ABSTRACT
Mobilized for speculation, entourage introduces aspects and effects outside of the control of the architect, such as the ephemerality of time, the irregular growth of vegetation, the seasons of landscapes. Entourage has always consisted of an unruly detritus of natural-cultural assemblies held together for relatively short periods of time. A loose, local informality between buildings, as opposed to a structured, generalized system has become a common strategy in contemporary architectural design. There are several ways to describe these “scattered plans,” but the basic phenomenon consists of multiple, similarly sized objects clustering together as a loose assemblage without a dominant formal hierarchy. The scattered plans under discussion here cannot remove the power structures of planning, but they do offer an aesthetic alternative that calls attention to the local episodic relations between objects and environments, and this redistribution is an important aspect underlying the allure of these organizations.
