Poor Theory
Notes Toward a Manifesto
Poor theory is less a theory than a way of proceeding.
Poor theory proposes to find ways of making the most of limited resources.
Poor theory uses the tools at hand to take the present to task. In the process it tinkers with theoretical technique and analytical object.
Poor theory suggests the need to ‘work around’ intransigent problems, when clear solutions are not discernible and the means at our disposal are limited.
Poor theory reflexively re-encounters the history of theory through paying attention to the murky, unsystematic practices and discourses of everyday life. Poor theory is conditioned by reflexive imbrication with probable pasts and arguments with/about possible futures, and thus comes to see the present, too, as heterotemporal.
Poor theory proceeds not through ‘tabula rasa,’ not by wiping the slate clean and starting afresh. That, to some extent, was the modernist aspiration, which has proven to be always costly and often undesirable. By contrast, poor theory proceeds through appropriations and improvisations, through descriptions that do not leave what it describes unchanged.
Poor theory is theory shaped by the fact that we are always confronted by objects and situations that are ‘riddled with error’ (Benjamin) and that outpace theory. Critically using the tools at hand, poor theory questions their construction and re-orients their practice. Tinkering calls for a tactical, recombinatorial, experimental ethic toward theoretical objects, and an historical analysis of the changing political contexts of intellectual inquiry.
Poor theory suggests not a resignation to epistemological futility but an openness to that which outpaces understanding. Objects of analysis present, in their contingency, in their being unsystematic, a degree of intransigence that frustrates mastery. The intractability of the object throws into relief the possibility of error in our methods.
Poor theory puts the stress neither on knowledge nor on ignorance, but on finding a relationship to what we do not know. It takes seriously the possibility that fascination can be turned into a critical method. Poor theory proceeds with fascination and urgency, instead of mastery, and a recognition that the critical tools we have at hand have their limits. It recognizes, for instance, the limits of archival preservation (from the inherent aging of media and materials to a lack of funding or political will), the limits of legibility (given the opacities of translation), the limits of a rational impulse to understand and thus fix the meaning of a messy problem or situations characterized by excess. But, nonetheless, we proceed, armed with the awareness of these limits, tinkering, working against and around them.
The ‘poor’ in ‘poor theory’ suggests a kind of discomfort not so much with theory as with its indiscriminate and undiscriminating use. It is not an endorsement of bad or sloppy theorizing, nor is it an all-too-easy condemnation of the ‘poverty of theory.’ Poor theory still engages with political economies and epistemic shifts, with historical arcs and ruptures, with new directions
and enduring legacies, but, more experimentally, it sits among the insistent desiring practices, obscure forms of address, and tangential intimacies of a changing transnational landscape.
Poor theory is alert to novel ways in which particular forms of life come to matter, and to the relational labor involved in those valuations. Neither seeking to make epochal generalizations nor to fetishize the new, it is nevertheless a prompt to think theoretically in spaces and through times that have not often cohabited with the space of theory.
Shaping paths ‘around’ intransigent problems, poor theory seeks not to erase the problems of ‘theory,’ but, rather, to rearticulate pasts, presents and futures via different conversations, not simply re-forming prior modes. Observing a general economy of the critical modes, poor theory invites us to jettison the economic rationalities that reduce our theories to use values and wise investments and other naturalized vestiges of a system of surplus accumulation that profits even from waste and catastrophe. In an era of global fiscal crisis, poor theory invites informal economies and popular boycotts into the theorization of global imaginaries in formation.
Poor theory is more a matter of de-scriptions than of ‘thick descriptions.’ Its procedures have something in common with ‘bricolage’ and ‘détournement,’ but with a difference. In the era of information and electronic technologies, bricolage necessarily becomes arbitrage. Cultural arbitrage exploits existing hierarchies by tracing and refracting imbalances and unevenness in global culture, much as economic arbitrage exploits profit price differentials in financial instruments. Putting `difference’ to good use, recognizing merit in what is generally considered meretricious, turning compost into compositions: these are some strategies of poor theory.
