In Search of an Ethico-Aesthetics for Wet Architectures

Architects engaged in experimental practice are increasingly returning to the study of life forms for inspiration. Although the so-called natural world has always provided formal tropes to the architect, the underlying processes of biological life now drive much design research, specifically in the domain of so-called digital architecture. In their biomimetic investigations creative architectural practitioners are advised to equip themselves with a working knowledge of calculus, not to mention evolutionary science, and to remake themselves as technicians—and/or scientists—of an electronic realm of discrete bits, ready to take on genetic algorithmic adventures. A combinatory of computer science and biology has given rise to a term that has been gaining increasing currency, ‘emergence’. Defined simply, emergence refers to the way in which basic units, determined by simple rules or codes, assemble in the neighbourhood of each other and begin to behave in such a way as to create complex wholes—for example, swarms and ant’s nests and even cities. When applied to the generation of architecture, the surging forth of self-organised life in the emergence of complex and novel systems promises the wonder of built forms that become living organisms, or a wet architecture. With this paper I would like to ask: What is at stake in this artificial animation of architecture? Furthermore, What practical ethics might be engaged such that these experiments augment rather diminish the continuance of life forms that are ever in formation, whether individual, social, human or other? To venture a tentative direction with respect to the question of a new ethics, or ethico-aesthetics for digital architecture, I will make use of the work (both individual and collaborative) of French thinkers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. Their ethics is novel in that it offers the promise of new social formations rather than the tired tirade of rules to be followed. The fruitful conjunction of ethics and aesthetics also suggests that ethics can be actively pursued in creative ways, and that an aesthetics can be formulated that is decidedly ethical.

Part of the given task of this essay is to venture the outline of an ideology of the imaginary for the 21st century. In the field of digital architecture the prevalent ideology privileges quasi-scientific discourse in the articulation of design processes that remain open-ended. The risk of this discourse is that it reduces to a codified regime that reifies rather than augments life; a life, any life whatever. Perhaps what is at stake, and the drift that has returned the question of life to the agenda of architectural discourse, is a somewhat misled desire to return to a real that is imagined as a paradisiacal nature of endless potential. With this paper I will survey a series of contemporary digital design projects, both international and local, that is, based in Melbourne, that invest in the combinatory of computer sciences and life sciences. The argument I will propose suggests that, obscured in the midst of the novel algorithmic adventures undertaken by digital architects in search of digital life, is the legacy of the work of French philosopher, Deleuze and his occasional collaborator, the psychoanalyst, Guattari. It is predominantly from Guattari that I borrow the ethico-aesthetics of the present paper’s title as a means of ethically, aesthetically, and politically engaging in the frequently non-critical discourse and practice of digital architectures.

I will begin with a detour through the work of Hannah Arendt, who is interesting, for she stands as a philosopher poised at the brink of much of the work that emerged between computer science and biological science from the 1950’s onwards. In her seminal book, The Human Condition, Hannah Arendt draws a distinction between animal laborans and Homo Faber. Where homo faber is the fabricator of the human world, working with her hands such that the earth is transformed into world, animal laborans labours away incessantly in order to sustain the very possibility of the continuance of his life. Homo Faber transforms mute material into worldly artefact with her hands, and through this process controls the world in the act of wilful creation. Where Homo Faber wants to make life more useful and beautiful, animal laborans strives to make life easier and longer.¹ Irrespective of these differences, and I quote Arendt: “not only the utilitarian philosophy of homo faber but also the men of action and the lovers of the results of sciences have never tired of pointing out how entirely ‘useless’ thought is—as useless, indeed, as the works of art it inspires [yet] the activity of thinking is as relentless and repetitive as life itself, and the question whether thought itself has any meaning at all constitutes the same unanswerable riddle as the question of the meaning of life”.²

