Wind map of the US North East (detail of Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New York & Connecticut). Map modified by the author based on the wind patterns/data of the fantastic wind project by Hint.fm.

About a week ago, the website of WNYC (a New York radio broadcast part of the National Public Radio) published a news according to which “The NYPD [New York Police Department] and a national laboratory will be studying how chemical weapons could spread in the air and throughout the subway system this summer in what is the first study of its kind in such a large urban environment.” The rest of the article is short enough for me to copy it here:

Israeli settlement of Rimmonim on the road from Ramallah to Jericho

I am not quite sure to know the reasons that made me take so much time to write this article, three years after my last trip in Palestine; better late than never as one says so here it is: a majority of the photographs (see below) I took when I was there of the Israeli settlements in the West Bank. It seemed important here that I include only my own photographs in order to reduce the “degree of separation” between the readers and them.

Those photographs are important to me as they give another approach to the multitude of maps that have been traced to ‘cartograph’ the situation in Palestinian territories. The latter are effectively fundamental to understand the legal implications of the occupation but it also tends to desincarnate any discourse one might have about it. It is therefore extremely important to add to them a more subjective approach, not so much for emotion to emerge, but rather to trigger a clear understanding of the physicality of the occupation on the field. Without this understanding, everything remains abstract and in the realms of territories, thus forgetting that these territories are actually physical and host physical bodies on it.

I want to stress the fact that approaching the problem in a more incarnate and subjective way does not mean in any way that we should focus on the ‘news items’ however tragic they may be. What I mean by that is that what requires all our attention is what systematize the colonial organization of space and the bodies, what affects them on a daily basis. That might be less spectacular than the “news items” I was just evoking; however, there lies the real and durable condition of occupation. In this regard, I would like to link this article with another I wrote a bit more than a year ago entitled The Ordinary Violence of the Colonial Apparatuses in the West Bank that was addressing a similar dimension of the occupation through the various devices that control and hurt the Palestinian bodies on a daily basis.

This notion of ordinary violence, in opposition to the more spectacular/news one, is fundamental here as it involves a coldly thought strategy of power registered within the colonial organization of life. Of course, this ordinary violence is also the one that architecture takes care to provide thanks to its weight and non-penetrability. The settlements, in their own way, participate actively to this ordinary violence at several levels. The level of their very illegal existence of course, but also in the way they redirect the (restricted) flows of movement (by their location, but also by the private roads that link them to Israel) in the West Bank and finally in the sheltering of a population that sometimes – it is not true for all settlements – storm out of their base to attack the local population before storming back in immediately after.

The following documents allow to a certain extent to comprehend this ordinary violence. The map indicates where the photographed settlements are located in relation to the Area A & B on which the Palestinian Authority has a relative power. Further, each settlement is illustrated with its aerial view and my own photographs on the field.

Location of the Settlements on the Palestinian Archipelago Map: (all map and photographs except google earth are by the author 2010)

PESAGOT (Ramallah Region):

RIMMONIM (Ramallah Region):

MA’ALE ADUMMIM (East Jerusalem Region):

Hebron Region:

HAR HOMA (Bethlehem Region):

PISGAT ZE’EV (East Jerusalem Region):

GEVA BINYAMIN (East Jerusalem Region):

KOCHAV YA’AKOV (East Jerusalem Region):

SHILO & ELI (Nablus Region):

ARIEL (Salfit Region):

ENAV (Tulkarm Region):

The recent manhunt of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev in Boston was probably quite shocking to many non-Americans – and probably some Americans too -, for the anachronism it constituted. The latter was caused by the ability for a Police to empty an entire city and therefore implements a sort of state of emergency, as well as the “march of the heroes”, the multitude of police officers acclaimed by the crowd after they arrested their prey. There is a profound feudalism in such absoluteness and one has the right to wonder what motivates this disturbing joy.

Let us focus on the urban condition that contextualize this manhunt. I have been repeatedly writing in the past, each house through its impermeability due to the implementation of private property is susceptible to become a prison for the bodies living inside of it in the sudden legal implementation of a quarantine. For an important part of Boston, the quarantine was not implemented stricto sensu but it was highly recommend to each resident to stay inside and the context of fear created by the ubiquitous media made such a recommendation a quasi-order. In the areas of Boston where the police and army was actually deployed, the quarantine was very much effectuated as this article illustrates: Looking through the windows seems to have been prohibited and enforced through the threats of weapons.

While this event was unfolding I was thinking of the descriptions that Michel Foucault makes in his seminar Abnormal (Les Anormaux) at the College de France (1975) of a Medieval/Renaissance city when contaminated by the Plague. Foucault distinguishes two things historically: the negative reaction to cases of leprosy in the same city that consists in the effective exclusion of the sick bodies from it, to the point that they are declared socially dead; and the positive (in the sense that there is an inclusion) reaction to the Plague that provokes a state of emergency and the absolute reorganization of the city according to a quadrillage which has been not so well translated into partitioning. Quadrillage involves indeed a sort of physical or virtual partitioning of a space, but it also implies a detailed, systematic and extensive examination of this same space by a controlling entity. Such an action is thoroughly described by Foucault in his class of January 15th 1975 in this same seminar:

[…] the practice with regard to plague was very different from the practice with regard to lepers, because the territory was not the vague territory into which one cast the population of which one had to be purified. It was a territory that was the object of a fine and detailed analysis, of a meticulous spatial partitioning (quadrillage).

The plague town-and here I refer to a series of regulations, all  absolutely identical, moreover, that were published from the end of the Middle Ages until the beginning of the eighteenth century-was divided up into districts, the districts were divided into quarters, and then the streets within these quarters were isolated. In each street there were overseers, in each quarter inspectors, in each district someone in charge of the district, and in the town itself either someone was nominated as governor or the deputy mayor was given supplementary powers when plague broke out. There is, then, an analysis of the territory into its smallest elements and across this territory the organization of a power that is continuous in two senses. First of all, it is continuous due to this pyramid of control. From the sentries who kept watch over the doors of the houses from the end of the street, up to those responsible for the quarters, those responsible for the districts and those responsible for the town, there is a kind of pyramid of uninterrupted power. It was a power that was continuous not only in this pyramidal, hierarchical structure, but also in its exercise, since surveillance had to be exercised uninterruptedly. The sentries had to be constantly on watch at the end of the streets, and twice a day the inspectors of the quarters and districts had to make their inspection in such a way that nothing that happened in the town could escape their gaze. And everything thus observed had to be permanently recorded by means of this kind of visual examination and by entering all information in big registers. At the start of the quarantine, in fact, all citizens present in the town had to give their name. The names were entered in a series of registers. The local inspectors held some of these registers, and others were kept by the town’s central administration. Every day the inspectors had to visit every house, stopping outside and summoning the occupants. Each individual was assigned a window in which he had to appear, and when his name was called he had to present himself at the window, it being understood that if he failed to appear it had to be because he was in bed, and if he was in bed he was ill, and if he was ill he was dangerous and so intervention was called for. It was at this point that individuals were sorted into those who were ill and those who were not. All the information gathered through the twice-daily visits, through this kind of review or parade of the living and the dead by the inspector, all the information recorded in the register, was then collated with the central register held by the deputy mayors in the town’s central administration.

[…]
There is a literature of plague that is a literature of the decomposition of individuality; a kind of orgiastic dream in which plague is the moment when individuals come apart and when the law is forgotten. As soon as plague breaks out, the town’s forms of lawfulness disappear. Plague overcomes the law just as it overcomes the body. Such, at least, is the literary dream of the plague. But you can see that there was another dream of the plague: a political dream in which the plague is rather the marvelous moment when political power is exercised to the full. Plague is the moment when the spatial partitioning and subdivision (quadrillage) of a population is taken to its extreme point, where dangerous communications, disorderly communities, and forbidden contacts can no longer appear. The moment of the plague is one of an exhaustive sectioning (quadrillage) of the population by political power, the capillary ramifications of which constantly reach the grain of individuals themselves, their time, habitat, localization, and bodies. Perhaps plague brings with it the literary or theatrical dream of the great orgiastic moment. But plague also brings the political dream of an exhaustive, unobstructed power that is completely transparent to its object and exercised to the full.
Michel Foucault, Abnormal, Lectures at the College de France 1974-1975, translated by Graham Burchell, New York: Verso 2003.

Foucault’s style, as always, reinforces what he is saying: “Plague overcomes the law just as it overcomes the body.” (“La peste franchit la loi, comme la peste franchit les corps”), “a political dream in which the plague is rather the marvelous moment when political power is exercised to the full.” (“un reve politique de la peste, ou celle-ci est au contraire le moment merveilleux ou le pouvoir s’exerce a son plein”)… This dream was fully expressed on April 19th 2013 in Boston when the Police and the Army were occupying alone the public realm, quadrilling (I apologize for this neologism) the city and searching houses one by one. Without falling into a sort of paranoid interpretation of what happened then, we can suppose that the Police was not only searching for a man that day, but was also re-establishing a new administrative cartography, at least of the city in ideal conditions that will not reproduce for another long time. I am not necessarily suggesting that there was a deliberate plan for such a cartography but the thousand of pages that have probably been filed in the form of administrative reports have very similar characteristics than a more organized data collection and it would be surprising that they would not be used as such.

This voluntary and involuntary construction of an institutionalized knowledge is precisely what Foucault describes as being the foundation of a positive form of power that implements itself through the technique of the norm.:

The reaction to plague is a positive reaction; it is a reaction of inclusion, observation, the formation of knowledge, the multiplication of effects of power on the basis of the accumulation of observations and knowledge.

In this regard, the city of Boston and its police can be said to have reinforced its power through this exception-al reorganization of the city and constructed this knowledge in a more effective way in one day than what had probably been done in the few last years. When this political dream, that Foucault evokes, ended, Boston inhabitants thought that they were going back to a normal life when actually the norm had changed and the normal life would be more asserted as a normed life.

Destruction of the Glencairn Tower in Motherwell (near Glasgow) / Photograph by Sam Hardie

Explosions are so ubiquitous in Hollywood Cinema, and the emotion is so intense when one torn-down reality that we do not quite seem to realize what they really are. In 2007, Mike Davis was trying to historicize the car bomb and its urban consequences in his book Buda’s Wagon: A Brief History of the Car Bomb (Verso, 2007) but his analysis was legitimately anthropocentric, which I want to avoid in this specific article. “Leaving the human” can sometimes be risky as it potentially leads to the depoliticization of things – depolitics being a form of politics too and a rather totalitarian one – but it also allows to think of a better understanding of the material world in which we live, and from which we exist as a body.

