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!

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.

Critique 1 (or, My Gripe with the Columbia GSAPP)

Contemporary architectural theory is at a crisis of faith. With the effective elimination of the problem of precedent and acceptable æsthetic system, architectural form has been left free of constructive constraints. With the rise and (thankful) collapse of postmodern theory and its associated ironic and heavy-handed historicisms, architectural meaning has been left free of constructive constraints as well.

On the one hand this is an especially liberating move for architectural form – indeed for the very definition of architecture, and how that definition operates in the built environment. From the halls of revered architectural institutions – Harvard, Yale, Berkeley, Columbia – comes a constant flow of radical avante-gardism, praising the liberation of architectural form and program, and raising hopes of an almost endless possibility of architectural potential.

If this liberation had been taken in earnest there might be no problem. If, in the tenuous position of the void, architectural avante-gardists had proceeded intelligently, some truly wonderful things could have developed. Some indeed have, but the vast majority of new radical architecture being produced today has a sort of bland uniformity - exactly the condition against which it is a reaction.

Across the board the rhetoric is euphoric and densely packed. Palimpsests, autonomic actions! Virtual architecture, reusable architecture, impossible architecture, bad architecture, the architecture of absense. The architecture of difference! Reactive architecture!

This development is particularly exciting. It seems, at first glance, that there is a real opportunity to engage with the consequences of contemporary philosophy and literary theory, to engage with the commodification and virtualization of the contemporary city, to discuss in architectural form the death of the American suburb, the Disney-esque takeover of the European Centre-Ville, and the emergent and rapid urbanization taking place worldwide.

But architects (and especially architectural students) have woefully failed to live up to this opportunity. The vast majority of architectural output – uniformly, regardless of institution or studio metholodolgy – is composed of the same formal moves. Stealth bomber architecture, a cluttering of frenzied and disparate angles which say far far more about the architect's ego and their own formal statement than provide any real engagement with theoretical discourse. Avant-garde architecture has become formulaic: discourses of metonymies and 'activated spaces,' 'recombinable pseudo-events' thrown together with 'contextual resituations' and 'spatial reconfigurations,' while churning out the same architectural forms – spurious grid deformations, algorithmic plane shifts, cuts and slashes and folds that hold only the most deranged relation to their purpored rationale. The most ironic part of this practice, which is nothing but masturbatorial formalism, is that it decries pure formalism and purports to show a deeper relationship to higher philosophical and psychological ideas, which become the rationale for every piece of the design. This connection, of course, can only be explained or comprehended by the architect, and thus justification for any design becomes abstracted, externalized, and brought through the built environment only by the sheer genius of the designer. We should be thankful to the architect, for puzzling out this enigma of architecture which operates on the highest ephemeral levels of abstraction and psychology. We ought praise them, and accept justification for this formalism and something sacred and too complicated for mere mortals – the 'system' of building, the 'methodology' of building. Pure adulterous egoism.

And shameful, as well, that so many potential designers think this way, and are trained to think this way. This ideology of avant-garde formalism, rampant in every advanced architecture studio at every top architectural design school across the nation (and world, for that matter) is nothing more than a new classicism, a new traditionalism, in which rules are constructed and followed, and are rigid.

The instant at which an architecture is subjected to comprehensive and cohesive rules, the point at which the formal and programmatic qualities of the architectural object can be figured out from a part already developed, is the point of the death of architecture. It is no longer interesting.

The major disconnect is not between theory and reality, for the theory we are discussing desribes reality and is indeed drawn from it – Foucault, Derrida, Sartre, Kafka and all the rest – describe and propose operating systems of linguistics, of control, of existence, and of dreams which are drawn from, inform, and stimulate the life of the everyday in incredible and necessary ways. These ideas are vibrant and potential – incompleteness, incoherency, self-reference, creep, mapping, autonomy, machinism... no, the problem is not with the theory with which the contemporary academic endeavor engages.

No, rather the problem is that this engagement itself is false. It is in large part lip-service to these ideas and comprises nothing less than a sick and confused discoure to rhetorically obscure the damning uniformity of contemporary architectural thought.

Let me give an example. In the 2005-2006 volume of Abstract, Columbia University GSAPP's yearly review, is a page describing and illustrating the operating methodology and resulting architectural proposals of the advanced architecture studio 5, critiqued by Yehuda E. Safran and Marta Caldeira. The description runs as follows:

Mnemosyne: The Ruin of our Time

The concept of the ruin hovers like a specter above architecture. This specter may not initially seem to be directly pertinent to our contemporary situation, but it has an oblique function: like the knight's move in the game of chess, it cuts across, at an angle, the field of time. This studio invited students to rethink Aby Warburg's idea of Mnemosyne, a project that set out to trace and sustain the afterlife of classical antiquity up to the threshold of our own time. Warburg's method aimed to chart the transformation of human gestures in the mimetic arts.