Arendt also describes an important operational concept that has become even more pertinent of late with respect to architectural design production: process. Arendt describes the interminable, even unstoppable force of process. The concept of process is discussed both in relation to natural processes, and in relation to the fabrication processes by which Homo Faber gets things done: “processes, therefore, and not ideas, the models and shapes of the things to be, become the guide for the making and fabricating activities of homo faber in the modern age”.³ Following Arendt’s account, it is with modernity in particular that process comes to be extracted from nature and turned to technological ends. Where process is identical to the unfolding of the forces of nature, it becomes distinct in relation to the “products of human hands”.⁴

With the advent of computation as a crucial part of the representation of architectural projects, and more radically the ever-evolving action concomitant with design, process can be considered a key term. Despite the transfer of process from natural to techno-scientific ends, the vital life inherent in the notion of process in fact thwarts the best efforts of Homo Faber, who, according to Arendt’s account, is concerned with ends over means. Ends that can be identified in the completed artefact, the monument, the architectural object. An emphasis on process erases the end product as such and sets it into the indefinite circulation of production, consumption, production. This is a preoccupation that has increasingly come to the fore in the practice of digital architecture. As we will see, digital architecture seeks to de-emphasize the end product in favour of interminable process, thereby exposing a desire to place its activities back on the side of natural process.

Arendt, who argues that Homo Faber has been defeated by animal laborans, asks “why within the diversity of the human condition with its various human capacities it was precisely life that overruled all other considerations”.⁵ Arendt speculates that exactly through his fascination in capturing, measuring, scientifically accounting for life, man by increments returns to the animal he once was; an animal supposedly emptied out of thought.⁶ The greatest risk for Arendt is that thought becomes lost to us. At the conclusion of her book she attempts to slow all the fervent activities of the vita activa, in order to rest in the shelter of a little contemplation, which she provocatively suggests requires conditions of political freedom in order to flower.⁷ Arendt is provocative in the 1950’s, as she already draws attention to the transformation of life and world through technology, perhaps an age old concern, that nevertheless shifts gear with the conjunction of computation and biological systems.⁸  While politically astute, Arendt remains conservative about possibilities for the body, specifically the post-human body, a concept which arrives on the scene after her work is done. For Arendt, the body is stable, fixed, inalienable, its interactions in space and with technology are relatively banal. Arendt asks less what a body can do, and pursues instead the infinite flights of thought, or the contemplative life.

Thought as an active engagement with an immanent milieu is quite a different matter for Deleuze and Guattari. It is a creative activity and not a will to truth, it is dangerous, fraught, “begins to exhibit snarls, squeals, stammers”. If thought searches, “it is less in a manner of someone who has a method than that of a dog that seems to be making uncoordinated leaps”.⁹ The importance of the interplay between the fits and starts of life, and the uncoordinated leaps of thought that Deleuze and Guattari celebrate through the laying out of what they call a plane of immanence and the concomitant construction of concepts will become more clear as I proceed.

