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Give Me a Gun and I Will Make All Buildings Move: An ANT’s View of Architecture
DOI link for Give Me a Gun and I Will Make All Buildings Move: An ANT’s View of Architecture
Give Me a Gun and I Will Make All Buildings Move: An ANT’s View of Architecture book
Give Me a Gun and I Will Make All Buildings Move: An ANT’s View of Architecture
DOI link for Give Me a Gun and I Will Make All Buildings Move: An ANT’s View of Architecture
Give Me a Gun and I Will Make All Buildings Move: An ANT’s View of Architecture book
ABSTRACT
Our building problem is just the opposite of Étienne-Jules Marey’s
famous inquiry into the physiology of movement. Through the
invention of his “photographic gun,” 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, 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 transformations. 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 out side, 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 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 continuous
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 successive freeze-frames that could at last document the
continuous flow that a building always is.