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Culture Call: An Interview with Bruce Mau

by Nader Vossoughian

Designer Bruce Mau's career has been wide-ranging. In 1995, he collaborated with Rem Koolhaas and the Office for Metropolitan Architecture on S,M,L,XL. In 2000, he published Life Style, an investigation into contemporary image culture. This year, he returns with Massive Change. What's new about this project? The scale, for one. Massive Change is not just a book. It is also a major exhibition, a radio show, a website, a lecture series, and a poster project. As our twenty-minute interview reveals, it was the product of an extensive collaboration between Bruce Mau Design and the Institute without Boundaries, a post-graduate research laboratory that Mau launched in partnership with George Brown-Toronto City College.

To start the interview, click here. If you have trouble opening the link, you probably need to install Macromedia's free Flash Player plug-in.

Interview with Bruno Latour: Decoding the Collective Experiment

by María J. Prieto and Elise S. Youn

Bruno Latour is a social scientist whose writings and collaborative work mediate between the fields of sociology, anthropology, science, technology, art and architecture. He emphasizes experimentation as a tool for decoding the connections between the human and non-human world. In his latest book, Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy (2004), he argues for a rethinking of political language around what he terms “attachment” and "critical proximity," that is, the notion that people and things are intimately connected through politics.

On a recent visit to Columbia University, Latour spoke to us about an exhibition he is curating at the Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie (ZKM) in Karlsruhe, Germany (Figure 1). Entitled “Making Things Public,” this project was inspired by Pragmatism, which stresses experimental testing and trusting in the world. As Latour puts it, “we want to make an exhibition where politics, science and technology explore a new future based on a diagnosis of present practices illuminated through the perspective of material history.”

Q: What is the goal of the “Making Things Public” exhibition? What are the intentions behind it?

BL: The aim of the “Making Things Public” exhibition is to try to assemble different ways of assembling. The show explores the idea of an “assembly of assemblies,” or more exactly, an “assemblage of assembling,” different ways of gathering things together.

There is no overarching party line in the show, even though what we are trying to do is very clear. The exhibition is more or less an opportunity to share my views about modernism. The different accumulations of things that are assembled are connected not by the top, as if they were all part of a huge, overall scheme, but by the bottom. They are connected by the fact that they are all techniques of representation. These techniques are necessary if you want to approach representation in the triple sense of science, politics and art. As techniques of representation, there is something that they all have in common. Indeed, we are just as interested in the structure of financial markets as we are in listening to religious sermons, creating “post-political” spaces in the classical sense of the word, or even learning how to build architectural models (we have a small part in the exhibition on this by OMA).

The aim of the show is to open up the repertoire of political attitudes and affairs. We are trying to steer the debate in a slightly different direction, one that is very inspired by the American tradition of Pragmatism. The main work of art – apart from the architectural installation done by the Graduate School of Architecture at Columbia – is an invisible work of art called the phantom Body Politic. It is a sort of materialization of Walter Lippmann’s argument concerning the notion of the “phantom public.” It is actually a virtual work of art that will surround the whole exhibition, like political bodies surrounding us. We cannot see it, but we feel its effects. We want to try to do a visual, artistic re-presentation of what the body politic is in this Pragmatist tradition.

To answer the second part of your question, our intention is basically to regain confidence in mediation after the time of critique. My argument is that critique as a repertoire is over. It has run out of steam entirely, and now the whole question is, “how can we be critical not by distance but by proximity?”

The exhibition includes examples of many different techniques of representation – most of which seem to have very few connections to each other – in the 2500-meter-square space of the ZKM. It will push us to ask why all of these techniques of representation are connected to one another. The visitor is supposed to see the connections between these techniques.

When we usually think of politics, we think only of a very small series of attitudes that suppose a gathering of people around the question of the representation of people. These perspectives have little to do with things , nor are they related to other ways of gathering. The only thing we want from the visitors is for them to recognize that there are many other ways of assembling, and that most of this assembling – this politics – is about things. If you turn the things around, you get a different type of gathering and agreement, or dissent, which you don’t have in the classical definition of political philosophy.

Q: In your proposal for the “Making Things Public” exhibition, entitled, “’A Parliament of Parliaments,’ How to Overcome the Crisis of Representation,” you write, “we want to make an exhibition where politics, science and technology explore a new future based on a diagnosis of present practices illuminated through the perspective of material history.” How can individual architects and artists take part in the process of producing assemblies to “explore a new future,” while facing the modern duality that you describe in your book, We Have Never Been Modern? This duality is defined as the separation between nature and society.

BL: It is not a show about modernism per se. Although it is inspired by my argument that modernism is not the future of humanity, it is not specifically about that question. It is actually about a much simpler question: if we are dealing with matters of concern – and my argument tries to decode the shift between matters of fact and matters of concern – if we are moving in this direction, which seems to be obvious, although we don’t have to buy the whole argument from the anthropology of science about matters of fact and matters of concern – what are the aesthetics of this shift? What are the politics of it? In stylistic, artistic terms, these are the questions I want to raise in the show.

Now, why are architects involved? Architects have always been involved with these sorts of questions. We have a very nice sub-exhibit in the show that is a small reconstruction of Otto Neurath’s “Isotype” work in Vienna (1924-1934), from the time of the great modernist moment of logical positivism and the Bauhaus. I want to show the “Isotype” work as the perfect example of the link between the philosophy of science, logical positivism, architecture, the Bauhaus, aesthetics and social politics. I want to take the “Isotype” argument not to criticize it, but to say that it was an interesting event – a great, important moment for architecture and the philosophy of science, stylistically. However, it is not the moment in which we are right now. Now, we still see the connection between architecture, the philosophy of science, politics, statistics, social responsibility and so on, except there are no matters of fact as a bedrock on which to construct a perfectly pure style, a perfectly pure philosophy of science, a perfectly pure socialist politics, etc.

So I want this small exhibit on Neurath to ask everyone in the show, “can you do better than Neurath?” This is really a stylistic question: “can you do better than the Bauhaus, the logical positivists, the socialists, and those who were interested in the statistical-aesthetic connection?” Of course it’s a grand question, and it’s just an exhibition; it’s just 2500 meters square, and the budget is very small, but that is the question I’m interested in tackling.

Architects are also in the show in many other places. There is one exhibit on the architecture of parliaments themselves, as well as another on scale models. This exhibit on scale models is by OMA and tries to answer the question, “how do people utilize scale models to understand architecture?” So architecture is present in many areas. In terms of art history, the transformation of churches into temples is also featured in a sub-exhibit. However, architecture is significant because it is the constant metaphor about what it is to live in a common space. For instance, the dome is an architectural metaphor. This stylistic question can only be approached from a multidisciplinary point of view with philosophy, politics, sociology, design and of course architecture.

In the way it deploys these objects, the exhibition itself has to represent this multidisciplinary question. It won’t resolve it, but it will re-present the question. That is why it’s a very integrated exhibition. Everything that is in the show resonates with everything else. No one is allowed just to put something there and then isolate it from everything else. All of the projects are connected to each other, and because of this, they are also all in flux.

We are imagining a very fluid show because we are assembling things that have never been assembled together. These assemblies do not yet exist for the most part. It’s not like a normal show where you present things that already exist, and you bring them together for display in a museum. Here nothing exists yet. Apart from Cranach’s painting, which is already painted, everything else is being made expressly for the show on a shoestring budget, and mostly by people like me – complete amateurs – who have never done this sort of thing before.

Q: You write that one of your goals for the ZKM exhibition is to invent “new procedures, forms, shapes, and sites to dramatize the public space to literally, re-present them anew.” In what way can the architect create “new procedures” that encourage public interaction and criticism? How can the architect serve effectively as a mediator to engage the public in the creation process as co-designers?

BL: I cannot speak for the architect, but I can see why, metaphorically, architecture is important for building a common world. Practically speaking, I can also see that people should be enjoying the different parts of the show, no matter if they prefer the piece by OMA, the exhibit on the models of different parliaments, or the architectural intervention that the Columbia students are proposing (Figure 2). All of these projects are about the obvious interactions between space, things and common assemblies. Literally all architecture is about this question of the common world.

Then the question is, “which type, which style of architecture is adjusted to the task?” We have a whole style of architecture designed around the notion of matters of fact and the notion of objects: modernist architecture. What is the successor to this style of modernist architecture? I am interested in pushing the designer into asking, “if you have to imagine that the world does not consist of matters of fact, but instead of matters of concern, what happens with the concepts of function, sobriety, public space, etc.?” I am interested in trying to push the architect towards thinking about these issues.

Q: What is the responsibility of the architect in the process of “making things?” There seems to be a trend in architecture right now in which there is less interest in the architect engaging the public in a socio-political sense than relying on computer-generated systems and imagery. We see the emphasis you place on the thing, the end product (rather than on the individual and his choices) as a potential method of escape, as an excuse for the architect to avoid involving the public or dealing with socio-political considerations. Is there a way that you could clarify your concept of “making things” to ensure that the architect remains a critical agent?

BL: It is not just about making things; rather, it is about making things public. At the same time, if people want to escape their social responsibility, they are going to find a way. The question is not actually to insist on social responsibility at all – not because the exhibition is “apolitical,” but because the classical definition of “politics” is very narrow. The whole idea of the show is actually to say that there will be very little involved about politics in the sense of a conventional repertoire of demonstration, indignation, order and power.

Of course, all of these things are very important, but politics in the sense of assemblies of things and attachments to things is a much larger set. My understanding is that the crisis of representation is largely due to the fact that people define politics in too narrow of a sense; that is, it is always defined in terms of race, gender, power and class relations – a very limited repertoire. These relationships are important of course, but they are somewhat restrictive and carry too little of what the thing in its attachment really is. In fact, this position, which is the reiteration of political responsibility and social discourse, is actually apolitical. It is critical and can help someone feel good, but it does not necessarily propose an entry into the construction of the collective.

I have indeed done a lot of research in this area in the past, but I think the crisis of representation today occurs because it is very difficult to speak about the production of things with this limited repertoire. This repertoire blocks you at the entry of science and technology, and architecture is part of science and technology.

If I understand the question, you are worried that the interest in things will “demobilize the masses,” so to speak. Is that right?

Q: Well not the masses generally, but architects specifically, if they are so focused on producing things, which seems to be the case.

