Contributors & Abstracts

Magic comes, as Calvino conjured, with the moving object in narrative that traverses the gaps and recesses of characters and scenes without prior connections; it generates the force field that keeps not only the story but also our relation to it alive. The lesson of quickness brings not speed, the dromological obsession that modernity thrives on, but vitality that comes by working with and through incongruous fragments and seemingly bizarre leaps. Extraordinary tales that lure us in yet leave us puzzled is built on quickness not in time, but in space, or a space where time can recover its rhythmic and syncopating potential. By means of six registers - indistinction (finding zero), immediacy (hearing things), impatience (wishing and waiting), intimacy (being dissolved), interruption (re-assembling) and impregnation (saturating) - this paper attempts to sketch out some of the possible modalities of the movement-(magic)-object as quickspace, found amongst the ground that gives, simultaneous things, slow stitching and persistent difference. Quickspace, alive, alert and animated, is ambivalent in its state of being solid or fluid that challenges assumed objectivity and materiality, and uncertain in its transaction between forces and substances that is contingent to the relativity between moving bodies. Drawing from recent debates and urgent demands to reframe architecture's role in ecological practices, new materialism, slow science, affectual fields, situated knowledges and techno-vitalism, the six registers of movement-objects unravel architecture through its introjective and hyperjective casts. These enquiries are set out as hopeful anomalies or the quickening of space that can overcome the projective determinacy and efficiency, as well as the oppressive predicament of permanence, totality and continuity that long shackled architecture and eliminated its vital quickness. Each part will prelude with a tale that resonates and rides on what Calvino meant by mercurial agility, which then will be followed by disclosing a mode of quickspace as a process that can enable us to recover architecture not as what is, but as what does and what moves, its lively and deadly magic, in our uncertain and entangled worlds. 

This will be a brief essay exploring the threshold when a design idea crystalizes and a process that leads to materialization. It is an opening that may be possible in due course as variables arise align in relation to constraints. Despite the immediacy of the moment of the conception of a creative idea, the speed of thought and the materialization of ideas reflect varied processes of development in which ideas consolidate. Ideas require time to develop, yet, in a professional field there is constant pressure to hurry conception. On one hand, there is the time of production defined by constraints, performance, capital; on the other hand, there is the time of creation defined by limitless-ness exploration. The constraints of production are generally externally derived, while the constraints of creation are generally believed to be internally derived. To structure this exploration, I will use specific examples and design dilemmas in the installation projects the Black city series.

Italo Calvino’s memo on ‘quickness’ is anticipated, in some respects at least, by an introduction that he wrote for an Italian translation of Voltaire’s Candide, published in 1974. The edition about which he was writing incorporated the illustrations that Paul Klee had drawn for the novel between 1911 and 1912. Klee’s reading of the book had, as the artist recorded in his diaries, a powerful effect on him and he produced a series of depictions showing figures animated, Calvino observed, ‘by an eel-like mobility’. These, he went on, gave visual form to the ‘joyous energy’ that the book continued to discharge to readers centuries after its writing.

This talk triangulates between the ‘Six memos’, Klee’s drawings and the Voltaire introduction, which Calvino titled ‘Candide: An Essay in Velocity’. It argues that Calvino’s remarks on ‘quickness’ are structured by an underlying commitment to an idea of vitality, which represents something akin to an absolute value for the author and which the early meaning of ‘quick’ as ‘lively’ comprehends. (Only latterly and by association does it come to signify ‘speed of action’). The protagonists of Candide are collectively caught up in a propulsive force that exceeds any one of them and constantly defers any terminal condition by a relentless overspilling into what will come after.

The argument will draw on the work of writers such as Erich Auerbach and Mikhail Bahktin, as well as Calvino’s memos. In conclusion, it will explore an example from architecture that is instructive to consider alongside the quickness of Calvino – one that works as a project of prolonging the project and that shows, in the spirit of Calvino, how quickening might be the outcome of slowing things down.