What is an explosion at the pure physics level? A bomb is an apparatus that contains folded within itself the potential liberation of an important volume of energy in the form of an exothermic reaction. Such a volume of energy and the speed with which it gets released provoke a sudden disaggregation of the material bodies (animate or inanimate) that surrounds its center. Insisting on the suddenness or the violence of the explosion would be another anthropocentric way to consider it as it would necessarily associate the scale of time in which it occurs to the scale of time of human perception. In other words, the Big Bang could be considered as a sudden explosion at a certain scale of time even though, 14 billions years later, the universe is still affected by its original release of energy. In a materialist interpretation, the speed to which an explosion is effectuated is therefore irrelevant and such an “event” can be compared to any other modification of matter like erosion or entropy. If we define destruction by the operation in which physical bodies are being “broken down” into smaller material assemblages, we can however define an explosion as a destructive transformation of matter without being anthropocentric.

Now that we read explosion at a materialist level, we can go back to what our bodies make us, humans, and maybe for some of us even, designers. What does such a materialist knowledge (only very briefly sketched here) mean in terms of design. The bomb, as we know it, is an artifact and a very precisely designed one. In his Entretien sur la mécanologie (Interview about Mechanology, 1968) about which I will write much more some other day, Gilbert Simondon explains that a machine, in order to exist, needs to be stable i.e. that it does not have any self-destructive characteristics – he refers to the very first engines that often tended to explode. The design of a bomb, a grenade, or any other explosive apparatuses does not apply this definition as it needs to control the precise moment of its self-destruction. The latter is likely to trigger the destruction of the other material bodies around it and therefore accomplish the goal that its creator has imagined for it.

The design of such apparatuses therefore involves its precise assemblage in such a way that its moment of self-destruction can be controlled; that is the design of the object’s actuality, but there is a second dimension of design to observe; one that addresses the object’s virtuality. What I mean by virtuality is the volume of energy that will be release by it and that requires to be precisely designed as well. Of course, in the case of terror, this part of design is not as much considered as the impact wanted is simply maximum; but in the case of military or para-military operations such a design is fundamental. In his lecture, Forensic Architecture (2009), Eyal Weizman describes (see past article about the notion of urbicide) how the American and Israeli Army uses the services of people, who we could call “energy designers”, that carefully elaborate the assassination of targeted individuals or groups through the design of bombs in relationship to the built environment. What is interesting here is that the virtual volumes of energy that are designed are not so much targeting these same individuals’ bodies directly but rather, the physical structure that host them. The building and the failure of its structural integrity are literally used as a weapon against them. Just like “normal” architects design schemes to ultimately have them built, these military technicians are designing schemes to ultimately have them destroyed. In this case, the volume of energy is wanted to be controlled to limit the destruction to a level where only the targeted individuals’ bodies would be affected and destroyed by it. Of course this is only theoretical and E. Weizman reveals that each operation has a specific amount of tolerated civilian deaths that would occurs at the same time than the targeted individual’s one.

This article is, of course, not written to suggest that we might ever be designing such “volumes of energy”, but rather that each modification of matter that we design and orchestrate has (at least) two levels of reading that cannot be considered individually: a non-anthropocentric physical one and a political one. Practicing architecture should consist in the skillful and informed articulation of these two dimensions.

The immanent domain (see third letter) – Dharavi in Mumbai / Photograph by Léopold Lambert (2009)

FIRST LETTER (New York on July 12^th 2012) ///

Dear Lucy,

I read your essay Archiving Burroughs: Interzone, Law, Self-Medication with attention and appreciated, as usual, the way you manage to link narrative, law and space all together. I do think however that we should keep this text for a little bit later in our conversation as its specificity might make us miss the bases of the discussion that we would like to have about law and architecture. In this regard, I would like to ingenuously start by stating some obvious facts which are always good to remember for such a discussion.

Law, understood as a human artifact, constitutes an ensemble of regulations which have been explicitly stated in order to categorize behaviors in two categories: legal and illegal. In order to do so, it expects from every individual subjected to its application a full knowledge of its content in order to moralize and held accountable attitudes that are either respectful or transgressive towards it.

Law is undeniably related to space as it requires a given territory with precise borders to be able to implement itself. Nothing easier to understand this fact than to observe in which space one is allowed to smoke and in which one is not. It also includes within this territory smaller zones of exclusion, from the corner of the class room to the penitentiary, in which another form of the law -supposedly a more restrictive one- is applied for individuals who, through an active refusal of specific parts of it, are to be separated from the rest of society. Those individuals, when captured by law enforcer instances, are brought within those zones of exclusion and are being held in them for a given period of time provisioned by law itself.

Many other spaces constitute territories on which law is also different but composed of layers of laws which do not contradict each other. Spaces like schools, offices, factories, hospitals, for example, apply a legal superimposition in order to complement the territorial law with set of rules specifically formulated to optimize their institutional function.

Space itself is not necessarily an artifact, although the designation of borders that delimit it certainly constitutes a human intervention, and probably the first legal gesture that is. Let us consider architecture as the ensemble of human physical modification of its environment. It would probably be useless to wonder whether law invented architecture or if it is precisely the opposite. What we can possibly affirm, however, is that architecture, through its physicality, embodies the immaterial law. This is clear in the case of the zones of exclusion that I was evoking above. The fundamental element of the law of exception applied in them consists in the ban for their subjects to exit their space. In order to implement such a ban, an impermeable architecture needed to be created: it is the invention of prison as a building.

Prisons are the extreme examples of how architecture embodies the law. We are nevertheless surrounded by more domestic cases of architectural enforcement of the law. During a curfew or quarantine, your own house, supposedly so neutral and innocent, can become your own prison. But was this house so innocent anyway? Isn’t the house the material embodiment of a law which integrates private property as one of its components? How to enforce property in a better way than to build impermeable walls on the lines that law abstractly constructed? Architecture, by using the universal “laws” of physics –nobody can cross a wall for example- insures the explicitation of the law which would need to be discursively enunciated otherwise in order to be acknowledged by its subjects.

This vision is however an articulation centered on architecture and I am wondering how the legal theory specialist that you are interprets this relationship. Do you think that there can be a law with no architecture or/and a lawless architecture? If architecture is really the embodiment of the law, can we possibly think of an architecture of illegality?

I very much look forward to reading you on those questions, and on the others that you probably have.

Cordially yours,

Léopold

SECOND LETTER (Exeter, UK, on August 17^th 2012) /// 

Dear Leopold,

Thank you for your letter dated 12^th August, I apologise for my tardy reply but I have been away as you know in India.  India, of course being a great example for the themes of architecture and law of which you speak, whereby not only are there plural legal levels of law as a result of the genealogies of colonialism, but so too there are those very clear architectures of law that reveal legal dichotomies, the insides and the outsides, those included and excluded (and of wrath of the common law in particular).  Nowhere else has there been such a use of law as a mechanism of legitimated dispossession than in colonial India, with the decentralised despotism of the Raj and their opulent palaces as reminders of their decentralised British power; the acceptance of customary law into a plural legal hierarchy of state law that put the common law as the pinnacle of all might.

When thinking of the role of land and law, and the wall as the boundary, the legal space in which all of the divisions and structures of hierarchy are analogised (or not even analogised, but actualised), there is a reason why one is so struck by architecture as the architect of law – or law as the architect of architecture.  Western individual property rights, are based on a presumption that ‘ownership’ of land, the right to design land as one sees fit (or hire a draftsman to follow design instructions), is the right to have exclusive access and possession to that particular geography of land.  Thus, and this is taking from the highly influential German jurist Carl Schmitt, law starts and ends with the earth, and is determined through the categorisation and enclosure of the earth where all other phenomenology resides.  This intrinsic link between law and architecture is the design of property rights, it is the manipulation of space which acts as a way of keeping something in, keeping a population out.  Therefore, architecture lends itself specifically as the embodiment of law, it is the dividing line, the juncture of liminality that is so easily described, and yet the most elusive thing in the world, that which is all order and chaos.  It comes together in one coordinate, the coordinate of legal design; the sketchings of the architect.

What struck me recently when I was away in India was how obvious the past, and indeed the future, was expressed within the buildings, and moreso within the constant construction going on within the megacityscape where each new wood and cement fixture became another limb of the great living organism that was growing and gurgling as I would veer past in my auto-rickshaw.  These were buildings that were not completed yet, that would most probably always remain incomplete as the years of bureaucratic procrastination and judicial protest halt the creation of the flyovers and office blocks.

What I would like to throw in here is a consideration of the role of entropy within law and architecture, and how this can offer a framework through which we can understand the role of law within architecture and architecture within law, and what you might think of this in relation to property, aesthetics as a whole, and law so too.

Take the seething urban mass of Bangalore, a city that only 30 years ago was a quaint retirement destination for local Karnatakan residents and its surrounding states, which since then has become the size of London, with no public transport infrastructure – and is still growing, with an air of toddlerishness that hints to only being a tenth of its potential size.  The population has matured its foundations, and the job of producing new living spaces and working spaces have not kept up.  There are two types of design, those of the massive land acquisitions and re-mappings that allow for colossal new speedways and airports; and then there are the designs of the slums – both of these architectures of law rely on unplanning, as opposed to planning, and are reactive and emergent in their convergences.  This, I would argue, is the entropy of architecture, and therefore entropy of law.

Specifically in relation to land law, there is little in the way of actual planning law, and when there is, it is planned with a certain group of elites in mind.  The majority of those who live in Bangalore cannot afford to buy cars or motorcycles, and yet there are apparently 1,000 vehicles added to the road day in the city.  These are the upwardly mobile Bangalorians who work within IT and are making the most of the burgeoning city and it being known as the ‘Singapore of the South’.  Huge land acquisitions are undertaken in order to build in the name of the swelling bourgeoisie.  Land acquisition is a common law inheritance and is known in India as ‘eminent domain’.  It exists as a stop valve for the state to acquire land for ‘public purposes’, without the permission of those who already live on the land and have rights and attachments to the land.  Those who are moved are by and large the architects of law from below, the slum dwellers and impoverished who own little or no legal rights to the land on which they reside.  A complex web of common law legacy gives way to a situation whereby land is acquired and new building schemes begin, whilst at the same time architects from below utilise the notoriously slow, but most certainly relevant litigation processes of the courts to try and halt the taking of their homes and the construction of new hegemonies.

