#13 PART.II.thought — Desire and Thought in Practice
The Goal in Architecture PART.II.0.2 Desire
Desire is for me related to the image of our future that the Jetsons cartoon portrays where technology had made everyone luxury dwellers. This future was promised to me more than once during my school days. One would desire that. There is no land nor a tree to be seen, they live up in the sky, and the only wider environment is other homes in the clouds, partly representing the sidelining of nature that we have now. Would one desire that? In CS Lewis's story on a magical Venus that he called Perelandra, desire leads from simplicity and innocence to horror and to victorious peace, with the feathers being torn off hundreds of birds to make the innocent Perelandrian woman more beautiful with a feather coat, and then to victory over the goals of the coat's maker. Perelandra is the name Machaelle Wright gave to her garden where she started researching our co-creative relationship with nature through her communication with nature. Behaving as if the God in all Life Mattered is her initial book about the co-creative relationship we have with intelligent nature. These are concrete expressions of the flow of desire, and paths to healing damage.
Desire was a token of value in the making of the projects we undertook at the GSAPP as students. The then recent Deconstructivist Architects exit at MOMA, and people representing that cultural impulse populating the school at the time, had a big influence on that. Desire represented all that we young architects … desired.
Building the profession and our relationship with nature includes our desire/s; either with desire or in an after–desire condition. This article focuses on the role desire plays as part of thought in the profession in this context.
On kind of desire is exemplified in a narrative with architectural characters. This part of the original cover image of Rem Koolhaas' Delirious New York: A Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan. It is named 'Flagrant Délit', painted by Madelon Vriesendorp. The cover was originally uncredited, which to me represents the delirious desire of grasping at power of some of us.
Desire is a prominent component of architectural practice and in the education of architects. It is less central than it was. But books continue to be written about desire, and conferences on that theme are arranged.1 Desire holds qualitative value. Design is made to respond to the desire of the client and the occupants and participants while the architect fulfills her desire for form with a range of spaces and objects between functionality and ‘eye candy’. In practice, desire is a programmatic element of a project's Entwurft that appropriates the client’s intentions that the architect prepares.
Value of dwelling is generally expressed in terms of convenience and luxury, formed as physical quality that serves desire, primarily through architecture’s technicst proxy. The colour of the car in the advertisement is chosen with desire in mind. Desire also serves as a ‘wild card’ in the mutual play of the client and the prerogative of the practicing architect to allow for the intensive technical requirements of building, which include finance and regulations, where we manipulate needs and the variety of outlooks, and transform it all into requirements that lead to architecture. Desire allows ‘requirements’ to escape the strictly pragmatic terms of technology and materiality, and it allows for serving individualistic ends, personal ends, and implies satisfaction and satiation. Desire in this role in concealing conflict within those terms of the profession, even as it enables the practicing architect’s functionality.
By asserting desire as a form of need, real-estate, commercial and consumer product market demands become a need of business and economy that architectural professional practice then provides for. Desire has come to be a programmatic attribute, that is often codified and programmed into projects as a positive idea. The architectural profession explains this as value-adding objects of desire.
Schools of architecture define their curriculum with technical accreditation and qualifying requirements. But a way to raise up architctural projects with a valuative components is through desire. We otherwise often shy away from humane need beyond the technical attributes. Desire is not really humane, but it points toward human qualities better than mere technic. This is a concealed conflict. Desire-as-programme absorbs need related to the difference between occupying functional spaces, dwelling and what is nature or natural. We want to harmonize with nature, including our inner nature, without co-creating. We cannot avoid that we are always actually co-creating, but the systems of the Machine Age Modernist profession ignore it, and we are not listening.
Desire is then an architectural programme conceived as additional to what is extant or available for providing for feelings of fulfillment and proper actions through the means of building or otherwise preparing an intentional environment. Desire is part of architectural discourse as a spark of interest that gives the intended environment the liveliness of a product, but it also serves to locate architectural preparations’ costs as ‘additional’. The need for our aspiration and love is re–territorialized as desire in technicist architectural practice to allow it to be joined to the fulfillment of the experience of dwelling that architecture fulfills.
Desire as a programme allows the architect as the operator of the preparations of dwelling to bring the entire spectrum of world into the realm of their role and yet to be free choose their desire, embedding it in technical design services. There is nothing necessarily wrong with this, but the process of it necessarily causes issues. The practice of architecture and the individual architect who is practicing architecture may pre-load the essential quality of need-as-desire into their projects, where ‘need’ is then de-fanged and has the quality of being ‘optional’ in the sense that desire retains the quality of choice, turning to the freedom to choose, which is human. This is what backfires in practice. Architecture is felt as optional when it is about desire. Architecture is de-valued vis a vis concrete or material technological and procedural values (including finance and economic elements), reenforcing the issue that desire as programme seeks to circumvent, de-valuing architecture as a response to our need for wellbeing.
