TIMELY DETROIT OVERLAY UNDERLIE
Overlay Underlie Manipulating Logics of the Veneer Alexandra Ziemba It was the capitalistic ventures, mass manufacturing, that both developed and changed the image of Detroit. This city and image have always gone hand in hand, a place of vanity, and exporter of image and lifestyle. As the industrial revolution took hold, the middle class and early capitalism were created. In Detroit, Henry Ford perfected the automobile and assembly line, while other manufacturing enterprises gained momentum and power. An economy based on mass production and the efficiency of the copy, Detroit helped change the process of making, while also creating the image and products of the American lifestyle. The emergence of a new stratification of society and the purchasing power of a new class, led people to mimic the lifestyle and image of the elite upper echelon. Yet, contemporarily, the conditions of neglect have revealed these thin lies. Materials have often masqueraded as others. The mass manufacturing wrappings of vanity are decaying. Brick veneers of stamped asphalt and fiber now split at the seams, their blemished surface the only indication of a lie. These working class and middle class houses had once adopted the symbolic nature of the older brick and stone mansions of the region’s elite. Yet, through time and neglect, they now passively bend and twist, crumble, and fall. The veneer is unique in possessing two strange conditions, that of the trick and that of absolute thinness. Historically made viable through mass manufacturing, the veneer may serve as an element of interest in a shifting economy towards precision fabrication. The veneer is capable of exploring and experimenting in and with a range of issues such as: social class and power, image and perception, materiality, performance form and space. The very vision of their decay, may provide inspiration for their use in generating new domestic architectures. The veneer may become an active tool for exploring custom strangeness, providing a system for new explorations and critiques based on old logics.
Project Summary:
Nine houses were found, each specimen demonstrating various manifestations of the brick asphalt veneer. Each house was examined, and analyzed and documented in the ways in which the presence of the veneer was revealed through various physical clues. The brick veneer splits at seams, curls, bends and twists. The veneer crumbles and provides holes to black caves. The veneer portrays brick in non structural and impossible configurations. These houses were not brick houses, their image fake, a series of false narratives in the landscape. Narratives were constructed to accompany each house, using a metes and bounds style prose. Metes and bounds traditionally provide the description of the boundaries of a property by using distinct physical markers in a simplified drawing and narrative starting at a unique point or marker. Within the metes and bounds narratives of this thesis, the veneer is revealed over time. Starting with the house number, a unique identifier, a marker of sorts, each narrative travels around the facade. As ones encounters physical attributes of a domestic space, one begins to encounter oddities, warping and bending of brick, strange gaps, holes, and seams, and so on. The veneer is revealed in time. The domestic components of the narrative described were kept in the accompanying drawings, while other information was erased. The act of erasure simultaneously defined the boundaries of the facade, while framing the view the audience should take in regards to the veneer, and simultaneously flattening the images to emphasize thinness of material. Each narrative begins to describe a different attribute of the veneer, be it thinness, non structural capacities, bending, mimicry, low thermal performance. This method of erasing information is utilized as a means to isolate critical points from the research for exploratory drawings and the construction of the partial installation. This mimics the process of translating from brick to brick veneer, a process of copying, averaging, and flattening critical aspects. Next, the nine drawings were overlaid and flattened digitally. This copy-flatten process created a series of ephemeral drawings. These overlapping, distorted, shifted specters mimicked earlier questions generated in the research while demonstrating new possibilities for the veneer. Some houses had veneered over multiple material and cladding systems, had bricked over windows, and distorted additions. What happens when the skin and the frame don’t match, when the outside and inside do not align at 1:1? How can the veneer reconcile exterior and interior, beginning to bend and warp to generate new sectional possibilities?
