Maps

Marie-Ange Brayer

"My surface is myself". William Carlos Williams, Paterson

 

The digital world coils and uncoils, enravels and unravels. The changes occurring with paradigms have benefited dynamic and process-based systems, the generative aspect of form, and a complex world of synapses. "Everything is involved in a continual process of transformation" (Lars Spuybrook, "Motor Geometry"). The architectural object, closed in upon itself, has been replaced by new fractal forms of geometry, which put the local in touch with the global, and challenge irregularities and singularities. A new geography of auto-similarities within differentiation has been introduced. Connection, movement, and co-existence of many, varied dimensions - forms of heterogeneity all living in syntonic harmony in this machinic world. Digitization may well have ushered in a time of simultaneity, but it also leads us towards a time of retrospection, in which informative and formal data reverberate. The architect whose intent is to get to grips with this complexity - which is cultural, social, political, territorial and digital - finds him - or herself facing an unstable and fluctuating world, pierced by all manner of infiltration, woven with flexible fabric, permeated by ebbs and flows, analogies and variations, and at once differential and similarly oriented.

This world no longer admits place and form as separate, disjunctive entities. On the contrary, it talks in terms of "topomorphs", morphologies and morphogeneses of place. Nowadays the number of architects appropriating concepts of architecture, landscape and infrastructure, in order to map them in one fell swoop, is legion. Among them we find Adriaan Geuze, Maxwan, and Schie 2.0. The geographical map is no longer merely an instrumentalization of territory : it has become a fully-fledged procedural tool, in which many different dimensions of appropriation come together (sociological, economic, climatic, etc). The age-old dichotomies between nature and artifice are having a bad time of it. With regard to the "topological landscape", Mark Lee defines this as seeking "to eradicate the difference between the artificially constructed and the natural landscape" (1). Likewise, the Catalan architect Vicente Guallart talks to us about a digital nature and an artificial ecology. What the geographical map offers these architects stems here from network, mesh, fabric, and the "intranet", where the natural and the artificial cross-fertilize. The map is something that performs; it is transitive; it reactivates the factual data of the territory which is projected into it in all its complexity. The map offers a "vertical economics" (Christian Jacob), where a whole host of conceptual plans and entries of the territory are overlaid and dovetailed. As Deleuze and Guattari demonstrated, the map is a rhizome with many different entrances - an interconnecting arrangement between differing orders of representation and semanticization.

The instability of new urban conditions, and the shifting of people caused by war and natural disaster throughout the world, refer architects to a crisis of inclusion and the idea of foundation. "We are in the process of becoming nomads" declared Constant in the 1960s, imagining, as he did, with "New Babylon", the first global city where the shifting movement of individuals involves the transformation of architecture. "New Babylon" is just a map, a space turned into a vehicle and a vector by displacements. In so doing, Constant perpetuated the precepts of "moving urban situations" championed by Debord and the Situationists. He was also subject both to the influence of the mega-structures and "streets in space" proposed by Team X and Aldo van Eyck, who themselves develop maze-like, suspended urban forms, and to the influence of Alison and Peter Smithson, in England, who support the concept of "ceaseless changes" within urban grids and the complexity of the "human association". "New Babylon" time is one involving a slow flow of human movements. "It is actually more a question of a continually changing micro-structure, in which the time factor - the fourth dimension - plays a considerable role" (2). In the 1980s, Deleuze and Guattari developed the concept of "deterritorialization", a decentralized, hierarchy-less space ; and they defended the idea of intensities and their nomadic organization of movement and flux. Nowadays, an architect like Michael Sorkin is updating this notion of trajectory in his urban projects. He talks to us about a "culture of encapsulation" (vehicles, trains etc) which co-exists with a phenomenon of neo-nomadism with an electronic heart.

