Eleven Years of Transiency Collegiate Writing, Claire Philips, Fall 2012 This assignment for a collegiate writing class examined critically a childhood experience as in its relation to history at the individual and society levels. My childhood was gilded with elaborate cathedrals of wooden blocks and Lego skyscrapers, all neatly thrown together from one side of the family living room to the other. Dispersed between these sprawled innumerable toy airplanes, each flying about its own undefined route. A trans-living room flight could take days or weeks to traverse its journey, depending on my will. At the time, I would never have thought of the unique misery to which its imaginary passengers would have been subjected. There could have been no crying babies, and no pocket of rough air around the family couch could have created turbulence. The world was naïve, innocent.
clearly showed me otherwise. From this, it was the pinnacles of modernity to which I clung. Aircraft and skyscrapers offered me an oasis from the realities I escaped at home. While my “family” shook and rolled like a poorly framed bridge in the wind, cities and airports provided me with what I then thought was flawlessness.
I gazed into the monotony and fortitude of our creations. Every morning, the sun struck the John Hancock building in Boston. The same as any other morning, the sun reflected from its monstrous façade onto the street below. Peopled filtered in and from the tower, and business was conducted within its grasp on a repeating basis. With such easy this performance took place that I became fixated on its routine, on its foreseeability. Likewise across the Charles River, Logan International Airport held a constant flux of flights from the far reaches of the planet. As if by a diThese two passions, those for architecture vine model, each jet landed, disembarked and flight, had arisen from the two polar and began its next trek – clockwork. There ends of my life, two firm supports on which were no prospects of unpredictability, I asI rested my young being. At one end, my sumed; such systems functioned sequenmother infused in me a deep appreciation tially time after time, without falter. Unlike for the aesthetic. Our home glimmered these solid exemplifications, the happiwith meticulously placed vases and ness filling our home was very much conpainstakingly cleaned china. It was as if a tingent on a number of things, especially reach towards visual perfection had been the unpredictable nature of my parents’ made in a superficial ploy to cover emorelationship. To these vestiges of moderntional blemishes. Beside this, my father’s ism I kept my hope. The discrete skyraw passion for flight stood vehemently scraper and the timely airport appeared as another pillar of my early life. Having to give us the ultimate ability to conquer worked at the FAA for what seemed at the nature. Any idea of a random intervention time an eternity, his intrinsic fascination into the timely spectacle humanity had with the mammoth machines crisscrossing created would have been absurd. Then, our skies instilled in me a unique regard it all foundered. The bridge spanning my for the wonders above me. Like a skyparents’ differences crumbled under the scraper, every detail of which held deep force of a vehement gust. Some heard roots in methodical planning and execuwhispers of an affair in the wind, though I tion, a jetliner shone a similar beauty in am more inclined to believe it was simply its engineering. No curved panel clung to my mother’s increasing weight, a lament the wing without reason; not one window of my father which had eventually come to had been placed on the bulkhead without define at least their last decade together. proper thought to its effects on cabin In any case, eighteen years of a repetitive pressurization. This obsession with refine- struggle to patch the canyon between my ment in both architecture and aeronautics parents’ personalities had slowly rotted took hostage both my mind and eyes. the support beams of an already shaky Perhaps, it was this precision in mankind’s connection. Under the weight of a particucreations which I began to see as a refuge. larly challenging year, it splintered. By the While my parents’ marriage appeared from end of 2000, my situation had home had an external perspective to be pedestrian, been carefully divided in a courtroom. Lawif not downrightly bourgeois, even my naryers for each side had diligently chopped row understanding from within the house apart each asset of my life into two equal
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portions. These were then conscientiously be that jetliners and buildings had been dispersed to either my mother or father. employed as weapons? How odd must the reality of the world be if the two staples of Amidst this melancholy, I remember little. solidarity in my life had been upturned? The days must have blurred together, Staring at the smoldering pile of rubble in because only certain moments protrude Lower Manhattan on the television, I came in my mind, one of the most significant of to grasp what remained of my broken ideals. which occurred a few weeks into my first While I redefined my identity in relation to week of second grade. Streaming from my parents’ divorce, America awoke from a the school doors at 2:30 on that Tuesday somber of steadfastness. Our nation was afternoon, we joyfully poured towards our no longer impervious, no longer a metal-clad awaiting parents, as was so any other day. giant whose motivations and ideals only Usually greeted by open arms and inquisi- the starkest of adversaries could besiege. tions into the day’s doings at school, we Likewise, marriage was no longer an unshakfound only confusion and astonishment able union. America, torn from her dignity, awaiting us. The air sobered our juvenile staggered to reinterpret what exactly she follies with fallout from something which meant. My parents, shaken by their up-
How could it be that jetliners and buildings had been employed as weapons? How odd must the reality of the world be if the two staples of solidarity in my life had been upturned? Staring at the smoldering pile of rubble in Lower Manhattan on the television, I came to grasp what remained of my broken ideals. had happened a five-hours’ car ride away, heaval, pondered similar questions, facing a in New York City. Most predominantly, I world not yet set to their newfound lonelirecall being told that two airplanes had ness. Having worked at the air traffic control collided with the World Trade Center, a center that held the last contact with three favorite attraction of mine which I had ac- of the flights hijacked on September 11, my tually visited only a few months before. My father sulked away for some months. More minuscule understanding of that day slow- so than many others, the day had completely ly sprouted around two central facts: many restitched his identity. Adding to this was people had died, and all flights across the the anxiety caused by the relativity of the United States had been grounded. tragedy to our lives. My mother had regularly flown American Airlines flight 11, from Boston As the details slowly unrolled, my personal to Los Angeles, twice a month for ten years journey merged with that of a nation taken on business, concluding her travels in 2000. back by a unique tragedy. How could it The solidarity he once found somewhere
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The Future City Collegiate Writing, Claire Philips, Fall 2012 The streets bustle. The air fills with noise, and man’s ultimate physical confinement becomes apparent. Within his shell, he is imposed to stringent anthropomorphic limits. As his limitations in the world withhold form him the true grasp on his environment, his cities grow more crowded with the day, as he stuffs himself within his bounds. The city becomes his living prison. It toils with him, and it meanders with his movements into an abyss of meaningless work. He yearns for a breach from the monotony. He tightly scrapes at the idea of his physical incapabilities. They stifle him. His cities fill block beyond block, box after box, clinging to ill-preached homogeneity. Throughout this modernist wasteland, man roams. He clings to the air. Like tentacles, it reaches around his monstrous glass towers into the heavens. The air is everything, and man is only one small speck, one numerated subject in its serfdom. The air does not die, it does not live, and it does not feel. It is fair; it lacks his pejorative nature towards the greater forces around it. It is indifferent to his foibles and inconsistencies.
On a personal note – I firmly believe what happened on that otherwise mundane morning in September was a defining event for my generation. In many ways, I see it in retrospect as a definitive predisposition which would arise in my relationship with architecture. How could a small group of determined men comply knowingly with the perpetrated slaughter of some 3,000 innocent civilians? How could anyone sit in the pilot’s seat of a Boeing 767 and knowingly hurl themselves into the side of a skyscraper? Given the horrid failure of these judgements in the minds of those who did in fact enact these atrocities, architecture must have been a symbolic force. For them and all those they would unfairly implicate, that complex in Lower Manhattan had come to represent something much more than its simple geometry, ordinary location or mundane program. Architecture is inherently officiated as a symbolic act, and in the last century its ramifications as such have come to be innately tied to the lives of so many. How many thousands have lived and died in the shadow of an architectural ethos? It would seem then so vital to interrogate the stakes of our architecturally ingrained acts of power when their consequences hold such might.
between 12A and 34B had been torn from its pedestal. Amongst us all, a riff began to mold the ground which we had once considered so timeless. As if physically
parted by some crevasse left in the aftermath of a particularly violent earthquake, my parents and I, as well as in many ways our country, found ourselves atop a mighty
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His economies do not phase it. It has no conception of frameworks or timetables. Unlike the rail, his greatest achievement, with its thousands flocking from one block to another, the air is everywhere at once, but man can only inhabit his immediate space while his comrades pass their time contributing to a larger picture. Their millions of daily actions feed a larger society, and yet, in the end, they are consumed. They themselves become the sociology of this city. Individual worthlessness hill. Before us lied a valley under a thick abounds. It is by these parameters that blanket of fog. To us, what stood before our feet was uncertain. It was both myste- man realizes his next step, that the physirious and ominous at one precise moment. cality of the body is no longer conducive We were in so many ways, both bodily and to his current state. He is now a spiritual being. His is a psyche irrelevant to the metaphysically, the Wanderer Above the confinements of flesh and bone. Bodily Sea of Fog. In 2000, one marriage, two individuality cannot coexist in this brave towers and innumerable identities collapsed, leaving in their wake only a striking new frontier. Man must become omnipotent. Only then may this next phase of his taste of indecision and irresolution. existence harness the true ambiguities of the world, savoring every shade of its wonder.
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Diagram and Disaster: Flight 901 Expand and Contract, Bryony Roberts, Spring 2014 As a personal assignment within Expand and Contract, each student was asked to compare an artist within the scope of the course, firmly tied to a specific timeline of artistic history, to a contemporary practitioner. A set of drawings was assigned to arbitrate the formal intentions of each so as to gather a more comprehensive survey of the condition of art since 1960. This brief text attempts this analysis by investigating the ideas of wrapping, offset and estrangement in the works of Christo and Jeanne-Cluade (specifically in “Wrapped Reichstag”) and Adam Ferris (in “Man with the Pith Helmet, respectively).
Literary theorist Viktor Shlovsky notes in “Art as Technique” that “habitualization devours work, clothes, furniture, one’s wife, and the fear of war”, coming to a conclusion that art must function to remove the spectator from a typical frame of reference. Estranged from the quotidian perspective with which we gaze onto the events passing before us, we return to normality as altered beings, forever eschewed
it is within reason that we might conclude these discrepancies to be ineffectual things of pragmatics and preservation, but a more nuanced reading acknowledges their substantial importance in regards to the overall experiential journey which one takes once faced with the abstracted landmark. Undoubtedly, our phenomenological perception of the Reichstag is unmistakably altered by this void space, and, as
explorations currently undertaken across the artistic community. Akin to the Wrappings of Christo and Jeanne-Claude, these works inherently confine themselves to the chosen precedent which, in turn, estranges itself before us, the Audience, through an abstraction. For example, Ferriss’ “Man with a Pith Helmet” addresses a presumed situation of complete nonimportance. We gaze onto an otherwise
Photo displaying the utter destruction of the Reichstag briefly after the end of the European fronts in the Second World War in 1945. Its architecture, having been pillaged and scarred by Russian forces, gained an inherently representational essence. How are we treat such objects? Wounds of our many pasts, buildings have innate abilities to remind our collective psyches of the cultural and societal remorse we carry.
result, we come to question our prior relationship with the building as an object itself in a myriad of terms, both contextual to narrated history and individual to the audience in the same instance.
Christo and Jeanne-Claude, “Wrapped Reistag” (1995, in Berlin)
Complacencies and Estrangements in the Works of Christo and Jeanne-Claude and Adam Ferriss Throughout everyday existence, we accumulate a significant number of complacencies about the surroundings we inhabit. Numbed to the finite complexities of contemporaneity, it is a natural response
from pedestrian progressions and their consequent ennui towards the everyday.
This lack of sensual engagement with one’s surroundings inhabits a crucial component of much artistic exploration.
Such is the encounter garnered by much of Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s work. In particular, the artists’ “Wrapped Reichstag”, when taken into proper historical context, effectively defamiliarizes the audience. Paramount to this effect is the addition of void space between the immediate object (in this case, the Reichstag itself) and its wrapping. While initial conclusions may be prone to devolve the relationship to something of a 1-to-1 affair, closer inspection reveals a significant ontological differentiation between each element in the whole. That is to note, as the metallic fabric swoops along the structure’s façade, deviations begin to establish functionally protective seals between the ornamental accentuations (statues, cornices et cetera) and the fabric itself. Of course,
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In wrapping the Reichstag, Christo and JeanneClaude, for reasons both artistic and pragmatic, were foced to contemplate the negative space between the structure and their wrapping. This was to become the reality of multiple possibilities in the explication of objecthood in the piece.
that humanity would begin to exhibit signs of necessitated ignorance in the perception of those environments constantly encasing life.
It thus cannot be taken lightly that to encapsulate the German parliament, nonetheless on the eve of her unification after an ordeal birthed from both the most heinous war and the grimmest genocide ever to face mankind, is to engage the active space that is the perceptual distance between the individual (or the mass) and corresponding surroundings. Inasmuch as Christo and Jeanne-Claude engaged this conceptual gap, intentionally or not, they took on as their confines the innate state of an object of great importance with a large quality of historical baggage. The work, subsequently, is directly referential to its precedent. Would it truly have been of the same affect, had the artists chosen instead to wrap an object of more mundane nature? A more immediately contemporary oeuvre along similar lines can be found in the works of Adam Ferriss, and, as a side note, of the larger part of the Glitch Art
Diagram and Disaster: Flight 901
unremarkable beach scene throughout which families and other visitors frolic across wide dunes and shallow surfs. In the most subtle way, Ferriss’ scripted abstraction gradually skews both the colors and timings of the piece so that, by its termination, at least four distinct realities simultaneously exist. Whereas the metallic resurfacing of the Reichstag created two firmly extant masses (the original building and its cloaked skin), the video, warped by Ferriss, achieves similar affect in the divulgence between time and image. How can we objectively gauge our assumedly true perceptions of the world after having been presented such definite bifurcations in the relationships intrinsic to Objecthood and Experience? In this “void”, each aforementioned example shears our direct assumptions, and, in return, we are to face ourselves. We find in the discrepancy before us a direct confrontation with our own complacencies. What we initially presume to be an everyday interaction between a father and his son through a Frisbee completely
deconstructs itself and its surrounding beach panorama into a stream of various realities. Likewise, a “glitch” – albeit more materialized than Ferriss’ inherently digital medium – emerges between the figure of a building and its displaced skin, together trampling across a controversial history hosted in an object (the Reichstag) by a people divided and disparaged by an era-changing war (the Germans). These
interventions are integral to the distancing of the perception from its very gaze, thus enabling a space within which the agency of the spectator might take up its own account for the reality which otherwise passes unbeknownst. On Air New Zealand Flight 901 On 28 November 1979, Air New Zealand Flight 901, while on a 237-passengeroccupied sightseeing trip over Antarctica, slammed without initial explanation into the mountainside of Mount Erebus on Ross Island, just off the coast of the ice-cloaked continents’s mainland. The incident at once claimed 257 lives, nearly doomed the reputation of the McDonnell Douglas DC-10 aircraft and delivered great confusion onto subsequent investigators.
twenty-one miles West of their actual location. Their true position placed them effectively within a scale model situation in which their perceptual cues trained during instruction of visual-reference flying over the barren continent convinced them against reality, placing them before a sheet of fog concealing the slopes of the mountain. This bay at the foot of the mountain contained cliffs nearly exactly
travel and its modern machinery alike. In the drawings, these techniques are amplified, using a methodology of wrapping contingent to that of Christo and Jeanne-Claude, so that a further estrangement might be taken upon. Like both this duo and artist Adam Ferriss, the role of precedent can be read as paramount to the understanding of the piece. Through a discrepancy in wrapping, a simultaneity of existences is proposed which, in turn, questions our presumptions. We are presented several views of the exactly same aircraft, and, through an intentional abstraction in the understanding of such drawings, it might be posited that, were these drawings to represent the actual object in question in one real instance of perception, we have approached a kind of multiverse. Below the aircraft, we see in both plan and section the ground line, imminent to colossal impact. Furthermore, a series of geometric transformations estrange parts from the aircraft, splitting its assemblage before us into the myriad of
complex systems which surround us. We view the aircraft as a singular being, when in reality is an infinitely complicated combination of discrete systems. Therefore, the idea of its disintegration upon impact is quite disturbing for us, as it represents yet another ruinous derailment of our assumptions occurring beyond our control yet before our captivated (and willing) agency as an audience. In the terms of the two works chosen in the presentation, this arbitrates the estranged techniques of both artists into the two singular compositions, acknowledging their contingent goals as self-similar in consequence for our presumed and often complacent understandings about the world. Ferriss’ employment of simultaneous situations between both real and virtual possibilities of a Deleuzian logic fuses with Christo and Jean-Claude’s use of discrepancy in wrapping to produce a finally eschewed presentation in the form of a highly removed notion of reality. This, in relation to our approaches at
Adam Ferriss, “Man with the Pith Helmet” (2012)
one-third the size of those with which the pilots had expected to make visual contact, rendering the combined perception of the crew to be a completely complacent situation in which each member worked from and amplified the assumptions of the others. Thus, they emerged only six seconds before impact from a state of nearly utter estrangement, lost hopelessly within a complex set of deterministic presumptions.
After a many-year process, the cause of the accident was uncovered to be a combination of navigational misfortunes, coincident and, most importantly, visual estrangement. As the pilots approached the bay before the mountain on their closing of the Antarctic coastline, they came to believe that they had as planned flown into a nearly identically shaped bay some
This unfortunate tale seems ideal for a comparison to the artistic techniques of Estrangement, primarily because its involvement within the realms of defamiliarizing nearly all those involved from their typical frames of reference. In the wake of the disaster, the nearly surreal images of the strewn aircraft’s parts along the paperwhite sheet of ice skinning the mountain would shock the public. In so doing, it could be argued that they had torn the Fourth Wall in the perceptions we hold about jetliners. Otherwise singular objects, to see the wreckage of the aircraft is to see the destruction of an ideology held complacent to reduce public fears of air
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Diagrammatic explorations of the formal prerogatives in each work. While Christo and Jeanne-Claude (left) explore a method of multiple realities in their misaligned wrapping of the Reichstag in Berlin, Adam Ferriss (right) uses an explosion of the streams which produce the confluence of systems that we define as reality. Each decomposes the present in a set of geometric operations which question the estranged perception we hold of the objects and situations around us.
constituencies which together territorialize the jetliner itself in its perceived instantiation as a grand piece of machinery. In a way, this is to prick our predisposed assumption, as the Public, to simplify the
coping with the presumptions rampant in our experiences with the world, touches upon the errors of our very perceptions. Inevitable to everyday life, these are unavoidable facets of existence which are thoroughly acknowledged by the works of art analyzed, provocations to comprehend in deepened significance the variables deterministically tied to the contemporary Human Condition. Next spreads – drawings diagramming the essence of a multiply blurred reality through offset and wrapping, pertaining specifically to Flight 901
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Diagram and Disaster: Flight 901
Diagram of Collision with Mount Erebus
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as the composition is consumed? As the film progresses, we are again presented with an image of dissolution. This time, it is by the symbolism and the interpretation of a window. The architectural aperture of our homes, windows naturally function in a conventional sense to expose us to that which is outside our inhabitancies, revealing to us that which is beyond our immediate apprehension. We place in them our trust to connect us to a viable perspective on the outside world. Here, Von Trier once again plays on the expected (itself a construction both held by and produced within our collective psyche) and the reality, a far less subjective force, something more inherently existent. The composition of the trickery goes beyond the basic level of understanding intrinsic in its components, relying further on coloring to set a specific reading. The frame and the room surrounding the window are painted a deep black, suggesting a darkened interpretation of their intentions. Whereas white framing would symbolize purity, definition and straightforwardness, the obscured nature of the set’s shade hints at skewed motives. It is as if the window hides something from us, blurring our comprehension of what it depicts. Beyond
Observations on Reality in Melancholia Visual Rhetorics, Stephen Phillips, Fall 2012 Lars Von Trier’s 2011 “Melancholia” places before our eyes a convincing take on the deterioration of a reality. We glimpse as cracks form gaping crevasses, forever pondering the assuming verification of a connection we ascertain to stand between ourselves and reality. What exactly does this mean for our complacencies in daily existence? Our collective nature is grounded on assumed realities. In the world with which we interact at a daily level, we use these accepted facets about our environment to comfort us. They cradle us, at times removing our need to question their true value. Enter Lars Von Trier’s Melancholia. Within it, a deep discussion about perception is accumulated, centered around the true solidity of objects upon which we rely in life. By juxtaposing these banal things in an extreme situation, Von Trier attempts to criticize the verity of their archetypal associations in our society, thereby undermining their value to our sense of reality. Whether a painting, a window or a teepee, all objects in which we invest ourselves through symbolism fail truly to rectify our situations. While Melancholia places this discrepancy in a rather absurd situation – the end of the known world – Von Trier’s point is ubiquitous in meaning. Played through his imagery, the world is decomposed and questioned through its common assumptions about ordinary entities in our lives. Earliest on, Melancholia poses the viewer before a painting rich with nostalgia. When seen especially through the lens of the European culture into which Von
Trier introduces this trope, the symbolic nature in the image of a burning painting holds deafening value. Von Trier slows the camera, accentuating the doom of the picturesque winter scene. In burning it, he calls to question the homey values in the artwork. The image goes further to construct a multilayered analysis. On a more material level, he judges our investment in something which is, in the end, only a canvas and some paint. Its slow immolation reveals that it is no more a memory, no further an appreciated artwork sprinkled with zeitgeist and technique. To the
In the world with which we interact at a daily level, we use these accepted facets about our environment to comfort us. They cradle us, at times removing our need to question their true value.
contrary, it shrivels before the audience’s gaze. Even within the chosen image, this duality is played out, harping to an important theme throughout the film. What appears and what actually exists are two distinctly desperate beings in the Melancholia-styled interpretation. As is so, the image depicts a picturesque winter skating scene, yet in reality the camera shows this cold environment being taken up by flames and heat. We are brought to interrogate the happiness demonstrated by the worriless skaters and frolicking hikers. How can their joy be true when it is left static
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the foreground, Von Trier further questions our perceptions and assumptions. We see a burning bush, the sole enflamed object in the landscape beyond the windowpanes. While this conjures inferences to the Bible, in which a burning bush ignited the Israelite’s march to
The Failure of the Contemporary Gallery Collegiate Writing, Claire Philips, Fall 2012 This paper attacked the commercial nature of the contemporary art gallery, claiming that, instead, the local venues around Los Angeles should work for the progression of the field.
comparison to that of the local museums, shows us the ills of its own contemporary existence.
For example, the gallery culture all too often gives way to burgeoning economic Art provides us an intrinsic mirror. As demands. Notoriety and profit margins are the sciences, its vastness exposes have emerged from the catharsis of the our lesser known and seldom observed 2008 economic meltdown superordinate trivialities. Consider the plethora of banal to the greater purpose of the profession. objects one gazes upon photographed While this may represent a more immedialong the walls of galleries – they strike us ate reaction to economic hardships, its as typical, normal, benign, but it is in this effective eradication of smaller ventures way that the arts beg us to approach a has seriously hurt gallery culture, a sympdeeper understanding of the complexities tom echoed around the nation (Holson). around us. They propose an alternative Transversing Gallery Row, one cannot help hypothesis to the present, a skewed prism but to notice the staging of galleries such through which we may see perspectives as that of Robert Reynolds, the presentaof ourselves au courant, resting otherwise tion of which appears more ostentatious hidden beyond obstructions imposed by than anything else in its relation-ship to reality. Without this careful foil, we are left the sidewalk. Although, at first glance, ignorant. It is for this precise reason that the massive windows adorning its façade the arts must be cultivated among the seem to break apart the public-private public. Currently, dogmatic privatization barrier, it comes as a massive reproach to and innovational-timid attitudes stagfind that the gallery is open only by special ger the true potential of art’s most direct appointment. Such is the case of many viaduct to the populace: galleries. Though galleries in the downtown scene. How can this deprivation is in part compensated in the public efficiently be indoctrinated by museums and other foundations, the state the fruitful observations art provides if it of the gallery scene must notwithstanding cannot access viable locations to experibe rectified. ence exhibitions, showings and galleries?
stagnation towards general purposelessness (beyond materiality and economics) steams ahead at a pace far greater than that which one venture could capitulate.
