18

ARCHITECTURE OR ACCELERATION

Position as opposition

Anne Bordeleau

In order for the patient to survive from the crisis Alberto Pérez-Gómez diagnosed in 1980, a decision had to be made.² When I consider the phrase Architecture’s Appeal, I can only think that the title must point to our responsibility as architects to constantly appeal a decision that appears to have been made. Pérez-Gómez was specifically building upon Husserl’s reading of the crisis in European sciences, but the necessity for architecture to plead and plead again, i.e. to put forward a formal answer or objection, is relevant in light of another use of the term crisis. Since 1780, crisis has been applied to history to express “a new sense of time which both indicated and intensified the end of an epoch.”³ Acceleration, this sense of time that ascended over the last 200 years as a child of modern sciences, now dominates not only political and economic dimensions, but also everyday life, the perception of culture and even more fundamentally how we situate ourselves in the world as mortal beings.⁴ The idea of reconciliation, whether or not it is still possible, implies a relation between the temporal and the eternal, two realms traditionally mediated through architecture. Positing the possibility of mediation at the heart of architecture’s relation to time, in this paper I first question the impacts of acceleration to then glimpse at architecture’s appeal: how it exerts its power to address itself to “chora” as a “space of ontological continuity,” wherein the transience of becoming writes itself against the immutable figure of Being.5

Acceleration and depth

In a critical research on acceleration, the sociologist Hartmut Rosa ascertains the existence of our late-modern experience of time through a study of its social, theoretical and political underpinnings.⁶ Some of Rosa’s observations on the socioeconomic dimensions of acceleration will be familiar. Indeed, it is widely accepted that the growing rate of production and technological innovation fuels a greater level of consumption along with the insatiable sense of unfulfilled desire. The perception of acceleration has far-reaching consequences that include individual and collective senses of a scarcity of time, the conditions of the non-simultaneity of the simultaneous between (and often also within) specific social groups, the institutional adaptation in the form of exceptional powers as well as the experience of a growing distance from tradition. Implicitly, Rosa’s study also points to the troubling nature of the relation between surface and depth. Over the past decades, architectural theorists such as Antoine Picon, Sanford Kwinter and Joan Ockman have considered how an unchallenged technological will rests at the core of the relation between the fluid surface and the petrified depth.⁷ In Polar Inertia, Paul Virilio also addresses the stiffening effects of technology.⁸ Paradoxically, the technology that propels the perpetual attraction for change and novelty also leads to the eternal return of the same. The technological promise of emancipation ultimately congeals in a new form of oppression that calls for alternatives to former conceptions of salvation. Identifying the daunting and ultimately oppressive nature of endless movement, voices both within and outside architecture – Marshal Berman, Hilde Heynen or David Harvey – have alluded to the persisting need for some redeeming figure of stability.⁹ This figure, however, takes the form of an aestheticization of politics, a longing for the eternal, or a spatialization of time. The reference is no longer the possibility of ontological or even historical continuity, but rather the frozen moment of an endless present. We have moved from a time defined through duration, sequences and rhythms to what Manuel Castells describes as timeless time: a time without depth.¹⁰

The loss of depth, a real depth in the sense advocated by Pérez-Gómez, is directly related to the transformation of our relation to time. It must be understood in light of the shifting conception of, and changing relation between, time and eternity. From the sixteenth to the nineteenth century, the ability to measure time verified impressions of a temporal foreshortening that were gradually transformed from an experience based in eschatological Christian expectations of an end fixed from outside, to progress in the natural sciences that could be measured within history. In the words of historian Reinhart Koselleck, the Christian apocalyptic conception of a “foreshortening of time … became a metaphor for acceleration. . . .”11 Rosa adds that in a secular conception wherein eternity refers to a world that will continue after our fast-approaching death, the ability to live faster, that is to live more options, eventually serves “as a functional equivalent to eternity.” Functionally, the “almost infinite plurality of forms of life” that a late-­modern individual embraces to match transformations in their changing world becomes synonymous to “traditional ideas of an ‘eternal life.’”¹² In a strange reversal, the “open, experimental, and fragmentary images of the self” that one adopts to keep up with incessant changes pose as the figure of eternity, whereas stability in one’s identity is avoided, doomed to be anachronistic.¹³

