I was completely mystified by the meaning of the phrase "my colt'' or “his colt."...I couldn't possibly understand what it meant when I heard myself called by people as the property of a human being. The words "my horse" referred to me, a living horse, and this seemed to me just as strange as the words "my land," "my air'' or "my water."
–Tolstoy, Kholstomer, quoted in Viktor Shklovsky’s “Art as Device.”
Shklovsky’s “Art as Device” has had a varied lifespan as the ur-text for modern artistic formalism. From generating Russian-Soviet Formalism, to being a half-read footnote in Postwar American Formalism, Shklovsky’s intent has been mined and undermined for nearly a century of art and architectural theory. For Shklovsky, formalism is an artistic strategy for making apparent the hidden qualities of objects through their “enstrangement.” These objects are made anew through oblique descriptions that allow the reader to question long-held assumptions. For architecture, Shklovsky famously uses a note from Tolstoy’s journals where the author questions whether or not he has already dusted a couch. Formalist art aims to abolish this inattention through design and description, removing Tolstoy from his forgetful fugue state. In the time since Shklovsky’s article, form has become a noun, a quality of objects themselves. Particularly in architecture, form has degraded from a process of uncovering “universal syntax”—however misguided—to mean a focus on the shape of something. In response to architecture’s “apolitical” formal moment in the 1980s and 90s, form has become taboo.1 But a turn away from form as an a priori quality of objects is a limited critique.
Bataille’s definition of form as ideology allows the reappraisal of formalism as a tool instead of as a stable quality of objects or as a process of design. If architectural form is spatialized politics, then formalism is the diagnostic tool of understanding those politics and making them apparent. This reorients form from being a primarily shape focused practice to a political action. This isn’t just a redefinition either, the understanding of form as political technique can tie together the pre-desk process of architectural production with design itself in ways that the abandonment of neoliberal form cannot. Returning to the themes of the last two letters: formal “analysis” can be reoriented as a demolition plan, identifying the specific qualities of striated architectures—prisons, suburbs, etc.—in order to better plan their dis– and re-assembly. It may be true that the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house, but without those tools we will never know the house either. In a time where the climate crisis has shown us there is no “new world,” an intimate knowledge of the methods and materials of capitalism is necessary. What does the oil pipeline become when it is dismantled?
Studio: Suburban Deformalism
This speculative studio prompt focuses on the analysis and re-position of the quintessential American striated space: the suburb. Each student takes a canonical suburb as their quarry (pun intended) and works toward two deliverables. The first is the production of a body of research that diagnoses and analyzes the form of the given project. How has the suburb organized the life of its inhabitants? How is private property inscribed in the land? And, how has the organization of domestic space produced or reinforced the division of domestic labor? This research re-orients the study of form from the divining of replicable technique toward an almost dialectical opposition to the existing built environment.
The second deliverable is the reposing of the given material into new forms of living. The students are tasked with taking the diagnosed material of their given suburb and dismantling it and reposing it into new forms. How can what was once destructive become constructive of new lifeworlds? Can the suburb be condensed for co-living and partially returned to a “productive” peasant forest? And, most importantly, how do we teach future architects the value of a serious engagement with material reuse?
In this project we must accept the limits of Bataille’s abjection. The demolition of form is well in line with Bataille’s skepticism toward ideology itself, but if there is to be production of any form after the demolition, we’ll need to accept some amount of ideological belief. As Formlessfinder has pointed out, in the presence of humans there is never only form or only formlessness but always a mix. The demolition and reposition of the given material of a suburb degrades that material “opening space” for both the quality of formlessness itself and toward Jill Stoner’s preferred Deleuzian lines of flight. This is the essence of repose: not only the acceptance of contamination, but its celebration. The use of the degraded literally and symbolically removes us from the labor and material networks of contemporary industrial production. It is not the reorientation of the industrial monolith, but its destruction through dis-use; through a refusal that opens its potential reposition.
It would also be wrong to say that form was always apolitical even in architecture’s “apolitical” period. Theorists like Elizabeth Grosz and Jennifer Bloomer worked through the 90s with a heavy focus on theory, form, and politics. The focus on form as only a neoliberal paradigm is just another example of erasing the minor and valorizing the major, or, in other words, essentializing the exact history that capital itself promotes: that of its totalizing and eternal reach. As a side note, there is no single theorist other than Bloomer that this newsletter is indebted to, her 1990 Sci-Arc lecture on beauty and the repose of the odalisque has been singularly influential.