Hypersurface
Theory:
Architecture><Culture*
PART(2)
Stephen Perrella and Rebecca Carpenter, Mobius House Study, 1998
Transversal nurb animations
AntiTRASCENDENTal defectionsIn mathematics, a hypersurface is a surface in hyperspace, but in the context of this journal this mathematical term is existentialized. Hyperspace is four + dimensional space, but here hypersurfaces are rethought to render a more complex notion of spacetimeinformation. This reprogramming is motivated by cultural forces that have the effect of superposing existential sensibilities onto mathematical and material conditions, especially of the recent topological explorations of architectural form. The proper mathematical meaning of the term hypersurface is discussed here as being challenged by an inherently subversive dynamic within capitalism. While in mathematics, hypersurfaces exist in "higher," or hyperdimensions, the abstractness of these mathematical dimensions is shifting, defecting or devolving into our lived cultural context. Situated In this newly prepared context hypersurface comes to define a new condition of human agency, of post-humanism, one that results from the internal machinations of consumer culture, thereby transforming prior conditions of an assumed stability. "Hyper" instead of meaning higher in an abstract sense, instead means altered. In both contexts, ideal abstraction and the life-world, there is a operation in relation to normal three-space (x, y, z). In the mathematics there are direct, logical progressions from higher to lower dimensions. In an existential context, hyper might be understood as arising from out a lived-world conflict as it mutates the normative dimensions of three-space, into the dominant construct that organizes culture. In abstract mathspace we have "dimensional" constructs, in cultural terms we have "existential" configurations, but the dominance of the mathematical model is becoming contaminated because the abstract realm can no longer be maintained in isolation. The defection of the meaning of hypersurface as it shifts to a more cultural/existential sense, entails a reworking of mathematics. (This is similar to what motivates Deleuze to reread Leibniz). This defection is a deconstruction of a symbolic realm into a lived one, not through any casual means, it arises and is symptomatic of the failure of our operative systemics to negotiate the demands placed upon it. If one could describe an event whereby cultural activities could act upon abstractions so as to commute it from its normative, etymological context into a context of lived dynamics, what activity has that capability? The term hypersurface is not simply attributed new meaning, but instead results from a catastrophic defection from a realm of linguistic ideality (mathematics). If ideals, as they are held in a linguistic realm, can no longer support or sustain their purity and disassociation, then such terms and meanings begin, in effect, to "fall from the sky". This is to describe the deterritorialization of idealization into a more material real. In the new sense for hypersurface, "hyper" is not in binary relation to surface, it is a new reading describes a complex condition within architectural surfaces in our contemporary life-world.
Capitalism and schizophrenia
The cultural forces leading to conditions that now evoke hypersurfaces are complex but may be traced through one main bifurcation in particular, one among many, that is formative in the history of Western culture. This division is between architecture as a formal practice, divided and divorced from the practices of everyday life. Theorist-historians Alberto Perez-Gomez, Christian Norberg-Schulz and Robin Evans offer some of the most compelling accounts of the constellation of issues that this bifurcation involves. The overt result is that architecture comes to sustain an idea about form based upon its own internal discourse, one increasingly disassociated with the meaning structures constituted in the everyday world of commerce and material practices.Our current architectural values tend to continue the division between the (capitalist) program on the one hand and (elite) form-making on the other. There have been many attempts to overcome this division within Modern architecture. Strategies such as the "form follows function" dictum, stemming from Mies van der Rohe, while affirming everyday activities, remains complicit with the assumptions of capitalist progressivism prior to any interpretation of function or program (one merely accepts the capitalist program and expresses it). The modernist tactic privileges one oppositional term over another (driven by the obvious instrumentalism in the term "follow") and is how binary thought works in the service of transcendentality. (In typical dialectics the synthesis of binary oppositions aspires to ascend to an ideal, one attended to by an ideality, like God). But any process that assumes an ideality as an ultimate end, is doomed to failure, inasmuch as it is ultimately unattainable, yet this has remained the mandate of Western thought and has pervaded every value structure. And thus schizophrenia, sustained by capitalism, is continually forwarded by any attempt to synthesize a resolution with which to heal the fundamental split between form and program. One of the least considered strategies with which to negotiate perpetual dichotomization (as it is reinscribed in the built environment) is to accept the schizophrenic condition, instead of incessantly attempting to overcome or transcend it with further rational methodologies.
