The Architecture of Error ─ Matter, Measure, and the Misadventures of Precision

When architects draw even brick walls to six decimal places with software designed tocut lenses, it is clear that the logic that once organized relations between precision and materialerror in construction has unraveled. Precision, already a promiscuous term, seems now to have beenuncoupled from its contract with truthfulness. Meanwhile error, and the always-political space ofits dissent, has reconfigured itself. In The Architecture of Error FrancescaHughes argues that behind the architect's acute fetishization of redundant precision lies a specialfear of physical error. What if we were to consider the pivotal cultural and technologicaltransformations of modernism to have been driven not so much by the causes its narratives declare,she asks, as by an unspoken horror of loss of control over error, material life, and everything thatmatter stands for? Hughes traces the rising intolerance of material vagaries -- from the removal ofornament to digitalized fabrication -- that produced the blind rejection of organic materials, theproliferation of material testing, and the rhetorical obstacles that blighted cybernetics. Why isit, she asks, that the more we cornered physical error, the more we feared it? Hughes's analysis ofredundant precision exposes an architecture of fear whose politics must be called into question.Proposing error as a new category for architectural thought, Hughes draws on other disciplines andpractices that have interrogated precision and failure, citing the work of scientists NancyCartwright and Evelyn Fox Keller and visual artists Gordon Matta-Clark, Barbara Hepworth, RachelWhiteread, and others. These non-architect practitioners, she argues, show that error need not beexcluded and precision can be made accountable.

Francesca Hughes lives and works in London, where she taught at the Bartlett School of Architecture and the Architectural Association for many years. She is the editor of The Architect: Reconstructing Her Practice (MIT Press) and Drawings That Count.