Ardeth
A magazine on the power of the project
1 | 2017
ArchitecturalDesignTheory
«Give Me a Gun and I Will Make All Buildings
Move»: An ANT’s View of Architecture
BrunoLatourandAlbenaYaneva
Electronicversion
URL: http://journals.openedition.org/ardeth/991
ISSN: 2611-934X
Publisher
Rosenberg & Sellier
Printedversion
Date of publication: 1 October 2017
Number of pages: 103-111
ISSN: 2532-6457
Electronicreference
Bruno Latour and Albena Yaneva, « «Give Me a Gun and I Will Make All Buildings Move»: An ANT’s View
of Architecture », Ardeth [Online], 1 | 2017, Online since 01 October 2017, connection on 13 November
2020. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/ardeth/991
CC BY-NC-ND 4.0
103
Our building problem is just the opposite of Etienne
Jules Marey’s famous inquiry into the physiology
of movement. Through the invention of his “photo-
graphic gun” (Fig. 1) he wanted to arrest the flight of
a gull so as to be able to see in a fixed format every
single successive freeze-frame of a continuous flow of
flight (Figs. 2, 3), the mechanism of which had eluded
all observers until his invention. What we need is the
reverse: the problem with buildings is that they look
desperately static. It seems almost impossible to grasp
them as movement, as flight, as a series of transfor-
mations. Everybody knows – and especially architects,
of course – that a building is not a static object but a
moving project, and that even once it is has been built,
it ages, it is transformed by its users, modified by all
of what happens inside and outside, and that it will
pass or be renovated, adulterated and transformed
beyond recognition. We know this, but the problem is
that we have no equivalent of Marey’s photographic
gun: when we picture a building, it is always as a
fixed, stolid structure that is there in four colors in
the glossy magazines that customers flip through in
architects’ waiting rooms. If Marey was so frustrated
«Give Me a Gun and
I Will Make
All Buildings Move»:
An ANT’s View of
Architecture
First published
in Geiser, R. (ed.)
(2008),
Explora-
tions in Architec-
ture: Teaching,
Design, Research
,
Basel, Birkhäuser,
pp. 80-89.
DOI
10.17454/ARDETH01.08
ARDETH#01
Bruno Latour, Albena Yaneva
104 “Give Me a Gun and I Will Make All Buildings Move”: An Ant’s View of Architecture
1 - Marey’s photo-
graphic gun. Taken
from E. J. Marey’s
Movement
(1895),
gure 75.
not to be able to picture in a successive series of freeze-frames the flight
of a gull, how irritating it is for us not to be able to picture, as one con-
tinuous movement, the project flow that makes up a building. Marey had
the visual input of his eyes and was able to establish the physiology of
flight only after he invented an artificial device (the photographic gun);
we too need an artificial device (a theory in this case) in order to be able
to transform the static view of a building into one among many succes-
sive freeze-frames that could at last document the continuous flow that a
building always is.
It is probably the beauty and powerful attraction of perspective drawing
that is responsible for this strange idea that a building is a static struc-
ture. No one, of course, lives in Euclidian space; it would be impossible,
and adding the “fourth dimension”, as people say – that is, time – does
not make this system of coordinates a better cradle for “housing,” so to
speak, our own complex movements. But when you draw a building in
the perspective space invented in the Renaissance (and made more mo-
bile but not radically different by computer assisted design), you begin to
believe that when dealing with static objects, Euclidian space is a realist
description. The static view of buildings is a professional hazard of draw-
ing them too well.
This should not be the case, since the 3-D CAD rendering of a project is
so utterly unrealistic: where do you place the angry clients and their
sometimes conflicting demands? Where do you insert the legal and city
planning constraints? Where do you locate the budgeting and the differ-
ent budget options? Where do you put the logistics of the many succes-
sive trades? Where do you situate the subtle evaluation of skilled versus
unskilled practitioners? Where do you archive the many successive
models that you had to modify so as to absorb the continuous demands
of so many conflicting stakeholders – users, communities of neighbors,
preservationists, clients, representatives of the government and city
105Bruno Latour, Albena Yaneva
authorities? Where do you incorporate the changing program specifics?
