Virilio for Architects

John Armitage

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317549741
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture General

Paul Virilio is an innovative figure in the study of architecture, space, and the city. Virilio for Architects primes readers for their first encounter with his crucial texts on some of the vital theoretical debates of the twenty-first century, including:

• Oblique Architecture and Bunker Archeology
• Critical Space and the Overexposed City
• The Ultracity and Very High Buildings
• Grey Ecology and Global Hypermovement

In exploring Virilio's most important architectural ideas and their impact, John Armitage traces his engagement with other key architectural and scientific thinkers such as Claude Parent, Benoit B. Mandelbrot, and Bernard Tschumi. Virilio for Architects allows students, researchers, and non-academic readers to connect with Virilio's distinctive architectural theories, critical studies, and fresh ideas.

CHAPTER 1

Introduction

Paul Virilio’s chief contribution to French post-Second World War thinking has been to demonstrate that questions of architecture are urban and military questions. For him, architecture is not something just to appreciate or study; it is also a critical site of cultural action and intervention where territorial and military relations are both established and possibly unsettled. Virilio is a rare intellectual, in the sense that his writings have made a difference both to theoretical debates on architecture and to the making of architecture (Virilio and Parent 1997a, 1997b, 1997c). Architecture Principe, for many Virilio’s most remarkable creation – an architectural group and its eponymous magazine, Architecture Principe – not only included the famous French architect Claude Parent; it also introduced the theory of ‘the oblique function’, which resulted in the construction of a major architectural work – the Church of Sainte-Bernadette du Banlay in Nevers in 1966 (Virilio and Parent 1996).

Yet Virilio is not a political activist, who uses direct action, such as demonstrating or striking in opposition to or support of a cause, masquerading as an architectural thinker. He is unconvinced by the idea that intellectual architectural groups and architecture journals can or should assemble, marshal, or coordinate the general population – for example, for the purpose of resisting the militarization of urban space. This is because Virilio does not believe either that there is such a thing as the general population – in the sense of a pure, genuine, united community – or that there may be a quick solution to spatial inequality, some way of fixing it for good, at some indeterminate time in the future. Space, Virilio argues, is a site of ongoing critique and struggle that can never be certain for one side or the other. In this sense, Virilio’s intellectual contribution has been not only to expose the militarization of urban architecture, but also to show that this architecture is never reducible to militarization.

For Virilio, the study of architecture involves exposing the relations of urban and military power that exist within culture at any given moment, so that we may then consider how marginal or subordinate groups might win architectural space, however fleetingly, from the dominant group (Virilio and Brausch 1993). This is an enormously multifaceted process, full of potential drawbacks, and we will examine below in greater detail how, for instance, Virilio has theorized the computer interface, virtual space, and the ‘contamination’ of real space and put into practice this approach. For now, though, concentrating on the relations of urban and military power suggests a way of thinking about Virilio’s conception of virtual and real spaces. However, his thought is not a set of internally coherent, unchanging ideas through which we can move step by step, from the unity of urban time and place to ‘the overexposed city’, or chapter by chapter, from real space to virtual space; it is rather an enduring and unavoidably incomplete process, always recombining and redividing. Avoiding a philosophical standpoint founded upon a belief in a historical point of pure origin, what is important about Virilio’s contingent architectural thought is that it is focused upon a critique of the binary oppositions that endow a first term in a sequence – such as real space/virtual space – with the authority of a governing fixed point. Virilio does not become interested, for example, in theories of reception and perception just because that may seem a good idea at the time; his thinking forms part of a response to architectural, urban, and military developments at exact moments in French post-Second World War history (e.g. in the early 1980s, which saw the transformation of real space into virtual space). As Virilio might put it, he is not interested in architectural theory and practice per se. He is interested in why they were as they were in the 1950s or 1960s or are as they are in the 2000s. For Virilio, architecture is a process over which we must mount a critique and a struggle against unequal interactions of urban and military power – not a stationary object that we can merely explain or wrap up in a grand overarching theory.

