Islands, Palaces and the Symbolic

Emmanuelle Chiappone-Piriou

PhD candidate at ATTP

Thesis Supervisor: 
Univ.Prof. Dr.phil. Vera Bühlmann

abstract

Islands, Palaces and the Symbolic:
Enclosing Virtualities in the Age of Hyper-Resolution

“A few spurs of intimate pride trumpeted evoke the architecture of a palace, the only habitable: outside of any stone, on which the pages couldn’t close”.

Stéphane Mallarmé, Crisis of verse, 1897 

This PhD starts with a simple question: how can architecture invent manners in which to accommodate a we today, given that this we is composed of a multiplicity of life forms and fleshes (be those geological, biological, synthetic or cosmic, human or animal, or else)? And how, in this quest, could it produce conditions that are at once objective, that is to say, defined upon a criterion that is true to all living forms (universal), and locally and temporarily adapted (plural), as conditions for stabilities in our atomised world? In other words, how can architecture neither induce an understanding of order as being unifying and all-inclusive, nor favour social constructivism, reified epistemologies or reductionist categorisations?

The aim of this PhD is to frame this question with regard to the mutations of architectural ratio in our computational era, characterized by the inflation of the levels of discretisation and, subsequently, of data. From the exponential technically aided journey of the Eames’ between the two extreme poles of the universe, subsuming everything to a unified dimensionality, to the contemporary aggregation of myriads of data in simulation, architecture appears to have engaged in a quest for “truth”, for a “right” or a “just” grasping of both the natural and the social domains at once. This can be seen in parallel to the modern scientific and technological quest not only for a world view that is magnified, hence understood as precise, but one in which the world comes to us by means of a dis-humanized, supposedly perfect, observation, that opens up the possibility of a non-anthropocentric cognition. That is, a hyper-resolved cognition, that claims legitimacy based on its capacity to grasp, detect, sense, and record the world in a supposedly objective manner, to the level of its smallest variations and differences.

A certain understanding of the notion of resolution in our contemporary technical condition, and specifically in its articulation to the intellectual use of the term as termination, participates, in our view, in establishing a techno-scientific project of which the core value, exactitude, legitimises a power that is understood to operate in a transparent and immediate manner, on levels that lie beyond our perceptive thresholds. We understand this “technically produced objectivity”, and the quantitative accounts of the world it relies upon, as fuelling a naturalism, that preoccupies itself with what is already there, and understands the world as being given (through data) rather than subjected. What is naturalised, we would like to argue, is – in Michel Serres’ words – an “arithmetic of integer”, that funds our understanding of the world upon our secret desire for elements, atoms and numbers. This “unitary knowledge” can be understood as what underlies the dialectic upon which modern architecture has established itself.

Instead, if one exploited the resolution of technical tools so as to grasp matter at hyperresolved frequencies, one would discover a fundamental porosity in lieu of the dialectical opposition between individuality and the world. In this research, resolution will therefore be understood as a continuous process that produces a liminal state between order and disorder, an entropic and collective (non-individualized) state. This research will then exploit the polysemy of the term resolution in order to question the supposed immediacy and objectivity of our datafied accesses to the world, and the representations these rely upon.

The resolved, or atomised, world will therefore not be seen as what is terminated, but rather as an entropic domain of virtualities, from which to probabilistically edify an enclosure or draw the outline of a territory. In these terms, architecture will be approached as being funded upon a – fertile – ambiguity: navigating between control and potential, aiming at mastering and producing regularities, while simultaneously accounting for the world’s fundamental uncertainty. While the PhD will address the architecture’s history of thinking in clouds and mist, it will more broadly investigate how architecture can operate in this “ordinary of situations” that this fundamental multiplicity constitutes (Michel Serres), and how it can objectively relate to it, without reifying it. Opening up the dialectic opposition between naturalism and idealism, it will explore architectural and architectonic manners that transpose the world, and, in so doing, do not repeat, but rather vibrantly abstract it. Coding, in this respect, will be understood as a manner to seize, translate, transform and stabilize to make new worlds come to be; the architectural project will therefore be thought of as an inventive process of encoding, or entwining, from a set of elements, that imitates nature in producing local (temporal and physical) combinations.

Decorrelating the architectural metrics from the modern scientific value of exactitude, the research will proceed to explore historical positions on metrics, discriminating between ratio, module, standard, and proportions, with regard to the relativity they imply, the contractual status they establish and the sensible accesses and the formalisations they allow for. The PhD will confront with poetry, techniques, aesthetics, philosophy and politics to challenge architecture’s capacity to set a ground, or build a house, funded upon a homology: as that which – by conserving an objective relation to quantity, without implying a naturalisation or a totalisation – allows for a common or collective recognition (through certification or ratification) and symbolic inhabitation.

Lectures & Conferences

Related Publications

— Uncertainty and Poetic Inhabitation: Or how to articulate chance, in “Contour” (forthcoming).