- I use the American program to indicate both architectural programme (in British English) and computational program. It is precisely the promiscuous ambiguity between one and the other that I wish to convey. After the appearance of the computer but before the mobile phone, Reyner Banham called for a revolution in the technologization of the environment, a complete folding of architectural and cybernetic programs. Reyner Banham, “ Architecture after 1960, ” Architectural Review 127 (1960): 253 – 260. See also Anthony Vidler, “ Toward a Theory of Architectural Program, ” October 106 (2003): 59 – 74. For a fascinating discussion of the role of program as a technique of provocation in the late-1970s architectural avant-garde, see Rem Koolhaas and Bernard Tschumi, “ Two Architects 10 Questions on Program Rem Koolhaas + Bernard Tschumi, ” Praxis 8: Journal of Writing and Building, May 18, 2006.
- It may be a matter of debate whether for parametricism that a shift away from representation is at work, or whether the style has introduced a formal vocabulary for the indexical expression of fast finance in building form. Schumacher, however, may not find this such a problem. See “ I Am Trying to Imagine a Radical Free Market Urbanism: Conversation between Peter Eisenman and Patrik Schumacher, ” Log 28 (Summer 2013). However, this is not the only perspective available. Luciana Parisi has outlined a more promising alternative grammar of algorithmic thought and practice in contrast to deterministic homeostasis and formal closure in her Contagious Architecture: Computation, Aesthetics, and Space (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013). Instead, (through her reading of Alfred North Whitehead) architecture is staged as a mereotopology of points, parts, and wholes, and put into motion by algorithmic machines toward open-ended, ultimately contingent and indeterminate cascades of formation, information, and deformation. It overflows the authority of a given designer, design, or transactional urban context, and in this way, algorithmic “ thought ” escapes from stylistic, methodological, or economic strategic fields and becomes an alien machinic irruption into urban fabric according to its own self-directed aesthetic and procedural programs. The torsion between individual points resolving continuous surfaces and the mutualism between the smooth and the striated (the work of parametricism) as a platform logic refocuses attention on the agency of envelopes and surficial complexities to mediate those programs. This serves the critical path of connection between the larger career of algorithmic operation in The Stack and the agency of the line, envelope, and epidermis to organize its effects.
- Alejandro Zaera-Polo, “ The Politics of the Envelope, ” Volume 17 (November 2008): 76 – 105.
- Without rehearsing Zaera-Polo ’ s entire schema here, suffice that he focuses on four envelope types (flat-horizontal, spherical, flat-vertical, and vertical) and the types of polities they configure. The flat-horizontal envelope, such as a very large airport, stadium, or big box retail, organizes flow into artificial environments; the spherical, which dislodges representation and function and has the most to offer for the presentation of building facility; the flat-vertical, which presents a sectional diagram, organized tessellation, and segmentation of public and private at the plinth; and the vertical, which works at a much larger perceptual scale and organizes variation within a projection of power.
- Zaera-Polo ’ s schema is meant to index the architectural envelope ’ s status quo and provides terms of speculation on what it might do differently. He concludes that we think of the politics of the envelope as a set of possible strategic maneuvers and tactical tricks that can be insinuated into projects as a supplement to a client ’ s conservative plans, but which can restructure spatial publics in ways to which he may not be attentive and incapable of perceiving. For him, while his politics of the envelope is pragmatist design within the presumed formats of capital cultures, modulations in the envelope might constitute a transformation in the possible enrollment of publics and of the urban-scale diagram of their configuration, and thereby a new political ecology of things and people. We can certainly add to his index as needed and expand it perhaps to include the scope of interfaces accounted for as The Stack. What about the megacity slums and shanties that are arguably the dominant urban typology of our era? Would their envelope be the flopping door, a shifting envelope as unclear as the barriers between legal and alegal occupation? Is the whole favela one vast shared envelope, or should we look instead at each individual construction? Should we assume that its politics of the envelope can be deduced by measuring operations at the aggregate scale or the individual? To add a fifth wall to the taxonomy, we might also nominate the elongated wedge, exemplified by the US border fence, the Israeli security barrier, parts of the Berlin Wall, or any of the hundreds of similar geopolitical membranes that have appeared in recent years. It is, in some ways, our moment ’ s most characteristic political envelope, and at least as much as the original four typologies, its spatial, political performance is guaranteed by an animal physicality irrespective of whatever ideological symbolism may accompany that concrete posture ’ s purpose. The elongated wedge represented aspires to be an ideal envelope cleaving an absolute inside and outside, without hosting any regular interior program within itself, diluted by no perforation (the bunker and the camp depend on the wedge-like envelope but also host human habitation within them, one for protective exclusion the other for protective inclusion).
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