Americans are historically a mobile people. Space defines them; as the storied vastness was consumed by their transit, transformed from a real frontier to an abstract framework, mobility hardened into cityscapes and highway systems. But the perfected dimension of American mobility, the remainder and memory of the pioneer’s original experience of space, is the frozen muzak of the suburb. This sprawling landscape represents America’s efforts to invent its own ideal geography. The grids and cul-de-sacs map out a carefully engineered, artificial landscape that harbors, in the tug-o-war between individualism and conformity, the genetic material of the national character.
The suburb’s emphatically vague occupation of space recalls the more heroic indeterminacy of the frontier. The unavoidable isolation of those wide-open spaces survives in the suburb’s use of space for separation rather than containment. Though considered wasteful, the tracts cultivate this isolation no less intensely or purposefully than agronomy husbands its acres or urban speculation wrings the last rentable square foot from awkward sites. The yards, setbacks and easements, verges and parking lots and driveways and sidewalks are emphatically useful, places for the ceaseless motion that asserts—and then overcomes—this separation. The traffic across these spaces discloses a productive looseness of fit in the planned life of the suburb that delivers a complex bounty.
The social effect of this spatial isolation varies between a vaunted privacy and discouraging anomie. Since this maneuvering room does not necessarily offer any independence or real freedom, the privacy it offers is tinged with an offsetting restraint. The issue of “fit,” then, has a different valence from this perspective; conformity to the character of the neighborhood and subordination to the spatial organization of the tract grow from social pressures as well as from the tract’s provenance as a mass-produced, factory-built environment. When the fit becomes tighter and attention is focused on the featured objects that serve as counters in the well-regulated game of keeping up with the Jones’s, the shrinking interstitial spaces subtly shift roles. The systemic homogeneity of the mass-produced pieces on the factory-built game board transforms space into spacing, and the vague areas of the yards and setbacks are drafted as cordons sanitaire, carefully signifying ownership and control, rather than freedom.
The success of mass production, with its multivalent insistence on fit—the consumer to product, and product to assembly line—resists the proliferation of choice. While suburban tracts have traditionally offered a range of “models,” distinguished by simplistic variations in “style” and floor plan, the extent of this variety has been less than satisfying. To realize the economic benefits of a wider product line, and to liberate the potential variety buried within mass production’s own proven manufacturing formula, the idea of modular construction has been advanced.
Modularization is a matter of the spacing and relative fit of the components to each other and to the overall intention—a natural consequence of the spirit of the tracts—and its development has paced that of the tracts. From the ready-cut housing that supported western expansion at the turn of the century to the development of the 4x8 prefabricated panel that has propagated the American suburb since the 1940s, the dream of the factory-made house has been largely advanced through the agency of the module. Despite the continued proliferation of modular units in construction, however, very few examples have been considered successful by both the market and architects.1 Most efforts struggle explicitly against this perception, attempting to address the limitations of overly rigid systems with a factory-determined flexibility or mass-produced open-endedness, and consequently have been overwrought or undercooked. Either the module progressively shrinks, multiplying itself to cover every possibility, or it becomes increasingly specific in order to gain absolute control over a much more restricted universe. In either case, the expectations trend toward ever-greater levels of neatness and perfectibility.
The curve of desire sketched out in these trends culminates in the possibility of “mass customization”2 which combines the economic benefits of mass production with custom fabrication’s opportunity to “have it your way.” Two strategies for achieving this convergence have emerged. In the first, sometimes referred to as “built-to-order,” a wider than usual (but still finite) array of menu-driven choices about different aspects of the product is offered to the customer, who can mix and match among them according to certain rules. In the second case, the “choices” become more autographic through technology that translates the customer’s random or gestural commands directly into “unique” components within a standardized framework; typically this has been interpreted formally rather than in terms of performance (except where issues of fit are concerned, such as sports equipment). As introduced into housing and architecture, proposals for mass customization have slighted the former model in favor of the latter, lately deploying digital technology in the name of “continuous differentiation” to pursue a vanishingly fine modularity. Despite architecture’s avowed interest in empowering the user, control of this modularity has remained firmly in the hands of the architects, so the chief beneficiary of such “customization” has been the designer rather than the user. The key advantage of the advanced technology of mass customization has in fact been greater freedom in the design process rather than more flexibility or open-endedness in the finished product.
With respect to flexibility and open-endedness, architecture’s intellectual borrowings have tended to follow an opposite path to practice’s technical foraging. As technology permits more precise control over the process of design, architecture has become increasingly interested in thinking that promotes the maneuvering room and loose fit that runs counter to this imperious exactitude. With each wave of technology a new “ism,” with a corresponding design methodology, finds its way into the conversation; each outdoing its predecessor in its liberation bona fides. Thus the introduction of structuralism’s liberating objectivity and rigor into architectural discourse was shown by post-structuralism’s deconstructive practice to harbor repressive hierarchical structures, while deconstruction in turn has been forced to face the fact that a hierarchy reversed is still a hierarchy. More recently, the possibility of a permanent state of “undecideability” has been raised in order to prevent the promiscuous web of relations uncovered by deconstruction from settling into a rigid structure. This progressive loosening suggests that the problem lies where purpose and freedom collide. A design methodology that can accommodate the force of necessity (function, program), without becoming repressive of the other, unforeseen purposes and activities, has become the stated goal of practice-oriented discourse.