1. Rapiditá 

Italo Calvino’s second memo for the next millennium is titled Rapiditá in Italian, deriving from Latin rapere – to take by force – while the English title Quickness derives from Germanic languages for life. These two synonyms’ contradictory origins of violence and nurture have a paradoxical chiastic relationship between quickness and slowness where each contains its opposite.  

2. The Most Perfect Crab 

Calvino ends Quickness with the story of an artist royally commissioned to draw a crab who, after ten all-expenses-paid years, arrives before the king and in a single stroke creates the most perfect drawing of a crab. While Calvino’s fable is likely apocryphal, it nonetheless has a long filiation. The same story is told repeatedly with varying attributions in architecture including Frank Lloyd Wright and Carlo Scarpa. The dramatic moment of genius is emphasized, but equally important are the long hours of preparation. The frequency of this trope suggests its deep appeal in the union of mercurial swiftness with saturnine slowness. 

The myth of artistic genius erupting in flashes of inspired creation, especially advanced in the romantic era, continues into contemporary times among architects. Yet, as Louis Kahn attests, the opposite is more accurate: “a building is a struggle, not a miracle.” Just as important as the quickness of drawing is its slow contemplation.  

3. Ductus 

Crabs are bilaterally symmetrical but often scuttle sideways – their ductus is awry. In rhetoric, ductus describes the rhythm of a story’s flow as fast or slow, direct or meandering, and so forth. In architecture, ductus describes the character of flows through buildings, not only water and air, but also the circulation of people. Similarly, the ductus of a drawn line is evident as fast or slow, confident or searching.  

4. Vita activa and vita contemplativa 

At the root of the tale of the inspired drafter is the enduring contrast between the active life of practice and the contemplative life of theory. While the active architect is engaged in construction on the building site, the contemplative architect designing at the drawing table in the scholar’s study is typically represented like Dürer’s saturnine figure of melancholia. Historically, the contemplative life of thoughtful reflection was the highest goal but beginning in the early modern world, that valuation was inverted. John Evelyn (1620-1706) in Public Employment and an Active Life Preferred to Solitude (1667) expands the active life to include the historically contemplative, reducing solitude to slothful laziness. Evelyn’s active “good architect may without great motion operate more than all the inferior workmen.” 

The fable of the crab drawing isolates contemplative design thought from active design drawing. However, this is misleading because it overlooks the critical contribution of drawing to design thinking. Drawing does not merely record a preexisting design idea; it is complicit in its creation. Unlike some contemporary theorists’ portrayals, Leon Battista Alberti cautions against this separation when emphasizing that even his favorite parts of a design projected in his imagination can prove faulty when studied in drawings or models. It is only through ten years of preparatory studies that the drafter can make the crab drawing “most perfectly.” 

5. Efficiency’s happiness minutes 

A contemporary reader would assume the story’s draftsman is taking advantage of his client for ten years of leisure and relaxation. As Josef Pieper explains, in the modern world of work, contemplation is replaced by relaxation that is nothing more than preparing for more work. 

At the turn of the last century, under the dominance of machines and mass production, efficiency became highly valued as a way to maximize production while minimizing fatigue for workers understood as “human motors.”  As efficiency was proclaimed a moral good, the principles of scientific management were extended to all aspects of life. Architects applied the ductus of the efficient straight line to their plans. In the home, efficiency experts like Christine Frederick (1883-1970) offered the efficient homemaker “happiness minutes” as her reward. More recently, the efficiency of computer-aided design is lauded, but one must ask efficiency for whom? 

6. Cybernetics and Ghosts 

About a quarter of a century into the new millennium, we are now living what Italo Calvino could only imagine 25 years before it began. Already in 1967, however, Calvino contemplated the arrival of cybernetic writing machines; concluding “what will vanish is the figure of the author” resulting in “the decisive moment of literary life will be that of reading.” If the author becomes a highly engaged reader, when AI assumes the role of designing buildings, will the architect become a highly engaged inhabitant as a critic and theoretician?  Perhaps architects will assume the contemplative role named by John Evelyn in 1664 as Architectus Verborum or Logodaedalus.

