Sci-Fi

In going through some readings i did this summer, i came across an especially applicable fragment of Reinhold Martin's paper on "Architecture's Image Problem", in Grey Room 22, Winter 2006. Here he triangulates Latour, Jameson, and Venturi & Scott-Brown by way of the scientific laboratory. I've uploaded a pdf at: http://www.troyconradtherrien.com/KIMSTUDIO/

The passage begins on p.19 and ends on p.24.

The impetus for posting this is its address of the relationship of architecture to power and production. On p.20, Martin gives the example of AIDS research as ostensibly living within the domain of science, but it is actually contaminated by politics (and economics, culture, society...).

Another example of contaminated science is the creation of the Atom bomb. The Manhattan Project was entirely decentralized (though centrally orchestrated), carried out by many scientists across the US, each asked by the government to work on specific problems, so specific and remote that it was almost impossible for many of them to know what they were working on. As such, science (and its practicioners) was liberated from value (moral, ethical, theological) systems and able to perform as it is often thought to perform: in a vacuum of reason. Once the bombs dropped in August of 1945, many of the scientists realized their co-opted participation and were outraged.

The crux of the studio is to negotiate the interface between science and the public, and many are taking on contamination. I am posting this paper to stimulate an understanding of another direction of contamination: from society into science.

Martin starts out the passage with setting up science as necessarily entirely fact, or entirely fiction, by the nature of its own constitution. He then tempers this by bringing Latour into the picture as one who straddles the line, as he is, "simply unwilling to transfer the source of scientific authority from a universalized 'nature' to a relativized 'culture'."

I think this (double) double move, of creating a totalizing system (fact OR fiction), then destabilizing it with a third option (fact AND/NOR fiction) is an issue to consider when making the laboratory public. In other words: What is your position with respect to science, is it pure, enlightened reason at practice, is it a puppet of the state/culture/etc., is it a more complex relationship; and, how does your architecture relate to this (reflect, reveal, negate, obscure, bifurcate, stimulate...).

Finally, as Martin goes on to talk about the Lewis Thomas Lab at Princeton by way of the oikos (greek for house... get used to this, you'll see it a lot... it is the etymological root for economy and ecology, as elaborated locally by Wigley, Martin and Aurelli, amongst others), that is, in terms of the social space which allows for interdisciplinary work, I think this can be instrumentalized in the studio as a means of understanding the interaction between scientist in the space, between scientists and the public if they are to enter the space, and how it can relate to image (ie. how the architecture may register this).

that's all.


For continuity, I've reproduced below what Martin refers to in: "... Jameson reproduces Latour's 1984 list of sardonic synonyms for "the modern world," all of which exhibit a shared aversion to the impure, networked hybrids that Latour argues constitute the true firmament of scientific knowledge." (p.19)

the modern world, secularization, rationalization, anonymity, disenchantment, mercantilism, optimization, dehumanization, mechanization, captialism, industrialization, postindustrialization, techinicalization, intellectualization, sterilization, objectivization, Americanization, scientization, consumer society, one-dimensional society, soulless society, modern madness, modern times, progress.