Our goal in this studio was to find an architectural equivalent above and beyond the figurative gesture. This could be a way in which the ruin could stand in between the part and the whole, just as the gesture occupies a mediating position between the inner and outer person. It was our task to imagine the ruin that would usew [sic] the insight of the Warburg method only to subvert it. As we cannot return to the past, and the future does not yet exist, it is as if every architectural project is the residue of a thought. The program could be relatively free from any antecedent. The ruin can teach you how to forget as well as how to remember.

Well and good. There are a bevy of engaging ideas here – potential ripe with architectural possibility. The relation of the past to the future, how the past is viewed by and preserved (or not: central Paris vs. old Pennsylvania Station) by the future, the shifting of program and how that is effected by contemporary ideology, which values of historicism are present and act upon the sustenance of the built environment, how contemporary design reacts to that. Especially as new urban projects are inserted in context rather than upon a presumed tabula rasa, these kinds of explorations are crucial and potentially highly informative to building strategies in the next years. The territory of discourse between ruin and reality, of interpretation and layered architectural intervention, of examining the historical and contemporary consequences of the architectural event – all areas highly important for the practice of contemporary architecture and ideas which ought be explored and pushed in a studio which purports to be research-based and experimental.

Yet suddenly the tone shifts – it is apparent, even, to the word – in the second half of the course description. We are moved away from architectural reality into the realm of architectural fantasy. We are no longer in discussion with real objects, real ruins, real insertions or real urban environments. Instead the studio has focused on the fetishization of the object. All of the presented renderings corroborate this claim – they are contextually vapid, perhaps formally interesting but all of the same mold, all perfectly dateable and thus already perfectly dated. Instead of holding an engaging and intelligent discussion on the role of architecture in the existing urban environment, the idea of architecture as imposition, the idea of the ruin is taken as a justification for freeing the subsequent architectural proposals from any formal or programmatic constraint. What is left behind is a void, beneath the sheen of theoretical justification in terms of history and ruin and complicated words like "Mnemosyne," what we are facing is the vapid discourse of architectural formalism. Architecture has become disengaged from theory while hiding behind it.

This practice is dishonest and frankly reprehensible. Such formal and programmatic experimentation is in itself not the problem – after all, Columbia is a reasearch lab, and these kinds of experimentation are useful and fun. But it is not honest architecture. It is not an honest operating procedure, and it falls victim to every critique of functionalism and international modernism which has been advanced in the past 20 years.

The same can be said, to varying degrees, of some of the luminary starchitects in the field who engage in the same kind of ideology. Every other week, it seems, there appears a media darling explaining the inherent genius of urban integration and systemic distortion while pushing forward the same type of architectural proposal. There are among starchitects, thankfully, more exceptions to this rule than followers of it. Gehry, for example, makes no justifications for his formalism, but simply embraces it as formalism. Every presentation graphic from Koolhaas traces the rationale in very real operative ways for every aspect of formal development. Piano and Foster make no excuses for the structuralisms. Even Calatrava, a name somewhat taboo in hotbeds of American architectural academia, explains his lyrical projects lyrically.

And it is truly unfortunate that this obsession with new form, with deformation, with algorithmic architecture, is so endemic. It is doubly unfortunate that it is disengaged so blindly from its own rationale. For the first time, perhaps in history, architecture stands at the threshold. Impelled by a massive paradigm shift – which is already becoming apparent, and will only accelerate in coming decades – towards hyper-architecture, networked and virtual architecture, personal and integrative urban architecture, we stand at a point in history unprecedented in any other age. The architecture of the Western world has always been ruled by the same ideology – from Iktinos and Vitruvius through Le Corbusier and Mies – Architecture has been that which plays with a set of abstracted rules, that which is inhabited, that which is constructed from a system outside of itself and infinite. Architecture has always been Cartesian, in this sense. Philosophy has moved past Descartes, the condition of our contemporary life is impelling architecture to do the same.

Too much of contemporary experimental research on architecture is simply new and obscure formalism and justified by hand-waving obfuscation. Shouldn't we rather dive into the heart of these ideas, with real engagement and simple language, and see what comes out? To be dishonest about architectural practice – to start from the other end, a finished product, to claim to be the answer while obscuring the question, heralds more than anything else the true death of architecture. It means that the discourse in this country has died, and we are doomed to an every-expanding wild array of virtuoso acts, shimmering spires of glass and steel which will fade almost faster than they are built. Already the edges are beginning to tarnish and disappear. Let us engage rather in true architecture, in honest architectural methodology, and take some care in what we produce and diagnose.

Architectural Techniques

1. Assess the urban environment. No new construction can occour without accompanying destruction. Construction is both physical and psychological, and will always have an impact on the city. Destruction is the same. Both are historical acts.

