MILLIØNS — New Massings for New MassesCollectivity After Orthography MIT Keller Gallery & MIT ArchitectureOn View 05/15 — 08/31Opening Reception, 05/15 Thursday, 6:30pm

New Massings for New Masses Collectivity After Orthography

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!ere once was an architectural dream called Housing, which demanded from any architect who dared wander into its dream-shadow a complete rejection of existing culture. Housing was, during its early and most radical period, the "rst legitimate architectural counterculture. It was also a possible path towards career suicide. Housing is no longer possible—in part because all of the historical and socio-political conditions that made it a sensible concept have been swept away: Socialism and Liberalism have given way to Neoliberalism; the State has been swallowed by the Market; sociality has dissolved into interactivity; the city has been erased by urbanism; etc. !is much we know.

More importantly, however, for our pur-poses: the architectural spirit of experimen-tation that motivated Housing has ceased to exist because the technical-representational surface from which it emerged—the or-thographic architectural drawing—has disappeared. Architecture has not yet discovered ways of experimenting with collective forms of life within its new technical regimes.

We expend our energy pushing things across surfaces. !ose surfaces constitute a kind of technical substrate for our in-tuition—for how we think about our ob-jects and their relation to our world. We once imagined architectural possibilities by pushing ink and graphite across me-chanical surfaces. We called that process “orthographic drawing.” We now push buttons and keys on electronic surfaces to produce “models.” !ese models do not contain drawings, but rather simula-tions of all possible drawings, because “cutting” through an electro-topological model—“making 2D”— bears no rela-tion to the task of hand-mechanically drawing an orthographic plan. !e pushing of buttons is neither better nor worse than orthographic drawing, but despite all visual similarities the two are separated by a techno-epistemic chasm that cannot be crossed.

Just like writing, architectural orthogra-phy was a hand-mechanical, rule-bound system of geometric marks that made possible certain historical ways of think-ing. History and orthography are insepa-rable not merely because texts and lines allowed for the recording and archiving of events, but more profoundly because

the capacity for orthographic recording and archiving gave birth to an entire sensibility in which ideas and dreams about the future were bound to a graphic description of the past (ȖȡȐijȦ: -graphia: scratch, carve, draw, write). Orthogra-phy constantly subjected the present to the past, exposing it to lost ways of living and thinking. It also presented the present with an open choice between continuity or revolution.

!e technical substrate of orthographic reasoning has now disappeared from the world, and cannot be brought back as anything other than historical reenact-ment. Post-orthographic models contain an analysis of all possible future object-scenarios; not just formal possibilities, but increasingly also tectonic speci"ca-tions, construction and maintenance costs, energy consumption metrics, etc. !e “Real Time” analysis of all possible fu-ture states is a very di#erent imaginative framework than orthography, for which “thinking” meant using the past to make sense of the future.

It would be senseless to consider one kind of time “better” than another: the aim is always to orient one’s own language and thought by describing di#erences between two regimes of time. Unlike Historical Time, which was concerned to always relate pres-ent and future to the past, Real Time

“instantaneously” relates an electrical representation of the present (data) to all possible futures (or at least as many as can be counted and computed). Ortho-graphic time was historical; it enmeshed architectural reasoning in a technics of historical precedent. Real time is statisti-cal; it enmeshes architectural reasoning in the technics of data. If previously the logic of historical precedent was used to legitimize architectural objects, architec-tural culture now uses the imagery and language of Real Time data to justify its activities: performance, e$ciency, "delity, etc.

Under the new pressures of Real Time, our working surfaces are, at pres-ent, coalescing around a narrow set of concerns—“managerial” concerns—that canalize and smooth-over architectural experimentation in favor of prediction and control. Management is e!cient and e"ective, but we should wonder whether those twinned principles constitute a su$cient platform for imagining the possible resonances between architecture and lived life.

Housing was a delicate dream of novel techniques concerning circulation, stacking, distribution, superimposi-tion, and di#erence-within-repetition. Orthographic repetition and spatial aggregation were laborious and timely operations; step-wise deviations from

repetitious organizations were even more painstaking undertakings. Managerial logic thinks that e$cient repetition is Housing (can we say that the “copy” but-ton constitutes a fundamental rupture in architectural reasoning?).

At this point, the exercise of electro-simulating housing has become so boring that most schools of architecture have dropped it from their instructional curriculum.

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Lost in the yawning academic gap between a#ective fabrications and ter-ritorial ambitions, the lonely architec-tural object has lost all appeal. No one believes any longer in the idea that architecture might be enough; that it might contain within itself the capac-ity to stimulate experimental lives; that, despite its inability to discursively justify its “agency,” the architectural object nonetheless contains a potency not found in the reductive precision of the word.

