Performative spatial practices in the urban realm

Author: Janet McGaw Contact Details: [email protected] Affiliation: Faculty of Architecture Building and Planning The University of Melbourne, VIC 3010

Performative spatial practices in the urban realm: a ‘tactic’ for transcendence

Abstract Performative spatial practices in the urban realm have been used by artists as vehicles for transcending the boundaries defined by land ownership, wealth and power since the late 1960s. As Michel de Certeau noticed, power relations are enacted through an unfolding performance between ‘strategies’ – those people, institutions and things that draw boundaries around place and declare ownership – and ‘tactics’ – those that use timing to usurp, momentarily, the place of another. ‘Tactics’, de Certeau suggests, are the practices of the marginal that unfold through the dimension of time to transcend the spatial limits imposed by the powerful.

Whilst words such as ‘performative’, ‘event’ and ‘unfolding processes’ have been part of the vocabulary in architecture also for the past two decades, such

practices in architecture have been largely confined to the generation of form or its inverse, ‘the void’. They have ‘strategic’ objectives. Rarely is performance used ‘tactically’ by architects as a critical practice.

There are exceptions, however. This paper will present examples from some of those architects who use ‘tactics’ to critique power relations in the city. It will contend that architecture that arises from this type of performance does not privilege form-making. Although the outcomes may include built form, the performative spatial practices that unfold along the way are as important, generating new types of social relations and developing new visions for a sustainable future. Tactical performances such as these are often collaborative, crossing disciplinary boundaries to critique authorship, ownership and rights to the space of the city

Introduction Performative practices entered the domain of the visual arts in the late 1960s as a social and political critique. In reaction to the totalising urges of modernism, artists such as Allan Kaprow, the situationists, Carollee Schnneeman and others began to embrace the contingencies of collaboration and performance to critique traditions of authorship and control, and challenge the place of art in the circuits of capital. By the 1990s words such as ‘performative’, ‘operative’, ‘event’ and ‘unfolding processes’ were common adjectives used to describe architecture as well.

In some respects this may seem a strange phenomenon in architecture given that the performances of everyday life have always been an intrinsic part of the experience of built space. Indeed modernism in architecture asserted that form ought to follow function. That is, that architecture had a machinic quality as a giant, prosthesis for daily living. The interest in performativity in architecture since the late 1960s is different. It has been a deliberate attempt to engage with post modern critical theory as defined by the Frankfurt school, Foucault, Bordieu and more recently Soja, which has levelled a sustained critique of the internationalisation, domination and lack of historical and spatial specificity intrinsic to modernist architecture.

As Jane Rendell observes, the last two decades have seen a convergence of art and architecture where artists have embraced the contingencies of public engagement that is intrinsic to architecture, and architects have sought to use architecture as a practice for social and political critique (16). This turn in architecture this has not been straightforward. This paper will critically review (briefly) the difficult history of critical performative practices in architecture and present the work of one practice

from the UK, muf, who have developed what I think is successful approach.

Tactics and Strategies But let me first locate my interest in performative practices theoretically. Michel de Certeau, noticed that power relations are played out in the urban realm as a relationship between those people, institutions and things that draw boundaries around place and declare ownership (which he called strategies) and those that use movement and timing to usurp, momentarily, the place of another (which he called tactics). (3) ‘Tactics’, de Certeau suggests, are practices that unfold through the dimension of time to transcend the spatial limits imposed by the powerful. Architecture has traditionally been regarded as strategic: sited, owned and relatively permanent. The destination of this paper is to uncover architectural practices that operate tactically, or use movement and timing as a critique of architecture’s usual collusion with power, permanence and privilege.

A brief history of performance in architecture since the 1960s Arguably, one of the most important precedents for using tactical performances as a practice to transcend spatial boundaries in the urban realm was the situationists. The situationist’s critical practice, which they called unitary urbanism, included a range of performances that challenged city structures: in particular, derive (intuitive wandering in the city), and psychogeography, (study of the city through play). Performance was instrumental, the situationists asserted, in transcending the mechanisms of control exerted by the ruling class that induced passivity in ordinary citizens. (15) The situationists unitary urbanism can be similarly described as tactical. Their practices of taking over the street for their own ends, deploying graffiti, and attempts to create

environmental ambience through new sensory experiences were all practices that generated zones of freedom from social norms and questioned assumptions about ownership of public places. Architect Constant Nieuwenhuys was a member of the situationsts. His work included designs for a ‘situationist city’, New Babylon, in which streets and living spaces were elevated and automated so that there was no need to work and people could engage endlessly in fluid creative play. While provocative and widely publicized for a brief period in the 1960s, he quickly became a marginal voice in architectural discourse, possibly because his project remained in the realms of the imagination. And this is key: where architects have projects realized in the urban realm, they struggle to remain tactical.

