If I can take a ride in a driverless car on a public street, then I

ASSISTANT EDITOR
Coincidentally, two things in particular bear on Log 28. :he fi~st is hi~t~rian
Anthony Vidler and architect Peter Eisenman's guest editorsh1p of th1s 1ssue,
in which they reprise the idea of "stocktaking" from Reyner Banham's s~ries
of probing articles published in Architectural Revin~~ in 1960. The second IS
the exhibition "Archaeology of the Digital," curated by architect Greg Lynn
for the Canadian Centre for Architecture. In both this issue and Lynn's show,
which opened in Montreal in May, the unspoken question seems to be, Have
.
.
we really come very far, so fast?
Vidler and Eisenman use the framework of stocktaking to talk w1th colleagues in their fields about architectural practice and pedagogy t_oday, ju~t as
Banham did more than SO years ago to interrogate the then perce1ved sch1sm
between tradition and technology in architecture. Lynn goes back 25 years to
establish a framework for inspecting archives of digital work - such as they
are -and projects that he considers at the root of what I mi~h.t call co~puta­
tion today. In fact, the weight of the seemingly ephemeral dig• tal practice
(and its very definition) hovers over this issue. Brett Steele ~ells ~idler, "The
digital thing is yesterday. It's 20 years old. In terms of machme time, the mo-
Luke Studebaker
ment is over."
JtFSP
fJ.'•
•
,
EDITOR
Cynthia Davidson
GUEST EDITORS
Peter Eisenman
Anthony Vidler
MANAGING EDITOR
David Huber
PROTAGONISTS
Denise Bratton
Tina Di Carlo
Catherine Ingraham
Manuel Orazi
Julie Rose
Sarah Whiting
If Steele is to be believed, there is all the more reason for "Archaeology
of the Digital," which, CCA director Mirko Zardini writes in thC: cata~ogue,
defines the digital as experimental projects that "engaged proactively m the
creation and use of digital tools to reach otherwise inaccessible results." Lynn
puts it in !et another context; "Too often in archite.ct~e, the wor~ digita~' has
been quahfied by the words: m the future." The exh1b1t~on, he contmue_s, assumes that technology can no longer be discussed [as] m the future but m the
recentpart."
The exhibition spans six galleries that display in rich depth four
very different projects: Frank Gehry's sculptural Lewis Residence, Peter
Eisenman's analytical Frankfurt Biozentrum, Chuck Hoberman's operable
Expanding Sphere and Iris Dome projects, and Shoei Yoh's roofs_for s~orts
complexes in Japan - one of which, the Galaxy Toyama Gymnasm~, 1s
the only project in the exhibition that was built. Each, however, radiates a
freshness that begs the question of time. More telling of the very partness of
their making is a room of bulky darkened monitors sitting alongside beefy
hard drives, slack printers, a fax machine, a FedEx envelope, and software
manuals - now faded if not forgotten precursors to the machines and systems
common in architecture today.
"Archaeology of the Digital" is not the first, nor will it be the last investigation of the inroads of computation in architecture, but i~ is a provocative
starting point. Just as the exhibition looks at the recent past. m ~rder to see the
present anew, this issue attempts to take stock of current thmking and work
in architecture as a way of looking in the mirror again, if only to see whether
that mirror might be cracked. - CD
Log
SUMMER2013
Pier P'ittorio Aureli
67
Preston Scott Cohen
Elizabeth Diller
Peter Eisenman
& Anthony P'idler
Lydia Kallipoliti
jeffro Kipnis
Greg Lynn
27
21
143
Patrik. Schumacher
Felicity D. Scott
Brett Steele
Bernard Tschumi
Anthony P'idler
Sarah Whiting
Alejandro Zaera-Polo
Cover Story:
Log 28 Copyright © 201l Anyone Corporation. All ~ghts Reser:ed. .
