Nun Will Die Sonn' So Hell Aufgehn

There was one particular moment in Haneke's The Seventh Continent, watched at the incomparable Kino Fist on Sunday, that strikes the viewer immensely. It occurs minutes from the end, in the bathroom, as the mother of the family swallows down all her sleeping pills. She swallows them with difficulty, fills up her glass, drinks some water to make sure they stay down, then looks at herself in the mirror, turns and leaves, the deed is done. As she walks out of the bathroom, however, she switches off the light.

Now, as the film itself dwells interminably on the mundanity of the objects and habits in the protagonists' lives, it could be seen that this gesture represents just the persistence of habit to the end, its inescapability. This would go against, say, the Proustian system whereby suffering and habit are in opposition, never concurrent. Against this, we could say that the ennui that has driven her to this point has become total, that the objects in her life may have been destroyed but the habits that are the extension and complement to these objects can only be destroyed with her death.

But that is not, I think, the real power of that gesture. I am reminded of Derrida's line on death : "chaque fois unique, la fin du monde"; Death is the end of the world, unique each time. Essentially, once the pills are down her throat, she is dead, walking dead, a zombie. To switch this light off requires her to make a massive investment in the persistence of the world outside of her being, so much so that one wonders if it could be read as an utterly reduced grain, the tiniest fragment of universal behaviour.

Perhaps it is just drive, unsatisfied even by death itself, perhaps it represents that even at the ultimate extreme there is no 'outside' to escape to, but the gesture worked magnificently as a cinematic punctum, pricking me; a subject who, just like everybody else is always already dead.

Diploma Lingo Bingo

with apologies to C.D.



A new game, for two players.
1) decide to visit an Architectural Exhibition (student or otherwise).
2) before entering, draw lots to decide who takes the first turn.
3) take turns to select polysyllabic, vaguely theoretical words one would expect to see in the exhibition.

The words used may vary from exhibition to exhibition, but will generally be along the lines of:
parametric, reflexive, responsive, deforming, pataphysical, intensive, rhizomatic, algorithmic, generative, smooth, &c.

4) first person to collect all their words gets taken out for dinner afterwards...

Memories from the Haunted Exhibition Palace

Three tracks are up on e&v @ murdochspace. They are forgettings based upon three pieces of Victorian ephemera discovered during research into the Albert Palace, of which more soon.

Show, don't tell.

A few tiny grains of e&v's work will be on show at the Royal College of Art from Tuesday the 29th of January as part of the interim show, and will be visible for two weeks. Come down and make your presence felt.

The Accidental Brutalist

This photo causes me problems. I feel that it is worth striving for an architectural communication that can accept incompleteness, decay, dirt, and, well, gloom, despite the fact that this would only occur if the world was run by Beckettians, but it does bother me when this spatial language is just the unintended byproduct of some shitty acrylic paintings.

Just as the work of Eisenman Architects is interesting despite his awful torturing of genuine thought, so Zaha Hadid Architects seem to completely miss the point of their own work. Their physical output is almost, but not entirely, completely unlike the drawings, renders, and those vastly overrated canvases. This is not that terrible - most architects produce images that bear no relation to reality - sunny days, crowded streets, smiles, &c. but it is especially disheartening because a language of flamboyant, transfigured brutalism would be incredible, and appropriate for today, and for Zaha's to veer towards it, not through any considerate action, but merely because nobody (yet) has paid for them to construct buildings out of the platinum they so obviously would wish to, so that they continue to use concrete for its 'plasticity', is useless.



Take the Phaeno Science Centre, for example. The building, especially from the exterior, looks as if it could be some ill-remembered car park or university building, more elaborate, more ornate, more special than it had ever been in its actual experience. The addition of strange shapes, the angles, the irregularity is almost like looking at the process of forgetting acting upon the tricorn centre or somewhere similar, the addition of decay (or a worsening, as Badiou's Beckett might put it...), the much talked about way out between iconoclasm and pastiche, right down to the sickly yellow of the lights dribbling down from what resembles a waffle slab, structural mainstay of the multi-storey. But then, of course, Zaha is a capitalist modernist, with a Rand-esque artistic vision of an architecture that flows, that is dynamic, &c. She didn't mean it. If you look at the developmental material, there is never even the slightest hint of this system of reference, just powerful shapes viewed from extreme perspectives (I'm aware of the explanation for this - the images, paintings &c. are diagrams, not to be seen as representational, but I don't think that this explains the aesthetic one little bit). Give the Science Centre just a little time and it will be a real mess, stained and rotting away, but that won't make any difference to the coffee table books...



