LEGIBILITY! by Giancarlo Valle

another pamphlet 2011 #01 \ / | < | \ | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |

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disciplinary legibility the legibility of ghosts the cultural value of legibility participating in legibility interior + exterior legibilities urban legibility the legibility of play legibility and domination visceral legibility

The Eye of Go, Gabriel Orozco, 2005

LEGIBILITY!

Collective Housing Project, Sou Fujimoto Architects

FOUND IN TRANSLATION What an object says, is not always what we hear. In 1962, the historian George Kubler asserted that every man-made object has the basic capacity to produce a ‘self signal’, a relay of information described as the “mute existential declaration of things”.1 This signal communicates that object’s essential purpose through its particular formal organization. An ‘adherent signal’, on the other hand, gives suggestion to its symbolic order, process, or sphere of influence. It is here that the object’s meaning can be deciphered, not through some passive transmission but by active participation on the reader’s part. Kubler contended that neither signal has the capacity to act alone, instead forming a codependent bond, and ultimately sharing a formal vocabulary. The historian Vincent Scully indentifies the critical agent in the recognition of signals as human memory. Empathy and the identification of signs are both learned responses, the result of specific cultural experiences.2 As long as we can remember, the domain of architecture has depended on the construction of coherent languages in order to communicate the built environment. Peter Eisenman, in particular, thrives on his own brand of architectural fiction, conceived of through an indexical grammar of formal transformations, and driven by a sequence of internal concerns. The forces at play in Eisenman’s work exert an air of undecidability, a contingent and provisional condition that requires prolonged reading. Robert Venturi, who has been critical of the vacuum created by the self-imposed formalist repertoire, instead allowed his environment to seep in. Rather than retreating to a codified world, Venturi’s surroundings become absorbed and reappropriated into a familiar lexicon. So where do these paths lead the curious but noncognoscenti public? Must architecture choose between a privileged aesthetic code or a shallow populist regime? Today our profession must actively seek a wider, more diverse audience by finding common ground on which to stand. But does our audience require a set of instructions, or might they already know what to look for? Kubler, George “The Shape of Time”, (Yale, 1962) Scully, Vincent “Introduction” in Complexity and Contradiction, (New York, 1977) 1 2

Franklin Court Museum, Venturi & Rauch, 1976

VENTURI’S GHOST The FBI has given up. Unable to decipher the pages found in the pants of the cadaver of Ricky McCormick (deceased at age 41, an unemployed cryptography aficionado), the Federal Bureau decided to solicit public help. The target was to find the Rosetta Stone that would render McCormick’s code readable. The corpse was found in 1999 in a cornfield close to Saint Louis, Missouri, five days after his death, with 30 lines of ciphers, letters, slashes and parenthesis written on the pages he had in one of his pockets. What interests me here is not the elusiveness of McCormick’s talent but the acknowledgment of the complexity of communication. One question is how to render his code legible, a very different question is how to comprehend it. The distance between language, translation, communication, and meaning can become insurmountable without the proper context. This point can be better illustrated by revisiting the well-known project of Venturi and Rauch for Franklin Court in Philadelphia. Built in 1976, the authors describe the intervention as two “ghostly houses” standing in the original location of the buildings that Benjamin Franklin built for his family. However, very little historical information regarding the original objects was available to them to create an accurate reconstruction (even for just the outlines). If we then assume a dubious relationship of appearance, we have to conclude that Venturi and Rauch’s design entailed an act of spectral impersonation. It seems more probable though that they found in caricature the inspiration for their final design. The amount of cartoon-like representations of American suburbia that Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown used at that time might stand as clue. But the minutes of the meeting between the architects and the Franklin Scholars in June 1972 provides this interpretation the patina of plausibility. The word ‘caricature’ was there, right before the final design, underscored by Robert Venturi himself in the notes he took. The Franklin Court structures were the opportunity to materialize those suburban cartoons in a real urban environment.