ISSN: 1547-4690. ISBN: 978-0-98!6491-6-8. Printed m USA. Log 1s published
WWW.AN.YCORP.COM
three times a year by Anyone Corporation, a nonprofit corporation in the State of New
York with editorial and business offices at 41 West 2Sth Street, 11th floor, New York, NY
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by Ubiquity (US) and Idea Books (worldwide). Single1ssues are $1~ plus sh1ppmg. The
opinions expressed herein are not necessartly those of the ~r~tagomsts or of the board of
the Anyone Corporation. Send inquiries, letters, and submlSSlons to [email protected].
Stocktaking
28
53
1H
A project is a lifelong thing; if you see it, you will only see
it at the end
The inevitable flatness of floors interests me
Architecture is a technology that has not yet discovered its agency
In Conversation
It is our obligation to translate the emerging ecology of the cloud
I am for tendencies
59
If I can take a ride in a driverless car on a public street, then I
see no reason why my building can't wiggle a little
39 I am trying to imagine a radical free-market urbanism
79 I want to argue that contemporary scholarship be cast as a sort
of ongoing counter-memory to familiar historical narratives
87 The key project of the architectural school today is the
making of audiences, not architects
99 I do not mind people being innocent, but I hate when
they're naive
12 Taking Stock: Architecture 2013
109 I am interested in a project of engaged autonomy
119 Humans are not so interesting now; at least not exclusively
interesting
Reyner Banham at John Muir School, Santa Monica
Postcard photo: © Los Angeles Times
Greg Lynn
kits; manufacturing at home through personal3D printers; a Wikihouse with opensource plans that can be replicated, improved,
and updated anywhere; and countless other
examples." 4 This certainly does not mean that
the discipline is dead, but the identity of. the
architect as the single author of space m1ght
be. So is the venture to classify disciplinary
objects based on their iconicity. According to
Sylvia Lavin, some buildings now produce
"mood boards" for collective action, "deferring iconicity to the Internet, wh~re an
endless supply of videos, maps, tounst p~o­
tographs, tweets, logos, and blogs offers Image after image of the [building] in use, not
. mouon.
. » 5 suc h
in use, about to move, an d m
an organizational platform, where different
creators, collectives, and projects can mix and
remix, and the open-source assemblage of
information in mixed-media clusters relate
to our data-driven culture and the emergence
of cloud computing. Perhaps postmodernism
died with Google. Growing out of Google's
model of detecting correlations through applied mathematics and not th~ough context,
information clouds rank fractional connections above holistic perceptions of phenomena. We can no longer speak of systems, trees,
and networks of practices as understanding the complexity of the world of i~eas as .a
whole. The cloud necessitates an enurely different way of understanding the world, "one
that requires us to lose the tether of data as
something that can be visualized in its ~otal­
ity."6 What is essential about the cloud 1s the
absorption and collection of data that crystallizes in a region rather than the overall contextual interpretation of the data.
4. Elian Stefa and Ethel Baraona Pohl, "NCR-01 [Agenda] : An
Ad-hoc Revolution," Istanbul Design Biennial, May 24, 2012,
http:/ /istanbuldesignbiennial.iksv.orglncr-01-agenda-an-ad-hocrevolution (accessed September 29, 2012).
5. Sylvia Lavin, "The Report of My Death," Log 25 (Summer 2012): 159.
6. Chris Anderson, "The End of Theory: The Data Deluge Makes ~he
Scientific Method Obsolete," Wired, June 2l, 2008, http://www.~.
com/science/discoveries/maguine/16-07/pb_theory (accessed April
If I can take a ride in
a driverless car on a
public street, then I
see no reason why
my building can't
wiggle a little
PETER EISENMAN: Greg, I have three questions for you.
One is the nature of your project, the second is what you
feel about consensus, and the third deals with mechanisms,
i.e., robots, etc. I want to start with project. About 15 years
ago, your two books were a new idea of where architecture
could be after postmodernism, not just heralding the digital
but framing the digital in an architectural context. Part
of that heralding involved an idea that this was something
new. And precisely because of this - what I consider to be
the fatal flaw of any theory that postulates itself as new - it
isn't new anymore. Tell me about your project, then, today
and tomorrow.
