Technoetic Arts: A Journal of Speculative Research Volume 7 Number 2 2009 Intellect Ltd Article. English language. doi: 10.1386/tear.7.2.

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Plectic architecture: towards a theory of the post-digital in architecture

Neil Spiller Professor of Architecture & Digital Theory,
Vice-Dean, Director of AVATAR group, The Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London

Abstract
My research is centred upon how architecture is invigorated by cyberspace, the blurred boundary between the virtual and the actual, and how the different parameters of these spaces can be used to inform one another. My early experience in practice was that buildings are limited by the inert materials used to construct them and by the unimaginative ideas of what a building should look like and be. My research draws upon a variety of different disciplines to inform one architecture. The areas of research are multidisciplinary and include the changing status of the architectural drawing, smart materials, computeraided architectural drawing, computer-aided manufacture, emergent systems, responsive environments, the architectural design of cyberspace, interactivity, cybernetics and evolving systems and algorithmic design. To create responsive, non-prescriptive designs for architectural intervention was the starting point that led to an interest in the logic of algorithms and openended systems. These problem-solving diagrams used by computer programmers are very useful as a way of describing fluctuating conditions in responsive environments. This led to an interest in other computing paradigms such as cellular automata, complexity and emergence. These and other ideas I attempted to bring into the arena of architectural design to help architects cope with the rapid growth of computational technology, which is starting to revolutionize the way buildings are designed, drawn and built. We are at another of the important perturbations in technology and epistemology that seems to affect us so often these days. Cell biology is the new cyberspace and nanotechnology. Once we fully understand the exact nature of how our world makes us and, indeed how it sometimes kills us, we will be able to make true architectures of ecological connectability. This is our professions future. Small steps have been made, but much more remains to be done.

Keywords
cyberspace virtual surrealism architecture cybernetics plectics nanotechnology post-digital synthetic ecology cyborgian geography

Definitions
First, it is important to stress that post-digital architecture is not an architecture without any digital component. Indeed it an architecture that is very much a synthesis between the virtual, the actual, the biological, the

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cyborgian, the augmented and the mixed. It is impossible, anymore, to talk of digital architecture as a binary opposition to normal real-world architecture. Cyberspace has insidiously insinuated itself into our existence, at every scale and at every turn. Murray Gell-Mann defines plectics as
the study of simplicity and complexity. It includes the various attempts to define complexity; the study of roles of simplicity and complexity and of classical and quantum information in the history of the universe, the physics of information; the study of non-linear dynamics, including chaos theory, strange attractors, and self-similarity in complex non-adaptive systems in physical science; and the study of complex adaptive systems, including prebiotic chemical evolution, biological evolution, the behaviour of individual organisms, the functioning of ecosystems, the operation of mammalian immune systems, learning and thinking, the evolution of human languages, the rise and fall of human cultures, the behaviour of markets, and the operation of computers that are designed or programmed to evolve strategies say, for playing chess, or solving problems.
(Gell-Mann 1995)

If we start to think of the architecture in this book as the first stirrings of a plectic post-digital architecture, then Murray Gell-Manns mid-1980s definition of plectics seems a suitably broad umbrella within which to situate it. Such terrain can include a variety of complex subcultures of architecture that are all composed of differing degrees of the digital, the virtual, the biological and the nanotechnological interaction and reflexivity without banishing the more off-piste and often less fashionable investigations, propositions and researches. Above all, these architectures seek to simplify, amplify or facilitate and make visible the complex entanglement of contemporary space. The etymology of plectics talks of braiding together. Gell-Manns description of plectics resonates with current architectural concerns.
It is important, in my opinion, for the name to connect with both simplicity and complexity. What is most exciting about our work is that it illuminates the chain of connections between, on the one hand, the simple underlying laws that govern the behavior of all matter in the universe and, on the other hand, the complex fabric that we see around us, exhibiting diversity, individuality, and evolution. The interplay between simplicity and complexity is the heart of our subject. Likewise, if the parts of a complex system or the various aspects of a complex situation, all defined in advance, are studied carefully by experts on those parts or aspects and the results of their work are pooled, an adequate description of the whole system or situation does not usually emerge. The reason, of course, is that these parts or aspects are typically entangled with one another. We have to supplement the partial studies with a transdisciplinary crude look at the whole, and practitioners of plectics often do just that.
(Gell-Mann 1995/96, p 320)

It is this transdisciplinarity and reflexivity that architects can often offer.