To claim a point of view from the present I will now turn to the work of Catherine Ingraham, a well-respected architectural theorist based in New York. In her recent book, Architecture, Animal, Human: The Asymmetrical Condition, Ingraham appears to implicitly confirm Arendt’s suggestion that we are overcome with an interest in life, by announcing that “the subject of life always raises the stakes”.¹⁰ When it comes to architecture, Ingraham argues, biological and psychological life are the precondition for the existence of architecture and “must always be indifferent to the life within it”. Hence the “asymmetrical condition” of Ingraham’s title. Nevertheless, what Ingraham calls “the competition between the wet and the dry and the question of the technological animation of the computer, are already at work in architecture in subtle and overt ways”.¹¹ I draw the ‘wetness’ of my title from Ingraham’s description of this competition, or asymmetry between the wetness of biology and the dryness of computer hardware and software. Ingraham, who is interested in the impact of new computational processes on architecture, maintains a stalwart asymmetry between, on the one hand, human, animal and other life, and on the other, the material constraints or framed enclosures of architecture. Advancing computer technologies, themselves increasingly life-like in their operational capacities, are provoking experimental, avant-garde digital architects to pull down the artificial wall between architectural form and human form and to imagine a continuum that unfolds in both directions, one infecting the other, organic interpenetrating with inorganic like the hard and soft parts of an oyster and its shell (and, in turn, the mircroscopically small hard and soft layers of the shell that the oyster secretes).¹² Apprehending a continuous variation between life and architecture, a symbiotic relationship evolves that suggests all sorts of future possibilities for our understanding of what constitutes human identity, whether it can still be distinguished from that which houses it, and whether its enclosure is, in turn, something other than the life it shelters in its midst. Ingraham confirms that digitally astute practitioners are increasingly fascinated by the potential to bring life movement, vegetative and animal forms in formation into the arena of architectural form making.¹³ Ingraham has in mind such architect-theorists as Greg Lynn, who understand that forces are less to do with Newtonian science than a way of understanding the animated field upon which the designer operates, a “new arena for intricate responses in architecture to everything around, in, and of it”.¹⁴ Architectural form, emerging out of a field of forces, has thus shifted in kind in that it is no longer stable, but apt to unpredictable transformations that respond both to internal (genetic) rules and external, environmental factors.

Would Ingraham’s asymmetrical condition not be better conceived as a continuum of human, animal, other life, organic and inorganic parts, a continuous variation that resembles an undulating field upon which everything gets played out? A field, what’s more, that owns a reverse and right side, conjoining both thought and the material conjunctions, the wet and the dry of all variety of bodies? On this field, which can be found through various permutations across Deleuze and Guattari’s oeuvre, thought proceeds in an uncoordinated manner, responding to chance-like shocks and encounters that are, paradoxically, the necessary relations of our composite existences. Arendt’s notion of the contemplative life is radicalised by Deleuze and Guattari such that thought exposes us to grave dangers, and far off lands, but importantly, thought is always co-present and co-productive with material admixtures, the affects and percepts of different kinds of bodies, including architectural bodies. Ingraham, for instance, stresses that along with the question of changes wrought on architectural form is the difficulty of accounting for the shifting shape of human life itself. What sense of aliveness is shared between these domains, which we have formerly imagined to be sheltered one inside the other, human form curled in architectural enclosure, soft, wet part inside hard dry shell?

Conventionally, an architectural design process results in an architectural form, built or unbuilt. With digital architecture, as I have argued above, the outcome is de-emphasized in place of the process. Modes of representation shift such that orthogonal drawings no longer account for what is architecturally formulated. Instead, diagrams, animations, fly-throughs better explain the architectural proposition. The question remains, if a pressing contemporary problem is identified, how does the architect seek to resolve this problem? How does a system of continuous variation meet an end, when the end continues to transform? By mimicking life processes, is it that architecture comes to be birthed, learns through life experiences, forgets again, grows old, and slowly dies?

In order to consider some of the questions and problems broached above I will present a series of architectural examples, all of which have a vested interest in the vital signs that might be detected in a digital architecture that increasingly invests in what some are identifying as a new biological paradigm.

Example one: Greg Lynn’s Embryological House
Greg Lynn is a key figure in what could be given as a paradigm shift that takes us from the rectilinear form of the so-called modernist box sitting distinct from a tabula rasa field, to the smooth, continuous and variable form of the so-called ‘blob’ that supposedly emerges out of a given field, or in response to environmental conditions (natural and artificial). In 1999 Lynn designed his Embryological House, which is less a house than a system articulating strategies that respond to issues of customisation, variation, flexible manufacture and assembly, and site specificity. Lynn explains, “there is no ideal or original Embryological House, as every instance is perfect in its mutations.”¹⁵ The Embryological House is not one singular and fixed form, but an open system that allows for an unending series of formal permutations. Of his serial experiments (he formally tested 6 instances of the house) he says, “I love them all equally as if they were my children. The design problem was not about the house, but the series, the entire infinitesimally extensive and intensive group.”¹⁶ Lynn’s anthropomorphic attitude troubles his uptake of the embryological process; he personalises the process rather than freeing potential forces. There is also the issue of the transgendering that takes place here, in that Lynn acts as mama and papa, superseding the necessity of the maternal womb for the creation of his “children”.¹⁷ By basing its inception in the morphogenesis of individual human life, does this architecture assume the same body, and the same regimes of subjectivity that we are familiar with, or does it open up new universes of value, and generate transformative possibilities and modes of expression? It appears to promise the latter, while remaining trapped in the former.

