Inhabitation of Bodies and Toys
Marjan Colletti, Marcos Cruz (marcosandmarjan) 2002
Transcribed from ‘Actions re Form’,
Bartlett School of Architecture, February 2002. (not published)
Marcos Cruz - I have been observing you and your toys for a while now. What still seems to me very intriguing is the way they work as the trigger for new ideas about inhabitation of space. Which aspects of your work reflect this?
Transcribed from ‘Actions re Form’,
Bartlett School of Architecture, February 2002. (not published)
Marcos Cruz - I have been observing you and your toys for a while now. What still seems to me very intriguing is the way they work as the trigger for new ideas about inhabitation of space. Which aspects of your work reflect this?
Marjan Colletti -
I may have to specify what kind of toys I mean. Generally, one could
differentiate two different categories: ‘throw away toys’ and ‘keep
forever toys’. The first group has very short life expectancy and a high
‘transience index’, as psychologist Alvin Toffler calls it. These toys
are a product of the throwaway society and its high ‘rate of turnover’
of things, ideas and places.
Soft
toys belong to the latter group, and are called ‘transitional objects’,
which means they serve the child to transit from the childhood to the
adult stage. Psychologists imply separation from those elements. Why? I
think that the act of playing with these toys reveals itself as an
incredible demonstration of inventiveness, responsiveness and control
over the environment and objects. And that is not much different to what
I expect from the ‘professional architect’.
Mrc-
I understand that as a principle or analogy, but you also take them
literally into your design as physical inhabitants of two, and
three-dimensional space.
Mrj-
First unconsciously, then consciously, my friends constantly appear and
re-appear in my designs, inhabiting the space and filling it with
secondary layers of architectural information. If I say inventiveness,
responsiveness and control, I mean it in internal, psychological terms.
The playful, professional architect can re-create spaces and shapes of a
secondary layer which are triggered by one’s emotions and mood. I still
stick to the toys, and they turned out to be helpful designers... They
show up for example in the project Besking (a hybrid between a BEd, deSK
and intelligent thING) that re-introduces the toys’ softness and
reveals their shapes in plans, sections and details. Every (technical)
drawing has a secondary (private) story to tell. Since then, they
re-appeared in other designs. For instance, in the interior design
project for the refurbishment of a flat in Bozen, Italy, where they
permanently inhabit empty space, thus, reacting to the Aristotelian and
Freudian ‘horror vacui’. Aristotle’s ‘horror vacui’ argued the
impossibility of ‘nothingness’ and influenced the pragmatism of
Renaissance perspective realism, while Freud’s ‘horror vacui’ influenced
Secessionist Gustav Klimt to fill the canvas with symbols, shapes and
ornaments, representing an atmosphere of cosmic peace. I need ornaments
and friends. That is what the toys are all about; shapes are not just
shapes, they are friendly shapes and talk to me as friends. It’s my way
to somehow escape my ‘horror vacui’.
Mrc - Wasn’t that the case when I saw you for the first time with the toys sticking on your head?
Mrj -
The toys, wrapped in a blanket and velcroed onto my shaved head,
represented my vision of the professional, imaginative, and playful
architect. It was a very obvious way to introduce my friends into
architecture. Maybe that is why we both shaved our heads when we had to
present ourselves at the Bartlett: I did it for the toys and you did it
to put yourself into a sticky, slimy latex wall, isn’t it? And that
before the Matrix!
Mrc -
That was about the ‘Deviant Bodies’ and ‘In-wall Creatures’, ideas,
which later reappeared into the project of ‘Hyperdermis’. The
proposition was that inhabitants would incorporate their body in a
flexible, and living architectural ‘dermis’: a biological tissue with
several service-devices, such as ‘Storage Capillaries’, ‘In-wall Seats’,
‘Relaxing Cocoons’, and ‘Communication Suits’. It was a hypothetical
scenario. The ‘Inhabitable Walls’ were surfaces punctured by pores, and
bulging scars, and reactive tentacles, in which people crept into wall
chambers through stretchable orifices. I was somehow annoyed that the
traditional architectural discourse was just concerned with the use of
‘empty’ space. My interest was focused on what was potentially
in-corporated behind our physical surrounding, in this case trans-lucent
walls and membranes. It triggered in fact the existence of a new
inhabitable ‘in-lucent’ reality. These ideas were related with William
J. Mitchell’s comments on inhabitation in ‘City of Bits’, in which he
observed a change of meaning, “one that has less to do with parking your
bones in architecturally defined space and more with connecting your
nervous system to nearby electronic organs.” As he continued, “your room
and your home will become part of you and you will become part of
them.”