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Understanding the architectural design of architectural design

Such an architecture must also address itself to the issue of the many epistemological unknowables in our world. Plectic architecture cannot be developed, as one would conduct a series of scientific experiments: objective and sacrosanct. First we must establish an understanding of the activity of design and the ontology of designer. Plectic architecture can be nothing if not a second order cybernetic system and its designers nothing if not epistemologically observing and acting conversational dynamos. Second-order cybernetics, often known as the cybernetics of cybernetics, is a relational subject; it never excludes the observer or the observer of the observer of a system. We must understand that everyones world-view is different and we construct this world-view by interacting and building, in short, having conversations with people, objects and ideas. Language has a propensity of inaccuracy, for personalization, for misconstruing, misreading, for relativity and it is emotively subjective. Scientists perceive themselves as fighting against this ontology of language and ask us to believe in objective and ubiquitous language to describe its allegedly ubiquitous knowledge. It is here that sciences biggest error has been made and it is here that poetry through its acceptance of the ontology of language has bloomed. Glanville et al. (1998) narrows this problem down to the denial of the concept of I in scientific reportage.
To pretend that what is written is written without a writer seems to me to profoundly and intentionally misrepresent what is going on, at least as I understand it []. Rather, it is that the I needs not to be excluded, for to exclude it is to create an epistemology that we cannot sustain. Without the I there would be nothing to report and no one to report it.
(Glanville et al. 1998)

The practice of architectural design has, in the twentieth century, been seduced by this impersonal way of documenting and describing science denying the I. Architectural discourse camouflages this lacuna with the myth of the hero architect, visionary genius and beneficent form giver. This approach has throughout the years fostered a modernist mistrust of narrative, decoration, symbolism and anyone or anything seen to be selfindulgent or of expressionist personality. This stripped-down architecture has been reductively honed down to almost nothing a ubiquitous plainness. All that distinguishes one building from another is a 450mm zone of cladding, produced by a limited number of cladding manufacturers. One cannot preordain the way architecture is seen, observed and interacted with. I argue that the nuances that architecture delivers can only be personal and personally mnemonic, to the observer/user in short a movable feast, a radical constructivist mind dependant reality a nomadic science. When I design I make space by putting things together, creating void from mass and mass from void. When I put things together I like them to do more than one job to be multivalent. I might like an element to be structural, decorated and change in position related to a predetermined algorithm and that algorithm might be able to fluctuate in time changing its criteria and optimization logistics. I might construct narratives about the
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whole or the pieces that allow me to develop deeper and more resonantly complex semiotics. I might like to take the view that my work is part of the Modernist Project and that its functionalism includes its symbolic nuances. The conversation between my work and the user/viewer of it (and the ability or inability of the observer to understand and decode my intentions) should be able to evolve in all manner of associations and hierarchies, some considered by me and not by others. These internal (to me) and external (to me) conversations are all languages and metalanguages, which are a rich broth of symbiotic interaction between me, my inspirations, my architectural lexicon and idiosyncrasies, my intent and the observer/users preoccupations, memories and formal associations and intent. These systems are ascalar universes of discourse. Cybernetically, a universe of discourse denotes the entire set of ideas, notions, concepts that are potentially useable in a specific domain of discourse. Gordon Pasks Conversation Theory seeks to describe the parameters of conversations. A conversation is circular, but not always verbal: it happens when one observes and one can talk of conversations within conversations. Conversations with humans and also machines and our reflection on them define who we are. This is second-order cybernetics. Design is a second-order cybernetic system and Gordon Pask was the first to stress the relevance of cybernetics to architectural design. Pask also introduced the notion that the architectural profession might start to use computers as surrogate architectural assistants.
One final manoeuvre will indicate the flavour of a cybernetic theory. Let us turn the design paradigm in upon itself; let us apply it to the interaction between the designer and the system he designs, rather than the interaction between a system and the people who inhabit it. The glove fits, almost perfectly in the case when a designer uses a computer as his assistant. In other words, the relation controller/controlled entity is preserved when these omnibus words are replaced by designer/system being designed or by systematic environment/inhabitants or by urban plan/city. But notice the trick, the designer is controlling the construction of control systems and consequently design is control of control, i.e. the designer does much the same job as his system, but he operates at a higher level in the organisation hierarchy.
(Pask 1969)