Poor theory overlaps with but is not identical to many other projects: `poor cinema’ (Julio García-Espinosa et. al.), `weak thought’ (Gianni Vattimo), `architecture for the poor’ (Hassan Fathy),`poor theater’( Jerzy Grotowski ), and `arte povera’ (Germano Celant et. al.), for example.
Poor cinema is a powerful movement in film making, growing out of the aesthetics of hunger (Glauber Rocha in Brazil) and imperfect cinema (Julio García-Espinosa in Cuba). Poor cinema values creativity over technical possibilities, and tactical, partial engagements over comprehensive programs.
Poor theory, unlike `weak thought,’ is not primarily concerned with arguing for a kind of philosophical anti-foundationalism: its concerns are more everyday and social.
If poor theory desires to do more than advocate for the use of mud bricks and the return to traditional building methods or their equivalents, it is because ‘local knowledge’ under today’s spatial conditions cannot afford to be nostalgic or to have a merely local application. Poor theory looks for the points of communication and networks of contiguity between the urban poor in scattered city centers and across national borders. Poor theory thinks historically, relationally, and theoretically around and against denials of co-evalness (Johannes Fabian). Through new mixings of the practical and the theoretical, it destabilizes prior and continuing formations of the national, the colonial, the imperial and the postcolonial as pure categories.
Grotowski’s ‘poor theater’ is verbally close but ideologically distant from poor theory. Poor theater was an attempt to strip theater of its spectacular elements, and to reduce it, in good Stanislawski fashion, to the relation between actor and audience. Poor theater was a protest against theater’s over-abundance of resources; the ascetic was its aesthetic. Poor theory may be
the diametrical opposite of poor theater. It sees an abundance in what is commonly labeled poor. It explores the conditions in which pronouncements of abundance and scarcity are enunciated.
Arte povera tried, among other things, to turn compost into compositions. Nevertheless, the direction some curators saw in it was a powerful move from ‘zero to infinity’, from nothing to everything. By contrast, poor theory has to be concerned not with nothing or with everything, but with the ‘not quite’, with ‘dis-appointment’.
Poor theory is not so much a new theory conceived from whole cloth as an invitation to do theory-work through an intermingled multiplicity of approaches and topics.
Poor theory is not a lever, a toolbox nor a key. Poor theory is an open set of engagements.
Work in poor theory can proceed in many different ways. It does not simply celebrate fragmentation and pluralism; rather, it seeks a complex interdisciplinary engagement across cultures, histories, and practices. It draws inspiration and rigor from all disciplines, but it does not seek to redefine theory as a singular disciplinary endeavor. It may be particularly suitable to mingling familiar sites of theory with sites still incompletely engaged by other forms of theory. It may turn its iterative methods and generative re-mixtures toward, for instance, the zones of affect and economy, capital and life, value and reproduction, production and culture, subjectivation and materiality, science fictions and technopolitics.
We fully expect that it will be elaborated in unexpected ways. It is open to re-mixture because its borders are always available for examination and always under construction. We encourage different individual and collaborative projects to emerge out of poor theory’s engagement with heterogeneous probings, fragmentary thinking, and open-endedness, and its resistance to totalization, restriction, and closure.
Begin forwarded message:From: CRA-Carlo Ratti Associati <pr@carloratti.com>
Subject: AN EARTHY, MICHELIN-STARRED CANTEEN
Date: November 21, 2024 at 6:14:02 AM EST
newsletter NOVEMBER 2024
AN EARTHY, MICHELIN-STARRED CANTEEN
CRA designs an innovative dining hall for Mutti, global leader in tomato-based products, located in Italy’s Food Valley. The expansive, light-filled space was created by excavating a section of the site’s terrain and elevating it above ground level, to integrate the space with its natural surroundings. The canteen, operated by a culinary team renowned for its Michelin-starred restaurants, will serve both factory workers and external diners.
