Okay, Here's The Plan...

Author(s): R.E. Somol and Sarah Whiting

Source: Log, No. 5 (Spring/Summer 2005), pp. 4-7
Published by: Anyone Corporation
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/41765018
Accessed: 10-07-2017 02:51 UTC

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Still from The Italian Job ,
DIRECTED BY PETER COLLINSON
(1969). Courtesy Paramount
Pictures.

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R.E. Somol and Sarah Whiting

Okay, Here's
The Plan . . .

So we hijack this issue, try to give it a shape, but unite it nei-

ther by thematic nor ideological consistency. At most, it's
organized by sensibility and personal affinity. These are the
people with whom we hang out, play cards, drink until clos-
ing, escape conferences, plot futures, compete with laughter,
and fight with conviction. It will no doubt be perceived as a
gang of insiders, a cabal, and that's okay by us. Fact is, we're
talking cabal without borders : there are almost twice as many
contributors to this issue as previous Logs , and only four of
the 27 have appeared in its pages before. But for them run-
ning out of time and us running out of space, there could
have been others among this band, and you know who you
are. Rest assured, you'll have roles in the next big job.
Beyond sharing a loose grip on reality, this criminal pack
calls for action more than observation, privileges speculation
over erudition, and aims wildly at getting something going.
Anything . Bigger pictures, funnier punch lines, larger stakes.
There are disagreements here, significant ones, but they
invariably unfold through an open conversation among peers
and co-conspirators - a discussion over diverse means to a
common end. The end, of course, is nothing more and noth-
ing less than springing architecture and urbanism from the
hoosegow of critical commentary and commercial complici-
ty. The plan - with all its accessories of blowtorches, grap-
pling hooks, disguises, and stopwatches - demands the reor-
ganization of urban ecologies, economies, and establish-
ments; the figuring of new architectural organizations; and
the invention of alternative genres and styles. And, like all
great plans, it's so stupid it just might work.
This unlikely confidence in the plan is what separates us
from those who assume that anything that works must be
facile. While the architecture of criticality has made its name
of late by exposing the "failure" of apparent success, we
embrace the possibility that failure may be a new form of
success. In other words, the eruption of the unexpected may
only follow the incessant attempts to calculate, control, and
configure the present with full knowledge that these schemes
will backfire and leave us holding the bag.
The critical project opened productive horizons in our
5

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Still from The Italian Job , discipline, but we now need to explore what those horizon
DIRECTED BY PETER COLLINSON

(1969). Courtesy Paramount look like and hoi v they work. Exposing the norm and revel
Pictures. in ambiguity, hybridity, and marginality are no longer
enough. For a plan to "work," those in on the job (its sub-
jects) need to be complicit, not detached or merely told w
to do. If one were to sketch the discipline's conscription o
the subject over the past 25 years or so, Eisenman & Co.
replaced a behaviorist, causal relation between the subject
and the architectural object with an optical-conceptual
model, whereby the subject could be distanced from the
object and reflect upon his or her own subjectivity. At the
same time, with Jencks, Venturi, & Co. offering a multipl
populist platform, all subjects could find themselves in th
object and thereby be consumed by their own subjectiviti
While both trajectories led to some classic hold-ups and p
infractions, their straight repetition by the respective Cos
have made them into rote procedures rather than surpris
capers: Mark Wahlberg and Charlize Theron replaying The
Italian Job as an elaborate excuse for the product placeme
of the rereleased Mini Cooper rather than as the producti
seizure of a previously unknown urban topography. In an
effort to retrieve some of the latter unpredictability, this
issue of Log aims at a Doppler-like relationship that does
6

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 predicate itself upon distinguishing either subject and object,
or program and form, but rather offers an immersion from
which new practices may emerge - a dialogic architecture
rsonnante rather than a monologic architecture parlante, an
architecture of accomplices rather than audiences .
That said, we number ourselves among those who
believe that a return to the plan is the best shot for this kind
of resonant or projective discipline. While there are those
among our cohort who have also argued for some form of
return to the plan (architectural or urban) by attempting to
rescue it through the procedural introduction of time, the
dynamic , our contribution is to call for a specific - if provi-
sional - end state, the plastic . To date, dynamic form and
dynamic program have led respectively to animation and
mass customization, or to scenario planning and slide-bar
visualizations of alternate data sets. While imparting signifi-
cant contributions to current architecture and urbanism,
these parallel dynamic platforms have all too often been
reduced to an argument for "flexibility" and thus for the
ultimate accommodation of the contemporary world and its
arrangements. Such calls for flexibility may be timely, even
just-in-timey but are rarely untimely. By contrast, the pro-
gram of plasticity projects a specific virtuality - one with its
own stable points, orders, and figures - that explicitly scripts
and reroutes the material and behavioral protocols of the
world. Responsive and evolutionary, the dynamic platform
relies on literal randomness , while the plan of plasticity
wagers on real chance .
For now, we've invited the players, declared the game,
and dealt the cards. Nothing left but to let the chips fall
where they may.

R.E. SOMOL IS A DESIGN THEORIST

WHO CURRENTLY DEPARTS FROM

LAX. Sarah Whiting is an associ-

ATE PROFESSOR OF ARCHITECTURE AT

Harvard's Graduate School of

Design and a partner in the
architectural firm WW. They are
THE GUEST EDITORS OF THIS ISSUE.

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