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DRAWING WITH THE ARCHITECTURAL BODY: Fragments

by Renée Charron

The Leadline: A Parrallel Experience

Drawing a line as a means of experiencing and exploring the city implies taking the pulse of lived places in transition, on the verge of transformation, contracting situation and nomadic situatedness in the hold on the pencil. The point of the ‘pencil’ wanders the surface, drawing (in), sensing and transducing into vibration urban lived atmospheric qualities traversing the body through it: Scribbling until it cannot quite differentiate the drawing surface from the ground by which it is moved, the wind from the breath by which it is carried, the white paper from the light by which it is traversed. The drawing surface, artist Sharon Jewel writes, is a ‘substrate across which the world variously passes and takes root’. (Jewel 2014: 2) Drawing in this sense cannot depict place, it can only perform it. Place emerges, becomes with/through the gesture the vital movement of line, the surfacing of intensive qualities and relations on the cusp of dissipation, into affective strokes and tonalities. Delimiting contours against the lifeless stage of perspectival space and arrested horizons expresses nothing of place unless it evolves from the thickness of the dynamic sited event as a crystallization of vital relations ; in performing the elasticity of spacetime. Drawing here with-draws from form in its formative movement. It strives to capture forces and to activate them in various manners of expressibility. Sketch (esquisse, entwurf): ‘a projection toward what continues to come, […] to open oneself to a form which shows itself in the movement of its emergence’. (Nancy 2009 : xiii) Architecture likewise is not bound by geographical borders; its horizons are always warping and multiplying, pushed and pulled, stretched to the infrathin limits of time : to the nth dimension of forget-fullness and the always more-than of virtuality in futurity, in excess of built form. Horizons are simultaneously expanded and contracted into place’s germinal force of production. Drawing from this perspective does not strive to represent but rather emerges: architectures, body and drawing are simultaneously and conjointly produced, individuated together in the process.

The Abstract or Gothic Line

What if that which is recounted in the adventures of the Surfline was in fact of a meandering ‘line’ carried by flows of mingling breaths, being played with in the scribbles of an architect? Architectural and urban excess over-flowing from/with and in-between ‘constructed’ form, actual and virtual, present-past and projected, captured by continuously varying abstract lines in flight and fiddled with so as to raise it to new planes: Inflecting the line from fixed geometries, following its liberated flow between the points, verticals and horizontals, moving peripherally, multi-directionally and transversally across smooth, and striated contours of instrumentality and performativity. A flowing nomadic line fraying into multiple filaments, eluding contours or at best resounding from within them to open them up to their generative and qualitative excess : atmospheric and affective forces in dormancy. Striving to liberate the power of life from the striated constructions of Architects’ machinations and perhaps to transform them into assemblages of another sort; architecture turned inside-out möbius-like, exposing its potential lin(e)ings. It is not about organizing matter with (de)lineations but rather connecting with it, traversing it and emerging elsewhere dragging out its cooped up flows and vital forces, perhaps translating or transducing its potential affective forces into an autopoietic momentum. Formative power of form, form always on the re-form, emerging internally in the relational movement of gestures, exposing, stirring and germinating forces old and new in a spatiotemporal expanse.

A resonance clearly appears between the nature of the surfline depicted above and that of the Gothic or Northern line as postulated by Worringer: ‘created by parts strangely both abstract and alive, by flexible ribbons that interlace, connect and bundle together’. There is an abstract wildness or violence to the ornamentality of the Gothic line, a tending to the perpetual more-than of form, an excess always on the cusp of overspilling any of its configurations. A continuous vibratory movement or resonance is inherent in the very nature of the Gothic line. Its speed or intensity of movement, somewhat hysterical, propels the line into continuously changing rhythms and directions, deflecting, splitting, twisting, coiling and whirling it, and endows it with a restless vitality that constitutes its inner force and beauty: ‘the untimely beauty of that which will not stand still in its place – even if it stands for centuries.’ (in Spuybroek 2016 :xxii) We are far removed from the contour line that visually delimits, outlines or fixes form. If there is a contour or geometry it is a groundless coordinateless one which emerges from the turmoil of its inner movement and in turn inflects and intensifies the line: it is an operative geometry. Otherwise the line alone possesses its own outline, like that of Worringer’s ribbon, the fluctuating limit of the movement of its own inner mass. (Deleuze 2002 : 105) The dynamics of the ornamental line must not be mistaken for that of the organic, Spuybroek explains, it is no longer of the classical interplay of line and form but of ‘topological figure’ (to which I will return) and relation, configuration and expression. (Spuybroek 2016: 11) And expression comes not from representation, contour or form but from the affective inner workings or their formative process. Nor does it come from the optical per say but from a felt tactility infused in the visible: from the haptic.