More information and images available upon request through pr@carloratti.com
International design and innovation firm CRA-Carlo Ratti Associati has completed the construction of Quisimangia (“Here we eat”), a new company Canteen for Mutti, a global leader in tomato-based products. The canteen, which will function as a restaurant by night, is located in Montechiarugolo (Parma), in the heart of Italy’s Food Valley. The structure was created by excavating a section of the site’s terrain and elevating it above ground level to integrate the space with its natural surroundings. This project marks a continuation of the partnership between CRA and Mutti, which began with the masterplan for a new factory and production site and was followed by “The Greenary,” a private residence that has become one of CRA’s most awarded buildings.
The new project features a dining hall crowned by a green roof made from compacted earth sourced directly from the site. Diners, seated in a recessed glass structure, are fully immersed in the surrounding vegetation, eating at the same level as the exterior meadow. The design evokes the image of a clod of earth lifted from the ground. The soil is elevated up to 5 meters above ground, covering an indoor area of almost 500 sq m (5,400 sq ft) for a total area of 1,200 sq m (13,000 sq ft).
Quisimangia will be managed by ViCook, the catering arm of brothers Chicco and Bobo Cerea, famed for their Michelin-starred Da Vittorio restaurants in Bergamo, St. Moritz, and Shanghai. It will be open to both Mutti employees and, in the near future, to the public. Adjacent to the new dining hall, an old tavern visible from the road has been renovated to serve as the canteen’s kitchen. The canteen will be an open space where people can meet in a friendly environment.
The gardens outside—a 1.1 hectare garden designed by Italian award-winning landscape architect Paolo Pejrone—showcase the bounty of the local region. The design reinterprets the 18th Century French concept of “ha-ha”, which means surprising the viewer by creating a vertical barrier while preserving an uninterrupted view of the landscape beyond from the other side, allowing guests to immerse themselves in nature.
“This project illustrates our quest to merge the natural with the artificial,” says Carlo Ratti, founding partner of CRA, professor at MIT, and curator of the Biennale Architettura 2025. “This clod of earth rising from the ground creates a constant dialogue with nature. Instead of a ‘déjeuner sur l’herbe’ we could call it a ‘déjeuner sous l’herbe’, dining under the grass.”
“We are pleased to continue our collaboration with CRA to bring this visionary project to life. The Mutti Canteen is much more than a dining hall; it is the finest expression of our commitment to quality and sustainability,” states Francesco Mutti, CEO of Mutti. “Integrating the natural beauty of our surroundings with cutting-edge design, we are offering an environment where our employees can connect with both the land and each other in a meaningful way.”
The principles of circularity are evident throughout the building’s design. The canteen also features a unique floor made from tomato skins—byproducts of Mutti’s production line. It is estimated that more than 3 tons of waste material were used to create this floor. The facility is equipped with advanced environmental control technologies to minimize energy consumption.
CRA’s designs emphasize the relationship between the natural and the artificial, pushing the boundaries of innovative construction materials. During Milan Design Week 2019, the “Circular Garden” installation explored the architectural potential of fungal root mycelium. In 2024, “sunRice” experimented with rice as an adaptable material. In 2020, CRA, in collaboration with Italo Rota, Matteo Gatto, and F&M Ingegneria, developed the “Italian Pavilion” for Expo 2020 Dubai, a living laboratory for advancing circularity in architecture, incorporating coffee grounds, recycled plastics, and algae into the structure. CRA’'s work on “The Greenary” and its collaboration with BIG on the “CapitaSpring” skyscraper in Singapore, which includes indoor public gardens, exemplifies their approach to integrating nature within artificial spaces.
