"Give me a gun and I will make all buildings move": an ant's view of architecture

By Bruno Latour and Albena Yaneva
Our building problem is just the opposite of Etienne Jules Marey’s famous
inquiry into the physiology of movement. Through the invention of his
“photographic gun,” he wanted to arrest the flight of a gull so as to be able
to see in a fixed format every single successive freeze-frame of a contin-
uous flow of flight, the mechanism of which had eluded all observers
until his invention. What we need is the reverse: the problem with build-
ings is that they look desperately static. It seems almost impossible to
grasp them as movement, as flight, as a series of transformations. Every-
body knows—and especially architects, of course—that a building is
not a static object but a moving project, and that even once it is has been
built, it ages, it is transformed by its users, modified by all of what hap-
pens inside and outside, and that it will pass or be renovated, adulterated
and transformed beyond recognition. We know this, but the problem is
that we have no equivalent of Marey’s photographic gun: when we picture
a building, it is always as a fixed, stolid structure that is there in four col-
ors in the glossy magazines that customers flip through in architects’ wait-
ing rooms. If Marey was so frustrated not to be able to picture in
a successive series of freeze-frames the flight of a gull, how irritating it is
for us not to be able to picture, as one continuous movement, the project
flow that makes up a building. Marey had the visual input of his eyes
and was able to establish the physiology of flight only after he invented
an artificial device (the photographic gun); we too need an artificial
device (a theory in this case) in order to be able to transform the static view
of a building into one among many successive freeze-frames that could at
last document the continuous flow that a building always is.
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