We would like to express a somber nostalgia for a long-forgotten historical moment—before diagrams or “discipli-narity;” before autonomy or “criticality;” before the culture of popularity prizes and Young Architect Parties—when a small architectural counterculture crys-

talized around the concept of collective life, and when the technical possibilities available to formal experimentation seemingly aligned, however brie%y, with an intense political desire to live life dif-ferently, together.

We began with the vague notion of “architectural collectivity.” At the scale of the collective, the "rst and most decisive architectural gestures involve the technics of massing, where spatial and formal metastrategies begin to impose themselves on an imagined multiplic-ity. From that stage forward, all e#orts grind towards the articulation of those initial carvings and divisions, which are, in a sense, proto-architectural gestures, containing and constraining architec-tural possibilities without determining speci"cities.

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What emerged at the outset of the twentieth century as protracted counter-cultural speculations on possible forms of life has devolved into a faux-archi-tectural form of "nancial speculation (condos, townhouses, apartments): ex-truded spreadhseets for co-isolating the Creative Class. Sincere dreams of living with and for one another have been de-voured and regurgitated by an ongoing project towards “spacious open-concept layouts,” with “plenty of storage,” and

“an array of modern, stylish, high-quality "nishes for everything from %ooring to countertops.”

Living Together: Haven’t we already tried that? Didn’t those naïve experi-ments dissolve into either Stalinism or Psilocybin? Only by telling ourselves di#erent stories about modernity will we "nd release from its orbit. What if we were only able to dream of living togeth-er because we had been drawn together? What if Housing was once possible only because architecture had gradually dis-covered, within its own (non-discursive) orthographics, an immense platform for drawing things together—materials, bodies, politics, concepts, friendships, desires, reveries —as architectural objects? Not as “theses” or “arguments,” but as object manifestos.

Housing and Drawing: two long, mod-ern shadows whose dark spaces conceals the fact that each no longer exists. Were they in fact the same shadowed surface, illuminated by a single dying light that modernity had twisted back upon itself, so as to appear two-sided? If so, architectural reasoning must come to terms with a reality in which technics and politics are simply two names given to the very same primal impulse: to live together rather than merely survive on one’s own.

!e questions today: how can nonmodern collectives be drawn together after the Age of Orthography? What would a post-orthographic material philosophy of col-lectivity even look like? And if one were able to somehow propose legitimately new architectural collectives—even pres-ently impossible ones—would anyone want to live in them?

To the skeptics, for whom those ques-tions hold no weight, we say "ne, tell us another story, over which irony or anachronism do not hang like a lumi-nous haze…

MILLIØNS

— MILLIØNS is a Los Angeles-based design practice with projects in California, New York and Beirut. MILLIØNS is directed by John May and Zeina Koreitem.

Team: Elliott Sturtevant, Ehran Holm, Victoria Walker, Luke Duross, Peter Osborne and Venessa Heddle.

!anks to Nader Tehrani and the MIT Department of Architecture. Special thanks to Irene Hwang, Michael Smith, Ultan Byrne, and Nicholas Hoban. We remain grateful for the generous and continued support of Richard Sommer, and the John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design at the University of Toronto

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www.millionsofmovingparts.org

The Keller Gallery

— !e Keller Gallery was established in the fall of 2011 with a generous donation of materials and labor in kind from Shawn Keller, principal with C.W. Keller & Associates. At about 200 square feet, the gallery shows a steady stream of faculty, student and experimental work, includ-ing work from alumni and friends.

Events

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05/05, 6:00

Sumayah Al-Solaiman

AKPIA Lecture

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05/07, 6:30

Hiroto Kobayashi

MIT Special Lecture

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05/12, 12:30

Sinead C. MacNamara

BT Special Lecture

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05/13, All Day

Options Reviews

MIT Architecture

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05/14, All Day

Core 2 Reviews

MIT Architecture

Located in MIT Building 7, Room 408, it is free and open to the public Monday through Saturday from 9 to 6. Exhibi-tions are coordinated by Irene Hwang. For more information on the current exhibit or for general inquiries, send an email to kellergallery@mit.edu. Mailer design by Kyle Barker.

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05/15, All Day

Options Reviews

MIT Architecture

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05/16, All Day

Thesis Presentations

SMArchS, MArch, BSA

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05/19, All Day

Final Reviews

ACT

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05/20, 1:30

Final Review

Arch 4.111

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05/21, 1:30

Final Review

Arch 4.113

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05/22, 1:30

Final Review

Arch 4.115

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05/23, 1:30

Final Review

Thesis Prep (MArch)

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