Becoming Form: Athenian Urban Ecologies

Stavros Kousoulas

Faculty of Architecture & the Built Environment TU Delft

The Netherlands

Becoming Form: Athenian Urban Ecologies

What’s the Matter? Materiality and Materialism at the Age of Computation486

As any analysis of contemporary architectural discourse will attest, the discipline is presently revealing a series of unprecedented concerns in regards to its methods of inquiry and practice. At a time when the heavy reliance on critical theories as a means and a method to interrogate the practice of architecture has been loosened in favor of other, more pragmatic and pluralistic approaches, contemporary discourse and theory formation are reacting accordingly. Arguably, the reflective character of architectural theory, its dependence on taxonomic classification of form and typology, its tendency to react to the presentation of flamboyant design concepts via a critique of a host of forces influencing the practice from outside, as well as an emphasis on notions of sus-tainability and development, are all but examples of how architectural theory and its discourse are grappling to deal with the rapid changes brought about by the increas-ingly complex reality of the present.

In the present paper I aim to depart from the problem of critique in contemporary architectural discourse, and rather argue that new or renewed attitudes and per-spectives are necessary to further contribute to the body of knowledge of the disci-pline. One such approach could be the understanding of aesthetics vis a vis critique. While ideology, for example, was considered a stronghold to explain and understand change, and in fact, was believed to generate change itself, today the validity of this assumption is being challenged. If one moves from ideological judgment to aesthet-ic encounter, then change can be understood as the correlation between intuition (aesthesis) and the processes that condition it. Change and its possibility are then to be problematized in plural terms, placing them within an environment of relation-ships.

The shift from reflection on thought to reflections on our environment (understood as milieu) implies a shift towards an ecological perspective. If material forms are seen not as systems which operate on an input/output base –from the concept to

Stavros Kousoulas 487

the built, from the plan to space-, but as the incorporation of functions as intricate ways of dealing with complexity, then it becomes clearer that an appropriate posi-tion from where to formulate architectural theory is on the immanent middle point, not on the edges. In other words, architectural discourse and material practices have to meet halfway. In order to outline the parameters for a renewed architectural re-search methodology, materiality itself, –the scope of this research-, will have to be rethought.

This requires the introduction of a broader understanding of agency, which de-centers the human being –the architect, i.e.-, and posits it within materiality, where materiality is understood as an equally active agent. The plasticity and multidi-mensionality of matter as the locus of form, on the one hand, and on the other, the acknowledgment that human perception is itself plastic, are crucial. Perception and its techniques of deployment, seen as epistemological tools, become central to an understanding of the production of form as a temporally crystalized pattern of complexity. Using hierarchical or scalar-based methodologies would be futile, as the point in question is precisely to unravel a process of becoming. For architects, the “carpenters of materiality”, this implies to step out of a reflective loop, and into a trajectory of emergence.

On MethodMy aim is to examine the correlation between active morphogenetic processes and their perceptual classification as typological categories of any kind. Considering archi-tectural and urban design as substantial drivers of material production, I will outline an understanding of matter as an active agent in morphogenesis: the birth of form. Shifting from an essentialist approach, which focuses exclusively on actual products and conceives matter as an inert receptacle of forms from the outside, thus prioritizing concepts over matter, central to my research is the gradual replacement of an obedient matter with one in which its own tendencies and capacities drive its reproductive proc-esses. Using materialism as its ontological and epistemological base, and with the aid of assemblage theory 1, dynamical processes such as architectural and urban produc-tion, -seen as a spatiotemporal cascade of mimesis and differentiation-, will be coupled with the subsequent representation and interpretation of the urban environment by its inhabitants, as well as with the behavioral patterns that they formulate. The aim is to bridge a significant gap between ongoing material production and its a priori or a posteriori classification, proposing a non-hierarchical methodology of architectural research, which regards materiality neither fully empirically nor solely speculatively, while being able to remain abductive and pertain to real constraints.2 In that sense, the contemporary urban ecology of Athens will be used as a case study for applying a new form of architectural research.