Bernard Tschumi was an early champion of performative processes in architecture. Tschumi, having studied architecture in the 1960s in Switzerland, was steeped in the philosophy of Lefebvre and Marx and exposed to the street spectacles of the situationists. Lefebvre had conceptualised space as tripartite: ‘objective’ (that is, able to be geographically defined, bought and sold), ‘subjective’ (able to be experienced by the senses), and ‘abstract’ (able to be represented and imagined). The street spectacles of the situationists had explored the sensory, or ‘subjective’, experience of the space of the city. But Tschumi similarly concludes that it is only in the ‘abstract’, the imaginary or unreal project, that architecture can transcend the boundaries placed on it by the social systems of land ownership, wealth and power. In a lecture he gave at the Architecture Association in London in the early 1970s he observed that “attempts to find a socially relevant, if not revolutionary role for architecture culminated in the years following the events of May 1968 with ‘guerilla’ buildings, whose symbolic value lay in their seizure of urban space and not in the design of what was built.” (18)

These were an architecture of situations, momentary appropriations of physical space that prioritised the social event. Tschumi observed that when architectural practice remained in the physical realm it remained constrained by the circuits of capital. A project of his from 1974 explores a more radical turn: "Fireworks: an Architectural Performance" was his first foray into architecture as an immaterial event. In this project Tschumi contended that in a society gripped by accumulation and consumption, architecture that is immaterial, cannot be bought or sold, yet evokes pure delight, such as fireworks, is the most subversive of all. “…architecture must be conceived, erected and burned in vain. The greatest architecture of all is the fireworker’s; it perfectly shows the gratuitous consumption of pleasure.”(18)

Tschumi’s architectural practice over the next three decades are evidence of an ongoing struggle to determine a way around this apparent impasse. In the 1980s, he embraces Derridean theory (along with Eisenman) to deconstruct the profession, translating Derrida’s ideas about writing into architecture by deconstructing ‘architectural texts’ through a displacement of familiar signs while retaining the ‘trace’ of each of these actions in the final built fabric. Tschumi applied this process in his design for a grid of 26 folies for Parc de la Villette, an industrial wasteland in Paris. While Tschumi describes the folies as “abstract notations in a process, metaoperational elements, a frozen image, a freeze-frame in a process of constant transformation,” etc., he also acknowledges, “the constructions on the site are real and material”(17). This is a perceived problem that is debated with Eisenman and Derrida in the book Tschumi edited, Chora L Works. By the 1990s, still searching for a tactical architecture, vectors of movement, such as bridges, passages and ramps become Tschumi’s primary infrastructure and the generator of building plans.

Architecture is treated as solid matter into which flows are carved, an indication that processes of occupation have become a driver of the architecture, not just processes of design.

Dutch architect, Rem Koolhaas, shares Tschumi’s interest in performative ‘voids’. During the 1990s both deal with their desire to make ‘performance’ and ‘event’ the drivers of their architecture by inverting the additive process of designing form to a subtractive process of carving or erasure to make space within which performances can occur. Koolhaas’ Très Grande Bibliotèque competition entry of 1989, defined the ‘very big library’ programmatically and symbolically as a solid block of information into which the major public spaces were carved: absences of building, voids carved out of the information solid. “Since they are voids, they do not have to be ‘built,’” Koolhaas contended, they were free of the usual constraints of architecture, such as external envelope and gravity. (10) These voids were designed, though, and in the course of the design development maquettes of the ‘absences’ were built repeatedly as solids and the informational solid block became a ghostly absence.