BL: Things are not objects. In fact, things are precisely the opposite of objects. When we are focused on things, we are actually also focused on ourselves. When I am focusing on the attachment of this coffee cup, I am actually getting back to myself quite fast, as well as to the entire history of Italian coffee-making, the people who are harvesting the coffee, etc. This cup of coffee is an assembly. In the exhibition, for example, we have shopping carts that are made from different products, so these shopping carts are in fact political assemblies as well.

If you are interested in things, you are precisely not being limited to objects – that is the difference. To arrive at the thing, you are proliferating in all sorts of places that do not of course look “political” in the traditional sense of the word, but they certainly do not look like objects either, in the same sort of isolated, bounded ways that have so often fascinated modernists. That is exactly the point of style. There is something in the object that is detached from the background and foreground and that has a much narrower definition of what it is to be connected to the world.

Q: There is another trend in architecture towards using the self-organizing system to generate a formal language. Software programs such as Maya allow the architect to plug in a set of coordinates in order to generate instantly a form that is then placed onto the site. What is your opinion of the use of artificial self-organizing systems both in architecture as well as in the social sciences?

BL: I don’t know enough about this software, although I am very interested in it. Actually, for the exhibition I am looking to understand what the visual display of things is, instead of what the visual display of objects is. First, all of these methods are very old from what I understand. The idea of self-organizing systems was invented in the 16th century. It is nothing new.

I am from Beaune in Burgundy, which is the birthplace of Gaspar Monge, the inventor of descriptive geometry. All of these computer-based visualizations are basically faster versions of descriptive geometry. The world in which the object is made to move is a modernist world from beginning to end.

So it is not as if you are talking about a new world with self-organizing systems, on the one hand, and CAD-based designs on the other. You are actually still in an old world – the very old world of modernity – where objects move without being transformed. They are instead geometrically manipulated or projected. With this kind of projection, you do not move an inch out of the modernism framework. You are still focused on the object rather than the thing.

A new beginning would be – in contrast to the world of objects we’re imagining now – about how the architect displays a thing, which in an architectural project would mean to draw connections between where you would simultaneously see the people of the neighborhood criticizing the project, where you would see the costs, the pollution, the asbestos removal in the building, etc. As an architect, using this kind of visualizing software, you would be able help people figure out this non-modern space on your computer.

Q: With Maya, there are many different approaches to design, many different factors you can input. For instance, you can design a weather system.

BL: Is this what you call “non-standard architectures?”

Q: Yes, it is related to that exhibition at the Centre Pompidou. It has to do with artificially creating natural systems such as weather, and with expecting unexpected things to happen based on the self-generating systems created by the computer program. There is also an interest in trying to build formal chimeras using this kind of computer-generated design.

BL: What you are describing seems to be the same as 16th-century Baroque design. This kind of architecture is based on anamorphosis, on the whole imagination of the modernists. The “Non-Standard Architectures” exhibition that took place in Paris is completely modernist. It is about formalism, mastery, self-organization, and anamorphosis. In addition to that, I found the architecture exhibited in the show terribly ugly. Non-standard architecture represents a monstrous kind of formalism. It seems to me to be much more related to some sort of late Archimboldo anamorphosist invention than anything that is related to matters of concern.

However, I want to return to this issue of matters of concern. Why am I interested in the work you do at Columbia’s Graduate School of Architecture? Precisely because I am hoping that you can deliver to me at the ZKM in Karlsruhe a space that begins to resemble the spatial requirement of this new non-modernist language. That is really what I am interested in.

And since there has been this discussion about Manhattan post-September 11th, can you retranslate this discussion in a visual vocabulary and grammar that can then serve to teach us a lesson – independent from the final result – which will allow us to understand that we are really entering another world, not the Baroque world of anamorphosis, mastery, formalism, and matters of fact? The world is not made of these categories. Nevertheless, we still need the visual tools; we need CAD to design; we need these methods. But why should we limit ourselves by leaving modernism to amorphism? Amorphism is the post-modern version of a crisis. It tells us, “let’s have no shape.” No, the collective has to have a shape – a very strong one – but this shape has to be invented.

Q: Rem Koolhaas is considered one of the most “political” figures in architecture today. Yet, he seems to be a strategist who adapts himself and his work according to the global market, rather than acting as a critical mediator. What do you think of the way Koolhaas has defined the role of the contemporary architect, both as a master architect and as a role-model for the younger generation?

BL: I cannot answer that last part because I am not an architect. It so happens that I know Koolhaas fairly well because I have two students – one of whom has studied with him and the other who is working with him – and so I have met him several times. I think that one of his important aspects is that he is – like me – said to be cynical, because he is not politically correct, in the sense of simply articulating the critical idiom. So he is often accused of being complacent and conniving with market forces, as if he were sort of enjoying this kind of power in architecture.

I think this is a very silly critique of him because more importantly, Koolhaas is a perfect example of the difference between having a political stance and being interested politically. Of course he does not have a political stance in the sense that he does not say what he is supposed to say or what makes people feel good – which is that market forces are dominated by late capitalism. Compared to people who do say these things, he looks conniving and complacent.

However, his way of handling the question of “non-modernism,” “second modernism” or “hypermodernism,” as he may call it, is highly political because it produces architecture (such as the CCTV Headquarters Building in China) and books (such as Mutations, which I find very interesting as a sociologist, and The Harvard Design School Guide to Shopping) that recognize the presence of politics. These works are ten times more interesting, for instance, than dozens of other works done by sociologists of the city and of markets.

Take The Harvard Design School Guide to Shopping; there are hundreds of books (by Walter Benjamin, etc.) lamenting the consumption and the Americanization of the world. But what Koolhaas has produced is much more interesting, even in terms of science and data than all of these lamentations over the power of the market, because he is interested in attachment.

It is something like a “new realism” that is part of an engagement with the future. Of course it does not look “politically correct” because it does not pay respect to the very small number of categories you already have.

Now since I am not an architect, I cannot offer a critical opinion about his architecture. I find that Koolhaas’ buildings are often ugly, but I know he likes them to be like that. I am not an architect, but as a social scientist, I can tell you that the series of books he did are masterpieces.

Q: Like Koolhaas, you are said to be somewhat of a cynic. Yet there is also a tone of idealism in your work, in terms of how recognizing the politics in things can open up new ways of thinking and being critical. Also, your ideas are clearly related to Pragmatist theory and the interest in trusting in the world, in testing out your ideas through doing and making things. However, as you mentioned earlier, there is a difference between simply “making things” and “making things public,” or actually engaging people to create something public and constructive. How does your work try to negotiate this difference? What is the goal of your work?

BL: What is common between Koolhaas and me, if I dare say so, is experimentalism. The political sphere is not yet composed; it has to be composed. The common world is not made; it has to be made. There is no authority that has the definition of the common good; it has to be experimented upon. Where are the experimental tools? What is the public demonstration? How do we prove these positions?

I think that is where the Pragmatist outlook in politics is just starting. Intellectually, the current interest in Pragmatism raises an important point: why did Lippmann and Dewey create such an interesting definition of politics in 1930, and then we waited 70-80 years to recover it? What happened in between? What happened in between was the introduction of a completely authoritarian definition of politics from the right – with economic cybernetic systems theory – and also from the left – with the whole rise and demise of Marxism. Now back to Pragmatism, if you read Lippmann’s book, The Phantom Public (Library of Conservative Thought), it is as fresh as if it were just off the press. If you read Dewey, it is amazing how contemporary it seems.

I think we have become interested in Pragmatism again because “the public” continues to be a problem. “The public” is not what is meant simply by a certain definition of the common good. If you speak about it in terms of a common good, then you have to find the experiment that makes it work. Where is the experiment that proves that you are right? If you decide you can define what is good for Americans or good for architects, for instance, where is the proof? Prove it! Find the protocol of the demonstration. Decode this protocol. Engage politics, not in the sense of feeling good and having the right set of political positions and so on, but around the protocol of debriefing the collective experiment.

In that sense, to come back to Koolhaas, I find a great resonance in what Koolhaas has done in his book on the development of China’s Pearl River Delta, Great Leap Forward. It is a monstrous experiment, but this experiment is decoded in a book that is much more interesting than all the whining and criticizing about the modernization of China. In that sense, Koolhaas is involved in debriefing the collective experiment. This is also precisely what I am trying to do in my own work and in the “Making Things Public” exhibition.

Bruno Latour is author of Laboratory Life (1979), Science in Action (1987), We Have Never Been Modern (1993), Paris: Invisible City (2004), and Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy (2004). He has taught at the Centre de sociologie de l'Innovation at the École nationale supérieure des mines in Paris since 1982. Together with Peter Weibel, he was the curator of “Iconoclash” (2002).

"Making Things Public" will open at the ZKM Karlsruhe in March 2005. For this event, Columbia University's Center on Organizational Innovation and the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation have been working together with Latour to design an installation that deals with the reconstruction of Lower Manhattan.

7 Factorial: An Experiment in Writing and Research (Part II)

[for Part I, click here]

VII.

Seminar readings include Otto Neurath’s “Museum of the Future” (1933), Empiricism and Sociology (1973), International Picture Language (1936), and Nader’s “The Language of the World Museum: Otto Neurath, Paul Otlet and Le Corbusier” (2003). Nicola presents two visions of the modern museum; that of Schinkel’s Altes Museum as compared to Neurath’s "museums of the future."

Nicola: In my presentation for last week's class, I wanted to highlight the differences between a “traditional” museum (the Altes Museum by Schinkel) and Neurath's conception of the social museum. (Figures 34, 35)

The Altes Museum (1823) in Berlin is an emblematic example of Europe's new political equilibrium that followed the Congress of Vienna of 1815 (the Restoration of the Monarchies previously defeated by Napoleon). Schinkel's client was the Prussian monarchy, which wanted to represent its restored power through the modern museum.

Without any intention of increasing the knowledge of the visitor, the Altes Museum was like a cabinet de curiosité where the works of art were treated as details subordinated to an architectonic whole. Thus, the relationship between painting and museum was reverse: it was not the museum that contained the paintings, but the paintings that were part of the decoration of the building.

This element of celebration still exists in contemporary museums, although the attention towards cultural information has increased exponentially (thanks to people like Neurath). For between Neurath and Schinkel there are 100 years of radical changes: the idea of the proletariat has changed from that of “servant” to the “self-aware” mass. Neurath wanted to update the museum, and to do so he focused on improving the accessibility of information. Although his analyses were exact, however, he wasn't able to replace “the museum” with another medium: in the end, his proposal for a new museum is not convincing, because it didn’t distinguish enough from traditional precedents like the Altes Museum.

