1. The Culture of Congestion: Complexity and Complication
In Delirious New York, Rem Koolhaas writes that “the original promise of the metropolitan condition” is the “Culture of Congestion,” which is a culture that is premised on conflict, complication, and a continuously changing skyline. Buildings as ideology constantly rise and fall, and the experience of this energy keeps the metropolis alive. Jackson, MS lacks all of these characteristics and consequently is a dead metropolis. This thesis is a proposal to reinvigorate Jackson with complication and complexity. The city needs to be layered with conflicting patterns of ideas, circulation, functions, aspirations, successes, and failures. We do not simply need urban density, but rather a culture of continuous change and conflict.
2. Rhizomes: Building the Chaosmos
“Unlike a structure, which is defined by a set of points and positions,” Deleuze and Guattari write, “with binary relations between the points and biunivocal relationships between the positions, the rhizome is made only of lines: lines of segmentarity and stratification as its dimensions, and the line of flight or deterrritorialization as the maximum dimension after which the multiplicity undergoes metamorphosis, changes in nature.” Binary logic is the logic of a tree, a centralized and grounded object, one which is familiar to most of us today in the various forms of modernism and critical theory. It is organized, rationalized, “scientific”, and linear. In contrast, rhizomes, systems that have no central core or specific starting point, are multiplicities, or varieties, of elements that have no unit of measure. They are chaos. The world is no longer (or never was) cosmos, it is chaosmos. Rhizomes are not made up of points, but rather of lines. Rhizomes are always between a beginning and an end, never at them. As Deleuze as Guattari write, “the rhizome pertains to a map that must be produced, constructed, a map that is always detachable, connectable, reversible, modifiable, and has multiple entryways and exits and its own lines of flight.”
3. Delaying the Rush to Meaning: Revising Phenomenology
Phenomenology as an architectural method clearly, and rightly so, finds strong affinities with the spatial and experiential aspects of the philosophy of Merleau-Ponty, and consequently much of related architectural practice and theory has focused on sensational qualities such as light, color, perspective, movement, time, and sound. Through the method of bracketing, the transcendental reduction allows Merleau-Ponty to resolve the need for primordial description in ontology by the use of the doctrine of “primacy of perception” that situates being in phenomenon. The focus on the primacy of perception is the bridge that has led the phenomenological approach to architecture to focus on the experience of phenomenon, and bracket off other issues. I would like to suggest here that the real project of phenomenology in architecture should be considered much larger in scope. Limiting “phenomenological architecture” to the work of people such as Peter Zumthor, Steven Holl, and Juhanni Pallasmaa, in contrast to other contemporary architects such as Coop Himmelb(l)au, Herzog and De Meuron, or Rem Koolhaas is not only detrimental, but possibly even the eventual nail in the coffin for phenomenology as architectural theory.
Gilles Deleuze’s criticism of phenomenology actually provides a means for criticizing the tendency to narrow the scope of phenomenology. According to Deleuze, phenomenology assumes the world to be “primordially impregnated with univocal meaning,” thus reinstating axiomatic thinking. However correct, Deleuze’s criticism does not spell the end of phenomenology, for the robust ontology of the flesh laid out by Merleau-Ponty provides a serious response and even companion to Deleuze’s notions of paradox and multiplicity. In light of Deleuze’s criticism and a focus on Merleau-Ponty’s later work, I would like to characterize the real goal of architectural phenomenology as the creation of architecture that leaves the door open on univalent interpretation as long as possible so as to delay the collapse of meaning and to allow the freedom of expression and imagination. Architectural phenomenology does not simply find its roots in the visible and the sensuous, but also the invisible. This characterization should suggest the application of phenomenological theory in a number of different ways and should lead architects and architecture theorists to address concepts such as unnameability, complication, paradox, chaos, and multiplicity as facets of phenomenology. As Merleau-Ponty writes, “movement, touch, vision, applying themselves to the other and to themselves, return toward their source and, in the patient and silent labor of desire, begin the paradox of expression.”
The work of this thesis then is to reject phenomenology as simply a product of over expressed and over emphasized phenomena, and, instead, suggest that architecture should be engaged in delaying the collapse of meaning. Building an architecture that slows the move towards meaning would involve an attempt to use both phenomena and meaning based conventions to explore multiplicity, unnameability, paradox and chaos. This thesis could be executed with any sort of program, but greater success may be possible with a larger scale, public building, which will allow a freer exploration of slowing meaning in a social setting.
There are certain affinities of this definition with the work of Rachel McCann in Wild Being and Carnal Echo: The Experience and Design of Architecture in the Flesh, Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Architectural Association School of Architecture, London.