2. Begin from the center. Not the geometric or even theoretical center, but the center of what the project should be.

At this point you may cry 'but meaning in architecture is over, that has passed. Program is fluid and modular, as Cedric Price has illustrated, and the building is therefore nothing but a form to be activated, and to carry along the activation of program with it by its form,'

and you would be partially right. The idea of moveable (and removable) program is powerful and appropriate in any architectural project that has been dreamt up in the past 10 years. But this hardly means that the building has been reduced to a formal or technological shell. Not at all!

There is no such thing as an empty room, no meaningless architecture is possible. At worst what comes out is confused architecture, which tries to be meaningless but beccomes instead unusable. If every architectural move is consequential – that is if at every step the architect is culpable – then we might as well embrace it. The center of every project is the will you wish to impress upon space – this is not necessarily something so constrictive as program or form, but may address, ultimately, both of these concerns. I'm talking, rather, about the initial decisions – what do we wish to do, what do we wish to explore? Everything must come from there – not that these decisions are fast and hard, or must be adhered to. But without operational clarity, the resultant architectural musings will be nothing but empty formalism or empty functionalism.

3. Intrude. I wrote the phrase "impress upon space" above, and I apologize – technically this phrase is impossible. I use it out of rhetorical necessity. Space ought not be treated as if it had existed beforehand. There's this great myth floating around of the infinite Cartesian grid, this sort of tabula rasa upon which things are made or projected. This sort of thinking is useful up to a point, perhaps, but has been exhausted through 500 years of continual use. It's time for something else. Space, after all, does not exist on its own. Any architectural insertion must elbow its way into the city, edging out competition and things already existing; architectural designs must fight for resources. The condition of the city is of a thing starved for space. There can be no architectural injunction without destruction – not in a karmic sense, but in a very real constructive sense. There can be no architecture without catastrophe, without loss, without murder.

4. Extrude. Know your intent and your culpability. Edge out, nudge, impose upon. Architecture must grow from two sides: the context (danger: empty reactive shell, dead architecture) and the city (danger: murderous declarative architecture, heroism, dead cities). Both must be employed and bound together. The result will be more forceful.

5. Wash, rinse, and repeat.

Hello, World!

“Come in, make yourselves comfortable. Pull up a chair. I have quite a story for you. Or rather, many stories. Stories about steel girders and structural philosophy, of unexploded ordinance and sandbags protecting the altars of High Gothic Cathedrals. I have stories about the vibrancy of the sidewalk, about the death and rebirth of the street, about how the avenues and boulevards breathe – expanding and retracting in rhythm through the years. I have stories about the city."

This blog is a place for me to try an old type of writing in a new type of atmosphere. I've carved out something of an identity for myself in other places, with other intents. This experiment is something else. It's not intended to be literary or artistic (except that nothing really can't be, anymore), and it's not intended to be personal, as far as anything can be impersonal. This experiment is something else. It's about architecture and it has a vaguely pretentious title: don't let that throw you. I'll explain how that came to be, and all the catastrophic subtext, in the first essay I post. [ - Just kidding! I'll get around to it eventually, and work it into one of these essays... no promises as to when though.]

But yes, you heard right, architecture. The word has developed a sort of copper-coated distaste. We've arrived, at this dawn of the 21st century, at an incredibly fascinating point in the history of architectural practice and theory. The world is rapidly urbanizing, and theories about the city and how to relate to it architecturally are springing up and flourishing with astonishing rapidity. Globalization, post-modernism, new urbanism, third-wave international style, historical revivalism – ideologies clamour for space in the squares, fling cobblestones at each other in a vicious dance driven by entrepeneurs, bureaucrats, financeers. Public, private, ownership, borders, transportation, infrastructure – the very definitions and consequences of these concepts, once stable building blocks of the city, are flickering and shifting. The idea of the city is shifting. The idea of architecture itself is shifting. It's a very exciting time to be building.

I'm extremely fascinated by all of these things – both personally and professionally. This is a place for me (and others, if you would like to contribute) to share some of my thoughts on the practice, theory, and culpability of architecture. The tone will be more academic than some of my other creative projects, but the ideas that I'm trying to address are incredibly lyric. My goal: to pin down the ephemeral core of architecture, to assess and critique the current state of affairs, to try to push through the boundaries of architectural thought towards a new type of architecture.

And what, after all, is architecture?

You employ stone, wood, and concrete, and with these materials you build houses and palaces: that is construction. Ingenuity is at work. But suddenly you touch my heart, you do me good. I am happy and I say: "This is beautiful." That is Architecture.

( le Corbusier, Vers une Architecture, 1923)

As an introduction, that ain't half bad. Architecture is radical. Architecture is fun. Above all, architecture is no longer serious. So come in, pull up a chair. Don't be shy. Stay and listen for a bit.