The Dynamic of Interrelations of the Object to the Field

Design As Research I

Robert Stuart-Smith | Mollie Claypool | Doreen Bernath | Winston Hampel

THE DYNAMIC OF INTERRELATIONS OF THE OBJECT TO THE FIELD Case Study:

The High Line Park vs Barry Le Va’s work

Andreas Y. Kyriakou

Architectural Association School of Architecture London, December 2014

00 | ABSTRACT

As society understands that the world is structured fundamentally on complex phenomena, architects, artists and designers are called to implement more effectively in design, models of complexity found in nature and mathematics. Field is the site of action, the real space that anyone but more specific the mentioned group can act, apply and share his ideas, inspirations and innovative methodologies.

Regarding architects, they need to be equipped with the necessary knowledge and skills to be able to explore both the physical world and the digital data environment that evolve with immense accelerating rate. Modern architecture failed to address adequately the complexity of urban context. It failed to implement a unitary thinking and basic methodologies so that to be able to manipulate, manage and be associated with the indeterminacy of an urban fabric.

However, as architecture moves and evolves, it realizes that it is imperative to recognize its limits of ability to control and direct the urbanization, “and at the same time, to learn from the complex selfregulating orders already present in the city” 1.

Allen, Stan. ‘From Object to Field’, Architectural Design: After Geometry, London, 1995

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OUTLINE | CONTENTS

01 | INTRODUCTION

02 | THE FIELD IN ARCHITECTURE Definition Field Conditions 03 | THE DESTABILIZATION OF THE ARCHITECTURAL OBJECT Changing of the architectural object “Hard” and “soft” qualities of an object The definition of “quasi-object” 04 | THE HIGH LINE PARK An example of static field condition 05 | BARRY LE VA’s DYNAMIC FIELD WORK Examine of Le Va’s work in relevant to the dynamic field 06 | COMPARATIVE STUDY

07 | CONCLUSION

08 | BIBLIOGRAPHY

09 | APPENDIX

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01 | INTRODUCTION It is accepted that architecture as a theoretical notion with natural results in spatial design, requires and is applied to a real field. Until now, field had mainly treated as static - physical space where various functions and activities could take place. However, the last 20-year, several thoughts, views and ideas which want the space to be treated as a destabilized and transitional field have been increased and reinforced. The city – the main architectural and spatial entity – is recognized as a heterogeneous and changing field with social, environmental and economical dimensions.

The forces that transform the city field act dialectically on different scales, from the scale of the street and the neighbourhood to that of the global economy. Different sites within the urban context are the appropriate field for thinking in that way, in the multi-layered reality of the city, where are presented “discontinuities”, “ruptures”, “displacements” and “disorders”. In such transitional sites, the question of the limits of the architectural object is put under discussion and is investigated. This architectural object can be internal or external, natural or artificial, tangible or intangible, social or environmental.

Aim of the current research work is to investigate the ontological conditions which are necessary for the establishment of an architectural object which may be involved in processes (in a specific field) that are able to be unfolded in real time. It examines the impact of the visual potential

object as it is opposed to the representation – criticism relations during a certain time, its effects at the relationship of fragment – holism and the dipoles which are generated by this correlation.

Furthermore, it tries to understand how architecture defines the new working framework, in an effort to define new rules, orders and relationships, more fluid, with the complexity of the field.

To achieve more understanding, we examine two specific examples - projects, focusing on the intersection (or their relationship) with the field. The first example concerns the High Line Park project in New York which represents a static object into the dynamic urban field.

Although it is a redesigned object, doesn't seem to embody features from its environment and act independently in its own frame. In contrast, the second example is referred to the work of the American architect, contemporary sculptor and installations' artist Barry Le Va. Le Va's work is interested because it dissolves the idea of the sculpture and displaces the control at local series of rules or “sequences of events” which interact direct and relevant with their environment, in an attempt to redefine the form (the whole object).

While we have examined the two examples, then we will try to put them under a comparative study so that we can complete the whole study.

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02 | THE FIELD IN ARCHITECTURE Before we move on, it is necessary to define the meaning of the word “field” into the view of the architectural terminology.

