Hacking the Expanded Field
In Rosalind Krauss’s 1979 essay Sculpture in the Expanded Field, she observed how sculptural works of the 1960s and 1970s in America were experiencing a paradigmatic shift in its logic and rule making abilities of the discipline. Set in backdrop of an aesthetic polemic that posited post-modernism's opposition to all things modern, Krauss' theoretical repositioning of sculpture was in parallel to the times. Sculpture's rules and logics were redefined by setting it in opposition and exclusion to the categories of other major creative fields such as landscape and architecture (see figure 1). Sculpture in the traditional modern aesthetic sense, had actually been left behind as sculptors began to hack at different mediums at the edge of these expanded fields. Visually represented in a Kline group structure, Krauss also identified 3 additional emerging practices with their own set of logic: site construction, marked sites, and axiomatic structures.
In 2009, the architectural blog InfraNet Lab, posted a similar but revised diagram of architecture’s relative position in its newly expanded field (see figure 2a). Whether the zeitgeist of a paradigmatic shift runs in a similar streaming thought of Krauss' time is questionable but the blog stakes its claim:
“Architecture is in need of a range of situational qualifiers to establish its position amongst the rapidly expanding terrain of landscape architecture and within the fractured and troubled territory of urbanism.”
Unlike Krauss’ maintenance of sculpture at the edge of her field, InfraNet cleverly removes the term architecture and replaces it with urbanism. The proposed Neo-Kraussian diagram no longer displays 'architecture' but more powerful exposes its hacked logic. InfraNet has managed to slip architecture into this self-propagating disciplinary framework model which results in even wider disciplinary implications. For example, the original logic of the Kline Group structure (i.e., its reliance on exclusive qualifiers) generates disciplinary topics and operable spaces such as infrastructure, productive surface, civic conduit, and spatial container which are of relevancy to architecture. Furthermore, these terms also imply wider disciplinary fields of flows, velocities, ecologies, economics, and energies.
InfraNet's hacking play is in alignment with the earlier quoted observation and perhaps its hopeful goal of re-situating the architectural field. A better position anticipates that architecture can address critical "disciplinary loopholes" that are being displaced in traditional fields of economics, geography, ecology, and landscape. Furthermore, they pose the open ended question of ‘now what’ or ‘how’ to the architects that must propose a design!
Re-Hacking an Expanded Field
Hacker as architect not only assumes the playing field of logistical cities but the architectural discourses at hand. In the ethos of disciplinary hacking, the hacker as architect further problematizes the lingering set of questions asked by InfraNet by asking ‘what else?’
First, the current InfraNet iteration of the Kline Group still maintains the logic of exclusion and opposition to the organization. This is a quick and simple way of organizing the discipline by distinction but perhaps limiting in its ability to contextualize and encourage interdisciplinary streams for new knowledge. The hacker proposes the removal of these ‘not-’s of distinction.
Second, the hacker agrees with InfraNet that marking the expanded field in architecture with their four newly generated terms (see figure 3a) can be helpful for understanding new purposes or opportunities for architecture within the local and regional networks. However, further reconfigurations of these opportunities are in order due to the removal of the ‘not-’s that supported each respective term, except for infrastructure.
Third, the hacker also acknowledges the newly defined disciplinary territories of ecologies, economics, energies, velocities that emanate from flows. InfraNet’s insertion of ‘flows’ into the diagram’s logic is perhaps the most ingenious iteration. However, the hacker is aware that in our finite existence of a continuing conversation, we don’t always recognize this central configuration. Many times we are busy controlling and regulating the flow of discourses- and materials- through our own expanded territories of production and accumulation (see figure 3c).
Fourth, the Kline diagram may have evolved to an organization of expanding networks but lacks critical elements of linearity and time (see figure 4). Critics such as Easterling comment on how architecture has “few common terms to describe spatial organization with active parts, temporal components, or differential change.” Perhaps the flow may be non-linear in order of progression as DeLanda likes to suggest. However, at a certain point there must be a continuity which leads to produced and accumulated knowledge. After all, flows emanating from a center inevitably turn into many streaming narratives as it must engage the barriers and obstacles of entry into each respective disciplinary territories. Otherwise the streaming narratives would regress to systems of purely abstracted points and lines of intersection. What happens to the flow as it engages each territory is the most crucial for hacker’s operations to commence in what is called the “exchange”.
Thus, this thesis re-hacks contemporary working models of an expanded field of architecture. The never ending generative net of narrative streams that emanated with a central area of flows has evolved into inverted characteristics with the direction of flows traveling in a linear movement (see figure 5) . The ever expanding disciplinary territories (i.e., production and accumulation) encroach and networking with one another as its re-displace terms of infrastructure, urbanism, landscape and civic conduit occupy its overlapping areas. Meanwhile, the linear flow reorganizes the four terms into a sequence that enables it to shuttle back and forth between the peripheral territories of production and accumulation and remains hyper active in the center of exchange.
