Book Review | Bracket [Goes Soft], edited by Lola Sheppard and Neeraj Bhatia - a podcast by The Architecture Post

The second volume ofBracketentitled[Goes Soft], a publication co-founded byInfraNet Lab,archinectandActar Editorial, addresses the topic ofSoft Systems, including the contribution ofBenjamin Bratton,Geoff Manaugh,Neeraj Bhatia,Philippe Rahm,Jeffrey Inaba, andLola Sheppard. The publication is organized into six sections: sensing/feedback, interfacing/enveloping, subverting/hijacking, formatting/distributing, contingency/resilience, and diffusing/generating. The common denominator of these essays and research projects resides in their speculative approach — the editors believe “in truth, not the truth, but an unexpected truth”.Bracket [Goes Soft]looks at a series of questions that ranges from obsolete infrastructure to forces that are re-shaping our society: ecological crisis, economic globalization, the digital revolution, climate change, natural resources shortage, population expansion, technological and scientific advances.

Bracket [Goes Soft], cover

The central idea of this volume lies in the notion of 'soft'. Soft means smooth, flexible, agile, malleable, shock absorbing, responsive, non-linear. Unlike hard, soft talks about indeterminacy, performance, contingency, uncertainty, proposition. The legacy of the 1960s, in particular, soft architecture strategies, is relevant in this second volume.Reyner Banham, for example, encouraged postwar architects to look at research including cybernetics, environmental studies, science, technological progress, and disciplines focused on human behavioral systems, asChris Perry, co-principal ofPneumastudio, convincingly writes in his articleFast Company: Architecture and The Speed of Technology. Today, as illustrated in these projects, architects are engaged in elaborating a new language borrowing from science fiction, robotics, Internet, social networks, information technologies, ecology, specific technologies (neuro-technologies, synthetic biology, genetics, cybernetics).

Bracket [Goes Soft], spread

These projects and essays — including proposals ofrvtr (Colin Ripley,Geoffrey Thün,Kathy Velikov),Dan Handel,Bionic,m.ammoth(Stephen BeckerandRob Holmes),Tim MalyandFree Association Design(Brett Milligan), orMariela de Felix, among many other fascinating proposals — account for the interconnection of infrastructure, energy economy, politics, and ecology, that ecological system and engineered system arearticulate, and that an articulated cohabitation of cultural, social, political, climatic, ecological, energy, economic, and landscape-architectural-urban is required to engage architecture in a society that will be facing a range of uncertainties.

Bracket [Goes Soft], spread

Bruno Latourhas convincingly posited a shift from a time of time to a time of space, in his discussion withNew Geographiesin 2009. The time of time, he said, consists of “you destroy the past and then you have something else” while the time of space implies that “cohabitation of all of things that were supposed to be past are now simultaneously present.”

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In this current era of time of space, the shift from site to territory, namely, from a specific field — architecture/ science/ politics/ ecology — to anarticulated collective— transdisciplinarity — can be a possible means of problem-forming this avalanche of challenging contexts.Lola Sheppard, in her essayFrom Site to Territory, posits that “architecture can no longer define its parameters and responsiveness at the scale of its immediate site, but rather, must operate at the scale of the broader territory, a space expanded and thickened with environmental data, competing social and political claims, economic forces, systems of mobility, ecological systems, and urban metabolisms.”

Bracket [Goes Soft], spread

Or, to put this statement more simply, architecture must operate at the scale of anarticulated collective, asNeeraj Bhatiastates, that supposes to re-evaluate the role of the architect as an active agent, an enabler, as all the authors attempt to demonstrate in this second volume.

Bracket [Goes Soft], spread

All these design proposals ranging fromDredge,Soft Goes Hard,Arctic Opening, Aqua_Dermis, to Soft House,Estuary Services Pipelineand Swamp Thingemphasize this paradigmatic shift of architecture as becoming an interface with the environment. Architectural boundaries are becoming flexible, soft.
Now, asLola Sheppard forthrightly mentions, in the current epoch of globalization, social, ecological and technological changes, the concept of territory, which seems to be more appropriate, more accurate than that of site, «has become the necessity scale required to register and engage the complexity of networks and information at play in a given physical environment».
Enlarging the boundaries of its site allows architecture for a better understanding of, or better, an engagement in the changing world. To say it withLola Sheppard, «to represent the territory is to understand it, is to operate within it, is to (re)design it» but in the very softest way.

Book:Bracket Goes Soft
Editors:Lola SheppardandNeeraj Bhatia
Publishers:Actar Editorial

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