Ant

Cheatsheet Content

### Essay Overview This cheatsheet summarizes Bruno Latour and Albena Yaneva's essay "Give Me a Gun and I Will Make All Buildings Move": - **Core Argument:** Traditional architectural representations (photos, CAD, perspective) present buildings as static objects in Euclidean space, which misrepresents their dynamic, ever-changing nature. - **Proposed Solution:** Employ an Actor-Network Theory (ANT) perspective to view buildings as "things" continually in motion, shaped by networks of human and non-human actors. - **Goal:** Develop new tools/theories to "capture" the continuous movement and transformations of buildings, similar to how Étienne-Jules Marey's photographic gun captured bird flight. ### Page 80: The Static Problem - **Title Analogy:** "Give Me a Gun and I Will Make All Buildings Move" — referencing Marey's "photographic gun." - **Marey's Gun:** Captured continuous bird flight (e.g., gull) in successive freeze-frames on one plate, showing motion. - **Buildings' Problem:** Buildings appear "desperately static" in photos, renders, magazines. - **Reality:** Buildings are **not static**; they are "moving projects" that age, transform, are used, modified, renovated, and change over time. - **Missing Tool:** We lack a tool like Marey's gun to picture the building as a "continuous movement/flow" or "project flow." ### Page 81: Critique of Euclidean Space - **Needed Tool:** An artificial device (a **theory**) to turn the static view into freeze-frames of a building's flow. - **Culprit: Perspective Drawing:** Renaissance invention, extended by CAD, creates the illusion of stasis. - **Euclidean Space:** Drawings make us believe buildings are fixed in Euclidean space, but "no one lives in pure Euclidean space." Adding time (4th dimension) doesn't solve this. - **3D-CAD Unrealistic:** Hides complexities like client conflicts, legal constraints, budgets, logistics, and continuous model changes for stakeholders. - **Conclusion:** Euclidean space is for drawing, not for how buildings are built or lived. ### Page 82: Phenomenology's Limits - **Reversed Marey:** A dead gull is useless for studying flight; a static building drawing is useless for understanding its "flight" as a project. - **Phenomenology:** Gibsonian psychologists emphasize "embodied mind" and "lived environment" over "objective" material shapes in Euclidean space. - **Problem:** This approach reproduces the **subjective vs. objective split**, paralyzing architectural theory and separating architecture from engineering. ### Page 83: Reducing Things to Drawings - **Hidden Assumption:** Phenomenology assumes engineering drawings correctly describe the "material" world, and only adds a human subjective dimension. - **Paradox:** To avoid reducing humans to things, they first reduce **things to drawings**. - **Buildings Don't Live in Euclidean Space:** Not only humans, but also buildings themselves, wood, steel, paint, and marble transform and exist dynamically. - **Euclidean Space as Tool:** It's a human tool for drawing/manipulating objects on paper, not a metaphysical property of the world. - **Descartes's Res Extensa:** A historically/technically limited way of drawing. ### Page 84: Materiality and Models - **Euclidean Space:** Subjective, human-centered, knowledge-centered, fails to do justice to how humans **and things** operate in the world. - **Phenomenology's Flaw:** Praised for resisting human-to-object reduction, but condemned for reinforcing **materiality-to-objectivity reduction**. - **Proof Against Euclidean Drawing:** Architects use **multiple models** (physical, drawings) to grasp ideas and engage stakeholders. - **Models/Drawings as Primal Matter:** They stimulate imagination, fix unfamiliar ideas, gain new knowledge, and create alternatives. - **Adding Dimensions:** Architectural activity constantly "piles on more dimensions" (zoning, finance, client concerns) requiring new techniques, not limiting to 3D. ### Page 85: The Need for a New View - **Continuing Critique:** Reiterate that Euclidean space is human/knowledge-centered and fails to account for the dynamic interplay of humans and things. - **Phenomenology's Failure:** While good at resisting human reduction, it reinforces the worse reduction of materiality to objectivity. - **Transition:** The essay now shifts towards proposing a new way of seeing buildings that overcomes these limitations. ### Page 86: Introducing Actor-Network Theory (ANT) - **ANT View:** Buildings are not static objects but "things" in the old sense (a contested assembly). - **Network of Actants:** A building is a network of conflicting human and non-human actors: clients, architects, users, materials (wood, steel), tools (CAD), regulations, budgets, weather. - **Equality of Actants:** All actants are "equal"; none are passive. Materials resist, tools surprise, regulations block, users modify. - **Understanding a Building:** To understand a building means to **trace** its **trajectory** or "flight path"—following its continuous movement, transformations, and controversies. ### Page 87: Trajectory and Dissolving Dualisms - **The Trajectory:** Involves a series of transformations (design iterations, site corrections, user modifications) and controversies (fights, material failures, legal blocks). - **Controversial Datascape:** The building navigates an unstable landscape of changing definitions, resisting materials, and conflicting appraisals. - **Building as Modulator:** An active device that redistributes actors, regulates flows (people, air, light, money), enables some actions, and impedes others. - **Dissolving Dualisms:** ANT helps dissolve false dichotomies: - Subjective/Objective - Building/Context (context mutates with the project) - Human/Non-human (tools and materials actively shape outcomes) ### Page 88: Non-Humans Act - **Examples of Non-Human Action:** - Foam models "astonish" architects, suggesting new ideas. - Materials resist (e.g., concrete cracking forcing redesign). - Drawings get coffee-stained, folded, corrected on site, becoming active participants in the process. - **Concrete, Earthly Flows:** Instead of adding "parasitic dimensions" (stylistic/symbolic) to a static core, ANT traces the concrete, earthly flows of entities in their specific times and spaces. - **Relevance of Architecture:** This approach makes architecture relevant again by grounding it in dynamic, contested reality, free from illusions of stasis. ### Page 89: Conclusion - The Ant's View - **Call to Action:** Abandon "god-like Euclidean overviews." - **Adopt the "Ant's View":** Focus on small-scale, follow the trails of actors and connections on the ground, tracing how a building assembles and disassembles the world. - **New Visual Vocabularies:** Needed to depict buildings as "networks in flight," "apertures/closures in open circuits," not enclosed boxes. - **Final Idea:** "Give me a gun (a new theory/tool) and I will make all buildings move" — to capture their living, disputed, and ever-changing reality.