The Ultimate Goal of Architecture
Generative Design has become a prisoner of Capitalism. We need to break its shackles and move ahead with it.
Venture capitalists are dropping serious money in companies that use generative design tools with conspicuous, neoliberal intentions of efficient and optimised architectural and urban designs. And that is a problem. Architecture is not just a solution to shelter the activities of human beings (that would be mere construction). Architecture is not just an optimal solution to problems (that would be mere design). Architecture enhances our existence by affording us to see the world in new ways or even see new worlds previously inaccessible to us. Architecture’s ultimate goal is to be art. We need to use generative (digital) tools to helps us create art, not just construction and design.
Construction drawings (floor plans, elevations and sections) have already been digitised. With generative design tools, we have digitised design (rules of adjacency between programmatic areas and its material and environmental performance). Now we need to digitise the process of affecting its users, that is, digitise art.
Architecture is more than a commodity. Architecture is more than building buildings as cheap and as fast as possible (efficiency and optimisation). A consequence of architecture as art is that we can let go of the grip capitalism exerts currently on architecture. As the Greek economist, Yanis Varoufakis put it “doing art […] is the very definition of going against Neoliberalism.” Let’s dive in.
WHAT IS ART, ANYWAY?
Art is what humans do after they have covered for their basic needs (shelter and food). Art is the new worlds we imagine, paint, sculpt, decorate, design. Simply said by Brian Eno, just as kids imagine new worlds when they play, adults imagine new worlds when they make art. And all this playing and imagining is a waste of money and time if you consider it a short term investment. But it is in this playfulness that we find our best ideas and concepts. Art, in the long term, is an investment in keeping us human. We are the only recursive species.
Imagining new worlds includes this one that Eno uses as an example, “I would like to go to that restaurant with Gene and John on Friday evening. I wonder what that would be like.” This is Joseph Beuys’ ‘Every man an Artist’.
But let’s push things further, shall we? We can agree we are all artists, but some artists have found ways to take us into special worlds, worlds that speak universally, that stand the test of time, that take us sophisticatedly by surprise. These are the pieces of art we tend to save in museums. But what is this sophistication, anyways?
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari said in What is Philosophy that art is capable of bypassing our (five) senses and of “affecting” our nervous system directly. The affects produced by such an art piece can’t be smelled, seen, touched, heard or tasted, but they affect us physically nonetheless.
Architects have used other methods like Phenomenology to explain what art is. The phenomenologist architect Steven Holl spent six months till he got (by chance) the “concept” for his Stretto House. Still, if we are interested in digitising art, a concrete understanding of art becomes necessary. So we will stick to the historic materialist definition of Deleuze.
Deleuze and Guattari offer us two possible methods to produce such affects. First, re-territorialisation. Catwoman becomes handy to explain this method. Catwoman is not art. It is a human dressed up as a cat, imitating it, meowing included. That is not art. Art is Anthony Hopkins interpreting Hanibal Lecter in The Silence of the Lambs. For this movie, instead of learning about serial killers, Hopkins studied cats, their behaviour. He even asked the producers to change his costume and hairstyle… as fitted as possible just as a cat licks itself and keeps itself tidy. Hanibal Lecter catches us off-guard. We like him, find him familiar, but at the same time, we feel the horror of what he is. He affects us. Our nervous system is affected directly, our senses are bypassed. So it is the Mona Lisa, that mysterious smile that hides. And so are buildings like Mies’ National Gallery in Berlin (this is my personal experience. Walking around it and not understanding why I was feeling “strange”). Peter Eisenman or even Koolhas are masters of this kind of art.
On the one hand, re-territorialisation is literally occupying an existing territory or space that previously belonged to another entity (Hopkins’ territory occupied by a cat). On the other hand, the second method offered by Deleuze is territorialisation. It is about creating an entity. When something doesn’t exist, it cannot occupy a space. But once it exists, it occupies and generates a territory. It is a literal operation. When something is new, it means we have no reference for it, we cannot compare it with something else. It doesn’t “look like” something else. This is what happened to FOA’s Yokohama International Port Terminal. It was a building designed from a diagram and data. It was an “informed” building. Rumour has it that journalists kept asking Farshid and Alejandro what was the concept of the building, cuz all the data and circulation diagrams they were showing them weren’t enough. In this case, novelty was the trick. We are incapable of “reading” something new. The fact that we lack references disables us, disables our senses. And… you know the chant by now… our nervous system is affected directly.
