excess

this is me and Kimmo Sarje



THE NORDIC SOCIETY OF AESTHETICS
CALL FOR PAPERS 2010
"ENVIRONMENT, AESTHETICS AND THE ARTS"
Lahti, Finland, 3.6.–6.6.2010 Annual Conference of the Nordic Society for Aesthetics 2010

Este es el paper definitido presentado. Las imágenes que lo acompañaban son demasiadas para colgarlas. Entre el público, Karsten Harries. Todo un honor.

AESTHETICS OF ARCHITECTURE : AN ENVIRONMENTAL EXCESS

1.
This paper will try to reestablish some relationships between environment, architecture, technique and in some way ethics through the aesthetic appreciation of excess, in order to rethink the necessary construction that every environment is: its ever-lasting technicity. More to the point I'll try to approach in which ways, if possible, an architecture of excess, of waste, of gratuity (both as tip and as cost-free, which both obviously relate to gift), could paradoxically renegotiate our relationship with nature as a kind of restitution. But maybe renegotiate is not the right word, because in some sense it implies at least two statements you not necessarily concede easily as true:
-one that we can "negotiate" with nature (or Nature, with capitals), which is neither granted nor obviously deduced from direct observation and/or physical perception and intellectual apprehension,
-second that, since I used the particle "re" to qualify "negotiate", I assumed this negotiation in fact has happened, in a long distant past, in a primeval Golden Age where men seemed like demi-gods, before the Fall, in-between the forest full of apples where Adan and Eve walked hand in hand: in a time when in fact this negotiation doesn't need to take place, because men were no different from nature, because they were bound to rules that, so to say, matched them perfectly, without rest/remainder/residue/remnant or waste. But this relationship, in fact, came not as a voluntary one, but as an imposition, or more accurate as a constituent element of what we call "the human", so there were no transaction, in fact no intellectual knowing of the real existence of this rules. No negotiation then: only a subjection but one mediated through techne (not to be overlooked the rich semantic field opened by the word "subject").

2.
Architecture in recent times has become obsessed with the question of its mechanical insertion in the environment, with its supposedly revolutionary becoming-green through the magical aid of technology. Filed under eco-architecture, bleaching green, ecoLogical and so on architects and technicians (but specially politicians), have become obsessed by (and auto-imposed with) a new green belief, that, nevertheless, in much more cases than I think necessary (and even sane) face the problem through the use, the abuse and specially the exhibition of the mechanical. Why do I say mechanical? Because, being technical (architecture is always technical), the answer some eco-architecture seems to give to the problem is mainly through the use of mechanical systems, by the enhancement of energetic efficiency through the display of more and more sophisticated engineered gadgets, by primarily addressing the question by a management of the expenses as if the solely question is finding the perfect machine of pure efficiency: by an strictly economical response, in the worst possible sense of the word. So to say: trying to undermine the excess always implied in technical production as only a byproduct of a not so developed technology and not recognizing its intrinsic value, its economical circulation, its impossible emasculation. Fortunately there is still enough good leading "green" architecture, but as always happened, out of the main economical building trends and policies.
But in fact... ever existed any architecture that haven't been mechanical? So to say, technical? Of course mechanicality is a particular aspect of technicity, though sometimes seems to absorb the whole field of techne, becoming its supplement, its substitute or its double (its specter in many ways). So, is it possible for architecture set itself outside the eternal circle of reapropiation of consume and waste, of the supplementary condition any techne always implies as part of its nature? Architecture as techne always have been mechanical, always have performed its tasks through the implementation of different systems (structural systems, comfort systems in its various forms) based in a certain kind of performance, of active-passive response to the external demands, in a technical re-action to natural environment.

