Ardeth

A magazine on the power of the project 

1 | 2017
Architectural Design Theory

«Give Me a Gun and I Will Make All Buildings

Move»: An ANT’s View of Architecture
Bruno Latour and Albena Yaneva

Electronic version
URL: http://journals.openedition.org/ardeth/991
ISSN: 2611-934X

Publisher
Rosenberg & Sellier

Printed version
Date of publication: 1 October 2017
Number of pages: 103-111
ISSN: 2532-6457
 

Electronic reference
Bruno Latour and Albena Yaneva, « «Give Me a Gun and I Will Make All Buildings Move»: An ANT’s View
of Architecture », Ardeth [Online], 1 | 2017, Online since 01 October 2017, connection on 13 November
2020. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/ardeth/991

CC BY-NC-ND 4.0
«Give Me a Gun and
I Will Make
All Buildings Move»:
An ANT’s View of
Architecture

Bruno Latour, Albena Yaneva

Our building problem is just the opposite of Etienne First published

in Geiser, R. (ed.)
Jules Marey’s famous inquiry into the physiology
(2008), Explora-
of movement. Through the invention of his “photo- tions in Architec-
graphic gun” (Fig. 1) he wanted to arrest the flight of ture: Teaching,
Design, Research,
a gull so as to be able to see in a fixed format every Basel, Birkhäuser,
single successive freeze-frame of a continuous flow of pp. 80-89.

flight (Figs. 2, 3), the mechanism of which had eluded DOI

all observers until his invention. What we need is the 10.17454/ARDETH01.08

reverse: the problem with buildings is that they look

ARDETH#01
desperately static. It seems almost impossible to grasp
them as movement, as flight, as a series of transfor-
mations. Everybody knows – and especially architects,
of course – that a building is not a static object but a
moving project, and that even once it is has been built,
it ages, it is transformed by its users, modified by all
of what happens inside and outside, and that it will
pass or be renovated, adulterated and transformed
beyond recognition. We know this, but the problem is
that we have no equivalent of Marey’s photographic
gun: when we picture a building, it is always as a
fixed, stolid structure that is there in four colors in
the glossy magazines that customers flip through in
architects’ waiting rooms. If Marey was so frustrated

103
1 - Marey’s photo- not to be able to picture in a successive series of freeze-frames the flight
graphic gun. Taken
of a gull, how irritating it is for us not to be able to picture, as one con-
from E. J. Marey’s
Movement (1895), tinuous movement, the project flow that makes up a building. Marey had
figure 75. the visual input of his eyes and was able to establish the physiology of
flight only after he invented an artificial device (the photographic gun);
we too need an artificial device (a theory in this case) in order to be able
to transform the static view of a building into one among many succes-
sive freeze-frames that could at last document the continuous flow that a
building always is.
It is probably the beauty and powerful attraction of perspective drawing
that is responsible for this strange idea that a building is a static struc-
ture. No one, of course, lives in Euclidian space; it would be impossible,
and adding the “fourth dimension”, as people say – that is, time – does
not make this system of coordinates a better cradle for “housing,” so to
speak, our own complex movements. But when you draw a building in
the perspective space invented in the Renaissance (and made more mo-
bile but not radically different by computer assisted design), you begin to
believe that when dealing with static objects, Euclidian space is a realist
description. The static view of buildings is a professional hazard of draw-
ing them too well.
This should not be the case, since the 3-D CAD rendering of a project is
so utterly unrealistic: where do you place the angry clients and their
sometimes conflicting demands? Where do you insert the legal and city
planning constraints? Where do you locate the budgeting and the differ-
ent budget options? Where do you put the logistics of the many succes-
sive trades? Where do you situate the subtle evaluation of skilled versus
unskilled practitioners? Where do you archive the many successive
models that you had to modify so as to absorb the continuous demands
of so many conflicting stakeholders – users, communities of neighbors,
preservationists, clients, representatives of the government and city