In class, I also questioned whether Neurath's idea for a museum of the future was not simply a vehicle for exhibiting information. Thus, I drew a distinction between the museum and the exhibition: the first is an institution that hosts information (in a preexistent, circumscribed space); the second is a technique for displaying information (which creates an interstitial space as sub-product). The museum has the power to celebrate and elevate any single work exhibited; the exhibition doesn't celebrate but informs. This is a vague but important difference. In the end, the museum is a sacred, albeit temporal, space. Neurath's new museum should be reproduced in a series: but the result would not be comparable to an automobile (as he said), but rather to a church. What is Neurath's attitude toward the existing museum? What is his attitude toward existing masterpieces? Should they be preserved or destroyed (treated “iconoclastically,” to borrow Latour’s language)? And what about art (art that produces unique objects)? Should it not exist anymore?

I think that people who appeal exclusively to a scientific conception of the world (e.g., Neurath) elevate scientific knowledge to a metaphysical level. This blind faith in science goes against what Neurath writes in the Unified Science as Encyclopedic Integration: "An empiricist must permit himself, if necessary, a certain vagueness. Scientism does not depend upon exactness but only upon the permanence of scientific criticism" (Neurath 1955, 21). I understand ”vagueness” as the agnostic refusal of any totalizing explanation of all natural and social phenomena.

Mike: Nicola, maybe Neurath's use of the word "museum" is an instance of his society’s inability to make an association with something that already exists. What I find interesting about the Altes Museum is that it functions as an architectural version of Neurath's mistake. Just as Neurath used the preconceived language of the ISOTYPE to describe his new "archive," Schinkel created a new museum type, the public museum, with a neo-Classical vocabulary. In the Museum of Society and Economy, the performance of the modern museum changed, but this did not influence the design. Indeed, how long does it take for a museum design to reclad itself in the image of a radically different program?

The only real problem I see with Neurath's strategies, from his ISOTYPEs to the world museum, is that they are too reductive. They seem to rely on a system of variance and change, but in their effort to unify everything, they seem to combat or compromise that variation (Figure 36). It seems sometimes counterintuitive to accommodate economic, population, manufacturing flows, etc. through a relatively finite language of symbols.

Malini: I think that Nicola’s comparison of the Altes Museum and Neurath’s “museum of the future” is apt. I would have liked to have seen the two images in Nicola’s presentation merged. What would Neurath’s exhibition look like had it been displayed at the Altes Museum? Maybe Neurath’s intention was to create an exhibition that could be displayed in a grand setting. I pose this as a possible explanation for the neutrality and blandness of the exhibition space of the Museum of Society and Economy.

Google is a wonderful thing, Surfing on it, I found the following in the website of a graphic design firm called 2X4 . I think it is very relevant to our discussion and probably describes in a contemporary context the significance of a Museum of Society and Economy:

Museum of the Ordinary, a proposal: The museum holds a unique position in the collective consciousness of the design profession. Inclusion in a permanent collection seems to verify the value of a designed object, as the museum is, after all, charged with the eternal protection of significant artifacts and masterworks. The imprimatur of inclusion is a potent marketing device in itself: the tag line "included in the collection of the XYZ museum" promotes everything from wristwatches to laptops. The museum-sanctified design object may be the only masterpiece – albeit a mass-produced one – available to the average consumer. Grafting the concept of permanence to the ephemeral activity of design, the museum provides an institutionalized constancy and inoculates the object against the anxiety of fashion.

Neurath’s “museumization” of ordinary data, using a graphic language with “a new clarity and purposefulness,” gives its exhibits a level of uniqueness. Maybe this uniqueness made a visit to Neurath’s exhibition/museum more worthwhile for the visitor.

Brian: In the process of researching international art biennials for my Kinne grant proposal, I came across an interesting quote that was related to last weeks' discussion:

Big expositions are artificial environments, somewhere between carnivals and museums. They are dependent, of course, on the mobility of works of art, as they are taken from original sites and permanent repositories with a freedom equal to that with which a critic selects photographs for reproduction. In this respect, a recurring exhibition like the Biennale is more like the drive-in movie theatre than the museum from which some of its exhibitions may be borrowed. It is originals that are being spun around the world, and so to speak, inserted, into a core of permanent services at the exhibition ground. (Alloway, 1968, 39)

The reference to the movie theater was a startling coincidence. Reading this made me wonder if in fact the art biennial is perhaps not so far from Neurath's ideas for a "manufactured museum". The format of the art biennial has recently proliferated to the point that at any given moment in a two-year cycle, some country is hosting an international art exhibition. In the 1950’s the international art exhibition circuit was limited to three locations: Venice, Kassel and Sao Paulo; today there are more than 45 such venues. Within this system, the exhibition hall (occasionally an actual museum) becomes a form of standardized infrastructure that mobile art "plugs into."

Unlike Neurath's museum, the art biennial exposition is composed of originals, not mass produced artifacts. One could say that it is mass-transport rather than mass production that makes this new form of museum possible. It is the relative ease of global travel that has prolonged the life of the original artwork and has created an alternative to Neurath’s “museum of the future”. It is not the contents that have become mass-produced, but perhaps the space itself, increasingly becoming a standardized, neutral container.

Does the biennial address any of the social agenda behind Neurath's “museum of the future”? At first glance, it would seem to be exactly counter to his goals, essentially catering to an aristocratic art elite who jet-set from place to place. Though this is inarguably the case, the art biennial has an interesting side effect of allowing local museums otherwise marginalized by the art world access to contemporary collections. Under the guise of a mobile feast is perhaps a social benefit not far from Neurath's democratic goals. The biennial is not a mass-produced publication, but nor is it very different from a lending library. (Figure 37)

Giorgos: In opposition to Nicola’s position, I would argue that Schinkel’s Altes Museum and Neurath’s Museum of Society and Economy were not at odds as greatly as we originally thought. For both projects suffer from an inability to reconcile facts and artifacts, meanings and essences. Stated differently, Neurath’s scientific world conception is Plato’s metaphysics turned inside out. What did Plato believe? Plato believed that matter is a manifestation of eternal and ideal forms. For Plato, everything we do, everything we see around us, is nothing more than a reference to something superior. For Neurath, by contrast, the fact seems to be the generator of the artifact; the information precedes the object. This is a crucial difference: in Plato’s case, the fact is imposed upon the artifact; in Neurath’s case, it generates it. Neurath tries to explain reality from within; he tries to break it up into rational facts. For Neurath, everything can be reduced to information. His diagrams try to reach beyond the superficial materiality of the world, not towards an exterior that would imply Plato’s transcendental Forms, but towards an interior structure that supports it. For Neurath, information is the DNA of the real.

Naturally, there is a problem here: to assume that everything is information (as Neurath or even Karl Chu suggest) is to leave out material reality. Neurath relied on strategies of seriality and quantification in coming up with his graphics (the ISOTYPEs). But at the same time, he was reductive and could hardly give any sense about how to deal with the artifact in any factual way. Afraid that any formal approach would be considered metaphysical, Neurath mistook simplicity for factuality, ignoring the fact that whatever he did, in the end he would have to face the problem of the artifact, that is to say, the aesthetics of the information being presented.

Brian: Giorgos, you actually made an interesting point in class about "types" as a means of mediating between artifactual facts and factual artifacts. You suggested that the architectural “type” resides precisely on the edge between the fact and the artifact. I think this is true not only in architectural typology, but very much the agenda of Neurath's "ISOTYPEs". It is interesting to think about the relationship between typography, “[t]he act or art of expressing by means of types or symbols,” typology. To what extent was the Siedlung planning a typographic process? Looked at in this context, the difference between the flat-roof and the vernacular gable becomes a decision of font (sans-serif versus serif).

I was recently reading about Herbert Beyer's design of the universal font, which in a way seems related to the scientific world conception both in name and agenda (Figure 38). The idea of typeface might also be an interesting angle on Arvin's question about the "clear, simple architectural form" that he raised in class. A technological solution like Loos' one-wall house is completely independent of stylistic articulation (medieval cottage vs. modernist box). By analogy, one could say that the content or technology of this sentence is identical whether I use Arial or Times New Roman. In either case, the "fact" remains intact, though the artifact is perhaps articulated differently (is there a relationship between the words “articulate” and “artifact”?). It is only the modernist goal of "truth" that demands expression of technology in a new "clear, simple architectural form," though we have all seen that this true expression of fact is by and large stylistic (i.e. Mies' use of the I-beam at the Seagram building) (Figure 39). David Turnbull recently described Bruce Mau's work as creating a "typographic urbanism". Mau’s willingness to push the conventions of graphic design, and to look at the page as a site in the architectural sense, are characteristic of this mentality. The various collaborations between Mau and Koolhaas (both in typography and urbanism) are perhaps the clearest examples of the urbanism Turnbull alludes to. To what extent could the various studies in Seidlung plan configurations, and disagreements about stylistic expression, fall under the same heading?

Nader: I'm very intrigued by Nicola's most recent email, which in many respects is an elaboration of the position he took in class last week. Characterizing Schinkel's Altes Museum as an agent of the "curiosity" - this seems like a rather curious position to take, especially in the light of the remarks you made a couple of months ago. Wasn't it you, Nicola, who had been arguing that works of art like those by Raphael were steadfastly NOT curiosities? Doesn't the stance you've taken vis-à-vis the Altes Museum suggest that you've retreated from your previous statements, that you now "buy into" Neurath's remarks about the history of the museum? How tenable is Neurath's historicization of the museum?

I agree with Giorgos' comments that "to assume that everything is information leaves out material reality." But I would qualify Giorgos' comments about the Museum of Society and Economy and how it resembles, conceptually speaking, a “white box.” Indeed, I would argue that the for him the museum represented something quite the opposite: what was important for Neurath was the fabrication of the "black box;" not the black boxes you find in airplane flight recorders, though that would also be an interesting analogy. But the black box of the cinema - the black box of the "mass transport" exhibition space, as Brian might characterize it. Neurath, in other words, wasn't so much interested in making geometry real - merging Platonic forms with material reality - but in rendering the physical totally unreal, that is to say, as a pure medium, a vehicle for transmitting information.

Mike: Obviously, Neurath's work seeks to reduce complex information and associations into a simple form, but he also reduces it to a two-dimensional plane. The ISOTYPEs usually don't even have shading to produce a perspectival image. Even in Neurath's diagrams of the museum, the images on the wall are described as posters or charts. They lend themselves to the "offsite" interfaces (computer screens) we use today.