In this world of fluctuation and diversity, in which we are caught in the disarray of forever changing scenes, why does the geographical map still offer us a credible frame of reference ? It goes without saying that, like any form of tabularity and informational system, the map does away with the illusionism of style and content, which many architects try to dodge, because, for them, it extends the illusionism of the object placed on a support. Yet the map informs a coded process of representation. It is a system of projection. Mercator's cartographic distortions appropriated the expanding world of the great discoveries of the Renaissance ; the atlases of Ortelius conveyed a new, encyclopaedic conception of the universe, by indexing the whole world within the space of a single book ; in the 1930s, Richard Buckminster Fuller's dymaxion map pointed to a new internationalization of the globe. Local and global merge in the cartographic representation that encompasses particular and general, and detail and overview, at one and the same time. The map, however, is only ever a map of movements and flows. "We might wonder, in the final analysis, what cartography deals with, if not fluctuation. Continents drift, deserts encroach, landscapes suffer wear and tear and erode, and climates change. Our age is acutely aware of the world's instability and "liquidness". And this is in turn expressed in our actual constructions" (3).

With the geographical map it is also possible to mentally survey territory. This is something that Land Art artist Robert Smithson developed through his "site" and "non-site" dialectic. His activities in a post-industrial nature which he called "ruins in reverse" were presented like an entropic landscape, sedimented in a time frame rendered archaeological. The "non-site" may be a map, a text, or an installation, referring to the site. Site and non-site are not two distinct entities, but quite different states of one and the same phenomenon. Likewise, the procedural, and no longer merely instrumental, recourse to geographical maps by architects, is perhaps not foreign to this dimension of similarity and differentness introduced by the site and non-site dialectic that also embraces territory and map. Mapping and map-making in present-day architecture, turning towards the exploration of new territories that are physical and digital alike, possibly also links up with the ancient notion of "periegesis" (4) - the map as graph of a new anthropological dimension of constructed space.

Tiering : artificial landscapes

Constant's "New Babylon" (circa 1957) is a global city ; it is the whole earth that no longer belongs to anyone in particular. There are no boundaries any more, because humankind has become fluctuating. "Life is an endless journey through a world that is changing so fast that it always seems different" (5). In "New Babylon", automated production has reunited all its inhabitants with a creative freedom. The "sectors", where the social space is concentrated, are interconnected, and stretch in every direction. In them, links are being ceaselessly forged and undone, and mobility brings on disorientation with a "dynamic" labyrinth, which is invariably liable to change shape, from one activity to the next. Constant declared that the topographical survey of New Babylon could not be carried out using the usual cartographic methods. "New Babylon" is actually organized on many levels (ground, roof-terrace, etc) which intercommunicate. The fact that no map can get this across is not least because "New Babylon" is itself a map, a diagram, a nodal interplay of networks and interconnections, which Constant transcribed in the geographical maps on which he marked human movement and displacement. "The network in general [...] comes together in the distance, synchronizes, opens up faraway and at the same time draws near : the way, the fork and the connection all lend structure to the territory by abstracting it from itself, and by allocating its simple unity - or by, in a way, de-allocating it, and putting it to another purpose. There is no such thing as territory without network, there is always just network, or grid ; the simple unity of the territory is mythical" (6). This network which binds and synthesizes the territory is also, however, an archipelago of dis-locations, otherwise put, migratory locations which outline a cartographic arrangement, for here territory and map have come together in the synaptic city with its foundationless narrative.

In 1958, Yona Friedman developed the "spatial city", to wit, a three-dimensional, bestraddling structure, which touches the ground only on a minimal area. In it, constructions can be dismantled and moved, and they can be altered as the occupant so desires. This spatial structure, raised up on piles, contains lived-in volumes, set within some of its "void" spaces. The tiering of the spatial city on several levels that are independent of each other defines this "spatial city-planning". The piles contain vertical circulation systems (lifts, stairs). A residential city, a commercial city, and an industrial city can all rub shoulders on the same site. The spatial city thus represents what Yona Friedman has called an "artificial topography", a grid suspended in space. Once again the city has become cartography, through its homogeneous, continual and indeterminate network. Its modular mesh authorizes its unlimited growth. The cities of Constant and Friedman, which hoist architecture above the territory and transform it into an "artificial landscape" are lived-in maps. The geographical map is no longer capable of describing the spatial city, because it is a graph, an independent diagram, which thwarts the factual limitations of the territory as exteriority. The artificial landscape is an inhabitable map ; the map, an inhabited city.

