F15
exquisite corb
MENUSERIE SYLVA | SAINT DIES DES VOSGES
instructor: Anya Sirota curation: Akoaki studio research and design: Adam Wilbanks, Megan Peters, Wenye Zhu, Sydney Brown, Allyson Hrit, Chia-Hsing Chang, Gaurav Sardana, Kerry Conway, Ming Qi, Ryan Goold, Tafhim Rahman, Xjiajun Zhang special thanks to Patrick Beaucé, Christian Debize, Géraud Didier, Yannick Le Coquil, Marie Combes, Christophe Ponceau, Matthieu Gafsou, Colin Ponthon, Remy Duval, Sharon Haar, Maryann Wilkinson & the Ville de St-Dié-des-Vosges and the École nationale supérieure d’art et de design de Nancy February 2016
note Following the 1945 fire-bombing of Saint-Dié-des-Vosges, a small French town near the German border, the industrialist Jean-Jacques Duval convinces his choice architect Le Corbusier to design two parallel projects: a garment factory for the Societé Claude et Duval to replace one destroyed by the Germans, and a master plan for the redevelopment of the city. The Manufacture ClaudeDuval is completed in 1951 – a material expression of humanist ambition and a structural precursor to the Unité d’Habitation. The urban plan in contrast, though touted by Sigfried Giedeon and Josep Lluís Sert as a civic masterwork, plainly fails to garner the requisite public support. In response to the plan’s sweeping iconoclastic gestures, St Dié’s political constituencies and residents side with an alternate, more conventional, and peach-tinted image of urbanity. After a span of public banter and name calling, Le Corbusier leaves town appalled by what he observes as a case of terminal ‘petit bourgeois conservatism’. That much is known. Few historians and architects, however, are aware of a third surreptitious and more tentative project that Le Corbusier may or may not have contributed to during his stay in Saint-Dié: a vernacular house cum architectural test site so outwardly banal that it remains virtually invisible for more than a half century. This unnamed house harbors a strange, heterogeneous accumulation of domestic mock-ups. Some are big: like staircases, shower stalls, and kitchen cabinets. Others are small: door handles, colored glass punctures, integrated shelves. But as a series, the disparate architectural artifacts inserted into a prosaic French “pavilion”, conspicuously channel the pictorial and aesthetic qualities, sensibilities or estimations of Modernism’s most iconic protagonists – Le Corbusier and Jean Jacques Prouvé. This house, previously undocumented and unpublished, serves as the material and speculative framework for the studio. Once an industrial workshop, and later transformed into the familial residence of Jean-Jacques Duval, the house is a site of historical approximation, one that allows for the reconstruction of a nuanced and complex affiliation between an affluent client and a prominent architect. One thing is certain. Duval’s was a champion of Modernism’s formal tropes; less definitive, however, was his obligation to and appreciation of modern notions of authorship. Closely gaged, the details amassed in or created for Duval’s family home fall within a broad spectrum of creative estimation: some objects are unambiguously attributable to an architect, whether Le Corbusier or Prouvé, others seem inspired by or in conversation with an architectural sensibility, still others dwell in the shady realm of the knock off. The result is a puzzling gradient between the authentic and the ersatz, which speaks to an unreliable dichotomy between authorship and appropriation, authenticated remnants and constructed fictions. Perhaps it’s relational intimacy translated into a case of poetic license, or more accurately, a case of unapologetic transference. Exquisite Corb takes stock of the details, opening up the enigmatic house in Saint-Dié for collective consideration. In its appreciation of juxtaposition, irregularity, chance and idiosyncrasy, the house makes a case for architecture’s capacity to reinterpret, fictionalize, and participate in public discourse through a process of direct encounter. This publication assembles a few selection from the studios first impressions, on site experiments, propositions, and wayward tests. - AS