Koolhaas defines ‘the void’ as the great liberator; the zone for a new beginning where space is a performative zone unencumbered with the physical impediments of structure, order or boundary. “Imagining Nothingness” a paper from 1985 revisits the modernist idea of the Tabula Rasa, a wholesale demolition of slums in the pursuit of ‘better’, more equitable cities. In it Koolhaas asserts that the void is not something to fear, but rather a site for potential, a site for performance, a “liberty zone”.(9) Metropolitan voids do not stay empty, he argues, they are appropriated for unexpected programs of activity. For Koolhaas, performative practices are generated by

occupants: the role of architecture is to create space in which they can occur. Not that different from any architecture, really.

With the development of digital generative processes, performative architecture has taken a new turn. In the early years, computers were used as representational tools for architecture, but as their computational power has increased a whole range of performative digital processes have developed that are generative of architectural form, including topological space, isomorphic surfaces, kinematics and dynamics, keyshape animation, parametric design, and genetic algorithms.(6) Greg Lynn has been a forerunner in the development of this type of performative practice.

Kolarevic identifies Greg Lynn as one of the first architects to use animation software as a generator of form. Lynn’s essay from 1993 on “architectural curvilinearity” is a critique of performative deconstructivist design processes, which he believes used the “logic of conflict and contradiction.” He proposed a new type of process that foregrounds fluidity and connectivity enabled by computer generated NURBS - NonUniform Rational B-Spline curves and surfaces.(6) Part of Lynn’s critique is that until computer generated design was developed, performative architecture remained trapped within Cartesian space. Lynn employs motion-based modeling techniques in the virtual realm to simulate organic movement in an object. Lynn’ s early experiments were formally inventive, and unsurprisingly, extremely expensive to build as the logic of computer rarely coincided with construction practices though as computers have begun to be used in factory prefabrication, this is no longer always true.

Indeed new digital processes are developing at an exponential pace. Kolarevic notes an emerging understanding of performative architecture that begins with simulating building performance on a range of indicators including technical domains such as acoustics, structure, thermal and environmental as well as financial, spatial and cultural indicators.(7) But still, these digital performances use time and motion to transcend primarily aesthetic and technological boundaries: they are the boundaries of Euclidian geometric systems and traditional construction practices. Rarely is performance used as a critical practice to transcend the social boundaries defined by land ownership, wealth and power. Although they operate in a temporal domain, they are not, what de Certeau would call ‘tactical’: they exploit movement and timing in the service of ‘strategies’.

Why did the socio-political critique that drove architecture’s initial foray into performative practices in the late 1960s disappear? Margaret Crawford, in her paper “Can architects be socially responsible?” argues that despite professing a strong concern about issues of social and economic justices, the architecture profession has moved away from engaging with these issues because the success of a professional is inherently dependent on the business interests of his or her client.(2)

Performative Tactics in Architecture This may be true to some extent, but there are architects who have managed to develop tactics for engagement so that their work does reflect an interest in the social and political consequences of their work. The practice I would like to focus on is muf: art/architecture. Their philosophy is in direct contradiction of Koolhaas. They state, “there is no such thing as a tabula rasa and, however green a greenfield site, there are

always edges to negotiate. (And not only edges: a Greenfield site is a nexus of legal, social and other pressures, just as an empty volume of air is crisscrossed by radio frequencies, cellular telephone messages, etc).”(13)

Muf is an interdisciplinary practice of artists and architects that was begun by Katherine Clarke, Cathy Hawley, and Liza Fior. The acronym stands for “modern urban fabric”. They work primarily for local councils in the UK on urban regeneration projects in particularly disadvantaged neighbourhoods and boroughs. In their handbook, this is what we do: a muf manual, they state that they are committed to revealing “The interdependence between the built and the lived, between physical and social infrastructures”.(13) Muf believe that the performative modes of architectural and urban design practice that have dominated the profession have tended to privilege the construction of forms in space, ignoring the needs and desires of the occupants. They challenge the presumption that the architect’s only role is to create the built fabric of our urban environments. Muf demonstrate that architects’ creative practices can be used as generative processes to engage the users and boarder public even before a brief is written.