One solution to this failure has arrived in the shift from private to institutional support for the art scene. Especially in the case of emerging areas, not unlike that of our microcosm, downtown Los Angeles, these foundations can have significant sway. They provide, in the absence of a cultivating gallery atmosphere, fora for discourse. Whereas galleries may serve the explicit purpose of promoting the bartering and consumption of art as an economy, they rarely approach the value of more prolific intentions held by museums. In fact, in some cases, they philanthropically open their doors at no charge. Though this practice is hard-found in Los Angeles, there emerge some examples from other urban centers which offer us hope. In Mexico City, the newly completed Museo Soumaya offers us a shining spectacle of the power of publicly oriented art ventures. Financed by Carlos Slim, one of the world’s richest men, the museum charges no admission to the public, standing purely as a philanthropic symbol. As notes architectural writer Adam Wiseman for the Architect’s Newspaper, “Slim has given the Once a keystone in the connection beA glimmer of hope is found in the selfgift of free enjoyment of his art collection tween visual depth and mental intellect, proclaimed LACDA (Los Angeles Center to everyone in Mexico, perhaps a small the modern American art gallery society for Digital Art). The small gallery holds a gesture of social responsibility”. Should has slowly eroded at its base. It has streamlined collection of generative art, we look onto these large private ventures become elite, patrician. Can we expect the produced vicariously through the computas conducive to a recovery of the investcommoner to join the cultural conversaer, often with scripting. While this paramet- ment in the public by the art community? tions of this new, heightened world? The ric artform has long existed within insular Possibly. Though we must have trepidation mere existence of the question strikes into circles, the gallery’s exposition of the craft that some endeavors remain either pubour understanding the way things stand as to a wider audience serves a vital pathway licly funded or foundation-based, as the juxtapositions between our beliefs and our in the downtown community. Though its enormous wealth backing collections such realities. In their place, art galleries have gallery spaces stand sealed from the per- as Slims begins to question the modes been supplanted by a thriving institutional spectives of the corner on which it rests, of access to art. Regardless, the visceral conundrum of museums. Though these large works of art are displayed along the implementation of the possibility of open satisfy without a doubt the grander portion windows. This gives an opportune moment arts into the public eye by institutes like of the public thirst, albeit subconscious, to form juxtaposition. While the Robert these throws ajar the boundary between for culture, they cannot function alone. Reynolds studio appears trans-lucent to the public and the enclosed sphere of art Rather, they cannot properly practice their the public needs, it performs a greater which has grown so cavernous. sewn relations to the populous as a whole purpose of taunting its passersby with art when art galleries effectively degrade which they will never attain, at least withIn short, the modern art gallery presents their argument. To see this devolution, one out appointment. By comparison, LACDA an elitist, removed ideal. The citizenry of can observe the ways of downtown Los invites a discourse in its showroom-style our establishment cannot be presented Angeles, a microcosm in its best right. In façade windows. It compiles an exhibition, such dichotomous arguments. How cora city whose mere existence is justified not a testimony. Still, the small redemprectly can we expect them to gauge the in near totality by the media, the microtion within the singular gallery does little world of art when at once they may stair culture of the gallery scene, particularly in to nullify the overall trend. The general a one entity alienating and welcoming
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them? Bred from this odd existence comes a modern naïveté among too many of our contemporaries. Their world must be integrated with ours. The arts must been seen as both means and ends in the positive progression of the human society. This myopic focus on commercialism and intentional, purposeless absurdum must be smudged and molded into a viable portal between the elite scene and the general population. Works Cited Brownell, Gianne. “Belgrade’s Art Scene, Waiting for Its Moment”. The New York Times. The New York Times Company, 29 June 2012. Web. 9 November 2012. Fergus, Jill. “Now Dazzling: Museo Soumaya in Mexico City”. New York Times Style Magazine. New York Times Magazine. The New York Times Company, 14 April 2011. Web. 9 November 2012. Holson, Laura. “The Young Gallerists”. The New York Times. The New York Times Company, 30 September 2011. Web. 15 November 2012. Knight, Christopher. “Review: LACMA’s ‘XYZ’ on Robert Mapplethorpe: Gay Artist vs. Straight Tradi-tion”. The Los Angeles Times. Tribune Company, 4 November 2012. Web. 15 November 2012. Ng, David. “Matthew Marks Expanding Los Angeles Gallery”. The Los Angeles Times. Tribune Company, 24 October 2012. Web. 14 November 2012.
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An Abstracted Botticelli Humanities I, Jill Vesci, Spring 2013 A conceptual foraging into a subsequent essay on perspective in Renaissance art, this scripted interpolation of Botticelli’s “Primavera” (1482) seeks to expose the fundamental formal composures present across the canvas. If we remove some of the literality of a piece of art, can we more thoroughly approach the essential experience which we find as we gaze upon it?
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Abstracted “Primavera”
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Equally as possible to pontificate are the superficial overlaps we may be eager to make, should we begin to bastardize the true meanings of ancient intentions in Here, the bastardized findings of misunaccordance to modern wills. Ergo, it will derstood elements in Japanese culture be easier to begin with defining what is throughout Los Angeles are critically bluntly not a crosscentury manifestation in undertaken in an effort to comprehend modern Los Angeles, even to the ends that the pervasively Postmodern interchange they appear to be such before deeper inbetween cultures, significations and func- terrogation. For instance, both the Higashi tions in architectural forms. Honganji and Hompa Hongwanji Buddhist temples of Little Tokyo reveal themselves The Western Eye confounds itself before to be little more than decorated boxes untraditional Japanese architecture. It perder even minimal critical analysis. Aesthetceives forms at once infinitely simple and ically, though they appear to match Japaendlessly complex, stumbling before its nese precedents, closer reading reveals relationship between form, philosophy and their amassed hoax. Not only do they functionality. In many cases, this renders follow few of the constructive techniques valid comparisons between Ancient Japaof traditional Japanese architecture, but nese structures and contemporaneous they collectively presume a set style which Western creations nullified, but, in order is based upon aesthetic considerations to aid such a comparison, we perhaps rather than material or structural ideals. must warp our narrow understanding of As such things go, this stands in biting these structures so as to embody pure contrast to authentic precedents across ontologies in order for them to divulge the Pacific, the structures of which reprenew relationships and profundities. Their sent combined material investigations into formal qualities and engineered systems adaptation within environment (Young 6). may embroider us more fruitfully with their Particularly in the field of earthquake-engiknowledge thereafter. It is by this compar- neering does this void become incredibly ative method that links across centuries apparent when transposed into a series of of architecture render themselves visible juxtapositions Japanese structures from to our naked eye, though it is important to ancient times and Angelino buildings au note that we must not conclude absolute courant. Herein, the separation emerges, subsequence from them. Rather, it is more and any ties vanish which these sites in productive to our comprehension of the Little Tokyo purport to hold. matters if we see them as coincidences among human architectures throughout Instead, we can perhaps look upon other, history. Although seemingly insignificant less visually analogous structures around upon first gaze, the coincidences we Los Angeles to draw valid interconnections encounter therein may hint at something between the City of Angles and ancient larger, manifestations in their own rights Japanese architecture. Through this, we on scales as prolific as global trends in gain an understanding that, though these building. This dually reveals both an oddity buildings lack visual commonality, their inand (more importantly) a possible archeternal structures and intrinsic frameworks type of the architectural process across mirror, but do not recapitulate, various mankind, thus speaking to how we interact traditional Japanese designs. To reiterate and meld our environment. As possibly the again, it is important that we note the exmost basal level of our interaction within act value of these comparisons, for many the field, our comprehension of its being of the similarities are far from being true across eons and through cultures inhercognates. Analogically speaking, they are ently parallels who we ourselves are, along false cognates, or words whose phonologithe way both referencing superficiality in cal properties parallel one another across our understandings of the world and the languages while lacking linguistic reladispositional assumptions inert in our col- tionship. That is to say that they arise as lective mind. coincidental pairings across idioms. Like the German haben and the Latin habere, Following this comparative method, we both meaning to have yet etymologically might at first be astonished to see the derived from different histories (the Protointricate ways per which Japanese archiIndo-European roots keh2p [to sieze] and tecture of the past itself parallels contem- ghabh [to grab], respectively), these strucporary structures around Los Angeles. tures on each side of the Pacific Ocean Manifestations of Japanese Style in LA History of Architecture 1, Christoph Korner
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share morphological and organizational commonalities, but otherwise differ on the precise evolutions thereto. Unlike linguistics, wherein these freak collisions across languages mean little more than mottled chance, overlaps in architecture, specifically when outside frames of ancestral history or convolution, harp to architectural intrinsicities. To recapitulate, they alternatively present to us poignant examples of archetypal ideas which inherently manifest themselves in our built world, speaking deeply to the human approach to perceive and to adapt alongside the site, the con-
tially dangerous moisture, correspondingly. Both are mistakenly mapped onto the various Buddhist temples of Little Tokyo, yet each so clearly employs a myriad of nails to hold together the frame of its structure. In fact, the Hompa Hongwanji Buddhist Temple goes so far as to aesthetically mimic the beams with poured concrete. Indeed, these temples fulfill semiotic connections necessary in their designs, but, in doing so, they fail to honor the architectural rational behind these respective styles. For our purposes, this disparages them to the point of virtual invalidity, which
Aesthetically, though [these manifestations] appear to match Japanese precedents, closer reading reveals their amassed hoax. Not only do they follow few of the constructive techniques of traditional Japanese architecture, but they collectively presume a set style which is based upon aesthetic considerations rather than material or structural ideals. text and the conditionalities. By example, Japanese architecture frequently employed few to no nails in their designs (Addiss 12). This decision holds massive ramifications in regards to earthquakes. As the ground sways, such buildings employing strict rations of nails oscillate freely. This movement counteracts the forces of the earthquake, stabilizing the structure. To enable such a scheme to be implemented throughout a design, a complex interlocking substructure emerged in Japanese design, often categorizing the buildings visually by their intricate beams. This, in turn and by parallel to similar Chinese developments, gradually necessitates the iconic curved roofs so representational of Oriental architecture. These terrace-ottaladen roofs, sheltering underlying buildings from rain as well as taking stress from the weight of the tiles employed alongside, also hold functional ideologies (Coaldrake 367). Both aesthetic resultants rely on simple properties of functionality. Interlocked beams resist earthquakes, and overhung roofs both resolve the intricate system of connections between beams and shelter exposed wooden structures from poten-
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is not to criticize iconoclastically their existences as functional spaces for worship, but rather to declare them disingenuous both structurally and histrionically alike. They can most profitably be understood as effortless mimicry, rather than genuine attempt at transposition between foreign philosophy of design into indigenous landscape. Left without resonance in Little Tokyo, where each temple displays indulgent regurgitation of nails, screws and all things Western by bastardization, we might more advantageously look downtown to find properly articulated corollaries. Another similar methodology to the aforementioned which propagates easily on both sides of the Pacific is found in the form of base oscillation, a response to earthquakes in modern engineering, effectively allowing the entire structure to move in four directions along a two-dimensional plane during tremors, achieved by supporting the building atop two rows of sliders. The first row enables motion within one axial direction, during which the second set functions for the other. Empowering the coordinates of a Cartesian plane, this
It dispenses for us a functional underwork to a commonly fetishized aesthetic. The Westerner’s mind is deluded in depictions of curve-roofed structures in all things Chinese and Japanese. allows infinite positions within a defined, two-dimensional area. Such systems have recently been retrofitted into both Los Angeles City Hall and Pasadena City Hall, as well as below precious ancient sculptures at the Getty (Gilbert).
coming analyses.
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Perhaps foremost in our modern psyche, there appears here additionally a clear parallel to mass dampers, one of which was recently installed at the Theme Building at LAX (Miyamoto Earthquake + In the case of the newly retrofitted City Structural Engineers). In these, we see Hall, placed atop base isolation technolthe pertinence in the Japanese’s disogy, the building, in conceptuality, exists covery of the comparable method many separately from the ground (Nabih Youssef centuries before the modern world would Associates). When receiving the forces of grasp its usability in structures. It also an earthquake, the edifice concurrently dispenses for us a functional underwork slides across two levels of struts. Each to a commonly fetishized aesthetic. The level controls the different direction of Westerner’s mind is deluded in depictions oscillation, effectively allowing the entire of curve-roofed structures in all things structure to sway as it will to resist lateral Chinese and Japanese. They adorn his changes in force. While this may be menChinese food boxes, establish setting tioned to further the structural alienation in his films and without delay conjure in of the mutants in Little Tokyo, it is perhaps him an iconographic portal to Asian style, more important when seen as a dynamic though in reality, these roofs’ development element during earthquakes. This, in turn, traces more productively to their relationis translatable into the ancient aesthetic ship, as aforementioned, alongside their which we seek to contrast. In the case, as performance in earthquakes, particuthe ground shakes, stacked frames and larly when addressed as attachments to beams in traditional Japanese pagodas pagodas. Unknown in the visual perspecare freed to move without much resistance tive by which many process the buildings on two axes (The Economist). Otherwise before them, these heavy roofs effectively minimal structures, heavy terra-cottatiled function as do mass dampers, in attrition roofs hold the tiers down firmly. This oscil- to their role as oscillation devices, when lation works similarly to the two modern used in conjunction with the thick, sturdy adaptations of noteworthiness. Furtherheart pillars (The Economist). Lateral momore, a system of springs and pulleys, ac- tion created by the structure’s sway during tively performing dampening forces to the an earthquake is offset by the roof’s mass lateral movements, echoes the functional- swinging to and fro in opposite directions. ity of the central heart pillar of pagodas, to A similar reaction occurs in the Theme be elaborated upon in further detail in the Building, though it is subjugated to only
one damper located within the depths of the unseen understructure subsequent to recent renovations. While the Ancient Japanese method is forward and apparent, manifesting itself as an actual piece of the building’s personal visuality, extant dampers find themselves leading more reclusive lifestyles, often within the core of the building or otherwise secluded centralized spaces feigned from the public eye. If the heart pillar was the town crier, the damper of nowadays is the leper, ostracized and yet intrinsically interlaced between the inert threads of identity in an architecture. This placement of the former has over the centuries contributed to the falsehoods accompanied by the perception of pagoda-type structures as purely aesthetic in the Western Eye. In this case, the superficial reading of the roofs to be decorative elements has trumped a vital understanding of their actual functionality in perspective of their buildings’ contextual properties and refined histories. Our misunderstanding becomes our cultural comprehension, and a false ethos gradually surrounds the correct consideration of these archaic examples in modern milieus. If we then continue to compare styles based on assumptions that architectural reality could fundamentally be seen as a resultant of structural intentions manifest aesthetically, a return to the analysis of Little Tokyo shows that both temples fail to complete their prerequisites. Instead, we see a variety of other buildings as in fact more similar to ancient structures. Should we desire a fruitful comparison, we must look no further than the US Bank Tower. Along its façade above the 53rd floor, reinforced struts help the structure resist winds and swaying as result of earthquakes (Emporis). By vertically tying the levels together in their most vulnerable areas, the risk of exaggeration of forces along the height of the structure is minimized. Likewise functions the aforementioned heart pillar of the Japanese pagoda designs (The Economist). Pagodas’ strong vertical connection throughout their structures allows them to both sway adequately and to resist overarching tensions at one time. Again, we must see these adaptations to the environments as two distinct evolutions not necessarily connected. Rather, they serve to distinguish a technique which has itself been manifested multiple times over the course of human architectural history. As is such, we ought to regard them as highly crucial
in our understanding of how we perceive the built world by default. Using them, among others, an archetypal response to stimulus can be identified. In this case, it represents a clear vertical bias in securing taller structures which clings to the dichotomy of both adversely allotting and systematically stemming sway in buildings. It therefore stands as highly poignant that these two human interventions into the physical world respond in similar ways and demonstrate an adaptation which sufficiently spans a dramatic difference in scale and context. While the traditional pagoda address problematic sway at much more physically minimal scales, the fundamental process employed in each building carries over consistently between size, venue and culture. Nonetheless, differentiations can be made which perhaps address better the conditionary situations in which each structure exists. The US Bank’s Tower’s core is relocated for elevator shafts, stairwells, access ducts and the like; the Japanese pagoda has no such parameters to which to adhere. Therefore, its structural element (the pillar) can consume much of the volume therein. Still though, this may, in another interpretation, mirror the central concrete structure so commonly employed in modern skyscrapers. The core seems to be the most intrinsically protected in the human mindset. It shelters us, perhaps harping back to the inner security and persistent search for complete encapsulation which we found in primitive, cave-dwelling eons. Both Ancient Japanese architects and contemporary American engineers seem to have grasped this concept in their designs. Because we find these two widely separate understandings of architecture overlapping in this particular circumstance, we must attempt to fortify their value in connection. Clearly, a more acute understanding of an approach to combat an inherent architectural problem is in play. Through an iterative evolution, the two resultant solutions overlay larger concepts of the human condition in relation to architecturality, if we may. They insinuate the certain understanding that such loads can be counteracted both by working on façade and core levels. In turn, an applicable holistic vantage on how issues must be ascertained, categorized and resolved precedes our understanding. It both blinds us and fortifies our approach into the future at once, yet the identification of its presence in the architecture around us is
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without doubt constitutive to constructive approaches to considering its importance. These comparisons between the modern West and the ancient East overall dynamically demonstrate similar alignments about structural responses towards environmental restraints. It is also of note to observe the mentioned bastardizations of the Eastern aesthetic, lest we forget the evidently pragmatic nature of traditional Japanese design in the face of purely formal reproductions. Rather than reject them as failures, they may provide us an interesting base for thought. They show the sheer success of the Japanese methods in integrating the structure into the overall visual ethos of the building and in so doing communicate the overwhelmingly assumption-oriented judgments which occur between cultures whose architectures begin to interact. Whereas contemporaneity in Los Angeles has attempted to understand the Japanese design style on a level only pursuing the resultant of a long evolutionary process, natural circumstance has covertly masqueraded parallel techniques into a sizable collection of Angelino buildings. These moments of contextual espionage and parental confusion surround us, capitulating in a multiplicity of human intrinsicities architecturally representative throughout America’s second largest metropolis. Little Tokyo’s temples may show gaping misjudgments by each culture of the other visàvis formal assumptions, but other cases such as the US Bank Tower and the City Hall articulate a more passionately intimate brush with understanding and reaction – one which seems to infect the very most underlying ideologies employed. By learning from these, we see that the validities we rely upon may be deeper than surface appearances. They are, in fact, ontologies persistent only when viewed as misunderstandings. Although this may in fact be productive in deriving certain mutations of forms, the more hidden commonalities between our cultures’ breakdown differentiates what aesthetics may surmise. Through this perception of the puritanically formal as a weak standpoint for deepened criticality, the broader depth of identification for parallels unravels before us our own human condition in relation to – or rather emergent within – our architecture.
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Works Cited Addis, Stephem; Groemer, Gerald and Rimer, J. Thomas. Traditional Japanese Arts and Culture. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press. 2006. Print. Coaldrake, William H. Monumenta Nipponica Volume 39, Number 3 (Autumn 1984). Tokyo: Sophia University Press. 1984. Print. Emporis. “US Bank Tower”. Emporis GMBH, 2012. Web. 1 March 2013. Gilbert, Maria L. “All Shook Up! Protecting Art in an Earthquake”. The Getty Iris. The J. Paul Getty Trust, 2012. Web. 13 March 2013. Miyamoto Earthquake + Structural Engineers. “LAX Theme Building”. Miyamoto Earthquake + Structural Engineers, 2013. Web. 15 February 2013. Nabih Youssef Associates. “Los Angeles City Hall”. Nabih Youssef Associates, 2009. Web. 1 March 2013. No author provided. “Why Pagodas Don’t Fall Down”. The Economist. The Economist, 1997. Web. 15 February 2013. Young, David and Michiko. Introduction to Japanese Architecture. Singapore: Periplus. 2004. Print.
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to find the truth to be far more ambiguous. While the strict adherence to either subscripted canon of values proves often This paper examined the critical contexts overbearingly limiting, an examination of of so-called “radicality” within the conthe activities in the field seems to indicate temporary purview of formal obsessions. the inherent benefits of a synthesized apIn the analyses, it brings to focus both proach. In a way, this is a kind of blurred the Villa Savoye in Poissy and the Gehry architecture, no longer chained to any Residence in Santa Monica as potentially binary but instead free to roam a continproblematic demagogues for the architec- uum of possibilities. Such an architecture ture discourse du jour. is neither a reiteration of the extant nor a naïve leap forth, rather a sophisticated For a great deal of time now, we have interpolation between both which enables been fooled by an immense ruse. We the acknowledgement appropriate to precpass through our lives day by day under a edent as well as the will to innovate. grand illusion, the philosophical residue of several centuries’ wasted thoughts. They As far back as the Querelle des Anciens tell us, “This will be new”. They say, “This et des Modernes, we stumble against is the future”. They are the radicals, and a question of progression and tradition this, of course, is the surreal artifice that inherently tied to the notions of radicalism is “Progress”. Under it, we have been lead and conformity. In dichotomies like those to valorize the radical, uphold the deviant between Perrault and Blondel, one gazes and swoon the heretic. We are coaxed upon differing interpretations around the into a battle which, in fact, does not even manners by which we ought to appropriate exist, forced to conform within the narrow the past which contemporaneity so ineviterms of those either for or against their tably inherits. This debate has become a own pasts. Who is the left the victim at the lengthy, fruitless process, resulting in the end of this rampage? Architecture, forever mutual exclusivity thrust unnecessarily the slave to the cyclical nature of humanupon its terms. The illusion of this “progity! That is to indicate, when surveying ress” has throughout the field’s history “Progress”, or the Misguided Radicalism History of Architecture 2, Todd Gannon
commencement of the Italian Renaissance from ashes of the otherwise Northern Gothic (Margini). While the outward appearance of the dome itself seems to be of classical reference, in line with its conceptual heritage, closer examination reveals its indebtedness to the Gothic buttress, embedded below an otherwise structurally austere surface (Scaglia). In this genealogy of these mirages, we find as well Le Corbusier’s Villa Savoye, employing a brick-laid structure in the place of the architect’s lauded method of poured concrete, the effect of which is rendered nonetheless to fool us by plastering the façades of the building (Fig. 1). Such examples are numerous, revelations against the blinding binary of past and future. This is not to underwrite the value of progressive thought, but rather to highlight the importance of the synthetic approach. Inasmuch as we so valiantly bespeak our
…A more synthetic engagement of architecture seems to be nuanced in its comprehension of context and precedent, avoiding the pitfalls of strict isolationism or overwrought individuality. successes to radically new thought, we too often fall into a cycle of reactions, wherein the truly profitless redundancy of radicalism and counteraction preemptively halt worthy progress.
the developments of architectural history since the Renaissance, one uncovers an omnipresent trickery, a steady disguise overlaying the perceived progressions which have by their own accounts driven the discipline forward. In the face of this supposedly linear evolution, we are lead to believe a false tale centered either about the phantom of progress or the shackles of tradition. In the most superficial of inventories done around each topic, those of both camps attempt to verify for us the validity of their arguments, but, given appropriately closer examination, we come
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Figure 1 – Villa Savoye, photograph from construction showing underlying brick structure to be plastered over from Le Corbusier; “Villa Savoye, Under Construction”; Archive of Affinities; archiveofaffinities.tumblr.com, 12 September 2011; Web; 11 December 2013.
lured many towards an empty promise. It has for quite some time proven difficult to articulate with much verity to its own cause. In fact, what we find behind many of the revolutionary moments in architecture is an undoubtable debt to the past. Take, for example, Brunelleschi’s Duomo in Florence, lauded as the architectural
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inscribed the investigations of their 1932 introductory exhibition on the topic at MoMA (Hitchcock). Rather than entailing philosophical outcroppings or fundamental goals, their text tends instead to stylize the presentation of the early Modernist works they sought to introduce to the American audience, its introduction going to great ends to impart onto the reader more so than anything else the aesthetic commonalities of the work. Thus, their own explorations culminated in the death of the movement, the rendering of its values as null at the hands of stylization. In these examples, we find the fertility of progressive and radical movements numbed by their own recessive wills and failures which encircle the process of their self-actualization and eventual stylization. Progression falls victim to its own boisterous insecurities.
Each era of thought eventually seems to perform two distinct roles. First, its filibustering supporters undercut the verifiable progress made in a prior movement. This problematic patricide rears its prominence in examples such as the dialectical opposition between Mies van der Rohe’s proscribed “Less is more” and Robert Venturi’s counter-reactionary “Less is a bore”. Although these are in the most obvious way playful mnemonics, they each underline the problematic tendency of these supposed radicals to enact scorched earth policies, scathing the very territory they inherit by preemptively limiting themselves within narrow conceptual programs. After having emptied the stage for their own performances, each group subsequently tends to ruin itself in the banal pity of stylization, accomplishing the second facet. We see this in moments such as the very opening lines of HenryRussel Hitchcock’s and Philip Johnson’s pamphlet on the International Style which
In opposition to these approaches, a more synthetic engagement of architecture seems to be nuanced in its comprehension of context and precedent, avoiding the pitfalls of strict isolationism or overwrought individuality. The Radical seldom appears able to productively engage the systematic development of the field alone, often mistakenly displacing the work relevantly around his in order to establish a territory of investigation. That is to say, when we falter in taking account of our historical liabilities, the risks of insensitivity and abrasiveness become flagrant. We encounter this derailment of architectural intentions in Le Corbusier’s monstrously unapologetic proposals for urban planning in both Manhattan and Paris. Seemingly radical, each fails before inquisition, gradually appearing to be little more than situationally overbearing in nature. In Paris, the Plan Voisin purports to level a sizable chunk of the vital core to the city. At first glance a Cartesian masterpiece of overwrought Modernism, one must take into account the effective state of the area in question within Paris as an unsanitized slum during the architect’s time (Lubin). Thus, what so valiantly advertises itself as progressive is in truth much more a sling-
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shot solution of oversimplification pasted above a problem of contextual complexities. In a similar scheme for Manhattan, Le Corbusier blatantly ignores both the densities and conceptual frameworks of the city’s abstractly gridded layout (Keats). The fact that both projects effectively resemble one another, thus conferring their status as ubiquitous solutions on the part of the architect, is of additional concern. These manifestations of architecture re-
fetishistic levels of data analysis and political self-awareness in respective localities. Therefore, OMA seems able to compile pertinent information on context and still offer radical solutions to issues at hand, in so doing aligning its architecture to both radically progressivism and more sitesensitive agendas. Such is the case in the interplay with the respective urban fabrics in both the Jissieu Library and Seattle Central Library, each of which achieves
hybridization.
