Architectural Weaponry: An Interview with Mark Wigley

[Image: The cover of Volume 10 and Mark Wigley].

Mark Wigley is Dean of the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation (GSAPP) at Columbia University. He is also the author of Constant's New Babylon and The Architecture of Deconstruction: Derrida's Haunt, among others, and he is co-editor of The Activist Drawing: Retracing Situationist Architectures from Constant's New Babylon to Beyond.
Mark is also a co-founder, with Rem Koolhaas and Ole Bouman, of Volume magazine, the 10th issue of which was recently published. BLDGBLOG posted an interview with Ole Bouman several weeks ago, discussing the strategy, purpose, and future of Volume; this week, we talk to Mark Wigley.
However, even beyond Volume, I'm also interested in Wigley's tenure as Dean of the GSAPP. In an interview last year with Kazys Varnelis, Varnelis explained:

Under Mark Wigley’s deanship a new way of thinking about the role of the architecture school has emerged at Columbia. A number of labs are being developed there to serve as an interface between the school and the rest of the world – places where the school can undertake projects involving people both inside and outside the school, where a new kind of experimentation can develop.

I thought, then, that while I talked to Mark about Volume and the relevance of the magazine as a publishing format, I would slip in a few questions about the nature of architectural education, the role of sustainable design at Columbia, and whether books by Gilles Deleuze or science fiction novels are more useful to assign for a design studio...
Along the way, we discuss editorial collaboration, the global building boom, today's generation of students, architecture as a limitation of freedom, and the real politics of Constant's New Babylon.

• • •
BLDGBLOG: First, if one of the editorial goals of Volume is to agitate – or to introduce turbulence into architectural discussions – then what is the actual strategy through which you hope to realize that goal?

Mark Wigley: Well, the mechanism of Volume is to try to produce a form of conversation that takes away the traditional categories of a school, an office, and a magazine. I think what’s great about having a kind of triangular partnership at Volume is that it works like a conversation. One person says one thing which gets misinterpreted by the other two, so they then launch another version of it, and it spins around – but what’s really shared is a deep conviction that the shape of the journal, and the shape of the institution, and the school, needs to shift.

The pretension of it is to have everybody lose their normal identity by collaborating – and each issue comes out as kind of a shock to all the people who produce it. In a certain way, agitation therefore is the aim of the project, and so the Agitation issue is also thinking about what the Volume collaboration values the most. It’s an attempt to locate alternative role models. So, in the last issue, the thought is that an expert dog trainer is just as likely – if not more likely – to offer us clues about future directions of architectural discourse as a famous architect or a non-famous architect. Everything has to be continually placed alongside things that don’t normally appear there – and, in an old format like a magazine, this requires a kind of curatorial delirium. I mean, you have to go with things whose purpose is not clear and whose final effect is not clear, risking some bad articles – but also having some really great ones.

BLDGBLOG: Is that strategy changing over time?

Wigley: We have changed the structure a little bit. Now, in each issue, one of the three sides of the editorial triangle takes the lead and defines what’s going to go on in that issue; but the other two sides of the triangle then contribute material toward that idea.

For instance, the Agitation issue came out of C-LAB. And C-LAB, of course, is headquartered at the school – but it precisely is not representing the school. Or the way it represents the school is the extent to which it has an autonomous capacity. So if Columbia is a radically experimental school, one of the signs of that is there are things going on there that don’t have to be tied back to what the rest of the school is doing. C-LAB has a sort of semi-autonomous, freelance capacity to connect with the world and with other people.

More and more I’m trying to cultivate, or construct, a wild west that takes advantage of the fact that we can bring all the resources of the university to bear. So nothing necessarily that’s in Volume is going on inside this school. So could you have a school which is entirely of that spirit? A kind of free-ranging conversation?

BLDGBLOG: To some extent it seems like the lack of agitation in today’s architectural discussions comes from the format those discussions occur within. In other words, you get five people who already know each other and you put them on a panel; they then talk about something they’ve already talked about before – and, two hours later, nothing’s happened. So it would seem that, if we really want to introduce turbulence into architecture, as you say, then we need to structure our conversations differently, to explore new formats. If that is the case, what formats lie beyond the seminar, the lecture, the panel discussion, etc.?

Wigley: It’s a great question. I don’t think Marshall McLuhan can go far wrong – the medium/message thing. I mean, what you’re saying is: does the medium, the technology, of education and communication in our field limit the kind of things that we can say? And the answer is absolutely yes.

