Productions: spatial practices, processes, and effects
(from The Interior Architecture Reader, edited by Gregory Marinic, 2018 Routledge)
Productions: spatial practices, processes, and effects
Clay Odon
For many speculative, interiors-focused design practices, traditional concepts of form generation, formal planning, and arrangement have become secondary considerations in their fundamental agency to produce spatial effects and atmosphere (Figure 29.1). How and when did questions of space and effect become important to contemporary design practices – not as a byproduct, but as a focus? Simply put, contemporary spatially oriented practices that work through iterative, distributed projects tend to generate interiorities that are not discrete, temporally frozen responses, but multivalent systems, ongoing spatial effects, and atmospheric productions. These practices (ranging from interior design, architecture, and installation art to hybrid art/interior architecture) challenge preconceived notions of the interior by their very fixation on the production of space and ephemera. Although disciplinary and transdisciplinary practice is an area of critical concern today, this investigation focuses on spatialities as broad conditions for consideration. Therefore, we will not make clear distinctions or draw clear disciplinary boundaries between these effects-oriented practices.
Exploring critically driven spatial practices, where generation of space and effects within, on, and between what are the increasingly unknowable forms of the urban, interior environments may be most readily engaged – productions as both processes and ongoing, generative outcomes become primary conditions for consideration. The notion of productions, however, also begins to circumscribe what could be seen as simultaneously fundamental and exploratory forms of contemporary cultural creation. Immediacy and subjectivity certainly begin to outline qualities generated through productive processes, but qualitative outcomes need not overwhelm a depth and rigor of approach.
The notion of “productions” as artificial constructs has certainly been a core aspect in the development of landscape architecture, theater, and film. These more generative, production-based processes yield a range of material and ephemeral conditions that offer aspirations for other spatial practices. Critical questions and uneasiness with productions as generated conditions, or, pejoratively, as “superficial” concerns, are outlined effectively in the first sentence of Robert Venturi’s manifesto, where he states, “I like complexity and contradiction in architecture. I do not like the incoherence or arbitrariness of incompetent architecture nor the precious intricacies of picturesqueness or expressionism.”1 There is validity in a critical engagement with questions of ephemerality, materiality, designed objects and environmental productions. To address such uneasiness, it is what design processes produce that matters.
Figure 29.1 Emergent lighting effect, called a caustic, generated by the diagram-driven collaboration between material and form deployed through operational methods within an existing context in the project Tesseract 3.0 by Clay Odom
Production-oriented practices
Sensuality has been known to overcome even the most rational of buildings. Architecture is the ultimate erotic act. Carry it to excess
and it will reveal both the traces of reason and the sensual experience of space. Simultaneously. (See Figure 29.2.)
Today, we see a proliferation of temporal, ephemeral, and exploratory projects generated by what we will call production-oriented practices, or POPs. The innovative and challenging projects generated by POPs emerge out of contemporary cultural conditions (a post-9/11, globalized, market-driven, urbanizing and interiorizing world), but also are results of a continuum of radical conceptual and theoretical projects produced in the 1960s (from Reyner Banham to Superstudio, for example) dealing with form, atmosphere, and technology. Archigram and Superstudio are still exciting when viewed through this lens, because the approach that they leveraged is incredibly similar and the potentials are pertinent to POPs. The broad potential of their work (as a reference entangling the spatial and formal with the rational and the contextual) are valid. “This was Archigram’s super-modernist aesthetic and its avant-garde ethic: to promote a world of perpetual becoming. Endless permutations of existing forms or extreme outcomes for established methods were to be discovered.” Projects produced by POPs in the last ten to fifteen years, as evidenced in the work of Olafur Eliasson and Anish Kapoor, tend to engage temporality and atmospheric ephemerality, as well as issues of object formation and surface articulation. Ultimately, a fundamental dialectic between the production of objects and production of effects sets the basic tension between preconceptions about theoretical and conceptually driven approaches, the actualities of making, and the capacities of design and making in tandem. The vacuum between these poles may be engaged as a space where speculative, critical practices may claim territory, and where systematic approaches to design from concept through actualization may be leveraged. To fully claim this elusive territory, the range of processes, and products of those processes, must be interrogated as being fundamental to production-oriented practices.
In his essay “Arguing for Elegance,” Patrik Schumacher inadvertently helps to position the work of practices such as POPs, stating, “innovation involves more than radical newness. Mutation is to be followed
by selection, recombination, and refinement before the avant-garde can release its results to mainstream reproduction.” Schumacher goes on to state:
At this juncture the protagonists involved typically bifurcate into two distinct groups with two quite different career trajectories: those who go mainstream together with the innovations they contributed to, and those who stay within the domain of the avant-garde to move on into further unknown territory.
