Public Announcement

Here if I may I'd like to make a little announcement. As of the end of work today, the 29th of August 2013, I will be a full time writer. For the next few months at least I will be working on a new project for Verso; entitled 'Last Futures', it's a study of technology and nature in post-war architectural avant-gardes. In it I will be telling the story of the last time that there was any real attempt made to work towards a plausible architectural future, in the late sixties and early seventies. It was a strange period when high-technology and first-wave environmentalism were prominently discussed, before both were swept aside by the rise of neoliberalism. Now from the current age it appears tragic how so many of our most urgent crises were already under discussion back then, only to be kept off the agenda for a generation until we're now at a point where the situation already appears to be too late to save.

Last Futures will cut through the standard architectural histories of the period, which portray much of the experimental architecture of the time to be either hopelessly naive or impotently critical, and will demonstrate that many of the ideas and proposals of the time were more-or-less rational extensions of where things were heading at that point. I'll focus not just on paper projects, speculations and manifestos but on the more bizarrely quotidian examples of these ideas, to further stress the concreteness of these lost directions. In so doing, I hope to further develop ideas from The Architecture of Failure (which you can still buy) which searched for a synthesis between romantic and modernist concepts of architecture, and how important this task might actually be for us. Expect cybernetics, drop outs, hippies, mass-housing, biospheres, space frames, situationists, countercultures, technocrats, environmentalists, dialectics, disasters and defeats...

Thing is though; it's now been half a decade since I finished my post-grad, and well over three years since I submitted the manuscript for my first book. In the intervening time a lot has happened, but it also feels as though time has stood completely still, at least compared to how fast it moved as I went through education. I basically fell into a day job as I was finishing off the manuscript, and it has taken this long for me just to be in the position to take the opportunity to write another one. In the meantime I've written hundreds of thousands of words, for Icon and for all manner of other publications, I've interviewed many of the biggest names in architecture, I've visited new buildings all over the place, I've lectured across Europe, I've appeared in national media, I've built (with friends) various installations and small projects, and all the while I was working four days a week in an office. Add to that the slow background work of learning a completely different method of playing music, some really rather miserable experiences of various kinds along the way, and finally a period of being gravely ill and needless to say, I'm pretty exhausted.

Obviously one should never play the what-if game, but it's difficult to know how working at a pretty intense job while simultaneously trying to fit some kind of career as a writer around that would stand up, compared to some of the other options that were available to a post-grad architect floundering around in the maelstrom immediately after the crash five years ago. Perhaps, like some, he ought to have fled the country to doss about in Berlin, in which case god only knows what he'd be doing now, or maybe he should have dived straight into a PhD, which would most likely have had the word 'haunting' in the title, and would now be complete, giving him the rapidly evaporating academic world to thrash around in. Either way it certainly feels that in the last few years developing intellectually or critically has been almost impossible with the demands consistently made on my time. But never mind; these are worthless counterfactuals, of course I'm not doing too badly after all, and as everybody knows, "This life is a hospital where every patient is possessed with the desire to change beds."

So for now I'll be trying to knuckle down and get stuck into this new book, and hopefully there will be opportunities to do some interesting projects in the meantime. If you're around say hello, and let's see if something good can happen even in these worsening times.

Owen, Dezeen, photography, criticism and its decline, etc etc

[EDIT - For some reason I lost the second paragraph of this piece when I originally posted it - I've now put it back in]

In the last week there was a very minor spat, which although silly, does point to some interesting difficulties in the way that architecture is mediated these days. It concerns two very different approaches to how we discuss buildings. It started with Owen Hatherley writing a blog for the Photographer’s Gallery, about modern architecture and photography. Overall this focussed upon various topics close to Owen’s academic work; critiques of Neue Sachlichkeit, constructivist photography and the influence of black and white photography on the design of early modernist buildings. It’s all very interesting, and you can read it here.

But it’s Owen’s opening gambit that’s of interest here. In it, he laments that the current archi-porn websites Dezeen and Archdaily “provide little but glossy images of buildings that you will never visit, lovingly formed into photoshopped, freeze-dried glimmers of non-orthogonal perfection, in locations where the sun, of course, is always shining” - a situation he describes as “disastrous, a handmaiden to an architectural culture that no longer has an interest in anything but its own image.” While I generally agree, I think that there still needs to be a proper discussion of super-photographers like Iwan Baan (who recently jumped into mainstream media by taking that image of Lower Manhattan blacked out after the storm), but that will have to come some other time.

Within a day however, Dezeen posted up a link to this very article, summarising its points, under the headline of ‘Architecture “no longer interested in anything but its own image”’. Rather cleverly they’d found a picture of Owen being all vain and Bowie-ish, thus somewhat hoisting him by his own petard. Underneath, Dezeen editor Marcus Fairs did actually respond, saying “Rather than being "utterly distastrous [sic]" for architecture, sites like Dezeen are a powerful new platform for presenting and discussing architecture in new ways, in front of far bigger and more diverse audiences than the old magazines (and their hermetic writers and critics) ever managed to reach. It's a huge opportunity.”

Of course, Dezeen’s posting up of Owen’s criticisms is amoral recuperation - as a web-business, anything that gets them ‘hits’ is good, so it matters not a jot whether Owen’s right, because it only makes them stronger - and one can imagine them laughing away in the office at the irony of their choice of picture. But it’s also very symptomatic of where ‘criticism’ is at the moment.  Owen has never made any secret of his distaste for these sites, although he luckily doesn’t need to keep a close eye on them - my RSS feed is constantly plugged into them in case there’s a press release that I haven’t received. In fact, frequently I’ll receive an email from a PR, and within half an hour or so it’s up on both Dezeen and Archdaily, wording unchanged; which certainly undercuts the journalist’s traditional information privilege. But at the very same time it also wipes out the role of the expert journalist in giving context and narrative to these unconnected images. So on the one hand you have the democratising effect of internet culture, but as we have seen in other fields, this causes a sagging in quality, and I certainly find most of the stuff that gets posted up there depressingly banal.

