I'd like to try to acknowledge two lines of thought and try to make them become related. The first line would be to observe that our whole conception of form has been inverted. Physical form, biological form, the mathematics of form, how order emerges, how stability emerges, these have now all been structured in time, where form has become part of time. Fractal geometry, order on the edge of chaos, self-organization, catastrophe theory, finally there have emerged concepts of geometry in which time itself has become essential, where the accident has become substantial, where form and order have become pattern, interference, iteration, rhythm, something created in time, and only to be understood in time. Especially living systems are thought of as closed organizations AND open systems, that is: seen as an organization of relations and information they are very autonomous and stable, and as a structure there is an incredible flow of matter and energy passing through the whole system. One would almost say that their continuous realization is structured in time, and their materialization in space. Actually, one should not so much think it is closed AND open, but in fact more as being organizationally closed BECAUSE it is structurally open. The shape of a vortex, for instance, is not a given organization and is materialized by the flow of energy, no, the instability itself is a given and the order, the form emerges from it. The shape of a flock is, as another example, not given by the head-pigeon flying at front with a blue-print under its wings, neither is he or she communicating the overall shape of the flock by morphogenetic resonance. The flock is an emergent property, a global coherence created by local rules and parameters, and the interaction of both levels is only possible because of the flexibility and plasticity of the form, it is not a phalanx, not a military organization on the move, but a movement that creates order, a movement that passes through the form. * All matter is organized, whether it is in a rock, in a drop of water, in a cell, everywhere. Matter actually has a 15 billion year old history of organization, that's why it becomes ever more complex, because complex organizations move into even more complex ones. And history in this sense doesn't mean filing events and forgetting them but speed. Movement is stored in matter, and matter passes on the movement to other matters. Every form is so much underway, so highly directive, that things can only pass things on. And while the energy passes away, matter circulates. While the energy gets less and less, the order increases. * Now, I'd like to ask, for starters, how much form is there in the information, how much matter is there in the diagram, how much of the structure is there in the organization, how much of the actual is there in the virtual? - If you don't mind I keep this question on the stove a bit. Now, the second thought concerning substance and accident is media as the continuous accident of architecture. Of course, this dichotomy is omnipresent in theory, and I oppose it vigorously. Media as the so-called immaterial and architecture as the material. Media as soft and informational and fluid, architecture as hard and formalist and static. Or media as light and architecture as matter. And, suppose it were true, all the more reason why we should move architecture into media. I'd like to propose an architectural and especially material view of media, and vice versa. First of all, media comes in waves, in tides, and it deals with space as a medium, as a field, that is a soft substance through which events are transported by waves, and become interrelated as a result of interference, amplification and decay... Media are a way to inhabit time as it where, a movement connected with our own movements, something far more sensitive and responsive than an architecture of frames, crystals and solids that is only capable of returning always the same answers to an experiential body. Soft matters are responsive and hard ones are reactive. I'd say the largest misconception of our age is the thought that media liberates architecture - now I'm quoting Koolhaas - that it frees architecture of dealing with images and furniture and other daily goods. We should resist this preservation of the old Aristotelian split of the essential and the temporal, matter and time, substance and accident, tectonics and textile. Architecture as tectonics, media as textile. Architecture as a passive and neutral carrier, media as (inter)active image. That is: architecture as urbanism, as tectonics, as (infra)structure, as 'bigness' - as Koolhaas has titled his agenda -, and media as life, the changing, the ephemeral, whatever. Instead of moving architecture into bigness, I would suggest to move it into textile, into furniture, into media... We should never mix up architecture and building. Just because our buildings can't move, it doesn't mean our architecture can't. As our buildings are hard and intransigent, our architecture could be active and liquid. This obviously does not mean retreating into neutrality, into the Big Hall, the empty envelope. It's an old misunderstanding in architecture that when you create the greatest common denominator of all possible movements, an architecture that gets out of the way, it will induce movement