 

The influence of Constant and Friedman would be decisive for the "plugged" cities of Archigram and for the Japanese Metabolists (Isozaki, Kurokawa) ; and, closer to home, for Rem Koolhass and his approach to the "grid" as architectural subconscious ("Delirious New York"), his conception of the city as "archipelago", and his definition of the urban landscape as "SCAPE", cross-fertilizing nature and the man-made. Today, the Dutch architects MVRDV are developing "Datatowns" (1998) (cf. ArchiLab 1999), which may well solve territorial over-densification problems. These "Datatowns" are vertically tiered, like Friedman's spatial cities; they are towns of data, which are merely information networks. These towns, which are developed high up, are without topography, without representation, and without context. All that matters is the multiple and simultaneous presence of levels. There is no original referent any more, as with Friedman. Once more, the city is its own cartography.

Upheavals: landscapes of derivation

"Architecture will soon shed light on a hitherto hidden element, the floor-ground, at once a means of contact and a means of overview. By assuming its full significance, the ground tends to absorb the other architectural factors : at once partitioning, covering, façade etc... This transformation, made possible by the use of the oblique, is imminent, for the ground is the least abstract of all the elements, and the most useful" (7). And Claude Parent said when he met Le Corbusier : "Freeing the ground has become false. Occupying the ground in the military sense becomes the only true action" (8). Surfaces and ramps now create upheavals in the ground forming "topotonic" plates which encourage circulation and movement.

For Architecture-Principe - Claude Parent and Paul Virilio -, "the oblique is the medium of spatial continuity" (9). "Oblique architecture becomes a kind of activity generator". Being static is replaced by being energetic, because oblique potentialism summons up its physicality and its participating dimension. Once detached from the ground surface, the city includes "sites of derivation" wich unfurl like waves. The major principle of the oblique function is that of "inhabitable circulation", made possible by inclined planes, artificial ground and ramp systems. In the Parent/Virilio city that pulsates with inhabitable circulation, it is the movement of people that imbues the architecture with its dynamic. Architecture is co-extensive with movement. Here the territory is in perpetual transformation, changing from one moment to the next. So how is it to be mapped ? These upheavals, derivations and emulsions of private life in the social space make the city levitate. Once more, the city is a situation which no map can describe, because it is choreographed by the itineraries that are caught in a "journey without maps" (10). Claude Parent nevertheless lays claim to a cartographic eye for the oblique city : "For the human inhabitant, an overview of the landscape turns into a necessity, a right ; it replaces the horizontal vision, and introduces bird's eye views and worm's eye views" (11). The sites of derivation are surveyed by the map-maker's synoptic eye. The map not only paradoxically offers a deterritorialization of the territory, but also refers to a vision that has become operative. The anchorage is no longer the ground that has risen up, like a skin, like a change of territory, which has separated like an independent surface of projection. Nor is it any longer the body, always active and always in motion. The anchorage comes from a new system of vision, artificial this time, and no longer "natural" - the vision of the map-maker, with his aerial, overbearing eye, and his "oblique" way of looking that passes through space, without any centrality, and perceives its relief through the range of its viewpoints. The map then tends to merge with the landscape of derivation.

Space is an envelope, a surface that coils and uncoils, rises up and shrinks back. With Parent/Virilio, the ground is indeed this hybrid between the site's naturalness and its artificiality. This radical exploration of the surface is nowadays being forcefully echoed in the research projects being conducted by architects, from Greg Lynn to Reiser-Umemoto. For FOA (Foreign Office Architects), only the reconfiguration of the ground can shift the meaning of architectural production, as is shown by their work in progress on the Yokahama terminal, and the "Virtual House" (1997). "What happens when the ground - geographical, geological, cultural, economical - becomes distorted through mechanisms of temporal and spatial displacement that characterize our age ?" (12) As an active field, the ground gets rids of the binary contrast between style and content, between the two-dimensional and the three-dimensional. With FOA, the ground is neither a volume, nor a flat surface, but lies somewhere in between the two, in a figurative possible that has been released from the determination of the anchorage. Architecture is the "incorporation" of territorial data. These "surfacings" are unstable topics, lying somewhere between object and space, between the territory and its artificial making in map form. These surfacings are a "flexible" and abstract form of mapping, retaining the planar dimension, the dimension of a smooth sheet, across which the world's flows are forever spreading.

