Hypersurface
Theory:
Architecture><Culture*
PART(1)
Stephen Perrella
Nike's marketing strategy develops both form (product development) follows market and the reverse - first the creation of image and lifestyles (creating the market) and then the design of the products that support that lifestyle change. For example, a kid in Harlem plays basketball, Nike re-presents that image, markets it and that image comes back to the court, and now the kid is wearing Nike shoes.
John Hoke, Nike Marketing Strategist
In curved space, the shortest distance between two points is a curved line.
Albert Einstein
Stephen Perrella and Rebecca Carpenter, Mobius House Study, 1998
Transversal nurb animations
Email (excerpt) posted to Brian Massumi, September 1997
In architecture, there has been a tendency to eschew vulgar capitalist programs, that is, to avoid the contamination of everyday consumer praxis, to stand-off from it, and somehow establish higher cultural ground. This, of course, describing a specific course through the last sixty years of Modernism but is generally a basic aspiration. Over the last ten years or so, with the advent of Derridean and post-structuralist thought, architecture, through a discourse established by only a small group of critics, exacted a questioning of architecture's logocentrism leading to the movement known as "Deconstructionist architecture". The effect, although pervasive in academia, didn't satisfy a few of the architectural theoreticians, because they thought that architecture still had a material presence that the language/textually oriented philosophy of Derrida didn't accommodate. So, they moved toward the thinking of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, to improvise a radical theory that addressed architecture in its materiality. My sense all along has been that these improvisations are too narrow a reading of Deleuze, as in the theories of Greg Lynn and Peter Eisenman. But as Deleuze's The Fold became the main focus of theoretical architecture and computer technology became pervasive, we began to see in architecture, a clear move into topology. So much of the designs produced (especially here at Columbia GSAP) took on smoother and more landscaped forms.My concern with this, is that it still continued an Enlightenment Modernist tendency to avoid the messiness and vulgarity of everyday consumer praxis, an issue that Robert Venturi and Denise Scott-Brown tried to bring into the consciousness of architecture. And so, the saturation of the internet and the spread of teletechnology into regular business practices wasn't quite find its way into these topological architectural design processes. But as a journalist-architect, I am more inclined to embrace the radical proliferation of everyday advertisements, or sign-culture as they connect to ever greater interfaces; or what we now witness as the emergence of a media culture. And I wondered how architecture's reading of Deleuze could possibly accommodate these semiotic mutation from everyday praxis as well, inasmuch as Deleuzean thought is concerned to open boundaries and unfold surfaces, into conditions of pure exteriority. Having a Heideggarian/Derridian background, I read the media proliferation as an auto-deconstruction. That is, the deconstruction of the capitalist-subject through the very modes of production and technologies that proliferate due to the instrumentalism inherent in consumer economics. And so it seems the action at the level of the street, a hitherto neutralized element of the architectural problem, is becoming a contaminating factor, and the problem is that architecture, because of its formalist tradition, doesn't know how to think or embrace the technologically deconstructed or deterritorialized consumer-subject. Yet arguably, these "media" forces are pressuring the sanctity of elite architecture (and of course every other discipline) to enter into formative processes. And this is why I am attempting to conjoin these two trajectories: mediatized culture and topological architecture, into an intertwined dynamic, one that I have come to call hyper-surface. Your writings in Capitalism and Schizophrenia: A User's Guide, and Gary Genosko's readings of Felix Guattari, convinced me that there was, in fact, a semiotic and experiential dimension to Deleuze and Guattari that is missing from the initial and perhaps biased reading by architectural theorists and that resulted in a privileging of unadorned topology. While I truly support the topological impulses, I also realize that without it being connected to everyday life, the architecture isn't alive, or even animate. And that is why I seek your consideration and Gary's to assist me with this second reading, so architecture wouldn't miss all the rich affects of a radical empiricism, as it concerns new forms of experience.
Hypersurface: architecture><culture
Hypersurface is an emerging architectural/cultural condition affected through an intertwining of often opposing realms of language and matter into irresolvable complexities that create middle-out conditions. In an effort to avoid thematizing this effect and to consider it in its fullest complexity, the term hypersurface is introduced, to describe and render productive an Otherness that resists classical definitions but that is simultaneously produced by the tenets of traditional culture. As a verb hypersurface considers ways in which the realm of representation (read images) and the realm of instrumentality (read forms) are respectively becoming deconstructed and deterritorialized into new image-forms of intensity. Hypersurfaces are an interweaving and subsequent unlocking of culturally instituted dualities. Hypersurface theory is not a subjective invention in contrast to what seems an unending foray of "isms" attempting to explain postmodern culture, (for instance in the efforts of Charles Jencks). Instead this research suggests that there are self generating and auto-emergent forces deeply insinuated within cultural historicity that are being unleashed by the machinations of contemporary praxis, that already present a formidable challenge to the authority of the designer. Binary relations in Western culture, as in the relationships between image and form, trace a long tradition leading to schizophrenic dichotomization. Hypersurface theory may work productively with through the effects and mutations that occur as a result of an accelerating capitalism. Hypersurfaces are configured immanative topologies constituting nondialectic image-form interfaces, into which intersubjectivity is being absorbed, only to reemerge autopoeitically.Hypersurface is a reconsideration of often dichotomous relationships existing in the environment. These binaries include, image/form, inside/outside, structure/ornament, ground/edifice and so forth, not as separate and hence static entities but as transversally constituted fabrics or planes of immanence. Hypersurfaces are generated in the problematic relationships that occur when binary categories conjugate because such divisions can no longer be sustained in isolation through either linguistic or material divisions. Categories of the Real and the Unreal, for instance, are insufficient today because each is infused within the other. The reality of a Disney phantasm superposed with the unreality of media constructs, such as the O.J. incident, begin to describe a process of debasement brought about by deeply-rooted cultural contradictions-indeed, a schizophrenia.
The mechanisms that drive the real through the unreal and vice verse, impairing both, stems from the accelerating force of ubiquitous, everyday, consumer-culture. This is what leads such theorists as Frederic Jameson and Mark Wigley to describe our contemporary condition, as one of being "lost in space." A more accurate description, however, would be that we are "lost at home," because there are no longer clear insides or outsides, and it is from the contortions within this context that immanent forces now issue-forth. Such events are described here as hypersurfaces, producing intensities that are tangible, vital phenomenological (or proprioceptive) experiences of space-time-information.
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["Hypersurface Architecture" is published by Academy Editions, a division of John Wiley & Sons. Available at bookstores, Barnes & Noble, and Amazon.com]
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