THESIS PROPOSAL DRAFT

This is a copy of the Thesis Proposal (rough...) I submitted a little while ago.

Adriel Mesznik

Thesis Proposal

Advisor: Timothy Hyde

9-7-07

My thesis project will address the contemporary global proliferation of lawlessness. I will propose an architecture and a way of architecting that can effectively engage this lawless context. I will arrive at this proposal through the research of agents, productions, and techniques that are already engaged, successfully or not, with such lawlessness.

Lawlessness thrives in/on lawless zones. Zones explicitly beyond the reach of civil law. Zones outside of state control, or no longer exclusively or effectively under state control. Emerging or decaying, fleeting or permanent, conscious constructions or haphazard byproducts.

Warzones represent one extreme of lawlessness, zones outside the control of civil law, with their own complex legal structures, created by states outside of (but perhaps overlapping with) the territory of states themselves. Other examples might include: private security zones, airports, international waters, the internet, multinational corporations, megacities, gangland, no-man’s land…

In the end, though, I am interested in the architecture, the structures, of these zones. Structures that might define, comprise, support, conceal, locate, describe, choreograph, influence, coexist with, emerge from these zones of lawlessness. Architectures unique to a particular lawless zone or common to all. I am interested in the physical entities (and attendant processes and techniques) that are the definition, corollary, product, or byproduct of a particular lawless context or to lawlessness in general.

Currently, these architectures of lawlessness are considered unknown, irrelevant, or incidental to contemporary architectural discourse and practice. Architectural discourse and practice have become dangerously complacent in ignoring (willfully or otherwise) the proliferation and subsequent importance of such zones and their architectures (existing, emergent, implied, or potential). As a result, discourse is unable to successfully consider such zones, and practice unable to engage them. Architecture (as discipline and practice) remains locked in an increasingly anachronistic relationship with aging, ineffective powers that hold little or no purchase over or effectiveness within the expanding lawless zones. Architecture is becoming increasingly powerless and irrelevant, unable to recognize, much less engage, an increasingly large percentage of the world’s spaces.

This situation must be remedied if architecture is to remain the primary means of shaping the world around us.

The contemporary conditions of lawlessness are neither new nor unique. Nor are they uncharted or unnavigable. I will therefore turn to cotemporary and historical scenarios as precedent from which architecture can learn. I will be researching groups that engage such lawless zones and exercise agency within or over them, the techniques and practices they use to do so, and the results or products of their engagement that have some impact on or relationship with these zones.

I might observe the example of the US military as it restructures itself to function in newly redefined warzones, outsourcing to paramilitary corporations such as Blackwater and cooperating with non-governmental organizations such as Medecins Sans Frontieres. Research might involve looking at a Field Manual, a piece of hardware, a strategy, or an ideological shift. I might investigate pirates and privateers, terrorists and mercenaries, missionaries and explorers as agents that operate with varying degrees of efficacy or success within lawless zones…

The intent is to find precedents that will allow for the assembly of an architecture of lawlessness, a means for architecture as a discipline to exist within, engage with, and ultimately influence the structures of these zones of lawlessness.

Random helpful quotes-of-the-week:

“If organization, as reflected in architecture and urbanism, possesses disposition, the means to aggress or collude, it may also be an adversary or a competitor. It may be brittle or stretchy. Its software or hardware is capable of political manipulation or violence, and also capable of storing or unleashing this agency in its inception, planning, and building as well as its occupation. As it mixes with overt or covert lawlessness, architecture possesses the means to war.”

“…effective activism will now rarely look like classic resistance. Rather resistance may come cloaked in its opposite, just as capital can be cloaked in the costumes of resistance…the various masquerades of resistance need not correspond to those of a tragic counterculture with its principled self-valorizations – righteous dispositions they share with war.”

“Political practices often gravitate to one of several well-rehearsed roles: the earnest public servant, the political theorist, or the strident activist…”

“Piracy is a useful construct here – one that yields a continuum of characters from the privateer and military entrepreneur to the terrorist and murderer: enough variations on the confidence game to provide reflections of diplomats, viceroys, orgmen, and elected officials.”

Keller Easterling, Enduring Innocence, pgs 7-11