“Give Me Some Wiggle Room”: How to Feel at Home in the Gap between Design, Building and Decay

Abstract

This article takes the Caritas building by De Vylder Vinck Taillieu (2016) as a foil to discuss tolerance from a number of perspectives, demonstrating the productive nature of the very notion of tolerance as a filter through which to understand a contemporary building with an innovative approach to professional conventions in both psychiatric care and architecture. The building, a pavilion on the campus of a psychiatric care facility in Belgium, flies in the face of architectural conventions for care facilities, yet provokes a rethinking of contemporary institutional care. Its strategic use of the gap between idea and building and of improvization in the building process provide a striking example of the potential ripple effects from a singular project that provide “wiggle room” in order to understand what architecture can do.

Keywords:

• tolerance
• architecture
• new materialisms
• object-oriented ontology

Notes

Notes

1 For an overview of the developments in new materialisms, see Diana Coole and Samantha Frost, eds., New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010); or Rick Dolphijn and Iris van der Tuin, eds., New Materialism: Interviews & Cartographies (Ann Arbor, MI: Open Humanities Press, 2012). For an overview of the developments in speculative realism, see Levi Bryant, Nick Srnicek, and Graham Harman, eds., The Speculative Turn: Continental Materialism and Realism (Melbourne: Re.press, 2010); or Graham Harman, Speculative Realism. An Introduction (Cambridge: Polity, 2018).

2 Coole and Frost, “Introducing the New Materialisms,” in New Materialisms, 2.

3 John Law, ed., Power, Action, and Belief: A New Sociology of Knowledge? (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1986); Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social. An Introduction to Actor–Network-Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).

4 Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (London: Duke University Press, 2007); Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency (New York: Continuum, 2008); Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010); Lambros Malafouris, How Things Shape the Mind: A Theory of Material Engagement (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 2013); Graham Harman, Object-Oriented Ontology: A New Theory of Everything (London: Penguin, 2018).

5 Timothy Morton, Humankind. Solidarity with Nonhuman People (London: Verso, 2017), 159.

6 Law, Power, Action, and Belief.

7 Meillassoux, After Finitude, 5.

8 “Chapter 4: Indirect Relations,” in Harman, Object-Oriented Ontology, 147–94.

9 Timothy Morton, Realist Magic: Objects, Ontology, Causality (Ann Arbor, MI: Open Humanities Press, 2013), 93.

10 Timothy Morton, Dark Ecology. For a Logic of Future Coexistence (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016), 70.

11 Ibid., 93.

12 For example, see Harman’s discussion of the White House in Harman,Object-Oriented Ontology, 154–57.

13 For example, see Bennett’s discussion of her encounter with trash in Bennett, Vibrant Matter, 4–6.

14 Morton, Dark Ecology, 103. In cognitive science, Alva Noë’s work has provided a similar recalibration of how we understand consciousness by focusing on the combination of brain and body in relation to the world as it shows up for us; Alva Noë, Out of Our Heads. Why You Are Not Your Brain, and Other Lessons from the Biology of Consciousness(New York: Hill & Wang, 2009).

15 Ibid., 48.

16 Bruno Latour and Albena Yaneva, “Give Me a Gun and I Will Make All Buildings Move: An ANT’s View of Architecture,” in Explorations in Architecture: Teaching, Design, Research, ed. Urs Staub and Reto Geiser (Basel: Birkhäuser, 2008), 80.

17 Ibid., 82.

18 Ibid., 89.

19 Ibid., 87.

20 Ibid., 86.

21 Stephen Cairns and Jane M. Jacobs, Buildings Must Die: A Perverse View of Architecture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2014), 11.

22 Ibid., 65.

23 Ibid., 64.

24 Ibid., 65.

25 Jill Stoner, Toward a Minor Architecture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012), 17.

26 Ibid., 10.

27 Ibid., 7.

28 Ibid.

29 For example, Boie relates an anecdote about a woman wandering around night after night through the building, wondering what the function of the building is supposed to be; Gideon Boie, ed., UNLESS EVER PEOPLE (Antwerp: Flanders Architecture Institute, 2018), 212.

30 Stoner, Toward a Minor Architecture, 4–5.

31 Ibid., 22.

32 Gideon Boie, “A Note on the Names of the Square,” in Boie, UNLESS EVER PEOPLE, 170–172.

33 Likewise, the question of authorship is complex in the Caritas project. While it is usually attributed to the architects De Vylder Vinck Taillieu, the role of BAVO, the participating patients and staff members, as well as Herman Roose, the current director of the institute, cannot be understated. Different publications demonstrate the difficulty this project raises in the conventional standards of architectural publishing and discourse: design credits are variously attributed, depending on the publication. The Flanders Architectural Review, no. 13, mentions BAVO as “project designer,” the KARUS psychiatric centre as “co-producers,” and the staff and patients as “user-architects.” Boie’s UNLESS EVER PEOPLE mentions no authors on the cover, instead providing on the back an alphabetical list of all those who have contributed to the project as well as to the book, with a total of twenty-four authors.

34 As described in ibid., 186–223.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Bart Decroos

Bart Decroos is an architect, researcher and editor based in Brussels. He is currently a Ph.D. candidate at the Henry van de Velde Research Group, University of Antwerp (a fellowship of the Research Foundation Flanders), with a focus on the “materialist turn” in contemporary architectural theory and design. He is an editor of OASE Journal for Architecture and writes for various architecture magazines.

Lara Schrijver

Lara Schrijver is Professor in Architecture at the University of Antwerp, Faculty of Design Sciences. Before Antwerp, she taught at Delft University of Technology and the Rotterdam Academy of Architecture. She is editor of the KNOB Bulletin and has served as editor for Footprint journal and OASE. Her book Radical Games was published in 2009; in 2016 she co-edited the volume Autonomous Architecture in Flanders.