Similar
ideas came back during the NEB competition proposal. I saw the 300
scientists specified in the programme as our ‘Deviant Bodies’,
suggesting that their spatial constraint in the proposed inhabitable
lab-cones was standing in opposition to their visual freedom when
popping out of the roof in their office-capsules.
Mrj - So is architecture the extension of the body?
Mrc -
In this sense, yes. We are living in an era, in which anti-flesh
Puritanism is gradually disappearing, at the same time, that the
contemporary body is affected by a technical upgrading towards
anatomical and sensorial perfection. There is a belief in the
‘technologised’ body as capable to interface with its increasingly
changeable and responsive environment. It is a time of Cyborgs (A.
Clarke/ D. Haraway) and Biomechanoids (H.R.Giger), but also of
Robosapiens (P. Wenzel/ F. D’Aluisio)4 and … yes, with more and more
Extropians.
Mrj -
I always asked myself whether your deviant bodies were sort of
neglected grandsons of Le Corbusier’s Modulor and Neufert’s ‘ideal man’?
Is
Man still the measure of all things? As Volker Giencke once told me,
the measure must be the intellect, and not the body of Man.
Mrc -
The contemporary body-machine is not at all an average character. On
the contrary it looks by any means for an individual identity in terms
of mind and physical appearance; it also looks for the potentials of its
extension towards its physical dilution in real and virtual space.
Describing Extropianism, Rachel Armstrong assumed a new generation of
people that has a desire for science and technology in order to “improve
their internal character, radically transforming both the internal and
external conditions of existence. The Extropians regard technology as a
natural extension and expression of human intellect, creativity,
curiosity, and imagination, encouraging the development of evermore
flexible, smart, responsive technologies.” As the wish for an
artificially differentiated physical identity progresses, the more it
carries with it the human body understood as manipulable object. And it
is a result of the vanishing classic norms of beauty and function,
expressed in the ‘sacred’ integrity of the body’s natural seal. The
‘contemporary body’ can’t anymore be understood without the
sophisticated apparatus that triggers its ‘healthy’ permanence,
deliberate ‘re-design’ and, as a consequence, the materialisation of a
newly inhabited ‘biotectural chimera’. It is the re-application of this
scientific knowledge into a future architectural bio-machinery that
interests me.
Aesthetics of cuteness and disgust
Mrj -
Many wonder how we can work together at all, you being engaged with
aesthetics of disgust and the grotesque, and myself with aesthetics of
cuteness, softness and blurness. Are these aesthetics actually that
different? Or do extremes equal each other?
Mrc -
Contemporary architecture is still (Although some might say not) very
much structured upon a tradition of Platonic prejudices in favour of the
‘noble senses’, such as vision and hearing, and also upon Kantian
aesthetics of the ‘pure taste’, which consider the ‘abstract’ and the
‘intellectual’ of a higher rank than the ‘material’ and the ‘visceral’.
Both our drives towards the disgusting and the cute wish to break that
tradition.
Pierre
Bourdieu wrote that, “pure taste and the aesthetic, which provides its
theory, are founded on a refusal of ‘impure’ taste” and of aisthesis
(sensation), the simple, primitive form of pleasure reduced to a
pleasure of the sense (…).” That’s what characterises the predominant
taste in contemporary architecture for minimal objects and spaces.
Mrj -
Isn’t that related to a certain aesthetic of cleanliness, even in the
(contemporary) cyber architecture? I always wondered where this hegemony
of glassy, glossy rendering came from. Now I am starting to understand
that it may be this need for hygiene, which found the ideal environment
in the digital realm.
Mrc -
Of course. Since the middle of the 19th century and in particular at
the beginning of the last century, hygiene became a dominant
preoccupation in cities and in particular in the domestic realm. That
had an immense influence upon design and upon our values of taste and
beauty. Adrian Forty has a chapter in ‘Objects of Desire’ dedicated to
this matter. He describes that dirt and disorder became “labelled as
unhygienic and therefore the source of disease”, suggesting that this
phenomenon brought up an intensifying anxiety about levels of
cleanliness. Thus, an increasing demand for simplicity, and purity in
design; a design of clear order!