and vitality in the actual building. It is exactly the other way around, one just creates stillness, with that kind of generic neutrality one neutralizes action. That means they don't appreciate that architecture is media, that architecture is an event in itself, an event that, in their case, passes on its tectonics onto the body. I opt for a geometry of the mobile, where the geometry has become part of the furniture, the moveable - nothing neutral, nor passive. Now I should come back to the prior argument. Generally one would assume there is a one-way relationship between the organization and its structure, especially in architecture, first you have the scheme, describing the configuration of its parts, then the materialization. But in living systems theory - and what is not a living system? I know Maturana and Varela try to be very clear about this, especially in their distinction between allopoietic and autopoietic, between machines and living things, but I'm not so sure: I'm not sure about that at all - we know one should envisage this relation in time, in the continuous PROCESS of realization. The relation between organization and matter is surely that of the machine, but any machine reads both ways. This in fact means that we're not only caught up in a process of continuous realization, but that the real is caught up in a continuous process of virtualization. In this sense the diagram is a NOT-REALLY-ABSTRACT-MACHINE. Obviously in architecture machines, seeing- and measuring machines, have played a very important role in this continuous process of production. We should not only see diagrams as machines but foremost look upon machines as diagrammatic, as an active in stead of passive instrument. The whole structural coupling of the conceptual and the perceptual has always been very strong in architecture. As I've written in 'The motorization of reality' one could write quite a history of these machines moving time and time again from the passive position of recording and describing towards the active and generative position. Pure anti-instrumentalism: machines for recording became drawing-tools. Tools to look at form became tools to make form. First perspective, then the cinema (accompanied by the train), then television (accompanied by the car) and then computing. A history that in itself moves from the optic towards the kinetic. Or, a history where the optic itself moves from the static towards the kinetic. All of these machines could be accompanied by their own architectural styles, all matter is charged by light, and I would say here that geometry is first a property of light and then of matter. All of these machines are nothing but rulers that have progressively taken on movement, becoming clocks. Perspective which depicts substance in chiaroscuro against the revolutions of the sun, film which accelerates or slows down in relation to the sun, television which instead of recording events in natural light captures them in its own shadow-free light with its own rhythm and oscillations. In fact we build machines to inhabit time rather than space, not just to connect perception and processes, but more importantly to internalize these and connect them with the millions of rhythms and cycles in our body. For our own substantiality is at issue, our own experiential complexity. If the old perspective was a machine to viewing form in space, then the computer is an instrument for viewing form in time. Virilio justly describes the supercomputers which Mandelbrot used in the seventies to come to fractal geometry as telescopes. When the Ancient Greeks saw a cloud, they only saw a cluster of spheres. When we look at a cloud we see the succession of iterations in time. We no longer look at objects, whether static or moving, but at movement as it passes through the object. As architects we used to be obsessed with the cube and the sphere; now we have become obsessed with a cloud, or a flock, with a traffic jam, with the behavior of a dog, with the substance and surface of water. We draw less and less, we calculate more and more. We've stopped modeling form from the outside, and generate it from the inside instead. Obviously, the computer is used in this conceptual shift, a shift from Euclidean geometry to topology, from tectonics to textile - Hi Rem! - , from crystalline space to the undulating field or medium… From the conceptual we move to the perceptual and back again, we'll step into the screen and from there create architecture, milling reality with the light, without any metaphor or representation. Similarly, we should move machines into architecture, into building, the same machines we use to go from the conceptual to the perceptual should also feed back in such a way that reality is constantly motorized, amplified, charged and electrified. Machines that multiply the NOW. The sunlight must become interactive and interaction should be less and less reflexive. For every light filters into the soft system where light is already stored, the overexcited soft matter of the body-memory that itself is a landscape, a GEOPSYCHOGRAPHY where actions emerge and are absorbed. SoftSite The SoftSite-Project was done for the DEAF- festival (Dutch Electronic art Festival 1996) which had a theme called "digital territories". Asked about the relationship between the virtual and the