104 “Give Me a Gun and I Will Make All Buildings Move”: An Ant’s View of Architecture
authorities? Where do you incorporate the changing program specifics? 2 - E. J. Marey,
Le Vol des Oiseaux,
You need only to think for one minute, before confessing that Euclidian
1890
space is the space in which buildings are drawn on paper but not the
environment in which buildings are built – and even less the world in 3 - E. J. Marey,
Analysis of the
which they are lived. We are back to Marey’s problem in reverse: every-
Flight of a Seagull,
one agrees that a dead gull cannot say very much about how it flies, and 1887
yet, before time lapse photography, the dead gull was the only gull whose
flight could be studied; everyone agrees that the drawing (or the photog-
raphy) of a building as an object does not say anything about the “flight”
of a building as a project, and yet we always fall back on Euclidian space
as the only way to “capture” what a building is – only to complain that
too many dimensions are missing... To consider a building only as a static
object would be like gazing endlessly at a gull, high in the sky, without
being able ever to capture how it moves.
It is well known that we live in a very different world than that of Euclid-
ian space: phenomenologists (and psychologists of the Gibsonian school)
have never tired of showing that there is an immense distance in the way
an embodied mind experiences its surroundings from the “objective”
shape that “material” objects are said to possess. They have tried to add
to the “Galilean” bodies rolling through Euclidian space, “human” bodies

Bruno Latour, Albena Yaneva 105

 ambling through a “lived” environment (Vesely, 2004; Holl, Juhani and
Perez-Gomez, 2006). All this is very well, except it does nothing more
than to reproduce at the level of architecture the usual split between sub-
jective and objective dimensions that has always paralyzed architectural
theory – not to mention the well known split it has introduced between
the architectural and engineering professions (and not to mention the
catastrophic consequences it has had on philosophy proper). What is
so strange in this argument is that it takes for granted that engineering
drawings on a piece of paper and, later, projective geometry offer a good
description of the so-called “material” world. This is the hidden presup-
position in the whole of phenomenology: we have to add human subjec-
tive intentional dimensions to a “material” world that is well described
by geometric shapes and mathematical calculations.
The paradoxical aspect of this division of labor envisioned by those who
want to add the “lived” dimensions of human perspective to the “objec-
tive” necessities of material existence is that, in order to avoid reducing
humans to things, they first had to reduce things to drawings. It is not
only the architects, his or her clients, de Certeau’s pedestrians, Benja-
min’s flaneurs that do not live in Euclidian space: it is also the buildings
themselves! If there is an injustice in “materializing” human embodied
experience, there is an even greater injustice in reducing matter to what
can be drawn. Matter is not “in” Euclidian space for the excellent reason
that Euclidian space is our own way of accessing objects (of knowing
and manipulating them) and making them move without transformation
(that is, maintaining a certain number of characteristics); it is definitely
not the way material entities (wood, steel, space, time, paint, marble, etc.)
have to transform themselves to remain extant. Descartes’s res extensa is
not a metaphysical property of the world itself, but a highly specific, his-
torically dated and technically limited way of drawing shapes on blank
paper and adding shadows to them in a highly conventionalized way. To
press the (admittedly philosophical) point further, it could be said that
Euclidian space is a rather subjective, human centered or at least knowl-
edge centered way of grasping entities, which does no justice to the ways
humans and things get by in the world. If phenomenology may be praised
for resisting the temptation to reduce humans to objects, it should be
firmly condemned for not resisting the much stronger and much more
damning temptation to reduce materiality to objectivity.
But what is even more extraordinary is that this famous Euclidian space in
which Galilean objects are supposed to roll like balls is not even a good de-
scriptor of the act of drawing a building. The best proof of this is the neces-
sity for an architect even at the very early moments of a project to produce
multiple models – sometimes physical models – and a great many different
types of drawings in order to begin to grasp what he or she has in mind
and how many different stakeholders can simultaneously be taken into
account. Drawing and modeling do not constitute an immediate means of
translation of the internal energies and fantasies of the architect’s mind’s