One of the primary roles to be played by the experimental activists in architecture is not to come up with new ideas of what architecture should be, but to come up with new ways to talk about it – new media. In that sense it’s absolutely crucial that we foster new techniques of communication – with all of the incredible care and precision that we use to foster new forms of design. We need equal care and equal attention to incubate new forms of communication. For instance, if a student project gets to be really interesting, but then we just dump it into the typical format of a magazine, or a monograph, then it can never do what it is really able to do. If we work with a bad medium, you know, it’s all bad.

Take a school, for example. A school is, or should be, an incubator for new forms of architecture and new forms of conversations about architecture. But what you’re really trying to incubate is not a delicate creature but something that has real force in our community. You’re trying to incubate a weapon, if you like. And that requires that schools allow an incredible diversity of experiments to go on, because none of us can be sure what’s the next step. I think most schools of architecture don’t honor that need for the field itself to grow. Or, to put it another way: the real, interesting mission for a school is not a particular shape of building, but a particular shape of architect. A particular shape of operator – not a new operation. I think that’s an incredibly exciting mission, and you never get, I think, better students or better teachers than in a school of architecture.

Volume, therefore, is part of that. But it will not be part of that if it’s just another school magazine. It has to be a laboratory. It has to be a space in which even the school is shocked, not just the people who produce it or the people who read it. That’s the spirit.

[Image: A page from Volume 10].

BLDGBLOG: There also seems to be a huge reliance today on extra-architectural theory, like Gilles Deleuze. But if students were instead locked in a room with some science fiction novels, or even a comic book, it might actually stir up some new ideas. At the very least, science fiction actually addresses architecture. So perhaps the problem is one of reference? Or even of genre? Or just specifically Deleuze?

Wigley: To cut to the chase, if it’s a choice between being locked in a room with a science fiction book or being locked in a room with Deleuze, go for the science fiction book, for sure. No doubt about it. But that’s not a choice against theory – because, in fact, science fiction is an incredibly important mode of theorizing about technology and about space, and the people who produce science fiction are often incredibly canny theorists.

So the problem in the current discussion about theory is that when people say theory they really mean a particular thing. For example, when you say: what do I think about the use of these extra-architectural theories? That makes sense only if we know what architecture is. In fact, what’s so exciting about architecture is that its limits are not clear. It’s a way of thinking; it’s not a fixed territory. In a way, you can reach what seems a long way away – to somebody like Deleuze – in order to get a feel for how those limits are moving. At certain moments in time, Deleuze might seem to be totally inside the limits; at other moments, he might seem a long way away – but that’s not necessarily a move toward or away from theory. Mies’s famous saying: build, don’t talk. Well, that’s a theoretical statement. He had a theory about practice. It’s amazing how many people quote him saying that – they quote a piece of theory against theory.

The more important question is: which theory, at which time, mobilized in which direction? I, myself, would like to be locked in a room with a science fiction book – but that’s just me. Someone else would like to be locked in a room with Deleuze, and generate some thinking for architects that seems much more urgent and seductive and accurate. And somebody can read science fiction and come up with trash – I mean, there’s a lot of junk science fiction out there, and there’s a hell of a lot of bad architecture out there, too.

But I think it’s great that people are reading different books now than they were reading five years ago. There’s no subject an architect won’t talk about. And that sort of restless promiscuity is entirely positive. What’s interesting is that architects have often been informed by a very precise theory, whether technological or political or scientific and so on; but we also learn a lot by just paying attention to the seemingly ordinary details of the city around us. And architects are fantastic at stitching ideas to objects. That’s what we’re really good at.

Architects are builders who theorize – articulate builders.

[Image: Two pages from Volume 6, illustrating large-scale building projects in the Middle East].

BLDGBLOG: It’s interesting, then, to note that all of the construction going on today, from Dubai to Beijing to midtown Manhattan, is specifically referred to as the building boom – not the architecture boom. There’s a huge difference there. To what extent, then, are we surrounded by more architecture than ever – or less architecture than ever before?

Wigley: I’m really tempted to say it’s less. You can have a building boom and it will actually be an architecture deficit. So architecture can be in decline at a moment of massive building. I think that would be a fantastic subject for debate.

You could say that, in the current explosion of building, architects are getting more and more opportunities to not live up to the potential of their field. [laughter] You could say: all across the globe, architects are blowing it. Of course, they blame the client, the money, the economy, and so on. But you could say that we have more lost opportunities than ever – but there are more opportunities. And that’s important.

