[Content]

[INTRO] thesis

[ 1 ] WARFARE = WAR // ARCHITECTURE = PEACE?
1.1 THE CITIES´ ERASURE AS A NEW OPPORTUNITY
1.2 THE SUBJECT OF ARCHITECTURE

[ 2 ] CITY – APPARATUS OF WAR
2.1 THE URBANIZATION OF WAR
2.2 THE PROCESS OF BUILDING AS A WEAPON = JIHAD OF BUILDINGS
2.3 THE ROLE OF SPATIAL BORDERS IN THE FUTURE

[ 3 ] THE ISRAELI-PALESTINIAN CONFLICT
3.1 VOLUMETRIC BORDERS AND A DYNAMIC NETWORK OF POINTS
3.2 2D-MAPS AND 3D-PROBLEMS
3.3 PANOPTIC FORTRESSES
3.4 THE CONTROL OF AIRSPACE
3.5 BYPASS ROADS, TUNNELS AND BRIDGES

[ 4 ] DIGITAL WARFARE, AI + THE PRODUCTION OF ARCHITECTURE
4.1 FUTURISM AND WAR
4.2 NEW TECHNOLOGIES - NEW WARS, NEW ARCHITECTURE
4.3 ARCHITECTURE AND ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE (AI)
4.4 CYBORG AND VIRTUAL REALITY, CYBERSPACE

[EXTRO] conclusion

[INTRO]thesis
A well-known architecture magazine intended once to publish an issue, which should deal with the topic of architecture and its connection to war and therefore wanted to publish projects of some well-known architects. But almost every office rejected and did not want to be brought into the connection of the theme of war.

For that reason it becomes evident that there is a certain kind of resistance among architects to enter the discussion about the relationship between architecture and politics, and therefore war. As Lebbeus Woods emphasizes in his quote above, architects are and have always been committed to supporting the existing structure of authority and the political system behind it. Architects believe themselves to be creators and innovators, but in fact they are very often not more than the executors of a physical and social order. Architects tend to hide themselves behind their “professionalism” in order to protect themselves from confrontation with political conditions.

It goes even beyond, in many examples in the past, but also in present times, architects have become perfect strategists in the organization of war and the machinery behind it. Architecture becomes an instrument for controlling space and has always been an apparatus for establishing boundaries, physically and mentally.

Another point is that both, war and also the production of architecture have gone through a radical change, especially during the last 20 years until now. “Intelligent” machines, namely the further development of the computer have influenced warfare but also the production of architecture. Behind the background of Artificial Intelligence, the computer takes on more and more human abilities. If we compare the role of the robot, implied with artificial intelligence, in the new wars, where the human gets almost obsolete, does this then predict also the radical change in the production of architecture within virtual space, where the architect would loose his influence, because the computer could take on such abilities? Is the architect going to be eliminated from his “battlefield” like the human element or the soldier is going to be eliminated from the battlefield of war? And what would be the consequences?
For the understanding of the role of the architect and the changes both in the production of architecture and within the war machinery, it would be informative to take a closer look at a place of conflict where architects are consciously or unconsciously part and executive arms of a war machinery. Furthermore, I am deeply interested in how wars have changed and how far they have invaded our built environment, our cities.

All this has to be considered in coherence to the technological changes, both in architecture and in warfare. My thesis is that the invention of artificial intelligence and of virtual space, both in these two components of society, will have an enormous impact on the perception of the question of responsibility for action, both in the case of warfare and within the production process of architecture and its consequences.

This key position I want to evaluate and argue by the content of the following chapters.

[ 1 ] WARFARE = WAR // ARCHITECTURE = PEACE?
1.1 THE CITIES` ERASURE AS A NEW OPPORTUNITY

War has always been a mighty employer. During the 80s, in times of the Cold War the debate about the need for architecture became quite predominant. The nuclear threat threw a different light onto the role of architecture of reconstruction. The bunker buildings which the architects were engaged with were rather needed by an inner political deception, which should reassure and simulate chances of survival, where there were none. Architects could already earn money in that first part of the war, which is there before it starts. However, the second part of a nuclear war, the reconstruction, would be dropped. In this case war can no longer be progressive.

On the other hand, in the years before, reconstruction was always welcomed by architects and urban planners. The war that erased everything old and rusty, primarily during bomb attacks, created a plain field for the latest urban planning ideas. This makes it clear that an urban planner’s technique, performed on planning paper, was transferred to the immediate reality of war: the erasure of cities. The logic of drawing after erasure became here crucial [img01/02]. One could even say that architects gave their consent to destruction, though war was the trigger for subversion, new state buildings and cities. The logic of further spreading seizure resulted in a kind of revolution, destruction and renewal. Naturally there have been radical chances since man’s existence, for instance during the Renaissance or in revolutionary architecture, where a newer, uncompromising form replaced the old. The claim of architecture to renew the world is anything but new. Le Corbusier´s plan for Voisin was so radical, that a devastating aerial war would have been necessary, to bring it into discussion as a reconstruction proposal. The strength of radical change caused by a nuclear bomb [img03], however, would be so unbelievably strong as to make reconstruction more than superfluous.

