Event-space: A performance model for spatial design

Author: Dorita Hannah Year: 2018 Source type: chapter (Ch. 35 of The Interior Architecture Reader, ed. Gregory Marinic, Routledge)

Raw file: raw/chapters/hannah-2018-event-space.md

Summary

Dorita Hannah — New Zealand architect, performance designer, and performance-studies scholar (PhD NYU Tisch, 2008) — gives the Marinic Reader its performance-model chapter: interior architecture and spatial design understood "as a kind of scenography" that structures experience "through open-ended spatial dramaturgies," positioned on a trajectory "between" architecture's claim to enduring structures and the dynamic flux of theatrical performance — "between the everyday and spectacle; between the seemingly eternal and the ephemeral." The chapter theorizes event-space as a performative model for spatial design: not what built space is, but what it does, where constructed space is itself an event and "an integral driver of experience." Its sections move from the hyphen's Derridean spacing (via Tschumi's Parc de la Villette and Austin's speech acts, through Kwinter's evental) through the three modalities of the event (historic, aesthetic, quotidian), to a post-catastrophe disciplinary audit (Bataille, Foucault, Lefebvre's "objectality" against Deleuze's "objectile") and a closing alignment of spatial design with Solà-Morales's "weak architecture" — transience, permeability, and anti-monumentality as resistance to the securitized, post-9/11 built environment. The chapter develops Hannah's earlier "Event-Space: Performance Space and Spatial Performativity" (in Performance Perspectives, Palgrave 2011), applying the event-space paradigm to interior design, and draws from her book Event-Space: Theatre Architecture and the Historical Avant-Garde (Routledge 2017).

