+ Published in the Archilab Catalogue 2004 +

Do-It-Yourself Urbanism:

Psychogeography, Generosity, Serendipity and Turriphilia.

"Examine once more those ugly goblins, and formless monsters, and stern statues, anatomiless and rigid; but do not mock at them, for they are the signs of the life and liberty of every workman who struck the stone" - John Ruskin (1853)

Form Follows Flights of Fancy

Horace Walpole (1717-1797) was a psychogeographer long before the word was invented in the early 20th century. His contributions to culture are many: he wrote a gothic novel called "The Castle of Otranto", he authored an important text on garden design, he coined the term serendipity [finding something unexpected and useful while searching for something else], and he was a true icon of turriphilia [the manic desire to built towers]. Walpole, like his contemporary and fellow turriphiliac gothic writer William Beckford is often regarded as a specimen of a predictable kind of romantic eccentric. Psychogeographers however, admire Walpole for his rare ability to create, seemingly by accident, new sensibilities as a by-product of his generosity. Architecture was one of many mediums of expression Walpole tried his hand at. In a period of 20 years he reconstructed a unassuming Tudor mansion into a famous gothic castle on Strawberry Hill near Windsor, London. Both the interior and exterior of Walpole's 'toy-castle' were meticulously designed to provoke a vast array of sensations in its visitors. This carefully engineered psychogeographical atmosphere created a feedback loop with its creator when it inspired Walpole to write his 'The Castle of Otranto', a book that simultaneously defined and superseded the genre that culminated in Harry Potter. Tongue-in-cheek from the first to the last syllable, Walpole entertained his readers by serving them at breakneck speed what would become predictable clichés: ghostly interventions, witchcraft, haunted rooms, secret trapdoors and dark dungeons. Through sheer irony Walpole was saved from the one-dimensionality that characterises his followers: Walpole's generosity works at several levels at once and he gave too much for some to grasp the immensity of the gift.

Psychogeography

In psychoanalysis the word psychogeography is used in relation to phenomena of location based hysteria: you are perfectly sane, you enter a particular room and within a split second you are stark raving mad. Only when this response is universally shared and not dependent on a random individual neurosis, this power of a room can be called psychogeographic. Albert Camus suggested another form of place induced behaviour by telling the story of a man who, hypnotized by a conspiracy of sun, beach and ocean, committed a murder. These are the fictional reports of intuitive minds trying to grasp the conditions that lead to extreme deeds. Both are circumstantial evidence for the existence of something impossible to isolate: the power of landscape to force us into certain behaviour, sometimes even overpowering our will. As it turned out, this interaction is much more complex than generations of urban planners, politicians, political radicals and behaviourists suspected. Urban planning has had its fair share of projects attempting to hardwire human behaviour in urban structure. Walpole exemplifies the suspicion that psychogeographic effects can be artificially created, not as a linear process, but as an emergent, that is serendipitic, enfolding of events. The importance of these indirect consequences of urban form resurfaced as relevant subject in urban planning in the late 1950ties when Kevin Lynch modestly rephrased the need for architectural objects that generate meaning, in his concept of imageability, "that quality in a physical object which gives it a high probability of evoking a strong image in any given observer".  

Generosity    

The emergence of the gothic movement in the late 18th century has been explained as a means to invent new mysteries during a period science was clearing away all the old ones, most notably the rainbow. To attack this inflation of the poetic, Walpole, and this is even more true for Beckford, turned his attention to the Orient: an imaginary domain of caliphs and harems, of mysterious nomads and stubborn camels, of djinns and ghouls, of distant palaces where a story can save your life. This psycho-geography of distant Arab deserts had little to do with reality, but speculative geographies like these function as a domain in which experimental solutions for problems not yet understood can be prepared. Flaubert, during his stay in Egypt, excelled in this spatial fiction when he wrote that nationality shouldn't be based on where you are born, but where you feel at home. This psychogeography for a passport, antidotes the traditional geographical control systems that have become unworkable. Flauberts motherland is one of a nomad: it's generously distributed around the globe, its exact locations saved in a database, its qualities described in PML, Psychogeographical Markup Language, an application agnostic data format, that allows you to compare your pockets of motherland with those of others, helping each other to find places you might feel at home too. The psychogeographical attraction of the nomad as icon is obvious: the nomad doesn't live in a desert, he lives with the desert, a landscape on which human will has no grip and in which cities are impossible to maintain. Cities that are distrusted by the nomad as nothing but a source of aggression and competition, a place that turns former tribesman into rivals. All this, and the political distrust of a mobile lifestyle, has turned the nomad into a historic anomaly. The nomad, legendary for his generosity, is a spectre, and what is more gothic than spectres? It's no coincidence that Walpole added serendipity to our vocabulary in his Persian Tales. Perhaps Kathy Acker had all this in mind when she predicted in the 'Empire of the Senseless' that in few years Paris will be destroyed by Algerian youth, as the justified revenge of the children of the nomads on their coloniser.