106 “Give Me a Gun and I Will Make All Buildings Move”: An Ant’s View of Architecture
eye, or a process of transferring ideas from a designer’s mind into a physi-
cal form (Porter, 1979), from a powerful “subjective” imagination into vari-
ous “material” expressions (Busch, 1991). Rather, the hundreds of models
and drawings produced in design form an artistically created primal mat-
ter that stimulates the haptic imagination (Bredekamp, 2004), astonishes
its creators instead of subserviently obeying them, and helps architects
fix unfamiliar ideas, gain new knowledge about the building-to-come, and
formulate new alternatives and “options,” new unforeseen scenarios of
realization. To follow the evolution of drawings in an architectural studio
is like witnessing the successive exertions of a juggler who keeps adding
more and more balls to his skilful acrobatic show. Every new technique of
drawing and modeling serves to absorb a new difficulty and add it to the
accumulation of elements necessary to entertain the possibility of building
anything. It would be simply inappropriate to limit to three dimensions an
activity that, by definition, means piling on more and more dimensions
every time, so as eventually to “obtain” a plausible building, a building that
stands. Every time a new constraint is to be taken into account – a zoning
limit, a new fabric, a change in the financing scheme, a citizen’s protest,
a limit in the resistance of this or that material, a new popular fashion, a
new client’s concern, a new idea flowing into the studio – it is necessary
to devise a new way to draw so as to capture this constraint and make it
compatible with all the others.
So, during its flight, a building is never at rest and never in the shape of
this Euclidian space that was supposed to be its “real material essence,”
to which one could then add its “symbolic,” “human,” “subjective” or
“iconic” dimension. Very often models and drawings and the building
stand side by side, and are amended and improved simultaneously.
Under the pressure of construction, and in front of the eyes of astonished
workers and engineers, architects constantly move back and forth be-
tween the building-in-construction and its numerous models and draw-
ings, comparing, correcting and updating them. Architectural drawings,
transformed into engineering blueprints and from there into the many
pieces of paper used by the workers on site (glued to the walls, folded
into attaché cases, smeared with coffee and paint) are still undergoing
a bewildering number of transformations, none of them respecting the
limits of what is described in only “three” dimensions... When a worker
signs a drawing to prove that he or she has understood the workflow,
is this in length, in height or in depth? When quasi-legal standards are
added to the tolerance margins, which Euclidian dimension is this? The
flow of transformations does not stop there, since once the building has
been built, another problem of description arises: the building is now
opaque to the eyes of those who are supposed to serve and maintain it.
Here again you need completely new types of diagrams, new flow charts,
new series of boards and labels, so as to archive and remember which
part is where and how to access it in case of accident or the need for re-
pair. So, at no time in the long succession of transformations through the

Bruno Latour, Albena Yaneva 107

 cascade of many writing devices that accompany it during its flight, has
a building ever been in Euclidian space. And yet we keep thinking of it as
if its essence was that of a white cube translated without transformation
through the res extensa.
What could possibly be the advantages of abandoning the static view of
buildings in order to capture them (through a theoretical equivalent of
Marey’s photographic gun) as a flow of transformations? One advantage
would of course be that the divide between the “subjective” and “objec-
tive” dimensions could be abandoned.
The other would be that justice could at last be paid to the many material
dimensions of things (without limiting them in advance to the episte-
mological straight jacket of 3-D spatial manipulations): matter is much
too multidimensional, much too active, complex, surprising, counter-
intuitive to be simply what is represented in the ghost-like rendering
of CAD screen shots (Yaneva, 2008). Architectural design embraces a
complex conglomerate of many surprising agencies that are rarely taken
into account by architectural theory. As William James said, we material
entities live in a “pluriverse,” not in a universe. Such accounts of design
would reveal to what extent architects are attached to non-humans
such as physical models, foam and cutters (Yaneva, 2005), renderings
and computers (Houdart, 2006). They can hardy conceive a building
without being assisted and amplified by the motor potential of many
thinking, drawing or foam cutting, hands. And that is what makes them
so materially interesting. Thus, the smallest inquiry into architectural
anthropology, the tiniest experiment with materials and shapes shows
to what extent an architect has to be equipped with diverse tools – aids
of imagination and instruments of thinking tied to the body – in order to
carry out the simplest procedure of visualizing a new building.
Another advantage would be that at last, humans’ many various de-
mands could be fit into the same optical space as the building they
are so interested in. It is paradoxical to say that a building is always a
“thing” that is, etymologically, a contested gathering of many conflicting
demands and yet, having said that, to be utterly unable to draw those
conflicting claims in the same space as what they are conflicting about.
Everyone knows that a building is a contested territory and that it cannot
be reduced to what is and what it means, as architectural theory has tra-
ditionally done (Bonta, 1979 ; Jencks, Baird, 1969 ; Venturi, Scott-Brown,
2004). Only by enlisting the movements of a building and accounting
carefully for its “tribulations” would one be able to state its existence:
it would be equal to the building’s extensive list of controversies and
performances over time, i.e. it would be equal to what it does, to the way
it resists attempts at transformation, allows certain visitors’ actions and
impedes others, bugs observers, challenges city authorities, and mobi-
lizes different communities of actors. And yet we either see the uncon-
tested static object standing “out there,” ready to be reinterpreted, or we
hear about the conflicting human purposes, but are never able to picture