Selected attributes of the nine houses are explored in a partial installation piece. This tenth house, an imaginary averaged house, magnifies and explores these documented decaying aspects of the veneer. Taking the cues from the original veneers and distorting this work to bend and twist with more depth in some spaces, while maintaining thinness and low resolution copy in others; a spatialized instillation plays with the opportunities of the veneer. This fragment of a larger whole and larger idea serves as a foil to traditional flat lamination domestic construction. In this piece the improbable or the impossible is explored while also highlighting the conceptual depth of the veneer. Asphalt was used as a roofing material and as veneer cladding for the facade, a universally wrapped house. The material was bent around corners in a way that is impossible for brick. The material invaded areas of the house where brick did not traditionally exist. The installation uses these tactics in an exaggerated manner to call attention to the odd nature of the house, to focus on a small aspect of the domestic to re-examine the past, understand the present, and question the future. The copy or replication is key, as brick veneers copied, averaged, and flattened an existing module. The installation utilizes vacuum forming and manipulation of existing architectural elements using .01� thick HIPS Polystyrene. The universality of the material, the datum point of the frame or plinth from forming, and the suspension of selected elements (much like the erasure drawings) speaks to the strange realities and logics of the veneer.
/v ‘nir/ e
ve· neer
noun noun: veneer; plural noun: veneers 1. a thin decorative covering of fine wood applied to a coarser wood or other material. a layer of wood used to make plywood. synonyms: surface, lamination, layer, overlay, facing, covering, finish, exterior, cladding, laminate an attractive appearance that covers or disguises someone or something’s true nature or feelings. synonyms: facade, front, false front, show, outward display, appearance, impression, semblance, guise, disguise, mask, masquerade, pretense, camouflage, cover, window dressing verb verb: veneer; 3rd person present: veneers; past tense: veneered; past participle: veneered; gerund or present participle: veneering 1.cover (something) with a decorative layer of fine wood. cover or disguise (someone or some thing’s true nature) with an attractive appearance. 1
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“Veneer.” Google. N.p., n.d. Web. 01 Dec. 2014. <https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&rlz=1C5CHFA_ enUS618US618&ion=1&espv=2&ie=UTF-8#q=veneer>.
Veneer can be: Tool - to make image, to distort, cloak, lie, assume Apparatus - to see, frame a view or mindset Technique - an action of lamination Material - has distinct physical properties
Veneer: Projected Image
Space: Mental Image
Veneer: Physical Presence
Space: Physical Absence
TIMELY DETROIT THESIS PIN UP
TIMELY DETROIT 9 HOUSE NARRATIVES
Worn red digits, 2516, a red brick house stands alone in the snow. The red like a wound upon the landscape, while black graffiti calls out the names of those that once resided here. Begin by traveling across the solid base, hints of dead and dying grass softening cold red clay edge, passing unit patterns like a picture frame. Go up the right most column of brick, supporting edge of blue gray roof. Grey receding into the distance. Upon this pitched plane a second story arises, wood shingled dormer of empty window pane, a portal beyond to an alternate side of a house. Other stories do lie here, beyond framed presence. Thin stories yet to be uncovered. Start again at peaked roof sharp against a gray white sky, made by wood flecked in fading veneered red paint. Go down the left most side of roof, pass the traces of neglect, and alight atop a sturdy column of red brick. Now travel down behind a name thinly scrawled. Precariously stacked alphabet units preserve their presence. Alight again on solid ground of snow. Standing before a lonely brick house.
Start where a sliver of orange proclaims 2527, an old red brick house. Situated in a long forgotten neighborhood, snowdrifts and twisted trees beyond. Tangled weeds where welcoming stairs once stood, and revealed a cinder block foundation resides. Run right across abandoned porch, and over to solid brick pillar that rests in the shade. Small piles of brick in shadow of house beyond. Run up the sharp corner of stacked red brick, and up to like brown asphalt roof. Travel up the brown shingles to lonely dormer green, through gaping window where light beyond filters inside a smoky pitch. A fire did consume what cloak this house possessed. The side beyond in the light of sun, dark and bubbling, where bricks of red-brown in different form could not stand. For they were not forged by fire but by stamp. But blackened by smoke and burned by flame, they slowly drifted apart like ash. The once brick house disguised in a cloak of same material. Draped in asphalt, it slowly warmed in the late winter sun. This house was never a more than an illusion, brought to light by fire.