As we begin finally to understand Neurath and the projects like the Museum of Society and Economy, it would be interesting to see what projects like that are happening today, even if they are not necessarily by architects or designers. There are a lot of interesting projects that may deal with these issues: the virtual Guggenheim by Asymptote, which was commissioned by the Guggenheim enterprise to establish a museum on the internet (Figures 40); Superstudio's “Supersurface,” which attempted to package all infrastructure into a monolithic surface that provides equal access of resources to everyone (Figures 41). The Museum of Society and Economy could also be compared to Neal Stephenson's Metaverse in Snow Crash, a virtual world that only correlates with the real world through users interaction and perception of virtual space. People may have many avatars (or personalities), and you may have a valuable Internet address, but in the real world you live in a cargo container. The internet is equivalent to the “Supersurface,” but rather than housing all infrastructure, it houses information.

Brian: Clearly, it is not white walls (Giorgos’ point), but mirrors that Neurath envisions enclosing his museum. The mirror has a few properties which might aid in Neurath's endeavors: first it dematerializes the wall - whether it is the Altes Museum or the Biennial Exhibition Hall matters not. Secondly, in it's ultimate state the only content would be the museum-goer him or herself; third, the actual space of the museum becomes infinite through reflection of reflection ad infinitum. At the current Whitney Biennial, Yayoi Kusama has an installation that actually creates this condition of visual infinity within the museum (Figure 42). Interestingly, due to the multiplication of visual space and the absence of boundaries, the end result is that of disorientation, not clarity.

For Neurath, it was information that acted as a mirror. The question then becomes one of optics - how clear is the reflective surface? Wittgenstein's statement, “something that can be said can be said clearly," echoes this sentiment. Paradoxically, the clarity of reflection (as in the case of Kusama's installation) leads not to clarity of reception, but instead to disorientation. Neurath's desire to reduce information is perhaps his attempt to avoid disorientation (fact overload), but in essence he is reducing one form of clarity to provide another. One is unable to see the whole picture (with all of its vagueness), but the portion that one sees is undeniably clear. Neurath's criticism of the museum that shows hundreds of species of birds is symptomatic of his mindset. The ultimate question is, which model is more clear?

Just to be of the moment (the UES strike has forced the seminar to meet not on campus, but at St. John the Divine), I am wondering if a Columbia seminar held in a cathedral is different than a Columbia seminar held in 412 Avery (at Columbia). It almost seems like something that should have been tried during Bernard's tenure (if you can't ice skate in the cathedral, maybe you can hold Vienna Circle seminar there). I am curious if our discussion will tend towards the metaphysical. :)

VIII.

Empire and e-publication. Work has begun compiling the semester’s newsgroup postings: editing, referencing, and illustrating. Readings, completed in the spare moments between design studio renderings, were from Michael Hardt and Anthony Negri’s Empire (2000). Due to the Teaching Assistant Strike, class is held off-campus in Cathedral Hall, a neo-Gothic side building to St. John the Divine.

Brian: The information revolution described by Hardt and Negri (Hardt and Negri, 2000) reminds me of our discussion of Diderot and D'Alembert's Encyclopedie. The proliferation of encyclopedias in the 18th century corresponded to a historical moment where knowledge itself proliferated to the point where one could no longer grasp the world around them, thus generating the need for a container of knowledge—a way to quantify and possess it. The rise of the information economy in this century can be seen as a direct development of this same desire; the encyclopedia was perhaps the first commodification of information. Within this commodity mindset, the use-value of knowledge becomes dominant. In an odd way, one could argue that the Vienna Circle fed directly into this system; metaphysical thinking is perhaps the type of knowledge that is least justifiable in terms of use-value. By purging metaphysics, one assures the marketability of information.

The proliferation of facts brings about the increased need for the editorial. It is not enough to have an encyclopedia that contains knowledge; one needs a means through which to filter that knowledge. In the absence of a singular truth, editorializing (bringing opinion to fact) is perhaps the only way to begin to handle multiple, conflicting facts. The rise of internet blogs is symptomatic of this. As Steven Johnson writes in his article “Blog Space: Public Storage for Wisdom, Ignorance and Everything in Between” (Johnson, 2003), “Networks based on trust become an essential tool. You start evaluating the relevance of data not on search query results but on personal testimonies. (‘This page is useful because six minds I admire have found it useful’)”. The merging of fact and editorial (factorial) is perhaps the only response to the endless proliferation of fact.

Is an artifact a factorial? I would argue yes, and in fact yes in two ways. First, the artifact as a constructed thing represents an editorial process: decisions were made, information was edited, and facts no longer exist in their atomic state but are merged with the intention of the maker. Secondly, an artifact has the potential to be factorial in the mathematical sense, meaning the product of all integers contained within it. The artifact has the promise of multiplying the meanings of the facts contained.

Perhaps more than a traditional research paper, the newsgroup format we have all been utilizing for our writing process lends itself to the creation of a factorial project. Each fact presented is editorialized from seven viewpoints. Research is offset by conversation that elucidates rather than presents a singular argument. Connections (products) are made which exceed the individual contributions. In a way the newsgroup was the extension of the seminar beyond the classroom walls, allowing for discussion to continue in another media. The newsgroup succeeded in archiving (making artifacts of) our thought process.

Giorgos: The artifact as factorial, or else as a product of editing: this is something we never doubted. The production of artifacts is the result of an intuitive or rational decision-making process. What we have taken for granted, however, is the almost subliminal objectivity of the fact. By that I mean that acting like “Neurathian” prophets, we have been seduced by reason and have promoted the fact as something with a given value. In contrast to this is the artifact, which to our eyes lacks coherence and inherent meaning. Thus, I am glad that Brian drew our attention to the editorial identity of the fact, which somehow reverses the previous position: the fact as factorial is not that different from the artifact. One could even say, that the fluid, immaterial state of the fact makes it more susceptible to editing. On the other hand, the artifact lends itself less to the powers of subjective editing, because it is constrained by its inherent materiality.

So, which is the fact (=given) and which is the artifact (=created) today? In a world dominated by facts and continually producing even more facts, information becomes metaphysical. It is deprived of its ability to provide true meaning. Maybe today we depend more on the artifacts (even curiosities) to speak about the world than we do on pure information. This tendency has even surfaced in architectural discourse. I will cite here a short quote from the 2002 Venice Architectural Biennale, that I believe shows such a move towards the artifact:

“Architecture recently has often been presented as if it were a form of installation art, or dominated by cyber space or video. This biennale will concentrate instead on the physical, the material and the tactile. Architects have been invited to submit large-scale models, and where appropriate full size material prototypes. Toyo Ito's work with aluminum and with glass-reinforced cement for example will be represented not only by drawings, but by actual materials. Future System’s innovative department store for Selfridges in Birmingham will be shown in model form, but also feature a full size representation of its strikingly inventive cladding.” (Sudjic, Deyan)

In other words, after architecture had been exhausted on a diagrammatic, informational level, the Venice Biennale of 2002 attempted to return our attention to the physical, the material and the tactile in architecture: to the artifacts themselves.

In this light, what is the role of theory in a school of architecture? What is the relevance of a seminar, and this seminar in particular to the production of architectural or other artifacts? We have to admit that this was a “Neurathian” seminar, one that was preoccupied with facts and their associations or their editing. The role of the artifact during the course was reduced to a collection of black and white reproductions of writings and images. Should I add to the list of artifacts the screen/computer/keyboard combination that served as a dominant interface between us and the newsgroup? And what about the final e-publication? Regardless of how much we trust in the fact (that is, the content of the e-text), in the end we are producing an artifact. The “e-“ in the front does not spare us from our obligation to deal with its “artifactness”. Indeed, the ease with which it can be printed means that we are most of all disseminating artifacts and secondly facts (=knowledge), if the content is ever read (hopefully it will be!!). I am afraid our artifact will be similar to the ones Neurath came up with; it will be a service platform for the disseminated facts and therefore wasting its “artifactual” privilege in a world of facts. Regardless of this, however, I believe that the problem of the fact and the artifact could only have been brought about by a ”paperless” seminar on the Vienna Circle!

Mike: The newsgroup format utilized this semester has extended the structure of the class beyond the three-hour time slot. The attitude of the conversation is obviously less formal and I would say less restricted by dead structures (institutionalized structures which have been produced for previous forms of research). On the other hand, the newsgroup is not the same as a conversation. Response is never immediate and you have more time to think about what one say when you write. The newsgroup moves toward a new direction, which is to say away from a formal (and ultimately limiting) way of producing research.

The logic of the factorial mentioned earlier is completely appropriate. Similar to the newsgroup, I think the factorial is a move toward the appropriate direction. That direction may in fact be the same as Neurath’s. The factorial is a description of the amount of combinations that can be attained through a given set. The ideal version of this way of working would be a factorial of an infinite set. Much like the internet, it would resemble a network structure (Figure 43).

I understand everyone's concern about too much information, but the editor or curator may not necessarily be someone who converts opinion into facts, but instead someone who sets up a structure. I think this is what Neurath was trying to do. He was showing trends. It wasn't necessarily the specifics of an individual ISOTYPE, but the way it was combined with other such ISOTYPEs. This is why numbers were not important, but rather the ratios of size representing information. In this way, Neurath became a partial editor, or perhaps one of many editors. He definitely forced the public to view certain information in a certain way, but unfortunately he did this like someone guiding a herd of animals or an assembled mob. You can coerce them in a certain direction, but the edge is always unclear. Each member affects the others and in turn they all become partial editors as well, interpreting the information, communicating among one another and even back to the main editor (there is no question Neurath’s approach to the ISOTYPE changed during his career).

Through the ISOTYPE, Neurath tried to produce a finite set of symbols that could proliferate in new combinations much like the idea of a factorial. The seminar itself does this by eliminating all superfluous structures of organizing material, and utilizing only those which serve the information/research. The promise of this strategy is to allow everyone, even the public (through the posting of the work), to act as editor.

Nader: Giorgos, your point about the "factualization" of knowledge is very much on point. In seminar, we've mostly looked at reproductions - and in many cases, reproductions of reproductions: photocopies of photographs; digital projections of photographs of drawings; citations of transcriptions of archival manuscripts; so on and so forth. In a way, we have yet to encounter anything "auratic" or authentic. The fact that we spent our time outside seminar writing and thinking (as opposed to traveling) only further underscores this point: we are archaeologists of facts, not artifacts, which is not to say, however, that we renounce truth and objectivity. On the contrary, the "artifactuality" of the fact constitutes the very core of what we've been seeking to uncover. Indeed, we've been "showing and telling" a great deal these last months, only not in the sense with which one might ordinarily be familiar: as Brian points out, producing "factorials" doesn't just give us knowledge and information; it also provides us with a means of reconfiguring and rethinking the physical.

