[courses]

On the Partition in/of Architectural, Cinematic and Computational Program, , UCLA AUD

[07.2005]

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Projection and Formation:
On the Partition in/of Architectural, Cinematic and Computational Program
 
Benjamin H. Bratton
benjaminbratton@gmail.com
UCLA A|UD
Summer 2005
Critical Studies Seminar
Mon and Wed, 10-1, Rm.  1243b

 
This seminar is about the program, its imperatives and its limits. We will consider the program and programming as a comprehensive image of architectural thought and practice, such that what exceeds or evades program would appear in greater relief. Toward this we will both incorporate and contrast the architectural program to two other logics of the program, the cinematic program and computational program, and will  index how architecture, as a whole, has come to rely upon what it has borrowed from these and upon how it has resisted these.

Functionalism vs.  play, form, autonomy, etc. projective practice, but rather different than Somol and Whiting, equivocating...

As a point of common reference across all three logics of the program we will consider the figure/device of the partition as an elemental vocabulary of design and diagram. According to the planometric view of architectural space, the partition --line that codifies and cleaves volume"?is a technology of emergence. By dividing volume from volume according to the potential image of how space will be consumed, architecture's tectonic imperative is transformed into a social machine. But no program ever truly masters the narrative of space in the way it projects itself. That is, people transform spaces into habitats in ways irreducibly incongruous to the designer's proposition. Further, that transformation from tectonics to sociality is itself a provisional translation of an internal architectural proposition into the external language of the lifeworld. The tentative autonomy of that internal dialogue is never really broken, is never really ever shuttled into the maxims of use and use-value.

Cinematic program is also animated by an interplay between the creative premises of production, the diagramming of cinematic elements and their flow, and the affective intensity of their reception. Cinema, in all its analog and digital guises, remains a particular system of manipulating the raw material of imaging media into a projective system or whole. Like architecture, it configures smaller instantiations of spatial and temporal events into a programmatic apparatus that stands in for a part of the world, and like architecture those configurations can only position themselves in a social field outside of its control, one that however governs its ultimate legibility.

Computational program -literally software programs, the creative enrollment of those programs, and the deployment of software as an environmental media"?has already remade much of architectural thought and practice in its own image. The symbolic registers of the interface and the database, to cite two, have transposed architectural intelligence into an investigate system of form, information, iteration, deformation and automation in ways that we still are barely able to properly theorize. Computation has become the immediate field in which the designer explores reasoned and intuitive gesture, and also, as a component of the contemporary city, a building block of that city. That is, computation is both something to make architecture with, and something out of which to make architecture.

Clearly as well, both cinema and computation depend on the fixity and fluidity of certain "architectural" partitions: screens, cuts, plateaus, surfaces, insides and outsides. This dependence both links the three and positions them apart. All of this also suggests, crucially so, that the logic of the partition is not only within a particular design discourse, but also between them. Architecture is partitioned from cinema and computation, even as or perhaps as a precondition of, its absorption of them. Such partitions shift, are variously permeable or opaque within different design practices, and yet they remain. They are, I will argue, a limit horizon against which the possibility of the contemporary architectural argument or projection can be made. The program, then, is not only scripting of social habitation in advance of itself, it is a conceiving the entire image of form, material, context, content, etc. as multiple forms of the interface, that in-between point that connects two unlike systems and governs the performative conditions of their exchange and interpenetration, and serves as the locus of the designer's activation of them both.


Requirements:

Each week students will read selected texts, watch films, visit local sites, and prepare research briefs for group discussion.

I will prepare a guiding brief each week, which will be handed out one week in advance of the seminar during which we will discuss the material, discussed therein.

Each seminar session will include a one-hour lecture talk by Bratton and a student-led discussion of readings. We will look at a variety of artifacts including political theory, urban theory, architectural critique and commentary, in additional to architectural theory.

Each student will prepare a one-two page brief each week on the assigned reading and lectures. You are welcome to use the weekly brief to workshop a provocative polemic or to present sober data you've mined. You are encouraged to link your seminar research with your studio project. We are of the opinion that work invested in one will bear fruit in the other.

A final project/paper (2500 words), (abstract due midway) as well as course attendance and active participation in discussions completes the requirements of the seminar. During selected weeks, there will be additional student presentations on assigned topics. 

