Women Are Heroes, JR (2008) – Favela Morro da Providência, Rio de Janeiro – Brazil.

Deleuze and Guattari uses the roots as metaphor to define an open system, decentralized and compost by networks without beginning, middle or end, that implies the idea of infiltration, spreading like water and occupying all the empty spaces. The concept of a Rhizome is explained through six principles:

• 1° and 2° – Connection and heterogeneity: any point of a rhizome can be (and usually is) connected with another one with no order or symmetry;
• 3° – Multiplicity: the idea of unity is substituted by multiplicity, creating an open system that is always changing;
• 4° – Asignifying rupture: a rhizome can be broken, but never stopped, it will return to grow in a different path or maybe with a different function;
• 5° and 6° – Cartography and Decalcomania: the system don’t follow a model, axis or structure. It is like a map, not a tracing.

Related to the society relations of exteriority, in a Rhizome system each person is part of an organism, but still is unique and individual at the same time, and more than that, can start another system or join an existent one. It is a constant process of movement and self-organization that grows in all directions, creating many connection possibilities.

A modern example of a rhizome are the South American favelas. With no hierarchy or bounder, everything is connected, and overflowing the land they occupy, there are cultural exchange with the rest of the city and especially in individual relationships, creating a network much more complex than we can imagine. It never stops to grow (first horizontally then vertically) and in this case, who builds, expands and transforms are those who walk every day by these communities. Seeking survival in scarce conditions, they are their own urban planners, nothing more natural.

INTERNET
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/bd/Internet_map_1024_-_transparent.png

Blur Bluilding by Diller, Scofidio and Renfro for Swiss Expo 2002

This pavillion is an analogy to a cloud, with its uncertain and unpredictable boundaries. Solely made of its light tensegrity structure hidden by the fine water particles that floats in the air to create a fog mass through thousands of nozzles that project the water pumped from the lake on which the buildings sits on, or rather seems to be floating on. The water nozzles control its intensity through pressure and amount of water, regulated on a base of micro local weather state using digital sensors, either it is the wind strength or direction, temperature, air pressure, etc. to ensure the permanent yet ephemeral presence of the building as described.

Concept of rhizome by Deleuze and Guattari in the text “A Thousand Plateaus”
First, the concept of rhizome is the part of philosophical turning point, a shift in discourse of contemporary philosophy, with Deleuze considered as most important according to Foucault. Ontologically speaking, the choices are beyond binary and dualist; it is multiplicity. The openness to possibilites, attractions, influences and connection between these characterize the rhizome, as a complex map. Like a botanical rhizomatic system of roots with nodes, the concept of rhizome supports that there is no hierarchy, nor linearity, nor beginning nor end, it is always in a part of complex interrelated processes, often opposed to the tree system, where choices are linearly branched through linear ascension with clear cause as entry and consequence as exit.

The experience through this pavillion as a case study can be interestingly related to this concept of rhizome. The blurred limits of the building which statistic states are ephemeral, or rather constantly dynamically evolving based on its environmental influences. Once in this sensorial space, a visitor cannot visually and auditorily locate itself due to the dense myst and innumerable nozzles’ noise. Only the central system, as a third-eye can track the position of each individual. The smart raincoats, which respond in LED a color that corresponds to an affinity of one visitor to another based on a pre-input data from a questionnaire prior to the visit, can be related as a part of sensorial experience, as a social relationship. It is hence digitally mapped as a network of people, but also as one approaches another, there is social and psychological responses through attraction and repulsion between unpredictably approahing people meandering in a 3D space, resulting in a proliferation of senses, new encounters and further experiences. This evolving network of links and chains of reactive responses is clearly an analogy to the Internet, which reminds us of how the concept of rhizome is part of our life.

These ideas are right within our field of study. How does affinity between buildings and inhabitants, social context and existing environment within a micro context can impact its neighbourhood and building design? Mapping this relationship in a micro scale and macro scale to finally obtain a global tendency or evolution of city as a whole network can foster us architect in approaching better tools and assets to design a better builiding implementation within its context and multiple factors defining its area and the area within an urban area. It would be interesting to take advatage and full potential of digital tools to relate a new building design and its context, a node with its possible networks.

Reading:   Thousand Plateaus -Rhizome   |  Deleuze- Guattari

Case study:  Blur Building  |  Diller Scofidio – Renfro

Image collage for academic assignment: Javier F. Ponce

Difuminating the limits

A Thousand Plateaus :Capitalism and Schizophrenia, by Deleuze and Guattari, was written in 1980 in a non-linear way which allows the reader to move among plateaus  in any specific order. Plateaus propose self vibrating regions of intensities. A Plateau is always in the middle, not at the beginning or the end.

The authors describe some types of logics, like the tree-thinker / central trunk logic (vertical, territorial, hierarchical), the Radicle system (fascicular root, indefinite multiplicity of secondary roots, but the root’s unity subsists) and the Rhizome. The latter can be illustrated as a vegetable which propagates, an acentered system which spawns and proliferates. A Rhizome is made of  Plateaus. We can say that the Rhizome is inherently multiple, it has no center, its horizontal (avoiding vertical or linear connections) , it just proliferates, it is not genetical, all within a Nomadic non-territorial approach which opens endless possibilities.

They also talked about the following principles:

- Principles of connection and heterogeneity: any point of a rhizome can be connected to anything other, and must be.

- Principle of multiplicity:Multiplicities are rhizomatic

- Principle of asignifying rupture: A rhizome may be broken..against the oversignifying breaks separating structures or cutting across a single structure.

- Principle of cartography and decalcomania: a rhizome is not amenable to any structural or generative model. It is a stranger to any idea of genetic axis or deep structure.

As in the example of the Orchid and the Wasp, the orchid forms an image and the wasp reterritorializes on that image, they form a Rhizome.

While discussing the case study and the reading in class, a few analogies came to my mind: Just as the Blur building difuminate the limits of  “the container” , allowing the mist (fog-mass)  to expand in the context , the Rhizome proliferates, it has no limits and it is not contained within a linear structure. When entering the Blur building, the person experience a lack of all visual and  acoustical references, the visitor is not sure what to expect. The same happens  in a rhizomatic system, in which different unexpected inputs from different sources can emerge from any direction, allowing for new relationships and multiplicities. Internet can be a good example of a rhizomatic system where information can be shared form endless different sources.

Regarding my personal research or line of inquiry, I’ve been attracted by self-sufficiency, de-centralized systems and non hierarchical structures related to the way people interact and how  architecture can play a significant role in this type of logics. As an example, a decentralized energy network based on the contribution of the neighbors to the energy system can be far more efficient and sustainable, if managed properly,  than the current centralized scheme, where someone produces and others consume, at almost any price…I’ll like to kep on exploring the Self-sufficient agenda and the way our profession can be a major input.