108 “Give Me a Gun and I Will Make All Buildings Move”: An Ant’s View of Architecture
the two together! Almost four centuries after perspective drawings and
more than two centuries after the invention of projective geometry (by
Gaspard Monge, a compatriot of Marey from the little Burgundian city
of Beaune!), there is still no convincing way to draw the controversial
space that a building almost always is. It is hard to believe that the
powerful visualizing tools we now possess are still unable to do more
than Leonardo, Dürer or Piero (Latour, 2008). We should finally be able
to picture a building as a navigation through a controversial datascape:
as an animated series of projects, successful and failing, as a changing
and criss-crossing trajectory of unstable definitions and expertises, of
recalcitrant materials and building technologies, of flip-flopping users’
concerns and communities’ appraisals. That is, we should finally be able
to picture a building as a moving modulator regulating different inten-
sities of engagement, redirecting users’ attention, mixing and putting
people together, concentrating flows of actors and distributing them so
as to compose a productive force in time-space. Rather than peacefully
occupying a distinct analogical space, a building-on-the-move leaves
behind the spaces labeled and conceptualized as enclosed, to navigate
easily in open circuits. That is why as a gull-in-a-flight in a complex and
multiverse argumentative space, a building appears to be composed of
apertures and closures enabling, impeding and even changing the speed
of the free-floating actors, data and resources, links and opinions, which
are all in orbit, in a network, and never within static enclosures (see the
project MACOSPOL, www.macospol.eu and www.designinaction.com).
But one of the other advantages of taking a gull-in-flight view of buildings
would be that context could be done away with. «Context stinks» as Kool-
haas so famously said. But it stinks only because it stays in place too long
and ends up rotting. Context would not stink so much if we could see that it
too moves along and flows just as buildings do. What is a context in flight? It
is made of the many dimensions that impinge at every stage on the develop-
ment of a project: “context” is this little word that sums up all the various
elements that have been bombarding the project from the beginning: fash-
ions spread by critiques in architectural magazines, clichés that are burned
into the minds of some clients, customs entrenched into zoning laws, types
that have been taught in art and design schools by professors, visual habits
that make neighbors rise against new visual habits in formation, etc. And of
course, every new project modifies all the elements that try to contextualize
it, and provokes contextual mutations, just like a Takamatsu machine (Guat-
tari, 1994). In this sense, a building project resembles much more a complex
ecology than it does a static object in Euclidian space. As many architects
and architectural theorists have shown, biology offers much better meta-
phors for speaking about buildings (Picon, Ponte, 2003).
As long as we have not found a way to do for buildings the reverse of
what Marey managed to do for the flights of birds and the gaits of horses,
architectural theory will be a rather parasitical endeavor that adds his-
torical, philosophical, stylistic and semiotic “dimensions” to a conception

Bruno Latour, Albena Yaneva 109

 of buildings that has not moved an inch (King, 1980; Leach, 1997; Borden,
Rendell, 2000). That is, instead of analyzing the impact of Surrealism on
the thinking and design philosophy of Rem Koolhaas, we should rather
attempt to grasp the erratic behavior of the foam matter in the model-
making venture in his office; instead of referring to the symbolism
implicit in the architecture of the Richards lab in Pennsylvania as a sci-
entific building, we should follow the painstaking ways its users reacted
to and misused the building after the fact of its construction, and thus
engaged in thorny negotiations with its architect Louis Kahn, with glass
and daylight; instead of explaining the assembly building in Chandigarh
with economic constraints or with the trivial conceptual repertoire of Le
Corbusier’s modernist style and his unique non-European experience in
master planning, we should better witness the multifarious manifesta-
tions of recalcitrance of this building, resisting breezes, intense sunlight
and the microclimate of the Himalayas... Only by generating earthly
accounts of buildings and design processes, tracing pluralities of concrete
entities in the specific spaces and times of their co-existence, instead of
referring to abstract theoretical frameworks outside architecture, will
architectural theory become a relevant field for architects, for end us-
ers, for promoters and for builders. That is, a new task for architectural
theory is coming to the fore: to find the equivalent of Marey’s photo-
graphic gun and tackle the admittedly daunting task of inventing a visual
vocabulary that will finally do justice to the “thingly” nature of buildings,
by contrast to their tired old “objective” nature.

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Bruno Latour, Albena Yaneva 111