The Rise of the Darists

At long last, Rice University School of Architecture’s Plat 2.5 is out. Actually, it’s been out for the last few months. I have an essay called “The Rise of the Darists.” In this essay, dar is an abbreviation for “design as research.” I explore what the rise of post-critical forms of research discourses imply for architectural practice and its relevance to today’s social needs. Here’s a quote:

Locating the boundaries of Dar is not simple, but we may approximate its major threads and limitations. Dar fuels the noticeable proclivity to fortify projects with large data sets and algorithm-fueled software. The translation of these data clouds into any number of scales and forms—from parametrically-derived undulating pavilions to urban farming master-plans—yields a popular impression of formal and rhetorical rigor underlying the project’s gestation. Although intricately related to a history of research practices in architecture, Dar exceeds these.

Examining the idea of research in architecture doesn’t fit into a single essay, so perhaps this can be just a start. But in this piece, as a rapid scan, I wanted, not to examine all the history of research in architecture—which would have been impossible—but the recent replacement of theory with the simulacrum of a research practice in design. In addition, “design” itself has risen, of late, to camouflage the crises of architecture. In other words, I look at a marriage of the rising stock of design with the mimesis of research. I argue that the coupling of “design as research” is problematic because each term refers tautologically back to the other, not only as a semantic trick, but in practice as well.

I discuss how the problematic appropriation of research in architecture, bundled with the business-friendlier term of “design,” has certain origins in neoliberal market ideology. The fallacy of objective research that is instrumental for post-critical forms of business and governance is best exemplified by MVRDV’s Pig City proposal. In conclusion, as an alternative to dar, I identify a kind of compass point in, yes, King Crimson guitarist Robert Fripp’s Frippertronics—an example of an alternative coupling of design and research, where each is autonomous and yet informative to the other.  I hope that leaving behind “design as research,” we can turn a new leaf and examine more embodied, affective, and scalar forms of architectural practice.

I’m really happy to finally post this essay. I’ve been stewing some of the ideas in this essay for a long time, as a part of a text that by now seems to have died at the shores of the economic crisis for a certain book publisher. Some of the work for this text emerged during preparations for the 2010 iteration of the architectural theory capstone course I co-teach at California College of the Arts—my thanks especially to fruitful conversations with students, and with my colleagues David Gissen, Clare Robinson, and Tom Beischer. Thanks, as well, to Yanni Loukissas, Nick Sowers, and Bryan Finoki for reading and commenting on the draft. I worked with the journal editor-in-chief, Mary Casper, who was exacting and relentless (and I truly appreciate all her attention). And thanks as well to MVRDV for image permissions. Any errors, omissions, or unheeded advice are my own fault.

I posted a PDF scan of the essay and a final draft (which might be a bit easier to read on digital devices):

The Rise Of the Darists

Final draft submission 2012

http://platjournal.com/

Subnature, Subsmoke, Subair

Gissen's Subnature

Princeton Architectural Press recently sent me a copy of David Gissen’s new book, Subnature. Several sites have reviewed this book recently. Among them: Weekly Dose (“a favorite”), Landscape+urbanism (“impossible to put down”), and a wonderful explanation in a longer article on ruins by Bryan Finoki. Subnature, in short, has been very well received. People are starting to grappled with it, and with good reason.

Subnature is not exactly a scholarly work in the traditional sense. It’s actually a meditation on architecture, deliberately performed untraditionally, at the margins of what architectural theory has been able to stomach (therefore, the “sub” part). It comes from research that Gissen was doing for—but that did not become a part of—a  dissertation on nature and architecture. It’s tour-like, as in someone pointing at unnoticed things from a moving car and remarking intelligently on them. Fully disclosing all my biases here, David’s a recent editor of mine, a colleague, a friend, and a frequent source I find difficult not to deal with. I find his ideas on architectural outcomes as these encounter the confines of the natural hard to avoid. Therefore, I can’t and won’t offer you, dear reader, a review here. Take this more as a plug for his book.