Serendipity

Traditionally, psychogeographers adopted surrealists tactics as the guiding principle for navigation without habit; post-Freudian times however demand other paradigms for urban space cut-ups. The insight that simple mathematical rules can result in unpredictable behaviour, are these days applied to the exploration of cities. Small generative algorithms (like: second left, first right, second right, repeat) generate a route filled with strange turns leading into misdirected circumnavigations exploding into the depths of bridges and quays without turns. Like logic-gates, streets can be programmed, and algorithmic walks can be used to program a Turing-complete pedestrian computer as grotesque optimisation of urban space's functionality. Psychogeographical walks are systematic approaches directed against preconceived and unquestioned mental images of landscapes, urban or rural. Psychogeographical walks actively create situations for serendipity to occur: ideas, marvellous views, strange situations, savage transvaluations, human psychology served as permanent vaudeville, the latest dancehall-tunes sounding from car-windows, sudden insights in streetgrid mathematics, inventions and invitations. Cities are generous in what they offer, but the extent of its generosity beyond our grasp, its map not able to express its richness, every bit of city is just as relevant, and just as much part of the whole, as any other bit. But you can't find all this by looking for it. Some people are totally unsuited for psychogeography because they lack the ability to deal with open ended situations; if you don't immediately wonder what might happen when you would execute the above algorithm, you are one of them. Experiment after experiment has proven that every street you always thought to know as the back of your hand can hide interesting goblins previously unnoticed. Psychogeography employs the walk not only because the slow pace allows for close scrutiny of the place you're walking, but because walking is imperative to thinking. This was common knowledge to peripatetic philosophers like Aristotle, while Henry Miller, an ardent pedestrian, discovered it serendipitically. Through his many random encounters with the people he was taught to despise, Miller overcame the racial prejudices he was brought up with.

Turriphilia

Psychogeography is the art of intervention, a conjuring of urban fiction in other peoples backyard: architectural scrying, in a language of form, that scales to the speed of psychogeographical imagination. It's about making something happen, not events, but something more timeless, something less confined by gravity. Something afterwards called 'ghostly' to make it understandable: atmospheres, associations, memes: first bootstrapped into existence, afterwards left alone to enfold according to the logic of the moment, adapted to its spatial circumstances. Turriphiliac buildings drives home the point of generosity and serendipity as interventionists architecture in your backyard. Turriphiliac builders disregard common sense or even the laws of nature. At times both Walpole and Beckford consulted proper architects, but their practical regards were regarded as a nuisance, their suggestions ignored if deemed diminishing to the grand vision of gothic re-enactment. The main tower of Beckfords Fonthilll Abbey collapsed soon after its completion, but Beckford took it as good sport and immediately ordered its rebuilding. Walpole, also, spared little to live up to his architectural visions. After 20 years of constant activity Walpole, by no means poor, was bankrupt. He saw it coming but he didn't seem to care. It shows turriphilia as a pleasant and highly addictive activity that is most of all highly engaging to innocent bystanders. To a turriphiliac the fun of building is more important than the short-lived satisfaction of finishing it. Strawberry Hill's look, feel and function were constant subject to overhaul, its outward appearance never looking quite splendidly enough: turriphilia as the art of overdoing it, excels in generously adding goblins, trapdoors and useless monuments to heroes long forgotten. Turriphilia is the challenge to compile the biggest psychogeographical joyride in existence, it's played like a game of Tetris, but with real bricks. Walpole's folly has nothing to do with the sugar-coated architecture found in Disneyland or Las Vegas. These are mock, superficial ornamental kitsch: turriphilia turned pathological. The goblin of Walpole and Beckford, and of Ruskin too, is no special effect, it's the sign of honesty and generosity urban space needs so much at the moment.

In the end psychogeography is not about intervening through constructing (or demolishing) physical objects but about constructing narrative structures on top of what already exists. Turriphilia is just one way to add a story to the bag of urban legends and apocryphical invisible cities that give meaning to the spaces we inhabit. There is sublimity in a remarkable tower hitting the ground right after its completion, but the resources to built in denial of the laws of gravity are unfortunately not equally distributed, and not very often sought after either. But like Walpole in the end was building his tower foremost to create new stories to enhance his own life, so likewise can we, even though our medium might be different. This brings us back to the before mentioned Psychogeographical Markup Language. Perhaps this is just a product of geekdom coupled with a badly understood notion of the semantic web, but if turriphilia with bricks is out of the question, arranging bits of data will do as well. If algorithms can augment experience, then perhaps serendipity can be downloaded while the beach will turn out to be beneath the pavement after all. Portable computational devices in combination with collaborative mapping practises, are slowly delivering us the ability to construct detailed location-aware, ad-hoc, maps that are more detailed than the territory. This psycho-geography on your device won't tell you where to find the nearest hamburger, it will be a window on gothic softspace layered on top of your common mode of experience. Authoring packages of meaning for non-places or leaving memories related to your old room before you move to new one, is Do-It-Yourself urbanism without having to mess with building permits. You're garden is too small for your turriphiliac purpose anyway. Urbanity is a state of mind. With PML you can create/record your own experiences, you can use them at other times to alter your experience of space, and as such behaviour, and you can also share your library of PML data with friends. This gothic softspace you carry with you at all times, will guide you through your city like a personalised demon. The output of this demon is based on previous input, but the unsuspected results it derives from analysing this, results in such augmentation of common modes of experience, that it will change the feel of urban space into something very much unlike the experience of everybody else, until of course everybody else starts to contribute to the realm of the psychogeographically inclined gothic softspace as well.

Wilfried Hou Je Bek / socialfiction.org


credits and bibliography

* Thanks to Nick of epram.org for pointing me to the concept of turriphilia.
* Most major works of Walpole, Beckford and Ruskin can be found on-line.
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