In this context, the role of the intellectual-architect is, as Virilio puts it, relatively inactive politically. Speaking on the subject of the intellectual-architect in the 1990s, Virilio pointed to the ‘disqualification’ of the architectural critic who becomes embroiled in political activism: ‘To me the work of a thinker consists of his work, not his opinions. To me opinions are nothing. So to consider opinions of primary importance is to disqualify the work’ (Virilio and Brügger 2001: 94).

At the same time, Virilio also stresses that intellectual-architects do raise important urban, military, and architectural questions. Intellectual-architects, he argues, are also people who question whose urban visions are represented and whose are not. Moreover, unless we operate within the tensions between an intellectual-architect’s politics, critical works, and thought, we will never know what architectural studies can and cannot do, visualize, and represent in the urban realm; nor will we know what they have to do politically or what they alone have a privileged ability to do architecturally. Intellectual-architects, Virilio suggests, are not just concerned about the declining influence of architectural critics; they are also concerned about the architecture and urbanism of ‘the big night’ (e.g. the silence surrounding the disappearance of the night sky in contemporary cities) and the decline of certain forms of urban stasis (through the emergence of various forms of escape from the city). The intellectual-as-architect example points at once to Virilio’s sense of the limitations and relevance of intellectual work and to his commitment to architectural studies as urban and military studies.

Virilio’s architectural career

Anyone beginning to write a history of the French post-Second World War intellectual architectural scene, and looking around for some archetypal urban figure to connect its numerous avant-garde trends and ideological phases, would find himself or herself almost spontaneously turning to Paul Virilio. In the 1950s Virilio played a key role within a group of French architects concerned with the significance of military strategy for the development of the modern city. In the 1960s and 1970s he appeared as a foremost exponent in various new intellectual and architectural fields: architectural studies of destruction and acceleration, technology, movement, and politics. In the 1980s he was one of the most outspoken and persuasive public – yet intensely private – intellectuals and architects in debates on structural design, the transformation of the modern city, transit, and space. Meanwhile, since the 1990s, Virilio’s influential writings on architecture, ‘grey ecology’, and ‘the cities of the beyond’, combined with the growing reputation, within and outside the architectural academy, of his work on critical space, globalization, migration, and the event, have earned him global recognition as a pre-eminent figure in architectural studies today.

Virilio’s influential writings… have earned him global recognition as a pre-eminent figure in architectural studies today.

However, Virilio himself would question any characterization of his architectural career that does not emphasize issues concerning his lack of formal architectural education, the city, war, and large-scale obliteration:

I don’t have any training in architecture whatsoever. I came to the question of the city through the question of war… I lived through the trauma of full-scale war, the destruction of cities, like Nantes, where I lived and where eight thousand buildings were destroyed. It was this relationship with war which led me to become interested in the city and in architecture.

(Virilio and Limon 2001: 51)

These remarks present students of Virilio’s work with specific problems – namely how to create an architectural narrative of Virilio, how to introduce his architectural writing on the city, and how to foreground his importance regarding the effects of war and destruction on the field of architecture.

Strangely perhaps (given the problems above), the best way of solving them is to begin with a consideration of Virilio’s participation in interviews. For, during the 1980s, 1990s, and beyond, Virilio repeatedly used interviews as a platform for theorizing: not for presenting architectural explanations but for exploring architecture as an oblique concept (see Chapter 2).

Born in Paris in 1932, Virilio grew up in the care of a Breton Catholic mother and a father who was an Italian communist and an illegal alien in France. Virilio has described this dual nationality upbringing in an environment torn apart by the Second World War as one of devastation. He felt estranged from the North Atlantic region in Nantes because of his origins in Paris, from which he was evacuated during the war, and his growing sense of being a ‘war baby’ (as he often put it) was mainly due to the fact that he was only 15 when Allied bombs fell on Nantes, where his family had sought refuge. For this eventual urban planner and architect, the destruction of the metropolitan setting of Nantes was his testing ground, the fragility of the city his first concern. Eager to escape from Nantes after the Allies liberated France from German occupation in 1945, Virilio returned to Paris and attended the École des Métiers d’Art with the idea of becoming a master artist in stained glass. The frequency with which he has returned to document his early childhood experiences in France during the Second World War signifies their important formative influence on his later thinking, most especially perhaps in terms of his intellectual preoccupation with architecture, urbanism, and militarism.