LYDIA KAI.LIPOLITI IS .AN AllCHITECT1 ENGINEER, .AND
THEOI\IST TEACHING DESIGN STUDIOS, ENVIRONMENTA
TECHNOLOGY, .AND HISTORY .AND THEORY AT THE COOP I II
GREG LYNN: Anything associated with the digital starts
with the claim, "In the future" - in the future we'll being
doing this, in the future we'll be printing buildings, in the
future we'll be paperless. It's always in the future. There are
still too many claims of "in the future" attached to discussions of digital technology. I think now it's very interesting
to say, "In the past" -in the '70s and '80s - and look at what
was going on then with the digital. Having done that, I think
a lot of history is repeating itself, in terms of how architecture is being designed and how buildings are being built. And
in terms of taking stock, I would not put a huge amount of
energy into the digital paradigm right now, because it's here.
There's no sense in trying to run the same experiments or
looking for the same happy accidents all over again. I think
UNION .AND COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY IN NEW YoRK.
26,2013).
S9
ss
ETIENNE-JULES MAREY, CtrALIER ARABE, 1887.
most of that innovation has been done and
it's time to think about things in a slightly
different way.
PE: That means a project. Not thinking about
the new or innovative future, just project.
GL: By the way, I never would have said that
my project was about the new. I was looking at [:Etienne-Jules] Marey, I was looking
at [Eadweard] Muybridge, I was looking at
Borromini. My personal histories and passions have always been about techniques of
geometric description and drafting. I love to
draft. The computer came along and I loved
the computer as a drafting tool. I didn't like it
as a computer. My project has changed in that
I'm tending to look back, more than forward,
for new things and innovation. I do believe in
the new.
PE: What we were doing together, and what
your show at the CCA, "Archaeology of the
Digital," is about, had no premonition of
what has happened. It wasn't looking to
promote Patrik Schumacher, Hernan Diaz
Alonso, and all of that work. So what went
off the track?
GL: I wouldn't necessarily say that it went
off the track. If anything has gone off the
60
track, it's architectural discourse and its audience. It's like a broken record to ask who's
going to do the next Delirious New York. or
what is the next treatise going to be. I'm not
totally sure that our field is equipped to produce a young person - I mean somebody in
their thirties- who is going to make a treatise like that.
PE: Pier Vittorio Aureli is not one of those
people who could do that?
GL: Is he a young person? He certainly has
the ambition to write a treatise but I associate him more closely with the revisiting of
the neorationalists and Tafuri. I have always
found PV to be cynical.
PE: Rem [Koolhaas] is more cynical. Listen,
you were there 15 years ago. That's the question: what has happened to your project?
GL: It was a vibrant time to be in conversation
with my colleagues and my mentors. There
were Any conferences annually. There
were museums and institutions looking to
sponsor thoughtful shows, like the FRAC
and MoMA. Those shows were meant to
take what was happening between a small
number of architects and find its intellectual and popular audience. The possibility of
Log28
getting into discussions with other architects, and the possibility of addressing
n different kind of audience to change the
way people thought about architecture,
was tangible. You could see how to do it.
It was very clear who the interesting people
were and which institutions were doing
the work. As these events have disappeared,
in the last several years I have become
nccustomed to and content with working
with a higher degree of isolation, and I am
therefore less polemical. I find the current
situation to be more vacuous than those
halcyon days of discourse when positions
were being formulated.
PE: You were involved in the Venice Biennale
with Frank [Gehry] and me under Philip
(Johnson]'s auspices. And it was all set up.
Philip was appointed the curator so he could
do this. Money was made available from a
Republican state legislature for us. Why can't
that happen today?
GL: Nicolai [Ouroussoff] and I are trying to
do the US Pavilion right now with [Richard]
Koshalek. To do that pavilion, we're going to
have to raise our own money, and the subject
and intellectual agenda for the show are in
response to this fact to some degree. We had
to find our own institutional partner, and
thankfully there is Richard at the Hirshhorn.
All these critical decisions regarding institution-building needed to be made before we
could even start curating the show. Nobody
is interested in the US Pavilion anymore because it poses a massive institution-building
project. That's where we're at. Before, it was
Philip's project, or it was Marshall Cogan's
project, people interested in ideas and interested in architecture.