For Sanford Kwinter, “the field describes a space of propagation, on effects. It contains no matter or material points, rather functions, vectors and speeds. It describes local relations of difference within fields of celerity, transmission or of careering points” 2.

It is obvious that field is not described neither by the Euclidean system nor by the Cartesian coordinates system anymore.

Position, velocity and acceleration are the aggregates which are able to lead in a new vision and describe the field in a new way within a different framework. Dynamics are these elements that play an authoritative role now. Consequently, field is evolving to a new and more promising space of action for the architect.

Additionally, the new field is a reality that is characterised by conditions. According to Stan Allen, “field condition is any formal or spatial matrix capable of unifying diverse elements while respecting the identity of each. Field configurations are loosely bounded aggregates characterised by porosity and local interconnectivity” 3. The resulting shape from that new kind of field which characterised by predefined internal regulations (algorithmic logic) can be highly fluid concerning its form and extension.

The new field is defined in a range of connections and relations with local Kwinter, Sanford. Architectures of Time: Toward a Theory of the Event in Modernist Culture, The MIT Press, USA, 2001. Page 60 3 Allen, Stan. ‘From Object to Field’, Architectural Design: After Geometry, London, 1995. Page 24 2

character. Field is not static anymore, but extremely dynamic. Finally, we refer to an architecture with unclear boundaries and identity, or rather an architecture that can constantly redefine its boundaries and the identity.

However, what happens with the object which is called to be part of this unstable architectural field?

03 | THE DESTABILIZATION OF THE

ARCHITECTURAL OBJECT

It is clear that the object of architecture changes dramatically, as each activity which is required to accommodate a space creation, is analyzed in a changing complex of activities that are developed in the physical space and those that are developed in the digital space of the internet or in another space. Principally, it is understandable that there is a “destabilization” of the design object in architecture. It is not disappearance, but the presence of “gray zones” and ambiguity which try to transform the object using ways and directions that are not wellknown. Throughout the design, it is possible the object to change constantly, according to the field configurations.

However, the integration of instability, ambiguity and change in the architectural design, the configuration of consciousness of the building environment and the development of activities which are relative to the space start to attract an interesting for further investigation and research at the field of new technologies and their integration into the design process.

Additional, the destabilized object of

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architecture is possible to be described as “quasi-object”. M. Fraser 4 noticed that “Matter does not ‘exist’ in and of itself, outside or beyond discourse, but is rather repeatedly produced through performativity, which brings into being or enacts that which it names.” The research into either the “hard” or “soft” qualities of an object are naturally applied in practice, but how these two cultures function together and form a complex whole. This is remarkable to say the least because in reality we do not make distinguish of the two situations, but we assume combinations - hybrid relationships. Michel Serres and Bruno Latour suggest that we have to forget the ‘soft’ or ‘hard’ object from our minds and we should start to speak about the “quasi-object”.

The quasi-object provides us the supplies to develop a new model of knowledge that goes beyond of separation into the two situations we mentioned before. Rather than considering an object as a fact or a value, to see it simply as a form or social function, we must begin to grasp the facts/values as native interrelated wholes. 5 According to Bruno Latour, “Quasi-objects are much more social, much more fabricated, much more collective than the ‘hard’ parts of nature, but they are in no way the arbitrary receptacles of a fullfledged society. On the other hand they are much more real, nonhuman and objective than those shapeless screens on which society – for unknown reasons – needed to be ‘projected’.” 6

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Researcher and theoretician.

van Toorn, Roemer. The Quasi Object

van Toorn, Roemer. The Quasi Object

Elsa Chryssohoides, Linking dynamics fields.