Company, 1932. Print. Keats, Jonathon. “Le Corbusier vs. ManThus, Architecture has arrived at a mohattan: MoMA Exhibit Shows Why the ment of boundless possibility whereby the Original Starchitect Never Quite Conconfining characteristics of both blindquered New York. Forbes. Forbes Publisheyed radicalism and mindless tradition ing, 12 August 2013. Web. 10 December are annulled in the promise of a synthetic 2012. approach. Architecture in this new compre- Lubin, Gus. “Why Architect Le Corbusier hension is of a plastic nature, well adept to Wanted to Demolish Downtown Paris.” both assimilation and differentiation in a Business Insider Online. Business Insider, manner of highly simultaneous efficiency. 20 August 2013. Web. 10 December 2013. Margini, Graziano and Catherina Frost. “The Dome of Santa Maria del Fiore”. Scientific Itineraries in Tuscany 15 May 2008. Museo Galileo, Institute and Museum of the History of Science. Web. 8 December 2013. Scaglia, Gustina. “Building the Cathedral in Florence”. Scientific American 264.1 (1991): 66-72. Print.
The Radical seldom appears able to productively engage the systematic development of the field alone, often mistakenly displacing the work relevantly around his in order to establish a territory of investigation. ject too much on their path to progression, forgoing tradition and societal relevance in a will towards ignorant singularity. Far more successful in their possession of context and engagement are works like Gehry’s eponymous home in Santa Monica, which offers implications of locality through both its materiality and well fit integration atop the site’s existing architecture. Avid uses of chain-linked fencing and corrugated metal, alongside a myriad of formal cues, bridge the gap between the radicalism of the scheme and many of its surroundings, offering passersby the physical connection necessary to engage it in a proper manner (Fig. 2). By referencing something so inherent to his setting, Gehry effectively allows the work to abstract from its sourcebook. One could levy this as akin to Kenneth Frampton’s guides on Critical Regionalism, although Frampton’s arguments disproportionately valorize material and referential approaches. Forgoing these presumptions, we might find work such as that of OMA and her kin to be highly successful in their relationship with context and history not for the aforementioned qualities, but rather in rich understandings of context through nearly
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Figure 1 – Photo of a side elevation of the Gehry House in Santa Monica, showing both formal and material connections to context. Note the interplay between the original home’s exposed wooden structure with its window and that of the below addition by Gehry as well as the use of corrugated metal and chain-linked fence, from Olga Shchedrova; “Frank Gehry’s House in Santa Monica”; Simferopol; Panoramio; 6 January 2011; Web; 12 December 2013.
a novel formal experience engaged with yet not in subservience to context. A folly of both-and-ness, as we might coin it, emerges from such an overlap, allotting uniquely experimental benefits from its architectural endeavors into theoretical
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To betray ourselves by aligning against these lucrative abilities is to stifle architecture itself. Therefore, it is only by the productive investigation into a synthesis of prerogatives that can we interpolate the blurred space of an absolute yet integrated architecture. Works Cited Hitchcock, Henry-Russel and Philip Johnson. The International Style: Architecture since 1922. New York: W.W. Norton and
“Progress”, or the Misguided Radicalism
Loos and Wright: Early Modernisms History of Architecture 2, Todd Gannon This piece employs Adolf Loos and Frank Lloyd Wright as canonical comparisons of early divergent trends in Modernism. In as much as contrasting the two, it argues a fundamentally differentiated understanding between spatial organizations inherent to the era. As the Twentieth Century bore into its earlier decades, a definitive vein of architecture began to emerge from the quotidian tendencies of the prior centuries. Distinctive rejections of outdated assumptions began to supplant themselves into the built ethos of the times. While this eventually coalesced into the recognizably Modernist works of the later decades, a great deal can be formed from the comprehensive comparison of Early Modernist exemplars, particularly in their explorations of varied expressions of the investigative characteristics which would come to define the movement. To approach this internal investigation of Modernism’s roots, it proves particularly profitable to evaluate in comparative juxtaposition Adolf Loos’ Villa Müller and Frank Lloyd Wright’s Darwin
unenclosed plateau of the Martin House. Built before the consolidation of Modernism in the forms of both the 1932 exhibition on the International Style at MoMA and the legible repercussions of the CIAM Conferences, only in their infancy at the time, the two differentiations of space set themselves distinctly apart within the heterogeneous atmosphere of Early Modernism. The consequences of these actions help to further the girth of the void by which the plans distance themselves conceptually. Whereas Loos carefully orchestrates the procession of his building in the tight regulation of circulation, Lloyd Wright opens the barriers of his program, removing walls to create a continuous flow of space defined more by its formal context than any functional demarcation (Jackson-Forsber 23). To accomplish this, Wright carefully curates his spaces by a methodology entirely different from that of Loos. Thus, the two exert dissimilar characteristics in their minute control of the architecture in each building to the ends that they might be put in opposition by the results of their individual investigations. Loos halts his architecture, for the most part, at the individual room. With the notably fetishistic exception of the panop-
…Before the consolidation of Modernism at both MoMA and the CIAM Conferences, the two differentiations of space between Loos and Wright set themselves distinctly apart within the heterogeneous atmosphere of Early Modernism. D. Martin House, respectively in Prague and Buffalo, because, although both hold key tenants of the emerging style, each distinctly presents unique solutions to design imperatives. For example, while the Villa Müller modulates small autonomous spaces, the Martin House attempts to blend nearly all programmatic regions into one volume delineated among a series of planes. These contradictions between the proposals allow their dialectic comparison, summoning forth an idiosyncratic comprehension of Early Modernism’s variability.
tic notch for Milada Müller in her eponymous house, in which embedded furniture allowed Loos to carefully detail the space, the overall scheme of the Villa rejects the notion of Gesamtkunstwerk which Lloyd Wright so wholeheartedly takes on. The Martin House instead becomes a tour de force of the architect’s own Prairie Style, attempting great efforts to promote the agenda that follows thereby. While this could be read purely on an aesthetic level, a deeper understanding aids in the heightened differentiation of the architectural philosophies purported by the two houses In this examination, what is perhaps most in review. We must therefore come to view evident at first gaze across the drawings is the Prairie Style’s visual appearance as the dichotomy between the clearly aggreboth a heedful interpretation of a functiongative nature of the Villa Müller against the al agenda and a formal response to the
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American West, at once. In his liberation of the walls from their coincident connections to floors, Wright opens his design to allow a flowing, singular space. On the planes of the American expanse between the Appalachians and the Rockies, the hope rested that a vast horizontality could be engaged, connecting the home to its ecology and to the surrounding context (Rogers). Rested on a hill in the knolled city of Prague, Loos’ Villa Müller desires no such intentions. For it, the horizon took less priority in the formal execution of its architecture, thus shifting the prescribed intentions of its apertures to allow momentary interventions along otherwise starkly white façades. By contrast to Wright’s will in opening the enclosure of his design, Loos resisted the extroversion of his proposal in favor of a mannerly demeanor. Following a strict set of geometrical relations, Loos derived his façade in a manner most appropriate for his architecture, attempting to express neither emotionality nor ornament (Besser 22). Here in, the most basal ontologies by which the two architects derive the forms of their respective designs clearly demonstrate divergent interests in the development of the Early Modern aesthetic, later to be unified and, to some extents, homogenized under the epithet of canonical Modernism prevalent through the subsequent decades. The highly differentiated approach to the façade of the Villa Müller, by which many small windows become seemingly unified only in their positioning within on an expansive flat plane (until deeper geometrical analysis, at least), continues to the interior. Rather than the agape and flexible methods played by Lloyd Wright, preemptively aiding the production of a Gesamtkunstwerk, the Villa becomes highly subdivided into a series of interlocking rooms organized by a central core of vertical circulation. By opening his space, Lloyd Wright effectively reduces the possibility that his patrons could adhere to their own personal desires in regards to furnishings. His clients were not interested in their authorship over the constant redefinition of the architecturality of this expansive floor plan, thus ceding to Lloyd Wright the ability explicitly define the interior design of the Martin House. In the innumerable possibilities of the open plan, Lloyd Wright gives himself, as the architect and therefor chief orator of the proposal, the implicated power to craft a Gesamtkunstwerk. Notable in this aspect is the
repudiation of a designation as Gesamtkunstwerk in the work of Loos through its interior allowance of variously combined elements which were not designed by the architect (Colquhoun 288). Although Loos flexes a significant amount of control and even condescension over the furnishings which would adorn his designs, he resists the precise creation of their interiors beyond basic architectural elements, instead choosing to curate essentials while leaving the further choice of composition to the owners as their relationship with the home evolved (Barnes 11). It comes to considerable interest how both methods allowed for the appropriation of the built and stylistic elements of the time in manners which would come to be grappled with in later iterations of the larger movement as well as overall architectural history. Inasmuch as Van der Rohe’s Farnsworth House and the Venturi House tackle the later ramifications of the contemporary ideals and ramifications of the Gesamtkunstwerk in contexts both of and after Modernism, an abutment of the Villa Müller with the Martin House reveals the pretext for their arguments, impositions into the emerging ethos of the aesthetics to follow during the Twentieth Century. Beyond this theoretical dichotomy presented by the projects, a great deal can be explicated from the formal differentiation in their designs. As aforementioned, circulatory systems form the cornerstone of this comparison in defining both the material and metaphysical essences of the projects. Where the Martin House relies on a horizontally oriented axis running from South to North, the Villa Müller primarily employs a vertical stairwell directly linked to the entrance from which shoot off a number of interlocked spaces leading upwards. In the most basic case of these systems, both projects employ a processional logic, a set path curated by the architect. In the Martin House complex, this takes a linear path from the main house to a garage behind. Here, one finds the processional quality in the spaces through which Lloyd Wright pulls the spectator, ultimately questioning the true interiority of the project by only gradually opening the architecture of the walkway. While beginning within the main structure, it soon unwraps to stride between gardens, ultimately terminating at the opposite end of the lot. In so doing, the visitor is taken from a verily interior area, though diluted through the eradica-
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tion of clearly definitive walls, to a semienclosed space and finally a completely natural pasture. By comparison, the Villa Müller takes an approach entirely different when understood formally. Rather than aligning onto axes (other than the main stairwell), the arrangement of spaces lead the visitor from the main entrance to upwards to the roof. This inherently forfeits plan-based comprehension in favor of a wholly spatial organization, outlined as the Raumplan theory by Loos (Jara 185). Not unlike the overall parti of the nearly contemporaneous House for Josephine Baker, Loos’ tactics in the Villa Müller involve an intertwining of spaces which invite adventurous wandering throughout the building while simultaneously engaging a singular core element. Whereas the Baker house revolves conceptually around its pool, the Müller residence emanates from a clandestine room from which Mrs. Müller could voyeuristically oversee the entire occupation of the house. While these two schemes vary greatly in their formal implications, basic ambitions align coherently. It is in the function of these implementations that the reviewer finds the variations, both of which revealed to be deeply invested in the individual agendas of the architects. In this respect, Lloyd Wright promotes a naturalist agenda, grazing the participant through a series of exposed spaces and gardens, while Loos engages a panoptic organization of spaces to the ends that the visitor must meander through the hallways of the building, all the time in the captive survey of the owner’s gazing eyes. Further within reasonable extrapolation is the novelty with which Loos’ Raumplan presents itself. Rejecting the traditional axial organizations of so many buildings before him, the spatial diagram employed in many projects, including the Villa Müller, develops a more locally organized aggregation of spaces interlocking in all dimension, proposing a clearly Modern classification of space.
the field can be assessed. Where Wright’s rather symmetrical axial systems gave way to organizations more akin to Loos’ Raumplan, progressions in the synthesis of Modern architecture occur. Likewise, Lloyd Wright’s disregard for the direct connection between seemingly infinite floor and restricted wall seems fundamentally precursive for much contemporary opinion on the matter. The indexing of these decisive moments in the discipline proves the wealth which might be gained in such juxtapositions, gradually compiling to form an amassed lineage for architecture itself. Works Cited Barnes, Timothy J. “Josef Hoffman and the Emergence of Gesamtkunstwerk in 20th Century Architecture.” Not published, 2009. Web. Besser, Joern, and Stephan Liebscher. “Adolf Loos: the Life, the Theories, Analysis of the Villa Mueller.” Bath, the University of Bath, 2005. Web. Colquhoun, Alan. Modern Architecture. New York, the Oxford University Press, 2002. Print. Jackson-Forsber, Eric. Historic Furnishings Report for Selected Spaces of the Darwin D. Martin House. Vol. 2. Buffalo: Martin House Restoration Corporation, 2008. Web. Jara, Cynthia. “Adolf Loos’s Raumplan Theory.” Journal of Architectural Education. Vol. 48, Issue 3. New York: Association of Collegiate School of Architecture, 1995. Web. Rogers, W. Kim. “’Organic Architecture’: An Ecological Approach in Theory and Practice”. The Pivotal Force of the Genesis / Ontopoesis of Human Life and Reality. Ed. Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka. Houten: Springer Netherlands, 2004. 381-390. Print.
This information compiled, the overlaying of the Darwin D. Martin House onto the Villa Müller reveals the momentary particularities of the time period from which they arose. These dichotomies, nascent from the variant overlaps and distinctions between the projects, allow for a apprehension of the state of Modernism before its canonization in the decades soon thereafter. Insofar as this culminates in a major shift in Architecture, the elements which were to swell in and stumble out of
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Rationalism and Authority in Architecture texts of the Querelle, centralizing around History of Architecture 2, Todd Gannon the ideals of an inherent beauty which could with rational analysis be understood This essay intrudes into the agency of the and replicated. While Blondel and Winckauthor in architecture, especially given elmann espouse a belief in God-given Humanistic developments having taken genius (Pérez-Gómez 41, Winckelmann 5) place since the European Enlightenment. Perrault and Burke arguably go to the utmost extents in finding a universal, which, Within the Enlightenment, central figures in in the latter case, further emerges into an European philosophy gathered to reenenquiry of the sublime (Burke 72). During gage a manifold set of ideals previously the Enlightenment, such an exploration held in complacency during Medieval was of crucial standing, its spoils accumutimes. Of these, beauty arose to promilating to propel the human understanding nence towards the canonization of a new of the world beyond the Medieval standard era in the arts. Alongside a contemporane- of the time. ous shift from another Medieval practice, having centralized the arts as a form of On one side, Burke pontificates to great craft, often following nascent principles extents in establishing the basis on which such as iconography, Enlightenment this argument might be formed, proposing thinkers set to demarcated art, as well as that, because “[all men] concur in calling
Broadly, these dichotomies harp significantly to the divide between intuition, bespoken to the Roman and Greek classics, and a universally oriented search for deeper truth, irrelevant to personal talent or genius. architecture, in their own rights. As a natural intersection of these two progressions, divergent beliefs formed from as various systems of thought gained momentum. In respect to the comprehension, advocation and subsequent implementation of beauty, the Querelle des Anciens et des Modernes comes to typify the keystone of contention for centuries to come, addressing the fundamental rift between those who looked upon beauty in the capacity to be understood or academized and rival stalwarts set in the notions of born genius and latent talent. In particular, the comparison of two mascots for the oppositional sets of philosophy in the time, those respectively of Claude Perrault and François Blondel and subsequently those of Edmund Burke and Johann Joachim Winckelmann, sheds great light on the discourse surrounding beauty in the arts during the era. Broadly, these dichotomies harp significantly to the divide between intuition, bespoken to the Roman and Greek classics, and a universally oriented search for deeper truth, irrelevant to personal talent or genius.
sweetness pleasant, and sourness and bitterness unpleasant” (Burke 21), the grounds for human perception can be mapped. If beauty, as apparent through taste, were based on perception, then, logically speaking, the predisposed inputs could be coordinated to guide man in the quest to explicate the fundamentals of what was beautiful. In so doing, the formula for the replication of the beautiful could be codified. Hinged in the pursuit of generality, a hypothetical common denominator to the ends of underlining all human behavior with certain universalities, Burke goes so far as to expound the probability that “the standard of both reason and taste is the same to all human creatures” in his very introductory stance.
beliefs within mankind. As notes Alberto Pérez-Gómez in Architecture and the Crisis of Modern Science of the architect, specifically regarding perspectival correction of ancient buildings such as the those at the Acropolis, Blondel believed “[it] was precisely the aspect that revealed the architect’s strength of intellect” (PérezGómez 39). Where Burke and his cohorts among the Moderns would eagerly seek a rational foreground for formal decisions in architecture, art and the like, the Anciens muster great expectations for the hand of the master in order to bring forth beauty. It can be neither standardized nor disseminated at will, instead bound to the unpredictable erudition within the genius. This notion of an aptitude by birth further catalogues the rift between the two groups. As expressed by his investment in the thorough study of the both the finer examples of ancient architecture and the masters of his time in his Cours d’Architecture, Blondel clearly values the thorough study of those predetermined as talented (Pérez-Gómez 39). By far the antithesis to this approach, his contemporary, Perrault, contends that the duplication of the beauty within the ancient orders of columns holds as its most basal principle the manifestations of ideal proportions in their geometries (Allais 61). Though the implementation of these systems of aesthetically choreographed relationships may have been done by the hands of their respective authors, a larger system persists by which the beauty of the results might be standardized into a universal à la Burke’s subsequent propositions.
These strokes, for and against the natural intuition, further connect to the larger con-
In respect to this issue of the ancient methods, Winckelmann takes prominence. His culminated observations put him sharply in contrast to the beliefs of both Perrault and Burke, a die-hard crusader for the lore of a master over the possibility of a greater, more ambiguous truth. In retrospectively casting Greek society as a By comparison, Blondel, a firmly set Anbucolic, semi-clothed lark scattered with cien, finds himself inherently in opposition wrestling and ramped nudity, Winckelmann to both the inquisition for such a standard purports that the Greeks had approached between all men and, if found, the mere a picturesque state of nature, perfecting importance of its presence. Instead, the it within their replications in art (Winckemphases of his views align towards talent elmann 13). Thus, his proposal to rely as a catalyst for beauty. It is for Blondel on imitation to learn from the ancients in the task of an individual to coax beauty crafting beauty diverges slightly from the into things, and, as is such, it is not posAnciens while, for the most part, staying sible to teach a standard, the ends of largely within their framework. Although he which might appeal to some common-held notes that one might find in Greek art “not
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only nature at its most beautiful but also something beyond nature, namely certain ideal forms of its beauty” (Winckelmann 7), an endorsement of a somewhat more universal ideal for beauty, his stabs at the rejection by the Moderns of the arbitrary method and authorship present in such elements as the intricate folds of statues’ dress divulges a clearly Ancien track in his assertion of the sculptor’s talent as integral to the work (Winckelmann 31). When accumulated, these views form two coherent halves to the rife of the Enlightenment. From them, the contemporary observer might both posit a rendition of retrospective history and at the same time project forward the possibilities of what might emerge in the understandings of beauty. Though they differ as to the means by which beauty is to be found, the important conceptualization of its rhetoric through their work stands still as a basis on which human understanding can forge forward. Works Cited Allais, Lucia. “Ordering the Orders: Claude Perrault’s Ordonnance and the Eastern Façade of Colonade of the Louvre”. Future Anterior 2.2 (2005): 53-74. Print. Burke, Edmund. A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. New York: Harper and Brothers Publishers. 1860. Print. Pérez-Gómez, Alberto. Architecture and the Crisis of Modern Science. Cambridge. 1985. Print. Wincklemann, Johann Joachim. Reflections on the Imitations of Greek Works in Painting and Sculpture. La Salle: Open Court. 1986. Print.
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In the Bastardized Perspective Humanities I, Jill Vesci, Spring 2013 The Linear Perspective We stand in awe before the Renaissance painting. It effervescently lines our galleries’ walls with glowing portraits of Roman tales and eloquent scenes alike. Since its conception, this redefined notion of beauty has ingrained itself within our psyches to a level so insistently intrinsic that we find little remorse in its shortness and singlemindedness. Proof of its deeply symbiotic entwinement ensues us around every corner and across innumerable walls in any Western museum of fine art. At the mere mention of timeless beauty, Mona Lisa struts herself across our minds, Venus dances from her shell, and Adam extends his dainty finger towards God. After the centuries passed since the beginning of the Renaissance, the movement’s values have become something of a de facto to our minds. We laude in particular the refinement of the linear perspective projection which reemerged during the Renaissance. This becomes something rather problematic if we are
linear perspective defines far too much for the viewer. Its grid disposes from our minds the need to establish a myriad of personal decisions. Therefore, it traps us within its logic. To progress our understanding of the perception of the world around us, it may perhaps emerge consequentially beneficial to reject the dictatorial ontology of the linear perspective à la Renaissance. If not complete revolution from its reign, a proper decomposition and thorough understanding could at least expose us to this tyranny.
Consider Pietro Perugino’s fresco “Delivery of the Keys”, painted between 1481 and 1482 in the Sistine Chapel. Quite literally, we see before us engraved into the scene a constructive grid. Within it, we are encompassed by mathematical rule. That is to say that nothing can break the order. If we gaze upon the frolickers or congregated citizenry in the midground of the Perugino’s work, both depicting tales
scenes arrange themselves by varying importance, we find an inability to discuss the meaning of their placements.
argument is their compositional arrangement and subsequent interpretation. In Andrei Rublev’s 1411 “Angels at Mamre”, for example, something more suggestive transpires than comparable Renaissance work. Through an inverse perspective – that being reliant on the reversal of the relationships among the picture plane, the vanishing point and the viewer – we are challenged more in our interpretation. Elements within the painting pronounce themselves as the defining elements for our comprehension of importance and value rather than a pure coordinate position within a grid. Questions about its interposition between a representation of the Holy Trinity and the more simplistic depiction of three angels may arise from a more abstractive place.
To avoid the emergence of a diatribe, a more positive proposition is put forth. We may find some inspiration in Medieval iconographic paintings. Rather than the interpretation of icons and their religious connotations, what lies important to this
Inequalities Two of the tools employed by the linear perspective – the grid and the vanishing point – are particularly issue-bearing when critically assessed. Their shortcomings and biases manifest themselves in the meaning of the painting rather than the purely visual essence thereof, and, in that way, we ought to refrain from criticizing
We stand in awe before the Renaissance painting. It effervescently lines our galleries’ walls with glowing portraits of Roman tales and eloquent scenes alike. Since its conception, this redefined notion of beauty has ingrained itself within our psyches. to approach the issue of complacency in artistic method. This perspectival inclination culminates both in our subconscious rejection of alternative paradigms for the composition of art and subsequently a disposition opposed to abstractive consequences of other techniques. In short, the
the ephemeral beauty of the composition. Without doubt, we find a plethora of Renaissance works worthy of the title of beauty by our contemporary eyes. The colors, the arrangements and the scenes are far less problematic than the meaning of the culmination they produce.
from Jesus’ life, we fail to encounter even one instance of irrationality, disorder or individuality. Each character in this dramatis personae finds himself engaged completely in the logic of his environment. His scale, his position and his depth are so clearly paraded before our eyes. In this way, only his position within the field of the grid may determine his importance or relevance to our understanding. Because of these intrinsic traits of the linear perspective, we encounter a lack of abstraction. Inherently, we are told both our position in relation to the work and how it is that we are to understand what transpires before us. Perugino takes no remorse from determining for our comprehension that Jesus himself, alongside St. Peter, are the key figures of our reading. Naturally, the work cannot be judged pejoratively for offering a particular focus. Within the context of Perugino’s commission for the frescos, this is to be expected. Upon those regards, it then becomes the methods behind the work which are less than eloquent. We might surmise then that the pure mathematical language behind the scene purports far too much. Its quest for justification within the linear perspective ultimately leaves little room for discourse. Beyond the fact that the
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It might also then be fitting to bring forth the issue of the vanishing point. In Perugino’s work, we might a tyrannical disposition. The coincident placement of the vanishing point behind a rendering of the Temple of Solomon references far too heavily the client of the artist. Although an expected level of cross-reference is to be expected without remorse between the church and the painting, it again depletes
the precise element, encapsulating the comprehension of the exact moment depicted. We retain now the unique position to argue for the misunderstanding. A detailed observation casts light on slight malfunctions in Botticelli’s perspective construction which serve in one regards a flattening of the canvas and in another a new endowment of a more heavily meaningful depth. Observe the overlap of Mer-
the vital probability of abstractive discussion about the painting as a whole. Our interpretation is assigned in an amount of detail beyond reason. We find ourselves confounded by this example, only one reference from a source of so many others, because it declares before us nearly every visual element present. By comparison, Rublev’s creation allots the power invested in the vanishing point to the audience. In essence, the viewer himself becomes the centrality of the painting, and a ubiquitous nature of its understanding overcomes the bias and property so basal in later works from the Renaissance. Irregularities
To progress our understanding of the perception of the world around us, it may perhaps emerge consequentially beneficial to reject the dictatorial ontology of the linear perspective à la Renaissance. Perugino. One straightforward approach is exemplified in various works of Leonardo da Vinci. Take, for instance, “The Adoration of the Magi” from 1481. Particularly in his perspective study series related to the work, a reliance on multiple perspectives comes across. This move allows da Vinci to harness an array of vantage points onto the understanding of the painting, though we might still find slight issue with the aforementioned forceful nature still inherent in each of these perspectives.