In this Gothic ornamental life of lines, lines multipling, splitting and interweaving follow a growth or expansion logic that is also structural; life and movement is thereby transferred to structure.[1] The proliferating behaviour of this nonorganic living line, Spuybroek argues, is such that it produces structure and it is through this vitalized structure that geometry comes to life in Gothic architecture. The Gothic pulsion, its interminable flow, its ‘irrepressible urge’ to multiply and bifurcate that ‘keeps tending toward the making of a body’ from within is the operative force through which the structural also becomes compositional, or configurational. This was the main premise of the fourth topology, ‘Ephemeral Wind Structurings’, whereby ‘structures’ were instantaneously produced as the result and expression of a collective and transversal formative process: manifold movements folding over, under, through one another ephemerally coagulating in one ‘solid’ body: movements congealed into nonformal forms captured by the camera. ‘First there is variation, then there is differentiation – and then there is again more variation, and again differentiation.’ (Spuybroek  2016: 16) Moving (with) the surfline was a means of reinstating a felt relationship between the crafting of matter i.e. the forming of a body - and the abstract world of drawing. Although the surfline is concrete, its quasi-weightlessness partially liberated it from the force of gravity allowing it to weave, entangle, intersect, overlap, flare and bifurcate freely enacting its textile nature in the drawing out of spacetimes. It operated as an abstract line tending toward the con-figur-rational (or at least the pre-figural): a flexible, multipliable and repetitive agent of variation, change and relation able to absorb minor shifts and deviations, as well as a surface exposing in its ripples, creases, folds, and wrinkles the ‘linearities’ of an en event-texture or textility; this relationship was sustained essentially by movement and continuous transition. The gestural impetuses and rhythms brought to life in the urban modulation of surflines began to germinate potential manners or modes of moving-thinking-feeling that might inform both the processes of form-making and of drawing as well as their internal relationship. This coming together of dynamic thought and feeling in the felt abstract line constitutes the vital beauty that Spuybroek calls ‘sympathy’.

The Surfline Behaviour

What could the surflines reveal of this formative process, how could they operate in it, and why would they have been chosen to convey and explore the intervals between drawing (gesture), thinking and architectural processes? As liquid-textile airborne limit-surfaces they first reveal invisible flows: connections, interactions and relations, which underlie and sustain the fluid rhythmical and generative advances of event-forming movements. Mirroring the movement and laws of liquid flow, air flows are produced by the mingling of forces, earthly and cosmic, and modulated by various environmental elements: air density, pressure, vibration, temperature, humidity, their relation to the moon, obstacles they encounter, etc. The surfline membranes register these interactions in the same way the surface of a wave expresses the formative power that shapes the water’s encounter with changing forces. Schwenk explains that ‘the wave is the newly formed third element, arising between polarities - for instance, water and wind - and appears at their surface of contact’. (Schwenk 1965: 28) The surfline is meant to operate as such a surface for the medium of air in bringing to expression the manifold flows of turbulences and vortices created by force encounters between corporeal and incorporeal bodies. The boundary surfaces (internal and external) in water act as sense organs or ‘feelers’ as Schwenk coined them, reacting to changes in pressure and expanding-contracting with converging currents and undercurrents, registering the varying speeds and intensities, amplitudes and frequencies of flows. The formative principle of the wave is therefore based on movement and not substance as such. ‘It is movement that takes hold of the substance and moulds it.’ All living form according to Schwenk, organic, mineral, vegetable, all living creatures are created and formed by the principles of fluid movement. And everything is inwardly connected or mutually related in this movement that has neither beginning nor end. The form of the wave may appear stationary but it is constantly being reshaped out of movement and tuned to atmospheric fluctuations and vibrations.(Schwenk 1965) This formative process is also the basis of a thinking-drawing activity expressed as a dynamic movement of thought or formative flow, which may or may not congeal into form, on/through the surface? In the same manner every flowing movement of the surfline can lead to the formation of entirely new individuated forms as a reaction to, and expression of force encounters. Or in Schwenz’s words, ‘boundary surfaces are everywhere places where living formative processes can find a hold.’ (ibid.: 42)

Replace the body of water with the fleshy body in the above example of the wave;  the surfline then becomes a ‘surface of contact’ of sorts between wind and body. The body with its internal parts and composition, its individuating set of relations encounters a body of wind, an extrinsic body of relations. At first it is taken off guard and must compose with its effects, confront the pulling, twisting, tripping, re-composing itself in relation. It is immersed in a conquest of existence.

'I start, I splash around as they say. What does it mean to splash around? Dabbling is very simple. To splash around, the word indicates well, it is clear that these are extrinsic relationships: sometimes the wave slaps me and sometimes it carries me away; those are shock effects. Those are shock effects, namely: I do not know anything about the relation which is composed or which decomposes, I receive the effects of extrinsic parts. The parts which belong to me are shaken, they receive a shock effect, from parts which belong to the wave.' (Deleuze 1981)

Parts of the body then yield to the wave while parts of the wave are appropriated by it. As the body begins to get a sense of the relations that compose the wave and the way in which its own relations can compose with them, a relation of relations develops, a rhythm or rhythmicity, constituting a new individuated body of movement.

'I know how to swim, […] an astonishing know-how, that is to say that I have a kind of sense of rhythm, rhythmicity. What does it mean, the rhythm? It means that my characteristic relations I know how to compose them directly with the relations of the wave. It no longer happens between the wave and me, that is to say, it no longer happens between the extensive parts, the wet parts of the wave and the parts of my body; it happens between relations. The relationships that make up the wave, the relationships that make up my body and my skill when I know how to swim, to present my body in relationships that are directly composed with the relationship of the wave.' (ibid.)