To be more clear and understandable what is the meaning of the destabilization of the architectural object or the quasi-object into a field of instability due to variable conditions, we will continue below with the examination of the two examples which were referred to the introduction. At the end, it will follow a comparative study. //

04 | THE HIGH LINE PARK

An example of a static field condition The High Line Park is a 2.33 km-long linear park which is situated in New York. It is developed on a raised part of the abandoned Central Railroad track of the New York, about two stories high, running along the western edge of the city from 34th street to Gansevoort Street. Inspired by the 4.8-kilometer Promenade plantée, a similar project in Paris completed in 1993, the High Line has been redesigned and planted as an aerial greenway and rails-totrails park 7. Via their design, architects 7

Wikipedia “High Line (New York City)”

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James Corner Filed Operations and Diller Scofidio + Renfro have offered art installations, innovative landscape design, and space for diverse cultural events, creating a new perspective on the city.

Indeed, the High Line Park is an excellent design attempt for contemporary design pragmatism in which design is neither simply form-making nor theoretical elaborations but a complex response to existing physical infrastructure, competing socio-political forces, and ecological The project has also concerns. 8 investigated new possibilities for urban space, the power of the ideas that comes from communities of activists, and new urban project techniques as a means to invigorate economic development.

On the other hand, if we try to examine the park as an object into the field – in our case into the New York City – it is easy to understand that we have to cope with a project that is characterized more by static than dynamic. The essential design strategy is just the redesign of its content.

The whole form of the object - the abandoned railroad track - is extremely the same and it seems that it neither influences the city nor influenced by that. The content – the new design – remains into the strict frames of the former infrastructure but operate independent of the whole form, using a design vocabulary which is characterized by repetition and some references to the old situation. Moreover, the whole form seems to have no relations to the environment of the area where it is sited. In other words, we can speak for three discrete elements – the city environment, the frame of the old infrastructure and the new design content.

Hierarchically, the one is embedded into the other and they fit perfectly all together but their relation is static or “global”.

Previously, we defined and analyzed the meaning of the quasi-object. Trying now to compare its notion with the object "High Line Park", it is obvious that is not possible to catch or isolate any kind of local interrelations.

Here we have a phenomenon of two hard cultures 9 which are called to coexist under “conciliations”.

Someone could assume that it is impossible to speak for lack of object–field relation the same time that the object is part of the field. Indeed, we do not refer to a condition with no relationship but to a situation that the relevant interconnection parts are not fragments of whole, but simply parts. To be more specific, someone can approach the park via eleven single accesses which are distinguished into five elevators and six staircases and they are consecutively placed following the linearity of the High Line Park. These links establish a rational connection to the city fabric; highlight the difference and contrast, while they contribute at the continuity and existence of a distributed, dimensional and close-interval, hard and striated space.

We refer to the two main entities: the redesigned park and the city environment.

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Prof. Huppatz, D., J. The High Line

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Field Operations and Diller Scofidio + Renfro (2008). Rendering image shows th staircase of the 14 street pavement, supplemented by an elevator.

Friends of the High Line, Designing the High Line: Gansevoort Street to 30th Street, USA, 2012. Page 61

Annik La Farge. View of the High Line looking south from the Standard Hotel.

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05 | BARRY LE VA’s DYNAMIC FIELD

WORK

On the other side, the American artist Barry Le Va tries to walk out of the cubism, understanding that local relations are more significant than the whole form. According to the Juerg Judin, “Le Va’s sculptures are always expansive, processual and transient. This locates his oeuvre at the edge of a contemporary definition of art, and the fact that this has been true of Barry Le Va throughout his entire career marks him out as one of the most significant contemporary American artists. He has long maintained that his ambition is to transcend the understanding of sculpture as consisting of enclosed and formed matter. His works are the result of a process of distributing, spilling, scattering, blowing, layering, dropping, throwing or crushing - using common materials like wooden slats, ball bearings, pieces of felt, aluminium bars, viscous oil, flour, powdered chalk, cast concrete and neo­prene rubber.” 10 Examining in detail the whole work of Le Va, we realize a common feature: he deals with the piece, the fragment. “The fragment can be understood as part of the whole (a totality) and as an imperfect representation-image of it. The fragment is pulled from the whole but is cannot be produced by itself.” 11 It is obvious that Le Va “puts” rules which govern the fragment, Juerg Judin is an art dealer and collector who keeps his own gallery in Berlin. He has hosted many special exhibitions. His gallery mainly focuses on artists that are established draughtsman, painters and sculptors.