I’ve recently been working on a piece (warning: a shameless plug on the way here too) for an upcoming issue of Alphabet City, one that I have provisionally titled “Aerosol Architecture”. The article touches upon different anxieties and delights of working with air as a material. (In effect, the issue itself is thematically geared towards the topic of air). I looked to Subnature for a better understanding of how architectural theory has addressed issues like the expulsion of smoke from spaces or the forms and ideas of air handling. As Gissen explains, vapors, gasses and smoke (various examples of “subnature”)  have actually confounded theorists and designers because these so often come to be associated only with impurity or seen as the antithesis of proper architecture, a sign of its dysfunction, if you will. Smoke, (certain) odors, vapors, and such often signify a lack of progress in air handling (albeit other times marking progress in a developmental sense), and bad health.

The flip side of this last idea is to actually have the presence of vapors and clouds in a space in order to make it alluring, mysterious, or somewhat edgy and decadent. To paraphrase from the article I’ve been working on, this is the nature of the smoke that pervades music videos, night clubs, and rock concerts; a bit of a safe danger in a controlled place. This is also a type of air use, by the way, that also stumps theorists and architects, because it usually pertains to entertainment, perceived as a lowly terrain for “serious” designers. So air in architecture has been difficult, to say the least. You’ll have to see what I wrote later on about projects that play with these dualities of dirty air that is also made alluring and dream-like.

Anyway, that’s a small dose of one of the ways that I found this book to be quite exciting and, in fact, entertaining. I hope others will as well.

In/un-stable domesticity

For your clippings files, my friends: a recent news item I wrote for Frame Magazine on “Stability”, a work by Alex Schweder and Ward Shelley, reflecting “the tradition of experimental performances-cum-architectural interventions that revolve around making changes to daily life.”

Fabricating the Digital Contemporary Moment: A Book Review

Going through the projects in Lisa Iwamoto’s newly published survey, Digital Fabrications: Architectural and Material Techniques (Princeton Architectural Press, 2009. 144 pages) gives me the impression that much of the contemporary outlook in architecture, especially in its schools, has a lot to do with the rediscovery of Gottfried Semper. Here we have a frenzied revelry in the assembly of various independent components, an exploration of the textile properties of materials, and a recovery of skins as something wanting a glorious independence from mundane structures.The book publishers, on their part, quietly present this book in a small note before the index as a part of the Architecture Briefs series. This means “basic principles in design and construction.” But Iwamoto rightfully went further than this directive. Iwamoto, along with her partner Craig Scott, have been one of the most ambitious young practices of recent years.* So, almost in a manifesto voice, Iwamoto makes the case that today’s design approach should be conceived out of a rich interplay between digital files and on-site fabrication. This encounter, we’re led to believe, makes it possible to, in fact, close the gap between the textile and the structural—not separate them—sometimes intermixing the two without any distinction. However, it’s hard to buy that part when so much of the work featured operates in the safety of a gallery space or as a temporary pavilion (and usually both) without major seismic, climate, or equipment loading concerns. True, as Iwamoto is quick to point out, the installation scale and the one-to-one experimentation going on in offices and schools of architecture affords students experiences with unprecedented construction difficulties and provides a petri dish of sorts to test structural limits. That’s been amazing to see. But the ambition is to go out and up in scale—and do so faster and cheaper than if working primarily with manual labor. Whether that’s technologically or administratively possible, or economically feasible, is still very questionable.The driving logic of digital fabrication, according to Iwamoto, is one that brings the design mind and the ultimate product closer. One part of that logic means that materials can be exploited for their inherent structural properties, and therefore skin and structure become one.Although the book is divided into five chapters that separately focus on an overarching logic of making (i.e. folding or tessellating), what unifies these works is their surface property and their smoothness. In short, this outlook is about domesticating a project, no matter what sort of programmatic thorniness, into a strong clarity of unit aggregation. Be they ribs, bricks, folds, polygons or whathaveyou, these projects promise to sweep you away with their unquestionable beauty and order. It might sound like I’m resisting that sweep, but I must plead guilty to really liking it—in some contexts and with certain caveats.Time and again, projects like Tom Wiscombe’s Dragonfly or IwamotoScott’s own InOut Curtain drive the point home (maybe to a fault) that any number of design considerations can be sieved through a software and amalgamated into a self-supporting surface. This loose cohort of architects and their disciples is taken by explorations of lattices, cellular patterns, and self-similar repetition, to name a few. If this book is to serve practitioners and students, as the publisher promises, interested in these lines of investigation—or perhaps in being seduced by them—then the book clearly succeeds, and does well in introducing some of the principles behind all this.But what if you’re not sure you want produce architecture in this way, yet still are interested in digital fabrication? Indeed, there still is quite a bit of instructional material in here. However, it’s one thing to adopt the mechanism, and it’s entirely different to end up with something that resembles the wing of a dragonfly or some Alice-In-Wonderland-derived pattern. It’s yet another issue to take many of these projects into a more permanent, programmed, urban scale. Are these projects actually about the directness of their constructability and a control of material economy—the so-called streamlining—as seems to be insisted upon? (Actually, if we take a glimpse at the work of small studios like Machinehistories outside the covers of this collection, we start to note that not all has to be so peaceful and direct in the translation from file to material).Besides, can this total-building agenda be recalibrated? Need architects shy away from the legitimate decorative potential in this work, bifurcated from the overall structural system of a building?There is some kind of disconnect here between the promise and the delivery. Most of the projects in the book remain in a gallery or school hall setting, and the few that push against the harshness of nature in a more permanent way, such as ____, are not all that complex in terms of mechanical building systems or program complexity.These are some of the hanging questions that this otherwise luscious book has in store, at least from my perspective. I have a suspicion that there’s something else beyond these surfaces, and may also lead the reader to ask: How did we get here? Answering that question is beyond the scope of the Architecture Briefs series, and also might go against the streamlining impetus, but it shouldn’t escape the mind of these designers or those who come after. It’s not just Semper’s ghost that lurks around these projects, but also the accumulated discussions of the past decade or two about, for instance, “landscapes of intensities” (as Stan Allen called them), the Deleuzian “fold”, and the “smooth and striated.” Bringing in these intellectual histories into the process might disrupt the clarity and directness of the work, leading one to question wether the “scalability” of these works, though maybe technically possible, might even be objectionable on other bases. It may very well be unavoidable to add some measure of political interference in the transmission line as these techniques get broadcast out of the screen and beyond the summer pavilions and gallery installations.For many, many years now —and time to blog this will not suffice to ramble about it, nor do you want me to— discussions in architecture about meta-concepts like the projective landscape, the Deleuzian fold and Deleuze and Guattari’s “smooth and striated”*[full disclosure: I often partake in Iwamoto and Scott’s academic panels at Berkeley and CCA respectively, and know them professionally and socially].However, this narrative usually has us believe that the only obstacle faced by these practitioners is client reservedness and conservatism. But is it? The argumentation usually has us believing that the mechanical will save the day and that these constructional principles, aided by technology are scalable. In other words, no extra man-power, affordability, organisation. But one of the paradoxes of computation as a social force is the scales of service that it tends to generate, and architects often neglect this. everything might be numerically-controlled but quality control and the administration of the construction becomes more complex, not less.Which leads me to ask, does it matter? What if we embrace these projects for what they are? If we embrace their qualities as drapes, as skins, as perhaps Semper could inspire us to, we can forget about their desire to be total buildings.

