Flat Ontology

Definition

A flat ontology is an ontological position that refuses hierarchical distinctions between kinds of entities or levels of reality — here, specifically in architectural production, the refusal of the "split ontology" that separates the "high" (the masterwork, the genius, the authored object) from the "low" (the banal, the everyday, the anonymous). In the architectural-historiographical usage drawn from Agarez & Mota (and the phrase "flat ontology" has a broader philosophical lineage in DeLanda/Deleuze-Guattari), it means treating all modes of architectural production as equally real and worthy of study.

Key Thinkers

• Ricardo Agarez & Nelson Mota — deploy "flat ontology" against the "prejudice of the split" (Tim Gough) in studying bread-and-butter architecture.
• Dell Upton — argues for relinquishing the Architecture/architecture (high/low) hierarchy: "There can be no Architecture, only architecture."
• Manfredo Tafuri — his refusal to hierarchize between operative-critical and other histories has affinities with a non-hierarchical treatment of production (via Wallenstein).
• Graham Harman — the philosophical lineage's OOO wing, entering the wiki via Clay Odom's chapter: "For Latour there are no cryptic essences lying behind… There are only actants of all possible and actants are fully expressed in each moment" — a flat ontology of objects rather than of historiographic dignity; Jane Bennett's linked subject–object correction ("unfortunate to simply decouple the object from its productions") supplies its design-deployed form (via Odom 2018; not yet paged — see log). Note the two usages differ: Agarez & Mota/Upton flatten the value hierarchy of architectural production; Harman's OOO flattens reality's hierarchy of kinds.

Related Concepts

• Everyday Architecture — the object a flat ontology makes visible.
• Authorship — a flat ontology dissolves the privilege of the authored masterwork.
• Ideology — the high/low split is treated as ideological.

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• Architecture is Always in the Middle (Gough 2015) — the fullest statement of the "prejudice of the split" and its Spinozist, flat-ontological refusal.
• The 'Bread & Butter' of Architecture
• Architecture, Critique, Ideology
• Architecture in Everyday Life (Upton 2002) — relinquishing the Architecture/architecture split.
• What the Files Reveal: Making Everyday Architecture Talk
• Making New Connections in Vernacular Architecture
• Between Traditionalism and Modernism: Approaches to a Vernacular Architecture
• Buildings Without Architects: A Global Guide to Everyday Architecture
• A Discourse on Method: The Segal System
• Productions: spatial practices, processes, and effects (Odom 2018) — the term's OOO deployment in design theory: Harman's object-oriented ontology ("no cryptic essences lying behind… only actants") positioned — against Böhme's atmospheres — as one of the two theoretical poles of production-oriented practices, with Bennett's correction ("unfortunate to simply decouple the object from its productions") converting the flat ontology into a design programme: "a linked" subject–object condition whose "active ecology of design processes and design productions allows for critical engagement with the world." A second, distinct sense of flatness: not the high/low refusal of the historiographic usage, but the refusal of essences behind actants — flatness as design's operating ontology. See thing-ontology, nonhumans.
• source-notes/broome-1986-essential-method-segal
• source-notes/rudofsky-1964-architecture-without-architects
• source-notes/swedish-association-of-architects-2010-architecture-for-everyday-life

Open Questions

• Is a "flat ontology" of production compatible with retaining a critical (normative) distinction between better and worse architecture, or does it collapse into mere description?

Theme

• Vernacular Architecture — the field a flat ontology makes visible.