His target is to bring together those established artists with younger, aspiring artists.

11 Moras, Antonios. The critical conditions in architecture. The concept of the virtual architectural object 10

are inherent to the whole and they cannot differ because in this case they could not be perceived as such. If the rules governing the fragment are different then they must be integrated into a conceptual system of another entity.

The Institute of Contemporary Art of the University of Pennsylvania (ICA) described Le Va’s work as: “Since the late 1960s, (...) part of a generation intent on knocking art off its pedestal, Le Va claimed the floor as his field of operations by scattering massive amounts of materials, or forms, to create works which he called "distributions." Apparently random, even chaotic, these installations are in fact premeditated and executed according to plan. Not surprisingly, drawing plays a significant role in the work of this artist whose formative training is in architecture.

Le Va's distributions make him one of the leading practitioners of Post-minimalism and Process Art. But his own, preferred frame of reference comes not from recent art history, but from mystery novels. He has likened his installations to crime scenes and invites viewers to look for clues to reconstruct the, often violent, act or concept that underlies them.” 12 If we want to understand more the way Barry Le Va builds his framework and puts his installations, we have to change the way we perceive the fragment. This requires a line of thought which does not adopt the dipoles representation-reality and criticism-representation; a line of thought beyond the control and supervision of the whole result. Instead of examining the parts or the sections of the whole (the entity) leading in similar relations, we should focus on the interactions in which 12

Wikipedia: Barry Le Va

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parts and sections are involved. Barry Le Va doesn’t negotiate a fixed object, but he treats his installations as an open-body relationship or as a field of forces. The body and its parts are not immune to the interrelations of the rules and the relationships that exist and as a result, neither the whole nor its fragments are.

Barry Le Va, Dissected Situations: Institutional Templates (1990-1991).

A. Spaces/Abbreviations, B. Close-ups/Distances, C. Observers/Participants.

Diagnostics – CBF with unknown variable (10 observers). Cast black hydrastone and neoprene.

Dimensions variable.

Barry Le Va, Study for 1 sculpture occupying 2 Areas.

Institutional Templates: Reading from Above, 1990 NTL Conference Isolating Variables. Collage on paper.

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06 | COMPARATIVE STUDY Studying the whole work of Barry Le Va, it is obvious that he opposes the idea of static, while he tries to implement dynamic relations from the field which his installations interact with it. In the case of the High Line Park, it is given only elemental consideration to the whole external form. The most significant for the designers is the close attention to the measure and interval of the individual design elements. But for Le Va there is a precise and repeatable connection between the operations of the active field and the whole form of his installations.

Le Va said in an interview: “What you‘re seeing on the wall is looking down as a template. It may be a rectangle, but in its relationship to something else it is not just that, it is looking down at a table. And maybe the next form is looking down at a stool, or a chair. Since they’re taken from templates, people will see these forms as geometric. Of course they are, but they are also a language in themselves.” 13 Essentially, he claims that he creates forms which come from triple sources that he combines. It is like inventing an ideogram which not read linearly. But what actually Le Va means is that he takes information from the field to create his object, his project, his installation. He spends a lot of time to study and to find all these details and complexities which will help him to produce his new kind of work each time.

Field is the force which forms his work.

Consequently, the object is directly connected and is in a very close 13

Green, Denise. Metonymy in Contemporary Art: A

New Paradigm, Univ Of Minnesota Press, 2005. Page 119

relationship with the field. It is not only about the form, the process the scale or the size but it is also about an interrelation. The object carries emotions which emanate from the same field.

In particular, for Le Va the fragment is “sitedepended”, not “site-specific”. It relies on the architectural context but the same time adapts to its container. He finds essential to rethink the features of the autonomy and process. The same time he enhances the connection with his field, intersecting himself with subjects like “everyday life” or “life into art” in the age of mass media and “cultural revolution”.

At the High Line Park, the overall form is developed with different conditions which are established locally and are distinguished from the external environment. The project rejects the idea of a closed integrated system of relations and interactions, while it promotes an architecture that doesn’t come in touch to the earth but stands on a grid of columns.

