This lecture will explore architecture’s nervous encounter with liquids. Our buildings, like ourselves, are filled with pipes. Water, gas, electricity, and information flow inside walls, floor and ceilings, crisscrossing basements and running across rooftops. Yet these tubes are rarely allowed to enter the space. No evidence of flow is allowed. But the ever expanding repressed world of pipes always has its leaks, blockages and occasional overflows. The building and the discipline occasionally get covered in what was meant to be excluded. There is an astonishing architecture of pipes, a radical liquid architecture.
Mark Wigley is Dean of Columbia University's Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation. The author of The Architecture of Deconstruction: Derrida's Haunt (1993), White Walls, Designer Dresses: The Fashioning of Modern Architecture (1995; both MIT Press), and Constant's New Babylon: The Hyper-Architecture of Desire (010 Publishers, 1998), he coedited, with Catherine de Zegher, The Activist Drawing: Retracing Situationist Architectures from Constant's New Babylon to Beyond,(MIT Press, 2001). He has curated exhibitions at the MoMA in New York, the Witte de With in Rotterdam, The Drawing Center in New York, and the CCA in Montreal.