Nomadology
in Architecture
ephemerality,
movement and collaboration
A dissertation submitted to the School of Architecture, Landscape
Architecture & Urban Design AT the University of ADELAIDE
in candidacy for the degree of Master of Architecture
Gregory Cowan
This dissertation forms part of
the requirements for the degree of Master of Architecture by research at The
University of Adelaide.
Supervisors:
Professor Judith Brine, The University of Adelaide,
Stanislaus Fung, The University of New South Wales, Peter Scriver, The
University of Adelaide (acting Principal Supervisor)
Declaration:
This work contains no material which has been accepted for
the award of any other degree or diploma in any university or other tertiary
institution, and to the best of my knowledge and belief, contains no material
published or written by any other person, except where due reference has been
made in the text.
I take responsibility for the accuracy of the text. I give consent for a copy of this thesis to
be deposited in the University Library and to be available for loan and
photocopying.
Signed, Gregory Cowan
19
November 2002
The
University of Adelaide
South
Australia 5005
telephone: +61 417 902 856 e-mail:
gregory@cowan.com www:gregory.cowan.com
private:
5
Ruth Street Perth 6000
CONTENTS
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ............................................................................................................. iv.
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS............................................................................................................. v.
abstract...................................................................................................................................... vi.
Introduction: Challenging Western Architecture............................................... 1
Contexts – Nomadism – Nomadology and Nomad Thought –
Applications – New interest in Nomadism – Strategies – Diagramming
–Ephemerality – Movement – Collaboration
CHAPTER
SECTION I. CONTEXTS
1. DIAGRAMMING
ARCHITECTURE.........................................................................................
22
Diagrammatic Distinctions Between Verticality and
Horizontality in Architecture – Diagramming in Recent Architectural Thought and
Practice – Rhizome – Epigenesis – The
Primitive Hut – Fire as Diagrammatic Architectural Agent and Tool – Diagramming
Performance
2. Movement and
Architecture...................................................................................... 40
Chora and Genius Locomotionis – Static versus Moving –
Military architecture
SECTION II. APPLICATIONS
3. Tents and
Collapsible architecture...................................................................... 50
Tent literature prior to the 1990’s– Contemporary
Literature about Tents – Tent as Symbol – Tent as Structure – Applications of
Tents – Nineteenth Century Military use of Tents – New Developments in Tent Literature
4. Bedouin Nomadology
and Architecture.............................................................. 76
Arabs, the Archetypal Nomads – Western Constructions
of ‘Arab’ and ‘Nomad’ – The Black Tent – Mobility – Gender – Variations of the
Bedouin Tent – Politics of Space in Arab Culture
5. Nomadic Resistance....................................................................................................... 101
Strategies of Occupying Contested Space – White
Invasion of Australia – The Meaning of the Tent Embassy – Architecture for
Reconciliation
SECTION III. Strategies
6. Architecture as
Peripatetic Practice................................................................... 134
Peripatetic Practices – Interpretive City-Walking
Diagrams – Ephemerality – Movement – Possibilities for Peripatetic Practice –
Activism and Agency – Machines and Latent Desire – Collaboration –
Collaboration, Collectivity, Choreography – Peripatetic Reconciliation
WORKS CITED............................................................................................................................. 138
Acknowledgments
Many thanks to the following persons and institutions for
their assistance in this work: my editor Robyn Mayes, acting principal
supervisor Dr Peter Scriver, Dr Michael Tawa and a second anonymous examiner
for critique and editorial suggestions on final versions of this manuscript,
and to my original supervisors Professor Judith Brine and Stanislaus Fung for
their sustained and critical attention to the work throughout. I am solely responsible for any flaws that remain. The School of Architecture and the Division
of Humanities at Curtin University provided support, especially through its
Outside Studies Program. During this
Program, I benefited from working with Professor Kari Jormakka and Dörte Kuhlmann at the
Department of Architectural Theory at Vienna University of Technology, and also
with Bill Taylor and Professor Geoffrey London at the University of Western
Australia. I am grateful to all for
their critique and suggestions. Many thanks are due to Rae Rutt in Adelaide,
and to my colleagues and close friends who have offered their comments,
inspiration and support, and especially Clare Hill.