Arvin: I disagree with the notion that Neurath acted as a “partial editor,” as Brian says. I think he is better described as the Editor-in-Chief of the Vienna Circle (with capital letters). This leads me to my evaluation of the newsgroup format of the seminar and its effectiveness. Although my participation was reduced (due to both editing and my own laxity,) I must say it was a good and effective way of disseminating and debating ideas. I liked the writing more in its "pure" edition, in the newsgroup itself rather than in the e-book formatted edition. As Giorgos mentioned on his posting, the "e" on it doesn't spare us from responsibility. In a way, the newsgroup version of the seminar, with the changing dynamics of each posting, the title of each posting, its chronology, history of the discussion and even all its mistakes, is still the primary source and the end in and of itself. The crystallized version of it (in the e-book), with all its merits and pros, becomes somehow an artifact, unidirectional, command line-based and "routinized" by the conventions of language.

Knowledge for knowledge’s sake doesn't exist. We may live in an era where "informatization" is the rule, but that gives no one guarantee of being knowledgeable. At times, too much information has the opposite effect. We should see knowledge as something subject always to power. This brings me to the notions of the fact versus the artifact. Somehow we could say there is no subjective fact, and that all facts are artifacts. Have we been dealing with facts or have we created another artifact?

Nicola: It is a pity that the confrontation between Neurath and Negri/Hardt’s theory came at the very end of the seminar. It is here that the course wants to link the “informationization” aspirations of the 1920s with the one happening in our contemporary world. Unfortunately, now that we can grasp the connection we don't have time to go deeper.

But is this comparison really possible? Are we giving Neurath's effort a retroactive meaning? This doubt came to my mind apropos Josef Frank's criticism of the modern movement. In our discussion Frank was celebrated as a pre-post-modernist, before the modernism had even been properly defined. As you can see this is something that I haven't digested yet!

Though Neurath's recognized the importance of information and information dissemination, I have to disagree when Nader says that Neurath anticipated Hardt/Negri’s position. In the 20s, no country in the world had begun the transition to the third paradigm of economy (informationization). To say otherwise is to project Neurath's ideas into a future, and ultimately this is just our own speculation.

I wanted to comment further on Brian’s point regarding the connection between Diderot and D’Alembert’s encyclopedia and the contemporary “informatization” described by Hardt/Negri. I want to argue that the scientific mindset around the need/desire of the systematic handling of knowledge is pure metaphysics. The “container” (encyclopedia) as well as the “filter” (editor) are both external entities that decide what is to be included in the realm facts. The figure of the “filter” is still really generic: I enlist under this category Neurath's “agents of the museum-goers.” Filter and agent remind me of the demiurge of the gnostic, a figure almost as metaphysical as god. I like Mike’s image if the editor as “goat-herder of information” – facts are like sheep that defy both containers and filters.

Even if the demiurges were actual persons, how would Neurath be sure of their impartiality? A powerful caste (of mandarins!) and its degeneration has been the theme of several movies from the neo-post-gothic scenario, mainly Brazil and Blade Runner. A similar theme arises in the post-neo-classicism of 2001: A Space Odyssey. In Kubrick's movie information is a sleek, black monolith deployed from another world at the dawn of civilization. Information is then filtered and controlled by the self-aware computer HAL9000. Thus, as soon as facts are contained or displayed, they become metaphysical. That's my conclusion.

"Since science has begun to distrust general explanations and solutions that are not... specialized, the grand challenge for literature is to be capable of weaving together the various branches of knowledge, the various 'codes', into a manifold and multifaceted vision of the world….

What tends to emerge from the great novels of the XXth century is the idea of an open encyclopedia, an adjective that certainly contradicts the noun “encyclopedia,” which etymologically implies an attempt to exhaust knowledge of the world by enclosing it in a circle….

Medieval literature tended to produce works expressing the sum of human knowledge in an order and form of stable compactness, as in the Commedia….

In contrast the modern books are the outcome of a confluence and a clash of multiplicity of interpretative methods, modes of thought and styles of expression." (Italo Calvino on Multiplicity, 117-124)

Calvino ends this apologia for the novel affirming that each life is an encyclopedia, a library, an inventory of objects, a series of styles. The story of each life is the story of the universe (otherwise not graspable). The complexity is generated by the reordering in any possible way of the simplicity of any single event (the works of Perrec, Borges, Queneau are perfect examples of this polyphonic multiplicity).

I personally don't think that science is the means to achieve the control of knowledge. Alternatively, I think that the arts (literature, painting, architecture, sculpture, etc.) has the potentiality to conceive in non-systematic thought the whole human experience.

Neurath was wrong! But thank you to Neurath and Nader for letting me challenge my innately positivistic view of the world.

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7 Factorial: An Experiment in Writing and Research (Part I)

by Arvin Garay-Cruz, Malini Kochupillai, Giorgos Mitroulias, Nicola Mongelli, Brian Ripel, Mike Szivos and Nader Vossoughian

Over the spring semester, I had the pleasure of giving a seminar in the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation at Columbia University. Titled “Facts and Artifacts: Science, Language, Culture,” the course attempted to address globalization and the rise of the information age. I wanted to examine early twentieth-century antecedents to what Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri have termed “postmodernization,” which meant looking outside the traditional canon of architectural modernism in search of figures who paved the way for what one might loosely term the “architecture of information;” everyone from the Viennese modernist and logical positivist Josef Frank to Austria’s “first woman architect” Margerete Lihotzky; from the sociologist Otto Neurath to the philosopher of history Ferdinand Tönnies.

A second and perhaps more important objective of the course was to reflect upon how the proliferation of new media technologies have reshaped the very means by which research and knowledge are produced. How is email affecting the relationship between research and writing? How are the conventions of scholarly discourse being challenged by the internet? In order to investigate these questions, my students and I wrote semi-monthly "reaction emails” that attempted to engage the concerns that we were addressing simultaneously in class. We distributed these emails among ourselves, which allowed us to read and respond to one another’s work. Toward the end of the semester, we compiled our exchanges, edited them, and generated the text you find below.

The goals behind this exercise were threefold: to deformalize and demystify the act of writing; to decentralize the production and proliferation of knowledge; to explore new forms and techniques of intellectual exchange. Brian Ripel, one the seminar participants, probably put the goals of the seminar best:

Perhaps more than a traditional research paper, the newsgroup format we have all been utilizing lends itself to the creation of a factorial project. Each fact presented is editorialized from seven viewpoints. Research is offset by conversation that elucidates rather than presents a singular argument. Connections (products) are made which exceed the individual contributions. In a way, the newsgroup was the extension of the seminar beyond the classroom walls, allowing for discussion to continue in another media. The newsgroup succeeded in archiving (making artifacts of) our thought process.

Whether we succeeded in this project of “archiving… thought” still remains to be seen. One of the most important things is to bear in mind, however, is that this project will always remain, by definition, a work in progress. We assume from our readers some familiarity with the history of twentieth-century architecture and philosophy, probably more than could reasonably be expected. Nonetheless, in sharing the dialogue that follows we hope to stimulate further discussion about the future of scholarship, discourse, and knowledge.

I wish to thank Kenneth Frampton and Columbia’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation for sponsoring this seminar. I also wish to thank my students and co-authors Arvin Garay-Cruz, Malini Kochupillai, Giorgos Mitroulias, Nicola Mongelli, Brian Ripel, and Mike Szivos. This project would not have been possible without their exceptional efforts and insights.

-Nader Vossoughian

I.

Instructor sets up the goals of the course...

Nader: What is the project of this seminar? On the one hand, our field of interest will be historically circumscribed: we will be dealing with ideas about science, language, and culture in early twentieth-century Vienna, tracing the resonance of these concepts in organizations as varied as CIAM (Congres Internationaux d’Architecture Modern), the German Werkbund, the Bauhaus , and the Unity of Science movement. On the other hand, we will also try to think about the production of knowledge as such: I would argue that how we communicate, whether as writers of words, speakers of language, or as designers of buildings, radically informs what it is that we can and cannot say say. Stated simply, “the medium is the message,” as Marshall McLuhan once put it.

Needless to say, there is an agenda behind this interest of mine in "knowledge production,” and it might be summarized as follows: in contemporary architecture, we often judge the quality a given design by how the thing looks. Most every signature architect has a signature aesthetic, and institutions often reward that tendency. But is innovation in design only a formal thing? That is, can we not think about innovation in social, even organizational, terms? Clearly, the answer seems to be “yes.” My contention is that by rethinking process, the manner by which we organize and manage knowledge and information, we can challenge more basic assumptions about authorship and agency.

More generally, I think that by utilizing the new technologies that we have at our disposal (this newsgroup medium for example), we can find ways of rethinking some of the commonly-held assumptions about academic scholarship. I do not think that writing ten-page papers is outdated. I do think, however, that we as theorists, historians, and researchers of culture be more imaginative about the formal assumptions we bring to bear upon our work.

Brian: The notion of "process" has come up in a number of class discussions recently, particularly in reference to so called "process studios". I suspect, Nader, that you are using the word differently from how we might use it in a studio setting, but thought it might be interesting nonetheless to throw this other usage into the conversation.

The criticism of "process" in studio seems to be the way in which it provides a buffer or defense for "product" decisions. I used process "x," and magically it created object "y." There is a certain apolitical agenda lurking behind this kind of argument - the system is closed and is judged internally ("yes, you followed the process, therefore the product is good..."). This scenario is played out to the 'nth degree when a processor, literally a CPU, begins to do the processing for you. Again, I suspect this is exactly the opposite direction intended for the group writing process, but I thought it was an interesting intersection.

Nader: You make an excellent point. "Process" has been recycled so many times; perhaps it's not even a meaningful description of what I’m trying to talk about. In the way it is conceived classically in studio, process is very much about creating a narrative that somehow "determines" or "necessities" a given design outcome. What I am talking about, by contrast, concerns taking a closer look at what we are doing while we are designing: what are the conventions we rely on in thinking about a given problem? Why? How does the very means by which we attempt to address a design (or writing) problem condition the kind of knowledge we come away with?

My critique of "process" as it is often conceived in studio in an extremely instrumental manner: there are assumptions about "right" and "wrong" methods of design that are aren't scrutinized very closely.