Non-linear Urban CausalityAn essentialist approach to urban entities considers them as a seamless whole, a total-ity, whose parts formulate relations of interiority leading later to its emergent proper-ties. 3 Most of essentialist approaches consist of a very specific process: starting with finished products, discovering through logical reductive analysis the enduring proper-ties which characterize those products, and then elevating this set of properties into a defining essence. This process eventually generates the inability of conceiving archi-tectural objects and urban entities as emergent products, enforcing a constant resem-blance to archetypical taxonomies.

On the contrary, in this paper causal relations are understood in their productive po-tential, in the sense that the cause would produce the effect, not just imply it. More importantly, the cause would not produce an identical recurrent effect, but rather sets of similar yet differentiated events, which could eventually counter affect the trigger-ing initial event. 4 By applying non-linear causality in urban research, the city is exam-ined as a whole of multiple components and their interactions; material environment, inhabitants, their expressive behaviors, flows of energy, networks of people, which in their synthesis endow the city with properties that are not necessarily retraceable back

Fig. 1

View of Athens from the Parthenon. S. Kousoulas.


to them. The linkages between the components of a city are not logically necessary but contingently obligatory. 5 And while logically necessary relations may be investigated by thought alone, contingently obligatory ones require an empirical research, one fo-cusing on the history of the coevolution of the related parts, inserting crucial param-eters such as their heterogeneity, and thus conceiving them as historical products. 6

Flat OntologiesThe main characteristics of an assemblage may be understood as component parts that are characterized by relations of exteriority, thus existing in principle independ-ently of their interactions, having both material and expressive roles, interacting in processes which stabilize or destabilize the assemblage (territorialization and deter-ritorialization) while others, mainly expressive ones, rigidify its identity (coding and de-coding), resulting in larger scale entities that have properties irreducible to the initial components. 7 On this base, and on the claim that urban entities and their perception are both historical products and catalysts, the aim would be to formulate the diagram of their evolutional and procedural characteristics. The diagram here is equivalent to a body plan; a set of universal singularities that structure the space of possibilities of the assemblage, while its component parts are so-called individual singularities. 8 There-fore, rather than focusing on the properties of an imaginary end product, one focuses on the processes of urban reproduction, as well as on the processes that maintain or destabilize it.

Objections to scalar and hierarchical approaches require a reconsideration of the epis-temological methods, which obscure the situated complexities of the urban milieu. 9 In order to construct a new methodology for architectural and urban research, a flat on-tology composed of complex, emergent spatial relations will be adopted. Flat ontolo-gies consist of self-organizing systems, assemblages, where the dynamic properties of matter produce a multiplicity of complex relations and singularities that sometimes lead to the creation of new, unique events and entities, while more often to relatively repetitive orders and practices. 10

For a coherent flat ontology to support a new urban research, three transdisciplinary conceptual fields have to be considered: the analytics of composition and decompo-sition, which resist the practice of representing urban ecologies as a mere jumble of flows; the focus on differential relations, which constitute the driving forces of mate-rial composition and problematize axiomatic tendencies to classify architectural ob-jects and urban spatialities; and finally, the attention on localized and non-localized emergent events of differential relations actualized as temporary sites where the social unfolds. 11 A transdisciplinary flat ontology will eventually be able to account for socio-spatial emergencies within the urban ecology without demanding any prior, static and monotonous conceptual category.

In order to carry out this endeavor it is necessary to follow a continuous balance be-tween theoretical and practical investigation. This constant exchange of theory and


practice will prevent confining the investigation and endowing it with an unwanted sense of automatism. In other words, by rejecting any automatized apparatus based on input output binaries, a methodology able to heuristically explore urban environ-ment, even on a trial and error base, is proposed. This allows us to remain within a conception of space and time as equally important factors, not prioritizing neither of them, thus acknowledging the rate of change –or in a broader meaning of this, the speed of becoming 12 - of the objects it examines. The speed of becoming can be under-stood as the instantaneous value of a morphogenetic process and therefore includes information, which has local spatiotemporal characteristics. It is this immanent locality that demands the linking of theory and practice on an actual territory.

