East Contemporary

CityU Architectural Studies Seminar: Dr. Jonathan A. Hale: Body-Building-World

(11/12/2013)

Prof. Hale’s (The University of Nottingham) guest lecture started off with a clearly dualist view of ‘transparent’ vs. ‘opaque’ technology, pitting against each other the ‘good old world’ and the ‘brave new world’: Handheld mechanical tools that provide ‘direct feedback’ vs. electric tools that provide an ‘experience of the machine’ instead of an experience with the material itself. Hale then sketched a continuum between those two pointing out the tendency towards amplification (of efficiency) and reduction (as abstraction – reduction of auxiliary information). Further, Martin Heidegger was invoked, in his distinction between embodiment (i.e. prosthetic extension) and hermeneutic relations (controlling a machine). I liked Hale was taking account of a user’s bodily physicality, what I did not like was the dualist presentation of two opposites, as we can find many positions and mutations on the continuum between the two extremes. Latently, Hale did not discard the idea of a continuum between the two poles, which became evident in the reference to Bernard Stiegler, where the body, clothing, furniture, architecture, city and ultimately any technology are seen as extensions of the body. After that he proceeded to an architectonic example of a building, forgot which one, which showed importance of ‘expressing’ the materials and processes that lead to its construction, linking it back to the body of the workers who built it (tectonic articulation: material vs. thought) and users who inhabit it (signs of occupation: building vs. use). His call for ‘materiality’ also echoed in his support for drawing as a way of understanding which linked back to one of the definitions he put forward earlier – of technology as a process of revealing (Martin Heidegger): Information as the resistance of the material/environment.

After the lecture, inevitably, a question of parametric architecture was raised on how this approach can be reconciled with the quest for materiality, direct sensory feedback, etc. Prof. Hale’s response reiterated his claim of technologies as human extensions, saying that parametric architecture is just a way of ‘new materiality’, which is indirectly, but still, controlled by a ‘human touch’. This reconciliatory tone was kept when I raised the idea of simulation instead of feedback when talking to prof. Hale after the lecture: I agree that there is a human need for sensory feedback, but it seems that in more and more cases, this need is fulfilled by a ‘substitute’ rather than the ‘direct’ feedback that prof. Hale seems to prefer.

I wondered whether we do not already live in a world which has bridged the split between direct and indirect feedback, reunited in Jean Baudrillard’s term “Hyperreality” – the inability of consciousness to distinguish reality from a simulation of reality. The term does not of course solve the split between the body and the world ‘out there’ but it offers a term to define a phenomenon that is taking place anyway, and is probably more constructive than to keep lamenting over the ‘loss of contact’ with the ‘real’ materials: Looking around myself, especially in Greater China, I see “simulation” in architecture wherever I turn my eye, which seems to lead to the conclusion that for now (while more money awaits to be made) the nostalgia for materiality is dismissed into the museum of old Europe.

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