It is a reversal in responsibility for professionals' authority. What is desired as just reward stands for the right of freedom-of-choice that forms our choosing. Freedom-of choice is a human capacity, which is fundamental to human being, generates the need for responsibility using that capacity. Elevating desire as a necessity that poses as a right doubles what is already a natural attribute of consciousness, leaving its original nature undone. Desire as pragmatic functionality to prepare environments is in conflict with architectural presencing in practice through human capacity for intentionality and will. Such programming of desire, as a shift of quality to capital value via technology, must contradict architecture’s essence.
This is more than ignoring nature's role in our lives. The professional seeks to negotiate and becomes an aggressor in that conflict. Desire undermines the value of the profession in light of humanity and our role in nature. This is a feedback loop of affect, symptom and cause. The architect is in an essential conflict of interest with her architectural outcomes. We have the weirdly frozen unnatural world of the Jetsons.
Post–Modern architecture flowed from attempts to face this conflict as yet still within that same conflict’s terms; so technicism become more sustainable through this mitigating influence. (This was then reenforced by the concurrent beginnings of intensifying sustainability and climate friendly techno-solutions, further justifying the current professional technicism.) The practice of architecture continues to be in conflict in the rigid and narrow confines of technological materialism, finance and regulation.
'Desire' as pragmatic constructed elements supports ‘production’, including ‘knowledge–production’, as a nexus that can gather the image of architecture limits the professional architect. Desire as part of sensed wellbeing is closely linked to personal identity. Desire implies intimacy. During my studies at Columbia, this danger was an explicit part of nearing the cutting edge. It is a safe danger, enlivening the work as Batty, the replicant in the movie Bladerunner, would push a nail through his hand to keep living a little bit longer. Desire is like that nail in our current profession. Batty in turn keeps Deckard alive. Architecture 'survives' with the help of technology. But architecture is suffering in the tyranny of hegemonic technological values. We require an escape to rejoin what cannot be measured and what is only in human nature, to live our evolutionary consciousness.
Technology as it is currently embedded professionally undermines practice while saving it, as people do, by still claiming architecture. Bringing what architecture needs in practice in terms of desire seems to be a satisfactory and safe approach to the danger. But to demote technicist means of practice so that the profession changes paradigmatically, right at its root philosophy, is to propose the dissolution of the danger. That appears to be dangerous too. Desire as positive valuative element of the basis for architectural projects allows us to subdue the danger and curbs the appearance of needing that change. Desire absorbs the conflict that the architect must face.
Desire in this role in the profession appears to surmount the conflict as a form of freedom-of-choice2 — but the profession has lost its raison d’être. Any individual practicing architecture may have freedom-of-choice to make the world. But desire fills that space that might otherwise bear our aspiration and love.
This coheres with the modernist myth of garbage. Garbage as a functioning myth and social institution of valuation allows the elimination from concern of nature and of results that do not reconcile with our systems of valuation. We may also choose to, or simply not notice or recognize, the factors of this conflict and to propose the solution to conflict in the preparation of architecture as desire or garbage. The freedom-to-choose remains an essential component of being human and of architecture, as well as it is to dissolving our conflict.3
Desire and garbage are the poles of an axis that the architectural professional accepts. They generally take the form of food and consumer goods, but there is vast amount of wealth involved in programmes of desire and garbage production that thought creates early in the development process of our environments.
Desire in design as a technological function is a measured material requirement for results that bridge the discord of expressing one thing — i.e. architecture — as another. That other has no name, so I am calling it the ‘idea of architecture’.4 The architectural profession slips to default positions, concealing wellbeing as desire, using the concept of ‘styles’. This conflict programmes the current architectural profession.
Desire and Professional Identity
The profession has spent more than a generation struggling with its identity while attempting to allow technological forces and partnerships to be properly represented. We are now in a place where we speak of 'design' instead of architecture.
The place of desire in each of us is at the heart of professional authority through a series of reversals and folds. Understanding this helps to keep in view the hindered functionality of the architect and the student in the studio for preparing projects that may be enthusiastically accepted and financed within machines.