3.
From the structural timber frame of any primeval hut to the different openings and moving parts of the same hut (the door, the chimney, the windows, the screens etc.), the mechanical answer formalized architecture from its very beginning, mythical or historical (not to forget that any structural calculation is a mechanical one, implying the equilibrium of gravitational forces and its transmission to the earth in form of foundation). Of course things changed from mid nineteen century on, when the development of technology (including mechanics) to an unprecedented level affected not only quantitatively but qualitatively its own essence. Although the implementation of new technologies in architecture (elevators, mechanical ventilation, electricity etc.) was rather timid at the beginning, at least from the point of view of design (or aesthetics if you prefer), enveloping itself in a pseudohistorical approach to architectural essences (not without much critic voices, from Ruskin to Morris), nevertheless this mechanical fever infiltrated architecture in its bit by bit better fit to what, maybe, could be called human necessities, or in fact human (or technical) desires.
The endless acceleration of technology, though, introduced an important nuance to the question: technology, in certain ways, became transparent. The different mechanical implementations that seems to make easier the life (and that indeed does), in its forefront visibility, nevertheless, in a kind of delightful perversion, hides its own real nature: its waste. If we thought technology came to fulfilling our lowest desires, surely it does. If we thought it was for free, we were clearly wrong. We must cope with this kind of double bind: the more visible, exposed, technology is, the more tries to erase its own tracks. Since the moment we cannot see the connections between the (mechanical) instrument and the necessary consumption of energy nor only for performing its function but for its construction, the trick is accomplished. Transparency, in this sense, implies a (voluntary) dis-connection: the veiling of the relationship between the turning on of a bulb switch and the huge process of waste that lies behind: enormous reservoirs of water flooding entire cities, massive scale electrical plants, tons of coal or petroleum burnedto ashes and polluting atmosphere.
Archigram and Banham superstructures (mobile and standstill) gave as a kind of idea of what we were talking about, Superstudio and Archizoom utopical journeys into the void spiced the mix. But... technological or anti-technological, utopias always missed the point: not that we need a kind of techne to survive or to improve our daily living in the nature, or even to colonize far distant planets, it is more than our very living, our more intimate way of being in the world, thrown beings as Heidegger pointed out, is technical. And it implies, in fact demands, at the same time shortage and excess. From language to architecture, or being is technical. And our (technical) being on the world generates waste: produces a kind of rest, an irreducible ash. In fact, a supplement. An excess. A waste excess.

4.
But, what, then, if the problem is the other way up? What if what architecture must do is precisely makes things visible? What if the problem, and not only in architecture, is efficiency? Of course recent ecological architecture (but not only architecture), at least in part, is a tricky one: if the energy consumption of a building could be reduced through the use of these mechanical systems with much better efficiency rate (better photovoltaic solar panels, better heating and cooling machines, better lightning systems with low consume bulbs, better systems of controlling "natural" ventilation, use of "clean" energy like that provided by windmills or geothermal energy, etc.), we could build much more buildings without disquieting our conscience (but not the environment). Ecological imprint, then, must be made visible through eco-architecture: architectural imprint has the moral obligation of showing its costs. Not only buildings must have letter classification, like washing machines and refrigerators, to assure its low consume: they must show, for being honest with its green concern, its whole ecological imprint, past and future.
Efficiency, although not expressed in this terms, is one of the leading ideas behind modern architecture, and as such, is the base of so much (sterile) functionalism, which today has turned into something like an ecological high tech functionalism. Obtaining the maximum employing a minimum, without any rest, any byproduct, any waste: but architecture, real architecture, has been always inefficient, indeed its definition could be inefficiency, because architecture always produced in excess. A building (like a book, like a painting) always gives more than was originally intended to, always produces something more, always leaves something to a future, to time to come. There is no straight relationship between what is given by architecture and what is inoculated at its origin. And that radical dissymmetry annihilates any possible calculation in terms of efficiency. In fact its efficiency could be either zero or infinite. Architecture is excess.
Post capitalist or globalized economy, as is known, is in search, desperately maybe said, of efficiency. Nor that this logic pointed to other thing that to a glorification of excess. The problem here is that this excess, the unmoral and pornographic quantities of money that the implementation of this logic of efficiency to market, so to say to working labor forces, has, then, a cost. A cost measured in terms of shortness, in terms of poverty. An unbearable one. The excess that works in architecture, instead, is for free. Is a gift. And that is what couldn't be obscured by this otherwise necessary rethinking of architecture in terms of its impact in environment. The line that divides the free excess, the gratuity and the excess that comes from obscene accumulation must be constantly retraced, but couldn't be forgotten or diminished as question of the past. In fact, is the question of future.

