Adolf Loos’s description of producing affect is anything but haunting. “If we find a mount six feet long and three feet wide in the forest, formed into a pyramid, shaped by a shovel, we become serious and something in us says, Some one lies buried here.”[1] Upon hearing such a proclamation of this sort, one cannot but think of a constructed space merely as a process to devise an object or thing that stops growing once its construction has been completed. Rather, there is a second stage, one that finds its genesis in the affect of a work that spurs on those who engage with the work.[2] A few years back, K. Michael Hays delivered a lecture at the University of Michigan on the concept of the “symptomatic” as a means for architecture to further its interaction with the production and consumption of culture. In this lecture, he premised his concept around the aforementioned Loos quote.[3] For Hays, architecture has an ontology that goes beyond mere beauty in form, but rather is concerned on another level in spurring others to take on a constructed environment that encourages users to exercise an active sense of being or to all together take on ownership of the space and to make it his or her own. In thinking about such trajectories, Stan Allen, in his essay “Trace Elements,” posits that the life of a built object does not cease to grow once design and construction have been completed, but rather, the space now grows in regards to its context, interacting in complex dialogues.[4] He writes, “This is a process that design and construction can only imitate, or steer in a very general way. It is a process that unfolds in a complex interaction with the messy and unpredictable forces of life itself.”[5] Knowing that a mechanism for producing environments that encourage the production of culture on a myriad of levels can be philosophized, how then might an identification of precedents and theirs productions be indicative of a symptomatic and participatory architecture? Furthermore, how can such architectures spur on the individual or the collective to act upon or with a space, and what does this mean for legibility and effectiveness of his or her own agency as a result of these interactions? 

            A half century after Loos’s pronouncement of an architecture that has the ability to make one serious, the political and economic climate of the 1960s and 1970s helot to allow for designers in the West[6] to begin positing the need and function of political awareness in the built environment. The work of the Florentine collective, Superstudio, is an excellent example of the ethos of this time and how it is manifested into the language of architecture. Their films from the early 1970s, Live, Supersurface and Ceremonia are both thought provoking investigations into the participatory and authorial role of the user in the fabrication of the built environment. Such spaces are a means to produce architecture that is indexical of the contemporary moment and is able to liberate these users from the demesne of liberalism. One can trace the trajectory of dialectically engaged architecture to the present day with the French office Lacaton and Vassal. The husband and wife collaborative builds work that engages with users in a manner that is not so dissimilar to the mechanisms deployed by the likes of Superstudio. Lacaton and Vassal’s work, specifically their celebrated Mulhouse Social Housing project, has become indicative of the nascent French architectural philosophy of “stylelessness,” in which it seeks to be an architecture that, through an active participation with its users, is always in the present moment, never lagging behind and subjected to easy categorization.[7] But, in understanding the evolution of this historical trajectory of a symptomatic and participatory architecture, how can the discipline, or at least parts of the discipline, identify and design an architecture that not only produces an affect that stirs emotion within a user, and not only encourages the users to interact with and make a mark in a constructed environment, but also awaken an awareness inside of an individual to realize his or her own ability to produce narrative in the built environment, be it political, social, economic, historical, or whatever? In short, how can an architecture make users aware of his or her own ability to exercise their respective will in regards to a space or place?

            To better understand how architecture could produce new forms of affect so as to yield a heightened sense of a user’s presence and will vis à vis a place, it might be advantageous to look at the realm of minimalist art. In particular, the works of Donald Judd and Dan Flavin come to mind because of their ability to be able to enter into dialogues with the viewer. In the mid-1960s, Judd published the now-famous essay, “Specific Objects,” in which he posits that a form of art that is neither painting nor sculpture, but rather one that is interested in forming spatial relationships.[8] It is out of an assemblage of shapes that an artist is able to produce an object that becomes “emotive” in ways that painting or sculpture cannot.[9] Taking Judd’s words and applying them to either his metal works (fig. 1) or Dan Flavin’s light installations (fig. 2), one can begin to understand that these two artists are interested in mollifying the space in the gallery. But for this to work, the viewer must be there to experience and validate such an action. In viewing an artwork of this ilk, the viewer walks around the large presence of the metal box or fluorescent lights as he or she slowly takes in the totality of the work. The art historian and critic, Rosalind Krauss, in her seminal essay, “Sense and Sensibility,” published in ArtForum in November 1973, seeks to understand the role and actions of the viewer vis à vis works like those by Judd as having the emotive qualities of Specific Objects. For Krauss, the ability to understand or experience this sort of minimalist art is a predicated on each individual’s ability to think or reflect upon a piece.[10] But, as she rightly points out, in distancing this link from the one-way relationships employed by methodology of Abstract Expressionist artists,[11] to one where the viewer’s prior experience is invited to interact to interact with the artwork.[12] However, it is now the onus of the artist and the artwork to challenge the viewer’s understanding of the construction of space.[13] What goes into the formation of this space could be seen as the assemblage of various elements of a context that help to form an overall conception of an environment. In other words, the viewer and his or her previously held convictions are questioned by the presence of the artwork, but in turn, the viewer is now questioning the role of the artwork, enabling a dialogue to commence. But what could be understood and applied to the symptomatic and participatory architectures is that a built environment should not coddle or demote prior experience, leaving it as is. Rather, the built environment, like a Judd for Flavin work, must challenge viewers, making them now participants, to understand where he or she is in relationship to an object, space, or place. In one way, it is an act of conscience raising, in that the architecture provokes the user. The question now becomes how is this moment of awareness acted upon in a way that promotes a form of spatial and narrative productivity.

