{"id":1102,"date":"2013-09-26T19:37:29","date_gmt":"2013-09-26T19:37:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/openhumanitiespress.org\/feedback\/?p=1102"},"modified":"2013-09-26T19:59:31","modified_gmt":"2013-09-26T19:59:31","slug":"soft-architecture-etc","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/openhumanitiespress.org\/feedback\/urbanities\/soft-architecture-etc\/","title":{"rendered":"Soft architecture, etc."},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Alveolar_soft_part_sarcoma_-_low_mag\"<\/a>

Low magnification micrograph of an alveolar soft part sarcoma. Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.<\/p><\/div>\n

The following is the first installment of an exchange between L\u00e9opold Lambert<\/a>, Justin Read, and Craig Epplin.<\/em><\/p>\n

Dear L\u00e9opold and Justin,<\/p>\n

I’m writing with some thoughts occasioned by some recent readings, most specifically Lisa Robertson’s little book\u00a0Occasional Work and Seven Walks from the Office for Soft Architecture<\/i>. There’s lots more to say beyond the scattered reflections I’ve included here below, but there will be time to get to that (or not).<\/p>\n

Among the hard materials of the built environment, extensions of softness feel like respites\u2014and sometimes like traps. The most obvious soft material is furniture: couches in lobbies or seats in movie theaters. Grass in parks is soft when compared with the sidewalks and streets, and bucolic pools of water where ducks swim are softer still. Fountains are unique for their combination of hard and soft materials\u2014stone and water\u2014though the forms traced by the latter\u2019s movement are often as stable and, viewed while squinting, as still as those carved in granite. Walking through the city, we are drawn to oases of softness. People love the park, its lush grass and soft dirt fields; we sit around water just to watch its lapping movements happen, a spectacle of inert mobility.<\/p>\n

In a similar vein, Sergei Eisenstein thought that the soft, stretchy animality of Walt Disney\u2019s cartoon figures represented a reaction to the hardness of discipline: \u201cthe very inhumanness of the systems of social government or philosophy, be it during the epoch of American-style mechanization of daily life and behavior or during the epoch\u2026 of mathematical abstraction and metaphysics in philosophy.\u201d Softness, in his view, frees us from the harshness of angular, institutional life.<\/p>\n

But therein lies the trap. Heather Warren-Crow has written that a logic of animation underlies the \u201csoft-body\u201d forms of contemporary digitized buildings: buildings whose skins are made of light in motion, for example, or that are responsive in myriad other ways. And buildings are not alone; many elements of our built surroundings are now animated and activated by our presence: traffic signals, to mention a relatively benign case, surveillance cameras to name a sinister one. These technologies of control do not represent the same sort of softness as cloth, grass, and water, but they share with these materials a tendency to accommodate and assume the contours of the body. Their soft receptivity and mutability facilitate control. If hard objects repel us because of the contrast between flesh and stone, and if soft objects are alluring because they cushion the blow of contact, then the most insidious form of control would be the softest, the one that barely touches the flesh\u2014a building so light it would threaten to float or flicker away, or one whose outlines were drawn only in dashes: – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –<\/p>\n

I thought I\u2019d begin with the concept of softness because it seems germane to L\u00e9opold’s concise definition of architecture as the discipline that organizes bodies in space.I suppose what I\u2019m interested to know is what role materials\u2014soft and hard, analogue and digital\u2014play in this process of organization, in both the practices of architecture and criticism. Feel free to elaborate on any of this or to steer the conversation in an entirely new direction.<\/p>\n

– Craig Epplin<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The following is the first installment of an exchange between L\u00e9opold Lambert, Justin Read, and Craig Epplin. Dear L\u00e9opold and Justin, I’m writing with some thoughts occasioned by some recent readings, most […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":1103,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1102","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-urbanities"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/openhumanitiespress.org\/feedback\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1102","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/openhumanitiespress.org\/feedback\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/openhumanitiespress.org\/feedback\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/openhumanitiespress.org\/feedback\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/openhumanitiespress.org\/feedback\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1102"}],"version-history":[{"count":13,"href":"https:\/\/openhumanitiespress.org\/feedback\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1102\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1117,"href":"https:\/\/openhumanitiespress.org\/feedback\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1102\/revisions\/1117"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/openhumanitiespress.org\/feedback\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1103"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/openhumanitiespress.org\/feedback\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1102"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/openhumanitiespress.org\/feedback\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1102"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/openhumanitiespress.org\/feedback\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1102"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}