Critique of Object Oriented Architecture
Patrik Schumacher, London 2017, full unedited manuscript
Published in: The Secret Life of Buildings, Editors: Michael Benedikt & Kory Bieg, Center for American Architecture and Design, University of Texas at Austin

This essay is trying - in a constructive if not partisan spirit -  to probe the prospects of what might be termed Object Oriented Architecture, an architecture inspired by the object oriented philosophy of Graham Harman. Five years ago I had been asked to appraise the value of Harman’s philosophy for architecture. At the time I insisted that “the validity and fate of object-oriented ontology within architecture is a matter of architecture’s autopoiesis”1, i.e. a matter of architecture’s own discourse. My point was that architects should not be intimidated by a supposed philosophical master-discourse but must remain the arbiters of architectural value, while looking outward for inspiration and intellectual resources (as well as new technological resources) that could assist innovation in the context of the societal demands they are confronted by and called upon to address. The reference to discipline-specific societal demands is crucial. Architecture’s business is not the illustration or translation of the latest philosophical doctrines. Such a translation cannot by itself confer value, cannot be an end in itself, but only a means to architecture’s upgrading with respect to its societal tasks.  My attitude with respect to Harman’s influence within architecture was “wait and see”. Five years on Harman’s influence within architecture has grown and he himself has been further drawn into our discourse, and indeed is now attached to one of our most prominent academic institutions. Further, there has grown up a body of design projects that proclaim to be inspired by and even seem to claim to embody the concepts and to instantiate the virtues of Harman’s philosophy. Therefore an appraisal of Harman’s influence is now possible. This is the main task of this essay. The second task  - a task I would like to begin with here – is to continue the direct dialogue with Graham Harman which began when we sat down for some hours at a Café in London five years ago and which continued via a series of challenges to my writings that Harman launched in lectures and essays at various occasions in the interim. While I had not found the time and occasion to respond earlier, I very much welcome the dialogue and want to welcome Graham into our discipline, a discipline that could certainly benefit from more high level theoretical engagement. I am particularly grateful for Graham’s engagement with my writings as insightful critical push-back has been rather rare.

Let me posit my preliminary conclusion on both object-oriented ontology and object-oriented architecture right from the start: While I have plenty to criticize, I certainly consider both to deliver a net benefit to architecture and further I consider both to be allies rather than enemies in my (increasingly impatient) quest for a strategic transformation of the built environment, in line with the specific transformational demands and opportunities of our contemporary post-fordist network society. This implies that the contrast between the architecture that has been promoted under the triple-O flag and parametricism, as well as the contrast between Graham Harman’s philosophy and those philosophies that have inspired parametricism, i.e. Deleuze/Guattari, Complexity Theory and Social Systems Theory, have been unduly over-emphasized, obscuring deep and relevant continuities that promise convergence potentials. Kory Bieg also attests to the “significant overlaps”2 of OOO with Deleuze and Guattari’s assemblage theory.
If the insistence on the withdrawn reality of an object, on its inexhaustible excess over known/actual/manifest effects, consists in (and is motivated by the interest in) the unfolding of new unforeseen relations, capacities, and functions the object might engage in and if (as I would argue) an alertness to such possibilities is the heuristic advantage of an OOO-inspired practice, then OOO is in a fundamental way continuous with its nemesis “relationism”, rather than its denial (in the form of a relapse into essentialism). It just adds a strong explicit reminder and caveat of open-endedness to the relational conception of objects, an open-endedness that was already implied, and certainly not denied, by figures like Derrida (when he critiqued the “metaphysics of presence”) or Deleuze (when he counter-posed assemblages to organisms) or by Niklas Luhmann and Bruno Latour when they emphasized systems/networks as crucial to event/object individuation. I’ll come back to this point repeatedly below.
Harman – who overall is very generous in his readings of Latour -  is right that Latour3 et al have often used exaggerated or misleading language to promote their anti-essentialist insights that make them indeed liable to the charge of anti-realism or ‘idealism’; and passages can certainly be clipped and exhibited as proof for this. Harman quotes this from Latour: ”There is no other way to define an actor than through its actions, and there is no other way to define an action but by asking what other actors are modified, transformed, perturbed, or created”, and then Harman goes on to insist that this “allows objects no surplus of reality beyond whatever they modify, transform, perturb, or create” and claims that this would be like the claim (“refuted” by Aristotle) that that no one is a house-builder unless they are currently building a house.4 But must we read this passage in this rather ungenerous way? Should we not rather appreciate that Latour’s point is the rejection of the traditional essentialist, non-relational conception of actors rather than the exclusion of an underlying surplus of reality, which - if it ever becomes manifest – will do so in the form of further actions, who’s surplus in turn will manifest by impacting yet further actors’ actions? A few pages later Harman writes: “In an age when all the intellectual momentum belongs to context, continuity, relation, materiality, and practice, we must reject the priority of each of these terms, focusing instead on an immaterialist version of surprise and opacity.”5 My hypothesis is that Latour would absorb Harman’s reminder about an underlying, opaque, surprise-producing surplus reality without the slightest resistance, just as I am happy to absorb this reminder for my theory of architecture that indeed emphasises “context, continuity, relation, and practice” and more specifically the embeddedness and individuation of works of architecture as framing communications that function within networks of communications, as facilitating premises of further communications or activities/actions. Those further communications are largely predictable – that’s the whole point of the architectural framing -  but there might also be unanticipated, surprising effects, facilitating unanticipated, surprising activities (that might sometimes even be welcomed). That’s certainly not excluded by my relational architectural ontology. If we see the purpose of philosophy with Wittgenstein as furnishing reminders (rather than as system building), then Harman’s general reminders are welcome.
As these hints indicate, I don’t think this rather abstract realism vs relationism (or correlationism) debate merits  - I am only talking from the perspective of architecture here -  the positing of a whole new ontology. My plea here is for a meta heuristic of convergence  - going vigorously against the inexorable inclination of philosophers as self-differentiating agents provocateur -  i.e. my plea is that we architects and architectural theorists (and this also includes philosophers who are mutating into architectural theorists within schools of architecture) should not allow ourselves to be blinded by philosophical shock-and-awe rhetoric, nor to be drawn into the hair-splitting ramifications of the abstract algebras of professional philosophers6, but instead focus on the currently known or explored architectural applications of these conceptual algebras and how these start to cash out in terms of tangible results.

