Intensive Architecture

Posted by admin on April 27th, 2008 filed in art, theory

Molly Wright Steenson of Active Social Plastic, has written a nice summary of some of Philippe Rahm’s architectural practice. His work seems fascinating and I’ve spent most of the day reading what I can online about his work. This is the first encounter I’ve had with his work, but it seems to resonate with something I’ve been thinking about for a little while now: the notion of intensive architecture. This is a decidedly raw and underdeveloped idea that is possibly developed elsewhere, and you’re always in danger when delving into other disciplines for the first time, but then this is a blog for testing out such ideas. This has been filtering into my recent practice, and at some point will develop into some more considered writing, but Steenson’s post has touched on something that compelled me to write for more experimental reasons.

First, a little information on why this grabbed me: The theoretical context for my recent work has more than a few dark, shadowy corners. One such corner is where the Bergsonian critique of spatiality lingers and is developed by Deleuze. I’ve yet to follow up some references suggested to me by Levi (as I’ve been on a soldering binge for a while) but either way a certain suspicion has formed regarding the synonymity of architecture and hylomorphism. Where spatiality is understood in strictly extensive terms, in the sense of things being-there, it is instrumental in the construction and maintenance of identities, that is to say, as spatial multiplicity which when divided retains its identity. I find the discrepancy between spatial and intensive multiplicites interesting, and this is where I need to get stuck into Bergson, as when I think of spatiality in Deleuzean and more idiomatic terms I tend to think of spatio-temporal dynamisms as they appear in Deleuze’s earlier texts (The Method of Dramatization in particular) and also because this seems more attuned to space-time rather than a split between temporal (durational) and spatial multiplicities. Like I say, I need to read up on Bergson but that’s not going to happen for a while, so speculation will have to do for now. The metaphorical use of architecture, abstracted from its purely industrial and commercial practice, has been of particular use to a wide range of artists and writers working with sound, Brandon LaBelle is a excellent example of this. With this work in mind, as well as the influence of architectural practice and theory upon it, an understanding of architecture built around a critique that limits it to a purely extensive practice of the organisation of matter, the maintenance of form, spatial identity, its subordination to durational and intensive multiplicity, seems overly constraining and limited to a commonplace notion of architecture in an almost industrial or commercial sense. Alternative practices within architecture and related theory (Jane Rendell for example) break this open into a much more interesting and informative field. I’ll come back to this once I’ve got onto what I find so fascinating about Rahm’s work.

Steensons writes:

Swiss architect Philippe Rahm … told an audience at Princeton last week, “When you create a space, you create a climate.” His architecture is environmental in a literal sense: he creates ecosystems and climates: by changing variables like temperature, UV light and oxygen, he experiments with new types of spaces that might be recreated…

Hormonorium, the Swiss Pavilion in the 2002 Venice Biennale, manipulated levels of UV light and oxygen in the room in order to shift hormonal levels within its visitors, making them feel less fatigued and more stimulated. 528 fluorescent tubes under clear plexiglass construct the floor, and illuminate so brightly, they make the boundaries of the room disappear. The flooding of UV light creates a decrease in melatonin level, waking up and turning on the visitors. Bringing the oxygen level down to that usually found at 3000 meters stimulates the production of a hormone that increases red blood cell count and improving physical capability. The room changes the physiology of its participants…

Rahm noted how writers like Jules Verne noted how the invention of streetlighting completely changed the experience of night and day. Diurnisme reverses this effect, shifting time by recreating the night during the day, with its many yellow-orange lamps. The effect works on melatonin production, which operates on the blue and red wavelengths of the eye but not the yellow. The room played 18 Diurnes, composed by Rahm as an inversion to nocturnes.

It’s been noted, in some of the bits and pieces I’ve found online today, that Rahm has a meteorological approach to architecture: the creation of dynamic ecosystems that make an impression upon the physiology of its inhabitants. This is architecture projecting intensity rather than maintaining extensity, woking upon embodied spatium rather than communicating form. This intensive approach, working upon the very matter of beings rather than their spatial organisation, seems to go against the critique of spatiality that Levi has flagged up. This method of architectural practice sees the creation of an energetic environment, an informative affective and individuating bubble that resonates more with Deleuze’s ‘Method of Dramatization’ than the outline of spatial critique that is in some ways haunting aspects of my work at the moment. I’m thinking of the environments constructed by Rahm as informative in the sense that are affective spaces working upon the very fabric of the body, eroding the boundary between occupant and host site, opening the individual to a more overt interactive and processual individuation. This intensive projection is nonetheless architectural, a built and meticulously designed environment, but it presents itself as a primarily intensive practice Such an architecture finds its site in embodied intensity, a projected site that undoubtedly relies upon an extensive framework to support it, but it occupies and distorts such a framework. As Jane Rendell has pointed out, architecture is always already an occupied territory, occupied by architecture itself; architectural space renders us and our movement subject to a spatial hierarchy. Rahm’s intensive environments seem to occupy and eat away at such extensive frameworks, usurping its spatial hierarchy and imposing another. This is a practice that seems to be embedded in a certain environmental noise, taking a route to the conditioning of extensive behaviour through intensive processes, providing a meteorological, chemical, etc., … , catalyst for the manipulation of environmental experience and interaction. Here architectural intent is filtered through the individuals that occupy it, distorting it at the point of its realization. This is why Steenson’s title is interesting, ‘Manipulating Environments’, suggesting the manipulation of individual physiology and experience as much as the strictly spatial and environmental aspects of the constructed site.

My intrigue in Rahm’s approach, and the inclination to speculate on what the work’s doing, is driven by current thinking and practice (my own and that of others) working with spatial sound. The application of architectural theory towards are more nuanced interpretation of sound installation, environmental sound, auditory environments and so on, is a useful one. Sound is, however, a more dynamic and illusive material than that commonly and reductively associated with architectural practice, yet it can be seen to impact upon spatial and interactive experience in sufficiently similar ways to warrant making such comparisons. Rahm’s practice, the creation of intensive and manipulative environments that distort and transform a host site, gets close to some of the ways I’ve been thinking about the construction of sonic fields and their impact upon those that pass through them.