Brian: Nader, thanks for your response. I absolutely hear what you are getting at regarding being self-critical about our own "process" - this is clearly something that is lacking in the process studios, or perhaps even in all studio production.

To elaborate on the issue of politics and process, I suppose I am alluding to the way in which products or objects of process are presented as scientific facts without any self-critical reflection. This internalizes two questionable positions: first, that facts are "natural" and are thus are beyond questioning, criticism or even politics; second, that the actual process involved is held to the same standards of precision that one would expect of a lab experiment. Rarely are “process studios” held to this standard of precision, however. Often, the actual processes are more like fuzzy math. But like fuzzy math, they generate a genuine product that has a value and can perhaps challenge architectural conventions.

Within this logic, product is the ultimate criteria for judgment, not how you got there. In this regard, Mark Wigley put forth an interesting argument last semester regarding "bad theory." Though I am sure that I am simplifying his argument, his main point was that if an architect incorrectly applies a concept of Deleuze to an architectural project, or conducts a fuzzy scientific experiment, having done so is of no importance so long as the misunderstanding was useful--in as much as it generated something that otherwise would not have been produced.

In this "bad theory" scenario, it seems to me that process becomes a "back of house" function that remains unseen in the final product (Enrique Walker's notion of process as a “scaffolding” that should be invisible within the final product might be creeping in here). I know this view of product runs contrary to the seminar goals previously discussed, though I also wonder if an e- publication that is meticulously edited and reformatted is any different then a “final review.”

II.

Over the following weeks, seminar reads Community and Civil Society (1887) by Ferdinand Tönnies; Fritz Ringer’s Decline of the German Mandarins (1969); portions of Eve Blau’s The Architecture of Red Vienna (1999). Texts are discussed in the context of Vienna’s settlement movement [Siedlungsbewegung], which took root in the aftermath of the First World War. Instructor suggests that Tönnies’ theorization of Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft anticipates the sociologist and planner Otto Neurath’s efforts to centralize production and management of settlement housing and development. Grass-roots cooperatives play a crucial role in this process, he adds. While public housing movements in Frankfurt and Germany were organized largely like giant corporations, early engagements with settlement development in Austria were by contrast education-based; that is to say, public participation in housing projects was assumed. Facts, not artifacts, drove the growth of regional settlements.

Nader: Following up on our class discussion, one of the points I would like to underscore is the degree to which organizational concerns – questions about how you manage and organize people – drove the architectural and urbanistic strategies of the cooperative housing movement in Red Vienna between the years 1919 and 1923. Why was it governed in this way? As I suggested in class, one reason was because Vienna was already dealing with a population of 100,000 squatters who were occupying public lands outside the city (Figures 1, 2). From the standpoint of Vienna’s municipal socialists government, the challenge was to find a way of harnessing these energies - to take the "wild" settlement movement and transform it into a well-ordered, industrially rationalized movement. Unlike housing movements in other parts of Europe - Berlin, for example – the city sought to teach settlers to build for themselves. It wanted to be able to take an unskilled laborer - a teacher, a factory worker, etc. - and teach him or her basic construction, farming, and home maintenance skills. In other words, Red Vienna sought to treat urbanism and architecture as pedagogical, rather than strictly formal, problems.

Moreover, it created an institutional infrastructure to help achieve these ends: as we discussed in class, the Austrian Settlement and Allotment Garden Association was created in 1921 to advise settlers on matters concerning settlement design and development, home building, farming, husbandry, domestic furnishing, personal hygiene, so on and so forth; in a way, it attempted to militarize and rationalize settlement movement along Fordist and Taylorist lines. Meanwhile, the Austrian Settlement, Dwelling and Building Guild was started in 1922 to organize and harmonize relations between professionalized labor unions, tenant’s associations, and cooperative workers (Figure 3). As Eve Blau has observed (1999), the Building Guild boasted 400,000 members before disbanding in 1923.

Why is this information important? One reason, I would argue, is that Vienna’s cooperative movement anticipated the informationization of the architectural field. If a Secessionist designer like Henri van de Velde subscribed to a notion of architect as "visionary" - if he believed that architects and artists should dictate what the masses should and should not consume – Vienna’s settlement advocates c. 1921-1923, and Otto Neurath in particular, attempted to think about reform as an exercise in information dissemination. In a manner not dissimilar from MVRDV, they insisted that the architect or urbanist ought to attend actively and aggressively to the “margins” of design – information gathering and distribution, regional zoning laws, and public education.

On what basis could one critique an organization like the Settlement and Allotment Garden Association? What kinds of hierarchies are implied? How is power distributed and managed? How might it reflect or play upon the dualistic character of modernity that Tönnies explored in his Community and Civil Society? These are questions I want to leave you with

Nicola: Nader, I will address your last question about Tönnies and settlement planning in Vienna by way of a definition of the term “mandarin.” As you know, the word appears in the title of Fritz Ringer’s book, The Decline of the German Mandarins:

Main Entry: man•da•rin
Pronunciation: 'man-d(&-)r&n
Function: noun
Etymology: Portuguese mandarim, from Malay menteri, from Sanskrit mantrin counselor, from mantra counsel -- more at MANTRA 1 a : a public official in the Chinese Empire of any of nine superior grades b (1) : a pedantic official (2) : BUREAUCRAT c : a person of position and influence often in intellectual or literary circles; especially : an elder and often traditionalist or reactionary member of such a circle.
Ringer’s usage: "[M]andarins… spoke for themselves."… "No social connection with the landed aristocracy, no roots in the capitalist middle-class either, no commitment to proletarian socialism." (Ringer 1969, 162-180)

”Wesenwille,” the natural will through which the members of a community are unified, and “Kurwille,” the arbitrary will that underlies societal relationships, are the forces at play in postwar Vienna. The attempt by the Social Democrat (SPD) intelligentsia to institutionalize the spontaneous housing and food movement can be understood as the passage from a natural and wild will to a rational and organized one (in this sense, I agree with you, Nader). Although this development was driven with the best of intentions, it gave rise to a sub-culture of bureaucrats: mandarins whose main goal was not to build and harvest, but to extend its own life.

Brian: My apologies for not being able to attend last week's class - as you can all imagine, Spain was just miserable, and I just couldn't wait to get back.

I share with Nicola the disappointment in how the "emergent" quality of the "wild settlements" in Vienna became formalized within a hierarchical structure. It strikes me that Neurath's flow diagrams are the product of his investigations into "war economy", where efficiency necessarily trumps traditional concerns like community. Rather than reflecting a community in Tönnies' sense, the flow diagram (Figure 3) seems to be a proposition for the creation of a society.

If I understand the chart correctly (Figure 3), it is interesting that the Vienna Municipality and Austrian Government sit low in the hierarchy. The Settlement and Allotment Garden Association seems to form a parallel government, working above the existing political structure. The fundamental flaw within the flow diagram (perhaps indicative of the form) is the single direction of flow - the absence of a feedback mechanism informing the top of the hierarchy. Perhaps if the flow charts sought to document the existing structure of the settlements, then it might begin to describe community, though I imagine the chart would look very different.

Giorgos: What is Gemeinschaft? What is Gesellschaft? As Nicola suggests, Gesellschaft corresponds to a society organized like a tree diagram, one in which members are subordinated to a strict hierarchy. Any relationship that the individual forms are external and always filtered through the larger group. If we take a look at the diagram of the Settlement and Allotment Garden Association (Figure 3), we will see that being part of a group in the lower ranks means that one may relate to subsequent ranks, but not with higher or parallel ones, except if this happens through the group as a whole. From the micro-scale of the nuclear family to the macro-scale of the state, people are always seen through the lens of the institution to which they belong. The theory of Gemeinschaft, by contrast, implies a more organic, direct, unmediated, and internal relationship between part and whole, individual and society. The subject is part of a group by connecting directly to everybody else, as in a network. To use Tönnies’ example, in a neighborhood people do not strict boundaries so as to understand how they relate to one another. Actually, people in a Gemeinschaft don't even need to understand their relationship to one other, as this is something naturally given.

Arvin: I agree with the point Nicola made above. In a way, Vienna’s settlement housing strategies suffered from the same excess of planned process that makes the whole Red Vienna experiment "more real than reality". This over-processing is perhaps due to the fact that Neurath and other allotment garden settlement planners in 1920s Vienna attempted to use command-driven war experiences in the design of the new society. In principle, this entirely contradicts the definition of a self-organizing system. For according to Manuel Delanda, self-organized systems are based on know-how rather than know-that principles (e.g., you know that a bicycle is red, but you need to know-how to ride the bike in order to use it). Naturally, Vienna’s settlement movement exemplifies the know-that principle.

III.

Seminar explores Otto Neurath’s Museum of Society and Economy (1925-1934). The museum is interpreted as an example of modernity trying to come to terms with the cultural and social consequences of informationization and industrialization.

The week’s readings include Lorraine Daston and Katharine Park’s Wonders of the Order of Nature (1998), Otto Neurath’s “The Museum of Society and Economy in Vienna” (1925), “Visual Education and the social and Economic Museum in Vienna” (1931), and Nader’s “Signification as observation: Otto Neurath and the Museum of Society and Economy” (2004).

In class, Malini and Giorgos present images ranging from the Elephant Man to Marchel Duchamp’s Ready-mades. Theirs was a presentation that tried to tackle the endless subject of the museum. In the process, they stimulated a lively debate over whether Raphael’s paintings were curiosities.

Brian: I have been thinking more about Neurath's use of the museum as venue (Figure 4). In one respect, I feel that his notion of a mass-produced museum is quite radical, yet the persistence of the museum-as-place is oddly reminiscent of the "aura” of the original that Walter Benjamin speculated would “wither in the age of mechanical reproduction” (Benjamin 1988, 221). The contents of the museum may now become mass-produced, but the museum itself is still a one-of-a-kind. I can imagine that it was the very aura of the museum as a place of culture, intellect, and learning that influenced Neurath. Rather than creating public billboards or subway advertisements, the museum would provide societal validation for the data. To a certain extent, this pattern mirrors the struggle of internet-based data, that is to say, the relative newness of the web (and ironically, the democratic process of information production) makes it difficult to judge the value of information found. The museum as an institution legitimates Neurath's data.

One other thought I had resulted from Nader's comment in class regarding the actual space used for the Museum of Society and Economy, which after 1927 was located in Vienna’s New City Hall (Figure 5). To what extent was locating the museum in this public building a statement about socializing public institutions in Red Vienna? The museum-as-place is significant as a territorial act – literally taking a public place and turning it over to the masses. I can think of one particular example of this that happened in Shanghai; a 19th century pleasure palace (Great World Exposition Hall, Shanghai China) was rededicated during the height of the communist era as a communist youth hall - the significance of the place had to do with the act of re-programming it (Figure 6).