Pleasure Garden of the Utilities was a project for the Stoke City Council. The brief was to design a lifting barrier to prevent illegal traffic coming into the town centre of Hanley to begin an urban regeneration project. In this area shopping has moved off the street and into a large, enclosed privatised mall so that the social spaces of the street have disappeared. Muf began by re-writing the brief. After interviewing locals and observing the town centre they decided that the problem was not traffic, but a lack of social connection between residents. They convinced the council to let them

design new spaces for social connection that included this bus stops. Armitage Shanks, a well known ceramic factory that makes sanitary ware and crockery is the major employer in the district. So they decided that the driver of the design should be to make visible community workforce. Bench seats were made from porcelain with an oversized plate design. For the first month after installation a video projection of the people who worked on them in the factory was played nearby. They wanted to “reveal this as the place where the person you sit next to on the bus or pass in the street are the hands of the person who shaped the plate from which you eat your dinner. New social connections were forged through an unfolding design event.

London Arts Borough in conjunction with the Borough of Hackney initiated a project to regenerate South Shoreditch, a neighbourhood of council housing and recently gentrified light industrial building. Muf began the process with a question: how to make meaningful place from the “invisible infrastructure of memories and personal history?” First they asked residents who were initially interested to imagine a world where they most wanted to live: tropical paradises and bucolic idylls featured strongly. (16) Out of these conversations they developed an installation on the small patch of lawn outside the council housing block, bringing in sheep to graze and setting up video monitors of tropical fish. This first performance provoked another: conversations in the pub that enabled muf to elaborate a sensitive and responsive brief.

For an urban renewal project along a street in Southwark on the Thames in 1996, muf engaged usually forgotten stakeholders in dreaming the future: the local children. What became apparent in their initial conversations was that children had no

territorial distinction between the real and the imagined and were just as likely reimagine the street as a funfair or a Stage for the Spice Girls.(5) While Tschumi, after Lefebvre, might see the realm of the imaginary as the ultimate space where architecture can transcend the boundaries placed on it by the social systems of land ownership, wealth and power, muf found a way to make the imaginary real by bringing the sea and the childrens’ dreams to Southwark. The footpath was widened to make a ‘foreshore’ and a video of the childrens’ drawings of the river from their own imaginations was projected onto a public wall behind. It played for a 24 hour period, at the conclusion of which, the children were invited on a boat trip down the river to the real beach to connect their imaginary places, geographically, to the sea. An unfolding performance of the children’s hopes for the public realm, became part of its renewal.

During the project, “My Dream Today, Your Dream Tomorrow” Community Garden, in the Broadway Estate, Tilbury 2003, the consultation question muf asked is “what is the land used for, what is its value?” They began with interviews of the various user groups but from these initial questions developed ways to make the dreams real immediately. A gymkhana was staged for the teenage girls on the estate, for example, with real (and not so real ponies. The final design, is a simple landscape device of changing levels. The undulations makes space for the different groups different needs: under fives needed a playground, older children wanted a dressage area, and steps for meeting one another. The elderly wanted safe zones where the younger people wouldn’t knock them over on their bikes. Ledges and gabions are used to zone uses rather than fences.

SureStart on the Ocean project in Stepney in 2000 was a Government funded play space for under 4 year olds and their carers. It doubles as a meeting space at other times. Muf became aware in their consultation that the mothers and their children experienced an internal existence and were subject to social stigma. The performative architecture began with a video titled ‘At Home’, that was projected onto the façade of building during construction. It depicted the babies that live in the estate in their domestic environments and was projected at night time during the unofficial curfew of women and children who live on the estate making them more visible and present in the community.(1) In the built project, texts of statements made during the consultation is retained as a permanently present voice on windows in Bengali and English.

Muf’s first built work, was in St Albans, 2001-4 where a Roman mosaic was discovered underneath a park’s surface. Muf were engaged to design a pavilion, the Hypocaust Building, to protect it. Their design raises the turf up on to the roof, cranks it open. They have lined the soffit with a mirror to reveal the hidden remains to passers-by in the park. Conversely, when people are inside the mirror reveals the exterior. Walls are glass reinforced concrete with crushed oyster shells with fenestration patterns that derive from decorations in the mosaic.

