N.B. A complementary part of this claim, not discussed here, is that we can examine how the mundane relational politics of enclosure and mobility figures affective bodies, where militarisation can be “traced and interrogated in more accountable ways” (Isla Forsyth in Merriman et al. 2017:50; also Rech et al. 2015).

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In these field notes from my doctoral research at the University of Manchester (Shayya, 2021), I raise questions about patents as cosmogarms, i.e., “external depictions of the elements of the cosmos and the connections among them” (Tresch, 2007, p. 92), associated with planetary design as a practice of scalable technics. I also catalogue observations about architectural associations between militarised bodies, armoured vehicles, and landscapes. I present my analysis in a hybrid format of field notes and a visual essay, which can be read as a set of non-sequential, quasi-ethnographic observations. Readers can rearrange them to generate nuances or trace their actor-networks across a transdisciplinary thought experiment. These observations form the basis of an upcoming research publication on the architectural translations of survivability.

I collected these notes and empirical media during my doctoral research fieldwork (2017-2019). They allowed me to assemble an alternative field to study mobile architectures – as relevant to architects, designers, and engineers – or the architectures of mobility – as relevant to geographers and sociologists. Inspired by STS and Bruno Latour’s call to house the nonhuman masses in a new social theory (1992) and Albena Yaneva’s theorisation of associations that bind us architecturally (2009, 2010, 2017), my proposition expands the scope of architectural research to include the expansive domain of inhabitation where humans and mobile machines inhabit each other – as much as humans inhabit stationary buildings in the traditional architectural perspective.

However, extreme technological organisations, like the military, astronauts, firefighters, and mechanical sports, have different practices for pre-figuring the body-risk training relationship. The human body gets “enrolled” (Akrich, 1992) in specialist training programmes, as part of the human-machine hybrid performance.

In STS, enrolling the body is analysed as a practice of coding body parts (Latour, 1996a, 2004; Mol, 2002), but not through associations of an architectural character between the enrolled body and its enrolment environment. Let us consider the case of a violent mobility event, a military vehicle rollover. My field notes trace this event to war operations and the U.S. military’s protracted occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan.

Rollover is an extreme spatio-morphological figure of body-environment association. It destabilises the horizontal habitable space once it passes the maximum side slope angle (varies for different vehicles, but usually less than 40%). A vehicle flips on its side (90 degrees), on its top (180 degrees), or rolls (more than 180 degrees). Usually, this is a function of a vehicle destabilising on a flat surface under its speed and weight, destabilising on uneven or unstable ground, or upon a blast’s thrust. Rollover impacts the human body in three ways inside the enclosure: the body gets displaced, experiences extreme vibrations, and gets trapped.

Lived experience and evolutionary biology tell us humans must stand and walk upright, not hang upside down. Thus, horizontality emerges as an ontological association between body and terrain for being and becoming human. However, horizontality is not a given property in nature; instead, it is one that humans must generate, mass produce, and maintain as an architectural association for making space for inhabiting a medium. You can see and experience this all around us in the single or multiple flat surfaces of multi-storey buildings, car interiors, aircraft cabins, truck beds, double-decker buses, cruise ship decks, roads, and stacked interchanges.

Mobility renders horizontality complexly dynamic. Humans delegate mobile architectures the task of dynamically maintaining and continuously negotiating that horizontality. In buildings, soil mechanics and engineered foundations actualise a stabilisation, which also recruits dampers, pendulums, and mesh structures for earthquake-proof construction. For land vehicles, suspension is the invention that accounts for these concerns until a vehicle rolls over. So, what does it mean for a breakdown to have a morphology? And how can we trace it?

Through an STS- and ANT-inspired methodology, I trace a breakdown of MRAP-type vehicles employed for increased concerns of U.S. military survivability. This breakdown is not only an event in the field. Rather, it is distributed across references where the world is packed into words (Latour, 1999, p. 24). It is distributed in the form of cosmogrammatics, i.e., elements that represent the rollover world as found in utility patents, technical reports, news stories, and photo-video documentation.

Two notes here:

First. The patent emerges as a critical empirical site to trace associations between the enrolled body and its enrolment environment. It is an unusual reference for architects and urbanists. Although it is primarily a techno-legal apparatus to territorialise industrial copyright (see Bowker, 1992), a patent enacts innovation as public and referential sociotechnical associations – including ones with an architectural character – susceptible to development, forgetfulness, or re-emergence (see Shayya, 2021). The patent constitutes a modern cosmogram that embodies and enacts a worldview through a technical mode of existence (borrowing from Simondon, 1958/2017), assembling cosmic things (after Tresch, 2007) and depicting the localisation (after Latour, 2005) of geopolitics through clear associations between the technical object and its environment.

Second. Analysing a vehicle enriches an alternative field for studying the architectural as a type of associations. It extends the architectural as a relationship between humans and the human-shaped landscape beyond buildings. Stories of body-environment associations could be traced in various media including text, patent art, photos, and videos, and abstractions of the human-made landscape could be traced in rotating machines, training procedures, rollover simulations, and psycho-bodily traumas.

Accordingly, these field notes exploring mobility and horizontality breakdowns helps me expand the concept of the architectural in my doctoral thesis, one that reads armoured military vehicles like the MRAP as a “… highly protected and enclosed atmospheric capsule that privileges the survivability of specific bodies and not others” (Shayya, 2021). The wider scope of the thesis observes how such capsule translates terrain through technics of survivability and enrols active bodies in protective envelopes across networks of simulation and training, which we can read through an “architectural” (after Yaneva, 2010) lens across the ground as “technical lands” (Galison, 2022). The thesis argues that the cosmogrammatics of patents open the field of architectural research to investigate how military sociotechnical imaginaries of survivable mobilities fold Afghanistan’s rugged landscape into the performance of vehicular spatialities and militarised bodies.

So, how do humans inhabit the non-horizontal, especially in an extreme situation like a rollover? In the following institutionally-documented evidence from the field, we can see how the US Army folds the impacts of an MRAP’s rollover into the soldiers’ bodies. The landscape (of Iraq and Afghanistan), risk (of bodily trauma), and breakdown (or rollover) are abstracted and simulated in a universal training exercise called MRAP Egress Training using a device called the MET –MRAP Egress Trainer.

Reading U.S. Patent no. 8,758,016 B1 Vehicle Driver and Combat Situation Simulator comogrammatically shows a technical register of “polyscalar” (Parikka, 2023) architectural practices. A first scale: technical thought grapples with the possibilities and thresholds of inhabiting the non-horizontal, upon the rollover breakdown. It negotiates a survivable rollover instead of preventing it. A second scale: science and engineering abstract the landscape to simulate the breakdown. They reassemble schemas from across inventions to generate the MET rollover training device. A third scale: operational logics fold the consequences of rollover and inhabiting the horizontal into the soldiers’ bodies through training and procedures in the lab. Thus, the rollover event creates a sociotechnical narrative that re-figures the body-environment associations across imaginaries, geographies, and materialities.

In this sense, a patent is not strictly an “immutable mobile” (Austrin & Farnsworth, 2005; Latour, 1988), an inscription that moves without transformation. Rather, my field notes briefly illustrate how a patent operates as an archive of cosmic relations – a cosmogram – that document sociotechnical flows in diagrams of body-environment associations.

This is not the iconic cosmogram we know of – a mandala, the Holy Trinity, or the Forbidden City. It is a translation of the science-engineering-military network into human-machine-space associations representing the military’s world: a rollover-resilient human body that can survive non-horizontal worlds inside a rotating capsule, i.e., the military’s sociotechnical mode of existence in the occupied soft-soil landscape of Afghanistan.

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