Among the manual tasks that Taylor studied and endeavored to reform was shoveling; a task so seemingly simple, and so intuitive, that, in his words, “the average man would question whether there is much of any science in the work of shoveling.” But in Taylor’s view, there was indeed such a science. It was defined by identifying a certain shovel load, the load at which an optimal shoveler would do his maximum day’s work for Bethlehem Steel. Through experiment, a combination of tool, technique, and task could be found that offered the most efficient possible deployment of that most simple lever, the shovel. 

Is there a difference between efficiency and quickness? The two words mark out a distinction within a seemingly narrow space of identity, for efficiency must be measured more by the result and quickness by the nature of the action itself. Efficiency endorses the science, while quickness endorses the skill. Pursuing a line of thought and speculation about the shovel, and its extensive but unremarked participation in architecture, this presentation will explore the distinction between efficiency and quickness. Using the construction site, both historic and contemporary, as an archive of the possible manipulations of tools, techniques, and tasks, this exploration will aim to cast the simplest of tools, the shovel, as a protagonist of quickness within and against an architecture of efficiency. 

Three distinct kinds of architectural time will be outlined at the start of this study: the time of the world, its seasons and cycles, the time of the human body, as it moves through built and unbuilt settings, and the time of the architectural project, from conception to construction, then renovation to ruin. Only the second—the time of spatial movement and inhabitation—will be examined with respect to quickness. A difficult methodological premise will guide the study: avoiding the familiar and rather obsessive focus on the human experience of architectural works, as if meaning-for-me or you were all that mattered. With the perceiving subject decentered, the aim will be to describe and interpret not only the things that buildings and their settings themselves do to sustain experience, but more importantly the work’s participation in the wider environment that enlivens it. Quickness in architectural operations will not be viewed as a matter of speed or velocity only. It will also be seen in the several ways that walls, rooms, and streets can be unhesitatingly yielding, directly communicative, and tersely economical. Architectural ease and aptitude will be described, alacrity rather than acceleration will be the chief concern. 

The quickness of buildings will be explored in three commonplace topics of design and construction: 1) entry halls, 2) apertures, and 3) dwelling equipment. The first will point toward the capacity of settings to offer immediate indications of the distant settings that are available for inhabitation, both near and far. Secondly, the building’s preparations for quick responses to unforeseen changes in its ambient environment will be brought into focus. And the third topic will show the ways that uncongested works of architecture allow improbable forms of occupation. Three buildings in Philadelphia will be closely examined, with passing reference to a range of other illustrative cases, mostly modern. Brief concluding comments will broaden the study to a still more basic issue: the work’s synchronization with the time of the world—with and without delay.

O God, I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself the King of infinite space’. Hamlet, II: 2.

Italo Calvino defines quickness in many ways, as swiftness, agility, economy in argument, simultaneity of ideas, use of imaginative examples and mental speed. Just as embedded in all of his Charles Eliot Norton lectures was a conceptual couple, his apologia for quickness includes its opposite, savouring the notion of digression, repetition, lingering, slowing down the course of time, losing and finding the thread after many twists and turns. These concepts, as he explains, could not be brought off except within the brief span of short stories linked in a network. If quickness and digression give narrative form to Calvino’s aesthetic ideas of space and time, this paper explores how they can provide these ideas architectural expression. It develops in two parts: the first part will discuss Calvino’s Invisible Cities, T-Zero and Mr Palomar, all of which involve the brief span of a short story reminiscing on space-time. The second part will explore quickness and digression in architecture, exemplified in the synchronic design logic of a work and the sequential constituencies of the embodied imagination necessitating the movement of a sentient viewer. Drawing from historiographical agendas that are sensitive to these concepts, I will argue that they define a dual consciousness offering an alternative history of modernity. First identified by Wölfflin and his student Gideon, and subsequently explored by Wittkower, Rowe, Evans and Frampton, modernist architecture and its historiography flourished in the space between the mental perception of a design and the varied embodied impression of cities and architectural works. Accentuated by large scale industrialisation in the early 20th century, the relationship between the perceiving subject and the work has been radically shifting, from breaking the link between the abstract logic of the whole and visual sensation in modernity to the disappearance of both the whole and the experiencing subject in the 1990s. Returning to Calvino’s conceptual couple of quickness and digression, I will argue that it defines a work as both a thing and a process producing an emergent organisation that not only offered critical alternatives to the architectural and urban conditions in the 60s and 70s, but also prefigured the digital turn, enfolding readers into the combinatorial adventures of ‘mental circuits that capture and link points distant from each other in space and time’. He thus, exposed readers to a range of unexpected architectural and urban constructs, revitalising the socio-spatial and ethical imagination. The talk aims to situate architecture and the city into a broader context of exchanges between the arts and sciences, politics, literary philosophy and interdisciplinary thought, reiterating the need to understand them as living organisms at a time of crisis.