As speculative, spatial practices that are not form-centric, POPs are built upon developing process-driven, systemized, and iterative relationships between material, technological, and spatial effects; they develop a new type of rigor. In becoming focused more on processes realized through patterning material, space, and sequence, this new practice becomes tuned to subjective conditions; the role of people and experience in design becomes primary. For POPs, and the processes that afford for their creation, critical engagement and iterative development are both creative and generative. Here, the system includes material technical components and the organization of these components: the installation, the generated effects, the emergent conditions, and the human experiences combined into one.
Situating productions
In writing about what could be called an entanglement of effects and form found in the work of seminal practice, Herzog and de Meuron’s (entanglements understood here as Venturian contradictions), Jeff Kipnis seeks to reconcile rigorous planning and form production with surface and atmospheric effects in what he described as “The Cunning of Cosmetics”. The very framework of this chapter, as well as its timing at the beginning of contemporary production-oriented practices, recapitulates the dialectical tension between what is traditionally the domain of design preoccupation (the object) with a growing focus on the manipulation of the surfaces of form and the production of effects. This shift seeks to make sense of effects and processes, while positioning them within the larger context of design and architecture. It is a critical question to the development of contemporary spatial practices as described above.
To accomplish this turn toward productions (of space, atmosphere, surface, and even contemporary investigations of glamour) design processes and design outcomes in the form of materials, codes, criteria, atmospheres, affects, and effects must be intertwined as Kipnis suggests. Buckminster Fuller, who many consider the father of the 1960s radicalism noted above, famously asked, “How much does your building weigh?” This exquisitely simple question forced architects and designers to critically question the very processes of design that they had come to take for granted. It also generated even more fundamental questions regarding the role that objects play beyond themselves in connection to broader ecologies. These questions forced designers to critically reconsider objects’ relationships to the world beyond including makers, designers, and materials, and even the markets that drove their creation. This question is still valid. For contemporary designers engaged in the world of spatial production, the question might be rephrased into, “What does your work produce?”
Describing the trajectory of the development of production-oriented practices, from planning to form to space to effect, is the
fundamental question that helps to define productions and to situate the work of POPs with regard to larger trends in spatial design.
In other words, technocultures do not abolish one another in clean or comprehensive ways. Instead, new capacities are layered onto older ones. The older technosocial order gradually loses its clarity, crumbles, and melts away under the accumulating weight of the new.
Some five years after Kipnis’s 1997 essay on “The Cunning of Cosmetics” and some thirty-seven years after the seminal work Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture was published (at the beginning of what Mario Carpo has recently described as the “second digital turn”, and probably the antecedent for POPs), Gregg Lynn mounted the exhibition Intricacy at the Institute of Contemporary Art at the University of Pennsylvania. In the exhibition catalogue, Lynn states, “the term intricacy is intended to move away from … understanding of the architectural detail as an isolated fetishized instance within what is an otherwise minimal framework.” As we move forward to today, we can begin to see that the issues are now moving through Lynn’s Intricacy of form and surface production into a new territory, where the production of space and spatial effects are the focus of the work. More directly, contemporary projects, such as Olafur Eliasson’s Feelings Are Facts or Tomas Saraceno’s On Space Time Foam, are beginning to leverage form and surface not only for their own intrinsic qualities, but also for the ephemeral effects and experiences that they have the capacity to produce. The escape velocity needed to generate this trajectory of design’s movement from objects to space was reached due to the expansion of digital tools and techniques, access to low-cost hardware, and – most importantly – the proliferation of installations as a typology of work where advanced spatial practices can be tested, evaluated, deployed, sampled, and redeployed.