Digital Fabrications: Architectural and Material Techniques

By Lisa Iwamoto

144 pages, 175 color illustrations

Princeton Architectural Press, (publication date 8/1/2009). Series Architecture Briefs.

Going through the projects in Lisa Iwamoto’s newly published survey, Digital Fabrications: Architectural and Material Techniques gives me the impression that much of the contemporary outlook in architecture, especially in its schools, has a lot to do with the rediscovery of Gottfried Semper. Here we have a frenzied revelry in the assembly of various independent components, an exploration of the textile properties of materials, and a recovery of skins as something wanting a glorious independence from mundane structures.

The book publishers, on their part, quietly present this book in a small note before the index as a part of the Architecture Briefs series, defined as “basic principles in design and construction.” But Iwamoto rightfully went further than this directive. Iwamoto, along with her partner Craig Scott, have been one of the most ambitious young practices of recent years.* So, almost in a manifesto voice, Iwamoto makes the case that today’s design approach could (should?) be conceived out of a rich interplay between digital files and on-site fabrication. This encounter, we’re led to believe, makes it possible to, in fact, close the gap between the textile and the structural—not separate them—sometimes intermixing the two without any distinction.

Nonetheless, it gets harder and harder to purchase that claim when so much of the work featured operates in the safety of a gallery space or as a temporary pavilion (and usually both) without major seismic, climate, or equipment loading concerns. True, as Iwamoto is quick to point out, the installation scale and the one-to-one experimentation going on in offices and schools of architecture affords students experiences with perhaps unprecedented construction difficulties and provides a petri dish of sorts to test structural limits. That has been amazing to see. But the ambition is to go out and up in scale—and do so faster and cheaper than if working primarily with manual labor. Whether that’s technologically or administratively possible, or economically feasible, is still very questionable.