DOWNLOAD HI-RES IMAGES + READ THE FULL PRESS RELEASE HERE
CREDITS:
A project by CRA-Carlo Ratti Associati for Mutti
Creative lead: Italo Rota
CRA team: Carlo Ratti, Andrea Cassi (partner-in-charge), Francesco Strocchio (partner-in-charge), Giulia Tolu, Nicolette Marzovilla, Gary Di Silvio, Pasquale Milieri, Gianluca Zimbardi
Structural Engineering: INGEMBP (Corrado Curti, Marco Bertelli, Giuseppe Coco)
MEP Systems Engineering: PROJEMA (Ivan Pavanello, Simone Graziano, Emanuele Lenta, Diego Dellerba)
Acoustics: 2LD Acustica S.r.l. (Diego Dellerba)
Fire safety: ARCHING (Stefano De Pippo)
Authority Approval, Health & Safety Lead: Aldo Trombi
Photos by Melania Delle Grave, Agnese Bedini, DSL Studio
:
More information is available upon request: pr@carloratti.com
CAPITASPRING WINS THE INTERNATIONAL HIGH RISE AWARDS We are thrilled to announce that CapitaSpring, the building we co-designed with BIG-Bjarke Ingels Group, has won the International High-Rise Award 2024/25, the world’s most prestigious prize for skyscrapers. But CapitaSpring is more than just a tower—it’s a vertical ecosystem featuring a Green Oasis with over 80,000 plants, a public rooftop urban farm, and lush sky gardens that redefine what a garden city can be.
A CIRCULARITY MANIFESTO FOR THE BIENNALE ARCHITETTURA 2025 Carlo Ratti, as Curator of the Biennale Architettura (Venice, Arsenale and Giardini, 10 May-23 November 2025), launches a Circular Economy Manifesto developed with guidance from Arup and input from the Ellen MacArthur Foundation. This Manifesto calls on Participants in the Biennale Architettura 2025 to address the fundamental challenges of the built environment and work together to create a genuinely circular exhibition.
URBAN REGENERATION
BARCELONA, SPAIN
NOVEMBER 26
The Barcelona University School of Urban Management will host Carlo as a special guest for its Urban Regeneration course, exploring innovative city design and concluding with an interactive session.
BAUWELT KONGRESS
BERLIN, GERMANY
NOVEMBER 27-28
Carlo will deliver a keynote at the Bauwelt Kongress 2024 in Berlin on the impact of digital technologies in urban design and how smart technologies can cultivate resilient, human-centered cities.
/ 22 AUGUST
Just how could a globe-spanning bubble shield us from climate change? Tune into BBC Radio 4's "Curious Cases," where Hannah Fry and Dara Ó Briain dive into MIT's Senseable City Lab project Space Bubbles with Carlo!
Adaptive reuse, new public spaces, and stunning views of the UNESCO-listed Piedmontese Alps are standout features in ArchDaily's coverage of CRA's renovation of the iconic Palazzo Micca in Turin, Italy.
Archilovers spotlighted how the Circular Economy Manifesto strengthens the exhibition's commitment to combating climate change through a sustainable model for design, installation, and operation.
For our Francophones, don't miss this interview with Carlo, where he tackles pressing questions about future materials, the free market and regulation, and whether he prefers funky Rio de Janeiro or charming Paris.
Check out The Plan's feature on our renovation of Palazzo Micca, where the project's dual goals are highlighted: sustainably revitalizing existing structures and transforming unused office spaces into vibrant public areas!
Curious about what can be revealed ahead of the Biennale Architettura 2025 opening next spring? Check out this feature in Wallpaper for a sneak peak at the exciting developments taking shape.
CRA is hiring! We are looking for new talents for our offices in Turin and New York. To discover all the vacancies and send in your application, visit our JOBSpage. Are you an experienced architect? We are looking for senior architects to join the team!