Architectural studies take on a different character when considered from the standpoint of Virilio’s early life. If Virilio was central to the founding of an avant-garde architectural field in France, then that was partly the result of insights afforded by his oblique, equivocal relationship to prevailing ideas of war and the city, art, and architecture. His background as a devout Christian associated with Abbé Pierre (1912–2007) – the French Catholic priest, member of the Resistance during the Second World War, and deputy of the Popular Republican Movement – and with the homeless placed Virilio at an oblique angle to the Second World War, to France, and to French architecture from the 1950s onwards. It might be said of Virilio that he feels better taking a sighting of the domain of architecture from the German bunkers of the Second World War’s ‘Atlantic Wall’ (a massive coastal defensive structure built on Hitler’s orders that stretched from Norway through France to Spain) than from French post-Second World War architecture. It was this military perspective that, in an earlier period of his career, allowed him to contest some of the most taken-for-granted features of French cultural and political life (he actively took part in the student-led strikes of Paris in May 1968), while opening architecture up to the submerged questions of the military’s relationship to urbanization. Considered within this context, Virilio’s importance as an architectural thinker has less to do with his lack of formal architectural education than with how he calls into question the very idea of a purely architectural education. One of the traits of his architectural work is its refusal of the two fundamental directions of Euclidian space – the vertical and the horizontal – of both post-Second World War French architecture and modern American architectural formations such as skyscrapers more generally. In the chapters that follow, Virilio will be seen arguing that, from Manhattan to Marseilles, there is no modern architecture that is not haunted by ‘the oblique function’ and by ‘bunker archeology’ (see Chapter 2); no conception of urban space that is free of critical overexposure to the interface of virtual space (see Chapter 3); no city without its increasing nocturnal extremes (see Chapter 4); no architect untouched by ‘grey ecology’ and ‘the cities of the beyond’ (see Chapter 5).

Virilio’s importance as an architectural thinker has less to do with his lack of formal architectural education than with how he calls into question the very idea of a purely architectural education.

After returning to Paris to work on stained glass in the early post-Second World War years, Virilio eventually deserted his initial vocation, feeling that he could no longer address the theoretical urban and military questions that were starting to consume him in pure practical terms. Significantly, these were also the years in which Virilio became involved in new movements taking shape within French architecture – movements that argued for a more urbanized and militarized conception of architecture and a more architectural conception of urban and military questions.

During his time as founder, with Claude Parent, of the Architecture Principe group, and as editor of its review Architecture Principe, Virilio supported himself financially by becoming a discussant, provocateur, writer, and theorist in Parent’s architectural practice and elsewhere in Paris. This marked the start of a career that would span nearly 40 years and is thought by many to be a fundamental facet of Virilio’s contribution to post-Second World War French architecture, urbanism, and the critique of militarism (see Scalbert and Mostafavi 1996).

Between the 1960s and the 1990s Virilio worked first in Parent’s architectural practice and second, crucially, in higher education from 1969 on, as professor and workshop director at the École Spéciale d’Architecture (ESA) in Paris, where he became director of studies in 1973. He also remained a prominent member of the editorial staff of the review Esprit. Unlike the writings of other architectural thinkers, which circulate almost exclusively in academic circles, Virilio’s editorial and other work has appealed to a much wider audience. Indeed, his ideas have been disseminated on DVD, as in the case of Penser la vitesse (Virilio and Paoli 2009); on television (Virilio and Kittler 2001); in the news print media of Western Europe (La Libération, Die Tageszeitung); and by prestigious university presses such as Princeton (see Virilio 1994a and 2000b). Virilio is a teacher, a curator of exhibitions, and an artist-researcher as much as he is a writer, and his editorial and public influence extends far beyond his post-1975 general directorship of the ESA and those texts he himself has authored.