Although the book is divided into five chapters that separately focus on what is argued to be an overarching logic of making (i.e. folding or tessellating), what unifies these works is their surface property and their smoothness. In short, as an architectural thesis, this outlook is about domesticating a project, no matter what sort of programmatic thorniness, into a strong clarity of unit aggregation. Be they ribs, bricks, folds, polygons or whathaveyou, these projects promise to sweep you away with their unquestionable beauty and order. It might sound like I’m resisting that sweep, but I must plead guilty to really liking it—in some contexts and with certain caveats.

Time and again, projects like Tom Wiscombe’s Dragonfly or IwamotoScott’s own InOut Curtain drive the point home (maybe to a fault) that any number of design considerations can be sieved through a software and amalgamated into a self-supporting surface. This loose cohort of architects and their disciples is taken by explorations of lattices, cellular patterns, and self-similar repetition, to name a few. If this book is to serve practitioners and students (as the publisher promises) interested in these lines of investigation—or perhaps in being seduced by them—then the book clearly succeeds, and does well in introducing some of the principles behind all this.

But what if you’re not sure you want produce architecture in this way, yet still are interested in digital fabrication? Indeed, there still is quite a bit of instructional material in here. However, it’s one thing to adopt the mechanism, and it’s entirely different to end up with something that resembles the wing of a dragonfly or some gorgeous Alice-In-Wonderland-derived pattern. It’s yet another issue to take many of these projects into a more permanent, programmed, urban scale. Are these projects actually about the directness of their constructability and a control of material economy—the so-called streamlining—as is insisted upon? (Actually, if we take a glimpse at the work of small studios like Machinehistories outside the covers of this collection, we start to note that not all has to be so peaceful and direct in the translation from file to material). (Besides, could this total-building agenda be recalibrated? Need architects shy away from the legitimate decorative potential in this work, bifurcated from the overall structural system of a building?)

These are some of the hanging questions that this otherwise luscious book has in store, at least from my perspective. I have a suspicion that there’s something else beyond these surfaces, and may also lead the reader to ask: How did we get here? Answering that question is beyond the scope of the Architecture Briefs series, and also might go against the streamlining impetus, but it shouldn’t escape the mind of these designers or those who come after. It’s not just Semper’s ghost that lurks around these projects, but also the accumulated discussions of the past decade or two about, for instance, “landscapes of intensities” (as Stan Allen called them), the Deleuzian “fold”, and the “smooth and striated.” Bringing in these intellectual histories into the process might disrupt the clarity and directness of the work, leading one to question the promised “scalability” of these works,  which may be technically possible, but might even give pause on other bases. It may very well be unavoidable to add some measure of political interference in the transmission line as these techniques get broadcast out of the screen and beyond the summer pavilions and gallery installations.

*[full disclosure: I often partake in Iwamoto and Scott’s academic panels at Berkeley and CCA respectively, and know them professionally and socially].

Going through the projects in Lisa Iwamoto’s newly published survey, Digital Fabrications: Architectural and Material Techniques (Princeton Architectural Press, 2009. 144 pages) gives me the impression that much of the contemporary outlook in architecture, especially in its schools, has a lot to do with the rediscovery of Gottfried Semper. Here you have a frenzied revelry in the assembly of various independent components into elaborate skins, an exploration of the textile and foldable properties of materials, and a recovery of surface as something wanting a glorious independence from mundane structures.

The book publishers, on their part, quietly present this book in a small note before the index as a part of the Architecture Briefs series, which means “basic principles in design and construction.” But Iwamoto rightfully went further than this directive.

Iwamoto, along with her partner Craig Scott, have been one of the most ambitious young practices of recent years (IwamotoScott).* So, almost in a manifesto voice, Iwamoto makes the case that today’s design approach could (perhaps should?) be conceived out of a rich interplay between digital files and on-site fabrication. This encounter, we’re led to believe, makes it possible to, in fact, close the gap between the textile and the structural—not separate them—sometimes intermixing the two without any distinction.

