Cognition and the Built Environment

Review Copy - Not for Distribution Håvard Wibe - Norwegian Universtiy of Science and Technology - 19/01/2018

Cognition and the Built Environment

Cognition and the Built Environment argues that interacting with our built environment, as users and as architects, is a cognitive process. It claims that architecture, in its form and meaning is a basic, embodied level of human cognition. The assumption is that we and our built environment together form an intelligent system, a cognitive feedback loop between us and the world of which we are part. With this as a vantage point, the book discusses the meaning and intelligence of concrete architectural environments as well as the agency of the architect, of his client and of the user. The inquiry oscillates between abstract thought, topological models and cognitive semiotics, between pragmatist philosophy and the professional practice of planning cities, developing projects and using objects. Architecture serves more complex purposes than our caves, paths and landmarks did. Written for students and academics of urban design, urban planning and architectural theory, Cognition and the Built Environment argues that human cognition feeds on the interaction between thought, agency and built environment, and that architecture is the spatial form of this interaction. Ole Möystad defended his PhD on architecture and cognitive semiotics in 1994. He has pursued this topic through academic as well as professional work in Beirut, Oslo, Trondheim, Lisbon, Barcelona, Asmara, Xi’an, Delft and Brussels. He is Professor in the Faculty of Architecture and Fine Art, Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), Norway, and head of The Urban Trigger Group.


“This book is a monument of research and intellectual weaving. It shows how architecture goes way beyond the boundaries of a profession (implying the occupation of professionals), or even an art (the form of expression of creatives), demonstrating how it can be seen as the universal dimension of any place making, any production of cultural meaning. Hence, if there is anyone asking today: ‘are we human?’, the answer is: as long as there is architecture, we are.” Ole Bouman, Founding Director of Design Society, Shenzen. Former Director of Nederlands Architectuurinstituut “This is a very timely book. It aims to overcome the organism-environment duality that has been the predominant discourse in planning and architecture for the last two centuries. It explores ideas that are beginning to take hold in ecology, where niche construction and cognition show that the relationship between organisms and their environments are complex and complementary. This is essential reading for anyone interested in the theoretical state of the art.” Professor Alan Penn, Dean of The Bartlett Faculty of the Built Environment, UCL, UK

Review Copy - Not for Distribution Håvard Wibe - Norwegian Universtiy of Science and Technology - 19/01/2018 Routledge Research in Planning and Urban Design Series editor: Peter Ache Radboud University, Nijmegen, the Netherlands

Routledge Research in Planning and Urban Design is a series of academic monographs for scholars working in these disciplines and the overlaps between them. Building on Routledge’s history of academic rigour and cutting-edge research, the series contributes to the rapidly expanding literature in all areas of planning and urban design. https://www.routledge.com/Routledge-Research-in-Planning-and-UrbanDesign/book-series/RRPUD University Spatial Development and Urban Transformation in China Cui Liu The Virtual and the Real in Planning and Urban Design Perspectives, Practices and Applications Claudia Yamu, Alenka Poplin, Oswald Devisch and Gert de Roo Unplugging the City The Urban Phenomenon and Its Sociotechnical Controversies Fábio Duarte and Rodrigo Firmino Planning for Greying Cities Age-friendly City Planning and Design Research and Practice Tzu-yuan Stessa Chao Heritage-led Urban Regeneration in China Jing Xie amd Tim Heath Tokyo Roji The Diversity and Versatility of Alleys in a City in Transition Heide Imai Cognition and the Built Environment Ole Möystad



Cognition and the Built Environment

Ole Möystad

Review Copy - Not for Distribution Håvard Wibe - Norwegian Universtiy of Science and Technology - 19/01/2018 First published 2018 by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2018 Taylor & Francis The right of Ole Möystad to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Möystad, Ole, 1954- author. Title: Cognition and the built environment / Ole Moystad. Description: New York : Routledge, 2017. | Series: Routledge research in planning and urban design Identifiers: LCCN 2017034244 | ISBN 9781138188365 (hardback) Subjects: LCSH: Architecture–Philosophy. | Architecture– Human factors. Classification: LCC NA2500 .M69 2017 | DDC 720.1–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017034244 ISBN: 978-1-138-18836-5 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-64238-3 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India


For Hettie



Contents

Acknowledgements Prologue Between The Empty Space and ‘The Empty Brain’ 1 Life, Thought and Brain 2 Meaning and Physical Form 3 Object and Urban Fabric 4 Interaction 5 This Book 6

xiii 1

PART I

Making Sense

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1 Some Steps Towards Meaning Aliquid stat pro aliquot 13 Stoic Physical Theory 14 Aristotle 15 Transubstantiation 17 Occam’s Razor 18 Anticipations of a Modern Epistème 20 Some Contemporary Semiotic Schemas 21

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2 Umwelt The Empty Centre 29 Korematic Schema 30 Brussels: Oslo 31 The Cusp 33 Beirut – Case 1 37 Feedback Loop 38

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Review Copy - Not for Distribution Håvard Wibe - Norwegian Universtiy of Science and Technology - 19/01/2018 x Contents 3 Place and Interpretant Facts 44 Intentions 45 Point 46 Place 47 From ‘Spirit of Place’ to ‘Art of Place’ 48 The Stability of Meaning 49

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4 Postscript to Making Sense

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PART II

The Field

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5 ‘City’ as a Measure of Density What is a Field? 58 What is the Matter of Architecture? 58 The Modern Condition 59 Globalization of Space 60 Dematerialization of the Urban 62 Changing Forms of Meaning 63 An Architecture of Umwelt 66 Infrastructure 67 Oiko-Logica 69 ‘City’ 69 Reflection and Projection 70 ‘City’ and the Twentieth-Century Avant Garde 70 Rethinking the Urban 73

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6 An Architecture of the Field A Structural Turn 76 The Ontological Basis of Representation 79 The Scenario of Aesthesis 82 The Archème 86 Scale 88 Architecture and Its Class of Objects 89

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PART III

The Object

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7 The TAO of Architecture

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Review Copy - Not for Distribution Håvard Wibe - Norwegian Universtiy of Science and Technology - 19/01/2018 Contents xi 8 Physics of Meaning and Form Steps Towards an Architecture of Thoughts and Things 99 InFORMation 104 Modalities of Tension and Intensity 105 Object Summary 107 9 An Architecture of the Object Space 110 Time 111 Actualization 113 Basic Level Perception 114 The Object of Architecture 115 Use 116 Material 117 Material Structure 118 Cognitive Structure 118 Ideas 119 Matter 120 Morphogenesis 120

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PART IV

The Work

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10 Change Between Development and Catastrophe Disaster 126 Collateral Damage 127 Disaster Capitalism 128 Beirut – Case 2 129 Trauma 130 Wound and Opportunity 131 Art and the ‘Possible’ 134

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11 Speed and Urban Development Object and Agency 138 Meaning and Agency 138 Tools and Agency 140 Circular Oikonomia 141

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12 A Topology of the Work of Architecture A Spatio-Temporal Phenomenology 147 A Mind-World Passage 152

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Review Copy - Not for Distribution Håvard Wibe - Norwegian Universtiy of Science and Technology - 19/01/2018 xii Contents Misfit – Competence 157 Client – User 157 Architect and Object 158 Navigating WoA 159 Concluding Remarks 159 Epilogue

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References Index

165 185


Acknowledgements

This book has been many years in the making, and I need to extend my gratitude to many good people who have supported my work in various ways. Poet and linguist Per Aage Brandt founded the Centre for Semiotics at Aarhus University and developed it into a hub of European semiotics. I am indebted to him for introducing me to the field of cognitive semiotics. My other big debt goes posthumously to architectural theoretic Christian Norberg-Schulz. His oeuvre explored issues of meaning and architecture, and he was always open to discuss and defend his positions person to person. I learnt a lot from those debates. I am grateful to the Department of Architecture at the American University of Beirut for offering important field work possibilities, to the Faculty of Architecture and Fine Art at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology for offering me research leave and support to complete this book, and to my university colleagues for offering a generous, inspiring and inter disciplinary academic environment. Architects Ingerid Helsing Almaas, Elin Børrud, Einar Bjarki Malmquist, Isabel Marcos, Josep Muntañola, Hettie Pisters and Wang Tao have offered valuable opportunities for discussing and writing on ideas of the relationship between cognition, art, urbanity and architecture. Dr. Rita Elmkvist Nilsen of the Kavli Institute for Systems Neuroscience at the NTNU has offered patient and extremely valuable support and comments on my ventures into the exciting territories of neuroscience. Her efforts was a support, which is very important to any research across disciplinary borders. For this I am deeply grateful. A special gratitude goes to Mads Nermo, Jostein Breines and all the brilliant students and colleagues who have worked with me in exploring how the ideas from my research could be applied and become methods of agency in project development. These results and these people come together in the Urban Trigger Group. Finally one special thanks to my PhD student Jørgen Hallås Skatland who kept inquiring until I simply had to write this book to provide him with a consistent set of references.



Prologue

Is it not strange that sheep’s guts should hale souls out of men’s bodies? William Shakespeare, Much Ado about Nothing: Benedick in Act 2, Scene 3.

Between The Empty Space1 and ‘The Empty Brain’ 2 A short, professional career as an actor took me to stages like the Young Vic in London, the Piccolo Theater in Rotterdam and the Clifton Cathedral in Bristol. After performing in Peer Gynt on the experimental stage of the National Theatre in Oslo, I left acting to study architecture. The shift caught friends and colleagues by surprise. They asked how I could make such a U-turn. In my view, it was only a minor adjustment of perspective. I had worked very hard to understand and to perform the intrinsically spatial art of theatre. I had devoured Peter Brook’s The Empty Space on how theatre makes the invisible visible, brings life to space. After six years being on the road, adapting plays by Shakespeare, Ionesco, Ibsen etc. to a different space almost every evening, it became very clear to me that the meaning of a play had to be brought to life again and again, not only every evening, but also for every space. My theatre training had prepared me for the actor’s role in the mystery, but my fascination gradually shifted towards the spatial end of the mystery. How could a physical space be prepared to recreate the life of a new performance every evening? And, since ‘all the world is a stage’, was it possible that this property of physical space inside the theatre also existed outside it, that every-day life was an interaction between ‘all men and women’ and their ‘stage?’3 The topic of this book, published almost 40 years after I walked out of the stage door for the last time, is still the same as the mystery that drew me from acting to architecture.

