do my reading home work

The response form teacher:

Hi Talal,

I think your discussion of painting in relation to figuration relates to some of the issues raised in Gilles

Deleuze’s texts “Painting and Sensation,” and “The Diagram” (in the readings for week 9). You should

also definitely refer to the attached text by Charles Jencks as a primary source for how collage was

defined in the context of Postmodern architecture. It would be useful to differentiate between collage as

defined by Jencks and what you refer to as ‘iconic’. You should identify specific techniques that are used

in several projects in order to facilitate legibility. How does this contemporary form of architectural

legibility differ from discussions of Postmodern iconicity and collage (Jencks)? It would be good to

review all the readings in the Figuration topic in order to present your position in that context. It would

also be useful to speculate on what aspects of our contemporary cultural moment have prompted this

shift in forms of legibility in architecture. I look forward to seeing the essay develop.

Best, Marcelyn

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Before delving into the argument, I should probably admit a personal aversion to
political ideology that goes beyond its application to architecture and which probably
has a biographical origin. My experience of Spain’s transition to democracy has
left me with a rather cynical view of political ideology as an effective tool for under –
standing or transforming reality. I was born in a dictatorship and I remember
having to learn to vote at school as one of the new protocols of the new democracy.
As a left-leaning adolescent, I remember longing for the Western powers to inter –
vene against Franco’s dictatorship, an episode that came back to haunt me thirty
years later when pondering Western intervention in Iraq, in a far worst dictatorship
and in a far more globalized world. In Spain I first witnessed Javier Solana,
then Spanish Minister of Culture under the Socialist Government, campaigning
for Spanish integration into NATO. Then came the termination of compulsory
military service by Aznar’s right-wing government, with the Socialist Party

in

opposition, which reinforced my doubts about political ideologies. On the other
hand, I had witnessed the subversive effects of foreign tourism on sexual behavior
during Franco’s strictly Catholic era and the impact of low interest rates, home
ownership and massive infrastructure construction on social mobility. The demise
of the Aznar government, brought down by text-messaging, convinced me of the
deeply trans formative political potentials of seemingly neutral technological and
economic processes.

It is precisely in the most pragmatic, concrete operations where contemporary
politics are to be found.1 The current American presidential campaign proves that
within contemporary politics, an all-encompassing mass politics focused on class,
gender, race, creed and identity and built upon partisan ideologies is less effective
than more nimble molecular politics capable of engaging swing voters. Within the
contemporary processes of the built environment, where an increasingly complex
interaction between different agents takes place, ideological politics often become
an obstacle to urban development.

The discipline has been split between those who believe architecture is a
mere social construct and those who believe that architecture’s facts are determined
by the inexorable laws of physics, economics, buildability, climatology and ergo –
nomics. Recent attempts to shift the grounds of the architectural debate away
from tech nology and production toward political critique and ideology are rightly
aiming to recover some political ground that has been missing for some time within
the discipline. However, they haven’t succeeded in coupling political genealogies
or ideologies with disciplinary traits, and therefore have been unable to produce
effective political strategies in architecture, let alone new architectural possibilities.
The attempts to politicize architecture have emerged from the hypothesis that
architecture is a ‘social construct’, a cultural fabrication and an embodiment of
political concepts, disas so ci ated from an architecture governed by natural laws,
statics and climatic demands.

But architecture is as much a physical construct as it is a social or political
one and to understand architecture as a mere representation of the political is as
problematic as to declare architecture entirely ruled by natural laws. In order to
enable a viable strand of architectural politics, we need to politicize the discipline
as the mediator between humans and non-humans, culture and technology and
as the mechanism that will enable us to produce problematized matters of concern:
Things rather than Objects.2

This text is an attempt to initiate an effective link between architectural
tech nologies and politics and to advance a new political critique of architecture
capable of addressing the challenges posed by globalization by incorporating
political content to architectural entities.

1 ‘The conflict over the basic terms of
social life, having fled from the ancient
arenas of politics and philosophy, lives
under disguise and under constraint in
the narrower and more arcane debates
of the specialized professions. There we
must find this conflict, and bring it back,
transformed, to the larger life of society’.
Roberto Mangabeira Unger, What Should
Legal Analysis Become (New York: Verso,
1996).

2 Following the description proposed
by Bruno Latour in Politics of Nature:
How to Bring the Sciences Into Democracy
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 2004). Latour retrieves the
Heideggerian notion of Ding (‘thing’ in
German) to coin the neologism Ding –
politik as an alternative to Realpolitik.
In the Latourian conception thing is an
assemblage between humans and non-
humans, politics and nature as well as
con cerns and facts that is neither merely
a natural object nor a socially constructed
one, but an assemblage of both, the
object and its attachments.

The Politics of the Envelope
A Political Critique of Materialism
Alejandro Zaera Polo

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The Powers of Architecture

During the last two decades we have witnessed a substantial reformulation of the
political stance of architectural practice vis-à-vis the development of global capitalism.
As a result of new conditions through which cities and architecture are produced,
the politics of architectural practice have changed, but their impact on the discipline
has not yet been fully theorized. The increasing complexity of global developments –
the distribution of power within the world economy, the transnational competition
between cities, the development of world-wide environmental policies, the growing
importance of media as a political force, the increasing presence of private agents
in the provision of services and infrastructures – are redefining the politics of archi –
tecture and urbanism. Multiple and ubiquitous communication technologies have
eroded the power of dialectics and discourse as a political instruments, while the
rising profile of city governance relative to national politics and the surge in violence
and military activities as a contemporary form of geopolitics are indexes of a
physicalization of the political.

Despite having become a crucial political battleground, architecture and
urbanism appear to be unable to find a role within this new politics. Architects’
traditional role as visionaries and ideologists has become redundant as the sheer
speed of changes overtakes architects’ capacity to represent politics ideologically.
Within a reality far more complex and multi-faceted than any visionary formulation,
an ideological position devoid of a close link to actualization and corporeality will
remain disempowered. Paper architecture has lost its effectiveness as a political vehicle;
like utopia, it is restricted to pure representation without the attachments and
frictions capable of politicizing matters. In order to guarantee a minimum level of
agency, architects need today to engineer their acquisition strategies, procurement
routes, etc. to sustain a certain level of research. And those decisions become an
integral part of the project.

Within this context it is vital to produce an updated politics of architecture
in which the discipline is not merely reduced to a representation of ideal political
concepts, but conceived as an effective tool to produce change. Rather than returning
to ideology and utopia (as some critical theorists are proposing) a contemporary
politicization of architecture needs to relocate politics within specific disciplinary
domains – not as a representation of an ideal concept of the political but as a political
effect specific to the discipline.3

The building envelope is possibly the oldest and most primitive architectural
element.4 It materializes the separation of the inside and outside, natural and artificial
and it demarcates private property and land ownership (one the most primitive
political acts).5 When it becomes a façade, the envelope operates also as a repre sen ta –
tional device in addition to its crucial environmental and territorial roles. The building
envelope forms the border, the frontier, the edge, the enclosure and the joint: it is
loaded with political content. We have focused on the envelope as an optimal domain
to explore the politicization of architecture and, possibly, the development of a
Dingpolitik.6 A political critique of the envelope will hopefully help us to reconstruct
the discipline as an effective link between material organizations and politics.

Despite the envelope’s original role, the political performances of architecture
have conventionally been located in the plan or the section, even if the protection
from the elements and the securing of a physical domain were the primary reason
for building. The plan of the building organizes the political structure and protocols
hosted within it, while the section organizes the social strata and its relationships
with the ground. For example, centralized or symmetrical plans have been thought
to contribute to the stability and hierarchy of political structures, while distributed,
clustered or labyrinthine plans are supposed to preserve the independence of localities
from a central, panoptic structure. The traditional differentiation between the attic,
the basement and the piano nobile, as well as the modernist homogenization of the
section through the use of pilotis and plan libre are some of the political effects that
have been available to buildings to date. In the past, the envelope has never had this
capacity to directly effect and structure communities and has been traditionally
relegated to a mere ‘representational’ or ‘symbolic’ function. The reasons for such a
restricted political agency may lie in the understanding of the envelope as a surface,
rather than as a combined effect of the construction technology of the building’s
skin and the specificities of its massing.

The choice of the building envelope as an object of research aims to thicken
the range of attachments of the surface, a field of research that has recently returned
to the architectural debate with unexpected strength, albeit within a rather isolated
scope. The envelope exceeds the surface by incorporating a much wider set of
attachments within the issues of construction and representation that converge in
the design of the physical limit of a building. It includes the crust of space affected

3 This was a condition already announced
by Tafuri: ‘From the criticism of ideology
it is necessary to pass on to the analysis
of techniques of programming and of the
ways in which these techniques affect
the vital relationships of production. For
those anxiously seeking an operative cri ti –
cism, I can only respond with an invi tation
to transform themselves into analysts of
some precisely defined economic sector,
each with an eye fixed on bringing together
capitalists development and the processes
of reorganisation and consolidation of the
working class’. Manfredo Tafuri, Archi –
tecture and Utopia: Design and Capitalist
Development (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,
1979), xi.

4 ‘…the beginning of building coincides
with the beginning of textiles. …The wall
is the structural element that formally
represents and makes visible the enclosed
space as such, absolutely, as it were, with –
out reference to secondary concepts. We
might recognize the pen, bound together
from sticks and branches, and the inter –
woven fence as the earliest vertical spatial
enclosure that man invented. … Weaving
the fence led to weaving movable walls.
… Using wickerwork for setting apart
one’s property and for floor mats and pro –
tection against heat and cold far preceded
making even the roughest masonry.
Wickerwork was the original motif of the
wall. It retained this primary significance,
actually or ideally, when the light hurdles
and mattings were transformed into brick
or stone walls. The essence of the wall
was wickerwork’. Gottfried Semper, ‘The
Textile Art’ in Style in the Technical and
Tectonic Arts: or, Practical Aesthetics (Los
Angeles: Getty Trust Publications, 2004).

5 Aristotle mentions the management of
property as one of the primary reasons
for the need of a political organization
of human communities. The binding of
goods and physical domains to the com –
munity or the individual is at the root of
power structures and political behavior.
Legislation and constitutions are very
much based on the structuring of property
over material goods. In one of the first
known expositions of Tragedy of the
Commons Aristotle wrote, ‘that which is
common to the greatest number has the
least care bestowed upon it. Everyone
thinks chiefly of his own, hardly at all
of the common interest; and only when
he is himself concerned as an individual’.
In addition, he says when property is
common there are natural problems that
arise due to differences in labor: ‘If they
do not share equally enjoyments and toils,
those who labor much and get little will
necessarily complain of those who labor
little and receive or consume much. But

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by the physical construction of the surface, by the scale and dimension of the space
contained, by its permeability to daylight and ventilation and by its insulation values
and solar-shading capacities. It also involves the space that surrounds the object, its
orientation in respect to sun, wind, views, etc. This includes its capacity to re-present,
not in the sense to which the architectural critique has accustomed us, but in the
ancient political role that articulates the relationships between humans and non-
humans in a common world.7 The envelope is the surface and its attachments.

The envelope is a core concern of the discipline affecting materiality and
construction, environmental performance, energy efficiency and other issues, but it
also engages several political forms: economical, social and psychological. Yet there
is no such a thing as a unitary theory of the building envelope in the history of archi –
tecture. Previous theories of the building envelope have addressed either problems
of representation and composition or construction technologies. Semper’s analysis
of cladding materials and Durand’s proposals for an adequate expression of the
different typologies are examples of these partial approaches. The Loosian ornamental
crime and the modernist abstracted ‘whitewash’ of the façade are other episodes that
relate the design of the envelope to what happens behind. Colin Rowe’s aesthetic
critique on ‘Character and Composition’ and ‘Literal and Phenomenal Trans parency’8
insists on similarly compositional issues concerning transparency. Venturi’s theory
of the decorative and the representational are also precedents to this discussion, and
of course there is a large body of knowledge addressing the environmental and
structural performance of envelopes: Fuller, Le Ricolais, Banham…

Like the skin of a living creature, the envelope is the primary actor in the
complex process of maintaining homeostasis in the building.9 In human life, however,
the closed circle of homeostasis is opened up by psychological, political, social and
cultural surpluses. The façade of a building functions not only on a purely biological
level. It assembles the building’s interior, which it protects, and the external public
realm with which it communicates. The surface of the building has a kind of double
existence intervening in two disparate worlds: the private inside and public outside.
It is a boundary which does not merely register the pressure of the interior, but
resists it, transforming its energy into something else. And vice versa. The envelope
is the result of an act of violence on both spheres.

In the same way that artificial intelligence and genetic modification have
become key political subjects, the building envelope is central to a political discussion
of material practices. It is not by chance that we have become interested in the
envelope at a time when energy and security concerns have replaced the earlier
importance of circulation and flow as subjects that structure contemporary material
practices. A unitary theory of the building envelope may be an answer to the decoupling
of politics and nature and an opportunity to construct a hybrid world of Things,
rather than political subjects and natural objects.10

Globalization has propelled a set of spatial typologies primarily determined
by the capacity to conduct flow. Architects have tried to engage with this new
borderless space, the ‘space of flows’,11 by dissolving the envelope as an obstacle to
flow and spatial continuity and presenting an image of the world as a chaotically
flowing magma. However a new picture is emerging in the form of bubbles and
foams, containers of a liquid reality. The proliferation of bubble buildings, bubble
furniture and bubble objects in the last decade is difficult to explain as a simple
coincidence: Foster’s 30 St. Mary’s Axe and London City Hall, Grimshaw’s Eden
Project, Future Systems’ Selfridges and Lord’s Media Centre, Herzog & de Meuron’s
Allianz Arena and Beijing Olympic Stadium, Paul Andreu’s Beijing Opera – to
name just a few very iconic buildings – demonstrate the powerful attraction of this
aesthetic trend within the contemporary architectural Zeitgeist. The power of archi –
tecture is not just iconographic but also organizational. The lower envelope ratio
that bubble buildings produce in respect to buildings of comparative volume is an
index of the rarefaction of the exterior surface, perhaps as a result of increased
security and energy concerns. These are social and political forces that have direct
bearing upon the physical, material nature of the envelope.

Peter Sloterdijk described this new paradigm in his Sphären Trilogy12 most
eloquently. His powerful imagery evokes the world as a foamy space filled with
bubbles and balloons of different scales and qualities. This capsular society and its
phenomena such as global provincialism, the politics of climatization and the social
uteri describe a new paradigm that requires not just a reconsideration of the tech –
nologies and economics of the building envelope, but of its political, social and
psychological implications.

Another crucial factor in the renewed importance of the envelope as a central
problem of contemporary architecture derives from the evolution of its production
technologies. The rise of global capital markets and the transfer of urban power from

indeed there is always a difficulty in men
living together and having all human
relations in common, but especially in
their having common property’. Aristotle,
Politics 1261b34 (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1999).

6 Dingpolitik is the term coined by Bruno
Latour to address the politics resulting
from the crisis of objectivity triggered by
the collapse of modernity and the search
for a new model of objectivity in which
politics are one aspect of the object, its
sciences and nature at large. See Bruno
Latour and Peter Weibel’s introduction
to the exhibition catalogue Making
Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005).

7 This borrows Bruno Latour’s proposal for
a political ecology capable of politicizing
science without resorting to the idea of
an entirely ‘socially constructed’ nature.
Latour, Politics of Nature.

8 Colin Rowe, The Mathematics of the Ideal
Villa and Other Essays (Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press, 1982).

9 Jean-François Lyotard has applied this
term to social ‘power centers’ he describes
as being ‘governed by a principle of
homeostasis,’ sometimes ignoring radical
new discoveries or changes of environ ment
because they destabilize previously-
accepted norms or the status quo. See
Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A
Report on Knowledge (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1984).

10 See Bruno Latour’s critique in Politics
of Nature.

11 Manuel Castells, The Informational City:
Information Technology, Economic
Restructuring, and the Urban Regional
Process (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989).

12 Peter Sloterdijk, ESFERAS I Burbujas.
Microesferología. ESFERAS II Globos –
Macroesferología. ESFERAS III. Espumas.
Esferología plural (Madrid: Ediciones
Siruela, 2003, 2004 and 2006
respectively).

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institutions to private agents have generated a global, market-driven building culture
of predominantly private commissions, as even institutional clients are increasingly
seeking private-public partnerships (PPPs) as a means of delivering and maintaining
vital public infrastructure. While most other aspects of the architectural project are
now in control of other agents (e.g. project managers, specialist contractors) that
ensure the efficiency of the project delivery, the increasing facelessness of the client
gives architects license to invent the building’s interface. The envelope has become
the last realm of architectural power, despite the discipline’s inability to articulate
a theoretical framework capable of structuring its renewed importance. Mobilizing
a political critique of the envelope capable of addressing its multiple attachments
and complexities may enable us to frame architecture not merely as a representation
of the interests of a client, of a certain political ideology or an image of utopia, but as
an all-too-real, concrete, and effective political agency able to assemble and mediate
the interests of the multiplicities that converge on the architectural project. In order
to realize these potentials we need to generate a definition of the discipline that
remains attached to reality and yet resistant to consolidation. A discipline that rather
than aiming at revolution as a political ambition, focuses on explicitation.13 Within
professional practice we can find a positivist model of naturalization in which the
discipline is driven toward seemingly quantifiable processes where statics, construction
processes, economy and lately environmental performance are seen as the backbone
of architecture, excluding the political questioning of the models of quantification.
For example, the tests behind a LEED certificate include parameters like job creation,
ethnic diversity, carbon footprint and use of renewable energy sources – each of
which is a politically loaded subject. Are biofuels truly sustainable? Are the carbon
footprint parameters applicable world-wide? Is a liberal job market – which creates
and destroys jobs at a faster rate – a more sustainable employment policy? Can you
offset embedded energy with recyclable materials? Admittedly, the number of para –
meters contained in the assessment would even out potential biases in the quanti fi –
cation models of some of them. But once a ‘gold’ certification is issued, the building
is beyond any question of its sustainability credentials.