These two unplanned movements of law and architecture, the state land acquisition and the litigious rigour of Bangalore’s civil society, operates in an emergent coagulation and one that is realised in the half built pillars and cement covered children on the roadside.  These are not complete spaces, but half spaces, spaces that are not aware of how they will end up as a result of the intersection of law in design.

So what does this have to do with entropy?  At a very basic level, and one that takes from a traditional thermodynamic view, entropy is the amount of usable energy within a system.  The more complex a system becomes, the more energy it uses, and the more it strives towards order, the more disordered it becomes simultaneously.   Entropy exists in all systems, those that are alive and those not, as long as they possess enough energy to do work, and even theories on entropy themselves are part of the emergent systems of burgeoning theories on thermodynamism and complexity.  Entropy is thus the contradictory premise that the world is rapidly becoming more intricate, requiring more energy to be used within its systemic bounds, marching onwards on a treadmill of a Darwinian perfection and evolution, whilst at the same time, the more complex it becomes, the quicker it moves towards a finality of heat-death.   Entropy is therefore the juxtapositioning of order and chaos, which arguably conjures an aesthetics of symmetry, dissymmetry, design and architecture.

Seemingly, order as something that is necessary for the human mind to understand anything.  There are those systems that appear ordered, and yet they rely on the dismemberedness of their interior, their genealogy, to exist and continue, considering Michael Buor’s depiction of the structure of New York in the 1950s:

“…marvellous walls of glass with their delicate screens of horizontals and verticals, in which the sky reflects itself; but inside those buildings all the scraps of Europe are piled up in confusion … The magnificent grid is artificially imposed upon a continent that has not produced it; it is a law one endures.” 

What does this description of the underbelly of New York tell us of how law affects architecture, and the same vice versa?  What can entropy tell us about the seemingly out-of-control cityscape of Bangalore, the planned unplanning and unplanned planning of the architects of law from below and those of the law from above?  What is the role of property in this, and indeed aesthetics itself?

At this juncture I am going to go and have some lunch and leave it for yourself to ponder dear Leopold.

Yours,

Lucy

THIRD LETTER (New York, on May 2^nd 2013) ///

Dear Lucy,

It has been (too) long since we last sent each other a letter to think together of the way architecture and the law interact with each other. I apologize for that as it was “my turn” to write to you.

In your last letter, you were reflecting on the strange collision of the Indian eminent domain with what I would slyly call immanent domain that is developed by the slums. You were talking about this collision in Bangalore; I happen to know Mumbai much more as I lived there for a little while but I assume that the two situations are relatively similar for that matter. Both eminent and immanent domains constitute a form of violence towards the law as they both “break” a traditional understanding of what property is about.  In the first case, the municipality or the State expropriates a group of people, while in the second one, a group of people claims a piece of territory that does not belong to them to build their dwelling. Two things ought to be noted in this matter. The first one is that, on the contrary of the immanent domain, the eminent domain somehow registers within the legal system even though it seems to contradict the law at first “sight”. The second thing to note is that, while eminent domain unfolds itself on an inhabited territory/building, the immanent domain exists on a land/structure that is either the object of estate speculation or that does not receive enough financial founds to be developed. I know that you are very interested in how the various squats of the world are questioning the legitimacy of our definition of property and I am sure that you have already thought extensively about those two notes.

It is interesting to observe how the eminent domain implements itself in a country like India as it reproduces part of the process of colonization: something from the outside that imposes itself as the new law upon the bodies that happen to be present on the concerned territory. The reminiscence of the colonial era is something that really questioned me when I was living there. Many of the administrative buildings of Mumbai are still the same that were used by the British. I am still wondering today if the continuity it creates is strictly symbolical or if it actively shapes the way this administration is operating. The same question goes for the Rashtrapati Bhavan in New Delhi, the Viceroy Palace that Gandhi wanted to transform into a hospital and that Nehru attributed as the Presidential Palace of the newly independent India. I suppose that there are a multitude of laws that were similarly elaborated during the colonial era and that remained afterward. You are interested in the entropy of law, I suppose that we could remain in the field of physics and talk about its resilience.

What interests us however, is not so much architecture and the law considered separately, even when they are intricate in similar processes of existence, but rather as both part of the same strategy in the organization of a society; I want therefore to go back to this notion of immanent domain as its relationship to the law might be more complex than the one I was describing earlier. In Turkey for example, I read that the police cannot immediately destroy an unauthorized dwelling whose construction has been finished; this kind of dispute has to go to court to be settled. This scenario, because it involves the inertia (some more physics) of the administration that goes with it, is likely to require enough time for the dwelling’s inhabitants to use it for a while. There are therefore strategies to build a home in one night to avoid a potential destruction the following day as the construction would have not been completed. I find this example fascinating as it interprets the practice of the law in a different way that we traditionally do it. It is a form of negotiation with the inertia of the system rather than a strict reading of the law that would indubitably establish each behavior in the two categories of legal and illegal.

There is also a dimension of illegality that I would like to address. When does an illegal behaviour can be legitimately called “civil disobedience” to use Thoreau’s well known idea? My theory about it would probably deserve more work on it, but I have the intuition that one has the right to disobey a law when, through this action, one is primarily questioning the legitimacy of the law itself. I will use a comparison I made in the past to illustrate what I mean. When someone assassinates someone else, the chances are that this first person is not contesting the fact that one is prevented by law to kill another person; however, when Rosa Parks decided to go seating in the white people section in the bus in 1955, sitting was not primarily what she wanted to do, she wanted to deeply contest the very essence of the segregationist legal system. Of course, there might be some more complex and less extreme examples but this distinction allows us to make a difference between a selfish disobedience to the law from a political one. I suppose that the slums we were talking about are a mix of these two dimensions as they claim a territory opportunistically, not to be relegated to the outskirts of the city, but also as a manifestation of their existence and their right to the city.

Do these peregrinations of my mind resonate in any way for you? I look forward to hearing from you as I am sure that you will know how to challenge and articulate my intuitions.

Yours,

Léopold

FOURTH LETTER (Exeter, UK, on a rainy Tuesday May 14^th 2013) /// 

Dearest Leopold,

Well, thank you for your last correspondence, and as I read through our previous meanderings into law and architecture, I am transported back to the sultry heat of India, the free flow of writing in the summer months of a soporific, verdant Devon last year.  Perhaps any hints to a summer heat do not ring quite true here in the UK, but you get the picture!  Not only has it been a while since writing to you dear Leopold, but it has been a while since writing full stop.  The almost robotic practises of teaching – reading, reformulating, copying, altering, presenting, speaking, reproducing, shaking – are almost the inside-out of writing, the catharsis of mind that allows for ponderings on an aesthetics of law.  But I am sure my six months of vocal not written engagement will be contributing and inspiring my thoughts nevertheless.

I am back in India with your immanent domain, quite a metaphor for the emergent and by no means inert scientific allegories we are sharing in relation to property, both that requisitioned by the state and that performed by the slums.  The immanence of the Indian geography speaks to this kinetic energy, a city in flux through its response to legal and illegal planning regimes.  It is interesting that you refer to the dichotomy of legal and illegal, as what has always been of interest to myself has in fact been this space in between, the point and threshold at which a constituent creates the constitution, the resistance becomes law.  This is the immanency of law and resistance, the energy and metabolism whereby from one heartbeat to the next there is something that resembles a juridical formulation.  Locating this moment is akin to imposing a rigid grammar of prescription to a work of art; to the ephemeral the resides as a sapphire in coal dust, because it does just that.  But this liminal space in between the non-institutional and institutional still fascinates and allows for what is legal and what is illegal, within and external to law, like a Kafka-esque gate keeper, patrolling the door to the stomach of the law.  By trying to understand these movements, the idea is to understand any foundation of law.

I also want to draw on your mentioning of disobedience, as this is something that I have been working (sadly more confined to within the academy than so much outside these days!) of late in relation to the concept and practice of ‘naughtiness’.  Thoreau places the justification for disobeying law as that which rests as a duty, ‘If (an injustice) is of such a nature that it requires you to be the agent of injustice to another, then, I say, break the law.  Let your body be a counter friction to stop the machine’^[1]; Arendt would say this is ‘testing the statute’ whereby to be civilly disobedient is to counter a law in order to change a law.  The institutional character and limits of law comes up again in Arendt’s understanding of civil disobedience and its role in constitutionalism, whereby to be civilly disobedient is to effect and affect law through extra-legal action, ‘… the law can indeed stabilise and legalise change once it has occurred, but the change itself is always the result of extra-legal action’^[2].  Thus, this division between the exterior and interior of law assumes the foundation of law, as therefore being innovated from an outside source.  The legal, illegal, alegal, extra-legal, or infra-legal even, are all a motion of legitimation and structuration and where can it be better expressed than in architecture itself, in a seething urbanity, in a reconfiguration of law whereby slums rest on the grid of colonial property rights in a stasis of illegitimacy.  And yet without them, property itself would not exist, nor indeed the pre-eminence of the Common law.  Slums are the extra-legal to the right to exclude.

As you know I have focused my research for the last few years on squatting, a way of performing architecture in both an appearance and legal loophole of transiency, and yet the performance can last in a temporality much longer than that anticipated by either the squatter or the state.  This inertia in which you wonderfully place our discussion of bureaucracy and the techné of law, is as you say, both a source of frustration and also a procrastination that results in the expedient re-appropriation of land.  Returning to physics here allows for the role of time to be understood, or space-time more precisely, as a motor for resistance, as a means of testing the statute, whether the disrupt it and change its course or otherwise.  Entropy is the arrow of time, and so in this inertia is an aesthetics of dilapidation and decomposition, an inevitability that the half-built speedway or giant-like pillar of a flyover will eventually shift from being built – to becoming ruins.  That plateau of architecture and law – between construction and destruction – where entropy curlicues.

Once again dear Leopold, I shall leave it at that for you to ponder upon and will return to my teaching duties.