ILLUSTRATIONS
Figure Page
1. Drawing of
'Tortoises' from the Stürzenacker’s
edition of Vitruvius............................................. 6
2. Main Nomadic
Peoples by Region.......................................................................................... 10
3. Torvald Faegre's
drawing of a Bedouin dwelling floor plan....................................................... 25
4. The two pages
devoted to Nomadic Architecture in Bernard Rudofsky’s exhibition catalogue
for Architecture Without Architects......................................................................... 53
5. Commanche Lodge................................................................................................................. 72
6. The Sibley Tent....................................................................................................................... 73
7. Construction of
the ‘oriental’ Black Tent type, left – without cross band; and occidental type,
right – with cross band...................................................................................................................................... 86
8. Drawing of plan
and section of a Bedouin Tent........................................................................ 88
9. Floor Plans, Two
Pole and Three Pole Mutair Bedouin tents.................................................... 89
10. Bedouin Tent Layout .............................................................................................................. 90
11. Zemmour Tent Layout ............................................................................................................ 90
12. Beni Mguild Tent Layout ........................................................................................................ 91
13. Djebel Amour Tent Layout ..................................................................................................... 91
14. Moor Tent Layout.................................................................................................................. 93
15. Kurd Tent Layout .................................................................................................................. 93
16. Baluchi Tent Layout ............................................................................................................... 94
17. Tibetan Tent Layout ............................................................................................................... 94
18. Construction of a Tuareg Mat Tent.......................................................................................... 96
19. T-ridgepole frame Tuareg Skin Tent ....................................................................................... 97
20. Teda Tent Layout................................................................................................................... 97
21. The beginnings of
the Aboriginal Tent Embassy at Provisional Parliament House, Canberra, 1972 -
as an umbrella, four activists and some placards............................................................................. 104
22. Afghan Refugee Camp.......................................................................................................... 119
23. Healing Walk Redfern, Sydney 27 September....................................................................... 124
24. Gabra Women erecting an armature tent................................................................................ 134
ABSTRACT
This thesis investigates the theoretical and practical
importance of nomadic ways of life for architecture. Nomadology is a
construction of Deleuze and Guattari's 'counter-philosophy', challenging
authenticity and propriety, in this case, in the context of architecture. This thesis describes how nomadology may serve contemporary
architectural practice and criticism; challenging static, permanent, and
heroically solitary ways of working and dwelling. Nomadology in architecture proposes ways for thinking and working
temporally, dynamically, and collaboratively.
The thesis suggests strategies – diagramming, ephemerality, movement,
and collaboration – as ways of reconciling nomadism and architecture.
The 'Contexts' section of this thesis surveys Western and
global contexts of understanding nomads and nomadology, and how these pertain
to architecture. Western conceptions of architecture have inhibited the study
of nomadology in architecture. A case
is made for challenging biases in Western views of architecture, for critically
employing the ideas of the diagram and the rhizome in architectural criticism,
and for recognising the role of movement.
The 'Applications' section shows, through practical
examples, that the potential of nomadology is latent in spatial and
environmental practices of architectural production and architectural
criticism. This section of the thesis identifies
the significance of nomads as users and exponents of architecture, despite
their frequent exclusion from architectural history. Tent architecture, practices of nomadic resistance and Bedouin
life practices are considered as key examples.
The 'Strategies' section suggests ways of applying
principles of nomadology. This final
section expands on the potential for 'peripatetic' practices of
architecture. Processes of reconciling
settled and nomadic tendencies in architectural projects are outlined.
Strategies are described by which engendering and collaborating may be the
means for creating architecture. The continuing research into, and
interpretation of nomadology in
architecture are proposed as a basis for critical theorisation and
reflective practice of architecture.
Introduction
Challenging Western Architecture
There is a pressing need to challenge a certain cultural
bias in Western architecture and theories of architecture. In the context of the increasing
globalisation of architectural cultures, an imperative to challenge Western
sedentary bias arises from the need to reaffirm the value of diversity in
architectural cultures. Traditionally,
nomadic cultures have been strongly affected by capitalist western culture
through increasingly ‘Western’ globalisation.
However, global culture also adopts and deploys nomadic strategies in
the West. The present thesis proposes
ways of approaching reconciliation of these divergent cultures that still
articulate and promote the benefits of cultural difference. The conflict between increasingly globalised
Western architectural cultures, and the often invisible and marginalised
architectural cultures of non-Western and traditionally nomadic societies,
suggests that cultural difference that might fruitfully be much better
addressed by architecture in the future.
