Trust the Process

I have no tattoos. Unlike what is apparently most men of my age, class, and social milieu, I was never inked with an ironic anchor, there are no roses creeping out from under my collar at work, and I certainly don’t have sleeves. But if I were ever to get a tattoo, I know exactly what it would be. In Gregory Bateson’s 1972 Steps to an Ecology of Mind, there features a cybernetic diagram, explaining the ecological crisis through a series of feedback loops, its curves and arrows orbiting around a set of titles: to the exterior, “war,” “pollution,” and “famine,” and at the core, “population,” “technology,” and, oddly, “hubris.” There’s something I find incredibly silly but also extremely compelling about what Bateson is doing here, something he shared with much of the cybernetic culture of the time: attempting to explain the complex and irregular systems of the world in a clear manner, he made diagrams that indicated the flow of influence and impact between all the different phenomena.

Bateson’s diagram isn’t included in Matthew Allen’s Flowcharting, but other visually satisfying examples of the genre make an appearance. In Alfred Barr’s The Development of Abstract Art (1936), sinuous black lines connect disparate cultural influences, while in Claude Lévi-Strauss’s stunning oblique projection from Totemism (1963), a twisting grid in three dimensions links animal and human identities. The same motifs appear in Jacques Lacan’s deliberately obscure diagrams of the mental structures of signification and jouissance and in the huge, sprawling projection of the World3 model, the Club of Rome’s early 1970s attempt to use computation to understand the “predicament of mankind.” This last diagram is a poster-sized field of different nodes with captions like “land yield,” “industrial output,” “persistent pollution,” and, um, “fecundity multiplier,” all tied together by a whirlwind of directional curves, whose recursive calculations infamously resulted in predictions of total social collapse by the year 2050—perhaps not so ideal for that tattoo.

The power of these diagrams is in the way that they sit on the cusp of very distinct fields—the perfect symmetries of mathematics and the sloppy fuzz of the humanities—and the fact that many were made under the early influence of electronic computing, whose promise to make calculations of dynamic systems possible for the first time adds a satisfying historic rawness to them. The cyberneticians in particular were also working through the implications of humanity’s newly discovered ability to destroy the whole world, and this haunted mood gives their work particular resonance today. Flowcharting dwells a lot on these scenes: Allen tells us to expect “a story of how architecture came to imagine itself as a discipline that contends fundamentally with flows”—so far, so cybernetic—but he actually spends much of his time on tangents, wending around a cluster of historic art and literary movements looking for a particular algorithmic thread running throughout.

The cast that Allen assembles is enjoyably free from the usual architectural personae. Picking up in the 1930s, when avant-garde architects faced questions regarding how serious their commitment to industrialization actually was, Allen traces a certain attitude of anonymity and process in the tradition of UK “small magazines” spearheaded by Circle (launched in 1937), which tried to understand where the scientistic aesthetics of constructivism might lead, and culminating in Data and Form of the late 1960s. The latter two were the work of a body of artists whose response to American guts-out abstraction was to go cerebral, searching for the boundary of mathematics and aesthetics and making work there. Constructionist artists, such as Anthony Hill, frequently made their work by defining the processes that would create it, after which they became merely its executants, while others, such as Vera Molnár, were introducing random chance into their operations, retreating yet further behind their instructions.

Intellectually, Allen is attempting something quite refreshing. He circumvents the shadow of poststructuralists like Derrida or Deleuze and Guattari, which is cast so long on architectural culture by instead drawing upon structuralists such as Lévi-Strauss and Roland Barthes. In doing so, a particularly human virtuosity and superfluity of meaning—all the multiple-entendres and proliferation of concepts—is replaced with an intense clarity, what Allen calls “a formalism of form, an abstraction of the abstract.” And in a fascinating section on poetry, he contrasts the hyperintellectual J. H. Prynne, famed for the vertiginous intensity of his semiotic constructions, with the concrete poets who preferred to work with more fundamental qualities of semantic expression.