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Sha Xin Wei
The Turing model of computation (or equivalently, Church’s lambda-calculus) is a purely formal concept. And for some 80 years, electronic machines materially realizing Turing-equivalent computation have been architected to maintain the immaterial illusions of Turing computation: (1) replacing ontology by tokens, in particular binary data; (2) the immateriality and omnitemporality of representation; (3) the conceit that computation takes no physical energy and no space. On the other hand, the metabolic is conditioned — though not determined — by thermodynamic energetics, friction, analog continuity, and complexity, with the extra features of mortality, natality, dense metastability, anti-entropy (negentropy), indeterminacy and non-prestatability. Is there any way to associate these seemingly antipodal families of notions? Rather than reduce the metabolic to the formal (as done by machine pattern classification and synthesis, computer games, a-life, assembly theory), I speculate what alternative concept of “computation” might enjoy some of the features or effects of the metabolic. And following a pragmatic approach I propose some performative experiments from Synthesis @ ASU.
Andrés Saenz de Sicilia
A crucial moment in the development of Marx’s materialism was his deployment of the concept of metabolism to theorise the human relationship with nature. The metabolic framework situates human social activity within an energetic rather than conceptual economy, marking a decisive break with idealism. Yet for Marx social life remains unintelligible as a merely energetic transfer, for that transfer always takes place in historically specific forms, bound to historically specific social relations, institutions, technologies, identities, ideologies, etc.. The critical force of Marx’s account of Capital lies precisely in the analysis of the social forms that mediate the human-nature metabolism in the modern epoch. This paper examines this link, between metabolism and capitalist social form in Marx’s thought, in order to clarify the stakes of the present ecological crisis.
Violeta Garrido and Ramón del Buey Cañas
It is well known that, at least since the publication of the report to the Club of Rome in 1971, thinking in depth about the ecological problems of our time means the understanding of the origin and nature of our ways of living and, moreover, seeing that these are coupled to a type of metabolism that is resulting in a severe erosion of the web of life and an accelerated waste of our material and energy resources. This is another way to pose that, in addition to a knowledge of the social, institutional, imaginary and motivational construction that sets in motion the current capitalist orders, an integrated project of ecological economy also needs to address the dynamics of energy and material exchanges that are established at its base. And for this, a solid knowledge of the functioning of these energetic and material dynamics at a fundamental level seems unavoidable.
This is precisely what the work of Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen pointed to, when he claimed the crucial importance of entropy in the study and conceptualization of a truly eco-integrative economic proposal. At this point, however, a crucial question arises: does entropy have the potential to become an integrative concept for ecological economics, and is it possible to construct a mutually intelligible interdisciplinary approach to economic processes that takes entropy as its cornerstone? Our hypothesis, which is supported by the numerous and crucial works of Antonio Valero and Alicia Valero, is that it is not possible. From their point of view, although the economy must undoubtedly be taken into account, and incorporate thermodynamics in its accounting, entropy is a bad indicator for it. Why? Our talk proposes an answer to this question, important also to address some crucial debates around the notions of ‘energy’ and ‘exergy’, which are transversal to the fields of ecological economics, feminist economics, ecofeminism and ecosocialism.
Oswaldo Emiddio Vasquez Hadjilyra
As the ongoing “return to matter” trickles down into reinvented glossaries and research methodologies motivated by new materialist thinking, it remains unclear how it challenges our understanding of computation. Even within a resurging field like fluidic computation there is little, if any, theoretical engagement with the material affordances of fluids as a mode of computation.
Developed at first to model post-war national economies (MONIAC) while anticipating the Cold War hysteria as it could operate in an ionized environment, fluidic computation could carry out computations dynamically by solving multiple differential equations simultaneously. In more recent years, scaled down to microfluidics, its operations have been reintroduced in the health sector in lab-on-a-chip (LOC) research.
In this presentation I would like to approach fluidic computation from a theoretical standpoint by re-interpreting some of its key components, and focus on its materially constituted logic, whereby negation is not the result of a posited non-being (NOT) but the outcome of turbulence disturbance. To do so, I will examine Michel Serres’ The Birth of Physics, in which he notes that when a laminar flow of atoms is disturbed by turbulence is what leads to existence. But such turbulence, in fluidic engineering, is what defines the ‘NOT’ operator. From this study case I will conclude by further complexifying the notion of negation through Paolo Virno’s “linguistic anthropology”.
