Design Portfolio

(Design Portfolio)

Notes on Delirious New York I

Manhattanism — delerious urgency of isolation and automonument; enabled by and support by the grid, that is, brutal rationality which has become irrational — sanity which becomes, under repetition, insane.

The 21^st-century city — delirious and raucous expansion, growth for growth; expanded Manhattanism, perfected Manhattanism; Manhattan as a model to overtake in leaps and bounds. Manhattan delerium, amplified, without the grid. The automonument is no longer only its own island universe, it is as well the sum and description of the universe, its reality, its persuasion.

Architecture returns to urbanism — the slum, the tower, the park, the parkway...

Each contains and extends a sphere of bitter reality, crowded and clamouring.

The city of the new is Manhattanism without buildings. The façade is a fiction, is no longer useful ——— the façade becomes the street.

The grid is vestigial, happenstance, authored and atomic. No armature can withstand the 21^st-century city.

Douala = Dakar = Dubai = Shenzhen

The city is unique and transparent but also the same everywhere. The city cannot be tamed and resists architects as superfluous and petty creatures.

... They came to the city to find wealth and power, they travelled for years over dusty paths towards a city built in their dreams.

But when the horizon broke and they arrived at the cracking concrete rings imprinted in the ground they found that there was no city.

And so, finding no city, they resolved that the only logical thing to do was to construct one.

Not knowing what a city was, they build a dream of a city — houses, expensive storefronts empty of customers, ditto soaring glass apartment towers. They build an arcade and a swimming pool and a bowling alley and a boardwalk. They build a park in the business district and a skyscraper jutting out into the ocean. ...

Fragment: Architectural Linguistics I

Architectural reality has always shadowed philosophical reality. In the contemporary moment this means extensive dialogues on intertextuality and context, centred around layers of meaning, interpretations of existing conditions, and a strong desire to draw out and interconnect fragments in a novel and illustrative way. Contemporary architectural discussion on context and systemic deformation and skin/structure relations, and of program and form have all taken the form of a linguistics-based debate.

The idea is that this type of analytic construction of space is privileged because it brings light to an alternate set of information while leaving the first intact. The approach is hybrid, taking creation as an act of drawing out from existing data. This process has obvious implications in the fields of interpretive semiotics and comparative linguistics. Combining and intermingling texts, constructing alternate and subtextual narratives, introducing and accentuating decided ambiguity, and even the concept of translation all have architectonic parallels, and it is along these lines that most avante-garde architectural work is proceeding.

(Or was proceeding, perhaps. The rapid speed of urban development coupled with increasing globalization — rather the increasingly rapid realization of the implications of globalization as a fact — have called into question some ideological and methodlogical tenets.)

Mimicry, however, isn't quite enough. To artfully transcribe these ideas of layers and palimpsests we need to be comfortable with them on an architectural (and not just linguistic) level. Pointing to Foucault or Derrida, while certainly fashionable, is hardly justification in itself for any architectonic idea. The architectural reasoning must be carried out in tandem with — that is, side by side with — the philosophical and analytical. The work must be reconstructed, modified, and constantly checked for architectural validity before being applied to the design of a building. This is largely fortunate. First, most of the applicable ideas or theories are architectonically structured (this statement of course begs the question, but that is somewhat besides our main point) and secondly that de- and re-construction keeps these processes alive and vital. If constant examination and re-examination is taken as a serious step to applying the writings of Deleuze or Foucault to architectonic operations then they will be all the stronger in application.

Question: So, why is it that this working methodology has yielded, by and large, works similar or similar enough to be read as producing nothing in nearly two decades?

Answer: Because the operational parameters are extremely limited. Not only because of the focus on contextuality, but also because the design methodology gravitates around a certain kind of flatness, a certain type of phenomenal transparency which flickers on the surface but only halfway entices.

It's a lot of flash and surface hiding in intertextuality and interplay of dialogues. More often than not the analytic work is undertaken behind a sort of magic curtain (that is, the ARCHITECT) and resolves into nothing more than flat posturing without an accompanying monograph. In other words inacessable, obtuse, elite. Above all, unfortunate.

What's happening now, though, is that the increasingly insane speed of construction is destroying any theoretical framework constructed to facilitate it. It's the phenomenon of the expanding African city but in a methodological sense. It's not exactly that the rapid pace and demand for construction — coupled with lack of building code or enforcement — results in an uncontrolled and hyper-organic growth (although there is certainly enough of that to go around), it's more that the old and tested methods of dealing with urban space no longer apply. They are worse than antiquated, they are insufficient.

It is a difficult problem. In all likelihood, it spells the death of the architect.

Notes Taken On... (no. 1)

Notes taken on a program for the 37th seasonal recital of the Nancy Meehan Dance Company, May 17th 2008:

• NO CANON, NO FORM
• NEW ART; CONSTANTLY CHANGING ART; ART AS CONSTANT CHANGE
• CONSTANT CRITIQUE AS CREATION
• IDEA V. PRODUCTION; TRANSLATION & EXECUTION
• CONDITIONED RADICALISM = JUST A DIFFERENT SET OF EXPECTATIONS
• JOHN CAGE IS NO LONGER REVOLUTIONARY
• EVERYDAY SYMPHONY

Just a couple lines on monumentality

Monuments only work as a disruption in the fabric of the everyday. Or at least that's the only way a monument can be about memorial and memory rather than the aura of monumentality. There's this sweet trap with memory, and with architecture too actually, where it all comes to be about the building or the moment or the ostentatious physical presence of the monument just as a monument. Whatever the memorial is supposed to represent just gets sort of compressed, or lost.