Key Claims

Interior architecture as scenography: the discipline "could be approached as a kind of scenography that structures experience and interaction through open-ended spatial dramaturgies orchestrating material and immaterial elements as temporal, interconnected, and mutable phenomena." Scenography here expands beyond theatre design to "the visual, experiential, and spatial composition of an event" — how integrated elements "are presented (via the production) and received (by the audience)" (note 1). See scenography, spatial-dramaturgy.
The trajectory thesis (the chapter's disciplinary position): interior design exists "anywhere on a trajectory 'between' architecture's claim to enduring structures and the dynamic flux of theatrical performance. It exists between the everyday and spectacle; between the seemingly eternal and the ephemeral. No longer bound to a structural inner envelope, this interstitial realm – as both discourse and built environment – is sited both within and without architecture." See interior-design-vs-architecture, inside-outside-dialectic, ephemeral-interior.
"Spatial design" as the liquescent age's term: "Perhaps more germane in our increasingly liquescent age, where virtual and visceral worlds enfold and entangle each other, is the term 'spatial design,' which expands the interior domain beyond architecture to include external sites as well as those of the imagination – gaming, cinematic, object, urban, landscape, and event design." See event-space.
"Perform or else!": via performance theorist Jon McKenzie (drawing on Goffman and Foucault), "we 'perform or else!'" — the highly mediated world has become, per McKenzie, "a designed environment in which an array of global performances unfold." The chapter's political corollary: "the spatial designer is conventionally operating by kowtowing to politicians, institutions, lawmakers, and corporations – themselves designers of experience – and generally reinforcing, rather than challenging, prescribed performances."
Schechner's "broad spectrum approach": casting a performance lens on architecture requires "recognizing that, while not everything is a conscious performance, everything can be studied as performance, including aesthetic, strategic, and operational acts occurring beyond theater."
The co-creativity thesis: "While space disciplines us to perform through architecture as a spatial discipline, it is also dependent on the co-creativity of its inhabitants, who simultaneously construct their environments through perception, imagination, and sensory engagement via bodies, materials, technologies, and objects."
Reflexivity over objectification: invoking Lefebvre's claim that "space is socially produced and practiced, in turn producing social relationships," design must move "towards reflexivity in design, rather than objectification" — Rendell's critical spatial practice: "self-reflective modes of thought that seek to change the world, or at least the world in which the inequalities of market capitalism, as well as patriarchal and colonial (or postcolonial) interests, continue to dominate." See critical-architecture, praxis.
The event-space thesis: "a theory of event-space as a performative model, which recognizes that constructed space is itself an event and an integral driver of experience."
Not what it is but what it does: against building performance's "technical and diagnostic" regime (occupants rendered "users," modernism's utopian optimization), Leatherbarrow's warning that technical performance "will lead to nothing more than an uncritical affirmation of old style functionalist thinking – a kind of thinking that is both reductive and inadequate because it recognizes only what it can predict" (p. 7). "It is perhaps more productive to ask not what a building (as singular object) is, but what the fabricated environment (as a dynamic multiplicity) does… built environments no longer need be perceived in relation to singular works of architecture, but as multimodal spatial action itself – as spacing!" See architectural-performance.
The hyphen performs: event-space's hyphen "simultaneously separates and joins while enacting a break or interruption." Via Derrida's Of Grammatology: punctuation's "dynamic action" aligns with "spacing" that "speaks the articulation of space and time, the becoming-space of time and the becoming-time of space" (p. 68) — "a 'productive,' 'genetic,' 'practical' movement, an 'operation'" (Positions, p. 76). "The hyphen operates like a necessary membrane holding the fluid from the solid, the dynamic from the static, event from space. The pairing of these two terms, however, must not be understood as existing in opposition." See spacing, boundaries.
Derrida's architectural performativity: through the Parc de la Villette critique (1982–98), Derrida proposes "architectural performativity, whereby architecture, by 'taking place,' becomes 'the event of spacing'"; the follies as madnesses (les folies) "acting out dissociation"; Derrida thrown "into the space of architecture, rather than architectural space." See deconstruction, tschumi-bernard, derrida-jacques.
The illocutionary act of construction: Austin's speech acts (p. 8) — "I do," "I bet," "I name" — require "certain environments, actions, objects, and witnesses"; "these places and things, replete with cultural meaning, also perform rather than describe. As dramaturgical scenography – enacting multiple narratives – they are not mimetic (copies) but authentic elements inherent to the event." Hence: "within the illocutionary act of architectural construction something is being done through spacing as both the act of designing/building and embodied time-based inhabitation." See spatial-performativity.
Design as doing and thing done: Elin Diamond: performativity is "that risky and dangerous negotiation between a doing … and a thing done," providing "access to cultural meaning and critique" (p. 5). "As an aesthetic invention, 'design' is both a doing (creative act) and a thing done (cultural artifact). Spacing, like design, represents both noun and verb, thing and action."
Kwinter's evental: architecture must confront its character as "an illocutionary event, or at the very least as an element inseparable from and in constant interface with the world of force, will, action and history" (p. 14); the modernist revolutions shifted "the static spatialization of time to a more dynamic temporalization of space" (p. 13); "Architecture, no longer recognized as a fixed, eternal entity, is rendered performative and realigns itself as active becoming rather than passive being." Kwinter's "micro-architectures" (relations saturating the object) and "macro-architectures" (relations enveloping and exceeding it) derive "from a range of practices that are both private and political." See temporality, static-vs-dynamic-architecture.
Event-space belongs to Tschumi: "Event-space is a term attributed to contemporary architect Bernard Tschumi, whose mantra has long been 'there is no space without event'" (Hays: "the term 'event-space' belongs to Tschumi," note 27). The link between event and space "questions architecture's traditional association with continuity, coherence, and autonomy by focusing on time, action, and movement." See tschumi-bernard, event-space.