Constructive Relations between Architecture and Philosophy

Before articulating what I consider to be a constructive utilisation of philosophy within architecture, I want to bluntly state what must be rejected, namely the idea that an architectural approach and its results can somehow be justified, acquire meaning, earn recognition or attain a heightened cultural value by its alignment with a great philosophy. An architecture’s merit depends solely on its results. So the question is: How can philosophy contribute to these results?

To productively reflect on the relation between architecture and philosophy requires a mature understanding of its two terms: philosophy and architecture. Philosophy is certainly the more difficult and controversial term and thus in more need for clarification. The best way to start is by identifying a paradigmatic exemplar. I suggest we initially take Deleuze & Guattari’s ‘A Thousand Plateaus’ as paradigm work of (contemporary) philosophy. This is what I had in mind when I characterized philosophy as “exchange hub or transmission belt for conceptual innovations or irritations between different disciplines” in my article “Architecture’s Next Ontological Innovation”. My choice of ‘A Thousand Plateaus’ as paradigm is pertinent with respect to its influence on architecture 20 years earlier and with respect to my intention to compare this productive experience with what seems to be in the making now with OOO. This example and my characterisation of philosophy from five years ago emphasizes the gap that separates a loose, open-ended, multi-functional (if not anti-functional) philosophy from a strict, goal-oriented and straightforwardly instrumental science. This emphasis also accords both with my appraisal of Harman’s philosophy as well as with his self-appraisal (as I witnessed in some of his lectures), and implies that the relation to architecture is inspirational rather than instructional. Philosophy in this key does not deliver applicable theories or truths but at most a promise of truths in the form of open-ended thinking tools that can become useful in other disciplines that might adopt and adapt them. Harman for instance refers to his “tacit desire to create a general intellectual toolkit that might be useful to everyone working in any intellectual field”7. The relation of mathematics with science or engineering could serve as a helpful analogy here.
There is no space here to rehearse my arguments put forward in my article from five years ago8 (available on my website). My article included a whole chapter on this issue under the title “No more Master-discourse: How Architecture Intersects with Philosophy”. Harman accepts that philosophy can no longer pose as master discourse but worries that my pragmatic criterion for the application of philosophy to architecture is reversing the priority and degrades philosophy to become a mere “handmaiden”9 of architecture and other practical disciplines. While I would never suggest that all philosophy should aim straight at practical utility for specific domains, I do suggest that the (if only vague) anticipation of eventual utilisation potentials (somewhere) should serve as a guiding horizon or “attractor” for philosophical intuitions and I further suggest that a later practically relevant, productive influence should serve as retrospective validation of an earlier philosophical effort. My attitude of patient pragmatism imbued with plenty of methodological tolerance towards abstract experimental philosophical concept-crafting (akin to pure mathematical calculi) treats contemporary philosophy not only in parallel with pure mathematics, but also, perhaps even more pertinently, in parallel to contemporary art (and theorizes their societal function in parallel too), with equal emphasis on their inherent need for degrees of freedom and irresponsibility that would seem reckless in any other arena of intellectual or societal life. However, the lack of determinate instrumentality in both art and philosophy (of the Deleuzian and Harmanian type) is in my view an aspect of its latent function: to serve as general mutation chamber and brain storming arena for all societal function systems (with manifest functions) including architecture. Paradoxically philosophies and art works (like brain storming contributions) can serve their inherently indeterminate, yet to be discovered/specified purposes best if no particular (limiting) purpose is in view. The open-endedness of these practices comes in degrees, and so does their degree of intentionality and self-awareness. The tolerance society accords to these unavoidably wasteful and thus risky (if not paradoxical) practices is largely due to a protective mystification. One would hope that philosophy can serve its thus characterized function without self-mystification and without the sense of self-degradation indicated by the use of the handmaiden analogy. Patient pragmatism is compatible with tolerating philosophers “wasting their time on armchair metaphysical speculation.”10
When Harman takes issue with my pragmatist conception of truth, by denying the possibility to identify truth with pragmatic efficacy, his arguments merely point to a more broadly defined, future-open, generalized, multi-functional pragmatic efficacy. What else could he mean when he claims that “truth has a greater power, reliability, flexibility, and allure than mere practical success”? My point is both normative and anthropological: we are well advised to and should value eventual pragmatic success and allow the appraisal of its chances to guide our investments, and we indeed have  - as creatures of biological and cultural evolution -  always already broadly done so. Again, when truth becomes a reservoir for virtual (not yet actual) means towards practical success, then the strong contrast between our positions dissolves.

Harman tells architects “never to worry about misunderstanding philosophy”11. This seems to echo the point in my earlier article (published in tarp in 2012) that there can be no question of philosophy somehow exercising mastery over architecture. Architectural design remains a creative act that might be inspired by philosophy but should not be thought of as being legislated by philosophical concepts. (The relation to science is different: Relevant scientific knowledge should be taken as a legislating, compelling constraint). However, this openness of the creative translation of philosophical concepts  - e.g. the translation of Deleuze’s ‘smooth space’ via quasi-topographic floor surfaces or alternatively via a differentially dense smarm of ceiling lights  -  does not mean that misunderstanding should not be a worry. Indeed below I’ll point out some pernicious misunderstandings of OOO philosophy that Harman should indeed be worried about. On the other hand, there should be certain limits to the open-endedness of the inspired translation, if an indiscriminate ‘anything goes’ is to be avoided. Not all references and utilizations should flatter a philosopher. I feel it should worry rather than thrill Harman, if, as Kory Bieg attests, the style of OOO-inspired architecture “varies dramatically”12. Bieg enumerates diverse styles that use OOO, including “postmodern revivalism with its mix of Eisenmanian axonometrics, or pastels applied to Venturian primitives, or kitbashing ornamentation, or an-formal discrete mereology”13. Bieg concludes: “There is no telling what is right from what is wrong, nor should there be.”14 I beg to differ: There is certainly the need within architecture to at least broadly tell right from wrong. This might not be within the capacity of a very abstract, ahistorical, and maximally generalizing philosophy like Harman’s. But then such a philosophy’s value to architecture becomes altogether questionable. However, as will become clear in what follows below, this pessimism is not warranted. Despite its very high level of abstraction OOO has indeed re-injected a fundamental and valuable concept into contemporary architectural discourse, namely the (Deleuzian) concept of the virtual. However, OOO re-injects this concept by another name: the concept of the (withdrawn, opaque, deep, strange) object. This concept has a discriminating thrust that is productive for contemporary architecture, and certainly excludes prominent trends like minimalism and neo-rationalism, while it indeed includes the diverse collection of trends  - all invested in complexity -  listed by Bieg. Thus, while the OOO influence in architecture is, in my view, not discriminating enough, it’s certainly not altogether indiscriminate.