Review Copy - Not for Distribution Håvard Wibe - Norwegian Universtiy of Science and Technology - 19/01/2018 2 Prologue

Life, Thought and Brain A theatre performance is a small piece of real life unfolding in the interaction between a set physical space, a playwright, a director, a group of actors and an audience. If it is a dull play or bad acting, every show will be but a dead repetition of yesterday. If the show is good, it is an event that unfolds anew every time and in every space. It is real life; possibly artificial, as in, man-made, but it is real and it is life. The first Western narratives of Genesis imagined man as sprouting from the ground, physically shaped from mud and brought to life by God. In his recent book on artificial intelligence, George Zarkadakis outlines this narrative as the first of six models or metaphors man has created in order to understand his own brain.4 During the Antique, one did not distinguish between thinking and living, and the brain was considered a part of the body like other parts. Being alive implied thinking, like any other bodily function. Antiquity’s studies of hydraulics provided the second metaphor in Zarkadakis’ list. With the knowledge of hydrodynamics and the technological development that this knowledge generated, the hydraulic metaphor of the brain developed. The theory of the ‘humors’ based on the flow of fluids in the body became the dominant paradigm for the understanding of how man worked both physically and mentally. This metaphor lived for about 1,600 years – until the new knowledge of mechanics emerged at the transition from renaissance to baroque. At this time, the antique episteme started to bifurcate. Early modern science drew a wedge between knowledge and belief, which cost the lives of early scientists such as Giordano Bruno. During this phase René Descartes established the division between mind and body, and the philosopher, Thomas Hobbes, suggested that thinking was produced by small mechanical motions inside the brain. Zarkadakis calls this ‘The Mechanical Metaphor of the Brain’. This mechanical paradigm was part of the initiation of modernism. In the 18th century electricity and chemistry split off from philosophy and became scientific disciplines in their own right. This gave rise to the electrochemical metaphor of the brain, and in the early 19th century, Hermann von Helmholz apparently brought a dead frog to life, or at least made it move, by sending an electric current through it. The telegraph provided the fifth metaphor of the brain, and during the second half of the 20th century the development of the computer triggered the information processing (IP) metaphor. The IP metaphor has proven resilient. In its ultimate form, it forms the basis of the Human Brain Project,5 which started in 2013 on the belief that within 10 years it would be possible to download an entire human brain to a hard drive. The IP metaphor implies that Descartes’ division between mind and body is somehow correct. It basically implies that the world has a double, made up of information inside the human brain, and this information can live forever – without a body.

Review Copy - Not for Distribution Håvard Wibe - Norwegian Universtiy of Science and Technology - 19/01/2018 Prologue

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Cognitive scientists like George Zarkadakis (2016), Robert Epstein (2016) and Anthony Chemero (2009) argue that the problem is not the choice of metaphor. The problem is trying to explain cognition by means of metaphor at all – because, they claim, any metaphor has some kind of an IP metaphor at its roots. Computers are information processors and they are able to demonstrate intelligent behavior. However, as Epstein points out,6 it does not follow from this that any organism that demonstrates intelligence is an information processor. These scientists propose instead to understand human cognition as a matter of direct interaction between the systems inside and the systems outside the brain. Consequently, one would have to imagine memory as a pattern of behavior, or interaction rather than as stored information. We will return to this concept later and relate it to our work of using and producing architecture.

Meaning and Physical Form Architecture has always formed the physical environment of private and public life. Its first purpose was to give man shelter from the storm, but soon the simple shelters started to form settlements and to take on more complex functions. While remaining a material ontology the human-built environment eventually evolved to also performing functions of social, cultural, political and cognitive nature. Ever since the School of Athens, architecture has served as a basic mnemotechnical tool. In Rafael’s painting, we see Plato and Aristotle talking while literally walking from one topic to the next. The mnemotechnique was not about information being written or pictured on the walls. This is only the case in, for instance, a cathedral where the aim is to impose certain information on the viewer, which is something quite different from helping someone to reflect. The mnemotechnique is about interacting physically and mentally with the architectural spaces to recall and to relive prior thoughts or experiences in order to keep developing them or to change them. This takes us back to the mystery of theatre. Are there certain properties or qualities that prepare a built environment to serve as a mnemotechnical tool? What is it that makes us perceive one space as meaningful and another one not? Basically, any building with insulated walls and a tight roof can serve as a shelter from rain and cold, the difference between being perceived as more or less meaningful obviously rests in something else than the physical functions of the individual object. At the ‘Best Practices in Real Estate Education’ seminar,7 one senior real estate developer remarked that: ‘We do not invest in bricks and mortar, but in what buildings do for us’. Treaties of Architecture, from Vitruvius onward, discussed issues of form, composition, perspective, technics, function etc. Meaning was, however,

Review Copy - Not for Distribution Håvard Wibe - Norwegian Universtiy of Science and Technology - 19/01/2018 4 Prologue taken for given; given by nature, by the church, by the state, by tradition or by the pure necessities of everyday life. Architecture seemed to form an episteme in its own right. During the baroque period, this episteme started to disintegrate, and with Descartes’ division between mind and body architecture slowly started to develop a division of its own between primary and secondary functions, between material technology and cultural values, between individual building and architectural context etc. As modernism fastened its grip under the slogan of ‘Form Follows Function’, architecture seemed to adopt a mechanical metaphor of its own. Closely following technological development, it can even be said to have flirted with the telegraph metaphor (cf. City of Bits and E-Topia by William Mitchel), let alone the IP metaphor behind the ‘Smart City’ discourse.

Object and Urban Fabric People relate to buildings and buildings to people in more complex ways than the strictly functional ones. We need to relate buildings to a context in order to make sense of them. In his photomontage, ‘Aircraft Carrier City in Landscape’ from 1964,8 Hans Hollein showed a huge war ship in a pristine agricultural landscape. The work’s power rests the discrepancy between object and context. What would the Eiffel Tower be if it didn’t have Paris as an urban context? And, indeed, neither Paris nor the Eiffel Tower would be what they are without Parisians and tourists using them. Architects are trained to admire the beautiful object. We educate architectural students to design the beautiful object and even to build it. The single-family home of American suburbia may be beautiful in itself, but no matter how many times we copy it, it hardly generates what we would perceive as a meaningful architectural environment. Picture an aerial photo of American suburbia, or google it, and then switch to the Nolli map of Rome. What makes one come across as meaningful, even intelligent, and the other not? Is meaning embedded in buildings or in the spaces between them? Looking for the ‘meaning’ of a place or an environment in the form or construction itself of an individual building seems like looking for time inside a clock, or for Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony in Herbert von Karajan’s brain, or searching for Othello in Laurence Olivier’s cortex. In fact, any actor asked how it is possible to memorize four hours’ worth of text will tell you that the work is not about storing one’s lines. Acting is about practicing the interaction with the other actors, about going along with the sequence and the logic of spaces and events – like snowboarding. Lines are just replayed as an integral part of the complexity of interaction, together with your tone of voice, facial expressions, gestures, movements, your subtext etc. No actor needs to, or is even able to, store and process and repeat such an amount of information. And if he was, he would probably be a total bore on stage.


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Interaction During the years of research preceding this book, I have searched and researched for the common denominator between the work of the actor and that of the architect: between using space and producing it, and between object, space and behavior. My best bet on a common denominator is ‘meaning’. Producing meaning – whether in the form of acts, objects or spaces – requires intelligence. Intelligence is the capability for appropriate interaction between system, agent(s) and environment. Meaning may be defined as the accomplishment if such interaction.9 These definitions have served me well through my years of research, and they resonate well with the pragmatic understanding of cognition implied by the concept of ‘Direct Interaction’.10 Cognition is understood here as an integral function of a living system. There seems to run a line of thought from the antique ‘Mud Metaphor’ right down to the brain research of Zarkadakis et al. and to contemporary studies of biosemiotics by scientists such as Jesper Hoffmeyer, Claus Emmeche and Fredrik Stjernfeldt.11 The trigger point of these biosemiotic studies was the concept of ‘Umwelt’ as formulated by Jacob von Uexküll12 in 1940. The word means ‘environment’. Uexküll coined the term as signifying the life-world or existential niche of a particular organism or species as appropriated, shaped, inhabited and navigated by that species. Later biosemiotics studies have produced fruitful insights on life and its meanings in the context of von Uexküll’s Umwelt. In 1993, adopting the concept of ‘semiosphere’ from Yuri Lotman,13 Hoffmeyer proposed to understand information as the basic element of nature.14 During the next 20 years, this research produced proposals like ‘semiotic scaffolding’ and the ‘semiome’.15 Architects know scaffolding as a temporary structure used in the construction site to aid the erection of the building. Applied to our Umwelt Semiotic Scaffolding indicates the temporary structures that aid certain patterns of understanding and behavior to evolve; the temporary forms of ‘direct interaction’. The semiome is a semiotic adaption from ‘the genome’, as ‘semiosphere’ is an adaption from ‘biosphere’. Emphasizing the basic role of agency in the life of an organism, its ability to act in and with its world, Hoffmeyer points to the ability to communicate as the precondition for any living process. ‘We can define a semiome in analogy with the genome as the entirety of an organism’s semiotic tool set;. Hoffmeyer writes, ‘i.e. the means by which the organisms of this species may extract significantly meaningful content from their surroundings and engage in intra- or interspecific communicative behaviour’.16 In our terms, as humans, it is tempting to translate Umwelt as ‘architectural environment’, and to adopt the architectural concept of ‘scaffolding’. In all the chapters of this book, we will be discussing these perspectives,

Review Copy - Not for Distribution Håvard Wibe - Norwegian Universtiy of Science and Technology - 19/01/2018 6 Prologue but from a more intrinsically human viewpoint, focusing on our cognitive interaction with our Umwelt – architecture. As I was working on the first draft for this book in 2014, the Nobel Prize for Medicine was awarded to May-Britt and Edvard Moser, two neuroscientists at the Kavli Institute for Systems Neuroscience at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology for their discovery of grid cells.17 Grid cells are popularized as ‘the GPS system of our brain’, and the claim is that they form a link not only between space and memory, but between spatial structures inside and outside the hippocampus. Since the discovery of grid cells in 2005, the team has identified more kinds of spatial cells: place cells, border cells, speed cells and head direction cells.18 In a 2013 paper on ‘Memory, Navigation and Theta Rhythm in the Hippocampal-Enthorinal System’, Moser and co-author Buzsáki propose that mechanisms of memory and planning have evolved from mechanisms of navigation in the physical world. In the lab around the corner from my office the Moser team were suggesting a cognitive interaction between our Umwelt and our brains!