Summarizing, architecture that is art is an architecture that makes us experience new worlds, that facilitates and fosters our ability to imagine those worlds; and also, it can be an architecture that affects us directly into the nervous system. This level of sophistication in architecture requires architects that have the skills to do it. Such skills are three: literate, artisan, artist. They correspond to construction, design and art, respectively. Let’s talk about that, then.
WHAT ART IS NOT, BUT OF WHAT IS BUILT UPON
An artist creates blocks of affects and percepts; an artisan is a mechanical performer; and a literate person can read and write. It is one thing to compose a poem, another to declaim it, and another to take dictation of it. Art, design and construction, respectively, as we mentioned it at the beginning of this article. The current use of generative design (GD) tools is myope, as a very good capitalist itself. The practitioners of the most recent wave of GD is somewhere in between artisans and literate. So it is important to frame things. I will be brief. Afterwards, we will explore how GD can be used to push architecture into more productive territories.
Literate is the one who masters the grammar of a language, who knows how to write and read a language. There will be literate in music, dance, Spanish, architecture. It is writing per se, flat, without intention, just repetition. The simple ability to take dictation, for example.
The artisan’s craft is an entity inferior to art in that it does not seek to produce affects but simply to fulfil a current function previously specified, it is designed. Everything a human being does is a craft, mechanical executions of instructions inherited genetically (instinctively) or culturally learned. Commercial music is designed. This is Max Martin but also Jukedeck. Since 2012 the later have been using Deep Learning to design jingles. And now we have Test Fit, Spacemakers, etc. All artisans.
“Any kid with a laptop can be a DJ”. So any kid with Grasshopper can be a developer’s consultant. The kid’s laptop comes with autotuning software, it also includes quantisation tools that fix your sloppy playing. And if you cannot play any instrument at all, it comes with a library of riffs and beats that adjust themselves to whatever tempo and key you choose. It is like magic. It is Siri writing your text messages. And we have them in architecture as well, plans drawn magically inside a given outline/contour. Or desks layouts.
Are these kids literate at all? Do they understand the nuts and bolts, the grammar? I am not against this tech as such. It saves me tons of time I can invest in creating and exploring, playing. But you can only go so far. Architecture is having the same problem. We are in a similar stage when learning became industrialised a century ago. They needed the kids to learn how to read manuals and fix the machines in the factories. The same is happening again. We are teaching the kids how to click here and there to get a Deep Learning model running. How it works doesn’t matter. Architects have become BIM-CAD monkeys. Architects are the new drafters. Are we even literate anymore? Luckily some in the new generation are preoccupied about this.
My point is, before writing any jazz, you need to learn harmony, deeply, properly. The DJ kids might not even know what a chord is. And the same is happening in architecture. But let’s assume we are literate architects. So we can be designers. We can solve old problems with new solutions. We pollute, we need to clean. We did it with Modernism. We have LEED and a myriad more of eco-standards. We will manage to keep that 1,5 centigrade at bay. And we might reinvent our cities to be virus resilient, just as sewage became an urban feature a century ago. Design, craft and artisans are not going away. We have amazing music artisans still. Design is quite alive. Very soon we will stop putting ourselves as the centre of the universe. Soon we will embrace the object-oriented ontology. We will even make philosophy for rocks, songs for animals. We will learn to live truly ecologically. But this is all design. Mere design, solving old problems with new solutions.
Can we dare to push things further? Shall we dare to be artists? Shall we challenge efficiency and optimisation and their father Mr Neoliberalism? Can we use generative design tools to create art?
[In a coming article, I will try to explore the possibilities to territorialise and re-territorialise using the current digital tools]