As the body interacts with water in swimming it shapes, conjointly with the new body of water, the surface(s) of their encounter. But with the wind the textility of the surfline acts as a third relational element that co-interacts as both a mode of relationality and its expression. It operates as a textile/tensile extension of the body-wind surface in that it behaves as a surface that responds to, and expresses the mutual disruptive effect (the redistribution of relations) of the body and wind, much like that of currents in the wake of a pebble in a running stream. And like the Gothic line, it is this element that reconfigures their relationship while conveying their structural and connective logic.

The Japanese architect Toyo Ito regards architecture from this perspective. When we insert an architectural element in the urban environment it causes a redistribution of flows of circulation, information, wind, it creates vortexes and turbulences that will invite people to gather or to move in various ways. In nature, he writes, ´places where people chose to gather are determined by the terrain, the location of trees, or the direction of wind’. The capacity of architecture to similarly engender gatherings in the folds and eddies of its flows, to assimilate rather than confront ecological forces, is key to inducing collective events. Architecture is a relational operator contributing to the qualitative difference or singularity of events. In fact for Ito, architecture appears with events and disappears when they end, and this 'condition of dissolution' only amplifies its intricate interrelation with the lived environment. Immersing people in vital currents while situating them in a framework of architectural form are two inseparable aspects of architecture.

‘To give life to architecture and let it breathe, it is vital to constantly generate vortexes of events and currents connecting these vortexes against the movement of formalisation which always seeks a rigidly fixed and stable order. It is critical to aim at spaces of unstable states which may be conducive to movement or flow.’ (Ito 1992)

The Topological

Of the formative process of the surface we could say: ‘form follows force’. But this surface formation, that never ceases forming, that remains engaged in a continuous repetition in variation or rhythmic modulation is of the nature of the ‘topological’. It emerges in its cycle of appearance and disappearance as a form or ‘figure’ that encompasses the overarching formal nature of its transformative process. Massumi refers to it as the ‘topological figure’: the form of the continuum between forms, the underlying form of transformation; ‘it may be thought of as the form of all the forms that express it. But it is not a “form” in the same capacity as they are. They are forms of expression. It is a form of transition.’ (Massumi 2019 :3). This formative or transformative continuum is here generated by a wind-architecture-body-biosphere-cosmos intertwinement: an ecological figure rendered topological by the surfline. And ‘the relation of the overall topological figure to any of the forms that can be extracted from it is that of immanence.’ (ibid.)  That which is immanent here in all ‘frozen’ forms is in fact more than ecological, tending (heuristically) toward the 'ecosophic'[2]. The surfline, the textile surface through which the transitional figure is generated and expressed likewise operates in-between ‘forms’ because it cannot sustain any one form; it also operates in-between (the above) components engaged in the continuum; in-between line and surface; the abstract and concrete; and drawing and architecture: It is a creature of the interval.

We must not think of this topological figure entirely in computational terms in which Massumi for example, writes in ‘Architectures of the Unforeseen’, even though they bear resemblances. In these architectural practices parameters, be they formal, practical, urban, environmental, social, etc. are fed into the computer as algorithms and processed into continuous transformations generating forms that can be extracted from the topologies at any time. Our topological figure does not produce architectural forms or configurations[3], nor does it seek to do so; it will not operate in the realm of the geometric or Euclidian but rather of fluid dynamics. Our topological figure is generative not so much of form to be extracted as such, but of a rhythmic contraction and dilation of ecological timespaces whereby a lived event constantly comes into itself in a flicker of consciousness: surfaced sited awareness, to which I will return below. But perhaps it can imbue or ‘line’ digital processes with the felt, experiential acuteness or sensitivity to lived formative form, of kinaesthetic-haptic-affective spatiotemporal form-making in which intensive qualitative forces become generative of the events’ unfolding, of form's forming. So we might suggest, at best, that it could function as the topological figure of an architectural topological, the lin(e)ing that subtends the process of topological computation in architecture, that brings it to life in the making-feeling-thinking of architecture. This is perhaps its only significant contribution to algorithmic design processes such as those of Greg Lynn. The surfline process however does operate in relation to force-fields of attraction and repulsion in several registers as does Lynn’s computational process. On an urban and geopolitical scale, forces of repulsion (for the practice itself) have included for example, traffic flow zones, private properties, crowded public spaces, while those of attraction have included green spaces, educational premises, water sources, specific topographic characteristics, light conditions, sight lines as well as certain types of architectural configurations or contexts[4]. On a more local and practice-based level, the surfline literally oscillated between forces of attraction and repulsion, physical, mental, social, and affective. But again, let us not forget that our topological figure does not seek to actualize form in architecture, it works in-between architectures, environment and bodies. Architecture is a force field for topologies on equal footing with other force fields, the qualitative effect of architecture is experienced, ‘tested’ or probed but always in relation to other forces at play; in this sense our topology plays a heuristic role by remaining operative in-between, and expanding the intervallic field to architecture itself.

