Productions: spatial practices, processes, and effects

Author: Clay Odom Year: 2018 Source type: chapter (Ch. 29 of The Interior Architecture Reader, ed. Gregory Marinic, Routledge)

Raw file: raw/chapters/odom-2018-productions-spatial-practices.md

Summary

Clay Odom — Austin-based interior designer, StudioMODO founder, and Associate Professor in the Interior Design Program at the University of Texas at Austin — theorizes the shift by which speculative, interiors-focused practices stopped treating form generation, planning, and arrangement as their primary agency and turned instead to the production of "spatial effects and atmosphere." He names these practices production-oriented practices (POPs) — a category deliberately spanning "interior design, architecture, and installation art to hybrid art/interior architecture" without drawing disciplinary boundaries — and productions: artificial constructs that are simultaneously processes and "ongoing, generative outcomes." The chapter traces a trajectory from planning to form to space to effect, genealogically from Venturi's 1966 unease through the 1960s radical continuum (Banham, Archigram, Superstudio), Kipnis's "Cunning of Cosmetics" (1997), Greg Lynn's Intricacy (2003), and the "second digital turn," to contemporary installation works (Blur Building, Cloud Gate, On Space Time Foam, Feelings Are Facts). Odom's rephrasing of Buckminster Fuller's "How much does your building weigh?" as "What does your work produce?" is the chapter's thesis-in-miniature, and his six-point definition of POPs (note 2) is the closest thing the Reader contains to a manifesto of contemporary interiors practice.

