Stack architectures are also conceptual strategies for design, not just for description, and they are not only conceptual architectures, they are models for actual architecture as well. Le Corbusier ’ s Five Points toward a New Architecture is a strong stack, as embodied in Villa Sovoye and the vertical platform for five essential but undetermined programs. <sup>14</sup> The building may be “ a machine for living in, ” but the Five Points stack is the machine for making machines. Constant ’ s ever-changing New Babylon speculative urban system was redesigned again and again over the span from Sputnik to the OPEC embargo. It changed shape constantly, but one durable characteristic was the notion of a new city designed on top of the old one in two exclusive stacked layers. It imagined the new city as a landscape of vast multilayered networks and as continuous territories of ludic interfaces and opportunities, defined not by relation to a master ground plane but to the horizontal and oblique vectors of movement up and down the exploded sectional program. It was to be based not on functional regulation but on the feedback systems of play and serendipitous interaction. This project in turn inspired Rem Koolhaas ’ s revision and expansion of Mies van der Rohe ’ s sectional diagram into a generic principle of scale, for which the vertical juxtaposition of unlike programs in a single structure allows them to interoperate with as much mutual transparency or opacity as might be required, or which could be staged for optimizing spatial performance. This is seen perhaps most dramatically in the horizontal skyscraper OMA ’ s (Office of Metropolitan Architecture) 1972 conceptual project, Exodus: Voluntary Prisoners of Architecture, in which residents pass from layer to layer as they move through the discrete biopolitical stages of their lives. <sup>15</sup> Other architectural stacks are even more graphically explicit, such as Gordon Matta-Clark ’ s slices through stories of buildings, Robert Smithson ’ s concentric-layered world maps, and the stratified landscapes of MVRDV ’ s Hannover 2000 exposition pavilion that stacked and segmented artificial nature and program into a hyperdense world-in-a-box. Elsewhere, stack perspectives erupt uninvited and unintended. The verticality of flattened systems is seemingly uncontainable. While world maps render space in x- and y-axes, no linear geometry without thick verticality could represent the most entrenched geopolitical conflicts, rational and irrational alike. Consider Israeli architect Eyal Weizman ’ s multidimensional maps of the overlapping and interweaving claims of sovereignty in Israel-Palestine, showing that no horizontal cartographic linear delineation, or any regular vertical elevation all by itself, can finally describe, let alone govern, the multidimensional violence of that particular jurisdiction-intensive politico-theological matrix. Multiplications of the plane and rotations of perspective that move the flattened into the vertical are prevailing. Everywhere are stacks, good ones and bad ones, big ones and little ones, and many of them agglomerating into larger and larger platforms.
Platform and Stack, Model and Machine
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