Authenticated. Ming Qi | Adam Wilbanks
The Menuserie Sylva is among many things, an idiosyncratic collection of artisanal and industrially-fabricated domestic parts: lacquered steel door handles, sliding blackboard partitions, handcrafted window latches, colored glass wall punctures, sunken baths and elevated sinks. Each cryptic fragment suggests a world of possible translations and historical conjectures. As an aggregate composition, the narrative becomes even more complex and contingent. Any architect, historian, or design aficionado visiting the house for the first time is struck by the incongruity of the juxtapositions and cannot help but imagine all sorts of virtuous or torrid possibilities that might have prompted the scenario. While one might be interested in the origins of these architectural details and what they can tell us about the history of the house, the reality is that the artifacts are not clues or testaments. Instead, they are architectural alibi that help construct various possibilities of disciplinary fiction. In fact, the origin stories of the artifacts are almost irrelevant. The detail functions as a floating signifier, disconnected from the possibility of returning to an intended or original signification, waiting to be interpreted and used as a component in the fabrication of an identity for the home as a larger whole. The details, divorced from traditional disciplinary evidence in the form of drawings, documents or representations, allows the interpreter to reinvent, redraw, and conceive of alternate narratives. In my own encounter with the Menuserie Sylva, I selected to collect the details, to catalogue them, order their fictional authenticity, consider their tectonics and hypothesize their relevance, and in so doing make a case for architecture’s agency and complicity in the recreation of history. It is curious to consider that St. DiÊ’s current right leaning local government stands firmly behind the idea that the artifacts are authentic, attributing the house to the Modern canon. The left characteristically takes a more relativist stance, admitting that the some of the details may be real, others inspired, borrowed or just imagined.
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0101 VERNACULAR | YELLOW BARN |WOOD
1301 VERNACULAR | GRIDDED ENTRY | ALUMINUM & GLASS
2004 VERNACULAR | HALF WALL | WOOD
1401 VERNACULAR | SHELF WALL | WOOD & ALUMINUM
0103
0805
0702
0804-1701
ARCHITECTURAL | PROUVE CURL | WOOD
ARCHITECTURAL | CORBU SHINE | WOOD, GLASS & CONCRETE
ARCHITECTURAL | CORBU PUNCH | WOOD, GLASS & CONCRETE
ARCHITECTURAL | CORBU TUNNEL | WOOD, GLASS & CONCRETE
0303
0302
0701
0803-0902
ARCH. INSPIRED | JEAN PRIMARY | WOOD
ARCH. INSPIRED | CHARLES SHELL | WOOD
ARCH. INSPIRED | CHARLES TWINNING | WOOD
ARCH. INSPIRED | JEAN BREADBOX | WOOD & ALUMINUM
1001
0503
2002
1703
KNOCKOFF - GRADE A | JP ESCAPE | WOOD, GLASS & STEEL
KNOCKOFF - GRADE A | CP ORDER | WOOD & STEEL
KNOCKOFF - GRADE A | JP SLIDE | WOOD
KNOCKOFF - GRADE A | JP OVERLAP | WOOD
0201
2001
1304
KNOCKOFF - GRADE B | DUVAL DIAMOND | WOOD
KNOCKOFF - GRADE B | DUVAL EXTRUDE | CONCRETE
KNOCKOFF - GRADE B | DUVAL RESTSTOP | WOOD & ALUMINUM
0801
1302
2003
1303
ARCH. COLLAB. | PROUVE & CO. DRIFT | WOOD
ARCH. COLLAB. | PROUVE & CO. ASCEND | WOOD & ALUMINUM
ARCH. COLLAB. | PROUVE & CO. MEMO | WOOD
ARCH. COLLAB. | PROUVE & CO. NOOK | WOOD
1305 VERNACULAR | UP & OUT | WOOD, GLASS & ALUMINUM
1101 VERNACULAR | BLUE STREAK | WOOD, GLASS & ALUMINUM
1102-1501-1402 VERNACULAR | SHIFTING DISPLAY | ALUMINUM & GLASS
0201 VERNACULAR | DUVAL - DOMESTIC | WOOD & ALUMINUM
0401
1103-1704
0901
1702
ARCHITECTURAL | PROUVE POCKET | WOOD
ARCHITECTURAL | PROUVE TRI-TUBE | WOOD & ALUMINUM
ARCHITECTURAL | PERRIAND PUZZLE | WOOD & STEEL
ARCHITECTURAL | PROUVE CLIMB | WOOD
0102
0301
ARCH. INSPIRED | JEAN WANDER | STEEL
ARCH. INSPIRED | JEAN WAVE | WOOD & ALUMINUM
1601
0601
0501
0502
KNOCKOFF - GRADE A | JP ORGANIZE | WOOD
KNOCKOFF - GRADE A | LC HASHTAG | CONCRETE, GLASS & STEEL
KNOCKOFF - GRADE A | CP FLOAT | WOOD & ALUMINUM
KNOCKOFF - GRADE A | JP BEND| ALUMINUM
0802
0801