But both Owen and Dezeen are successful - now that Owen basically doesn’t blog any more, he’s occupying a very traditional niche of the writer/journalist, creating long arguments spread over hundreds of thousands of words. On the other hand the archi-blogs have been traditionally devoid of original thinking, but neither Dezeen nor Archdaily are as blank as they were before; for example, Archdaily now has columnists and short original articles, but they are often of cringe-inducingly low quality. Dezeen generally doesn’t speak in its own voice, but the massive increase in filmed interviews that they post up means that there actually is a rather high level of debate being conducted on the site, channelled through Dezeen rather than directly created by them. I certainly applaud this, it's certainly great to have access to people discussing their work, but I have to say that it’s also dangerously flawed. Fairs has made an incredible success of Dezeen, which now has all manner of pie-fingers, selling watches, organising events, pop-up shops, sponsoring various events and even appearing in global branding campaigns for Apple. But at the same time it buys into a rather sickly language of web-entrepreneurship, all ‘creatives’ and ‘content’ and assorted bollocks. It sails close to some very negative practices too; recently it got involved with a property developer in the East End of London, inviting local ‘creatives’ to submit work which would eventually adorn the lobbies and spaces of a new block of yuppiedromes in the extremely poor neighbourhood of Stepney Green. I personally find this horrid; you can’t claim to be celebrating ‘creatives’ while at the very same time contributing to the forces that make their lives difficult, you can’t promote the East End design scene while simultaneously assisting in its being wiped out.

So while Owen is very lucky to be in a position of disseminator of expert knowledge, creating original ‘content’ of intellectual and critical quality, it’s an incredibly hard life, getting harder by the year, as the traditional media model sinks ever deeper. Dezeen have found a platform that works, that financially sustains itself, but it doesn’t necessarily perform a useful role in terms of understanding, historical context or, of course, critique. Is the only way forward from here an ongoing obliteration of culture’s independence from PR?

A (belated) guide to the Autopoiesis of Architecture

About a year ago Patrik Schumacher's 'Autopoiesis of Architecture' was released. I read it and reviewed it for Icon here. What I also started doing was writing a detailed review, with the rationale that a work so ambitious needed at least to be given a proper look. The problem is, however, that I never managed to finish the bloody thing, being a) just a mere mortal, not a Herculean near-god like Patrik, and b) really bloody busy. That said, I've been getting a bit cagey about the general criticism that Schumacher gets from people who haven't read the book - I mean, they may well be right about it, but at the same time it's not a firm foundation for criticism. With this in mind, I went and had a look at the thing I had started writing, and realised that I had basically stopped after the exposition, which was more or less complete.

So I've decided to post up what I had completed by the 9th February 2011. It should hopefully function as a fairly neutral guide to what is contained in Schumacher's book, so may be of some help to someone who just has not the time to go through the bloody thing. Hope you find it useful.

Patrik Schumacher has written a book. Or two books. Well, sort of. He has written one book, which is so long that it has needed to be split into two volumes. Thus everything that I will write here is based upon the first half of the project. Whether or not this invalidates what I am writing is I suppose up to you to decide. I will refer to his book as if it were a complete work - I have no idea when the second volume will be released, so perhaps there will be occasion to read and write about that one when the time comes.

The book is titled 'The Autopoiesis of Architecture'. Autopoiesis is a neologism from the Greek, which means 'self-making' (it can also mean something else too, which I'll get to eventually). Schumacher has gotten the term from German sociologist/philosopher/theorist Niklas Luhmann, who in turn got it from biology. It's worth noting here that Schumacher reckons his work (henceforth AoA) is an application of the work of Luhmann to Architecture. If, like me, you've not had occasion to read Luhmann's work, then this puts you at an immediate disadvantage. I would go further and suggest that if somebody like me hasn't read Luhmann then very few architects at all will have done so. As a bit of background research I did ask about Luhmann in the company of a mathematician/theorist/political activist/nocturnal flying mammal, and the response was something like "OH! He's that crazy right-wing German systems theorist!" And sure enough, a cursory glance at the wikipedia page for Luhmann and it would seem that he was a social-ontologist, with a theory of emergent complexity, and was what you might call a 'relationist', in that his ontology seems to be structured more around the connections and less about the objects that make them up (OOO fans take note). In fact, his theories apparently have no room for subjects at all, and if wikipedia is to be believed, they have been criticised for being rather right-wing. The other thing that's worth noting is the gargantuan size of his theoretical edifice, which apparently is of a scale and scope that rivals Marx.

But, to go back for a second, who is Patrik Schumacher? He is partner at Zaha Hadid Architects, and is commonly thought of as Zaha's right hand man, and less charitably as the brains of Zaha's operation. Many of their designs of the last decade or more have been credited as 'Zaha Hadid with Patrik Schumacher', so you get the idea of his stature in the firm. He is also credited with being the main driving force behind the digitizing of Zaha's design process, which progressed from paintings to floppy shapes rather quickly from the late 90s onward, leading to much talk about pre-computer and post-computer Zaha buildings (Maxxi and the Evelyn Grace Academy are pre-computer, Guangzhou Opera House and the Aquatics Centre are post-computer, for example). As well as being at the top of the pile of the top of the league of 'starchitects', he has also been running the Design Research Lab at the Architects Association, which is, depending on your viewpoint, either one of the top post-grad programmes in all of architecture, or a fee-paying internship for those who want to work at ZHA. Schumacher seems to get a lot of flak from a number of directions, from old-school modernists, to environmentalists, to anti-theorists, to those who simply find his megalomaniacal pronouncements in public forums a little too much to take. I too have heavily criticised ZHA in my time, sometimes with more spite and venom than at others. I do not intend to be mean here - I will endeavour to be as reasonable as I can. I am approaching this as someone who has trained as an architect, has plenty of experience of digital architecture and its technologies, and some knowledge of the workings of parametric software. I am also reasonably well versed in continental philosophy and the history of modern theoretically influenced architecture. I am (overall) positive about the prospects of digital design in architecture, and also take theory to be more than fashionable nonsense. I would like to think that I am an ideal reader of this book.

