The Unknown City: Contesting Architecture and Social Space

Part IV: Tactical Filters
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Iain Chambers
power is betrayed in the perpetual transit and translation attendant on our
seeking other accommodations in the world. Here we exit from the confines
of calculation to run the risk of thinking. To think what calculation cannot
represent, what the numbers and lines repress, is to expose the plan to the
incalculable risks—to the world—it hides.
Architecture as the attempt to stabilize space, to transform it into
place, building, habitat, is always confronted with the instability, the narrative
eruption, of social life and historical being. At this point there
emerges the prospect of a “weak architecture”: an architecture able to accommodate,
or at least register, the interval between plan and place. Clearly
this attempt seeks to weaken architectural sovereignty by turning attention
away from the disposition of a homogeneous rationality through insisting
on the heterogeneous histories that the construction is destined to house.
The architect becomes less of a universal planner and more a caring builder:
one who constructs, tends, and harbors human habitation. 18 The plan, the
project, the building becomes a weaker construct—less monumental, less
metaphysical in its aspirations, more modest, open, and accommodating in
its response to the place in which it is destined to acquire lives, histories,
memories, meanings. That calculation cannot, of course, be simply built in.
The act of architecture is always a disturbance, a provocation. It radically interrupts,
or more modestly reconfigures, an already existing place. Even if
the imperatives of capital and the global property market could be set aside,
architecture cannot withdraw from that task. But the awareness that architecture
also embodies something which goes beyond its calculation, something
which exemplifies and exposes that supplementary condition, and
thereby always exceeds the more obvious techniques of design, engineering,
and planning, paradoxically insists on its limits. Such an architecture intersects
the art of rational construction, mere buildings, with the projection,
and protection, of the ethical—with the question of dwelling.