On Blank Architecture.
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0.0.0 Blank architecture is produced by a quality defined as architectural blankness.
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1.0.0 Architectural blankness is the condition that allows and enables (perhaps even encourages) the appropriation of a place by any urban player.
1.1.0 With this unparalleled capacity to accommodate any urban agent’s desire, blank architecture can be defined as an enabler with the capacity to establish protected spaces for ‘consumption.’
1.2.0 A very flexible space, one might argue. However, the flexible nature of a blank space, as almost any type of flexibility, is simultaneously functional and ideological. It is precisely due to its apparent lack of inherent ideological content that blank architecture remains constantly available for appropriation and is always on the verge of vanishing into excess and domination.
1.3.0 Although blankness might be a condition lacking ideological content, its architectural application always occurs within a larger cultural, political, and social framework. The design itself — its form and materiality, for example — might seem ideology-free but its conception and design process must have been conceived from a precise political vantage point.
1.4.0 Therefore, the responsibility of the architect as a political agent is not avoided: it is merely transferred from the formal to the conceptual realm.
1.4.1 A logical offspring of this argument is that form must then assume an apolitical role. But, is this truly possible? Even ornament, architects’ traditional frivolity par excellence, is not devoid of a political stance. Orientalist, commercialist, iconographic, symbolic, indexical … are just a few of the adjectives which fellow architects might dedicate to a building with no clear political agenda.
1.4.2 “Form ever follows function.” Louis Sullivan, “The Tall Building Artistically Considered.”
1.4.3 Louis Sullivan: The poetry of architecture by Robert Twombly and Narciso G. Menocal is “the first book to include all of Louis Sullivan’s known existing drawings” from 1867 to 1923. And, what did Louis Sullivan draw? Ornaments. No building plans or sections; just organic and nature-like ornaments.
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2.0.0 Blank architecture has been and continues to be capitalism’s best physical developer.
2.1.0 As it is well known, the typological developments of the nineteenth century shall be considered as one of the vehicles that enabled modern society to emerge since at the time, Modern Architecture constituted an essential actor in the development and implementation of new values.
2.1.1 Five typologies exemplify the architectural developments that came to constitute Modern Architecture and whose blankness was essential in the construction of modern society: exhibition halls, beaches, factories, parks, and offices. As we will see, each of these types demonstrates a unique quest for maximization; a search to be satisfied as part of their role as capitalist enablers.
2.1.2 The Exhibition Hall, or the quest for maximum flexibility.
Industrialization brought along a need to share — and flaunt — technical developments in a new type of social and cultural forum, the World Fairs, which demanded the conception and design of a new typology, the exhibition hall. As Pinocchio’s whale, this new type of building was required to hold the whole new world in its interior. But for this to be possible, the interior had to be as flexible as possible.
The first exhibition hall was John Paxton’s Crystal Palace. Although it was originally built in London for the Great Exhibition of 1851, this space was successively used for various events destined to many different audiences until it accidentally burnt down in 1936. As Kate Colquhoun described it in A Thing in Disguise: The Visionary Life of Joseph Paxton, the Crystal Palace was used for international fairs, music concerts (it had an organ of 3,714 speaking pipes), animal shows, an exhibit of giant dinosaur replicas, firework festivals, cricket matches, dirt-track motorbike races, tightrope walkers, art exhibitions, educational symposiums, pleasure gardens, conventions, etc. An empty and infinite interior where anything is possible.
2.1.3 The Beach, or the quest for maximum freedom.
Despite its natural configuration, the beach was not socially constructed as a space for enjoyment until the nineteenth century. As an alternative social space where everyday social protocols are replaced by more relaxed kinds of sociability, the beach has triggered the interest of many architects since the possibility for thinking about the domestic and public realm in a manner quite different from everyday life is enormously liberating. The beach’s blankness was (and is) the architectural quality that enables such liberties.
It should come as a surprise then that the beach has continued to be a realm capable of yielding liberating results. This is probably the reason why Candilis-Josic-Woods, in their Dice House of 1971 for example, looked at this social and spatial condition in order to liberate themselves from established constraints.
2.1.4 The Factory, or the quest for maximum efficiency.
These industrial buildings always provide a very powerful spatial experience: their extensive space is bizarrely fulfilling. In most situations this is achieved by the appearance of an interior horizon line produced by the protective extra coat of paint located in the lower half of the columns and reaching up to a person’s eye-level. This accidental datum, unique to this type of building when it is completely empty, provides a very powerful psychological effect making the visitor feel like in an interior desert.
But, what is manufactured here? Unless we are able to see the space occupied — that is, when it is no longer blank — we do not know and we cannot tell: the building does not attempt to represent it nor does it want to show it. It could have been cars or it could have been tanks. It could have been a vehicle, the car, to enable the middle class to achieve the so-called American Dream, but it could also have been a vehicle, the tank, dedicated to the killing of other individuals. A blank space, therefore, can be amoral and does not initially discriminate between the possibilities that it can enable.