Athenian Urban EcologiesThis territory will be Athens, examined within a specific time period ranging from its inception as the Greek capital in 1834 up to the present. The choice of Athens as a case study is based on the artificiality of its denomination as a capital, an act beholding ethnic and political implications rather than actual facts such as economic and cultural power, and to the existence of a multilayered environment whose temporal aspects of historical evolution do spatially co-exist. In other words, Athens as a historical entity possesses characteristics of an intense spatiotemporal multiplicity, further complexi-fied by the appliance of power concepts on the body of its material environment and its inhabitants. Taking into account all the specific characteristics of the Athenian en-vironment, its urban, social and physical ecology, the attractors of its development will be located; the rhythmic of order and disorder that produces the Athenian asym-metries, as experienced in the fundamental unit of urban reproduction, the polykatikia. It is through the study of the urban unit as a historical product that we will witness the actualization of practices and policies into space, and the ways that through its replica-tion, differentiated forms of socio-spatial attitudes emerge.

By examining the differentiating character of practices of inhabitance through their spatiotemporal recurrence, we will be able to trace connections between multiple fields, which in different proportions of mutual affection gave rise to various patterns of inhabitance. A situated flat ontology will be able to account for the intricate ways that the layout of the built environment operates as an ordering force in relation to the practices that humans arrange in conjunction with it. 13 Therefore, in order to exam-ine the Athenian ecology one must follow a multiplicity of interactive urban practices through their localized interconnections. Having already introduced the notion of the universal and individual singularities and given the significance placed on practices and orders of inhabitance, I will consider their manifestations as material actualizations of their space of possibilities. That translates them as fully contingent, meaning that other arrangements of actual and possible urban relations would result into different practices. It is this move that permits to place my research in the in-between of the extensive mimesis of urban reproduction and its immanent intensive capacities for the emergence of the new. 14


Immanent Urbanity When King Otto laid foot on the port of Piraeus on December 1, 1834, the fate of Ath-ens as the modern capital of the newly formed Greek State was sealed. Approximately 170 plans for new towns, including Athens, were executed in Greece during the nine-teenth century. The majority of the plans for these new towns were based on standard orthogonal grids, with the urban legislation of the period being the locomotive for the creation of a homogeneous urban environment. The new Athens followed a relatively symmetrical plan, originally devised by German and Greek architects Schaubert and Kleanthe (1831-1833), designed for a population of approximately 40.000 residents. 15 Its most important element was the Isosceles triangle, nowadays referred to as the ‘his-torical triangle’, from where the city’s most significant landmarks found their rearrange-ment. The new plans of the city forced its development towards the northeastern side of Acropolis with the Royal Palace placed at the center of the project, positioned on the top of the Isosceles triangle, facing the Parthenon, while the other monuments were aligned as fundamental parts of the urban tissue. The remaining Ottoman occupied land was subdivided and distributed among small land owners, thus making it almost impossible to conceive an urban grid based on the city block as its key element. 16 This

Fig. 2

The plan of Schaubert and Kleanthe for Athens in 1833. K. Mpiris, Athens from the 19th to the 20th Century, (Melisa: Athens, 1995).


plan became the basis from where thousands of small- and large-scale buildings were to be constructed.

This is the precise moment of deviation in any analytical historical approach which would aim to account for the emergence of the Athenian contemporary urban unit, the polykatikia. A traditional approach would advance the archetypical resemblance of the newly emerging urban unit with the dominant modernist principles of the first half of the 20th century, diminishing thus its formulation and width spread to an appli-ance of a replicated set of transcendental design rules. On the contrary, my research aims, as already stated, to avoid treating the emergence of form neither as an input nor an output of a linear process. And if the mesoscale, the in between of micro and macro processes, is the starting point, then the very understanding of the concept of environ-ment has to slide from transcendentality to immanence.

German biologist’s, Jakob von Uexküll, concept of Umwelt would significantly contrib-ute to that. Umwelt stands for “…the biological foundations that lie at the very epi-center of the study of both communication and signification in the human [and non-human] world”. 17 In other words, it is the continuous surrounding practical world, in which an object –animate or inanimate- does not exist in a habitat, but it itself is the habitat. Uexküll through the concept of Umwelt set the very first principle of imma-

Fig. 3

Aerial view of Athens. Greek Army Geographical Service.


nence, the foundation of ecological thinking; organisms, objects, environment, inside and outside do not differ in kind but in degree. It is via immanence that any linear account for the emergence of form can be exchanged with a research methodology which handles form similarities as populations of contiguous ways of treating com-plexity, formulating and reshaping environments. In that sense, the polykatikia, is not an archetypical resemblance to a modernist fantasy, but rather the complex solution to complex problems.