Every designer is different and feels that they have something original to bring to their world, solving a problem in an original or idiosyncratic way. No two designers are the same, no two designs the same, no two sites are the same and no two observers or users are the same (and all change over time and have varying durations). These facts have led me to view the world as exceptional, as particular, as a series of cybernetic personal and conversational mnemonic events. My design work within this blooming tapestry should do nothing more than exploit this systematic paradigm and create poetic moments in its interstitial spaces. So post-digital design must attempt to be immune to sophist arguments of style and good taste. It should rejoice in the particular and the I who and whatever is the I (we must remember that objects can now become I to a growing extent).
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Above all, post-digital design is relativistic, glocal, ascalar and constructed from a genius loci that does not just include anthropomorphic site conditions but also includes deep ecological pathways, mnemonics, psychogeography and narrative.

The continuums of architectural composition at the beginning of the twenty-first century

The experience of contemporary designers is one of positioning their work in relation to seven continuums. These are: 1. Space There is a continuum of space that stretches from treacle space standing in a field, no computer, no mobile phone, no connectivity whatsoever to full bodily immersion in cyberspace, along the way between these two extremes are all manner of mixed and augmented spaces. 2. Technology Like space, technology ranges from simple prosthetics (the stone axe) via the Victorian cog and cam, to the valve, capacitor, logic gate, the integrated circuit, the central processing unit, the quantum computer, the stem cell, the nanobot and a million states and applications between and beyond. 3. Narrative, semiotics and performance An architect or designer can choose whether their work operates along a continuum that ranges from minimal engagement in quotation or mnemonic nuance in relation to the history of culture or the contemporary world, or embraces the multiplicity of the complex and emergent universes of discourse that we inhabit and engage with it daily. A design might conjure new conjunctions of semiotics as a way of re-reading them. It also might integrate itself with human and cultural memory and it might be reflexive and performative (in real time or retrospectively). 4. Cyborgian geography A designer now can posit work, which operates in all manner of mixed and augmented terrains that are subject to all manner of geomorphic and cybermorphic factors and drivers. 5. Scopic regimes Architecture can exist at all scales, it all depends on the resolution of the scope that one chooses to use: continents, oceans, cities, streets, rooms, carpets, micro-landscapes and medico-landscapes are all part of this continuum. 6. Sensitivity A designer might decide to make objects, spaces or buildings, whose parts are sensitive, that pick up environmental variations or receive information. These sensors therefore can make objects and buildings that are influenced by events elsewhere or indeed are influential elsewhere. 7. Time This is the most important of these continuums. All the above six continuums can be time dependent. Therefore designers can mix the movement of their spaces, buildings and objects up and down the other six continuums So a design might oscillate the spaces within itself with varying elements of virtuality over time. A design might use different technologies at different times in its existence. A design might perform complex mnemonic tableaux at certain points in its life cycle. A design might demand of its occupants the use of different lens with which to see other than anthropocentric phenomena or spaces. A design might coerce the occupant to be aware of environmental conditions in other
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locations that change. A design might change the sensitivity of objects over time, dulling them sometimes, making them hypersensitive at other times. In other words it is the negotiation and understanding of these continuums that will give us the opportunity mentally, physically and virtually to create post-digital plectic architectures. Whilst the description of the continuums re necessarily relatively simple, the manifestations of post-digital plectic architecture is extraordinary and infinite. It is important to illustrate some its spatial potential. It is also important to note that I do not include sustainable criteria in my continuums for two reasons: any design work done in the twenty-first century must be sustainable in some way and that sustainability should be embedded in all the seven continuums they cannot exist without issues of sustainability and indeed ethics. For millennia the simple act of building has been in essence one of destruction or at very least ecological truncation and rearticulating. Things and relationships are lost and others formed. A post-digital plectic architecture needs to buck the entropic trend and it needs to be smart enough to comprehend and respond, if required, to the myriad of natural and artificial ecologies within which it sits. Architects need to also understand that architecture must be bedded into a landscape of ecology that far exceeds the boundaries of any specific site, country and continent and it is the spatial manipulation of the relationships in these ecologies that their architecture resides. Architects must understand, appreciate and design within the subsumption imperative of flora, fauna, machines and networks and their architecture capable of husbanding the forces of bio-chemistry, virtuality, movement patterns, the seasonal and diurnal and even millennial perturbations, and accommodate and rearticulate slow and abrupt phase changes of sites and landscapes. The following projects are a knot of positions utilizing the continuums described above and are gleaned from work conducted by the AVATAR (Advanced Virtual And Technological Architectural Research) group at the Bartlett, University College London. I present them here as harbingers of the future for plectic architecture.