Dichotomization can easily be read in the architectural cladding Western culture. If we consider what architecture has historically symbolized, that is, what its form/surface relation has signified, it could be argued that form-surfaces (a prioritization of structure over skin) have been at the service of the institutional power or a metaphysical belief behind a particular architectural institution. Whether a religious, public or private institution, architectural surfaces are thoroughly coordinated representations; whether they are structurally expressive as in the case of Gothic architecture or metaphorically as in the case of recent postmodern styles. Again, what seems most characteristic of Modernism, in many of it manifestations, is that its system of representation is one of instrumentality; form-follows-function structures signification to be subsumed within the form. This is precisely how the realm of signification, or signs, are interpreted for the sake of form (where geometry becomes a scaffold for a transcendental belief structure). But signs have another meaning and another context, one that is normally superposed over construction. The vulgar program of architecture simultaneously sustains a signification system, better described by Jean Baudrillard and Umberto Eco.* And so, this doubled systemic of structure and sign commingle, leaving us to construct identities within schizophrenic contingency.
In an attempt to supersede the hierarchy of structure over surface, architect Bernard Tschumi used structural glass in his Groeninger Museum Video Gallery, employing tactics of reversal and dynamization. The video columns on the interior displace the traditional meaning of a column-as body, into flickering signifiers adrift upon the galleries night surface. This project is seminal in a move toward hypersurfaces, in particular, in the manner in which it reconfigures traditional architectural assumptions. In Tschumi's work, form is negated in order to celebrate program in a tactic of negative modernism that affirms the deteritorialized consumer-subject as into an ornamented membrane. Tschumi's deconstruction of traditional hierarchies in architecture reveals the latent potentialities of consumer praxis into an event space. His sensibility remains distinct, however, from the topological strategies of form that might carry his deconstructed and disseminated signifiers into contiguous surfaces. This possibility is taken up in other practices, notably in Toyo Ito, Studio Asymptote's work as well as that of Coop Himmelb(l)au. These are examples of Architecture reaching toward consumer culture remain distinct from everyday consumer praxis reaching into architecture (unmediated by a designer). This is a propensity that architects may strive to engage, but in so doing, may need to relinquish further degrees of authorship, as in the work and strategies of Bernard Cache, whose work raises the issue of the obsolescence of the architect altogether.
What appears to be a spreading trajectory is the further decentralization of commercial representational systems to afford new forms of human agency, in the guise of information-play within the material surfaces of the built environment, to become unleashed. Nowhere is the possibility for such transformative liberation (radical democratization) so blatantly evident as in the electronic displays of New York's Times Square and Las Vegas (in particular the Freemont Street arcade). These examples are, of course, ones that Robert Venturi and Denise Scott-Brown, Rem Koolhaas and philosopher Mark Taylor and numerous others have already cited with varying degrees of architectural and philosophical import. (And it seem that the original impulse of Venturi/Scott Brown and Izenour - that is, to embrace the authenticity of volgar culture - was quite prescient. Venturi's recent attempts, in his book Iconographics and Electronics Upon a Generic Architecture, to once more make architecture relevant to those who use it, was a move to embrace the dominant modes of signification for architecture. It was a move to democratise the discourse of architecture as walls to be written upon by those who inhabit it). But while each, respectively, notes an underlying impetus within these deterritorializing contexts, their descriptions continue to embrace the extreme manifestations of capitalist culture as exemplary and exhilarating (as almost all right or delirious). Yet we may ask what is offered in their descriptions to adequately negotiate a more deeply ingrained schizophrenia? The question is, to what extent do architects who attempt to absorb "vulgar" culture into the elite realm of architecture, only further subjugate capitalism's uncanny vitality into the formalisms of architectural discourse?
Hypersurface theory argues for planes of immanence (not planes of reference) whereby a vital relation between form and programme is a play of intensities (becomings) that are non commodifiable. Whether we are learning from (VSBA), delirious of (Koolhaas),or hidden because of (Taylor) the excesses of capitalism, the phenomenon and radicalization of consumption in relation to the graphic sign (whether print, electric or electronic) can be seen as an activity that takes on self-transformative in the way the older systems of representation used to work for institutions and the way that hyperconsumptive semiotics can serve to refigure an intersubjective self-image in an endless process of reconfiguration - indeed, disfiguration.
["Hypersurface Architecture" is published by Academy Editions, a division of John Wiley & Sons. Available at bookstores, Barnes & Noble, and Amazon.com]
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