Key Claims

The effects-turn as the contemporary practice condition: "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" — space and effect became a focus, "not as a byproduct, but as a focus." See productions, atmosphere.
Interiorities produced, not frozen: POPs "tend to generate interiorities that are not discrete, temporally frozen responses, but multivalent systems, ongoing spatial effects, and atmospheric productions" — directly parallel to Massey's frozen-time critique (see interiority, plurality-of-befores-and-afters, static-vs-dynamic-architecture).
The discipline of no boundaries: the practices span "interior design, architecture, and installation art to hybrid art/interior architecture," and the chapter "will not make clear distinctions or draw clear disciplinary boundaries between these effects-oriented practices" — spatiality, not disciplinarity, is the frame. See interdisciplinarity, interior-design-vs-architecture Position AC.
POPs defined (note 2, the chapter's most systematic passage): POPs are spatial design practices, methods, processes, and pedagogies whose intention is to generate multiplicities of outcomes, extending "through and between academic and professional practice": (1) POPs maximize productions (of effects of form, surface, space, experience, atmosphere, and programmatic potential) by leveraging processes; (2) POPs are projective and open — not focused on design as a discrete "problem-solving" exercise; (3) POPs are affiliative — processes and productions seek and generate relationships; (4) POPs are collaborative, seeking transdisciplinary connections; (5) POPs are extensive, testing processes outside traditional disciplinary boundaries; (6) POPs may generate normative practices or projects, "but that is not their fundamental goal." See production-oriented-practices, critical-vs-projective.
The genealogy: POPs emerge from "a post-9/11, globalized, market-driven, urbanizing and interiorizing world" and from "a continuum of radical conceptual and theoretical projects produced in the 1960s (from Reyner Banham to Superstudio… dealing with form, atmosphere, and technology)" — with Archigram's "super-modernist aesthetic and its avant-garde ethic: to promote a world of perpetual becoming" (Sadler, quoted) still pertinent. Superstudio's potentials are "incredibly similar" to POPs' approach.
The master dialectic: "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." See cunning-of-cosmetics.
Kipnis's framework: Jeff Kipnis's "The Cunning of Cosmetics" (1997, on Herzog & de Meuron) supplies the chapter's framing — "an entanglement of effects and form" (understood "as Venturian contradictions") that "seeks to reconcile rigorous planning and form production with surface and atmospheric effects"; the chapter 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."
The rephrased question: Fuller's "How much does your building weigh?" "forced architects and designers to critically question the very processes of design that they had come to take for granted" and generated questions about objects' relations to "broader ecologies… including makers, designers, and materials, and even the markets that drove their creation." For contemporary spatial production, "the question might be rephrased into, 'What does your work produce?'" — the fundamental question that defines productions and situates POPs.
The trajectory: "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."
Technoculture layering (Sterling, quoted): "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." See cultural-registers — independent corroboration of the register-succession model.
The genealogy of intricacy: between Venturi's Complexity and Contradiction (1966, whose first sentence voices the uneasiness with productions as "superficial" — "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") and Kipnis's cosmetics essay, Greg Lynn mounted Intricacy (ICA, University of Pennsylvania, 2003, at the start of what Mario Carpo calls the "second digital turn"): "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." Contemporary work moves "through Lynn's Intricacy of form and surface production into a new territory, where the production of space and spatial effects are the focus."
The escape velocity thesis: "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." See installation, digital-architecture.
Precedents: Diller-Scofidio's Blur Building (2002 Swiss Expo) and Anish Kapoor's Cloud Gate (2004) as "early manifestations of the 'elusive qualities'" of POP productions; also Christo, Eliasson, Numen/For Use, Saraceno. "In Cloud Gate, Kapoor leverages form and material integration not as ends, but as means of producing new situations and effects within the city" — production-oriented because it extends geometric methods from earlier work (Marsayas, student drawings "confound[ing] spatial perception").
The historic lineage of productions: "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." The definition: "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."
The installation as testing ground: "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." See ephemeral-interior, installation.
Harman on Latour (quoted): "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." See actor-network-theory, nonhumans, thing-ontology.
Rigor and looseness: "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." In Saraceno's On Space Time Foam, "moments away from contextual connection are conditions where surface and spatial effects are maximized"; the work is "one in a series of iterative projects completed across of range of sites and times using similar methods and materials."
The process-art lineage: Turrell, Judd's 100 Boxes in Mill Aluminum (spatial, optical, experiential effects "by means of entangled geometries and materials"); Cage and Mehretu ("rigorous processes organize material and forms, while allowing for a broad range of new conditions and effects to emerge"); Tehrani, Oxman, Sabin, and scenographer Robert Lepage as architects/designers of "material and formal organizations… in service of environmental and even ornamental effects."
Böhme's atmosphere (quoted): effects and atmosphere rest on "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.'" See atmosphere.
The system as ecology: "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." See systems-theory, ecology, interactive-architecture.
Bennett's critique (quoted): against "simply decoupl[ing] the object from its productions" and against limiting "the role of subject and object as a dialectical condition, rather than a linked one" — Bennett'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."
Multiple resolutions, not solutions: "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." See patterning.
Patterning defined: "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." Its strength is software-agnosticism: "Due to this fundamental diagrammatic state, it is a process untethered to a particular software or fabrication technique… It is inherently digital… and it may also be enacted through purely analogical means." See patterning, diagrammatic-practice.
Diagrammatic practice (van Berkel, quoted): "a diagrammatic practice pursues a proliferating, generating, and open instrumentalization" — generating "fundamentally new conditions" through "iterative, diagrammatic, code-based processes." See diagrammatic-practice.
The epigraph trio: the chapter is framed by block quotations — Tschumi ("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."), Kipnis ("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"), and Sterling (technoculture layering).
Performance not function (Koolhaas, quoted): "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?" — interrogated "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." OMA's Prada Foundation ("mirroring operations to optical mirrors") is classified as production-oriented. See architectural-performance.
Positioned in the breach: "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)" — note 21 names Böhme's "Atmosphere as the Fundamental Concept of a New Aesthetics" and Harman's "Tool Being" as setting the stage for "the dialectic between Atmospheres and Objects, where the concept of Productions and Production-Oriented Practices is developed." See atmosphere, thing-ontology, flat-ontology.
Productive tension: "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." Negotiating processes and products "generates conditions that supersede constituencies of the system to produce wonder."
The evaluative claim: productions give "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."
The materiality caution: "Words such as 'ephemeral' or 'phantasmagoric' are often used to describe the transitory or elusive effects manifested by these contemporary production-oriented practices… Too often, attention is focused on the ephemeral as having no material implications." See ephemeral-interior, phantasmagoria.
Self-citation: the chapter builds on Odom's own "Tesseract Series" (suckerPUNCH Daily, 6 Feb 2015 — where the Fuller rephrasing first appeared), "Mobile Processes, Transient Productions: Nomadic Spatial Practices" (Nomadic Interiors, 2015, first presented at the Interiors Forum World Conference, Milan), and "Patterning Entanglement" (ii Vol. 3, 2014, expanded into the UT seminar Patterning: Diagrams, Sequences and Systems).

Connections

Concepts: productions · production-oriented-practices · patterning · cunning-of-cosmetics · diagrammatic-practice · installation · architectural-performance · atmosphere · interiority · interior-architecture · ephemeral-interior · emergence · actor-network-theory · thing-ontology · nonhumans · systems-theory · ecology · cultural-registers · multiple-interiorities · interdisciplinarity · hybrids · digital-architecture · interactive-architecture · parametricism · phantasmagoria · architectural-ornament

Authors: odom-clay (author) · marinic-gregory (Reader editor) · cited in the text: Jeff Kipnis, Graham Harman, Jane Bennett, Gernot Böhme (bohme-gernot), Bruno Latour (latour-bruno), Patrik Schumacher (schumacher-patrik-rogner-christian), Robert Venturi (venturi-robert), Rem Koolhaas (koolhaas-rem), Bernard Tschumi (tschumi-bernard), Reyner Banham (banham-reyner), Buckminster Fuller, Greg Lynn, Mario Carpo, Bruce Sterling, Simon Sadler, Ben van Berkel, Stan Allen, DeLanda-adjacent OOO

Debates: interior-design-vs-architecture (Position AC — the boundary-refusing production register) · critical-vs-projective (POPs as projective and open, avant-garde per Schumacher's bifurcation) · ornament-vs-purity (cosmetics/glamour as effects-ornament) · static-vs-dynamic-architecture (ongoing productions vs temporally frozen responses) · interior-design-vs-architecture and ornament-vs-purity shared frivolity axis