Rebooting natural ecologies

Since the Industrial Revolution bulk manufacturing processes have polluted and torn the delicate interrelationships of the natural world. Those natural relationships, set in particular fitness landscapes, geomorphic and economic conditions, can create local rituals, cuisine and indigenous variations of animals and plants. Massimo Minales project is situated in the French Carmargue and aims to optimize the indigenous fish populations. He does this by using four differently scaled sonic devices, each type used in varying clusters to guide fish to various aquatic environments that suit the various stages of their life cycle all within the water bodies of the Carmargue. The project has diurnal, seasonal and yearly time cycles. It was inspired by Minales earlier research into micro-sound. Under the skin of the musical note lies the realm of micro-sound, of sound particles lasting less than one-tenth of a second. Recent technological advances allow us to probe
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Figure 1: Massimo Minales cyclically responsive sound architecture for herding fish populations to optimize breeding.
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and manipulate these pinpoints of sound, dissolving the traditional building blocks of both music and, more importantly, architecture into a more fluid and supple medium. Whole sites, from the rasping drone of a cars exhaust to the flicker of a flys wing, can be granulated down into points, pulses, lines and surfaces. Particle densities evaporate and mutate into one another giving birth to fluid landscapes, spanning across continents.

Harnessing the growth imperative

Christian Kerrigans work is predicated on the fact that if one puts metal corsets around growing trees it encourages timber to grow that has a higher density and therefore it can be more effectively used to construct things. This extreme bonsai technique can utilize other technologies such as nanotechnology that can create within sections of trees, sorts of Purist compositions of objects growing and harvestable as yet unseen. In short, the project harvests the growth imperative of trees, particularly a yew tree copse (the subject of an extensive technical treatise), to grow a ship. This was a project that had a 200-year life span as the copse/ship/launching pier grew. This achieved, he then sought to understand and choreograph the effect that a radical brief change would have on his system. So if we said around year 150, the ships use became of no use but we needed to harness our system to excavate an obelisk, how might this be achieved, using the partially formed ships timbers? How would the system rearticulate itself to achieve new ends? So from a theoretical point of view this project is about a synthesis of the natural and the artificial and the potential of an architecture of parts that makes another architecture an architecture before an architecture fuelled by the natural power of growth.

Mnemonics and the ghost in the machine

Lenastina Anderssons work attempts to create an architecture resonating with memory: it utilizes the art of memory and the second-order cybernetics of memory. It also utilizes a range of technology to create its allusions, ambiences and minute vibrations. Her family own a very dilapidated house in Sweden; it is now empty. But it has had a rich and varied history as farmhouse, doctors house and grannys house. Andersson set about designing a series of small, very subtle architectures that hint at past events and interactions. The pieces were composed of simple domestic utensils, spoons, bowls and bottles or pieces of plough or a doctors ancient blood transfusion unit. All the arrangements of pieces were given a little power by wind catchers in the adjacent wood. This enables them to subtly change position over long periods of time. These mnemonic micro-architectures exist in Rembrantian shadow until occasionally highlighted by a redirected suns ray.

Nano re: creation

Glen Tomlins research was interested in the myriad vectors and spaces that are never seen or appreciated that are generated as a side effect of the creation of a recognized masterpiece, in this case of Picassos Les Demoiselles dAvignon (1909). To do this he utilized nanotechnological implants at an artists wrists, elbow and shoulder. So as the work was in progress three other nested paintings were generated. Simultaneously such nanotechnological devices could also act as preventative medical sensors, sensing the
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health of the users bone marrow, blood constitution, muscle fibre and nervous system. The project, again backed up with extensive technical and medical analysis, reveals a series of architectural spaces that could be provoked, interacted with or used to drive other architectures.