Gilles Deleuze’s “image of thought” has lately been influential in architecture theory because of its joyous recognition of the intractability of this problem.3 Insisting that only the truly new thing can avoid entanglement in a necessarily repressive web of fixed relations, he rejects the possibility for real creativity anywhere but the purely aleatory. Unlike the proponents of structuralism or deconstruction, Deleuze studiously avoids the promulgation of any clear methodology. But architects, aided by Deleuze’s familiar-seeming terms and abetted by the advent of digital muscle, have nonetheless attempted to forge their own, based on these ideas. Despite the impressive complexity of the results, these efforts (as with all digital production, however fine the “resolution”) remain approximations of the actualized virtuality Deleuze holds as the strictly unseekable goal of such production. Like the attempts to define a perfectly general modularity, attempts to create an open-ended “event” space through imaginative “cross-programming,” elaborate diagramming, or involved mapping strategies cannot escape the finite limits of practice: mere complexity does not equal true indeterminacy. And like the deployment of an increasingly fine modularity, the application of exotic software to the task of creating an “other” formalism of continuous differentiation, however “smoothly” flexible or alien, cannot prevent the results from merely introducing (newly) prescriptive patterns of occupation.4
In fact, among all realms of production, architecture is already the most definitively indeterminate. Beyond its institutional identity in the hazy ground between a difference-from-building and a difference-from-art, architecture is ultimately conjured from thin air; no more substantial and determinate than the space it figures. Space is the ultimate seat of freedom, and most of architectural history has been spent vainly trying to control it. Space itself is uncontrollable, “smooth” in Deleuzian parlance. For this reason, design, of whatever intentionality, must result in less freedom. Yet architects cannot give up design, just as clients cannot give up expectations of fit. And neither can avoid confronting the economic reality of the market and its bias toward mass production.
With the assurance of architecture’s ultimately unavoidable indeterminacy, a strategy of loose modularity can be proposed that supports a program of liberation from within the mass-production ethos. Such a surprisingly direct expression of the multiplicity, and its technological extension into the machinic,5 challenges both the creeping absolutism of systems of “customization” that rely on continuous differentiation and the fixed universe of those that permit choice only within the parameters of a proprietary menu. A loose modularity preserves openness by admitting unmandated difference, through the choice, arrangement, extent, and variety of the highly factored but non-proprietary modules. Mostly, though, this freedom is an effect of the undetermined space around and between those modules. In contrast, most programs of mass customization that promote continuous differentiation eliminate this interstitial space entirely, and with it the literal and conceptual room to maneuver. If freedom is a function of these spaces—Deleuze’s lines of flight leak out here6—then systems that factor it out are free only in their initial determination and must be un-free thereafter. For all of their flowing forms, continuously differentiated spaces describe a prescriptive and thus ultimately static environment with no possibility of post-construction alteration or customization. A system of loosely arranged discrete modules, on the other hand, describes a spatial porridge of continuing possibility that encourages change over time. This underscores another chief difference between the two approaches: unlike proposals for mass customization that understand the home’s uniqueness to be primarily formal, loose modularity pins that uniqueness almost entirely on performance. The resulting “homeliness” of the lumpy proposal is a better expression of real domestic value, transforming the meaning of “homely” from ugly to comfortable, if not beautiful.
In such a “lumpy” system, the most difficult, complex elements are fabricated in the factory, while the rest is left for assembly in the field. Rather than the vain wish of a seamless continuum from the factory to the finished installation, lumpiness allows gaps to remain that permit literal and conceptual movement during design, construction, and post-occupancy. The factory-produced modules maximize the quality control and cost-effectiveness afforded by their origin, while their self-sufficiency eliminates all but the most rudimentary impediments to their continual recombination and rearrangement. Since the interstitial spaces are filled on site according to project requirements, they remain technically independent of the factory-produced lumps; this “secondary” construction can adjust to accommodate the relative permanence of the particular arrangement. The indeterminate character of the matrix of gaps distinguishes the lumpy strategy from other approaches to modularity and mass customization.
Lumpiness avoids an extreme adherence to a mantra of systematized flexibility that would inevitably become as stifling and inflexible as the form-based efforts of continuous differentiation or the finite palette of the “built-to-order” equivalent. Instead it offers a challenge to work with the leftover spaces, in the loose fit between and around the lumps. Consequently, a lumpy system has no expectations for completeness that the user must either fail or chafe against; it does not view the house as a finished product, but as a continuously negotiated collection of products and their accommodation. The “customization” is not exhausted in the initial purchase or fabrication—or design—however unique, but continues through the transformation of the initial choice in the “mass” of choices that come after. And by such continual transformation, the freedom of the wide-open spaces that exists otherwise only in memory, is reawakened in the tighter spaces between. This is what remains for the architect; lumpiness allows her to work with it.
First published in Praxis 3 (2002)