Three Songs of Architecture and Shape-shifting
Peg Rawes

Let us talk of the relationship that exists between architecture and the history of ideas in Western philosophy. Both are concerned with modes of building and system: architecture is the production of built form and philosophy is the production of concepts. In addition, each discipline has used binary ideas to define, organise and differentiate its practice, for example, the relationship between; subject/ object (e.g. designer/ user, and user/ building), form/ matter, system/ programme, reason/ unreason, stasis/ event or, inside/ outside. But there are also practices that are not restricted to the fixed oppositions of the binary system, allowing more dynamic operations and modes to exist. These are tales of transformation within matter that is both perceptible and imperceptible, real and imaginary, concrete and virtual, and propose qualitatively different relations in which architecture can be realised.
“Tell me a story,” said the Kite, spreading her wings on the hot soil to dry the remaining drops of rain on her plumage. Thanks to Ariadne’s reason and thread, the Octopus, Kite and Earwig had finally got out of the tedious labyrinth that some insist is filled with endless holes (but this is just an illusion)... So, outside the restrictive limits of an idealised, yet divided, empirical order they settle between the molecules of air, water and earth to hear the Earwig sing her tale of Persephone’s  movement between dark and light, heat and cold, surface and depth. [See also the work of Christina McPhee, sonicpersephone at www.soundtoys.net or http://www.naxsmash.net ]
Persephone, daughter of Zeus and Demeter (Goddess of the Harvest) moves between the world of air and light and the underworld of gas and dark because, since eating pomegranate seeds, which are the food of the dead, she is bound to Hades. Not only does she live between the upper and lower worlds, both inside and outside the earth in the realms of the living and the un-living (she is Queen of the dead), but she also has two names: Persephone and Kore. As Persephone she is intrinsically sound taken from the Greek word, perse, meaning in itself and phone, meaning voice, sound and combining form. And as Kore she is girl. Girl and sound come together. Persephone, then, has more than one identity or mode in which to be, and each name refers to her inherent multiplicity. The philosopher Gilles Deleuze and psychoanalyst Felix Guattari have used this girlish potential in their concept of ‘becoming-girl’ to challenge the primacy given to the single male subject or author. For example, in Freud’s analysis of sexual difference, girl is the most marginal state in the system, since she is always either castrated or substituted and therefore always incomplete; Deleuze and Guattari propose, by contrast, that becoming-girl represents the most radical state of difference that disrupts psychoanalysis’s symbolic system of the movement of desire.1 In a similar sense, the sound-wave is a continuum or vibration moving through matter in space and time2 (i.e. Persephone or Alice’s voice), rather than the static and unchanging relations between the subject and object (i.e. Hades wish to possess Persephone as an object). The writer Michel Leiris has played on this multiplicity to describe Persephone’s corresponding homonymic animal state ‘the earwig’ because the French name for earwig is ‘pierce-orielle’, the ear piercer, which is also a homonymic link to Persephone. In Persephone, then, sound states reveal a more complex structure of the subject that unravels time and space to become a story of transformation and change. and into an architecture in which the single autonomous subject becomes amplified into continuous folds of different kinds of girlish intelligence.
A breeze passes between the group, bringing with it an echo of Persephone is moving tale, and ruffling the Kite’s feathers so that she is prompted to lift off and becomes what could be called a ‘Corporeal Sky’.3 On a wing, in a wind, she becomes the echo that Kierkegaard has described as an infinite repetition of difference, rather than the same voice that ties Echo to Narcissus, a voice which only allows her to mirror his words, feelings and desires.4 Instead the Kite is an Echo of both material and immaterial ground. Benjamin Franklin recognised the kiteís potential when he made the link between the electrical field of the storm cloud and the shock-wave of the key. But this story of electricity tends to omit the material qualities of the raptor and her connection between animal and flying-machine, body and architecture, magic and technology. Thus, the simultaneity of her roles gives her a unique position through which to embody a rapturous link between air and ground.
The wave that carries the kite and wind fascinates the Octopus, for she produces her own folds of matter, especially if she has to negotiate her way through a maze. She takes the thread that Ariadne weaves and demonstrating her own bodily capacity as a shape-shifter she transforms herself by contraction and expansion to envelop the spaces of the labyrinth. Like, her name-sake whose reason enables Theseus to escape the Minotaur in the labyrinth, the Octopus uses an-other intelligence to make routes out. The scope of her muscular control also means that by minute changes within the cell-walls her pigmentation can be changed in seconds so that her external form is constantly under modification both in colour and in shape demonstrating that, rather than form being produced by external forces, the Octopus’s propensity to camouflage and shape-shifting is the result of biological and material change.5
And so these stories of embodied desire become states through which to build architectural realities, both imaginary and real, abstract and concrete. For, if architecture is concerned with constructing and building relationships (as philosophy builds concepts) then the transformation of Persephone, Echo and Ariadne into the Earwig, the Kite and the Octopus, respectively, introduces other relationships in which vibration and an infinite continuum of real, material singularities drift, touch, distort, rub and breathe. As a result such architectures have both imperceptible and perceptible spectrums in which to build different spaces and different realities.



*Peg Rawes was born in the Uk. in 1968. She teaches History and Theory at The Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL and Critical Studies in the Visual Arts Department, Goldsmiths University of London. Having studied Art History and Philosophy and Literature she is researching a Ph.D. into topology and contemporary art.

Notes:

1 Deleuze, Gilles; Guattari, Felix: A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism
and Schizophrenia, The Athlone Press, London, 1996, pp. 276-277.
2  Grivel, Charles: "The Phonograph's Horned Mouth," Wireless
Imagination: Sound, Radio, and the Avant-Garde, edited by Douglas
Kahn and Gregory blackhead, The MIT Press, Cambridge Massachusetts,
1994, p. 53.
3 Corporeal Sky is the name of an exhibition of work about the
relationship between the body, science and the 'aether' in Sydney,
Australia, 1999, http://curve.to/corporealsky
4 Battersby, Christine: The Phenomenal Woman, Polity Press, London,
1998, p. 184.
5 Painleve, Jean: a scientist associated with the Surrealists has
observed the chimeric dance of the octopus, both underwater, during
sexual reproduction and as it negotiates its way along the water's
edge, in film.