Production precedents
Despite the use of the term as neodeterminist jargon today, performance in architecture is closer to theater and music than to science or engineering, as much if not more a question of elusive qualities than of measurable effects.11
Two works that can be understood as early manifestations of the “elusive qualities” of productions generated by POPs is perhaps most clearly seen with Diller-Scofidio’s Blur Building completed for the 2002 Swiss Expo and Anish Kapoor’s Cloud Gate completed for Chicago’s Millennium Park in 2004. Certainly, these conditions are also seen in the work of Christo, and more recently in artists/architects such as Olafur Eliasson, Numen/For Use, and Tomas Saraceno, to name a few. Considering the potential of effects, both generated by and entangled with other conditions through patterning processes, rather than selected and applied hierarchically, allows POPs to explore concepts from other fields related to the implications and productions of materials and surfaces. In Cloud Gate, Kapoor leverages form and material integration not as ends, but as means of producing new situations and effects within the city. This work is production-oriented because it extends geometric material methods of generating spatial and atmospheric effects from his previous work such as Marsayas, or even earlier student drawing studies, dealing with complex geometric transformations that “confound spatial perception.”12
Even if productions are fundamentally transient and ephemeral in many ways, their realities are what drives them within production-oriented practices. Projects such as the aforementioned Blur Building and Cloud Gate are diagrams for productions of ephemerality and experience. We can also begin to trace this desire for the production of effects within the historic interior. The religious and cultural constructions of the Greeks and Egyptians or the projections of political power of the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles offer examples. These may be seen in the atmospheres of proto-modern artists such as Whistler and Turner. In these examples, productions
are edgeless, yet particular conditions which proliferate. Ultimately, they are effects producing conditions that either contain edges and borders or generate edgeless, fluctuating territories. Today, contemporary art installations, scenography, and temporary interior interventions are of particular interest because they have become the most accessible territories for emerging methodologies to be tested. Rather than focusing on mediation and problem solving as the end goals of design, this work begins to generate a range of potential conditions.
In Graham Harman’s exposition on Bruno Latour, for example, he notes,
For Latour there are no cryptic essences lying behind… There are only actants of all possible and actants are fully expressed in each moment … it is true that new features of objects appear through the unfolding of successive events.13
Engaging in acts and processes of design that are both rigorous and loose in terms of contextual specificity allows for projects to exhibit both autonomous effects and contextual connectivity. This is a crucial understanding. For example, where a project is literally connected to an existing building or other contextually specific condition, the concept of connectivity is realized materially. Leveraging this connectivity allows for other moments of disconnection or autonomy from the existing to emerge. Within Tomas Saraceno’s On Space Time Foam, moments away from contextual connection are conditions where surface and spatial effects are maximized. When these emergent conditions are aligned more intentionally with material considerations, other types of effects may also begin to emerge. Furthermore, this work can be seen as one in a series of iterative projects completed across of range of sites and times using similar methods and materials.
Other examples from artists, such as James Turrell, and Donald Judd’s 100 Boxes in Mil Aluminum, exhibit how an approach to design may be fixated on the production of spatial, optical, and experiential effects by
means of entangled geometries and materials. In the work of process-based artists, such as John Cage, or contemporary artists engaging systems like Julie Mehretu, we see how rigorous processes organize material and forms, while allowing for a broad range of new conditions and effects to emerge. Examples of this thinking in speculative work of contemporary architects includes Nader Tehrani, Neri Oxman, and Jenny Sabin, and also contemporary scenographic projects by designers such as Robert Lepage. Their work, and the work of like-minded designers, deals with material and formal organizations, as well as a range of effects generated by material, formal sequencing in service of environmental and even ornamental effects.
Within POPs and their referents, spaces and atmospheres are driven by collaboration between form and surface that reflect and transmit light, while also creating moments and passages for people to move through or pause within experientially. Moving back to the example of Saraceno’s On Space Time Foam, form and material merge to generate places for people and the sense of weightlessness and visual effects of floating. One may make connections between how materials, spaces, and people are brought together to mediate between them with the outcome being a total environment. These productions are inherently spatial, affiliative, productive, and not directly tied to stylistic conceits, but rather as functions facilitated by diagrammatic, active entangling. This may allow designers to move fluidly between these processes and outcomes to “negotiate a field in which the actual and the virtual assume ever more complex configurations.” In this way, the work extends on what Gernot Bohme described as the basic understanding of the effect of atmosphere and how “we are not sure whether we should attribute [effects] to the objects or environments from which they proceed or to the subjects who experience them.” The totality of the system including individual visitors and interactive, informative components – whether simply a spatial sequence, spatial proximity to material, or active user-generated manipulation or manipulation via sensors – expands the system and intertwines constituencies into a coherent, if not completely self-aware, ecology.
As Jane Bennet proposes in a critical essay on the aesthetic philosophy of object-oriented ontology (also known as OOO) developed by Graham Harman, “it is unfortunate to simply decouple the object from its productions as it is to limit the role of subject and object as a dialectical condition, rather than a linked one.” Bennet’s critique reveals the flaw of the object/production dialectic position. The affiliative and productive potential of an active ecology of design processes and design productions allows for critical engagement with the world, rather than estrangement from it. This entanglement produces effects ranging from the programmatic (or proto-programmatic) to the aesthetic and material. The system simultaneously seeks multiple resolutions, rather than a singular condition defined as a “solution.” This allows for constant and ongoing actions of design to become fundamental as a holistic, proliferating set of systematized generative processes.