While Harman is, in my view, making a mistake in asserting “that the more architecture styles that can emerge from OOO the better”, he is rescuing the relevance of OOO when he rejects the idea of a giant minimalist cube as a “literalist misunderstanding” of his philosophical concept of the object. Harman does not explain why a minimalist cube is incompatible with OOO’s concept of object. I suspect he might only react negatively to the “literalness” of the concept’s application which seems to misunderstand the generality of his object concept. But this literalness of translation might also apply to all SciArc applications of the concept as I’ll discuss below. I want to suggest instead, that we must avoid being drawn into full philosophical generality. The spirit and thrust of the OOO concept of the object, in my view, resides in the concept of the virtual: the versatility and fecundity of an object with respect to engaging in multiple new and unexpected assemblages that reveal unexpected capacities. This virtuality comes in degrees and the general statement that all objects have some of it distracts from the crucial fact that they do not possess it to the same extent. Minimalism is alien to the spirit and thrust of OOO because it is delivering poorly in terms of the production of virtuality. And to be sure: Virtuality has pragmatic value within 21st century post-fordist network society.

As should have become clear by now: pragmatism is compatible with a conception of philosophy that assimilates it to the open-endedness of art, in sharp demarcation against science. (Richard Rorty is perhaps the philosopher who has made this option most explicit.)

However, this time around I want to argue that we might be more demanding of philosophy and will offer a different paradigm.
While I did assimilate philosophy to art in my tarparticle five years ago, and while this was pertinent with respect to the exemplar of ‘A Thousand Plateaus’(1980), I want to shift emphasis here and argue for a more ambitious role for philosophy15, more closely related to science (without being fully assimilated to science), not less but more pragmatic, and better geared towards the current, more mature stage of architecture’s development within its current historical cycle of innovation. I am looking for a philosophy that has been elaborated into a theory of society and societal self-transformation that can instruct as much as it can inspire. While Marxism is perhaps the prime example (and had indeed been my guiding framework at an earlier time) I would instead like to posit Niklas Luhmann’s ‘Social Systems’ (1984) as my current paradigmatic exemplar for a philosophy that meets these requirements. Despite the fact that Luhmann describes himself as sociologist (which is fully justified due to his extensive sociological oeuvre), ‘Social Systems’ offers a fully-fledged philosophy, complete with original ontology, logic, epistemology, theory of meaning and a sophisticated philosophical critique of the concept of rationality that absorbs the lessons of recent science (complexity science) and “recent”16 philosophy (including the philosophy of Derrida and Deleuze). Most of the key references and insights that are alluded to and swirl around in ‘A Thousand Plateaus’ are here ordered and instrumentalised in a new potent philosophical system that is focussed on the tasks of sociology and the theory of society, albeit offering an ontological sketch that locates society and social processes within a layered, encompassing reality17. The focus on the social sciences and Luhmann’s self-location within sociology have so far obscured his philosophical reach. The fact that Harman and in particular his co-protagonist Levi Bryant are among the very few philosophers that have discovered Luhmann as inspiration and indeed cite him as (an unwitting) witness for the OOO approach, should be seen as an indication of the compatibility of our approaches, despite our apparently divergent interpretations of Luhmann’s ontology. While I am sceptical (but curious) about Bryant’s surprising generalisation of this ontology not only beyond Luhmann’s social systems but even beyond Maturana’s living systems, I am intrigued to see that the concept of ‘machine’ that underlies his new ‘machine oriented ontology’ is modelled on Maturana/Luhmann’s concept of autopoietic system18. This exploration too has to be left for another occasion.

In my account philosophy is indeed the meeting ground of professional philosophers (like Heidegger, Derrida, Deleuze and Harman) and those radical innovators (like Marx, Mach, Guattari, Maturana, Luhmann and Latour) who probe the first principles of all human reasoning and action from within their various specialist domains.
While ‘A Thousand Plateaus’ was incredibly fertile as inspiration for the take-off of the architectural movement of parametricism, ‘Social Systems’ (and indeed Luhmann’s total oeuvre) was able to deliver a sound base for its further elaboration within a systematic and comprehensive theory of architecture19. It is my contention that a fully-fledged architectural theory that aspires to steer the discipline’s progress must be grounded in an up to date theory of society (and theory of social processes in general) that allows architecture to locate itself and its tasks within world society’s evolutionary trajectory. Obviously, neither ‘A Thousand Plateaus’, nor any of Harman’s works offer such a theory of society. (Although I applaud Graham’s first attempt  - in his book ‘Immaterialism’ -  to probe the potential of his abstract philosophical algebra for doing insightful, productive work in the arena of social/historical theorizing.) Here is not the occasion to elaborate this any further. This is just a pointer towards the important work that lies beyond the scope of any OOO inspiration, necessary work if we want to make a truly transformational impact, and work with respect to which in my view OOO-inspired architectural experimentation can play a part, not by substituting itself for parametricism, but by developing an original strand within it. While this claim might trigger an immediate gut rejection, I urge both protagonists and observers to appreciate the abstractness and thus open-endedness of parametricism and to probe whether the triple-O inspired works under consideration here indeed violate any of parametricism’s “dogmas” (vary, differentiate, correlate), or perpetrate any of its “taboos” (fixity, repetition, collage). I can demonstrate, via close reading of any of SciArc’s self-classified OOO projects, that they operate fully within the (expansive but nevertheless determinate) bounds of parametricism’s search space.

Appraisal and Critique of OOO-inspired Architectural Projects

The most conspicuous characteristic that seems to confront us in the form of the OOO-inspired SciArc designs is their obvious quality as discrete, clearly identifiable and individuated objects, i.e. their unmistakeable object-hood in contrast to the anti-object approach of parametricism weaving projects into urban textures. It would seem, thus, that these works might indeed be plausible specimens of a design approach that tries to translate object oriented ontology into architecture, and that the contrast to parametricism could hardly be starker. I will argue below that these projects are indeed manifesting valuable concepts that have in this case been inspired by OOO, but had been available to architecture prior the reception of OOO. I will further argue that the concept of discrete object-hood is not one of them, and that the self-ascribed, prima facie contrast to parametricism is misleading and unproductive.