Theoretical and ideological challenges to sedentary or
'state' architecture have long been rallied from Western intellectuals outside
the professional circle of architects. Such criticisms challenge the state
apparatus, positing the idea that mechanisms of sedentary architecture are
monuments of contemporary culture.
In the latter part of the twentieth century in particular,
these social criticisms became more widespread and accessible through mass electronic
communications. The nineteen sixties
emerged as a decade of popular ideological revolutions in Western culture and
concomitant developments in globalisation of culture. The sixties were notable also for avant-garde Western architectural projects emerging from these
concerns. Constant Nieuwenhuys’ New Babylon (1956-74), and Cedric
Price’s Potteries Thinkbelt (1964)
are examples of architectural projects that challenged the static and sedentary
tendencies of architecture from within the European architectural
discipline. Ephemeral, pneumatic and
collapsible architecture of the time was a visible part of social and political
activist movements. However, the seeds
for these architectures had already been sown in the beginnings of
modernism. In thinking about the
Western and European city at the beginning of the twentieth century, as seen in
the work of Walter Benjamin and Oswald Spengler, a discussion around the
'flaneur' began to emerge in increasingly internationalised Western urbanism as
a symbol of a new democratic architecture.
After the first and second world wars in the twentieth
century, a broader understanding of nomads and architectural nomadology
emerged. Diagrammatic architectural
strategies – movement in architecture, ephemeral architecture, and the
importance of collaboration in architecture all re-entered the debate and
regained significance.
This introductory chapter gives an account of the main
lines of argument of the three sections of the thesis; in contexts,
applications and strategies.
Contexts
The contexts for challenging sedentarism in architecture
and for considering nomadology in this thesis pertain to both the theory and
the practice of architecture. The
professional practices of architects have become increasingly scrutinised and
commercially contested in the twentieth century. In Australia, for example, the regulation of the societal role
and ‘brand’ identity of architects has been investigated by the Productivity
Commission in a federal governmental inquiry. In the Western world, by the middle of the
twentieth century, architects had become regarded as specialists in the
business of building with military-industrial capital. This thesis suggests that architects in the
Western world had therefore developed a strong vested interest in sedentary
settlement.
However, architects can more broadly provide leadership to
societies in the development of liveable environments, whether fixed, permanent
and solitary, or portable, temporary, and communal. This thesis argues that the possibilities of the latter have
often been neglected, and that this imbalance may be acknowledged and
rectified. It is argued here that
architects may become more socially engaged by constructing environments
strategically.
The Ten Books of
Vitruvius, a work that is usually regarded as the earliest Western work of
architectural theory, touches on concepts of portability, temporality and
collaboration as some of the key ways of thinking about and making
architecture. In inventing some of the
first buildings, according to Vitruvius, humans modelled them on the way
swallows built their nests. Elements of motion are critical to
Vitruvius’ writing on the use of water, hoisting machines, and the machines of
defence such as the 'tortoise'. For Vitruvius, portable and temporal
elements were clearly part of architecture. However, in the subsequent two
millennia of Western history, these concepts appear to have become less
significant. They have been neglected
by architects, or relegated to the specialist military and engineering
disciplines.
Western architecture has become largely concerned with
sedentary life. This preoccupation has
both ecological and communication implications. The domination by humans of natural landscapes they occupy forms
part of a defensive attitude to civilisation as 'settlement'. The communication of architectural knowledge
as a hierarchical, finite and universal set suggests a permanent and static
phenomenon. Architectural theory
appears to have been generated by the invention of printing and type. Printed information in the fifteenth century
also became available on a previously unprecedented scale, while the Internet
or world-wide-web has done this on a wider scale still within the technological
Western elite. History has traditionally
been constructed in a linear way, and this thesis argues that there has too
often been a tendency to employ conceptions of architectural history as linear
or 'arboric' in such big picture overviews of architecture as Patrick Nuttgens'
The Story of Architecture. This linear view suggests chronologically
progressing from 'primitive and nomadic' towards an ‘advanced’ state of
'settled civilisation'. One-way
directional linear concepts of the progress in architecture and history are
significant. There is a danger this may
be used as a justification for changing the physical natural environment, which
has contributed to extensive displacement of nomads. The sedentary bias, it may be suggested, contributed to the
construction and fortification of a profession of architects during the last
century. The sedentary bias sets up an
exclusive culture of permanent, static and heroically individualistic buildings
as the sole 'civilised' works of architecture.