  

So what the hell is AoA all about then? It is an attempt to provide a 'Grand Theory' of Architecture, and Schumacher's strategy is to utilise Luhmann's theory of society to explain architecture. Before we've even really started, Schumacher introduces us to Luhmann's theory of society as a series of autonomous networks of communications, for example economics, politics, law, the mass media, science and art. According to Luhmann, these networks function 'autopoietically', in that they emerge spontaneously as society becomes more complex, and then maintain themselves through internal communication networks, thus perpetuating the very complexity that gave rise to them. Schumacher has decided axiomatically that architecture, which in Luhmann is subsumed within the art system, deserves to be considered an autopoietic network by itself:

The comparisons and parallels that could be drawn between architecture and the various functional systems analyzed within Luhmann's oeuvre accumulated to the point where the possibility of a theoretical reconstruction of the discipline of architecture, set within this new encompassing theoretical system, seemed viable. This reconstruction is the core ambition of the theory of architectural autopoiesis. To orient the discipline's forward thrust is its purpose. [19]

We can see that there are already some grand claims being made about what is going on in the text - the notion of it being a guide to action rather than just an analysis is there from the beginning. But the fact that Schumacher is deviating from Luhmann is not lost on him, and the text is peppered with occasions where Schumacher is happy to tell us that he reckons that Luhmann was wrong, leading to the final admission that "Faithfulness with respect to Luhmann's work can thus no longer be claimed." [435] What is worth noting here is that for Schumacher, buildings themselves are only one kind of communication within the autopoiesis of architecture, indeed, buildings themselves are considered to be a 'negligible' [4] part of the theory. Instead, architecture is the discussion of architecture, the hypothesising of architecture, the speculation of architecture. An abstract render or essay can be as important as any building, if it connects up properly in the network, and makes allies which lead to further communications (we're very much in Latour territory here). What Schumacher is trying to do here is create a concept of architecture that would include all of the peripheral work that has been going on in academia over the last few generations to be uncontroversially counted as 'inside' the field.

           

Schumacher's first task in this vein is to stress the importance of theory in architecture. Rather than being a bunch of pretentious shits waffling at each other, as is sometimes claimed, Schumacher insists that theory is a vital aspect of the autopoiesis of architecture, giving the following trajectory of luminaries:

Virtually every architect who counts within architecture was both an innovator and a theorist or writer. The most striking examples are Alberti, Le Corbusier, Rem Koolhaas and Greg Lynn. [35]

Schumacher will insist that only self-reflexive architecture is worthy of the title:

Only theoretically informed building design constitutes architecture. [36]

            Schumacher will go on to discuss the difference between problematising (critical) and generative theory (inspirational), with Hannes Meyer an example of the former, and Eisenman the latter. Problematising theories are required when contemporary architecture is no longer adequate to the building tasks at hand, and once they have put standard practise into question, generative theories come along which begin to form methods in which these new problems can be solved. [41]

            As well as these distinctions, Schumacher insists that architectural theory must be

'autological' i.e self-reflexive, and senses that this occurred when architecture began to import ideas from 'post-structuralism'. In this sense it was important for architects to read Derrida at one point in order to increase the complexity of architecture theory - Schumacher feels that the increased complexity of an 'autological' theoretical system makes it more effective and able to contribute to its field. Schumacher feels that deconstruction becomes more of a hindrance to architecture at this point, because it "refuses this extensive system-building endeavour and therefore can never break the cycle of Deconstruction and counter-Deconstruction." [60] Schumacher states that the failure of deconstructive theory is in its inability to provide 'a coherent account of philosophy', and that this can only be achieved with a 'comprehensive theory of society' i.e. Luhmann's/his.[62] He seems a little disgusted with 'deconstructive' theorists, because he feels that they overstep the boundaries of architecture, and thus become if not irrelevant, then at least useless to the architecture's forward march. Basically, theory for Schumacher is utterly vital, but it is not worth a damn if it doesn't help architecture to 'innovate'.

           

            The next main section of AoA is historical. As you might have noticed, Schumacher is reframing the word 'architecture' slightly. Although he has set up the 'autopoiesis of architecture' as the emergent network within society, he already has a tendency to refer to it as simply 'architecture'. This is worth bearing in mind. Schumacher wishes to explain the 'historical emergence of architecture', ie the point when his 'autopoiesis of architecture' emerged from undifferentiated social complexity.

            Schumacher reckons that architecture didn't exist between antiquity and the renaissance. Gothic architecture isn't actually worthy of the name because it wasn't theorised, and so it is only with Alberti that architecture restarts, if you will. Renaissance architects allow architecture to emerge as an autonomous discipline, a status that has not regressed since. We are treated to a brief historical sweep through self-reflexive architecture, progressively differentiating itself from other function systems, right up until the differentiation from both engineering and art gives us modernism and figures such as Le Corbusier. [88]

            It is at this point that Schumacher brings in his notion of the avant-garde, which is to be differentiated from 'mainstream' practice. It is utterly vital for Schumacher that there is a separate subsection of architecture that is engaged in experimental research, and it is even more vital that they are protected from the constraints (economic etc…) of practice in order to better perform this role. The best place for this to occur, of course, is in academia. Schumacher's notion of the avant-garde is actually likened to scientific research, in the sense that creating a social vacuum around the avant-garde allows for a freedom to experiment that benefits society at large through the innovations it makes possible. [100]

            Of course, Schumacher must deal with the meanings that are already attached to the name 'avant-garde'. To do this, he divides the avant-garde into 'revolutionary' and 'cumulative' periods. Revolutionary periods are where many innovations are made very quickly, without necessarily working them out, whereas cumulative periods are when these innovations are systematically worked out. The proliferation of radical philosophy in architecture over the last 20 years was a symptom of a revolutionary period, which has receded now that avant-garde architecture is more interested in how to fit windows into curved walls. [122]

            No discussion of the avant-garde is complete without dealing with questions of utopia, and Schumacher doesn't disappoint. While stating the commonplace that utopian thinking about the future is out of the question, he goes on to suggest that what architecture can offer is the notion of 'latent utopia':

The radical architectural projects proliferating on today's computer screens do not offer themselves as utopian proposals in the sense of elaborated proposals for a better life. […] They are open-ended mutations that at best might become catalysts in the coevolution of new life processes. […] Who is to judge and deny a priori that a strange building will not attract and engender a strangely productive occupation. […] A decoded architecture - made strange - offers itself to inhabitation as an aleatoric field, anticipating and actively prefacing its own 'détournement'.[127]

            Did you get that? What is being asserted here is that the radical formal research conducted by the 'avant-gardes', by creating spatial configurations that are out of the ordinary, provide a necessary supplement to quotidian space that might possibly be taken up by an unforeseen new social arrangement.

           

            By far the longest section of AoA is the third, which goes into depth about architecture as an autopoietic system, and it is here where most of the 'theoretical heavy lifting' of the whole book resides. In this third section Schumacher first outlines exactly what it is that he thinks makes architecture architecture, and then proceeds into the elucidation of his own vision for architecture and its future. The former section contains an argument for architecture's autonomy, followed by an analysis of the process of architecture and the form/function distinction. The latter introduces the extra layer of the  beauty/utility distinction, before making an attempt to rehabilitate the notion of 'style'.