So what is the model that we work with here? Some people might say: the way the world works, 99% of things that go on are boring, but there is that 1% that explosively changes the landscape. The real issue would not be: is the planet being covered with beautiful new projects? But: over the whole globe, are we getting, every year, four or five projects that force every architect to think again? See, I would rather have four or five projects a year that make us all feel like we have to argue passionately about our field, than have 90% a little better than before. And I would say that the staggering statistic is how few buildings are produced globally that literally force us to change our mind about our field.

That’s obviously one of the pleasures of working with Rem Koolhaas – of course, he has that capacity, as a writer and as an architect. But the number of people who can do that is very, very small. But that’s the Darwinian thing, the new species – where is that coming from? And I think that can come from anywhere. I’m super-impressed with the emerging generation of designers right now. I think the kinds of expertise, and the kinds of unexpected strengths that are emerging in students right now, are going to change the landscape. I think it’s going to be harder to grind these people down. They have real tricks. They are totally articulate, literate, mobile, canny – I think we can give them incredible training, and the world better be careful.

But two things: almost nobody – I mean, very few people – are doing things with theory, with words, with books, with buildings, that are shockingly demanding us to change our mind. Very few. But you get the feeling that there’s a generation cooking. A generation that can overcome, let’s say, some of the resistance. And what you said earlier I think is right to the point: can we generate new communication systems that will allow this network of emerging thinkers to redefine the landscape and empower themselves? Because, of course, all the traditional magazines, all the traditional schools – everything – is set up to reinforce a certain slow evolution of the field. Architecture is obsessed with being slow. We can make the most exciting thing dull. We have that expertise. Our social role has been that: to be slow, to be stable, to be a reference point for change. It’s, in a sense, how we have been so clearly the enemies of turbulence – and the question is: how do you foster turbulence? It’s the question for every teacher: how do you foster turbulence without freezing it? Without stopping it?

You know, we live in a world where everybody wants their future to be absolutely predictable from their present state. I think what would be really interesting is to take away that absolute desire to control your own future and to take a risk. And I think architecture needs to take a risk. That’s a pretentious way of saying it, but I think that’s the case.

[Image: The iceberg as architecture; a page-spread from Volume 10].

BLDGBLOG: In one of Ole Bouman’s essays he talks about “unsolicited architecture” as a way of introducing new ideas. In other words, you can offer a whole new vision of London or Manhattan – and not because anyone asked you for it, but because it’s shocking and unexpected and futuristic and fun. It makes people see their own city differently. So I’m curious what role you think unsolicited architecture might play in the quest for agitation and turbulence.

Wigley: I’m not sure I know what Ole meant by unsolicited – and that’s actually part of the collaboration. It’s not that we speak with one voice. There are, let’s say, many voices on the C-LAB side and many voices on Ole’s side and many voices on Rem’s side. So nobody’s entirely in synch, and the syncopation, being slightly out of synch, is what generates the whole thing. So my reading of what he means would probably be different from what he means. But I think there are two senses of unsolicited architecture: one is exactly like you say – which is producing stuff that was not asked for – and I think that’s an amazing resource. I think there’s a long and wonderful and important tradition of architects inserting counter-proposals – forcing the discussion to move differently. I think that’s a really interesting approach.

There’s also unsolicited architecture, which is something that didn’t even think that it was architecture. You point to it and say: maybe this is architecture. And what’s unsolicited about it is that the person didn’t even think that they were making a proposal for a new landscape; but if you point to it and say, hey, from the point of view of an architect, this could be really interesting…

I think one of the purposes of Volume is to keep saying to the reader: is this architecture? And the answer could easily be: no. Or the answer could be: wait a minute, maybe… So unsolicited means two things: that the person delivering something wasn’t asked to deliver; and that someone else was just told that they’ve delivered something they didn’t mean to deliver.

BLDGBLOG: Earlier, you mentioned the idea of the architect as operator – that we need new kinds of architects as much as we need new kinds of spaces. As far as education and training go, then, how does one cultivate this or implement it? Is it just a question of being more interdisciplinary?

Wigley: My personal feeling is you should reinforce all of the divisions, to get out of them whatever you can, and then you engineer the contamination. So you reinforce the individual character of architecture vs. urban design vs. preservation vs. real estate vs. planning – so that what’s juicy in each of those distinct silos can be really exploited – and then, when you engineer a crossover between all those programs, you actually know what you’re crossing over from. You actually know what it is that each group is able to do. You create, within the space of an institution, a kind of wilderness of promiscuous mutations.