Yours,

Lucy

The space beyond the walls: Defensive “a-legal” sanctuaries
(originally written for the Wheelwright Prize – failed)

Considered purely in the abstract, the law appears to be a tool which makes strict categorizations of human actions and behaviors as either legal or illegal, just or unjust. Concomitantly, the abstraction of the law corresponds with a similar spatial abstraction in which territories are defined diagrammatically. This is true as far as the sovereignty of states is concerned but also for all architectural plans; they diagrammatically organize space into distinct territories of jurisdiction. In each case, law and diagram are reduced to their abstract lines. Once manifested as physical architecture, however, such strict delineation becomes far more ambiguous. Which law is applied in the space of a wall, the space of a border or the space of a contested zone? These spaces are legal anomalies and may be understood as the architectural manifestation of what Legal Philosophy Professor Hans Lindahl calls a-legality. Such in-between spaces seem at once to underwrite the law as well as to contradict it. In this research project, I propose to investigate specific cases in which the architecture of such “a-legal zones” is strategically used as a space of sanctuary from coercive forces. My argument insists that an “a-legal architecture” is specifically a defensive one as it gives itself the means to preserve such a status.

This research will examine four of these legal anomalies. To some extent, they constitute a holdover of pre-modern ecclesiastical structures in which the right of asylum is transplanted onto modern geopolitical landscapes. In this regard, Greek universities have recently ended a thirty eight year period of asylum within their campuses where access by the Police and the Army was prohibited. This legal right had been granted has a form of acknowledgement of the students’ role in the overthrow of the junta dictatorship in 1974, but was recently considered as problematic by the authorities. The ‘inertia’ of this law is, however, still active and can still be examined. Within the context of such a legal status, architecture plays a fundamental role in influencing its application. Entrances and exits, for example, determine the way some students are able to ‘swarm’ in or out of the university when they are occasionally chased by riot police after a demonstration. Similarly, the way university buildings are being used cannot be neutral as the police often “siege” the campuses thus forcing fugitives to organize forms of “in-habitability” within them.

When many factories had to cease their activity after the economic crisis of 2001 in Argentina, similar processes of appropriation and defense began with workers taking control of their working place. Organized under the banner of the fábricas recuperadas (re-claimed factories), they have developed an alternative to the capitalist and hierarchical mode of production. The architecture of the Zanon ceramic tile factory (Neuquen), the Brukman textile factory and the Hotel Bauen (Buenos Aires) recounts such an alternative, as well as the survival and defensive means that needed to emerge in order to resist the various forces deployed against them.

The third case-study proposed for this research also exists through the means of expropriation, in this case, within the frame of colonial tactics. The Israeli settlements inhabited by over 500,000 civilians in the West Bank constitute a violation of Article 49 of the 1949 Fourth Geneva Convention which stipulates that “the Occupying Power shall not deport or transfer parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies.” However, through their de facto occupation of the Palestinian territory, as well as with their continuous territorial expansion, the status of a legal anomaly is gradually transferred to the land that they slowly but surely circumscribe. My analysis of this specific architectural example would be built on the bases of my previous research about the role of architecture in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict since 2008.

The last item of investigation globally questions the legal/architectural typology of the Embassy. Here again, the legal anomaly it constitutes makes the notion of national sovereignty more complex and ambiguous as embassies are effectively parts of a given country within another. The way such a relation is articulated between both territories is truly architectural. The American embassies in particular are interesting examples to study as the past few decades of antagonistic US foreign policy has only added fuel to the fire causing the diplomatic architectural paradigm to shift to a defensive strategy that shares many similarities with the strategies of Middle Age castles. The American embassy in Cairo, for example, carries such medieval defensive characteristics. The building, designed by Metcalf and Associates in the 1980’s, is a ten-story ‘dungeon’ that is required to withstand a potential force of 2,000 pounds of TNT. Such defensiveness surely played an important role during the management of the recent protest in which an angry crowd attempted to penetrate its perimeter last September.

I envision this research as a continuation of my personal work that deploys itself both through theoretical investigations and the practice of design. In this regard, the book I would like to produce through the Wheelwright Prize would include the collection of the case study analyses, as well as a personal architectural project informed by this research. Refusing the dichotomy of writing and designing is, for me, a way to accept the responsibility that each architect has towards society, as well as an opportunity to determine an architectural means to subvert the role that has been chosen for him or her by the establishment. Only under these circumstances can we think of an architecture that does not reinforce the dominant relationships of power but rather, that articulates a strategic response in order to resist them.

What is wrong with these pictures? Start maybe by looking at them all. The landscapes that they show are beautiful and seem to be almost untouched by humans. The problem is that they are taken where Palestinian villages used to exist before 1948. Five days ago was the 65th anniversary of the Nakba (the catastrophe in Arabic), the day that hundreds of thousands of Palestinians had to flee from their land when the State of Israel was established. These photographs are from the website of the association Zochrot that attempts to familiarize Israeli people with the tragic consequences that their country originated, advocate for a Palestinian right to return (see past article about it) and, hope for a bi-national reconciliation. In this regard, Zochrot has established a map (in Hebrew only) giving an inventory of the Palestinian villages that were evacuated and those that have been destroyed after 1948.

Sometimes their destruction led space to the new Israeli towns but as these photographs reveal, it was a much more profound destruction than a “simple” take over. Palestinian villages have been purely annihilated to the very last stone. Such a clear act of negating the presence of a civilization before the existence of Israel is even more shocking and disturbing as it occurred only a few years after the industrialized Nazi death machine against the Jewish people – let us not forget the gypsies, homosexuals, handicapped and communists either. Ruins of these villages would have told a narrative involving the Palestinian existence prior to the state of Israel and would have implied their evacuation from it. This narrative was apparently not part of the newly born State that got rid of it through the violent erasing of this historical tracks. The ruin implies a tragic situation, but the negation to the right to the ruin goes even further: it is an absolute re-writing of history as it attempts to erase a part of it (it is understood here as the factual history, not the interpretation of it, also named history).

I usually do not want to mix the blog with my own design projects but one of the latter seems relevant enough about this right to the ruin to briefly write about it. The design project of Weaponized Architecture was dramatizing an architectural disobedience to the colonial law that prevents Palestinian construction in 63% of the West Bank. The project was functioning with various tactics of camouflage but was also incorporating the hypothesis of its own destruction by the Israeli army in case it would have been discovered. Its materiality and its ‘uneven geometry’ however, were partially designed in such a way that it would requires too much energy to be fully destroyed. The project would thus become a ruin that would still carry the narrative of its existence and continue the territorial resistance against the colonial law in the West Bank.

The following photographs – the second one was taken by Noga Kadman for her book Erased from Space and Consciousness (see this article on +972 about it) – through their captions and their collection also reconstitute the narrative that was destroyed with the villages themselves. They will never be able to replace the ruins that should have remained and carry this narrative by themselves, but hopefully they are able to translate the disturbing civilizational absence of the post-nakba landscapes.

Aarhus-based architect James Martin was kind enough to share with me the small book he created (with the help of my friends Ben Clement and Sebastian de la Cour) around, what I would call, an archaeology of truth in Northern Ireland. He named the book Revising Histories [building truth] to reflect the collection of narratives that he came to encounter in his attempt to reconstitute what we might call, an illusory reconstitution of truth. By illusory I do not imply that there are many truths that would be all equal, but, rather, that the notion of truth is only communicated through constructed discourses, which always involve the subjectivity of the “teller” and the “listener”. This subjectivity is based on what I would like to call “axiomatic truth”, i.e. that on what one’s constructed system of truth is constructed upon and that constitutes the very core of any political conflict since there is a fundamental impossibility to understand each other as long as the axiomatic truths do not overlap. What James conveys brilliantly in his project is that several constructed narratives — sometimes in conflict with each other — can be collected around a given object, thus creating another level of truth discourse.

The book includes for example two leaflets illustrating two antagonist discourses about the same region of Ulster for which they are both hoping to develop tourism : one coming from the Northern Island government — officially part of the United Kingdom — and one from the Irish Nationalists. While the first part promotes a sort of “pre-political” history of the region as well as the geographical quality of the site (see edited photograph below on the left), the second one, on the other hand, is focusing on the local resistance to the British occupation materialized by the remaining watchtowers (see document below too) and goes as far as promoting the (veritable or not) amount of British soldiers killed in the region.

To these two (sometimes more) truth discourses collected by James all along his book, he adds an additional one: an architectural one. He designed five towers (The Tower of the Perpetrator, the Tower of the Unknown, the Tower of Peace and Propaganda, the Tower of the Uninformed and the Tower of the Victim) in the form of proposal to the local population(s) that would or would not accept the acknowledgement of the truth discourses that are materialized through them. I copied below the description that James elaborated for each of them. Of course, the truth discourse that is constructed through these towers is also ambiguous for its symmetry and its outsider position.

My own truth discourse about this project can be formulated through the form of a suspicious paranoia. By paranoia, I do not really want to refer to a pathology but rather to the systematic questioning of any truth discourse. My reading of the book Revising Histories is based on the following suspected narrative: James never went to Northern Island, he never collected leaflets, edited photographs or any other historical documents. He produced himself all the documents of the book from his office in Denmark, he built up a website to reference the made up photographer he is using and, for that matter, he is not even a real person, but rather the simulacrum of a College student used by benandsebastian for their new art project.

What I want to convey through this doubt is not a sort of Cartesian quest for an elemental truth — “the only thing I am sure of is that I am — but rather that the subjectivity of truth discourses can be embraced in order to reveal an element of the real. The only difference between a fiction film and a reportage by CNN is that one of them explicits the subjectivity of its truth discourse. This is why the pseudo-documentaries (see past article) of Peter Watkins and Chris Marker are so powerful. The viewer knows that (s)he is watching a piece of fiction, but the means used to unfold this fiction being the exact same than the ones used by documentaries that claim a sort of objective truth discourse, the vision of the real expressed is more susceptible to be conveyed.

All following documents are extracted from Revising Histories [building truth] by James Martin (2012):

01-  Tower of the Perpetrator

The first tower to be constructed in Croslieve is an exact replica of Golf Four Zero, the original observation post that was removed from the mountain in 2007. The Tower of the Perpetrator is to be used as a monument to those that died on both sides of the conflict: both Loyalist and Nationalist paramilitary groups have used the status of “victim” to justify their acts of violence and have seen the other as the “perpetrator” of their suffering. Both observation posts are to be reconstructed using data obtained from photographs: as the information is incomplete the structures shall remain empty-shells lines with the names of the perpetrators. Visitors will find these structures at the southernmost point of the Croslieve Mountain ridge and, from inside, can admire the view below to the countryside of Northern and Southern Ireland.