Lynn is also well known for the Folding in Architecture edition of Architectural Design (AD), where he introduced the work of French Philosopher, Gilles Deleuze, translated, sometimes too literally, into the variegated folds of architectural form. There we find that it is less the modernist box, per se that Lynn’s new architecture promises, than an escape from the tortured forms of deconstructive architecture and the tenuous link made between this architecture and the work of another French philosopher, Jacques Derrida. Lynn explicitly counters the heterogeneous, fragmented and conflicting formal systems that arrive out of deconstructivism, with the supple, pliant, softened and folded curves that are inspired by the work of Deleuze, specifically through his book, The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque.¹⁸ The emphasis, either way, lies in a formal distinction between the rectilinear (however fragmented or broken), and the curvilinear. Lynn announces a further conceptual shift as his work develops and he comes to recognise his growing dependence on computer software. What is most interesting in his progression from an interest in animation, the fold, and the philosophy of Deleuze, to the application of the geometric engines of calculus based design software, is the underlying fascination in something that approximates vital forces wedded with architecture. As Ingeborg M Rocker in conversation with Lynn suggests, a further implication of this shift requires that an investment in the history and theory of architecture be placed to the side in favour of  “the technological regimes of computational design devices.”¹⁹ This marks a disturbing trend in architectural discourse whereby theory has come to be discarded, making architectural production a techno-scientific and acephalous activity: architecture has lost its head, and with it the possibility of framing intellectual projects with any kind of ethical depth.

Example Two: Emergence and Design Group, Michael Hensel, Achim Menges and Michael Weinstock
In 2004 Architectural Design published Emergence: Morphogenetic Design Strategies, edited by the Emergence and Design Group, Michael Hensel, Achim Menges and Michael Weinstock. In late 2006 there appeared a sequel of sorts, Techniques and Technologies in Morphogenetic Design.²⁰ Architectural Design, commonly known as AD, is where you read about the most innovative advances in architectural design. A brief examination of AD illustrates the rapidity with which architecture and its associated concepts fall in and out of fashion. For instance, with decreasing frequency the proper noun, Gilles Deleuze can be found across its pages. As Reinhold Martin has explained, it is now with some embarrassment that we venture to name this legendary philosopher.²¹ The legacy of Deleuze’s thought still implicitly inspires a great deal of the content, but what we now read is a language that sounds decidedly quasi-scientific or else directed at the computer scientists amongst us.