The redefinition and relocation of eternity is dramatic in at least two crucial ways. First, and fundamentally, the new secular conception negates the formerly implied transcendental dimension. From a temporal perspective, the quality of meta-narrative that any ideology tends towards is inevitably endowed by a certain sense of eternity. Plurality of fragmented approaches – like the “almost infinite plurality of forms” at the level of the individual – now replace former attempts to hint at some shared stable ground. Second and paradoxically, the secular location of eternity within accelerated time actually fuels an alienation from time. The experiences lived in accelerated time do not carry mnemonic depth; they disappear from memory as quickly as they vanish with the present.¹⁴ This lack of reference leads to a form of self-alienation. To avoid becoming anachronistic one must constantly focus on the new, one must move with time’s flow. In “Le Cygne,” Charles Baudelaire was referring to the life of things that we behold in our memory once we have experienced them, a life that he then considered could outlive the objects themselves.¹⁵ Along with the stable figure of eternity, even Baudelaire’s memories – as heavy as stone – now evaporate.

Architecture’s compensation: territory, the everyday and the fragmentary

The demystification of infinity in relation to human orientation in space has its temporal counterpoint in the ascending importance of acceleration. The former implies the superfluity of a larger cosmological order; the latter brings eternity within time at the expense of the lived-time of experience. As we witness the fragmentation of architectural practice and its expansion into larger fields, we can discern two apparently opposed tendencies. Current practice is polarized between tactical interventions and infrastructural urbanism, between ephemeral installations and metabolistic approaches to the territory, between explorations of digital materiality and ecological urbanism. At the punctual and ephemeral end of the spectrum, the emphasis is on the “everyday.” At the other end, different definitions of “perpetuity” form the temporal framework inherent to broad and operational interventions. But whether in their investment in the everyday or in longer sustainable cycles, how far do these approaches reinforce or resist the intrinsic processes of our late-modern temporal regime?

Small-scale intervention, playful or parasitical projects that emerge and vanish quickly – lasting the time of a day, a festival or a season – projects rooted in the everyday typically rest on the participation of a willing crowd. Digital architecture is often the motor of production; mass customization, freedom in permutations and apparently limitless possibilities of appropriation frequently characterize the installations. When these projects are published, users are invariably represented. The architecture of the everyday must be shown in use, the crowd it gathers is the measure of its success. But they gather, how? Given the alienation engendered by the secularization of “eternity as acceleration” and its effect on the experience of time, how meaningful can the everyday remain? With the absence of an Other, of eternity as an immutable idea, isn’t the everyday merely existing on the skin that time has already shed? In Virilio’s words: “in our ordinary everyday life, we are passing from the extensive time of history to the intensive time of an instantaneity without history made possible by the technologies of the hour.”16

If the temporal site of the architecture of the everyday is the flow of time experienced by individual users, projects operating at larger scales are situated against some greater flux of time. To overcome the thrilling but overwhelming sense of the ever changing, emerging architectural practices expand to embrace ecological urbanism, infrastructural urbanism or landscape architecture, leaving behind the single building to tackle greater scope and broader territories. Framed against geological time, ecological time or global time, the projects are conceived as processes that have the ability to respond or perhaps even to control anticipated changes. In the past few decades, large parks such as the Duisburg-Nord Industrial Landscape Park in Germany, the Olympic Sculpture Park in Seattle as well as Fresh Kills have rightly been heralded as successes. These projects take ownership, and with some delight, of the aestheticization of the forces at play – whether natural, economic or social. In other scenarios, alternate programs grow on the corpse of defunct infrastructure. For example, the High Line in New York offers promises of a renewed life for the old tracks but also for the buildings surrounding the elevated line. Notwithstanding its positive impacts on the city, High Line in all its bustling activity strangely museifies itself, the city and its past. Literally, the project promotes musing in a redefined urban museum. On top of this petrified image of a former life, the new path and everything that comes along with it – the rules, the new crowd, the rise in property value – have effectively replaced what was no longer relevant.17 Like the territorial interventions, the project offers minimal resistance to economy and productivity, the driving forces of acceleration. As these projects sustain existing economic processes, the characteristics of acceleration persist despite, or perhaps even precisely through, the subservient changes of a deeper infrastructural core or larger territorial expanse.