ARCH. COLLAB. | PROUVE & CO. COLLECTION | WOOD & ALUMINUM
ARCH. COLLAB. | PROUVE & CO. CROOK | WOOD
2004
2003 2002 2001 1303 1304 1305
1701 1702
1302 1703
1101
1704 1601
1001 1401 1402
1501 1502 1102
0902
1301
0901 0801
11
0802 0803
0805 0804
0701
0702 0601
0503
103
0502 0501 0201 0401
0303 0302 0301 0103
0102
0101
Interventions Sydney Brown In many ways, the Menuserie Sylva is an ambiguous and protracted architectural intervention. First constructed as a woodworking shop, in the late 50’s it is transformed into an experimental residence by the industrialist Jean Jacques Duval. This marked the beginning of a series of erratic and undocumented domestic experiments and enigmatic architectural interventions. If an intervention is the insertion of a new thing into a given context, its task through juxtaposition is to alter our perception and produce new meanings. A cross between installation, art, and architecture, the intervention can be as small as a detail or as phenomenal as an Anish Kapoor pavilion. Understanding the Menuserie Sylva as an aggregate of architectural interventions, offers the architect opportunities to further intervene, to adapt, to supplement, alter and qualify. Rather than museumifying the site, the studio collectively explored the house and its landscape as a terrain for continued experimentation and intervention, suggesting the possibility of changing focus and sensibilities progressively over time.
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Lolhlm Ming Qi | Wenye Zhu | Xjiajun Zhang
The project considers the HLM or the “Habitation à Loyer Modéré”, a ubiquitous, low cost housing typology, which since the 1950s has come to define and distress France’s urban peripheries. Built indiscriminately in response to the country’s post-war housing shortages, the subsidized housing was adapted to accommodate, and often isolate the country’s immigrant populations. Today, the HLM accounts for 16% of all housing in France with 4 million residents occupying often deteriorating midcentury apartments in mega-scaled concrete blocks material remnants of a misguided utopia. The repetition of the HLM façade makes differentiation, individualism, or the creation of a sense of place very difficult for residents. In response, LOLHLM attempts to undermine the apparent and surficial homogeneity of the architectural urban surface by turning the seemingly unrelenting unity into a subtly variable interior ornament or wallpaper. Difference is therefore rendered visible through intentional discrepancies between accumulated, domestic artifacts, spatial appropriations, cultural idiosyncrasies, and on occasion the embellished presence of cats. These cats, as prosaic embodiments of cultural sedation, signal that cuteness, if nothing else, may help soften the brutal edges of economy and utility. Installed in the Menuserie Sylva the LOLHLM wallpaper is also a playful critique. The house, after all, was designed, inspired or knocked off while LeCorbusier was working on the Manufacture Claude-Duval, a modern aspiration toward a humanist factory and a precursor to the architect’s much-admired Unité d’Habitation. And while the simulation of architectural details may create funny little moments at the domestic scale, expanded the poorly calibrated knock off proved disastrous. We see this, paradoxically, the working class Kellerman neighborhood of St. Dié, where the Menuserie Sylva is sited and surrounded by low-grade HLM housing stock, in essence regrettable replicas of LeCorbusiers Unité.
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Salma, Iman, and Karim attend the Université de Lorraine, IUT-St Dié and share an apartment.
The Debeche family arrived in France in 1992. Their children attend ccounting school.
Sophie and Gérard Frappier married in1989. She works at Médiatheque. He works at Gantois Industrie making metal mesh.
Christophe and Yasmine met at the Pôle d'emploi de St. Dié. He works for Manpower. She babysits part time. The share a passion for Téléphone and Indochine.
Colette is a seamstress who retired from Usine Claude et Duval Factory in 2002. She now collects cats.