The work that I have seen so far at SciArc is impressively coherent across a whole series of design studios. All the projects present rugged, nearly amorphous (shapeless), enigmatic lumps with rich, agitated exterior articulations and complex, convoluted, cavernous interiors. These projects are indeed intricate building designs, as demonstrated in rather large, impressively elaborate models. I am thrilled about this work at SciArc for three reasons:
First, most generally, it displays an intense commitment and passion for architectural design that has become rare in the current academic landscape where design studios have all too often mutated into a mixture between a political debating society and a polemical concept art studio. Second, I am thrilled about the coherence of the overall architectural pursuit that becomes evident in the end-of-year exhibition of the school’s works. This means that all the attempts and efforts are directly relevant to each other, and immediately comparable. This stimulates competition and amounts to a cumulative, collective design research process that makes rapid progress probable, as is indeed evident in the very impressive results. The school thus rightly rejects the dominant presumption for a pluralism of approaches and styles and has no qualms about displaying a strong convergence and indeed unified front. This across the board coherence of the work itself, seems to be backed up by OOO as the shared “theoretical”20 language that is meant to “underpin”21 the work, and that indeed seems to direct the development of the work.
The third reason I am thrilled about this work is its pursuit of spatial complexity, morphological heterogeneity, as well as the pursuit of a rich surface articulation. These pursuits are congenial with the most recent pursuits within parametricism. The complexity is here made possible by the fat volumes that characterize all the recent Sci-Arc projects, thus exploiting the “regime of complexity” that Rem Koolhaas already emphasized as the key affordance of “bigness”. (I mention Rem’s Bigness insight  - which I place within the genealogical lineage of parametricism -  as indication of the continuities I am out to emphasise throughout this essay.) Bigness, i.e. a deep, fat volume opens up the possibility of adjacencies in all directions in contrast with slender slabs or towers where there is simply no space for manifold adjacencies. Big volumes (like Rem’s competition design for the French National Library from 1989, and all of SciArc’s OOO-inspired architectural objects) also allow for voids to open up the section to multiply visual connections and thus relational complexity.

What I am less thrilled about is the persistent insistence on the polemical dis-embedding of the projects in relation to their contexts. They starkly emphasize their separateness as broadly convex, hermetic objects. They appear like spaceships or meteorites, barely making contact with the ground. In this respect the projects are in contrast with the agenda of parametricism that would suggest to seek out affiliations and continuities with the context, aiming for an intense embedding, via alignments, adaptive deformations, fusions, resonances, inversions, morphings, articulatory assimilations, or via any other imaginable way of establishing perceptually palpable relations with the context that will lead to a sense of an overall embeddedness. Why is parametricsim aiming to establish such correlations? Because correlation is one of parametricism’s formal dogmas? No, correlation is one of parametricism’s formal dogmas because it makes general pragmatic sense as a default agenda in terms of architecture’s social functionality within contemporary urban conditions: Affiliative correlations facilitate the synergetic functional connections of the new building’s life processes which motivated the placement of it’s particular program into this site and context in the first place. The refusal to make connections thus amounts to a violation of the project’s very purpose.

I suspect that discrete object-hood and the functionally detrimental pursuit of a stark discontinuity with respect to the ground and the built context is due to a desire to somehow illustrate or spatially express what Harman calls the “withdrawal” of the object. The severing of continuities and the refusal to set up relations with the surroundings seems to be due to Harman’s (here misapplied) rejection of philosophical “relationism”, an example of “literalist misunderstanding”, based on the naïve conception of the relationship between architecture and philosophy as illustrative.

Harman’s concept of object is the most general concept imaginable and in no way privileges physical objects that would be easily recognisable as discrete, distinct figures unmistakeably set against a background. Within Harman’s abstract conceptual scheme an architectural project that camouflages, embeds and diffuses itself into an urban context, making itself indistinguishable would be no less an object for that matter. Both projects would be objects, and both would be equally “withdrawn” from us and other objects in their vicinity. What Harman’s calls the withdrawal, is not indicating a rejection of relations with other entities, but implies the ultimate inaccessibility of the object itself conceived as surplus beyond its currently manifest relations, i.e. Harman’s anti-relationism does not stand against relations as such – he admits that most objects engage in myriads of relations -  but only against the philosophical attempt to “reduce” an object to its current relations, as if the object was constituted solely by its current relations, or exists only due to its relations.

The Object = the Virtual

What Harman calls the “hidden depth” of the object is nothing else but this same ‘withdrawal’, the ‘surplus’ or excess in its capacities kept in reserve, over and above its routine functions or known capacities, the ‘inaccessible’ residue that is meant to ground its reality, agency and capacity to engage in new, perhaps even radically new and unexpected relations.
So as indicated above: relations are central to Harman’s philosophy, as central as to Deleuze’s and Delanda’s philosophy of assemblages that was so influential for the beginnings of parametricism. Harman is even saying that what he calls objects is what Delanda calls assemblages.22 I would rather paraphrase this and say: What Harman calls “the object” is what Deleuze calls “the virtual”, what Harman calls “reality” is what Deleuze calls “virtuality”. This identity is my working hypothesis in what follows, with one caveat: While I believe that Deleuze allows virtuality to come in degrees, I am afraid that the category object is an absolute either/or concept for Harman, and as such spells its sterility, until he allows it to transmute into a concept that admits degrees and thus discriminating judgements.

