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!

Grid and Grid Systems - Brief Definition, Clarifications

The idea of the grid is of something to be extruded into. Grids are seen as marking space, that is creating an arbitrary but useful division of space which organizes an intrusion upon it. The mentality of the grid is one of imposition – not the imposition of axes, mind you, which are implied, but the further imposition of geometry upon an already existing infinite space. If we're talking about architectural creation, then the architect has already lost control. The project becomes bound to a system, defined by a system, which is not of the architect's creation. Or more accurately, if it is of the architect's creation, it is a creation with implicit axioms and assumptions about the operating principles of space.

By "Cartesian space" and "grid systems," I don't necessarily mean right-angled working lines, or linear geometry. Grids may exist as deformations (Reinmennian geometry, or spherical, or hyperbolic geometry, to name some examples) and may even be self-contained. What I mean more specifically is the Modern mentality – "Modern" in the technical sense, or "Modernist" if you like – that the nature of space is rational and neutral, that space exists at all in an infinite and pervasive way, such that grid lines may be drawn upon it, and coordinates may be plotted upon it.

The difference is between geometry and arithmetic, in the historical sense of the terms. Euclid (nor Phidias and Iktinos, for that matter) was not Cartesian in this way – the operations of the compass the straightedge and the pen all grow from within themselves. Each circle drawn on paper (or marble!) viciously creates both the circle and the space to which it relates. The relationship between the two only exists because they were created – further, the circle and its center only exist by an act of force. The plane itself, arguably Cartesian and arguably a geometrical concept necessary in the creation of the circle, is created by an act of force. The infinite did not exist beforehand, but exists within itself and within the representation of itself, and is contained only within the representation of itself.

It is the rational which is impossible to grasp. It flits away and slips sideways – it is impossible to proceed one from the next without an act of destruction, a jump from the scratched and tangible surface of the vellum sheet, through a point in the air, to begin again another world unrelated to the first except through that point in the air. The rational procreates in one next to the other, not touching but dimly aware of the other's existence.

I feel that there is a much more elegant way to put this, but perhaps words are not the correct medium. The larger point for architecture is simple: grids and grid systems carry assumptions about the operations of space, which become inextricably tied to assumptions about the organization of space, which is to say program, circulation, &c., which is to say architecture. Part of the great dissonance I feel towards the mentality outlined in a previous post about the Columbia GSAPP is this dissonance – that such projects claim to have broken the grid system while remaining entrapped within a Cartesian system. Claims about intrusion, elbowing out, growing from the center, architecture developing from itself and pushing itself violently into the world just inherently don't work if it is assumed that these operations create architecture upon existing space.

No, rather, it is the act of creation which is a violent event. The tabula rasa is only catastrophic as an afterthought, while the true creation of space from within itself (and into no thing) is the implied catastrophe embodied in an event. It's the reason that the Greek Temple works so fantastically, why the Parthenon speaks today as an incredible crystaline carving out of space itself, while the French Neoclassical fails so spectacularly in the same goal – the Pantheon in Paris tries to be all about support and the application of structural logic to form, but in the end is all about grids. It's the difference between Jenson and Didot, in a sense the same difference between the Carolingian and Neoclassical scripts, between the high French Gothic and La Madeleine.

Rashtrapati Bhavan

Because I had just been re-skimming it, and a lot of the operating methodology is directly applicable to this journal, I thought I would post a link to the thesis I wrote last year as part of my Bachelor's:

Defining a Nation

Viceroy's House, Government House, Rashtrapati Bhavan

A Study in Iconography, Social History, and Semiotics

{ Figures & Photographs }

This is something I will be sure to return to – and hopefully refine. It would really have benefitted from another week or so of editing, but what can you do.