However, it’s hard to purchase that part of the claim when so much of the work featured existed in the safety of a gallery space or as a temporary pavilion (and usually both), without major seismic, climate, or equipment loading concerns. True, as Iwamoto is quick to point out, the installation scale and the one-to-one experimentation going on in offices and schools of architecture affords students experiences with unprecedented construction difficulties and provides a petri dish of sorts to test structural limits. The driving logic of digital fabrication, according to Iwamoto, is one that brings the design mind and the ultimate product closer. And it’s been amazing to see this going on. But the ambition is to go out and up in scale—and do so faster and cheaper than if working primarily with manual labor. Whether that’s technologically or administratively possible—or economically feasible—is still very questionable.

Although the book is divided into five chapters that separately focus on an overarching logic of making (i.e. folding or tessellating), what unifies these works is their surface property and their smoothness. In short, this outlook is about domesticating a project, no matter what sort of programmatic thorniness, into a strong clarity of unit aggregation. Be they ribs, bricks, folds, polygons or whathaveyou, these projects promise to sweep you away with their unquestionable beauty and order. It might sound like I’m resisting that sweep, but I must plead guilty to really liking it—in some contexts and with certain caveats.

Time and again, projects like Tom Wiscombe‘s Dragonfly or IwamotoScott’s own InOut Curtain drive the point home (maybe too hard) that any number of design considerations can be sieved through a software and amalgamated into a self-supporting surface. At the same time, this loose cohort of architects and their disciples is taken by instinctive explorations of lattices, cellular patterns, and self-similar repetition, to name a few—and there should be no shame in that. If this book is to serve practitioners and students, as the publisher promises, interested in these lines of experimentation—or perhaps in being seduced by them—then the book clearly succeeds, and does well in introducing some of the principles behind all this.

But, what if you’re not sure you want produce architecture in this way, yet still are interested in digital fabrication? Indeed, there still is quite a bit of instructional material in here. However, it’s one thing to adopt the mechanism, and it’s entirely different to end up with something that resembles the wing of a dragonfly or some gorgeous Alice-In-Wonderland-derived pattern. It’s yet another issue to take many of these projects into a more permanent, programmed, urban scale. Are these projects actually about the directness of their constructability and a control of material economy—the so-called streamlining—as seems to be insisted upon? (Actually, if we take a glimpse at the work of still-small studios like Machinehistories outside the covers of this collection, we start to note that not all has to be so peaceful and direct in the translation from file to material. Besides, could this total-building agenda be recalibrated? Need architects shy away from the legitimate decorative potential in this work, bifurcated from the overall structural system of a building?)

These are some of the hanging questions that this otherwise luscious book has in store, at least from my perspective. But then, I also have a suspicion that there’s something else beyond these surfaces, and may also lead the reader to ask: How did we get here? Answering that question is beyond the scope of the Architecture Briefs series, and also might go against the streamlining impetus, but it shouldn’t escape the mind of these designers or those who come after. It’s not just Semper’s ghost that lurks around these projects, but also the accumulated discussions of the past decade or two about, for instance, “landscapes of intensities” (as Stan Allen called them), the Deleuzian “fold”, and the “smooth and striated.” Bringing in these intellectual histories into the process might disrupt the clarity and directness of the work, leading one to question whether the “scalability” of these works, though maybe technically possible, might even be objectionable on other bases. It may very well be unavoidable and advantageous to add some measure of political interference in the transmission line as these techniques get broadcast out of the screen and beyond the summer pavilions and gallery installations. – JA

*[full disclosure: I have frequented Iwamoto and Scott’s academic panels at Berkeley and CCA respectively, and know them both professionally and socially].

• Note to Publishers: Book submissions are gleefully accepted for review, under the stipulation that time usually doesn’t allow me to review everything submitted, nor can I promise to feature a book on this blog just because. Please email me for more information (hola AT javier.est.pr).

Collages for Jen and Juan

A set of collages by Bernice and Javier that they made for tables at Juan Calaf and Jen Soriano’s wedding. These are approx. 5″ x 7″ and were made over the course of two weeks with paper collected during travel in Spain and Puerto Rico.

Vodpod videos no longer available.

[posted with vodpod | suggestion: see the larger res slideshow]

Exploring the City in Google Earth

Tom Wu, MArch II Studio Project: BEATTY FORD ISLAND, 2007 "In gleaning/scanning, unintentional disturbances inevitably occur, thus at unpredictable, but site-specific conditions there emerge moments that manifest a reversal of intentionality."