Deleuze distinguishes virtuality from possibility and the actualization of the virtual from the realization of the possible. Deleuze’s concept is incredibly difficult to pin down and one might wonder about its (precarious) integrity across the diverse contexts (from consciousness to physics to politics) and across the different books in which it features (‘Bergsonism’, ‘Difference and Repetition’, ‘The Fold’).
The origin of the Deleuzian concept in science  - from which he then creatively extrapolates a whole new ontological category – is rather helpfully traced and explained by Manuel Delanda in his “Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy”23. There is no space to rehearse this here. Instead I shall rehearse (below) the reception of the concept within the architectural theory and design practice of the 1990s. Here is a passage from Deleuze, just to get a whiff of some of conceptual features the architectural discourse picked up on: “The possible and the virtual are . . . distinguished by the fact that one refers to the form of identity in the concept, whereas the other designates a pure multiplicity . . . which radically excludes the identical as a prior condition . . . To the extent that the possible is open to ‘realization’ it is understood as an image of the real, while the real is supposed to resemble the possible. … Actualization breaks with resemblance as a process no less than it does with identity as a principle. In this sense, actualization or differenciation is always a genuine creation.”24
I suspect Graham Harman will be baffled about my identification of his concept of the object and Deleuze’s concept of the virtual.25 The various cursory remarks about Deleuze’s concept of virtuality I found in Harman’s books did not signal a very definite stance or engagement. In any case, I would not dare to venture such a identification as a contribution to philosophy. My identification claim is strictly limited to the architectural context within which these concepts are adopted, adapted and put to work.
The distinction of the virtual versus the possible as it has been adopted and adapted within architecture hinges on the surprising newness of actualized virtualities versus the realisation of the possible as a draw from a set preconceived possibilities. This is an important distinction. The unexpected, as an aspect of creativity and as a chance for innovation, is something of value, in particular within the avant-garde segment of our discipline where novelty (and certainly innovation) is desired both by the architects themselves and by their clients. However, the design of architectural objects rich in possibilities (of utilisation) should not be sneered at either. Further, a design that proliferates possibilities in the sense of a multitude of preconceived readings, i.e. a design with strategic ambiguity, might also thereby possess additional virtuality and thus spawn unexpected actualisations on top. So my hypothesis here is that richness in possibilities tends to come or correlates with a high degree of virtuality.

The “withdrawal” of the object – according to Harman – applies as much to an intensely embedded project like e.g. ZHA’s Maxxi or ZHA’s Dong Daemon Design Plaza as it applies to a severed SciArc-style lump. But my argument goes much furher: I argue that the intensely embedded architectural objects parametricism promotes are better OOO objects because they have more of what seems to count here, namely virtuality, i.e. they have more surplus capacities to engage in new assemblages, and a higher probability to do so. My argument here relies on the intuition that the gaps that separate and isolate a building are obstacles to the discovery and garnering of future network synergies.
If the very generality of Harman’s philosophical concept of the object, of the “hidden depth of the object” applies indiscriminately to all buildings, parametricist, minimalist or SciArc-style, then it’s useless within architecture. This is one of my main questions and challenges to Graham here:  Would a very shallow, isolated, minimalist slab building, dissected into disconnected repetitive floors and cells, still count as a withdrawn object with hidden depth? Because such a building too could - in principle - engage in new relations and might harbour unknown capacities that could be actualized in new circumstances, e.g. at a later stage of dereliction?26 If we admit this for a moment, we might further ask: How far would this generality stretch? A one cubic centimetres stainless steel cube in my desk drawer will probably never surprise me with unexpected symbiotic powers. Is this still an object in Harman’s philosophical sense? If so, then this philosophy cannot guide us. We need to move from sterile sweeping generalisations to differentiations and correlations that can distinctly guide our design work. I would therefore argue that the degree of an object’s capacity to surprise us tends to correlate with its complexity27, which in turn depends on its size, proportions, internal heterogeneity and its embeddedness into networks. So, to go back to the minimalist slab sketched above: We should recognise and emphasize its relative lack of virtuality; and its potential in a state of dereliction should not count here for much. The philosopher’s pursuit of maximal generality is counterproductive here.

If we emphasize that all objects are withdrawn in their hidden, inexhaustible depth, then we are de-emphasizing the important differences between objects in precisely this most interesting respect, namely the very different degrees of “depth” or virtuality we encounter. This matters for architects who cherish and pursue “depth”. We need to know how to maximized depth, and should start to distinguish “deep” from “shallow” architectural objects, i.e. distinguish rich, enigmatic objects that are bound to challenge and surprise us (by engaging in new assemblages, revealing hidden capacities for new useful effects and ready to self-transform via symbiosis), from simple, obvious, trivial objects that will most probably never surprise us.
Literal building depth – what Rem Koolhaas theorized as Bigness facilitating “regimes of complexity”  – is positively correlated with virtuality. What contributes less or indeed nothing to this conception of the inexhaustible depth is the literal opaqueness of the building’s envelope. This rather constrains the potential relational complexity and fertility of the project, as it contributes to isolation. Solid walls prevent new assemblages. On the other hand what does contribute is “opaqueness” in the sense of strangeness. Strange buildings and spaces deliver more virtuality than very familiar buildings and spaces. Making strange withdraws routine readings and engagements and thus opens up and indded forces inventive engagement. Making strange is indeed one of the key strategies of most of triple-O inspired architecture.

So the following analysis of the state of “Object Oriented Architecture” and its relation to the philosophy of Object Oriented Ontology transpires:
The philosophy of Object Oriented Ontology proposes a single concept, the concept of the object. This concept is equivalent to the Deleuzian concept of the virtual. Harman offers a whole series of paraphrases or metaphors to explain his concept:
Withdrawness, hidden depth, inaccessibility, opaqueness, surplus, strangeness. All of these are suggestive metaphors, many of them spatial metaphors. All of these metaphorical terms are prone to induce a literalist misapplication within architecture. Some of these literalist misunderstandings strike lucky: The literal spatial depth of a building is in fact conducive to the enhancement of virtuality. The same goes for strangeness. Surplus, understood as excessive articulation and geometric agitation also strikes lucky: it too enhances virtuality. However, withdrawnness literalized as separateness, discreteness, isolation and anti-relation back-fires and blocks virtuality. The same applies to literal inaccessibility as well as to opaqueness if literalized as solidness, avoiding transparency. So when it comes to the literalist architectural interpretation of Harman’s terms, we witness a hit and miss with respect to operating as an effective architectural translation of the profound and profoundly productive underlying key concept that deserves to be (re-)injected into architecture: the concept of the object as the virtual.
We got somewhere: The engagement with OOO inspired the deep, complex, enigmatic projects that spur our imagination, delivering an “inexhaustible” surplus or reservoir of unforeseen affordances.
So while on overall balance we witness a net benefit from this ‘hit-and-miss’ literalist approach, which had its heuristic value as engine of invention, I suggest it’s time to take stock, reflect and weed out the misses, and be more cautious with respect to literalism in the next stage of this new tendency’s development.