Within architectural academia, disciplinarity has been caught up in a critical
model of negation that unfolds in two directions: a critique of interiority or a critique
of exteriority. A critique that assumes the autonomy of the discipline enables the
development of its codes in the absence of external attachments but limits the trans –
formative potential of the discipline. A critique that assumes the attachment of the
discipline to external constraints questions the performance of architecture on a
wider political level, usually focusing on a political discourse which architecture can
only represent. Disciplinary knowledge has fallen captive either to a univocal idea
of nature or political representation. Neither approach can effectively engage in the
transformation of reality – that is, to work politically – and simultaneously update
the core of the discipline. The question is whether it is possible to open up the
definition of the discipline to the impact of market forces and technical advances as
a drive to evolve its codes and simultaneously engage in practice while operating as
a critical agent. Is architecture socially constructed, or is it a faithful representation
of reality? Or is it rather the missing link between the community of humans and
the community of things as political entities?

Previous theories of the building envelope have not been capable of directly
relating the technical and physical properties of envelopes to their political, social and
psychological effects. As with the impact of certain technical fields (artificial intel li gence
and genetic modification, for example) on the political arena, a general theory of the
building envelope could reconstitute a political discourse of architecture with the ca pac ity
to produce effects that may actually destabilize power regimes rather than func tion ing
as mere representations of politics, whether of the status quo or its resisting parties.14

This theory needs to be constructed on a careful analysis of the contemporary
envelope’s phenomenology as different aspects of the envelope have the capacity
to produce specific effects. For example, a more intricate design of the limit between
private and public increases the contact surface between both realms, like a radiator
adopting an intricate form to increase the surface of heat exchange with the air.
A more permeable definition of the property boundary is more likely to effectively
accommodate a fluid relationship between private and public in an age when the
public realm is increasingly built and managed by private agents. The envelope of a
retail complex or the enclosure of an office building lobby are powerful mechanisms
of social integration; the façade ratio of a residential block determines the environ –
ment’s level of artificiality; a gradual delimitation between the natural and the
artificial in the façade of an office building could help to improve energy efficiency
and minimize its carbon footprint; a more ambiguous appearance may allow for the
reprogramming of the building’s identity…

13 Explicitation is the term used by Sloterdijk
as an alternative process to revolution and
emancipation. The history of explicitation
is made increasingly intelligible in the
spheres and objects to which we are
attached. The categories of the French
revolution and left and right, both with
their particular techniques of classifi ca tion
and of positioning, no longer correspond
to the order of things that is no longer
hierarchical but heterarchical. Whether
we talk about carbon footprints, dere gu –
lation, genetically modified foods, con –
gestion pricing or public transport, these
issues give rise to a variety of political
configurations that exceed the left/right
distinction. The left/right divide still
exists, but has been diluted by a multitude
of alternative attitudes. See Peter
Sloterdijk, ESFERAS III.

14 ‘“It’s very cheap and easy for architects
and artists and film-makers to pull out or
to make this kind of criticism,” Herzog
says. “Everybody knows what happens
in China. All work conditions in China
are not what you’d desire. But you wear
a pullover made in China. It’s easy to
criticise, being far away. I’m tempted
almost to say the opposite…How great it
was to work in China and how much I
believe that doing the stadium [and] the
process of opening will change radically,
transform the society. Engagement is the
best way of moving in the right direction”.
Excerpts from a conversation between
Herzog & de Meuron and Tom Dyckhoff
in The Guardian, March 14th, 2008.

The Eden Project, Cornwall, UK.
Grimshaw Architects.

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It is at this level that the discussion of the qualities and structure of material
organizations – such as difference and repetition, consistency and variation, flexibility,
transparency, permeability, local and global and the definition of the ground – that
architecture becomes political. The politicization of architecture may also be induced
by virtue of representation – and not just by synthesizing physical expressions of
political concepts, but by literally redesigning typical living conditions or lifestyles –
or by disrupting political norms or assumed environmental imperatives. What is at
stake here is the possibility for architectural entities to acquire the status of Things,
to develop various attachments to a multiple reality, to enter the realm of the contested
entities rather than remaining the inevitable product of established forms of power
or the mere representation of alternative ideologies.

Political, social and economic factors shape architecture; the question is
whether architecture can in turn alter the distribution of power. The hypothesis of
this text is that the relationship between politics and architecture is one of mutual
influence. Instead of resorting to predefined and all-encompassing political ideologies
or utopian references to frame the practices of architecture, we aim to map possible
correlations between architectural strategies and political effects in order to mobilize
the discipline on a sub-political level. 15 The question now is not whether certain
architecture is aligned to the right, to the left or to a certain political party – as in
earlier embodiments of architectural politics – but rather what architectural strategies
may trigger effects on the distribution of power. We may question whether explicitation
is sufficient; but in any case, we may need to disengage from conventional political
forms in architecture in order to politicize society at large.16 Until now, buildings
considered to have a political program included, for example, city halls, schools, social
housing, parliaments, airports… To be able to discern the politics behind a retail park,
a commercial complex or a residential development, we need to resort to a political
analysis of architecture that has not yet been integrated into the discipline.

The introduction of certain cladding and roofing technologies, such as curtain-
walling systems, silicon joints and plastic waterproofing membranes, has eliminated
the need for cornices, corners, pediments and window reveals. With respect to
envelope technology, the difference between the roof and the walls has disappeared
and fenestration is no longer a critical building problem. The growing number of
buildings adopting supple envelopes with differentiated patterns is not mere coin –
cidence, but is an index of a convergence of factors leading to a particular design
choice. One of the important forces behind this tendency is the evolution of building
technology. While just a few decades ago the crucial question for architects was the
choice between pitched roofs and flat roofs, today we are considering the choice
between the box and the blob as the primary articulations of the building envelope.
Given the advancements in envelope systems, the choice between the box and the
blob is therefore a specious one, unable to structure a robust theoretical frame to
discuss the convergence of political forms and architectural technology.

Yet the erasure of those primary articulations of the envelope arises simultane –
ously from an increase in the complexity of the faciality of buildings. What is the
nature of public representation in the age of PPP when both corporations and public
administrations are procuring their buildings and infrastructures from developers
who are sourcing their capital from private equity, hedge funds and Real Estate
Investment Trusts (REITs)? Even if the rise of sovereign funds and the re-empower –
ment of central banks – following the downfall of Northern Rock, Bear Stearns,
Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and Lehman Brothers – succeeds in removing fluidity
from the identities of power, the building envelope will still be required to fulfill
a complex set of performances, as the primary regulator between public and private,
inside and outside.

The contemporary city is built for corporations run by administrative boards
for multinational shareholders’ interests; it is built by building emporiums serving
multinational interests as well, who procure the buildings and often run them for
decades, taking care of maintenance, security, refuse collection, energy supply and
even the provision of infrastructure. All this is happening in a market in which cities
are competing fiercely for well-educated citizens and foreign investment, making
urban identity a crucial weapon, even if in the wake of more distributed ownership
structures identity has become contingent. The choice of the developer and the
contractor, the primary agents of urban production, is not democratically managed,
and yet they are not entirely free of political – or sub-political – influence. These are
the kind of mechanisms that need unmasking if we are to engage with contemporary
urban politics.

In order to develop a political discipline, we will try to draw the links between
spatial typologies and political modes. Richard Sennett’s concept of spaces of
democracy is an interesting precedent for the articulation of this type of discipline:

15 ‘Subpolitics is distinguished from politics
in that (a) agents outside the political
or corporatist system are also allowed to
appear on the stage of social design (this
group includes professional and occu pa –
tional groups, the technical intelligentsia
in companies, research institutions and
management, skilled workers, citizens’
initiatives, the public sphere and so on),
and (b) not only social and collective
agents but individuals as well compete
with the latter and each other for the
emerging power to shape politics’. Ulrich
Beck, The Reinvention of Politics:
Rethinking Modernity in the Global Social
Order (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 1997).

16 Ulrich Beck in The Reinvention of Politics,
Bruno Latour in Politics of Nature and
Peter Sloterdijk in ESFERAS III attempt
to theorize the politico-technological
complex that drives contemporary life.
They have written extensively about an
emerging political dynamics that is no
longer ruled by party lines, class, gender
or race and has become mediated through
technologies such as genetics and
information technology.

The four envelope types:
flat-horizontal, spherical, flat-vertical
and vertical.

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his identification of the edge as the most politically active zone of a material organi –
zation sets up a model for tracking the political content of an architectural entity.
Sennett theorizes that deliberative democracy, which is primarily mediated through
language, can be traced back to Greek democracy and located in the Pnyx, while
associative democracy is mediated through the body and unfolds primarily in the
Agora.17 The Pnyx is a central organization built as a theater and based on political
representation and submission to the majority, while the Agora is characterized
by the Stoa, the limits between the public and the private space, where community-
building takes place informally by mere coexistence. Sennett concludes that it is
precisely this peripheral position of the Stoa, rather than the centrality of political
rhetoric, that can produce forms of politics driven by difference rather than by
indifference and submission. Establishing a parallel with natural populations, borders
appear to be the most biologically active and diverse zones: the areas where inter –
action between groups happens, where exchange intensifies, where mutations occur.
They are also where political energy is concentrated and activated by difference.

Likewise, a general theory of the building envelope aims to draw a direct link
between spatial typologies and political modalities or forms of political organization
through the identification of a series of concrete domains of architectural performance
with attached political potentials. Environmental performance, the drawing and
definition of borders, the structuring of interfaces and the representation of com –
munities are some of the political domains where specific architectural actions may
trigger substantial political effects without resorting to all-encompassing political
paradigms and ideologies.

The structure of this theory of the building envelope has been based on the
hypothesis that the political possibilities of the envelope are primarily related to
its dimensions, and that every dimensional type can trigger specific technological,
social and political effects. Admittedly, the dimensions of the envelope are not usually
left for the architect to decide and are usually associated with the type of project,
the site constraints and the client’s requirements. Therefore this analysis is primarily
aimed at laying out the field of political opportunities within the con straints – the
attachments – that come with these different envelope typologies. Within those
constraints and within each envelope type, there is a wealth of possibilities that can be
activated that would transcend the mere technical problems and affect the wider
political performance of the buildings. The structure of this analysis has been con –
sistently organized into four categories of envelope: flat-horizontal, spherical, flat-
vertical and vertical resulting from the specific ratios between the envelope’s primary
dimensions. What are significant in each category are the technical and the political
variations that trigger the particular potentials that this theory attempts to identify
in the following chapters. These four categories are aimed at establishing an effective
taxonomy capable of bringing together environmental and political performances in
a new discipline of the building envelope. Obviously they are particular cases of a
much more gradated speciation of envelopes that ranges across them. While there
are buildings that occupy an ambiguous position within this taxonomy, it seems
improbable that we can initiate a revision of the discipline without resorting to some
form of taxonomy, however precarious and ephemeral it may be.

17 ‘Do we find it (democracy) in those
spaces or places where the word recedes
in importance? A different democratic
model would be a place where it does not
matter whether people understand each
other verbally, but they understand each
other by their bodies. They can only do
that through the form of association in
which they are both together, aroused by
each other’s presence, but still kept distinct.
That is the democracy with the living
edge. And that is what I believe in, and I
think it is something that architects and
planners can make’. Lecture entitled
‘Democratic Spaces’ by Richard Sennett
at the Berlage Institute on March 3rd 2004.
See also Richard Sennett, Respect in the
World of Inequality (New York: WW
Norton and Co., 2003). The concept of
associative democracy is borrowed from
Paul Hirst, Associative Democracy: New
Forms of Economic and Social Governance
(Amherst, MA: University of
Massachusetts Press, 1994).

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18 David Harvey, The Condition of Post –
modernity (London: Blackwell, 1998).

19 The notion of an artificial atmosphere is
particularly vivid in this type of envelope,
which returns us again to the work of
Sloterdijk on the artificial diversification
of the atmosphere within the capsular
society. The human island, the capsule
and the greenhouse are the prototypical
devices for a new generation of buildings
committed to this diversification of the
atmosphere in which this envelope
typology features prominently. Peter
Sloterdijk, ESFERAS III.

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X≈Y>Z. Flat-Horizontal Envelopes. Loose Fit.
The first category of building envelopes comprises those in which the horizontal
dimensions are considerably larger than the vertical. Buildings like stations, airports,
train stations, industrial buildings, trade fairs, convention centers, markets as well
as retail and leisure complexes generally belong to this category. Flat-horizontal
envelopes perform by delimiting edges, frontiers and boundaries and sheltering the
domains they enclose, operating primarily on the articulation between natural and
artificial. Since their comprehensive perception can only be obtained from an aerial
perspective, flat-horizontal envelopes are experienced in a fragmented manner and
are therefore less concerned with representation and figural performance than with
the organization of material flows: traffic, ventilation, daylight, security, etc.

The capacity for buildings to handle large flows of transient populations and
goods is one of the mechanisms of spatial displacement18 that global capitalism has
created as one of its basic infrastructures. Their ability to host crowds, enclose public
space and control flow in an artificially controlled environment, as well as their
conflictive relationship with the local, qualifies flat-horizontal envelopes as highly
politically charged.

Flat-horizontal envelopes are crucially determined by the structural per formance
of the roof membrane, as their floor-consuming functions are usually coupled with
long-spans. Often, they are also determined by flow control mechanisms: in the case
of transportation buildings – stations and airports – the footprint of the envelope
is usually related to a security protocol, while in retail parks, stadia and convention
facilities the importance of access points and interface with the public space constitute
the crucial determinations of the building outline.

From a structural perspective, flat-horizontal envelopes can be generally classified
into two groups: those that bring gravitational loads down to the ground at regular
intervals, like shopping malls, and those that span between their walls across the
space, such as trade fair halls and sport venues. The structural system, the spatial
organization and the depth of the envelope are interrelated parameters: if the function
is centrally organized, the structural depth increases to avoid intermediate supports
as the span grows larger. Distributed flat-horizontal envelopes are built on a struc –
tural base unit that covers the ground by repetition, thus economizing resources.
The roof pattern, driven by structural modulations or daylight and ventilation supply,
is one of the regular features of this typology.

The flat-horizontal envelope induces a strong differentiation in terms of
performance between its predominantly vertical and horizontal surfaces. The primary
performance of the vertical surfaces is first defensive and then ornamental, primarily
determined by the relationship of the object to the outside. Alternatively, if we
consider the roof – the predominantly horizontal component of the flat-horizontal
envelope – the most critical determinations are primarily environmental and
atmospheric performances.19

Due to the volume of air they contain, flat-horizontal envelopes are crucially
determined by environmental constraints: the potential of the roof design to provide
daylight, solar shading and enhance natural ventilation are critical concerns that will
gain importance in the near future as energy becomes a costly commodity. Retail
malls, a particular case of this typology, are generally designed as sealed envelopes
where interior and exterior are strictly detached environmentally. On the other hand,
trade fair halls, stations and airport terminals are often designed as permeable skins,
capable of filtering daylight, enhancing natural ventilation and opening views
between inside and outside. We can therefore identify two divergent lineages in the
evolution of this typology: the first toward a privatized and artificially controlled
environment and a sterilized atmosphere; the second toward a more gradual integration
of nature and public space within the building. The fact that retail malls are privately
owned while transport infrastructure and trade complexes are usually run by public
bodies may be the reason for this divergent evolution of this type, beyond the
functional specificities.

The global economy has triggered some processes that affect the evolution
of these typologies very directly. As public infrastructures become increasingly
procured by the private sector, and the private sector becomes increasingly concerned
with the public nature of retail developments, the degree of engagement between
the flat-horizontal envelopes and the surrounding urban fabric intensifies. As flat-
horizontal envelopes keep getting larger to provide for a burgeoning urban population
and the consequent growth of consumers, goods and transient populations, an
interesting dynamic powered by the contradiction between permeability and
energy-efficiency emerges.

As energy concerns grow, the incorporation of passive technologies such as
daylight provision and natural ventilation is quickly entering the mainstream: sealed

Stansted Airport, Uttlesford, UK.
Foster + Partners

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20 ‘Political ecology’ is the term Bruno
Latour proposes to describe an anti-
fundamentalist politics of nature in an
attempt to overcome traditional
distinctions between nature and society,
subject and object as well as human and
non-human. Bruno Latour, Politics of
Nature.

21 See interview with Bjarke Ingels in
Volume n. 13 (2007): 48-51.

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envelopes are no longer the default solution as a more gradual engagement with the
surrounding atmosphere is proving to be more sustainable. While compactness is
one of the most energy-efficient qualities of an envelope, the edge surface and the
roof may be able to enhance the relationship between the internal and the external
environments – both as a climatic device and as a physical and visual boundary.
The material and geometrical configuration of the edge is crucial to the articulation
inside and outside: insets of the footprint or corrugations of the vertical surface and
the use of permeable materials may contribute to enhancing osmosis between the
contained program and its surroundings.