            It is worth quoting Schumacher's thesis about the autonomy of architecture in full:

"There can be no external determination imposed upon architecture - neither by political bodies, nor by paying clients - except in the negative / trivial sense of disruption."[188]

Now before you spit out your tea, there is actually a technical point being made here; 'Architecture', as the shorthand term for 'the autopoiesis of architecture', has to be autonomous as it is already defined as the emergent network of architectural communication. So technically (if a little tautologically) this is correct; for example, the cost of the building is an economic aspect of a building object, and by definition is not a part of the 'autopoiesis of architecture'. The budgetary constraint placed upon a building is not an architectural constraint, it is an external 'irritant' which can only be approached 'architecturally'.

            According to Schumacher, the 'elemental' architectural communication in architecture is the design decision, which is embodied in the elemental vector of architectural communication, which is the drawing. All of the external constraints that an architectural project must pass through are translated into design decisions, which are then communicated as drawings. The client of a building is not 'inside' architecture, but the pressures they exert must be translated into issues 'within' architecture.

            How are external irritants changed into internal architectural issues? Schumacher states that this is down to the 'lead distinction' of form/function. Any pressure that imposes upon the autopoiesis of architecture is transformed by forcing it through certain questions: "The total domain of architecture - the totality of its issues - is dissected by the distinction of form and function"[208]. Now, this might at first sound rather obvious, but there are interesting aspects to Schumacher's way of seeing form & function. First of all, this distinction understood this way doesn't have to be foundational - it can be seen as an emergent property, thus it is protected from idealism. It gives us a very simple way of mapping architectural communications, for example, the process of designing modernist buildings was obviously more strongly concerned with function, while postmodernism was far more concerned with formal questions. As the process of design proceeds, at any point one of the two terms can be used as a guide to move further on in the process; they help keep the complex activity of design moving forwards. Finally, if anything crops up that cannot be placed into this framework, then it is of no consequence to architecture. Form/function allows architecture to maintain its differentiation from other social systems.

            On top of this, Schumacher brings in a further binary here, that of the beauty and utility. This is the introduction of value into form/function. Beauty is good form, and utility is good function. Beauty & utility can be seen as two terms that all possible communications within architecture can be analysed with. As a metaphor we might think about how any point in two-dimensional space can be explained as the conjunction of an x and a y value. In the same way, a formal and functional analysis will place any design communication at a point in the autopoiesis of architecture. It's worth noting here that this is a rather significant deviation from Luhmann, who describes binary codes such as legal/illegal (legal system), or true/false (science). Architecture has what Schumacher calls a 'double code', ie, an architectural communication has to be fitted into 'beautiful/ugly' AND 'functional/dysfunctional'. This is Schumacher's own system, which he justifies by pointing out various failed attempts to eradicate one of the axes (for example, Hannes Meyer's functionalism or Peter Eisenman's formalism).

           

But this is still not enough; Schumacher introduces a third code into architecture, or at least the avant-garde section of architecture that he identified earlier. This is the code of novelty [228]. Schumacher's point is that although in the mainstream of architecture there are only two questions that can be asked (is it beautiful, is it elegant?), within the avant-garde there is a third question that puts itself forward: is it new? The reasons for this are twofold. Firstly, according to his Luhmannian framework (which he is increasingly deviating from by this point), autopoietic functions inherently become more complex; it is in their very nature to do so (Schumacher explicitly claims that a society becoming less complex is commensurate with totalitarianism, a rather Hayekian idea if you ask me). Thus an extra code of novelty is seen to allow for greater accommodation of this very complexity. Secondly, Schumacher is drawing from his own experience of being an avant-garde practitioner; in his milieu, newness has been enthusiastically taken up for the last fifteen years or so, after the relatively atemporal period of 'pomo'.

There is also a third aspect to Schumacher's obsession with novelty, which is perhaps the most interesting aspect of the book as a whole: Schumacher's analysis of the drawing. If you've bothered to read this far then you probably already know that Schumacher is one of the more prominent exponents of scripted/parametric architecture, and his expertise in the subject becomes highly apparent in this analysis. In keeping with the axiomatic character of AoA, Schumacher posits 'the drawing' as a singular yet typical medium for all of architecture, which provides a vital function within the autopoietic system of architecture:

Drawing has been developed as a medium of speculation that is able to depict an uncertain future state with a very convincing degree of internal consistency and detail. A drawing can cohere a large number of people around a new complex endeavour requiring long chains of coordinated activity, the results of which lie in the relatively distant future.[329]

Schumacher puts forward a very convincing argument about how the drawing simultaneously makes possible the creation of architecture as well as limits what is possible within it. He provides a brief history of the drawing that discusses what was geometrically & cumulatively possible as a result of the drawing techniques available. So the invention of the corner perspective greatly increased the ways in which a building could be composed, and the development of tracing paper allowed for a greater level of recursiveness in the development of a design. Now, with the rapid advances in digital modelling technologies, the possibilities to recursively edit a design are increasing almost exponentially, and the level of complexity that can be stored in a digital model that need not be fully worked out constantly is also vastly greater than it was, even one generation ago. The level of modulations that are made possible using parametric modelling software do indeed make possible a hitherto unseen level of flexibility in the design process in architecture. So the fact that brand new tools are consistently being made available to the practitioner means that if the avant-garde are to be worthy of the definition that Schumacher has given them, novelty must be their priority - it is their job to test out new and under-developed potentials.

All this novelty and exponential increase in potential options poses a problem of what the hell an architect is supposed to do with all this freedom. Schumacher's solution, and what will probably be the most controversial aspect of AoA is his rehabilitation of 'Style'. Schumacher wants to provide a functional analysis of 'style' in architecture as a guiding principle for formal decisions that allow the architect to resolve the massive complexity of the information that they have to process as they work through a design. It should be noted that he is primarily interested in large, overarching styles, rather than the individual styles of particular architects:

An epochal style is the dominant style of a particular civilisation within a particular historical era. It is primarily in this last sense that the theory of architectural autopoiesis uses the concept of style.[242]

As you've probably worked out by now, Schumacher's entire theory is not revolutionary. This is not such a problem, as no doubt he would prefer to think of his theory as evolutionary. His aim is not to reject previous theories but to include them in a more complex and more effective system. Thus, instead of reacting against stylistic concerns, he wishes to admit both previous stylistic theories as well as theories that have rebelled against style. He is attempting a reconciliation of ideas about architecture as divergent as eclecticism and functionalism, and the upshot of this is the familiar notion that a style is tied to the epoch that produces it, which is exemplified by this approving quote from Otto Wagner:

'Each new style gradually emerged from the earlier one when new methods of construction, new materials, new human tasks and viewpoints demanded a change or reconstituting of existing forms.' This lucid statement of the fundamental conditions and motive forces behind the development of architectural styles is as valid today as it was then. (With respect to our contemporary condition we only have to apply the now crucial factor of the evolving design media).[251]

At this point you might recognise what's coming along here. It's the old 'zeitgeist' argument:

Ephocal styles are those […] styles that demonstrate long-term viability because they offer a systematic solution to the essential problems and challenges of the respective epoch.[253]

Schumacher is convinced that there has recently been an epochal shift in the complexity of society, which is challenging architecture with new tasks and problems which the ordinary paradigm of architecture is ill-equipped to cope with. At the same time, new design technologies have sprung up which have made possible a new kind of formal expression in architecture. These two parallel processes make it possible for Schumacher to proclaim the following historical progression:

GOTHIC

RENAISSANCE

BAROQUE

NEO-CLASSICISM

HISTORICISM

MODERNISM

PARAMETRICISM [254]

So - what is parametricism? Parametricism is what Schumacher believes has finally come along to rescue us from the half-century crisis that modernism has been struggling through. Postmodernism and Deconstructivism qua styles of architecture were both transitional rather than epochal styles, too attached to the critique of the overarching narrative of modernism to truly surpass it. But Parametricism, born out of the research that avant-garde architects have been conducting into new digital design technologies, has finally coalesced into the style that is ready to take architecture into the new generation. Thankfully for us, Schumacher has lucidly and simply expressed what constitutes the style of Parametricism [286]: formally it is that everything must be 'parametrically malleable' and correlated, while rigid forms and simple repetition of elements must not be allowed. Schumacher is saying that the new possibilities to construct complex shapes mean that older formal strategies in architecture must be avoided. This is in keeping with his quest for novelty.

As far as function is concerned it becomes a little bit stranger. Here, what is demanded is that the function of the building must be understood in terms of smooth 'fields' rather than fixed 'spaces' of function. This notion of field is explicitly drawn from Deleuze & Guattari's notion of 'smooth space' [424]. The 'field', to Schumacher, is a gradiated, almost liquid transition of forms and functions that undermine simple binary distinctions like figure/ground, and allow architecture to supercede the modernist fixation with space which can only lead to false simplicity and a denial of autopoietic complexity.

But after all this, WHY parametricism?

Schumacher states that:

In an evolving, increasingly complex and demanding societal environment each of the coevolving function systems is burdened with the requirement of continuous adaptive upgrading. This also includes the continuous adaptive upgrading of the respective specialised media: new forms of money and financial instruments, new mechanisms for social control and the administration of power, and new design tools and techniques within the medium of architecture. All of them are upgrading their capacity on the basis of the advancing technologies of computational information processing. [347]

What he means is that world society is so complex now that only buildings of the complexity made possible by parametric software are capable of accommodating it effectively. Modernism (a term which for Schumacher includes corporate architect of choice Norman Foster [297]) is not capable of properly articulating the complexity of a globalised, decentred, diversified world and its spatial requirements.

Parametricism is the great, new, viable style after Modernism […] Parametricism provides a pertinent spatio-morphological repertoire for architecture and urban design that is able to organise and articulate the complexities of contemporary (post-fordist) society. [129]

            I have now given you a (rather extended) ride through AoA. You might consider everything up to this point to be a disinterested guide to the book, one that takes the book at more-or-less face value, that has avoided making strident critiques. Hopefully this in itself will be useful for those who may not have time to read 400 pages but might just have the time to read 4000 words or so. But in reading the book I have also collected a number of criticisms which I think are significant, which I will now outline below:

And that's where I gave up.

Up n Coming

Here are a few things that are happening now/soon, or are just worth looking at:

-Mark Fisher and Nina Power will be talking at the ICA on Saturday the 22nd, and it's free. The press release describes the event as "A public discussion on how the dissemination of artwork and information on blogs’ and websites has altered the way that artists distribute and discuss their practice."


-Between Channels is posting a wonderful series of photographs of UK towns in 1968 that they found. They're gorgeous in their own way, and in the words of Mr/Ms Channels: "This is just everyday life as it once was, and never will be again."

-A really rather terrifying post from City of Sound regarding the Australian floods.

Trailer – The Pruitt-Igoe Myth: an Urban History from the Pruitt-Igoe Myth on Vimeo.

-There is a film that has just been made about the reality behind the architectural myth of the Pruitt Igoe flats. Hopefully there will be showings in the UK at some point in the future.


-A post on 'We Make Money Not Art' highlighting some fine art photography of 'La Vela' in Napoli, one of the most notorious housing estates in the world.

-If you're into philosophers who have spies telling them when you've sarcastically mentioned them on twitter, or even if you're just into some of the most interesting young thinkers currently active, then there is a new collection of essays, 'The Speculative Turn' which can generously be downloaded from here.


-There is a little exhibition down at the Nunnery in Bow, where artist Simon Terrill has created a massive photograph of Balfron Tower and its residents. There is a symposium on Thursday the 20th of January with Edward Colless, Nigel Warburton and Owen Hatherley.


-And finally; I will be giving a talk and taking part in a panel with Rut Blees Luxemburg at the London Art Fair. The theme of the talk and the accompanying show is 'the Ephemeral', so I'll be cracking open a can of 'spectrality' and discussing representative media, ghostliness and probably a bit of politics as well.

Twothousandandten

Don't worry, come back! It's not another list! But it is the end of one year, and the start of a new. It's a time to reflect, to take stock, to blah blah blablah. What I will say is that on a number of levels (although not that many) 2010 was a far better year than 2009. I was employed in what amounts to 2.5 jobs for the whole year, got to write for various people, got to travel across Europe to write, got to give talks to various people, got to travel across Europe to talk to people, even got to do a bit of teaching. During this time I met a lot of wonderful people, many for the first time, and for all this I'm very grateful. As well as this, my carousing became less desperate & less fatalistic, I took better care of myself, and also some loose ends were tied up, writing a less tragic ending to one of the most horrible stories of my last three years. All in all, it was a damn sight better than the year before, although at the end of the day I'm still the same old miserable bastard.

So anyway, what follows are some collected thoughts on the year just passed, apropos of nothing, and not really in aid of anything either. Perhaps this will help me figure out what next year is going to be all about, or maybe I'm just writing this to pass the time, which will pass in any case. But no matter! Onward! Things can only get better!