Anamorphism and hypertext

Melissa Clinch uses ideas of architectural anamorphosis to create a series of spaces and semiotics that inhabit that great exposition of anamorphic painting, Ignatius of Loyola Church in Rome. The church has an anamorphic painted ceiling and an extraordinary painted anamorphic dome. From certain positions in the nave the dome looks perfectly real, in others it reveals it for what it is a distorted painted form on the ceiling. Clinch positioned three-dimensional forms within the church that create fluctuating architectural spaces according to the dynamics of the observer. These spaces open and collapse as one moves and help the viewer understand the science of anamorphic projection and also the rituals and history of the church. These objects operate like four-dimensional hypertexts.

The biotechnology of breakfast

Sacha Leongs polemic project focuses on the potential of bioengineering to become ubiquitous and everyday. His project is an artful mix of the scientific with the quotidian domestic. Basically, Leong explores a near architectural future where the technologies of biochemistry are as common and unremarkable as making breakfast. Breakfast after all, is a biotechnological experiment practised time and time again. Leong then create a lexicon of elements that can function as breakfast utensils and biotechnical laboratory equipment. The project culminated in a full-size installation. The project asks what is unusual anymore? Are we not indistinguishable from the advanced processes we manage to manipulate? What is normal for humanity now? Are we all not biotechnological engineers?

The spaces of literature

Martha Markopoulous research project focuses on the inquiry of the possible relations between language and architecture and it is based on the novel Salammb by Gustave Flaubert (1862). It is research on how an architectural system could embody a novels narrative and syntax and how we could construct a physical reality out it. It is an attempt to conceive architecture as the physical body of a fluid text. The project consists of a series of softly oscillating devices that translate in space and time the conditions found in the narrative, concerning points of view, changes of direction, speed, perspective and scale. The barbaric aesthetic aims to reveal the exotic beauty that exists in Salammbs world of literature. References
Gell-Mann, Murray (1995), Plectics, in John Brockman (ed.), The Third Culture, New York: Simon and Schuster,

____ (1995/96), Lets call it Plectics, Complexity, 1: 5, pp. 183. Glanville, R., Sengupta, S. and Forey, G. (1998). A (Cybernetic) Musing: Language and Science in the Language of Science, Cybernetics and Human Knowing, 5: 4, pp. 6170.

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Pask, Gordon (1969), The Architectural Relevance of Cybernetics, Architectural Design, Vol. September, pp. 4946.

Suggested citation
Spiller, N. (2009), Plectic architecture: towards a theory of the post-digital in architecture, Technoetic Arts: A Journal of Speculative Research 7: 2, pp. 95104, doi: 10.1386/tear.7.2.95/1

Contributor details
Neil Spiller is Professor of Architecture and Digital Theory and a practising architect. He is the Architecture Graduate Programmes Director and Vice Dean at the Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London. He is also Director of the Advanced Virtual And Technological Architecture Research (AVATAR) Group at the Bartlett. He is co-editor of Architectural Design Architects in Cyberspace (1995), guest editor of Architectural Design Integrating Architecture (1996), Architectural Design Architects in Cyberspace II (1998), Architectural Design Young Blood (2001) and Architectural Design Reflexive Architecture (2002) and formerly editor of Building Design Interactive magazine. He is co-editor, with Sir Peter Cook, of The Power of Contemporary Architecture (1999) and The Paradox of Contemporary Architecture (2001). He is author of the book Digital Dreams: Architecture and the New Alchemic Technologies (1998). His monograph Maverick Deviations was published by Wiley in 2000 as well as his book Lost Architecture about architectural projects of the last two decades of the twentieth century in 2001. He was also one of the ten international critics featured in the Phaidon book 10x10 (2000). He has also edited Cyberreader for Phaidon, published in 2002. He is the author of Visionary Architecture, a book about radical architecture of the twentieth century, published by Thames and Hudson in October 2006. He is also author of Digital Architecture NOW, which Thames and Hudson published in November 2007. He lectures around the world and his work has been exhibited and published worldwide. He is a visionary architect and has an international reputation as an innovative architect, critic, theorist, teacher and author.
Contact: The Bartlett School of Architecture, Wates House, 22 Gordon Street, London. Tel: 0207 679 4839 E-mail: [email protected] Web: http://www.bartlett.ucl.ac.uk/otherhostedsites/avatar/spiller.html

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