Folds : fractal landscapes

For François Roche, architecture is not erected on a ground, but within a critical experience that effects a change in contextual parameters. In the extensive field of architecture, his approach, which we might also describe as "Spinozist", involves a kind of "plane of immanence", constructed by "the speed and slowness of metabolisms", articulating "sociabilities and communities", "frozen catatonias and accelerated movements, unformed elements, unsubjectivized feelings" (13). How can architecture become a fluence affected by social, economic, sensorial and territorial multiplicities ? "Places and territories nurture identities, preconditions and feelings that architecture and city-planning are forever restricting and eradicating" (14). For Roche, on the other hand, architecture is a "management of differentiated flows". "Fractal City" (project for Rotterdam, 1998) is at once a singular territory and an artificialized nature. Here it is upheavals of the ground which become architecture. Topography and infrastructure are understood as structural tools. What about territory and map ? Territory is cartography, and maps are endowed with the structural, stratigraphic depth of territory. Both are involved in the same operative function, which links up with Robert Smithson's "sites" and "non-sites".

This congruence of map and territory recurs in a project like NL Architects "Flat City" (1998), for the future town of Leidsche Rijn in the Netherlands. These architects describe it as a " folded linear town ". No constructed volume is erected, the ground is raised by several metres, radically opening up the skyline. In the oblique function of Parent/Virilio, the roof was already a ground to be climbed and crossed ; here, lawn coverings make the roofs of "Flat City" accessible. Maps - semantic, urban and anthropological - are folded in the inflections of the "endogenous fold" (Deleuze) of the territory.

For Kengo Kuma, digital technology has dissolved the idea of territoriality. His conception of the "landscape" or "digital gardening" stems from a reversal of perception : "Instead of looking towards architecture from outside, we must look at the environment from inside. It is important to plan architecture like a frame for observing the environment from within". "By doing away with the object, we must bring out a place in its stead" (15). Venturing into different forms of matter because there must no longer be frames for viewing : architecture can no longer be an object that is visually measured ; henceforth it is surveyed like a territory, it has gained in materiality at the same time as it merges in the digital world of continuity. In his "Park Network" (1996) project for Tokyo, the park is at once a source of sustenance and a refuge in the event of an emergency. For Kuma, we have to live in a "garden" - i.e. in a territory that is at once cybernetic and physical - and no longer in a building.

The reconfiguration of territory is achieved, by the Catalan architects ACTAR and Vicente Guallart, through a cartographic modelling and recourse to fractal geometries. "Fractals are defined as infinite curves contained in a finite area". Involved here are "orders that are changeable in their complex relations", in which contradictory states co-exist. "Fractals capture a new type of order typified by half-similarity, the similarity between the part and the whole on many different scales. Snowflakes, clouds, ferns, coastlines, the ramified forms of blood vessels, and even the "cytoskeleton" within each cell, all are examples of fractal structures" (16). Manuel Gausa developed the idea of "(LAND)ARCH", "new operative landscapes" which proceed by way of "colonizations, infiltrations, insertions, camouflage, and modelling", or new "operative topographies (carpet : land on land ; relief : surface = land ; folds : intersection of the land ; furrows ; scratching the land)". For Gausa, Guallart and Willy Müller, "offering a different description of reality is already the beginning of projection" (17). They define their projects as "operative maps", flexible mechanisms for discovering new potentials in the stratified territory.