In 1972 the Montreal-based architectural firm, Papineau Gerin Lajoie Edwards (PGLE), was in the midst of designing a new residential school complex in the community of Puvirnituq, then part of “Nouveau-Québec” and the province’s accelerating efforts to claim Inuit lives and livelihoods as part of its project of cultural-linguistic colonialism. The creation of the design of the school came at a critical moment in the trajectory of colonial influence on Inuit lands, particularly with the increased attention the government of Quebec was paying towards the educational conditions of Inuit children, that went from being essentially nonexistent in the 1950s to efforts such as the school complex in Puvirnituq that was meant to serve as a hub for nearly 500 students in the region.  It also coincided with the creation in 1968 of a dedicated body, the “Commission scolaire du Nouveau-Québec,” (CSNG) to oversee the education of Inuit youth and to ensure their ‘integration’ into the province’s cultural milieu and sense of economic futurity. All of this frenetic architectural, political, and cultural activity would abruptly halt and transform with the signing of the James Bay and Northern Quebec Agreement in 1975, a land claim settlement that amongst a myriad of other legal and cultural outcomes replaced the CSNG with the Kativik School Board, giving Inuit more control over their pedagogy.

This paper intends to pursue two paths to address the question: What does it mean to create architectures for a foreclosed future? It will dwell in this space-time of accelerating colonial transformation to understand how northern colonial architectures held assumptions about Indigenous futurity.

The first path will focus on this very precise period of time, from 1968 to 1975, when PGLE was active in northern Quebec, as well as elsewhere in the then Northwest Territories, developing what they saw as an Arctic ‘vernacular’ premised on polymer resin panels and imagining a colonial architecture for a Quebecois future aimed at assimilating Inuit community members. As I have described in previous research on PGLE’s northern schools, their design was an articulation of logistical constraint—climate, shipping times and costs, the cost of diesel fuel for heating, the cost of labour, all of which were amplified in northern, remote environments, and all of these generated what they saw as this new kind of ‘Arctic’ vernacular that could create heat-retention rich structures in the North at fairly low cost and in response to forecasted governmental needs for a timely institutional presence in these contested spaces of northern sovereignty, particularly during the Cold War.

The second path will open broader questions around how PGLE’s realized and unbuilt projects were instrumental in creating a practice of architecture that could serve as a form of colonial enclosure---a ‘settler surround’ that absorbs wage labour, the sourcing of food and heat, education, and, through its precise pedagogical context, the simultaneous promise of language support, revitalization, and loss.  The paper will further develop the concept of the ‘settler surround’ in order to understand what are the practices, technologies and infrastructures of settlement, particularly when this settlement was undertaken in conflict with the sovereign aims of a given people, thus making it a practice of ‘forced settlement’. Overcoming the settler surround suggests pathways toward turning back the finality of settlement.  In this way photography, architectural plans, renderings, and letters, and other archival media generated by PGLE and community members, become means of reinhabiting very precise ‘pasts’ of pedagogy in Puvirnituq in the 1960s.