Let us now return to the surfline as surface from Massumi’s perspective. I wrote of the surface of the wave (aqueous or areal) as a surface of contact and expression at the limit of force encounters. Massumi likewise speaks of the abstract surface produced by the collective affective forces constituting the ‘stadium wave’ and made visible by the shared movement of the fans’ gesturing hands as they respond to a game or event. The wave is the result of the oscillating surface effect created by a continuous coordinated movement of raised waving hands across the mass of spectators. In the stadium this surface is generated by shared enthusiasm reflected in a live projection onto large screens that help sustain its momentum, and broadcast by the media. If we were to cover the surface of gesturing hands with a material surface such as a tarp, this textile or concrete surface would double the abstract surface. (Massumi 2019 : 42) As a concrete sensuous surface, the surfline played a similar role. It redoubled or concretized the (collective) affective engagement with environmental forces. The difference between the abstract and concrete surface is postulated by Massumi in terms of intensive and extensive matter :

‘This is the difference between intensive matter (which is non localizable, as an all-over effect) and extensive matter (which, concretely extending over an area, has physical location). The affective matter of the wave is redoubled by visible matter. The  nonphysicality of the body-event concretes. The touchable membrane covers the event, contributing its own physicality to it. That physical resurfacing interposes itself between the formative factors of the wave – the crowd of the stadium fans– and the home fans populating the wider context of the media environment.’ (ibid. : 47, added emphasis)

Shifting now with Massumi to the architectural surface, the operative potential of the surfline can be carried through to architecture and its implications revealed. The ‘wall’ or concrete architectural surface, he contends, operates as extensive matter infolding across open fields of intensive matter: on one side, the intensive field of inhabitation and all that it encompasses, from practical daily functions to psychological needs; on the other, that of the urban: the geopolitical, economic, social, etc. Although the wall surface does not literally redouble the affective abstract surface - ie. it is disjunctive in that it maintains its distinct form - it functions in essence as its double. As a permeable element of passage it folds inside-outside across its surface registering and affecting the relation of private-public, domestic-urban, body-environment affective forces as architectural-body-event. It is a surface of contact that resonates and interferes between the differential open fields; or as Massumi claims, it is a transducer between these fields, shifting affective intensities in the passing. At least, that is what we would aspire it to affirm. But one wonders to what degree such a dynamic permeability actually is positively active in the better part of our architecture. Do surfaces not tend more toward interference than resonance or porosity, buildings toward enclosure and isolation cutting us off from our surroundings, putting individuals into impersonal bunkers ‘protecting’ from the ‘outside’? This is a question the Urban Surf(ac)ing proposition seeks to address heuristically by manipulating and experiencing the membrane as a permeable tactile surface registering, affecting, and making felt affective forces; negotiating the vital energies of collective body-events as a force of sustenance of the active passage across its surface. Perhaps Massumi has a point when he writes that ‘architecture must be defined in the first instance in terms of proto-architectural forces, from which architectural forms proper are processual precipitates: derivatives’. (ibid.: 30) And pedagogically speaking we could infer that: ´essential to the architectural design process are techniques for transducing form-making, or form-taking, becoming-body-events from one level and scale to another. Each transduction moves the process to a new associated milieu (a different duplexing of open generative fields)’. (ibid.: 51, an added emphasis)

Moving one step closer in formulating a proposition for drawing, could we not then think of the drawn line as a topological surface or as the transduction of a virtual surfline, transducing affective-kinaesthetic-‘ecological/ecosophical’ form-taking into architectural drawing, in-forming the process of conception? Can the gesture of the ‘hand’ for example, not also flow between intensive matters to germinate affective abstract surfaces in-between body-environment, domestic-urban, or to generate a structuring of spacetimes? Start by drawing, painting, sounding and stirring space as a relational tangible qualitative medium and let it constitute itself  like a cloud of ethereal particles seeping through, coagulating or merging across boundaries and surfaces in the making, crystallizing into structures. Architects are too often prone to depicting form from an affective vacuum, cerebrally constructed lifeless shapes rather than drawing or generating space(times) transversally, in-between, that will activate and structure form.

The In-Between

‘[…] the wind, a movement of the in-between, of the interstices, a midstreaming that ruffles every surface with which it comes into haptic contact.’ (Ingold 2015: 150)

Throughout these previous paragraphs we have been calling on movements of the in-between: in-between the points, the abstract and the concrete, the corporeal and incorporeal, bodies, architecture and environment, inside and outside, domestic and urban, line and surface, drawing and architecture, and so on. We have also insinuated some kind of ‘mediating immediacy’ by appending a bracketed syllable to the verb ‘mediate’ expanding its meaning to (im)mediation. It is now time to develop a clearer understanding of these terms and their primordial significance in the Urban Surf(ac)ing proposition.