Related source notes: Jacobus — Toward the immaterial interior — the Reader's neighbouring chapters on the contemporary interior: Jacobus's media-history register meets Odom's effects register at Sterling's technoculture layering and the digital tools that gave the trajectory "escape velocity"; Gattegno & Johnson — From ambient environments to sentient spaces — two installation-based practice chapters: gradients of atmosphere and sentient surfaces as POPs' cousin lineage (both quote Eliasson's milieu); Manack — Fabricating interiority — interiority as fabrication vs. interiority as produced effect ("embodied spatial effects" vs. "ongoing spatial effects"); Olsen — On technological limits — the installation as low-risk test-bed named by both chapters; Carraher — Technologies — Stan Allen's digital phases via Carraher, diagrammatic practice via Odom; Taylor — Shape shifting — the responsive environment vs. the production-oriented practice: actuated surfaces vs. systemized effect-production; Massey — Time travel — the ephemeral as interruption (Massey) vs. the ephemeral as primary product (Odom); Meninato — Spatial seductions — two installation-art registers of the Reader: reassembling (Meninato) vs. effect-production (Odom).

Direct Quotes

"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."

"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."

"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." (Bernard Tschumi, Architecture in/of Motion, p. 107, quoted)

"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." (Robert Venturi, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, p. 16, quoted)

"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." (Simon Sadler, Archigram, p. 47, quoted)

"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." (Patrik Schumacher, "Arguing for Elegance," p. 30, quoted)

"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." (Schumacher, p. 36, quoted)

"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."

"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."

"How much does your building weigh?" (Buckminster Fuller, quoted) → "What does your work produce?" (Odom's rephrasing)

"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." (Bruce Sterling, Shaping Things, p. 14, quoted)

"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." (Gregg Lynn, Intricacy, 2003, quoted)

"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."

"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." (Jeff Kipnis, A Question of Qualities, p. 2, quoted)

"In Cloud Gate, Kapoor leverages form and material integration not as ends, but as means of producing new situations and effects within the city."

"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."

"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."

"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." (Graham Harman, The Prince of Networks, p. 47, quoted)

"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."

"In Tomas Saraceno's On Space Time Foam, moments away from contextual connection are conditions where surface and spatial effects are maximized."

"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."

"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." (Gernot Böhme, "Atmosphere as the Fundamental Concept of the New Aesthetics," p. 113, quoted)

"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." (Jane Bennett, "Systems and Things," p. 226, quoted)

"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."

"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."

"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."

"Due to this fundamental diagrammatic state, it is a process untethered to a particular software or fabrication technique… It is inherently digital, as we see in the following examples, and it may also be enacted through purely analogical means."

"a diagrammatic practice pursues a proliferating, generating, and open instrumentalization." (Ben van Berkel, quoted)

"Words such as 'ephemeral' or 'phantasmagoric' are often used to describe the transitory or elusive effects manifested by these contemporary production-oriented practices… Too often, attention is focused on the ephemeral as having no material implications."

"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?" (Rem Koolhaas, interview with Charlie Rose, 2011, quoted)

"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."

"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."

"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."

"negotiate a field in which the actual and the virtual assume ever more complex configurations." (Stan Allen, "Diagrams Matter," p. 17, quoted)

Open Questions

The chapter's own question is left open: are productions "contingent or autonomous to the systems that produce them?" Odom's answer — projects exhibit "both autonomous effects and contextual connectivity" — names the tension without resolving it: can a production be designed and emergent at once?
Is the six-point POP definition a description of an existing practice genre or a manifesto for one? Its claims ("maximize productions," "affiliative," "projective") are evaluative ideals — what practice would fail the test, and is POP therefore unfalsifiable?
POPs emerge from "market-driven" conditions and borrow glamour (the turn "toward… even contemporary investigations of glamour"), yet claim criticality. Does effects-production evade the spectacle critique (spectacle) or simply re-enact it — is "wonder" an aesthetic achievement or a commodity-form?
Böhme's indeterminate attribution ("not… whether we should attribute [effects] to the objects… or to the subjects who experience them") is the philosophical ground of the atmosphere concept — but Odom's "What does your work produce?" presupposes the designer can produce it. Can a design method claim to produce what phenomenology says cannot be attributed to either pole?
The chapter spans "interior design, architecture, and installation art" without boundaries — but if POPs have no disciplinary edges, what makes a production an interior production at all, and does the Reader's framing (interior architecture) smuggle the boundary back in?
Sterling's layering ("new capacities are layered onto older ones") contradicts Jacobus's sharper register-succession (book displacing building; see cultural-registers). Which model of technocultural change does the wiki's media-history cluster hold — displacement or accumulation?
Odom's own practice (studioMODO's Tesseract series) is the chapter's only built instance of POP. Can the concept generalize beyond one practitioner-theorist's installations — and what would a POP production look like in normative professional practice (note 2: POPs "may generate more normative professional practices… but that is not their fundamental goal")?