02- Tower of the Unknown  

The Tower of the Unknown and its surrounding structures are based on those that once inhabited other military sites in the Ring of Gullion They will be erected alongside the remaining structures of the Golf-Four-Zero complex. Here this mishmash of pieces, new and remaining, will present the misconceptions and myths held by the people of South Armagh: an inconspicuous garden shed conceals an underground accommodation unit, while the fifteen-metre-tall tower (G20) dominates overhead. These non-functional attention grabbing structures question the role the originals had in the landscape from the perspective of the South Armagh community.

03- Tower of Peace and Propaganda

Jutting out from the west face of Croslieve’s summit, The Tower of Peace and Propaganda is to be used as a museum to celebrate the peace agreement and a headquarters for organising and holding peace talks and meetings for the communities of the Ring of Gullion and South Armagh. The tower complex will also house offices for the political tour operators of Nationalist and Loyalist denomination. Visitors to the tower can gain an insight into the history of the peace process of Northern Ireland and/or attend a presentation from both standpoints in the underground conference room. All spaces of the tower complex are lit indirectly from overhead window slots and roof lights – while views of the landscape are denied.

04- The Tower of the Uninformed

Before reaching the summit one can find refuge in this wooden tower and its complex of carved out spaces below. The entrance staircase, cast into the landscape, tapers to filter walkers into single file so as to better appreciate the succeeding space of the tower’s cavity – lit from above. Off this, in the mess hall, the walker can eat their packed lunch in front of a picture window with a view towards the summit of Slieve Gullion – the centrepiece of the Gullion Ring. An inaccessible terrace protrudes out from the mess hall under this window frame and obstructs views down on those ascending from below. Overhead the tower’s observation deck is accessible yet the tight space restricts numers to one at a time. From here views are controlled to specific mountain and hill tops in the Gullion Valley. The tourist is not informed that these positions in the landscape were once sites of occupation and conflict, instead they are allowed to admire the landscape in peace. Accommodation is provided in the underground dormitory should the bad weather persist.

05- The Tower of the Victim

The Tower of the Victim shall sit on and in a small hill at the base of Croslieve Mountain and the start of the Croslieve Way. The tower shall be used as a memorial to the 3,722 people who lost their lives during “The Troubles”. The victim’s names can be read on the walls as one ascends its staircase. The names, both of Irish Nationalists and Ulster Loyalists, sit side by side and are lit from an out of reach light-shaft above. The pace of the stairs quickens the further into the hill one ventures. A small bench at the top of the hill provides a resting spot for those to stop and admire the ladder fields of the surrounding countryside and assess the climb ahead. The landscape will be cut and shaped to expose and showcase the basalt rock of this ancient volcanic region while providing a safe-haven inside of it. From the top of the stairs the underground tunnel network of Croslieve Mountain is accessible.

A Body of Gezi Park. 31 May 2013. From Yücel Tunca via Nar Photos.

For the last five days, the small park of Gezi near Taksim square in Istanbul has been occupied by dozens of thousands of people protesting, at first, against the urban project in development for this site that involves a shopping mall. Such a project that transforms a public space into an instrument of capitalism is part of a long series of others that has been changing Istanbul’s urban landscape and politics in the last decade. Very quickly however, the protest generalized itself and reached other cities of Turkey (Ankara, Izmir and more) in an attempt to globally constitute a strong resistance against the conservative and religious Turkish government and its Prime Minister, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.  The latter used to be Istanbul’s mayor and still has strong interests in its development. The police violently attacked the protesters, injuring severely some of them, but reinforcing the movement’s determination and legitimacy.

It is interesting to observe that such a news has been spread out much rapidly on the international level than on the national one since the Turkish Press – just like the American one, including the New York Times, at the beginning of the Occupy movement – did not communicate about this information in a clear submission to the political status quo. In New York, hundreds of occupiers went back on Zuccotti Park to show their international solidarity with the Turkish movement of the same name.

For the last two years, many “professional politicians” in power learned what it is to be afraid of the multitude. All answered with brutality (from Cairo to Santiago, via Benghazi, Damascus, Athens, Montreal, New York and many more), some stepped down, some kept their status, some others are still ordering massacres against their own people but all of them seems to have feared the power of the crowds, gathered by their common will to resist against totalitarianism and capitalism. Something needs to be understood here: despite all the media attempts to “surf” on these political waves with a common approach of the use of social media as a new form of political act – to a certain extent, it is not completely wrong – the thing that veritably choked the status quo is the gathering of bodies in the public space.  Of course, some gathering of bodies are less political than others – sport events related ones for example – and therefore, there needs to be a certain performativity involved in this process; however, there is something inherently political in this act of forming a group of bodies in the public realms. As I have been writing often, especially to exclaim the sense of this notion of occupying, our body can only be at one place at a time and, because of its materiality, no other body can be at the very same place at the same time. This involves a certain necessity as our body is always spatialized but, at the very same time, it also involves the radical choice for this space at the exclusion of every other in the world. At each moment of our life, we have therefore to re-accomplish the necessary yet radical choice of the localization of our body. When thousands of bodies choose to be localized together in the streets or on a square, in such a way that they are not participating to the economy and might even have to confront the physical violent encounter with the various forces of suppression, rather than choosing the comfort of the private realms, a strong political gesture is being created.

It would be too easy to necessarily applaud any political gesture of this kind. The recent numerous demonstrations of catholic extremists and other movement of right wing activists in France against the legislation authorizing gay marriage – now in vigor -  prove it well. In this latter case, the bodies that were demonstrating were the bodies representing the norm: white Christians heterosexuals. The latter do not really suffer from the way society is organized as they constitute the bodies that society considers to organize itself. The streets of Istanbul, on the other hand, are filled by people whose bodies are getting more and more constrained by the conservative religious dominant ideology – by dominant, I don’t imply as much a question of majority than one of relationships of power.

As always, architecture is not innocent here. The fact is that these bodies are gathering in the public realms, but more precisely, outside, in the streets, on the squares, in the parks. Architecture through its internality always has a limitation of the amount of bodies it can host (the maximum occupancy as the urban code defines it); the outdoor world does not really. Choosing for our body to be outside is to potentially contribute to a crowd that theoretically won’t be limited in its number by physical borders, hence the fear of politicians to see the movement spreading. Architecture is inherently participating to the striation of space, nevertheless, it can attempt to create a substantial porosity between the space it contains and the public one that surrounds it, in such a way that the political bodies can appropriate it.

For an excellent reflective digest about Occupy Gezi and these last five days in Istanbul, read this article on Jadaliyya.

Prosthetic Aesthetics by Lawrence Lek (2012)

Today I want to talk (once again) about the body and its relationship to design by presenting five young (four of them are less than 30 years old) designers (two French, one German, one Korean and one American) who each in their own way challenge the body through their design and vice versa. In order to do so, I will introduce them successively from the design at the closest of the body to the one at the furthest. We might call the first one fashion, the last one architecture and the ones in between industrial design or art, but really that does not matter at all and attributing these designs to a specific discipline would be missing their common point: their investigation on the body. It is true that the scale of clothing (or prosthetic), because of its privileged relationship to the individual who wears it, might present a more direct political dimension as it introduces an immediate performativity of the same individual within the public realms. What we wear is necessary a form of political expression of our desires, our gender, our social class, our ethnicity, or rather the desire, the (non)gender, the social class, the ethnicity and the relationship to society and to the norm that we choose to express. I would like to claim nevertheless that the same is true for the localization and behavior or our body, and that also involves our relationship to the designed and built environment that surrounds it. Most of us do not design our own clothes, our own furniture, our own buildings. What the body make of them is obviously conditioned by the design, but it can also consist in the subversion of these conditions, or at least in the sum of behaviors that go beyond the original spectrum of behaviors imagined by the designer and other decisive actors of a design.

The following projects were not necessarily thought through political arguments; it is actually not impossible that none of them actually were. I would claim however that design being necessarily political because of the relationship its develops with the bodies, designing for the body cannot be not making a voluntary political argument. For example, none of these five works are arguing for the comfort of the body. They might nevertheless be at the antipodes of  the Cruel Designs (i.e. designs that are conceived in the voluntary goal of hurting the body) I regularly address in these articles. Comfort is certainly not the opposite of pain. The opposite of pain is the Spinozist joy experienced by a body who realizes that it is empowered by its vitality. These five works, all in their very specific way, invoke this joy. The gravity they design is not one that crushes the body to the ground, it is rather one that the body, in its materiality, can play with, dance with, jump with and support itself upon, taking advantage of each surface of fabric, wood, metal, plastic or concrete that interact with it.

YIQING YIN: Collection Spring Summer 2011:

I already dedicated a text to the beautiful work of Yiqing Yin in which I was insisting on the material operation that the fold – that could not exist without gravity – consisted in. The fabric as a second skin, one whose epidermic sensitive surface saw its area multiplied quasi-infinitely. This poetic notion of the infinite is important here as these dresses seemed to have folded the world in them as the fabric seems to be never able to fully unfold itself.

LAWRENCE LEK: Prosthetic Aesthetics (2012):

Lawrence Lek created three different wooden prosthetics that, rather than replacing a limb or any other part of the body, augment the latter for specific actions, running, tumbling and jumping (see diagrams below). In this case, the prosthetic is a sort of exoskeleton that mimics the structure of a (relatively normal) human body and after analyzing some of its capacities simply exacerbates the latter by increasing its amplitude. The choice of the material is far from being neutral as wood is here used for its capacity to absorb the contact with the ground before using its resilience to go back to its initial state when this contact stops.

