Figure 0.1 Diving, Plongeoir, Carnac. Photograph courtesy of David Collins (2006).
There are moments when we are struck by the sheer brilliance and glow of the Earth. Moments when we are struck by the rhythmic and surging chaos of the shoreline, by waves, by wind and by clouds. There are moments when we feel the force of the Earth directly. Sometimes the force pushes us, blows our hair and warms our skin. At other times the force strikes us hard in silence and stillness. It is often architecture that puts us in proximity to these forces. Platforms that take us over water, towers that take us into the sky. These moments tend to involve at least two sensations thrust together in a complex simultaneity. The first is the sensation of the here and now – of being intensely located. Specifically positioned in space and in time, only here and just now. This is the sensation of finding ourselves. The second is the sensation of being dislocated from our centres and our boundaries. Of forgetting the defined extents of who we are and what we can do. Otherwise or whatever. This is the sensation of losing ourselves. It is these dual sensations of finding and losing the self and to their continual passage to which this book turns. I am exploring architecture as a very particular instance of such passage. In this sense, architecture is at once a harbour and a launch-pad. At the end of the platform or the top of a tower we reach for a rail in order to hold us in place lest we completely drift away. And then, just sometimes, we breathe in deeply and let go.
There is a diving tower, a plongeoir, that sits poised above the gentle waves of la grande plage, Carnac (Figure 0.1). This diving tower rises approximately 7 metres into the sky, when measured from the shifting sands in which it is anchored. I’ve not measured it though, or at least I’ve not measured it in any other manner than in the vague measures entailed in the act of climbing – the stretching of arms and the bending of knees. The tower is composed of a tubular steel frame and is roughly triangular, or more accurately a square pyramidal frustum. Four legs are spread wide at the base and come closer together at the apex. At this apex a first and second leg bend into a third and fourth respectively. That is, the tubular steel that rises as a first leg is bent in order that it descends as a third, and the steel that rises as a second bends as a fourth; such that the main structure is composed of only two pieces of bent tubular steel. The tower is divided into three equal sections vertically. Each section is marked by a square of horizontal steel tube that acts to brace the legs. The base section is empty (other than the four legs of the tower). The second and third vertical sections have ladders and simple handrails of the same tubular steel, but of a lesser diameter – that make these parts easier to grasp. There are two diving platforms that project out from the structure over the water. One platform sits at approximately two-thirds up from the base, the other towards the top – approximately six and a half metres into the sky above the shifting sands.
This diving tower sits about 15 metres from the shoreline – but this depends on the tide, which in turn depends on the moon, the sun and rotations of the Earth. The tide rises and falls by about 2.5 metres twice a day; more when the moon is full, less when it is new; more in winter when this part of the Earth is closer to the sun, less in summer. This shifting shoreline is located at the southern edge of Carnac, Brittany. It is not far from the thousands of Neolithic stone monoliths that sit across the landscape of Carnac. Thousands of huge stones aligned and organized in manners that are difficult to discern from the Earth – but that seem more obvious when viewed from the sky, as if they are wayfaring devices for gods. Brittany was once a kingdom, then a duchy, then a province and is currently a region of France. The peninsula of Brittany is the north-west tip of Continental Europe. Or, from the other direction, it can be said that this diving tower of la grande plage, occupies the waters of Quiberon Bay and Quiberon Bay is of the waters of the Bay of Biscay and the Celtic Sea and these bays and this sea occupy the waters of the North Atlantic Ocean. This tower, this diving tower, is a marking of a particular place. A geographic point or pointer. In many senses it’s more stable than its geography. Like the monolithic stones of the fields, this tower is the carving of territory out of the chaos of the sea and the sky, a temporary stability in the shifting of sands; the rolls of the tides; of lunar cycles and the spinning of the Earth; of socio-political assignations and borders, and; of the perpetual migrations of waters.