The problem of inserting a large shed into an urban fabric is well known.
The lack of active frontages turns flat-horizontal envelopes into large-scale obstacles
to urban flows, sterilizing their surroundings with a usually forbidding edge. Stadia,
stations, retail malls, trade halls and factories are all structures primarily driven by
the necessity of roofing over a large area and tend to present a very low level of environ –
mental engagement, as these containers do not usually contain activities with a strong
interface with the outside. A classical solution to this problem is to wrap them with
complementary programs capable of producing active frontages.

One of the specificities of this envelope type is a very high ratio of solar exposure
per square meter of covered floor plate which makes the roof features crucial to the
environmental performance of the building. The flat-horizontal envelope’s roof
produces an extended horizontal limit that provides shelter from temperature, rain
and excessive solar exposure, but is also required to allow daylight and ventilation
into the enclosed volume. Due to its waterproofing functions, the horizontal limit
of building envelopes was traditionally rather definitive, but as the envelope becomes
more extensive, a certain degree of opening is necessary to allow for ventilation and
daylight unless an entirely artificial environment is implemented.

One of the most interesting concerns of the flat-horizontal envelope is whether
its relationship with nature is one of exclusion or inclusion, and furthermore, what
sorts of natures this relationship implies. The flat-horizontal envelope usually engulfs
nature in an idealized form, as all those bamboo gardens and water features in air ports
and convention centers demonstrate. The proliferation of biospheres and bio topes
as part of this envelope typology resonates with Latour’s proposal of a political ecology
based on the multiplicity of natures, as an opportunity to challenge mononaturalism.20

The possibility of a manipulation and eventual reformulation of the ground is
an alternative challenge to the idealized version of nature that is frequently deployed
in these projects and that usually excludes political considerations from its conception.
Yet these opportunities are often misspent. The technologies of the flat-horizontal
envelope roof can be effectively used to produce the rearrangement of daylight,
airflow and solar intake for the production of a specific atmosphere without having
to resort to the radical detachment of interior from exterior. Could interior gardens
be used to reduce carbon dioxide inside the building in order to minimize the air
renewal cycle, and therefore the heating loads in winter? Can vegetation act as a hu mid –
ifier helping to cool the air in the summer? Is nature an ideal notion to be represented
inside these large envelopes, or is it an integral part of the building systems?

On the other end of the spectrum of possibilities, the roof of the flat-vertical
envelope can operate simply as a new datum: an artificial ground which does not
engage in atmospheric continuities, but challenges a uniform concept of nature and
alters a politically loaded architectural element. The treatment of large-scale roofs
as new natural grounds seems to have become a default solution for buildings today
as green credentials and organic features have become a favorite with both politicians
and urban activists.21 The success of a certain infrastructural approach to archi tec –
ture in recent years suggests a similar process of multinaturalization of the human
environment.

The use of large flat-horizontal envelopes as grounds, often employed in land –
scape design, can be found across a variety of programs and locations. The COEX
Center in Seoul, the Suntec City Mall in Singapore and the West Kowloon Mall
in Hong Kong are examples where retail facilities act as connective tissue to a large
urban complex, forming a socle or ground onto which other parts of the program
are placed. The sort of nature that is constructed on these artificial grounds is often
an idealized one rather than an exploration of potential interferences between nature
and the artificiality of its physical support.

Digging the program underground or generating multiple grounds through
bifurcation avoids the disruption that flat-horizontal envelopes may produce within
the urban fabric by blocking arteries and destroying active frontages. If in the modernist
ideal the democratization of the ground was produced through its reproduction
(the Maison Domino or the elevated walkways built in the 1960s as a solution to the
intersection between pedestrian and vehicular traffic), these new strategies of urban

Roof as atmosphere-inducer: Southern
Cross Station, Melbourne, Australia.
Grimshaw Architects.

Roof as ground-infrastructure: Namba
Parks, Osaka, Japan. Jerde Partnership.

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ground bifurcation are usually attached to active frontages on several levels and
incorporate a very high density of program, particularly retail. The advantage of this
type of intensified ground is that it produces a series of gradations between natural
and artificial capable of adjusting to the intensity of the urban field they are serving.22

Generally the requirement to make the roof more permeable to light and air
implies a lower capacity to work as a ground, as a physical infrastructure. The question
for flat envelope roofs is then whether the natural – or rather, what natural – lies
below or above the envelope. Does the design attempt to produce an atmosphere by
reducing artificial lighting, moderating the temperature variation and inducing
natural ventilation? Or is the purpose to act as a ground by increasing thermal mass
and insulation, retaining storm-water and absorbing carbon dioxide with vegetation?
Once the flat horizontal envelope has ceased to act as insulation between the natural
and the artificial, it will develop entirely different mechanisms to qualify either
as an atmosphere-inducer or as a ground-infrastructure. In order to produce a more
gradual determination of the atmosphere, we will find unitized roofs built from a
base unit resulting from the intersection between structural solutions, drainage
paths, daylight provision and natural ventilation. Stansted Airport is a particularly
interesting example of the modular construction of an atmosphere, integrating all
environmental control systems in a base unit that builds the whole by repetition.

As carbon footprints and energy prices become key subjects of global geo politics,
energy consumption and carbon dioxide emissions will become crucial political
performances of a building. Building technologies can substantially improve these
performances by increasing the insulation capacity and thermal mass of the envelope,
but energy consumption is primarily a geometrical problem, a function of compact –
ness: the less external façade a building has, the easier it becomes to maintain its
internal temperature.23

Technically, the limits of a large-scale envelope derive from the provision of
daylight and fresh air, but there is already an arsenal of systems to solve this problem
without having to resort to energy-intensive artificial lighting and air conditioning:
mechanically oriented mirrors bring daylight deep into the space, water jets and
wind turbines produce adiabatic cooling and atria can be strategically distributed to
produce natural ventilation through stack effects. The capacity to enclose and
manage vast volumes of air and produce energy-efficient artificial atmospheres
capable of minimizing the consumption of natural resources crucially depends on
the capacity of the envelope to regulate flows of solar radiation, air, water, people,
vehicles, etc.

Sloterdijk’s ‘politics of climatization’24 points to a process in which growing
sectors of urban space are given to private agents to develop and maintain: gardeners,
event managers and private security agents are part of the design of these atmos –
pheres. Koolhaas’ junkspace25 is another description of the same phenomenon of
sanitization of ever-larger areas of the city, providing a safe –environment, assuming
we are prepared to surrender police duties to private security services. Norman Foster
has just announced Crystal Island,26 a project in Moscow that will contain 2.5 million
square meters under a single envelope, the world’s biggest building, approximately
five times the size of the Pentagon building. The project is described as an example
of sustainability, able to improve the environmental performance of the building by
swallowing ever larger areas of the city under a single envelope designed to enhance
natural ventilation and daylight.

Whatever contempt we may feel for the junkspace megastructures and other
social uteri, they have an undeniable popular appeal and their energy performance
is quickly improving and may eventually surpass the conventional city fabric where
the requirements for natural ventilation and daylight force the adoption of a smaller
envelope texture with a much higher envelope ratio. The question is whether the
environmental achievements of Crystal Island and the refinement of its skin devices
to allow for atmospheric gradations across the surface will be sufficient to guarantee
an adequate political performance. The political dangers of the scale of the flat-
horizontal envelopes lie in the scale of space they regulate: the fundamental difference
between, say, Yona Friedman’s Ville Spatiale and the Mall of America is that the
first is not an envelope but primarily a frame, while the second is a container with a
thoroughly sealed and dressed envelope. Because of its smaller grain, traditional city
fabrics were perhaps better adapted to intensifying a social mix and the coexistence
of diverse population groups in a space. The only way to ensure that the skin of flat-
horizontal envelopes does not create a radical split between those who are included –
let’s say shoppers with a certain acquisitive power – and those who are excluded is
to devise equally sophisticated mechanisms of permeability across the skin. And the
larger the envelope becomes, the more sophisticated the interface has to be to guarantee
an appropriate level of mix in the population of the envelope. The transparency of

22 Some examples of this strategy of public
space bifurcation on two or more levels
can be found in projects by the Jerde
Partnership, for example in the Beurs –
traverse in Rotterdam, Namba Park in
Osaka and Kanyon in Istanbul.

23 This is something that Buckminster Fuller
identified some time ago. His proposal of
a giant dome over Manhattan in Operating
Manual For Spaceship Earth (New York:
E.P. Dutton, 1971) was a ground breaking
proposal in the development of atmo s –
phere design.

24 Peter Sloterdijk, ESFERAS III.

25 See ‘Junkspace’ in AMO-OMA/Rem
Koolhaas et al, Content (Köln: Taschen,
2004), 152-161.

26 ‘Enclosed within a vast mega structure
covering a total floor area of 2.5 million
square meters – the project’s scale is
unprecedented. Conceived as a self-
contained city within a city, it contains a
rich mix of buildings including museums,
theatres and cinemas, to ensure that it
is a major new destination for the whole
of Moscow’. ‘Crystal Island will have a
range of cultural, exhibition and per –
formance facilities, approximately 3000
hotel rooms and 900 serviced apartments,
as well as offices and shops, designed to
maintain a dynamic and animated public
realm throughout the day. Residents are
able to work and live within a densely
planned area where every amenity is
within easy walking distance, including
an international school for 500 students.
Mixed-use also presents a strong case for
energy balance, with individual com –
ponents using energy at different times,
while reinforcing the breadth of economic
and social activity of the area’. ‘This
terracing creates a series of wintergardens,
which form a breathable second layer and
thermal buffer for the main building,
shielding the interior spaces from
Moscow’s extreme summer and winter
climates. A vertical louver system sheaths
the internal facades to ensure privacy for
the individual apartments’. ‘Dynamic
enclosure panels slotted into the struc –
tural framing allow daylight to penetrate
deep into the heart of the scheme and can
be controlled to modify the internal
environment – closed in winter for extra
warmth and opened in summer to allow
natural ventilation. Energy management
is at the heart of the design, with additional
strategies to include on-site renewable
and low-carbon energy generation’.
From Foster + Partners website,
www.fosterandpartners.com.

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the membrane, the projection of an image of exclusivity or accessibility and adjust –
ment to the surrounding urban fabric are devices that can be used – in addition to
the security policies27 – to enhance the mix. The politics of climate offer the possibility
for environmental technologies to disrupt the logic of the controlled envelope. Just
as the air conditioner enabled large areas of horizontal space to be enclosed, the sealed
envelope is in turn superseded by open, permeable horizontal spaces whose openness
is justified on environmental grounds – for example in the Masdar project from
Foster and Partners in Abu Dhabi. The eco imperative becomes a means to break
down the impermeability of membranes and to intensify contact between populations.

An interesting case study to analyze in this respect, particularly significant
for the relationship between large-scale flat-horizontal envelopes and urban fabrics,
is the retail developments done in second tier cities in the UK in the last ten years.
This process started in 1996 with the Sequential Test, a planning policy issued by
John Gummer, the Conservative Secretary of State for the Environment, which gave
priority to mix-use development and inner-city sites over out-of-town locations
as a response to failing city centers and the failed strategy of privatizing the urban
regeneration processes. Urban centers in Britain had reached levels of substantial
degradation in the mid-1990s and the Sequential Test was designed to entice the
private sector to invest in inner-city sites by making the price of inner-city property
so low that moving retail to the suburbs, as in the American model and promoted
in the UK by early Thatcher policies, reached its extreme in the completion of the
Bluewater mall and no longer made sense. Inner-city locations came together with
infrastructure and catchment population. This policy has resulted in large sectors of
the city centers of Birmingham, Bristol, Liverpool, Leeds, Leicester, Manchester,
Sheffield and Southampton being bought up and redeveloped by private developers
while being closely monitored by intense public scrutiny. This process has unfolded
through the New Labour tenure which promoted these developments as strategically
vital to the survival of city centers, triggering a shift in the orientation of UK retail
development and planning in the late 1990s toward a focus on urban regeneration.
A beefed-up public planning infrastructure was put in place by the Labour Govern –
ment to continue what John Gummer had already started during the conservative
governments; The Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment (CABE)
and the Urban Task Force were set up in order to promote denser urban cores and
an ‘urban renaissance’. City councils pioneered the link between retail and urban
regeneration as a central component of a strategy focused on the development and
promotion of urban cores. In turn, the notion of such a ‘place building’ – which has
been at the heart of New Labor’s urban policy agenda – has become entwined in
current revisions of retail planning policy.

The resulting struggle between old urban structures and the junkspace invaders
is certainly being played out on the domain of the envelope and performed as a
negotiation between developers, who want to swallow as much space as possible
within their complexes, and urban planners, who want to keep as much permeability
as possible throughout these complexes and extend the city fabric through them,
producing active frontages and intensifying permeability. The final form becomes
a hybrid between the existing urban fabric and the diagram of a suburban retail
massing. The question is whether this is actually a regeneration of the urban centers,
as New Labour claims, or whether it is the takeover of the inner cities by a sort of
alien organization with air-conditioning and private security. In effect, the process
denotes politics played out around the concept of the envelope: the urban fabric
may be understood as a single envelope pitched against the envelope of the retail
mall. As with the example of climatization, it seems that the description of the politics
of each condition can be expanded through a dialectical conception: the urban core
versus the suburban envelope. The envelope as a concept becomes a way to politicize
all typologies (new and old) and represent in any given example the intersection of
technology, social values, environmental or security performances and human con –
stituencies: a vehicle for the discipline to define political, social and cultural terms.

The possible outcomes of this gradation range from the small grain of the
traditional urban envelopes, proposed by the New Urbanists and Prince Charles,
to the omnivorous envelope of Crystal Island. In the first model, the envelope coin –
cides with the demarcation of public and private spheres. There are clearly delimited
responsibilities for public and private agents in policing, maintaining, cleaning and
controlling the environment with a clear division between the public and the private
at the envelope line. The second model requires a more complex political structure
in which a single operator – in the case of the British inner-city retail complexes, a
private one – is capable of ensuring the maintenance of a piece of the city, including
both private and public areas. One could argue that the privatization of the public
realm by the retail sector on a planetary scale is a politically corrupt urban strategy

Crystal Island, Moscow, Russia.
Foster + Partners

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birthplace of the ‘chavs’ – a teenager
movement in the UK characterized by
wearing sports clothing with hoods and
gold jewelry and a cult of consumerism,
drug abuse, anti-social behavior and life
on benefits – forbade entrance to indi vi –
duals sporting hooded sweatshirts or base –
ball caps. The policy allegedly increased
the number of visitors to the center some
20%. Bluewater Shopping Centre, the
largest mall in the UK, has been identified
also as a major target of radical Islamic
groups.

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in which large sectors of public space are given to profit-seeking operators. Yet as
energy become a scarce resource, we may reach a threshold where minimizing the
building envelope may strongly favor the process of hybridization between the
public and the private spheres. The New Urbanist development of Seaside and the
new town of Poundbury, despite keeping a strict consistency between the envelope
that separates public and private and inside and outside, are hardly examples of open
public spaces. Whether the commercialization of the public realm is the inevitable
outcome and whether the management of such operations should be left in private
hands are different matters. But as environmental technologies make these struc tures
more energy efficient and regulations strive toward energy efficient, high density
urban development, there is no reason why those spaces may not eventually revert
to public ownership and management.28

To exactly what degree architecture can effect social integration, the redistri –
bution of wealth and the maintenance of social mobility is difficult to determine.
But without reducing the political potentials of the building envelope to a question
of energy efficiency and resource usage, it is clear that architecture can have decisive
environmental effects. Buildings account for 48% of carbon emissions and over
60% of energy consumption. Carbon emissions will be a crucial geopolitical issue
that will have to be globally managed to avoid a few economies causing global damages
to the ecosystem. A global carbon footprint map shows the relationship between
wealth, carbon emissions and the consumption of energy resources: wealthier states
are ‘invading’ the poorer ones by exceeding their carbon footprint. Energy prices,
rising quickly due to the massive increase of the middle class in emerging economies,
are dramatically affecting the global economy. Fossil fuel energy sources, concen –
trated in selected areas of the globe, are a major source of geopolitical strife. When
a building substantially reduces its energy consumption, it contributes to defusing
global tension. In using renewable energy sources, a building reduces energy
dependence and mitigates global warming. In order to do this it needs to engage
local climatology and resources.

The engagement with ecological concerns is contemporary architecture’s most
direct path to political effect, and this performance largely depends on the envelope’s
design. A political ecology enables architecture to regain an active political role and
overcome the division between nature and politics. The design of flat-horizontal
envelopes can play a decisive role here by ensuring a gradated transition rather than
a boundary of exclusion, both environmentally and socially, and producing a
multiple concept of nature.

Retail development as urban regen –
eration: The Bullring, Birmingham, UK,
showing Future Systems’ Selfridges.

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Jersey passed judgment on a sentence
against J.M.B. Realty Corporation, the
owner of several suburban shopping malls
in New Jersey in favor of the New Jersey
Coalition Against War in the Middle East
who had demanded the right to demon –
strate and hand out pamphlets against
the first Iraq War in several malls owned
by the plaintiff, arguing that the malls are
effectively public space, despite private
ownership. This decision demonstrates
the legal status of retail compounds as
public. See New Jersey Coalition Against
War in the Middle East v. J.M.B. Realty
Corporation. Supreme Court of New
Jersey, 1994.138 N.J. 326, 650 A.2d 757.

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X≈Y≈Z. Spherical Envelopes. Relaxed Fit.