Last, I wanted to revisit this idea of the mass producible museum. Malini and Giorgos' image of Duchamp's Boîte-en-valise comes immediately to mind (Figure 7). Duchamp’s efforts to reproduce (in miniature) his major works and package them for travel seem akin to Neurath’s mass produced museum. To what extent would the production and distribution of Neurath's museum have the paradoxical effect of calling greater attention to place? In connection with this question, I am reminded of the famous experiment by Lev Kuleshov (Tschumi, 1994, 131), where the identical image of the Russian movie actor Ivan Mozhukhin (Figure 8) was placed in various contexts, causing viewers to interpret differing emotions within the actor. The contemporary notion of the traveling show is a funny twist on Neurath's idea - the myth of the original is perpetuated and even extended through mass transportation. The museum stays put, but the curiosities travel.

Mike: Brian's example of the youth hall in Shanghai is a very a good illustrations of how difficult it is to erase history. We exist in a spatial condition – not necessarily a three-dimensional condition, but rather one of connections, associations, crossovers, nodes, bridges, and bypasses (Figure 9). Experience is not based strictly on empirical data, but contains a networked structure. You cannot simply erase information without changing other information.

I think this point brings up important issues concerning the creation of a “scientific world conception,” which we talked about in class, and the rise of the Museum of Society and Economy. In order to create a unified view in the terms suggested by the Vienna Circle, you would have to strip objects of their history or contextuality. How long would it take people to forget that the youth hall in Shanghai used to be a pleasure palace? Is it possible to forget history, or is it imbedded in the morphology of the building (architecturally as well as perceptually)? How would you describe or make "universal" the meaning or symbol of a constantly changing museum? How do you account for things that are in a constant state of flux or flows?

In many respects, the museums of today defy the logic of a unified world perspective, premised as they are on the unity of all knowledge. For projects like Koolhaas' two museum in Las Vegas and Gehry's Experience Museum Project resemble an amusement ride more than they do a static assemblage of objects, facts, and exhibits. Gehry’s EMP actually has a monorail flowing in and out of it (Figures 10, 11). Even older things like the EPCOT, the Center for the Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow, exemplify this (Figure 12).

Nicola: First of all, Brian's comment about the museum as a medium "that provides societal validation for the data" is brilliant, and I would like to add just an observation. Nowadays, we have available to us a wide range of different media (TV, internet, magazines and newspapers), and the weight of a museum (the building, not the institution) as a container of information has become quite relative. I have the feeling that in the 1920s the museum had a more relevant position in the spreading of information, as the mass media was still in its infancy.

Second, I have concerns about Neurath’s definition of the curiosity. Although I don't have any problem with Neurath’s aim to make information accessible to the masses, I do have a problem when he consider a Flemish painting a form of information.

In order to understand this issue more thoroughly, perhaps we should look closer at the definition of a curiosity and a work of art. Example: "The goldsmith H. Lencker turned the Seychelles nut into a luxurious goblet" (cited in Daston and Park 1998, 255). First, a goldsmith is not an artist, and there is a big difference between craftsmanship and art. Second, are we nowadays still amazed by a coconut shell? I don't think so. But a Flemish painting enchants us. Third, luxurious doesn't mean that an object is a masterpiece. But luxury can be traced with charts and diagrams where costs, quantities and work-hours can be detailed (Figure 13, 14, 15).

If a curious object surprises, one work of art can multiply indefinitely that surprise! And I don't think there is any system of charts that can represent successfully the complexity of a masterpiece. By the way, I think that the cabinet for the King of Sweden is a piece of crap (Figure 16)! The themes of classic art where mythology, war and religion are at play: we can find subtlety embedded in these iconographies, the representation of communities and societies. Neurath’s call for a more explicit representation of sociological values is correct but doesn't exhaust the need for the other means of representation!

Malini: I love Nicola’s expletives! Trust an Italian to speak with such “passione”! I agree that to compare Flemish Painting, The Pieta, and any number of works of art to Neurath’s pictograms is a stretch of the imagination! Where one is a model of artistic genius that few understand and even fewer possess, the other is a diagrammatic “breakdown” of facts and figures – designed with the sole intention of being “crystal clear” to one and all. However, I am not completely convinced that an object of luxury and an object of functional and resourceful design are very different. Frank Gehry’s “Easy Edges’”(Figure 17) cardboard furniture is not only a curiosity (Cardboard furniture exhibited at the Vitra furniture museum, a curiosity in itself!); it is also a very functional (low production cost!) piece of design sold at an exorbitant price (over $950 per piece). The pure functionality of Mies’ Barcelona chair is highly coveted but barely affordable at $1500 (sale!). (Figure 18). In other words, resourceful design is often fetishized to an extent where it starts to lose its value as a well-designed chair or table or (insert any everyday object); where it might be compared to “fact” and becomes an artifact.

Brian: Both Nicola and Mike key into something that I was also thinking about regarding Neurath and Wittgenstein. The atomization of the fact (I am assuming that "atomic fact" refers to the reduction of information to the smallest basic unit of fact), which was a goal for Wittgenstein's philosophy and Neurath's designs, seeks to say only one thing. On a micro scale, the scale of the atom, it is a simple, absolute fact. The very goal of the ISOTYPE was to achieve clarity of communication through the reduction of language to a limited set of graphic images. Combined together, these images sought to produce a "world picture," but ultimately this image was still a unitary image, which was still a drastically edited view of the world.

Contrary to the notion of a singular, absolute fact, something like Flemish painting is ambiguous, subject to multiple readings. In his book Ways of Seeing (1973), John Berger explores this very idea by analyzing the work of Frans Hals. Berger looks at Hals' painting Regents of the Old Men's Alms House, 1664 (Figure 19) , which the destitute artist was obligated to paint for the benefactors of the alms house whom he relied upon for his sustenance. Within the painting, Hals is able both to fulfill his obligation and embed a critique of the Regents by presenting one of the men in a disheveled state, suggesting drunkenness. Within the format of this formal portrait, a critical subtext is played out. The same portrait could simultaneously be interpreted as glorifying and ridiculing its subject. The painting allows for multiple, even conflicting interpretations. Simply put, there is a subtlety of communication that is perhaps lost in when one attempts a reduction for the sake of absolute clarity.

Malini: Following up on Brian’s point, Neurath’s diagrams and depictions allude to a particular “place” and “time” even though they are meant to be reproducible and publishable (Figure 20). On this basis, one could argue that his exhibits are one-off pieces. Take, for instance, his diagram representing automobiles produced in 1929 in America and Europe. While this data may have had relevance when published, such “facts” hold meaning and value for a limited period after which they become obsolete and “collectible”! If exhibited today, Neurath’s diagrams would be curiosities – maybe not so much in the form of representation, but definitely in their content (Figures 20, 21). Today’s interpretation of Neurath’s diagrams could be any number of banal traffic rule charts, graphic representations of populations and economies; you name it (Figures 22, 23). After all, they use simple, easy to understand, and universal “pictograms” to bring basic knowledge and information to the “average Joe”!

Brian’s comment about Neurath’s chosen medium of a “museum” as a means of “societal validation” makes perfect sense, but doesn’t the fact that the first answer to any question today is, “did you Google it?” also provide societal validation to information? Isn’t the internet search engine today’s Museum of Society and Economy? If Neurath’s museum was to provide information to the Viennese, isn’t this what Google does for us today?

Giorgos: I would like to start with the questions that Nader posted. The first one was why Neurath chose the museum as an institutional framework for his exhibition designs. This strikes me as contradictory because Neurath attempted to introduce change by using means that belonged to the era that he wanted to leave behind. I will give a very simple example that could be seen as an analogy: looking back at the invention of the automobile, we realize how much the first car designs resembled carriages. Even if the automobile was radically different in its conception, designers based their vision for this technology on an established and obsolete shape. I would say that in the beginning of a new era, it is common for change to occur using means that are already at hand. The museum as a foundation might be of a “conservative” nature in comparison with Neurath’s approach, but nevertheless it was an established one. It could act as a vehicle for initiating change.

IV.

Seminar explores the philosophy of the Vienna Circle in connection with Otto Neurath’s Vienna Method of Pictoral Statistics, a universal system of signs and symbols. Weekly seminar readings include passages from Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1922); Otto Neurath, Rudolph Carnap and Hans Hahn’s “The Scientific World Conception of the Vienna Circle” Empiricism and Sociology (1973); and W.J.T. Mitchell’s Picture Theory (1994).

Mike compares Ludwig Wittgenstein’s House for his Sister (1926-1928) with Neurath’s ISOTYPE diagrams; conversation focuses on possible parallels between Wittgenstein’s architecture and philosophy (1922); seminar contrasts Wittgenstein’s engagements with modernism with Neurath’s.

Nader: I just wanted to recap for you some of the themes and issues we dealt with in the last class; the first is regarding the nature of the “scientific world conception,” which Mike alluded to in a prior email. What is it, exactly? As I mentioned, there are at least two scientific world conceptions, and they might be divided (roughly) into the Wittgenstian variation and the Neurathian variation.

The Wittgensteinian understanding of the scientific world conception goes something like this: philosophically speaking, the only things worth talking about are those statements that can be expressed clearly and that can be confirmed or denied through empirical observation or logical scrutiny. Those claims that transcend science – those which assume metaphysical presuppositions at their base – ought to be dismissed out of hand.

That said, Wittgenstein also argues that there are limits to science despite the fact that these limits cannot be known (or even talked about). As he writes in the conclusion of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1922), "Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent." (Wittgenstein 1999, 108). What does this enigmatic expression mean? My take is that here Wittgenstein is trying to distinguish between those statements that can be stated in language and those that can only be shown. I can show what statement “x” means, but I can't illustrate how it means what it means. Take the following example: consider the sentence, "There is a grammatical convention known as a period at the end of this sentence." Now, I can describe the convention that comes at the end of the statement I just cited, but I cannot "speak" what this convention does. The pausing that happens as soon as I use a period cannot, by definition, be "spoken." For to "speak" a pause in language would be tantamount to not being silent, which, by definition, undermines what it is I'm trying to express (the "silence" of the pause).

In broader terms, Wittgenstein's contention is that the absence of language is not the same thing as the negation of words. While factual expressions can be judged true or false – while scientific knowledge can be accepted or refuted logically -- knowledge about language, the structure of language, must simply be taken as "given". It constitutes both the limit and possibility of scientific understanding.