WORST BUILDING OF THE YEAR!

By far the most embarrassing object to come to my attention this year was the ArcelorMittalOrbit, the ugliest, most aggressively stupid piece of public art I have ever seen, and it's not even built yet. Everything about it, from the anecdote about BoJo the Clown meeting Lakshmi Mittal in the pissers at Davos, to the clichéd sub-Derridean patter that accompanied the planning application, to the banality of the napkin sketch to the already tired digital resolution of the silly shape, nothing signified the moral and aesthetic vacuum at the heart of this pathetic little island better than this 110m tall trinket to be built within stumbling distance from my flat. ARGH!

BEST (NEW) BUILDING OF THE YEAR!
Well this one has to be a toss-up between one of two buildings, one of which I think is better than the other, one of which I actually visited.


The former is the Spanish Pavilion from the Shanghai Expo. I wrote about the Expo a couple of times this year, both in print and on the blog, as well as interviewing Benedetta Tagliabue for ICON magazine around the middle of the year. What I thought was good about the Spanish Pavilion was that it showed a mature attitude both to the implementation of digital technology / fabrication in a building, as well as to its symbolic language.
Regarding technology, rather than any quasi-avant garde-ist babble about CAD plug-ins being the generators of an unprecedented spatial complexity that enacts its very own detournément, this building was digital in that it used computers to resolve the structural gymnastics, without making any hi-falutin claims that don't stand up to expert scrutiny.
The building also understood the architectural value of formalism for the façade, functionalism for the insides.
And as for the formal language, in an Expo notable for its vacuous pop-formalism, its doily facades, its sand-dune buildings, its frankly stupid conceptualism, this building took the dumb gesture, that of the wicker basket, and made something abstracted and complex from it, referring at once to Chinese tradition, Spanish tradition and previous works by EMBT, as well as all of the other architectural clevernesses they're good at. It was good to see them get some credit, after such a long time as being 'the firm that completed Miralles designs'.


The second building was the 8 House by BIG in Copenhagen, which I reviewed for ICON. I'm suspicious of BIG, to be honest. I find the post-Koolhaas overblown functionalism to be a conceptual one trick pony (HEY guys! What's the zoning envelope? Let's just build right up to it! etc…), and of course I find Ingels' hyperactive optimism to be precisely the opposite of my own ideas about architecture, but it was excellent to see people having a go at the megastructural housing block. Basically a yuppiedrome, the 8 House put all the speculative housing completed in the UK over the last year to absolute shame. In fact, even the developer seems like Nye Bevan compared to the scum we've got over here in the UK. Depressing.

WORST EVENT OF THE YEAR!

This shower of bastards sneaked in, and already they're wrecking the place like it was an unfortunate Oxford restaurant. The simplest way I can understand the situation is that these gentlemen have come to the conclusion that the only way to improve the economic climate in the UK (meaning stimulate opportunities for 'wealth creation', i.e. profit extraction for their friends) is to roll back the rights that our parents and their parents and their parents fought so very hard for so very long for. These hooligans have looked jealously at levels of exploitation in the third world and have thought "Bingo! That's what we need!" It beggars belief.

Not only have they managed to sell the country the mind-bogglingly stupid analogy of the economy being a cupboard that has been left empty by the profligate previous government, thus we're all (i.e. just the poor) going to have to starve, but they're also in the process of destroying the state higher-education system, squeezing the poor out of the inner cities, and crippling the NHS yet further.

As an intellectual, an aesthete, and a person with a strong attachment to the notion of the universality of humanity and its suffering (phew!), I've never felt more adrift from the zeitgeist. I want them stopped. They are bastards, and they're trying to ruin it for everyone apart from them and their clique. STOP THEM!

But then, inamongst this genuine anger, and despite the fact that as K-Punk so perfectly put it: 'history is starting again', there is always the looming fact that this is a systematic crisis in capitalist society, one that is of course intrinsically linked to the looming (unfolding?) environmental catastrophe. Perhaps capitalism might not collapse in the next 100 years, but it's going to get a lot more ugly, as if the world weren't already ugly enough. My wild prediction for what to expect from the next decade? Pogroms. Lots of 'em. All over the place, happening to all sorts of people. Maybe not, but something spectacular needs to be pulled out of the hat if we're going to avoid WWII levels of horror in the next generation or so (but of course, we saw WWII levels of horror in the last ten years in the Congo, didn't we? It just goes on and on…)
Trümmer auf Trümmer…

MUSIC OF THE YEAR!
Oh, it's difficult for me to talk about music much these days. I mean, it's still very very important to me, ridiculously so, but it feels strange to be a music lover nowadays. I hardly ever buy music any more, the occasional album by a contemporary artist, mostly experimental electronic-y stuff, but there's just such a hell of a lot of youtube watching, spotify listening and so on that I can discuss at length various aspects of 'the latest shit', without actually feeling any kind of enthusiasm for it. I suspect this is a very common feeling as the crisis of music consumption brought about by the internet becomes yet deeper, as the sense of discovery that once went hand in hand with finding new music vanishes yet further. I did go to see Hype Williams playing in Hoxton, for example, although I decided that I couldn't be arsed with the Salem gig at Shoreditch church.

I continued trying to practice, although business meant that certain projects I had going during the idleness of 2009 are now on the back-burner, perhaps indefinitely. This year I'd like to make recordings of some of the myriad arrangements that I have almost completed, if only to get them out of the way, to give oneself the feeling of having done something, anything!

2010 also saw me give proper time and consideration to Wagner, which led to some (what I thought were) fascinating insights into the High Romantic imagination and its relationship to technology. Verso reissued Adorno's book on Wagner, which is excellent, although I don't know if I can really be arsed reading what Badiou has to say about him in his newly published collection.

FILM OF THE YEAR!

Well, it's going to have to be Keiller's 'Robinson in Ruins', which I reviewed for ICON. One of the most striking things about this film was the way that the exquisite melancholy of his earlier Robinson films had given way to a sense of pessimistic dread, as Vanessa Redgrave read quotes of climate scientists earnestly discussing the imminent 'End of Life on Earth'.

Overall it certainly wasn't as good as the previous films - one got the sense that Keiller had turned his RCA research fellowship into a Robinson film only under duress, but I still cannot get over the breadth, intelligence and wit of his work, and I'm totally in thrall to its ability to draw out the embedded history and struggles that are latent in the landscapes we inhabit, while also making comprehensive artistic statements.