            If a symptomatic or participatory architecture could be understood as acting in a manner similar to the likes of Judd and Flavin, where viewers are challenged, and are likely to try to understand their relation to the space that is shaped by the artwork, how then might this thinking then be applied to a collective like Superstudio? The collective’s work is at once a critique of the capitalist appropriation  of the International Style for the designs of their corporate headquarters,[14] but also a critique and response to the failure of Modernism’s goal of creating a utopic world by heavily authored environments. In 1972, the collective was invited to participate in in the group show at New York City’s Museum of Modern Art, titled Italy: The New Domestic Landscape, Achievements and Problems in Italian Design, which was curated by Emilio Ambasz.[15] For this exhibition, Superstudio made the conscious decision to use film as a means of design new architectures. In the catalogue for a 2003 retrospective of the group at the Pratt Institute and the Storefront for Art and Architecture, Peter Lang and William Menking wrote that Superstudio chose to produce for the 1972 exhibition a series of films titled “The Five Fundamental Acts […] as a thesis on the metamorphosis of architecture into life, calling for architects to abandon their calling and express themselves by living architecture.”[16] The five films – Life, Education, Ceremony, Love, and Death[17]– each “[…] centered on the relationship between architecture (as the conscious formalization of the planet) and the acts of human life.”[18] Out of the five originally planned films, only two were fully realized: Life, Supersurface and Ceremonia.[19]

            These two films are radical departures from the modes of architectural representation that were typical of the time and even until recently. Life, Supersurface is concerned with how humanity, divorcing itself from the then-present context of 1972, is able to produce a new network that reimagines the spatial relationships across the swath of the earth. For Superstudio, this network materializes into the form of the Cartesian grid, which is seemingly oblivious to variations in geographies, societies, politics, or the like. In addition, this is exactly the point. Like the initial discomfort that Judd and Flavin were positioning with their works, the Supersurface asks its viewers to place him or herself in the position of a user who is able to separate oneself from the current epoch and start anew. About six minutes into the film, Superstudio proposes that humanity takes residence on this Cartesian grid (fig. 3). Spatial relationships are now understood, as indicated by the film’s narrator, by one’s relationship to nodes formed by the grid. These infinitely small points are now the means of determining spatial relationships. Moreover, through the new constructions of sense of space vis à vis these nodes, users are able to establish his or her identity as they wish, as it is unencumbered by the once preceding weight of history. Represented in the now famous collaged-renderings of young men and women lounging naked on the grid, free of the restraints of the liberal epoch, or the child jump roping o-n the metallic surface of the future (fig. 4), the Supersurface is Superstudio’s foray into creating architecture that promotes individuals defining a space as a means of exercising his or her own agency. But if one is to probe the Supersurface further, how might it be able to function? And what are the potential outcomes? 

            What might be a good way to approach and analyze the performativity of Superstudio’s Life, Supersurface film is through the film Ceremonia, which constitutes the third act of The Five Fundamental Acts series. Completed in 1973, Ceremonia posits a scenario in which “People emerged from the earth, through openings in the submerged work of architecture.”[20] As images of people interacting with the famous Histogram works designed by Superstudio (fig. 5), the narrator, an omniscient voice of an identified young woman, remarks that

The inhabitants of the underground house say: we are not going to show you the house which lies in the shadow. We will only show you how we live or would live in the invisible house that we are doing before your eyes. This house will be the projection and the dissolution of the submerged house. It will take from the submerged house only a flat surface, perhaps, or the axes, the direction in which to grow. The new house will keep only a memory, or the center point of the old.[21]