Monsieur Hamidou recently graduated from private technical school, and now works for Adecco. He is saving to purchase a small residence outside Timimoun, Algeria, where he hopes to retire.
hello, fellow. Ming Qi | Wenye Zhu | Gaurav Sardana Critics will attest that contemporaneity in artistic practice may well be more about process than outcome. Again and again, we see creative methods as fetish worthy subjects of documentation and rarefied public encounter. But few people outside the audiences of highend institutions find opportunity to experience works of art in process first hand. In response, we imagined how the Menuserie Sylva, borrowing programmatic and organizational logics from the Villa Noailles in Hyere, France, the Akademie Schloss Solitude in Stuttgart, Germany and the Chinati Foundation in Marfa, Texas, might accommodate a residency program. In order to gage how resident artists might occupy, animate, and amplify the Menuserie Sylva, we identified four hypothetical fellows, each nominated for his or her capacity to engage broad local interests. Next, we reflected upon their spatial requirements. This investigation, by considering programmatic variation, pointed to logical expansions a fabrication area below grade and the strategic activation of the expansive landscape.
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Vivian Lee is an architect and a founding partner of LAMAS, an interdisciplinary studio focused on issues of craft traditions and perception in architecture and the fine arts. Her research focuses on the role of craft and labor practices in architecture and building. Lee's writings, teaching, and design work have touched on the concept of craft in several diverse subjects including professional practice, labor, vernacular traditions, and ornament. Her award winning project Hair, Spikes, Cattail, and Turkeyfoot explores ways that traditional construction practices with thatch can be coopted for novel architectural and vegetal effects.
Onyx Oshanti is a Detroit-based sci-fi, electronic jazz artist and futurologist instrument inventor. He designs and prints his own prosthetic instruments for experimental and improvisational performances.
Yide Fan is an experimental chef, food designer, and culinary performer based in Nancy, France. His work and research couples preparation and degustation, hybridizing various unlikely cultural techniques.
Michael Beutler’s expansive sculptures are usually created on-site in relation to given architectural arrangements. In an idiosyncratic experimental process Beutler employs conventional building materials to question standardization, using DIY strategies and creating machines that facilitate the construction of the piece. He lives and works in Berlin.
Quivering Shingles. Allyson Hrit | Gaurav Sardana | Adam Wilbanks
Before breaking ground, the French architect and cultural activist Patrick Bouchain starts his large-scale, experimental and institutional projects with one simple move: he builds a “Cabanon”, the French diminutive for the word cabin. A humble, brightly painted, often mobile unit, no bigger than a construction site trailer, the Cabanon serves as a place and a marker to let residents and interested people know that something terrific and architectural is about to happen. To garner excitement and solicit feedback, the Cabonon hosts events, exhibits architectural drawings, serves snacks. But more importantly, it creates a space for encounter and observation where the construction process is treated as cultural programming. Ironically, the Menuserie Sylva already accommodates a cabanon. Just outside the southwest corner of the house you’ll find a forlorn little miniature replica of Le Corbusier’s famous microresidence in Roquebrune, France. With its hinges undone, this tiny children’s hideout perfectly recalls the proportions of the architect’s domestic interior. This one, however, is cluttered with a collection of deserted midcentury toys. Taking cues from Bouchain and the playful objet trouvé, we set out to introduce a Cabonon to the enclosed landscape fronting the Menuserie Sylva. We imagined that it would serve to garner public intrigue and create a space for collective discussion about the future of the site. Rather than replicate Le Corbusier’s cabonon at face value, we riff on the vernacular aspects of the original Cabonon façade by introducing a hacked and playful variation on the idea of skin. So we replaced the vernacular log with a synthetic shingle. In the modern architectural canon, the shingle is under-exploited vernacular element, which aggregated serves as a semi-permeable shell to both humble and historic northern homes. Our exploration, affectionately titled Quivering Shingle, seeks to take what we know about the vernacular building component, reimagine its functional properties, and augment its aesthetic and dynamic possibilities. The quivering shingle is both an aggregated graphic language and a loose, living skin. In opposition to the sturdy, patterned and stiff vernacular shingle, the quivering shingle moves and breathes with the landscape that surrounds it. The richness of its aesthetic is as much about the character of the singular shingle as it is the way in which the shingles aggregate to form a continuous skin. The material qualities and coloration of the quivering shingle are indicative of a faux luxury, which is simultaneously lowbrow and captivating. The faux luxury aesthetic self-consciously erases architectural pomp and artisanal preciousness, opting, instead, for a cheap, impermanent and easily available tectonic designed to delight. The quivering shingle invites active participation, by responding to wind, touch, and interior: come in, look around, touch, and immerse in the playful, non-didactic potentials of the site.