PE: Let's get to the second question. The
last theme of the Biennale was "Common
Ground." Bob Stern, quoted two weeks ago
61
in the New York. Times on Eric [Bunge] and
Mimi [Hoang]'s project that won the microhousing competition in New York, said that
what was good about it was that it showed
"common sense." The whole notion of the
common, as opposed to the uncommon, has
bred an era of consensus - we have to have
a million voices that have to agree on the
least common denominator - a certain kind
of backward populism. What do you think
about this consensus?
GL: Common sense would say that when
the times are unstable the architects provide stability, and when the times are stable
architects shake things up. You could not
say that there is consensus in America right
now. I can't think of a time when there has
been less consensus in the States. I think the
future of the country - finance, cultural
values, race relations, everything- has
never been worse off. Never. The government right now is bananas - every two
months there is some manufactured crisis.
When people are in that milieu, they look
to architecture for cute, happy, artificially
stable values. Nobody wants to do Wexner
Center right now. Everybody wants to do a
countrified museum. So if there's a consensus in architecture it's probably because
it's trying to be ameliorative rather than
representing what is going on in the culture
right now.
PE: No one wants high culture today. If
we're not producing stuff like that, cultural
stuff, then looking back on today in 100
years it will look like an aporia. If we don't
have a good US Pavilion, people are going
to say nothing. You're saying consensus
reigns, that when things are rough they go
soft and smarmy. And you agree with that.
GL: No. You're asking about the architectural
landscape, not my project.
Log28
PE: But you're saying there is no discourse.
How do we change that? Because you could
argue capital is under duress. That's the real
problem: we can't support social services, we
can't afford security, we can't afford welfare,
we can't afford all the things that capital
promises. That's what is under stress.
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GL: No, I just think it's more work. Look,
will we get the US Pavilion? I don't know. But
it was easier to focus on the content of the pavilion 20 years ago. Now, one not only has to
provide the content and make sure the thing
shows up in Venice but also organize institutional partners, travel to Washington, and all
this other stuff. If you have to do all that other
stuff it means something else is suffering.
PE: What is interesting is you would be curating your own show. Frank and I didn't curate
our show. Philip was the curator. Why curate?
Why do you want to curate your own show?
It's not your project.
GREG LYNN FORM, RV PROTOTYPE (RooM VEHICLE), 2011.
SECTIONS (LEFT TO RIGIIT): EVENING ROTATION, KITCHEN ROTATION, AND DAY ROTATION.
GL: It is my project, and Nicolai's.
PE: Well that's why I ask about consensus.
GL: I'm interested in all the people with
CNC routers cutting the walls that are in
all the hotel lobbies I go to, if they've ever
even seen a Frank Lloyd Wright block house.
And if they've even thought about how, if
you had a robot, you would make a Frank
Lloyd Wright block house. That's why I'm
curating. It helps me to think about my own
work to put the contemporary design world
in discussion with recent history.
PE: What does the robot have to do with
the idea of making, not the process of making?
How does the robot change what Frank Lloyd
Wright was doing with cutting blocks, the idea
of cutting blocks, not the cutting? What would
the robot have done for Frank Lloyd Wright?
62
GL: I would not describe him as being
surrounded by the sharpest tools in the
shed. He really liked to be surrounded by
automatons. So, would Frank Lloyd Wright
love a robot? Of course he would. Robots
are exactly what Frank Lloyd Wright
would love, because he put a high value on
the labor visible in an object, and he loved
decoration and pattern. All that stuff you
get free with a machine. Now, if you are
asking what's the difference between ornamental grotesquery facilitated by digital
tools and Louis Sullivan or Frank Lloyd
Wright, I would say, very much; the former
is mannerist and the later was the end of
the 19th century coming into contact with
paradigms of modern space and the free
plan. One is looking backward to justify itself, the other was dragging its history into
the present.
Log28
PE: But listen to where you're going. You're
saying that robots with Frank Lloyd Wright
is good, so now robots and Greg Lynn must
be good. It's a parallel.
GL: For me, now, robots move stuff. And
that's why I'm interested in robots.
GL: No, I am saying that looking back at
canonical work is how I keep myself honest.