The spherical envelope’s dimensions are approximately equivalent to each other;
cubic, spheroidal and polygonal geometries are also particular cases of this typology.
In principle, the spherical envelope has the lowest ratio between its surface and
the volume contained within. The specificity of this type is precisely the relative
independence that the skin acquires in relation to its programmatic determinations,
as function is not usually determined by proximity to the outside and therefore by
the form of the envelope. This often implies a wider variety of programs inside, each
with different environmental requirements. Spherical envelopes generally enclose
a wide range of spatial types with specific functions, rather than being determined
by the provision of a repetitive spatial condition, as in residential or commercial
projects. Unlike other envelope types in which the border between public and private
occurs on the surface of the container, the spherical type often contains gradients
of publicness within. Spherical envelopes often correspond to public buildings,
buildings that gather a multiplicity of spaces rather than a repetitive type of space:
city halls, court houses, libraries, museums, indoor sports facilities, etc.

Because of the low strength of attachment between surface and contained space,
the design of the spherical envelope focuses on the surface itself. While in other
envelope typologies the massing of the container is more directly driven by the func –
tional determinations of the programmatic grain – for example the depth of a
cellular office or of a bedroom – the spherical envelope usually contains a community
of diverse functions. The spherical envelope – like the flat-horizontal type – has been
decisively affected by the evolution of building technologies, because of its low surface
to volume ratio. The availability of air-conditioning systems and the devel op ment of
curtain-wall technology have made fenestration optional as an envelope system and
released the structural constraints, enabling tilts, curves and bends in the envelope’s
surface. The continuity between the roof and the wall – an improbable trait in con –
ventional building – has been made easy by the incorporation of plastics into the con –
struction industry, eliminating the cornice line as a necessary articulation; the corner,
a singularity derived from construction geometries and property alignments, is also
weakening as the limits between private and public fade and the structure of ground
ownership becomes challenged by contemporary urban development instruments…

Political expression and identity are particularly important in the dynamics of
the envelope as regulators of exchanges between inside and outside. The fenestration
pattern in a building’s façade has psychological and symbolic connotations and has
been historically attached to political representations. The symmetry and asymmetry
as well as the regularity and irregularity of the fenestration have long been associated
with political concepts such as order and freedom, equality, diversity and trans parency.
For example, the fenêtre en longueur was an index of the lack of compart men tali –
zation and internal freedom associated with the plan libre. Herman Hertzberger used
to joke that in his student years, left-wing architects were those who used horizontal
windows, while right-wing architects had a clear preference for vertical windows.
The correlation between the patterns of fenestration and those of inhabitation, and
the coincidence or divergence of physical, visual, thermal and atmospheric trans –
parencies across the envelope membrane are acquiring a new relevance through
currently developing environmental and security concerns.

But, beyond the emerging technological possibilities there is also a whole new
politics of faciality at play affecting the envelope as the locus of political expression.
The emergence of new political forms runs in parallel to the development of envelopes
that resist primitive models of faciality. As swing voters become the most crucial
electorate and political tactics move away from party-line ideologies and political
rhetoric, favoring instead sub-political mechanisms such as trends, movements and
other affect-driven political forms,29 we are witnessing the proliferation of modes of
faciality that can no longer be structured by the oppositions between front and back,
private and public, or roof and wall. Once cornices, corners and windows are no
longer technically necessary and the private and public are tangled in an increasingly
complex relationship, the hierarchies of their interface become more complex: the
building envelope must adopt more complex reference systems to become a field
of intersection between identity, security and environmental performances. From
Seattle to London to Beijing, the faciality of the envelope has proliferated to such
a degree that the pattern of construction joints seems to have become the new scale
of articulation. This is most visible in the spherical envelope because of its association
with public building typologies and because of its low envelope ratio. The spherical
envelope features the lowest level of environmental constraints and the highest levels
of representational demands.

The classical approach to the envelope as a vehicle of expression and
identity was to use a conventional architectural language inscribed on the surface.

Seattle Public Library, Seattle, US.
Office for Metropolitan Architecture

29 As Nigel Thrift has pointedly noted,
contemporary politics are progressively
less reliant on representation and pro –
position and more dependent on the
production of affects. See Thrift, Non-
Representational Theory. Space, Politics,
Affect (London: Routledge, 2007).

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Eighteenth-century French academic theory held that the façade of a building
should reflect its program and purpose, a doctrine that was adopted by the modern
movement and that dismissed the classical tradition according to which the façade
represented the building allegorically as a signifier that located the building within a
hierarchy of socio-political meaning. Instead, the façade was seen as the logical result
of the program – not as its representation. The architecture of the Enlightenment
still referred back to classical architectural languages as a sort of revival of Greek demo –
cracy, but simultaneously grounded itself on modularity and a rigid metrics of space
as organizing principles representing the egalitarian values of the Saint-Simonian
ideal democracy. During the modern period, the façade ceased to be an allegory
altogether, and instead became a symbol: the external surface of the building, cleansed
of any reference to stylistic convention, was now supposed to act both as an indis –
sociable part of the whole building and as a symbol of modernity.30 Faciality had
entered a crisis, and the envelope was directed toward the maximum degree of trans –
parency, literal or phenomenal.31 The question became how this transparency should
be structured, because the lack of an overt allegory in the façade did not necessarily
imply the façade’s disappearance as a quasi-autonomous element capable of repre –
senting a building’s internal organization. It is undeniable that façades are still designed
to communicate, although in an uncoded mode, unlike in pre-modernist practices.

If the political history of the 20th century could be interpreted as the exploration
of public freedoms in respect to the normative basis of democracy, the development of
the building envelope could be partially described in parallel terms. The modern
movement was invested in making the façade disappear, merging it into an organic
whole in which the external surface of a building would become a mere by-product
of either its programmatic organization or its constructive technology. As Alan
Colquhoun has described, these investigations follow two primary lineages: an
evolutionary, technical and aesthetic approach shared by the Esprit Nouveau and
Neue Sachlichkeit movements of the mid 1920s, and a more ideologically charged
approach represented by Expressionism, Futurism, De Stijl and Constructivism, in
which the building is considered transparent and fluid rather than divided into rigid
compartments or bound by solid walls. This fluidity has an ethical component,
as spatial boundaries are seen as symbols of social oppression to be avoided in a non –
hierarchical, democratic society.32 And yet, faciality could not entirely disappear:
in Chandigarh, Le Corbusier strove to synthesize the figures of function by literally
removing the façade plane while producing an element, the brise-soleil, supposedly
designed to reduce solar heat gain, but truly devised to compensate for the loss of
structural expression in the modern curtain-wall, providing an opportunity for the
façade to retrieve some of the plastic interest and representational potential it had
lost with the removal of the classical orders. In Ahmedabad, Louis Kahn expanded
this idea of transparency into a potent faciality by exposing the spatial structures
and programmatic units in the building. Yet even if an identity grounded in
faciality was in crisis, the concept of modularity, reinforced by the idea of industrial
production, remained solidly in place as a symbol of a democratic and egalitarian
society. Mies van der Rohe targeted another form of transparency and faciality
by revealing the load-bearing structure and the fabrication of the envelope as its
primary expression.

As the modernist world order collapsed at the onset of globalization at the end
of the 1960s, faciality was rehabilitated and legitimized. The post-modern period
reinstated the relevance of the envelope as a representational mechanism, taking
advantage of new building technologies to create plastic effects alienated from their
contexts, in correspondence with the prevailing capitalist ideology of individualism
and the spectacle. This architecture implied a future urbanism that differed as much
from the traditional city as from the utopian cities of the 1920s, as well as from the
models advanced by the critics of utopianism in the 1950s. Architects like Venturi
attempted to redeploy language and allegory, even in an ironic mode, as a legitimate
component of envelope design in the age of rootless and spectacular capitalism.

As language becomes politically ineffective in the wake of globalization, and the
traditional articulations of the building envelope become technically redundant, the
envelope’s own physicality, its fabrication and materiality, attract representational
roles. Globalization has on the one hand neutralized the effectiveness of architectural
language, propelling the iconic and symbolic as communicative devices while
increasing the demands for the envelope’s capacity for insulation and immunization
as a technical problem. As the envelope type that comprises most public building
typologies, the spherical suffers from a particularly intense conflict arising from the
demand to provide a consistent identity for the community and the demand to
insulate and immunize, environmentally and security-wise, against an increasingly
abrasive global atmosphere.

30 See Alan Colquhoun, ‘The Façade in Its
Modern Variants’ Werk, Bauen + Wohnen
n. 12 (2005): 12-19.

31 Colin Rowe, ‘Transparency: Literal and
Phenomenal’ in The Mathematics of the
Ideal Villa and Other Essays (Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press, 1976).

32 ‘The history of the façade between 1910
and the 1960s exhibits two partly parallel
and partly sequential tendencies. The first
tendency is the impulse to destroy the
façade as such. The building should not
be considered as consisting of plan and
elevation but as an organic whole in which
the external surface of a building is a by-
product of its internal organization. The
building is thought of as transparent and
fluid, and should not be divided into
rigid compartments or bounded by solid
walls. This fluidity also has an ethical
component. It symbolizes a non-
hierarchical democratic society. Spatial
boundaries are symptoms of social op –
pres sion. This tendency has an “idealist”
and a “materialist” side deriving on the
one hand from Rousseau and German
idealism and, on the other from Marxism.
In terms of architectural history, this
ideo logy belongs to the first pre-war
phase of modernism. It is represented by
Expressionism and Futurism, but
continues with De Stijl, Constructivism
and the avant-garde magazine ABC.
Beiträge zum Bauen after WWI, still with
contradictory idealist and materialist
connotations. The second tendency is less
philosophically radical. It sees the façade
in evolutionary, technical, and aesthetic
(rather than ethical) terms. This view was
shared by the Esprit Nouveau and Neue
Sachlichkeit movements of the mid 1920s.
The façade is not abolished but con tinued
“by other means”‘. Alan Colquhoun,
‘The Façade in Its Modern Variants’.

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The design of spherical envelopes has consequently focused recently on the

construction of the surface itself, both as an environmental and security device and
as the locus of symbolic representation. We can observe the proliferation of spherical
envelopes tending toward a multi-directional, differential faciality, which resists
traditional protocols in which representational mechanisms can be precisely oriented
and structured. Nouvel’s unbuilt, yet influential Tokyo Opera, Gehry’s Guggenheim
Museum, Future Systems’ Selfridges Department Store, OMA’s Seattle Public
Library and Casa da Musica and Herzog & de Meuron’s Prada Tokyo are notable
examples of these tendencies. This differential faciality is often achieved by dissolving
the envelope’s articulations as in Foster’s Swiss-Re building in London in which
the cladding system is extended to the top of the building. There is no crowning or
cornice line in this building, the closest element being a floating rail for the cleaning
cradle hanging toward the top of the building. The pediment is missing and the
form narrows toward the bottom producing an effect of instability. Freed from the
technical constraints that previously required cornices, pediments, corners and
fenestration, the articulation of the spherical envelope has become increasingly
contingent and indeterminate. OMA’s Seattle Public Library or Gehry’s Los Angeles
Disney Hall are also notable examples of this challenge to the conventional faciality
of public buildings. The demise of the primitive figures of building faciality – the
white wall/black hole system in Deleuzian terms33 – has found resonance in the avail –
ability of certain technical possibilities (such as printing technology and CAM manu –
facturing) which have enabled architects to play not only with tessellation geometries
and material textures, but with a wide repertory of layers that may some times play
an ornamental role, but also perform technical functions such as solar shading and
visual obstruction. The decoupling of the patterns of visual, thermal and atmospheric
permeability has opened unprecedented possibilities of multiple faciali zation of the
envelope by dissolving or intensifying the joints at will through the phasing and de-
phasing of these layers, for example in Herzog & de Meuron’s Eberswalde Library
or Ricola Factory. The conventional figures of building faciality have been replaced
by a more nuanced interfacial embodiment in which different layers of performance
are played out against each other to produce a far larger range of effects.

The current appetite for the envelope as a device of insulation and immunization,
as well as the devaluation of language as a means of architectural expression, has
shifted the envelope away from language and signification toward a differential
faciality in which the materiality and tessellation of the surface have become critical
design mechanisms mediating between simultaneous demands for iconicity and
immunization. The geometry of the tiles, their degree and variation, as well as
the pattern and nature of joints, have assumed the task of architectural expression.
As the articulation of the volume becomes infinitely pliable, it is the construction
of the envelope that is charged with architectural, social and political expression.

The general tendency toward the reinforcement of the envelope’s air-tightness
is played out in the joint pattern and modulation rather than the fenestration structure.
The emergence of polygonal tessellations as a contemporary tendency in envelope
design – for example PTM’s Beijing Watercube – may be related to the bubble
geometries of differential faciality, but it is also an index of a contemporary desire for
insulation. The construction of bubble envelopes is made possible by polygonal
geometries which may also reduce joint length: polygonal tessellations have smaller
joint length per surface unit than rectangular grids. Gehry’s fish-like skins are another
index of this tendency aimed at the erasure of the hierarchical faciality and modular
joint grid that characterize standard curtain-wall cladding systems. In doing so they
may be also exploring the expression of a sort of politics that move away from the
ideal, modular democratic organization based on indifference, independence and
interchangeability. If modularity was typically a quality of a democratic system that
prioritizes the part over the whole, some of the emerging envelope geometries seem
to be exploring modular differentiation as a political effect.34

This explosion of the spherical envelope’s faciality tends to produce an air-tight,
seamless material texture in which the consistency between the surface tessellation
and the geometry of the envelope and its singularities – folds, edges – has interesting
political resonances: is the pattern of the envelope consistent with its frame, with the
geometry of the envelope? This is a difficult consistency to produce once we move
away from the geometries based on flat vertical surfaces that have constituted the
core of traditional faciality. For example, OMA’s Seattle Public Library is remarkably
oblivious to the articulation between the tiling of the faces and the overall geometry,
particularly visible at the edges of the volume. In contrast, Herzog & de Meuron’s
Prada Tokyo exploits this consistency and extends it even to the section of the building
which is in a way a reversal of the modernist ambition of transparency, enacted
from the pattern of the envelope toward the internal volume. Is it possible to remain

Prada Aoyama, Tokyo, Japan.
Herzog & de Meuron

33 See ‘Year Zero: Faciality’ in Gilles
Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand
Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 1987).

34 John G. Blair observes that when the word
module first emerged in the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries, it meant something
very close to model. It implied a small-
scale representation or example. By the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries
the word had come to imply a standard
measure of fixed ratios and proportions.
‘A modular system is one that gives more
importance to parts than to wholes. Parts
are conceived as equivalent and hence,
in one or more senses, interchangeable
and/or cumulative and/or recombinable’.
Blair, Modular America: Cross-Cultural
Perspectives on the Emergence of an American
Way (New York: Greenwood Press, 1988).

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transparent in the age of spectacular capitalism and immunization? Prada Tokyo,
a paradigmatic building of this condition built for a super-brand that requires a
certain level of exclusivity – and perhaps of exclusion and atmospheric insulation –
developed a contemporary form of transparency that is one of the most interesting
attempts to address the contemporary demands placed on the envelope.

As transparency has proven a politically naïve tactic within global capitalism,
where the design of an adequate public interface requires detachment between
expression and building efficiencies, while growing security and environmental
concerns legitimize the consistency of the envelope, faciality is being deployed with –
out apologies. Yet this renewed self-consciousness is now embedded in the physicality
of the skin, pervading the materiality of the construction itself. Given language’s
devaluation as a means of expression and representation within global capitalism,
the contemporary envelope – the primary depository of contemporary architectural
expression – is now invested in the production of affects, an uncoded, pre-linguistic
form of identity that transcends the propositional logic of political rhetorics. These
rely on the material organization of the membrane, where the articulation between
the parts and the whole is not only a result of technical constraints but also a resonance
with the articulation between the individual and the collective, and therefore a
mechanism of political expression.

In Sennett’s definition of associative democracy, Latour’s Actor-Network Theory
and Sloterdijk’s foams the articulation between individual and society, part and
whole, is drawn by influences and attachments across positions, agencies and scales
that transcend both the individuality of the part and the integrity of the whole.
The emerging social structures theorized by De Landa, using Deleuze‘s theory of
assemblages, to posit trans-scalar social entities from sub-individual to transnational
that characterize globalized societies and their heterogeneous populations are coin ci –
dent descriptions of emerging forms of social and political organization that cannot
be expressed by modular grids.35 Assemblages are non-essentialist, historically con –
tingent actual entities (not instances of ideal forms) and non-totalizing (not seamless
totalities but collections of heterogeneous components). In these emerging social
assemblages, individuals, groups and other possible actants are primarily defined by
relations of exteriority and need to engage with different assemblages without losing
their identity. The relationship between an assemblage and its components is complex
and non-linear: assemblages are formed and affected by heterogeneous populations
of lower-level assemblages, but may also act back upon these components, imposing
restraints or adaptations in them.

