Melis Uğurlu: In your recent research on the Larkin Administration Building, as well as the Kew Herbarium, you point out that the unit of data has a longer history than we presume and that phenomena such as the paper technologies of the 18th century, the botanical research of the early 20th century, and modern office-management systems all directly precede today's regime of big data. How does this longer history change our understanding of data and its relationship with architecture?

Z. Ç. Alexander: Both in scholarship and popular media, the emergence of regimes of big data is frequently associated with the rise of electronic computing. That’s the narrative we’re given over and over again. Sometimes the argument is that our current status of information overload can be compared to the overload that occurred when moveable type was invented in the early modern period—for example, by the historian Ann Blair in her compelling book Too Much To Know.¹ While I welcome any attempt at historicization, I want to push back against such accounts, because these lines of thought make the predictable argument that there was a technological inevitability to the emergence of these epistemic regimes—the idea that the moveable type or the internet were the causes for the information overload that followed. I’m much more convinced by scholarship that argues that the rise of quantification in modernity had something to do with administrative and governmental forces—I’m using “governmental” in the Foucauldian sense here. I’m thinking especially of the work of the historian Theodore Porter, who has made a convincing case for the centrality of “technologies of trust” in modernity.² According to Porter, quantification—and, one could add, the emergence of data—cannot simply be seen as a technological or scientific necessity, but rather should be understood as a condition required by new regimes of governmentality, forms of governing in which power had to be mediated through modern forms of bureaucracy. Architecture, I argue, has played an important role in this history both by making bureaucracy possible and by serving as its limit condition.

Ian Erickson: In your work on the Kew Herbarium, you describe how the architecture of the Herbarium functions as a physical limit that pushes in on a system of archiving information, which could theoretically expand infinitely.³ This analysis of the herbarium inverts the more typical disciplinary approach of looking at a given building as a discrete object and, instead, analyzes the knowledge system that the architecture is delimiting. In doing so, you pull apart the herbarium's bureaucratic system into its logistical, technological, epistemological, and political dimensions. Given the attention you have paid to these often-invisible forces affecting architecture, why is it important to understand bureaucracy in relation to architectural scholarship and how does this approach change how we look at architecture?

The idea of infinity is very much tied, then, to the idea of an economy that isn’t limited but can be infinitely expanded—as in 18th and 19th-century debates about whether an economy should stay protectionist and impose tariffs or whether it should be allowed to open up to free trade. These ideas are still alive and well today. For example, the rhetoric of today’s Silicon Valley claims that while the world's resources may seem limited, through technology, it’s possible—miraculously!—to provide unlimited growth. In that sense, Silicon Valley offers alchemy for the 21st century. It’s important to note that infinity isn’t just the romantic veneer of these epistemic regimes; it is very much part and parcel of their ideology, which, in my understanding, is tied in with the ideology of economic liberalism, especially in its most pointedly laissez-faire iterations.

What's interesting about architecture is that even though it plays a central role in facilitating this fantasy, infinity comes up against a wall, literally, in buildings. In instances such as the Kew Herbarium or the Larkin Administration Building, claims of infinite expansion are undercut when it becomes clear that there are physical limits to the interchangeability of units on which the system’s claims of expansion are based. In the case of Kew, each building that makes up the complex is designed with the aspiration that it will accommodate the entirety of the botanical universe, but that assumption is proven wrong—again and again—as it becomes necessary to keep adding new buildings to the complex. In the case of Larkin, the building is designed with the assumption that it will facilitate the arrangement and rearrangement of information, as well as of labor and equipment. The analogy here is the card catalog, whose index cards one can shuffle and reshuffle. But at the end of the day, it becomes necessary to resort to a geographical arrangement of the departments with the result that reshuffling is strictly limited. So, neither the claim of infinity nor the claim of interchangeability can be realized, precisely because of the physical limits of architecture. And let me clarify here that by “architecture,” I mean not only the buildings but also the filing cabinets, shelves, and so on. Architecture, in other words, is a physical boundary that defines the limit condition of the claims of infinity and interchangeability made by the epistemic regimes of data.

M.U.: I’d like to draw attention to these filing cabinets, shelves, and equipment of the space. In your research on the Larkin Administration Building, you present us with a compelling relationship between the flow of paperwork and the design of space, noting that office equipment was key in directing this flow. Is it possible to think about this relationship or flow in reverse? To put it another way, has architecture ever been a measure in implementing bureaucracy or bureaucratic order?

