapes and scenarios.

this year i really want to focus on object form as well. in particular what i am interested in right now is our lack of artistry with volume and space. we are connoisseurs of the containers of space, but we are not really connoisseurs of volume. we don’t speak to each other in terms of cubage. we don’t even know the cubage of some of the most iconic volumes like grand central station.

are those the type of things you think we once knew as a profession and have now lost track of?

i think so. perhaps understanding volume was one of those things that architects used to be so good at. we might be like an enologist with wine or ‘the nose’ in perfume design that is able to talk about nuanced differences.

why do you want us to get better at active form? or is it inherently good for a form to be active versus inactive?

while it is not a matter of what is good or bad, to rehearse some of these ideas probably enhances our powers for dealing with the world. let’s say you want to design a table. all of your powers of geometric manipulation, shape and measure, understanding of body and domesticity and practices of dining, all of your knowledge of the object goes into that table. the advent of that object in the world—the way that object enters and travels through the world—is also important to the object. active form is often a partner, the thing that propels the object in culture. there is much more to the story of active form, but that is one point of entry.

so it almost gives the designed object a sort of darwinian evolutionary advantage?

who knows why something succeeds, as it is often out of your hands. you could make something like bilbao. reasons why it was loved and was politically instrumental were completely undeclared and unintended, and yet there it is. so you never know. people think i work on politics and things that come with moral overtones, but for me the artistic pleasures surround ingenuity and the chance to be effective.

it’s interesting that you bring up the example of bilbao.

it’s a stone in the water.

it’s a stone in water but it’s also very active in the way that it influenced the global cultural tourism industry.

somebody once asked me about this great movie, the man who never was, starring clifton webb and gloria graham. it’s a story about how the allied forces planted a decoy—a body with some maps and stuff—as a false lead for a plan that they were not going to deploy. there is an example of a dead thing, a still, dead, static body, that was nevertheless completely active, disruptive and able to part the waters. almost all object forms have some kind of activity but recognizing what it is and being able to manipulate those extra valences is a power.

do you think that as architects we understand active form as it implicates attributes such as beauty, as in the gehry example, and already use that to our advantage?

maybe. i think we also certainly understand the active forms of careerism. we spend a lot of time thinking about how the hero got popular, who is on top, or which starchitect is here and there. so all the entrepreneurial energy that we might be putting into other things are often expended on the construction of hierarchy. in this way, some of the people that you think of as the least interested in something like active form are masters at it—masters of entrepreneurialism, and of how to spin things in the world.

do you think that these sorts of endeavors are a productive use of active form?

the kind of active form i am talking about can go a lot further. for instance, i think architects would be quite good at establishing global protocols for certain kinds of development conundrums in the world. i just came back from the ecuadorian amazon where the problem is not how to make more object form but how to actually shrink the object. so you have a lot of people from mckinsey or the world bank, you have finance people, you have people who are experts in the carbon market, and they are all trying to make a difference. but we are the ones trained to make space. we are the ones that have been driving the development machine forward, and there is a chance that we know how to put it in reverse. so then what kind of training will you need if you have only been trained to make the object? what skills do you need to acquire to not only add but also subtract architecture? what skills could be useful?

in a site like this an active form might be something more like a valve, governor, switch or cosine x—a tool to establish interdependencies between properties. with a kind of ratchet effect it could be used to densify in one place and subtract in another. dial them one way or the other, to get them to leverage or offset. and that is something the political world could borrow from us. right now they have development formulas related to econometrics. they are all pretty abstract. attaching risks and rewards to visible, tangible space could be really useful. we can say ‘that piece of forest is worth this much on the carbon market and will be traded somewhere in geneva’. but what if it was a little bit more immediate and tangible? you look at mcmansion suburbia and try to understand that the house that you bought so long ago is attached to abstract (and imploding) global financial networks, but you just can’t see it. what if we developed a portfolio of spatial variables rather than abstract financial or other abstract variables?

is there a point at which there are too many variables for this type of strategy to be effective?

well you can figure out a few things. regardless of the complexity usually you start just by trying to understand the rules. i think it’s better when rules are simple, but repeated. even if you think about levittown, a condition that is as dumb as it gets, repeated, or multiplied, it is incredibly powerful. it is just finding things that ride that landscape and get amplified by it.

two examples of places where local governments have just established simple offsets are dubai and the amazon rainforest. in dubai, if you want to do business in oil and gas, there are a couple of simple rules. you have to start in another industry that the state needs, and you have to make a uae national the ceo. that is the rule, and it could not be simpler. in the amazon, the yasuni itt protocol says ‘we will preserve an especially biodiverse portion of the rainforest that is sitting on a huge oil field, if you compensate us for the lost revenues in oil’. so they are selling certificates to keep the oil underground. it’s a leveraging offset.

you often present your readers with information in a stylized or poetic way. rather than simply defining terms, you utilize storytelling as a way of communicating incredibly complex relationships.

maybe i am a writer before being an architect. i did theater before i did architecture, and i write things that aren’t about architecture. there is a kind of writing that i want to do but rarely get to do. maybe i just got so impatient with not being able to do it and with the academic necessities that limit it. maybe i decided that i was going to write for architecture while exercising some of the same narrative structures that interest me. in enduring innocence, but also in this book that i just finished, extrastatecraft, it’s very clear to me that while there are important rationalizing formulas running in the background, the irrational and the fictional are running the world. the evidence in enduring innocence was incredibly satisfying for me because i was able to write something like footnoted fiction. the narrative sequenced the information to tell a story. i hoped that the often quite dry research would read like fiction.

can you tell us a bit more about your upcoming book, extrastatecraft?

extrastatecraft is not a hyperbolic story like enduring innocence. in response to enduring innocence people often said, ‘you are giving us all this evidence but you haven’t told us what to do with it’. somehow an architect was expected to have answers or, at least, techniques. i was also asked to be more explicit about ‘my politics’ as if politics was only a declared label. this book delivers some techniques for form making and activism that are effective in the matrix space of global infrastructure. one section of the book looks at the development of free zones around the world. if the book has a one-liner, it would probably be that any zone incentives now typically located in exurban enclaves, should be mapped onto the city. it is a very simple, almost obvious idea. all the enclaves outside of nairobi and quito and moscow or lahore, if mapped back on to the city, would have an enormous effect, especially if the idea was contagious within a population of zones. if i had been smart, i would have written a popular book that was just about the zone. a book in 40,000 words or less, with a big one liner: here is the problem and here is what you might do. that might have been a really popular book.

extrastatecraft exists as a project online at www.extrastatecraft.net, and also as an upcoming book, extrastatecraft: the power of matrix space, to be published by verso in 2013.

[1] keller easterling, enduring innocence - global architecture and its political masquerades (cambridge: mit press, 2005), 1.

[2] easterling, enduring innocence, 1.

[3] easterling, enduring innocence, 1.

[4] keller easterling, the action is the form: victor hugo’s ted talk (moscow: strelka press, 2012).

[5] a multiplier is an agent that is repeated, or multiplied. in the example of levittown, houses were mass-produced from a few basic plans, and then propagated across the landscape. they were not treated as singular objects, but as a repeatable formula.