Their representation of Barcelona is thus a fractal landscape or an operative map : the city is like a fabric whose fibres are stretched in order to introduce infrastructures into their interstitial folds. Barcelona is no longer a series of lays, a seam of lengthwise strips which, in their dilatations and retractions, squeezed by perpendicular movements that "colonize"" it, have incorporated heterogeneous territories where voids alternate with solids. Maps alone make it possible to reveal systems of relationships and interconnections, and bring out the city as a "vibrating system", a mixed flux and a grid evolving on different scales, local and global alike. The city thus rises up in its fractal development through its multiple cartographic rendering. What the map ordains here is indeed the discharge of compositional factors, style/content polarities, and nature/artifice. For ACTAR, the map is a "metaterritory", an "osmotic ground". It alone makes it possible to broach the infrastructural dimension of the territory. The map is extruded territory. Or, conversely, for Xavier Costa, territory is explored like a "metacartography", with its lines, its boundaries, and areas of density. "In order to embrace as broad a spectrum of referents as possible, a distant positioning is necessary, permitting the act of drawing up a map of all these zones of influence. This cartography, which must have a critical dimension, is actually already in the process of constructing the new conditions of the city" (18).

For Vicente Guallart, likewise, architecture no longer has forms : it is a dynamic process, a co-nature. Through fractal geometries, Guallart explores the city like a media-related hybridization between nature and the digital. In "The City of 1000 Geographies" - also a tribute to Rem Koolhaas "City of the Captive Globe" in "Delirious New York" -, Guallart takes territorial samples which are as much fractal extrusions of landscape as they are cartographic fragments. Architecture must change in real time : trees may be artificial, mountains may be lived in ("Los edificios son montanas"). Nature is "artificially natural and naturally artificial". "The world thus becomes an inhabitable environment". It is a matter of "representing the real, inhabitable world based on the virtual world" (19), of "mapping, but mountains, water-courses, sunshine, views, vegetation"... "A fractal object with two essential features : an indefinite detail of each point and a certain similarity between the parts of the object and its complete characteristics" (20) : the fractal object is in itself a cartography of the object through its dimension of auto-similarity. It is a changing method of representation in which different distances and different moments may come together, and which can describe the changes in the landscape. With Guallart, everything happens as if "cartography could be directly included in the landscape it describes" (21).

Deployments : semantic landscapes

Kolatan/MacDonald, for their part, make use of the co-citation map system, so as to deploy complex networks of interrelations "between dissipative processes and aggregative structures", which form new, hybrid identities. To this end, they refer to the metaphor of the "chimaera", that genetically hybrid mythical being, at once singular and complex, to develop their transformational hybrid models. The co-citation map system is a kind of electronic index, borrowed from the new information-related sciences. "If one paper cites an earlier publication, they bear a conceptual relationship to one another. Implicit in these linkages is a relatedness of intellectual content. In reordering the literature by works cited, we obtain a citation index" (22). This co-citation map thus makes it possible to deploy conceptual linkages which are not otherwise visible. "The next level of organization is constructed as a map, a geographic description of relational knowledge. In this kind of map, groups of co-cited papers are organized in clusters, each cluster representing a network of interrelated, co-cited publications. What is achieved in clustering is a matrix of objects linked together by varying degrees and in different states of aggregation" (23). The co-citation method thus helps to "identify similarities between unconnected sites/structures/programmes" (Kolatan/MacDonald. The co-citation map deploys "a territorial description of associations and disassociations, to coordinate groups of morphologies into clusters that each represent a network of interrelated elements, a matrix of objects" (24). This is how Kolatan/MacDonald have reconfigured an interior based on the indexing of the outline of household objects which, when then interrelated, culminate in new formal and programmatic possibilities. This dictionary of object outlines has led in

turn to the discovery of new operational similarities. This same method means that they cross-fertilize the outline of a house with its environment to make "chimaeric" architectures.

