Embracing Top-Down: Prototypes and the Intensive
The autonomy project aimed at liberating design from imposed decisions, especially those from capitalist hands. But that included designers who were imposers as well. Eva Castro¹ has pointed out how post-structuralist designers (mainly architects), ‘abandoned or denigrated part of their own agency or role.’ According to Castro, ‘designers gave capital importance to the use of bottom-up procedures, and in opposition, any top-down decision was considered as the imposition of hierarchies,’ or, in other words, turning back to the old ways of meta-narratives, and to a subjective decision-taking process.
In the 90s and 00s, designers were strictly forbidden to explain any “personal” intentions they might have inserted in their designs. Rather, long lists of facts or diagrams were given as explanations for their designs. But if the designer’s agency is framed in the Intensive, those impostures are not a problem per se. It is in the Intensive that designers can position themselves as breeders, as actual top-down agents, without fear of becoming themselves promoters of reified paradigms², uncontested statements that are prone to be (mis)used in instances like societal control. Deleuze rightly pointed out two problems: essences and totalities. But if we forget totalities and the intensive, then we end up with transvestism.
Once the designer has set or generated the diagram or the space of possibilities (that is the Virtual); he/she can intervene (in) the following Intensive space, acting as a deterritorializer, a decodifier, an agitator. If in the Virtual the designer is creator/progenitor, in the Intensive he/she can act as a breeder. The instructions of entities’ matter distribution in time-space are mainly defined by the diagram, but the “execution” of such distribution can be enriched, obstruct, or redirected by the designer. All of this without lose of a bit of autonomy.
‘Either bottom-up or top-down procedures without criticality or intervention from the designer,’ affirms Castro, ‘will result in ugly or poorly developed designs.’ Just as a typing monkey won’t write the next Shakespearean masterpiece, endlessly running a computerised diagram-algorithm won’t output a beautiful design. But certainly the actualisation of the diagram can be led from the Intensive. The adaptation values chosen for this actualisation can be set by the designer from a top-down position, as an epigenetic agent. Through and through, this intervention can count a ‘non-imposed’ design. It is more so about playing with the properties of matter, taking it to behavioural extremes where new and unexpected time-space organisations can appear, or as put in co-director’s of the Architectural Association’s Landscape Urbanism Master, Alfredo Ramirez and Eduardo Rico’s own words, giving way to ‘potentials emergent from developmental pressures.’³ It finally is about endowing designs with new capacities that extend its own territory, or activate its own latent tendencies to foster change in its very own defining properties.
It is in the prototypical (intensive) stage where a top-down agent can be imparted via decoding, and deterritorialisation. All of this epigenetic procedures, can be utilised without fearing a subjective top-down approach, while at the same time, letting the bottom-up procedures — set in the diagram — do their work as intended. The apparent dichotomy of using bottom-up and top-down procedures can be solved by properly allocating each procedure in its right stage of development, that is, bottom-up procedures in the Virtual and top-down procedures in the Intensive. Summing it all up, the designer sets coding and territorializing instructions in the Virtual (designs diagrams) and sets decoding and deterritorializing instructions in the Intensive (designs prototypes).
Prototypes
Etymologically speaking, “proto” means early. A prototype is a type in a primary or early stage. The type belongs to the Actual, the prototype to the Intensive, the diagram to the Virtual; following Deleuze ontology. If the type is a final, fixed product, the prototype is always in a production state, becoming. As an intensive entity, prototypes are:
1) about ranges, as opposed to absolute quantities. Given its intensive peculiarity, prototypes are always in a condition of assemblage, very much like the Swift meatpacking (dis)assembly line Henry Ford later used to model his own car assembly line. This assembling is prescribed by the diagram. But,
2) precisely for being intensive entities, maleable. During its assembling state, foreign agents act and affect this process of formation. The spatial and temporal distribution a prototype follows can be influenced by the environment, sun, temperature, weight, available matter, available surface or volume for its development.
In Landscape Urbanism’s teaching methodology there is a stage were prototypes are developed, mostly in a laboratory fashion. Remedial landscape techniques are used to solve problems students had found previously in explorations of specific sites. Fishing ponds, water collection ponds, wetlands, retention walls, etc. All of these techniques work in a specific range of metric, spatial dimensions. With the help of parametric software, these techniques are modelled three-dimensionally with the purpose of stretching them out of their original ranges, that is, drive them out of stability, to chaos, where they start showing novel behaviour, becoming different.
In terms of representation and exploration, the different iterations resulting from varying the values within the aforementioned ranges are laid in catalogues, a 2 or even 3 entry matrix. As a visualisation tool, catalogues help to discern when or at what point any of these prototypes reaches the point of instability and become something different from what they were originally. Such unexpected prototypes that reach instability can be explore farther and, based on the possibilities it offers, be either implemented in the design or entirely discarded.
This means or proves, on the one hand, that novelty is not only achieved by using diagrams in the Virtual, but also by using prototypes in the Intensive. On the other hand, it is in these catalogues that the designer can act as a breeder. Having this visualisation, and seeing many of the variations of a prototype–including the ones where it becomes different–the designer can exert his/her agency and apply subjective and or objective impostures. Subjective ones like beauty (choosing either or another of the variations based of pure taste); objective ones like efficiency (choosing variations that offer cheaper or structurally stronger versions).
Outro
That that has been previously mentioned as subjective decisions imposed by the designer — in the Intensive in a very top-down manner — is not subjective at all. The existence of a style or common traits in a series of buildings from any designer, is because the repeated use of the same procedures. Subjective at the beginning, the more a designer uses them, the more he/she starts to become aware of its use, and at some point, the designer is objectively using them. Forsaking the Intensive is what has caused stagnation in recent architecture. We can learn from the prototypical procedures Landscape Urbanism.
(1) In conversations with Libny Pacheco that took place at different moments during the design studio classes imparted to the students at the School of Landscape at Tsinghua University in Beijing, China; during the period of 2011–2013.
(2) Paradigm here understood as uncontested generalities that become a behavioural pattern. Funnily enough, the origin of this definition of paradigm, based on the “5 monkeys and a ladder” is an urban myth with shady origins. A veritable example of an essence!
(3) Ramirez, Alfredo and Rico Eduardo. AALU Landscape Urbanism. ‘Latest Projects’. Retrieved from http://landscapeurbanism.aaschool.ac.uk/ on July of 2015.