The Form is the EnemyIn the work of Gilles Deleuze, an organism poses both a problem and a solution. For the sake of my research argument, let me enhance the former by replacing organism with form; a form poses both a problem and a solution. Why is it then that the form is the enemy? 18 It has nothing to do with a dislike of form; rather it intends to radi-cally raise the issue of going beyond form, past any taxonomical categorization and straight to the effort of unraveling the pure ontological processes that give birth to it. It redefines form as nothing if not the solution to a problem. 19 However, it simul-taneously problematizes it, aiming to shed light into it, conceiving a formal solution not as something fixed and reified, concealing the immanent problems that made it

Fig. 4

Polykatikia plan. S. Kousoulas.


emerge and which partially –or not- pertain. Because if form is a solution then it is a solution to its own problem. The question therefore is, what is the problem? What makes form emerge? What can it do? Out of which relations is a form composed? How are these relations articulated? This is the problematique that one must face if to account for the double nature of form. It is the problematique of tracing becoming in being.

The polykatikia, the unit of the Athenian urban reproduction, has to be placed in an environment of practices; a relational field of gravitational forces, attractors, which eventually give spatial and temporal shape –as spaces and rhythms of inhabitance- to the everyday life. The polykatikia, seen as the set of practices it affords and can afford to its environment, is then an assemblage of active agencies formulating the Athenian milieu. A milieu which as Deleuze and Guattari remind us, is always fourfold: an exterior milieu (the material ‘outside’ of the organism), an interior (its structure), an intermediary (the membrane) and an annexed or associated milieu (energy that transverses it). 20 Any form is in fact a composition of these environmental differential relations, and by recognizing it as such we are able to account for its dual nature of a problematized solution.

The practices of the Athenian urban unit as they unfold in the multiplicities of the mi-lieu, can be distinguished to those it partakes and to those that take place in it. These are the relations that Sanford Kwinter respectively names as “micro-architectures” – the ones that saturate and compose the urban unit – and “macro-architectures” – relations that comprehend or envelop it. 21 For Kwinter, practices are clusters of action, affectivity and matter which correspond less to formed, distinguishable objects than to a specific “regime” that for a specific time inhabits the urban field. A regime imposes a certain configuration on a field as it manages to organize, ally and distribute bodies, materials, movements and techniques in space while simultaneously controlling and developing the temporal relations between them. 22 If one aims to examine the emergence of the polykatikia, its persistence, its transformations, as well as the differentiating patterns of inhabitance it produces, then one has to trace, interrelate and diagrammatically ex-pose the –both virtual and actual – regimes that manifested it as a formal solution to the problems they posed.

It is then that historical facts seize to be part of a linear data insertion on an atemporal account of urban form emergence, and rather set on to formulate populations of at-tractors which drive the morphogenetic processes. Influences of the modernist avant-garde, the demands of a state devastated after the Second World War, the influx of internal migration to the expanding capital, the appraisal and consequent fall of the polykatikia as an ideal model of inhabitance, the use of a massively produced build-ing material, closely connected to the industrialization of the periphery of Athens, just to name few of them, are both singularities – moments of fundamental qualitative change – and intricate parts of a relational web which shapes the overlapping regimes of urban production.


Open-EndMy aim so far has been twofold; on the one hand, as part of an ongoing research, to highlight aspects of a pluralist methodology which would encompass population, in-tensive and virtual modes of thinking so as to account for the emergence of complex ur-ban phenomena. On the other, to problematize the emergence of the most prominent element of the Athenian urban ecologies, the polykatikia. What hopefully becomes evi-dent via their parallel development is the need for a paradigm shift in which the given is considered as incapable of explaining anything; on the contrary, it itself needs to be explained by determining the conditions under which it is actualized. 23 It is through this shift that the complexities of urban ecologies can be examined in their full potential, ex-cluding interpretations which fail to avoid being either transcendental or overspecified, while maintaining the capability of synthetically incorporating future events. Thus, an open-ended research process of urban and architectural emergence is structured, able of being simultaneously analytic and synthetic, aiming to affect not only the way we comprehend and consume space, but also the way we record and produce it. A research process which problematizes abstract design principles and choices via linking them with their actualization: urban and architectural theory with material practices.