I have undertaken work related to settler infrastructure building in what was then known as the Northwest Territories of Canada, but my focus on education here is an effort to begin to contend with these echoing histories of violence, abuse, forced assimilation, and family separation that the residential school system was based on—the participation of architecture, with precise agents and intents, in this system of cultural genocide as an essential element in the acceleration and intensification of colonial settlement and its foreclosure of Inuit futures. Settlement becomes a practice with precise rhythms that are articulated through architectural media, particularly when it comes to projecting near futures. In more direct conversation with the workshop and its participants, the paper will engage with ways of contouring architecture as a ‘landscape of making’ when it is premised on settler colonial permanence and the erasure of Inuit futures.  

In Italo Calvino's final lessons, the mastery of time is presented both as a literary value that can be controlled and as a resource that evades you. While laying the possibility that the experience of time can be interrupted, accelerated, suspended, or even negated through the art of storytelling, Calvino, in the same lesson, implicitly recognizes that the ambition of storytelling is to escape time altogether, to elude its modern rhythms, to save oneself from how "death is hidden in clocks", as Calvino emphasized with the words of Carlo Levi. This contradiction in the experience of time—at once subject to control and controlling—is, today, inseparable from capitalism. With the historical emergence of capitalism, time has increasingly organized life across the planet’s geographies; time, we could say, organizes one's relation to modern space. How to imagine Calvino’s notion of quickness in this space? Just as hours provide a rhythm of productivity and rest, the built environment registers this time through its materiality, resources, uses, occupancy and ownership statuses. I will argue that it is the latter—its status as property, whether private or collective ownership—that is the core spatiotemporal regime that pre-conditions all other temporal registers captured in the built environment. In this way, private property instructs a host of temporal rhythms through mortgages, investments, contracts, rental agreements, and dues, etc. And these, in turn, can be registered in its materiality and in the social relations its architecture enables. If time under capitalism is experienced as abstraction, the environment built under this regime is its physical manifestation. Just as Calvino argues for the possibility of escaping the abstraction of time by mastering digressions, repetitions, concisions, and speed with what he calls 'quickness,' resisting the spatiotemporal regime of private property must also be possible. I will elaborate on this possibility through several case studies of housing projects in Mexico City that will allow us to understand how spatiotemporal regimes operate through different modalities of ownership and, in turn, how they affect architectural expression and the possibility of resisting the modern logic of a life under capitalism.   

“The poles have wandered,” begins John McPhee’s book on North American geology. “The continents, perched on their plates, are thought to have been carried so very far and to be going in so many directions that it seems an act of almost pure hubris to assert that some landmark of our world is fixed…” (McPhee, 1998, p. 18-19). The structure of McPhee’s sentences encompasses vast scales and disparate velocities, the simultaneity of former and present worlds: from Pangea to trucks crossing the apron of the George Washington Bridge, from the transatlantic passage of European ancestors whose heritage characterizes the young geologist he’s accompanying to the counterposed actions of both upflowing prehistoric lava and the geologist’s hammer in 1980s New Jersey. It is, to cite Calvino, a narrative “raised to its square and at the same time…the extraction of its own square root” (Calvino, 1988, p. 61). Its scales converge at the infrastructural bravura of Interstate 95, a bravura dwarfed by its antecedent, the overreach of nuclear war.

Shortly after McPhee’s book won the Pulitzer, geologist Bruce H. Wilkinson documented how anthropogenic processes had eclipsed the non-anthropogenic in both scale and magnitude (Wilkinson, 2005, p. 161). Two decades later, the misconception persists that ground is place-bound and transtemporal. Architecture is implicated here, both its actions and its stories. Construction comingles debris with excavated virgin glacial deposits, too often abandoning both at landfills scores of miles away. Narratives of native landscapes and local ground ignore all but the uppermost layer of soil, relying upon an imaginary of vegetation to produce quick proof of belonging-on-site. The volatility of substrata may be clearest, through metonymy, in extreme instances of disruption – war, disinvestment, climate change. These may best capture the narrative compaction and conceptual expansiveness, the variability of speeds, that Calvino found in fairy tales.