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Quivering Shingles “Living” Assembly System
2 x 4 Stud Frame
Polycarbonate & Plywood Panels
3” Eye Hooks & 1/8” Steel Cable
Vinyl Shingles
Banded Shield
Leaning Luster
Guilded Grotesque
Gothic Seam
Streaking Glow
Cloud Escape
Squire’s Screen
Subtle Seam
Razor’s Edge
Fuzzy Fringe
Jester’s Point
Warped Wave
Le Corbusier’s Cabanon, 1952
The Cabanon Revisited, 2015
Full Bloom.
Megan Peters | Sydney Brown | Jaxine Chang
The Menuserie Sylva is complete. Almost. The basement is raw. The generous attic spaces are exposed and drafty. If the house and its gardens are to be occupied by artists, residents, administrators, and the public, the project requires more space – more warm, insulated, provocative, occupy-able space. In response to the Menuserie Sylva’s partial unfinishedness, the project reconsiders the potential aesthetic of an otherwise hidden and under-considered architectural element: foam insulation. Evoking the historical lineage of insulation, beginning in the form of tapestry and later evolving to include less refined but more available materials like horsehair, sheep’s wool, newspaper, and other inexpensive, the project works to combine both functionalism and ornament in an otherwise banal, industrial, and under-considered building element. Today, through ubiquitous industrial streamlining, insulation has been simplified, standardized, rendered austere, and virtually invisible. As a result, rolling, blowing, spraying and so on, are assessed by measures of speed rather than finish. Full Bloom considers architecture’s tectonic potentials made possible by rendering commonplace, industrial matter – in this case spray foam – visually explicit. Combining spray foam, precise application of paint, and a replicable mold, the project produces a series of insulating blocks deployed to weatherize and ornament interior surfaces. In this scenario, the architect, by reclaiming the prosaic, suggests speculates about the breadth of possible impact by engaging what might otherwise be dismissed as meritless.
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7/8 full
1
over-full
2
Shown here is the process taken to create the blooming foam units. 1. Fill container 7/8ths full with spray foam- too little will result in no blooms, too much will result in uncontrolled growths. 2. Determine slit size and overall patterning.
12 hr
RIGID
30 mn
12 hr
FLEXIBLE
0 mn
3
30 mn
12 hr
4
3. Allow foam to expand for at least 12 hours. 4. Repeat and document results. After all the units have been made arrange them in an overall composition based on ambitions for the overall bloom aesthetic.
3. Allow foam to expand for at least 12 hours. 4. Repeat and document results. After all the units have been made arrange them in an overall composition based on ambitions for the overall bloom aesthetic.
Techni-Color Sleeper Kerry Conway
The project explores how temporary installation deploying a simple vernacular stud frame construction system and inflated dichroic pillows can amplify perception and create ocular intrigue while heating and insulating an existing space. The intervention is envisioned as an insert activating a future artist residence suite on the ground floor of the Menuserie Sylva. With un-authored details, surprising juxtapositions and architectural experiments of its own, this Menuserie is conceived as inspiration for a projected cast of guests, instigators and actors. In this context, the Techni-Color Sleeper is an amenity and an aspiration. It suggests that the house, as an ever-evolving exploratory scenario, can simultaneously accommodate a broad array of unlikely interventions, creating a semiotic overlay impossible to achieve through a single authorial hand. In this singular context, the dichroic material simultaneously asserts a reflective presence and offers transparency, multiplying the cognitive possibilities within the space. Techni-Color Sleeper’s material palette is both frugal and pretty Using minimal means, it combines ornament and systems thinking to breath warmth, color, and life into an unlikely space.