All the various things that architects think about: allow each and every one of those to be exposed to radical forms of research, drawing on everybody. That dialogue is rich, and it’s unpredictable, and you create these moments of connection – basically exchanging genetic material, to create a kind of complex ecology in which new species emerge, and the whole point is you don’t know what this new species is. You really don’t know. And you don’t want to exchange genetic material all the time; you want to exchange it – and then see what happens. And then exchange some more. What you’re looking for is productive mutations, that make us hesitate. The greatest gift of the architect is to produce something that makes society hesitate and think. Another way of saying that the architect has been such an enemy of turbulence is that we have not interrupted enough. We have reinforced patterns; we’ve not interrupted them. And probably the architect, more than any other professional, has been called on by society to monumentalize existing patterns.

If you think of the architects that we love the most, the ones that have really affected us, they didn’t simply build what they were asked to build – they built something that was surprisingly better than what they were asked for. They changed the desire. The good architect is the one who makes you realize that your desires could be more adventurous, and then who satisfies those new desires in ways that are very, very positive. That – that – is a really important social mission. If you say that the traditional architect monumentalizes existing desires, that doesn’t sound like such a hot mission anymore.

[Image: A page-spread from Volume 10, pointing out who did what at what age, and when they died; the conclusion? Complete your "breakthrough work" before you turn 32...].

BLDGBLOG: On an educational level, what role does sustainability play at Columbia?

Wigley: What’s happening is sustainability now plays a huge role in the school at every level, because that’s where the students and the teachers are leaning. But what’s interesting – and this is where my own thoughts come in – is that nobody’s really interested in that word sustainability. That sounds like not ambitious enough. We do a lot of work that could be described as a search for more sustainable options – but, really, what it is is a search for a more radical ecological model. So the school’s not aiming toward sustainability, but aiming beyond that.

If you had asked me the same question five years ago, I would have said it’s occupying 10% of our attention – whereas now it’s occupying, like, 35%. That’s not because the new generation of students wants architecture to follow the latest code on sustainability, but because they think it’s one of the most interesting philosophical and technical challenges to the architect. There’s the responsibility – and I think we’ve got a more responsible group of students and teachers coming along – but it’s also exciting to them. They find the whole concept exciting.

Maybe five years ago, if you were for sustainability, you saw yourself as virtuous, and you saw yourself standing against radical avant-garde practices in architecture, which were, by definition, scandalously wasteful of resources. They neglected 99% of the human population and didn’t do anything good for anyone anywhere. But that’s not true anymore. A really radical ecological approach to architecture generates some of the most experimental avant-garde design. That old split between sustainability and being cool, so to speak – that’s gone. I think that’s a real difference between sustainability, as a defense against a relentless enemy, and sustainability as the opening up of a whole new series of potentials. And, of course, I love the latter. However, it may be that the former is more realistic. We’re not living in a good world. But I think it’s the job of architects to be optimistic, to invent new forms of optimism, to actually contaminate us all with the possibility that we could live differently.

[Image: Constant's New Babylon].

BLDGBLOG: Finally, I’d like to talk about your work on Constant. Specifically, everyone who writes about New Babylon seems to want so badly for that project to be considered liberationist – the epitome of human freedom – but it really appears to be the opposite. For instance, in your own writing you refer to New Babylon as "a mechanism that repeats itself endlessly, automatically," even though that mechanism "is not meant to be experienced as such." In other words, a hidden "mechanism" shapes and controls the everyday environment, even while no one can directly engage with that mechanism – which sounds, to me, like a perfect description of ideology! You also point out that residents of New Babylon will exist through a “collective revolutionary restructuring of the everyday environment” – but that’s only true insofar as they never leave the world that Constant built for them. It might sound a little hyperbolic to phrase it like this, but New Babylon actually seems to be an example of architectural Stalinism – a world of total control. Why do you think this aspect of Constant’s work is almost always overlooked?

Wigley: Well, I think that’s a terrific analysis. If I can just elaborate a little bit on what you’re saying: New Babylon is imagined as a playground. The model for it is a children’s playground. Of course, the traditional model is that, as a child, you get to play – but then, as you get to be an adult, you have to work. You lose the freedom to say and do as you want, to run free. You become narrow. You become a slave to the system – etc.

So New Babylon begins with this thought: what if you never had to work – so you could be a child your whole life? New Babylon begins with the thought that a real revolutionary society would not be one in which the workers overthrew the bosses, or, in Marxist terms, a society in which capitalism would eat itself and give way to a new order; the real revolution would be that technology would take away the political advantage of the boss vs. the worker. A real revolutionary society would be a society of the unconscious, and the freedom with which children explore whatever comes into their minds would be the sign of a liberated society.