The modular grid, indifferent to the relative weight of individuals or politically
active subgroups, very much embodies the ideals of democratic equality and liberal
individualism. It demonstrates a preference for non-hierarchical organizations and
other ideal notions of democracy in which individuals are equal subjects to the will
of majority. ‘Weighted’ models of democracy – either those committed to the exercise
of civil liberties or those that are driven by a hierarchical bureaucratic regime over –
laid onto basically democratic protocols – tend to relate better to allometric modularities
or variable repetitions as traits of expression to reintroduce a collective purpose to
a modular system without resorting to primitive forms of hierarchy. Associative
democracy’s space is primarily mediated through matter rather than language as a
vehicle of representation and the envelope’s materialization and modes of faciality
are a primary subject for this tendency. The drive toward seamless differentiation
is in turn mobilizing a variety of technical alibis: whether a differentiated view or a
differential solar exposure, the envelope’s tessellation patterns are now under pressure
to produce contemporary political affects. Simple modularity gives way to a weighted
modularity that resonates with the swarm-like organizations characteristic of both
associative and weighted democracies, depending on whether they are formed bottom-
up or top-down. Two examples of spherical envelopes, Herzog & de Meuron’s
Signal Box in Basel and the Ricola Storage Building, are experiments in producing a
differentiated envelope capable of dissolving the figures of faciality into a multiple,
differentiated skin. The façade of the Dominus Winery, another Herzog & de Meuron
building, goes even further in the redefinition of a relationship between the part and
the whole in the construction of a building envelope by resorting to the contingency
of a material pattern to produce differentiation.

Within contemporary politics, power seeks to represent itself in a very different
way from how other political regimes did in the past – think of Stalinist Russia or
Fascist Italy. It is not politically correct to demonstrate power, so its manifestations
are much more ambiguous and subdued. It is fascinating to see how China is now
choosing its architectural representation as the basis of its new global might. The
Olympic Games were a huge experiment in the formation of a new national identity
and the deliberateness and precision being used in its architectural formulation is

35 Manuel De Landa, A New Philosophy
of Society: Assemblage Theory and Social
Complexity (New York: Continuum
International, 2006).

Tesselated façades: Olympic Stadium
and Aquatics Center, Beijing, China.

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breathtaking, independent of the agents and authors used to build this image. The
Olympic Stadium, the Aquatics Center and the CCTV building display a similar
massing strategy: a more or less non-articulated shape built on a huge scale. There
is no illusion of transparency or openness, rather the ambition to construct a well
defined envelope. So far, we have not strayed far from Mao, but a closer analysis of
these skins draws out the differences: the three cases have been systematically struc –
tured with a varying pattern, probably aimed to portray a culture of diversity and
collective spirit – rather than an individualistic, modular one – in spite of the gigantic
scale of the projects being implemented. These buildings speak volumes about the
regime36 and the message seems to be that they can still organize massive projects for
a huge population while being sensitive enough to integrate specificities or multiple
agencies rather than driving everything through a central command. Or, they may
be saying that communist equality cannot simply be translated into the independence
of individuals who act within the rules and that certain adjustments may apply, as
in a swarm formation. In any case, the blue suit has been dropped as inappropriate
to China’s new political identity, and the homogeneous mass of proletarian public
has been replaced by those differentiated skins carefully constructed by the authorities
for the Olympic Games.

The question is whether these differentiated facialities and tessellations of the
spherical envelope correspond simply to a strategy to reinforce the impermeability
of the building envelope as a membrane of immunity and insulation while representing
an ideally differentiated public or whether they are genuine devices to proliferate
the faciality of the envelope and allow it to relate to a much larger variety of concerns,
environmental, social, economic, etc. Also of concern is whether they inflect in
response to multiple agencies and incorporate specificities, rather than resorting to
the mere production of political affects, spectacular embodiments of the phantom
public of global capitalism.37

Because of the contemporary proliferation of agencies in contemporary politics,
it is no longer sustainable to hold to the ideological assumption that a more regular
or a more differentiated pattern, one more permeable or more closed, is better at
representing a certain society and the production of transformative effects. The political
accuracy of a certain envelope needs to be judged in respect to very concrete assem –
blages. The most interesting envelopes among the iconic Olympic projects are
probably those in which the architects have succeeded in creating a plausible alibi
for the differentiated pattern wrapped around the massive unarticulated volume of
the buildings, where a resonance between performance and affect has been achieved.
This is where a new discipline of the envelope becomes politically operative, as it is
the discipline that can act as a piece of resistance without getting caught in the negative
project of the critical tradition or in the use of architecture as a mere representation
of politics.

36 ‘“We wanted to do something not
hierarchical, to make not a big gesture as
you’d expect in a political system like
that,” de Meuron says, “but [something
that for] 100,000 people [is still] on a
human scale, without being oppressive.
It’s about disorder and order, apparent
disorder. It seems random, chaotic, but
there’s a very clear structural rationale”‘.
‘“The Chinese love to hang out in public
spaces,” Herzog adds. “The main idea
was to offer them a playground”. The
Chinese government, they say, has carried
out their wishes to the letter. They make
a distinction between creating a building
that fosters a country’s ideology – say,
Albert Speer’s work for Hitler – and one
that seeks to transform it’. Excerpts from
a conversation between Herzog & de
Meuron and Tom Dyckhoff in The
Guardian.

37 Phantom public was coined by Walter
Lippmann in his critical assessment of the
public within modern democracies as an
artificially constructed entity. This work
triggered a more optimistic reply from
John Dewey about the relations between
information and the formation of
democratic communities in what has
become a famous polemic. Walter
Lippmann, The Phantom Public
(London: Transaction Publishers, 2002).

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X≈Z>Y. Flat-Vertical Envelopes. Tight fit.
The flat-vertical envelope, better known as a ‘slab’, is a category that includes those
envelopes that have predominant dimensions parallel to gravity distributed along
a line and in which the width of the building is greater than its depth. Flat-vertical
envelopes are generated by the horizontal displacement of a section of space, which
in order to support a specific function, optimizes density, daylight, ventilation,
structural constraints and the building’s relationship with public space and infra –
structure. Land-uses and orientation are also important drivers for this type of
envelope. We can probably include within this category most mid-rise residential
and many office buildings as they respond to the need to host a large volume of
homogeneous program. The flat-vertical envelope is primarily determined by the
façade-to-façade or façade-to-core depth, hence its laminar organization.

Modern urban fabrics tend to be predominantly matrices of flat-vertical
envelopes combined in various configurations and suited to a particular climate, use
and culture. For example, the façade-to-façade depth for office buildings will vary
from 12 to 36 meters (approximately 40 to 120 feet) or more. In Germany and the
Netherlands, glass-to-glass depth is limited to less than 15 meters (approximately
50 feet) in order to enhance daylight and natural ventilation. In the US’s energy-
intensive culture, the façade-to-core dimension of an office building will usually require
more than 15 meters because of a tradition of an artificially controlled working
environment and the demand for higher flexibility and compactness. In residential
buildings the façade-to-façade depth will vary between 9 and 24 meters (approximately
30 to 80 feet) depending also on the access system (double loaded or single loaded
corridors) – which is also determined by cultural uses – and residential typology
(double or single aspect).

The flat-vertical envelope characterizes the modern city where optimized
functional performances have prevailed over the cumulative structure of natural
topography, property boundaries, territorial limits and community thresholds and
float in the resulting tabula rasa. Functionally driven flat-vertical envelopes eman ci –
pate from the traditional urban fabrics at the point where internal forces – daylight,
ventilation, structure – override the property boundaries and divisions between
public and private. In modern housing typologies, where we can find some of the
most illustrative examples of flat-vertical envelopes, orientation, ventilation, salub –
riousness, constructive rationality, etc., have taken priority over traditional deter –
minations of the urban fabric such as the alignment to the property boundary and
the definition of private and public spheres.

Historically, from Durand to Khrushchev, the flat-vertical envelope has often
been associated with political programs and the desire for a new society free from
natural and historical constraints and governed by healthy, egalitarian and rational laws.
It also relates to a variety of social and cultural performances involving owner ship
structures and political representation. Haussmann’s interventions in Paris deployed
flat-vertical envelopes as a wrapping for surgical incisions on the old urban fabric.
Gropius and Hilberseimer’s orthodox flat-vertical residential typologies exploited the
freedom provided by modern property structures – extensive capitalist develop ment
or state-driven residential programs – to abandon street alignment and property
boundaries and engage with climatic conditions and functional determinations.

The contradiction between the alignment with street patterns and property
boundaries – containing and defining public and private space – and the search for
an ideal orientation of the units is a classic problem of urbanism. Whether the resi –
dential units are contributing to the legibility of the community structure or to the
optimization of the units’ environmental performance, it is the physical constitution
of the envelope that plays a crucial political role.

The flat-vertical envelope opens up a gradation toward a structure of publicness
and ownership that was unavailable within more traditional urban structures. Its
position within the urban field affects structures of both representation and property
and determines the limits between open public and private spaces. The traditional
19th century bourgeois urban block, for example in Barcelona, illustrates the conflict
between the envelope’s cultural and political performance and its environmental
capacity. The flat-vertical building envelope is often deployed as a border between
communal open space (courtyards or backyards) and public open space (streets or
plazas), forming a threshold between public and private space and establishing the
faciality of the building, its significative structure within the city. The Barcelona
block – like many other 19th-century urban extensions in Europe – was achieved by
bending a flat-vertical envelope to align with a property boundary. This operation
is a legitimate disciplinary challenge: the consequent loss of daylight and ventilation
in the corner areas and the surrender of the ideal orientation of the units to the role
of structuring the border between private and public is a well documented technical

Gifu Kitagata Apartments, Gifu
Prefecture, Japan. Kazuyo Sejima
and Associates.

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problem. Each side of the envelope is treated differently: the external face focuses on
the expression of the buildings, their signification and the provision of active frontages
while the internal face is primarily driven by functional constraints of solar shading
and ventilation. Siedlungen, Höfe and Mietskasernen are additional examples of the
problematic relationship between the flat-vertical envelope’s functions as an environ –
mental membrane and as a surface upon which urban representation is inscribed.

In Le Corbusier’s City for Three Million Inhabitants the paradigm of the high-
rises in the park aimed to defuse any hierarchy of open space, erasing the presence of
the site’s property boundaries: all land is public space and there are neither frontages
nor backyards. The dramatic failure of Pruitt-Igoe, Toulouse Le-Mirail, and the
Bijlmermeer – as well as many other examples of this envelope typology applied over
urban grounds no longer affected by traditional property structures – derives from
their inability to estimate the impact on the municipal economy of maintaining
such large amounts of public space. Most importantly however, their failure can be
traced back to the absence of a faciality structure that would make these complexes
understandable: there is neither front nor back but rather a deliberate attempt to
avoid addressing the signification of the buildings and their role within the construction
of a public realm. In the most accomplished examples the envelopes are distributed
across the site seeking the best orientation for the units and the right distances
between volumes to avoid blocking the sun from each other.

As an envelope type that accounts for the majority of today’s collective urban
dwellings, the flat-vertical envelope lies at the crux not only of how the population
of the contemporary metropolis is lodged, but also how it perceives itself in relation
to the city and to the public realm. Is the contemporary city a locus of social inte –
gration or a mere device for the co-habitation of culturally diverse populations?
Is social integration necessarily achieved by the submission to a series of common
protocols and laws or is it possible to form an urban culture made of exceptions
through a public endorsement of difference? How does an increasingly differentiated
urban population respond to locally defined iconographies, environmental specificities
and lifestyle patterns? These are some of the crucial opportunities for political
performance that we can find today in the flat-vertical envelope.

The most active surfaces in the flat-vertical envelope are the vertical surfaces
where technical requirements to insulate, ventilate, light or shade collude with
representational concerns. During the first half of the 20th century, the collective
residence adopted a monumental language in order to represent the emergence of
new communities of the urban proletariat, such as in the Red Vienna Höfe or the
Stalin-era housing complexes in Moscow. By contrast, modernists sought to recover
transparency between the function and the face: the Unité d’Habitation and the
Lake Shore Drive Apartments represent two alternatives to the idea of modernist
transparency. While the Unité d’Habitation explores cellularization as a modular
system of individual units, Lake Shore Drive submits to the repetitive rationality
of industrial production, resulting in an envelope that prioritizes the unity of the
container over the identity of the units, although modularity remains. Le Corbusier
expresses the modular nature of modern culture, emphasizing the independence of
the inhabitants, while Mies expresses a new collectivism based in production through
constructive rationality. Neither needs to resort to applied languages, but to an
explicitation – Sloterdijk’s term – of the cellularization of habitations or the modularity
of the new industrialized production of collective residence.

After the post-modern revival of the envelope as a surface of inscription and
representation, we witnessed during the 1990s an attempt to use the skin of the
residential building to represent diversity and multiculturalism through a literal
embodiment of social collage. In this paradigm individuals are different and can no
longer be represented by a homogeneous, repetitive tessellation of the façade, either
by expressing cellular units or in the modular nature of the envelope’s manufacture.
Dutch architecture became the epicenter of this experimentation, capitalizing on
a local tradition of cultural tolerance and multiculturalism as well as large housing
construction programs. The Dutch case is exemplary not only because it was where
the industry was more active, but also because of a Calvinist tradition of engagement
between the residential typologies and the urban space that continues up through
Big Brother, a quintessentially Dutch invention. Dutch traditional housing has con –
sistently blurred the boundaries between the private and the public: large windows
on the ground level are supposed to be left open for the public to keep an eye on the
private activities of citizens, while the traditional Dutch front window comes with
a projecting mirror for comprehensive surveillance of the public space.

In this sense some of the work developed in the Netherlands in the 1990s indexes
an interesting position both with respect to the Dutch tradition of trans parency and
as the embodiment of the new paradigm of a global culture of individualization and

Silodam Apartments, Amsterdam,
The Netherlands. MVRDV

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38 ‘“What some minorities have to accept
is that there are certain central things we
all agree about, which are about the way
we treat each other – that we have an
attachment to democracy, that we sort
things out by voting not by violence and
intimidation, that we tolerate things that
we don’t like. Short of people menacing
and threatening each other, we have free –
dom of expression. We allow people to
offend each other’”. Trevor Phillips in The
Times, April 3rd, 2004. Phillips endeavors
to illustrate with paradigmatic precision
the complexities of contemporary cultural
politics: his statements triggered a
virulent reaction from the traditional left
which accused him of trying to kill multi –
culturalism or of being a racist. After the
demonstrations against the Muhammad
cartoons, he requested Muslims wanting
to live under Sharia law to move out of
the UK, but defended the rights of local
Imans to criticize homosexuals, locating
Britishness beyond the traditional
categories of political discourse.

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mass customization. MVRDV’s Silodam and West8’s Borneo Sporenburg in
Amsterdam are some of the most paradigmatic examples of this phenomenon. In these
projects, units are differentiated in order to provide a diversified product for a dif –
ferentiated population and the differences are intensified by color-coding them, for
example, so that the ensemble becomes a patchwork of forms and colors, a graphic
image of a multicultural, global community. The Calvinist literal transparency has
been replaced by an artificially enhanced one that intensifies difference as a cultural
statement. The idea of a fragmented, ideally diverse population brought together
under the collective umbrella of a modern, multicultural society is at the origin of
these envelope strategies. The arrangement of colors and spaces in this work may
affect people’s feelings and actions and encourage individualism as opposed to
modernist cellularization. But then again it may only encourage residents to act as
a conformist, homogenous herd united by an illusion of individualism. In the anti –
podes of the patchwork approach we have Némausus, the experimental housing
designed by Jean Nouvel in Nîmes in 1987, where a totally homogeneous system of
double-aspect, loft-like spaces is proposed under the idea that a bigger home is a
better home. The Gifu Housing by Kazuyo Sejima or the VM housing in Orestad
by PLOT are intermediate alternatives that explore different possibilities between
repetition and differentiation. Yet isn’t it consistency rather than difference that con –
temporary global communities need to build across coexisting cultures? The future
of multiculturalism and diversification in the post 9/11 age is open for consideration
and there are reasons to believe that the politics of the globalized world will be moving
toward the enforcement of sameness rather than difference as the fracturous nature
of multicultural societies becomes apparent. Europe is a particularly interesting case
in this respect: both the French ban on religious displays and the project of ‘British –
ness’ are exemplary of the overcoming of fragmentation as a viable aesthetics to
regulate contemporary politics. The French law on secularity and conspicuous religious
symbols in schools was passed by France’s parliament and came into effect on
September 2nd, 2004, at the beginning of the new school year. At approximately the
same time, Trevor Phillips, then the chairman of the Commission for Racial Equality
in the United Kingdom, stated in a controversial interview in The Times on April 3rd,
2004, that multiculturalism was outdated as it encouraged ‘separateness’ between
communities. As an antidote he called for a greater emphasis on integration stating,
‘We need to assert that there is a core of Britishness’.38 Against the naïve celebration
of the ‘United Colors’, multiple identities and their and juxtaposition in a cultural
collage, Phillips points to the necessity of applying strategies of consistency and
convergence to replace the multicultural policies of the 1970s.

The project of Britishness is remarkable because it seems to return to a pre-global
model of cultural identity: the nation. This construct requires certain values grounded
in history and the update of previous models of ‘primitive’ national identity, a series
of operative criteria aimed at establishing minimum common denominators across
diverse populations. But in order to be effective it will also require a continuous up –
date to protect its inherent historicity from potential utopian or static formulations.

An interesting debate in this respect took place at the Berlage Institute circa
1990 between Alvaro Siza and Hermann Hertzberger regarding the project that Siza
had just completed in the Schilderswijk Ward in The Hague. This was a decade
before September 11th and the murder of Theo van Gogh by a deranged Muslim
fundamentalist. Both Siza and Hertzberger were totally innocent of political con ser –
vatism: Alvaro Siza was a veteran of the Revoluçao dos Claveles and Herman
Hertzberger was known as the paladin of Montessori education. Siza explained in his
presentation that most intended residents were to be from the large Muslim com –
munity in the Netherlands and that he had devised an ingenious mechanism that
used a movable partition to enable Muslim families to split a private area within the
unit where women could hide from male visitors. After Siza’s presentation Hertzberger
replied that public housing in the Netherlands should not support social habits that
run counter to Dutch morality and its belief in gender equality. The construction
of an additional layer of concealment inside the domestic space is certainly very alien
to the local spirit of Dutch cohabitation. Was the exfoliation of the private/public
threshold to the inside of the unit a politically advanced decision, appropriate for a
tolerant, multicultural society to embrace? Or was it a sign of unacceptable political
behavior that defies the most basic definitions of human rights? Incidentally, this
building includes other features that are more agreeable to local customs such as very
sophisticated pedestrian access to the units that further develops the Dutch tradition
of walk-up residences and the use of the Amsterdam School’s local brick and
fenestration, an intensification of local architectural traits as identity engines.