So Zaha's buildings rot quickly. Anybody could predict that, their early work is especially poor in construction and detail, but there's enough Zaha-bashing anyway, for worse reasons, and they should be supported against reactionary attitudes (and there are some great interviews with Zaha from during the 'deconstructionism' period where she cuts through the prevailing bullshit and charmingly points out that bad-theory is useless to her as an architect.). But seeing in their work hints of an architecture that could be complete in its incompleteness, able to communicate within the city without merely being a degenerated version of some financialist ideal or the never-ending sigh that is contemporary urbanism, this is a tantalising proposition, but it is disheartening that it should be unintentional, and unwanted.

(cheers to NBS for pointing out the photo.)

Hauntogeography III

Tower Hamlets planning application PA/06/01347

Demolition of all existing buildings and the construction of five buildings for mixed-use purposes to provide 385 residential units (Class C3), retail use (Class A1, A2, A3, A4, A5), and / or community uses (Class D1) and / or leisure use (Class D2); car parking, landscaping, new vehicular and pedestrian access points and other ancillary works

the death of the archive

As if by magic, this comes to my attention.

R.I.P.

Stockhausen.

Becoming Ruin

Ok, briefly to follow on from previous concepts: the ruin is not an example of some kind of neglect, or the absence of the action required to keep up a building. Nor is it the synthesis of the Power of Nature opposed to the Will of Man. The ruin is a typology - a thanatological supplement. It functions as an effigy of destruction, a memento mori. The ruin is an exception of space that helps to keep the basic spatial order intact; all other buildings can better signify their permanence if there is a space in which spatial decay can be contained and presented as an exceptional circumstance. Here, then, is the petrified spectre of transience, held in a coma of sorts, not to be resuscitated and not to be allowed to die, preferably held in a kind of elsewhere, where a pilgrimage can be made, a special time can be found to visit this premonition of death.

If the archive is predicated upon destruction, if the condition of possibility for the archive is forgetting, and the archive is the physical manifestation of an immaterial body which is fleeting, and always in the process of disappearing, then the ruin should also be understood as an archival space, albeit a very specific condition of an archival space. It is oft said that the city, or spatial structure as such is an archival system. In other words, the material of the city embodies certain memories, whether that be on the level of the individual, or on a much larger cultural level. Indeed, there is something specifically spatial about remembering, and there is a whole system whereby one's memory can be best understood as a system of spatial events. What does the ruin add to this? Ruination is the making apparent of the destruction that makes archiving possible.

The library is an archive, in particular, it is the space in which the immaterial material of knowledge is made physical, in the form of books. This is similar to the way that a graveyard functions as an archive of the dead in which the immaterial identity of the other is made material. Both of these archival spaces contain physical manifestations, 'effigies' of that which is fleeting. For a long time now we have been experiencing a 'becoming ruin' of these spaces. As knowledge becomes more digital, more spectral, we begin to see loss as such diminishing. We can now conceive of a digital archive in which everything we know that we know is stored, contained as digital information, spectral archive. What happens to the library now? This process is a becoming ruin of the library- when all is stored digitally, all there is that is left is the decay of the books and the incompleteness of the collection. As with the graveyard - as we document lives ever more completely, for over a century loved ones have been staring out at us from mantelpieces, have been speaking to us from beyond the grave, and now have the potential to sit there as permanent digital contacts, forever not returning our 'pokes', and the gravestone merely exists as the ivy crawling up and eating away at the name inscribed upon it. This is facetious, yes, but we are beginning to see our abilities to archive becoming effectively absolute, and this is the becoming ruin of the archive.

During times of war, when everything around is being destroyed, the ruin serves no function. The blitz was not a becoming-ruin of all buildings, it was a becoming useless of the ruin. A question that should be posed is this: what is the becoming-ruin of everything?

I can haz end to this now?

Good grief. Those who should know better... shame and shame.