Despite a lifetime of teaching at the ESA in Paris, it is notable that Virilio has always worked outside traditional architectural academic institutions. While at the ESA, he founded, with Alain Joxe, the Interdisciplinary Center for Research into Peace and Strategic Studies at the House of the Human Sciences, teaching geopolitics: a unique post in France in 1979. He then wrote L’Insécurité du territoire (Virilio 1976) and Speed & Politics: An Essay on Dromology (Virilio 1986), both essays on geopolitics, militarization, and the new information and communications technology revolution in transport and transmission. Moving to Popular Defense and Ecological Struggles (Virilio 1990), he sketched the conditions for popular resistance to war before writing The Aesthetics of Disappearance (Virilio 2009a), an essay on the cultural effects of cinematics. One of the most distinctive aspects of Virilio’s work at Esprit, Cause commune, and Traverses was the publication of his research on architecture in various monthlies and reviews such as L’Autre Journal, Critique, or Les Temps modernes, where his architectural ideas and philosophical projects could be read by people in the humanities, the sciences, and the arts.

In 1984 Virilio published The Lost Dimension (Virilio 1991), wherein he presented his architectural research into the crisis of the contemporary city (see Chapter 3). War and Cinema: The Logistics of Perception (Virilio 1989) was another unorthodox ‘Virilian’ essay on cinematographic techniques used during the two world wars, as was Negative Horizon (Virilio 2005b), which studies the links between speed, politics, and the cultural development of western societies. In 1987, under the initiative of the Ministries of Equipment and Housing and the Organization of Territory and Transport, Virilio was awarded Laureate of Architectural Critique status by the French government for his work as a whole. His research on vision technologies continued with the publication of The Vision Machine (Virilio 1994b), which deals with progress in automation – not only in postindustrial production but also in our perception of the world. We should also note that, while Virilio was nominated programme director at the International College of Philosophy in 1989, he was simultaneously writing Polar Inertia (Virilio 2000c), an essay on the recent evolution in remote-control technology and the environment. By the 1990s Virilio’s influence on architecture and various other subjects knew no boundaries, disciplinary or other, as almost all of his works were continually republished and translated into upwards of 15 languages. Once president of the ESA in 1990, Virilio reached out beyond its confines, to become advisor to the French Pavilion Commission for the Universal Exposition in Seville together with Régis Debray, the well-known French intellectual, journalist, government official, and professor of ‘mediology’ (see Debray 2004). Writing of the motivations behind the Gulf War of 1990–1, Virilio produced Desert Screen (Virilio 2002a), a series of chronicles for European newspapers such as L’Express that highlighted the US military’s special attraction to war at the speed of light. In 1991 Virilio also served as a member of the scientific advisory board for the Memorial of the Battle of Normandy in Caen while additionally preparing an itinerant exhibition for the Ministry of Defence on the theme of ‘The City and Its Defenders’. In different ways, Virilio’s numerous cultural activities and editorial work with French architects like Henri Gaudin allowed him to break with the pure vocational aspects of higher architectural education and connect with wider aesthetic and political formations beyond the ESA.

In different ways, Virilio’s numerous cultural activities and editorial work with French architects like Henri Gaudin allowed him to break with the pure vocational aspects of higher architectural education and connect with wider aesthetic and political formations.…

Virilio’s research in the 1990s – illustrate...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Series editor’s preface
• Illustration credits
• Acknowledgements
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Analysing the oblique
• 3. Critical space
• 4. The big night: into the ultracity
• 5. Bernard Tschumi, grey ecology, and the cities of the beyond
• Further reading
• Bibliography
• Index