Resolving the contradiction between the domestic protocols of the multiple
cultures that populate the contemporary metropolis is nearly an impossible task at

Schilderswijk apartments, Den Haag,
The Netherlands. Alvaro Siza.

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the level of political discourse. This is proof that architectural devices may have
greater potential for shifting political impasses than do traditional ideological or
discursive practices. If the French ban is probably best represented by a Gropius
block, 1990’s Dutch residential projects are a perfect intersection between the
Calvinist logic of transparency and the ideal model of a global culture that celebrates
differences, while a possible embodiment of the Britishness discourse is implicit in
Hertzberger’s critique. Siza’s option can provide consistency across cultures without
having to make the choice between an irreducible multicultural collage (Dutch
patchwork residential architecture) or the enforcement of a core of cultural identity
(Hertzberger’s critique). It enables a higher variation of private/public thresholds
within the envelope; this may serve to restrict private areas of the unit or enable a
variety of alternative purposes. Like the best examples of flat-horizontal envelopes,
the Schilderswijk project is capable of detaching the inside/outside of the envelope
from the private/public boundary, producing a richer gradation of conditions across
those dichotomies. The reason why it is difficult to find a corresponding political
enunciation of Siza’s typology is because it is politically incorrect.

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Z >X≈Y. The Vertical Envelope. Slim Fit.
The final category of envelopes is that with a predominantly vertical dimension and,
unlike the flat-vertical type, a multi-directional orientation in the plan. The specificity
of this envelope category is an intense relationship between physical determinations
and performances. Because of its scale and technical complexity, functional and
environmental performances such as daylight ingress and natural ventilation need
to be maximized, while the formal qualities of the envelope play a crucial role in the
building’s structural stability. The vertical envelope’s geometric determination
crucially impacts both the spaces that it encloses and its surroundings. In addition,
the visibility of the vertical envelope makes it particularly conducive to iconographic
performance. If in the spherical envelope the gap between representative and environ –
mental performances reaches a maximum, in the vertical envelope both sets of
performances are at their highest level. The collusion between extreme technical per –
formance and high visual impact produces the maximum tension between efficiency
and expression, a condition that runs deep in the history of this building type.

Political stakes are high for this building envelope type as it is one of the
most active sectors; according to Emporis, 40% of the world’s high-rise buildings –
buildings above twelve stories – have been built since 2000 and around 8% of the
world’s stock of tall buildings is under construction right now. If tall buildings have
traditionally constituted a statement of urban power and prestige, their sudden
proliferation is now paradoxically connected to a process of urban democratization.
There is an irrepressible trend toward the densification of existing urban centers as
the planet’s human population flocks to urban cores where already over half of the
world’s population now lives. The pressure on urban land and infrastructure this
process is triggering will require more intensive land use in order to allow migrants
to settle in cities and a high density of construction is probably the most effective
solution. Examples of this democratization of the high-rise city can be found every –
where from London to Kuala Lumpur, Moscow to Panama, Dubai to Madrid.
Once the preserve of the most rich and powerful inhabitants of the world financial
centers, tall buildings are no longer an expensive extravagance but a crucial develop –
ment vehicle engaging the middle classes. In this process of democratization the high-
rise has exceeded its natural milieu as a workspace and pervaded all aspects of urban
life: the most high-rise-intensive city in the world – Benidorm, Spain – already has
one high-rise building for every 180 inhabitants. There is even a high-rise cemetery,
the Memorial Necropole Ecumenica III, in Santos, Brazil. Paradoxically the opposite
phenomenon is also true: high-rise buildings continue to be seen as a symbol of
urban power, exclusivity and uniqueness. The political performance of a high-rise
largely depends on the articulation of this dichotomy, either as a device for the demo –
cratization of urban life or for the consolidation of the urban elite.

The vertical envelope lies at the intersection of the global processes of densifi –
cation shaping contemporary urbanity and increasing cultural and environmental
concerns, often driven by local pressures. As the level of investment these structures
require is often linked to global economic progress, foreign investment and migrant
populations, the typology has become an ideal battleground between big global
business and local urban activism. As a result, the vertical envelope has started to
move away from the generic extrusions which optimized technical and economical
performance during the second half of the 20th century to develop a wide range
of local variations in both its geometrical definition and its architectural expression,
usually driven by more populist and iconographic concerns.

The conventional high-rise envelope has conventionally been primarily driven
by economic purposes resulting in the extrusion of a floor plate and a structural grid
derived from internal efficiencies of construction technology and program. However
the current urban core densification is reviving the monumental drive for high-rise
construction. Tall buildings are paradigmatic of the representation of power in the
city, be it that of a corporation, a city or the might of a political regime. This is most
visible in a series of image-driven high-rises that once again seek to play an urban
role through iconicity. For example, in London there is a series of iconic skyscrapers
that have immediately been given nicknames: The Gherkin (Foster’s 30 St. Mary Axe),
The Shard (Renzo Piano’s tower in London Bridge), Helter-Skelter (Kohn Pedersen
Fox’s Bishopsgate Tower), and Walkie-Talkie (Rafael Viñoly’s design for a tower
on Fenchurch Street) among them. In New York, where simple extrusions were the
norm, the Twin Towers’ unapologetic simplicity is being replaced by the more com –
plex profiles of buildings like the Freedom Tower and Hearst Tower. Two recent
competitions, for the Tour Phare in Paris and for the Gazprom Tower in Moscow,
are paradigmatic of the representational role that vertical envelopes have acquired
within contemporary processes of urban development.

Although the configuration of the skin does not play as important a role as in

30 St. Mary Axe, London, UK.
Foster + Partners

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the spherical envelope due to the perceptual distance resulting from the scale of the
typology, an elaborated, graphic skin has become an economical device to respond
to the market demand for uniqueness. In other cases the manipulation of the envelope’s
crowning, where the technical determinations are weaker, is the technique to distin –
guish buildings otherwise designed as mere extrusions of an optimized footprint.
The deployment of an iconic image on the envelope is probably the most radical
version of this search for significance within the contemporary vertical envelope:
the tiered pagodas of older Chinese architecture in the Jin Mao Tower and the
image of gold ingots used in Taipei 101 are the most prominent examples of this
totemic approach.

A more nuanced alternative in the design of vertical envelopes to the one-off
iconic extravagance aimed at the pure representation of power is the correlation
of technical efficiencies and symbolic performance. The deployment of images that
resonate with local iconographies or figurations as geometrical determinations can
set in motion a productive engagement with environmental or structural efficiencies
of the envelope: the rotated square footprints of Asian Muslim towers in the case
of Petronas offer an increased façade ratio by striating the skin of the building. The
desert flower in the case of Burj Dubai provides a geometrical basis for the three
tapering buttresses that lower the center of gravity.

Representation is an important part of the vertical envelope and those who fail
to take it into consideration have been sometimes punished for it: Kohn Pedersen
Fox’s Shanghai Hills World Financial Center, which in an earlier scheme featured
a round hole at its crowning, suffered a last minute redesign to incorporate a square
opening, since the circle was deemed too reminiscent of the Japanese flag. Owned
by the Japanese Mori Corporation, its image had to be altered to avoid offending
the locals with a monumental manifestation of Japanese power.

Yet these epithelial, graphic and iconic treatments, unlike Hugh Ferris’ setbacks
for daylight, Louis Sullivan’s ornamented ceramic panels for fire-protection or Fazlur
Khan structural diagrids, are the epitome of a schism between technical efficiencies
and political representation (as the contemporary inner-city high-rise is inevitably
a location of power) which disables the discipline’s political agency. The expressive
layer that some of these buildings adopt is not alien to the history of the vertical
envelope, but the tension between efficiency and expression in the design of tall
buildings has never been greater than it is now. If we follow the logic of explicitation
that Sloterdijk proposes as a political program of modernity, the iconographic
treatment of the vertical envelope would act as a cover-up for the technical or social
processes taking place.

The most common approach by avant-garde architects in the design of high-
rises is to challenge the conventional, to produce the unique, to be revolutionary.
Instead, the proposition here is that the most effective approach to mobilize the
political in the vertical envelope is to express the efficiencies of the current demand for
urban density and high-rise construction. The most crucial task of a politically engaged
vertical envelope design may actually be to give new expression to the most generic
efficiencies of a high-rise city, to simply make visible the processes that drive its for –
mation. The search for the contemporary high-rise phylum39 is a project of explicitation.

There are a number of parameters that affect the processes of high-rise con –
struction that are increasingly obscured by the drive toward the iconic high-rise.
To convert them into physical tropes, to make them physically evident and to give
them expression would perhaps be the most critical political program for the vertical
envelope in an age when virtually anything is technically possible. The efficiencies of
the vertical envelope range across a set of parameters that embody local specificities,
for example climatic conditions, lifestyle, trade protocols, and market demands:40
program-driven façade-to-core dimensions, environmentally-driven façade and
fenestration ratios, market-driven population ratios, compliance with certain models
of structural efficiency and procurement systems… As the envelope increases in
visibility and iconographic potential, so do the environmental and structural demands.
It also increases its potentials for views and solar exposure. As a result of this inten si fi –
cation of the environmental parameters the vertical envelope is becoming increasingly
complex and anisotropic. It is reacting very specifically to the surrounding urban
context with specific inflexions that provide views, solar exposure, natural ventilation
and profile. The envelope in this case not only affects the interior space but it also
has a massive impact on its urban surroundings. The intensification of technical and
economic demands coupled with the demand for environmental efficiencies can be
expressed in a more inflected envelope producing a more intense physical relation –
ship to its surroundings which will move beyond the iconic and the graphic.

Looking at some of these processes now taking place which may be explicitated,
probably one of the most important is the strong global tendency for tall buildings

39 See my ‘High-Rise Phylum 2007’ in
Harvard Design Magazine n. 26 (2007).

40 The analysis of residential high-rise typo –
logies across a global geography displays
the wide differentiation across cultures
and climates. For example, in a proto –
typical residential high-rise development
in Dubai, the average façade ratio would
be around 0.45 square meters per indoor
square meter, in London 0.50 square
meters per square meter, in Miami 0.55
square meters per square meter, in Seoul
0.60 square meters per square meter,
in Kuala Lumpur 0.75 square meters per
square meter and in Hong Kong 0.85
square meters per square meter. This para –
meter relates the financial and environ –
mental implications of an envelope design:
if the ratio is high it means greater capital
expense; if it is low daylight and venti –
lation may need to be artificially supplied
therefore generating higher maintenance
needs and costs.

Floor plans of a Hong Kong
residential tower showing a
highly inflected envelope.

Benidorm, Spain. One high-rise
per 180 inhabitants.

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in residential markets. This tendency is one of the most interesting forces behind
a more articulated and diverse vertical envelope. As a result, the high-rise envelope
is now evolving toward a re-engagement with nature, away from its original milieu,
the artificial environment of workspace, and toward an integration of the tall
building with the patterns of residential use.

Because of its engagement with domestic protocols and specific climatic
conditions, the vertical envelope is now producing culturally-specific, vernacular
varieties. There is a direct relationship between the geometry of the envelope, the
local climate and the local culture: a higher façade ratio implies more daylight ingress
and natural ventilation but also more heat loss, while a more compact envelope
implies a more artificial environment. For example, a residential tower in which the
wet rooms are required to be adjacent to the façade will consume a much larger
amount of the façade than a building with internal, mechanically-ventilated kitchens
and toilets. The former will have a strong link with the outside, while the latter will
rely primarily on an artificial environment.

Contemporary high-rise residential envelopes across the globe are radiographies
of cultural hybridization and the synthesis of local variations. There are deep cultural
and political implications of the geometrical determinations of the vertical envelope.
For example, in Southeast Asia the residential high-rise has been largely naturalized,
while in the West high-rise life is still associated with extreme arti ficiality. A high level
of environmental mechanical control is acceptable in high-rise resi dential units in
the West and the Middle East, while the further we move toward Southeast Asia the
more common is the requirement for all rooms to have direct contact with the
outside and to be naturally lit and ventilated. In Western models residential units
rely heavily on full air-conditioning while in Southeast Asian prototypes natural
ventilation and under-floor heating are standard even when air-conditioning equip –
ment is also installed. The argument for this increase in the façade ratio in Southeast
Asia is often based on the humidity of the climate but it is more likely the result of
certain living patterns that Asian cultures are not prepared to give up even in a high-
rise residence. Local cooking has developed kitchens with dry and wet areas; com –
plex systems of service access and entrances into service areas exist within apartments
of a certain standard denoting a certain class structure; a culture of bathing while
being able to enjoy views and daylight is fuelling some expensive traits of the Asian
residential high-rise such as the systematic location of bathing areas on the façade
of the building. Kuala Lumpur and Hong-Kong are certainly very humid and when
the air-conditioning is turned off there may be problems, but there is no reason to
think that temperate zone cities like Seoul or Beijing need very different residential
structures from Paris, Manchester, New York or Chicago. Yet in South Korea a
high-rise apartment without adequate orientation may see its price halved compared
to those with optimum orientation within the same building. The combination of
these factors has interesting effects on the resulting geometry of the envelope of the
building, effects which tend to produce local species.

Even the tessellation of the skin is affected by cultural differences: a lawyer’s
office in the UK and most Commonwealth states will consume three meters of façade,
while an American lawyer’s office will take approximately 3.6 meters. In locations
such as London or New York where firms from both sides of the Atlantic share the
available space, the selection of the envelope modulation is important and will affect
the rhythm of fenestration and the interior planning grids.

If the corrugation of the façade is one of the most powerful effects of this process
of democratization and naturalization of the vertical envelope, there are also several
possibilities in which the current tendencies in high-rise construction may become
explicit in the sectional configuration of the vertical envelope. We can find an inte –
resting example in the correlation between the current tendency to use concrete as
structural material for high-rise residential buildings and the preference for pyramidal
envelopes. As the residential sector accounts for most of the tall building stock under
construction, concrete is surpassing steel as the preferred material for high-rise con –
struction. The ductility and lightness of steel, which gave it an advantage over
concrete in the early days of the type, makes it inadequate for residential construction,
as it has a level of deflection and sound transmission which are not ideal for domestic
environments. Instead concrete structure provides a solidity that reduces deflection
and noise transmission and provides more thermal inertia for the building. Con –
sequently, the construction industry has geared up to produce concrete construction
technologies able to deliver high-rise buildings efficiently. Slip-form construction
systems have now accelerated the rate of construction to one floor every three days,
which makes it basically equal to steel construction up to 50 story buildings. Beyond
this threshold concrete structures become problematic for very tall buildings.
In response, the building mass has become a crucial structural device for concrete

Ryugyong Hotel, Pyongyang,
North Korea.

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construction in tall buildings: there is a generation of mixed use super-high-rises
being built with a spire-like envelope optimizing the structural use of the building
mass. Tapering the envelope toward the top produces a higher structural section and
moment of inertia in the lower sections of the building, making the form coincident
with the stress diagram of a tower. Burj Dubai is probably the best example of the
return to an almost gothic type of structure; Renzo Piano’s Shard in London, Jean
Nouvel’s MoMA Extension Tower in Manhattan and Norman Foster’s Russia Tower
in Moscow also respond to this tendency of partially residential towers in which the
shaping of the envelope carries crucial structural efficiencies that have been made
explicit by the use of a pyramidal envelope.

The pyramidal shape, which has traditionally been an icon of stability and
hierarchy, has now become an expression of high-rise domesticity, a new earthiness,
as if the high-rise lineage was becoming increasingly grounded. Both the Ryugyong
Hotel in Pyongyang and the Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur are extreme examples
of the political role that vertical envelopes may play in representing a political regime;
both feature pyramidal sections. William Pereira’s Transamerica Pyramid in San
Francisco now hosts the headquarters of the Church of Scientology and OMA’s
CCTV building in Beijing is chiselled out of a pyramidal envelope. OMA’s CCTV
competition model had Egyptian-like low-reliefs as if it were a remainder of some
gutted-out pharaonic monument.

Commercial determinations are also producing substantial distortions of the
extruded vertical envelope, but in exactly the opposite direction. As height becomes
a desirable commodity, there is a growing disparity in the rental values on different
building levels. In a commercial high-rise, the lower levels are desirable because
of their proximity to the street (for retail or high density uses like trading floors).
Upper levels are desirable because of their views and isolation from street noise. In
residential high-rise buildings as the value per square meter increases with each floor
it is common to have fewer, larger apartments for buyers with higher purchasing
power. Therefore the larger the floor plate becomes at the higher levels, the more
valuable the building becomes. There are also several examples of contemporary
high-rise projects in which this commercial logic has been mobilized to produce
an aesthetic effect of instability. The structural and commercial logics seem to be
operating in opposite directions in the vertical envelope, opening unexploited potentials
that will produce effects of stability or instability depending on the vertical envelope’s
massing. The effects of the buildings may then become an explicitation of certain
efficiencies, whether structural, technological, programmatic or commercial, and the
problematization of these efficiencies becomes an interesting political field.