If the typical Renaissance example of linear perspective engages the mind on a one-level domain in which all pure visual understanding is regulated by a gridded environment with heavy emphasis on centrality and inequality, then several counterpoints may serve well to differentiate other possible media for representation which avoid the pitfalls collected by those like
In the same vein lies Botticelli’s 1482 “Primavera”. While a clear attempt at linear perspective pervades itself through the painting, the overall collaboration of the elements in the result slightly misses the intended mark. This is not to be lamented. In fact, the accidental abstraction remains
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cury’s scabbard (far left) above the Three Graces (second from left). Such details illuminate for the audience a more perplexing experience. As is such, the viewer must gaze across the canvas in more concentration in order to construct in his mind a clear interpretation of his perception of the portrayed image. This resultant of the abstractive qualities of “Primavera” should stand for us to be or great importance, transcending typically bland Renaissance agendas towards something more intrinsic to the human apprehension of art. Of additional interest comes the subset of works from both before and after the Renaissance which either mistakenly break attempts at the perspective or refute its rules. We may find great benefit in a critical assessment of a 1524 drawing
entitled “Destruction of Icons in Zürich” by an unknown artist. While it at first appears to us to be wrought with unfortunate lack of craft and detail, more metaphysical exanimation reveals a truly eloquent composition. The composition refutes the centrality of the Renaissance painting, instead taking on two distinct characters. While the left portion clearly relies on one-point perspective, something perhaps more intriguing graphically occurs on the right. We see before us a plaza scene in which the figures and their relationships to surrounding buildings seem slightly blurred from reality. Along this, a vaguely axonometric projection lays the framework for the work. To navigate between the two parallels forming the composition is to cross the poché of the wall which divides them. The unmarked author of the work cunningly employs the very architecture inherent in the spatial divisions of the picture to differentiate two realities. Each employs a specific projective methodology, and each thereafter defines for itself a specified trajectory for its depiction of a moment. We find again this odd space between the anal attention to detail of the mathematical perspective and the less rule-driven precision of alternative styles in Francesco Roselli’s depiction of Florence from the 1480s. Therein, it is vital to our assessment that we withhold the Renaissance biases we so will to project onto our understanding. Where these might ruin the validity of the painting’s play on scale and pseudo axonometric projection, important points are to be gained. Naturally, Roselli understood these pictorial choices, and as is such we must not discount the appearance of massive men, miniature buildings or immense trees as some sort of foible on part of the creator. They are without doubts abstract interpretations about the relationships inherent within the scene depicted, and, in that way, we might value their propositions higher than the strictly puritanical approach of the linear perspective. In Roselli’s work, a fundamental geometric principle does not rule autocratically above the canvas. It insists that the city must resist the universal implications of the grid so inherently tied to the perspective. Through such means, Roselli presents us nearly more with a collage than a composition, but he alludes
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of the new philosophy, a questioning of the values already present within the human condition would have been natural, if not unavoidable.
to a concept of complexity and diversity in subject. For his eyes, Florence was simply too heterogenetic to reconstruct itself visually within such narrow logics. This same elegance we might do well to find in Ambrogio Lorenzetti’s “The Effects of Good Government”, painted between 1338 to 1339. The contemporary eye eludes here a magnificent composition of Siena from whence we may gather a better understanding of the world around us. Again, the city is not confined to one logic, and the fresco as an entirety defies the pure need to grasp onto rationality. It pontificates its point a multitude of varying scales,
Opportunities As we progress, it becomes evident that the reinterpretation of our world is a constant factor in the societal psyches under which we reside. Therefore, it is of utmost importance that we take into account the wealth of understandings already extant in artwork. Before we might accomplish this hefty task, our inherent bias must be overcome. It goes without blame that we have become over the time since the emergence of the Renaissance reliant on the internal logic of a movement. To the eyes of those involved in the earlier years
This causes no concern, as it is a matter of the very nature of man. What does approach us as problematic is the moment in which the mind begins to accept such propositions as the linear perspective to be default. We must resist the urge to become complacent. This very complacency is something we so easily construe within the coordinate logic of the linear perspective. It defines for us a complete set of variables, leaving little to no room for abstraction in neither depiction nor interpretation. For these reasons precisely, the aforementioned tropes to the perspective are ideal. Within their ontologies, we immerse ourselves in an infinite set of understandings. For the Medieval world, this served its own purpose. For our world, a diversification of interpolation in meaning and visuality might be of extreme pertinence. It holds for us the ability to both declare and investigate our propositions about the places we inhabit. Rather than shroud-
ing our spaces with universally rational logic sets, these methods understand the intrinsic messiness of the world. Taking into play that very comprehension, they become incredibly eloquent proposals for one sort of world view. Perhaps it is time that we revisit it as such. Works Cited Pietro Perugino, “Delivery of the Keys”, 1481-1482; Andrei Rublev, Angels at Mamre, 1411; Leonardo da Vinci, Adoration of the Magi, 1481; Sandro Botticelli, Primavera, 1482; Unknown, Destruction of Icons in Zürich, 1524; Francesco Roselli, Florence, 1480s; Ambrogio Lorenzetti, The Effects of Good Government, 1338
What does approach us as problematic is the moment in which the mind begins to accept such propositions as the linear perspective to be default. We must resist the urge to become complacent. vantages and depths throughout which are woven in the fabric of the city’s daily life the complexities inherent within its subject matter. Unlike Perugino’s commandments along his gridded logic, Lorenzetti allots the viewer the unique position by which the choice to differentiate the stratification of the scene is his. He holds the ultimate means to interpret the meaning of that which is depicted.
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Warning of Nuclear Waste Sites Humanities I, Jill Vesci, Spring 2013 Broken Ground This is archetypal approach to warning future generations of spent nuclear material. The assignment called for the development of a means by which we might deter future inhabitants of the this planet from unknowingly stumbling upon our spent nuclear rods.
to our most inherent insecurities. It harps to the complete dissolution from life and certainty.
must warn and show at once, grabbing the human’s deductive reasoning and deep allegorical relationships in the psyche.
On Us on Ground
For this precise reason, voids should be cut through the form, and man should be presented the ability to pass if he likes. It must be his choice to choose his fate based on his observations of the warning.
How should the ground be eroded? It seems natural that the form of a sharp form could suffice. The triangular figure, when brought to an extreme point, eludes One could believe that the only way to danger and trepidation. Such an approach communicate a notion of danger sufficient- was taken by the US Department of Enly transcendent of eon or language would ergy in its design for “Landscape of Repulbe call to certain allegories which we can sion”, an architectural signifier designed to only hope descend throughout time. warn passersby of a nuclear waste site in the far future. For this, a design to block future wanderThere remains in this design, proposed in ers from nuclear waste must call upon something so intrinsic to the human the 1980s, possibly one problem absolute condition that its incorporation evokes to its interaction with human nature. Beunparalleled emotions. Perhaps one of yond conveying so much visually of danger, the strongest of these elementals to our the form becomes so dense that it nearly lives is the ground. For our species’ entire blocks the vista behind itself. This poses lifespan, it has solidly supported us. To an inherent issue when combated with decompose the ground is to decompose human curiosity. The warning should in no way provoke man’s keen sense of explorathe human condition from its deepest tion. It must be, in all ways, transparent. It fears, metaphorically. Its erosion speaks
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In these ways, the deformed forms provide an illusion to death. The composition, and in this sense the humanity which it contains, must be killed visually. Triangular stabs into its form signify its destruction. It suffers before the eye, and, when properly aligned, harps to the human eye’s ability to gather figures into a field. If this field can be manipulated to caution the mind to one specific area, the warning of the site should be sufficiently. This and next spreads – renderings of the “wall” presenting two radically different futures. The first, ruined by some unmentioned cataclysm, and the second, proposing a continued progression of humanity into modernity, purport the encounters with the barrier as provisions of faith in human rationality.
Warning of Nuclear Waste Sites
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FIELD
Ornamentism Urbanism Biometric Obsessions
Ornament
Poorly Exposed 1
Posthumanist Encounters
Rationalism and Author in Architecture
Glitches and Blurs A Brief Genealogy of Estrangement
Boys' and Girls' Club Scansion
Poorly Exposed 2
Precedent Analyses
Loos and Wright: Early Modernisms
Review of Grand Park l’Institut du Monde Arabe vs Dome of the Rock Review of “Lysistrata Unbound”
Chandigarh Analyses Sourcebook
Mercat Santa Caterina Analyses RELATIONAL
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Hollywood Boys’ and Girls’ Club Studio 2A, Todd Gannon
ANALYTICAL
NCARB decrees that all undergraduate students of architecture in accredited programs across the United States incorporate an element of “social action” into their studies. Unfamiliar in the realm of an otherwise formal SCI-Arc, this requirement was cloaked from the outset under the title of a Boys’ and Girls’ Club for Hollywood.
A Boys’ and Girls’ Club
This project thus proposes a diversion from both typological ironic bastards: a standardization within social action and a social action itself within SCI-Arc. From such an prerogative, how might the program of a Youth Center be interrogated as a living representation of both the goals inherent to societal vision and constituent context?
What constitutes a “Boys’ and Girls’ Club”? Inherently, the program of this building represents an architectural imposition towards a social ends. Located beside the W Hotel, its very existence hints at a fantastically Angeleno juxtaposition, the quintessentially collaged combination of a series of urban worlds collated in semicoherence within a stone’s throw of another.
FIGURATIVE Archeology, or Performance
As reflections might take us out of ourselves just enough to gain a vantage by which we can contemplate our existence,
It depicts before our eyes the moment by which it was disjoined from the otherwise linear historical timeline. This jolt provides for us the oddity that is a kind In the contemporary condition of the West, of third person perspective on humanity. the present has become uninhabitable. For the moment one gazes at the artifact, Temporal refugees, we flee towards two life itself becomes a transient state. The salvations: the past and the future. In the plasmid realm onto which this encroaches wake of Modern naïveté, the latter has amounts to a purgatory between times. been disheartened. It lays as a wasteInherently within this state, it is possible land in our foresights, remaining only in that we might look onto ourselves through its incrementally dismantled form, the the vantage of cross-linear combination. byproduct of two jetliners on an otherwise Neither state (the altered present nor quotidian morning in September. Disenthe resurrected past) quite align with franchised, we have clung to the hindsight, their prospective realities, but the misa time of blurred idealism pervasive with aligned intersection of the two encompass positivity before the eventuality of an something entirely novel which belongs in unforgiving reality. Straightforwardly renthe state of the alternative. It proposes a dered, the present and its uncontrollable small asterisk in the lineage of time to the ramifications thereafter leave us without ends that we might propagate conceptual control. We find ourselves to be the victims progression via intense retrospect. of an uncanny and transient determinism, cast aside into a consistently expanding In this duplication of the former moment within the boundaries of the fleeting prespool of banausic martyrdom. Nostalgia ent, the artifact deceives us by our own becomes the post-rationalization for our nature. We project onto it both our intencomprehension of an idealized past. The tions and our wills in the most subjective least of three evils, this series presents of ways. History becomes what we want itself as an interpolation into the realm of nostalgia through recognizable abstraction to see of it, often left to the byproduct of self-image and perceived value. This in architectural form (or any recognizable is, though, not to be rejected. It affirms form, in general) and icon as the prea consistently valid interpretation of the emptive arrival at a threshold for further present conditions on which we tread, exploration. because, in projecting onto the artifact our Thoughts on Site contemporary intentions, we effectively imbue ourselves deeply within the past, as Hollywood Boulevard is a lot of things; if standing before a mirror. Through it, we Argyle Avenue is a few, too. This is the fade into our own perceptions both vain conundrum-filled intersection between and virtuous. If only we become aware a path to the not-so-distant “suburbs” of this transaction, we might progress and the ephemeral feel of true urbanity. towards a self-comprehension in the form It is a moment haunted by several mishof an objective mirror onto the present. In mashed glimpses of Los Angeles. Although the ruin, we find ourselves presented with Hollywood Boulevard represents a major the definitive tabula rasa. The history lies interjection throughout the urban fabric of before us unwritten to the ends that we the area, Argyle Avenue is only a momencan script what we will. tary slice, a brief but jarring experience between the sickeningly suburban and Within the dichotomy between the retseemingly urban. rospective depiction and the present redefinition, there lies intrinsically the Bifurcated by the freeway, the situation of possibility of an overlap. This gradient the Boys’ and Girls’ Club presents itself zone of obscurity which crosses the two as a sort of urban petri dish of the general presents to us the opportune entanglement between the present and the idealstature of Los Angeles. A hill of density rises in an otherwise desolate expanse of ized. Through it, we might come to undersprawl, tract housing encroaches from the stand ourselves in our escapist reclusion
Relational Fields
Hollywood Boys’ and Girls’ Club
A Boys’ and Girls’ Club becomes an internalized world, interwoven in a nearly Calvinistic resistance from the exterior. It is a haven, the fleeing cause of which we might put on trial. From what precisely does the Youth Center gain its subjectified perception of the outside? The club is, by Accompanying the project, a lengthy set of definition, a deterrent from improper activtexts were produced, analyzing architecity, a prison from the “sins” of boredom, ture on a variety of levels, pertaining spethemselves the byproducts of an apathetic cifically to context, content and constituent childhood spent wandering the streets of interactions. Personally, these became as semiurban Los Angeles. This must (or, at least, could) be overturned. much the architecture of the project as the building itself, guiding a navigation and Given the unique situation of the site, a analysis of the architectural production contrasting drama of Elitism (The W), retrofrom conceptualization to postrationalizaspectivism (the theater) and depression tion. (the current site) constitute an ensemble of architecture which ought to be cast In a curatorial method, these are organized into two sets: analytical, which towards the production of a blurred perexplore the fact-based and straightforception of space. Protruding the site, it ward questions of the architecture, and entices both the rejective and inclusionary figurative, which through more abstractive qualities of the program. means ponder the circumstances and conIn one essence, the building might begin to stituencies tied in any number of indefinitely definite ways to any project (these play an off-on game with the public atmotexts are highlighted in blue for sake of sphere around it. Considering the overtly present entrance to the Metro, the lobby differentiating and indexing). of the W and Hollywood Boulevard herself, These are intentionally interwoven and an impetus can be formed by which formal dispersed throughout the presentation qualities might be arrived at. In this manof the architecture itself, as was reminisner, the form is not sculpted, later to be cent of their accumulation throughout the interjected into the present conditions, but rather it is extrapolated from the inherent project’s conception, darting sidewards between the pragmatics and phenomena regulating geometry of the situation. This of the architectural condition. is not a senseless repudiation of the qualities already extant, instead a possibility for the colonization of both critical inquisition and contextual pretext. Blurs
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blurs could, as well. This goes along with a series of photographs taken to explicate the point, hybridizing a series of preexisting buildings with the ideals of a blurred aesthetic. Perhaps the blur is a way to flee the present. Some thought about the state of renderings was also going on in conjunction with this to a certain level.
Los Angeles County existences of some 9 รท 4,752.32 square m square foot the prob tering one person eq ble chance of 0.000 sheer urbanity of the the potential for sere
encompasses the 9,818,605 people miles = in any given bability of encounquating to a negligi0074109907%. The e city has presumed endipity.
towards the mirror, where we meet before us the shadows cast onto history. In this brief kiss between objectivity and irreality, an entirely new element is considered. A transcendence occurs which neither seeks to rewrite the past nor to relive it. By this, we enter into a cyclically recursive loop of production in which we ingrain the present within the archeological and at once continue the march forth. The product of this might be a heightened sense to what we ourselves are, the realization by which we proactively shape the mere possibility of the approaching determinism that is the future and contemporaneously engage the precise moment inhabited by the present’s unceasing cartography that foments so vanishingly into the past. Narcissus Narcissus was not in love with himself, but, on the contrary to a higher degree of specificity, with his reflection. Rather than performing the self-loving portrayal we have cast upon him, he was merely a victim of the inert beauty of the dematerialized human soul. His was a decision without other option, for from within the pond’s surface he saw at once everything and nothing that he was. Unknowingly, his actions ignite for us the power that is the image, or (better christened) the mirage. From the waters of his silent pond, Narcissus was beloved to something without physicality. It was not the human he loved, but instead the essence of its being. Etymologically cast to the asylums of self-preponderance by our industrious ethos of the contemporary age, one might counter that Narcissus, under his aquatic enchantment, simply loved everything that seems to be, is not and cannot be in one time. The reflection cast back onto him the infinite depths of his own humanity, forever staining the source from which they arose. The inverted image he saw was not quite reality, but enticing enough to offer him the capability to grasp something with which a sum is produced in no parts.
East and industry smudges its premises from the South. The site cries for both repudiation and confirmation at once.
whom we wish to interrogate.
To understand this hedonistic advantage which might forefront architecture with both the means and the methods for appropriation of the next styles, we must adequately inspect the identity of the hipster
The Hipster is the prefect cultural leach. He ventures from one subgroup to anothWhile the situation is unlikely to remain as er, plucking what he feels at any whim into is after a thorough expansion of urbanity in his bucket of multicultural trickery. While the wake of the Metro’s extension into the a postmodern environment in which such area, its current situation is to the utmost an action could occur might predestine worth notating in the design of the Center. that he take into full account the societal ontologies of these newly found identiIn so doing, four ground planes are efties which he has accumulated, the sheer fectively created, only one of which reflects might of the Hipster’s will dictates that the current actuality of the site. When has no such prior judgment should transpire. Los Angeles ever been concerned with Delicate backgrounds, historical contextureality? These levels stack and squish alities and sensitive narratives alike find towards the heavens, sorting themselves themselves off the table of usual discusfrom most rational to most aberrant. The sion when under the reappropriation of the basement finds itself solidified on the Hipster. abstract architectural conception of the flattened site. It is, at its core, the fantasy Such could be architecture. (But perhaps of a skewed architecture. To the contrary, we might just interpose a slight amount the roof forms around a completely difmore judgment in our discrepancies toferentiated system. More than a mere wards the strawberries we choose to pluck duplication of the landscape, it morphs to from the architectural bushes.) the point of introducing a falsity to the city. It presents something which never was The specific historical context behind the and never will be. Through its undulating architectural or otherwise cultural refersurface bulge the imprints of a falsely col- ential offered to us must be ignored in a lected urbanism, the ghosts of a recommethod specifically catered to pillage what piled Los Angeles. we will of any connotations. Geometry
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Everything and Nothing Architecture might stand to learn a great deal from the Hipster.
Hollywood Boys’ and Girls’ Club
might better stand to remain pure geometry, and critical weight might well just wait at the door. The architectural party, fueled by a heavy dose of who knows what and Rhinoceros, has begun. These referenced elements should be employed for the inherent value that they offer the subconscious connection the cultures to which they originally belong. Though this might preclude the appreciation of their formalities by the outsider, it does two things which insulate it from the fires of previous failures. Thing 1. These gathered ontologies of both cultural and architectural features can appeal at both subconscious and conscious levels to differing constituencies. While the local embraces the familiarity of the object before him, the tourist might immerse herself in a world worthy of appraisal on a purely formal level. Both, in turn, can carefully escape to the level of flâneur within this novel geometric mood. Thing 2. The direct employment of the architectural feature or cultural contextuality can predoom architecture to overarching specificity and ultimate loss. That is to say,
This explication of the exterior, derived from the topology of the site, inherently begs a look inside. Therein, we encounter a Campo Marzio of Angeleno byproduct stacked between a series of landscapes. Drawn from the multiplicitous essences of the site, it makes into immediate archeology the ephemeral conditions at hand.
in question. The extruded volumes of the rooms resolve into what appears to be solid objects along a landscape, when seen from circulatory areas. Only the transition across the threshold of these antonymous beings, united purely in concept and singular relation to the undulating fields above and below them, reveals the ploy, forcing
In the contemporary condition of the West, the Present has become uninhabitable. Temporal refugees, we flee towards two salvations: the Past and the Future. Upon its encounter, these fail to stack properly. The implied diversification of the landscapes blurs as each level employs its own agents to slide into the next. Functional in their allowance for circulation between the levels, these vertical extrusions question the solidarity of the whole and the sovereignty of the individual. This thing plays somewhere in between, inscribed into the urban mechanism as neither sum nor part. Architecture as Orchestration Moving into the building, the multitude of ramps pronounce the presence of the visitor. He becomes the artifact, the living relic of the ruin. As if acting as pedestals, the circulatory paths of the building permit an understanding inherently grounded in observation. Those who pause survey over the transgressions before them, while those who choose to go forth on their routines become involuntary parts of the spatial ballet.
a one-on-one confrontation with the sky. Long the object of architectural ambition, it is employed purely as a methodology for the abutment of man and himself within the context of architecture. Nature, once the supreme force, is reduced to the priority of ceiling paint, subordinated to its own production: light. In these areas, we come to encounter only ourselves. Tempted by the innumerable presentations of our very ethos between the streets and the corridors of the building, each room brings us only to face the barest understanding of ourselves. Only the interjection within the procession of the labyrinth in which we find ourselves, we realize that reality is merely as strong as its presentation. Floorslabs as Worlds Divided
Architectural interjections into the otherwise flowing interior zones become seminal in the preemptive comprehension and consequent perception of the space
The bottom floor is by definition a fantasy, an imprint into the ground – an architectural idealization (impossibility) within a sloped site. This is the land of irreality. While it forms the shadow of what is above, the details have been skewed, a hurriedly compiled mess of preceptory mish-mash.
Connor Gravelle
Portfolio 2012-2014
any architecture designed so intrinsically to one existence could never attain any other. It existed in banal boredom within the confines of its only declaration. Should we introduce the possibility of a multiplicity of identities into this conglomeration, we ought therein to encounter a more basal integration of architecture within sociopolitical circumstances. After all, a bipolar building is more fantastic than its calmer little brother. More years of family-driven subjugation and parental abuse leave as greater entertainment to us, the onlookers to this mighty disaster. Times will change, and the building will be eroded slowly into their sands. As we stalk this architecture through its puberty and early adulthood, we should not fear to imagine it to be a fading Hollywood princess. Her slow demise before us across the innumerable covers of tabloids and papers only invigorates us to invest ourselves equally, if not more, in her soon-to-come replacement. Perhaps the ultimate salvation for this proposal lies in the effective abstraction of the symbol. This is not to predetermine that recognizable character of the reference is of no importance, but rather it only attempts to widen the boundaries within which the building itself may exist. The reference, that is to say the icon, must not always take its intrinsic form before our eyes. Rather, it is an illusive spirit of the Olympian mountains. As it descends onto our mortal realms, it takes whichever form it will from a myriad smörgåsbord of options. This is the abstracted icon as both specific and universal. Back to the Hipster. This shameless salvation of subgroup-based references effectively summates in the creation of a super-culture. The Hipster cares only about his immediate reward as the most ranged accumulation of a swatch of culturalities as omnipotent as the ancient Silk Road. In so doing, he is bound to alienate a variety of peoples. This is unimportant. We must remember that each individual culture simply represents a non-amalgamated potential for a more inclusive society (to the Hipster). The Hipster, by his very behavior, does even without his personal knowledge an act of miracle by which he leads a procession slowly welcoming into the mainstream a slew of otherwise ignored fringe slices of society. Should they choose to resist, so be it. His is simply the invitation to join something more prolific
The ground floor is the morning after, a suddenly unbeknownst realization of what happened before (or what might come to pass after?). It is the cold reality which foments below the hopes of the dreamers. The first floor is by far the most dramatically altered slice of the building. It is neither full fantasy nor harsh truth, a sort of crossing point between found and introduced things. Prometheus, having found fire, is chained to the mountain, destined to have his liver plucked an innumerable set of times more. Likewise, the first floor is intrinsically chained to the ground, gazing down to its vastly inert prominence. It gazes from capture towards the sky, a close yet intangible realization of what could otherwise be. Thus, the combination of the Second Floor and Roof both allow for access and repudiation of the intersection between Hollywood Boulevard and Argyle Street. The aggregation of the existing buildings on the site produces a variable “kissing” effect. False urbanity thrusts forth, a harsh counterinsurgency against the orthogonal grid of Los Angeles. Met with this quasi-Medieval logic of packing, the very elements which once comprised the built form of the neighborhood betray their masters. Moiré To these ends, several interjections may be purported, though with the strict earmark not to exclude other possible solutions. Firstly, a façade of several thousand metal bands forms a moiré. Themselves a kind of physical manifestation of the sum of many parts so integral to the formation of a city, these allow for a myriad of spatial interactions to occur. In their arrangement, they establish distinct viewing corridors. That is to say, tight orientations in their regulating geometry produce differing vistas of the building. From the concourse of the Metro Station across the street, the Boys and Girls Club reads as a united whole, the moiré acting as erasure of seismic variations along the envelope. The onlooker gains a unified understanding of what is presented before him. Moving down Hollywood Boulevard, an orchestrated visual procession occurs in which the solidity of the structure dissolves into the air. The confidence once
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1. Strange moments in Hollywood urbanity
2. Figures arranged into cluster
3. Cluster as used to “jostle� Angeleno tract sprawl
4. Skin as result of curated subtraction in sprawl
5. Extracted rooflines of tract sprawl
6. Rooflines as defining geometry for ramps and stairs
7. Rooflines as paths for experiential tower stairs
8. Catwalk from reconstructed urbanity
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than the individual. It is the sheer propensity to define the very culture itself. Architecture might do that same. By incorporating this bank of potential styles, the architecture itself gains the keen power of blissful nostalgia. The many cultures of the world could, in this case, flock behind a piece of built form simply for the reasons of subconscious connection. The building as the opiate of the masses. To ignite in their minds the subtle connections into whichever history they themselves are an exogenesis of is to harness the ultimate power over their inclusion in an architectural commonality. Without excluding one member of their respective casts, these pieces of omniarchitecture employ every
form and nostalgic retroactivism.
gained by the acknowledgement of the singularity before the eye capitulates to a He, the Hipster, picks at his will in a purely mess of parts. The sum is subsumed in selfish brush with connection. He grasps the multiplicitous presentation of its very for the sweet nectar of inclusion but feigns constituencies. Like childhood, the Center from the disagreeable aftertaste of comseems so break apart, in so doing leaving mitment. Rather, he has learnt how to miti- only the byproduct of its eradication, the gate the wills of so many into the collective vanishing of any prior understanding of its progression into the tomorrow. It is by this essence, as it approach the ends of its blended reality that he overlooks the sea viewings. of choices before him and closely approximates the most average point while exclu- This dissolution of the massing allots sively avoiding the trenches of boredom for unique visual perceptions. Apertures and mundanity. He is an architecture and provide vantages onto the interior of the a non-encroaching perspective. compound which allude to the interactions proscribed within. A voyeurism gathers as Liberated from the connotations and those on the exterior catch only momenconsequential conversations of specificity tary passings from beyond the walls. They see only fleeting seconds of the circulatory nature of the interior, aghast at the severe performance before them. The rarity that is to emerge onto the street only to encounter from eight stories’ height below the face of one person, distantly peering from between two slats far off in the façade, becomes the driving force of the exterior presence of the building. Small slips in the rooftop catwalk allow for similar interactions along the streets and entrances to the facility.
