Perhaps today no discipline has more expertise in interface design than architecture, and perhaps someday no discipline will ultimately have more expertise in architecture than some expanded interdisciplinary mode of interface design, because for the City layer, computation is not privileged over cement. The interfacial operations of software and architecture should not be categorized as two distinct economies, but as mutually involved sides of corresponding governing effects, sometimes symbiotic and sometimes antagonistic in their relations. However, under the interfacial regimes of planetary computation, programs that we may have asked architecture to host in the past are now assignments for software, with the latter not only absorbing but sometimes hollowing out the former as well. Meeting rooms become chat windows, store shelves become online databases, places are geotagged, organizational hierarchies become firewalled User access configurations, and so on. This transformation doesn ’ t only dissipate architecture ’ s authority (though in some instances, it does exactly that). Nevertheless, because architecture works as collective interface to urban space and because computation draws our attention to interfaciality per se and its contested governance of systems, then how architectural design will continue to enforce programmatic authority becomes an increasingly pressing question. Architecture ’ s ability to represent systems (idealized, abstracted, mythical, logistical) exceeds any physical mediation of space, and extends its reach beyond the semiotic play of the GUI at hand. At the same time, a shift in design discourse away from symbolization, toward direct material effect, and on political positions that are imminent in a structure ’ s postural embodiment in location, also has to be seen as a disciplinary reaction to the challenges posed by software ’ s virtualizations of architecture ’ s heavier interfaces. <sup>29</sup> It is a way of taking stock of what is left.
In his influential essay, “ The Politics of the Envelope, ” architect Alejandro Zaera-Polo proposed a political theory of the (normative) architectural interface based on a simple formal typology of the building ’ s envelope and of the different kinds of social spaces that each gathers into its midst. His model seeks to index the political effects of the architectural apparatus not in terms of what it might represent ideologically, but how it directly organizes publics (or subjectivizes Users of the City layer) as functions of the spatial networks in which it and they participate. In their different ways, envelopes structure and express links between the building and the world and introduce the segmentation, hierarchy, division, compression, massing, or adjacency that is, in the last instance, the reality of architectural micropolitics. <sup>30</sup> Through a close reading of building face and volume, Zaera-Polo directs us to see the envelope apparatus as a medium for the actors, networks, and assemblages that it might arrange, as well as a kind of master actor within the networks and assemblages in which it is itself situated. In the terminology of The Stack, the interfaciality of different architectural surfaces enables platform sovereignty through repeated access to networks and concrete images of those networks. Zaera-Polo ’ s scheme characterizes the envelope beyond architectural expressivity, and treats it instead as a material interface of polities and geography in situ . He writes, “ A general theory of the building envelope aims to draw a direct link between spatial typologies and political modalities of forms of political organization through the identification of a series of concrete domains of architectural performance with attached political potentials. ” <sup>31</sup> One structured micropolity is pressed against another and linked by the fuzzy membranes that make and unmake publics in different shapes and sizes. At the same time, however, his summary schema is limited in some of the same ways as interface theory in general, namely, the abstraction and individuation of one envelope from its contextual neighborhood of envelopes, which combine with others into urban-scale landscapes of competing envelopes and the polities they convene. <sup>32</sup> In groups, multiple architectural envelopes provide an interfacial rhythm that can be monotonous, dissonant, or catalyzing. No one interface interfaces in a vacuum: a fact regularly overlooked by normative interaction design methodologies that overindividuate Users, forever atomized and psychologized, instead of seeing them as part of larger and less frozen subject-apparatus networks.
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City Layer