This diving tower is also a site of the territorialization of selves. A temporary point of fixation in the demarcations and boundaries of the self and others. The tower operates as an anchor to desire. From the sand of the shore scattered with tanned families and colourful towels and umbrellas we see the tower, a tubular skeleton in the sea. We swim to the tower because it provides a point of attraction for glistening wet bodies. A wayfaring device for libidos. We swim to the tower because it is empty without us. A ladder always yearns to be climbed. A handrail always desires to be held. A diving platform begs to be occupied, if only tentatively, momentarily. When the tide is high you wade out into the water and swim to the tower. When the tide is high you can easily reach the bottom rungs of the ladder, haul yourself out of the sea and ascend the tower. When the tide is low, however, you cannot reach the bottom rung. When the tide is low it is impossible to thrust yourself from the water high enough to grasp the bottom rail. It is impossible to reach the ladder which makes it impossible to climb and equally impossible to damage yourself by diving into the precariously shallow waters of a low tide. The tide is engaged as a device to filter bodies and to afford access and exclusion. Even at higher tides smaller bodies have trouble hauling themselves out of the water and up the ladder. Weaker bodies have trouble too. There is a necessary strength involved. A strength in the arms that allows you not only to lift yourself but to overcome the strange gravity and grip of the sea. In this sense the tower is a simple machine. A tidal machine, a lunar machine. A machine for which the body is but one component. Stretching arms, bending knees, grasping hands. Muscles for a tubular skeleton.
One Tuesday in August 2008 we swam to the tower. It was high tide. We hauled ourselves from the water and climbed the ladder to the top platform. There was a warm breeze on our wet bodies. A warm sun on our salty skin. A tingling sensation on the surface. It feels higher than even the vague measurements of climbing suggested. It is quieter than the beach itself with children playing on the sand and the chatter of families. There is something magical about being in the air. Especially when you are in the air above the sea. Near naked, silhouetted in the midday sun, unrecognized, unrecognizable. When you have removed yourself, or been removed from, all those conventions by which you might be known: names, familial relations, genders and agendas, titles, professions, economies, race and class, religions and certifications; you are free. Free to connect with an outside, with the sun, the breeze, the air and a tidal harmonics. With slow-moving clouds and gentle waves. Free to return to the material intensities of the self, the Real. In this sense this diving tower is implicated in the losing of the self; in the dissolutions and indiscernibilities of the self and beyond. Up here above the water, the gentle waves, the gulf, the bay, the sea and the ocean there is a sense of being completely exposed. Raw. Bare. And barely there at all.
This diving tower is like much of the architecture of this book, a bare architecture. It is an architecture that the philosopher Gilles Deleuze might call a ‘prosthesis-organ’ or indeed what Deleuze and his accomplice the psychoanalyst Félix Guattari, might together refer to as ‘a body that is all the more alive for having no organs’.1 But it is also the architecture of Georges Bataille’s enforme. Of Michel Serres’ adrift. Of Roland Barthes’ air. Of Jean-Luc Nancy’s exscription. Of Maurice Blanchot’s speech. Or of Giorgio Agamben’s bare life from which the expression ‘bare architecture’ derives. This is not an architecture registered in style, typologies, tropes, distinctions, definitions, in fixed measurements and origins; but rather in its intricate excesses and in its affecting hazes. In its explorations and experiments. In the schizoanalytic thought it prompts.
The body of bare architecture is also at once intricate and indistinct. Though I start this exploration with a profound sense of being found and being lost I’m not imagining that there is something, an individual, an essential self, to be found or lost. Rather, I imagine that the negotiation of these intensities is itself formative. In his text of 1964 L’Individu et sa genèse physico-biologique, Gilbert Simondon refers to a principle of individuation as an ‘operation [that] rests on the singularity or the singularities of the concrete here and now; it envelops them and amplifies them’.2 The manners by which the ‘here and now’ articulates selves is a key part of this exploration. The individual at stake herein is not given but rather an ongoing operation or the continuously varying result of an ‘architectural procedure’ as the poet designers Madeline Gins and Shusaku Arakawa have called it.3 Bare architecture, in this sense, departs by hedging a bet that selves are configured as architectures are constructed, in a beautiful and intense breathing in and letting go.