This Book Between its Prologue and its Epilogue this book has four main sections. Each of which has one key chapter outlining the formal and abstract schematics and topologies of the cognitive semiotics involved and one to three chapters discussing real spaces, materials, places, cities or projects. In the present work, we will build upon American dynamic semiotics, largely based on pragmatist philosophy after C. S. Peirce, and on the spatiotemporal phenomenology of René Thom.19 The influence of linguist professor, Dr Per Aage Brandt, and the Centre for Cognitive Semiotics at Aarhus University has also been important. The semiotically educated reader may ask why prevalence is given to Peircean semiotics rather than to the French school of semiology after Saussure and Greimas. The short answer to this is that the binary sign of French semiology is a linguistic sign, while the dynamic sign after Peirce is pragmatic and based in the world of phenomena. Since this book is about human cognitive and direct interaction with his or her environment, pragmatic semiotics seems an obvious choice of logical structure on which to base a feedback loop. This particular point is elaborated in the last paragraph of Chapter 2 called ‘The Feedback Loop’. At certain points, such as, for example, the analysis leading up to the proposal of the archème in Chapter 6 we will, however, also allude to and discuss certain concepts from the French school. The two schools of semiotics are discussed more elaborately in Chapter 1. The three elements of the cognitive feedback loop are defined as ‘The Field of Architecture’ (FoA), ‘The Object of Architecture’ (ObA) and ‘The Work of Architecture’ (WoA). These three elements are in the present book set as a logical backbone of the direct and cognitive interaction between


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man and his environment. While ‘Making Sense’ is the topic of Part I of the book’s, ‘The Field’, ‘The Object’ and ‘The Work’ are the topics of Part II, III and IV of the book’s. FoA, ObA and WoA are elaborated on in specifically technical, semiotic and topological terms in Chapters 6 and 12. These chapters may come across as abstract and hard-boiled to a reader who is not familiar with semiotics. To this reader it is suggested to try and bite through the semiotics in Part 1 as an introduction and cling to the paragraph on the feedback loop at the end of Chapter 2, ‘Umwelt’. Then try to leaf past the technical Chapters 6 and 12, and enjoy the more reader-friendly and more case-based chapters while referring back to the ‘feedback loop’ as the logical structure underpinning the longer line of argument. Part I Chapter 1 gives a brief introduction to the concept of meaning in general. The narrative used in this is a sequence of steps from the history of philosophy that are outlined in semiotic models. Chapter 2 discusses urban cultural dynamics based on anecdotic material from two European cities, Oslo and Brussels. This narrative is used to introduce the Korematic schema. Chapter 3 investigates the problem of founding architectural meaning and human identity on a definition of geographical territory. The chapter is based on a discussion of ‘place’ as an architectural interpretant. The first part ends by relating the question of meaning to architecture, and outlining a semiotic structure of architecture based on the triangular sign structure according to Peirce. The three architectural aspects that are set as elements of the sign structure in our context are the FoA, the ObA and the WoA. Part II Part II discusses the FoA itself. Chapter 5 proposes the field concept as a way to avoid the division between urban and rural environments. The proposal is to understand architecture as a continuum, as one dynamic system in which the city is not an artefact, but a densification of the field. This view basically indicates that a city may be conceived and planned as well as reflected on. The intelligence of the built environment rests in the field. However, this field is built one building at a time. This implies that the intelligence of the system must somehow be embedded in the individual building as well as in the relations between buildings. This discussion, however, will be left for the following chapters. Chapter 6 proposes a model of the semiotic structure on which the field runs. It is tempting to compare it to Hoffmeyer’s concept of the semiome; to think of it as an architectural semiome, but I have chosen to stick with the name I gave it when I first started working on it in my doctoral research 25 years ago:20 The archème.

Review Copy - Not for Distribution Håvard Wibe - Norwegian Universtiy of Science and Technology - 19/01/2018 8 Prologue Part III Part III concerns the ObA; the actual, physically built thing. The object is discussed in its capacity of being a physical object in and of itself. This chapter will investigate how architectural meaning, by definition, rests, or is embedded in a physically present object, and that a main feature of the object is space, and that space is the embedded meaning of the object of architecture; its semiotic dimension. The Field exists as an effect; produced by the objects. Chapter 7 gives an outline of the nature of an ObA. Chapter 8 discusses the relationship between building materials and the technology that goes into the form of the object on the one hand, and its meaning on the other. Chapter 9 analyses the architectural project applying criteria from the previous two chapters. Part IV Part IV deals with the WoA. While the object is a strictly physical and spatial entity, WoA inscribes the object in time by understanding it in terms of production and use, hence constituting the space-time interface between concept and memory—or in terms used in the Moser research—between ‘memory and planning.’21 Chapter 10 discusses change and speed. When everything works, urban change is not obvious to the eye. When the system is set under extreme pressure and the pace of change is driven to pathological levels, change becomes visible. The examples are therefore collected from cases of urban practices during civil war, disaster, and reconstruction. Chapter 11 discusses agency: on what level does interaction with the architectural fabric play out? How are built environments produced? The questions are followed by two examples of urban development projects from Norway and China. Chapter 12 proposes the semiotic schema of the space-time interface. In this chapter, the spatio-temporal phenomenology of René Thom is adopted and adapted. It takes time to design and to build architecture. It takes time to use it and to wear it down, to maintain, restore, transform and to re-cycle it. In popular terms, one could claim that architecture is a verb, and that architecture without time does not have meaning. Another implication here is that our experience of architecture, i.e. not our abstract knowledge of it, but our concrete, sensual, everyday life in and with it, our interaction with it, is not related to a city but to a building, an urban space, something local, a location; to one or more points in the field.

Notes 1 The Empty Space, Brook, Peter 1972. 2 ‘The Empty Brain’, Epstein, Robert, AEON Essays May 2016: https://aeon.co/ essays/your-brain-does-not-process-information-and-it-is-not-a-computer.


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3 William Shakespeare, As You Like It, Act 2, Scene VII. 4 In our own Image: will artificial intelligence save us or kill us? Zarkadakis 2016, loc. 646 (kindle version) 5 The Human Brain Project, Brain Simulation led by prof. Henry Markram: www. humanbrainproject.eu/nb. 6 Ibid. 7 ERES, European Real Estate Society, TU Delft, November 2015. 8 The photograph can be found at www.hollein.com/eng/ART/Flugzeugtraeger-inder-Landschaft. 9 The formulation is my own. It is, however, based on my reading and understanding of C.S. Peirce’s ‘How to Make our Ideas Clear’ (CP 5.388–410). Cf. also Möystad 1995b. 10 Cognitive scientists Robert Epstein, Anthony Chemero and George Zarkadakis argue that action and cognition are non-representational, meaning that the brain is not storing and processing information like a computer (the IP Metaphor of the brain). Cognition is, in their view, not based on inner mental representations, but on direct interaction with the external world. Cognition is in other words here understood as an integral function of a living system. 11 The term ‘biosemiotics’ was coined by psychiatrist F. S. Rotschild, while Thomas Sebeok and Thure von Uexkull implemented the term in other fields. Barbieri M. (1985) The Semantic Theory of Evolution, Harwood Academic Publishers, New York. 12 Von Uexküll 1982(1940). 13 Lotman 2000. 14 Hoffmeyer 1993, 1997. 15 Hoffmeyer 2007, 2014. 16 Hoffmeyer 2014, p.28. 17 They shared the Nobel Prize with FRS FMedSci John O’Keefe from UCL. O’Keefe received the 2014 prize for his discovery of Place Cells in 1971. Place cells together with grid cells are basic elements of the positioning system of the brain. Both cell types belong to the hippocampal formation. 18 Moser 2015, p. 75. 19 René Thom referred to his take on Catastrophe Theory as a ‘Spatio-Temporal Phenomenology’. Thom 1991. 20 Möystad 1994, pp. 209–228. 21 Moser 2013, p. 130.



Part I

Making Sense



1 Some Steps Towards Meaning

The following notes are a brief discussion of some steps in the history of philosophy leading up to contemporary schemas of cognitive semiotics.1 The chapter ends by relating the question of meaning to architecture. When something means something, it means that the first something stands for the second something; that A is a carrier of a content B – or that A represents B. These notes2 on how meaning has been structured from antiquity to the present are made on the basis of following assumptions: 1 2 3 4

A stands for B; When (i), there is a relation between A and B; When (ii), there is meaning; A ≠ B.

Aliquid stat pro aliquo3 Umberto Eco has given the most comprehensive definition of a sign. He states that a sign is everything ‘that can be used in order to lie’.4 Because, he says, if something cannot be used to tell a lie, it cannot be used to tell the truth either; in fact, if something cannot be used to tell a lie, it cannot be used to tell anything at all. The difference between aliquid and aliquo can be illustrated like this: picture a couple of children playing in a sandpit. There is plenty of space and plenty of spades. Nevertheless, children often want the same spade, and to sit on the same spot. To a four-year-old there is no difference between spade, place and meaning. To possess that particular spade and to sit in that particular place is to have the meaning – to be right. Inversely: not to have exactly that spade and not to sit on that particular spot may mean not to control meaning – to be wrong. The dispute therefore becomes a struggle of existential importance to the children. At this point, there are two possibilities: either they have to fight it out, or an adult will come along and introduce the difference, by which the negotiation of meaning becomes possible by representing various combinations of spades and places among the struggling parties.

Review Copy - Not for Distribution Håvard Wibe - Norwegian Universtiy of Science and Technology - 19/01/2018 14 Making Sense As civilized grown-ups, we try to maintain and to cultivate this difference. To us as thinking subjects it ‘permits our hypotheses to die in our stead’.5 There is nothing new in this. That A stands for B is an insight as old as philosophy itself. This insight is at the very core of philosophy. If A = B, if something did not stand for something else, then something would merely be something, and then there would be nothing to reflect upon, nothing to learn. Then there would be no philosophy, only mute truth, or being. Semiotics as in the systematic and general study of the relationship between aliquid and aliquo is, however, considered to be a relatively new discipline. Its relevance to architecture is illustrated by the example of the children in the sand pit. As children build their castles in the sand, they distribute spades, places and meanings in their common world, as we do when we produce our built environment.

