The Unknown City: Contesting Architecture and Social Space

Architecture, Amnesia, and the Emergent Archaic
through the cracks in the sidewalk and the gaps in the highway to crease,
contest, and sometimes tear the administrative and architectural will.
In this site there exists what overflows and exceeds the planned and
projected structure of the city. In this unknown supplement—that both
adds to the plan and threatens to disrupt it—something occurs that transgresses
the instance of rationalism. For it is we who exist in this space, in
this step beyond rationalization. It is in our passage through this space,
whether on foot or on wheels, that the body becomes a subject, that we
become who we are. We, and our myths, our beginnings, originate here, in
this passage. “Building, dwelling, thinking” (so Heidegger) thus becomes a
question of how to originate, how to commence, how to construct and construe
our selves. Although the conditions are not of our own choosing, this
is not an arbitrary act. The languages, histories, cultures, and traditions that
envelop us in the city, in our daily lives, both provoke and constitute
this space. It is our inhabitation of this space that configures the city. Yet,
this space is simultaneously already configured, constituted, awaiting our
arrival, and supplemented by a void, surrounded by the blank margins of
the design and intimations of infinity—of what remains radically irreducible
to the closure of the plan. It is this unrepresented, even unrepresentable,
persistence that interrogates the city, its architecture, and all the
disciplines that seek to delimit and determine its destiny. The response to,
and responsibility for, this space invests all of us in the reconfiguration of
the city, in the reconfiguration of building, dwelling, thinking, and . . . listening
to this space.
With such considerations distilled from urban and Neapolitan life
in mind, it becomes possible to commence formulating a wider interrogation:
to ask a question of what the Japanese critic Kojin Karatani calls the
“will to architecture.” 3 To inquire into the desire to build—both physically
and metaphysically—is, above all, to consider how the understanding of one
is inextricably bound into an understanding of the other. Listening to Heidegger
at this point, I desert the security of the Cartesian axiom cogito ergo
sum for the uncertain prospect of being that exceeds my thinking the event
of being—ich bin: “I am” now equals “I dwell.” 4 From here I extend toward
architecture the question, which is a particular variant on the question concerning
technology (that is, the question concerning the application of technology,
techniques, and art to the environment, encapsulated in the Greek
word technê) that rises eternally in the application of historical forces, social
endeavor, and individual desire to the ambience in the making of a domus, a
habitat, a home.
Architecture as the planned and rationalized laying up, or standing
reserve, of time and labor, of historical and cultural energies, as the simul-