Vitruvius' designs for the 'tortoise' – an architectural
machine designed to penetrate fortifications – clearly set out to challenge to
the permanence of static architecture. (See Figure 1) The type has often been emulated in military engineering, but
seems to have been largely neglected by architects. There is some resemblance between the mobile
tortoise and the automobile, (not to mention military armoured combat vehicles)
which were invented almost 2000 years later, following the animal-drawn
chariot. The automobile in the
twentieth century became one of the most critical influences in contemporary
developed cities. Vitruvius, in the
last words of his Ten Books on
Architecture, dismisses the power of nomadic machines over sedentary
architecture in his time. He writes;
"not by machines, but by the opposition to the principle of machines has
the freedom of states been preserved by the cunning of architects". Vitruvius dismisses the potential power of
the machine in relation to the defensibility of architecture; a proposition
that this thesis revisits.
In the present age of intelligent machines, September 11,
2001 saw the diabolical strategic victory of an ideological machine
over an indefensible sedentary establishment.
This theoretical context of a perennial conflict of nomadic and
sedentary is further explored in the context section, and reflected upon in the
concluding chapter.
Fig.
1. Drawing of 'Tortoises' from the
Tenth Book of Vitruvius.
This thesis suggests that, to a greater degree than ever
before in the ‘developed’ and ‘developing’ parts of the world, dwelling
environments will require greater architectural attention and consideration,
and their conception may have quite the opposite characteristics to those of
sedentary peoples described above.
Increasingly, dwelling environments will be premised upon being
temporary, dynamic, portable and collaboratively produced.
The thesis considers the tendency to consider architects
as specialists in a society, the opposite of nomads, as generalists and
opportunists. The collaborative aspect
in architecture is complex, yet significant for understanding architecture as
process rather than material outcomes.
This thesis argues the need for a space for collaboration between
architects, designers and others. It
suggests the common misconception about architects as soloists derives from a
diminution of the scope of the activity of environmental design as patrons and
users of architects' services understand it.
Architects and designers, as often promoted in traditional Western
circles, are often characterised as part of a demographic in the capitalist
developed world as autonomous heroic white males. The architect as 'Fountainhead', as he is portrayed in Ayn Rand's
novel
represents a stereotype of the modern architect as young, strong, male and
'white'. Hence, the challenge presented to the
Western tradition by Labelle Prussin's work African
Nomadic Architecture has three important politically radical
dimensions. Prussin shows that
vernacular practices of so-called 'primitive' black people are significant as
architecture– embodying aesthetics of dwelling. Secondly, the true architects are primarily women builders and
'home-makers'. Thirdly, African nomadic
structures are not monumental or permanent. In the Western institutions, as Francesca
Hughes has noted, "the absence of women from the profession of
architecture remains, despite the various theories, very slow to change and
very difficult to explain."
The long-standing Western bias in thinking about
architecture, which the academy has reinforced with its increasing orientation
toward industry, has led to a global bias among state powers toward sedentary
forms of dwellings and settlement. As
Hugh Brody has noted in his extensive anthropological studies, the settled
peoples of the world have forced hunter-gatherer societies into the margins of
the world. Rene Guenon’s philosophical observations on
the ‘solidification’ of the world also highlight the problematic nature of
sedentary dominance over nomadic societies. However, the sedentary bias and its effects
of subjugation need to be challenged, exposing ways in which architecture might
articulate ecological and social issues. There are important reasons to defend
cultural difference, and to resist state attempts to force assimilation into
Western sedentarism. Understanding
difference will acknowledge and help liberate the role of architecture.
In the context of what is identified as a sedentary bias,
the thesis considers some of the meanings of nomads and architecture in the
chapter on diagrams, and why the tension between these opposing concepts
provides a useful framework for the challenge to Western architecture. Ephemerality and movement, key features of
nomadism and nomadic architecture– which challenge sedentary views– are introduced
as the basis for a set of concerns which runs through the thesis.
In order to approach issues of time and movement, in the
chapter on movement, the thesis addresses the concept of mapping space as a
‘performative’ humanistic activity. The
potentials of human movement and ephemerality to unsettle are considered in the
central part of this thesis. The
important roles of counter-cultures as activist forms of challenge to Western
architecture are highlighted. Activism
in architecture and literatures of nomadology provides the background for the
later chapter and concluding remarks on performative agency.