 
Seminar Schedule

Week One
    W10-Introduction to course: On the convergences and divergences of architectural, cinematic and computational     programs, lecture
    F12-  interfaces, reflexive modernization, programs, lecture

Week Two
    W17- The inevitability of program, lecture
    F19- Discussion of  student briefs.

Week Three
    W24- The impossibility of program, lecture
    F26-  Discussion of  student briefs.
    Visit: TBD
   
Week Four
    W31- Cinematic program, lecture
    F02- Visit/charette;  Imaginary Forces, LA office.

Week Five
    W07- Computational program, lecture
    F09-  Discussion of student briefs., internal review of final student papers.

Week Six
    W14- internal review of papers/mini-symposia papers; preparation of seminar book.
    F16-  presentation of seminar book
 

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1. On the Very Possibility and Possible Inevitability of Architectural Program
 



The cultural imperative of partition and repetition - program as accommodation/ program as projection - programmatic genres and institutions -  post-critical methods vs. ideological replications - Henri Lefebvre's notion of "habitus" - the scalar image of the city"?globalization and structural flexibility"?mobility and the shift from plan to surface - the history of "use value" --  Michel Foucault and the notion of "regime""?Anthropology of place - the spatial media of social, and Structuration Theory - the simultaneity of forces, present and absence - mobility, globalization, and the structure as physical narrative

• Hans Ibelings, "Supermodernism"
• John Summerson, "The Case for a Theory of Modern Architecture" (1957)
• Colin Rowe, "Program versus Paradigm"
• Scott Lash, "Henri Lefebvre"
• Somol, R.E. "Projective Design: Around Culture and Form," Perspecta 33 (2001).
• R.E. Somol and Sarah Whiting, "Projective Practice" Perspecta
• Rem Koolhaas, "Congestion Without Matter" and "Junkspace"   
• Stan Allen, "Artificial Ecologies, The work of MVRDV"
•  Michael Speaks, "It's Out There"
•  Greg Lynn, "A New Style of Life"
•  Fredric Jameson, "Is Space Political?"

   
   
2. On The Ultimate Impossibility and Strategic Evasion of Architectural Program

 

Historicity, contestation and paroxysm - Deconstruction and the apparatus of inscription --  From the abstract scalar body to specific horizon of embodiments - the agencies of war and terror - Spatial sickness - Psychogeography and Unitary Urbanism - the Image of the law - Feral cities - Mimicry and  mimesis - Opportunistic occupations - strong program in sociology of technology - Actor-Network Theory - the shifting autonomy of formal autonomy - scenario planning and sci-fi


3. On Cinematic Program: Film Form, Screen Real-Estate and The Time-Image



The expanded field of cinema - Deleuze's space-image and time-image - cinema as diagram of posture and emergence - diagram and affect (Bacon) - Eisenstein and the dialectical image - Vertov, Greenaway and the indexical form - Baudry and the expanded cinematic apparatus - Cinema and over-determination - Dogme95 and the latent manifesto - channel and surface.

 
4. On Images and/of Elemental Formation: Cinematic Program and Architecture

 

Cinematic program into an agent of space, mediated by architectural program - The restricted and general image of surveillance - interactivity and event - collage city revisited - scripted space - Imaginary Forces case study - IPTV -microcinema and macrocinema - cinema and the digital layer of the palette--camera obscura revisited and retired - Time-image as an quality of partition - from expanded cinema to CCCC - database cinema - cinema as a generalized property of the surface - mobility of/and the image -handheld interfaces and the cinematic drift-  work of Christian Moeller, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Joachim Sauter, others.

 
5. On Computational Program: The "Strong Programme" of Code

 

Heidegger on software - the diagrammatic basis of contemporary design - the organization of software in the image of architecture - the organization of architecture in the image of software - database as symbolic form, revisited - the political epistemology of FLOSS - protocol and emergent network formation - code and affect - the shifting programmability of the application and library layers"?predictive, projective and logistical models"?software and embodied habit - visual and non-visual computational agency

 
6. On The Aesthetics of Logistics: Computational Program and The Parliament of Things
 


Computational program as agent of space, mediated by architectural program -- From partition to protocol - Ulrich Beck's reflexive modernization thesis -- Logistical networks and globalization - neo-cyberneticist models and their discontents - the spectacle of organizational transparency - programming the emergent index - pervasive computation - network metonyms and metaphors - proprioceptive interfaces - Latour's image of material adjudication - Linear and non-linear organizational interfaces

Tags: ucla, architecture, theory

Published: 10.21.2006

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