The tortoise,the scorpion and the horse - partial notes on architectural research/teaching/practice

‘With Blade Runner's replicants, circulating capital achieves its highest form and real subsumption attains its ultimate stage of development: the replicants become the privileged objects of society's intelligence.’1 Eric Alliez and Michel Feher, ‘Notes on the Sophisticated City’, trs, David Berris and Astrid Hustvedt, in, Sanford Kwinter and Michel Feher, eds, Zone 1/2 (New York, Urzone Inc., 1986), p.41.

The term ‘replicant’, drawn from the 1982 film Blade Runner directed by Ridley Scott, is used here to conceptualise the ‘urbanism’ produced within the Central Building designed by Zaha Hadid Architects for BMW's plant at Leipzig in 2005. It is used not so as to critique the project's urban dimension as fake, but to propose that it is, like the humanoid replicants of the film, a new reality produced by corporate capital designed to function in its service as an improved version of the original from which it is derived.2 Ridley Scott, Dir., Blade Runner (1982). In the film's opening sequences replicants are introduced, in the form of an entry from the 2012 edition of Webster's Dictionary, as follows: Early in the 21st Century, THE TYRELL CORPORATION advanced Robot evolution into the NEXUS phase—a being virtually identical to a human—known as a replicant. The NEXUS 6 Replicants were superior in strength and agility, and at least equal in intelligence, to the genetic engineers who created them. Replicants were used Off-world as slave labor, in the hazardous exploration and colonisation of other planets. This proposition is developed through an analysis of the models of labour organisation currently utilised within managerial practice, and the confluence of its concerns with those of certain currents in contemporary architecture. The BMW Central Building is also analysed in the economic and political contexts of the plant's specific location, and with reference to the architectural means through which it has been designed to replicate and instrumentalise urban organisational patterns for the corporation.