You need only to think for one minute, before confessing that Euclidian
space is the space in which buildings are drawn on paper but not the
environment in which buildings are built – and even less the world in
which they are lived. We are back to Marey’s problem in reverse: every-
one agrees that a dead gull cannot say very much about how it flies, and
yet, before time lapse photography, the dead gull was the only gull whose
flight could be studied; everyone agrees that the drawing (or the photog-
raphy) of a building as an object does not say anything about the “flight”
of a building as a project, and yet we always fall back on Euclidian space
as the only way to “capture” what a building is – only to complain that
too many dimensions are missing... To consider a building only as a static
object would be like gazing endlessly at a gull, high in the sky, without
being able ever to capture how it moves.
It is well known that we live in a very different world than that of Euclid-
ian space: phenomenologists (and psychologists of the Gibsonian school)
have never tired of showing that there is an immense distance in the way
an embodied mind experiences its surroundings from the “objective”
shape that “material” objects are said to possess. They have tried to add
to the “Galilean” bodies rolling through Euclidian space, “human” bodies
2 - E. J. Marey,
LeVol des Oiseaux
,
1890
3 - E. J. Marey,
Analysis of the
Flight of a Seagull
,
1887
106 “Give Me a Gun and I Will Make All Buildings Move”: An Ant’s View of Architecture
ambling through a “lived” environment (Vesely, 2004; Holl, Juhani and
Perez-Gomez, 2006). All this is very well, except it does nothing more
than to reproduce at the level of architecture the usual split between sub-
jective and objective dimensions that has always paralyzed architectural
theory – not to mention the well known split it has introduced between
the architectural and engineering professions (and not to mention the
catastrophic consequences it has had on philosophy proper). What is
so strange in this argument is that it takes for granted that engineering
drawings on a piece of paper and, later, projective geometry offer a good
description of the so-called “material” world. This is the hidden presup-
position in the whole of phenomenology: we have to add human subjec-
tive intentional dimensions to a “material” world that is well described
by geometric shapes and mathematical calculations.
The paradoxical aspect of this division of labor envisioned by those who
want to add the “lived” dimensions of human perspective to the “objec-
tive” necessities of material existence is that, in order to avoid reducing
humans to things, they first had to reduce things to drawings. It is not
only the architects, his or her clients, de Certeau’s pedestrians, Benja-
min’s flaneurs that do not live in Euclidian space: it is also the buildings
themselves! If there is an injustice in “materializing” human embodied
experience, there is an even greater injustice in reducing matter to what
can be drawn. Matter is not “in” Euclidian space for the excellent reason
that Euclidian space is our own way of accessing objects (of knowing
and manipulating them) and making them move without transformation
(that is, maintaining a certain number of characteristics); it is definitely
not the way material entities (wood, steel, space, time, paint, marble, etc.)
have to transform themselves to remain extant. Descartes’s res extensa is
not a metaphysical property of the world itself, but a highly specific, his-
torically dated and technically limited way of drawing shapes on blank
paper and adding shadows to them in a highly conventionalized way. To
press the (admittedly philosophical) point further, it could be said that
Euclidian space is a rather subjective, human centered or at least knowl-
edge centered way of grasping entities, which does no justice to the ways
humans and things get by in the world. If phenomenology may be praised
for resisting the temptation to reduce humans to objects, it should be
firmly condemned for not resisting the much stronger and much more
damning temptation to reduce materiality to objectivity.
But what is even more extraordinary is that this famous Euclidian space in
which Galilean objects are supposed to roll like balls is not even a good de-
scriptor of the act of drawing a building. The best proof of this is the neces-
sity for an architect even at the very early moments of a project to produce
multiple models – sometimes physical models – and a great many different
types of drawings in order to begin to grasp what he or she has in mind
and how many different stakeholders can simultaneously be taken into
account. Drawing and modeling do not constitute an immediate means of
translation of the internal energies and fantasies of the architect’s mind’s