One casts her line in the air, not knowing if or how it will take. When a pulling or tugging force is made felt, an improvisational relation establishes itself between this uncanny invisible-cum-tangible body of air and the weighty-cum-buoyant body of flesh. What is ‘known’ as a force of wind and what is ‘known’ of the gravitational pull on the body seem to be scrambled in this new energy emitted by the surfline, appearing in its behaviour and reflected in the swells, swirls and creases of its fabric. The non-conscious recollection of the body’s past wind-ings is traversed and transformed by the line’s disruptive force in becoming-sail, the wind freely flowing through space is captured by the sail and transformed into generative energy. The body begins to feel-with the power of wind, to flow with its currents, swirl with its eddies in a becoming-wind, affecting the line in the process. What emerges from this trio, from the collective interstices of body-line, wind-line and body-wind in fusion is a new intervallic event-fabric the nature of which changes the individual character of each while revealing their differential in the encounter.

One might say: ‘well, the line is simply a mediator intervening between the body and the wind, joining them up from afar, or a wind-agitated line interposing itself between two bodies’. Simple mediation. But there is more to it than that and this more-than is felt in the experiencing and assimilated in the emerging event. It has to do with the giving(-in), becoming(-with) of all parties involved, such that what emanates from each in the coming-together of their affective-kinaesthetic energies compose another venue, which opens up to a generative open-ended potential that can sustain a dynamic continuum, one which continues to transform through the evolving transindividual relation. In this process, each individual’s immediate ‘present’ calls on a (non-conscious) selective recollection of past experiences, all that which can be taken up by/in the event to generate an immediate future. The present is energized by the merging impetus of individual pasts and the collective lure of an incoming future in the making, and emerges in a fusion of both, on the cusp of becoming-other. It is an endless relational ‘back and forth’ movement or continuum always pointing towards the not-yet-given. Ingold captures the essence of this movement of middling quite succinctly when he writes:

‘[…it] is a movement of generation and dissolution in a world of becoming where things are not yet given – such that they might then be joined up – but on the way to being given. It is an interstitial differentiation, a fission/fusion reaction, a winding and unwinding, inhalation and exhalation […]' (Ingold 2015: 147)

It is also the movement that spills into what Massumi refers to as ‘immediation’. Not 'mediation', which divides, dichotomizes, bridges across defined borders or fixed external entities, or that links terminal points.That which distinguishes immediation from mediation is the immanence implied in the former: the generative transversal movement across dynamic bodies or individuals that enable them to become-other-together, to infold outside-in and inside-out. (Massumi 2019) We have seen this not only in the practice of the surfline but also in thinking the abstract surface and concrete wall as infolding outside-in, the urban in the domestic; or with the architectural body infolding, unfolding surrounds across the body. The process of immediation produces what Massumi, following Peirce, calls a ‘genuine thirdness’ whence the coming-together of the multiple nature of participants produce an outer internal relation that exceeds them all and that has its own qualitative feel. Thirdness welds them together into a non-decomposable becoming-other, which consequently alters the nature of individuals when pulled apart.

'Internal relation is the mutual immanence of the multiple, in the singularity of a changeful event. Immanence is when things come out of themselves to come together. It is shared outside of what they collectively come into, to become-through.’ (ibid.: 508)

The in-between regarded from this perspective becomes productive of change. It is activated by a shared becoming that emerges from the middle, from middling itself. This merging together of the multiple does not preclude difference; it feeds off it to engender change, morphing the relation temporally and affectively. Recall the wall as infolding or as in-between intensive matter; accordingly, what constitutes it can never be fixed, as long as intensive matter varies across it, it emerges endlessly renewed. But as extensive matter it remains disjunctive, it is one of the participants contributing to change in/as relation with others. What exactly is its role in this relation? Turn to the collective surfline event for a moment: bodies interacting with a membrane that absorbs and mingles their energy on its surface along with that of the surrounds. The looped membrane makes felt from the inside the force of the in-between and allows bodies to participate in the coming together of a joyful sensuous ecological event, a dwelling-architecting of lived spacetimes. Cupped inside free flowing loops bodies partake of a dynamic inside-folding-outside-in – a möbius looping - moved and carried by the surface through a subjective-social-architectural-ecological journey. The dynamic and vital energy of wind, sunlight, rain, bodies, modulate the membranes into affective event-surfaces: ecological inhabitation immediated in the surface, expressed in the membrane. The shared relation of participants (discussed earlier) passes through the membrane, and it in turn enables participants to ‘swim’ together in the air that already immerses them in the world but which they may have forgotten: becoming-wind (a force that infuses and inflects air, making it appear), a movement of the in-between. Shouldn’t this be one of the wall’s primordial vocation? The ecological dimension is privileged in Urban Surf(ac)ing, the practice introduces wind (inseparable of course from other atmospheric elements such as light and sound) into the process as the primary more-than-human player so that the perception and experience of the dynamic medium or matter of the bioscleave, cosmological and infinitely vast and variable, become an indispensable part of any process of becoming, any coming into itself of a singularity, and hence, of any thinking about the ‘human’, drawing and/or architecture.

