I’ll be sporadically updating these notes regarding my academic and independent research in architectural history and theory.
PhD thesis project (updated 26 July 2009)
Public space, taken in its broadest sense, is the location of our interaction with others. Whether this relationship is between unique individuals, between individual(s) and group(s), or between different groups, it is the presence of the other(s) that is the primordial condition for the public realm. This view draws upon a notion of the public realm as fragmented and heterogeneous and owes largely to the theories of Habermas and their subsequent expansion under the influence of Bakhtin. Designing public space, under these conditions, turns out to be an almost paradoxical process defined by the fraught relationship between individual agency and collective identity, as well as between idealised representation and everyday complexity as it is actually experienced. My research approaches this problem from three distinct but interrelated areas. It draws on recent public space projects in London, design and architectural theories on author/user relations, and Bakhtinian dialogics in order to define and represent the broader ethical question of designing public space.
Ethics
This thesis recognises design as a form of representational authority, an imposition on the agency of individuals and the identity of collectives within the public realm. The act of design, because it is first and foremost a social act, is bound to ethics and the answerability of concrete actions (Bakhtin). Ethics is understood here as the evaluative deliberation process that takes place when faced with a decision whose consequences may affects others. It is not a static ethical code which dictates what is right from wrong, but an ongoing process of finding out what is right from wrong for a particular situation; a mode of relating to values rather than a source of values (Liapunov). This thesis is thus not an attempt at formulating a moral code, but rather an inquiry into the particular ethics of acting on behalf of others, on design representation in the public realm.
Recent public space projects in London
The research looks into recent public space projects in the Greater London area. These spaces, designed and realised within the last 15 years, bear particular significance in relation to a varying scale of intervention whose range includes the whole of the city, a borough and finally a community. The Greater London Authority City Hall at More London, completed in 2002 and designed by Foster and Partners, represents the whole of London. The Barking Town Square, completed in 2009 and designed by muf architecture/art, represents the London Borough of Barking and Dagenham. At the community level, a few projects are examined including the Speaker’s Corner project (Central Saint Martins and Speaker’s Corner Trust), and small interventions by offices muf and What If. The projects at each level are examined from two different viewpoints grounded on the larger question of ethics. First, thought is given to the relationship between author and user throughout the design process. Design process is taken here as ongoing and unfinalisable (Bakhtin), and reaches well beyond the official ceremonial opening of the place. The relationship is studied through the various and contrasting ‘voices’ which inform the design process (architect, client, government, community, etc.) and how they enter into dialogue with each other; in other words a study, to draw on Bakhtinian terminology, of the heterology of the architectural project. Second, the investigation turns to the formal design methodology employed by the architects. Particular attention is paid to how the design formally opens up to re-interpretation (multiplicity of meaning) and appropriation by the public. Three themes are explored in more depth: incompletion (unfinalisability), indeterminacy, and spatial dialectics (montage, assemblage).
Bakhtin and dialogism
The underlying theoretical ground for this thesis draws on Mikhail Bakhtin’s dialogics. For Bakhtin, dialogue is the defining aspect of any human society because the social precedes any individual consciousness; implicit in this is the idea that at the farthest reaches of the individual we find, not the true self, but the ‘other’ (Todorov). Bakhtin dialogics, thus, describe a view of life where any action and any individual is always defined by its relation to an other. This complex relationship is problematised by Bakhtin into a position which embraces the everyday ‘messiness’ of actual life and the co-existence of multiple voices in agreement and contradiction (heterology). Bakhtin’s point of departure is the disparity between abstract ‘theorism’ on the one hand and the individual experience of life-as-it-happens on the other. His philosophy strives to find a unitary view that transcends this disparity. In recent studies on the public realm, Bakhtin’s views have been used to expand and complexify the work of Jurgen Habermas often criticised as idealistic (Crossley & Roberts). In the present study, in addition to defining a view of the public realm, Bakhtin’s theories will also inform the question on ethics. His earlier philosophical work concentrates on aesthetic creation as an answerable act (i.e. an ethics of the creative act). He sets out to define the complex dialogic relationship between the author, the object, and the ‘other’. For him the answerability of aesthetic creation is the responsibility of the author, in relation to both the ‘I’ and the other (society), for his/her act or deed.
Design theory
The discussion on formal design methods in the investigation of the case studies is expanded and further developed using references to Bakhtin’s theories as well as general design/architectural theories. More precisely, the themes of incompletion, indeterminacy, and spatial dialectics, as they are drawn from the London examples, are discussed in juxtaposition with dialogism on the one hand, and the built and theoretical work of architects such as Lacaton-Vassal, Bernard Tschumi, Lucien Kroll, and Cedric Price on the other.