Mrj -
And in particular cyberspace has been the ideal environment for the
materialisation of such preoccupations. Actually, Kevin Rhowbotham comes
right to my mind. He argues that “in architecture, this proleptical
vision has produced a glassy” (and I add glossy!) “Urbanity; cities of
the net, (...) cities of insinuated transparencies, (...) in which
territories of difference (...) are smoothened and flattened (...).” But
for him smooth means clean. “Rather like old Sci-fi movies, everything
is tidy, everything is ‘in-place’.”…
Mrc - … here one can establish a parallelism to Mary Douglas’s theory of “matter out of place!”
Mrj -
Rhowbotham continues, “Clean not dirty, imagined not dirty-real. But
isn’t clean always and already a prevarication? At least when it is
projected as a permanent vision. Clean is the absolute presence of a
territorializing stratagem. The unadulterated idea. The lie.” This sort
of answers my question about the similarities of our arguments: our
disagreement with the ‘cleanliness’ of mainstream architecture.
Mrc -
I think that the conditions of disgust and cuteness which we are
referring to, definitely exist in a marginal territory. Interestingly
enough, the terminology we use does not belong to the traditional
architectural vocabulary. The implications of their aesthetic want to
shake the discourse that still follows the ‘pure’ and ‘clean’, the
‘abstract’ and ‘elegant’, and the purely visual. My interest in disgust
stands in straight relationship with the touch sense, and that is where I
like to experiment with matter that implies viscid, sticky, slimy,
squishy, or slithering properties. Although disgusting this matter has
for me an enormous capacity to allure. As William Ian Miller describes,
it brings with it affects that can “work one closer again to what one
just backed away from.” These affects range from feelings such as
curiosity, fascination, or even a wish to touch. I like that! A
materiality with intrinsically haptic and tactile attributes. But the
whole excursion into the disgusting has also to do with my study about
artificial skin growth, and the proposition to use this as living tissue
in architecture. That brings with it an unpleasant aesthetic, which
many related to the ugly and dirty. But I think that is exactly one of
its fascinations. I believe that our standards of perception and taste
are changing with the increasing ‘medicalisation’ of our environment.
Architects will have to look in the future into territories that might
be quite contradictory with the aesthetic parameters of contemporary
mainstream architecture.
Mrj - Can you give examples that you consider of particular relevance?
Mrc -
In architecture? Not really! Well, there is an experiment I can think
of, done by Gaetano Pesce in 1975. ‘Le comparse del tempo (Omaggio a
Mies van der Rohe)’, a weird model for a tower build out of pieces of
flesh and metal. A very unique experiment.
Mrj -
Ironically, Pesce is a quite isolated source of reference for the
figurative approach in architecture, too. The ‘Counter-Project’ for Les
Halles in Paris of 1979 and the ‘Maison des Enfants’ of 1985-86 i.e. are
in fact interesting…
Mrc -
But there are examples in art that seem to me of particular relevance.
Max Aguilera-Hellweg is a photographer who pierced into ‘the priesthood
of surgical theatres’ in a simultaneously beautiful and cruel way. The
visual grammar of the ‘dissected bodies’ raises questions about newest
surgical techniques, and the way they have extended themselves into
territories of ethic, moral, philosophical, and religious discussions.
Further,
Louise Bourgeois is a fascinating artist in this matter. In the 1960’s
she came across with a lot of, for that time, disturbing, near repellent
latex sculptures, which strongly transformed the predominantly
minimalist art scenery. Her two main projects of that time, The
Destruction of the Father, 1974, and Confrontation, 1978 became, I would
say, a liberating icon for the aesthetics of art … and architecture.
Following
a similar tendency, the English artist Helen Chadwick combined a whole
plethora of unusual, organic and visceral materials. As she said, “a
vital relation of incompatible elements”. She mixed very weird, yet
exquisite textures and sensations transforming them into installations
that implicated people into a complex sensorial pleasure, of both
seduction and nauseous revulsion. These are qualities that interest me
when applied to architecture.
About technologies
Mrc -
You are doing a research, in which you establish an interesting
relationship between soft toys and computers. What is the importance of
the ‘line’ in all that, considering that the line is an agent of
separation and differentiation of boundaries and territories, is getting
problematic when confronted with the contemporary conditions of
dilution and diffusion of these boundaries.