Fig. 5

Relational Traces. S. Kousoulas.


Notes 1. As introduced by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari and later developed by Manuel DeLanda. 2. Negarestani, R 2014, Frontiers of Manipulation, from Speculations on Anonymous Materials

Symposium MMXIV, (January 4th, 2014). 3. DeLanda, M 2006, A New Philosophy of Society, Continuum Books, London; DeLanda, M 2002,

Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy, Continuum Books, London. 4. Bunge, M 1979, Causality and Modern Science, Dover Publications Inc., New York. Bunge

credits both Spinoza and Leibniz with the introduction of efficient inner causation. Gilles Deleuze continues this tradition when he gives equal importance to capacities to affect and capacities to be affected.

5. “A seamless whole is inconceivable except as a synthesis of these very parts, that is, the links between its components form logically necessary relations which make the whole what it is. But in an assemblage these relations may be only contingently obligatory.” Manuel DeLanda, 2006, p. 11.

6. “What is an assemblage? It is a multiplicity which is made up of heterogeneous terms and which establishes liaisons, relations between them, across ages, sexes and reigns – different natures. Thus the assemblage’s only unity is that of a co-functioning: it is a symbiosis, a sympathy. It is never filiations which are important, but alliances, alloys; these are not successions, lines of de-scent, but contagions, epidemics, the wind.” Deleuze & Parnet 2002, Dialogues II, Continuum Books, London, p. 69.

7. Deleuze, G & Guattari, F 2004, A Thousand Plateus, Continuum Books, London; DeLanda, M 2006.

8. For Deleuze’s most extended discussion on diagrams, see Deleuze, G 2006, Foucault, Con-tinuum Books, London.

9. Law, J 2004, ‘And if the global were small and noncoherent? Method, complexity and the baroque’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space.

10. Marston, SA, Jones JP III & Woodward, K 2005, ‘Human Geography without Scale’, Transac-tions of the Institute of British Geographers, vol. 30, p. 422.

11. Marston, SA, Jones JP III & Woodward, K 2005, pp. 416-432. 12. Deleuze, G 2004, Difference & Repetition, Continuum Books, London. 13. Schatzki, T 2002, The Site of the Social: A Philosophical Account of the Constitution of Social Life

and Change, Pennsylvania State University Press, PA; Whatmore, S 2002, Hybrid Geographies: Natures, Cultures, Spaces, Sage, London.

14. DeLanda, M 2002. 15. Bastéa, E 2008, Neoclassic Urbanism and Greek National Identity, Libro, Athens, p. 155. 16. It is important to mention that here I am dealing with the period that covers the initial plan-

ning and its implementation. The distribution of land was posterior to the planning, and was executed factually only on state-owned land in central areas. In the remaining areas, which were considered less important, the grid followed the guidelines of the master plan. In later stages, the plots were subdivided, something that gave access to all the small properties within the block.

17. von Uexküll, J 1957, A Stroll Through the Worlds of Animals and Men: A Picture Book of Invisible Worlds, International Universities Press, New York; Sebeok, T 1976, Contribution to the Doc-trine of Signs, University of Toronto Press, Toronto.


18. Paraphrasing the quote “the organism is the enemy” from Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateus, p. 196.

19. Deleuze, G, Difference and Repetition, p. 272. 20. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateus, pp. 49, 52, 384; Buchanan, B 2008, Onto-etholo-

gies: The Animal Environments of Uexkull, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty and Deleuze, SUNY Press, New York.

21. Kwinter, S 2001, Architectures of Time, MIT Press, Cambridge, p. 14. 22. Kwinter, S, 2001, p. 14. 23. Deleuze, G, Difference & Repetition.

Becoming Form: Athenian Urban Ecologies

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