The Opposite of Control?

28.03.2011 "Self-organization is indeed one of the concepts that continually pops up in modern artificial intelligence. By self-organization we mean that some structure or pattern- for example, patterns on butterfly wings, stripes on the fur of a zebra, or a particular social organization in insect societies-comes about as a result of the local interaction of many components, rather than by external direction, manipulation, or global, centralized control. Self-organization is an extremelly powerful concept but hard to grasp intuitively because we always try to understand the phenomena around us in terms of control." How the Body Shapes the Way We Think, Pfeifer and Bongard, p. 50
The research into artificial intelligence and the contemporary obsession with creating life that is capable of thinking and acting like us has revealed several important issues about modern culture. First, modern society is based on the top-down approach of creating a system to which every component must adhere. The centralized control of a modern system is panoptic in the sense that it does not require of us that we are aware of who is controlling the system. In fact there are many systems in place to disguise the location of control or defer attention elsewhere. In the panoptic society, as long as the subjects submit themselves to the control, the system remains operational . The counterpoint to this is self-organization. The goal then should be to design the components and allow them to organize themselves. In other words, we need to realize that acceptable patterns of social behavior can arise independent of control mechanisms.
Another key point is how the control of modern society has manifested itself. This will be covered in depth throughout the thesis proposal but the essential crux of it is that modernism strips emotional content away from us producing a gap which is filled by consumption. If the new acceptable view of intelligence is embodiment, in other words emotion and reason are required in the truly intelligent being, then modernism strives to control subjects by means of denying intelligence. The promises of consumer goods filling an emotional gap rarely are fulfilled. This objectification makes it possible for us to divorce emotion from our consumer goods and dispense of the old in favor of the new. Extended to buildings, this premise allows us to discard of buildings and never engage in an emotional dialogue with them. This is critical in our current culture based on consumption. This is the reason that the environmental crisis has reached its current status. We believe we are exercising control over the objects in our lives when in reality they are being used in an effort to control us sacrificing our own health and well-being.

Control

I found myself staring at a skyscraper the other day. Not the twisting bulbous form characteristic of a supramodern construction, but the boxy gridded depthless surface of a glass enclosure. Made possible by the industrial revolution, this building is among a typology that is symbolic not only of the prosperity and corporate identity of post-depression economic recovery, but also of the historic divide between rationality and emotionality. The Cartesian duality introduced in “The Discourse on Method” reached its penultimate representation in the form of the mid-century modern skyscraper. The building takes the form of an entirely rational construction. Highly-standardized grids control the image of the building. The highly machined components of the building necessitate an architecture in complete juxtaposition to the environment in which sits. Its standardized, boxy grids are not experienced anywhere in nature. The intangible content is no less perceivable. Clearly in such a building there is no expectation of individuality, in fact the building’s image drives home the ideology of a socially unified inhabitation.

“Significant architecture makes us experience ourselves as complete embodied and spiritual beings,” (Pallaasma, p. 11). Architecture should in some way provide something to the society and culture for which it is built, and really it shouldn’t be limited to ‘significant’ buildings. Any buildings should contribute to a person’s embodied being in the world. Modernist architecture, while it clearly furthered the belief of a split of rational and emotional being, it was also interested in the individual. The difference is that the architecture of Modernism, while it may not necessarily have arisen this way, is primarily an architecture of control. “A culture that seeks to control its citizens is likely to promote the opposite direction of interaction, away from intimate individuality and identification towards a public and distant detachment,” (Pallaasma, p. 49). Modernism explicitly chooses not to participate in the development of the inner soul of a person, rather it forces the collective into a state of constant supervision. As Pallaasma goes on to say in the same passage, consistently high levels of light can function as mental torture. High levels of light can also serve to provide a system of surveillance. An architecture of control necessarily eliminates low levels of light providing an evenly distributed high level completely dependent on electricity and divorced from the dimension of time recorded by the sun. From a very functional point of view the over-abundance of light makes it possible for those in charge to keep tabs on everybody at all times. In Panoptic perfection, the presence of the light assumes the role of the all-seeing eye which removes the necessity for someone to be physically present. Interestingly now that workers are increasingly performing their jobs from home or other remote locations, what has taken the place of the all-seeing eye?

If the goal of architecture should be to participate in the development of the human soul, then what are the architectural techniques that can do so? Modernist culture leaves no space for withdrawal from the surveillance, providing no opportunity for a person to find oneself or to develop a voice in a culture which is dependent on constant transfer of information and never-ending communication. The Modernist use of materiality reinforces a distancing of one’s emotional being from one’s physical being.

The eye is the organ of distance and separation, wheras touch is the sense of nearness, intimacy, and affection. The eye surveys, controls and investigates, whereas touch approaches and caresses. During overpowering emotional experiences, we tend to close of the distancing sense; we close the eyes when dreaming, listening to music, or caressing our beloved ones. Deep shadows and darkness are essential, because they dim the sharpness of vision, make depth and distance ambiguous, and invite unconscious peripheral vision and tactile fantasy. (Pallaasma, p. 46)

We can logically conclude from this paragraph that emotional experiences necessitate a blocking of vision or more specifically confusing the perception of depth and distance. Fundamentally this differs from the confusion provided by glass in architecture. First there is no tactile experience connected with glass. What is seen in the reflection has an entirely different tactility when experienced in real life. While the reflection of ourselves in a pane of glass may be physically intimate, there is an ethereal distancing of imperceptible range. The mind’s experience of reality is separated from the body’s place in the world. Second, if the glass offers little reflection, it then objectifies whatever is beyond. The world beyond the glass is flattened to an image in the plane of the glass. No sound, touch, smell or taste is transferred to the body. Imagine experiencing a shark behind a pane of glass. The body’s experience is completely divorced from the natural experience of being in water with a shark. The emotional response required for survival in the presence of a shark is lost in the creation of an image of that shark. To the importance of shadow, darkness fundamentally requires certain heightened emotional states. When vision is deemphasized, the other senses pick up the slack in detecting potential dangers whether it be a predator or some other environmental danger. Shadows provide depth and record the dimension of time. Darkness elicits emotional response, some of which are tied fundamentally to survival.

The specifics of the use of transparency and reflection, light and shadow, and a unifying grid of similarity are the contributing factors to the Modernist control of the soul. Is there a contrasting point of view which uses these architectural techniques in an attempt to provide an embodied intelligent being with a soulful point of view? Could it be that Le Corbusier’s famous quote, “Architecture is the masterly, correct and magnificent play of masses brought together in light,” is the thing that sets him apart from the Modernists? I am searching for the characteristics of architecture which provide emotional experiences. The link between emotion, rationality and the soul lies in architecture that provides an embodied experience of the world through the senses. There is a lacuna between emotional and rational thought as seen through the eyes of Modernism. What is the architecture that fills the lacuna?