Recently it has become more apparent that a requisite of the contemporary citizen is the ability to perceive and react to inordinate amounts of information, the implication of which is resulting in the speedy revision of our shared traditions. Increasingly, opinions are being shaped by an immediate world-scale public forum in which every opinion can be heard: a melee of beliefs. This year in “Melee”, ADS12 will explore what it means if we can encounter everything at once.

The Communion of Strangers

A number of things must occur in the mass communion of strangers. The first thing that needs to occur is the encounter. Indeed, the social life of an individual cannot take place without encountering a stranger, and very quickly after they meet, a swirling mass of histories, values, mannerisms and beliefs entangle.

Up until the end of the 12th century in Europe, the battlefield encounter was typified by the term “melee”, from the French meaning “mixture”. A melee is a confused fight; a messy mass, a free-for-all at close quarters.

It was the invention of chivalry that encoded courteous behavior between combatants (eg. never strike a defenceless opponent) and developed rules for the encounters (eg. battles must only take place on tournament grounds). Similarly, martial arts follow a set of specific guidelines not just for the defense of the self, but for the physical, mental and spiritual development for those that practise it.

Rating an Island

As the sources and quantity of information grows, there is a strategy emerging that is being used to navigate the treacherous info-tributaries: subjecting information to ratings. We can now give a rating to a peninsular, a dog breed, an island. What if the weather was bad when you visited the island; what if there was a freak storm? What if, like on the Yemeni island of Dajjaall, it is believed an evil figure of Islamic literature is said to reside there? What rating would you give it?

From the five-star metric system, there is a growing suspicion around something if it has a perfect rating. So there are scenarios where manufacturers buy 5-star reviews for their competitors so that a product may look suspiciously perfect. What is to be said of the formation of public opinion if positivity can be purchased and that perfection is suspicious?

Another thing that must occur in the mass communion of strangers, is that it must be framed by a context, sometimes in the form of a space, more frequently, a platform. Recently the sites of opinion-forming no longer mimic traditional forum spaces. In late 2016 on Club Penguin, a Walt Disney Co. social media site where kids gather to design their own igloos and have care-free snowball fights, penguins declared "not my president," "no wall," "I'm with her," and "penguins of color matter," as they voiced their displeasure for their political situation.

And raves, those precious stages that early on, were lived out in the most marginal of spaces like the warehouse, are now frequently heading to the countryside. The rave as a communal jouissance borne of the warehouse “nave” gives way to the idyll green of the countryside, a space more marginal still.

Aspirational Opulence vs. Planned Austerity

What are the strategies to react to the melee if we could consider it a material? Even Le Corbusier labelled the construction site a “battleground” that was mal foutu (messed up) because of the difficulties to convey to contractors the subtle differences between poor construction (bad) and the primitive (good). It took Le Corbusier to devise his own theory of the “aesthetic of the accident” in order to bridge “crudity and finesse".

At first glance, two possible reactions to the melee emerge: one is the maximalist approach that finds value in every single object or subject that composes the whole. This is the opulent strategy that celebrates quantities from which sense emerges. Take for example, Monte Testaccio an ancient site in the middle of Rome made of 50 million crushed olive oil jugs that by its size alone is perceived as a natural object like that of a “hill”. The sheer number of objects when together, result in the transcendence of artificial objects to a natural setting.

By contrast there is the other position, of reducing the (material) melee via a process of abstraction that results in deliberate austerity for the sake of clarity or stability. Could it be that minimalism would never exist, if it were not for a bustling urban life and all it entails?

First Person Singular

In the case of a crowd, how does the individual position themselves as a member? In all of this there is the singular entity of which the melee is composed. And with every mass, there are centers and margins.

Take the legend of the Lone Ranger, a figure whose identity is synonymous with solitude, and whose membership to the melee is defined by a desired marginality. The image of vast nature accompanies the Lone Ranger, specifically, it is the barren plains of Texas which facilitates this solitude. Indeed, nature is the place where the Lone Ranger acquires freedom.

The Phalanx, the Wall

Nature, like the melee, has always implied the unknown, but even the unpredictable swarm of the battlefield melee evolved into the phalanx, a rectangular gridded mass of soldiers advancing in unison. And after nature, came the rhythmic and total parcelization of land, replete with walls and dwellings. In the quest to tame the melee, it could be said that the phalanx—and in the case of nature, the parcel—leads to a kind of consciousness. In the case of the soldier in the melee, they’re indistinguishable from any other other soldier, and yet within the phalanx, the soldier has a position within a structure and they’re able to relate their own objective to that of someone else. Likewise, the parcelization of land becomes the metric by which ownership becomes measurable.

Plenitudes

In “Melee” we will develop architectural projects as plenitudes: consisting of a minimum of two-thousand “acts” (eg. species, subjects, objects or processes and so on). We will explore the strategies an architect can deploy when the magnitudes of content they’re responding to, challenges their own perceptive shortcomings. We will include cultural interpretations on the idea of plenitude, and ask how are particular places and cultures dealing with violent pluralisms?

On site, we will explore what materials and tactics can we employ to relate each of the “acts” to address the contemporary situation from where they’re taken. We will explore how the relations between each “act” is consolidated. How are they bound together within an architecture capable of framing multiple scenarios?