Mrj -
I am keen on challenging the relevance of the line, since it is perhaps
getting a new meaning. The line is used in order to represent material
or immaterial boundaries, living or dead matter, static or dynamic
conditions, precise or unexpected situations etc. The line has been
accepted as translation medium from idea to drawing. In that sense the
furry softness of the toys was a great challenge to the line, since
elegance and cleanliness were not part of the information, which had to
be translated. Thus, initially, I thought I was going to declare the
death of the line. But we are not quite there yet. I therefore had to
reconsider the black ink line, and move towards written lines and other
sorts of possibilities with soft lines, such as carefully manipulated
CAD lines and curvilinear lines. The ‘Gestalt’ psychology, founded in
Germany in the 1920s, defined the whole as being more that just the sum
of the parts. Some of their various laws, which are not really
‘scientific’, but ironically have been taken up in programming software
for recognition of patterns and objects, are “Closure (the tendency to
group single objects to a whole), Common fate (the tendency to see
single parts moving together as an object), Contiguity of close-together
features and a preference for smooth lines”. Cartoonists depend on
these principles, and so does the figurative approach I mentioned
before.
Mrc - And how do you apply that to your drawings?
Mrj -
Since I am drawing with a computer, I cannot rely completely on the
‘talented hand’. I had to investigate the mathematical, geometrical and
informational properties of lines, splines and polylines in different
software. It was a rather dry investigation, but I needed it to widen my
understanding of the computer-space and to escape average skills. John
Maeda argued that this “is important to understand the underlying
principles of how the digital material is composed and behaves”, and
that this allows to predict “the behaviour of existing software and how
those elements might interrelate. (…) People all over the world create
average things because they use exactly same tools, (…).” I realised how
poor and almost dead the black ink line actually was. Instead, I began
to play with the computer to create distinctive soft, furry, feathery,
fluffy lines - or better: spaces.
Mrc - In that sense I found interesting how you used digital effects to make the screen become literally three-dimensional.
Mrj -
These drawings, which you call ‘patterns’, are in my eyes more than
just abstract images. They are some kind of reaction to Nick Barham’s
vision of contemporary intelligence and reality. A layering of
“multiple, conflicting, confusing, colliding realities on screens,
through music, [and] via urban brightness.” I wanted my drawings to be a
representation of these layered realities. In fact, although being
two-dimensional vector drawings, the amount of layers the software needs
to build them up is immense. Also the spatial depth of the drawings is
given by their precision. You can zoom in and out in the range from
3,13% up to 6400%, without loosing any resolution or detail, but gaining
a ‘gaze’ into this ‘flat deep space’.
Mrc -
In a curios way, it reminds me Michel Foucault’s definition of the
‘clinical gaze’5, which describes processes of unveiling the ‘visible
invisible’ of the body. Our eye has a limited capacity to apprehend the
real porosity and depth of the opaque ‘envelope’ that covers our
environment, body, or building, ...or the computer space. Therefore,
yours seems to me a sort of ‘digital gaze’.
Mrj -
Seeing the software building up the drawing element by element, layer
by layer is fascinating, and shows the spatial complexity of the
drawing. In the flat in Bozen project the sandblasted glass behaves like
the blurred computer drawings, creating a perception of
three-dimensionality on a flat surface. Body and distances are blurred,
light and space penetrates the walls, which can be considered
three-dimensional versions of the blurred, soft lines. Your skin studies
imply a similar research of two-dimensional surfaces. Yet you promote
model making; and looking at you doing them reminds me more the process
of a fine artist rather than that of an architect…
Mrc -
I like to work in an intuitive way with models and materials, because
model making is in itself a quite rational process of transformation. By
using different flexible materials, each model is a sort of
pluri-sensorial experience that is based on a negative-positive logic of
casting, moulding and pouring techniques. In a sense I believe that
challenges in architecture are changing according to advances in
material engineering. While the seventies were the era of polymers,
today much of the research is concentrated on the development of
‘elastomer’ phenomenology: latex, silicones, polyurethane, etc… But in
my opinion the real interest lies in the mix of material sciences and
biology, which develop histo-compatible and engineered compounds, that
can be infiltrated and co-inhabited with living tissue. We are getting
closer to the era of what I call ‘growingmers’.
Mrj - That is where your skin research comes in.
Mrc -
Artificially grown skin is a territory that is increasingly becoming
important. What interests me on that is the fact that it is increasingly
been produced in laboratories. And in fact, it is a kind of artificial
living surface that, although right now not available in bigger portions
than 10 by 10 cm, will, I presume, be produced in huge industrial sizes
shortly. Imagine new leather factories producing artificial grown skin
without killing one single animal… Also relevant is its hypersensitivity
to exterior and interior vicissitudes. The skin is our biggest organ
and at the same time the most important sense agent, since it integrates
in its surface all the other sense organs. But to create it
artificially we are increasingly hybridising it with a sophisticated
electronic-digital apparatus and biomaterials.