Stoicist Physical Theory Semeion is the Greek term for sign. When we consider semiotics a new discipline, it is only right in the sense of a field of knowledge. The ancient Greeks did study signs, but they considered linguistic signs as something else than signs in general, such as smoke being a sign of fire and red spots on the face being a sign of measles etc. Antique semeiotics was the discipline that we today refer to as diagnostics in medicine. Pre-Aristotelian understanding of the linguistic sign is outlined by several Stoicist within their physical theory. Just like semeiotics, physical theory claims a direct, causal relationship between the enunciated sound, the word and its referent. The development of this approach probably peaked with the etymology of Stoic philosophy of language. The Stoicists developed a structure of signification containing the three elements known to us from our own linguistic theories of meaning: the sign, the signified and the real object. The word was considered to be a physical entity inasmuch as it existed through the voice. If something was ‘sayable’, it was considered real. Both the word and the real object it referred to were considered physical objects. The link between them, the process of signification, or the emergence of meaning, was called lekton. Lekton was established by the intellect. The meaning of the word and the object was in other words both products of the human intellect. Intellect, or reason, (logos) was, therefore, considered the source of meaning. It would, therefore, guarantee the semiotic connection between word and object. See Figure 1.1. The etymological project of the Stoics understood sign and referent to be controlled by logos, and it is left to the same logos to claim a causal relationship between object and word to be true or untrue. In hindsight, the weakness of such a linguistic theory seems quite obvious.

Review Copy - Not for Distribution Håvard Wibe - Norwegian Universtiy of Science and Technology - 19/01/2018 Some Steps Towards Meaning 15

LOGOS THOUGHT

LEKTON

ENUNCIATION

OBJECT

Figure 1.1 Stoicist physis theory structure of meaning.

Aristotle Aristotle reformulated the three elements of the linguistic sign. He referred to the word or enunciation as the ‘Voice’, vox. He generalized the concept of object to signify the external, material world, res. Finally, he exchanged the human intellect for an entity more closely related to his ‘General Concepts’; species – a table of kinds, a taxonomy. Then he introduced a direct relationship between the world, vox, and the object, res, in addition to the indirect relationship via species. The Aristotelian triangle hence takes on a more general relevance than the Stoicist structure; see Figure 1.2. In a certain sense, Aristotle anticipated the semiotic triangle as we know it from C. S. Peirce.

SPECIES

GENERAL CONCEPT

SIGNIFICATO

SIMILITUDO

VOX WORD ENUNCIATION FORM

RES NOMINATIO

THING

Figure 1.2 Aristotelian structure of meaning.

The Aristotelian triangle is a logical structure. It interrelates not only the elements of the linguistic sign, but also the elements of phenomenological

Review Copy - Not for Distribution Håvard Wibe - Norwegian Universtiy of Science and Technology - 19/01/2018 16 Making Sense meaning in general as according to Aristotle: form – general concept – matter. Furthermore, Aristotle characterizes the interrelations between the elements of what we now can refer to as a ‘sign structure’. Vox relates to species by significato. This means that the auditory form, which is expressed in the enunciation, is given content by the general concept. When asked for its meaning, vox points to species. Which content is linked to which enunciation is, however, regulated internally by the interrelations of vox and species. The expressed meaning has no reference outside the relation between enunciation and concept. It is, therefore, conventional and arbitrary. On the other hand, vox is a form. As such it relates to res like form relates to matter. The form of a building is the border and the result of its matter. Building-form thus emerges from building-matter. Inversely there is no such thing as building-matter unless it is contained in a building-form. In Aristotelian philosophy, there is a causal relation between form and matter, like there is between smoke and fire. In the semiotic terms of Peirce, such a relation is called ‘indexical’. Aristotle calls it ‘nominatio’. Form and matter, like vox and res, are in other words singular entities – as in two sides of the same coin. General concepts, however, are general. The general concept/building is an empty entity inasmuch as it does not refer to any particular, real or actual building, only to buildings in general. The concept is, however, not completely neutral because they ‘resemble’ their objects. Aristotle calls the interrelation between species and res similitudo. Basically, the general concepts relate to matter according to the same principle. Form and matter are indivisible; as the examples of the building-form, building-matter and smoke-fire, show us. The general concept, however, evolves as a result of our knowledge, or as the form that our general knowledge of buildings takes on. Form, for example, the building-form, is directly connected with the particular piece of matter, for example, the buildingmatter, in question, whereas the general concept, ‘building’, will comprise all buildings. It refers to building in general. Aristotle shows us a structure which reflects an integration of physics and meta-physics. The former rests in the direct vox–res relation, and the latter is embedded in the more complex set of vox–species–res relations. The relationship between an architect and his client/user can serve as an illustration. In the context of architectural production, the architect will correspond to vox. He carries out, enunciates or articulates the architecture. The client/user on the other side represents content, function, economy, in short, the matter, res, which gives rise to, or initiates the form that the architect eventually articulates. The physical relationship between the architect and his client/ user, now corresponding to nominatio, is established by the building which is being produced. However, any contract for an architectural commission presupposes a relationship between vox and res previous to construction; a relationship which must be established by means of general concepts. This level of the contact is established by meta-physical means – such as, for example, similitudo and significato. In metaphysics, Aristotle describes

Review Copy - Not for Distribution Håvard Wibe - Norwegian Universtiy of Science and Technology - 19/01/2018 Some Steps Towards Meaning 17 architecture as composed of both physical and meta-physical elements. He explains the special status that this gives the architect, or ‘master-artist’: Inanimate things bring about the effects of their actions by some nature, while manual workers do so through habit which results by practising. Thus, master-artists are considered wiser not in virtue of their ability to do something but in virtue of having the theory and knowing the causes.6 Aristotle’s claims were not met with unanimous consent. Jacques Le Goff reports the heated dispute between architects and stone masons during the middle ages, about which were to be considered the masters of cathedral building. The issue of their dispute was exactly the same issue as the one Aristotle addressed one and half millennium earlier.

Transubstantiation The most important medieval re-interpretation of Aristotle’s logical structure is embedded in the doctrine of ‘transubstantiation’. Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274) gave it the form in which we have now come to know it, and in which it was adopted by the church as dogma in 1215. See Figure 1.3.

GOD

ACCIDENS BREAD AND WINE

SUBSTANCE JESUS’ FLESH AND BLOOD

Figure 1.3 Transubstantiation structure of meaning.

The problem of whether universals did or did not exist had been the topic of almost two centuries of learned discussion. In short, the doctrine of transubstantiation claims that the bread and the wine, which is offered at the Holy Communion do not represent, but are actually transformed into the flesh and blood of Christ. Aristotle suggested a structure of meaning where nominatio and significatio-similitudo were inherent aspects of the sign. He did in other words claim that form, matter and general concept were indivisible, and that meaning as well as form and concept were basically inherent in matter. He was an absolute materialist in this sense, and in De Interpretatione7 Aristotle rejected all external determinism.

Review Copy - Not for Distribution Håvard Wibe - Norwegian Universtiy of Science and Technology - 19/01/2018 18 Making Sense The fact that Thomas Aquinas could use the Aristotelian structure as basis for introducing God as an external source of meaning was because Aristotle had been studied and slightly re-interpreted by Ptolemeus and other Arab philosophers for 10 centuries while he was forgotten in Europe. Through their reading of Aristotle’s astronomical works, the Arabs tended to understand the influence of the celestial bodies on earth as an implicit emanation of form.8 The Arab interpretation of Aristotle allowing celestial powers as source of earthly forms opened the Aristotelian structure to further Christian re-interpretation. It must have been seen as a minor step from celestial bodies to Christian God. God was inserted between form and matter and replaced the general concept. This was a return towards the Stoic schema. It made it possible for St Thomas Aquinas to claim that if bread and wine tasted like bread and wine at the Holy Communion that was a simple coincidence. Aquinas could then explain that because of the intervention of God it really is Jesus’ flesh and blood which is presented to us at the holy communion – incidentally in the form of bread and wine. The corruption of Aristotle’s logics resulted in the existence of two parallel truths, and that put reason under pressure. On one hand, there was the secular truth of bread and wine being just bread and wine. On the other hand, there was the clerical truth, which claimed that bread and wine were not represented, but actually were Jesus’ flesh and blood. Each time the Christian believer received the holy communion, his senses were confronted with the familiar tastes of bread and wine. He was, however, compelled to believe that he was consuming the flesh and blood of Christ; against what his own senses told him. This ambiguity became a problem for philosophy; a problem which significant areas of philosophy are still toiling with. We would currently recognize this problem as ‘the problem of representation’.

Occam’s Razor William of Ockham (1284–1349) rejected the double truth implied by transubstantiation. He insisted that ‘The world is only given to us once’. With this dictum, he erased not only species and General Concepts from the Aristotelian schema, but he also abolished the semiotic categories of significato, the symbolic and similitudo, the iconic. The maxim is rendered as ‘Ockham’s razor’, see Figure 1.4. After this amputation, the general sign structure went into oblivion for centuries. The modern, binary, linguistic sign is nevertheless considered to be initiated by Occam’s razor. This could be considered the origin of modern linguistic semiotics and the initiation of nominalism. Ockham could obviously not claim that general concepts did not exist. But he did insist that they were absolutely neutral or empty, and that they were independent of vox and res, and of accidences and substances. As a


SPECIES CONCEPT

VOX

RES

WORD ENUNCIATION

THING

Figure 1.4 Occam’s razor.

substitute for the double structure of Aquinas, Ockham introduced the idea of an inner mental language, free from psychological or other meditations. Doing this he established a binary interplay between syntagm and syntax, between vox and species, form and concept. At this point the sign bifurcates–as illustrated in Figure 1.5. (SPECIES)

CONCEPT INNER LANGUAGE

ENUNCIATION (VOX)

EXPERIENCE

RES THING

Figure 1.5 The double sign structure after Occam.

This is the initiation of another great philosophical problem: the double nature of the sign, which became the germ of the division between semiotics as linguistic theory (the French tradition of the binary sign) and semiotics as logic (the pragmatist traditions after Peirce). The external language, vox–res, has now been deprived of its level of reflection. It is destabilized by the lack of an external reference. It becomes

Review Copy - Not for Distribution Håvard Wibe - Norwegian Universtiy of Science and Technology - 19/01/2018 20 Making Sense an arbitrary sign structure. The inner language, however, is left with only the concept and its enunciation. Deprived of external reference by Ockham’s cutting logic even the inner language was destabilized. To remedy the problem Ockham introduced sentence and syntax. This made it possible to form systems of concepts that together constituted meaning. As similitudo – or the iconical relation between the concept and the external world of phenomena, res – is abolished, the meaning hence constituted could, however, only refer to itself.

Anticipations of a Modern Epistème A benevolent reading of Descartes,9 may see in his work an attempt at recovering a ground for meaning after Ockham’s surgical operations. Descartes uses doubt as a methodological move, as a rhetorical step, in which he reflects the total instability of knowledge. ‘Cogito ergo sum’, however, sets out to restore the subject as a third element of meaning; cf. Figure 1.6.

