Hypersurface
Theory:
Architecture><Culture*
PART(3)
Stephen Perrella and Rebecca Carpenter, Mobius House Study, 1998
Transversal nurb animations
Incommensurates: architecture/culture
Hypersurface is an effect that occurs within the interface between two hitherto disparate trajectories of culture: in this case, the division between the aesthetic culture and academic discourse of architecture as distinct from the operations and machinations of everyday consumer culture. This is not an improvised separation, nor it is a forced dichotomy for argument's sake. Moreover, it is an attempt to identify and characterize the intertwining of two entirely different systems of subversion - one, avant-garde; the other, ordinary culture - taking place in two entirely different realms of culture but interfacing on the surface of built architecture. "Hyper" implies human agency reconfigured by digital culture, and "surface" is the enfolding of substances into differentiated topologies. The term hypersurface is not a concept that contains meaning, but is an event; one with a material dimension. We are currently at the threshold of this new configuration as a site of emergence for new intensities of culture and intersubjectivity. Toyo Ito has recently written:Through the penetration of various new forms of media, fluidity is once again gaining validity. As more urban and architectural space is controlled by the media, it is becoming increasingly cinematic and fluid […] On the one hand our material bodies are a primitive mechanism, taking in air and water and circulating them. On the other hand there is another kind of body which consists of circulating electronic information - the body that is connected to the rest of the world through various form of media including microchips. Today we are being forced to think about how to architecturally combine these two different bodies and find an appropriate space for the emerging third body.
The third body that Ito describes is what is meant here by hypersurface. However, the body does not remain an operative metaphor going beyond what Deleuze and Guattari have called a "body without organs".
On the side of materiality, form has been pushed out of relation to function, programme has been dissuaded from context, and structure is disjoint from signification in any given architectural nexus. Architecture may now be explored as a condition of variant (human) agencies playing through, about and within one other; singular, yet connected and in a state of flux.
Provisionally, this may be called a condition of hypersurface. This trope serves only to accrue, absorb and resonate meaning, acting as an infrastructural term, a gesture toward a new middle ground between the traditionally conceived body/object duality. "Hyper" suggests the existential eventualization of the consumer-subject and "surface" entails the new conditions of an object-in-relation. This is another way to consider Bernard Cache's theorization of Subjectiles and Objectiles but with an added layer of complexity, in the incommensurate condition in which the two dynamised polarities commingle. Grafted, conjoined and co-determining the existent (the ecstatic subject) and the object-in-relation or hypersurface (dis)resonate together in a highly problematic, inflected condition.
Two main impulses operate simultaneously and contribute to the dynamic of hypersurfaces in architecture/culture. These two streams are reflected in elite architecture, predictably mapping the schizophrenia from the larger cultural context. The weaker trajectory (weaker because it goes against the dominant values of architecture as materiality, and the modernist subsumption of the sign within form) within the discipline of architecture is what has been called "pixel" architecture that has been an attempt to manifest information space. Historically, in architecture, the sign or image has been relegated to a secondary, less functional or ornamental role. In the past century in modernism, signification has been subsumed into form and divorced from everyday activities while form (and its idealized use of geometry) has sought transcendence. Pixel of media architecture has sought to bring the vitality of the electronic sign into the surfaces of architecture, but in order to achieve this has negated or neutralized form. This strategy threatens to maintain signification in the role of ornament and is thus susceptible to commodification. However, media architecture helps to establish an infrastructure for hypersurfaces only without its material aspect. Hypersurface is fully intense when both surface/substance and signification play through each other in a temporal flux. For instance, if we could strip away all the electronic signs in Times Square, we would find a cacophony of material surfaces, each working to maximize the potential readability of the sign. It is this sort of drive, motivated by economic concerns, that differentiates surfaces, and that will propel the surface into the sign, and the sign into the surface. This "vulgar" impulse exists outside of the discipline of architecture in terms of pure commercialism even though it has been acknowledged in the media architecture trajectory. The media complex (as Paul Virilio continually describes it and how Brian Massumi describe its relations to capitalism) involves an impetus of consumption through distended impulses that emerge from everyday life which are becoming transliterated into global digital networks. This dispersion of data is a body without organs. Information culture is spilling out into the built environment, creating a need for surfaces through which data may traverse (hypersurfaces).