Mrj - In that sense, how much did these ideas influence a project like the Palos Verdes Art Centre?
Mrc -
The competition entry for the Palos Verdes Art Centre was strongly
influenced by this idea that body is building and building is body.
Which means that the building borrowed from the human body and skin
principles of locomotion and sensitivity, without necessarily imitating
its form. It was designed as a serious of gallery spaces surrounded by a
tensegrity skeleton that was embedded in a continuous skin of moulded
silicon. The ‘inlucent’ and malleable silicon filtered even light to the
galleries and incorporated a variety of inter-active devices on its
roof. The hairy roof was a field of ventilation hairs that colonised the
outside surface. These gestural hairs bent smoothly according to wind
pressure, but simultaneously twitching when censoring external movement.
There was a cause-effect reaction between the inhabitants and the
building.
Projects
Mrj -
As marcos&marjan we are trying to bridge the eternal gap between
theory and practice, researching in architecture by design.
Mrc -
Well, that is the basic principle of the PhD we are doing at the
Bartlett. But with marcos&marjan everything started in November 2000
with the idea of redesigning our tiny studio in to a scale 1:1. We
wanted to build a ‘soft table’ that could be pushed against the wall in
order to gain space in the studio. The table was to be built out of a
resin compound, which was gradually becoming flexible on its edges,
enabling those areas to slide up the wall. The table embedded in its
‘soft-inlucent’ mass drawers, plugs, light sources, water tubes,
electrical equipment, responsive structures, secret enclosures, etc.,
which were protruding irregularly from its underneath belly, yet keeping
the upper surface ‘deeply flat’. It became a beautifully moulded,
chunky plate...
Mrj -
…well, in the NEB competition for instance, the functional program
seemed to fit ideally your research topic: laboratories and clinical
environments, proteins research etc. It was very clear that we were
trying to combine our obsessions: ‘intelligent skins’ and ‘soft toys’.
The site for the NEB competition looked like a duck to me, and the
Tomihiro site like a polar bear. And my responses to all your ideas
about where to site the building were very figurative.
Mrc -
I remember that later we were sketching a lot. We were filling dozens
of pages in search for a possible scheme. It was exciting, because you
ended up doing a funny croquis, which summarised a lot of thoughts into
one idea. I saw you drawing the king and his (new) robe and also a Santa
Klaus with his Christmas bag. And, yes, that was our scheme!
Mrj -
The amount of input was rather stunning, and although we were talking
about completely different things and interests, apparently, at the end
our visions were not that distant.
Mrc -
My interest in the fusion of biological and architectural phenomena
triggered my immediate attention as we saw the announcement of the
competition programme on the Internet. It was an opportunity to deal
with spaces, in which molecular biology production and bodies could be
able to interface with architecture in an intriguing way. At that time I
was quite involved in discussions with Orlando de Jesus about the
project ‘Fabric Epithelia’, an installation for an exhibition at the
Textile Museum in Toronto.
Mrj -
Simultaneously, we tried to develop the scheme further with many
experiments. I remember you started with the first small wax-model,
while I sat in front of the computer and started playing around with an
oil layer over a digital surface. I put oil pills onto the screen
re-considering a holographic system for the roof.
Mrc -
Simultaneously my concerns were focused on three-dimensional matter, on
aspects of plasticity and ‘inlucent’ materiality. We speculated with a
continuous surface of a varying resin compound, embedding structural and
technical appliances in it.
Mrj -
Yes, we split for a while in fact. While you were pursuing this ‘soft
inlucency’, I tried to get similar results in the drawings re-working
them on different software.
Mrc -
The 150.000 S.F. proposal was our former ‘m&m table’ inserted into
the landscape. The building submerged its massive volume in the
topography letting its huge colonised office roof appear as a new
artificial garden in the site. The winter garden separated the interior
laboratory area from the outside bucolic landscape with a double-layered
transparent wall, presenting an enigmatic green façade. The trigger of
the project was the re-interpretation of the programme. It located the
private office areas in the roof and the wet lab areas in various cones,
integrating in between all circulation and mechanical support spaces.
The upper offices allowed each scientist to sit in the roof ‘touching
site and sky’. The skeleton of the building was embedded in the mass of
lightly coloured resin, which filtered a variety of different light
levels through its membrane. And the resin could also be host for a
variety of inter-active devices. The performance specification of the
membrane varied continuously along the surface, from the properties of a
rigid, opaque screen to those of a flexible, transparent skin.