For Neil Denari, likewise, digital technology has altered the concept of local. Neil Denari reminds us that the word map means "sheet" in Latin. The origins of the map consequently "are not in information, but in the geometry of the flat surface" (25). "The world, in terms of technology, is more like a map than a real sphere. Perhaps it could even be called a graph where information is more important than how many square miles of land a country or city has" (26). Neil Denari designed the redevelopment of the MA Gallery in Tokyo based on what he calls the Homolosine Interrupted Projection Mapping System. The inner surfaces are folded and deformed, turned down like "interrupted" projection mapping planes, stripped of all geographical information. They form a complex geometric space, smooth like a sheet or map, with without any referent. The exploration of these new digital, map-like territories has enabled architecture to become "another global surface". "Technology coerces a flattening of the world through its attempts to be horizontal, and to be in all places at all times. It creates a new form of global projection or a new cartography depicting phenomena surrounding the flowing plasmas of money, knowledge, power and politics" (27). These global surfaces which are developed as a spatial device have merged with a graphic, "logo-ized" world of intertextualized codes, taken from the world's cultural flows. For Neil Denari, nowadays, there is no such thing any more as a traditional map to guide us ; we navigate in floating spaces of signifiers. Architecture henceforth consists in "folding" the sheet of the world.

 

Movements : cinematic landscapes

The architects Ushida & Findlay explore the psychoanalytical and "psycho-geographical" components of architecture, in tandem with a line of purely scientific and geometric research into form. The "Truss Wall House", built in Japan, illustrates quite clearly their comprehensive approach, in which the subconscious meets mathematical modelling. For them, architecture is a psycho-sensorial geography, involving a free itinerary during which the inhabitant is being forever solicited in his cognitive and physical dimension. The organic shapes of their buildings stem from the movements of the human body. They are intrigued by "flowing space"(Leon van Schaik), and the interiors of their architectural works are perceived like "inhabited landscapes" - psycho-sensorial landscapes that are at once tactile and mental.

Digital technologies have thus radically capsized the ideas of territory and its modelling, because the digital territory encompasses all the heuristic features of a map. In the case of Greg Lynn, the formation of the architectural object is the outcome of a simultaneous crossing of map and territory. His "blobs", matrical elements and "isomorphic polysurfaces" are part of a generative grammar of forms, which is developed in both continuity and differentiation. Influenced by the radiolarians and the morphological studies of the zoologist D'Arcy Thompson. Greg Lynn compares the "blob" to a gelatinous organism, with no formal regulation, an evolving form which encompasses the components of its environment (28). The distinctive feature of the "blobs" is that they can be both mould and model, landscape and map. Greg Lynn thus produced panels of stratified wood based on machines with digital controls bearing the formal imprint of his "blobs". These panels form an analytical cartography of the "blob" as much as its moving geographical territory (cf. "Embryologic Space"). For Greg Lynn, the blob is an example of a "topological surface exhibiting landscape characteristics although it does not look like a topography" (29). Architecture lies somewhere between the unfolding of this proto-object and a field informed by oriented surfaces, which update the oblique function of Parent/Virilio. "Topological surfaces that store force in the inflections of their shape behave as landscapes in that the slopes that are generated store energy in the form of oriented surfaces" (30). Here there are no longer any locations ; the "topological landscape" is a folding of geological sediments. At the same time as it is permeated by gentle waves whose inflections cause a singular topography of hills and valleys. "These topological surfaces are inflected by the field in which they are modelled" (31) : the landscape and its cartographic modelling have merged with each other striated by one and the same space-time dynamic.

Maps are thus presented in their relational operative function, their transformational capacity, a return to the referent, made up of abstraction and similarity. The map here is neither an object nor a graphic representation ; it is a vehicle of translations between architectural form and its physical or digital environment. The map is a function, a go-between the cognitive field and an intertextual realm. The map is no longer there to measure and inform a comparative order between real and representation, it is at once impulse and inflection. As a folding of the signifier and the signified, it has become a "metastratum" which works in the manner of Deleuze and Guattari's "machinic arrangement" (32). The map is what imbues architecture with an implicit virtual movement. It is what renders architecture unassignable. The map has itself turned into a flux.