Find 1976, the yellow brick house situated between timber pole and timber tree. Starting where pale blue foundation stone meets the snow, under bough of tree, move up towards the blue-gray sky following brick of unusual yellow. Notice the carefully aligned stacked gold, forming a strong defined edge up to eave. Round the underside of the roof to scale along asphalt shingles framed with adornments of dirty white trim. As you ascend the proud peak you begin to notice the lies, seamed facade, signs telling of age and neglect. The pitch so tall as to reach the sky. You begin to tumble down to the other edge, passing peeling sheathing and gaping holes revealing skeleton. As the blemishes reveal themselves on the surface, and penetrate into nothingness, the mask begins to fade. You alight again on crisp snow white, perched before the hints of the ugly truth. The veneers of vanity, cheap tricks to transform image, have revealed in time. Fake stone and brick of asphalt kind loosely wrap a skeleton of sticks, not befitting such a word as timber.
2545 amidst units of yellow. White stairs between common yellow brick to the threshold of a once uniform house. This home did sit upon a bright red plinth, of large red stained masonry unit. Look over to side where late day shadow stretches right before the facade, yellow frames precariously opened to blank space beyond did stare openly. The lost panes held in varying size trim of yellow. Go up the side painted by sunlightâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s shadow, climbing units like brick in yellow. And over again past broken windows white, holding up thin remnants of fractured glass. Over once more, to where the roof meets the walls and a door above the first. An opening blackened by the shadow of extinguished flame. A fire did consume what fragile aggregates this house possessed. The same side beyond in the light of sun, where shingles of yellow in different shape could not stand. The scales and blocks did struggle to hold, onto the form and image of the yellow brick house. But slowly the house does shed its skin, and again emerge a house made in the form of a new image.
A chimneyed house on a corner near wooden pole. A sign proclaiming speeds of 25, on a street where life has nearly stopped. Ascend the stairs and approach the doors. Beyond, spy 2127, and 2120, the tell tale signs of a once dual existence. Look across towards timber pole and unruly hedge, slivers of dead wood reach for dull windows. Catch glimpses of an interior beyond misty glass, beyond curtain and layers of dust. Wander further over still, a lone window in an island of beige and yellow brick. Dark cracks surround dead portals. Move up this stoic brick wall, where seams the tell a second story. Not everything here is as it seems. Run across pale blue wood soffit, under umber roof. Peer into windows with dusty glass, white shade, red curtain, layers of time and memory. Over again to an expanse of yellow. Travel down towards pale blue wooden column, and find weathered planks en route. Lapped edges and old nails proclaim a house once as ship, timber bones and cladding against the onslaught of weather. Revealed the true skin beneath the tired cloak.
Behind, lie rows of white clones of clapboard house. In front a red brick house in field. On the right hints of a timber pole. Start on this same side with skeleton tree. Move up from solid foundation of burnt orange brick. Find where orange meets red. Travel up to the light, as the tree grows, to find missing brick near slanted roof edge. Round towards the top, where again orange meets red. Large rectangles blend to skewed triangles. Transparent window to a sky of white. Pass the pitched roof, to the side that lies flush in orange. Move down again to brick of red. Notice expanses of black, reveal thin bricks askew. Travel down to where red should meet orange, and realize the trick. Paper brick on black tar, orange paint over stone foundation. An asymmetrical beauty of lies. A stick frame, a house, as thin as paper. The base solid, uneven, as the image dissolves. Tearing away from the grounded reality, as wind whips through fractured holes. Bending and slanting under the weight of gravity. This is no house, only the image of house, solidified as it collapses to the ground.
