Architecture is Always in the Middle

Author: Tim Gough (Kingston University)
Year: 2015 (Footprint 17, "The 'Bread & Butter' of Architecture")
Source type: article
Raw file: raw/articles/gough_2015-architecture-is-always-in-the-middle.md

Summary

Gough answers Summerson's "bread-and-butter" essay and its condescension toward the ordinary work of the profession by proposing a flat, immanent ontology of architecture drawn from Spinoza and Deleuze-Guattari. Against the "habit of the split" (mind/body, poetry/pragmatics, high/low) that runs from Aristotle's Physics through Pevsner's cathedral/bike-shed distinction, bread-and-butter architecture "starts from the middle": it is embedded in a series of machines or assemblages (legal, contractual, personal, social, political) that are always already at work. Architecture, on this account, is not the physical building plus a "supplement" (poetry, authorship) but a machinic assemblage of people and place — a haecceity — whose poetry inheres in it from the outset. Recalling Le Corbusier's "machine-à-habiter" ("the house is a machine for living," not "for living in") and Deleuze's clinician/theorist of the "new table of disorders," Gough aims to dissolve the very question of a difference between bread-and-butter and high architecture.

Key Claims

• Starting in the middle: bread-and-butter architecture grows not like a tree from a seed but "like a little piece of couch grass root," operating within multiple machines on different registers; "it starts from the middle and it ends in the middle — it does not come to a conclusion, it does not come to a climax but remains on a plateau."
• No autonomy, no autopoiesis: against Luhmann (via Schumacher's Autopoiesis of Architecture), the machines and interplay of activity "never go so far as to separate themselves into autonomous realms," even provisionally. Cartesianism — the split of mind from body/thought from extension — is "made concrete" by being accepted and acted upon.
• Spinoza's flat ontology: instead of Descartes, "Body and mind are one and the same thing, conceived now under the attribute of Thought, now under the attribute of Extension." A "connection" implies a prior separation that, for Spinoza, does not exist: "it makes no sense ... to claim that the mind controls the body, because how can something be in control of the same thing — the very thing it is itself?"
• The habit of the split in theory: from Aristotle's beginning of the Physics (to understand is to analyse, to cut into parts) through Alberti and Vitruvius, architectural theory has analysed/divided its object; Summerson's generosity toward the "bread-and-butter" remains de haut en bas, sharing the structure that makes Lincoln Cathedral architecture and the bicycle shed mere building (Pevsner).
• Theory as symptomatology: one task of architectural theory is "to survey the existing symptomatology of the discipline and propose a new table of disorders"; such thought "will not be content with splitting architecture into parts but must necessarily be integrative — in other words must have more the nature of a novel or a work of art than the tone of a treatise" (Deleuze's clinician).
• Machine / machinic assemblage: 'machine' is positive (Le Corbusier + Deleuze): "not a mechanical device where the movement of certain parts is determined by other parts; it is more like an ecology"; with Deleuze & Parnet, "the machine is a 'proximity' grouping between independent and heterogeneous terms" — the feudal assemblage of stirrup, horse and knight, the wasp-orchid. "every assemblage is collective."
• Alloplastic stratum: architectural readings of Deleuze too often avoid the alloplastic stratum (the part of reality relating to us), yielding "an overly physicalist, materialist and formal use of this philosophy"; tools and technology are never primary or determinative because assemblages are intrinsically social.
• Anti-nihilism of an everyday ontology: following Deleuze on Nietzsche, nihilism = the "depreciation of our current existence"; an ontology of everyday architecture is anti-nihilistic in that it takes as its positive possibility "the machines of the everyday," and would destroy the desire to "even pose the question about the difference between bread-and-butter architecture and high architecture."
• Architecture as haecceity: following Deleuze we must rethink the "individual": the individual is an assemblage, "an assemblage made up of what we so often ... wish to keep separate" (place-people-event, read all at once); a haecceity is "not 'a decor or backdrop that situates subjects', but 'it is the entire assemblage in its individuated aggregate'" (Hopkins' Oxford). "We are the haecceity that occurs, the affect that occurs within the architectural machinic assemblages of which we are a part."
• Plane of consistency vs. plane of organisation: the plane of organisation (form, subject, a supplementary transcendent dimension) is an affect-effect of the primary plane of consistency (haecceities, intensities, relations of movement and rest); a "line of flight" returns to the plane of consistency and is "primary." Summerson's "competence and quality" is the plane of organisation — necessary and non-evaluated, not the whole.
• Evil as well as poetry: the assemblage can also discipline and control (the concentration camp, Bentham's Panopticon via Foucault); Deleuze & Guattari rework Foucault's dispositif into "assemblages not of power but of desire" with primary lines of flight. A flat ontology does not guarantee benign architecture.
• Architecture is always in the middle: "no tabula rasa," the architect is "always caught up in the assemblages of the office, of the discipline"; architecture "does not reach its climax with a final composition ... but rather in a continuation of the same movement and the same assemblage, projected into an open future of a people to come — those who will listen to it" (cf. the Schumann-assemblage, where the ontology of music links composition and reception).

Connections

Concepts: Assemblage · Flat Ontology · Everyday Architecture · Authorship
Authors: Tim Gough · Gilles Deleuze · John Summerson
Debates: Genius vs. Bureaucracy · Critical vs. Projective
Related source notes: Flows of Capitalism, Flows of Architecture · Bread & Butter and Architecture · The 'Bread & Butter' of Architecture · Deleuze and Space

Direct Quotes

"Bread-and-butter architecture starts from the middle. It starts from where we already are, from the machinery within which we are already embedded."

"Body and mind are one and the same thing, conceived now under the attribute of Thought, now under the attribute of Extension." (Spinoza, as quoted)

"Machine, machinism, 'machinic': this does not mean either mechanical or organic." (Deleuze & Parnet, as quoted)

"Nihilism deprecates our life in the name of a beyond, in the name of a transcendent or ideal realm."

"We are the haecceity that occurs, the affect that occurs within the architectural machinic assemblages of which we are a part."

Open Questions

• Can the Deleuzo-Guattarian ontology of the assemblage resist the same charge Gough levels at others — that it collapses into the "overly physicalist, materialist and formal" "architectural Deleuzism" Spencer critiques — by retaining the alloplastic, social stratum?
• If a flat ontology refuses the high/low split, does Gough's move to dissolve the very distinction between bread-and-butter and high architecture leave any critical-normative ground for judging "the most evil architecture" he himself invokes (concentration camp, panopticon)?