Etymologically cast to the asylums of selfpreponderance by our industrious ethos of the contemporary age, one might counter that Narcissus, under his aquatic enchantment, simply loved everything that seems to be, is not and cannot be in one time. nascent note within the tonal toolbox to produce songs which might enchant the newcomer and reignite the longtime fan. They sit atop the cliffs and hum to the passing sailors before. Instead of beaconing towards the rocks, they guide around the bend into a luscious cornucopia of abundant möglichkeit. This is a built ontology which surmises the complete extinction and utter proliferation of the milieus of mankind simultaneously. By convection and convention alike, we are drawn forth into a new whole. There we stand, triumphant for our personal inoculation against boredom. In the formal moment we so choose, this architecture enchants us by the way of the subconscious. It partakes in us the equal investment which we divulge in it by way of purely existing within its confines.
inherent to the choice of replication within existing geometry, this architecture seeks a vocabulary for the formation of geometrical relationships and copulation of spatial intricacies. This is the proposed architecture of everything, nothing and anything in between. Movements In a world wrought with the afterbirth of the Futurists, we have become obsessed with speed and movement. Our gaze sets only on the blurred object, and yet its truest nature is obscured by the tracks it leaves. We are unable to comprehend both its objecthood and its singular ontology when it shifts, in a gradient smoothing into the fabric around it.
From these, the viewer can only reconstruct reality from the shards of its shattered cadaver. Like broken porcelain, its countenance is in the agency of the subject, his complete service to recompile. The blur, the fragment and the reflection become keystone components to this interaction, questioning the verity of the assumptions we sequester to our minds as visuals. Our perception of reality is permitted solely by the direct consequence of architecture. Architecture Parlante: Significations What conjures the site? We find at the intersection of Hollywood and Argyle a conundrum of constituencies haunted by their perspective pasts.
This is an architecture which reinterprets the parameter as a methodology of incorporating more than simple vectorial geometry into the production of form. It proposes a radically different agenda in the age of the computer. Like the Internet itself, it places on the table a stance of negotiation to and fro between distinct
To engage its agency as the reductionary force behind our understanding of authenticity is to put on trail the intentions of our humanity. Without an imposed halt, the endless entanglement of our circulation leaves us powerless. Only the voyeur, he who stops in disregard to the flow for a momentary appraisal of that which transpires around him, gains the jurisdiction over the performance before him.
Nostalgia the chief agent of this mirror, we look upon ourselves by the estrangement of the present in this particular type of interaction. To further the effectiveness brought by this jolt of hyperreality, a series of phrases, indications or questions is interjected along the moiré of the façade. These accompany the shifting vantages onto the overlapping panels which comprise the envelope to allow a varying
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The Balcony, Stage The balcony is an inherently performative space. It beguils and yet commands the interaction of two parties. Entrapped before its rule, they must engage the script as planned. They themselves become willing actors of the architecture’s agency as definer of moments. Their very interaction is meerly the production of the architecture they encounter, and yet they do not realize it. Los Angeles: A Transient Urbanism Los Angeles County encompasses the existences of some 9818605 people ÷ 4752.32 square miles = in any given square foot the probability of encountering one person equating to a negligible chance of 0.000074109907%. The sheer urbanity of the city has presumed the potential for serendipitous human interaction, instead forging a vortex of complications, entanglements and overlaps. In these ephemeral crossings, the citizenry of the city kiss, their lives scraping one another in the most minuscule of strokes. To amplify this scar amongst the dizzied lives of the populace is to heighten their awareness of the transient nature which they cohabitate. This blurred existence acts as pretense for the exploration of the effects pronounced by the contemporary city. Superimposed by the fluid integration of space-eroding technology into the Modern life, we pass to and fro with little regard for the physical environment around us. Our senses have become numb to the intricacies of spatial interaction in a landscape obsessed with speed, productivity and comfort. Thus, estrangement must become the status quo. To remove ourselves in a bout of escapism is the only prerogative by which we might approach a novel understanding of ourselves. This moment of removal marks the point at which we stare ourselves in the mirror. We gain the illustrious eyes of the third person, an omnipotent presence that encapsulates us in its gaze, when we step beyond our quotidian pretenses.
+10.11 +6.94
Administration -0.53
Career Center (Multiuse) -2.00
Lower Courtyard -8.00
-0.82 +0.00
Recpt.
Main Circulatory Concourse -3.50 -2.67
Public Lobby
-0.76
+0.00 -6.15 -5.33
Lockers (F) -8.00
Pools
-8.00
-8.00
Lockers (M) +0.00 -8.00
-2.83
Lap Pool
-6.33
Weight Room -6.33
Athletics Lobby -8.00
-3.00
-4.43
Dance Room -4.43
Recpt.
-3.00
Wading Pool
Athletics Concourse -3.00
Aerobics Area -4.43
+8.50 -0.80
+32.76
Outdoor Theater Volleyball Court +33.00 +37.75
Outdoor Area +32.78
Viewing Platform +70.20
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Portfolio 2012-2014
Plans
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+13.71
+23.37
Computer Lab +6.48
WC
+13.71 +6.48
Games Room +7.28 -0.76
Upper Courtyard
+13.71
+9.28 -8.00
Woodshop +11.28
+8.85
+14.56
Apartment +15.59
Library +11.28
WC
Pick Up Area
+14.56
+6.42
+15.59
Apartment
+18.62
+20.69
+16.53
Classroo
+18.62
(To Pool) +6.42
Aft Exit +16.53
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Hollywood Boys’ and Girls’ Club
Plan of Main Level
+5.75
Theater +11.50
Learning Center
+7.50 +7.5
+17
+12.14
Kitchen +15.00
Storage Indoor Forecourt +15.00
WC
Classroom +15.00 +16.81 +18.26
Multipurpose Room +15.00 +18.61
om
+15
2
+21
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Portfolio 2012-2014
+20.65
165
system of interpretations and foci as the subject revolves around the mass. They come in four categories of signification: functional, informative, pensive and interrogative. Functional indications serve an clearly eponymic purpose, both directing the circulatory entrances of the compound and expressing to the interior the intentions of the program, though not in a ubiquitously honest manner. Informative scripting similarly indicates functional items, though not particularly things which are to do with the building or its program. They express an acknowledgement by the building of its own context. Pensive words inscribed to the façade ask the onlooker to contemplate his position. They present a reproduction of some of the inherent qualities of the site, a regurgitated reality to the ends that we might encounter a mirror of our own behavior. Interrogatives, finally, grasp the rich depth of constituencies surrounding and even
with onset ramifications.
They become the architects, their subjects the immediate result of the architecture. Functional: Pools, Gym, Park, Pick Up, Both engage a game of cat-and-mouse, Boys and Girls Club, Theater, Roof, Public, actor-and-director. As the overlords see Private, Teen Center over their landscape, the serfs dodge in and out of intrusions. Their movements Informative: Hollywood, Los Angeles, both reveal and disguise their presence in Argyle, Carlos, Vista del Mar, Freeway, Exit, the building, complicating the otherwise Crossing, Pedestrians, Door direct relationship between the seer and the seen. Pensive: LA, [Scripted Poem], Exchange, Estrangement, Removal, ¡Mírame!, Interac- What might occur with this intertwining of tion, Intersection, Façade, Performance constituencies? In this circumstance, the engagement of a performative architecture Interrogative: ¿Dónde está el mar?, ¿Quién both enables and enslaves us. Which role es Carlos?, ¿Quién era?, Agency, Suburbia, to we assume, and what does each mean? Exodus, Perception, Surreality, Image, If we choose to look over the others below Duality us, are we truly in control, or do we purely ascend to witness and an ephemeral asVoyeurism à la Shining sembly? Like a film, what we see is merely mirage, a temporary recasting of quotidian “All work and no play makes Jack a dull existences to the ends of falsified control. boy.” Inversely, if we walk below, do we tease Enter children and citizens, ascended and those on the tower, or do we chain ourexiting from stairwell onto roof of tower. selves to their visual wills? We walk about, They pause, leaning beside the edge of but do we really move or do we fulfill a the rail. Below them, a maze unfolds in deterministic script aligned to our masters the roofscape. Among its passages, other above? inhabitants float before them. Surveyor’s The subordinate and the superordinate become jumbled in only several meters’ space. No longer can a clear judgment be called as the two parties take on reciprocally diminutive (or empowering) roles.
Tempted by the innumerable presentations of our very ethos between the streets and the corridors of the building, each room brings us only to face the barest understanding of ourselves.
What It Might Mean to be a Ruin
imbedded into the situation at hand. Among other things but of note, they beg the viewer to ponder the political exchanges which foment into contemporary California, an intersection of distinct cultures
A ruin is an odd thing, a temporal quality which belongs to neither the present nor the past. Upon encounter, it presents us with a reality removed and eschewed from any precedent. It is inherently the result of an accumulatory process by which many various times are compiled into an exquisitely surreal collage. In so doing, the ruin acts as an index of the things which were, collating its references into categorical fields which, when entered, reveal for the researcher the unique qualities belonging to a myriad of periods and authors. In the Boys and Girls Club, we come to face ourselves in an abstracted iteration of Hollywood. This representation takes into account the misguided iconography of the postwar tract housing, the falsely superof this foreign landscape, they migrate and ficial theatricality of Hollywood and the mingle on the paths, orchestrating a visual voyeuristic quality of Angeleno social life. performance of space between its rafters. Together, they uniquely reference and challenge the site and Hollywood’s intentions The roof-dwellers gaze down on them. alike from critical standpoints both internal
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and external to the situation. Perhaps, it is easier first to take on those external references which the building confronts, as they are fewer in number and often shallower in scope. This is not though to say that they have no implications to those internal references. To the contrary, both categories of implications dealt by the architecture are intertwined and pivotal in their consequences and meanings. They are simply more efficiently digested in separate bouts before a grand summary can be attempted. As aforementioned, these external identifications of the project culminate around the perception of Hollywood as an overly superficial place of performance and over-the-top theatricality. Rather than rejecting these qualities as disingenuous, the architecture has assumed them to be inherently exploitable characteristics of its site. Moreover, this choice engages the entirety of Los Angeles as the effective capital of culture in the media-driven 21st century. Why would this project ever attempt outrightly to reject the performative aspects of Hollywood? They are, in fact, quite unique in their ability to produce experiential moments for the patrons of their architecture. For example, this account is addressed in the seemingly overdone circulatory systems of the building. These systems of ramps and stairs beg the visitor to engage them as kinetic moments within the experience. This performs a two-fold function. Without definite perception, those inside the building are compelled to circulate endlessly. At times, their trails lead them to dead-ends, often resolving into dramatic scenes which present them with vantages onto other functions of the building. Upon other encounters, they can simply engage these streets as methods for crossing the programmatic regions of the building. Whichever intention is held, they without inherent consent engage the theatricality for the building. The ruin acts as the inquisitory stage for a question of authority over the individual. Are we to continue onwards, forever caught along the will to progress, or does the momentary halt in our path aid us in understanding the role we perform? Only those who stop within the circulation realize the trickery they have become accustomed to. They see before their own eyes the power which architecture had taken over them, and, hopefully, begin to
another in this presentation of a blurred reality. It becomes impossible to read the articulations which differentiate the vast expanse which exists in the composition. Instead, we find in the place of boundaries a gradient of space. Specifically, the circulatory systems of the building offer few conclusions. It is important to note again that when such conclusions are to be found, they are highly curated to force an audience to emerge. The spectator leaves his role and is forced to confront reality. Here, the building cuts its defense of Hollywood’s ways and asks those involved to gather before their acts. They themselves become the voyeurs. The site building presents many stages for them to engage, as well as recasting the larger site as a performance in its own regard.
question the exactness of the building in that process. For them, the questions of forms’ references should come into play. Because of the nature the process took on in creating the formal aspects of the design, we find inside the compound many moments of normality, which, when accumulated, present an intentional question of their own reality. Regular systems of organization extant since the rationalization of architecture can be found, but they only resolve into larger ideas which nearly without pause reject a portrayal of a ubiquitous system for their logics. Like Hollywood, the compiled image put forth is reluctant to take one explanation. Instead, it materializes before us as an intersection of various elements, each trapped in a ballet with all the others. Their local compromises allot a great deal of interchange among their ontologies, and both the unique experiences of each as well as the perception of their summed whole amass the experiential qualities of the building, especially in its relationship with Hollywood.
ence devoted to the individual. Like a film, the success of the project depends on the engagement of the viewer. As a spectator, it is his choice either to follow blindly the powers at play or to invoke them as moments of pensive contemplation about the urbanity of the site. This is the point at which the project reaches a more internal connection with Hollywood in a self-actualized repudiation of the present. Here, the present is merely a tool. A moment is frozen in the history of Hollywood, a thing to be compiled, to be studied and to be abstracted. In this abstraction, the act of memory so inherent to the existence of a ruin is employed. In fact, it has been studied and proven by science that each time we recall a particular memory, it is likely that we change it ever so slightly.
The viewer can only reconstruct reality from the shards of its shattered cadaver. Its countenance is in the agency of the Subject to recompile.
Other elements add to this dichotomy between the theatrical communality of the building as a whole and the local experi-
and perhaps more honorable. Akin to this, the Boys and Girls club begs the flâneur to recompile his perception of Los Angeles’ urbanism. The seemingly collaged set of elements unites between two undulating surfaces to present two distinct interpretaRecent attempts at therapy for soldiers tions of the site. In one history, the messy returning from gruesome scenes of war onlooker simply views the continuation of have capitulated this hypothesis, forcing the chaos in Los Angeles’ cityscape. Noththeir subjects to relive a series of violent ing has changed. In the other, we read a moments. These computer simulations unique locality in which the parametric gradually underwrite the memories which inputs of many various elements combine have haunted these soldiers with kinder to produce interesting overlaps, experienplots. Though those killed or maned still tial consequences and urban questions. remain casualties, their fates are slowly re- The theatrical nature of both Hollywood written to appear less tragic, less random and the ruin find a tangent between one
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This is the goal of the Architecture on the scales of both the individual and the collective. That is to say, the actor and the audience are treated similarly to the ends that they might learn from their own relationship. The methodology behind this process centers around estrangement. The very nature of the project exemplifies the qualities of this as a foundation for the collective reinterpretation of reality. Each person to enter the building is presented with a series of estrangements. The ground is rarely flat for very long, and the walls seldom gather en masse to form grids, as commonly gauged by the unknowing pedestrian. It is in these hopes that both those external and internal to the context will, through these described references as well as the elements for which a description would only overload this piece (the moiré, the typography, the sky-lit rooms et cetera) can come together in their relationship to the present which their very actions are continuously inscribing. They are given the opportunity to look onto the very moment which defines the inscription of the present: their collective acts. This is by its own nature tied to the deep ontology of Hollywood as the cultural producer of our times, and, in their collation, the building and its site seek to eschew the compulsory nature that current exists. We are allowed, then, to grasp the finite complexities which define our reality. Like a play before our eyes, the condition of our interactions in this urbanity are subject to our scrutiny. What could come from this is left unknown, the will to define of those who have seen with new eyes what they
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typically take for granted. Its functional presence in the site, the deterministic qualities of history (the script done ex post facto), the ruin (the result of this deed) and culture (a product of Los Angeles) are enticed by our presence within the archi-
In the Boys and Girls Club, a similar concept is approached. Through the abstraction of a slew of references encased by the scheme, various problems are created in the perception of a whole. How can we see a mass when in reality it is comprised
If we walk below, do we tease those on the tower, or do we chain ourselves to their visual wills? We walk about, but do we really move or do we fulfill a deterministic script aligned to our masters above? tecture for the purpose of honing our own authorship of the moment. The Glitch, an Estrangement Recently, Glitch Art has emerged from the bowels of Digital Art as a verified contemporary medium. Due to its relatively young age, little has been made of it either philosophically or theoretically. Basic claims center around a nostalgia latent in a world where technology functions purely on the binary of life and death. A laptop rarely works “a little”, instead choosing the more polar statuses of “running” or dead” to describe its condition. Perhaps the Glitch is like a VHS, something ephemerally caught between functionality and technocratic schizophrenia. In any case, the more reputable of the Glitch Art finds itself inevitably tied to a particular facet of its own ontology. As all Glitch Art is inherently an abstraction, its very basal nature is tied to a precedent. This precedent will eschew itself into a haunting force in the artwork, and, thus, questions of recognizability and reference arise.
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of some three-thousand individual slices which are, in turn, variably laden in several materials? What is the agency of each? What does it mean when the whole of the composition is not always legible? These are among some of the issues brought forth. It is the aspiration of the building that the inhabitant take these provocations neither blindly nor complacently. By intentionally interjecting architectural elements into positions of authority, and thus compromising the typical relationship one might have with a piece of architecture, the design offers numerous points at which these questions might naturally arise in a coerced yet subconscious method. When one stops to ponder the exact nature of the forms encountered throughout the building, it then attempts to, at least, touch upon the geometric ontology of Los Angeles. Should the inhabitant feel a strange sensation upon the realization that each of the rooms roughly mimics the size of a typical suburban home? Like Hollywood and Her productions themselves, the building is a conceptual compilation of precedents and references.
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In a distinctly Postmodern era, these produce a ruin of the present in that they collect and without intentionally curatorial rationality to project our condition as humans onto ourselves. When we look at them, we see a skewed yet familiar moment. Hints of recognizability remain, but the overall work confounds our interpretations at complacent first glances. If we choose, we can become the subject of the abstraction. We wonder through its urbanity and pass about its contrived stages, forever either spectators or actors (or both?) to another constituency entirely. Should we realize the engagement we have encountered, we stand before a world ready to explore. In it, the many variations of these experiences await us, observational opportunities to grasp an comprehension further embedded into our cultural and societal psyches. Phenomenological Optics at Play Once compiled, the elements which comprise the Boys and Girls Club harbor a series of carefully calibrated phenomenological affects attuned to heighten the experience within and around the building. Primarily, these nuances serve either to accentuate or to extrapolate from existing idealogies about the design. For example, the undulating surface of frosted glass hanging between the upper floors and the roofscape serves several optical purposes. At a mundane level, these panels filter the light coming through the skin into the building, diffusing its power to evenly light the interior and, in so doing, aiding in the differentiation between true exterior and somewhat more enclosed spaces of circulation. At another level, these interact with the catwalks hanging in the upper spaces of
the form of streets, manifest as catwalks) which has been reconstituted from the abstractive operation at play is constantly projected upon the circulatory spaces of the main building. One level of circulation overlaps another, itself referencing an estranged reality. As visitors pass along the catwalks, their shadows, too, are cast into these spaces. They therefore become a piece of the abstraction. In essence, they come to represent the citizenry of this newly formed, yet so alien, ontology which exists on the rooftop of the building. As if levels of a hypothetical city, an orchestration of those on the roof, who watch those along the catwalks, who shade those on the interior, who provide spectacle for those in the rooms, a hierarchy (though without clear ability to ascertain either direction or authority) is established by which the building feeds its own mechanisms. Yet another cog in this machine is collated in the text which has been sliced into the envelope of the building. In total, there are seven systems of panels which interact: moiré panels in three directions (SW to NE, SE to NW and horizontally) and text panels in two directions on two layers, aligned to respective systems of moiré paneling. Applied to these five systems are four materials, corresponding to each of the directions and its corresponding layers of text (which alternate the materials in opposite directions). These materials range from matte black to mirroring and perforated metal. Combined, they allow a variable penetration of light throughout the circulatory spaces as well as a constantly shifting perception of solidity along the structural envelope. As one goes through both interior and exterior spaces of the compound, the perception of the skin’s ability to carry light is in constant question.
The subordinate and the superordinate become jumbled in only several meters’ space. No longer can a clear judgment be called as the two parties take on reciprocally diminutive (or empowering) roles. the roofline. As light passes through the stacked system, a gentle shadow is cast onto the interior spaces of circulation. Thus, the reconstruction of the urbanity (in
In turn, it is never certain to which level the reconstitution of the scheme’s parts have been compiled. Added to glass, dimensionality and interior-exterior relationships are
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exploded and often flipped so that those within the space as a collective constituency are constantly unsure of the validities in their experiences. When one gazes onto the skin from either side of the building, they interact usually with one panel, as the spacings designed into the moiré are dimensioned to the human scale, not unlike the columns along the façade of the original World Trace Center complex in Lower Manhattan. They are likely to see either whatever lies on the other side of the panel (if it is perforated) or a reflection (if it is glazed). Under the lighting conditions present throughout the site and within the bowels of the compound, the dichotomy between these options can become quite blurred. To this end, the momentarily brief realization that what was once one’s own reflection but is truly that of someone entirely else can have dramatic emotional impact. Of course, measures are taken to relieve some, though not all, of the anxiety inherent to this experience. Here, too, the value of the lightwells and rooms come into view. Beyond providing relief from the overly fragmented spaces along the perimeters of circulatory pathways, rooms reward the endurance of visitors by bathing them in total, unfiltered light. After having approached various interpretations, abstractions and mutations of light as it slivers between the perforated skin of the
If we choose, we can become the subject of the abstraction. We wonder through its urbanity and pass about its contrived stages, forever either spectators or actors (or both?) to another constituency entirely. building, the rooms offer oases. Herein lies also the aspect which differentiates the spaces of the rooms from those of the passages. Together, the linear hierarchy of the hallway so typical to architecture, where those within a building leave the secondary nature of the passageway for the primacy of the room, is not reversed but eliminated. Each attains a crucial experience within the composition. In the
halls, the overtly circulatory nature pressures the visitor to remain always on the move, thus estranging them into a state of discomfort towards the building. The rooms provide spaces to halt this progression, areas from which those who have not yet become keen to the theatrical trickery might look back on their experience with eyes anew.
We are allowed, then, to grasp the finite complexities which define our reality. Like a play before our eyes, the condition of our interactions in this urbanity are subject to our scrutiny.
Among other optics employed throughout the design, these aims culminate in the production of an entirely skewed experience. As if to take the urbanity of Hollywood (and, by that account, Los Angeles, as well) into a mirrored prism, the architecture seeks both a diagrammatic exploration and an experimental abstraction which remove the visitor from the present into a state of suspended reality, much like
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a visit to an archeological site, frozen in time like a stuttered video. This temporal condition returns the subject to the reality which he or she once inhabited with a new perception, forever estranged from prior understandings. End (A Quoted Piece) Du Runder, der das Warme aus zwei Händen; / Im Fliegen, oben, fortgiebt, sorglos wie / Sein Eigenes; was in den Gegenständen / Nicht bleiben kann, zu unbeschwert für sie, Zu wenig Ding und doch noch Ding genug, / Um nicht aus allem draußen Aufgereihten / Unsichtbar plötzlich in uns einzugleiten: / Das glitt in dich, du zwischen Fall und Flug Noch Unentschlossener: der, wenn er steigt,/ Als hätte er ihn mit hinaufgehoben, Den Wurf entführt und freiläßt –, und sich neigt / Und einhält und den Spielenden von oben / Auf einmal eine neue Stelle zeigt, / Sie ordnend wie zu einer Tanzfigur, Um dann, erwartet und erwünscht von allen, / Rasch, einfach, kunstlos, ganz Natur, Dem Becher hoher Hände zuzufallen. “Der Ball”, Rainer Maria Rilke
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Only those who stop tion realize the tricke come accustomed to their own eyes the p chitecture had taken hopefully, begin to q ness of the building
p within the circulaery they have beo. They see before power which arn over them, and, question the exactin that process.