The Originality of OOO-inspired Architectural Concepts

As hinted at above, Rem’s Bigness28 concept delivers for important aspect of the conditions of the kind of “depth” OOO-architects are looking for, namely size, spherical proportions, internal heterogeneity, and porosity. The fifth condition of depth/withdrawal is the aspect of stangeness or otherness, a sixth factor is the related aspect of excessive, overabundant articulation, like the “tattooing” Tom Wiscombe pursues and talks about. A seventh factor of virtuality is the contextual embeddeness delivered by Kipnis/Lynn’s concept of ‘multiple affiliations’. These seven factors were already emphasized in the early days of parametricism when the movement was developing under the banner of “folding”, “blobs” and “hyper-surface. Just as I argue that Harman’s object equals Deleuze’s virtuality qua inexhaustible relational potential, I would like to argue that the triple-O appropriation of this concept closely mirrors the way the concept of the virtual was productively adopted and adapted into architecture via Brian Massumi and John Rajchman in the mid-1990s. For instance, let me quote from John Rajchman’s text ‘The Virtual House: A Description’, which functioned as  competition brief of the Virtual House design competition launched by Any Magazine in 1997. This should sound rather familiar to our triple-O inspired architects: “The Virtual House, through its plan, space, construction and intelligence, generates the most new connections; it is arranged or disposed to permit the greatest power for unforeseen relations. … it most catches us by surprise … it looks like NOTHING that we already know or see.”29 Further he explains the underlying Deleuzian concept of ‘the virtual’ in relation to its conceptual complement ‘the actual’: “The actual manifests and effectuates the virtual. But the actual never COMPLETELY shows or activates all that the virtual implies. Something always remains.”30 Thus, as far as architecture is concerned, it seems Deleuze’s concept of the virtual does indeed deliver the essential aspect emphasized by Harman’s concept of the object as picked up by the OOO architects, suggesting the same excessive and strange richness of form and articulation as a means towards an open-endedness of affect and effect. Rajman suggests: ”The virtual construction frees forms, figures and activities from a prior determination or grounding. … Thus virtual construction departs from the kinds of organisations that try to set out all possibilities in advance. It constructs a space whose rules can themselves be altered through what happens in it. But how can there be such a thing as a ‘virtual plan’? The usual way to increase possibility is to abstract from specificity. … The house with the most possibilities might thus seem the one with the least specificities – the empty house, the house of silence or absence, awaiting a revelation that never comes. … The Virtual House is not like that. It is the one whose arrangement or disposition allows for the greatest number of singular points and the most complex connections among them. … The virtual functions by multiplying, by throwing together singular points and seeing what they can do.”31

The rationale of over-articulation and under-determination is the stimulation of unexpected readings (seeings) and utilisations, first by the designers and then by the users. An empty space allows for many things but probably leads us to fall back on and project familiar types and routines. It does not challenge us, nor does it inspire our imagination. A found object – like an old factory or warehouse loft stimulates our imagination and leads us to invent, like a bricoleur, new assemblages and ways of life. As Rajchman says, the empty house, in contrast, is awaiting a revelation that never comes. Brian Massumi has been arguing for the concept of the virtual within architecture with very much the same thrust.
Massumi describes the “new” (1990s) design processes as processes of discovery via “the run of the unform”, which turns the architect into a “process tweaker and form-flusher”32 with a certain “feel for its elusiveness, for its running, for its changeability: a feeling for its virtuality.”33 Massumi’s innovative contribution to the discourse was his parallel conceptualisation of the user’s utilisation of these spaces as equally explorative and potentially surprising, as an aleatoric process of imaginative appropriation. Massumi queries the relation of design process to design product: “Where is the virtuality in the final product? Precisely what trace of it is left in the concrete form it deposits as its residue? What of emergence is left in the emerged?” Massumi posits the “continuation of the architectural design process outside of itself, in another process, … the life of the building.”34  The design process is thus “to be taken up by other processes endowing the design with an afterlife.”
Massumi suggests that “built form could be designed to make the ‘accidental’ a necessary part of the experience of looking at it or dwelling in it. The building would not be considered an end-form so much as a beginning of a new process. … Forms can be composed to operate as catalysts for perceptual events. … A building can harbour foci of implicative vagueness, lucid blurs, dark shimmerings, not-quite things half-glimpsed like the passing of a shadow on the periphery of vision. … Architecture can accept as part of its aim the form-bound catalysis of the unform (the deform).”35

There are many architectural forms and spaces that might be used to illustrate these concepts. We might think of the Yokohama Ferry Terminal as a prominent example that was designed around that time. However, I would rather like to point to the even earlier work of Bahram Shirdel with Andrew Zago, which Shirdel had called “black-stuff” and Jeff Kipnis referred to as a “new, abstract monolythicity that would broach neither reference, nor resemblance”36 Kipnis mentions the Shirel/Zago entry for the Alexandria Library Competition and Shirdel’s Nara Convention Hall competition. He also shows the massing model of the entry for the Scottish National Museum competition for which Kipnis himself had joined forces with Shirdel and Zago. The resemblance of these early projects of the architecture of “Folding” (which later became “parametricism”)  – at that time the folding was still faceted folding – with the current SciArc versions of triple-O architecture is as striking as the conceptual similarity. The model photo of the Scottish National Museum design demonstrates convincingly what Kipnis emphasizes as black-stuff’s advantage, namely that these “monolythic, non-representational forms lend themselves well to affiliative relationships a posteriori”37. Disposition towards multiple readings and multiple contextual affiliations was a key pursuit. I argue that triple-O architecture is precisely this project, perhaps minus the contextual affiliation. And this minus is indeed a serious minus.

The Prospects of Object Oriented Architecture as Tendency within Parametricism

I am referencing and rehearsing these (20 years old but in my view in no way obsolete) texts here because they seem to formulate the very ambitions of OOO-inspired architecture, as far as I understand them from what I have seen and heard not only in SciArc, but more recently also at Texas A&M University (Casey Reas’ studio) and at the University of Texas at Austin (Kory Bieg’s studio). This strong sense of déjà vu (which I suspect must be shared by some of the current protagonists like Tom Wiscombe, Kory Bieg and Mark Foster Gage who were students during the 1990s) was further confirmed in an interview I gave together with Mark Foster Gage in Texas38 (at the occasion of our recent debate there). He was emphasising strangeness and complexity in connection with the possibility of multiple readings as the key ideas of triple-O architecture. As demonstrated via Brian Massumi above, these ideas are very close to the Deleuzian concept of the virtual (and can even be traced further back to deconstructivism). So something is amiss when Mark Foster Gage claims that “the Deleuzian philosophical basis for Schumacher’s parametric style is simply out of steam”39.