Space as volatile subject, not immobile object: "Considering performance space as 'evental' repositions built and imagined space as both embodied experience and evolving time-based event, where the constructed environment itself – whether permanent architecture or temporary installation – is no longer perceived as an immobile object but as a volatile spatial subject." Via Veltruský (1964): "even a lifeless object may be perceived as the performing subject, and a live human being may be perceived as an element completely without will" (p. 88) — extended to built space with Wigley ("in an important sense, space precedes action") plus "– as action."
The event between ordinary and epic: "As dynamic spatial action, event-space operates between the ordinary and the extraordinary, the subtle and the spectacular, the banal and the epic" — historic, aesthetic, and quotidian events "neither singular nor isolated, but manifold, fragmented, overlapping, and mobile, implicating all as participants in the plethora of life's daily performances." The quotidian event focuses on Tschumi's "spectacle of everyday life" (Architecture and Disjunction, p. 22). See everyday-vs-iconic-architecture, spectacle.
Grosz's saturation: occupancies described by Grosz as "saturated with spaces of projections, possibilities, and the new" (p. 78), "allowing the unrealized and unthought to emerge"; the virtual defined as resisting "an already preformed version of the real" in favor of what "promises something different to the actual that it produces" (p. 12). See heterogeneous-space.
The three modalities of the event: the historic event-space "occurs on the limits as a limit, through shock"; the aesthetic event-space "takes place between the opposing terms of reality and illusion, presence and absence, here and there, now and then, performer and spectator"; the quotidian is the accumulation of intersecting everyday performances. When the dramatic event leaves purpose-built venues (theaters, galleries, museums, nightclubs, restaurants), "the theatrical and representational" collapses "onto the banal and presentational of our lived reality" — event-space "needs to be considered through a range of modalities, scales, and temporalities: always as a dynamic organism that defies calculation." See truth-and-illusion, everyday-life.
Catastrophe as the event-space's limit test: "the slow performance of a seemingly eternal architectural object collides with the dynamic and destructive nature of the catastrophic event" — 9/11 (2001), the Indian Ocean tsunami (2004), Japan's megaquake (2011). "Architecture, like the banal quotidian event, is haunted by catastrophe as a moment of absolute failure and disruption from an exterior unrealized force, revealing civilization's impossible interior, dislocating representation, and presenting a moment where what seemed solid disintegrates."
The post-9/11 audit: "since the event of 9/11, our freedom of movement and expression has been purposefully curtailed – locally and globally – in the very name of 'freedom'"; architecture was "deliberately attacked in that decisive terrorist event for what it represented"; Snowden's 2013 disclosures revealed that 9/11 "sanctioned the infiltration of our personal spaces, both domestic and virtual."
Bataille's violent monuments: architectural monuments are "themselves violent phenomena that had to be eradicated because as static, dominant, and regulated forms they 'impose silence on the multitudes' and 'inspire socially acceptable behavior, and often a very real fear'" (p. 21).
Foucault and Lefebvre's spatial power: Foucault "aligned the history of powers with the history of spaces" and "highlighted architecture as a disciplining mechanism" (Power/Knowledge, p. 149); Lefebvre believed the "logic of space" conceals an authoritarian force through its "objectality," conditioning the competence and performance of the subject experiencing it as a resistant element "at times as implacably hard as a concrete wall" (The Production of Space, p. 57). See power-and-space, discipline.
The objectile: Deleuze's counter to objectality — the objectile, "a very modern concept of a technological object" (via Bernard Cache), no longer essentializing but active, the object rendered a "theater of matter" (p. 37); "Rather than framing and structuring space… it overflows its boundaries so as to annihilate the frame"; space, "saturated with spaces, becomes a continual unfolding, temporally defined and multiplied by an accelerated succession of actions" (de Certeau, p. 118). "Within the dilating layers of the architectural objectile, the interior can be experienced and understood as space-in-action." See objectile.
Eisenman's tardy embrace: Eisenman's "Unfolding Events" (1992) claims the new architectural object is an objectile involving "a temporal modulation that implies a continual variation of matter" (p. 424) — but "such a temporalization of space and form is not so new; it was played out by the historical and second-wave avant-garde who focused on the dynamic event, rather than the autonomous object. Eisenman's architecture of unfolding events announces a tardy embrace of the evental by architectural discourse." The Deleuzian ontology of becoming "challenges the invariable presence of modern architecture that has continued to rely on an ontology of stasis." See eisenman-peter, deleuze-gilles.
The objectile is not digital: against the effects-of-the-digital-age framing (Deleuze, Cache, Eisenman), "Marco de Carpo [sic, presumably Mario Carpo] points out that digital thought preceded digital technology (Architecture in the Age of Printing, p. 123). This chapter therefore maintains that the objectile, as active agent, is not dependent on digital media."
Massumi's filter thesis: "What is pertinent about an event-space is not its boundedness, but what elements it lets pass, according to what criteria, at what rate, and to what effect" (Parables for the Virtual, p. 79) — the event-space as selective membrane rather than container. See boundaries.
Weak architecture: Solà-Morales's weapon against "the brutal nature of disciplinary space": architecture utilizing "the fleeting, vestigial, and ephemeral" to construct a new monumentality "bound up with the lingering resonance of poetry after it has been heard, with the recollection of architecture after it has been seen" (p. 71). The diagnosis: architecture "foreclose[s] on chance by attempting to create itineraries of control"; the remedy admits "the aleatory and temporal." The maxim: "This is the strength of weakness; that strength which art and architecture can produce precisely when they adopt a posture that is not aggressive and dominating, but tangential and weak" (p. 71). Spatial design "can align itself to Solà-Morales's notion of weak architecture, which exerts its powers as both performative and resistant in defying attack through transience, permeability, and anti-monumentality. This could challenge architecture's conformist tendency in times of fear and crisis." See weak-architecture.