BOOK OF THE YEAR!
Accusations of clique-ness are probably well founded here, but Owen's book 'A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain' is a really stunning piece of work, a real demonstration that rather than the current standard of reactionary complacency posing as radical theorising all sheathed in unbearably turgid prose, it is eminently possible to combine architecture and politics in a work of genuine literary quality. Good for him!

Other literature that really stuck with me this year included Jonathan Littel's 'The Kindly Ones', Alisdair Gray's 'Lanark', & reading Geoffrey Hill's poetry.

BOOK OF NEXT YEAR!

In other literature news; I'm expecting that the first half of this year will see the publication of THE ARCHITECTURE OF FAILURE, the short book that I wrote about architecture, technology and weakness last year. Part history, part polemic, it takes a new look at the founding structures of modern architecture, the giant Iron & Glass palaces of the late 19th century. Instead of the triumphant expressions of technical prowess that they are generally understood to be, these buildings were expressions of a far more doubtful culture, which saw fragility, ghostliness and melancholy in their lofty transepts. This historical analysis begins to form a theory of architectural failure, a theory that starts to coalesce in the second half of the book where I apply it to three significant periods of architectural modernism, all of which have established conceptual links to these founding monuments - the 'Zoom' wave of Archigram et al, the Decon lot of the 1980s-90s, and the new generation of digiwibblists.

It will be neither conclusive neither definitive, but I would like to think that you'll enjoy it. I'll keep you posted.

Good Luck!

I just want to wish anyone who is marching, protesting, occupying, causing havoc, causing mayhem, getting attacked by police, taking over the tube, storming parliament & overthrowing the government tomorrow GOOD LUCK.

Some of us are in this together, the rest... well, we'll see what happens.

UCL Occupation visit

This blog has been rather silent of late, in what is turning out to be one of the most 'interesting' periods I can certainly remember. It's so strange, as I know that if I were still a student I'd be getting fully stuck in, but I've been left sat at desks, watching the protests as they unfold on the news and on twitter, wishing that I could be counted amongst the bodies.

So on Friday after 'the day job' I finally went down to the UCL occupation, in the company of Owen and Will and Joel, to see what was going on. Through the quad, the first thing that you notice is the chalk on the walls: in this case it was the old 'the point is to change it', which to be honest rather set the tone for some romanticised-quasi '68 nonsense. Once inside the building we were shocked to see that there was a soiree underway mere metres from the occupation, filled with champagne quaffing funders, seemingly completely unaware of what was going on a couple of doors down.

Past a security guard hanging around nonchalantly in a yellow jacket, up a few stairs, and past a table of people in their early twenties, opening a bag full of beers. Then pass through a pair of doors, and any notion that this is a rag-tag bunch of bourgeois hipsters, acting out while still at Uni is dispelled. There's about 50-100 people sitting around in a circle in front of a large projection on the wall of the agenda for a meeting. There's another 50 or so people milling around the periphery. One chap is trying to push the agenda along, while a young woman to his side is constantly inking a flipchart with points being made. There are laptops everywhere - some are twittering away, others -you imagine- are liaising with one of the many, many other occupations going on at the moment. The crowd are mixed more or less equally between the sexes, although the room is almost homogenously white. When people speak up they are mostly English and middle class - this is not an equivalent social group to that seen at the protests out on the streets in the last few weeks, although it's probably fair to say that more or less everyone in the room had been out there at the protests too.

The meeting is orderly - when people agree they shake their hands in the air, which I was told is something that you could see at the climate camp last year. The air is dedicated, but not necessarily professional, which may well be deliberate. It's certainly democratic, the chairperson merely trying to let as many people be heard while also moving everything forwards. Frequently, at the end of a discussion, someone will stand up and identify themself as the person to speak to afterwards if the point needs further discussion. It's very well organised, with people performing roles such as PR liaison and so on. You could easily run a business in this fashion, for what it's worth.

The meeting is adjourned, and a lot of people move off, but there are still around 100 people around, some off at the sides, and some bringing chairs up to the table. I had arrived thinking that I would just be hanging around, getting a look and then listening to Owen speak, but I suddenly find myself sitting behind the table, having to think up an impromptu talk myself.

Owen discusses 'Student Architecture', the latest ugly property bubble to get underway. Many luxury housing projects shelved when the recession hit are now returning as student flats, in which parents of foreign students are fleeced for up to £1000 a month for rooms that are yet smaller than the yuppiedromes that the developers no longer have the confidence to build. Owen rightly points out that companies like UNITE are among the most rotten and horrible developers in the construction industry, inflicting cheap and shitty buildings onto our cities that only a moron wouldn't recognise as repeating all the worst mistakes of the 1960s housing. It's truly shocking, and yet it just keeps on going.

I quickly try to discuss the uses and abuses of 'radical theory' in architecture over the last 50 years. Inspired by my reading an article about the occupation where architecture students said that they were inspired by the radical theories of Bernard Tschumi and Colin Fournier, I ramble somewhat, but try to get across the idea that if you are a clever architecture student who wants to read political theory that deals with space, don't go looking for it in the writings of architects. I prattle on about how because of the hermetic culture of architectural academia, and because of architects self-appointed renaissance man arrogance, as well as the futile nature of architecture practice in general, architect's theory often ends up as an awkward cloak that envelops all kinds of indulgences in its arcane misused terminology. I try to put across the point that theory has become a method of furthering one's career by doing a few years of academia, with radical theory aestheticised to the point that it can no longer be used as actual critique, and rather just adds a frisson of danger and exclusivity to one's formalism. I also mumble something about reading Lefebvre or Benjamin, but then I would say that, wouldn't I? My talk drifts off into silence, lacking any conclusion.

Will comes up next and discusses the privatisation of public space, and how one can read the subtle hints of it. He utters a great sequence about how classical architecture was intended to instil deference in its relationship with its public, and how modernism - especially post-Corbusian modernism - attempted to break down architecture to a more egalitarian form-human relationship, but then ended up being attacked for the supposed 'inhumanity' of those very forms. Now we have exclusivity expressed mainly through commercial space, seeing as genuinely non-shopping related public spaces are fewer and further between. And of course, this is accompanied by an insidious and worrying privatisation of all public space.