The profession of architecture has to reframe what ‘world’ is when it exits the limits of building technology or when architecture transcends the appearances that fit within current culture and society. Architecture always exits the limit of technology and the humane transgresses assumed appearance in each project, at least in principle, potentially. Architectural practice is in the awkward position of ‘needing’ to not moralize about a client’s life or business practices while at least appearing to support freedom to waste and undermine the humane and its qualities and resource. Ignorance influences form. This seems to contradict the efficacy and efficiency of technology and elegance in engineering, while they are the same thing. It is a matter that every project for architecture must include.
Desire implicates the higher attributes of human being, maintaining but redefining nature in freedom-of-choice as the right to do as one wishes, rather than responsibility. The problem of conflict with architecture leads the architectural profession to develop systems that image and symbolize architecture. We are free to call building architecture, while speaking of design, and to frame the needs resolved as attained desires. The preparation of architecture is turned to conceal the problem.
Architecture is value that is in conflict with the culture of Machine Age societies. These values are natural within us and around us. These values extend beyond that culture of technological knowledge. To deal with this is called spirituality. Being unaware of these grounds for asserting professional duty to provide for presencing them as architecture, and not recognizing desire in technology, limits the architect. Hence, this project explores the Verknüpfung of architecture with spirituality and it does this by going deeper through the conflict with ‘thought’ to match us up with capacities that are facilitated in spiritual practices.
Wishes and intentions are always available; that well spring never dries up. Architectural values are developed in thinking valuation. Thought develops the material world as it is.
There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so…5
Desire as a good thing, as torment and as excuse, is a product of thinking on answering to needs for all things in life. It also conceals. Desire can seem to be or to replace love. If there is desire and no love, the results or affect of the aim, or whatever is done, are cut off and will likely end in pain or disaster. If there is love and no desire, you can go as far as conceivable and far beyond that.
There is never absolute lack of love in anyone alive. A spark of love must be there just to be alive. There is no lack of love. Love may be compartmentalized in systems that do not support it or ignore it, such as programmes of desire.
Engaging the Verknüpfung with spirituality of architectural practice will find us embarked on a path of discovery to resolve what develops dis-ease.
A search for publications and conferences will show myriad books with desire and architecture both in the title. Conferences: Desire of City and Architecture - An academic conference exploring urban design and architectural philosophies; Architectural Desires Symposium - Focuses on the deeper desires that drive modern architecture; Designing Desire in Modern Cities - A conference discussing how desire influences urban planning and architecture; Spaces of Desire: Architecture and Urbanism - Explores how architecture fulfills human desires in urban spaces; Desires and Designs in Architecture - Highlights innovative design processes that respond to human desires. Books: Desiring Practices: Architecture, Gender, and the Interdisciplinary - Explores the role of desire in architecture and gender theory; The Architecture of Desire- A book that delves into how architecture can shape and be shaped by human desires; Desire and the Policy of Architecture - Discusses how desire influences architectural policies and design decisions; Architectural Desires: Essays on the Role of Desire in Design - A collection of essays examining the intersection of desire and architectural practice; The Desire Lines: Paths of Architecture and Urban Design - Focuses on how desire paths can influence architectural and urban design solutions. These 10 are all from www.archdaily.com. There are very many of these.
‘Freedom-of-choice’ and freedom–of-duty will be developed later in this project with a revised note and link here.
John Ruskin proposed legal provisions to limit architects’ ‘creativity’ in the 7th Lamp of Architecture. He saw our freedom running amuck with the new power coming over the horizon and wanted that freedom curtailed, given that he felt it impossible to find the discipline in architects. He outlines what became fascist terms of controlling human choice. Controlling architectural quality faces the conflict of defining in law un-measurable qualities. For John Ruskin those un-measurable qualities were clear; his writing is the evidence of such knowledge. This is the same conflict that PART.II addresses. We have political regimes that are claiming control over architectural styles even today.
See definition of ‘idea of architecture’ in N.3.1 Definitions. ‘Idea of architecture’ is thinking that the architecture of disjunct practice has value = architecture. ‘Idea of architecture’ is architectural elements of form and aesthetics that are part of the technological Bestand and essentially technical means. ‘Idea of architecture’ is measure of the built form representative of architecture as architecture. ‘Idea of architecture’ occurs when that object or environment is thought in disjunct practice. ‘Idea of architecture’ is this project’s term for the signs of architecture of any shape, detail or image that is attached to an environment and its material and structure that are ideated to be ‘read’ as being architecture. ‘Idea of architecture’ is architecture as tool of elements that exclude what would be infinite and immeasurable. This thought is of architecture as shelter and programmes, rather than the immeasurable and ‘truth’ presencing aspiration. A certain questioning is abandoned and dwelling in aspiration is in ‘oblivion’.
Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act II, Scene 2.