Connections

Concepts: event-space · scenography · spatial-performativity · spacing · spatial-dramaturgy · objectile · weak-architecture · architectural-performance · temporality · deconstruction · heterogeneous-space · homogeneous-space · spectacle · everyday-life · discipline · boundaries · inside-outside-dialectic · ephemeral-interior · interior-architecture · critical-architecture · practiced-place · multiple-interiorities · liminality · truth-and-illusion (debate)

Authors: Dorita Hannah · Gregory Marinic (ed.) · Bernard Tschumi · Jacques Derrida · Michel de Certeau · Henri Lefebvre · Gilles Deleuze · Peter Eisenman · Daniel Libeskind · Michel Foucault · cited without wiki pages: Jon McKenzie, Richard Schechner, Jane Rendell, David Leatherbarrow, J.L. Austin, Elin Diamond, Sanford Kwinter, Jiří Veltruský, Mark Wigley, Elizabeth Grosz, Gay McAuley, Georges Bataille, Brian Massumi, Ignasi de Solà-Morales, Antonin Artaud, Bernard Cache, K. Michael Hays (see log: PAGE NEEDED)

Debates: static-vs-dynamic-architecture · interior-design-vs-architecture · power-and-space · everyday-vs-iconic-architecture · truth-and-illusion

Related source notes: Productions (Odom 2018) — the sibling performance register (Kipnis, Koolhaas's "performance is not function"); Sensorial interior landscapes (Garófalo-Khan 2018) — the grotto's "event space" usage this chapter deepens into a full theory; Shape shifting (Taylor 2018) — the dynamic-interior paradigm the evental antecedes; Derrida for Architects (Coyne 2011) — the Derrida–Tschumi collaboration's other wiki treatment; The Future Is Hairy (Till & Wigglesworth 2001) — Till's architecture-depends line this chapter's weak architecture extends; Spatial Stories (de Certeau 1984/2006) — the practiced-place epigraph's source text; Deleuze and Space (Buchanan & Lambert 2005) — the Deleuzian spatial corpus.