Operational, combinatory, and organizational logics of transformation embedded within patterning (such as repetition, scaling, rotation, overlapping, separating, joining, cutting, and pasting) become tested and explored as graphic, spatial, and programmatic organizing tools. As a transformational tool, patterning is a diagrammatic approach that generates possibilities for relating and sequencing form, material, space, and effects. Patterning has the ability to be manifested and explored through a range of techniques from parametric modeling to analogical installation. In this fluidity, it finds strength as a contemporary design method. Due to this fundamental diagrammatic state, it is a process untethered to a particular software or fabrication technique. In fact, this peculiar quality allows it to move with agility across technical modes of production. It is inherently digital, as we see in the following examples, and it may also be enacted through purely analogical means.
As Ben van Berkel has stated, “a diagrammatic practice pursues a proliferating, generating, and open instrumentalization,” and this type of practice generates fundamentally new conditions. Developing production-oriented design methodologies through iterative, diagrammatic, code-based processes, the potential of contemporary global connectivity and transcontextual explorations are being developed by POPs.
Words such as “ephemeral” or “phantasmagoric” are often used to describe the transitory or elusive effects manifested by these contemporary production-oriented practices (Figure 29.3). We must then ask a set of questions. Are these productions contingent or autonomous to the systems that produce them? By extension, how is form produced, articulated through material, color, and finish, and then leveraged to produce (trigger, create, sponsor, and stimulate) a range of effects of space, light, and atmospheres? Can effects such as atmosphere be used to manipulate and explore form, surface, and materiality? Too often, attention is focused on the ephemeral as having no material implications.
Tracing a trajectory from the production of effects through engagements with material, surface, finish, and form toward a production of form through the manipulation of effects engages a type of expanded performance. Through projects and practices entangling effect, form, and material, POPs are engaging issues associated with the interior and emerging strains of interior design and art considering the implications of objects and materials as generators of effects. In an interview with Charlie Rose describing his work on Milstein Hall at Cornell University, Rem Koolhaas stated, “performance is not function. What role does the building play and what kinds of scenes does it trigger? … What does it create? What does it sponsor? And what does it stimulate?” When Koolhaas’s typically provocative statement is interrogated further, we can move beyond limited notions of building to questions of making, and ultimately to questions which are focused on the nature of objects themselves, what they produce, and the processes that produce them. Koolhaas’s more recent works, such as The Prada Foundation in Milan, are rife with effects of material and form ranging from mirroring operations to optical mirrors. This work itself is a
testament to its ability to be classified as production-oriented. That the Office of Metropolitan Architecture is engaged in projects like this further clarifies that it is, indeed, an area that deserves the attention of designers, theoreticians, and historians.
Situating contemporary practices that exhibit tendencies for ongoing explorations of speculative design processes, production-oriented design practices may be positioned in the breach between contemporary theoretical references from the work of Gernot Bohme (Atmospheres) and Graham Harman (object-oriented ontology). The dialectical attitude toward the relationship between producer and produced, between the objective and subjective conditions of this work, may be useful in developing serial diagrams of potentiality, but ultimately the work must be positioned on an interactive, oscillating continuum. This environmentalism is the ultimate understanding that allows the work to be developed and leveraged; negotiating processes and products generates conditions that supersede constituencies of the system to produce wonder. One deeply interesting aspect of productions is that they give us a tangible, if ephemeral, way of understanding design that allows us to make clear judgements about both process and products of design. The directness is still not completely objective – nor should it be – but it does provide for a rigor of engagement that may be useful to both designers and those of us who live within designed conditions every day.
Ultimately, the pull between producer and produced sets the basic tension for contemporary spatial design practices. This tension is becoming a productive rather than problematic condition. It is generated in spaces between preconceptions about theoretical and conceptually driven
approaches, the actualities of making, and the productive capacities of design and making in tandem. Through an understanding of productions, however, the vacuum between these poles may be engaged as a space where speculative, critical practices (such as POPs) may claim territory. This is a condition where systematized approaches to design from concept through to actualization may be leveraged. Finally, to fully claim this elusive territory, POPs must interrogate the range processes and products of those processes as being fundamental to speculative interior practices. These productions are spatial, affiliative, generative, and not directly tied to formal stylistic conceits; rather they function through diagrammatic, active entangling of objects and effects through processes. This understanding may allow designers to move fluidly between processes and outcomes to “negotiate a field in which the actual and the virtual assume ever more complex configurations.”