In an attempt to recover depth, different practitioners hark back to the social theories of Michel de Certeau and Henri Lefebvre, or to the idea of the relational presented by Nicolas Bourriaud and Bruno Latour. For example, atelier d’architecture autogérée implements projects that “take time” – a meaningful slowness in the context of acceleration. The firm looks for the emancipatory potential of the relational over the search for quick profit that characterizes commercial endeavors, it seeks to foster depth through rituals, repetition and continuity.¹⁸ Elizabeth Meyer likewise advocates an approach that includes if not the opposition to, at least the recognition of consumption and production, valuing confrontation of a collectivity or an individual as a means to effect changes.¹⁹ Striving for another kind of agency in large landscape projects, she calls for projects that make bare the “invisible consequences of our needs and desires,” allowing uncertainty and risk to frame our perception. Revealing discontinuities, making invisible forces uncomfortably tangible, allowing the moment to be fraught with tensions, accepting the irremediability of the gap: there is indeed great strengths in some of the projects that challenge the traditional domain of architectural practice to emphasize the ephemeral and the territorial. And yet, as interventions in the everyday or processes of territorialization, they are all rooted in the fluidity of time, projects and subjects of acceleration. The diversification of architectural practice may be rooted in a desire to address our modern relation to time, but as it moves along with everything else, or even as it anticipates and reacts, architecture remains subservient to the processes of acceleration, caught between a depthless time and a subsumed eternity.

When considering the possibility of an architectural resistance in temporal terms, it is precisely the concepts rejected or avoided by the architecture of acceleration that seem to be most promising. Today, to conceive of architecture as synonymous to a beautiful, useful and durable building is absolutely anachronistic. The same anachronism that plagues the stability of one’s personality undeniably tints the relevance of beauty often equated with aesthetic trend, of usefulness defined in flexible function, or durability approached as the ability to endure change. But the anachronism that brushes history and time against the grain may be one of the ways in which we can resist being subsumed in time. For Giorgio Agamben, relating anachronistically to time is to keep a firm grip on it precisely by maintaining a distance, and “the ones who can call themselves contemporary are only those who do not allow themselves to be blinded by the lights of the century, and so manage to get a glimpse of the shadows in those lights, of their intimate obscurity.”20

The projects in which this negative element is sought – the absent whole that lies in the shadow of the fragmentary presence – are certainly if intangibly hinting at some form of a shared pre-existing ground. Oscillating between a positive but fragmented presence and the implied potential whole that lies in its shadow, architects can not only reassert the position of the fragment in the present but also its indexical reference to what was or what could be. Examples range from the Gulag Stone in Moscow that literally and physically sets up a link with the history it represents,²¹ Pierre Soulages’ series of thick black paintings that reflect bright white light, or the simple joint at Peter Zumthor’s Gugalun House, homage to the aged wood that housed an older generation, humility of the new wood that merely extends and will weather, holding both stability and time, continuity and transience. Echoing a passage from a section that for me was undeniably the most vivid expression of the inextricability of our temporal anchors in the experience of space, we can say that these works appeal to “our capacity to under-stand the co-incidence of presence and absence, space and substance, light and shadow.”²²

Position as opposition

When Alberto Pérez-Gómez used the term crisis, he clearly used the concept as the Greek did to imply the necessity of choice, judgment and decision. But today, the categorical dimension of the concept is subdued in an ambivalent wish to defer conclusion. “The concept of crisis, which once had the power to pose unavoidable, harsh and non-negotiable alternatives, has been transformed to fit the uncertainties of whatever might be favored at a given moment.” This is Koselleck’s conclusion in his essay “Crisis.” And that, “a tendency towards vagueness and imprecision” is what he sees as a larger symptom of our current historical critical situation.²³ Deferring conclusion is again allowing the flow of time to preside over the impossibility to claim a meaningful position in time. It amounts to accepting the transformation of the fundamental dialectics between time and eternity into a self-propelled deferred image of eternity.

In Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty addresses the necessity of a double direction between time and eternity. “[A] two-way relationship that phenomenology has called Fundierung,” it is a relation between a founding term (time) and the founded (eternity).24 In this conception, neither time nor eternity precedes one another but both take their full meaning from the existence of the other. Neglecting the necessity of this double movement between the founding and the founded, the embrace of acceleration as the promise of the eternal creates a situation wherein both time and eternity are consumed. Acceleration consumes lived-time; accelerated time consumes the figure of eternity. We need to return to time as the primary element. In relation to landscape, authors such as Mark Treib, Denis Cosgrove and James Corner have been urging architects to carefully tune the temporalities of architecture against those of nature.²⁵ Turning to digital representation and to the Internet as an archive without sedimentation, Antoine Picon has revealed the inability of digital architecture to become the register of collective memories, encouraging practitioners to question some of the larger physical and metaphysical contexts within which they chose to operate.²⁶ But time, whether conceived through epistemological interactions or as the motor of the phenomenological encounter, loses its significant depth if considered singularly. It must carry resonances that hark back to history as well as to the depths of our memory.