5.
Architecture, good architecture, always has been ecological without the need of displaying any technological gadgets. Its insertion in nature, its building up a landscape is a constant present in the architecture of ancient settlements, and could still be traced in the buildings of what rest of our recent agricultural past. Architecture, in its excess, con-formed the landscape, allowed for something to happen in a given place precisely by its careful insertion into the nature and by its never forgiving its technical origin. Put in a moral way: been respectful of what is found in a given place, acknowledging its own natural conditions and working within this context, architecture must give an answer not as imposition but both as collaboration but specially as offering and as restitution. Architecture helped to build a landscape: that in which human life could take place but also, in adding something, takes something. The final balance must be that it gives more than its takes.
Curiously enough the English word landscape is formed by the words land and scape, a derivation of shape: giving form to the land is then constructing a landscape, something necessarily man-made, both through the gaze and through the physical building (through agriculture and architecture alike). Now that greenerie is coming back, not landscape architecture, but architecture as a true landscape (including landscape as landscape of events as Virilio pointed out) and specially its re-defining what a landscape is, must be reworked. Because by now we can't rely in the old and safe opposition between wild nature (the wilderness, that Nature still present for example at Thoreau's Walden Pond but by then with a touch of nostalgia) and man-made nature, or if you prefer spoiled nature (and moral and ethics concepts arise, of course, in its substantial) to reassure our established ideas. In its becoming or re-becoming green in full a redefinition of nature is necessary, because nature is almost man-made now. Environment is, by now, a technical question. Nature doesn't exist any more in wild but as a constructed one. Landscape, in this sense, changed place with nature.
Anyway, the question is the environment: how this actual eco-architecture builds a new environment and specially how tries to be related with the preexistent natural environment? Must this relationship be changed through a different aesthetical appreciation? What is, now, a landscape, and how we could came to appreciate "other" landscapes, in certain aspects as natural as the "original" ones? For example third landscapes as Gilles Clement defined in a much substantial text . Wasted landscapes, where the intervention of humans, directly or indirectly, modeled their very ways of being, could be called landscapes? With which instruments must we approach to them as concerning its aesthetic value?
Related to this, I find really interesting the use by Gilles Clément of the word délaissé for the characterization of this third landscapes defined in his Manifest. Terrain délaissé, forgotten land: places that have been plowed, or industrial, touristic, urban places no longer in use, where a certain oblivion hided them of the common gaze (and of the economical radar), and precisely because that oblivion allowed them to embrace and develop a new life as a natural life, as refuges of diversity where prior nonexistent vegetal species could grow, where nature could in fact regenerate them and transform this wasted and exhausted lands in spontaneous gardens: again the excess of the waste. Places subtracted to anthropologized world: places where human techne has retreated itself, places where architectural excess in form of (apparent) exhaustion paradoxically allowed nature to re-green. Aesthetical gaze, then, retreated itself from the contemplation of this forgotten places, and exhausted and annihilated, needed the temporal distance introduced by the labor of nature (in form of time) in order to rediscovered its real beauty, in order to became, again, disinterested in its contemplation.

6.
Because if something is the aesthetical gaze with which we confront the (natural and build: as said both two are builded) environment is a totally inefficient effort, an unrestrained process in which consumption tries to exhaust every "artistical" index that, of course, is only there after we have learned to look for it. Maybe is a question of senses, of perception as aesthesis, of apprehension, but specially, again, a question of waste, of extravagance, of absolutely disinterested prodigality: prodigality, excess, gift that necessary has to be for free, without interest, disinterested. So, maybe at the end the same problem raised by techne, the question of exhaustion and waste, of supplement and gratuity is similar to the one posed by the modern aesthetic gaze. Of course we know with Kant, that the pleasure we find in beauty is directly linked to the lack of interest in the existence of this same object we call beautiful. In this sense, it is interesting to verify that this terrain délaissé identified by Clément, in its lack of use, in its lack of any economical or commercial interest, in the forgiveness it suffered, in the disinterest we feel to its very existence, paradoxically allow the aesthetical gaze to appear (a deconstruction is at work here, in the interruption of a given system, in the fracture of any solid belief: the abandoned terrain, the forgotten place in facts is what allows to renew our tired gaze, our wasted senses). But maybe something more is at stake. Maybe in the disinterest aesthetic judgment introduces to the real existence of things according to Kant, in the privative particle of this dis, lies one of the reasons of our negligence towards nature and of course a painful aporia: if we could find aesthetical pleasure only through disinterest, is this very disinterest in environment which allows its destruction.
Kant being mentioned, a last reflection allows us to establish a final relationship between aesthetics (and in certain ways ethics) and excess, or more precisely, of the contention of the excess. As is known, sublime judgment happens to appear when, confronted with nature, something in it overflows our intuition, establishes a distance impossible to cover between what our senses transmit to us and what our intuition could admit. An excess. And in paragraph §29 of the Critic of Judgment (Kritik der Urteilskraft) Kant adds: "the judgment of the sublime of nature demands culture (more than the judgment of beauty)". Reason, that tries to cover the gap of this excess introduced by the sublime, happens to be the key. But what interest me is that precisely where the excess, the waste and the supplement appears, techne, in the form of culture, is reintroduced again. If we thought we were free of the technical when we approach supposedly wild nature, in the displaying of its major forces, in our being surpassed by them, it seems we were again caught in its trap. Because culture is what allows to cope with this situation, and rationalize in the form of the aesthetical judgment of the sublime (although it doesn't relieve us from the uncanny of the sense it wakes: that's where the aesthetical pleasure appears).
Maybe at the end the displaying of all those mechanical and eco-green gadgets architecture seems to be so proud now is no other thing that the necessary technical clothes any aesthetics of the excess are bound to.


José Vela Castillo