JIEUM KIM: Stepladder’s Gun (2013):

Stepladder’s Gun is a filmed performance created by Jieun Kim for the Centre for Contemporary Art in Kitakyushu (Japan). The choreography is mostly left to the dancer’s interpretation as she interacts with the three objects (and the floor) available to her. The body’s behavior is important here, but so is the strictly visual aspect of the choreography. The dancer wears a black dress and, through the positions of her body, draws ephemeral lines and figures on the white background. As Jieun puts its, her body composes alternatively “a very thick charcoal, a very thin pencil and a strong pen.” The lines created by the legs, the arms and the hair along with the surfaces created by the dress compose a dynamic drawing that can be seen abstractly (by half-closing your eyes for example) but that ultimately participates to providing a beginning of answer to the Spinozist question: what can a body do? (see past article)

EVE BAILEY: Shoulder Path (2011):

Each work that Eve Bailey (see her guest writer essay) creates explores in a very direct way the relationship between the body and design. I chose here her Shoulder Path but it could have also been her own corporal experiment with a stepladder as a sort of dialogue with Jieun Kim’s film, or her Drunken Body, Entasis Dance or Intuit performances that all involves a design that has been thought specifically for the body, but that the latter requires to continuously negotiate with both the designed surfaces and gravity. Her work is an ode to the research of balance for the body who needs to not fall, of course, but also to find the various gravity points of the design in order for it not to fall either.

KORDAE HENRY: Rebuilding the Body (2011):

The project Rebuilding the Body was created by Kordae Henry in the context of Sofia Krimizi’s Graduate Studio at the University of Pennsylvania that was precisely trying to achieve such investigation. Kordae designed an architecture that would offer a challenging terrain to Parkourers (see past article). This ambition is complex as parkour seems to often consists in the subversion of architecture’s conditioning of normed behaviors: a wall is not interpreted a “thick line” that prevents the body to penetrate to another space, but rather as a surface on which the body can briefly use to propel itself. All surfaces are thus interpreted as opportunities for the body to invent new forms of movement as long as it does not stick to them as if they were too hot to remain in contact with them. Kordae’s architecture nevertheless manages to provide a prolific terrain for this inventive activity as it multiplies surfaces and their angles without conditioning in advance the way they would be used by the body.

The second volume of The Funambulist Pamphlets that gathers past articles of the blog, is now officially published by Punctum Books in collaboration with the Center for Transformative Media at Parsons The New School. You can either download the book as a PDF for free or order it online for the price of $7.00 or €6.00. Next volume to be published will be dedicated to Deleuze.

Official page of The Funambulist Pamphlets Volume 02: FOUCAULT on Punctum Books’ website.

Index of the Book

Introduction: The Cartography of Power
01/ Foucault and Architecture: The Encounter that Never Was
02/ The Architectural Underestimation
03/ “Do not become Enamored with Power”
04/ “Mon Corps, Topie Impitoyable”
05/ The Cartography of Power
06/ The Political Technology of the Body
07/ Architecture and Discipline: The Hospital
08/ Questioning Heterotopology
09/ Foucault and the Society of Control
10/ Quadrillage: Urban Plague Quarantine & Retro-Medieval Boston
11/ The Inscription of Gender in Our Bodies: Norm Production in Foucault and Butler
12/ Modes of Subversion Against the Pharmacopornographic Society: Testo Junkie by Beatriz Preciado
13/ “My Desire is Someone Else’s Fiction”
14/ The Architectural Paradigm of the Society of Control: The Immanent Panopticon
15/ The Counter-Biopolitical Bioscleave Experiment: Bioscleave, Shaping our Biological Niches by Stanley Shostak
16/ Diagrams of Utopia by Anthony Vidler
17/ Quarantine and Remoteness: Paranoia and Mechanisms of Precautionary Incarceration
18/ Prison Information Group: Michel Foucault, Jean-Marie Domenach & Pierre Vidal-Naquet

It has been a while now that I am accumulating articles that address the philosophical or/and political dimension of the human (and sometimes non-human) body. I decided therefore to add one “category” in the archives of The Funambulist. Following the philosophical scream of Michel Foucault “Mon Corps, Topie Impitoyable” (see past article), this category will use its original French version Topie Impitoyable as the English translation both lacks of the full meaning (My Body, Pitiless/Inexorable Place) and also because the particular sound of this phrase adds to its philosophical power. This section already counts 92 articles so it convenes to recurrent conceptual affirmations that this body (!) of texts develops:

- The body is a material assemblage surrounded by other material assemblages (cf Spinoza)
- The body keeps encountering the other bodies that surrounds it.
- From these encounters, it can result either a beneficial or detrimental affect for both bodies (what Spinoza calls joy and sadness)
- Because the body’s materiality is coherent, the body can only be at one place at a time but it always needs to be at one place.
- Because the body is material, only one body can be at a given place at a time
- From the propositions above, we can deduct that the location of the body is necessarily political
- From the fourth and last proposition, we can say that there is a necessary yet radical choice to be made at each instant about the location of the body.
- The body has no inside
- The body is not one, it is multiple (more on that in an article very soon)
- The body is continuously producing material assemblages
- Part of this production is a body’s desire (cf Deleuze & Guattari)
- A body’s desire can be captured. This is what we call capitalism
- A body itself can be captured. This is what we call totalitarianism
- A body can be not white, not male, not heterosexual, not healthy, not adult, not procreatory, not urban and still remains a body that can legitimately claim for equal legal rights.
- The last proposition is a good thing as no body is simultaneously truly white, male, heterosexual, healthy, adult, procreatory and urban.
- Despite the last proposition, most pieces of design are made for bodies that are truly white, male, heterosexual, healthy, adult, procreatory and urban.
- A piece of design can be specifically made to torture a body
- A piece of design that is not specifically made to torture a body can also violently hurt a body
- A piece of design can be made to trigger beneficial affects to a given (preferably universal body (hint: I am not talking about a comfortable coach; quite the opposite actually)
- A body by its very movement and behavior can profoundly subvert the material environment that was originally set-up to
- Ultimately we don’t really know what a body can do (cf Spinoza again)

Power of the Lines – Lines of Power ///
text originally written in French for the 2012 issue of the journal of  ETH Zurich,  Trans entitled Stance (thank you to Stéphanie Savio). My apologies for the egocentrism of this article.

The graphic novel Lost in the Line (2010) materializes an allegory of my architectural manifesto. The line constitutes the medium used by the architect as a tool and a representation code. Geometrically it does not have any thickness; it is therefore difficult to imagine that one could loss oneself in it! However, when the line is drawn by the architect, it is susceptible to acquire a thickness with heavy consequences when transcribed into reality. A line that becomes a wall does not simply acquire a height, it also includes in its oxymoronic thickness a violence against the territory that it split and against the bodies that it controls irresistibly. Architecture is therefore inherently violent and each attempt to defuse its power on the bodies is useless. Maybe should we, on the contrary, accept this violence and use it in favor of our manifestos.

Lost in the Line is therefore a narrative allegory of such a position. In it, the line is both this geometrical figure traced on a piece of paper and that separates the desert into two parts, but also a fractal component and quasi-molecular that is contained in the dark matter of the graphite dropped on the paper by the pencil. The bodies, in this story, are subjugated to the violence of the lines that split the space all around them; however, they attempt to appropriate the interstices provoked by these lines in order for them to move in all directions, build new forms of dwelling, and ultimately cross the original line that yet constituted an impenetrable border at the macroscopic level.

This story also questions the control that the architect exercises on his (her) drawing, and therefore on the bodies that are subjugated to it in its materialized version that we call architecture. The problem of the labyrinth is interesting here. The labyrinth, in its classical bidimensional form constitutes the absolute paradigm of transcendental architecture that exercise its control on its subjects who gets lost in it until exhaustion under the mocking gaze of the demiurge architect that observes the whole thing “from above.” However, Franz Kafka’s literature invented a new form for the labyrinth; one in which even its author does not escape from the complexity of its work. Let us recall here that beyond the bureaucratic labyrinths describes in The Trial and The Castle, Kafka did not seem to have determine neither the order of the former’s chapters, nor the latter’s end. Lost in the Line therefore dramatizes a level of complexity on which the author of the line has no control. The confusion between the graphic novel’s author and the line’s author is useful here as it reinforce the ‘lines’ of subjectivity that enjoy such a loss of control. The latter, when it is planned thoroughly, allows the bodies to appropriate and to ‘conquer’ this built matter.

The figure of the funambulist (tight rope walker) who walks on the lines as a refusal to be subjected to their splitting effect also has a role to play in this allegorical manifesto. Of course, this character is not liberated from the lines as (s)he is walking on them; nevertheless, (s)he subverts the power of their original intention. On November 9th 1989, Berliners did not express the obsolescence of their wall by crossing it in both directions, but rather, by climbing on it, and sit on its edge. They occupied this 6-inch wide world that was surrounding the Western part of the city. The Berlin wall had been defined as the paradigm of political architecture for its simultaneous simplicity and violence; yet, we would be wrong to think that there are political architectures and others, which would be innocent.

Our lines cannot be innocent. They carry in each of them the power to subjugate the bodies. The most we can do is to make this subjugation escape from a transcendental control in order for them to present a potential for appropriation and emancipation that are the bases of any political conscious action.

Winning entry of the New State Danish Prison by C. F. Møller Architects (2010)

Thanks to my friends Mariabruna and Fosco (Microcities/Socks), I got to learn that the French department of justice, through its research mission — coincidentally entitled G.I.P. like Michel Foucault’s Groupe Information Prison — is currently calling for research proposal to rethink the relationships between architecture and the prison. The opportunity to work on this topic thus reactivated for me what appears to me as the most explicit dilemma for an architect: should I, as an architect, accept to be commissioned — or even to research — to design a prison that I will intend to trigger an improvement in the conditions of incarceration of prisoners, or should I simply refuse to conceive an architecture that is voluntarily cruel to the bodies that it hosts? I am writing that this is the “most explicit” dilemma, as this question can be asked in many other situations when exercising this profession. Not every architects will be asked to participate to the design of a prison in their carrier, but all of them will face this dilemma declined in a more or less subtle version of it. This is actually a more generalized dilemma than one only addressed to architects; every political strategy is based on this same question: can a set of reforms essentially change a society for better, or are reforms only a matter of cosmetics that participates to the dissimulation of the real essence of the relationships of power. Reform or revolution?

I would like my readers to believe me when I say that I veritably do not know the answer that I would like to give this question. On the one hand, refusing compromise can be a comfortable way to think as it allows no flexibility, and therefore no effort to adapt principles to a concrete situation; on the other hand, the reason that we elaborate principles when liberated from the specificity of a situation is a good way for them not to be corrupted by processes of self-persuasion that are often motivated on self-centered considerations. What is for sure, is that it is important to seriously consider this dilemma each time we find ourselves confronted to one of its declinations. In the case of an architecture commission — a prison, for example — each categorical refusal must be done after having reconsidered this question, and each acceptance must be done in the full understanding of what is the actual decision power of the architect, and in which political context (s)he is embedded to, when conceiving this project.