In contrast, Le Va seems to believe that the only way you could understand the object – the fragment – is if you walk through it, examining part by part, feeling the interrelations and becoming part of the whole field reformation, in real time conditions. He says: “Let me clarify the emotions underlying the work. I translate these real, physical relationships that exist in space and that are results of emotional situations – or possibly, even, unemotional situations. I spatially translate, almost verbatim, the arrangement of how things were. I filter the arrangement of furniture into geometric forms and you get a sense of something going on, but you cannot pinpoint it. It becomes elusive. But none of

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these relationships are formal compositions. All the relationships are taken from real life and my own experience.” 14

07 | CONCLUSION Concluding, we realize that we have two examples which confront the same notion of the field from a different perspective.

The design team of the High Line Park perceives the urban fabric as an independent field or the “representation scene”. In this, they express their objective theory for the object which it doesn’t have any substantial relation with the field. The architects look like a deus-ex-machina who are called to engage two seemingly incompatibles elements into one.

On the other hand, Barry Le Va remains diligent to the detailed conditions that define the link of one part to another by understanding the whole process “as a sequence of events”. In this way “it becomes possible to imagine an architecture that can respond fluidly and sensitively to local differences while maintaining overall stability” 15.

In Barry Le Va’s case, quasi-object is within the idea for the creation of local collective subjects around objects – catalysts. It may correspond to the angle we see the changing through the digital space as a place of assembly collegialities. In this perspective, it is possible to see the hybrid space as a field of intensity, a field of unstable equilibrium of forces. In contrast, static objects lose more and more of their “enforcement” as the force field is imposed on them.

Green, Denise. Metonymy in Contemporary Art: A New Paradigm, Univ Of Minnesota Press, 2005. Page 121-122 14

Allen, Stan. ‘From Object to Field’, Architectural Design: After Geometry, London, 1995. Page 27

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08 | BIBLIOGRAPHY Books Allen, Stan. ‘From Object to Field’, Architectural Design: After Geometry, London, 1995 Kwinter, Sanford. Architectures of Time: Toward a Theory of the Event in Modernist Culture, The MIT Press, USA, 2001 Green, Denise. Metonymy in Contemporary Art: A New Paradigm, Univ Of Minnesota Press, 2005 Sternfeld, Joel. Walking the High Line, Steidl, Germany, 2012 Friends of the High Line, Designing the High Line: Gansevoort Street to 30th Street, USA, 2012

Articles van Toorn, Roemer. The Quasi Object http://roemervantoorn.nl/quasiobject.html Prof. Huppatz, D., J. The High Line http://djhuppatz.blogspot.co.uk/2011/07/high-line.html Papalexopoulos, Dimitris. Knowledge and Artifact: on Quasi Objects, Topika, 2002

Essays Martin, Aja. Virtual Progression: The High Line as Verdant Infoscape, University of Houston, 2011 Moras, Antonios. The critical conditions in architecture. The concept of the virtual architectural object, 2nd Panhellenic Conference of Urban Planning, 2009

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09 | APPENDIX

The High Line Park. Renderings and diagrams collage.

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The High Line Park.

“The content – the new design – remains into the strict frames of the former infrastructure but operate independent of the whole form, using a design vocabulary which is characterized by repetition and some references to the old situation.”

Section plan at the Gansevoort Street “Whenever possible stairs are brought up between the existing beams, through openings cut into the structure. These ‘slow stairs’ signal a gradual transition from the busy street below to the quiet, elevated landscape of the High Line.”

Friends of the High Line, Designing the High Line: Gansevoort Street to 30th Street, USA, 2012.

Page 48

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Barry Le Va, Installation Sonnabend Gallery, New York, 1978. “Accumulated Vision-blocked”.

Masonite and wood.

Green, Denise. Metonymy in Contemporary Art: A New Paradigm, Univ Of Minnesota Press, 2005. Page 122

Barry Le Va, Installation Sonnabend Gallery, New York, 1995 “Separated, Catalogued, Sealed, Eventually Joined”

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