Fauteuil Chair, Aranda\Lasch, 2007

THE CULTURAL VALUE OF LEGIBILITY Humans are drawn to both formal difference and formal complexity but with different cognitive results. Recognizing subtle differences between shapes and forms employs the brain’s hardwired ability of pattern recognition to assign meaning. As the physicist Leonard Mlodinow has said “The human brain has evolved to be very efficient at pattern recognition, but as the confirmation bias shows, we are focused on finding and confirming patterns rather than minimizing our false conclusions.”1 In tihs he suesggts taht our dseire for lgeibliity oevrirdes raeilty and can reuslt in misreadings. When people encounter complex gestural or rule driven arrangements of forms, this process of intuitive pattern recognition is short circuited by a perceived sense of order beyond comprehension. While these forms can be beautiful, instead of assigning a known meaning to them people tend to disengage, marvel, or resort to metaphors to create an explanation. In architecture, these formal complexities are increasingly employed to “stand out.” Anomalous public works are often sanctioned as a sculptural shock from familiar daily forms. This kind of legibility operates in a zoomed out way that emphasizes distinguishing architecture from non-architecture but stops there. The public quickly confirms this label then disengages reducing the possibility of productive misreadings. What if instead of maximizing difference our cultural architecture engaged the public by creating uncanny forms that challenged people’s confirmation biases? Forms that weren’t quite what people were expecting but engaged the inbuilt desire to understand. When forms are legible but challenge people to alter their categorical definition we expand our relational vocabulary. When forms act as outliers people find it difficult to participate, and classify it as outside the lexicon. We may find ourselves asking more questions when what we see doesn’t quite fit our confirmation biases. Perhaps in our fantasy-obsessed culture where escapism and shock are the norm, a zoomed in legibility could help produce a participatory trend.

Leonard Mlodinow, Drunkard’s Walk (New York: Vintage Press, 2009)

A Psychic Vacuum, Mike Nelson, 2007

THE NAGGING PRESENCE OF AN ABSENCE In 2007, the British artist Mike Nelson created an installation entitled “A Psychic Vacuum” which filled the abandoned Essex Street Market in New York City’s Lower East Side with a tangled warren of rooms and corridors. Disoriented, the visitor emerged from the labyrinth into a large undistinguished room filled with sand. Slowly, and only after some concerted spatial arithmetic, it became clear that the spaces just inhabited were in fact buried beneath this pile of sand. Covered completely, the legibility of the spatial void hovered just beyond reach as one’s mind struggled to reconstruct its recent spatial history. Stubbornly unstable in form, the void nonetheless remained conceptually vibrant in its overt obscurity - in the nagging presence of its absence. How do we conceptualize (and therefore render legible) this type of formless (or at least object-less) interiorized space? How do we comprehend the shape of a space with no exterior, an inside with no outside? The challenge is that there is no way to get any distance from these spaces, no exterior vantage from which to “take it all in.” The single gestalt or plan view denied, the spectator is forced to move through the space in time, comparing current views to previous ones and then assembling these collected memories together, with the hope that comprehension will emerge from a sort of parallax of spatial observations. Yve-Alain Bois has traced the emergence and evolution of this radically new concept of space, one legible only to the moving spectator. In his article “A Picturesque Stroll Around Clara-Clara” of 1983, Bois identifies a strand of thought working against the classical notion of a unified, a priori sense of space and suggests in its place what he calls a modern picturesque space. He writes, “this space, from Rodin to Serra, is one of passage and displacement from the center, a space interrupted by the discontinuous time of involuntary memory, a slender space whose divergences it is up to the spectator to explore, while eventually connecting its threads for himself.”1 Legibility in this case demands an active engagement between spectator and space - a willingness to participate in the making of one’s surroundings.

Yve-Alain Bois, “A Picturesque Stroll Around Clara-Clara,” in Richard Serra (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2000) 1

Cummins Headquarters, designed by Roche/Dinkeloo + Associates, Columbus, Indiana (source: krjda.com)