SUBJECT (VOX)

MIND (INNER LANGUAGE)

SUBJECT MIND (INNER LANGUAGE)

WORLD (EXTERNAL LANGUAGE)

OBJECT WORLD (EXTERNAL LANGUAGE)

Figure 1.6 The goal of ‘Cogito ergo sum’ top, and its alleged outcome bottom.

Review Copy - Not for Distribution Håvard Wibe - Norwegian Universtiy of Science and Technology - 19/01/2018 Some Steps Towards Meaning 21 It is generally assumed that Descartes did not succeed in this project. In fact, he is, maybe unjustly, alleged to having driven the wedge in between subject and object, or in other terms between mind and world. During the middle ages, a group of speculative grammarians took a particular interest in how every piece of reality (res) can have different modes of being. They were called ‘modistae’ because of their interest in the different ways that something can be; the different modes of being of things – as formal being, as thought, as enunciated or as signifying.10 Different forms of being could, was the argument, be different modes of one and the same phenomenon. The decisive point in our perspective is that now the level of signification (significato) in language could be analyzed in and of itself, without considering its reference in res. This duality was further established by Descartes. Wittgenstein renders us with the world as immediately experienced on the one hand. On the other hand, we hold a closed, self-referring mental language. Wittgenstein terms it a ‘logical image’ of the world.11 ‘Logical image’ in Wittgenstein’s terms is not an iconical phenomenon. ‘Logical’ implies an indexical representation, which in its turn refers back to the Stoicist ‘Lekton’. 12 In his early work, Wittgenstein tried to account for the reference between language and world by means of a concept he called ‘accurate symbolism’.13 In his late work, he abandoned this ambition and retreated into ‘language games’, claiming that ‘the limits of my language mean the limits of my world’.14

Some Contemporary Semiotic Schemas Kant set knowledge as a product of the human mind. He held it impossible to apprehend the world directly, without mediation, as Ockham demanded. The world had to be brought to us, but he did not leave its apprehension exclusively in the care of subjective perception. He introduced the a priori given truths as an underlying structure as a support for human reason. These structures are reflected in variety of versions in the semiotics after Kant. Common to all of them, however, is the subject–object problem in one form or another. Basically, we can distinguish three traditions in modern semiotics – even if one of them is rather anti-semiotic. They are all, however, concerned with meaning and must therefore accept being considered as semiotic. The Binary Sign Ferdinand de Saussure (1857–1913) is considered the founder of French semiotics – often referred to as ‘semiology’.15 Saussure took little interest in the world outside language; even though he did touch on the problem of reference, his sign relation remained basically the relationship between the signifier (Sa) – or the linguistic expression – and

Review Copy - Not for Distribution Håvard Wibe - Norwegian Universtiy of Science and Technology - 19/01/2018 22 Making Sense the signified (Sé) – the linguistic content: Sa/Sé. This sign provided a weak and unstable relation between expression and content. However, it opened vertiginous possibilities of intra linguistic analysis. It is hard to imagine the Linguistic Turn and the textual strategies of Derrida without Saussure. In the architectural field, interest in semiotics in the 1970s concerned semiotics of French origin. Due to its linguistic nature, it turned out not to be very useful. Indirectly in the form of textual strategies and deconstruction, however, the binary sign structure has had an immense impact upon architecture. With respect to knowledge the effect was strongly negative. However, quite a few interesting methodologies, such as various kinds of ‘readings’, ‘mappings’ and ‘layerings’, were developed in its wake. The so-called ‘Paris School’, headed by Algirdas Greimas and later by Jean Petitot, has taken up bits and pieces of this tradition. It has elaborated and cross-bred the carré, and cross bred it with other traditions over the last 50 years.16 Greimas developed a new generation of the binary sign by combining it with the classical ‘Logical Square’. The resulting model, the Greimasean structuralist sign structure, is called Le Carré Sémiotique – the semiotic quadrangle (Figure 1.7).

Sa

CONTRARY RELATION

Sé

COMPLEMENTARY OR IMPLICATIONAL

CONTRADICTORIAL RELATIONS

COMPLEMENTAR OR IMPLICATIONA

Sé

SUBCONTRARY RELATION

Sa

Figure 1.7 The Semiotic Square after Greimas.

Even if this structure is more formally sophisticated than the Saussurean sign, it repeats the problem that the binary sign had in its relation to the world outside the text. A comparison of Ockham’s nominalist conception of the languages to Saussurean and Greimasean sign structures can be seen in Figure 1.8. In Saussurean terms, the external and the inner languages according to Ockham are both binary sign structures with one expression-side and one content-side, one signifier and one signified. Analyzed respectively as contrary and sub-contrary terms, the analysis renders them contradicting each other. A contradictorial relation between concept and experience, like the concept of Jesus’s flesh and blood tasting like bread and wine, between external and inner language, provides a wobbly ground for realistic meaning.


Sé CONCEPT INNER LANGUAGE

Sa ENUNCIATION Sé EXPERIENCE

Sa WORLD EXTERNAL LANGUAGE

Sa ENUNCIATION

INNER LANGUAGE

ENUNCIATION Sé

Sé CONCEPT

WORLD EXTERNAL LANGUAGE

Sa

Figure 1.8 Occam meets Greimas.

The other possibility of draping Ockham on Greimas, is to consider the inner language as a signifier for the external language, in other words to consider enunciation a signifier for experience and concept as a signifier for world as in Figure 1.9. Now, the two languages appear as contrarieties to each other, which may seem to be a reasonable relationship. However, the price is the internal structure of each language. The distinction between expression and content within the language is lost. Concept is reduced to an implication of enunciation, and world is reduced to a complement of experience. This analysis mirrors the antique ‘Physical Theory’, as well as Heidegger’s dicta ‘Die Sprache spricht’ (the language speaks) and ‘Das Ding dingt’ (the thing things) as expressions of inner and external language respectively.

Review Copy - Not for Distribution Håvard Wibe - Norwegian Universtiy of Science and Technology - 19/01/2018 24 Making Sense

ENUNCIATION

EXPERIENCE

INNER LANGUAGE

EXTERNAL LANGUAGE

CONCEPT Sé

WORLD Sa

Figure 1.9 Occam and Greimas meet Heidegger.

The Anti-Sign If Saussure can be seen as one of Derrida’s grandfathers, Heidegger might be considered to be the other. Calling in Heidegger at this point, however, is due to another of his heirs: Christian Norberg-Schulz, historian and theoretic of architecture. He set out to analyze architecture as a manifestation of man’s relation to the world around him. Norberg-Schulz established a semiotic structure intended to construe architecture in terms of concept, of actual physical presence and of the user’s perception of the two. NorbergSchulz located the problem of meaning to the question of center, which he later merged with the concept of place. We will return to discuss the role of place as architectural interpretant in Chapter 3. Meaning is given a geographical being-in-the-world. It is turned into mute ground. The sign structure has imploded, and meaning is territorialized, and representation is reduced to mute presence; see Figure 1.10.

HEAVEN

GENERAL CONCEPT

MORTALS

IMMORTALS

MAN EXPERIENCE

GOD ENUNCIATION

EARTH WORLD

Figure 1.10 ‘Das Gevierte’ after Heidegger in Bauen, Wohnen, Denken.

Review Copy - Not for Distribution Håvard Wibe - Norwegian Universtiy of Science and Technology - 19/01/2018 Some Steps Towards Meaning 25 The Dynamic Sign With Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914) the triangular sign structure reappears. Now as a general logical schema. Peirce merges phenomenology with logics and semiotics. As a matter of fact, he often refers to his semiotics as ‘phaneroscopy’, which is Greek and means ‘observation of phenomena’. Throughout his extensive body of works he gives numerous definitions and elaborations of his sign relation and its elements. One of his shortest and most comprehensive definitions is quoted from his text ‘Logic as Semiotic’: ‘A sign, or representamen, is something which stands to somebody for something in some respect or capacity;.17 His sign relation is composed of the following three basic elements: The Representamen /R/ or the sign, the Object /O/ and the Interpretant /I/. The first element /R/, stands for that which is immediately experienced when one is exposed to something – ‘aliquid’. The second element /O/ is the actual object which is the cause of the first experience – ‘aliquo’. The third element /I/ is a device of an abstract structural nature which enables us to relate aliquid with aliquo. So far it may look like several previous sign relations, only now the third element is not God or the subject (logos), but an abstract dynamic and structural device. The importance difference is that unlike God, subject or logos or matter, the interpretant is not a source of meaning, but a dynamic force in the production of meaning. Consequently, the vectors of the sign relation all point the same way. As shown in Figure 1.11, they do not point at one source of meaning, as they do in previous structures illustrated in Figures 1.1–6.

I

GENERAL CONCEPT

SYMBOLICAL

ICONICAL

SIGNIFICATO

SIMILITUDO

R FORM

O INDEXICAL

MATTER

NOMINATIO

Figure 1.11 The Sign according to C.S. Peirce.

Finally, and in coherence with his dynamic conception of meaning, Peirce includes the perceiving subject in meaning, and introduces habit, belief and pragmatics in the inventory of scientific investigation.

Review Copy - Not for Distribution Håvard Wibe - Norwegian Universtiy of Science and Technology - 19/01/2018 26 Making Sense It seems hazardous to call René Thom an heir to Peirce, but they share their relationship to the dynamic sign. Contemporary semiotics must account for time and for real-world phenomena in order to be in coherence with contemporary real-world knowledge. It therefore needs to include a spatio-temporal phenomenology like catastrophe theory (CT) in its toolbox.18 Traditional science only takes interest in a phenomenon when it is already there, whereas the particular interest of CT is how a flow of formless matter can generate form and become phenomena. ‘I would say that above all it (Catastrophe Theory) is a methodology’19 – René Thom holds that the object of any science can be inscribed in a spatio-temporal phenomenology. In his early works, he studied topological theory in mathematics.20 He started, however, to notice that the topologies he studied purely as abstract forms in mathematics tended to be mirrored in material processes, such as the morphogenesis of an embryo, the evolution of geological formations, the breaking of a wave etc. Based on such observations, Thom developed a general topological theory of the morphology of the natural world, the world of spatio-temporal phenomena. This theory was first published in 1972 entitled Stabilité structurelle et morphogenèse.21 The name ‘catastrophe theory’ is misleading. Stable conditions acting as attractors and unstable conditions acting as repulsors were familiar to topology. Thom, however, took a particular interest in the 0-values, or the threshold values were the condition lapsed from + to – (see Figure 1.12). 0

+ -

-

-

Figure 1.12 The topology of the Cusp after Thom: one threshold and two minima – i.e. stable conditions.