real, or the local and the global, in which Paul Virilio answered it as the glocal, the simultaneous stereo reality of the virtual and the real. I was very much interested in connecting this concept of the virtual not as a simulation of realty but something that charges and stimulates reality. V2 is a sort of smaller version of Ars Electronica and it might change in a very large media institute. I wanted to map the glocal behavior of people on the net, on the website of V2 and the artist working in this network-space to the local artists. Every one of these green slimes is an artist. It doesn't look like a diagram. But it diagrams web-site-behavior. A lot of website designers read Christopher Alexander. He is sort of the master of thinking in architectural metaphors in cyberspace, so he thinks of windows as a means of purpose. If you want to go somewhere you need a view; that's why we have windows or search engines. This going from address to address to address lacks this concept of space, that's why I criticize all these metaphors of space on the internet. What I did was try to multiply this behavior, I tried to multiply this intention of people going from addresses to addresses to addresses but actually to make it into a certain medium or field or a beach. So what I did was distract them from all these mating softscrapers and created other windows. So supposing you wanted to go somewhere, lets say to NOX on your left window. I sort of generated new views by overgoing something and that's why I distracted them. The interface had a sort of an oblique goal, a double goal. You wanted to go to i. e Knowbotic Research or to Ulrike Gabriel. And while you were going there your behavior was measured, it was mapped into the city. The city was not an architectural city, it was a slime city, a city which was alive and then it changes the interface again and this changing of the interface changes the behavior again because you didn't want to go to Ulrike Gabriel anymore because you were distracted. So there is this interaction between an action and then a reaction, in a responsive way of a system that changes behavior again. The real problem of course was perspective, so we built a camera which was based on the concept of this sort of spiral, of this feedback loop, of action/interaction or action/reaction/interaction. It was based on the patterned missile or tomahawk missile. It started every time within the model of 2000m highs. So this camera looked with a certain lens towards the softscraper that curved the most. So the most activity was at the spot where the curve was. It did that for 200 frames. And then again for 200 frames towards another spot. And with the 1200 frames it dived into buildings (like we know from the Dessert Storm animation). So for 2 weeks we had this camera that started up high and that dived into the city every time and time again and actually we generated more than 40.000 images with an animation of half an hour, where you could see, that Rotterdam started empty, then you see these green slimes coming in, the blue ones coming in and it really generates the sort of order, a very simple order which you cannot read without a changing of the interface. And that sort of ended itself. The V2-Lab This is a spline. It has control points. What I think is so interesting in the spline in 3D modeling is that it is a very mathematical thing, it's differential calculus. It is negotiating all sort of points (and the weights of these points) because there a handlers over here and factors on the tangents. But what is so interesting is that actually the spline originates from naval architecture and it is a very material concept of a curve. So lets say in naval architecture you would need a curve like this and this. It is like 20m. You would have to fix the form in certain spots and than add weights to it, add a balloon to it. But the interesting thing is, it is not a point in line structure. It is sort of something between a point and a line. Not a dimension of a point. I mean as architects we drew fifteen years ago a curve like this. We had to make it into arcs with mid points and angles. But a spline is a material concept of a curve. The action is not anymore around the form but the action itself is in the form. And this is for architects very interesting. The V2-Lab is based on the anti-Euclidean thought. Normally, traditional architects would reduce this to point and line structure. You would have points and lines, everything would be segmented. Either you are on a point or on a line: that is the essence of architectural tectonics. In the spring model (that's, where the spline-curve comes from) the point itself is a sort of sensitive zone within the line, it has much more rules, it can contain information or pass on information, it can shrink, contract and it can expand. So it is a point which is a zero dimension. But this point is going into the line, and it becomes a folded line and it is folded in such a way that it can contract and expand. Therefore it can not only absorb action but give a response to action. The V2 building is in a very narrow street. They client wanted to change the facade, the entrance etc.. They wanted a new facade that you could project images onto the facade. At the first floor they wanted a new lab. Now I've to talk about form and program