In Techniques and Technologies, the Emergence and Design Group describe our human biosphere and venture an enquiry into the consequences of understanding architecture as living entity, as well as the “potential benefits of applying life criteria to architecture”.²² Life in this context is quantifiable, controlled, mapped, recreated, grown, manipulated, subject to biopolitical measures, and “the entire energy dependent process called ‘life’ is enabled through photosynthesis”.²³ It is a matter of biomimetically learning lessons from nature, and of assimilating life criteria toward architectural processual ends. The synthetic life of architecture ought to specifically attend to the criteria of containment, metabolism, homeostasis, heredity and evolution. In the pedagogical context of the design studio, it is not uncommon today to hear a student or even certain architects describe how they have ‘evolved’ a form, or else how they have ‘grown’ a form, as though it were a matter of tending one’s garden. What’s more, there is software available to facilitate such tasks, for example, Surface Evolver, which enables the interactive modelling of liquid surfaces. It is a strange experience to peruse the pages of these two editions of AD, because architectural form and natural form, in intricate microscopic detail, stand side by side as siblings. To these two collaborations can be added a further publication, Morpho-Ecologies, a design manual or user’s guide of sorts that announces a new biological paradigm for architectural practitioners.²⁴ What is remarkable about this most recent addition to the ongoing collaborative project of the Emergence and Design Group is not just the investment being made in biology, but the return of digital techniques to material tests. An interface is elaborated between the electronic and often abstract and scaleless realm of computer aided design and the material manifestation of the processes explored. What the biological paradigm apparently allows the designer is a material return from the pure electronic realm of digital computation. This return does not constitute a mere retreat to hand-crafted techniques, instead material model-making techniques are clenched with immaterial computational explorations in a feedback loop where neither is supposed to be privileged. The biological paradigm allows us to see how these techniques reflect the way organism and environment also involve and evolve simultaneously.

The emphasis on the imbrication of architecture with biological life is what remains the most strident argument formulated by the Emergence and Design Group. It is perhaps no wonder that by the time we get to the end of Michael Hensel’s essay “(Synthetic) Life Architectures: Ramifications of a literal Biological Paradigm for Architectural Design”, he wants to reassure his reader that what the experimental design group is proposing is not a modern version of Mary Shelley’s Modern Prometheus: don’t be afraid of Frankenstein’s monster.²⁵ Despite Hensel’s qualification, I would like to suggest that questions of monstrosity should not be placed to the side: Tetralogical beings must also be accepted in relation to the plane of immanence, or the plane of nature if designers are serious about investing in such processes.  If we heed Arendt’s advice then “what is certain is that the measure [of all things] can neither be the driving necessity of biological life and labour nor the instrumentalism of fabrication and usage”.²⁶ Life always exceeds the categories we lay out for it, and the monstrous, for instance, is suggestive of that which exceeds our attempts to order the wild profusion of things that erupt in a world. In Deleuze’s late essay, “Immanence: A Life…” our perpetual attempts to account for what life is always fall short. What we can say is that “A life is the immanence of immanence, absolute immanence: it is complete power, complete beatitude”.²⁷ Life is a question ceaselessly posed, a capacity we continue to strive for, everywhere, in all the moments a living subject goes through, sadnesses and joys included: no form, no subject is inherently bad or good.

Example Three: Mesne (Tim Schork and Paul Nicholas)
Mesne is a young firm whose work was recently exhibited at the Beijing Biennale (2006).²⁸ While their speculative projects remain in the realm of the unbuilt, their design propositions are nonetheless provocative. Both of the principles of the firm are currently undertaking doctoral research at RMIT University, Melbourne, and supplement their practice and research with teaching. In 2006 Mesne led an Interior Design Studio from RMIT University through a collaborative group project entitled Screen Resolution, which resulted in an exhibition at Euroluce, Melbourne. The title, Screen Resolution, plays on both our screen mediated existences, as well as the material idea of screens as architectural components. To commence the design exercise, the studio decided on a simple geometrical figure, common in nature, the six-sided, hexagonal honeycomb. Schork describes how he made a special visit to the Queen Victoria markets to buy some honeycomb for those students who had never seen a specimen previously. The hexagon as base geometrical unit with which the group was going to work was imagined as owning both an electronic and a real manifestation in that it was conceptualised as both organic cell and as digital pixel. The hexagon is also convenient as it immediately facilitates structural efficiency. Each student, or member of the group decided upon a particular fascination to explore. These included colour distribution, scaling, lacing, whether the hexagonal cells could be more or less open. These fascinations were then transformed into simple coded rules that were fed through Rhino software, that is, a software commonly used for rendering 3D architectural objects. Off-the-shelf rendering software habitually deployed for the purposes of mere representation was adapted to specific ends that became integral to the design process.