Formal Analyses of Chandigarh Studio, Anna Neimark, Spring 2013 This project looked at Le Corbusier’s Palace of the Assembly in Chandigarh, India, through a formal retrospective. It decomposed geometrically the building’s primary plan so as to reveal intrinsic relationships among regulating lines. As the project progressed, a special emphasis began to birth itself around the placement of the Palace’s brise soleil. These agents of supposed function cram themselves along the facades in a meager attempt to hide their ornamental function. Deceptively depicting some kind of dynamical dichotomy with the sun, it is important to realize that their true function as proposed by Le Corbusier (that is, to block the sunlight) only performs its role during specific times of the day. Throughout all other hours, they function on a purely aesthetic level, becoming autonomous bits in the ontology of the building as a whole. In a mangled Modern interpretation, they remain pragmatic; in a Postmodern one, ornamental. It becomes of importance to inspect the puritanical reading intended by the architect while being cautious to find oneself deep inside a Venturian conspiracy. By injecting a higher level of integrated functionality into their design, they derange both hypotheses. Neither purely practical nor expressively embellished, they become problematically elaborate. Right – zoomed drawing of final plan with regulating geometry overlaid Next spreads – process of formal analysis
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Grid of Chandigarh
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Forward Brise Soleil Proportions from Faรงade
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Complete Overlay of Constructive Information
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Formal Analyses of Miralles’ Mercat Santa Caterina Studio, Todd Gannon, Fall 2013 In an analysis of the pertaining architectural geometries of Enric Miralles’ Mercat Santa Caterina, this series of drawings observed the gradual accumulation of architectural objects into wholeness in a palimpsest. That is to say, Miralles’ function within the design of the project would, and should, be read almost more with a curatorial light than an authoritative guidance. Analysis of the project’s drawings and relevant history reveals quite forwardly the spatial implications the site was to have upon Miralles’ composition. Through a transformative sequence of formal references, his scheme effectively pulls nearly the entirety of its ‘DNA’ from the existing and past conditions of the site. In the research, precedence was taken specifically towards a Convent and relatively newer Marketplace in order to question the building’s relationship with the site. Although no longer present, Miralles’ creation seems to suggest an architectural poltergeist intent upon lurking thoroughly about the past for possible inferences in the present. Many lessons taken in by these studies would go on to shift the paces and objectives of the Hollywood Boys’ and Girls’ Club, forcing a preordained interrogation of site and context to allow the project to generate, in many ways both figurative and literal, from its surroundings. Spatial Progession
Below – diagram comparing the compositional features of the Mercat Santa Caterina in both 1848 and 2005 with the older Convent de Santa Caterina, displaying the topological overlaps between each project
Axial Alignment
Next page – overview of the formal contingencies between the three schemes, ranging from the Convent (at bottom), to the 1848 Market (in middle) and finally to the current building (at top)
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Medieval Urbanity Nonorthagonal Movements Circulation Figural Vaulting Vectoral Relationship to Site Aft Massing Spatial Progession Axial Alignment
Pitched Roof Figure-Ground Relationship Structural Arrangement Foreward Massing Streetside Facade Gridded Innards
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Mercat Santa Caterina (2005)
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Convent de Santa Caterina (~1300)
Figure-Ground Drawings of Aggregatory Systems – the market asserts itself as an cacophony of elements both intrinsic and foreign to the site.
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Circulation – centralized religious processions and dispersed 1848 market circulation intertwine to produce a dual-natured system of circulatory paths
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Roofplane – jostling and conic sections are gradually used to reconstruct the gable rooftop of the 1848 market into a contemporary covering in Miralle’s circular style
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Architectural Ghosts – diagram of rib vaulting from the convent reemerges as a decorative flooring pattern in the 2005 design for the marketplace
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Grids vs. Irregularities – the otherwise orthogonal nature of Barcelona post Cerdà is contrasted with the organic nature of the Gothic inlet to shift the market’s booths
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Ornamentism VS, Erick Carcamo, Spring 2014 Through a sizable swatch of both Western and Eastern ornamental tradition, a deep focus has resided on the employment of order and magnitude in the differentiation of elements across gradated geometrical operations. Repetitious systems of formal geometries have long exemplified this claim in aggregations, arrays and accumulations patched atop existing forms. This project surmises that the removal or intentional eschewing of this “host form”, atop which the ornament is to be applied, allows for the productive exploration of the generation of a dialogue on the ornamental. Pivotal to the explorations innate within these formal exercises is the relationship between the orders, their synthesis and their arbitrating element, which itself was manifest in several ways and through a set of various representations as the project evolved. The syntheses of these formal means produced a dichotomy between the base and the objects in the project, encompassing two geometrical resolutions and interpretations of the same underlying geometry.
the viewer and the surface, a dialogue emerged between the compromises necessary to balance a clear perception and a phenomenal basis of understanding when approaching the project. This was explicitly dealt with in animated form, while, rendering studies on shadow and hatched linework augment this as projections onto a physical model, alongside rendered exploration in colored estrangements of the surface’s properties.
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A persistent question of part and whole is encompassed in the optical evaluations the viewer is to assume having encountered the form. While the logic of its surfaces is rather straightforward, their intentionally eschewed qualities, particularly those of shadow and reflection, enable a typological confusion of the overall form. When one considers the highly comprehendible massing, their preemptive presumptions about the project’s geometry are set. Thereafter, they are to interrogate what they believe to have perceived, arbitrated by the constant repudiation and augmentation of the surface from Explicated by the scheme, a supple set the model-based projections or rendered of eerily bubble-like surfaces protrude, as materials. These engage a perceptual if under pressure, from a flat plane. This instance that the overall surface quality itself implies a series of ordered geometri- cannot be comprehended at first sight, cal moves, which suggest the fundamental hopefully challenging the unquestioned principles at play. The plush surfaces relationship one might have assumed blend between one another while revealing oneself to have about geometry. a myriad of circumstantial overlaps in their crests, valleys and smooth sides. These These investigatory ends combined, the perceptual differentiations would protrude project surmises an Ornamentism which conceptually in the representations of the is both contingent upon the legibility of project as rather crucial to the interpretaan order (or eschewing thereof) and the tion of ornamentality. At the furthest level modulation of its magnitude so as to proof resolution, an overlay of regulating geduce a variable set of elements which can ometry organizes the seams of this effect, respond by their own typological characat once facilitating a pattern of tessellateristics to conditions predefined by their tions and ensuring a constant reference to geometrical situations, whether these be the original ground. atop a primitive geometry (as the bulbous sacks on the pyramidal geometries as obOf constant interest both formally and jects or the puffing of the seamed surface representationally in the project is the as base). The intentional engagement of gradated relationship of the ordered these terms at both high and low resolugeometries and their formal legibilities tions in the representation and construcfrom the perspective of spectator to the tion of the project furthers the degradation form, harping back to the aforementioned or intensification of these geometrical phenomenal entanglements between the elements, purporting a deepened blur surfaces. Preliminary studies in animation between the ideology of a geometry and revealed an interests in the notion of a its ornament. Ramp Shader as the technical explication of this investigation. Computationally, by referencing always the angle between
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Experience and Complacency Expand and Contract, Bryony Roberts, Spring 2014 For some time now, it seems apparent that a formidable undertow against the Experiential has collected itself in the discourse around art and general productions of culture. Maxim Gorky’s 1907 account of a visit to Coney Island decries the magnificent, amazing and dazzling alike; Michael Fried’s “Art and Objecthood” riles against the interactive theatricality of Minimalist sculpture. On some contemplation, it appears that these are not precisely attacks on the spectacle of viewing an artwork, per se, but rather rejections of the experiences these events attain. The visceral power of humanly perception is underwritten for the chilled demeanor of the reserved intellectual.
towards the aforementioned rejection of visceral experience. A striking seizure has severed the connections between these works and their very perception, as if to demarcate in the boundaries of their abilities an inability to progress beyond formal intentions. To discharge the sensorial implications of the works produced within this spectrum is to uncouple their productive relationship with onlookers, to disregard their estrangements of human sensation and to establish an elitist understanding of the art itself which threatens a dire schism between art and its audience. It is imperative that we encompass methodologies of production and interpretation alike which engenders at once these constructively esoteric interests alongside Without doubt, the fear inherent to these their empirical consequences. If the aims arguments is worthy of respect. The inces- of defamiliarization advertise an ability to sant stimulation of our senses risks a type reveal for us unseen potentials otherwise of anesthesia, a reduction to mere specta- overlooked by habit and desensitization, cle, which posits a complacency within us then the sensorially experiential offers against the enlightening variability of our fertile prospects for the progression of existence. This desensitized habitualizaour understandings about art, context and tion is exactly the prey of Viktor Shlovsky’s complacency. “Art as Technique”, wherein a purported value of “defamiliarization” seeks the In particular, a large body of Minimalist removal of viewer from typical frames of works seems to have reduced itself by reference to the ends that the spectator of these investigative means to the ends an artwork might return to his respective that pertinent ramifications for their reality enlightened to novel conditions as sensory importance have emerged. Their explicated in the piece he has encounsheer rigidity in handling specific aspects tered. Shlovsky annotates here a pivotal of art, whether those be color or supnotion, in conjunction with his fellow prac- port, have engrained in them through titioners at the time in Russia, within a extreme specificity of interrogated topic lineage of Formalism has gathered around implications both formal and strangely these premises, refining the objectives of experiential. Expressly from outside the their productions so as to interrogate the discussion of formal intentions, pieces like very means of their media within the field those of Barnett Newman cannot help but of art. For Clement Greenberg, this seems to encapsulate the viewer in an environexemplary in carrying to logical ends the ment potentially owing more or as much examinations of surface, support and pig- to phenomenological ends than anything ment in the canon of Modernist painting, else, while still pertaining valid discusthough this reductionism is indicative of sions understood by those outside the the variety of other media within the scope immediate accessibility of the oeuvre. An of Formalism’s onslaughts. Thus, these open-ended investigation bifurcates within highly specific typological explorations a number of these examples, in particular naturally necessitated in their focus the those which counterpoise line and canvas, curation of the innumerable potentials wherein synthesis is met between deep in artwork, selectively engaging certain questions of the painting’s ontology as a qualities while foregoing others in lieu work of art within its medium, expressed of pinpointed concentration towards the through examinations fully complaint with characteristics at hand. Greenberg’s categories, and something more immediate to the human sensation. What shutters under scrutiny as rather It the latter case, the imprint of the formal unfortunate in these studies is their trend prerogative often leaves almost indirectly
a distinctly phenomenal aspect to the work, estranging the particular elements of the paintings in their extreme abstraction.
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If we are to gauge these in relation with an artistic goal akin to Shlovsky’s – that is to say that the art itself might substantiate a novel interpretation of reality, or of an asset therein, by demonstrating for the
ity of levels, its ability to reengage the viewer’s perception of the world is simply given greater chance. In a transitive sequence of implications, from the formal to the phenomenological, the work comes to present a far more blended reality than a pure dichotomy could sustain in exclusively partitioning experience and intellect within art. Distinction no longer serves a productive dynamism when we find the
Scarcely are we faced so directly with color in a scale so exhaustive, nor with the singular or dual interjection of contrasting linework therein. Quotidian existence simply precludes these appreciations, as we pass through life awash in the polychromatic numbness afforded to us by our very own beleaguered vision and overloaded concentration. viewer a completely eschewed interpretation of something within his preexisting knowledge – there seems to be no challenge in the possible intersection that formal and phenomenological objectives might sustain when entangled by the work itself. By this logic, “Vir Heroicus Sublimis” (1950) posits simultaneously an intentional interrogation of the line and the canvas, inherently esoteric to the medium, and a compelling force as an experience of an interrupted color-field. Surely, the visceral involvement of the viewer before this canvas, amassed in a seemingly infinite band of red only inclemently sliced by abruptly descending lines, cannot be disregarded in the overall interpretation of its pertinence to art and viewership alike. As a flat canvas compelling one to draw as close as possible, further evidence unfolds that Newman’s creation instantiates a similar trait to Freid’s “theatricality”, though transliterated from the threedimensional object to the planar composition. This character can only bespeak the experiential work, as its perception by the viewer is immediately dependent upon the empirical participation between the eye and the painting. Moreover, because the piece is able to function on this multiplic-
overlap of the two to be of greater vitality in distinguishing the artwork as universal in its significance. The most pervasive exemplification of this principle, in the case of this specific painting, can be found the overt use of red. Given Greenberg’s indication of “pigement” as a valid subset of inquiry for Modern painting, it is logical that the experiential ramifications of the overall tonality present must have been considered in conjunction with formal imperatives. Thus, in one stroke, the red opens a dually natured intent to the work, both indicating the optical consequences of its expansive condition across the canvas and preserving an entirely formal prerogative towards pigment and abstraction. This is no singular experience, but rather a commonality found across Newman’s oeuvre. In the likes of “White Fire I” (1954), “Onement VI” (1953) and “Be I” (1970), to name only a dispersed few among a massive set of similarly pertinent works, an almost academic stance towards the study of color and line instigates a typified accentuation of color and stroke. In nearly every example, we find a rarity in the experiential forecast of everyday life. The basis of these paint-
ings’ gravity artworks must rest within this annotation of a commonly encountered concept such as color. Scarcely are we faced so directly with color in a scale so exhaustive, nor with the singular or dual interjection of contrasting linework therein. Quotidian existence simply precludes these appreciations, as we pass through life awash in the polychromatic numbness afforded to us by our very own beleaguered vision and overloaded concentration. So it stands that the painting renders an estrangement of hue from its commonplace contexts through formal means (the investigation of color and line in relation to pigment and support), which in the fleeting perception of our daily lifestyles begs us to reconsider its significance. As a consequence of this, the eye and its cognition meet an immediacy between linear stripes and mammoth swathes of opposing color in the problematic juxtaposition of Newman’s lines against their chromatically monotone canvases. Inasmuch as this enables a variance of conversations about composition, tone and support, it relies at
terms. Complementally, it can be contented without difficulty that more radical examples in the body of works (“The Voice” (1950), “Who’s Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue?” (1966), and “Midnight Blue” (1970), among others), establish a nearly algorithmic system of constraints wherein the interjected lines either translate to the farthermost borders of the canvas in annotation of the composition’s support or shift in hue to decompose the perceptual differentiations between background and stroke. Though earlier pieces engage blurs of these lines (“Untitled”, 1950) or more figural borderlands between tonalities (“Untitled 3”, 1949), later works remain predominantly interested in the composition as restricted to the understanding between a background and a vertical line. Preeminently, this fortifies overall the status of these formal inspections as irrevocably tied to their experiential repercussions, because, although all essentially rely on the previously explicated equation (background expanse and foreground stroke), their differentiation and registra-
typically assumptive perceptions function more effectively in searing their formal revelations into the mind of the spectator. Without such methods for evaluation, each painting cannot rely on its esoteric terms alone to gauge its promise, as no palpable quality enables the discernment of the transaction between the piece and its audience.
That Newman’s experimentation remains consistent in regards to the placement of these slashes and the calibration of the tones throughout demonstrates a clear and self-aware engagement of these
Following these measurements, the most successful of Newman’s paintings are those which posit a new understanding of their forms or colors onto the viewership they receive as a complement to chasing formal agendas. Returning to “Vir Heroicus Sublimis”, a phenomenal depth emerges from a rightwards bais of vertical stripes. Here, as in the other most prominent in the collection, an awkwardness emerges which questions the hierarchical relationship of the bands against the colored background with ultimately requires the viewer to express their interpretations of both the painting’s formal consequences and phenomenological affects in terms of experience. Perceptually, as the viewer approaches the painting, its engulfing red hues grasp the visual field as if to suggest a complete encapsulation, yet the imposition bands counter a presumed reading of depth. Though functional in instigating an illusionary depth when gazed upon from afar through variations in color, thickness and painterly resolution, this mirage of depth fails, becoming perceptually confounded, when seen at closer vantages. The constructed reality which the viewer purports in his own mind standing at a distance from the painting is effectively countered upon examination, constituting a primary estrangement of its optical tactics. Therefore, the experiention in a comparative manner is intrinsitial manifestation of the work arbitrates cally tied to the senses. How are we to initially formal means of composition and explicate in any manner but experientially content and with optical presumptions of the dissimilarity between one canvas depth (and its subsequent repudiation) to with a line more rightwards and another enable a conjoined deconstruction within in which the line is shifted to the left? It the preemptory mind of the spectator. would come across that Newman is engag- The state of confusion left in the wake of ing the viewer in a tournament of artistic this procession, given Shlovsky’s proposdétente. Due to their formal similarities, als, provides the gray space of undereach work requires explicitly phenomenal standing between a recognizable set of interpretations to identify it from the othreal conditions (those from afar) and an ers, and, in this moment of optical recabstracted resolution to the theatrical act ognition, a more memorable selection of bestowed unto the viewer (those up close). paintings suggests that those alienating Calibrated within the painting, we gain an
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Barnett Newman, “Vir Heroicus Sublimis” (1950)
the most innate level on our recognition of its uniquely divergent essence from an anesthetized set of complacencies to achieve a new level of engagement between the viewer and defamiliarized object before him.
assertive means by which to categorize the various formal experinements within Newman’s oeuvre with explicitly pertains to considerations inside and outside the esoteric value of the piece and its medium. In Greenberg’s dual admissions that Modernist Art “happens to convert theoretical possibilities into empirical ones” (7) and postscript warning against solely formal artwork (8), we find initial inclinations towards the immense premises which incorporate the intersection of the formal and the phenomenological. Moreover, what each lacks becomes critically balanced by the other, as honed in Newman’s approach. Formal inabilities to differentiate between similar items in the catalogue of one prerogative, such as lines against canvases, are compensated for by the experience of the piece in order to manage the categorization of each work within the larger body of the set. The particular disposition of these differentiations towards those which innately provoke questions in our minds about the relationships and values we hold complacently aligns these along a spectrum of strangeness, itself a means perched in ways between the experiential and the formal. If we might engage at once both of these fronts in the creation of a piece of art, the possibilities greatly expand for its accessible viewing, meaningful interpretation and exoteric value alike. The productive exploration of this expanded understanding is to acknowledge the entire set of attributes that define the creation and subsequent perception of art, in essence linking the artwork with its larger reception more cognitively so that it might with greater consequence articulate its own position within the grander context of the field. Works Cited Fried, Michael. “Art and Objecthood”. 1967. Greenberg, Clement. “Modernist Painting”. 1961. Gorky, Maxim. “Boredom”. The Independent 8 Aug. 1907: 309-317. Print. Shlovsky, Viktor. “Art as Technique”. 1917.
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On Space and Our Agency History of Ideas, Aaron Bocanegra, Spring 2014 It has become increasingly clear that in the most recent decades, abridging the 20th and 21st centuries, our spatial understanding as a society has undergone great strides in relation to the state of innumerable fields. Art, architecture, design and general form-crafting have seen dramatic expansions in their prospective repertoires. This has left in its wake a comprehension of space and geometry to which we have laid siege, seeming to notate a violent upheaval of the mechanisms for conceptualizing space held complacently for some centuries in the psyche of the populace. Broken of these dogmatic crutches, a formidable slice of the population must reevaluate its approach in accounting for these new forms. We have, in essence, alienated the spatially geometric foundations of our purveyor’s minds, presenting instead before them various forms previously unbeknownst in their tendency to evade convention. Splines and polygonal meshes have supplanted otherwise intrinsic intuitions which, since the Enlightenment, had found themselves overwhelmingly rooted in Cartesian logic. How are we to capitulate the agency of these spectators to our form in this rift of knowledge between the creator and the user? Having precluded the most basal understandings of the past several centuries which for so long allowed a cognitive engagement between us and our geometry, must we contemplate anew the didactic experience offered in these novel forms? It appears that today we reside before this precipice of contemplative identification, and, should we ignore the dire miscalculation of its consequence for our prospective fields, we set in danger the critical aspects of the agencies engendered between what we make and those who experience it.
this ideology in their recognition of the power the human cognition attains over its surroundings (Figure 1). The human ability to instantiate the ideology of a cube – that is, a form with six sides, eight vertices and twelve edges – from any object rather sharply edged and somewhat pertinent to the aforementioned description indicates this cognitive capacity of the human perception over the environment it inhabits.
its might. Thus, the power of the cathedral is often a secondary affect of the cognitive will on the part of its designer or owner to explicate the grandeur or authority of the church. Moving backwards along the historical timeline of geometry from Michangelo’s creation, the Gothic interpretation of this instantiation of might was to engender in the forcefulness of light a kind of experiential reverence to God (Spielvogel 191).
experience something unknown. The human cognition of the space’s affect therefore, it could be read, has been overtaken in a political agenda to subordinate the inhabitant. To comprehend the workings of the space, in this case through light, is to undo the wonder and sublime quality, which deviates from the accorded respect for which the church, as an architecture, is willing to beguile one into acquiescing.
Figure 1 – Illustration from Alberti’s De Pittura, the cognizance of the human being to conceptualize an environment as a set of geometrical means, here arbitrated by the understanding of an inherently Cartesian system, so that the capacity to engage that environment is enabled and the human is given agency in comprehending what surrounds him or her.
A square-chizzled rock is not necessarily a cube until the human labels it as such. It’s nominal declension within the geometrical understanding of the observer is innately both crucial and foundational in facilitating this empirical identification with space. It can thus be surmised that nearly as important as form itself is the humanly interpretation of its construction.
Figure 2 – Illustration of the HMS Mauritania along the side of the Great Pyramid at Giza from the 14 September 1907 edition of the Illustrated London. Printed in the magazine, an effective display of the pertinent coorelation between preexisting knowledge and strangely new understandings is depicted. Simply told the dimensions of the liner, many readers would have been unable to engage its immensity. The reference to an already familiar object simply allows greater accessibility and deliverability of the piece’s argument.
To preface, it is vital to trace the spatial understandings of the contemporary (Western) human. Inherently empirical, these have since the termination of the Dark Ages relied heavily on commonly held notions of comprehension, chiefly the logic of the grid (Roberts). We find in the advent of the grid a democratized systematization of space which allows effectively for the categorization and regulation of how we are to perceive form around us. Alberti’s illustrations from De Pittura carefully survey
Likewise, these forms have been employed more sinisterly since the dawn of our time to enact power of people, often by the subversion of their cognition. Here, the issue gains a completely problematic inclination in its ramifications. If we are to loose grasp as a collective body of spectators, we curtail the potential for our comprehension of the powers spaces attain against us. For example, those who stand within St. Peter’s are to feel the phenomenal force of the building’s ornament and structure crushing them below
To sit awash in the tones of vibrancy within these architectures in their era, characterized by cramped spaces often sheltered from the affective qualities of light, was to
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When approaching the complexity of contemporary form, we ought to understand dutifully this interaction between the environment and the individual or constituency (the mass of individuals). In “Art as Technique”, Russian literary theoretician Viktor Shlovsky decries complacencies, promoting a generally estranged perspective to be undertaken by the collective arts so that their patrons might, while encountering eerily familiar objects of life set askew, become aware of the artists’ hand (Shlovsky). This is to say, the spectator inherits his or her agency from the
comprehension of a somewhat obvious alteration innate to a piece of art from the reality it appropriates. Because a prerequisite cognition of the object is assumed to have existed forehand, the spectator gains the ability decisively to engage the piece. The gaze of the onlooker confirms immediately the relativity of the work to everyday life. An implication is inherent to this interplay: the spectator must confront
his or her prior cognitions, emerging anew from an understanding gathered within the work. Explicated in space, we see a steady growth since the invention of the Cartesian coordinate system in the human engagement of form on levels ever more democratized and homogenized alike. Simply put, Descartes’ grid reduces nearly all understandings of space to a regularized logic mostly within attainability from fairly straightforward criteria within the typical bounds of Western understanding.
articulate the relationship shared between viewer and the form when the basis which has arbitrated this interaction for some centuries is removed? Dealing alternatively with theater and artwork, Jacques Rancière annotates several constructions of this intersection. Rancière’s “emancipated spectator” is a kind of being developed to interact with surrounds pertinent not to outdated methodologies of either
Given these qualities, how are we to
the Enlightenment or 20th Century, but rather to the complex systems which produce in their confluence our current condition as a society. Of specific importance is Rancière’s observation that “in the past, individualism was counter-posed to totalitarianism. But in this new theorization [speaking of the current behaviors of our society], totalitarianism becomes the result of individualistic fanaticism for free choice and boundless consumption” (Rancière 38-39). This becomes the ideal analogue by which we might enter the discussion on space and authorship in relation to
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the interchange between possibilities for formal comprehension we see in current situations. In looking towards the past, we encounter the grid as a trope long enacted to be the catalyst of these geometries, bridging the individual ambition of the author with an implied understandability persistently shared with the viewer. There, Descartes’ geometrical logic posited a constant reference against which the
Figure 3 – Illustration of the HMS Lusitania along the side of the Great Pyramid at Giza from the 14 September 1907 edition of the Illustrated London. Even more so than before, the ship’s placement beside the primarily orthogonal nature of the structures, all of which were recognizable elements for Londoners at the time, allows an engaged comprehension of the novel sizes involved. An enrooted connection seems paramount to the engaged and cognizant observer of form in the example.
commoner, or person outside the esoteric discourse around a form, could engage novel creations without entering a state of complacency in their complexities or disfamiliarities. The observer was in many way
empowered by his or her cognizance of the space, because, one might propose, he or she understood at even the most basal level the principles, which were employed to create it. Anecdotally, we find a similar construction of references employed in the early years of the 20th century to enable the public in comprehending the sheer proportions of the era’s oceanliners. Much as we gaze unknowing onto these intricate forms of our times, lacking a universally fortified reference against which to gauge our perception of their geometries, such diagrams of size and scale displayed for those without the ability to perceive empirically the ships enough reference by which an intimate understanding could be fostered (Figures 2 and 3). It is unclear how the spatial diagram of these new geometries is to unfold. The interjection of surface-creation and other form-finding tactics, which rely heavily on advanced calculus, has driven the unique estrangement of the resultant geometry from the masses who are to confront it. What does seem pertinent to the immediate confrontation with this problematized state is that we engage these forms critically. If we are to approach objectively our interactions with them beyond spectacle and complacency, we might encounter a stance by the means of which we can articulate a spatial logic anew. Given the history of form’s instantiation into schemes of power, this seems pivotal while still within the grasp of the general populace. An emancipated participant with form is one who can approach cognitively those affects, which preside over him, although this is not to discount his experience to mere intellectualism. Understanding does not preclude the productive lessons such affective qualities might present, but rather offers a nuanced encapsulation of the space between the individual and his or her environment, which itself is so intrinsically linked with the larger forces of society and polity, thus procuring the optimal emancipation of the empirical awareness each inhabitant of or spectator to form should practice in order to remain cognizant of his or her agency.