I.E.:I was pleased that you brought up the historian of science Theodore Porter earlier because I’m very interested in the way that you frame bureaucracy as a “moral technology,” in the sense that Porter has used the phrase, in your work on the Kew Herbarium. If bureaucracy is truly a moral technology, I think it brings up several secondary questions with which we must investigate that morality, such as, whose morals, on whose behalf, with whose power, for what purpose, etc.? Keeping these questions in mind, why is this moral framing of bureaucracy important for architecture and how far can we extend it? Are all instances of bureaucracy moralizing? Do architecture’s own specific bureaucracies like contracts, order forms, licensing exams, etc., all carry with them a moral dimension?

Now, having said that, this isn’t a universal condition. I would say, it was from the late 18th century onwards in the West, when architecture started offering its expertise as a moral technology of sorts and playing a more explicitly political role. It’s precisely in this period that we identify with the rise of architectural modernity that architects start offering their expertise to mediate between the various stakeholders: the clients of the project, other technocrats like engineers, who also offer their expertise, developers, as well as workers and the users of architecture. This is how I was taught professional practice when I was in architecture school that architects work in the name of that elusive thing called “the public” and that an architect is supposed to be the professional, whose expertise should speak on behalf of those who aren’t present at the table. In other words, architectural expertise becomes a moral technology at the moment in history when architecture takes it upon itself to benefit society at large. This wasn’t a possible proposition, say in the 17th century, when architects would work for the Pope or a monarch in the West; it became a possibility only when the client changed to the so-called public.

I.E.: I want to transition from this conversation about bureaucracy and moral technology to what enforcing a set of standards and values allows, which is the classification of things once they’re forced into a uniform format. When you describe the standard formatting of botanical specimens in the Kew Herbarium, you refer to that mode of knowledge collection and production as “homogenous empiricism.” Homogenous empiricism is structured in such a way as to be immune to the theory organizing it, meaning that the method of cataloging information is decoupled from the information’s future interpretation. What’s the significance of this way of structuring information independent of an ordering system and what tensions exist between that way of structuring information and the ordering systems that are then overlaid upon it?

I.E.: I’m also thinking about the support systems that allowed the Kew Herbarium to exist. The Herbarium was surrounded and supported by massive logistical networks, shipping relays, communication routes, global labor forces, and other management techniques in the service of the empire. One can see your analysis of these systems as related to a kind of emerging material sensibility in architecture in which scholars are beginning to look very seriously at supply chains, material flows, logistics, and bureaucracies that support those things. Why is it valuable to look at architecture in this way and why, particularly, do you think this emerging sensibility is happening now? 

Z.Ç.A.: Yes, this has been called the “material turn,” but also goes under a number of different names. I have to admit that I’m somewhat skeptical of these particular claims to materiality for several reasons. First of all, it seems to me—and this is really on the level of simple observation—that the more one talks about materiality or materialism, in an attempt to get rid of all metaphysics, the more metaphysics seems to creep in. Take the case of art history: the more that art historians talk about the materiality of the artwork—and, again, I'm really observing this almost as an anthropologist of sorts—the more they seem to want to put art up on a pedestal as an autonomous object that seems to have a markedly different materiality than everything else in the world. Second, the desire to follow circulation flows can easily surrender to the very ideological position of liberalism that this circulatory system—frequently imagined as an organism of sorts—is also a self-regulating one. So, for those two reasons, putting too much emphasis on material flows may be a dangerous position. I know that in my work, I frequently stress circulation as well, but I hope I also make it clear that these materials didn’t flow very well at all. I'm realizing now that the rise of enterprises like the Kew Herbarium coincides with the strengthening of laissez-faire attitudes. When networks were allowed to get looser in general, it seems, storehouses of information were needed to regulate them to make sure that the system functioned properly. This isn’t to say that the Kew Herbarium functioned well at all; its homogenous empiricism wasn’t that homogenous. We’re not talking here about a well-oiled machine that efficiently brought things from South America to England or from England to India, etc.; the whole thing is better described as a comedy of errors. Plants died, ships sank, plantations failed to produce the desired crops. Even when things seemed to work, markets crashed. These were serious impediments to the flow, frictions in the system. The system produced more friction than flow.

In the introduction of Raw Data is an Oxymoron, Lisa Gitelman and Virginia Jackson offer a fitting analogy to explain and understand all of this. They draw a parallel between photographic image and data, pointing out that, similar to how photography is about framing, selecting, and choosing where to stand and shoot, thus rendering it subjective, data should also be understood in terms of framing or being framed.¹¹ Ultimately, it’s said that data requires our participation, which introduces subjectivity to it. To refer to Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, the history of objectivity turns out to be inescapably the history of the subjectivity of the self.¹² So, to apply all of this to architecture, how do we see subjectivity disguised as objectivity within our discipline?