Schork describes the simple hexagonal cells-pixels as genotypes, and their interaction in the context of a field as the phenotype. It is the language we must listen to, for it is appropriated from biological science, but activated in the field of computer technology and then applied to digital design. Where a genotype describes the internal genetic code and all the inherited traits of a simple unit, for example a gene, a phenotype determines the external explication of this internal code, which becomes manifest in the external characteristics of a form and how these external characteristics are then more or less suited to a given environment. This, in turn, determines the form’s survival and effects how the genotype manifests in the phenotype of a form or organism. In much the same way, each participating student can, in the first instance, be imagined as a simple unit that inherits a simple set of rules. When placed in a design environment together the simple units-students collaborate in the neighbourhood of each other’s concerns toward the creation of a complex system. What is remarkable about this pedagogical, digital experiment is both the outcome and the venturing of new social relations that might be articulated between designers. Together with a 1:1 scaled screen prototype constructed from cardboard, a series of plaster models were printed. The plaster printer, or ‘dust printer’ as it is also sometimes known, incrementally paints layer upon layer of plaster and watery glue. It is a wet process that integrates the dry part that is the plaster dust. This is also the kind of process that the body artist, Stelarc has speculated upon with respect to the printing of human organs. Much like Lynn’s Embryological House, the series of plaster maquettes that were printed constitute an open series to which further models could be added. What is of importance is the processual system that has been configured such that it can be applied in different contexts, depending on the nature of the architectural problem posed. What’s more, the process here is not just pertinent to the construction of form, but suggests new social formations amongst designers, who can come together with what might appear to be disparate interests and create collaboratively a fascinating whole. Nevertheless, the motivation behind employing a discourse affiliated with what has come to be known as the new biological paradigm is a question that remains unanswered here.

Example Four: FOA’s Ark
Foreign Office Architects (FOA), have recently published a manual of sorts, which they have named Phylogenesis: FOA’s Ark. The title makes an intentional play on Noah’s ark, with the suggestion that all life is held within the confines of its pages: it seems we are asked to read FOA’s Ark as the promise of all future architectural life on earth. Somewhat like Morpho-Ecologies, this publication also operates as a user’s guide to the new biological paradigm. The book itself is a neat green package (somewhat like a bible) with a fold out section that describes a phylogenetic tree of the architectural forms developed by the studio. Phylogenesis is the scientific means of charting a genealogy or line of decent of a living organism, and constitutes a system where evolution and taxonomy come together.²⁹ The manual reflects on ten years worth of work (1993-2003), such that a “population” of architectural forms could be gathered that was sufficiently large to apply the organisational regime of phylogenesis. Here FOA share an implicit understanding of the shared compulsion to classify that belongs to biology and architecture alike. Through a taxonomical chart that could be mistaken for a table of living organisms, FOA classify their formal output as though it were a living population, even a “genetic pool” in order to identify the fields of consistency that could be superimposed upon their labour. FOA explain “our practice may be seen as a phylogenetic process in which seeds proliferate in time across different environments”.³⁰ Their specific intention was to create a DNA of their architectural production.

Across all the examples considered above the question of the responsiveness of the surface conceived as skin, as wall, as built façade insists. Alongside processes that emulate life, the appropriation of genetic algorithms, as well as scientific systems of classification, that which receives increasing attention is the surface, as that responsive membrane which touches our senses. The surface goes deep. The surface is supported by the wetness of live being and the thickness of protection. The surface breathes—even if it is merely mechanical! The surface is the plane that brings live being and architectural material into closest contact, such that zones of indiscernibility are installed between what the phenomenologist, Maurice Merleau-Ponty once described as the interchange between touching and touched. Imagine your two hands pressed together: When you touch myself, at what moment can you identify the distinction between being touched and touching? The architect and the philosopher alike begin to imagine that matter speaks back, that matter answers through a language of the senses, having become increasingly intelligent in response to our advancing technological prowess. Or else, we might venture, has matter itself brought us blindly to this point?