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Scansion Collegiate Writing, Claire Philips, Fall 2012 This essay reflects on the literary devices present in a piece by Leslie Scalapino. In particular, patterns are identified as key to the formatting of its rhythm.
Statements like “…what she said about going to bed…” (line 3, page 24) even show a more visceral transition within meaning, enabling Scalapino to transverse from one dialogue to another. Near rhymes again Throughout Leslie Scalapino’s consideremerge further down the page in patterns, ing “how exaggerated music is”, a ceras in “actor”, “mirror” and later “under” tain melody can be found, created from (lines 3-6). Piggybacking on rhyme to conthe use of the written word, rhythm and nect notions through different lines, anothmelody. These elements work simultaneer level of repetitive use of literary device ously to affect the overall meaning and intensifies the writing once again. Again, interpretation of the poetry. Focusing the in its use, the reader also finds a quality brunt of her work on retelling surreal situof the writing to be almost surreal. While ations, Scalapino often interjects diverse the premises of her observations tend to constructions. When employed, these be around serious topics such as femininallow her to establish a foundation for ity and gender identity, rhyme lightens the the poetry. Especially when considering overall mood. Perhaps in juxtaposition, written verse such as hers, which nearly this draws the audience back, allowing mimics traditional prose, this underlying them to better view the piece as a whole. system woven amongst the text creates It breaks the monotony of the passages a commonality throughout the composiwith small perks of near humor, specs of tion. In turn, this guides the reader along, white on an otherwise black background. allowing wide gaps in subject to be bridged In this way, it becomes easier to analyze by style. the seriousness of the rest of the poetry. For instance, the integration of consonance, particularly in the form of alliteration, aids the consistent flow in the poem. Additionally, this characteristic of her writing serves to imbue tone into the work as a whole. These can be well seen in lines such as “…(like looking into a mirror, etc.), as I made love to her…as her face lay under me / …her legs seemed to me like the stamens / of the plant…” (lines 4-7, page 24). The same scheme reemerges, this time emphasizing initial “s” sounds in lines seven through nine on the same page in “stem”, “stamens” and “stirring”. By employing alliteration, Scalapino both permeates her work with a more intricate meaning, an idea of recurrence in theme, as well as links apparent chasms between ideas. A surreal idea is also fundamentally substantiated by this usage. Though the heavyweight subject matter of the writing can at times burden the reader with prolific ideas, a simple device like alliteration brings back familiar notions and comfortable constructions, things with which the audience is comfortable. They give a ladder upon which the reader can lean.
exploration into the ideas held by society about what it means to be a woman, or, even more simplistically, what it means to be a sexual being in the modern world, is aided by this grounding. It allows the author the ability to converse about a broad range of topics, all the while holding try to a centralized system. This established framework, around which Scalapino’s intricate oeuvre is constructed, relies heavily on an underlying combination of techniques. Emphasized in these are uses of these literary devices. Culminated, they amplify the meaning and development of the writing, both supporting the composition and enhancing it at once.
Scalapino goes even further in her addition of unique spacing to indicate new meaning and to better the flow of the narrative. Combined with the use of brief interjections, this can begin to encompass a powerful style, intensifying the reader’s understanding of significance. Long spaces, such as in “…I made love to her. So, as her face lay…”(like 5, page 24) add a new layer of complexity to the work. Again, this construction is repeated further down, on lines 7 and 8: “…like the stamens / of the plant, i.e. It was the male part of her…”. Scalapino’s strict adherence to this principle both continues her theme of literary devices holding decisive power in the progression of a work, but it also builds certain absurd dramatics around the relationship of cause and result in her statements. To explain on another level, these interjections act as clear dignifiers that the result of an action will be elaborated. “So” and “i.e.” show evident conjunctions between actions causing results and those actions’ collateral.
On another level, rhyme is employed to carry out the same purpose. Again, it shows for the reader the natural shift of ideas throughout her thought process.
Overall, these elements combine to provide a solid bed on which the work is formed. By instituting these parameters of sorts, the readings hold commonality, while their individual meanings may differentiate. The overarching theme of her
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A Discourse with Los Angeles Collegiate Writing, Claire Philips, Fall 2012 Having been recently completed, Grand Park is naturally an inclination of Downtown Los Angeles towards a more complacent definition of Western Urbanity. This piece examines the success and predominant failures involved in the project’s ambitions and execution. Congratulations, Los Angeles, you’re a real city now, almost. Though your shiningly new, enormously expensive Grand Park has opened downtown, the accomplishment speaks more to your inadequacies than your vibrant new identity. In many ways, we see a thorough articulation of your greatest weaknesses compiled in this strip of three desolate, downtown blocks, flanked on their sides by the internationally renowned ranks of the boastful Walt Disney Concert and the towering Los Angeles City Hall. On the other hand, we must access the success of your endeavor from two vantages: esoterically and exoterically. While those from the East Coast or Europe may gawk at this concrete strip, dotted haphazardly with sparse grass,
however the design attempted to escape such a fate. Is this truly possible in a modern world so interconnected at all points? When nearly any modern human being has inevitably seen the vestiges of the greenery held by New York or the nature retained by London, comparison is a result without alternative. You, Los Angeles, must perhaps either take a stand against other predominant parks around the planet or risk a comprehensive subordination to a merely bourgeois lifestyle in their eyes. Regardless, a larger point could dwell in your abstruse absurdity.
the automotive world. Whereas a car can be seen as the ultimate introversion away from mass exposure, your park attempts to create a more eager interaction between citizens, although, the correlation is shaky at best.
To begin at the most simplistic level, this public gathering spot exudes everything Angeleno, for better or worse. For instance, the availability so prominently of a parking garage may seem to be the utmost in asininity to those unfamiliar with your ways. On second observation, taking into account the foibles which truly make you Los Angeles and not New York or London or Stockholm or Barcelona, to name a few, such a thing perfectly matches, if not flaw-
Congratulations, Los Angeles, you’re a real city now, almost. Though your shiningly new, enormously expensive Grand Park has opened downtown, the accomplishment speaks more to your inadequacies than your vibrant new identity.
Image courtesy Google. Grand Park might just be the first urban adventure of America’s 21st century to attempt architectural alchemy – a blatant misreading of parking ramps and dangerously crowded streets as features of natural wonder, nestled among flower gardens and palms. What other supposedly “grand” slice of urban oasis in the country is effectively trisected in the space of only three blocks?
lessly reflects, the modern car-centric personality you’ve come to typify. In this very way, the space itself walks the obscured line between the definition of public and private spaces in an increasingly divided modern world. It has to be the finest mockery of the intended program of the neon benches and questionable fountains, gardens, the walkways and the fountains it may just well be the best you’ve got. – that is, to bring together the diverse As noted by Gloria Molina, Los Angeles communities – whose separate entities County supervisor, in an interview with compose the cityscape of America’s secJennifer Medina of the New York Times, ond largest city, when many of those who “Everyone has some characterization of access the park drive themselves there in it to compare it to the city they know”, cars, packed away in their own corner of
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So, I come to this roadblock in my way to accessing your latest expenditure. Those accustomed to rolling hills of green and fresh nature air, follies to the likes of both Central Park and Hyde Park, will surely wretch in revulsion at this excuse for an open, public place. Removing this
European cliché, built a necessary refrain to nature, from the discourse, you have forced us to reevaluate what we define as a space for the masses. How, when faced with this interjection into the modern consensus on the implementation of public space, can we properly gauge this social experiment? This obliges the visitors of this park to a harsh reality: though its environment serves no function to pacify the need for greenery in the boundless metropolis, a provocation is brought into conversation nonetheless. This is not to recommend every major city set aside three of its most horrid, concrete-clad blocks to be rebranded as public parks, but rather it performs as a nearly ironic juxtaposition between Los Angeles and the world. Is a philosophical observation more important than viable grounds for gathering?
they Central Park, Hyde Park, the Boston Common, the Tiergarten or the Kungsträdgården, among others. Just maybe, by the coda of this urban conversation, the importance of this grand attempt lies not so much in the immediacy of downtown yet in the vaster collateral discourse. This leaves Grand Park itself at a question-laden intersection. Should the park fade from prominence, its call against convention foregone to a nature-obsessed society? Or, in a scenario involving near divine intervention and a miraculous salvation from an immanent homeless invasion,
could Grand Park surmount all jabs to become a modern proclamation towards a new era of park design? Whatever may occur, Grand Park has already made a sizable embossment into the contemporary dialogue about Downtown’s unsure intentions, undefined principles and unrelenting realities. Doubtlessly, these several acres of pavement and commercialism will in some way shift the identity around which the neighborhood interlaces itself. Works Cited Medina, Jennifer. “Los Angeles Puts a New Park at Its Heart”. New York Times on the Internet 18 Aug. 2012. 25 Oct. 2012.
Even then, no one can be certain whether this challenge to the status quo was intentional or by sick accident, but does that really matter? Perhaps, the ramifications outweigh the execution. This is the constructed conception with Grant Park’s most likely unintentional contention to almost all other metropolises’ parks, be
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Sourcebook Introduction to Design Cultures, Dora Epstien Jones, Fall 2012 The “Sourcebook” was a compilation of inspirations which we were required to collect over the course of the first semester at SCI-Arc for an Introduction to Design Cultures Class. PDF available for download at: https://docs.google.com/file/ d/0BxBBVUKJ7Tofc1QtdGhkT0pSTXM/ edit?usp=sharing
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On “Lysistrata Unbound” Humanities I, Jill Vesci, Spring 2013 This is a review on Eduardo Machado’s resurrected rendition of the Classical Greek play “Lysistrata”, which attempted to reinvent the work in a more contemporary context. Serious issues of adaptation arose in the process, and this piece argues for a more critical engagement of our cultural past.
these charges, and it appears to enter a zone of insecurity between modernization and inspiration. While pure modernization could have been performed, the shaky interplay between Athenian culture and American ethos seem to be left without arbitration. Still, the directness of the performance and its unchanged, unadapt setting during the Peloponnesian Wars Beware the will to adapt. She is a broken distill any reasonability as a connection to siren; let us forgo her melodious hums. American affairs. When we look upon the Should we follow their effortless calls, we lengthy list of alterations interjected to juscertainly will collide with the cliffs of cliché tify the crucial amendments to the plot of and kitsch. Such are the follies of adapta- Lysistata in Machado’s work, it becomes tions, wherein we find an overwhelming apparent that the result has strayed far majority of unconsidered failures, crucial too distantly from the original. At such a oversights and sloppy translations. While point, the audience must forefront itself pussyfooting the delicate, root-tangled bed the question as to whether the new comof a literary jungle, Eduardo Machado has position strays so dramatically from the clearly tripped in Lysistrata Unbound. His host that it might as well be regarded as a work lands someplace between a critinovel piece, its connections through time cism of a bygone passion in the modern lost beneath an infinite sea of iterative American polity and a misunderstood redesigns and conceptual reworkings. bastardization of a late Classical comedy. Not quite sure of itself, it stumbles about Enter Machado’s [incorrect] interpretive this gaping void for a good ninety minutes, methodology. His transposition of the leaving an audience unsure of its reaction. classical play into modern ideals functions Surely, those who appreciate theater ipso similarly to an erroneous translator, and facto will be enthralled at the play’s techlest we forget that such mishaps can repnique and precise execution, but deeper resent serious diplomatic squanders. If an insights into the history and context of the interpreter’s misreading may provoke war, overall work reveal severe errors in the Machado’s script has without doubt enfinal product, especially when visited from sured at minimal a petite theatrical masthe perspective of a modern adaptation of sacre. While the original dealt mostly with an ancient piece. the shear absurdity of a woman taking to the public to voice her outrage at a war It seems that Lysistrata Unbound is not which had, by that time, plucked a sizable sure of its own identity. At various monumber of lives, Unbound attempts to imments, the play’s readings morph from crit- bue sincerity and depth to the argument. icisms of society’s will to war (juxtaposed Lysistrata defiantly abashes the death of between the Ancient Greeks and the conher son, himself a horrid invention of the temporary United States) to man’s domina- modern playwright’s overbearing artistic tion over woman to the value of a mother’s license, which ubiquitously seems to push love for her child and her persistence to forth without reprieve against the harshly take a stand in his loss. In these regards, misogynistic ways of archaic Athenian culthe play falls short in a variety of manture. This voluntary struggle would in most ners, and one should take into account circumstances be fruitful, but, in the conthat Aristophanes’ Lysistrata feigned from text of a work as aged as Lysistrata, the touching these interpretations in any criti- shear canon of history seems to overarch cal method. These, in culmination seem to any attempt to undermine convention. All portray a dramatic derailment of the play’s would still be well were these highly spikintentions which have unfolded throughout ing, poignant moments not engulfed with the process of its creation. They become a steady, nonterminating stream of phallic glairing signs of a weak underworking the wordplays, coital innuendos and abrasive feebleness of which staggers to uphold erotica. The play transpires more like the the play’s self-proclamation and lofty cast. lunchroom banter of a sixth grade cafetePerhaps the adaptive value of the work ria clique who has just learnt the colloquial does not exceed the deficit leveled by euphemism hard on than a sophisticated
work of modern criticality. This, in turn, spirals the carefully devised Greek comedy into the realms of Harold and Kumar served à la Lars von Trier with a dash of Talladega Knights. The resultant, predictably, has little opportunity to gather into much of anything. More properly placed in the collection of the culture from which Lysistrata emerges, Machado clearly misreads Aristophanes’ work to be an indulgent, would-be satyr.
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stumbles in many ways. It comes across as a play in puberty – not quite a man, no longer quite a boy. As is such, its first facial hairs endow it with a responsibility it cannot quite maintain, and its fractured moments of immaturity seriously subtract from its final value. By the play’s midpoint, it shines to be overwhelmingly visceral that Machado’s adaptation falls beneath the weight of
Beware the will to adapt. She is a broken siren; let us forgo her melodious hums. Should we follow their effortless calls, we certainly will collide with the cliffs of cliché and kitsch. Even if we somehow manage to gouge from our eyes and scrape from our ears these theatrical misdemeanors, we are left with a bastard child, the offspring of an illusive affair between a promiscuous American rejection of the war in Iraq and a licentious Greek farce. Here, we must remind ourselves that the play’s first performances occurred in the height of war between Sparta and Athens. Those were no times for deep intellectual observations on the status of women in society or the fetishizeation of battle, but rather delicate moments to be filled with light humor. This should conjure in our minds something along the lines of a primitive Stephen Colbert [or Bill O’Reilly, if you spice his rants with as little seriousness and as much satire as they deserve]. In their place, Machado appears to have been thinking along lines of intrinsically imposed poignancy, not unlike that of The Hurt Locker. His chimera of these arts
its own expectations. It unsuccessfully grasps at a compromise between the humor of the original and the authored meaningfulness of the contemporary. Perhaps the most recent success to which Machado can evidently only aspire would be Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet. Where Lysistrata Unbound tramples its few moments of contemplation in a smothering of all things sexual and penis-like, Luhrmann’s modernization eloquently updates a classical tale to match modern ideals with preserving the original’s depth and power. Perhaps most importantly, we can look to the two reproductions’ handling of dialogue and speech. Luhrmann chose to retain Shakespeare’s complex syntax from Early Modern English, relying triumphantly on the film’s articulate visuals to act as a guide to the transpirations within the plot which the modern ear may have overlooked. It both respects the precedent’s intentions and harbors a
creative will to interpose certain timelessness. Nostalgia is foregone to promote an eternal universality inherent in powerful drama. Without jettisoning original interpretations or extinct cultural meanings, the work inflects onto itself enough connection to our present psyche. If Romeo + Juliet were a Picasso, Lysistrata Unbound is the product of a kindergartener. It is very much the spaghetti art of the current dramaturgical world. Machado
Even if we somehow manage to gouge from our eyes and scrape from our ears these theatrical misdemeanors, we are left with a bastard child, the offspring of an illusive affair between a promiscuous American rejection of the war in Iraq and a licentious Greek farce.
council’s repertoire seems to lean excessively upon literary crutches. As is so, Machado ventures to propose Lysistrata Unbound as a prequel to its precedent. The claim holds little water. It retains just as little validity under historic scrutiny as could be diligently covered by artful writing and fruitful direction – that is to say enough embellishment to distract any theater student’s one-track mind. Hereby, the play falls trap to its own historical parameters when presented beside the authentic. In reality, the mere fact that Lysistrata had the ability to leave her house and appropriate the Acropolis to her protest surely deemed her a priestess, or at least a woman of high standing. Therewithal, she was most likely never given the mere possibility of producing kin. Moreover, any genuine interpretation of Lysistrata would render her a young woman. This rudimentary oversight reaps a vast slash in the side of the very foundation of the adaptation. Machado’s will to tap the thespian might of Olivia Dukakis and the potential emotional profundity of a mother’s loss seem to have cumulatively gotten the best of him.
tight place, stuck between two distinctly desperate definitions of the identity it so desires to assume.
At best, Machado tried. At worst, he monstrously raped a respected slice of ancient culture with modern value systems and unseen biases. In doing so, he seems to have unwittingly produced for us a reminder of the vastness of cultural development having taken place in Western civilization over the past two millennia. His adaptation’s oddities stumble over nearly every translative opportunity, never clearly porting the ancient to the contemporary unfortunately appears to be too taken up with all things extant to consider important but instead emerging an uncomfortmoments perhaps no longer pertinent yet able tension between the two. Neither Machado’s creative license nor the play’s which offer openings for beautiful scriptself-validation as a prequel seems to ing or powerful reworking. For instance, though Aristophanes’ dialogue for Lysistra- justify its ends. This mutant child of the ta runs as somewhat demanding, accusa- playwright’s mind is so jumbled that a final verdict of it even renders itself impossible. tory and uncivil, if not even adolescent, What could we possibly review in order to to a modern audience, its cumbersome interjection into the ethos of performance reach such a conclusion? Have we seen a poorly portrayed, factually distraught art at present grants a keen chance to privy modern onlookers about the breadth ancient comedy or an astray modern drama overladen (and thereby ultimately of theatrical morphogenesis which has broken) with references to male genitalia? befallen Western playwriting in the past Like the relationship between archaic two millennia. Athens and Sparta itself, the play overlays two ends abstracted from the same root, The author does deserve at least the presence of a defense on the most funda- but their cooperation is less than guaranmental of levels, though every piece in his teed. Lysistrata Unbound finds itself in this
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Poorly Exposed I Humanities II, Jill Vesci, Fall 2013 This project contemplated the value of estranged perceptions of our world as a foreground to novel experience. Its observations fed into further work in the class, centering around the value of unrecognizable yet familiar forms. In the contemporary condition of the West, the present has become uninhabitable. Temporal refugees, we flee towards two salvations: the past and the future. In the wake of Modern naĂŻvetĂŠ, the latter has been disheartened. It lays as a wasteland in our foresights, remaining only in its incrementally dismantled form, the byproduct of two jetliners on an otherwise quotidian morning in September. Disenfranchised, we have clung to the hindsight, a time of blurred idealism pervasive with positivity before the eventuality of an unforgiving reality. Straightforwardly rendered, the present and its uncontrollable ramifications thereafter leave us without control. We find ourselves to be the victims of an uncanny and transient determinism, cast aside into a consistently expanding pool of banausic martyrdom. Nostalgia becomes the post-rationalization for our comprehension of an idealized past. The least of three evils, this series presents itself as an interpolation into the realm of nostalgia through recognizable abstraction in architectural form and icon as the preemptive arrival at a threshold for further exploration.
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Poorly Exposed II Humanities II, Jill Vesci, Fall 2013 Upon searching out an article in the Encyclopedia, we seek the most direct and The Encyclopedia was traditionally unbiased recollection of information posperceived as the seminal collection of sible, yet before us we find only the culmiinformation. Its intent was to gather and nation of one specific contingency. Where to distill all that was humanly approachDiderot seeks to define “intolerance”, he able. Unfortunately, it has failed. In its quickly engages a barrage against religion. place, we find a destitute book, stranded Likewise, Blondel entraps himself in a defion the edge of human bias and conditional nition of “architecture” which decries the perception. We have found that at the end Roman technique as an “imperfect imitaof our abilities, it was not possible for us to tion” of earlier Greek traditions. Clearly, we escape the lives which we lead. On the Encyclopedia
It is in this context that I propose a new Encyclopedia. Instead of skirting the eventualities of the human experience, this edition not only takes advantage of our perceptional shortcomings but harnesses them. Where Diderot failed at avoiding the ultimate human desire to cast his or her self onto the world, a kind of sadomasochistic solipsism emerges which allows us to skew everything within grasp. If indeed the Encyclopedia’s efforts are in vain eventually to crumble at man’s handicaps, why not harness the freedom allotted to us? This is the Encyclopedia [of Human Foibles]. In a world which we by very nature see eschewed by our desires, contemplations and assumptions, why not create the literal embodiment of our blindness? Anachronism, bias and stereotype must be embraced as the de facto human perspectives onto the self-centered world we rule. Paradoxically to intents we must accept that the encyclopedia perhaps best transcribes our contemporary biases onto stone. It gives them the permanence they might otherwise have escaped in the bowels of time.
sions, but it has become too evident that they can no longer form the foundations of a body of knowledge in an age so richly imbued by various understandings and innumerable contextualities. The blur destroys “us”. It posits to glitch the one-to-one methodology by which we typically engage our surroundings. Prerequisite comprehensions and assumptions are both rendered null. This is the
supposedly without bias on subjects which inherently cannot exist outside conjecture. Their encyclopedia sought to become, as they saw it, the closest embodiment of the scientific method within the humanities, a ubiquitous categorization of all things to the ends that man might progress himself, but can we truly prescribe such subjective subjects to objective clarification? How is one to write about things so imbedded within his understanding without physically
The blur destroys “us”. It posits to glitch the one-to-one methodology by which we typically engage our surroundings. Prerequisite comprehensions and assumptions are both rendered null. This is the keystone of a proposed new encyclopedia, the final codification of our accepted shortcomings.
keystone of a proposed new encyclopedia, removing himself from his own realities? the final codification of our accepted shortcomings. As expected, the otherwise well intentioned attempt to index all that surrounded On Its Shortcomings Though the possible lenses by which we them ended in a bias representation of might achieve this vantage point of distorone method by which we might review Denis Diderot’s entry under “Encyclopetion are manifold, I choose for this occathe world. Human foibles reestablished dia” begins in perhaps the most predictsion the blur as a methodology for escapa vantage point on the world once again ably banal way, reciting the etymology ism. In estranging the present from what which collapsed at their hefty foundations. of the very word. This established, his we understand, swept away in a Gaussian This having been approached, we arrive While simpler definitions with quantitadescription continues for a short bout perception of reality, we might more aptive characteristics stayed within tangible at the untimely understanding of our own without note. It is then that Diderot grasp to the ways of the encyclopedia, propriately approach the understanding boundaries. By this point, we must then purported by the Encyclopedia, because larger ideas or politically sensitive groups begin to ascertain the realities of our pre- stumbles, his written infant in arm, down a truly problematic path. In describing the fell victim to circumstantial, intentional we will come to terms with our own biases. sumptions. Here, at the fulcrum by which ends of the accumulated work procured In the most literal way, the blur removes and subconscious biases. That is to say, Diderot prescribed himself to the failures and curated by Diderot and others, false the recognizability which we seek in some- of his own ways, we actively remove Diderot could not achieve the inhuman perceptions are quick to arise. In the thing like an encyclopedia. Inasmuch as it ourselves from the contexts in which we task required by his endeavor. He could removes the clarity of the image before us, exist. Finally, we might at the least hope to proclamation that the encyclopedia ought not remove himself from his present. Thus, to inscribe the teachings of their age for it plays on our assumptions and percephe became entangled within it. Like the approach in a novel method the inexacttions. ness of our world. Quantitative answers for the virtuous progression of humanity in the eagle which plucked at Prometheus’ chest in punishment for his attempt to bring so long readily supported our comprehen- approaching future, Diderot et al go forth
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are incapable of inscribing without perversion by truths we see in the world. Thus it seems natural that we lust for a collection of ruined images, both serving to question our assumptions and judgments and to reveal through some abstraction the qualities we may previously have foregone at the hands of our own vices.