Muf refuse to let form making, however, be the focus of their inventiveness, arguing that the interdependence between the built and the lived, between physical and social infrastractures ought to be the site of architectural endeavour. As Jane Rendell observes, muf’s “provocation then is that architecture can ‘stand in’ for conversation and perhaps conversely that conversation can ‘stand in’ for architecture.”(16)

Conclusion Performative installations that provoke stakeholders to participate in the briefing process and begin imagining new types of urban space into being, as well as installations that become part of the architectural fabric during and after construction, are critical practices that can challenge architecture’s traditional collusion with power and transcend the boundaries defined by land ownership, wealth and power. They manifest the ideals of the first turn in performative art practices and bring to the architectural profession the critical edge that was never quite realised in the 80s and 90s when architects were more concerned about the realm of the imagination (or paper architecture) and processes for generating form or conversely blank space in which performances might occur. Tactical performances such as those devised by muff are often collaborative, crossing disciplinary boundaries to critique authorship, ownership and rights to the space of the city. They distinguish themselves from the widely published architectural projects of other architects who use such adjectives as ‘performative’, ‘operative’, ‘event’ to describe processes for generating form, or its inverse, ‘the void’ through performances that are critical explorations of power relations. Architects such as muf use performance to generate, not just urban form, but new social relations.

References 1. Bullivant, Lucy. British Built: UK Architecture’s Rising Generation (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2005), pp 194-207.

2. Crawford, Margaret. “Can Architects be Socially Responsible?” in Diane Ghirardo (ed.) Out of Site: A Social Criticism of Architecture (Seattle: Bay Press, 1991) pp2745.

3. De Certeau, Michel. (1984) The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley: University of California Press) pxix

4. Derrida, Jacques. Positions, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1981, p62. Quoted in Joan Brandt, Geopoetics: The Politics of Mimesis in Poststructuralist French Poetry and Theory, Stanford University Press, Stanford, Cal., 1997, p148.

5. Hill, Jonathon. Occupying Architecture: Between The Architect and the User (London and New York: Routledge, 1998), pp 119-134.

6. Kolarevic, Branko. “Digital Morphogenesis and Computational Architectures” Constructing the Digital Space (Rio de Janeiro: 4oSIGraDI 2000) pp1-6.

7. Kolarevic, Branko and Malkawi, Ali M (eds) Performative Architecture (New York: Spon Press, 2005)

8. Koolhaas, Rem. “Field Trip: A (A) Memoir (First and Last …)” S, M, L, XL, Rotterdam: 010 Publishers, 1995, p228.

9. Koolhaas, Rem. “Imagining Nothingness,” S, M, L, XL, Rotterdam: 010 Publishers,

1995, p199-202.

10. Koolhaas, Rem. S, M, L, XL, Rotterdam: 010 Publishers, 1995, p602-661.

11. McGaw, Janet (1999) “Architectural (S)crypts: In Search of a Minor Architecture”, Architectural Theory Review, vol 4, no.1. April 1999 (Sydney: Department of Architecture, Planning and Allied Arts, The University of Sydney) pp19-33.

12. Morgan, Robert C. “Touch Sanitation: Mierle Laderman Ukeles” in Linda Frye Burnham and Steven Durland (eds) The Citizen Artist: 20 Years of Art in the Public Arena: An Anthology from High Performance Magazine 1978-1998 (New York: The Critical Press, 2002) p55. First published in High Performance Magazine, Sept-Nov, 1982.

13. Muf, This is what we do: a muf manual (London: ellipsis, 2001), p9.

14. Ngo, Dung and Zion, Adi Shamir. Open House: Unbound Space and the Modern Dwelling (London: Thames & Hudson Ltd, 2002) p34.

15. Nieuwenhuys, Constant. “New Babylon – Ten Years On “ in Mark Wigley, ed. Constant’s New Babylon: The Hyper-architecture of Desire, Rotterdam: 010 Publishers p. 232.

16. Rendell, Jane. (2006) Art and Architecture: a Place Between (London: I.B. Taurus) p160.

17. Tschumi, Bernard. “La Case Vide”, La Case Vide: La Villette 1985, London: Architecture Association, 1985, p3

18. Tschumi, Bernard. “Questions of Space: The Architectural Paradox of the Pyramid and the Labyrinth,” Studio International, Sept/Oct 1975, reprinted as “The Architectural Paradox: The Pyramid and the Labyrinth,” in Questions of Space: Lectures on Architecture, AA Publications, London, 1990, p25. According to Boyarsky, students at the AA, led by COOP Himmelblau, were taking over buildings in these years that had been used by squatters and making radical architectural insertions just before they were to be demolished. Alvin Boyarsky, The AA School and Projects, Pigeon Audio Visual, London, (no date given).