At the time, he called his theory ‘Cobordisme’, co-bord-isme. The ‘-bord-’ does not refer to border, but to edge or threshold between one condition and another; irrespective of whether the conditions in question unfold in ontology or deontology or from concept to matter or from matter to building.22 The edge re-evokes the Aristotelian concept of form as indivisible from its matter. Thom includes the temporal dimension of the phenomenon, which allows us to understand the phenomenon as a system. Figure 1.13. illustrates the phenomenon H₂O as a system of three different conditions: gas(steam), liquid(water) and solid(ice) separated by thresholds of transition from one condition to another. Thom set out with the notion that singularities, or discontinuities – in other words form – occurs whenever a homogeneous, continuous (time-) space is exposed to confinement or outer pressure of any kind. When

Review Copy - Not for Distribution Håvard Wibe - Norwegian Universtiy of Science and Technology - 19/01/2018 Some Steps Towards Meaning 27 PRESSURE

WATER 1 ATMOSPHERE

ICE

STEAM 0°

100° TEMPERATURE

Figure 1.13 A Phase space portrait of H2O demonstrating three minima: ice(solid), steam(gas) and water(liquid).

exposed to external pressure matter will fold and generate a phenomenon. According to Thom, what CT does is to visualize, to describe, and in some cases even explain morphogenetic processes as spatio-temporal phenomena, on a general level. What CT does not do, however, is to predict individual cases. CT models qualitative changes, but it does not quantify them. Later in this book, we will elaborate further and apply two of the catastrophe types: The Cusp (cf. Figures 2.1, 2.2 and 2.3) and the Butterfly (Part IV, The Work).

Notes 1 For a more in depth intro to medieval semiotics: http://plato.stanford.edu/ entries/semiotics-medieval/. 2 Möystad, O. 1995b. 3 Something stands for something else. https://en.glosbe.com/la/en/aliquid%20 stat%20pro%20aliquo. 4 Eco, U. 1979, pp. 58–59. See also ‘Sémiotique générale et philosophie de langage’, Critique nr. 452–453, 1985. Published in Danish in Almen Semiotik 1, 1990. 5 Karl Popper as quoted by William H. Calvin in Scientific American, October 1994, p. 83. 6 Aristotle’s Metaphysics, 981b5. 7 Aristotle, De Interpretatione. On Interpretation. Translation E. M. Edghill, https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/a/aristotle/interpretation/. 8 Libera, A. de 1991, pp. 246–268. 9 E.g. Jean-Franc̡ois Bordron 1990 and 1991. 10 Ebbesen, Sten 1998, p. 274ff. Kindle version. 11 Wittgenstein 1922. 12 Figure 1.1 13 Cf. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Introduction, Bertrand Russel. Online: http://www.iu.hio.no/~kirstenr/etikk/tractatus_introduction.htm. 14 Op. cit. Wittgenstein 1922, 5.6. 15 Ferdinand de Saussure, Course Géneral de Linguistique, 1985(1916).

Review Copy - Not for Distribution Håvard Wibe - Norwegian Universtiy of Science and Technology - 19/01/2018 28 Making Sense 16 One of these cross breeds is presented in ‘The Work’ later in this volume. 17 C. S. Peirce in Buchler 1955, p. 99. 18 René Thom 1991. 19 Thom 1983, p. 59: ‘je dirais plutôt qu’il s’agit d’une méthodologie’. 20 Received the Fields Medal in 1958 for his mathematical studies. 21 Thom 1989. 22 The lapse from concept to building is of course a point of particular interest to architects. For an elaboration of this point, and for a further introduction to CT, see ‘The Effect of Butterfly upon an Opus of Architecture – A Catastrophe Theoretical perspective on Design Theory’ by Ole Möystad, Nordic Journal of Architectural Research No 4, 1993.


2 Umwelt

The concept of Umwelt was adopted, in a semiotic context one might say ‘coined’, by the biologist Jacob von Uexküll (1864–1944) who introduced the concept of Umwelt in his Bedeutungslehre from 1940.1 In Uexküll’s biosemiotic theory, Umwelt denotes the subjective environment specific to every species, or the environment that every species creates around itself, as an appropriation of its biological niche. Umwelt has become a formative concept in biosemiotics, and it is becoming an important term in the study of the existential niche that humans are building for themselves too: architecture. In this chapter, we will approach the topic of the architectural environment (the city) as the evolutionary, intelligent system that one would assume a human Umwelt would be. First, we will essayistically discuss the urban dynamic between Brussels, the political and administrative centre of Europe and Oslo, Norway’s capital on the European periphery. Why Brussels–Oslo? Because the two cities are relatively normal. They work. Then we will have look at Beirut, which in normal terms represents an urban pathology, while at the same time it doggedly demonstrates a human capacity to adapt and to survive. Second, this text will take the opportunity offered by the narratives from Brussels, Oslo and Beirut to introduce some of the abstract schemas from catastrophe theory and from semiotics that will be used throughout the book as tools of analysis.

The Empty Centre2 ‘The present centre of The Old World is the centre of a battlefield (…) Brussels is the capital of Belgium, and Belgium is Europe – in the smallest form possible’. Benno Barnard3 Let us accept Brussels as an inner and Oslo an outer European periphery. This schema suggests that periphery is a prerequisite to cognition inasmuch as Brussels–Oslo not as cities, but as logical principles, can be considered as

Review Copy - Not for Distribution Håvard Wibe - Norwegian Universtiy of Science and Technology - 19/01/2018 30 Making Sense prerequisites for the culture that unfolds between them. There is presumably a Brussels on the inside and an Oslo on the outside of any culture. The architecture of Brussels carries, as every city does, the marks of the administration it has been subjected to. One should, therefore, not be surprised to find that Brussels, as has Belgium at large, developed certain traits of subversiveness. Central authorities have always been considered as occupiers; if it isn’t the Romans, then it is the Spanish, the Austrians, the Dutch or the Germans, then there is the Pope, the inland revenue, or the building authorities. To survive in a constant battlefield, without being involved in everybody else’s conflicts, one has to fold one’s world inwards. In his great Belgian novel, Het verdriet van Belgie (Belgium’s Sorrow), Hugo Claus sums it up like this: ‘We must make sure that we behave ourselves, grandmother said. We always have to behave ourselves. The history of our fatherland consists of nothing else’.4 The conversation takes place in the wake of Nazi Germany’s attack on Belgium in World War II. When the victors wrote the histories after the war, they all looked askance at the Flemish who had ‘behaved themselves’ rather than organizing resistance movements. The Flemish collaborated with their occupiers, but they also hid and saved almost all their Jews.

Korematic Schema A comparison between Brussels and Oslo requires a relational definition of the two. We will now establish an abstract model, a schema, by which we can relate Brussels and Oslo to each other. Using the schema, I will add observations about Oslo as points of comparison, using them to contrast the observations and narratives from Brussels. Kora is Greek and refers to a place, a space or a position occupied by a something or someone. It is, in other words, a location seen in relation to a subject, cf. choreography. The subject can be inside or outside this location, which may be formed by a society, a territory, a dialect area or whatever might constitute the kora in question. When a subject is defined in relation to a Kora, we will call this a koreme.5 By means of koremes we can make a korematic schema; see Figure 2.1. Graphically, a korematic schema is shaped as a set of concentric circles. The inner circle represents ‘mind’, and its logical opposite, ‘world’, will be represented by what is outside the outer perimeter of the target. Around the inner circle we can offset a number of circles with larger and larger width; each circle related to the issue we need to relate to. We will now establish a korematic Schema adapted to a comparison of Brussels and Oslo. Brussels and Oslo are regarded as abstract korematic positions, or topoï, rather than concrete cities. They will be marked BRU–OSL. In this perspective, the two cities will represent two peripheries of the same phenomenon – ‘a city’. Let us say that Brussels represents a point of infinite curvature, a point of infinite folding – a metaphorical black hole.

Review Copy - Not for Distribution Håvard Wibe - Norwegian Universtiy of Science and Technology - 19/01/2018 Umwelt 31 Oslo will represent the opposite: a continuity where all folds are unfolded. Oslo will represent infinity and Brussels zero. The Koreme is three-dimensional. We can picture it as a torus. The topoï of ‘zero’ and ‘infinity’ now belong to an external continuity. They are part of the same topological space. The schema now contains a field of values between zero and infinity, between Brussels and Oslo, a field to which Brussels and Oslo are external, and without which there would be no values at all. Zero and infinity are now, strictly in the logical terms of our korematic schema, undifferentiated entities. They are mere topoï, and their spaces are homogenous and without singularities. They are outside the border that delimits the space between zero and infinity. This border forms a topological threshold. It can be compared to Stephen Hawking’s ‘event Horizon’,6 or to Umberto Eco’s ‘empirical limit’.7 Inside the event horizon something does appear as different from something else. Singularities do emerge inside the space between zero and infinity. When something really happens, it happens inside the event horizon. Let us return to Benno Barnard’s idea of Brussels as Europe in its smallest possible form. Now as an abstract conceptual entity, Brussels can serve as the central turning point of Europe. korematically, we may now consider Brussels as an idea, rather than a place. As the central point of our Koreme, let us picture Brussels as the hole in a doughnut. Our korematic schema is surrounded by Oslo-the-Koreme. In a European perspective, Oslo represents a pastoral state of nature. Oslo is outside the European continent both mentally and geographically. korematically (and metaphorically) speaking, Oslo has not yet taken place. This may be the reason why refugees such as Wilhelm Reich, Kurt Schwitters, the Von Trapp family and Leo Trotski could escape Europe by going through Oslo. Like nature lends its forms to fantasy figures like trolls and pixies, Oslothe-city lends its forms to dreams of elsewhere. The architecture of Oslo has a lot of German classicism, Dutch functionalism, American post modernism and contemporary corporate neo modernism. ‘Ny York’ (New York), ‘Frankrike’ (France), ‘Kuba’ (Cuba) and ‘Italia’ (Italy) are all places, or rather topoï, in Oslo. Oslo is invested with English garden cities, Berlin perimeter blocks, a Viennese Ringstrasse, an inner ring road with Brussels’ tunnels and a hotel (Oslo Plaza) where the sky bar is oriented to Mekka. The latest addition so far is a National Opera whose unmistakable leitmotif is – not the Opera in Milan, but an iceberg.8

Brussels: Oslo Now let us consider the space outside the event horizon, the space whose conceptual poles are Brussels (BRU) and Oslo (OSL), as a semiotic space. The space inside the event horizon, between zero and infinity, can be considered an ontological space. We could also think of space outside and inside the event horizon as respectively virtual space and real or actual space. Inside ontological space phenomena have form. They form a field


UMWELT

of forms: as objects of politics, of science, of theory, of various social and cultural practices. We can differentiate the field of forms by distinguishing between the topoï of Brussels and of Oslo. We will then presume that Brussels (BRU) exists in two conditions: outside the empirical limit as a semiotic entity (BRUs) and inside as an ontological entity (BRUo). This schema hence implies that the concept Brussels (BRUs) reflects, more or less, the real, phenomenological Brussels (BRUo) inside the event horizon. We would obviously assume the same to be true for Oslo; (OSLs) outside would reflects (OSLo) inside the event horizon. Figure 2.1.