Neurath's reaction to this position – which was harbored not just by Wittgenstein, but also countless members of the Vienna Circle (i.e., Moritz Schlick, Friedrich Waissmann, et. al.) – was that it was metaphysically inspired. Neurath's belief was that knowledge was always socially circumscribed and that there was no such thing as an "ideal" language over and above empirical experience. He argued that metaphysics could be overcome – a physicalist language of science could be had – but if and only if we abandoned the quest for a "universal language." That is to say, while Neurath believed that science could make our lives better, he did not believe it was worthwhile to pursue philosophical or mathematical questions in an formal vacuum. Rather, for him the very point of "doing science" was to engage (and ultimately improve) society.

This brings me to the two “diagrams” of modernity, which Mike spoke about in class: the Wittgenstein House (1926-1928) on the one hand, which Ludwig Wittgenstein co-designed with Paul Engelmann for his sister Margarete (Figure 24), and the Vienna Method of Pictoral Statistics, which Otto Neurath invented as a means of disseminating scientific information. (Figures 25, 26, 27, 28, 29)

As Mike suggested, one salient different between these two projects is the fact that the one constitutes "an object" while the other, a "method." Neurath utilized "artifacts" in order to communicate facts; Wittgenstein took "facts" in order to explain a artifacts. That is to say, Wittgenstein was eager to bridge the gap between the real and the ideal, language and representation. He utilized the paired-down language of architectural modernism in order to achieve the "logical clarity" that he associated with his own philosophy. Technically speaking, he felt completely disillusioned with "ideas" as such – he abandoned philosophy for architecture precisely because of the inadequacies of verbal communication. But nevertheless! Wittgenstein could not help but to treat of the world as a philosophical problem. The physical detailing of the Wittgenstein House sought to mirror the logical rigor and austerity of the Tracatatus. Neurath, by contrast, was anti-object, anti-form, and anti-“Gesamtkunstwerk” from the beginning. His statistical diagrams reveal someone who was eager to appropriate pictures of things – houses , people and so forth – in order to draw attention to quantitative (rather than spatial) relationships. He used the visible in order to express the invisible, the pictoral in order to express the social.

Mike: We had a seminar for studio last Friday with John Rajchman on Pragmatism. He said something that I thought was interesting. He described a "relativist" approach to knowledge. It would be the opposite of Wittgenstein's approach. A relativist believes that facts are constructed through culture; they are embedded in and deeply associated with that culture. As culture changes, so also do the facts. The facts cannot be detached from culture.

Maybe this is closer to Neurath's approach, especially in the light of what Nader brought up about Neurath's position towards the "ideal." Wittgenstein’s views about language are interesting (i.e., if you can say it clearly, then it can be translated into empirical fact; otherwise, it is metaphysical and not worth talking about). But I think this standpoint is still limited. We tend to think of language as pure thought, but it is actually a prosthetic for our consciousness. Language is socially constructed. As Nikolas Luhmann's states in "How Can the Mind Participate in Communication?," the mind infiltrates whatever technology you are using to express thought (i.e. speech, writing, architecture, sign language, etc.). But the mind can never truly express itself in an unmediated fashion, because it is contaminated by cultural convention.

I remember once Nader gave the example of how deaf people have a hard time understanding what Wittengenstain would call metaphysical presuppositions. Language makes these ideas easier to explain, but I guess our experience is what defines them. And stating something simply is too easy – and not comprehensive enough to encapsulate our experiences.

The only problem I see with Neurath's approach is that he thinks of the scientific world conception as something existing outside of the system (culture), which one simply “drops in,” when in fact science should be understood (and maybe posited) as something created within the system. In this latter regard, I identify with the argument made by George Lakoff in his Metaphors We Live By (2003). The book describes a way of understanding the world through associations The individual does not transcend what he or she knows in creating something new, Lakoff suggests, but rather exists as part of a collective intelligence (i.e. culture) that participates in the production new things (facts).

Many contemporary architects – Rem Koolhaas, Ben van Berkel, and MVRDV -- exemplify this new attitude toward culture. Their work is per-formative in that it is driven by the associations between programs, allowing for adaptation and unintended future uses (Figures 30). It is not, however, necessarily in-formative (i.e., a factual artifact or a symbol) in that it is not a finished product, aesthetically and compositionally.

Brian: I was intrigued by Nader's description of Neurath's work as being quantitative as opposed to spatial (which is perhaps more indicative of Wittgenstein). In the simplest way, this was revealed in Neurath's description of what makes a "good" ISOTYPE, where having multiple icons for a truck was better than having a larger truck. As indicated in this example, space, while being quantifiable, is ultimately ambiguous in that it is difficult to distinguish between a box with half the volume from one with two-thirds the volume.

It seems that increasingly, modernism's obsession with spatiality has been the subject of criticism. Venturi was the first to do this in Complexity and Contradiction, but perhaps the whole introduction of the data-scape into architecture is an attempt to substitute quantity for spatiality. Alternately, I would propose that this might be an attempt to justify spatiality through quantitative means, falling back to science as a means of defending spatial conceptions.

Nader: I just wanted to respond to two points that Mike raised in his very interesting statement. The first is concerning Rajchman's comments. Yes, it does sound like his Pragmatist position resembles Neurath's much more closely than Wittgenstein’s. In fact, in a couple of weeks when we get to the Unity of Science movement (the successor to the Vienna Circle), we'll encounter a decidedly more Neurathian (and less Wittgensteinian) conception of knowledge, one rooted more in social and cultural practices rather than in mathematics or logic. What were the architectural ramifications for this? How would they affect/influence design? If on the one hand we regard Wittgentein's house for his sister as emblematic of the philosophy of the scientific world conception, on the other hand we might be able to see Neurath's collaborations with the CIAM (c. 1933) as more reflective of the outlook of the Unity of Science, which was a movement started in 1934 to help democratize the language of science. The former privileges the artifactual, the latter the factual. The former is about form; the latter, about formation, communication, and negotiation.

Concerning contemporary architecture: I would probably disagree with Mike and draw a distinction between first-generation pragmatists (like Koolhaas) and second-generation pragmatists (like van Berkel, MVRDV). The reason is to do with their respective views about the connection between theory and practice. While Koolhaas has been careful to separate his design work from his conceptual research – while he sees design and "analysis" as mutually exclusive – MVRDV, it seems to me, has over and again used theory in an instrumental way. They seem to believe that facts in a funny way can actually "give" us artifacts.

Nicola: I think that the distinction between the two generations of pragmatists works really well as analytical tools for highlighting the differences in the architecture of Koolhaas and MVRDV. Koolhaas’s architecture plays with the traditional elements of architectural language and is not a direct, three-dimensional representation of information. But if we consider the whole Koolhaas/OMA/AMO’s production, and the range of media involved (from books to buildings, from lectures to flags - the barcode for the European Union), it becomes more difficult to apply this distinction. A building is just one of the media involved. And it is in comparison with the book that architecture acquires its own autonomy.

Basically, Koolhaas uses a traditional approach to communication, as Le Corbusier did, where the theory in the book bears a connection with the theory in the building without the one overlapping the other. MVRDV, by contrast, take a more artistic approach to the relationship between the book and the building. They use the building as a vehicle for communication in the same way that the painter uses the painting as a vehicle for expressing his or her thoughts. Koolhaas’s architecture can be metaphorical (i.e., the elements from the architectural tradition refer to other fields), while MVRDV’s buildings are purely representational.

V.

Seminar reads Otto Neurath’s “Encyclopedia and Unified Science” (1938) and Bruno Latour’s Pandora’s Hope: Essay on the Reality of Science Studies (1999). Brian presented images from Diderot and D'Alembert's Encyclopédie, which Neurath cited as being pivotal to his Encyclopedia of Unified Science project. Seminar conversation draws attention to the image of the onion as being central to Neurath’s concept of the encyclopedia – a many-layered thing with a central core that continues to grow. The onion is contrasted with Carnap’s concept of a “system” as a means of containing knowledge.

Nader: Fascinating discussion today. Brian's contextualization of the Unity of Science movement was very useful, especially the description of Diderot and D'Alembert's Encyclopédie and its seminal importance in framing the ambitions of the Institute for the Unity of Science: both wanted to offer general education; both advocated collaboration; both sought to conceptualize knowledge as an open rather than closed system.

Nicola, your critique of the practice of the Unity of Science in class was very much on point. Strictly speaking, an encyclopedia cannot be "talked" about in any universal sense since it's constantly a work in progress, constantly being modified and changed; always subject to modification.

Just to recap your position, however -- Nicola, you seem to see promise in Neurath's call for "vagueness" as an antidote to the totalizing ambitions of Cartesian rationalism. You spoke favorably of Neurath's advocacy of Da Vinci’s project, whose work, you observe, bridged the fields of engineering, science, and art.

As a group, it sounds like we were pretty divided about whether the Unity of Science constituted a fact or a fetish or both (c.f., Latour). Latour, I think, would argue that there are elements of both impulses in Neurath’s work -- that the Unity of Science represents a "factish" in the sense that it assumes a concept of mastery that resembles both the fetishists' obsession with ownership and collecting and the "factoid's" fervor for gathering knowledge and information. I myself would probably agree with Latour's diagnosis, though I don't quite see how his position gets him out of the postmodernist quandary.

Brian: Latour is a difficult one. I wonder if his frequent invocation of the “Heideggerian ‘Thing’” is another way of describing an artifact. As he states, “[w]hat would happen, I wonder, if we tried to talk about the object of science and technology, the Gegenstand, as if it had the rich and complicated qualities of the celebrated Thing?” It seems like Latour is arguing that “matters of fact” once assembled, become Things, or in our terminology, artifacts. The etymology here is way beyond me, but there clearly are connections.

It is interesting to note that Otto Neurath’s ISOTYPEs will be featured in Bruno Latour’s upcoming exhibition “Making Things Public” at the Zentrum für Kunst- und Medientechnologie (ZKM) in Karlsruhe, Germany. John Dewey, another member of the International Committee for the Unity of Sciences, will similarly hold a prominent place within the exhibition. Latour describes in one of his “progress reports” for the exhibition that the goal of the show is “to relink, but through very different resources, the same domains that Neurath had connected so efficiently just before the War. The question is to know if we can do better than what has been achieved in the heyday of Modernism.” From what I understand of the full show, technology is the primary “resource” that will be explored – a chance to try and upgrade Neurath to current electr