Nomadism
The mythology of the nomad has been created and maintained
largely by sedentary peoples. It is necessary at the outset to distinguish
between sedentary and 'unsettled' peoples, in terms of the anthropological and
philosophical dimensions of such a distinction. Hugh Brody’s The Other Side
of Eden articulates the difference between nomads and sedentary people
through the spread of Christianity and the history of interpretations of the
Bible. The alignment of ‘settlement’ with
‘civilisation’ has been developed historically, and settled is regarded as more
advanced or evolved than nomadic life.
The connection has been a major justification for repressing,
relocating, or re-educating nomadic and hunter-gatherer societies.
Based on research by UNESCO, The Commission on Nomadic Peoples, by Khazanov and others, New Internationalist magazine in 1995
produced a facts sheet on Nomads as part of a themed issue on this topic. Three main groups of nomads were identified;
pastoralists, hunter-gatherers and travelling workers. There were then estimated to be 30 to 40
million pastoral nomads in the world, moving with their households in search of
pasture for their animals. Populations
of hunter-gatherer groups such as Inuit, Kalahari San, Amazonian and Australian
indigenous peoples are difficult to quantify, as they are difficult to
'capture' using organs such as Census surveys.
Their particular ‘nomadisms’ are characterised performatively by their
movement based on hunting or gathering food, rather than racial or biological
characteristics. The third group,
sometimes known generically as travellers, is the Roma, Gypsies or other
travelling and seasonal workers, who are neither hunter-gathers nor
pastoralists. While the Roma or Gypsies
are supposed to have travelled from North India to Europe about 1000 years ago,
elements of these cultures are spread globally today. The groups of nomads are indicated in the global map of main
nomadic peoples. While the first two
are identifiable, the Roma or Rom are too widely spread to register as
a figure on the mappable zones.
Fig.
2. Main Nomadic Peoples by Region
While traditional pastoral nomads and hunter-gathers may
still be mapped approximately as shown, other travellers, such as Roma or
Gypsies are extremely dispersed and can no longer be precisely mapped.
Nomadology and Nomad Thought
The term nomadology was
apparently coined in translation from Deleuze and Guattari’s French term nomadologie. Their later work A Thousand
Plateaus is described by the translator in the introduction as an exercise
in the positive, affirmative thought that came from Anti-Oedipus.
Nomadism can also be usefully understood from a
philosophical perspective. Deleuze used
the term "nomad thought" in
relation to the process in the philosophical work of F.W. Nietzsche, describing
Nietzsche's way of thinking outside and across institutional boundaries, as
decodification and recodification of thought.
For example, Deleuze calls Nietzsche's thought a "machine of war– a
battering ram– a nomadic force."
Like state philosophy, nomad
thought goes by many names. Spinoza
called it “ethics”. Nietzsche called it
“the gay science”. Artaud called it
“crowned anarchy”. To Maurice Blanchot, it is the “space of literature”. To Foucault, “outside thought”.
Besides nomad thought, an apparently slippery construct,
this thesis will be concerned, rather, with nomad performance. It is important to critically consider the
problem of defining nomads, who are often considered in a broad sense loosely
as 'outsiders' or ‘others’ – those who are unfamiliar to settled Western
peoples. The thesis sets out to do this
by means of an outline of literature.
The Western concept of architecture in the literature– as an
intellectual and spiritual culture distinguishable from pragmatic building –
was barely taking hold in the antipodes at the beginning of the twentieth century. Until the nineteen twenties in most states
of Australia, and as late as the -fifties and -sixties in the territories,
there was no regulation or qualification required for architects. Meanwhile, in Europe, the social role of
architecture was changing drastically with the effects of the industrial
revolution. Georges Bataille's 1929 article on architecture criticised it as a
restrictive cultural edifice. He
described architecture as a structure that "smothers social life under a
stone monument."
In this protest against the complicity of
architecture with industrialism and capitalism, the idea of liberating
architecture from its role as a structure for reinforcing sedentary hierarchies
is challenged. Bataille understood the
storming of the Bastille as a revolt of the masses against the civic monument.
This idea has existed well beyond the last centuries
in the Western world. The applications
section to follow considers some of the ancient and primordial challenges to
sedentary architecture posed by the tent.
A set of strategies is extracted which the thesis suggests will be of
value to reconciling local and global practice in architecture today.