at the same time. This machine (what you see here) is first a criticism on this xy Cartesian point, I wanted to make it into a spring. What I tried to do was to built a machine and have forces to go into the machine and have the machine which is made out of soft matter, which makes relations to all the programmatic wishes of the client (change the facade, new entry...) It's a sort of sketching machine. Normally as an architect if you draw or sketch for instance on the right side of the paper nothings happens on the left. But if you built this into the hyper-matter-model (this hyper-matter-model is made of certain parameters) the forces which you put in it will change the form. But this transformation of form is a relational device. It makes relations between all kinds of different elements that you want into the project, but related. Now I'm going only talk about the V2 lab (and not about the public facade etc.): Normally you get of a client a plan and a mechanistic scheme of human behavior, what they want to do in their space. The behavior is fixed. The mechanistic view on human behavior is related to this Euclidean, elementary thinking of architectural devices. The control in geometry leads to a certain control of the human body. On the other hand you don't want to oppose this crystalline thinking with the wild beach thinking of the 60's, where you just make an open structure. I was very interested in creating an office that is made up in time of these crystallizations of behavior. People have routines, they have tasks and habits. And these habits are organized in such a way that people are not just walking around and having a very ultimate flexible office but they are used to work in a right way within the right time. So I said to myself, "could you think of behavior not as a crystal but as routines and tasks that emerge out of behavior, that are something before this purposeful behavior, that you cannot really describe within a program, sort of all the white lines between the written lines of a program. So you get this program and a text which says so many square meters for this and that". And I tried to read in-between the program itself. So it is not an extension of program; it is an in-between of program. And I used that device to read through the program. So you read through architecture, you read through form and behavior at the same time. So it is not making form, a very complex form and then constructing it or putting program in it but it is thinking of program and form at the same time. Here you see the design of the V2 lab. This is the table, people can sit on that table. This is the corridor, people walk in here. The movement in the building is already there, it is given by the client but now there is movement in the architecture. We have the contour of a table, we have the contour of a corridor and the contour of a raised floor but they are connected. They are not only connected in space by the ruled (?) surfaces but they are also connected in time. What happens with behavior over here is, when you are very troopy, very Frankenstein like, you just walk straight in, or you go to sit at the table, that's 40% of your behavior, but now, when you are happy, extremely happy, you come in , run over the table and say "hi", and than you go like this in different moods. So there is excitation here, not only with the people who use the office, but also with he architecture, because the movement is in the architecture. The morphing of a contour, of a table, a corridor or a raised floor is a movement. It is of course somehow an abstract movement, a virtual movement, but it interferes with the actual movement of using a space. But this space was not formed by the usage, it was formed by a fact because it relates to a fact, it gives a bandwidth to action. So the rubber of the hyper-matter-model, the forces of the hyper-matter-model goes straight into the tendence (of behavior), into the muscles, and into the body. Generally people ask me, "where do you frees the form? You use animation software to frees the form, than construct it and than have people going about in it". But I say, "well, for me, this freezing of form or the notation of this lines is a moment within the process itself of sharing the movement between people and geometry. So this matter-rubber is not only in the computer, the forces are not only in the computer, but they are in all the affects that people share within this space, that makes you decide to walk in this direction, that direction or another direction. So it is not singular, it is not uni-directional, but it is multi-directional, it gives us sideways-orientation to behavior. So we have this crystallized behavior with which all architects have to deal with but there is also something leaking away from one behavior to the other in time that people can really meet each other. This curvature on the floor is about 3 an a half meters. And it didn't say in the program in advance, "Lars make a beach"! And nobody said to make a place for people to hang out. It just was created because of the in-betweens of the program, these crystals of programs and we made them sort of liquid so that we created this in-between program. Lecture held at the Symposium of SYNWORLD playwork:hyperspace Vienna (A), Museumsquartier, May 29, 1999, http://synworld.t0.or.at