For the factory to be efficient, the architect needs to design it empty. The best example of this understanding can be found in the development of Henry Ford’s factories by Albert Kahn. With the exception a few basics (maximum light, extensive flat space, minimum amount of columns), Ford and Kahn agreed that their factory designs should eliminate any specificity as to the manufacturing functions that would later occupy the space. The search for maximum efficiency required allowing the engineers to appropriate the space as they saw fit for each of the different manufacturing processes. Federico Bucci has univocally described it in Albert Kahn: Architect of Ford: “While the layout — the diagram — of pre-established manufacturing, was assumed as a basic plan for the definition of physical work space, Albert Kahn did not see the planning of industrial architecture as a simple response to the changes of labor management, but as an element that must be able to permit such changes. This way of proceeding, which implied continuous exchanges with the Ford Motor Company techniques, suggested the overcoming of the concept of a building univocally set on a unique, complex gear.”
2.1.5 The Park, or the quest for maximum education.
The designer that better understood the potentials of this new space was Frederick Law Olmsted. For Olmsted, a park was the space for congregation of a civilized society. Its empty spaces were to be appropriated by people of different backgrounds and in doing so, a social mix as the necessary forum for a civilized society would be attained. The temporary appropriations that have occurred in Central Park have progressively multiplied during its existence: tennis, sunbathing, concerts, soccer, demonstrations, art installations, etc. As Witold Rybczynski wrote in A Clearing in the Distance, “by the early 1900s the Arcadian illusion is complete. New Yorkers of all ages, classes, and races, gather in the meadow.”
2.1.6 The Office, or the quest for maximum changeability.
The generic term that best exemplifies the blankness of the office space is “typical plan.” In a certain sense, a typical plan seems to show a lack of commitment toward a precise agent. Its aims lie in the definition of an infrastructural space, rather than in the definition of a specific identity. The office as a modern type is the result of a certain ideological understanding of society’s values and desires, but the office as a blank space is a non-committed spatial organization.
Rem Koolhaas describes in “Typical Plan” the architectural conditions of this American invention: “It is degree-zero architecture, architecture stripped of all traces of uniqueness and specificity.” In his view, a typical plan is, among other things, relentlessly enabling, deep, gridded, neutral, not anonymous, and as empty as possible; it provides the multiple platforms of 20th-century democracy and it is the promise of a post-architectural future; and “its authors form an avant-garde of architects as erasers.”
2.2.0 Architectural blankness was at the core of these typological developments and therefore should be considered as the architectural condition that made these new establishments possible.
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3.0.0 Blank architecture consists of spaces that have procedural memory but lack episodic memory.
3.1.0 Episodic memory is a type of memory that enables human beings to remember past experiences.
3.1.1 Blank architecture does not aim to represent past events — as a monument, for instance — nor does it attempt to establish a representational link between its exterior image and its interior activities in order to make them comprehensible for future situations — for example, when we see a church we are able to remember the type of activity that occurs inside because its exterior image represents its interior activities acting its façade as an episodic memory device.
3.1.2 It is obvious that this type of memory might be activated if the appropriators of a blank space wish to do so, but it is not within the capacities of architectural blankness to establish such remembrances.
3.2.0 Procedural memory, on the other hand, is a subconscious type of memory that reminds us how to do things. The ability to remember the instructions for riding a bicycle, for instance, is a task of this type of memory.
3.3.0 Blank architecture, in this sense, can be understood as a pragmatic space where only certain instructions on how to do specific things are available.
3.3.1 Blank architecture is similar to the poetic meter blank verse — unrhymed iambic pentameter — that has been described by Robert B. Shaw in Blank Verse as “… something more than a halfway house between rhyme and open form. It has characteristics that give it a unique set of capabilities, setting it distinctly apart from either of these alternatives. It is not a “lite” version of formalist poetry; nor is it free verse in a coat and tie.”
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4.0.0 Blank architecture dissociates organizing procedures established by architects from the events that occur within its spaces.
4.1.0 What is important about these blank spaces is the array of procedures they have interiorized and not the specific events that can occur in them since these can constantly change. In other words, the events taking place in blank spaces do not define a permanent narrative.
4.2.0 Without a narrative, these environments are located outside of space and time: they are in limbo and as such can be referred to as Temporary Autonomous Zones (TAZ).
4.2.1 “I belong to the blank generation and
I can take it or leave it each time
I belong to the ______ generation but
I can take it or leave it each time”
Richard Hell and the Voidoids, “Blank Generation” in Blank Generation (1977).