This just in… Surface Cities presents experimental projects in digital video and still images of the city as understood through simulated environments, namely Google Earth. The experimental images of the city begin with the premise that we increasingly navigate through real environments by first encountering them in fictive representations. The projects have a clairvoyant proclivity. They propose that: “Exposing the city’s unique structure and patterns of use in Google Earth’s gravitationless, layered environment is, like Kevin Lynch’s studies in the Image of the City, not only a necessary precondition for manipulating its image, but in fact can already reveal existing alternative images.” The web site is maintained by [full disclosure] my friends and former colleagues John Zissovici and Yanni Loukissas, the latter of whom was mentioned here before, in a somewhat related post. The projects include work by them as well as by their students.

Some of the projects are more straightforward than others. In one, the image of the city revealed is that of the extreme commuter. In another, a “continuous line that changes and transforms on its path through the Bronx, Manhattan and Brooklyn following one of the favorite graffiti artists’ subway lines.” A third looks at golf driving ranges. And on the more rarefied side, take a look at the “extra dimensionality (…) harvested from interference patterns, derived from the procedure of paired scanning, as the means to generate the manifold of an atlas.” (Whew). The magnum opus may be the 8 min, 33 sec Angel Dust, 2009, by Zissovici and Loukissas themselves, an exploration of the space implied by the cross-Manhattan expressway fantasized by Robert Moses but never built, suggesting that by knowing the spaces that never were, there is something to learn about the city that is. Take a look (but be patient if the Quicktime movies take a few minutes to load). Highly recommended: Surface cities.

Maiko Muranaka, MArch II Studio Project: A TOUR OF WASHINGTON D.C., 2007 | Instructors: John Zissovici and Paul Soulellis

Something in the Air

In the Air was a project by Nerea Calvillo and collaborators that was shown earlier this year at the Prado MediaLab and I just heard about it from @mediavisual. One part of this project is rather mundane to me. According to the team of architects and artists, “In the Air is a visualization project which aims to make visible the microscopic and invisible agents of Madrid’s air”. Another visualization, I thought to myself. So what?

But what really captivated me about this project is that the team then made a prototype and, in effect, made an atmosphere, or what they call a “diffuse façade”, in which tinted particulates and pollutants become parts of a building:

The cloud brings to mind several other experiments, most famously the Diller+Scofidio Blur building. In that case, though, the objective was to make a building that challenged the materiality of buildings. It still was…a building. In this case, I think, there’s the possibility to really push something else altogether, perhaps allowing for users to ‘make’ new atmospheres and/or environments (and make interesting distinctions between the two) based on various agendas.

For instance, the oft-cited David Gissen, in considering the reconstruction of historical air above Pittsburgh, thought the actual realization was impossible. But is it, now that we hear of this prototype?

Reconstruction – Smoke, 2006 by David Gissen

In the case of In the Air, the authors imagine a time when:

Assembly instructions will be posted on the web and each user will be able to make a unit for their balconies or windows. This will generate a distributed net of visualizations, representing the data collected throughout the city.

An individual can “tune” their unit to select the pollutant they are interested in tracking – this will allow for the construction of a collective map of personal environmental interests.

In the Air - future?

Personally, I’m more interested –not in the mapping possibilities of this air, which is an elusive reality to map at best, and actually more politically fraught than the team has realized– but in the further inventive possibilities, which of course can actually be more charged than mere visualization.

A step in a related direction is put forth by the work of Bompas & Parr, who’ve made cocktail air and cinematic air. These loosely related ideas suggest that these emerging techniques can be put to work in other creative ways. With In the Air’s instructions perhaps one could single out the air made by a polluter, and even re-situate it in a different location, a gallery perhaps. Or, colorize and let pollutants hover over a prohibited landscape–depleted Uranium over the closed Vieques “wilderness refuge” (a clever American government hoax)–only to be seen by tourists from afar. Maybe a very patriotic artist makes a bizarre monument to “air war”–to chemical warfare, that is–as would maybe be of interest to readers of Sloterdijk’s Terror from the Air. Or we might hear of Inigo Manglano Ovalle, using this technique for historical inquiries. The work of Sean Lally/Weathers also comes to mind in this context.