Applications
Case studies of three examples illustrating nomadology in
architecture comprise the ‘Applications’ section of the thesis. These are tents, nomadic resistance and
Bedouin nomadology. The examples
address the inference that orderly structure is a suffocating imposition on a
free and liberal society. The primary
critiques of 'architecture' as a structure raised by French intellectuals in
the 1960s were philosophical and social. As Hollier has noted, throughout the
sixties, etymology was called upon to make a connection between structuralism
and architecture through the Latin verb struere
(construct). "The student uprising
of 1968 has often been described as a revolt against the structuralist
establishment." Resonances of parallel resistance began to
appear also in the antipodes, for example with Black power or indigenous
rights, as it is further discussed in the chapter on nomadic resistance, which
follows. Again in the present turn of
the century, the hierarchical and linear structures are being subverted by the
rhizome and the Internet model of reality, which is suggesting an endless
interconnected network.
The movement called "architecture autre", for example, was an “omnibus term for a
range of architectural ideas of the 1960s including Biomorphism, ad hocism, bowellism." In the nineteen nineties, it is widely
argued in ecological, anthropological and avant garde architecture circles,
that there is a need to re-balance Western conceptions of studying architecture
with “other” viewpoints.
New Interest in Nomadism
Accompanying deeply altered views of the world, as evident
in strategies and diagrams of architects work at the beginning of the
twenty-first century, there has been a revived interest in the model of
nomadism as it relates to architecture.
Vilèm Flusser suggested in 1990 that nomadology – as a way of thinking
about the then approaching turn of the century – marked one of the main
revolutions of developed societies in history.
In an essay Zelt, ('Tent')
Flusser suggested a return of developed society to nomadism through
communications, a movement that he regarded as being of similar global
significance to that of the original agricultural revolution.
This thesis suggests that nomadism and nomadology can be
connected to the strong movements associated with ecology and environmental
awareness today. Interest in human connections with nature,
through 'deep ecology' as a lived bodily experience, following the more
empirical scientific perspective of ecology, has revived interest in low
energy, low impact and ephemeral dwelling.
In the Western capitalist world these movements may be seen as a
reaction to the achievements of materialism and capitalist architecture in
state power structures and institutions.
In the beginnings of architectural modernism in Europe in
the early Twentieth Century, nomadism assumed an ideological importance,
symbolically associated with freedom and democracy. Popular interest in nomadism underwent a revival in the nineteen
sixties, coinciding with the space race and increased international travel and
communication. The 'architecture' of
the world wars was challenged by liberated, democratic society and the
hierarchical, vertical organisations of institutional authority were similarly
challenged. In 1999 the Architectural
League of New York held an exhibition entitled “The Inflatable Moment: pneumatics
and protest in '68.” The
exhibition suggested that there may be a contemporary movement interested in
finding the contemporary relevance of the sixties’ activism in challenging
architecture. The Utopie Group in 1968
described two possible approaches available to architecture students: "to avoid architecture - perceived as a
bourgeois formalist occupation – or to be against
architecture – the image and agent of social inertia." Recent research suggests that in the context
of the early twenty-first century, with developments in globalisation and
cyberspace, these interests are being revived.
Tents and nomadic architecture have, on many occasions, been regarded by sedentary peoples as unpredictable or
unsettling. As architectures, these
have become symbolic of cultures and peoples who seem incalculable, chaotic and
hence unpredictable. Unpredictability,
ephemerality, unexpected or sudden movement, and 'tribalism'– groups of people
working together – all have an unsettling effect on settled peoples. Nomadology has become a tool of political
and architectural resistance, by providing methods for deconstruction–
challenging established control.
Nomadic architecture has played a significant role in this challenge,
being dynamically portable, adaptable, temporary and conducted by numbers of kin
or tribe.
In the antipodean context, and for Australia in
particular, nomadology provides a rich set of potentials for thinking about
architecture. Stephen Muecke, for example, has been a proponent of this
thinking in Australian cultural studies, especially in Reading the Country. As Muecke et al. have written, of the ideas
of Deleuze and Guattari applied to the concept of nomadology;
For (Deleuze and Guattari), nomadology is the study of nomadism,
(nomadism being more than just a way of life of a people) and it is a
philosophy which has been developed in recent years, by scholars looking for
ways to contest the Greco-Roman philosophical traditions which have grown up
with advanced Western capitalism and continue to be its support. So it is more than a way of designating the
'behaviour' of a 'people', i.e. as nomadic as opposed to agricultural or
sedentary-type peoples. These are the
anthropological definitions of nomadism, ones that see nomadism as being a kind
of second nature to a whole group of people.
As long as whole races or communities can be designated or defined as
being of a certain sort, then the
grounds for racism remain intact."