Direct Quotes

"Interior architecture shapes, articulates, and details both space and experience… It could be approached as a kind of scenography that structures experience and interaction through open-ended spatial dramaturgies orchestrating material and immaterial elements as temporal, interconnected, and mutable phenomena." (n.p., opening paragraph)

"Discrete from – yet implicated 'within' – architecture, the design of interiors can be regarded as a discursive practice that falls anywhere on a trajectory 'between' architecture's claim to enduring structures and the dynamic flux of theatrical performance. It exists between the everyday and spectacle; between the seemingly eternal and the ephemeral. No longer bound to a structural inner envelope, this interstitial realm – as both discourse and built environment – is sited both within and without architecture." (n.p.)

"Perhaps more germane in our increasingly liquescent age, where virtual and visceral worlds enfold and entangle each other, is the term 'spatial design,' which expands the interior domain beyond architecture to include external sites as well as those of the imagination – gaming, cinematic, object, urban, landscape, and event design." (n.p.)

"While space disciplines us to perform through architecture as a spatial discipline, it is also dependent on the co-creativity of its inhabitants, who simultaneously construct their environments through perception, imagination, and sensory engagement via bodies, materials, technologies, and objects." (n.p.)

"[t]he continued dedication to a technical interpretation of performance will lead to nothing more than an uncritical affirmation of old style functionalist thinking – a kind of thinking that is both reductive and inadequate because it recognizes only what it can predict." (Leatherbarrow, quoted, p. 7)

"It is perhaps more productive to ask not what a building (as singular object) is, but what the fabricated environment (as a dynamic multiplicity) does. By folding performance into the mix, built environments no longer need be perceived in relation to singular works of architecture, but as multimodal spatial action itself – as spacing!" (n.p.)

"[spacing] 'speaks the articulation of space and time, the becoming-space of time and the becoming-time of space.'" (Derrida, Of Grammatology, quoted, p. 68)

"The hyphen operates like a necessary membrane holding the fluid from the solid, the dynamic from the static, event from space. The pairing of these two terms, however, must not be understood as existing in opposition. As an expressive interval, the simple dash adopts a performative gesture reflecting the creative and conflicting relationship between the fields of performance and architecture, forming an-other space for productive expression." (n.p.)

"So these places and things, replete with cultural meaning, also perform rather than describe. As dramaturgical scenography – enacting multiple narratives – they are not mimetic (copies) but authentic elements inherent to the event, suggesting how spaces and things do." (n.p.)

"If within the illocutionary act of speaking something is being done through the saying – which constitutes action itself, then within the illocutionary act of architectural construction something is being done through spacing as both the act of designing/building and embodied time-based inhabitation." (n.p.)

"Spacing, like design, represents both noun and verb, thing and action. Because action in space has a reciprocal relationship with space in action, our banal everyday environments can be perceived and utilized as continually fluctuating performances." (n.p.)

"Architecture, no longer recognized as a fixed, eternal entity, is rendered performative and realigns itself as active becoming rather than passive being." (n.p., on Kwinter)

"Event-space is a term attributed to contemporary architect Bernard Tschumi, whose mantra has long been 'there is no space without event.'" (n.p.)

"Considering performance space as 'evental' repositions built and imagined space as both embodied experience and evolving time-based event, where the constructed environment itself – whether permanent architecture or temporary installation – is no longer perceived as an immobile object but as a volatile spatial subject." (n.p.)

"As dynamic spatial action, event-space operates between the ordinary and the extraordinary, the subtle and the spectacular, the banal and the epic." (n.p.)

"These conditions are neither singular nor isolated, but manifold, fragmented, overlapping, and mobile, implicating all as participants in the plethora of life's daily performances. As a performative phenomenon, our daily event-spaces call into question both the materiality of the built world and the immateriality of the event, revealing the lived world as a space of potentiality." (n.p.)

"This is made particularly evident by spectacular moments when the slow performance of a seemingly eternal architectural object collides with the dynamic and destructive nature of the catastrophic event." (n.p.)