Many of the claims of the Emergence and Design Group appear radical, offering transformative potentials for a more sustainable world and an architecture that is living organism. Ingraham explains this potential in terms of the surface effect, “the surface meshes of computational architectures carry the potential not only for acting as some kind of living surface but also for making profound fields of reparation beyond their immediate boundaries”.³¹ That is to say, the material management of architecture, digitally augmented, might extend itself through these new technologies to attain more environmentally responsive systems. This is a key aspect of the argument forwarded by the Emergence and Design Technology Group, who explain that most form-finding methods result in curved geometries and smoothly differentiated surfaces, as surface curvature allows structural capacity and opportunities for controlling orientation in response to environmental factors.³² Finally, the curved surface interfaces well will ‘nature’ in more than a merely metaphorical way. What is curious is that there is no necessary connection between the application of biological processes appropriated from nature and what an architectural form looks like. A resulting architecture does not have to look ‘organic’ or as though it were derived from nature, and yet, so often such a resemblance inheres.

To this architectural surface of smooth differentiation what needs to be added are new relationships of intertwinement between human and other kinds of bodies and life forms, the immediate, mostly porous boundaries beyond which the environment and associated pressures insist. As Ingraham intimates, from the apparent rise of a techno-biological paradigm a new metaphysics, or perhaps ontology of the surface needs to be articulated. This surface writhes beneath the touch, is animated, suffers peristaltic movements and evolves over time only to pass resolutely away. The theoretical electronic domain of our computer software-hardware apparatuses shows us this process, but are such processual adventures enough? Guattari in The Three Ecologies argues for an ecosophy that accounts not just for the environment, but for social relations and human subjectivity.³³ He argues that an approach to environmental concerns can forget neither the co-presence of shifting social relations, the transformative potential of human subjectivity in construction, nor the components of subjectification. It should also be noted that Guattari argues for another paradigm altogether, an aesthetic paradigm, which is also a processual paradigm.³⁴ Importantly this paradigm always responds by way of a double, and asymmetrical surface articulation between infinite speeds of thought as they pertain, on the one side, to a plane of immanence and, on the other side, to the emergence of finite, manifested states of things and bodies. This is what Deleuze and Guattari name the conceptual surface of the plane of immanence, or the transcendental field, which does not describe a transcendent realm, but operates immediately with a present situation, effectively motivating the present, as well as becoming transformed in return.

Two kinds of surface are at work here, the diagram of virtual forces that Deleuze and Guattari illustrate, an active abstract machine that can be injected into the architect’s design practices, and the surface that results, and continues to progressively result, unfurling, unfolding, as processes of actualisation find form and make it durable for the meanwhile: topological, processual, digital architecture in its particular instantiation. For Deleuze and Guattari the work of art (and we can locate architecture loosely under this rubric) is defined as sufficiently durable for the meanwhile, sufficient to set into circulation beings of sensation composed of affects and percepts. Architecture is the first of all the arts, Deleuze and Guattari proclaim in What is Philosophy?, and its key action is to frame a patch of territory, to demarcate inside from outside, and so on.³⁵ In suggesting that the primary function of architecture is to frame, Deleuze and Guattari appear to remain too far away from the breathing wetness of the life, individual, collective, human, animal, other that comes to participate in the architectural milieu. If we posit instead a continuum of architecture and life, we can also begin to imagine zones of indiscernibility between digital immersive realms and our daily material existences.