In short, what is most thought-provoking about the possible direction of this project, at least to me, has to do with the new natures that could be created or otherwise objectified and displayed. Or the spaces of natures that are alien to humans and that remain to be seen.  It’s involuntarily related to that incident of “aerosolized pig brains”, a seemingly un-natural material that’s  nonetheless manufactured from nature.  Maybe in a swirl of the sublime at its most terrifying, one could walk into a cloud of pigbrains in a biohazard suit–a dystopic take on D+S’s Blur building–or create a house, a la R&Sie(n), where aerosolized pig brains become building envelope?

(Small) Theses?

As I write this post, I’m frazzled and in a multitask fog. But there are so many exciting things coming across my screen that I thought I had to share and at the very least register before I lose track. I started with the title “theses” because most of these loosely related items hinge upon some kind of thesis in one way or another. But the title is really just suggestive.

The state of craziness right now has to do with the fact that I have just finished an intense semester at Cornell’s architecture department, where I co-taught an MArch I (second year) studio, and a nifty little seminar on what I like to talk about as “everyday architectures”, or the in-between states where design comes into play materially as part of a larger political and social millieu. Anyway, if I can get around to it, I might post a syllabus. Finishing a semester usually means doing the usual grading madness, and returning books, but for me it also means, once again, packing up my belongings and sending ’em off to California, where they will await their owner’s return in August. Tomorrow morning I’ll jump on a bus to NYC, where more craziness awaits. Lots and lots of people to see and shows to catch…. (Columbia architecture show, Ernesto Neto’s Armory installation, ICFF-related stuff, 49 cities at Storefront, Dwell party?, Pin Up … It might be interesting to see how many things I can do in two days).

But lately I’ve been pondering many issues related to the dreaded architecture thesis. Oh yes. That one. The so-called capstone to design where you prove you’ve made your bones. This past semester was an intriguing one, being my first seeing thesis reviews at Cornell–from the other side of the range, that is (thank god). It was mighty interesting and saw some good projects. Others, mmm, not so good, perhaps, though usually some salvageable ideas.

Well, here is an image from one of the better ones (just cus this student has posted it online and others haven’t, that I know of… I wasn’t on this review but got to see the project after). This was in intriguing proposal to design the ruination and occupation of the decaying space of a post-military landscape (surely a topic close to my heart!)

By Garyhe33. click image for more.

Surely this student sticks to some Platonic forms in the landscape and perhaps consciously avoids prevalent trends in architecture (good for him!). Aside from the issue of vocabulary, it was also speculative –and detailed– at various scales, which was refreshing to see. Click the image for more.

But what worries me now is not so much an issue like the all-too-common incompleteness that made many potentially good projects not-so-good, in my opinion. For instance, if a student decides to design a building, then there’s gotta be some consistency from drawings to models and on to renderings. Perforations should be consistent throughout (not change in relative size from one mode of representation to the next), to name just one basic issue. And it’s galling what some get away with. But that happens every year.

What’s more serious is that I think we’ve gotten to a point, and Cornell is not the only one, where students have no position on what thesis itself can be. Maybe I am being romantic, but I think students should be able to explain why they had to do what they did. The thesis project would thus plumb the depths of a problem they conceptually should be able to frame. Yet there seem to be a series of trends going around — decoys, in a way. These are ways of getting away from justifying the scale(s) that the project intercedes in and the formats that were called upon to test the problem framed, if the student can frame it that is.

Another issue is a raft of quasi-scientific and “parametricized” projects shown unassailably as a thesis, just because of their seeming rigor. Also, then you have theses that show a building as a fait accompli… As if doing a building is automatically a thesis. Would the general spatial experience promised been accomplished with a few changes in grade or some kind of circulation system? Yes? Then why have a gigantic structure merely to “connect” portions of the city? That’s merely a simulation of a test, a test that actually has no strong variables.

But then on the other hand, there is also the issue of projects that promise to shift the very premises of architecture, only to then leave the jury deflated when there is no push to test it in some site or at the level of complexity of a program. Surely it seems the students can’t win no matter what, eh?… But then again, they can, if they take possession of what premises the thesis answers to and what it tests.

Philippe Rahm’s Archimedes House, a thesis-building if there ever was one. click for related Metropolis article.