If I take a robot and cut up a bunch of
blocks or stack a bunch of bricks, if it's not
either better than or an evolution from
a Frank Lloyd Wright block house, then
there's a problem.
GL: Yeah. Or roll this room over.
PE: What makes it better? Who decides what
is better?
PE: You mean as in, move this chair to there?
PE: Roll the room over. You can roll a room
over on the computer. You can take a drawing
of the room and roll it over. You don't need a
robot to do that.
GL: But if you're going to build the room
to roll over you're going to need a robot.
PE: Build the room to roll over. Here we go again.
GL: You have to do that on a case-by-case basis.
PE: Well, what is better? What can a robot do
for you that you couldn't do on a computer
with an algorithm? Why do you need to have
a robot do it? Why do you care about robots
in the first place? What do they do for your
mental processes?
63
GL: When you say, "Here we go again,"
do you mean here we go again with you
and me, or here we go again with architecture rolling things over? Where do you
think I got the idea to roll houses over
anyway? You spent the better part of
your life rolling houses over, tracing their
Log28
position and rolling them over again. I
am just interested in doing it literally and
phenomenally.
PE: It's architecture rolling things over. So,
what robots do for you is easi/y roll things over?
GL: No. They make movement possible.
PE: Tell me: why would I want my house to
move?
GL: Take Nike, for example, as I was just
in Beaverton last week. Instead of making
things in Southeast Asia they have developed
robots that knit the tops of the shoes; there's
no waste from cutting shapes out of rolls of
cloth and every shoe can have its own knots
and shape if they like. The soles are being
printed with 3D printers. Like the Russian
cosmonaut program did previously, they
test, measure, scan, and analyze the motion
of athletes not only to customize apparel and
shoes but to create training regimes, glasses,
and clothing that modifies how a person
moves. They have a micro-factory in their
store in Portland so they can dispense with
inventory and shipping. They are the best
example of a revolution in manufacturing,
communication, and design that I know of.
They want to inform you what to eat, when
to train, and when to wake up, as the shirt
and the beanie you sleep in have sensors that
record your activity even while you're not
moving. Your phone, your watch, and your
shoes are all recording motion and speed and
communicating data back to a service. This
isn't some future plan; this is what they are
doing currently. That's the world they see.
PE: That's neopositivism.
GL: I'm not making judgments about the
shoe world. I'm just saying that's where
they are. And I'm asking myself where the
64
architectural corollary is. Where is the architecture that addresses that contemporary
fact? And who are the architects who are
thinking like that?
PE: Or even, should it be represented?
GL: Well, some architects are comfortable
having a disconnected relationship to culture
in their architecture. I want to be in the
contemporary world, thinking at today's
level in architecture. If you want to do that,
I don't know how you could not think about
robots, and how you couldn't think about
moving buildings. It's a mandate as far as
I'm concerned.
PE: But you haven't written or proposed the
architectural analogue for that world, not
Delirious New York, not Absolute Architecture,
not the five points ofLe Corbusier. You have
not made a specific notation that says what
that architecture has to be in order to be
critical in that milieu.
GL: No, but it's what I'm working on.
PE: Working on it in what sense?
GL: The treatise on motion, robots, architecture, and this new manufacturing and
information paradigm; for me, I have to
work that through with my own work
initially, and then theorize it.
PE: Architecture and motion, for example,
seem to me like all those people in the '60s
who were talking about what it was going
to be like to live on the moon or in a rocket
ship. What is the difference between the
architects who were envisioning things
for moon living and space travel and, today,
the house moving and the hamster running around? What, conceptually, is the
difference?
Log28
VIDEO STILL, PROMOTIONAL MEDIA FOR GOOGLE'S SELF-DRIVING CAR, 2011. COURTESY GOOGLE.
GL: Today there are cars driving themselves
around California without a driver. If I can
take a ride in a driverless car on a public
street, then I see no reason my building can't
wiggle a little. You used to be an advocate for
wiggly buildings. Well, the automobile, television, all of that stuff in the '60s and '70s,
made architecture go a little bit crazy trying to figure out how to engage that. I think
now is a time like that. I don't believe there
are a lot of people who agree with me, but I
see today as a time of crisis - a crisis of ideas,
a crisis of consensus, a crisis of occupying
space - not as a time of consensus.