(to be continued)

DRAWING WITH THE ARCHITECTURAL BODY: Introduction to Studio Exam

(for more complete visual documentation of project see:

https://www.researchcatalogue.net/shared/8b38135887e7cf835952d2fb4ef7db13 )

by Renée Charron

Urban Surf(ac)ing : Line Walking : a first topology

The first thing the nomadic surflines set out to do was to wander the city surfing winds, crossing urban territories itching to deterritorialize, to sail on/with their various rhythms, taking/sharing the pulse of flows and turbulences, feeling their haptic aerial breaths, attempting to liberate light, modulate textures, and ephemerally resurface smooth out of striated spaces.[1] What appeared throughout their journey, in their encounter with fixed and fluctuating matter(s)[2] was the vital power of urban interstitial thresholds re-composed, in the mutual transduction and traversing of striated-smooth space. It brought to life what was imminently there for the making and transforming, in potential co-composition. As permeable fluctuating line-surface or ephemeral screen, the membrane became a formative power of expression, signalling forces, and blurring distinctions between exterior and interior. Moving between architectural solids, structures, forms, brushing against or fleetingly clinging to their geometricized, historicized surfaces, moulding their topographies just long enough to engender their dissolution, topological involutions. What stood silent and crystalline against inert perspectival spaces and framings anchored to Cartesian horizons seemed to liberate its power of involution in the vortical inflexions of the membranes’ ghostly lin(e)ings. Striated space reinstating smooth: light reflecting, sound resounding, flows modulated by orthogonal surfaces of architecture, were foregrounded and activated by passing surflines themselves deviating, curving, whirling and distorting space. The force of winds: speeds, accelerations-decelerations, and intensities transformed into rhythms by their encounter with the imposing order of sedentary architectonic masses was the main activator of these topological variations captured by the membranes in their encounter with light. Or perhaps it was the winds that captured the light, and the light, the membranes…or yet again the light resonating in contraction-dilation, cold-heat, dampness-dryness that captured the winds and the winds, the membranes. Regardless, through the surflines smooth space and striated contours of architecture seemed to interpenetrate across urban interstices, milieux traversed and transformed each other in a cartography of abstract lines[3].

Perhaps the affective intensity generated by membranes in flux derived in part from their nomadic matter-of-flux, the ‘clothes-tent-space vector’ of the nomadic outside[4]; what foregrounded were ludic meandering trajectories (souffles), and the subordination of striated architectural urban space to the unpredictable multi-directional fluctuations of smooth space seeping into, and morphing between its points, verticals and horizontals: Intensive flows, sound, light, the haptic made visible in the nomadic skin-clothes-sail vectors of the traveling interval.

Line Casting : Body Extensions/inflexions : a second topology

It took quite a few urban journeys, nomadic navigations for the surflines to find concordant architectural niches, playgrounds for encounters of another sort where bodies could collide, intersect, negotiate, re-compose in the intervals activated by the surflines. Bodies composed of ethereal particles, bodies of fleshy molecules and those of vegetable or mineral matter each pulsing with its own constitutive bundle of individuating relations, came together to co-compose, decompose and recompose into yet other bodies of relations.[5] Another kind of journey took place, in place : an immobile swirling or holding[6] of smooth space, another ‘mode of spatialization’ induced by the partial enclosure of fixed architectural spaces.

The surfline was the main protagonist, the main instigator trans-versing and blurring sets of relations, opening up intervals of potential new rhythms, new movements, intensities and affects in-between bodies. She wrapped around bodies of flesh, clinging  to their skins and infiltrated the complex dialogue emerging between architectures and passing worldly winds : breaths from other places far away, and of other days long ago. She would hold with wind just long enough for the fleshy body to be traversed, metamorphosed blob-like, and carried along moved by the force of unfamiliar encounters. She nudged and tugged at it, engulfed and squeezed, twisted and shaped it not unlike a sail, to steer its seafaring body along oceanic flows, demanding it co-respond. In fact, parts of the body became sail-like billowing with the surflines, others hull-like formed (with) the areal flows, undercurrents and turbulences, or yet again anchor-like hooking into the invisible depths of sound architectural footings, all traversed by the rhythm of wave-like movement. What moved through the body of flesh was an existential manner of relating to the world. The areal flows of yonder and those within formed but one shared body of movement. It is from that point on that the surflines became both a mode of relationality, of becoming-with and its expressibility.

What could they be expressive of exactly? What could they bring to awareness, to the surface of non-consciousness? Indeed, in their sensitive, porous, aqueous movement-prone surfaceness and möbius continuousness they seemed to contract the interval into an infrathin stratum of in-betweeness, to capture in their creases, ripples, swells, ebbs and flutters the coming together of multiple bodies at the limit of their shared encounters : An infrathin limit-thresholding where the dissolution of relations and flows of one body recomposed with those of another were tempora(ri)lly absorbed in the palimpsest surfline. Threshold’ing’ because affective kinaesthetic s-urges drove and sustained the unfolding/infolding across the intervallic surface. Wind currents rolled over by architectural masses and blown back against and along the spine of bodies heaving them forward; the surfline clinging to uplifting aerial deflections off other solid masses, stretching and twisting its fleshy-textile spine up and around; parts of the body pulling in counter directions with others shifting centers of gravity and yet others inflecting currents into new oscillations, turbulences and vortices. Complex rhythms were continuously enacted, or anticipated in the vibratile stillness of silenced winds, awakening the fleshy body to its intensive, extensive potentiality. And it is through the surfline that crossings and collisions, deflections and inflections could be felt, read and negotiated. From within, as between two pages of a book, intimate (affective-kinaesthetic) relations developed; from without, with distanciation, relations of relations were revealed. Within, every shift in center of gravity generated by sudden changing wind directions and intensities pulled the ground from under the body, deviated and multiplied orientations, scrambled links to surroundings and collapsed visual coordinates. The haptic and peripheral overturned the optical and could barely be visually recorded. From a distance a certain outside could be filmed, dissected into stills and studied, in-forming smooth space in the process.[7] Together they formed the cycle of an ever-evolving relationship.