1.2 THE SUBJECT OF
ARCHITECTURE

The subject of architecture goes along with the motives for designing. Is it the wish for self-realization that drives the architect?

There were times when the social strength of symbolism, achieved by architecture, was extremely important. When one considers the example of the Atlantic bunker buildings [imgs04], one could state that these re-recognizable architectures were inalienable for the regime and its warfare. Their aesthetics marked an important point. Today, as times have changed, modern killing machinery is no longer symbolised through architecture. The aesthetics of architecture are no longer a part of military politics. Military aesthetics are now rather expressed by the phallic design of rockets or by the high advanced technology that stands behind it.

Furthermore, architectural expression has been replaced by the quality of the engineer. There has been a profound shift in both, war and architecture, war and society. Military development continued, but experts for aesthetic visibility were no longer needed. In the 80s, the impersonal organization of mass killing was implemented by technicians who developed the direct destruction capacity in the form of atomic and chemical bombs. But this development did not come to an end at all. In the information era, intelligent and autonomous weapon systems came to the fore.

But now let us return to the “real” object of architecture. The process of building itself, the erection of the material building mass, is not recognized by architects as architecture. Architecture is something different, higher and absolute. There is even something like a “transcendental task of architecture” . The design and the plan is rather an intellectual machine, which creates connection between mind, paper and house. Hitler, for instance, considered war to be an aesthetic event, an architect’s dream?
There is also another striking connection between architecture and war techniques to be found. Machine art was already important for architects like Michelangelo, Brunelleschi and Leonardo da Vinci. The intellectual machine, the design, became a real machine and the brilliance of that device (machines for raising, supporting or moving) was decisive for the success or failure of the building. Somehow collapse was identical to a lost battle.

Looking more closely at architects in the past, Albert Speer, for instance, in the era of the Nazi regime, one can state that he failed as an architect, but then became an organiser of war, war architecture and finally organiser of the Total War. He mastered the total organisation of building and dictatorially organized production. In this case, that was his self-realization as an architect.
At least from that time on, warfare became its own industry, which no longer required architectural expression. Considering that, Dieter Hofmann-Axthelm writes in his essay, concerning the relation between war and architecture.

„Architecture does not appear anymore to be symbolic, it is rather the hardening other side of the war machine, the logistics, the war economic organization. (…) The symbolic part – the cartridges, the portal grimaces of the national fortresses, the design parts of Atlantic bunkers – are just an extra income, indispensable when in misery. The thicknesses of wall, the hitting angle and the radius of action, that matters.” Hoffmann-Axthelm Dieter: Krieg und Architektur; ARCH+ 71

What about if the architect would become instead of the decorateur, the organiser of war? And what would be the consequences, when in our information era today the machine, the computer would replace the architect as an organiser of space?

[...]

[EXTRO]conclusion

De Landa mentions in his book the intention of the military of getting the human eye completely out of the loop, and describes how the military has announced its intention to create robotic weapons, machines capable of automatic target detection friend/foe recognition:

“Autonomous weapons are a revolution in warefare in that they will be the first machines given the responsibility for killing human beings without human direction or supervision. To make this more accurate these weapons will be the first killing machines that are actually predatory, that are designed to hunt human beings and destroy them.”

This not reality yet, these technologies are still in their infancy and humans are still part of the decision making process – both in warfare and in the production of architecture, mentioned mainly in the chapter, describing the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In this case the political nature of architecture and urban planning becomes very clear. As I have described in this essay, cities and architects are becoming more than ever part of the warfare – and so their role and their occupation with political and social topics is becoming increasingly significant. The radical technological change in warfare and the invention of artificial intelligence have also affected architecture, its production and the perception of space. As already mentioned above, CAD and virtual space represents a mighty tool for reduction and control, because it is fixed and can not relate or react on social, political and economical changes. In the same way the realization of the “battlefield without humans” and the implication of autonomous weapons, is leaving too easily the responsibility to machines, which are (still) not “aware” of the consequences they cause by their action. The process of design, as already mentioned at the very beginning of this paper, used to be seen as a process of creation or “genesis”, which was done by the cumulating designing by pencil, where you would draw a material line onto the paper.

This repetitive process left space for intuitive adaptation and time for the growth of the concept. This stands in extreme contrast to digital design, where the cumulative repetition expresses itself through the lightening speed of data processing and where the meaning of time becomes obsolete.

On the other hand architecture has the potential to be a tool for establishing a dialoque, in which the participants exchange themselves in political issues. Architecture must initiate events, must act as instigator, agiator and active participant. The responsibility of architecture within society must be formed by the architect, who is fully responsible for his action. Architecture must be therefore an instrument of transformation, which of course naturally establishes boundaries, but on the other hand this architecture of transformation has to demand as well their violation. The computer itself, of course is an “innocent” machine. Since the raise of the personal computer, the computer screen has become an interface between the human and the machine. The computer display has been transformed into the surface of contact. Already in the past there has been the idea that the computer could become a medium to amplify man´s intellect and to provide a surface of contact between humans. Might there a possibility to establish a computer interface that can make the dream of a people-computer partnership a reality?

We do not know yet, but today in the times of radical changes within warfare and the production of architecture, technology can be a trap, where the screens can become narcotic mirrors and give a false and intoxicating sense of the user´s own power.