The present panel proposes to sketch out some aspects of a desirable reform of ontology and epistemology aimed at reappraising the relation between form and energy. Taking a lead from Gilbert Simondon’s theory of individuation, a special emphasis will be placed on his concept of ground: ‘what is determinant and plays an energetic role are not forms but that which carries the forms, which is to say their ground; the ground, while perpetually marginal with respect to attention, is what harbors the dynamisms.’ (Simondon, Mode of Existence of Technical Objects, pp. 60-62) Simondon’s approach indeed enables us to conceive of the participation of forms in a ground that is dynamic and rich in singularities. This notion of ground could not be further removed from the disembodied, neutral backdrop of transcendental notions of space and time, in which geometric points without extension and lines without thickness have ruled the ontology and epistemology of classical physics. (Longo, Le cauchemar de prométhée, Puf, 2023)
Cécile Malaspina
Sha Xin Wei
For Simondon, “information is never relative to a single and homogeneous reality but to two orders in a state of disparation…never deposited in a [given] form…[but] is the tension between two disparate reals.” The elastic dynamics of his material example, clay, is modeled by what materials scientists call the stress-energy tensor. I consider this tensor and its general relativistic analogue: the stress-energy-momentum tensor not to reduce phenomena to physics, but to see what insights we may derive from such non-Newtonian figures of thought, for a materialist, haptic, textural (distributed), approach to how “emergent energetic directionalities and/or networks structure human and nonhuman trajectories, behaviour, and affordances.” I propose to re-earth discussions of energy from dematerializing, transcendental versions of informatics and cybernetics, and orient towards a metabolic understanding of dynamics.
Muindi Fanuel Muindi
Since its inception, the science of energy, or “energetics”, has informed the researches of occultists and philosophers, serving as a guiding model and metaphor for the creation of new concepts of the uncanny, the other-worldly, the ontological, and the ethical. Magical and metaphysical thinking have, in turn, informed the science of energetics, serving as forerunners, presaging unexpected findings and paradigm shifts. This presentation investigates the energetic tropes that permeate the varied discourses that characterize magics and metaphysics and, in turn, the forms of magical and metaphysical thinking that permeate the scientific discourse of energetics.
To this end, it will engage with five forms of energetic agency and energetic agents: conduction and the conductors that channel energy; transduction and the transducers that transform energy; resistance and the resistors that dissipate energy; capacitance and the capacitors that intervene between conductors to store-up energy; and lastly, inductance and the inductors that convene (or coil) conductors around them to store-up energy. One particular family of energetic devices will serve as informative anecdote for this investigation: analog radios and their tuned circuits — consisting of a resistor (R), an inductor (L), and a capacitor (C) configured to form a harmonic oscillator.
Following this line of inquiry, the presentation will consider the manner in which Colonial Science tacitly accepts metaphors drawn from the magical and metaphysical languages of “the West” and rejects metaphors drawn from the magical and metaphysical languages of “the Rest”.
Alicia Juarrero
I’ve participated in this. The facilitator, who brought many years of experience working with organizations, closed our 3 day retreat with a version of this, largely silent reflective activity. Even in the rather formal conditions of an organizational retreat, I found it surprisingly moving, with my eyes closed listening to the quiet wash of people walking around the room, and occasionally feeling the lightest tap on my shoulder.
Xinwei
I’ve participated in this. The facilitator, who brought many years of experience working with organizations, closed our 3 day retreat with a version of this, largely silent reflective activity. Even in the rather formal conditions of an organizational retreat, I found it surprisingly moving, with my eyes closed listening to the quiet wash of people walking around the room, and occasionally feeling the lightest tap on my shoulder.
Xinwei