Anticipation confronted with unpredictability and uncertainty, were the primary factors undermining habituation, inhabitation and resolve, and reshuffling expectations : new biograms[8], body schemas in-forming, re-forming with wind. Temporal anticipation : « when and how will the winds rise again? »… as she slouches over dragging her shed skin. Spatial anticipation : « from where will the winds emerge, where and how are they blowing elsewhere, perhaps a few meters away in some narrow passage, between two columns exposed to an opening down the street, or at the foot of the stairs swept through by an unimpeded mountain draft, or again, in New Orleans sweeping away livelihoods at 225 km/hr?! » And suddenly a vigorous gust would wrest her from her thoughts, swell her skin with power and she would re-immerse herself in the here and now of action, reminded that she is always part of some expansive flux. In those magical moments when everything came together just right, an effortless and timeless dance took place somewhere in-between the fleshy body and the wind, flowing through the surfline and reinvigorating the spirit. At other times it didn’t come so easily, winds had to be scouted out. The surflines transformed into feelers, prosthetic sensors lured in by the voids left behind by fleeting tailwinds or jittering over fugitive undercurrents, would eventually come back to life when she knew how to engage them on their terms.

Line Weaving : Collective Composing : a third topology

The surfline spine caught in-between (in)corporealities, its own and others, negotiating and recomposing relations of relations spun across various scales of spacetime. Let us now add a few more bodies, call them human bodies, to the already more-than-human endeavour. The web suddenly thickens with complexity, especially from human fluxes co-inhabiting. Expanding and contracting relations, co-composing, every body had to revamp or topple expectations and habituations, pulling on and stretching, bending, twisting, fraying, rupturing threads of their constitutive rhizomatic web of relations while tentatively casting new ones. It took some time for webs to intersect, for creatures to come together in a collective weaving, spinning. Some initially drifted out : tendentiously centrifugal bodies, others were spontaneously lured in by communal centripetal itchings. What brought them all together in the end was a concerted becoming-wind. And what induced this becoming-wind was the appeal of surflines ; creatures in themselves thriving on more-than-human shared encounters : creatures of the interval, able to become wind-like while maintaining their individuality, and enabling other bodies in their process of becoming-wind : teaching them how to move-with, relate-to, traverse and connect-across multiple changing registers and intensities of spatio-temporal and affective flows. Mutating entities, somewhere between the areal, liquid and the vegetable, surflines revealed how to fluctuate in-between the corporeal and incorporeal, to play on the threshold of shared limits and merging or overlapping margins.

With multiple bodies of flesh also came multiple surflines; more complexity, trickiness, knottiness ensued. Surflines seemed to have a will of their own and each behaved differently according to their fabric, proportions, weight, position, and individual constitution. Certain were slippery, others assertive, clingy, sluggish, jittery, breezy, and the list could go on, expanding with changing relational conditions : Adjusting not only to varying atmospheric conditions but also to relative placement or formation for example, where one surfline could deviate or obstruct flows for another, forcing it to b(l)ow down and inciting the assemblage of bodies to shift and re-organize with the affected currents and turbulences. Or entanglements, knots that had to be collectively negotiated, with wind as the main arbitrator. Every minor inflexion from any one component engendered a chain of shifts throughout the entire assemblage that cued the event’s unfolding, opening up ever changing intervals of spacetime, intervals filled with potentialities ready to be actualized : lived inhabitation, shared ‘mobile architectures’[9] in the making!

Collective moving, feeling, thinking, becoming-with-wind translated into a becoming-place, lived spacetimes unique to the specificity of the evolving event. Light, wind, dampness, temperature, sound, vegetation, corporeality, and shared affect seemed to all converge and come forth, surface, induced by the surflines and ephemerally embedded in their surfaces as in the surface of a collective non-consciousness.

Ephemeral Wind Structurings[10] : Anchoring the Nomadic Line : a fourth topology

Throughout all these journeys what seemed to want to emerge, and what in fact appeared as fleeting glimpses of possibility, from the skin-clothes-sail vectoring surflines was indeed the ‘clothes-tent-space’ of the nomadic outside. Or perhaps even the ´humansnail house’ whose ´feel and weight cast you before you could start casting about on your own’.[11] But ‘house’ may be a tad too constraining here as there is no intention of residing for any length of time, so perhaps householding is a better term. It is rather about the continuous formation of constantly changing potentialities, architecture ‘constructed to exist in the tense of what if, [that] presents itself as intentionally provisional, replacing definite form with tentative form, the notion of a lasting structure with that of an adaptive one’. (29) And yet we prefer not speak of architecture either but rather some sort of mobile architectural lin(e)ing, embedded in some architectural milieux but moved from within and without it, and ‘thick with its own breathing’. Ephemeral tensile structures spatially and temporally formed inside-outside architecture, always on the cusp of becoming-with and in-between.