Monuments like Jefferson's or Lincoln's work in opposition to this rule, but that's only because they are immortalizing mythic figures and national narratives which surround and engulf those figures. So the scale and grandeur has to be there. Of course that's also an argument of historical context and mentality.

But for modern wars and modern monuments the mentality has to be different. The exaggerated mythos is no longer appropriate or acceptable. This is basically why I hate the new(ish) World War II memorial in DC:

It's heroic and symmetric and all composed of symbols, but it doesn't mean anything. It doesn't say anything about what that war was about, and it doesn't say anything about what that war was like. It's a heroic symbol without the heroes, or more accurately a heroic symbol which only means something as a symbol.

The Lincoln memorial is actually a great example. Because on the one hand you have this mammoth marble behemoth which celebrates a huge part of our national mentality through Lincoln, at the same time tying into ideas of nationalism and heroism of the 19th century... while on the other hand there's this little bronze plaque on the plinth out in front, which says simply:

I HAVE A DREAM

MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR.

THE MARCH ON WASHINGTON

FOR JOBS AND FREEDOM

AUGUST 28 1963

which (obviously) marks the place Dr. King stood and delivered that speech. It's a physical marker of a collective memory — a chance to disrupt your everyday experience and for a moment stand in that spot and let all those images and sounds that you've seen and heard in books, magazines, videos, and all the rest — to let all of that reality come flooding in and say for a moment: this happened here. This is a bit of what this was like. This is what he saw, in that photograph, this is what he was looking at in that video clip.

The image that inspired all of this? A recently completed (July 1999) memorial to the Kent State Massacre:

God that just grabs you, doesn't it.

Perhaps I've Been Too Harsh...

Thinking about my previous post on honesty in architectural design, and reading over some issues of the wonderfully produced Retrospecta, lent to me by a colleague, I felt it necessary to follow up with some caveats. Actually just one slightly long-winded caveat.

What I seem to be implying is a drive towards the Corbusian mentality, perhaps not in explicit formal or methodological property, but in general mentality. Something about the deep lyrical poetics of architecture, that resonates with something you can't quite place within yourself:

Architecture is the learned game, correct and magnificent, of forms assembled in the light.

— Le Corbusier

Rather, the volumetric, the proportional, the human scale. The challenge of rightfully assembling a series of interlocking moments (and the experience of interlocking moments) that touch the heart and lift forward in an arc towards beauty. I just finished Le Modulor, and found that I could have written (or have already written, closely enough to be startling) entire passages in the book. I found that the interlocking Fibonacci strands, tailored to a convenient if somewhat arbitrary 6'-0", was exactly the determining system I had set up to determine a range of type sizes in a first pass at my portfolio. Arriving at these conclusions I feel both vindication and revulsion. Strange moment, to have discovered a mind that is almost your own, or illustrates a path which you could easily take.

Here's the caveat: architecture is not just about the play of forms and the play of volumes. The framework of the Modulor threatens strangulation, asphyxiation. The tool is so definitional it may easily become overwhelming and stifle actual creation.

So my point is that explorations of surface and skins and folding and blobs aren't invalid. Even the postmoderns – and mostly I shudder at that kind of work – aren't really invalid. The mentality flies in the face of volumetric delight – it's all surface – but then again, why should I be so tied to a dogma?

So here I am, mostly freewheeling. I haven't come down on any side yet, which is both exciting and terrifying. But then again, maybe that is the only attitude that is appropiate in this contemporary age – absolute paralysis punctured by spasmatic creation, reactionary and schizophrenic thought.

1:1 Drawings

So, I snuck this link to a smithsonian article in the previous post, but thought I really should point out some of the sweetness here:

A few years after the Parthenon restoration began, University of Pennsylvania scholar Lothar Haselberger was on a field trip exploring the Temple of Apollo's innermost sanctuary. He noticed what seemed to be patterns of faint scratches on the marble walls. In the blinding morning sunlight the scratches are all but invisible, as I discovered to my initial frustration when I searched for them. After the sun had swung around and began grazing the surface, however, a delicate web of finely engraved lines started to emerge. Haselberger recalls, "All of a sudden I spotted a series of circles that corresponded precisely to the shape of a column base, the very one at the front of the temple." He realized he had discovered the ancient equivalent of an architect's blueprint.

Then, just above the outline of the column base, Haselberger noticed a pattern of horizontal lines with a sweeping curve inscribed along one side. Could this be related to entasis, also evident in the towering Didyma columns? After carefully plotting the pattern, the answer became clear: it was a profile view of a column with the vertical dimension—the height of the column—reduced by a factor of 16. This scale drawing must have been a key reference for the masons as they carved out one column segment after another. By measuring along the horizontal lines to the edge of the curve, they would know exactly how wide each segment would have to be to create the smooth, bulging profile. Manolis Korres believes that the ancient Athenians probably relied on a carved scale drawing similar to the one at Didyma in building the columns of the Parthenon.

Haselberger also traced a labyrinth of faint scratches covering most of the temple's unfinished surfaces. The lines proved to be reference drawings for everything from the very slight inward lean of the walls to details of the lintel structure supported by the columns. There were even floor plans, drafted conveniently right on the floor. As the temple's stepped platform rose, each floor plan was copied from one layer to the next. On the topmost floor, the builders marked out the positions of columns, walls and doorways.

The discoveries at Didyma suggest that the temple builders operated on a "plan-as-you-go" basis. "Clearly, a lot of advance planning went into a building like the Parthenon," Coulton says. "But it wasn't planning in the sense that we'd recognize today. There's no evidence they relied on a single set of plans and elevations drawn to scale as a modern architect would."

Source [emphasis added]

The Greeks drew their floor plans right on the floor! That's frikkin' awesome!