In the case of this specific call for research by the Department of Justice, it is probably important to remark that the current Secretary of Justice, Christiane Taubira, — who also carried the legislation to retroactively define slavery as a crime against humanity in 2001 and the one to legalize same-sex marriage in 2013 — has been repeatedly asserting something that a vast majority of us know well, but that is not necessarily brought to the governmental scales: prison does not make people “better,” i.e. does not make people more integrated within social interactions. Prison, as thought in many countries of the world, — on the contrary than what is done in Scandinavia — is essentially acting to serve two purposes: punishment and example. Punishment is a form of revenge from society toward the body of the accused, while example constitutes the spectacularity of the punishment that is supposed to discourage people in society to contravene the law. Both of these dimensions requires architecture to be voluntarily aggressive and inhospitable to the condemned body. Nothing is done to think and prepare the future of this body that will one day be liberated from this architecture. Mrs. Taubira also recognized that an important amount of people who are currently being incarcerated could be subjected to another form of punishment than prison when considering the ‘lightness’ of their crime.

Of course, these arguments are simply words — non-electoral ones, it is important to state — for the moment and an essential change cannot be accomplished by only one person, even if she is part of a government. However, this ideological background is fundamental to determine whether or not we should accept to participate to the reformist ‘path.’ It is as important as difficult to articulate an ethics that slightly dissociate discourse and practice as long as this dissociation is strictly motivated by unselfish reasons, the acceptance of the “least worst” while keeping arguing for the “better.” That is how we vote while denouncing the dysfunction of representative democracy, or that Foucault created the Prison Information Group mentioned above (see also this past article) that participated to a better communication (TV, newspapers, letters) between the prison and the ‘outside,’ when he was discursively unfolding the logic of power that are being activated through the carceral world and that in no way ceases to be operative in the frame of these small improvements.

There is no Hippocratic Oath for architects like there is one for doctors — they take the oath of always act for the good of their patient. Of course, there is no patients of architecture either, but when we come to think about it, the extent is not the same but our bodies are subjected to the power of architecture in a similar way than they are to the power of the doctors. Nowadays, an oath tends to be more valuable to the self-spectacle that involves its ceremony than to the essence of its ethical positioning; however, what it allows is the explicitation of the negative affect that it prevents and thus, surely participates to a form of awareness about it. In other words, the equivalent of the Hippocratic Oath for architects, by stating that an architect should not in any way participate to the conception of a design that would be deliberately hurtful to the bodies that it will host, it would contribute to architects’ awareness that their design can indeed be deliberately hurtful to the bodies. Like in medicine, this oath would also embody the base of the professional ethics and thus, could potentially make architects face their responsibilities at a judicial level. The sense of responsibility is key here, as it would most certainly help to answer the dilemma enunciated in the title of this article in full understanding of the consequence of its choice, whatever it might be.

The fourth volume of The Funambulist Pamphlets that gathers and edits past articles of the blog about Legal Theory, is now officially published by Punctum Books in collaboration with the Center for Transformative Media at Parsons The New School. You can either download the book as a PDF for free or order it online for the price of $7.00 or €6.00. Next volume to be published will be dedicated to Occupy Wall Street. Click here to see the other volumes of The Funambulist Pamphlets.

Thank you to Eileen Joy, Anna Kłosowska, Ed Keller, Lucy Finchett-Maddock, Costas Douzinas, Gilbert Leung, David Garcia, Santiago Cirugeda & Chaska Katz.

Official page of The Funambulist Pamphlets Volume 04: LEGAL THEORY on Punctum Books’ website.

Index of the Book

Introduction: The Law Turned Into Walls
01/ Architecture and the Law: An Epistolary Exchange With Dr. Lucy Finchett-Maddock
02/ Remus Has to Die
03/ Trapped in the Border’s Thickness
04/ Absurdity and Greatness of the Law: The Siege of the Ecuadorian Embassy in London
05/ The Space Beyond the Walls: Defensive “A-legal” Sanctuaries
06/ The Reasons for Disobeying a Law
07/ Political Geography of the Gaza Strip: A Territory of Experiments for the State of Israel
08/ Palestine: What Does the International Legislation Say
09/ In Praise of the Essence of the American Second Amendment: The Importance of Self-Contradiction in a System
10/ Power, Violence, Law by Costas Douzinas
11/ Fortress London: Missiles on Your Roof
12/ Short Digression About the Future of Drones (After Seeing One at JFK)
13/ Quadrillage: Urban Plague Quarantine & Retro-Medieval Boston
14/ Historical Map of Quarantine
15/ Collision, Sexuality and Resistance
16/ The Spatial Issues at Stake in Occupy Wall Street: Considering the Privately Owned Public Spaces
17/ Strategies for Subversive Urban Occupation by Recetas Urbanas
18/ Is Housing a Human Right? Considering the “Take Back the Land” Manifesto
19/ Center for Urban Pedagogy

I realize that I always write about the violence unfolded by architecture’s physicality on the bodies. However, there is a more or less implicit corollary to this affirmation that can be sometimes ignored, but that should nevertheless be acknowledged in the form of a small reminder of Spinoza’s philosophy (see The Funambulist Pamphlets Volume 01 for more articles). Architecture is violent to the bodies, but so are the bodies to architecture.

Spinoza does not talk about violence; he establishes two different sorts of affects that result from the encounter of two material assemblages (like a body). He calls them either sad or joyful. Joyful is, as I have had many occasions to write, the characteristics of affects that result from what we could call, a harmonious relation between these two bodies, whereas sad affects is precisely what we could understand as violence. What is interesting is that Spinoza, on the contrary of le Marquis de Sade, does not seem to think that there could be a body that can not experience a joyful affect while the other body of the material encounter  experiences a sad affect. In simple words, the knife that we use to cut butter is not strengthen by its repetitive function of cutting — i.e. it does not have a joyful affect — quite on the opposite, it actually deteriorates a little bit more at each cut to the point that we all know well, when one morning, the knife ends up breaking. Of course, the knife does not get equally affected from the material encounter with the butter. If it was, it would not serve its function as a tool. However, the double sad affect can be said to be effective; there is simply a difference of intensity between the two affects.

Intensity is an important word as we can understand our relation to the world uniquely through it. Something as artificial as the idea of races for example, is illustrative of how social categories have been applied based on an erroneous predicate. Each human is the entire world folded in itself at various intensities. Each of us contains the characteristics of the narrow social categories (man/woman, heterosexual/homosexual, black/white etc.), only the intensities of these characteristics are changing in a unique combination for each body. These intensities are also continuously fluctuating, which should in principle prevent even more the organization of a given society based on a definitive categories.

The immanent world interpreted by Spinoza is therefore a world of intensities. When we associate this thought with his “philosophical scream,” what can a body do (see past article), we might want to rethink of our own predicate that observe the violence of architecture on the bodies, and accept the actual reciprocity of violence by affirming that the bodies, as well, affect architecture with a certain violence. There is little chance that these two intensities can equalize, but when one sees these people who break bricks or concrete blocks with their bare hands, we might want to return to our ignorance about what can a body do. The predicate is that our body alone, i.e. without the help of an external tool, cannot develop enough energy to go through a solid wall, and therefore, there is a political and legal instrumentalization of these physical condition that goes from the crystallization of private property (take any house as an example) to the incarceration of specific bodies inside of it like in the case of a prison. We leave a body between the four hermetic walls of a prison, as we are absolutely sure that this body will not be able to modify the structural integrity of these walls, in such a way that it could pass through the lines that they materialize. We can therefore affirm that the carceral industry/politics thinks that it knows the answer that Spinoza asks (What can a body do?), or at least its reverse equivalent (What can’t a body do?).

Assuming that a body could actually subvert this certitude would be a mistake as it would also consists in a misleading certitude; however, we can integrate in our design and in our thoughts that there is an actual doubt about whether or not a body can cross a wall. When we see someone breaking a concrete block with his or her bare hand in front of us, what we see is raw strength, and therefore a form of reciprocal violence. What we might be missing nevertheless, is the fact that there is also a material reading of the hand that finds the condition of the encounter in such a way that the structural integrity of the block would be affected to the point that it would break into two parts. This reading, based on an interpretation of the world through its intensities, is not an obvious one; however, its experience allows us to rethink the relation that the built environment and our bodies develop with each other. By accepting a certain form of reciprocity of affects, even if of different intensities, we can also rethink the notion of subversion of the political instrumentalization of architecture as there is a possibility to negate the very bases on which the latter is built upon.

The fifth volume of The Funambulist Pamphlets that gathers and edits past articles (as well as additional photographs) of the blog about Occupy Wall Street, is now officially published by Punctum Books in collaboration with the Center for Transformative Media at Parsons The New School. You can either download the book as a PDF for free or order it online for the price of $7.00 or €6.00. Next volume to be published will be dedicated to Occupy Wall Street. Click here to see the other volumes of The Funambulist Pamphlets.

Thank you to Eileen Joy, Anna Kłosowska, Ed Keller, Liam Young, Lucas Issey, Eric Hazan, John O’Toole.

Official page of The Funambulist Pamphlets Volume 05: OCCUPY WALL STREET on Punctum Books’ website.

Index of the Book

Introduction: My Body Is a Political Weapon
00/ Photographs of Occupy Wall Street
01/ “I Am a Citizen of Liberty Square”
02/ Urban Insurgencies: Algiers’ Labyrinthine Casbah vs. New York’s Weaponized Grid Plan
03/ “Mic-Check!”: Human Transmission Technology
04/ “This is What Democracy Looks Like” Is Not Just a Slogan
05/ Why We Should Stop Calling Occupy Wall Street a Protest
06/ Spatial Issues at Stake in Occupy Wall Street: Considering the Privately Owned Public Spaces
07/ The Tremendous Power of Space
08/ The Archipelago as a Territorial Manifesto
09/ About the Notion of Occupying
10/ Judith Butler to the Occupy Movement: “This is a Politics of the Public Body”
11/ Occupy the Department of Buildings
12/ Creating the Urban Labyrinth in an Orthogonal Street Grid
13/ National Security Drones vs. Liam Young’s Electronic Counter-Measures
14/ Aestheticizing Violence + Capitalizing on the Revolt Imaginary
15/ Impetus
16/ Occupy Gezi: Why Are Politicians Afraid of Bodies
17/ The Republic of Taksim
18/ What Is a People?
19/ The Political Archipelago: For a New Paradigm of Territorial Sovereignty
20/ Official Report on the question of the so-called New York Commune
21/ The New York Commune [Film in Progress]

Juggling on the Berlin Wall / Photograph by Yann Forget

It has now been three months that I have the chance to write a monthly carte blanche column in Swiss architectural journal Tracés entitled Le Funambule. This third article is a re-articulation of various ideas that I have been writing in the past on this blog. I apologize for the clear redundancy.

