PAVILION

the self. Architecture thus not only consists
of demolishing and triumphal erection,
calculation and construction, but
also of incuring, inserting oneself, withdrawing
and enduring. It is not only comprised
of a representation of an imperative
will, but also of transformations, fluidity
and movement, conversion and transference.
If one wants to get beyond architecture’s
planning ideology, a notion of action is
required, that does not rely on cognitions,
making of plans and a subject’s assertion
as criteria for successful completion, but
instead asks the question of how and
whereupon a world is brought into being
and altered. Architecture is not simply a
question of skill.
The search for the fundamentals of
action should thus be aimed at performativity
as the potential of a process (of execution)
to generate reality and form cultures.
Such a process comes into being
in a situation in which an action might
suggest itself but is not enforced.
Performativity depends on open situations.
The unity of an action might be perceived
as a catastrophe, an accident, an
event or an incident, as a great deed or
silly coincidence. However, it does not
exhaust itself in the perception, which
shapes it, nor in the movement, which
causes it or which it responds to. Action is
a process, a transformation, a change, a
flow, a frantic standstill, always simultaneously
characterised by rest and modification,
which means, by the tension that
distinguishes a situation from a condition.
In a condition there is no space for
actions, no change of structures, no room
for unforeseen developments, steps,
thresholds, transitions, as they are representative
for situations. Situations enable
actors to do something. These opportunities
rest and remain unclaimed until
those capable of doing so, seize them.
The possibility of acting, the enduring
and one’s conduct arise from a situation.
This tension inherent in an open situation
not only evokes the human subject of
action. Rather the performative characteristics
of forces, things and creatures
count equally. That the material base formats
situations is revealed particularly in
the architecture of the public space. On
the one side this architecture has to be
aimed at eliciting actions from forces,
things or creatures and becoming the
interface of interactions. Thereto it has to
make its openness visible, so that persons,
things or forces can appear and
show themselves in a manner not predetermined.
On the other hand it has to
organise the perception of these actions
in such a way that these mark reality. The
architecture of public spaces thus has to
open up an arena, it has to arrange perception
as the level of expectations into
which an act enters and which it nonetheless
at the same time surprises. Actions
differ precisely from activities in that they
are neither expectable nor compliant to
certain rules.
This organisation can not, as those referring
to modern phenomenology or philosophical
anthropology believe, be
achieved by the body or the plaiting of
participation and distance in the intermediate
corporeality: Their execution
processes of perceptions are already
based on the contingent preconditions of
a situation, which first of all has to permit,
grant and even evoke execution processes
of action and thus activity and passiv-
ity, action and reaction. What senses and
patterns of activation we develop is a biological
answer towards the properties of
the world, which we inhabit. This biological
answer, this cultivation of organs thus
depends on free areas, which can be
used as resources of transformation. In
this sense architecture should be understood
as the creation and configuration of
sensuality.
At the centre of the public space is thus
an action, in the sense that architecture
first allows the thing, force or creature a
leeway to act differently or even not at all.
Accordingly, architecture is not a structural
parameter, but that which lets an action
appear - by no means exclusively as
building - but, by way of example, as the
actors assembling themselves and relating
to each other. It is reciprocally modified
by each action. Designing, building,
using and changing public space are
equally ways of acting. Actions respond
to each other and thereby change the
interstices in which they happen. The
architecture of this zone thus forms an
event out of that which comes into being
in such a performative situation.
The first consequence of an analysis of
performativity from the perspective of
architecture is that actions depend on a
situational framework of conditions.
These facilitate differentiation between
operations, incidents and execution
processes. This framework of conditions
determines the modalities of such differentiations
through embodiment. Secondly,
it follows that these distinctions
correspond to specific patterns of interactions.
These patterns crystallize from the
embodiments and determine who can act
and what counts as an action. Thirdly,
from this notion of action - having in view
the happening - follows the assumption
that a situational anticipation is needed if
the unforeseen should materialise in an
observable way.
The possibility of acting intentionally is
merely a derivative of performative architecture.
From this challenge of the notion
of planning follows the idea that places -
depending on the degree to which they
were planned by an individual - have
hardly any chance to appear as public
spaces. The action in the sense of implementing
the plan is the attempt to force
purpose, functions, structures of meaning
onto reality, with the result that the situationally
generated reality merely counts
as auxiliary criterion to the aims of an
individual or a society. Performativity of
the architect has not for nothing been the
paradigm of the demiurge, the creator
god, up until Leibniz; but at the same time
it is also the model of a political dictatorship,
in which only one will counts.
In his “Physics” Aristotle describes architectonics
as the art of working with a
material to fabricate a purposeful object.
Someone who uses this object has to be
familiar with its form. However, the producer
of this object, as the architect, has
to know the qualities of the material in
view of a particular function. Accordingly,
the architect is not the one who actually
fabricates the product or uses it, but the
one who develops the form-content unity
of a product by projecting its matter of
existence before it is even there.
However, designing is but only one version
of architecture.
A particular structure of social relations,
an artificial, common world is the prereq-
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