All the while, viewers are see characters in the film, dressed in the fashions current in 1973, engage in what many would consider to be the daily routines: eating a meal with one’s family, enjoying one another’s company, et cetera. But it is in the context that Superstudio proposes that living is the means to make architecture is where the similarity with the viewer’s contemporary condition ends. It is at a moment like this that place making as a productive force necessitates a divorce from all that has led up to this moment. In many ways, a parallel to Krauss’s argument in “Sense and Sensibility” can be made. What this means for Life, Supersurface is potentially that life as many perceive it continues on: births, deaths, marriages, et cetera, still happen, but they tare now framed in a new context proffered by new spatial epistemologies. By creating a space that invites and encourages users to reconceive of what they know and do could very well be a productive force in creating new outcomes. However, these films are predicated on the basis that they exist in the phantasmagoric imaginary of film. What lessons then might be learned from these intellectual forays and applied to the realized built environment? 

            Superstudio’s concept of creating a spatial environment in which users are able to assert their own will and leave a mark can find a reasonable level of legibility in the work of Lacaton and Vassal, the French husband and wife duo of Anne Lacaton and Jean-Philippe Vassal. Working in a larger framework of French architects and landscape architects like Patrick Bouchain, Gilles Clement, and others, who are exploring to a degree what some may describe as stylelessness architecture.[22] This type of architecture, in contrast to other forms or types, seeks to always be current by not adopting a visual style that could eventually limit its ability to stay current. To accomplish this sort of architectural immortality, practitioners of this belief put forth that others must act upon the architecture.[23] Who these characters are depends on the specific contexts of the building or landscape’s environment. However, it is through a continual interaction with this context that a designed environment is able to continually morph and live in the present moment, never having to succumb to a mortality in which is it no longer able to engage.

            Lacaton and Vassal’s Mulhouse Social Housing in Mulhouse, France (a part of a larger Cité Manifeste development that seeks to “[…] question social housing conventions”[24]), is an ideal example of this way of thinking about an architecture that is in continual engagement with the populace that makes the place home. In particular, the concept of making this building home – privileging simple aesthetics over complex tessellations and assemblies – helps to makes this project an enabler for users to exercise their own will.[25] For the husband and wife team, a project like the Mulhouse Social Housing is a means of designing an element like Superstudio’s grid at first challenges users but then encourages them to make of it as they wish. The photographs of the units were not taken until long after the housing in Mulhouse was completed.[26] The structure in Mulhouse is simple: a two-story building assembled from concrete glass and clear, plastic siding with large terraces. By many counts, this building is not overly designed. But it is these photographs by the photographer Philippe Ruault that show the individual units becoming unique indices of their respective occupants. In one unit (fig. 6), the bare concrete walls, absent of any complex or deliberate ornamentation, become the tabula rasa for the resident to place a bevy of large, pink cotton flowers on the ceiling, accented by corresponding orangey-red curtains, and furnished with seating replete with green and pink upholstery. Might it be due to the skill of the photographer, but the ease of what otherwise be called a kitsch aesthetic melds with the existing architecture of the building is seamless, and eludes the classifying into the low/high paradigm of taste. In contrast, if one were to look at the individual units of the Lafayette Park townhouses in Detroit designed by Mies van der Rohe, there is a specter that haunts the units. And that is the specter of Mies. In the book, Thanks for the Views, Mr. Mies: Lafayette Park, Detroit, residents interviewed, while most enjoyed living in the sleek, minimalist units, have to alter themselves to the architecture. Some residents have remarked that the hanging glass façade, while allowing for a strong sense of community with one’s neighbors, does greatly alter one’s daily habits.[27] In essence, tenants have to mollify their lives so as to live with the minimalist  architecture.[28] In light of this, Lacaton and Vassal are sacrificing any permanence of their vision – one that, like the Miesian Lafayette Park, might become “retro” – so that the tenants who live there might instead appropriate it. By designing spaces that are “raw,”[29] they are encouraging users to make of the space as they will, helping to maintain the space not only as always being of the moment, but also allowing individuals their own desires and tastes in a space and not having to obey the specter of an author’s vision.