WORLD

MIND

WORLD

U

W

A

B

M

BRUS

BRUO

OSLS

OSLO

EMPIRICAL LIMIT

Figure 2.1 The Korematic Schema. Centre: 3D representation showing section with Cusp inscribed. Top: the projection of its formal space. Bottom: the projection of its material space.

Review Copy - Not for Distribution Håvard Wibe - Norwegian Universtiy of Science and Technology - 19/01/2018 Umwelt 33 In the korematic schema we have now given Brussels to represent the position of ‘mind’ (M) and Oslo the position of ‘world’ (W). To establish a more general scope of this analysis we will now proceed from here by using the cognitive terms of ‘M’ and ‘W’ in the schema. The ontological counterpart to ‘mind’ is the ‘body’ (B) in which the mind rests, and reflects. What is the ontological counterpart to ‘world’ outside the event horizon? Avoiding Platon’s question of the world inside and outside the cave, we will modestly and pragmatically focus on the world as we humans experience it and give it form, inside the event horizon. A good term for the real world as we perceive and interact with it is Umwelt (U).

The Cusp9 Picture the korematic schema in 3D; as a torus, or a doughnut. In semiotic space, the doughnut is virtual, it is a hope and a promise. Semiotic space offers escape from political authorities: for Trotsky through Oslo and Bakunin through Brussels. The proof of the doughnut, however, is in the dough. Neither Trotsky nor Bakunin were able to enter ontological space and realize their hopes and dreams. Let us, therefore, make a section of the torus. This section is now a circular section, a slice, of the ontological space. From here on we will use this slice as a topology in its own right, without insisting on it being part of the torus. Ontological space is a real space where phenomena are present and perceivable to us, here and now; from events that took place yesterday or further back in history. The European Union located its headquarters in Brussels in 1958. This is a past event, which is still exercising a lot of pressure on present Brussels. The 2 degrees or 4 degrees temperature rise due to carbon emissions is a future event, which is exercising force on Oslo at present to roll out an efficient system of public transportation in and around the city. Life as it unfolds in our Umwelt, here and now, is under the influence of forces from the past (M) and the future (W). The forces exercise a pressure on the ontological space, making people and Umwelt do things, to interact, to make things happen. All this activity unfolds in certain ways. Over time it generates patterns. It starts to take habits, form conventions and laws to establish regular forms of architectural, social, cultural and political organization. A system evolves and grows intelligence. It forms human Umwelt. This is collective human behaviour and interaction with the nature of which it is part. On an abstract level, this formation of Umwelt can be described as a topology: we can say that forces from M and W cause folds in Umwelt (U); like a tablecloth when we place our hands on it and move our hands closer. Consider Figure 2.2. Each fold represents the topology of an event, of a change from one condition to another one. The cusp is hence generated by tensions between M and W in semiotic space, which exercise pressure on


Figure 2.2 The Fold of the Cusp and its 2D projection.

ontological space. Inasmuch as the cusp is a formalized model, and a mathematical figure, of the folding, it does in its turn exercise a counter pressure, creating tension in semiotic space. There is, in other words, a mutual dynamic between semiotic and ontological space across the event horizon, across the threshold between the idea of Brussels (BRUs) and the actual city (BRUo). BRUs and BRUo are not separate entities. They are different aspects of the same phenomenon. From this perspective, our schema is not one of projecting ideal forms on to matter. We are looking at a morphogenetic process of a neo-Aristotelian nature, in the sense that René Thom suggests,10 rather than a Platonic morphoprojection. Catastrophe theory has developed a topological typology of foldings. René Thom called it a ‘Spatiotemporal Phenomenology’.11 The Cusp, as illustrated in Figure 2.2, is one of them. The most common representation of the cusp is the 2D projection of the graph of behaviour, in catastrophe theory (CT) terms called ‘Control

Review Copy - Not for Distribution Håvard Wibe - Norwegian Universtiy of Science and Technology - 19/01/2018 Umwelt 35

EM

PI R IC AL

LI M

IT

Space’12 Cf. also Figure 12.2. In the following we will be using the 2D representation, as illustrated in figure 2.3, while always keeping in mind that it is a projection of a 3D fold.

FORMAL ONTOLOGY

M

MATERIAL ONTOLOGY

B

W

SEMIOTIC SPHERE

U A

Figure 2.3 The section of the Korematic Schema folded to a cusp. Mind (M) and world (W) are shown as external korematic topoï, in semiotic space. The cusp divides material ontological space in body (B), architecture (A) and Umwelt (U).

Let us return to the slice of the doughnut: Umwelt, or the ontological space between Brussels (M) and Oslo (W). Under pressure from its past and its future it will fold. We will represent that fold as a projection of the cusp, the control space, and then inscribe it in the section of the torus. Let us locate the folding point, or the tip of cusp, at the centre of the ontological space. Now the upper part of the circle is continuous and the lower part is folded. This divides the ontological space in two along a horizontal line through the centre. We will consider the upper, unfolded part a zone of formal ontology, and the lower part a zone of material ontology. The formal ontology is composed of formal entities such as for instance the table of multiplication. Below the folding point there is a material ontology composed of material entities such as buildings. The existence of formal ontological phenomena tends to be taken for given, to be protected by modal necessity. The existence of such phenomena tends to evade investigation under the cover of a certain modal necessity. The Ten Commandments, judgements of taste, religious beliefs are examples of such phenomena. They are held not to have been created by someone - other than God. They are simply accepted as being there until they for some reason disappear from the ontosphere. See Figure 2.3. While the zone of formal ontology remains unfolded and hence forms one continuous modal zone (U), the material ontology, is folded into three modal zones: As the ontological reflection of ‘mind’ (M) there is body (B).

Review Copy - Not for Distribution Håvard Wibe - Norwegian Universtiy of Science and Technology - 19/01/2018 36 Making Sense As the ontological reflection of ‘world’ (W) there is Umwelt (U), and in the space between them, inside the cusp, there is architecture (A). Under the ‘Oslo condition’ of the cusp (U), there is now a future where events have not yet happened, where Italy is still a dream and the City Hall turns its back to the city and its front to the sea, facing events still to come. The modality of this condition is one of being-not (yet). Under the ‘Brussels condition’ (B) things have already happened, the Palace of Justice is there, events are absorbed and inscribed in the city’s collective memory of stored knowledge. The modality of this condition is being. The Palace of Justice has been built, and the modality of its being there is not ‘can be’ or ‘may be’ or ‘should be’. It is. Between the conditions of past and future, inside the cusp, however, events are evolving, things are becoming and forms are being generated. While (U) belongs to future and (B) to past, the internal condition (A) is one of becoming. It belongs to present, it is dynamic and it is a condition of possibilities where phenomena ‘can be’ or ‘should be’ or ‘should not be’. This is the condition of reflection, creativity and morphogenesis. This is also the condition where phenomena are accessible to our senses. We can dream of future achievements. We can analyse historical events. But it is only under the condition of presence that we can experience a phenomenon with our senses. If the only input to our cognition was fantasies and memories, it might be hard to create a meaningful Umwelt. This schema now ascribes Umwelt (U) to a future condition. It is there as a potential, but not yet come into our modality of being. Body (B), however, belongs to being. ‘You know what you have, but not what you get’ is an expression which illustrates these modalities and how they are relevant to the BRU–OSL relationship. You have ‘What you have’ because you have it close to, or preferably inside, your body (B), like food or beer. ‘What you get’, however, korematically belongs to Umwelt (U). The problem with that is that such phenomena still have not taken on being for us, like promises given by politicians during an election campaign. They rest in our future, and it is not certain that they will enter our present. This uncertainty may be perceived as an agreeable condition or an acceptable one, or as a frightening one, all depending on the living conditions of the subject in question. It will certainly have a lot to do with the subject’s confidence in his or her living conditions; if they are experienced as safe, stable, predictable or not. Homo Belgicus seems to fold his life inwards, to prefer keeping everything close and stick to ‘what you have’. Homo Norvegicus seems to have full trust in his social welfare system and go whaling in the Antarchtis, crab fishing in Newfoundland, skiing across Greenland, emigrating to the Galapagos or chasing geographical pole points rather than cultivating his kitchen, his library or his next-door neighbour. At the outer perimeter of the korematic schema ‘what you get’ seems to be an attractor and ‘what you have’ a repulsor. At the inner perimeter, the opposite seems to be true. Inside the cusp, however, the two opposing

Review Copy - Not for Distribution Håvard Wibe - Norwegian Universtiy of Science and Technology - 19/01/2018 Umwelt 37 conditions are folded on top of each bother. Inside the cusp it is possible to go skiing to the South Pole and to think ‘You know what you have, but not what you get’ while doing it. This is so because inside the cusp the modal condition is between ‘being’ and ‘being not’. It is becoming. In present, in real-time the epistemology does not force you to decide whether something is true or not. Inside the cusp things are ‘possible’. Reflection unfolds in present. Thought is only productive if it rests on the condition of possibility, inscribed in a what-if, exploring the condition of may be. If the object of cognition is definitely true, or not true, there is little more to do for thought. Then reflection is over. In the middle of the material projection, inside the cusp, between the daily toil of les Marrolliens13 and the Oslo inhabitant yearning for elsewhere there is the space of possibility, of emerging new forms of civic human life. Relating mind to world is a long leap. It would probably have been too long if we had not been able to mirror bodies in minds and evolve the capacity to turn nature into our Umwelt and to generate an architecture (A) of interaction.