The proposed counter-strategy is to "call nomadism a
practice and a knowledge, potentially present in relation to any event,
potentially effective in relation to any struggle for survival". Thus the relation of nomadology to
architecture, as this thesis extrapolates, is that architecture can be a
similarly responsive culture, using timing, movement and collaboration to
respond to extant environments.
Nomadology refers to the study of ‘ways’ of thinking and
living as nomads. The most
authoritative and ‘original’ use of the term is probably that in Gilles Deleuze
and Felix Guattari’s work, Mille
Plateaux: Capitalisme et Schizophrenie, where they use ‘nomadologie’ to suggest “the opposite of a history”.
The thought process of the nomad underlies the work of an unrelated group of
philosophers who relate critically to the complicity of official philosophy
with the state. “The critique of
negativity, the cultivation of joy, the hatred of interiority, the exteriority
of forces and relations, and the denunciation of power” are the forces Deleuze
describes at work in A Thousand Plateaus, which may be applied in everyday life. Nomadology is not usually associated with
architecture. Rather, it might be
considered as the antithesis of the institutions of ‘civilised’ architecture. Nomadology can be understood as a shifting
critique of a sedentary position often implicit in Western (occidental)
architecture, a system that might be connected to what Deleuze calls an Oedipal
system.
Deleuze and Guattari published Anti-Oedipus: capitalism and schizophrenia as a guide to modern
life- the translator's foreword calls it a user's manual for the anti-fascist
life. As a protest against all forms of
fascism and control, the book has been declared as a handbook for the
activist. The influence of the thinking
of this book is widely manifested in new readings of practices of 'nomadology'
in the West and non-West– practices that connect the sixties and the present
through activism. Situationist and
activist idealism proposes architecture as a nomadic response to a physical and
social situation.
With the publication of recent re-examinations of
situationist architecture such as de Zegher and Wigley's Activist Drawing the gap between architecture and
activism in the sixties and the present has been closed somewhat. This and other new reviews of New Babylon are bringing new attention
to previously neglected material.
Constant Nieuwenhuys' work effectively reflects the invention of the
World Wide Web in the project New Babylon
(1956-74). The project is diagrammatic
of a free and interwoven 'nomadic' space without hierarchy. It is horizontal in operation rather than
vertically organised.
In the Middle East, where the Bedouin and the settled
people have played out a perennial but arguably co-dependent social opposition,
a notable advocate of nomadology emerged in the fourteenth century. The
Muqaddimah: an introduction to History may be seen as an indigenous account
of the background to the complementary opposition of nomads and sedentary
people. Although the work has only been
available in English since the nineteen fifties, it presents for Western
readers an account of nomadic and sedentary life patterns in the Arab world as
it is discussed in more detail in chapter 4 to follow. The historian Ibn Khaldun describes the
sedentary bias deriving from the different values of Bedouins and settled
people. Nomadism is a relative
tendency, and as Ibn Khaldun has noted in The Muqaddimah, people naturally tend
to oscillate between settled and nomadic life.
Strategies
Four key strategies are extrapolated in this thesis to
propose ways of practising nomadology in architecture. Diagramming is a means of conveying
performativity of architecture, and ephemerality, movement and collaboration
are reviewed with respect to the interpretation and deployment of architecture. Nomadic value systems have played an
important role on the fringes of mainstream societies in the critique and
challenge to Western sedentary societies.
Challenges to Western systems of architecture are presented by temporal
nomadism, spatial nomadism (movement), along with the collaborative and shared
experience of making spaces.
Diagramming
The diagram is a visual representation of the way
something works, rather than how it looks.
It is an abstraction and a reduction of something. It is a mode of notation, but also a model
of thought, and in this sense, nomadic architecture can be understood to share
certain abstract qualities with the diagram.
For designers, the diagram constitutes a form of visual thinking – a
‘thought-image’.
Ephemerality
The contingency of architecture upon variable and
negotiable time frames is addressed in practice in the conclusion. Architecture’s perceived relevance, in
particular to 'users' who are not architects, appears and fades away, dependent
upon the user or beholder to find architecture within the environment. Traditions of ephemeral architecture
encompasses a wide range of marginal yet culturally substantial structures,
environments, and scales, from traditional single women's' windbreaks of
Central Australia
to touring concert sets for pop music supergroups like U2. Ephemeral architectural phenomena are
discussed in this thesis in order to distinguish architectural values in the
differences between permanent architecture incorporating movement, and moving
or perpetually re-constructed environments.