INLAND, FACING IN Home to Cummins Engine Company’s global operations, the small Midwestern city of Columbus, Indiana is known for its unexpected concentration of architecturally significant buildings, an outcome of Cummins co-founder J. Irwin Miller’s program to elevate the status of the town by curating its architecture. (He covered the design fees if the city hired an architect off his preselected list). There’s a Robert Venturi fire station, churches by both Saarinens, a central library by I.M. Pei, some stylish public schools — a collection of independent type forms that shift attention away from any binding medium of urbanism (such as infrastructure, housing, or lack thereof) toward the objects of civic life (see Aldo Rossi’s analogous city). Here, architecture enables the mutual formation of a public agenda and private interests through separation and selective connection. The city of legible parts clears space for the corporate headquarters as a space of exclusion that inverts the exterior logic of the object-city in favor of total interiority. Designed by Kevin Roche, the Cummins Headquarters separates itself from the town with a continuous colonnade along its megablock perimeter. This column grid enters the vast interior and sets up an array of cubicles, air diffusers disguised as planters, and linear skylights. Mirrors wrap the inside of the zigzagging enclosure, forming angles of incidence that repeat these elements and compound their effects. The bounded interior appears boundless; the repeated reflections confound one’s sense of location within the space and relative to the collective workforce that appears more populated than it is. These techniques of constructing ambiences have the cumulative effect of an infinitely expansive environment (and therefore infinitely distanced from the urban exterior). The edges of this corporate enclave are materially diffused, but at the same time, reaffirmed by the external realm it subsidizes. The internalized logic of production and the false appearance of expansion cannot be understood without their reciprocal construction – an analogous city of legibility.

Gasometer, Rome, 2010

ARCHITECTURE MAKES POWER REAL, rather than the other way around.1 The legibility of infrastructure in the city paradoxically often too large and systemic or too small and distributed to actually be seen or comprehended – might be radically readdressed to disclose its role in constructing and enforcing economic and political structures, and to exploit the cultural possibilities embodied in its forms. 1. Expose Power Structures Can the visibility of energy generating infrastructure contribute to the political affairs of our cities? Too often the life-giving machines of the metropolis are buried, concealed or exiled to the countryside out of sight where, as distant concepts, their absence enables us to evade environmental responsibility and ignore issues of control and ownership between governments and corporations over physical infrastructure. Objects of power production tend to reveal themselves only when catastrophes strike. 2. At a Monumental Scale Can infrastructure redefine boundaries across the city’s terrain in order to test the limits of its capacity? Small actions such as recycling preserve the status quo by alleviating our conscience while maintaining current levels of consumption. In contrast, the principles of OMA/AMO’s “Eneropa” project propose change at the scale of a continent, where topographical conditions reassess existing interior/exterior states and power distributions. 3. To Facilitate Political Discourse How can forms of infrastructure serve democracy? Unlike the frictionless space of neoliberalist utopias, rupture in the urban fabric between civic and technological power could prompt public participation and resistance in the messy spaces between. 4. And Invent New Environments Can we harvest the by-products of energy-generating plants in the city? New hybrid typologies could arise from living/shopping/playing/administrating in proximity to power stations. Iceland’s Blue Lagoon Spa is heated by an adjacent geothermal power plant, creating a new sublime. 1

Reinhold Martin (2010: Utopia’s Ghost, xvi)

C Prototype, GA/Happold, exploded axonometric of program

PLAYGROUND RULES If legibility is defined as both a glyph and an allograph that discerns line and tone as a shape, phenome or sign in service of an organized clarity in order to render a thing as understood, what is required of legibility in terms of intuition, gaming or rules of play? Warren McCulloch1 defines a heterarchy by considering the case of three choices - A or B, B or C, and A or C - in which A is preferred to B, B to C, and C to A. A heterarchy makes an ambiguous set, providing a pragmatic reflexivity that allows for resources not fixed into one system but existing in several. Heterarchy is not a flattening out of hierarchy, but rather a holding on to some relationships in order to game the overlapping systems. This gesture has meaning for the individual and for the way we relate to one another in organizations. A heterarchy maintains and supports an active rivalry of evaluative principles. This lateral accountability determines worth using multiple evaluative principles to determine just the right mix of familiar and diverse, of reality and fantasy - just the right circumstances for understanding the conditions of play. Childrenâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s work is play; it is through play that children discover their bodies and space, their relationships to those around them, problem solving skills, and ways of working with others. A play space fosters complexities of interpretation that resist simple coherence. It promotes a diversity of options, a range of games, and an intimate understanding of the work that codifies this ongoing valuation (in a search where one does not always know what one is looking for, but recognizes it when found). Playground rules use intuition as a negotiated, learned, and acted-upon decision-making process. For those at play, sense is the absolute analysis and the work is both innate and effortless.