What was most heartening however; was that after the talks a discussion ensues for what I was told later was almost two hours. There are about forty of us, and we have a very interesting exchange of ideas. A few students want to discuss the occupation as a model for 'new space'. I think, yes, of course, it can be seen as an experiment in communal living, and lots can be learned, but at the same time there has been no real shortage of short term small scale experiments of this sort over the last 100 years. One student puts it well when she points out that they cannot say that what they are doing 'works', when they know that they are only likely to be there for a week more at most before being thrown out. I agree with her, in that occupation can only exist as an antagonistic bubble within a hostile wider environment. Owen points out that there were larger experiments with communal living in the early Soviet era - the Narkomfin for instance, and that they have a lot in common with post-war housing, as stepping stones to collectivity.

Another line of criticism is that the speakers have been too negative, offering only critique, and that there is a fertile world of community architectures and so on that need to be addressed and understood. Jeremy Till is mentioned. There is broad agreement from the panel, but also concern that again, the economics of scale have to be considered - I for one am very dubious that isolated examples can spread to become common practice without being adopted by some agency that has huge amounts of capital at its disposal - i.e. the State. Owen discusses Ralph Erskine's Byker Wall housing estate in positive terms.

There are also discussions of the state of architectural education, including the suggestion that the 1 student 1 project final year tradition is well overdue being abandoned as an inappropriate and unrealistic method. There is also a fair amount of 'what is to be done'?

Afterwards there is a performance by Slade students who are in occupation next door. At this point it becomes a bit too hipster-private-view for my liking, but then the occupiers have been working very very hard and deserve some relief, and some of the sketches performed are very funny. We are kindly supplied with a glass of wine, and a number of further conversations continue afterwards.

So… what? I was incredibly heartened by the occupation, but I am also fearful. The State is, of course, powerful, and obviously doesn't plan to stand for this kind of thing. But on the other hand, our dear leaders are fucking lightweights, with a background in PR and no real history of struggle. They hardly have a mandate, and even before any of their plans have begun they are facing massive protests, and the looming prospect of a g****** s*****. Thursday the 9th is coming up, and to be honest the government is going to win their vote. But it'll be an ugly win, one which only goes to show how utterly weak they actually are. The big question is how the heat of these occupations and protests will be kept up between now and March when the unions finally decide to get fully involved.

All in all the occupiers are very serious, resourceful and committed, and I wish them all the best, along with all the myriad other occupations, instant protests and actions.

And I should add that Aaron Porter is an absolute disgrace. It is in times like these that you see who is genuinely capable of empathy and strategy, and who is only concerned with their own well-trodden miserable career path. Scumbag.

My Christmas wish is that the students, the workers and the youth find their common ground and bring this zombie government down. Please Santa?

Megastructures?

I have recently been trying to move my thinking on from the book, which seems as far away now as it was before I wrote it, all of 8 or so months ago. If I can summarise the book, it's either: a bunch of essays that have mostly been superseded by stuff wot other people have been writing, or if you're being charitable; it's a critique of a certain standard view of modern architecture, a critique that does its work by going back to the very origins of the concept and then working forwards until it proves that everything is basically rubbish.

What's been occupying me now is the period around the time of the emergence of the post-modern project in architecture, the early to mid 70s, before the rise of the 'new right'. Specifically, I've been thinking that I need to look back at the megastructural project (see my paean to the space-frame, my look at the LOMEX, etc...), which it seems to me was curtailed by bottom-up critique, right-ward lurch and economic recession. In the book I discuss the 'Zoom' wave, Archigram and all that sort of thing, and I discuss how it ended up as corporate high-tech. I mean, you need only look at the Lloyds building to see both the future of corporate architecture; open, ultra-efficient floor plates, neoprene gaskets and full-height glazing, service voids above and below, etc etc... But of course at the same time it's the most surreal and extravagant building in all of Britain, hesitating at the threshold between brutalism and 'Zoom', with what seems now to be the seemingly inevitable descent into the fully glazed air conditioned office building.

And the link between Brutalism and high-tech is very important. Not only were Foster & Rogers taught by Paul Rudolph while at Yale, but one of the most interesting things about Archigram is to look at what they were doing in their early years - the 'bowelism' and the hyper-brutalism. Now although these kind of projects already betray the aestheticisation that basically spoils Archigram for me, the gee-whizz attitude of those who don't really think that things are so bad, y'know... I want to take them more seriously at this point just before they slide right off into whimsy. Where could this have led?

I'm considering putting together some kind of proposal regarding this research, although of course there's no money in it anymore, but basically the idea is something along the lines of a parallel history where the future didn't necessarily occur as predicted, but where it certainly wasn't rejected in the way that it actually was. As I've mused before - what if the Yom Kippur war hadn't happened and the oil crisis hadn't occurred? What if North Sea Oil had been nationalised? etc.etc. The resulting research would be part textual critique, but would also include the design of near-historic buildings from the hypothetical past.

I'm afraid at this stage it's going to have to take the form of an 'inspirational images' type post, I'm far too busy to actually do any of it justice right now, but you never know, maybe one day!

jus' sayin'...

Further to my Icon feature on BIG...

Ideas, Ideas, Ideas

"But before bringing these introductory remarks to a close, I beg those who really have philosophy at heart - and their number is but small - if they shall find themselves convinced by the considerations following as well by those above, to exert themselves to preserve the expression idea its original signification, and to take care that it be not lost among those other expressions by which all sorts of representations are loosely designated - that the interests of science may not thereby suffer. We are in no want of words to denominate adequately every mode of representation,, without the necessity of encroaching upon terms which are proper to others. The following is a graduated list of them. The genus is representation in general (representatio). Under it stands representation with consciousness (perceptio). A perception which relates solely to the subject as a modification of its state, is a sensation (sensatio), an objective perception is a cognition (cognitio). A cognition is either a an intuition or a conception (intuitus vel conceptus). The former has an immediate relation to the object and is singular and individual; the latter has but a mediate relation, by means of a characteristic mark which may be common to several things. A conception is either empirical or pure. A pure conception, in so far as it has its origin in the understanding alone, and is not the conception of a pure sensuous image, is called notio. A conception formed from notions, which transcends the possibility of experience, is called an idea, or a conception of reason. To one who has accustomed himself to these distinctions, it must be quite intolerable to hear the representation of the colour red called an idea. It ought not even to be called a notion or conception of understanding."

-Kant, Immanuel Critique of Pure Reason, New York, Prometheus Books, p.197

"Finally, the most shameful moment came when computer science, marketing, design, and advertising, all the disciplines of communication, seized hold of the word concept itself and said: "This is our concern, we are the creative ones, we are the ideas men! We are the friends of the concept, we put it in our computers."

-Deleuze & Guattari, What is philosophy?, New York, Columbia University Press, p.10