Simultaneously, in architectural design, an unprecedented plasticity of form deriving from computer technology is generating new explorations of form. As a result, there is a general topologising of volume-space into activated surfaces, as can be noticed in the work of a number of leading and highly influential practitioners. The second impulse, from within "proper" confines of the elite practice of architecture, is the deconstruction of Platonic architectural form into enfolded, radical deformations. Avant-garde architecture as it is explored and fostered within the academy and which to an extent defines future trajectories, has moved through a phase of self-critique, an inward interrogation of architecture's historical assumptions motivated by poststructuralism. Topology in architecture comes about due to the shift from in interest in language theories (Derrida) to matter and substance (Deleuze) in its theoretical discourses. The topologising of architectural form may be taken as a state of preparation for the reception of the flow of data as it overspills from contemporary cultural activities. A main effect of this transformation entails interconnectivity and continuity among previously systematized categories of architectural technics and production. The malleability of form and program influenced by newly available technologies also makes possible the realization of highly differentiated, topological architecture. The same impulses that bring technology to architecture occur throughout and across every facet of culture. An influx of new digital technology interconnects with other transformations taking place in global economic, social, and scientific practices cultivating fluid, continuous and responsive manifestations of architectural morphogenisis.
Architectural topology is the mutation of form, structure, context and programme into interwoven patterns and complex dynamics. Over the past several years, a design sensibility has unfolded whereby architectural surfaces and the topologizing of form are being systematically explored and unfolded into various architectural programmes. Influenced by the inherent temporalities of animation software, augmented reality, computer-aided manufacture and informatics in general, topological "space" differs from Cartesian space in that it imbricates temporal events-within form. Space then, is no longer a vacuum within which subjects and objects are contained, space is instead transformed into an interconnected, dense web of particularities and singularities better understood as substance or filled space. This nexus also entails more specifically the pervasive deployment of teletechnology within praxis, leading to an usurping of the real (material) and the unintentional dependency on simulation.
While the two impulses - pixel and topological architecture - have been separated categorically, at this juncture, overlaps are emerging as a direct result of respective deterritorializations and auto-destructurations. The events of overlap mark the beginning of more complex interrelations that may provide an opportunity to explore more rigorous and intense manifestations of Otherness. Hypersurfaces may be significant in the manner in which traditional assumptions are re-routed or are self-configured. Hypersurface is the activation of latent or virtual potential within forming substrates, membranes, surfaces, as an interstitial relation between bodies and objects; each distended as language/substance-matter. This does not occur as an intervention into an existing context, but becomes manifest due to complex interactions between technological manifestations and our media saturated background.
A hypersurface in architecture is elicited by incommensurate relations between form and image. The effects of hypersurface are also Other than that of either form or image. This is not the classical application of image or ornament to form, or the reverse. It is the superposed image, thereby creating a semiautonomous form (through decontextualisation) and in turn, incompleteness or lack. Both image (programme) and form became part of each other and part of larger and other logics. For example, the presence of an advert on a billboard creates an incompleteness in its connection to a context (as in Guattari's notion of the machinic). Even though a hypersurface is an effect created by an incommensurate form-image relation, this condition creates a continuity and thus promotes a fluidity of interrelationships. When an image of an advert is screened over the form of a bus the ad-graphic both accepts and denies the bus form. The advert parasitically appropriates the generally readable surface of the side of a bus. But the bus has other qualities that make it a graphically-charged surface, such as mobility. It is a surface that is latent with the potential to pass innumerable readers (willingly or not). The bus can remain fully functional and is unimpeded in having become fully appropriated by this ad-graphic. We may notice that the presence of the advert is connect to the forces of consumption giving the use of this form-surface a commercial value; a value that is also calculated by the consumablility of the surface. An advert must be brushed-over by reader-bodies to have worth. This is a rudimentary formulation of what may be considered a haptic tangibility, or how the dynamics of consumption lead to such qualities of space.
Architecture configures subjectivity in a process that does not determine either polarity in the traditional subject-object distinction. Instead, we might describe a process that works over and throughout a plane of immanence from the middle-out. In the contemporaneous nexus of culture, human agency is evermore defined through technological interfaces. Subjectivity co-figures architecture in a complex way. This activation of the vitality of a constitutive middle-zone is neither understood solely as architecture nor as subjectivity, as de facto determinants in a co-constitutive dynamic. We will need to leave behind the dialectic constructs of habit - a middle-out logic, one of unfolding and enfolding; of proliferative differentiation.
HOME > PART(1) > PART(2) > PART(3) > PART(4)
["Hypersurface Architecture" is published by Academy Editions, a division of John Wiley & Sons. Available at bookstores, Barnes & Noble, and Amazon.com]
Back to: EXTENDED PLAY