Somehow somewhere we need to discuss theses again. Maybe part of the problem is that the technology at the level of computation and at the level of outputs (laser-cutting, cnc milling) has made testing so easy, that it is even easier to forget, once again, these matters of the architectural scale of work. The multiples are so vast and the tests so endless that any size is seemingly possible. The screen space itself is subject to such a spectrum of scales of immersion (although often the students don’t understand them as such) that there is no longer a challenge of the basic assumptions. So, not to resolve the tensions brought up here… (no time for this today!)… But I just wanted to quickly scan a few projects that are small and have hit my inbox lately. just cus…

Alex Mergold and Jason Austin’s House in a can

The small, as a thesis or as part of one, need not mean the ‘final’ or the complete somehow, but a scale all-too-often overlooked. The scale of this next project is also a means to succinctly test larger ideas of nature and sociability…

A bird house...where birds must work as a team to get into the food (by Nathalie Jeremijenko with Chris Woebken) one opening the latch while the other eats...or traps the other inside(!) Photo by CW.

Another interesting project is this award-winner spotted on Pruned. So simple… and yet, it’s the kind of thing you could imagine a thesis student doing on the fly, in the dead of night… to take an idea to its limits…

The Crack Garden, by CMG Landscape Architecture. Photo by Tom Fox.

Another aspect that really intrigues me about the small scale (of course, the important question is how small), is its possibilities to evade capture, it’s stealth potential… It can be a scale to be manipulated for maximum spatial effect, but operating at a scale that many-a-times might be increasingly unimportant to the capitalist, and therefore pregnant with opportunities for lateral movement, invading sites, or registering landscape from an angle not commonly allowed by hegemony (also a key part of the CCA Actions show). In that sense, I am reminded of another recent small project by Austin + Mergold…

A good reuse for insulation... A CNC Kite, a nifty and evasive, stealthy scale to work at.

Total tangential relation to that kite, but thought I would just point you to an awesome pirate music vid: Windsurf – Weird Energy. Maybe it has nothing to do with the rest of this post, but it could…At least it’s representations of architecture with sound, and speaking of sound, I might as well also bring into this post what Nick Sower’s has been doing as a mode of spatial investigation: audio recording, which could very well fit into this theme of smallness. Check out his blog soundscrapers for samples…

One more example, just for the hell of it… The park cycle by Rebar:

An elusive park. Photo: Rebar

And finally, I thought I would also point you to what looks to be a very intriguing book going to press right now, though probably misplaced here, as it certainly may not be a small thesis: Subnature, by a frequent conversation partner, David Gissen. Check it out. Put it on your shopping list. More stuff to come soon…

Garden of Reverse Destinies

Lost Safdie project, a paradoxical inspiration to green architects everywhere?… According to a stubby entry in Archiplanet.org on Moshe Safdie: “Initially his ideas proved expensive and difficult to construct, but Safdie introduced the cellular scheme in several areas including New York and Puerto Rico where his ideas were successfully initiated.” Nonetheless, a chance encounter with a 2008 blog entry reveals something slightly less successful, but perhaps all the more thought-provoking: evidence of Safdie’s Puerto Rican project lost and abandoned amidst a jungle, located at the misnamed Berwin “Farm”. Or was that the success that was always envisioned? Is this a bit of accidental proof of how some architecture just so happens to be a fantasy about a deserted earth?

And I wonder…Did Minsuk Cho and Jeffrey Inaba go there, with fatigues and nightvision, for an inspirational visit as they planned this project? Or perhaps in this current era of overfertilized green architecture, all sorts of past forms of failed architectures get recast as disembodied lesson plans for the future. The new grand tour takes you to places like this one…

Safdie's module lost amidst Puerto Rico's vegetation. Photo by "Desayuno Calle", 2008.

See full entry with two more photos at Futriaca | To find out more about this project, and other Habitat experiments by Safdie, visit this matrix and this history.

After abstractions?

Top: United Architects' WTC proposal. Bottom: Tarantino's Kill Bill

I was going through some old files and found this image. I used to use it in my classes in Puerto Rico to speak about some of the ideologies of representation. Something about it reminded me about burying the past as if it were ‘done’ (i.e 9-11). Seems appropriate somehow now to raise the issue of ‘what’s next?’

Chain-link Clock

Che-Wei Wang designed a chain-link clock: a sprocket makes 1 revolution per hour and each chain link is a minute in a 12-hr cycle. Seems to resonate with bike enthusiasts. Love it…

"A single link is marked to identify the hour."