Movement
Movement in architecture has been employed consciously in
Western cultures – as it has by non-Western cultures – in articulating social
and physical change within architectural environments, often expressed through
dynamic objects and rituals. Movement,
privacy and enclosure have assumed various new architectural roles in the
context of changing communications technology since the late nineteen eighties,
as the changing cultural meanings of architecture and place have changed in the
internet-affected Western world.
Movement and ephemerality are elusive qualities of
architecture that are difficult to represent materially, so that pragmatic
issues of mapping become important.
Such concerns have been a fascination of many architects in the second
half of the twentieth century and have required applied lateral thinking to
facilitate the task of mapping.
Important proponents were the architects associated with the
International Situationist movement. Mapping provides the evidence of activity
and performance of humans and technology tracing the environment and its
manipulations. These tracings continue
to provide potentially very rich material for architectural research.
Collaboration
An example of late twentieth century developments in
changing theory about architectural space in the context of Western world
communications and globalisation is found in Vilèm Flusser's work in the 1980s
and early 1990s. Flusser identified new
difficulties in the visualisation and perception of distinctions between public
and private. He notes that public and
private are increasingly confused in the context of ubiquitous contemporary
communications. Vilèm Flusser was a
notable commentator on the Western implications of nomadology, in particular in
central Europe, until his untimely death in 1990. Opening a conference on Nomadology as part of the cultural
festival of a major European Arts Festival, the Styrian Autumn, in 1990,
Flusser referred to the context of the reconciliation of Eastern and Western
Europe through the then recent demise of the Iron Curtain. Flusser presented some challenges to
elements of architecture of the Western developed world, such as the tent and
the screen, prompted by new thinking about communications. Flusser posited the suggestion that in the
changing world of communications and the globalised environment, with the
transparency of private life, the invasion of the public into the private would
lead to a form of cultural 'homelessness'.
For groups marginal to the settled Western world,
challenge is imperative for physical and spiritual survival. Besides this, avant gardes challenge Western architecture voluntarily from
within. It is a valuable intellectual
by-product of developed societies that a surplus of ethical and critical effort
remains in reserve for challenging the complexes of sedentary states, which
although they are made to appear permanent and invincible, are also merely
complex social constructions. The
introduction has set out to suggest that this process of challenge may in fact
be internal to the process of architecture.
Radical thinking about nomads and nomadology has had an
understandably mixed reception from Western establishment. Yet in some institutions, the challenge to
Western culture and architecture suggested by nomads has been fostered.
Architecturally considered, Hakim Bey's concept of the T.A.Z suggests a process rather than a
canon or exemplar. Bey writes,
"What we like about Palaeolithic life has been summed up by the
Peoples-Without-Authority School of anthropology: the elegant laziness of
hunter/gatherer society, the 2-hour workday, the obsession with art, dance,
poetry & amorousness, the "democratization of shamanism," the
cultivation of perception--in short, culture." The extension of these ways of thinking
about ephemerality, movement and collaboration into architectural criticism and
practice is the aim of this thesis.
Architecture today need no longer be considered as a
monument which smothers social life, as Bataille considered in his 1929 essay. The notion that architecture is a means of
controlling and incarcerating people in solitary and inflexible permanent
structures should be challenged in today’s networked and fluid societies. Tendencies for oppression through
architecture must be challenged, and to be effective, resistance must remain
alive and regenerative through collaboration.
The challenge itself against the sedentary, static and hierarchical side
of architecture is what makes it critical.
This thesis takes up such a challenge by examining ways to challenge the
settled, inanimate and the static in architecture through movement,
ephemerality and processes of collaboration.
Chapter 1
DIAGRAMMING architecture
Diagrammatic thinking, for the purposes of this thesis, is
regarded as an abstract strategy that connects architecture to its agency. A
set of ideas abstractly associated with the diagram in architecture can be
considered as tools that may be used strategically for thinking and making
architecture. The present chapter
considers the diagram as a device for thinking about and making architecture,
in order to provide a context for examples applied to nomadology in the
applications section in the middle of the thesis. Nomadology can be understood to play a role in architecture that
is primarily functional and strategic rather than pictorial and visual. Hence most of the architectural elements and
ideas explored in the thesis are concerned with strategy, and conveyed by
architectural diagrams.
The diagram provides a means of showing connections
between disparate phenomena, as a basic architectural gesture.