Beirut – Case 1 In the previous section we discussed a normal, generic urban system, using anecdotes from Brussels and Oslo as the narrative matter of ontological space, or in CT terms: éspace de comportement (cf. Figure 2.2). The narratives of Brussels–Oslo have offered us the opportunity to introduce the korematic schema and the Cusp as abstractions, as schematizations and analytical tools; as an éspace de control in CT terms. While Brussels–Oslo served as the normal condition, Beirut may serve as the extreme case, the pathology that makes things more readily visible; like one can better observe the importance of renovation when in collapses.14 Beirut will serve as an illustration of the Peirce sign as a schema of a cognitive feedback loop in architecture. Beirut was caught up in a civil war that lasted from 1975 until 1991. The war was a slow war, fought with light weaponry and by up to 17 different militias. Fighting was on and off. During lulls in the fighting, there were periods of relative normalcy, even attempts at reconstruction and property development. The urban system, its social and political as well as its spatial structure, was subjected to a very high pressure and volatility. The war in Lebanon turned identities into territories. The driving force of this process was an urge to secure one’s identity by ascribing it to geographical place,15 to a territory which could be defended by military power. The consequence was, however, a profound destabilization of the fragile multicultural coexistence and ‘a geography of fear’.16 Among the outcomes of the civil war in Lebanon, were a host of strategies of urban warfare (Möystad 1998, Graham 2004, Weizman 2007), territorial and real estate strategies and tactics (Khalaf and Khoury 1993, Sarkis 1993, Gavin and Maluf 1996),

Review Copy - Not for Distribution Håvard Wibe - Norwegian Universtiy of Science and Technology - 19/01/2018 38 Making Sense terrorist methods (like the twin detonations to allow the medics to arrive before the second blast), not to mention the active and brilliant Beirut art scene that processes the hyper dynamics of war and reconstruction. The energy of the process dismantled the underlying structures of the society. The war ran out of hand and became a fight between self-made warlords and street gangs. Instead of an agglomeration of culturally homogenous safe havens, the most dominant characteristic of Beirut’s urban geography became the Green-Line Area. The name refers to the belt of greenery, which emerged when grass and trees took over streets and buildings damaged and abandoned in no-man’s land for years. The Arabic term for the front line is Khutut at tammas, which means ‘confrontation lines’, more accurately in plural.17 For the duration of the war, the architecture of the Green-Line became the architecture of Beirut. As it did for periods for Sarajevo and Grozny, and certain areas in Los Angeles, Detroit, New York, Chicago, and as it will most likely be in Aleppo, Mosul and Sanaa for many years to come. War accelerates the evolutionary processes imminent in all architecture, and the speed of the processes makes them visible – like cancer makes cell formation visible. War compresses time locally,18 in the sense that huge changes, big events can unfold in a short span of global time. In Beirut, the destruction took 22 years – seventeen years of war plus five of demolition – and the reconstruction was expected to take 30, but that was before the war in Syria broke out and caused 1.5 million Syrian to seek refuge in Lebanon. Beirut’s transition from pre- to post-war may very well outlast two to three generations of its inhabitants. During the demolition frenzy of the first couple of peace years, the established generation of architects, artists and intellectuals in Beirut opposed the process under the argument of preserving the collective memory. The students of architecture at The American University of Beirut at the time shrugged their shoulders: ‘We were born when the war started and we became students when it ended. Whose collective memory are they talking about?’19 The two implications of their argument were (1) to them war was not a state of exception but a condition of life and, (2) to them there was no other prior condition available for re-construction than war. To them, the new normality had to be based on processing and changing the conditions they knew. In Beirut in the 1990s, it was, in other words, a matter of urgency to identify the feedback loop that makes an intelligent system work.

Feedback Loop Intelligence is suspended as a field between mind and world, cf. the korematic schema. It is energized by the interplay between intentions, coming out of ‘mind’ and facts coming in from ‘world’. The problem is how to combine intentions with a closed or circular feedback loop.20 One must not

Review Copy - Not for Distribution Håvard Wibe - Norwegian Universtiy of Science and Technology - 19/01/2018 Umwelt 39 mistake facts for system. Facts, as well as intentions, are local. Facts are embedded in objects and intentions in subjects. Together they form local subsystems, waves or architectural pro-jects in the overall, nonlocal Field of Architecture (A). How facts and intentions interact, embed intelligence and produce meaning is a semiotic problem. In architecture, it is also a pragmatic and ontological problem. Let us therefore adopt the sign structure according to Peirce and adapt it to architecture, cf. Figure 1.11. The representamen (R) is a phenomenon as it is perceived and experienced by someone. It includes a time dimension. In terms of architecture, we can say that R is architecture as verb and event: The Work of Architecture (WoA). WoA represents the interaction between subjects and objects – the work of producing architecture as well as the work of using it. The object (O) translates to the Object of Architecture (ObA). ObA can be defined as the individual, physical structure: a building, a bridge, a tower etc. The interpretant (I) of architecture is the general Field of Architecture (FoA); roughly the equivalent to the zone, or field A in the korematic schema.21 See Figure 2.4. These three elements form a logical schema of architecture. The following three chapters of this book, ‘The Field’, The Object’ and ‘The Work’ will be elaborating on each element as a cognitive aspect of architecture. It is only when we interact with a house that it takes on meaning. It is through use that a house becomes a home. Over time, a home can become a shelter and a ruin. Under normal circumstances this change will unfold so slowly that it can hardly be observed. In Beirut, it happened so fast it was observable. It also happened slowly enough to be experienced, not as a momentary shock, but as a process, by the human senses. The speed of change is elaborated further in part IV, ‘The Work’. WoA hence unfolds in time from concept to project, through use and decay until demolition transfers it to memory. The sensual experience of ObA forms a local and individual sub-system. ObA is the actualization of a certain amount of space-time in FoA. FoA, in its turn, is the morphogenetic field with which ObA resonates. Resonance is when something vibrates in tune with something else. Resonance is a qualitative identification, which has to do with similarity rather than with identity or congruence. It is a case of similitudo in the sense that Aristotle uses the term to describe the relation between ‘general concepts’ and ‘res’.22 In modal terms, resonance belongs to the space of possibility: A resembles B. Maybe it is? The modal relationship between FoA and ObA is ‘possible’, and their semiotic relationship is iconical, cf. Figure 2.4. 23 WoA is an experience. We experience WoA as users, but also as architects. As users, WoA is our experience of ObA. When we have breakfast in the kitchen with the children before they go to school or with friends in the dining room in the evening and a drink on the balcony enjoying the view


FoA

SE MO MIO TIM MO DA SIS: E: F DA LITY SYM UTUR L F : N BOL E OR ECE ICAL CE SSA RY :

T EN

ES

PR : E: SIS : M I E: O I T M ITY RC L E S DA FO MO DAL MO

RE ST

TIME: PAST SEMIOSIS: INDEXICAL MODALITY: ACTUAL POSSIBLE MODAL FORCE: INTENSITY

WoA

LE SIB S O N LP IO ICO TUA NS R E T VI L

A NIC

ObA

Figure 2.4 The cognitive feedback loop schematized as a Peircean sign structure with annotated semiotic modalities.

and a cigarette, these experiences belong to WoA. They are caused by ObA, they are the effects of the work (WoA) done by the architect, and the safe and pleasurable use of the balcony is possible because FoA is encoded with a symbolic structure, a convention, that defines a border between the public space of the street and the private space of the balcony. As architects, ObA is the effect of our work; our WoA. The semiotic relation between WoA and ObA is causal. When we experience a piece of architecture, the experience is a direct effect or result of the physical object; like smoke and fire. The semiotic relationship between WoA and ObA is indexical. The border between public and private space on a balcony is immaterial. It is formed by law, by habit, by social convention, and it is respected because it rests on a consensus. It is absolute is the sense that it cannot be negotiated. The limit of privacy, of intimate private space, is different in different cultures because it is conditioned by the culture in which it is adopted.

Review Copy - Not for Distribution Håvard Wibe - Norwegian Universtiy of Science and Technology - 19/01/2018 Umwelt 41 Within that culture, however, it is not negotiable. It is a modal necessity. Between the individual experience of architecture, in ObA, and architecture in general, FoA, there is language, law, habit and other formal links that are based not on similarity, nor on causality, but on consensus. The semiotic relationship is symbolic. Symbols are signs, like laws, and they work because we have agreed on their meaning. When the intelligence of an urban system is brought in crisis, it is this aspect of semiosis that collapses first. Consensus is the first victim of a state of exception, like a civil war. In Beirut, one could observe balconies being walled up with sand bags or concrete blocks and transformed into sniper’s positions. The most valuable spaces in an apartment changed from being the beautiful living room with the great windows to the street or the square, into the stairwell, which gave better protection against shelling. When social consensus is destabilized, symbolic meaning collapses. Symbolic meanings must be sought within smaller groups; within the clan, one’s religious community, the family. Public authority rests on symbolic meaning. When such meaning implodes, public services collapse. After the war in Beirut, the postal service was depending on private relations. When one went abroad, one brought letters in and out in for friends and family. Energy was generated with private petrol-powered generators, usually placed on a balcony, and garbage piled up in the streets, wrapped in colourful plastic bags. The logics of war are indexical. It reduces every meaning to absolute modal necessity: yes or no, being or non-being, dead or alive, you are with us or against us, to 1 or 0. The value of a place relates to its strategic position. The most valuable places in Beirut were used as army check points. Valuable check points remained in the same place throughout the war, even if the militia territories moved. The check point was just taken over by another militia.24 Indexicalization detaches the architectural forms from the programs that once led to their design. Indexicalization de-programs and de-forms architecture. It fears ambiguity. It tends to close down ‘possible’, and hence to shut down reflection. Indexicalization folds architecture back into itself. It resorts to the object, to matter. Subjects become objects to each other. Let us return for a moment to the Cusp: Figure 2.5. We have seen how Brussels and Oslo were distributed between mind and world and how the interior of the Cusp opens a space of possibility where architecture unfolds and gives form to everyday lives. There is a global timeline running horizontally from Oslo as a future condition towards Brussels as a past. Let us set the speed of global time (T) as constant. Inside the ontosphere there is a local, phenomenological time (t). When something happens, a phenomenon occurs, t slows down, the ontosphere folds and the Cusp emerges. Let us say t moves along a vertical line through the folding point of the Cusp. At the folding point t = 0. Above the folding point t>0. Below it, in the interior of the Cusp t0 t=0

TIME: PAST SEMIOSIS: INDEXICAL MODALITY: NECESSARY + MODAL FORCE: INTENSITY

THE SPEED OF CHANGE: HIGHER T-VALUE - LESS POSSIBLE

INTERNAL TIME (1)

UNIVERSAL TIME (0)

TIME: FUTURE SEMIOSIS: SYMBOLICAL MODALITY: NECESSARY MODAL FORCE: REST

t0 t=0 t

Cognition and the Built Environment

Cognition and the Built Environment

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