 

 

(1) Mark Lee, "The Dutch Savannah. Approaches to Topological Landscape" in Daidalos. Architecture.Art.Culture, "Architecture Goes Landscape", Berlin, octobre 1999, n°73, p.9-15.

(2) Constant, "Een schets voor een kultuur", 1960-65 in Mark Wigley, Constant's New Babylon. The Hyper-Architecture of Desire, Witte de With, Center for Contemporary Art/ 010 Publishers, Rotterdam, 1998, p.163.

(3) Pierre Chabard in "Orbis Terrarum", sous la direction de Marie Ange Brayer, Moritz Küng, Ludion/Antwerpen Open, 2000.

(4) La périégèse est la "description littéraire où la géographie se mêlait à l'ethnographie" in Christian Jacob, L'empire des cartes. Approche théorique de la cartographie à travers l'histoire, Paris, Albin Michel (Bibliothèque Histoire), 1992, p.39.

(5) Constant, op. cit, p.161.

(6) Bernard Stiegler, La technique et le temps. 2. La désorientation, Paris, Galilée (Collection La Philosophie en effet), 1996, p.168.

(7) Paul Virilio, "Nevers chantier" in Architecture-Principe 1966 et 1996. Paul Virilio et Claude Parent, Paris, Les Editions de l'Imprimeur, 1996, s.p.

(8) Claude Parent in Aujourd'hui, n° 51, 1965.

(9) Claude Parent, "Architecture : singularité et discontinuité" in op. cit., s.p.

(10) John Rajchman, "Grounds" in Constructions, The MIT Press Cambridge, Massachusetts, London, England, 1998, p.86.

(11) Claude Parent, "Expérimentation" in op. cit., s.p.

(12) FOA in ArchiLab, Orléans, 1999.

(13) Gilles Deleuze, Spinoza. Philosophie pratique, Paris, Minuit, 1981.

(14) François Roche, "Situation" in Quaderns, "LandArch", Barcelone, 1997, p.97.

(15) Kengo Kuma, "La période du chaos. Jardin digital" in Quaderns, "Spirales, Temps ouvert - Temps fractal", Barcelone, 1999, p.128.

(16) Mae-Wam Ho, "La nouvelle ère de l'organicisme" in op. cit., p.154 .

(17) Manuel Gausa, Vicente Guallart, Willy Müller, Met 1.0. Metapolis. 25 propuestas x 21 equipos. Festival de ideas para la futura multiciudad, ACTAR, Barcelona, 1998.

(18) Xavier Costa, "El arquitecto como etnografo" in op.cit., 1998.

(19) Vicente Guallart, "La Ville aux 1000 géographies" in Quaderns, "LandArch", Barcelone, 1997, p.171.

(20) Op. cit., p.173.

(21) Xavier Costa in op. cit.

(22) E. Garfield, R. Kimbeley, D.A. Pendlebury, Mapping the Social Sciences : The Contribution of Technology to Information Retrieval. Cité par Kolatan/Mac Donald.

(23) Ibid.

(24) Kolatan/Mac Donald Studio in Peter Zellner, Hybrid Space. New Forms in Digital Architecture, Thames & Hudson, London, 1999.

(25) Neil Denari, "Interrupted Projections". Another Global Surface or Territorual Re-Codings on the World Sheet, Gallery.MA, Tokyo, 1996. Cf. aussi Neil Denari, "Project N0 9601 Interrupted Projections. Another Global Surface" in Architectural Design. "Architecture of the Borderlands", London, vol. 69, été 1999.

(26) Ibid.

(27) Ibid.

(28) Greg Lynn, "Blob Tectonics, or Why Tectonics is square and Topology is groovy", p. 169-186 in Folds, Bodies & Blobs. Collected Essays, Bruxelles, La Lettre Volée, 1998. Cf. ArchiLab, Orléans, 1999.

(29) Greg Lynn, Animate Form, New York, Princeton Architectural Press, 1998, p.30.

(30) Ibid.

(31) Op. cit., p.32.

(32) Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, Mille plateaux. Capitalisme et schizophrénie, Paris, Minuit, 1980, p.10.