My polemic response during the interview was to declare that triple-O architecture appears like a “rebranding of quite familiar tropes, insights and methodologies we’ve had explored within parametricism”. I would like to retract this charge of re-branding, and rather talk about a valuable rediscovery.
Here is Mark Foster Gage’s account of triple-O architecture: “A new generation of architects today … is being re-energised by a direct association with realist philosopher Graham Harman. … The reframed philosophical context of OOO challenges, in particular, Deleuzian-cum Schumacherian Parametricism in which all parameters are constantly shifting, but ultimately known, interconnected, procedural and calculable, and offers the possibility of an architecture of less predictable experiential outcomes, rather than one of forced obedience to the social and communicatory scripts outlined by the architect. In such an architecture, qualities are not necessarily all foreseen or traceable.”40 The coincidence of values and ambitions with a parametricism committed to Deleuzian cum Rajchmanian cum Massumian virtuality should be evident enough. At the same time there is also some truth to the contrast Gage is emphasising. In the latter development of parametricism not all of the early ambitions remained equally at play in the foreground, although I myself had never forgotten and often rehearsed (and reminded myself and others of) this aspect of productive indeterminacy within the overall pursuit of complex parametric determinations. This aspect receded into the background because it cannot really serve as the primary ambition of a fully generalizable paradigm and style with the ambition to establish a new global convergence and best practice, i.e. virtuality receded into the background for good reasons.

Virtuality cannot take over everything everywhere; a catalyst must catalyse non-catalytic, more stable and reproducible processes, and as such can only be a part of the story, not the whole story, except in experimental avant-garde ventures. However, virtuality should not be forgotten and perhaps deserves to be re-emphasized as parametricism is maturing into a stable paradigm. I believe that most contemporary institutions would be well served by architectural projects that include a significant dosis of virtuality, zones of indeterminacy, “spaces of becoming” (as Peter Eisenman termed what we are talking about here) as an arena for institutional experimentation, transformation and reinvention. From this perspective I can thus both appreciate and criticize the ambitions of triple-O architecture: It delivers an important reminder about an important aspect of what society requires of contemporary built environments and commits serious design effort in the pursuit of this aspect; however it also overshoots in giving his aspect nearly exclusive prominence, thus disqualifying itself with respect to leading the (whole of) discipline. The exclusive focus of triple-architecture on virtuality can only persist during its experimental stage, and becomes a liability when taking on real projects. Triple-O architecture is thus a research strand rather than a viable style.
I further believe that exclusivity is here nearly self-defeating: Without being integrated into complex networks of determinacy, indeterminacy becomes gratuitous, chaotic, interminable and thus ultimately meaningless, rather than fertile with unexpected but locally specific and pertinent readings, affects, connections and effects. The risk arises that the project remains this one-liner of the object as the ultimate unform, rather than spawning new, unexpected but determinate, assemblages. This dialectic of self-defeating radicalisation became clear in the Casey Reas’ studio at Texas A&M. The radical proliferation of “black-stuff” was here in danger of becoming indiscriminate, generating the same project over and over again. Those projects that integrated the play of dis-figuration and indeterminacy with determinate, readable figures and nameable forms-function complexes (e.g. recognisable furnishings amongst the more abstract and strange forms) were the most fertile and suggestive of new modes of living, e.g. suggesting the integration of retail and public café within no-longer-private residential spaces under the premise and radicalisation of the new shared living concepts that currently flourish in London and elsewhere, looking for congenial architectural instantiations and expressions.

While I selected (and recommend) the oeuvre of Niklas Luhmann  - his deep, original, ontologically and epistemologically grounded, comprehensive and systematic theory of society and everything social – as the framework within which an ambitious, comprehensive architectural theory can be elaborated (and has been elaborated in my AoA), I remain open and curious about other philosophical offerings, including offerings of the less goal oriented but more venturesome and abstract types represented by Deleuze or Harman. At this advanced stage of my own theoretical development (which I wish would find more followers become collaborators within our discipline), a philosopher like Harman who is very far from approaching a position where he could start to compete with Luhmann, can be (no more than) a very useful source of provocations and reminders. Some of these useful reminders are at play in this article. However, many of Harman’s pronouncements are also ‘dangerous’ in that they seem to denigrate important intellectual advances that have been made in architecture in the last 40 years. Reminders against one-sidedness are one thing, triggering a backlash against important advances are another, and require counter-reminders and rebuttals.
It seems to me to be an incontrovertible advance for architecture to think of a building, its various parts, as well as its spaces, features and furnishings as nodes within a network of dependencies, because features conspire to form and characterize spaces, the spaces within a building function together and depend on each other and buildings function together in synergy networks we call urban fabrics. The whole point of congregating in the city is cooperation. To keep track of all these interdependencies is obviously a non-trivial intellectual, methodological and technological challenge. Parametricism has been gearing up to meet this challenge by conceiving and computationally implementing the position, shape and orientation of buildings, spaces and components as interdependent via associative modelling, and dependent on both technical and functional performance parameters, each with its own computational registration. As argued above, a superficial mis-reading of Harman’s anti-relationist pronouncements seems to suggest that these advances are somehow wrong-headed and fallacious; an obviously absurd suggestion.

There is another danger here: Harman (following Latour) recommends a symmetrical theoretical treatment between human and non-human objects/agents. This was an advance within science studies as it brought out the dependency of science (and thinking in general) on material devices, including buildings. This was an important and empowering insight for architects that had indeed entered architecture earlier via Foucault’s concept of discursive formations where buildings and other equipment is revealed to have agency, even in ‘thought processes’, not only in social processes. Of course, this recognition of “symmetry” qua agency does not imply that non-human objects now “deserve equal recognition in their own right” in the sense of usurping human purposes, as if architects should stop privileging the human point of view, and start to see the world from the point of view of objects. A grotesque mis-interpretation of the abstract claim of a “democracy of objects”.  I am not sure if anybody really thinks like this, but I sense an implicit, pernicious tendency within the OOO-inspired architectural discourse to ward off talk about social purposes and to shield the discourse from the difficult task to always relate the to-be-designed objects to varied audience-dependent observer perceptions and user-group dependent agendas.41

In contrast, it has been my effort in recent years to reflect the subjectivity of all object individuation within urban and architectural settings, to problematize the decomposition of the scene into units for interaction, and to pose this as a worthy architectural design problem, namely to guide and anticipate how various user groups with various agendas and pre-experiences might cognitively decompose a complex scene. Of course this becomes a problem and task only under conditions of complexity. This thinking and work (which uses the insights of Gestaltpsychology) also opens the door for the positive exploration of productive ambiguities, multiple readings and gestalt-switches. If the superficial reception of OOO reminders within architecture leads colleagues to surmise that this kind of pursuit is somehow outmoded anthropocentrism, belonging to a fallacious “correlationism” (that falsely insists on relating reality to human perception and comprehension), then we have a serious problem of regression. I guess Harman should step in a.s.a.p. and put out such destructive wild fires.