At each turn, the focus is on artists or intellectuals who were trying hard to relinquish their own control, frequently putting their own authorship at risk. The question of the individual, of the peculiar idiosyncrasy of their creative act, is explicitly and implicitly tested. “Unencumbered by complicated human values, there is a certain freedom and joy to the logic of the assembly line,” rhapsodizes Allen, and each of his vignettes features someone attempting to drop the pretense of aesthetic control and surrender to the flows of modernity. Bureaucratization—through procedural art, through concrete poetry, through international style graphic design, through organizational diagrams—is repeatedly emphasized, as the artists become second-order creators, slipping into cybernetic intoxication. “If the artist is to become a technician,” Allen writes of the ethos that animated Form, “the artwork must become a machine—or perhaps a computational device.”

Which brings us back to architecture. Flowcharting is searching for something, but this short text is part of what is presumably a much larger project. What is at stake is the role that computation, or more specifically, algorithmic processes, might play in a project for a “progressive” architecture. Allen puts it clearly:

The first part of this is quite easy to see. The architecture and construction industry has over time become entirely dependent upon computation, most obviously with the use of CAD software. Architects may still use pencils at work, but the creation of the technical information used to communicate designs for buildings is now entirely digital, a fact of production that is entirely unremarkable in contemporary capitalism. In the last decade or two, however, reciprocity has increasingly been incorporated into these processes, whereby a design file doesn’t merely contain the raw digital information about the lines that the architect or engineer has drawn, but a cascade of interlinked information about the entities represented within the model and their relationships. Today, an architect using, say, Autodesk’s Revit can alter a detail in one part of a model and automatically trigger a flood of changes through a labyrinth of data connections, much like the Club of Rome’s World3.

It is true that this instantaneous reciprocity has become a hidden part of the process, “dryly technical,” as Allen has it, and importantly it need not affect the designs that are brought out of it. In most cases software enables a streamlining of the process—a labor-saving device more than a new medium for expression. But it is also true that there have been many attempts at generating an avant-garde out of the opportunities posed by new digital design tools, and another long shadow cast across architectural culture is that of the digital experiments of the architects associated with so-called deconstructivism in the 1980s. In the late 1990s, Frank Gehry and latterly Zaha Hadid, under the influence of Patrik Schumacher, rushed forward with the use of the computer as an experimental form-generating part of the design process, and in the 2000s there were flurries of theoretical activity, from the likes of Greg Lynn, Lars Spuybroek, and François Roche, attempting to generate a coherent avant-garde position from the possibility of algorithmic design.

In many ways this is the least fashionable architecture possible at the moment—it is neither tectonically dignified, environmentally conscious, critically canon-busting nor forensic in its investigations, and its self-indulgence and lack of worldly engagement make it particularly unpalatable at this point. Schumacher’s self-promotion and juvenile libertarianism has meant that his theory of “parametricism,” essentially asserting a “zeitgeist” role for his own stylistic predilections, has crowded out the others, and the fact that it tends to be the most profligate and dubious clients who commission the style has largely soured its claims toward being a general architecture of the future.

It seems that this is what Allen considers to be the missed opportunity of the algorithm. So what are his prescriptions? It’s not yet entirely clear. The thesis, such as it is, is that an algorithmic approach that gathers together the wider conditions for a project (environmental, social, material, economic, etc.) and designs the way in which their relations can be calculated offers an opportunity for architects to deal properly with systems (“the climate crisis, ecosystem collapse, social injustice, and the adverse effects of global computation”) to a degree they currently can’t. Rather than being virtuosically in control, artists expressing their souls, architects who “flowchart” would be akin to the process painters and concrete poets of the 1960s—engaging critically with the conditions of the work, the actual output losing some of its “aura,” perhaps.

It’s an intriguing and admirable prospect, and it offers a possible frisson of activism to working with Grasshopper, the popular scripting tool whose graphic environment of interconnected nodes has more than a little in common with the cybernetic diagrams of old. Rather than simply generating weird shapes for biomorphic pavilions, could tools like this be used critically to intervene in complex systems? Unfortunately, in the end Allen resorts to hand-waving regarding details of how agency might be wrested from the clutches of capitalist real estate, which at the end of the day is the key issue. This is no great sin, as precisely how architects’ use of the master’s tools can dismantle their house, so to speak, is the step in the process that is hardest to convincingly explain, bedeviling anyone trying to imagine ways in which architects could ever possibly find a useful way back to their twentieth-century relevance. Too brief to mount a more comprehensive argument, Flowcharting is nevertheless an attempt to provide some early steps toward escaping the dead end that previous decades of rhetoric regarding digital architecture led the discipline into, and that’s promising.