MITCHELL BOULD

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© Victoria Mitchell 2004
Published by The Winchester Gallery as part of
MITCHELL BOULD: Site Works by Belinda Mitchell and Trish Bould

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TRACING A FABRIC OF CONSTRUCTION

The object produced often bears traces of the matériel and time that have gone into its production – clues to the operations that have modified the raw material used…

It is never easy to get back from the object (product or work) to the activity that produced and/or created it. 1

People, a lot of different people, make buildings. Such is the division of practices that the overall sense of the social complexity of a building as it comes into being is easily overlooked and invariably hidden from view. A typical scenario of functions suggests a network of associations, a division of labour, in which different tasks are fulfilled by distinctive individuals and teams whereby clients commission, surveyors survey, archaeologists excavate, architects design, engineers attend to matters of construction, workers in factories fabricate components, builders build and the ‘end user’ finally inhabits and uses the building, adapting the built structure to accommodate specific needs. The subtle and complex transition between the makers and the users, upon which the success of the building depends, constitutes a distinctive narrative for which there is seldom a coherent record.

In discussion of the production of space, and specifically of social space, Henri Lefebvre recognizes that the making of an object invariably results in the disappearance and effacing of the labour of production. Thus “when construction is completed, the scaffolding is taken down", and "productive operations tend in the main to cover their tracks”2. Such tracks might be partially retrieved through clues and traces, but this is not a straightforward or complete recovery. We must attend closely to Lefebvre’s ‘clues’, ‘traces’ and ‘tracks’ if we are to recover or discover the partial narratives that are imprisoned behind or imprinted within the shell of completion; it is particularly in the traces of construction and production that a more cohesive narrative can be brought to light. The matériel of which he speaks, the “tools, arms, language, instructions and agendas” provides the agency of interchange between “the component elements of action undertaken on the physical plane”.3 It is through bringing this skeleton-scaffolding of activity to light that a dialogue between the construction and constructed or producer and product can be articulated. But how?

In drawing together such traces, the operation of ‘drawing’, in its widest sense and reflecting various stages of production, can serve to map the tracks to reveal that which the finished state of completion has hidden from everyday view. The more an object or product is recognized as a closed and finished item, as might be the case when we speak of a ‘building’, the further away it grows from the rich field of experience upon which production draws. The familiar sense of the term ‘production’ points to an increasingly defined cultural focus in the ‘product’, thus drawing away from a philosophically embedded sense of inclusive and wide-reaching natural or experiential becoming. The general gives way to the particular, experience gives way to exactitude, traces of activity give way to job specifications, the un-nameable and anonymous give way to the named. Lefebvre understands that the making of a product is more complex than that suggested by the finality of everyday appearance, thus, “as for the question of who does the producing, and how they do it, the more restricted the notion (production) becomes the less it connotes creativity, inventiveness or imagination; rather it tends to refer solely to labour”.4 Drawing, with its tradition of working through traces of the almost-hidden-from-view can be used as a tool in the ‘making transparent’ and ‘untying of knots’ that reduces the notion of production to an over-simplified and unimaginative product economy.

The role played by drawing, in weaving together the network of associations of the material and social fabric is already an essential tool of interaction between systems and people involved in the construction of a building. In this, the agency of drawing serves as a tool typically resulting in a series of templates of information, a continuous tissue of traces between different types of work, a passage of codes between operations or an interlacing of specialisations.5 At the end of the work, when the building comes to be used, the working drawings are put away; the operational tracks are covered over, leaving a residue of consequences in the building and its occupation.

This drawing, these drawings, constitute a hidden language of construction, a kind of textile for which the building might be the loom. They are a record not only of the technical know-how of production but also the conceptual and imaginary armature of the relationship between the visible and the invisible. In a lecture entitled ‘Connected Isolation’ Thom Mayne of Morphosis draws attention to interconnectedness, expressed as a desire to counteract the traditional antagonism between the public and private face of architecture. In the potency of this space-between, the role of drawing, by its very nature reflecting work that is fragmentary and unfinished, is critical.Thus

drawings can dismantle or disregard material and weight, providing insight into the unattainable. They are also so much more private – you can possess them, inhabit them, in a manner so different from the work. Drawings can represent a resistance to our dualistic tendencies, integrating intuition and rationality.6

A diagrammatic record can ‘provide simultaneous knowledge of the inside and the outside’ as if registering a play between opposing energies of (in)sight and site. In one exercise, (Politix, Portland, 1990) the Morphosis team made use of sixty-eight plates of glass to create a simultaneous view of interior and exterior perspectives, a transparent tracing of aspects resembling a factory or loom of fibres in preparation for fabric production. As in Mitchell Bould’s collaborative project, Site Works, at Osborne School (2004), this is the infrastructure of the construction process, that which can only be articulated through an interplay of simultaneous difference. Here, the layered drawings of the glazed balustrade articulate different perspectives and approaches to the making of the building, as if charting an interior fabric.