My effort here so far has been to reveal the strong and deep continuities – in terms of concepts, methodologies, ambitions and to some extent even in terms of formal repertoires – between OOO-inspired architecture and the early stages of parametricism.
Recent parametricism is also sharing this with triple-O architecture: the pursuit of heterogeneity, the integration of differences in kind within a single project and across projects, however, not in collage-mode, but via resonances or correlations, i.e. without allowing these radically different layers to rest in the stark juxtaposition of collage. There are, of course important differences between e.g. the OOO-inspired architecture we find these days at SciArc and the current state and stage of parametricism (which I call “tectonism”). The striking similarities and continuities tempt me to consider this work as an emerging subsidiary style (or substyle) within the big tent (epochal style) of parametricism. The drawbacks I identified (or hopefully mis-identified) above, i.e. the denial of contextualism, as well as the exclusive and self-defeating radicalism of the (otherwise productive) idea of Harmanian “hidden depth” (= Deleuzian virtuality), would have to be addressed and overcome in re-joining the movement.

There is however another – sharp but equally non-fatal -  criticism I have to level here, namely the lack of interest in aligning architectural design ambitions with engineering, technical performance and fabrication concerns, and the related lack of investment into more sophisticated computational methodologies that can deliver optimizations in these dimensions. It is certainly asking a lot to keep these only recently achieved targets at play while pursuing hidden depth fecundity in terms of readings/utilisations.
So while I appreciate the interest in hyper-articulation of the OOO-inspired approach, it pains me that these articulations are so randomly applied, as if a wall paper pattern was pasted on, without any more specific underlying rationale than the rationale to articulate intensely. (We had reached this stage already in the mid-1990s under the title of “Hyper-surface Architecture”42 after texture mapping had arrived.) I have come to realize that a very similar degree of intense and strange expressiveness can be achieved via all sorts of algorithms, transcoding all sorts of performance constraints. This expressiveness comes for free as a serendipitous side effect of the pursuit of structural, environmental or fabrication rationales. I have further come to realize that fresh expressiveness is one of the hidden motivating drives of those architects who invest so much passion and energy in the pursuit of new structural logics and fabrication techniques. This recent flourish of investment in new tectonic logics, including structural logics, environmental logics, material logics, and fabrication logics has indeed vastly enriched the morphological and articulatory repertoire of parametricism. Protagonists like Achim Menges, Mark Fornes, ZHA CODE, Mark Burry, Minimaforms, Kokkugia, Gilles Retsin, and Block Research Group a.o. all contributed to these new expressive riches beyond the smooth nurb surfaces of early versions of parametricism, albeit without explicitly referencing or emphasizing articulation and expression as key architectural agenda. This explicit emphasis on articulation  - as well as its instrumentalisation within a new architectural semiology -  is my contribution. The project of articulation that constraints itself via tectonic logics might be called “tectonism”, understood as the latest stage within the overarching paradigm of parametricism. I want to argue here that tectonism is fully compatible and congenial with the pursuit of multiple (rather than merely singular) readings and associations. It even produces virtuality, albeit without making this the sole ambition, The repertoire of materials, structural principles, morphologies, fabrication approaches and their respective algorithms has become so rich a palette for the pursuit of open-ended, “poetic”, “strange”, “enigmatic” ventures of articulation that the commitment to this world does further boost rather than reduce the “artistic” versatility of the designer. The benefits in terms of weight, cost and time are not be neglected. However, I also argue that the rule-based (rather than random) variety and a correlated richness of diverse layers and systems (via associative logics) allows for a denser network of relations to be assembled, both a priori intended and a posteriori discovered, while the raw proliferation of non-correlated patterns is often prone to collapse into the sterility of an indecipherable visual noise.

The idea of tectonic articulation is invitation to a form of creativity that uses constraints as engine of invention. This approach is certainly not unknown to Tom Wiscombe (who seems to be the charismatic force behind the current SciArc stylistic design convergence) who’s fibre-glass cantilever piece at SciArc with its expressive use of structurally deployed black carbon-fibre tape (“tattooing”) patterns is a strong example of what I call tectonic articulation, and therefore an instance of tectonism. I would also classify Wiscombe’s interesting attempt to use M&E systems as expressive articulatory medium that might give character to an architecture as a (indeed unique) contribution to tectonic articulation and tectonism. In both instances, the artistic pursuit of expressiveness was perhaps too obviously compromising the underlying technological rationales. But this is a matter of degree, a matter of balance and calibration rather than a matter of principle. Tectonism will always have to select, orchestrate and to some degree compromise the utilized engineering rationales for the sake of architectural composition and articulation; and this is only right and proper, as architectural composition and articulation are  - whether this is always explicitly grasped or only intuitively done -  means towards the enhancement of the project’s social functionality which indeed depends on the design’s communicative capacity.

To summarize: There is an Object Oriented Architecture in the sense of a OOO-inspired approach to architecture that, in its most valuable aspects, turns out to be less novel than it wants to see itself and that defines itself unnecessarily in contrast to parametricism. Object Oriented Architecture should ideally be seen as one of parametricism’s research tendencies that might mature into another of its subsidiary styles. Whether the current crop of self-identified triple-O protagonists agree with this classification is another question. I for my part wish they will, and would welcome the increased crosspollination of ideas and discoveries (that tend to be prevented by a sectarian camp formation on the basis of artificial rhetorical distinctions that are often pursued as marketing strategy). Parametricism can benefit from and perhaps even needs this refreshing injection of this OOO-tendency (even if it turns out to be a re-injection of one of its own lost moments) as much as this fresh tendency needs the constructive critique and solidarity of the overarching movement of parametricism. Why? What for? To make a real impact and to change the built environment for good, and to finally oust and replace modernism. What else?

End.