"Architecture, like the banal quotidian event, is haunted by catastrophe as a moment of absolute failure and disruption from an exterior unrealized force, revealing civilization's impossible interior, dislocating representation, and presenting a moment where what seemed solid disintegrates." (n.p.)

"It is important to recognize that architecture mutely incorporates power systems into the built environment – defining, regulating, and limiting our daily practices. This has become acutely evident since the event of 9/11, after which our freedom of movement and expression has been purposefully curtailed – locally and globally – in the very name of 'freedom.'" (n.p.)

"[architectural monuments as] static, dominant, and regulated forms… 'impose silence on the multitudes' and 'inspire socially acceptable behavior, and often a very real fear.'" (Bataille, quoted, p. 21)

"the 'logic of space' conceals an authoritarian force through its 'objectality,' conditioning the competence and performance of the subject experiencing it as a resistant element 'at times as implacably hard as a concrete wall.'" (Lefebvre, quoted, p. 57)

"Within the dilating layers of the architectural objectile, the interior can be experienced and understood as space-in-action." (n.p.)

"such a temporalization of space and form is not so new; it was played out by the historical and second-wave avant-garde who focused on the dynamic event, rather than the autonomous object. Eisenman's architecture of unfolding events announces a tardy embrace of the evental by architectural discourse." (n.p.)

"The Deleuzian ontology of becoming thereby challenges the invariable presence of modern architecture that has continued to rely on an ontology of stasis." (n.p.)

"'What is pertinent about an event-space is not its boundedness, but what elements it lets pass, according to what criteria, at what rate, and to what effect.'" (Massumi, quoted, p. 79)

"In order for architecture to be transformed into a dynamic and co-creative event, the aleatory and temporal, found in the theatrical event, must be admitted." (n.p.)

"'This is the strength of weakness; that strength which art and architecture can produce precisely when they adopt a posture that is not aggressive and dominating, but tangential and weak.'" (Solà-Morales, quoted, p. 71)

"Spatial design can align itself to Solà-Morales's notion of weak architecture, which exerts its powers as both performative and resistant in defying attack through transience, permeability, and anti-monumentality. This could challenge architecture's conformist tendency in times of fear and crisis." (n.p.)

Open Questions

Does the chapter's event-space absorb or annex the grotto's? The wiki's existing event-space registers (grotto exceptionality; urban microevent; spatial discreteness; exhibition program) are all kinds of event-spaces within Hannah's theory — but Hillier & Hanson's bounded "events" are precisely what Massumi's filter thesis displaces ("not its boundedness"). Is the bounded event a special case of the evental, or a different concept wearing the same word?
Can weak architecture be built at scale? Solà-Morales's strength-of-weakness is a posture for monuments (a "new type of monumentality"); Hannah extends it to spatial design as resistance in "times of fear and crisis." What does a weak interior look like as a program (housing, workplace, retail) rather than an installation or manifesto?
Is "perform or else!" a description or an injunction designers can act on? If the spatial designer conventionally "kowtows" to experience-designers of power (politicians, institutions, corporations), what would not reinforcing "prescribed performances" look like in a commissioned interior — and does Rendell's critical spatial practice supply the missing ethics?
The catastrophe asymmetry: architecture is "haunted by catastrophe" — 9/11 was an attack "for what it represented." Does event-space theory aestheticize disaster (the event as spectacle) or does its post-catastrophe audit (Bataille, Foucault, Lefebvre) constitute a genuine political test?
What becomes of the "user"? Leatherbarrow's critique targets the technical-performance regime that renders occupants "users"; Hannah's co-creativity thesis restores inhabitant-performers. Is the interior discipline's client therefore a performer, and what does commissioning, briefing, and programming look like when the brief is a dramaturgy?
The chapter cites Kwinter's avant-garde corrective to Eisenman ("a tardy embrace") — where in the wiki's clusters (Russian avant-garde, constructivism) does the evental's earlier architectural life live, and does the objectile's independence from digital media ("not dependent on digital media") separate the evental cluster from the wiki's digital one?