Productions

Definition

Productions, in Clay Odom's usage, are what design processes produce: artificial constructs — spatial effects, atmospheres, surfaces, and ephemera — as the primary, intended outcome of contemporary spatial practice, "as both processes and ongoing, generative outcomes." The term deliberately gathers landscape architecture's, theater's, and film's production-based generativity for spatial practices, and it answers a rephrased design question: where Buckminster Fuller asked "How much does your building weigh?", the production-oriented designer asks "What does your work produce?" Productions are defined against two failure modes: the pejorative reading of effects as "superficial" concerns (the unease Venturi voiced against "the precious intricacies of picturesqueness or expressionism" — answered by insisting that "it is what design processes produce that matters"), and the reduction of production to problem-solving (the system "simultaneously seeks multiple resolutions, rather than a singular condition defined as a 'solution'").

The concept has a phenomenological anchor and a formal signature. The anchor is Böhme's atmosphere — "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" — productions are that unattributable effect deliberately engineered. The signature: "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." Their lineage is long — "the religious and cultural constructions of the Greeks and Egyptians or the projections of political power of the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles… the atmospheres of proto-modern artists such as Whistler and Turner" — but their contemporary form is systematized: the installation, the generated effects, the emergent conditions, and human experience "combined into one." Productions give design "a tangible, if ephemeral, way of understanding design that allows us to make clear judgements about both process and products of design."

Key Thinkers

• Clay Odom — the concept's author and practitioner: productions as the POPs' outcome ("What does your work produce?"), demonstrated in studioMODO's Tesseract series (2018; the term first in his UT Austin research statement and suckerPUNCH's 2015 Tesseract text).
• Jeff Kipnis — the framework's source: "The Cunning of Cosmetics" (1997), the reconciliation of "rigorous planning and form production with surface and atmospheric effects" that Odom's chapter recapitulates (not yet paged — see log).
• Gernot Böhme — the atmospheric pole: "Atmosphere as the Fundamental Concept of a New Aesthetics" positioned (with Harman's "Tool Being") as the theory that "set the stage" for Productions; the indeterminate attribution of effects between object and subject.
• Graham Harman — the object-oriented pole: OOO ("no cryptic essences lying behind… only actants") as the second stage-setter; Jane Bennett's critique ("unfortunate to simply decouple the object from its productions") as the concept's ontological correction (not yet paged — see log).
• Buckminster Fuller — the question's source: "How much does your building weigh?" as the 1960s radicalism's ecological challenge to "the very processes of design that they had come to take for granted" (not yet paged — see log).
• Robert Venturi — the unease's canonical voice: "I do not like the incoherence or arbitrariness of incompetent architecture nor the precious intricacies of picturesqueness or expressionism" — the pejorative reading productions must answer.

Related Concepts

• production-oriented-practices — the practice genre that makes productions its fundamental agency; the six-point POP definition is the concept's operational side.
• atmosphere — the primary output: POPs' "fundamental agency to produce spatial effects and atmosphere"; the Böhme lineage.
• cunning-of-cosmetics — the effects-side of the object/effects dialectic; Kipnis's entanglement of form and surface effects.
• patterning — the method: "a diagrammatic approach that generates possibilities for relating and sequencing form, material, space, and effects."
• ephemeral-interior — the ephemeral as primary product rather than byproduct; the caution that the ephemeral is not without "material implications."
• emergence — "the emergent conditions" as one component of the produced system (caustic lighting effects; conditions that "begin to emerge").
• architectural-performance — the "expanded performance" the trajectory "from the production of effects through engagements with material, surface, finish, and form" engages.
• cultural-registers — Sterling's technoculture layering as the concept's media-historical frame.

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• Productions: spatial practices, processes, and effects (Odom 2018) — the concept's source: the opening effects-turn thesis; the Fuller rephrasing; the historic lineage (Greeks, Versailles, Whistler, Turner); "productions are edgeless, yet particular conditions which proliferate"; the multiple-resolutions thesis; the "tangible, if ephemeral" evaluative claim; and the positioning "in the breach" between Böhme's Atmospheres and Harman's object-oriented ontology.

Open Questions

• Are productions contingent or autonomous to the systems that produce them? (The chapter's own question, left open — the "rigorous and loose" answer holds both.)
• Is "wonder" — the condition that "supersede[s] constituencies of the system" — an aesthetic achievement or a commodity-form? How does the produced atmosphere relate to the spectacle's commodified ambiance and Baudrillard's calculated ATMOSPHERE (see atmosphere, design-atmosphere)?
• Odom's lineage (Versailles, Whistler, Turner) makes productions old; his frame (POPs, digital tools, installations) makes them new. Is "productions" a new practice genre or a new name for scenography's oldest ambition?
• If productions allow "clear judgements about both process and products of design," what is the criterion — and can it survive the admission that the directness "is still not completely objective – nor should it be"?