Notes
1 Robert Venturi, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1966), p. 16. 2 POPs (production-oriented practices) is used here to describe spatial design practices, methods, processes, and pedagogies whose intention is to generate multiplicities of outcomes. POPs are those which extend through and between academic and professional practice. And here we begin to understand that this mode of practice becomes focused not on the creation of discreet solutions, but rather on leveraging dynamic processes to produce a maximum range of effects and affiliations. These productions become the conditions through which new projects are conceptualized and generated. Speculative practices may be seen as exhibiting the following: 1. POPs maximize productions (of effects of form, surface, space, experience, atmosphere, and programmatic potential, for example) by leveraging processes. 2. POPs are projective and open, meaning they are not focused primarily on the view that design is a discreet “problem-solving” exercise. 3. POPs are affiliative, meaning the processes and the productions seek and generate relationships. 4. Speculative practices are collaborative; they seek transdisciplinary connections and understand potentials of linking diverse ranges of connection. 5. POPs are extensive, meaning they seek conditions to test processes that may fall outside of traditional disciplinary
boundaries. 6. POPs ultimately may generate more normative professional practices or projects, but that is not their fundamental goal.
3 Bernard Tschumi, Architecture in/of Motion (Rotterdam: NAi Publishers, 1997), p. 107; Simon Sadler, Archigram: Architecture Without Architecture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005), p. 47.
4 Simon Sadler, Archigram: Architecture Without Architecture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005), p. 47.
5 Patrik Shumacher, “Arguing for Elegance”, in Elegance, ed. Helen Castle, Guest-ed. Ali Rahim and Hina Jamelle (Architectural Design/AD, 77, no. 1 [January/February 2007], p. 30).
6 Shumacher, Elegance, p. 36.
7 Jeffrey Kipnis, “The Cunning of Cosmetics”, in Herzog & de Meuron: El Croquis 84, ed. Richard C. Levene & Fernando Marquez Cecilia (Madrid: El Croquis, 1997).
8 I first make this assertion in the online article “Tesseract Series” suckerPUNCH Daily, 6 February 2015, www.suckerpunchdaily.com/2015/02/06/tesseract-series/#more-38440.
9 Bruce Sterling, Shaping Things (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press and Mediawork, 2005), p. 14.
10 Gregg Lynn, Intricacy (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania/Institute of Contemporary Art, 2003).
11 Jeff Kipnis, A Question of Qualities: Essays in Architecture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013), p. 2.
12 Donna De Salvo, “Making Marsayas”, in Marsayas, ed. Donna De Salvo and Cecil Balmond (Tate Publishing, 2002), pp. 10–12.
13 Graham Harman, The Prince of Networks: Bruno Latour and Metaphysics (Melbourne: Re-Press, 2009), p. 47.
14 Stan Allen, “Diagrams Matter”, in Diagram Work: Data Mechanics for a Topological Age, ed. Cynthia E. Davidson, with guest editors Ben Van Berkel and Caroline Bos (ANY 23, 1998), p. 17.
15 Gernot Bohme, “Atmosphere as the Fundamental Concept of the New Aesthetics”, Thesis11 36 (1993): 113.
16 Clay Odom, “Mobile Processes, Transient Productions: Nomadic Spatial Practices”, in Nomadic Interiors: Living and Inhabiting in an Age of Migrations, ed. Luca Basso, Marco Borsotti, Imma Forino, Pierluigi Savadeo, Jacopo Leveratto, and Tomaso Longo (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2015). This section of text was examined first in a paper presented at the Interiors Forum World Conference in Milan, Italy, in 2015.
17 Jane Bennett, “Systems and Things: A Response to Graham Harman and Timothy Morton”, New Literary History 43, no. 2 (Spring 2012): 226.
18 Clay Odom, “Patterning Entanglement”, Applied Geometries, International Journal of Interior Architecture + Spatial Design, v3, ed. Jonathon Anderson and Meg Jackson (Houston: ASD Publications, 2014), p. 12; note: this work is also expanded in an Interior Design seminar titled Patterning: Diagrams, Sequences and Systems taught at the University of Texas School of Architecture.
19 Ben van Berkel and Caroline Bos, “Interactive Instruments in Operation: Diagrams”, in Olafur Eliasson: Surroundings Surrounded, Essays on Space and Science, ed. Peter Weibel (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001), p. 84.
20 Rem Koolhaas, interview with Charlie Rose, 19 October 2011, www.archdaily.com/182642/rem-koolhaas-on-charlie-rose/
21 Gernot Bohme’s seminal work “Atmosphere as the Fundamental Concept of a New Aesthetics” and Graham Harman’s work “Tool Being” are positioned here as setting the stage for the dialectic between Atmospheres and Objects, where the concept of Productions and Production-Oriented Practices is developed.
22 Allen, Diagram Work, p. 17.