The sheer scale of some of these building complexes is another new parameter
to address in the design of vertical envelopes. The simultaneous thirst for critical
mass and synergy that drives the dramatic increase in scale of these typologies is
leading several projects toward a configuration of interconnected towers capable of
providing adequate daylight while exploiting synergies across ever growing con –
centrations of urban activity. OMA’s Togok Tower, Louisville Museum Plaza and
CCTV projects have been designed as ‘an alternative to the traditional diagram of
the super-high-rise’ and to ‘avoid the isolation of the traditional high-rise’. They are
excursions into the unprecedented scale of some contemporary high-rise projects.
Our own Bundle Tower, a project for the Max Protetch show “A New World Trade
Center” was an attempt to develop a structural concept for a new generation of super-
high-rise buildings aimed at turning the fragmentation of volumes that becomes
almost unavoidable in projects above 300,000 square meters into a structural advan –
tage. The sudden proliferation of these branched versions of the vertical envelope
indexes the convergence between certain efficiencies in the design of very large com –
plexes and the emergence of the image of a network, that most contemporary icon.

All these parameters, often ignored when discussing the merits of high-rise
projects, constitute the material grain of the contemporary high-rise phylum. Vertical
envelopes constitute a field of convergence between the physical, the technological,
the perceptual and the symbolic, an important political performance. One of the
most important possibilities is obviously the development of more environmentally
conscious envelopes; for example, by increasing the façade ratios – at the price of
higher capital costs – we can largely avoid mechanical ventilation and artificial
lighting and generate energy savings and carbon emission reductions that may have
important political effects. Beyond their renewed aesthetic hipness, tall buildings
offer a high-density model that helps preserve the green belt from the ever-expanding
suburb and has a smaller ecological footprint than alternative urban models. The
eco logical superiority of the culture of congestion and the green credentials of the
elevator core as an alternative to the gas-guzzling six-lane highway are becoming
universally accepted facts and this gives the vertical envelope type an initial advantage.

Burj Dubai, Dubai, UAE, under
construction. Skidmore, Owings
and Merrill.

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But the environmental impacts of these structures, their relationship with infra –
structure and public space, their imposing presence and most of all the scale of
resources and development procedures that they imply poses serious questions about
their implementation.

In this sense, the current demand for spectacular high-rises41 runs exactly in
the opposite direction of what we can describe as a phylum of the vertical envelope
or in other words what Sloterdijk proposes as a process of explicitation. The current
search for novelty follows the 20th century’s tradition of revolution or emancipation
in which truly significant facts need to radically transform the real. On the contrary,
what we believe is politically relevant regarding the vertical envelope design is the
way it can contribute to making certain urban phenomena explicit. Starting with
the global process of urbanization and moving toward the densification of the resi –
dential fabric, environmental concerns and the technologies developed to enable these
processes combine to form a truly engaged vertical architecture capable of making
these current processes explicit and turning them into percepts or tropes, like the
‘Cool Biz Campaigns’ in Japan and South Korea, where the business attire code was
changed in order to both implement and signify a new environmental consciusness.42

The spectacular high-rise, the one that is contingent to the phylum, the one
that pretends to be novel, exceptional and revolutionary, is exactly the one that
contributes most to the maintenance of the power structures. It is precisely the dif –
ferential departure from the conventional, the permanent flight from the status quo,
rather than a radical opposition, that can actually reveal and subvert the dominant
urban powers.

41 ‘The current mania for flamboyant
skyscrapers has been a mixed blessing for
architecture. While it has yielded a
stunning outburst of creativity, it has also
created an atmosphere in which novelty is
often prized over innovation. At times
it’s as if the architects were dog owners
proudly parading their poodles in front of
a frivolous audience’. Nicolai Ouroussoff,
‘Towers Will Change the Look of Two
World Cities’ in The New York Times,
December 4th, 2006.

42 Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro
Koizumi launched the campaign for the
‘Cool Biz’ dress code in June of 2005
in order to help save on air-conditioning
and reduce carbon emissions. The
campaign promoted promoted removing
the customary business suit and tie in
order to raise the threshold of air con di –
tioning to 28°C (82°F) during the
summer season. The South Korean and
UK governments initiated the same
policy a year later.

43 As Manuel De Landa states, it may be
necessary to entirely replace the term
Capitalism by the terms markets and anti-
markets in order to be able to address
the complexity of the current system of
economic integration. Manuel De Landa,
‘Markets and Anti-Markets in the World
Economy’ in Technoscience and Cyber –
culture, ed. Stanley Aronowitz et al
(London: Routledge, 1996).

44 Examples of this tendency are Zaha
Hadid and Patrik Schumacher, Latent
Utopias (New York: Princeton Archi –
tectural Press, 2003) and Martin Van
Schaik and Otakar Mael, Exit Utopia:
Architectural Provocations 1956-76
(Munich: Prestel, 2005).

45 The emergence of ecological concerns
is an obvious example of this tendency
which extends to more strictly political
arenas. The recent interest within the
academy in the work of Antonio Negri
and Michael Hardt as a post-post-critical
revival of utopian and critical thought
and the return to a discourse with explicit
political alignments is one of the indices
of the current political reawakening with –
in the discipline. ‘Meanwhile, utopian
realism must be thought of as a move ment
that may or may not exist, all of whose
practitioners are double agents. Naming
them, or their work, would blow their
cover. (They may or may not all be archi –
tects.) Those who could voted for Kerry.
(So you, too, could be a utopian realist.)’
Reinhold Martin. ‘Critical of What?
Towards a Utopian Realism’ in Harvard
Design Magazine n. 22 (2005): 104-109.

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Epilogue: Some propositions for a directed political ecology of architecture

The question whether architecture and urbanism can or should be critical, projective,
progressive or utopian, and whether speculative architecture can remain an effective
practice, is still a much debated issue that needs to be addressed in respect to our
proposed general theory of the building envelope. The hypothesis of this essay is
that progressive architecture has an important role to play today as an instrument
capable of producing crucial improvements to urban life and therefore as an instrument
of change as well as technical, social and political experimentation. Architecture and
urbanism mobilize such a scale of resources that unless the practice is kept at a
purely speculative level it is difficult to sustain it without becoming, to a certain
degree, an accomplice of power. This is why, in order to regulate its relationships
with power, with the status quo and with emergent social structures, a progressive
architecture needs to develop political strategies to maintain a relation with power
while simultaneously challenging and opening its structures.

The challenge to established power has been traditionally enacted through the
proposal of alternatives developed in relation to a certain ideological position. But
the crisis of representation and objectivity triggered by modernity and in particular
by the advent of globalization has put into question the transformative capacities of
ideology and utopia. As an alternative to ideology as a tool for a politically engaged
architecture and utopia as its form of representation we have been testing an archi –
tecture of explicitation – to use the term coined by Peter Sloterdijk – through the
analysis of the architectural envelope. Within the model of explicitation, political
practices are increasingly attached to artificial environments in which we live and
with which co-exist, where disciplines become the primary link between humans
and non-humans, politics and nature. This model implies structuring the critical
mechanisms around spatial and material organizations rather than relying on the
great revolutionary narratives and their ideological conceptions of history.

The question then is whether architectural explicitation is sufficient for archi –
tects to regain a certain level of political agency in order to affect the current processes
of urban and environmental transformation. How does explicitation discern between
the failure or success of policies and designs? How does it ensure an appropriate
distribution of power? The uncertainty of these questions is currently provoking a
growing nostalgia for the days when there was a coherent political project that could
be described through ideology and represented in utopia. On the contrary we are
excited by the prospect of moving beyond a single narrative of how the world is or
feels, or where it is headed. In fact, it may be good to stop speaking of power in general,
or of the State, Capital, Globalization in general, and instead address specific power
ecologies comprising a heterogeneous mixture of bureaucracies, markets, antimarkets,
shopping malls, airport terminals, residential towers, office complexes etc., and
specific exercises of power within and between these organizations. We may need
to avoid abstract notions of power, such as the capitalist system, capitalist power, the
power of the State, Global Capitalism and Empire, and instead focus on specific
bureaucracies and economic institutions, and engage in a more concrete analysis of
institutional, social, financial and spatial dynamics.43

An interesting occurrence within the political framing of contemporary
artistic, architectural and political practices is the invocation of utopia,44 as well as
the increasingly common resort to dystopia as an alternative to the great revolutionary
narratives and utopian propositions. The architectural visionary has often been
grounded in some sort of epic formulation that provided the practice with political
directionality. Recently we have witnessed a resurgence of utopian thinking and
even some attempt to re-establish political correctness as a precondition for adequate
architectural practice.45 As an alternative to the superlative rhetorics of the politically
correct, the practice of the politically incorrect is an altogether more compelling and
transformative practice, if it is directionality we seek. The politically incorrect breaks
down the consistency of ideological politics and indexes the emergence of micro-
politics: Stockhausen’s comments in the wake of September 11th,46 comparing the
attack to an artwork on a universal scale, are an extreme example of political mischief
capable of triggering the sort of contradictions that reveal cracks in the fabric of
established molar politics. Deployed from a position of power, Donald Rumsfeld’s
cynical comments on the surgical splitting of Europe into “old and new” and the
potential bond between freedom and crime and between military action and pillory47
are far more critical (and dangerous) than the sanctimonious ideological rhetoric of
his neoconservative colleagues.

Within the field of architecture the politically incorrect is a machine for breaking
down molar identities into molecular components that can then be treated within
the specific realm of the discipline through categories such as difference and repetition,
consistency and variation, transparency and opacity, and local and global, rather

46 Asked on September 17th, 2001 at a press
conference in Bayreuth for his view of
the events, Stockhausen answered that
the attacks were ‘the greatest work of art
imaginable for the whole cosmos’.
According to a tape transcript from public
broadcaster Norddeutscher Rundfunk,
he went on: ‘Minds achieving something
in an act that we couldn’t even dream of
in music, people rehearsing like mad for
10 years, preparing fanatically for a con –
cert, and then dying, just imagine what
happened there. You have people who are
that focused on a performance and then
5,000 people are dispatched to the after –
life, in a single moment. I couldn’t do
that. By comparison, we composers are
nothing. Artists, too, sometimes try to go
beyond the limits of what is feasible and
conceivable, so that we wake up, so that
we open ourselves to another world’. Asked
further whether he equated art and crime,
Stockhausen replied: ‘It’s a crime because
those involved didn’t consent. They didn’t
come to the “concert”. That’s obvious.
And no one announced that they risked
losing their lives. What happened in
spiritual terms, the leap out of security,
out of what is usually taken for granted,
out of life, that sometimes happens to
a small extent in art, too, otherwise art
is nothing’.

47 ‘Now, you’re thinking of Europe as
Germany and France. I don’t. I think
that’s old Europe. If you look at the entire
NATO Europe today, the center of
gravity is shifting to the east. And there
are a lot of new members’. ‘They’re not
with France and Germany on this, they’re
with the United States’. Secretary of
Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld, briefing at
the Foreign Press Center, January 22nd,
2003. ‘Freedom’s untidy, and free people
are free to make mistakes and commit
crimes and do bad things. They’re also
free to live their lives and do wonderful
things. And that’s what’s going to happen
here’. ‘Looting is not uncommon for
countries that experience significant
social upheaval. Stuff happens’. Secretary
of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld, briefing
at the Pentagon, April 12th, 2003.

48 “I do not believe in principles… I am a
whore and I am paid very well for build –
ing high-rise buildings”. Philip Johnson
lecturing in 1982.

49 Francis Fukuyama, The End of History
and the Last Man (Free Press: New York,
1992).

50 ‘The division of things between pro –
gressivist and reactionary ought to be
abandoned precisely because the
topography of time, the repartition of

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than through the traditional political categories of class, gender, creed and race. The
politically incorrect is a mechanism of explicitation of latent political potentials that
currently remain covered beneath layers of ideology.

Our own invitation to New York to “forget September 11th” in our Max
Protetch Bundle Tower statement and its subsequent conversion into an embodiment
of “United We Stand” for the “Latent Utopias” show are in no way the result of
historical ignorance or a political impasse, but are a calculated short-circuiting of
contradictory political discourses by a material organization. Its polemical effect was
apparent on both sides of the Atlantic and motivated censorship of parts of our
statement by the Max Protetch Gallery in the publication of the book. Our recent
re-reading of our own work as a cynical orchestration of a series of populist repre –
sentational techniques follows a similar political game with a tradition that can be
traced back to the famous statement by Philip Johnson comparing himself to a
whore48 and that has been systematically played by Rem Koolhaas in his serial claims
over Atlanta, Singapore, Lagos, Pearl River Delta, Dubai and shopping as the new
models of urbanism. Toyo Ito’s Pao for the Tokyo Nomad Girl and Diller + Scofidio’s
Soft Sell on 42nd Street in New York are examples of a genre of dystopian politics
that is not more common because architects still have to perform primarily as organic
intellectuals. Rather than rejecting the political in architecture, the attack on political
correctness is an attempt to avoid architecture becoming simply a vehicle for political
representation and to become instead a viable political instrument. While the
politically incorrect may be a discursive operation more than a material one, it should
not be understood as apolitical but as a powerful instrument to loosen ideology’s
monopoly on politics. In combination with the search for alternative political
qualities and arenas, the politically incorrect may be seen as part of a two-pronged
strategy aimed to dismantle conventional politics in order to liberate material
organizations from political representation.

While the politically incorrect and the dystopian are consistent with the project of
redefining the politics of architectural practice, they still rely on a strategy of negation.
What would be a politically engaged and affirmative practice of urbanism or archi –
tecture in the age of global capital? Despite the claims that globalization would
terminate history and politics,49 within its short history we have already witnessed at
least two different eras: the origins of the system during the Cold War and the post-
September 11th world order. We may be facing a new change with the collapse of
the international credit system. Global capital has simply inaugurated a new breed
of market-mediated politics which we are still struggling to embody architecturally.

To define what is a politically progressive or reactionary, projective or critical,
revolutionary or service-oriented architecture within global capitalism is perhaps not
a very clarifying exercise and probably even condemned to failure as it is aimed at a
moving target.50 But we can make some hypotheses about what domains, processes
and qualities are needed for architecture to acquire transformative agency today, even
if it is on a provisional level. The following is a series of propositions that attempt
to establish some directionality for an architectural politics of explicitation.

Contemporary politics is primarily active within disciplines.
There are a growing number of new forms of political action which herald both the
emergence of different political qualities (such as affects) and domains (such as every –
day life).51 Contemporary politics are giving way to a new wave of powerful material
organizations, belongings and attachments, which are literally redefining political
space. Both governmental agencies and corporate organizations are moving toward
multiple layers of governance with intensified connections between them. We are
witnessing the emergence of a heterarchical order which increasingly constructs its
power by both producing and using diversity. As a result, the challenge to instituted
power can only be selective and a division of political labor has to be addressed by
multiple disciplines operating independently and simultaneously and not necessarily
in a multi-disciplinary relation. A singular politics of resistance is no longer capable
of challenging contemporary forms of instituted power. It is necessary to engage in
the political critique of disciplinary problems – such as the one proposed here, the
building envelope – in order to acquire transformative agency.

Contemporary politics is physically grounded.
In the globalized world, the communities and interest groups on every project have pro –
liferated enormously and communication technologies have become so ubiquitous that
representation and symbolic reasoning have lost substantial efficiency as political me di –
ators.52 The new political forms are shifting away from stasis, but also from repre sen ta –
tion, dialectics, words and time toward material and spatial organi zations, pop ula tions
and intensities and are crucially invested in the modes of production and exchange.

political passions, has been overturned.
Because in modernism, we were relatively
easily oriented towards a progressivist
direction. So we could distinguish between
progressivist and reactionary attitudes
with relative ease, reactionary being
linked to the attachment to the past and
progressivist to future emancipations.
Today, however, things have changed to
the extent that attachments are not only
in the past but also in the future. For
example, ecological questions, issues
concerning the city and urbanism etc.
We have gone from a time of Time to a
Time of Space, from a time of succession
to a time of co-existence. As a result the
differentiation is now based on the type
of attachment rather than on the old
reactionary and progressivist scenography.
So we are obliged to change the political
passions while they still remain relatively
classic, attached to the whole package of
progressivist/reactionary, liberal/neo-
liberal, anti-globalizing/globalizing. In
effect, in the details, we have to open the
package to understand the allocation of
attachments and the dose of emanci pa tion
and attachment they presuppose… On
the contrary, politics turns around objects
of interest, “issues”, “affairs”, “things”,
aiti¢a in ancient Greek. So it is of no
importance to know whether one is a
reactionary or not, but to know what those
objects are that one holds dear, and the
types of things to which one is attached’.
Bruno Latour in conversation with
Konstantin Kastrissianakis for Re-public.