4.3.0 The procedure usually followed by any architectural proposition for achieving such dissociation is comprised of the following stages:
• Stage 1: Monumental
• Stage 2: Functional
• Stage 3: Programmatic
• Stage 4: Formalist
• Stage 5: Blank
4.3.1 Each stage supersedes the previous ones.
4.3.2 In stage 1, architects establish a direct relationship between the architectural object and its meaning. Architectural propositions in stage 2 aim to literally satisfy specific functional needs. In stage 3, programmatic needs in the most encompassing sense (social, economic, political, cultural, etc.) start to produce a disassociation between the architects’ organizing procedures and the events to take place. Formalist architecture as the stage before last, places form as a receptacle with multiple possibilities (meaning, environmental behavior, etc.) but is still unable to establish a complete break in the architect’s traditional stream of power. Stage 5 requires a complete disassociation between the mind and the object, and it aims to yield an anti-monumental architectural proposition.
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5.0.0 Blank architecture should not be confused with minimal architecture.
5.1.0 Minimal architecture wants, and needs, to remain empty.
5.2.0 Blank architecture, on the other hand, accepts its disappearance when it is taken over or appropriated by any form of saturation.
5.2.1 It is important to emphasize that architectural blankness is then a temporary condition and it might disappear — temporarily or permanently — at any given moment.
5.2.2 However, this essential aspect cannot be misunderstood: blankness can constitute part of the essential nature of a space and its temporary disappearance should not be perceived as its complete destruction — at least in theory. Rather, the fact that an empty blank space is filled up or taken over by some form of excess should only mean that the level of architectural blankness has dropped down, maybe even to zero.
5.3.0 Architectural blankness is similar to the potential of energy: it varies according to the circumstances but it is not destroyed.
5.4.0 Another aspect of blank architecture, which differentiates it from minimal architecture, is that it does not require a specialized audience. In this sense, blank architecture should be perceived as a social infrastructure with the capacity to incorporate different environments in a practical manner without having to resort to a specialized language.
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6.0.0 The fact that blank architecture is initially empty and accepts its eventual disappearance does not mean that it is incomplete in its initial stages.
6.1.0 Architectural blankness defines architectural products that are finished and complete: they may be constituted by few elements but this state of being should not be understood as incompletion.
6.2.0 Blank architecture represents, from the architect’s point of view, the degree zero of management.
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7.0.0 The production of a blank space does not rely on elimination or simplification but rather on exact selection.
7.1.0 Devoid of secondary elements, a blank space elucidates the exact selection of values that society demands from architecture and that architects use when giving form to society’s needs, dreams, and desires.
7.1.1 During the Modern Movement, for instance, a blank space might have been defined by an empty plan between two horizontal slabs. That this organization can no longer be accepted as blank architecture is not due to its lack of potential as a flexible space but rather to the fact that it no longer represents the exact selection of values currently in place.
7.2.0 Several concepts that have been used in the history of architecture could be understood as synonyms of blank architecture. For instance, the specific names conceived by various architects such as The Smithsons’ “The Charged Void,” Abalos and Herreros’ “Areas of Impunity,” Rem Koolhaas’ “Typical Plan” and “The Generic City,” or Bernard Cache’s borrowed expression “frames of probability.”
7.2.1 Each of these terms can, if analyzed properly, accurately portray the exact selection of values demanded from society and used by architects at those precise moments in time.
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8.0.0 A work defined as blank architecture also has the capacity to produce a psychological effect on its dwellers.
8.1.0 The possible effects are not restricted to a specific type: they can be relaxing and soothing — due to the production of an interior horizon in the initially empty blank space, for instance — but they can also be annoying or aggravating — due to the lack of a clear orientation in order to maximize functional flexibility.
8.2.0 Blankness is an architectural condition with the capacity to link an initially liberating political project — enables appropriation — with a specific mode of operation — lacks episodic memory — through a precise formal composition — initially empty. This alignment, however, would not be complete if it is not associated, in one way or another, with the psychological state of the blank space’s population.
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9.0.0 In summary, blank architecture has four main properties: it enables appropriation, it lacks episodic memory, it is initially empty, and it produces a psychological effect.
9.1.0 In other words, architectural blankness is an architectural quality that produces a similar result as when the ground is covered with snow.
9.1.1 For instance, when the snow covers a university campus, people realize that they can use it as they see fit: notices like “Do not walk on the grass” or “Bike only on hard surfaces” or “Keep your dog on a leash while on path” suddenly become useless and irrelevant.
9.1.2 The new possibilities opened up by the new and fresh layer of snow depend on the blankness of the original ground … but only to a certain extent. In reality, the interesting and relevant part of this new condition is not the ground itself but the snow (the white stuff). The original element is not required to be relevant; but rather, the final product should be effective.
9.1.3 The snow, in summary, erases the episodic memory of a place (the events that took place no longer matter), opens up the possibilities for its appropriation, produces a psychological effect on people, and empties the space by eliminating differences.
9.2.0 For better or for worse, blank architecture can reveal hidden connections with the capacity to enable a different social reality.