“GIVE ME A GUN AND I WILL MAKE ALL BUILDINGS MOVE”: AN ANT’S VIEW OF ARCHITECTURE
Explorations in architecture: Teaching, design, research, (2008)"It is well known that we live in a very different world than that of Euclidian space: phenomenologists (and psychologists of the Gibsonian school) have never tired of showing that there is an immense distance in the way an embodied mind experiences its surroundings from the “objective” shape that “material” objects are said to possess. They have tried to add to the “Galilean” bodies rolling through Euclidian space, “human” bodies ambling through a “lived” environment. I All this is very well, except it does nothing more than to reproduce, at the level of architecture, the usual split between subjective and objective dimensions that has always paralyzed architectural theory—not to mention the well known split it has introduced between the architectural and engineering professions (and not to mention the catastrophic consequences it has had on philosophy proper). What is so strange in this argument is that it takes for granted that engineering drawings on a piece of paper and, later, projective geometry offer a good description of the so-called “material” world. This is the hidden presupposition in the whole of phenomenology: we have to add human subjective intentional dimensions to a “material” world that is well described by geometric shapes and mathematical calculations. The paradoxical aspect of this division of labor envisioned by those who want to add the “lived” dimensions of human perspective to the “objective” necessities of material existence is that, in order to avoid reducing humans to things, they first had to reduce things to drawings." p 82.Abstract
Our building problem is just the opposite of Etienne Jules Marey’s famous
inquiry into the physiology of movement. Through the invention of his
“photographic gun,” he wanted to arrest the flight of a gull so as to be able
to see in a fixed format every single successive freeze-frame of a continuous flow of flight, the mechanism of which had eluded all observers
until his invention. What we need is the reverse: the problem with buildings is that they look desperately static. It seems almost impossible to
grasp them as movement, as flight, as a series of transformations. Everybody knows—and especially architects, of course—that a building is
not a static object but a moving project, and that even once it is has been
built, it ages, it is transformed by its users, modified by all of what happens inside and outside, and that it will pass or be renovated, adulterated
and transformed beyond recognition. We know this, but the problem is
that we have no equivalent of Marey’s photographic gun: when we picture
a building, it is always as a fixed, stolid structure that is there in four colors in the glossy magazines that customers flip through in architects’ waiting rooms. If Marey was so frustrated not to be able to picture in
a successive series of freeze-frames the flight of a gull, how irritating it is
for us not to be able to picture, as one continuous movement, the project