PE: Asking people what they want is the crisis.
GL: That's never a good idea. You tell people
what they need, you don't ask them what
they want.
PE: Let's say the robots are going to exist,
that there is going to be the technology that
allows you to do anything with them. How
65
is that going to change what this office is going to be like in the future?
GL: Let's say every Yale faculty member gets
an office robot. What are you going to do
with it?
PE: Have it do my bibliography. I would
have the robot do a task that I don't think
is fit for a human. If you give me another
one, I would find tasks for the robot to do
that do not require thought processes. It
is not valuable to me in the sense that you
were when we worked together. You understood what the thought processes were and
were able to expand those horizons.
GL: What I'm saying is, all that stuff is around
and is not being used for architectural means.
It's just totally rote, functional replacements
for things we already know how to do. That
kind of stuff is everywhere. But if you could
have it change the space just for the qualities
of the space ...
Log28
PE: Well it's a different story if you could
think the difference in the space. I think
that at the stage that robots are going to be
working, you're still going to need the Greg
Lynns of this world to ideate the discourse
that could use them. What we're saying is
that robots are another technology. How
are the kids in your class going to being able
to transpose their thinking from algorithms,
or from what Hernan is doing, to what
you're doing, and produce critical work?
That's what they have to be doing. Otherwise they're wasting their time.
GL: Yeah, that was very geometrical. That
work has been done. I don't need to do it a
second time.
66
A project is a
lifelong thing; if
you see it, you will
only see it at the end
PE: What would this new thesis look like?
GL: So far it's being a hamster in a ball.
PETER EISENMAN: What do you think the state of pedagogy
is today in terms of the schools that you participate in and how
they relate to other schools?
GL: In my teaching I stress discourse and
addressing problems with "headlines";
clear succinct ideas that a nonarchitect
can understand as a problem with enough
cultural relevance that it is worth thinking
about. I think Hernan is interesting, but so
far he has not addressed a broader culture
with a claim like "The Helsinki Library
has the civic role in the city of an alien ship
because information today is ..." That's
something you have, that's something Rem
has, that's something Frank has. I think
it's because in writing a treatise, in less
than a sentence you're able to say, "Today
architecture is showing up in the city in
this way because it's relevant for the following reasons." I think Hernan does
everything else. I think he establishes a
paradigm that he can talk to other architects about.
PE: So, to sum up, you say that there is a
crisis, and the world, when it's in crisis,
responds to things that are easy. And yet,
what you're trying to do is to say that the
crisis is because we don't understand how
to use the potential of digital technologies,
i.e., provided by robots and others, to help
us to ameliorate crisis. And that's what
your project is right now. It's very different
from blobs.
Pier Vittorio .Aureli
PIER VITTORIO AURELI: First of all, pedagogy, for me, is
a very important issue because educating students has been
the main part of my work in architecture. And I've been doing that over the last 15 years, during one of the major transformations of education in Europe. This is the shift from the
idea of education as a kind of free knowledge or disinterested
knowledge, which is the way I was educated, to a model that
is very much directed toward the professionalization of architecture, making architecture a practice, something that you
can apply.
PE: Rather than a discipline. The disinterested view was the
disciplinary view.
PVA: Yes. Or knowledge as such, with no immediate professional application. For example, when I was a student, we
would spend a lot of time reading art history or philosophy,
and the teachers were never concerned to justify this, although
it wasn't needed for the demands of the market.
PE: There were no market demands that influenced the
curriculum.
GREG LYNN TEACHES ARCHITECTURE AT THE .ANGEWANDTE,
UCLA, AND YALE UNIVERSITY.
PVA: Absolutely not. But I became a teacher the moment the
situation dramatically changed.
HE IS ALSO THE AUTHOR
OF SEVEN BOOKS, INCLUDING ANIMATE FORM, FOLDING IN
ARCHITECTURE, INTRICACY, AND GREG LYNN FORM.
PE: Why did it change? And this is Europe we're talking
about, not America?
67