Architecture of error: matter, measure and the misadventures of precision
View/ Open
Date
09/11/2023Author
Hughes, Francesca
Metadata
Abstract
This PhD submission comprises two parts, the above book published in 2014 and its critical review. The latter, rather than transplant the book into the present, looks back to it, across the extraordinary contextual changes of the interval, to its making and reception, from the positions of both the present and 2014. Given the book employs diverse theoretical frameworks relevant to the material it interrogates, the review itself is framework-agnostic and instead is structured via a series of questions and recursive conceits or mirrors. Both the review’s (re)contextualisation and framework-agnosticism are elaborated in a foreword that acts as a guide. The review also comprises a summary of the book in question, the abstract of which is below:
Last century witnessed a quantum increase in both effective and surplus precision in all material processes.
‘precision’ mean when it is redundant? What is the price we pay for our use of generative or explanatory models that are made more reductive in order to be (apparently) more
precise? What might we learn from an elaboration of error as a productive category?
To address these questions the analysis sets out a latent subtext in the body of architecture’s twentieth century discourse: the accelerated unravelling of the relations between precision and error. This takes the form of a critique of the role of precision – itself a complexly imprecise term – in architectural culture, and a claim that behind the architect’s now acute fetishisation of redundant precision lies a special fear of physical error. It posits that each of the seminal turns that govern our historiographies of modernity can be understood to have been silently orchestrated by a fear of error. In each, error does not go away but necessarily reconfigures, and in so doing, also reconfigures the architect’s ever-precarious relations to material life. Focusing on the key moments of intensification in the material ecologies of architecture’s twentieth century, the book examines how the cultivation of surplus precision laid the ground-work for the removal of ornament, the rejection of organic materials, the arrival of ‘science’ onto the building site, the rhetorical obstacles that blighted early cybernetics, the subsequent ‘death’ of concept and the digitised operations in which an algorithm arbitrates new form.
The arc of the argument is organized not by the subject’s chronology but by its notional topography: we enter and exit at the surface with the drawing’s interrogation of precision in chapter 1 and with the substitution of ornament by redundant precision in the closing chapter. Following a second chapter that briefly sets out Aristotle’s conflation of error with matter (and not form), the middle chapters take us through the interior of error and precision relations via two key internal systems and their historic ruptures. The first, on materiality (in chapters 3 and 4) is defined technologically; the second, on reproduction (in chapters 5, 6, and 7), culturally. Although segregated, the analysis, if nothing else, demonstrates the inseparability of the technological from the cultural when it comes to error.
At the time of writing many of the questions raised had been neglected in architectural research, however they had been keenly addressed by key voices in adjacent fields: visual art, the histories and philosophies of science, STS, feminist and Gender Studies. Thus the critiques of techno-determinism emerging in STS, Nancy Cartwright’s critique of inference and Evelyn Fox Keller’s of metaphoric epistemologies are brought to bear on the effect of instrumentalism, inference and metaphoric trading on precision in architecture. Equally, close analysis of the material techniques of several visual artists that maintain alternative economies of error in their practice – Vija Celmins, Barbara Hepworth, Gordon Matta Clark, Rachel Whiteread – illustrates the potential of error as an active, critical category in architectural production. Gordon Matta-Clark understood that precision in architecture is a political question first; surplus precision does serve a purpose, it is just undeclared. At the same time, any endeavour to produce a comprehensive or even coherent theory of error would by definition be a fallacy: error will always evade containment and mutate to escape. What I proposed in this book is an active elaboration of error as a category that acts critically on our relations to redundant or false precision, short-circuits its material interference, undercuts its hold on our practice and imagination, interrogates the mechanisms that install and protect it, and understands it for what it is: an architecture of fear whose politics we must question.