Between orange slice of roof and white hole in the plan. Start at gaping door of 2647. Black digits on white plane. Descend down depressed stairs, to side with brick column. Rise up. Atop, a slate gray roof supporting snow heavy, like mountains in the West. Pass these peaks of crumbling stone, to the side with gray slivers of roof beyond. Teeter at the point before the descent. Past beige brick in careful aligned course. Below the windows, as dark caves interior. A single row of proudly standing brick. A single piece lost at end. Here, black shadowy remnants of the case. Revealing a thin hollow space always there. Where supporting red foundation of orderly brick row, did not need to aid the lie above. For both were nothing more than a dream of a home. A mirage of a more solid reality. Step back to asphalt street admiring the image before. A bricked house lightly blanketed in the crisp white snow. Where gray peaked roof of flimsy false stone shingle do lie. While beige and red wrappings with hole and tear reveal. A somber house merely blanketed in a light asphalt skin.
What once was 2652 sits silently facing broad roadway. Surrounded by apertures into surreal realities. To the right, an opaque wood fence collides with house, dissolving at left, chain links and lamp to an expansive emptiness. Start where yellow indicates a possible future dissolution. Move to light yellow traces of a seized abandonment. Move upwards where brick detached from like base, appears solid in bright white sky. Move up the bowing roof with holes to solid crown. Where proud peak with windows is naturally framed. Move left to run across the spine, and down again to where this surface now bows. Thin and broken portals of mere asphalt against the elements. Now, see splintered wood of fractured frame. Amidst a seemingly solid soldier course. Yet, brick bent in sweeping curves, as no longer remained a suspended disbelief. Revealed at last the truth of what once was. House of hovering lies. And a structure that never was. False brick read when detached from supporting frame. A common relic of flying material. Condemned by its lies.
At 2132, brick columns for heat mirror their place embedded in pitched angles like brick. Start at the slumping stair, low and near the chimney on the right. Attached to twin brick pedestal. Near where a scarlet letter proclaims a house without. Go up this side that darkly mirrors its neighbor house. Red, like and unlike rust, or stone, or clay. It wraps the house in a blanket. Standing starkly against the snow. Travel up this cloak to the roof, where like patterns shed the snow and rain. Travel up amongst the column for heat, back down its left-most side. Along the gable, past twin ridges behind a canopy of trees. Fall gently down the side with fence. Where brick meets brick. And down again, where brick meets brick. Here, a small cavern in the wrappings. Not far above the peeling base. An absence of clay. A dark hole reveals what shelter this place did provide. A thin covering of lies against a winter so cold. It did not provide, yet this house is a house. Where water does not run, nor heat the chimney provide. Here so few bricks are bricks.
TIMELY DETROIT LAYERED SPECULATIONS DIGITAL VENEERS
Layered Speculations Digital Veneers:
The process of translating from actual brick unit to brick veneer is a process of copying, averaging, and flattening critical aspects of the original. The accompanying drawings hack the process logic of the veneer to create a contemporary digital model or veneer. The nine drawings were overlaid, averaged and flattened digitally in Photoshop. This copy-flatten process created a series of ephemeral drawings, an averaged look at a veneered brick house in Detroit. These overlapping, distorted, shifted specters mimicked earlier questions generated in the research, the original erasure drawings, and demonstrate new possibilities for the veneer. These questions, while not necessarily answered, provide new paths for personal future explorations in this area. Some houses had veneered over multiple material and cladding systems, had bricked over windows, and distorted additions. What happens when the skin and the frame donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t match, when the outside and inside do not align at 1:1? How can the veneer reconcile exterior and interior, beginning to bend and warp to generate new sectional possibilities? How might one begin to re-conceive the house as one surface, and push and pull, texture, and offset that surface to new effect? How has the copying process, logic, and concept of the veneer changed with digital technologies? How have notions and laws regarding authenticity and ownership changed with it? Architecture until recently was not regulated under copyright or patent law, merely the construction drawings were protected. In an era of increasing regulations, digital capture, and precision/custom fabrication, how will authenticity and ownership change? Will the veneer change? Will each new project, each new building aim to be entirely unique, or will reproduction remain as a novel spectacle?
TIMELY DETROIT CONTEXT CONDITIONS