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INSTALLATION 2x4 Framing with Inflated Dichroic Insulation Pillows Name: “Technicolor Sleep Shrine” PILLOW CONSTRUCTION Crumpled Dichroic Film between two layers ETFE Filled with warm air
Novel Idea
Application in Vernacular Construction
Heated Dichroic Pillows provide a holographic effect on both sides of the functional insulation system
Full Scale Applications of Dichroic Insulation Pillows
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Opulence Tafhim Rahman
Since buildings are meant to outlive any single fad, notions of timelessness and tastefulness are often by default architecture’s embedded aspirations. Pushing architecture’s traditional allegiances to permanence and distinction, there are many architectural scales that offer an opportunity to play with aesthetic impurity and sensory overload. At the Atelier Sylva, the Museum Shop -- a place where high culture may likely meet crass or self-conscious commercialism -- is conceived as the ideal place for the exploration of (extra) disciplinary vulgarity. This design for the Shop takes the ubiquitous chain-link fence and through simple methods of “upscaling” allows for a mitigated experience of the interior. The products sold unapologetically merge the banal and the unique, the highbrow and the low: an aesthetic wager siding plainly with the muscle of popular embellishment. In this scenario, the rarefied architectural intervention, converted into simple, friendly, iconographic form and equated with a broad range of common objects of desire and sold, suggests quite simply that architecture, too, could join the party. This design for the Shop takes the ubiquitous chain-link fence and through simple methods of “upscaling” allows for a mitigated experience of the interior. The products sold unapologetically merge the banal and the unique, the highbrow and the low: an aesthetic wager siding plainly with the muscle of popular embellishment. In this scenario, the rarefied architectural intervention, converted into simple, friendly, iconographic form, equated with a broad range of common objects of desire and then sold, suggests quite simply that architecture, too, could join the party.
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Upscaled souvenir of the everyday and the unique
Unrolled elevation of shop showing mitigated interior
Cultural Archi-Scape Ryan Goold
the archi-scape at St. Die’s new culture center provides and secures a place in the neighborhood for ideas, creation and mischief... ... here various publics collide in a space where young minds and old spirits occupy a quotidian environment for making, designing, curation, and planning of seasonal events Architecture and landscape are alike in this way: the disciplines are composed of elements, both banal and novel, existing and constructed, but their experiences are not determined by the individual elements themselves. It is the curation of elements together into a compositional whole that produces atmosphere and user experience. This is what I find arguing in the agency of the contemporary designer, whether addressing architecture or gardens. He or she has a breadth of knowledge across disciplines and should utilize their abilities to curate a collective composition in the cultural landscape, whenever and wherever that may be. The backyard of the Menuserie Sylva has a special agency for the cultural and social function of its neighborhood. Its immediate connection to the new fabrication lab and the daily activities of workshops and exhibits means it offers a curatorial and designed opportunity as a multiplicity of scale. A site removed from authorial mitigation, it allows occupants respite from the urban norms, a composed garden that provokes unintended use and perhaps even rebellious behavior. The garden design uses simple geometric elements in a seemingly disparate composition to create a evocative whole from the various parts. Circular treescapes preserve the natural habitat and allow the garden to grow wild, provoking users to mold the existing ecology to their liking. Retaining walls segment the garden with swatches of hardscape and softscape, cascading the rainfall through porous concrete ramps and producing unprogrammed spaces between. Amorphous piles of dirt left over from the excavation of the Menuserie’s lower level blur the lines between these swatches and allow unexpected transformations as they get pushed and pulled from use. The most amazing moments become the spaces of conflict and intersection between the elemental zones, where parts and objects contribute the bio-diversity of the place and become part of a cohesive experience by performing together in that moment. The garden in Saint DiÊ evolves over time and throughout the seasons as users design their own experience by interpreting new programs and acting mischievously in order to shift the status quo.
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Ryan Goold landscape intervention, Menuserie Sylva workshop, with landscape architect Christophe Ponceau
Kerry Conway wearing "Atelier Sylva" swag at Exquisite Corb workshop October 2015; made possible through a collaboration with the ĂŠcole nationale supĂŠrieure d'art et de design de Nancy