What Do We Find in the Thickness of a Line? ///
(originally published in French in Tracés)

The line constitutes the principal medium of the architect. Of course, the lines that (s)he traces represent more than a simple drawing; they are thought as descriptive of an architecture that other humans will have to build. Nevertheless, it might not be exaggerated to state that the only veritably material act of the architect consists in tracing lines. The latter are mathematical entities that, by definition, have no thickness. When the architectural elements that they describe are translated in reality however, they acquire a thickness even it if it very small. This thickness is precisely the means for architecture to unfold its power on the bodies. A simple line traced on a map to delimit the American territory from the Mexican one, and, in reality, a thirty-feet tall wall to prevent the access to a country for bodies that seem to be considered to brown for it. The few millimeters of steel that embody this line insure of its physical and, by extension, political impermeability.

The line, in its geometrical perfection, is inscribed in a legal diagram that also benefits from a theoretical perfection. Its materialization as an architecture is an apparatus of implementation of this legal diagram in reality. A very simple of this statement can be found in the fact that a large majority of the world’s wall are the violent expression of a law that guarantees private property. Of course, this translation in to reality of the legal diagram cannot be perfectly executed: the material apparatus is fallible, and that is how hundreds of clandestine Mexican immigrants still manage to penetrate on the United States’ territory for example.

Each line corresponds to a law, or rather, each line determines a legal mode for each of its two sides (the differentiation between what is said to be private and public for example). This idea functions theoretically but when it is applied to reality and that the line acquires its thickness, we can wonder about the following question: what do we find in the thickness of a line? And, which legal mode is operative within the thickness of a line? Such questions have important (geo)political implications. For example, in September 2012, a group of twenty Eritrean refugees found themselves trapped for more than a week within the few yards of thickness of the border that separates Egypt from Israel. During seven days, these refugees were offered only the vital minimum of water from the Israeli authorities. In these conditions, one of the women who was pregnant miscarried her child. It therefore seems that there is no legal mode for such a geometrically impossible but actually existing zone. That means that the bodies that reside in it are liberated from any sovereignty to which they would be subjugated, but that they also do not own any legal status, not even the one of human. They are thus reduced to what Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben calls “bare life” (Homo Sacer I, 1998).

At a mythological point of view, we can also evoke the example of Romulus’s fratricide on Remus. In Roman mythology, Romulus delimits his new city (Rome) by digging a trench all around and then declares unilaterally the application of the Roman law that finds itself expressed and implemented through this trench.  Remus cross this border, disobeying the law to contest it, he receives what the law designs as a punishment when it is negated in such a way: he is killed by his brother. I would like to continue this myth by imagining that Remus’s corpse has been left inside Romulus’s trench, that is in the thickness of the line where he would remain symbolically liberated from this law that he wanted to contest.

This violent power that architecture has on the bodies, the architect has to carry its responsibility. (S)he traces these lines knowing what their power is. If (s)he is not aware of it, her/his ignorance is just much prejudicial since one could not possibly defend oneself by invoking a sort of humility in a system whose understanding is beyond us. As for our own bodies, they can still attempt to subvert — nobody can escape — the power of these lines, by digging their oxymoronic thickness, or by walking on it , like the funambulists of November 9, 1989, who did not express the obsolescence of the Wall by any other way than by setting themselves up on the foot-wide thickness of its line.

I am aware of the fact that I already wrote a very similar article (same topic, same reference) a bit less than three years ago. Yet, with the forthcoming sixth volume of The Funambulist Pamphlets dedicated to Palestine, it might be a good time to revisit it.

The small group of Palestinians practicing parkour in the Gaza strip has been largely spread around the net (see Joseph Grima’s article in Domus for example with beautiful photographs by Antonio Ottomanelli). However, we should not be overwhelmed by the aesthetics offered by these bodies subverting walls in a region where walls embody the paradigm of the containment from which the people of Gaza suffer. We should nonetheless not refuse the symbolical aspect of such practice as symbols have a strong impact on collective imaginaries. The latter have various degrees of political involvement and one can easily understand that, in the specific case of Gaza, the collective imaginary built by the Palestinians have indeed strong political implications.

The very essence of parkour is to invent a new practice of architecture, one where each surface constitutes an opportunity, but also as sort of ‘hot’ spot on which one could rely for only a fraction of second as to defy gravity. There are no more obstacles, only surfaces of opportunities. If I reiterate my definition of architecture as the discipline that organizes the bodies in space, parkour constitutes the intensification of the movement of these bodies to the point that the organization that they are subjugated to, becomes irrelevant. In the case of Gaza, architecture is directly built or strongly influenced (by bombs or bullets for example) by an exterior entity: Israel. There is therefore a resistive essence in the act of subversion of the organization of the bodies constituted by the Palestinian parkour. Of course, there is a danger to romanticize this gesture here as the walls that these parkourers use as “surfaces of opportunity” are not the ones that imprison them in their small piece of land. However, the fact that a ruin caused by an Israeli bombing for example, could be utilized as a practice field, if highly expressive of a civilizational resilience and could therefore be part of what I called “the right to the ruin.”

Parkour also constitutes the paroxysm of the construction of relations between the material assemblage that our body is, and the other material assemblages that compose our physical environment (a wall for example). Such a construction constitutes the goal of each architecture that engages the body in the quest of various forms of harmonious relations yet, in the context of a conflict it takes an additional dimension. If the role of the military (especially in an asymmetrical conflict) consists in the decrypting of the built environment in order to anticipate behaviors of a given target, parkour, by its subversion of codes, constitutes a form of blurring of these anticipated behaviors. The “sympathy with the obstacle” that Reza Negarestani evokes in Cyclonopedia (see multiple past articles) constitutes, in the specific case of the urban warfare, a defensive tactics that is not far from the one of camouflage. The sympathy or empathy with the material environment is a profound understanding of the composition and essence of the material assemblages that surround us as well as the one that we embody. Cyclonopedia being based on the fictitious predicate that the Middle East is an alive entity, the following passage cannot not have a certain form of resonance with the Gaza parkourers:

When it comes to urbanized war, every combatant must think like an obstacle –‘See everything from the perspective of an obstacle’. West then uses Parkour as the exemplary discipline in which the practitioner becomes as one with the obstacle during movement. Every soldier should be a traceur, a swerving projectile which has a deep sympathy with its physical obstacle. (Reza Negarestani, Cyclonopedia Complicity with anonymous materials, Melbourne: Re-Press 2008, 135)

Former American Embassy of Karachi by Richard Neutra & Robert Alexander

It happens rather often that architecture offices have to hold on their documents and drawings for a while as the client (often public in this case) does not want them to be spread around at this specific moment. It is rarer that architectural drawings should acquire a status of classified documents by a given government or army. That is what happens nevertheless when the concerned building’s layout and organization has to remain secret to prevent antagonist agents to be familiar with the building.

In May 2007, the Kansas-based architectural firm Berger Devine Yaeger Inc. leaked some documents introducing the design of their new project: the American Embassy compound in Baghdad, veritable fortified city in the center of the Iraqi capital. After having been contacted by the U.S. State Department, the firm managed later to withdraw these documents from the internet. The architectural drawings had become hyper-protected and secretive documents like military coordinates or intelligence agencies’ spied information. These drawings are only representative documents, but the information that they contain allow a holistic understanding of a building: its layout, its functioning scheme both a the human, goods and mechanical level, but also its structure, and thus is weaknesses. Knowing the material and the dimension of a given structure could indeed serve the purpose of an attack against this building in order to make it collapse. Such technique of intelligence gathering architectural information in order to profoundly understand a building is being used in the “design” of attacks by the U.S. and Israeli armies when they want to target one or several specific bodies in a building. These attacks, by its design, in the same way we speak of the design of a building, have for goal to minimize the amount of collateral deaths, since the strategists of these army are being allowed a limited of these civilian deaths as Eyal Weizman reveals in his lecture “Forensic Architecture” (see past article), and his essay “Thanato-tactics” (see past article). At war like at peace, “knowledge is power;” architectural drawings embody this knowledge and therefore this power.

Architectural drawings are also judiciary documents. They are assumed to represent perfectly the buildings that they present and, because of this, they embody pieces of evidence that need to comply with the various codes and rules that have been implemented for a given city or territory. An architect can however deliberately hide things from the plans — it is probably the case at the militarized level evoked above — in order to go around these rules. The following passage is how Andrew Rice’s March 18, 2011 article for the New York Times Magazine started:

Let’s begin with the mystery of the hidden bathroom. It’s the summer of 2008. A young couple decides to buy an 800-square-foot apartment in a new condo building on the gentrifying outer edge of a fashionable Brooklyn neighborhood. The buyers go to close on the place, and as they’re signing away half a million dollars, the building’s developer, keeping a wary eye on the hovering lawyers, leans over and whispers something. There’s a second bathroom in the apartment, he says, one that does not appear on the floor plan — its doorway is concealed behind an inconspicuous layer of drywall. At first, the buyers think the developer is kidding. This is before the crash, near the peak of the market, and no one’s giving away a square inch. But the developer says no, he’s dead serious, just look. So a few days after they buy the place, the couple takes a sledgehammer to their wall. (Andrew Rice, “The Supersizer of Brooklyn,” The New York Times, March 18, 2011)

This quite incredible story is only one example of the way Brooklyn-based architect Robert Scarano has been concealing architectural elements (bathrooms, mezzanines etc.) from the judicial document that his drawings constituted. There is nothing innocent in the way an architectural drawing is drawn, for that there is nothing innocent about the way it would be looked at.