Warren Sturgis McCulloch (November 16, 1898 â&#x20AC;&#x201C; September 24, 1969) was an American neurophysiologist and cybernetician, known for his work on the foundation for certain brain theories and his contribution to the cybernetics movement. 1

On Legibility, 2010

ON LEGIBILITY After the persuasive demonstrations of the untranslatability of architecture into linguistic terms, after Saussure’s discovery that language itself is a “system of differences,” after a calling into question of the conspicuous features of institutions, historical space appears to dissolve, to disintegrate, to become a justification for disordered and elusive multiplicity, a space of domination. Architecture creates institutions. As Derrida pointed out, architectural and philosophical concepts do not disappear overnight. Is this not the final outcome reached by a good part of the “Lacanian left” or by an epistemology of pure registration? It is a constructive activity. The once fashionable “epistemological break” notwithstanding, ruptures always occur within an old fabric that is constantly dismantled and dislocated in such a way that its ruptures lead to new concepts or structures. And after all, is not architectural writing (this phantasm that we now recognize as divided and multiplied into techniques incommunicable among one another) itself an institution, a signifying practice — an ensemble of signifying practices — a multiplicity of projects of domination? Architecture, by its very creation, is institutionalizing. In architecture such disjunction implies that at no moment can any part become a synthesis or self-sufficient totality; each part leads to another, and every construction is off-balance, constituted by the traces of another construction. Is it possible to make a history from such “projects” without breaking away from them, without abandoning the multiple perspectives of history itself, and without inquiring into that which permits the very existence of history? So for architecture to be, it must resist what it must in fact do. It could also be constituted by the traces of an event, a program. Is it still necessary to remember that the totality of the capitalistic means of production is a condition for both the cohesion and the diffraction of techniques, that the “mystical character of the commodity” breaks up and multiplies the relationships that are at the base of its own reproduction? In order to be, architecture must always resist being.

Pigpile detail, 2007

THE FRUITS WE EAT ‘The slightly misshapen orb rests gently against its neighbor. This particular one appears to be plump, mostly taut but with a few wrinkles, and sits there coyly blushing under my supervision. I squeeze it, the skin yielding to gentle pressure allowing me to feel the interior’s turgid and juicy center. This suppleness reveals its robustness and maturity, the slight pinkish glow welling up beneath the translucent pebbled skin alluding to health and freshness. Lifting it, it feels heavy and solid. Seeing this I know that this grapefruit will have to be devoured bent over the sink with a Brawny paper towel to sop up the tangy juices flowing from the segmented fruit. I imagine my face covered with dripping liquids, pooling in my beard and creeping down my neck. A shower might be in order after ravaging the fruit. Tantalized by these thoughts my mouth waters and swallowing heavily I step toward the sink, peeling the thick skin and perfuming the air with bursts of citrus. I know I won’t be disappointed and am actually mildly surprised by the sweetness of the fruit. Through examination I’ve deduced that the fruit would tickle my fancies and it has. I’ve seen its glow, felt its juiciness, smelt its ripeness, and tasted its syrup. Why don’t we enjoy architecture as viscerally as we do the fruits we eat? ‘

GIANCARLO VALLE is an architect in New York City and co-conspirator of another pamphlet.

JESSICA REYNOLDS is a professional tutor at Cardiff University and cofounder of the London based design firm vPPR Architects.

RYAN NEIHEISER is an architect in New York City and co-conspirator of another pamphlet.

MEREDITH MILLER is a lecturer at the Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning at the University of Michigan and co-founder of Milligram Office.

MICHAEL LOVERICH is a founder of the small design farm Bittertang, winner of the 2010 New York Architectural League Prize.

ISAIAH KING is an architect in New York City and co-conspirator of another pamphlet.

DOUGLAS GAUTHIER is Coordinator of Design and Construction in the Real Estate Program at Columbia GSAPP and principal of Gauthier Architects.

IBEN FALCONER is the Business Development Manager at Bjarke Ingels Group New York and an editor of Perspecta 45: AGENCY.

PEP AVILES is the Head of Graduate Studies at the Barcelona Institute of Architecture and a PhD Candidate at Princeton University.

LEGIBILITY! pamphlet contributors:

Above all, another pamphlet is a conversation, a loose exchange of forms and ideas, a shared excitement. It is a way to play, a frame through which to look, an open dialogue with our friends, our histories, and our surroundings.

For the fleeting life of this pamphlet, distinct voices are provisionally brought together into a contingent collective. But while the contributors and the ideas they contribute are vital, particular authorship is obscured. The collective dialogue is given primacy over the individual position.

The next conversation will be about REPETITION!

If you are interested in contributing to the next conversation, please email another.pamphlet@gmail.com