Opposing energies constitute the real which hides behind the visible. They are also the forces at work in the labour of construction. Inside and outside are the push and pull or to and fro of comings and goings; up and down, over and under, above and below, on and off, in and out, back and forth, behind and in-front, this and that, here and there, then and now, them and us – each interacting as a play of relationships and associations befitting the complexity of a living system. It is in the constant alternation and shuffling between separation and connection that the building grows, reflected in the exchange of information such as that which drawing provides. Pairs of opposing elements, bound to each other by force, provide the building blocks of matter itself, the raw material (material and matériel) of relationships between invisible elements at work within the construction process. This process is not dissimilar to the process of weaving in which the under and over crossing of warp and weft produces the coherence of construction necessary for a fabric; in its construction and use, the building resembles a loom to which the (social) fabric is always attached, but it is also the case that the building itself is permeable and porous like a fabric. It is particularly in the relationship between fixed and fluid that the dynamics of duality unfold.

In this analogy, it would be wrong to think that the loom is always fixed and the fabric fluid. Rather we see that the fabric in formation and the loom in all its mobility provide parallels; both are constantly shifting between fixed and fluid. Both operate within a time frame as well as being measurable as structures in space. Already before mechanization the operation of the heddles and harnesses, drawstrings and pulleys, sheds and treadles, drawing forks, comber boards and pulley boxes of the draw-loom determined the movement of parts necessary to the completion of a figured fabric. Quite remarkably, the draw-loom had probably already achieved in the late 10th century (in the Far East) the complexity of thread intersection of which it would be henceforth capable. It was the incessant desire for ever-greater speed and efficiency that determined all subsequent developments, thus what took years to make before mechanization can now be completed in a fraction of the time. In terms of construction, the basic principles have changed less than the shifting pattern of time within which the construction of the fabric is made.

The time-frame of construction, so important to the political economy of efficient labour, forms an essential aspect of the fabric of the building. We are familiar with the static, spatial structures of the constructed object or building, but as suggested by W.J.T. Mitchell, “time division multiplexing of activities is starting to look smarter than space division”.7 The notion of a fixed loom-building-frame is synonymous with a ‘wireframe-model of reality’, whereas Manfred Wolff-Plottegg calls for a dissolution of such a simplistic and rigid perception, and a search for a system which can reflect the constant growth and development of the building in formation. He says that

the theory of mapping_merging_morphing_faking different electronic, physical, and social spaces together as a new ‘site’ of architecture is the basis for the concept of virtual & real-life (sic) space. Thus – after the rigid, deterministic design of definite conditions…..the transition to an architecture of process-design is formulated.….the center of interest is not a detached singularity (auratic object, charismatic demiurg), but a dynamic interchange.8

There is a sense here of a moving drawing, a drawing on the move, a mobilizing of the means through which the indeterminate, through codes, ciphers, traces and trails of activities and operations can release, albeit in virtual form, something approaching a reflection of the real. Such a drawing would never be complete or would always point towards incompletion. In connecting the tissue of disparate functions, threading the human chain, weaving the double fabric (the double-weave) of material and matériel, such a drawing will simultaneously face forwards and backwards in Janus-time, referencing not only the activities that have gone into its making but also pointing to the actions of the people who continue to make the building what it will become in the future. In Mitchell-Bould’s work the simultaneous mapping and merging, of people in time and construction in space, is rhythmically embedded in the transparency and fluidity of old and new media, of drawn lines and digital images, of figures and forces at work within the totality of the making that becomes a building. This virtual tracing of many feet and hands, of stuff and information, this complex of layers and passages across territories and spaces like a Piranesian loom set in the evanescence of sunlight on glass, enables the closed structure of ‘completion’ to be defused, and for the making of the building to breathe from within.

© Victoria Mitchell 2004

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