When Merleau-Ponty points to the tendency to equate depth with breadth, he also contrasts the emphasis of one single perspective over the necessary movement between two realms. Only a view from eternity, an ubiquitous divine vision, would ever support a vision in which breadth would indeed match depth.²⁷ In order to explicate the fundamental nature of depth, the phenomenologist suggests a temporal understanding of its quasi-synthesis: “ … just as memory can be understood only as a direct possession of the past with no interposed contents, so the perception of distance can be understood only as a being in the distance which links up with being where it appears.”²⁸ For Pérez-Gómez, an architecture of resistance “celebrates dreams and the imagination without forgetting that it is made for the Other, and aims at revealing depth not as homologous to breath and height, but as a significant first dimension that remains mysterious, and reminds us of our luminous opacity as mortals in a wondrous more-than-human world.”²⁹ Indeed, the revelation of depth implies a double relation between architecture and what it seeks to bridge – human life and some figure of transcendental truth, a form of immanent order in the larger cosmos. Rather than accepting acceleration and adopting the instrumental, quantifiable, efficient and productive approach to practice, architects must take responsibility both for the past and the future by positing history as the only viable opposition to eternity as acceleration.30 But what does it mean to recover history, and is it still possible? We are quick and keen on remembering the technical and measurable, but it is of course much harder to hold on the intangible and immeasurable. History is getting squeezed out of programs, we are experiencing the 1930s anew to make room not for new forms but new dogma: technology, skills, and measurable outcomes. In this context, position becomes opposition: not to go with the flow, and firmly siting oneself within and against historical continuity. This may imply the careful selection of projects, refusal to participate in certain ventures, an awareness of the means we employ, a commitment to take the time that it takes, a pledge to acknowledge what is already there.

Architecture or acceleration

In the choice between “architecture or acceleration” lies a plea to consider anew the strengths of the anachronistic, the quality of durability and the need for some form of historical continuity. Perhaps it is only so-considered that approaches that privilege either the everyday, the fragmentary, the participatory and even the territory can be emancipatory. Indexical figures of continuity and discontinuity, fragments can oscillate between their presence in an ongoing dynamic and their ability to reference potential pasts and futures. Anachronistic also can be architecture’s durability, its unchanging form and resulting recognizability. A project like the Biblioteca España in Medellin, Columbia gains half its felicity by offering a counterpoint to the growing transit networks: from a space of production subservient to the larger economy of the city, the library is a place of contemplation, a break in scale and in temporality. Significantly, the project bears at its core the ambition to act as reference against the change it hopes to foster.³¹ Here, architecture assumes its representational and historical role within and against a world otherwise dictated by productivity. Architecture can be this figure of continuity through which time is revealed, a hyphen that lets us glimpse at the eternal by allowing time to unfold.

Notes

  1 Alberto Pérez-Gómez, Architecture and the Crisis of Modern Science (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1983), 4.

  2 Pérez-Gómez, Crisis, 3–14.

  3 Reinhart Koselleck, “Crisis,” Journal of the History of Ideas 67, no. 2 (2006): 358.

  4 Reinhart Koselleck, “Is There an Acceleration of History?” in High Speed Society, Social Acceleration, Power and Modernity, ed. Hartmut Rosa (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2009), 113–134.

  5 Alberto Pérez-Gómez and Louise Pelletier, Architectural Representation and the Perspective Hinge (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000), 10–11.

  6 Ulrich Beck, Anthony Giddens and Jurgen Habermas, posit the late-modern against notions of post-modernity to rather suggest a continuing modernity, hence a “late” modernity.

  7 Antoine Picon, “Digital Architecture and the Temporal Structure of the Internet Experience,” in Chrono-topologies, Hybrid Spatialities and Multiple Temporalities, ed. Leslie Kavanaugh (Amsterdam: Rodopi B. V, 2010), 222–236; Sanford Kwinter, Architectures of Time, Toward a Theory of the Event in Modernist Culture (Cambridge, MA: MIT press, 2002); Joan Ockman, “The Yes Man: Can Rem Koolhaas Make Consumerism Safe for Intellectuals? Harvard, Prada and Conde Nast all think so,” Architecture 91, no. 2 (2003): 76–79; and Joan Ockman, “Between Ornament and Monument, Sigfried Kracauer and the Architectural Implication of the Mass Ornament,” Thesis (Weimar: Wissenschaftliche Zeitschrift der Bauhaus-Universität), no. 3 (2003): 74–91.