The first complicity to develop on this particular journey was between the surfline and the architecture. One had to experience or witness their dialogue, how they engaged in sensory exchanges, sort of like a tentacular creature prudently casting its tentacles along foreign bodies. The surfline flowed across space carried by currents along horizontals and between verticals, from one court to another, fumbling and twirling at corners and crossings while architectural surfaces stirred winds, resounded sounds, projected light onto its surface. The surfline was readily lured in on its way by uplifting surges along walls and fiddled with their surfaces, feeling its way up to rooftops only to tumble back down siphoned in by spiralling downcast vortices. And off it went again jigging on undulating swells rippling across the floor bed until it was rolled over anew by cross flows at the edges of intersections and heaved up high, to the limit of its outstretched tentacles, in the eye of a vortex.

An oceanic well of sensations and topological potential! It was time to plunge in with our tensile anchorings, elastic puppeteer’s strings, to fiddle differently with this creature. Of course, the human reflex to control and master surged at first until it became clear that the creature was complicit, not at all duplicitous. It was then no longer a question of holding shape but of with-holding, letting shape emerge and dissolve, (em)powered by the multiple forces at play of which we were (a)part. Or yet again, of becoming-shape(d) : wrapped, covered, stretched and squeezed, inserted or excluded from the mobile assemblage in the forming : A mutating nomadic human-tent-clothe-sail blob on the move.

But the student architect-dwellers tended to the architect more than to the dweller, keeping a distance, looking and pulling from without onto the morphing shapes rather than entering, seeping into their formative forms. It is not certain whether they were intimidated by the creature or were simply not spontaneously lured in by this unfamiliar occurrence; my guess is that it might require several encounters for them to creatively embark. Certain dwellers did tentatively surface with time however, timidly crouching and crossing through the human-snail-tent, mixing and tangling in its epidermal filaments but not quite long enough to experience the repercussions of their passages on the assemblage : the swirling inflexions for example that transformed lines into surfaces into spaces.

From without, the assemblage took shape as an intense topological movement-feeling : a cellular mutation, a black hole involution, a diastole-systole intensification. At other times it mesmerized like a flame or a morphing cloud and at still others it seemed to deploy like an origami unfolding-infolding. But dissecting the event’s recordings afterwards revealed other dimensions of the endeavour otherwise barely perceivable. Instants captured in stills exposed generative structural tensions in surflines and their relation to the immediate environment, making visible and palpable the intangible matter of space sculpted by surrounding elements, corporeal gestures and incorporeal forces : a coagulation of forces, energies, and affects in co-composition emerging into structurings. Topological instants, shared limits of encounter, embedded in the surface’s relief seemed to expose a vital trace of a coming into itself of lived place, or to ´frame’ architectures of spacetime. What remained in the frozen images were multiple residual forms of some sort of moulted exoskeleton left behind in the event’s passing.

The dynamic tensile (de)structuring procedure initially proposed used multiple and variable anchorings, not to the ground of course since that would have been too slippery, but to its nomadic dwellers, responding to their every affective-kinaesthetic urge. The anchors : mobile points along linear edges, were not introduced to capture or fix form of course but to shift the collective movement of the morphing assemblage in multiple directions, to produce vectorial inflections. In fact it was difficult to know who was actually doing the anchoring, the dwellers or the wind? Regardless, as moving anchorers tugged and pulled, twisted and turned, released and slackened their hold on points while fiddling with space, surflines co-surfaced with lived ecological space, while oscillating between line, surface and space. At once edges of surflines relating surface and space, and linear surface overlapping spaces : the ‘space of the body’ and that of the biosphere. Could the surflines then activate relations between disjunct elements in ways that might inform the process of surface modulation in architectural practices, and the relation of drawing to building? Within this register, from line to space, one did begin to intuit how architecture might fluctuate not only between distinct event-spaces, but also between drawing and building…or better yet, how it could embody that oscillation. ‘Could the architectural surface not be the actualization of a virtual line in continuous expansion-contraction, or perhaps multiple virtual lines (temporally and spatially) coagulating in vibration?´, one began to wonder. But the architect-dwellers could not see, could not plan! Overwhelmed by the pure haptic pleasure and frustration of co-composing with the wind and its every whim, and by the unspoken complicity between co-anchorers, they could only respond, improvise or at best intuit. Pulled into action by some force of the unknown, lured by the joy of topological transformation, of new sensations, they disengaged their hold on form! It became all about in-forming, with a twinkle of uncertainty in their eyes; a purposeless formativeness[12] in the making. Form could only be fixed later by embedding stops in the event and freezing instants in time and space. But is there a point to freezing spacetimes, one wonders, when what enlivens is the vitality of tactile breathing pulses, the rhythm of living flows of dynamic event-fabrics?