            How then, might this symptomatic and performative architecture move forward? How might it help to engender the awareness of one’s own sense of agency so as to produce new outcomes? As has been shown with minimalist art, Superstudio, and Lacaton and Vassal, there so far has been a need to have limited form as the ingress point for users to interact with a space. If anything, the architect and user ought to come to a middle point so as to help produce an architecture that encourages people to make of the built environment as they will. In recent years, the work of faculty at the University of Michigan Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning has been on the cutting edge of this research and production. In particular, the work of fellowship work of Kyle Reynolds, and Anya Sirota and Jean Louis Farges comes to mind. Reynolds’s 2012 Symptomatic series (fig. 7) posits, through the use of stop-motion animation, what sort of indexical formal strategies can draw users in to complete the work. Using the complex context of Cincinnati, Reynolds engages with select moments in the city, and creates works that are performative and ephemeral in nature. While the users would not be aware of the greater implication of their actions, their involvement becomes an index for the exercising of their agency. The recent work of Sirota and Farges demonstrates an actual example of this new participatory thinking at work. Their latest project, The Mothership (fig. 8), is reimagining of Parliament Funkadelic’s Mothership for deployment along Detroit’s Northend, where Parliament Funkadelic got its start long ago. The work was a collaboration with community members as they wanted to create a symbol to better demonstrate their will to improve the area on their own to a larger audience. Locals came out to aid in the construction of this urban spaceship and it has become the beacon for a larger, community-driven campaign to locally redevelop the area, and to keep out the interests of land speculators. Furthermore, it helped to raise awareness about outside interests trying to alter the fabric of an old neighborhood. Considering these latest developments, the question will become then, how can this thinking be deployed on the scale of Superstudio’s Life, Supersurface? Could this participatory architecture see realization on the macro scale, or will it forever, at least in realized form, be limited to the micro? 

Images

fig. 1

100 untitled works in mill aluminum, 1982-1986, Chinati Foundation, Marfa, Texas

https://www.chinati.org/visit/collection/donaldjudd.php

fig. 2

Untitled, 1996, Dia Foundation Building, 548 W 22^nd St. New York

http://art-nerd.com/newyork/dan-flavin-at-dia/

fig. 3

Life, Supersurface, Superstudio, film, 1972

fig. 4

Life, Supersurface, Superstudio, film, 1972

fig. 5

Ceremonia, Superstudio, film, 1973

fig. 6

Mulhouse Social Housing, Lacaton and Vassal

2004-onwards Mulhouse, France

Photograph by Philippe Ruault

http://www.spatialagency.net/database/lacaton.vassal

fig. 7

Balloon Blanket, Kyle Reynolds

2012

http://www.is-office.us/symptomatic

fig. 8

The Mothership, Anya Sirota and Jean Louis Farges (akoaki)

2014, Detroit, Michigan

http://www.anyasirota.com

Bibliography

Actar, Total Housing: Alternatives to Urban Sprawl. Barcelona: Actar, 2010.

Allen, Stan. "Trace Elements." In Tracing Eisenman, edited by Cynthia C. Davidson, 49-

65. London: Thames & Hudson, 2006.

Art Nerd. “Dan Flavin at Dia.” Accessed December 18, 2014. 

http://art-nerd.com/newyork/dan-flavin-at-dia/

Aubert, Danielle, Lana Cavar, and Natasha Chandani. "Thanks for the Views, Mr. Mies: 

Lafayette Park, Detroit." In Living with Mies: The Townhouses, edited by Danielle Aubert, Lana Cavar, and Natasha Chandani, New York: Metropolis Books, 2012.

Chinati Foundation, “100 untitled works in mill aluminum, 1982-1986.” Accessed 

December 18, 2014. https://www.chinati.org/visit/collection/donaldjudd.php

Hays, Michael K. Symptomatic. Lecture at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. 

22 October, 2012.

Krauss, Rosalind. “Sense and Sensibility: Reflections on Post ‘60’s Sculpture.” Artforum. 

November 1973. 149-155. Accessed from artforum.com, 17 November, 2014.

Judd, Donald. "Specific Objects." In Donald Judd: Complete Writings 1959-1975, 181-

189.Halifax, Canada: The Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, 

2005.

Lang, Peter, and William Menking. Superstudio: Life Without Objects. Milan: Skira, 2003.

Reynolds, Kyle. Symptomatic, Film, 2012.

Sirota, Anya. Critical Conservation. Lecture given on 24 November, 2014. University of 

Michigan, Ann Arbor.

Sirota, Anya, and Jean Louis Farges. “The Motheship.” Accessed December 18, 2014.

            http://www.anyasirota.com

Spatial Agency. "Lacaton and Vassal." Accessed December 18, 2014. 

http://www.spatialagency.net/database/lacaton.vassal.

Superstudio. Supersurface, Film. 1972.

Superstudio. Ceremonia, Film. 1973.