  8 Paul Virilio, Polar Inertia (London: Sage Publications, 2000), 17.

  9 Marshall Berman, All that Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity (New York: Penguin, 1988); David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change (London: Wiley Blackwell, 1992); Hilde Heynen, Architecture and Modernity (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000).

10 Manuel Castells, Communication Power (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).

11 Koselleck, “Acceleration,” 116.

12 Rosa, High Speed Society, 9–11.

13 Hartmut Rosa, Aliénation et acceleration – Vers une théorie critique de la modernité tardive (Paris: La Découverte, 2012), 101.

14 Rosa, Aliénation, 132.

15 “Paris changes!” Baudelaire admitted, “but nothing in my melancholia has changed! New palaces, scaffoldings, blocks, old towns, all is becoming allegory for me, and my dear memories are heavier than stones” (Paris change! mais rien dans ma mélancolie – N’a bougé! palais neufs, échafaudages, blocs – Vieux faugbourgs, tout pour moi devient allégorie – Et mes chers souvenirs sont plus lourds que des rocs). Charles Baudelaire, “Le Cygne” (Tableaux Parisiens), in Les Fleurs du mal (Paris: Gallimard, 1972), 119.

16 Virilio, Polar Inertia, 25.

17 The High Line is called a “postmodern monument,” charming as it masks history by Rachel Stevens, “The High Line: Monument to Modern Ruin,” Afterimage: The Journal of Media Arts and Cultural Criticism 38, no. 2 (September/October 2010): 4–8. According to Adam Sternberg, “The project is the result of a perfect confluence of powerful forces: radical dreaming, stubborn optimism, neighborhood anxiety, design frenzy, real-estate opportunism, money, celebrity, and power.” Adam Sternberg, New York Magazine (2007) as quoted in Resilience in Ecology and Urban Design, ed. Pickett, Cadenasso, and McGrath (New York: Springer, 2013), 277.

18 Doina Petrescu, “Relationscapes: Mapping agencies of relational practice in architecture,” City, Culture and Society 3, no. 2 (2012): 139.

19 Elizabeth K. Meyer, “Uncertain Parks: Disturbed Sites, Citizens, and Risk Society,” in Large Parks, ed. Julia Czerniak and Gearge Hargreaves (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2007), 59–82.

20 Giorgio Agamben, “What is the Contemporary?” in What Is an Apparatus and Other Essays, trans. David Kishik and Stefan Pedatella (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009), 44–45.

21 Laura Mulvey, “Reflections on Disgraced Monuments,” in Architecture and Revolutions, ed. Neil Leach (New York: Routledge, 1999), 219–227.

22 Pérez-Gómez and Pelletier, Architectural Representation, 322–368.

23 Koselleck, “Crisis,” 399.

24 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Phenomenology of Perception (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1972), 394.

25 James Corner, “Eidectic Operations and New Landscapes,” in Recovering Landscape, Essays in Contemporary Landscape Architecture, ed. James Corner (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1999), 152–169; Dennis Cosgrove, “Mapping Meaning,” in Mappings, ed. Dennis Cosgrove (London: Reaktion Books, 1999), 1–23; and Mark Treib, ed., Spatial Recall: Memory in Architecture and Landscape (New York, London: Routledge, 2009).

26 Picon, “Digital Architecture,” 235–236.

27 Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 255.

28 Ibid., 265.

29 Alberto Pérez-Gómez, “The Historical Context of Contemporary Architectural Representation,” in Persistent Modelling: Extending the Role of Architectural Rep­resentation, ed. Phil Ayres (New York: Routledge, 2012), 23.

30 Elsewhere, I have taken up the idea – advocated by Pérez-Gómez and going all the way back to Vico – that history, in the form of continuity, is indeed the only trace of eternity that we may still hold in common. Anne Bordeleau, “Monumentality and Contemporaneity in the Work of Tarkovsky, Goldsworthy, and Zumthor,” in Chora: Intervals in the Philosophy of Architecture, vol. 7, forthcoming.

31 Giancarlo Mazzanti, “Biblioteca España,” in Landform Building, Architecture’s New Terrain, ed. Stan Allan and Marc McQuade (New York: Lars Müller Publisher, 2011), 106.