51 For a critique of affects as an essentially
contemporary political modality that
over comes representation as a more
traditional political form see Thrift, Nigel
Non-Representational Theory. Space,
Politics, Affect. London: Routledge 2007

52 ‘“Politics will become what he (Sloterdijk)
calls ‘spherology’ which is about the
habitats, artificial environments, artificial
surroundings in which we are and co-exist.
In arguments of this type, it is true that
the central metaphors tend towards space
rather than time. They are formed pri –
marily in architecture and in co-exis tence
rather than in the great revo lu tionary
narratives that reigned for centuries in
their left or right versions of history.
Sloterdijk proposed another more inte –
resting term to replace that of revolution:
‘explicitation’. The history of expli ci ta tion
is made increasingly intelligible in the
spheres and objects to which we are
attached. Therefore the problem is not to
order things according to time or space.
It is no longer hierarchical but heter –
archical. Rather, today we must try to
approach these new attachments, these
new political passions. The categories

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In the light of this, the possibility of a form of politics extensible to non-human

entities and interested in engaging with the transformation of reality, as opposed to
a form of politics driven by representation and judgment, is critical to attain political
agency. While traditional political practices were based on discursive forms, iden –
tities and dialectics and were subject to the permanent need to envision parallel
realities and all-encompassing systems, contemporary power structures operate as
physical aggregates where behavior is created through the localized complex asso ci a –
tion of molecular components, hence the importance of attaching political content
to a certain type of material organization, such as the building envelope. The typo –
logical classification of envelopes and their political attachments that we are pro –
posing is an attempt to create a related discipline. This Politics of Things, or object-
oriented politics,53 runs in parallel to the development of alternative models of physically
grounded,54 produced intelligence (also called behaviorist AI) than to symbolic
reasoning and representation. The AI models for this operative system are distributed
computing, subsumption architecture, and object-oriented software, all of which are
forms of artificial intelligence that operate by breaking down intelligence into mole –
cular, concrete components that relate independently to external inputs, collab o ra –
ting with or canceling each other depending on the particular assemblage and
specific location.55

Another relevant case of how the politics of cultural production has evolved
under the effect of globalization and digital technology can be found in the culture
of contemporary electronic music: as opposed to rock’n roll’s revolutionary indi vi –
dualism, the culture of techno has neither an overt revolutionary aspiration nor a
utopian formulation. It operates within the system.56 In order to do this techno
music replaces more traditional musical figures – melody and harmony – with texture
and rhythm, as primary forms of expression. The image of the rave, a collective
environment capable of mobilizing crowds of people into a single rhythm appears to
be a perfect incarnation of associative democracy as a coexistence of heterogeneous
populations and informal associations. The production of political affects through
material organizations is, as in the example of contemporary electronica, a critical
potential of architecture and is particularly relevant for building envelopes.

The global market is the primary milieu of contemporary architectural politics.
There are two basic forms of political structures that have historically organized the
exchange and flow of resources, skills and command structures in time and space:
markets and bureaucracies.57 They are the two domains where architects may try to
construct their agency. Within the global economy the market has become pre do –
minant as a mechanism of organization capable of integrating a larger number of
agents in its processes within a shorter time. Bureaucracies are organizations of power
which are based on a hierarchical totality operating in stable conditions for extended
periods of time and can hardly survive the pace of change and level of complexity
required by a global economy. While within bureaucracies the agents and their
relationships are fixed over time, markets are organizations that organize power through
a complex and constantly changing set of agents and factors. As the form of political
organization better suited to integrate ever expanding domains, the market is a
powerful force behind the failure of ideology and utopia as effective political devices,
as they would require a centralized power if they were to be implemented. The
market is probably a better milieu to articulate the current proliferation of political
interests and the rise of micro-politics.58 This should not be mistaken as an invisible
hand approach. In fact, intervention is possibly needed more than ever, but it is only
effective if mediated through the market. The traditional opposition between State
and Capital is no longer effective once the degree of integration between them has
reached the current levels. The rise of sovereign funds and the injection of cash into
the market by central banks to mitigate credit problems are present-day examples of
how bureaucracies are now embedded in the market, with their primary role having
been transformed into market regulators, precisely to fight anti-market forces. No
matter how devious the rules of the global market may be and how great the level of
bureaucratic control needed to avoid catastrophic effects, for architects to reacquire
political agency today it is necessary to engage with the market as the most
important medium of power distribution within the global economy. Those
advocates of ideology who hope for a return to a state-driven, ideologically-enlightened
society as a remedy to the miseries of the market economy and as an alibi for the
reconstruction of a representative, significant, even utopian architecture would do
well to remember the miseries of bureaucracies and consider how possible insti tu –
tional interventions can be channeled through the huge machine of the global
markets to prevent them from becoming sclerotic. The greatest advantage of markets
in respect to bureaucracies and ideologies is, precisely, that they are unstable.

of the French revolution, the left and the
right, with their specific categories and
particular techniques of classification, of
positioning, no longer correspond to the
order of things. Whether we talk about
global-warming, delocalisation, GMOs
(genetically modified organisms), habitat
or public transport, there is each time a
different configuration of these positions.
It is not that these divisions no longer
exist, but that they have been drowned in
the multitude of other attitudes”‘. ‘“Politics
always was object-oriented. It is simply
that in the modernist scenography, where
politics was one sphere amongst others,
such as those of civil society, economy,
nature, we were under the impression
that we could define politics in a proce –
dural manner. An arena through which
all kinds of affairs could pass but repre –
sentatives would treat them in such a way
so as to standardise them. What happens
today is that the techniques of political
representation no longer seem capable
of absorbing the multiplicity of positions
and, in any case, they are no longer
capable of standardising them”‘. Bruno
Latour in conversation with Konstantin
Kastrissianakis for Re-public.

53 Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel, intro –
duction to the exhibition catalogue
Making Things Public: Atmospheres of
Democracy.

54 The term is borrowed from Rodney
Brooks, a pioneer of behaviorist AI, who
has promoted the idea of a physically
grounded artificial intelligence from the
field of robotics as an alternative to
centrally structured coded wholes based
on symbolic reasoning. Rodney Brooks
has argued persuasively against symbolic
processing approaches to creating intel –
ligent machines, which had been the
focus of AI since the days of Alan Turing,
directly tracing back to the work of
Gottlob Frege. Brooks’ biologically-
inspired architectures and physically
grounded systems (e.g. subsumption
architecture) address basic perceptual and
sensorimotor tasks as the basis of intel –
ligence. These had been largely dismissed
as uninteresting by the mainstream AI
community which was more interested in
reasoning about the real world than in
interacting with it. Conversely, Brooks
argued that interacting with the physical
world is far more difficult than symbo –
lically reasoning about it. ‘There is an
alternative route to Artificial Intelligence
that diverges from the directions pursued
under that banner for the last thirty some
years. The traditional approach has
emphasized the abstract manipulation of
symbols, whose grounding, in physical
reality has rarely been achieved. We

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Contemporary politics is based on change and imbalance.
In the Western tradition, progressive politics were traditionally associated with an
equalization of power across different population groups, such as class, gender, creed
and race and their independent identities, for example class equality, gender equality,
racial equality and religious tolerance. It is becoming apparent that those allegedly
progressive political principles of Western democracies (equality, indifference, sub –
mission to the will of the majority, etc.) are becoming an unwanted export among
cultures that are perhaps more prone to either informal associations (such as mafias,
tribes or families) or hierarchical bureaucracies. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan,
the resistance of China and Russia to submit to Western political standards and the
emerging resistance to Western models in Latin-America are examples of a certain
cultural friction between ideal models of Western democracy and models of
governance implicit in cultures driven by more informal associative principles. Even
in the West contemporary politics are already reacting to the new economic and
technological order by opening forms of political activism that have moved away
from parliamentary democracy toward a multiplicity of agents, vehicles and fori.59

It is precisely change and imbalance that constitute the most powerful engines
of creativity today, while the traditional form of political ideologies and utopias
is a static organization, whether hierarchical or horizontal. While a parliamentary
democracy is characterized by a partial empowerment of everybody, one of its best
qualities as a political system is that it produces a regular revision of power struc tures.
The proposition here is that progressive politics today is enabled through dynamic
disequilibrium, not static evenness. Rather than a politics of indifference, inde pen –
dence and evenness, progressive politics promote connected unevenness, inducing
difference and interdependence. And this is where architecture’s material mediation
becomes crucial for updating political models, as we saw in the example of Siza’s
Schilderswijk Housing in The Hague. The building envelope is critical for estab –
lishing a homeostasis between the internal environment of the building (and the
community that inhabits it) and the environment outside and other neighboring
envelopes, hence its importance and the relevance of designing envelopes capable of
regulating flows in and out of spaces and through changing conditions.

Political directionality is a property of systems guided by a concept of history
and nowhere is history more evident than in the dynamics of economic power,
where the capacity to manipulate the prices of inputs and outputs of the production
process as well as their supply and demand produces a continuous fluctuation and
evolution of markets. The contemporary paradox is that even if history has pervaded
material organizations, we can no longer rely on the arrow of time as a pointer for
an evolution of political systems, but rather must engage the intrinsic qualities of
material and spatial organizations to direct and regulate flow and exchange. Con –
temporary forms of power are generated through the ability to initiate, track or
modulate flow with increasingly systematic and sophisticated devices. Networks,
flow architecture, infrastructures, heterarchy, complexity, etc. enable the relocation
of bodies and other objects both governmental and corporate on an unprecedented
scale and extent.

The proposal here is a transversal political practice that is constantly evolving
and accumulating new political concerns as new events unfold and that, through
such accretion, builds a whole that is more than the sum of its parts but remains
open. In that sense an architecture of explicitation involves more complex political
directionalities as it transforms the space and the material organization of the built
environment, even if those transformations cannot be inscribed in a holistic political
program. For architecture to express the domestication of density and high-rise life
through specific massing strategies in tall buildings is a legitimate political per for –
mance of an architecture of explicitation, as it is to convey that certain tendencies in
the articulation of the building envelope capture new political affects and processes
of diversification, to communicate that certain manipulations of the ground and
the roof index the politicization of nature, or to explain that the breakdown of the
correlation between interior and exterior and private and public signals more advanced
social structures. And as such, this architecture does not need an overt alignment to
a political program or ideology, nor to subscribe to a utopian formulation, to become
politically directed. As an alternative to historical directionality, what we are pro –
posing is a study of the political dimensionality of space. The dimensional analysis
of building envelopes is an attempt to reground architecture’s political performance
in space and material organizations.

The particular interest in envelopes as political devices is that they constitute
the element that confines a system and regulates the flow of energy and matter in
and out of it. If traditional politics were based on equilibrium and closed systems,
the contemporary mechanisms of social and economic integration suggest the need

explore a research methodology which
emphasizes ongoing physical interaction
with the environment as the primary
source of constraint on the design of
intelligent systems. We show how this
methodology has recently had significant
successes on a par with the most success –
ful classical efforts. We outline plausible
future work along these lines which can
lead to vastly more ambitious systems’.
Rodney Brooks, ‘Elephants Don’t Play
Chess’. See also his ‘Intelligence without
Representation,’ both in Cambrian
Intelligence: The Early History of the New
AI (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999).
See also Brooks’ ‘The Relationship
Between Matter and Life’ Nature n. 409
(2001): 409-411.

55 For example, the interesting development
of the Linux software as an assemblage
of programmers in an evolving system
where the different agents interact con –
tingently, forming assemblages and
alliances for a concrete purpose, rather
like in a bazaar. See Eric Raymond, The
Cathedral and the Bazaar: Musings on
Linux and Open Source by an Accidental
Revolutionary (Sebastopol, CA: O’Reilly
and Associates, 1999).56 The techno-
underground is anti-corporate but not
anti-market: it expresses the fight of
micro-capitalist units (small labels and
clubs) against the mainstream enter tain –
ment industry, following a model of viral
production. It challenges individualism
and subjectivity as the author tends to
disappear into the technical milieu (sound
ceases to be associated to physical gestures,
music is made by machines, Roland 808,
Moog, Rhodes…). Electronic music
expands perception through an increase
in complexity, through process rather than
interpretation. It is not music as com –
munication but as communion, going
with the flow, connecting across cultures,
and at the same time it is site-specific and
has a deeply tribal context. It is addressed
simultaneously to the mind and to the
body as it is made for dancing. For a
description of the politics of contem porary
electronic music as an interesting model
for a revision of politics in material
practices see Simon Reynolds, Generation
Ecstasy: Into the World of Techno and Rave
Culture (New York: Routledge, 1999).

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for open systems. As in thermodynamics, equilibrium is only valid for closed systems
where the overall amounts of energy are always conserved. If one allows energy to
flow in and out of a system, the number and type of possible historical outcomes
greatly increases. Instead of a unique and simple equilibrium, we now have multiple
ones of varying complexity.60 By analyzing the building envelope, we have tried to
identify some of the possible entrances into the political within architecture that
may be able to re-empower the discipline as a truly transformative force.

57 For example the manipulation of the
input and output mechanisms of pro –
duction and prices, regularly practiced by
global corporations, is a fundamentally
anti-market technique aimed at control –
ling supply/demand dynamics. Likewise,
anti-trust legislation is a product of
bureau cracies aimed at preventing markets
from evolving into monopolies. See
Fernand Braudel, A History of Civili za tions
(New York: Penguin Books, 1993).

58 Ulrich Beck, The Reinvention of Politics.

59 ‘“The Parliament is a place where very
little happens. We could argue that it has
become largely irrelevant. Not because
the Great Politics has been sidestepped
by economic forces, but because the tech –
niques of representation of the official
political arena have not evolved in the
same speed as the multiplication of hybrid
forums around ‘matters of concern’. This is
what we tried to stage with the exhibition
‘Making Things Public’. The Parliament
was there as a particular technique among
the multitude of other hybrid, non-official,
not necessarily legitimate forums which
are very effective involving a variety of
things: from the supermarket, and finance
to law, technology, debates over nature,
etc. Therefore there is a proliferation of
‘micropolitics’, to use Ulrich Beck’s term.
In my opinion the dream of macro –
politics, the sphere that could cover all
these forums, has disap peared”‘. Bruno
Latour in conversation with Konstantin
Kastrissianakis for Re-public.

60 Ilya Prigogine revolutionized thermo –
dynamics in the 1960’s by showing that
the classical results were only valid for
closed systems where the overall amounts
of energy are always conserved. Thermo –
dynamics of open systems do not operate
within an overall equilibrium model, but
present multiple states of equilibrium
(static, periodic and chaotic attractors).
Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers.
Order out of Chaos. (New York: Bantam
Books, 1984).

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Talalbin Jahlan

CS Theories Cont Arch 1
Oct14, 2013

Figuration

Painting is a mode of creative expression, and the forms are numerous. Drawing,

composition or abstraction and other aesthetics may serve to manifest the expressive

and conceptual intention of the practitioner. Also is a beautiful thing to express

natural, however in architecture it can exploit in order to acquire projects or can give

ideas a simplicity for the audience to understand an image for the project. Sometime

architectural drawings are hard to demonstrate in public, nevertheless the painting

could expose a secret behind the project and affect the audience judgment.

I can see that in the Hokusai Wave design by Alejandro Zaero-polo(Forign office

Architects). Alejandro won in the Yokohama competition project in February 1995.

Thanks to British painter Richard Sweeney. The story started in Yokohama City Hall.

During that day Alejandro felt the audience didn’t get the message while he was

explaining his proposal. He proceeded to explain the circulation diagrams, the

geometric, transforming and the construction technologies that he involved in the

project, hoping that the audience would be aware about a principle thought from his

proposal. Suddenly his rescue came, which is Hokusai Wave, a drawing by local

painter that he had been toying with while he indulged in geometry manipulations

and construction hypotheses during the design phase of the competition

entry. Alejandro explained to the audience the image of Hokusai Wave was his

inspiration after that the proposal became clearly understood for the audience.

Iconography is a convenient tool to make the architecture concept obvious to the

public also connect the architecture with nature, so we can see that clearly in The

Beijing Stadium designed by Herzog and De Meuron refer to the image of a birds

nest. The solid material for stadium takes a new impression, it considers a bunch of

wood but in the reality is a bunch of steel and concrete, but the public knows the

inspiration of artificial birds nest as a way to describe the stadium.

Conversion thing to a perceptible value that what happen with iconography in

architecture. Usually, when start any design with manipulates a geometry and see the

unexpected shape come is going to be hard to define it in public without the process

design which lead to a final result even with the disciplinary for the geometry. For

instance, when see Zaha Hadid works and want to describe it to someone is hard to

tell what is looks like or don’t know the start point she did to get a nice geometry.

However, with iconography a normal person will feel he has a nice information about

any design comes from any idea he realized which gives him a valuable information

will make it easier to describe it for anyone. For example, ING House in Amsterdam

of the Dutch architects Meyer & Van Schooten is not explicitly designed to be

iconographic in any sense. To the public however the building looks like a shoe, an

ice-skate. When ask people about that building next to the highway in Amsterdam,

they refer to it like an ice-skate.

Finally, iconography helps an architect to open the door for Imagination and gives

any building identity between the other building. Furthermore, it redefined the solid

material is used in the building as connection with natural life or gives more value

than a stone , a steel or concrete

. In the other hand, the iconography contributes a clarify figuration for people who

believe the architecture is hard to be understood.

The response form teacher:
Hi Talal,
I think your discussion of painting in relation to figuration relates to some of the issues raised in Gilles
Deleuze’s texts “Painting and Sensation,” and “The Diagram” (in the readings for week 9). You should
also definitely refer to the attached text by Charles Jencks as a primary source for how collage was
defined in the context of Postmodern architecture. It would be useful to differentiate between collage as
defined by Jencks and what you refer to as ‘iconic’. You should identify specific techniques that are used
in several projects in order to facilitate legibility. How does this contemporary form of architectural
legibility differ from discussions of Postmodern iconicity and collage (Jencks)? It would be good to
review all the readings in the Figuration topic in order to present your position in that context. It would
also be useful to speculate on what aspects of our contemporary cultural moment have prompted this
shift in forms of legibility in architecture. I look forward to seeing the essay develop.
Best, Marcelyn