The ideology of the imaginary that emerges in contact with the experimentation of digital architecture is marred only where false authority is claimed from the sciences, and life as a vital force is reified as so many adventurous, adventitious, but empty forms. An empty form is that which answers to no problem, and problems can be relatively serious or frivolous. An empty form answers nothing but its own question, and remains disengaged from the social field, or plane of immanence. If architecture becomes less about built forms and more about an open ended process of continuous variation, participating intimately with the ongoing upsurge of life’s interpenetrations, the interminglings of bodies and flights of thoughts, how, then do we explore strategies to frame useful segments of the plane of immanence, such that they can be put to use toward pressing contemporary problems? How do we support the real, immanent intricacy and complexity of social and other relations as they pertain to the aliveness of an architectural milieu?

The ethico-aesthetics that I call forth with the title of this paper comes predominantly from the work of psychoanalyst, Guattari, well known for his own work (practical and theoretical), as well as his collaborations with Deleuze. You simply have to open Guattari’s book, Chaosmosis, to get the sense of great distances traversed and enormous conceptual and adventurous leaps being made. He tells us “geopolitical configurations are changing at a great pace whilst the Universes of technoscience, biology, computer technology, telematics and the media further destabilise our mental coordinates on a daily basis”.³⁶ We are faced with crises ecological, social, political and existential (and it should be noted that Guattari writes this prior to the events of September 11, 2001!). Guattari asks, “how do we reinvent social practices that would give back to humanity – if it ever had it – a sense of responsibility not only for its own survival but equally for the future of all life on the planet, for animal and vegetable species, likewise for incorporeal species such as music, the arts, cinema, the relation with time, love and compassion for other, the feeling of fusion at the heart of the cosmos?”.³⁷ This is his ethico-aesthetic challenge to us. And he joins with Deleuze in calling us toward a creative practice, to produce “creative sparks” that touches on all the micro-behaviours of our everyday existences, day in, day out, travelling upon and through the plane of immanence. Guattari recommends that it is less a matter of managing novel cognitive spheres (we don’t necessarily require the latest techniques and technologies), rather it is a matter of “apprehending and creating, in pathic modes, mutant existential virtualities”.³⁸ How then do we make ourselves worthy of what we are fully capable? If we remember the ever mobile, undulating surface of the plane of immanence, we are asked to imagine how transversal or non-hierarchical relations are created that might augment rather than diminish a capacity of existence through conceptual and sensory becomings of all imaginable kinds. Guattari refers to this creative activity, this ethico-aesthetics as a cartography. We are all map-makers, drawing up diagrams of sense on a daily basis and our milieu is the plane of immanence.

Now the problem with architects is that in becoming preoccupied with novel distributions of matter and form, they do not always remember to conjoin thought and matter toward the framing of pertinent problems. It is always important to stress that concept construction, for Deleuze and Guattari must secure itself to contemporary problems, without which the concept would wander, disengaged, like the empty form I invoked above. The plane of immanence is also like a plan awaiting our experiments of actualisation, that is to say, “The map expresses the identity of the journey and what one journeys through. It merges with its object, when the object itself is movement”.³⁹ But architects too often forget the constellation of affects and percepts that attend the plane of immanence, that one can really become transformed, depending on what encounters one has. These are our sensory and conceptual becomings, whereby we become something other than what we once were. Instead, the digital building-object too often emits novel signs and gizmos, technical prowess and innovative techniques, and forgets the life that moves in its midst, forgets that it is already part and parcel of this life. How is architecture then taken up in the relations that articulate the plane of immanence? Architecture, like art, is an incorporeal species of being as well as a coagulator of actualised material effects. The work of art and architecture too, for those who use it, is “an activity of unframing, of rupturing the surface, of baroque proliferation or extreme impoverishment, which leads to a recreation and a reinvention of the subject itself”.⁴⁰ The main battle to be fought is with habit, cliché and opinion and often architects might ask themselves, how little design do I need to undertake?

Hélène Frichot is a senior lecturer in architectural design and theory at RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia. While architecture is her first discipline, she holds a PhD in Philosophy from the University of Sydney. Hélène co-curates the RMIT University Architecture + Philosophy Public Lecture Series