rhizomatic architecture

As per the first couple observations on nothingness and architecture as well as today's talk on rhizomatic and post critical architecture, let us ask how the built environment can be rhizomatic. For Betsky, architecture is a verb, not a noun; buildings are nouns; they are instransigent and uncompromising. Where this argument can overstate itself--a flaw of many post structuralist architectural formulations--is its neglect of the transformative powers of use versus the morphological powers of design(ing). The article we read today, "Lethal Theory" by Eyal Weizman, illustrates one odious instance of such capacity for violent and drastic resignification.

Take parkour, for instance. For those who are unacquainted with this sport, recall the opening scene in the latest James Bond film which involves an extremely acrobatic fight scene through a construction site. This is a fascinating moment, certainly not a dead moment. If anything it constitutes the revivification of a self-aborting building. The very mundane building is in the process of construction whilst James and his prey are literally reconceiving how the gestating building can work spatially. Plumbing becomes hallway, floor slabs become stairs, stairs become obsolete, and cranes--the ancllary and prenatal tools to formal realization--become the building. Architecture is turned inside out by use, in spite of otherwise terribly banal design. In fact, parkour developed in corbusien architecture in France precisely because its painfully regular form was so amenable to deviant forms of habitation and movement. Venturi's and/or-ism is realized in such moments and, arguably, enunciated and stimulated by precisely those forms that Betsky would pronounce most dead. Use can be architectural necrophilia, prophetic perversion, frankenstein's bolt of thunder.