But what I think you’re saying is: that’s all very well, if you think that a playground is really a space of free movement. Because, of course, a playground is also a space of total control – it has an inside and an outside; there are only so many things you can do inside it; and there is always somebody watching. So the playground is also a space of surveillance and so on. You could say that the nightmare of Constant’s project is that you never get out of the playground.

So you’re absolutely right to stress the extent to which a supposed society of liberation is actually a control society. But it’s interesting to look at Constant’s own criticism of the project.

He does New Babylon for about twenty years – till he becomes convinced that he’s made a terrible mistake. He realizes that, if you give everybody a playground in which they can unleash their desires, then it won’t be a 60s paradise of love and solidarity and all that – people will actually kill each other, because we’re dark, miserable creatures. He was very affected by the failure of May ’68 in Paris, and by the Vietnam War, and by the death of a child of a close friend of his – so he really started to see people as their own enemy.

He spent the last four years of the project showing the horror of what it would be like to live in New Babylon. He’s the only architect – or let’s say quasi-architect – I’ve ever known that spent not just one image but four years’ worth of images to show how horrible life would be in his own city.

[Images: Constant's New Babylon].

BLDGBLOG: [laughter]

Wigley: And if you look at Constant’s New Babylon, you never see a single person in it. He’s not going to show the people of the future, because he doesn’t know what they’re going to look like. He says: that’s what we’ll do, we’ll design our own bodies, even. But then he brings the people in, in the last four years – and they’re basically dying, and killing each other, and there’s a huge amount of blood.

So, if he was with us in this conversation, and if you said to him: don’t you think there’s a kind of Stalinesque quality – you have this global, technocratic machinery out of which there’s no escape, and you have freedom, but it’s the freedom, let’s say, to swing in the jungle gym? I don’t know what his answer would be. But, definitely, he sees the dark side of this project.

I kind of want to finish the answer to your question in a particular way: I think you’re right – but the way in which you’re right would perhaps be true of any architectural project that offers its inhabitants some kind of freedom. Because the question is: what is the nature of that offer? If I build a beautiful loft in which you can divide the rooms whichever way you want: okay, that’s a kind of freedom, but it’s like the freedom to choose what part of the prison cell you’re going to occupy. So it could be that the architect, as an architect, is never really able to offer freedom – and, in particular, political freedom – and that there’s something in the substance and organization of form that resists human potentials. If you look at, for example, the writings of Georges Bataille, that’s exactly what he said: that architecture, no matter what it is, in any form, is a prison.

But I think your example of Constant is a great example to demonstrate this argument. In other words, you say: even somebody dedicated to play, in the end, produces a control society. I’m just trying to reverse the question a bit and say: can we think of an architectural practice which, in a genuine sense, liberates the user? In a real, genuine sense? And I don’t know. I think the work of Gordon Matta-Clark is particularly interesting in that sense; he also sees architecture as a kind of dark force, and his surgical cuts tried to expose that. But he doesn’t really offer a moral – it’s not like he was saying: I’ll show you how nasty architecture is, and, as a result of that, you’ll be liberated. He was a pretty depressed guy.

[Image: Constant's New Babylon].

BLDGBLOG: Another example might be the utopian promise of the mobile home – but, again, you’re only free to go anywhere you want insofar as you never leave the US highway system. So it’s a very precise and circumscribed form of personal freedom.

Wigley: You make me think of something else. You know, Enrique Walker, one of the teachers at this school, thinks that architecture is always about constraint, and that architects don’t acknowledge that enough. We really build constraints – we don’t build freedoms: we build reductions of freedom.

I think what’s great is that, if you think that way, you really have to take more responsibility for every decision, right, because every decision is a kind of narrowing of options. I mean, it’d be great. What would happen is, in a school of architecture, we would just tell everybody: every line you do, every decision, every statement, as an architect, is going to limit more options than it opens up.

And then the question is: what are you going to do? How are you going to behave?

What’s your role?

• • •
With a big thanks to Mark Wigley for taking the time to have this conversation – and to Benedict Clouette, for putting the two of us in touch.
Meanwhile, be sure to check out BLDGBLOG's interview with Ole Bouman – and, coming soon, an interview with Jeffrey Inaba, which will round out BLDGBLOG's recent conversations with the editorial team behind Volume...