A critical reading of the architectural practice of r&sie through the lens of Gilles Deleuze
“In a restless moment near the end of their lives, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari revealed their sensitivity to the uncertainty within their work, which was constantly being reformulated, by asking what it means to create. While the act of creation is not a representation of something that already exists, it is also not an eruption of the uncontrolled or undefined; it is not born of pure chaos, nor does it refer to it,” Natanel Elfassy
Project Outline
I’mLostinParis, r&sie, 2008
Scenario:
1) Design of a Private laboratory as Duck Blind cabana
2) 1200 Hydroponics ferns
3) 300 glass beakers “blowing” components for bacterial culture / extra light through refraction / “Rear windows” negotiation with the neighbourhood opposite views on closed courtyard.
4) Collecting raining for watering plants with individual mechanical drop by drop system including nutritional adding on proportioning controls
5) Devil’s Rock emergences (“close encounters of the third kind”), with a nature (fern) coming from the Devonian period (dinosaur), technologically domesticated to come back in the actual regressive French period
Devices of Power
“A main question for us is the degree of mass media culture we assume and consume. We are fed a lot of references. This consumption doesn’t help us to be more accurate, it just justifies that we are consuming, it justifies the simulacrum of knowledge. So the question is how we could find a way inside this consumption.” Francois Roche, Interview with C-Lab. Volume 10: Agitation!
Reflecting the systems of organization and technologies of communication of its period, disciplinary societies operate through "organization of vast spaces of enclosure". The goal was "to concentrate; to distribute in space; to order in time; to compose a productive force within the dimension of space-time whose effect will be greater than the sum of its component forces".
In this binary model of inside versus outside, architecture as a device of control is naturally implicated: spatial choreography within a space of enclosure reifies the relations within it. In this mode, the agency of architecture - its war machine - is primarily spatial.
For example, the organizational stratification of floors in a vertical building is a literal spatial transcription of a corporations hierarchy - the architecture of a building is the system of reification for the power systems at play. The capital-intensive production of buildings necessarily puts architects in a subservient role to those who fund it. The war machine in this is simply the erosion of stratification into a pliable surface - the fold.
Folding as a literal practice of resistance: “To reassert its credibility, we imagine the surface of the parvis as pliable: a social magic carpet... These new surfaces - a vertical, intensified landscape - are then 'urbanized'... Instead of a simple stacking of one floor on top of the other, sections of each floor are manipulated to connect with those above and below.” Competition entry for Jessieu Library, OMA. 1992
This model, predicated on the Factory model of capitalist production, concerns itself with the accumulation and concentration of resources, both human and material - the individual is engendered in the masses. The Corporation - a more contemporary mode of capitalist production - melts this solid model into a gaseous state.
As in a gas, binary oppositions have given way to gradients, resulting in "ultrarapid forms of free-floating control that replaced the old disciplines operating in the time frame of a closed system". This constant modulation of the Corporation dismantles the agency of space as a form of meta-resistance: while the stratification of floors is still the reification of immediate relations, the reification of relations within the Corporation, becomes a-spatial. Control replaces discipline, perpetuated through "desiring-production".
Desiring Production is a perverted form of hypnosis - the creation of continuous desire, the perpetual promise of a "there" that is always one step ahead of fulfillment - the equivalent of a mirage. (e.g. the fashion industry machine) The perpetuation of this desire - the desiring machine - is a rhizomatic system of marketing, a roman orgy of media tie-ins, viral marketing and celebrity plugs . In a mass media culture, the boundary between the "real/authentic" and the "imaginary/fake" becomes collapsed to the point where we are all voluntary prisoners of our own creation, ignorant that we are all voluntary prisoners of our own creation.
Interior View
In a well disseminated project statement, the architects write: “It s the story of an urban witch living behind a rear windows designed as a duck cabana. As alchemist, she feeds the plant with drop by drop hydroponics system watering liquid substances coming from the bacterian chemical preparation in 200 beakers disseminated in the ferns surfaces.The neighborhood is both attracted by the green aspect and repulsed by the brewage and the process to produce it.”
Franoise Roche’s use of the word alchemist requires that the foundational certainties of modernity with its emphasis on objective truth founded in a rational unitary subject be relinquished for a more multi-faceted conception closer to that of the arts. The models of representation he uses are attempts to corrupt the puritanical. Instead of a “green agenda”, which in many instances are co-opted to smooth over other issues, he confronts the reader with an alternative form of hypnosis that is not tied to desire or any promises.
This is reinforced through the fact that most of the technical data is kept private , which is a resistance to "knowing" or creating knowledge systems, instead, an appeal to the imaginary. "We don’t want to use technology as a new propaganda of the future but more as a vector of subjectivity, individual and collective…to reintroduce uncertainty, vibes of time, and fears of sleeping comfort"
Parallax Gaps
“It’s clear in the desire machines of Duchamp, that he does not replicate technology, but technology is a metaphor and a vector, a vector that reprograms relationships and collective desire.” Francois Roche, Interview with C-Lab. Volume 10: Agitation!
Parallax Error: “This interaction between the space of the preserved old houes and the interstital space created by the wrapping generates a new space, a space which ‘poses a question fundamental to the thinking about contemporary American capitalism.” The Gehry Residence, built 1978. Featured on The Simpsons episode 349, The Seven-Beer Snitch. Textual excerpt from “Living in the End Times” by Slavoj Zizek paraphrasing Frederick Jameson. Three levels of parallex gaps.
Parallax Error 2: Contextual View, I’mLostinParis. r&sie, 2008
For R&Sie(n) every building must be inspired by its environment. They use climatic, topographic or organic data as their primary tools in elaborating a structure’s shape and function in purely logical form.
The city’s dysfunctions and its chaotic mechanisms make it possible to imagine another articulation of architecture and the creation of new aesthetics and functions. In this sense, the building functions as a minor literature within the text of the city an opens up a parallax gap, a space for people to imagine an alternative to their version of reality that is independent of known forms of luxury or consumption.
In essence, they are archaeologists that seek to reveal under-represented biotopes, and in their interaction with the major text of its context, perform a type of corruption: not as a moral or ethical provocation, but for difference. .
F for Fake
“My position is against Jules Verne. It’s against using science to finish, or close the possibility of a story. My position is use science in an indeterminist way, using indeterminism as way to produce knowledge.” Francois Roche, Interview with C-Lab. Volume 10: Agitation!
Fisheye view of ground level and perimeter conditions
The lack of articulation of entry/exit, window/door and the facade of ferns is a tool of deterritorialization for the project in the context of the city. It establishes a wider plane of immanance, folding from the system it comes from by co-opting a “wildness” that is typically found only in abandoned sites or buildings in disrepair. In doing so, the limits of power and relations that govern what is “civil” in the city is expanded.
The effect is clear from the outset: the house has caused some controversy around the neighbourhood; it took the architects five years to build it, as according to French planning permission the owners had to have 66% of the neighbours on their side, to go ahead with construction.
Imagining this expanded, if the whole neighbourhood were composed of similar strategies, the use of wildness creates a dynamic physical boundary: territories between neighbours have to be constantly re-negotiated, a relaxation of the stand-offish white-fence of this-is-mine versus that-is-yours into a more open collective field.
The Dice Throw
R&Sie’s Francois Roche: “...all our projects are based on a similar protocol; they touch the boundaries of architecture. It takes off from a typically ecological approach, but goes beyond that. People are always curious when they walk by but sometimes they find the system creepy, or even dangerous to some; it is a game of attraction and repulsion.”