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advancement, Diderot’s own circumstantial perceptions rip the guts from his logic, incarcerated forever to the biases of his times. It is often to this fate that our endeavors are subjected. Without formally approaching ourselves form a perspective completely estranged from everything we are familiar with, we are inherently unable to objectively view a single object within our world. A fitting example can be found in the initial contact between the indigenous American civilizations and the early European explorers. As was the case for Diderot, the conquistadors, British parties and natives alike, among others, brought upon their encounter perceptions long held to be intrinsic. When the Aztec civilization mistook at first the arrival of Cortés for the descent of their Gods following a then recent prediction of a catastrophic event to come, they saw the present through a lens prescribed to their civilization. Without doubt, the misrepresentation of the event would prove disastrous. Similarly, early British parties along the East Coast found themselves insulted at the Natives’ traditions about ownership and possession. These misreadings can only be attributed to human nature. Inherently, they were powerless to see anything but that which they already knew. Perhaps then, this initial contact between the West and those living for centuries in the American continents demonstrates the necessary estrangement by which one might face himself. Both civilizations offered each other a trope, a mirror into which their gazes could cast back exactly what they quite obviously had missed in themselves. This taken into account, it is possible to underwrite the purpose of the encyclopedia. Once the collector of knowledge possible for the progression of mankind, we might now experience it with new eyes to be the literal inscription of our woes. While whimsical infractions in the straightforward recodring of definitions might pass us by, larger issues spring forth from Diderot’s efforts, such as the ascription of slavery to the “weakness of white men” in the harsh North American Climate (Le Romain). In so doing, the encyclopedia both gave into its own temptations and failed to perceive the greater forces at work around it. A predetermined exemplification of the more unrefined notions of its day, the accumulated work functions far better as a highly reflective mirror than a time capsule. Rather than offering a mechanism around
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which the lives of men could organize for the future, the Encyclopledia seems to codify existing beliefs under an improvised system. Whereas the scientific method held the possibility checks and possible repudiation in new findings within the realms of natural studies, the humanities became prey for intellectual stagnation and societal solidification when inscribed within the Encyclopedia. This effect, in turn, fed a paradoxical loop of logic which seems inherent in both the work of Diderot and that of the
play, rather than redefining explicitly any ethos. If the Enlightenment had been truly potent in shifting the perceptions of mankind within his world, the innumerable travesties which followed it would have been avoided. Such events as the First and Second World Wars doubtlessly provide evidence that the Enlightenment failed to change the inherent state of man. Perhaps it is this threshold which crippled Diderot’s Encyclopledia. Although simpler definitions were adequate to be inscribed, more complex topics failed the straightfor-
by which true advancement might have taken place. While the methods by which human society worked were indeed in flux, their outcomes would still be bound to the rules already in place. Works Cited Blondel, Jacques-François. “Architecture.” The Encyclopedia of Diderot & d’Alembert Collaborative Translation Project. Translated by Reed Benhamou. Ann Arbor: MPublishing, University of Michigan Library, 2003. Web. 20 October 2013. Diderot, Denis. “Intolerance.” The Encyclopedia of Diderot & d’Alembert Collaborative Translation Project. Translated by Philip Whalen. Ann Arbor: MPublishing, University of Michigan Library, 2002. Web. 28 October 2013. Le Romain, Jean-Baptiste-Pierre. “Negroes.” The Encyclopedia of Diderot & d’Alembert Collaborative Translation Project. Translated by Pamela Cheek. Ann Arbor: MPublishing, University of Michigan Library, 2003. Web 30 October 2013. First page of article – Caspar David Freidrich’s “Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog” (1818), blurred Previous spread – Alexander Cabanel’s “The Birth of Venus” (1863), blurred Below – Michangelo Buonarroti’s “Creazione di Adamo” (1511), blurred Next spread – John Everett Millais’ “Ophelia” (1852), blurred
larger Enlightenment. Instead of offering solutions ad infintium, the work and its respective movement altered the ways by which society looked at the world before it. Although this allowed for temporary progress, it could be noted that the adherence to the methodologies taken up during the Enlightenment, many of which Diderot went to such lengths to codify, would set into play the stagnation of the society’s perception of itself. Just as the encyclopedia inscribes a false justification to slavery in North America, the general movement would simply shift the powers already in
ward translation without serious incredulities. In the end, the lofty goals of both the Englightment and Diderot alike may have outpaced the glass ceiling of human nature which existed before them. They were unable to escape the intrinsic nature of man’s eye, blinded to only the things which they had already seen. Although the French Revolution and the development of the scientific method at the time seem to have managed to estrange Western Civilization enough that it was able to contemplate slightly on its own existence, they clearly failed the make the seminal jump
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A Brief Genealogy of Estrangement Humanities II, Jill Vesci, Fall 2013 Reality is a condition to which we become all but accustomed, a raison d’être by which the answer begs no question. That is to say, it is a state of complacency. We often drift to and fro in an air of blurred insolence as we resist the permeation into our bodies of the myriad occurrences around us. Thus, reality is a sensorial dam imposed by the mind in order to quell the incessant noise of the external world in the face of momentary objectives. Efficient in our daily lives, this anesthetic allows for our fixation on conscious goals, often preventing the recognition of potentially beneficial nuances. Much has been accomplished in addressing this inadequacy of the human condition in art, procuring various methods by which we are to see the objectives of our existences otherwise obscured by our very actions. Of note throughout this oeuvre of revealing introspectives is a consistent reliance on estrangement. It is in the removal of the subject from his typical vantage that we come across a pervasive quality in escapism. As if having ascended to the plateau of a gargantuan plinth looming above all that is pedestrian, he, the Mindless Flâneur, grasps the final step with a rotation, turning his vision. Behind him, he gazes across the landscape that was his existence, now playing before him in the third person. In this, his estrangement has enabled him more objectively to survey that which he once so numbly took for granted.
our perception of its characteristics and consciously returned to reality so that we might see it anew. In the aforementioned example, the eye is first caught in the background by the recognizable outline of the Venetian skyline. Following its swoop across the lagoon’s shore, we encounter the abstracted (yet clearly defined) form of a dock, lined by a series of boats. It is significant that here the paint strokes gradually evolve from being features of known objects to more ubiquitous gestures. We transcend the momentary understanding of the depiction as a purely optical thing and begin to contemplate the form and aggregated nature of the boats, among other things. Although these work as straightforward artistic accents in the overall composition, they can markedly be rewritten in the interpretation of the painting as explicit elements of estrangement. Turner continues this investigation in his 1834 studies, “The Burning of the Houses of Parliament”, where the blurring of a crowd and the hued amplification of vibrancy in the fire-engulfed background seem to estrange us from the explicit inscription of the scene. In these works noted, the implications of these estrangements tend to remain rather phenomenological, devoid of tangential reference or political consequence .
nearly anyone familiar with the combustion of a firework, the scene clarifies instantaneously. We arrive to the same position whence we began, back in reality, and yet our understanding has been altered. A deeper appreciation of the innate beauty in the conflagration of the night’s sky lodges itself into our psyches. Truly, this is the epitome of the removalist goal at play. Other works by Whistler depict similar narratives. “Nocturne in Grey and Gold: Chel-
ing tower in the painting’s background and the reflective qualities of the scene depicted, it would attain a purely abstract interpretation. To avoid this derailment in affect, Whistler allots the audience precisely larger enough a set of referentials to weave a personal connection in each onlooker to the subject of the painting. Still, these are blurred from an obvious understanding in various methods throughout the oeuvre (in this case, through the
As if having ascended to the plateau of a gargantuan plinth looming above all that is pedestrian, he, the Mindless Flâneur, grasps the final step with a rotation, turning his vision. Behind him, he gazes across the landscape that was his existence
To these ends, a chronology of artistic estrangement is extensive in its breadth, although the technique is perhaps best based from early uses of abstraction. Beginning with the likes of Turner, this methodology of removal can be seen in explicit detail. As early as 1819, Turner begins to employ an erasure of realism beneath the cloak of abstraction, such as in “Venice, Looking East from the Guidecca, Sunrise”. The implicit fact that these actions begin to eschew the difference among the depicted scene and other variables (this is to say, the medium, the subject and the work itself) refine the distinction between straightforward abstraction and a more subtle technique of estrangement. Whereas abstraction might birth from typical portrayal a reconstructed aesthetic, estrangement holds an explicitly political goal. We are intentionally withdrawn from an understandable subject, tweaked in
Nearly contemporaneously, the gradual development of James Abbott McNeill Whistler’s Nocturne series parallels similar progressions in estrangement. “Nocturne in Black and Gold, the Falling Rocket” (1875), perhaps most famously, demonstrates a clear removal of the viewer from direct interpretations. Done in an effort to study color, its delineation of the pictorial content from a more straightforward image to an abstraction underlines the early assets of the estranged technique. We find ourselves first countered with what appears to be an interaction of colors, our eyes gathering in fascination about their intricate entanglements. It is only then, after the initial confusion over subject, that we begin to compile what lies before us. Figures at the canvas’ bottom left become discernible, and cues of reflection on a watery surface gradually lead us to the conclusion that we overlook the final moments of an explosion above a lake. This realization, by way of the estrangement, returns us to our contextuality. To
sea Snow” (1876) in particular exemplifies early components of the estrangement. A distant street renders itself as blurry, here conjoining to the snow’s optical effects on the eye. We are presented the appropriation of an intentional abstraction to the ends that we might come back from the painting with a heightened sense for the phenomenological ramifications of snow in darkness against the gleaming lights of a street. Assisting us are a small variety of reorganizations: a wandering person, a foregone window, a dim tree. In “Nocturne Grey and Silver” (1875), the same technique is employed. If not for the glimmer-
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use of a blur), so that the viewer might first come to understand some essence of the moment. Thus, the spectator moves forth from the work having received a highly sophisticated optical interaction with the subjects at hand. Whether the firework over a lake, the streets in snow or the town above a fogged river, an inherent change interplays the apprehension which occurs at the moment between the unclear abstraction of the estrangement and the realization of the subject. As the subsequent abilities of abstraction as artistic device progress from these
early examples, so too does estrangement entangle itself in the interpretation of various works. We find in the rise of impressionism the keen impregnation of the method into major artistic techniques. Inasmuch as these works rely on oppressively thickened brush strokes and overtly emphasized color, the slight skewing in the relationship between a subject and its otherwise immediate recognition in the artwork come to underlay key joints in the
than allowing a consequent progression of comprehensions, Monet’s goal through tonal estrangement seems to elicit a deep connection to color, as would naturally be the case for the Impressionist agenda at hand. Regardless, we must emphasize to ourselves that Monet’s work relies implicitly on the subject in order to ascertain this effect. Were it not for the minimally articulated House of Parliament lingering atop the hues of blue, we would not be
artworks’ poignant structure. Claude Monet’s various studies in 1984 of the Rouen Cathedral capitulate this exchange. In the series, the tool manifests itself in the intense overlay of color to the point that the cathedral barely emerges from details of the painting. In “Rouen Cathedral, the Portal, Morning Fog”, we only minutely discern what lies before us in small articulations. The sheer effect of the extreme amplification of blue tones consumes the subject. A choreographed exchange between the encapsulating fog and the subservient architecture jolts our immediate understanding. Herein, Monet uses our moment of brief confusion to interject the impressionist appreciation of light and tonality. Blurred is the space between atmosphere and object, encircling the comprehension of the depiction as it was before Monet’s eyes in a mist of gradated affect. When finally the vision catches the more subtle details of the façade, the true impact is felt. Monet delivers with high emotive precision an understanding of the effect occurring, through estrangement from the direct cognitive discernibility of the painting, to the end that we might approach the scene later on with a more sophisticated appreciation. In his later studies of the British Parliament against the River Thames, we again encounter this muting of the subject within a slightly differentiated field of color. “Houses of Parlilament, Fog Effect” (1903) nearly completely decimates the relationships intermingling among foreground, subject and background. Rather
(1920), it could be critiqued in regard to the importance of the estrangement that abstraction has overtaken subject. Thus, artistic agendas begin to defer from estrangement into the utterly removed realm of complete abstraction in a great deal of works. These Cubist appreciations for said explosion, via faceting, of an object shine as pinching notes of piquancy before a long silence. Consider the aforementioned works by Picasso. In both, very slight indications of subject gradually offer the viewer the realization of what he sees. We gain in each an enhanced interpretation of form and inherent shape as we return from the abstractive qualities of their facets and otherwise broken geometries. From the woman, snipped momentarily in her dance, we are given a novel understanding of stance and form in a work where the subject emerges only in relief able to properly implicate ourselves into from a varied background of underplayed the work. As we view any of the series of hatches. Respectively, “Head of a Man” color studies by Monet, we are overarchimparts in one reading, as do many other ingly tied to distinctly familiar subjects. Our similarly timed Picassos, a redefinition of predisposed knowledge of the Gothic style organic geometry. or the Parliament’s iconographic outline are cornerstones to the proper impact In succession, we survey an underplay delivered by the overwhelmingly vibrant of the estranged subject in much of the colors. highly abstract works of Modernism. This is perhaps a key note to both the failure of This is akin to yet less dramatic than Paul the movement and the emergence of its Cézanne’s still lives, appearing roughly at conceptual reaction, Postmodernism. Here the same time. In these, a more subtle too enters the key role of estrangement estrangement of perspective serves simi- in divulging the immensely critical role of larly as a catalyst for the eschewed space art in relation to the masses. Though to between onlooker and subject. Although be appreciated by those esoterically in their immediate reception appears to be of the know, much of Conceptual Art and the little noteworthiness, a closer examination prior Abstract Impressionism fall victim reveals the utter deconstruction of the to their own levels of removal from realperspectival apparatus. Differentiated into ity. What has become a joke of patrons a series of interposed systems, we gradu- writing into the interpretations of Rothko ally (yet perhaps only subconsciously) paintings their own objects (whether those register the non sequitur relation between be something as belittlingly mundane as the fruits and their bowls. This, in turn, a sandwich or as melodramatic as the informs a great deal of the exploration in scene of a murder) is in truth an indicaconsequent Cubist work, itself another tion of the highly problematic nature of level entangled with the complexities of such works. Which is the proper funcabstraction. In many ways, this highlights tion of such artworks in their relationship Cézanne’s work as a typological hybrid with those who view them? Although between earlier attempts at estrangeRothko, Pollack and fellow cohorts may ment and a transition into more implicitly have underwritten this obviously accusaModernist works. Earlier faceted abstrac- tory inquisition with the hopes of eliciting tions such as Pablo Piacasso’s “Dance of emotive responses in their constituenthe Veils” (1907) lead gradually to a higher cies, it can easily be leveled against their caliber of gap between the subject and productions that the public in general is its own clarity. By the progress reached far more receptive to objects which are, in “Head of a Man” (1913) or “Pedestal” at least in the end, more recognizable.
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The value of estrangement lies truly in its ability to so briefly sieze the viewer into an artwork through his very realization that he sees in it something which is familiar to him.
While both the Abstract Expressionist and the Conceptual agendas devalued a priori the subject in their works, they seem to have in so doing set their own demise, an artistic glass ceiling which has as of yet to be surmounted. Although of an aesthetic nature in one interpretation, the value of estrangement lies truly in its ability to so briefly sieze the viewer into an artwork through his very realization that he sees in it something which is familiar to him. With this, the piece slices into his personally specific psyche, forever engraining in his memory the moment at which he saw as evident to himself the metamorphosis from an intended effect to its subject – the facets to the woman, the outlines to Venice or the glimmers to a firework. In Monet’s work on the Rouen Cathedral, for brief example, the power of the artwork is felt at the instantaneous recognition of the subject. We are bathed in the reference to the Gothic valor for lightness so inherent in its architecture. We swoon in the prick of our consciousness that is the transition between a Ganzfeld of color and the articulation of masonry under fog. All this wonder is void in much of the aforementioned work of late Modernism. This act of disappearance finally leads to an emancipation in the work, specifically, of Jasper Johns, whose series of studies on the American flag (1954-1955) can be seen to initiate the conceptual framework on which most contemporary studies into estrangement stand. Having employed the geometry of the flag itself, Johns’ abstractions begin to play out a careful and curated discussion with both its intentions and ramifications. What does it mean for the viewer to encounter a flag rendered purely in shades of white? What might a blurred flag infer? Thus, the artist harnesses the required ability to engage personally a relationship with an object which is commonly kept within complacent terms to the audience. This fulfilled materialization of the power in estranged references compels the works in the study to delve with particular vigor into the ethos of the Modern American mindset. Each of the undertaken transformations, whether they be the multiplication of the flag onto itself or the desaturation of its colors, are fundamentally estrangements from the status quo. These prod at the constancy with which the American populace comes
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into contact with its own representative icon, engaging alterations (estrangements) as methods by which the inquisitive viewer might begin to question or to displace a relationship otherwise inherent. It is beyond these extant purposes to offer conjecture as to the intention of any specific member in the series. Rather, the importance of these abstracted flags lies in their methodological abstraction under a popular symbol, by which they engage the populace before them, and a noticeable discrepancy in the reproduction thereof, which harnesses the moment of recognition as an intuitive possibility for deepened understanding or enlightened passivity on the matter brought forth. Such early reemergences of the reference as an underlying element in art cornerstone the Postmodern movement and, although not all uses of precedent preclude estrangement, allow a great deal to be interplayed within these general themes to a variety of ends. The reinterpretation of the everyday, in place of the explicitly conceptual as a field for artistic study allots a significantly viable body of subjects. Here again, it is in the estrangement that the work takes on its role as something interpolative rather than merely reproductive. An image taken without pedigree is no more than a replication of a moment at someplace in time, devoid of much meaning. Contrarily, a work intentionally removed from its proper state demonstrates a decisive and crucial strategy an artist may choose to employ. An estrangement levies its potentials in this regard, comprehensively allowing the dislocation of subject from viewer. By these accords, Andy Warhol’s developments seem to be of utmost priority. As in Warhol’s chromatic overlays on journalistic photographs of car crashes published commonly in newspapers (ca. 1963), we see the slight disjunction of the reference from its prototypical frame. We view the work from an oblique, at once stepping beyond our natural tendencies and yet retaining a vital tie of importance which holds firm the poignancy of the piece to our psyches as an audience. The bodies lie across their metallic gravesites as is to be expected, but a certain level of confusion occurs in Warhol’s minimal abstraction. The distance commonly held towards the image, one minutely tapestried to our societal mentality by a complacency with the photographic medium, is tweaked at a perceptible level. In so doing, we are
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forced to review our confusions, if by nothing more than the pure realization that our reality has been sheared to one side. We grow closer to that which is precisely in question. Whence we bring a myriad of experiences alongside photos, we are in the most basal of natures pulled around and forced to face what we typically bypass. Familiarity is hijacked on a perceptual endeavor to reset the constructions we entitle for the world. Such images, commonplace in American print media at the time of Warhol’s work, gain naturally a numbed
the interests within New European Painting best begin to demonstrate the overt implementation of the approach at hand, setting the determinative factors for its use in the current artwork of the 21st Century. Though there is often a lesser role for optical play concerning immediate recognizability in the movement, certain estrangements occur through medium and subject, among other abstractive methods. An early example can be found in Gerhard Richter’s “Elizabeth I” (1966), where we encounter a portrait of the
It is in the estrangement that the work takes on its role as something interpolative rather than merely reproductive. An image taken without pedigree is no more than a replication of a moment at someplace in time, devoid of much meaning. Contrarily, a work intentionally removed from its proper state demonstrates a decisive and crucial strategy an artist may choose to employ. effect when seen in the multitudes. This strain in the artist’s oeuvre parallels his experimentation with the replication of Marilyn Monroe in his series of portraits concerning her (1962- ), wherein estrangement is reached through seemingly mechanical reproduction. Evolving the use of color imposed atop typically black and white photographs, Warhol removes our humanly reference from Monroe, causing a gap to form between our understanding of her humanity and her stardom. Here, the message is clearly one of commodification and celebrity, inscribed onto the artworks in a process which removes us from a normative vantage. The political foresight of the estranged perspective seems to thrust forth as an effective methodology for explicative artwork. In general, much can be said of this correlation between Pop Art and estrangement. At a most fundamental level, the genre itself must inherently reference the already known features of contemporaneity. In many ways, it is the final subversion of the overall tactic into the art world, leaving in its wake a series of deepened explorations into the subject. Of these,
Queen utterly distorted by a constant blur. As if caught in a moment of uncontrolled movement, the work begins to question before us our perceptual understandings of something otherwise fairly innate, much in the same vein as Warhol’s nearly concurrent investigations into Monroe. In the blurred countenance of “Her Majesty”, we encounter a snapshot of seeming informality. The typicality of Elizabeth’s highly infamous features is eschewed, as if to entangle the pomp of the monarchy in its own humanly failures. Without the immediate recognition of the work’s subject, we are to understand the woman it portrays as a mere human being. We gaze into a splinter from the propaganda and ceremony, a revelation only allotted for us through the briefly fleeting augenblick of estrangement. This theme continues in Richter’s work, next emerging in prominence in two works, “Woman Descending the Staircase” (1965) and “Brigid Polk (305)” (1971). In these, the estranged aspect so vital to the work’s success renders itself as an issue of material. Though both seem to depict in photorealism blurred captures of quotidian interactions, whether these be a woman stepping down stairs or another gazing
Relational Fields
A Brief Genealogy of Estrangement
blankly into the lens of the camera, the revelation to the audience that both are painted oil on canvas shifts an embedded understanding of representation quite inherent in the modern psyche. Having been barraged with innumerable slews of photographs for the greater part of our exoteric interaction with media culture, we emerge quite dazed at seeing such a thing depicted in hyper-reality through an unpredictable medium. Such is the allure of many photorealistic works of painted, sketched or sculpted works. The implications of this newly skewed understanding seem pervasive throughout art in the later decades of the 20th century (and subsequently those of the 21st), especially within circles influenced by the likes of Pop Art. Works like Ron Muecks’ “Boy” (1999) or Olafur Eliasson’s “Weather Project” (2003) play similar games with scale and frame of reference. To supersize a hyper-realistic sculpture of a young boy is to break our everyday connotations just as is respectively to drop an artificial sun into the entry hall of the Tate. Of particular interest to the efficiency of estrangement is Eliasson’s “Your Rainbow Panorama” (2011), wherein the artist buids a massive ring of colored glass, alternating along the spectrum of the colors in the rainbow, above the ARoS Museum of Art in Aarhus. With one experiential shift, Eliasson effectively removes the city from its a priori context. Those who visit the work walk along the circle and view the overlay between the colored light and the otherwise preemptively understood vista of the city. Therefore, one might be lead to believe everything must be reinterpreted, having been without question cast in a new light. The exuberance with which the everyday interactions of the metropolis must reemerge from beyond the tones of the glass is an exemplary exogenesis of the estranged moments provided by the structure. Would not such implementations forever alter the ways we look back at the city, once removed from its imposed abstraction? In a number of ways, these estrangements in recent decades have become tied to various forms of glitches, momentary confusions of scale, tonality or reference, among other topics. It is thus of little surprise that the emergence of Glitch Art would take in a multitude of ways from the playbook of estrangements available to it. Although still an emergent field, its
explorations to date have been incredibly fruitful in harnessing the technique for the utter abstraction of the frame of reference. Unfortunately, many of its achievements have been tied to the examination of the technocratic implications on modern life, especially in regards to the digital age, wherein we are removed from prior understandings so inherently tied to analog mechanics. In lieu of this reading, it might be posited that Glitch Art instead grasps our regularized comprehensions in an estranged capitulation of misunderstood interpretations. Take, for example, the work of Adam Ferriss. In “Satellite Photo of Island� (2012), we are bent from the usual perspective we take when viewing satellite imagery. This medium, to which we have become so accustomed in the 21st Century, is inherently abstracted by Ferriss’ imposition of a series of tonal bands running horizontally across the image. These are the residue of a scripted interpretation, the result of which presents a confused understanding (on both the parts of a computer and a viewer) of the data provided. As we oversee the forms before us, we are provided the new ability to discern what is consequent of either the photograph or the glitch. In one way, the informative aspect of the imagery is stripped of its usefulness, forever reinterpreted as a formal investigation with little explicative ends. By another interpretation, it begs us to question our presumptions about the natural features which cause our immediate recognition of such images. Why must we take for granted that these even represent the truth? In fact, Ferriss simply provides us the formalization that everything comes in an intrinsically bias representation. Whether the lens of the satellite or the digitized algorithm through which the image ran, nearly all visual media we encounter have the residue of the political, technological and social hierarchies to which they are subject. This is therefore a keen capitulation of the politically efficient successes evasively tied to estrangement.
we have come to a time when this methodology might serve well to rectify much of our comprehensions about subject and representation. What we see in these estranged portrayals is the momentary interplay between what we already know and an alternative perspective as of yet foreign to our eyes. There, far beyond the normalcies to which we are numbed, we appropriate an alternative appreciation for otherwise nuanced moments around us. Be they the topographical identity of an island, the humanity of a monarch or the veracity of an early train, we are endowed an escapist agenda by which we emancipate ourselves from complacency. The artist here must engender the moment with an implicative empowerment. In the aforementioned examples, we survey the meaningful ramifications of this contextual break. We thus present ourselves with the opportunities to skew reality against itself, allowing the pivotally crucial reinterpolation of its infinitely minute details to come forth. It is in these hopes that we stumble across this fragile state to find anew something already known, thereby gaining a heightened acknowledgement of the variables so omnipresent in both the execution and determination of our lives.
In nearly every case of this effect, we approach a certain kind of precipice. Our conceptual underpinnings of the world around us are torn loose, and in the reactionary force unleashed we are shoved backwards, ripped away from our normative paddings. Such is the prospective of the visual intervention which has been described in this varied set of artworks. A product of early abstraction,
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Portfolio 2012-2014
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Nouvel vs. Jerusalem History of Architecture 1, Christoph Korner Given the task to compare l’Institut du Monde Arabe and the Dome of the Rock, out group set out to delve specifically into façade ornamentation and geometric pattern, accumulating throughout the argument that the historic bridge between these examples is allowed by the representational tactics of Postmodernism, enabling unique and directly relational juxtapositions, appropriations and depictions to emerge in architecture. Done in collaboration with Deborah Garcia, Graham Jordan and Esra Durukan.
Durukan, Garcia, Gravelle, Jordan
Slide 7
L’Institut du Monde Arabe Dome of the Rock
L’Institut du Monde Arabe
An Architectural Comparison
Jean Nouvel, Paris, 1987-1988 CE
Durukan, Garcia, Gravelle, Jordan
Slide 13
So, what?
Esra Durukan, Deborah Garcia, Connor Gravelle, Graham Jordan
Durukan, Garcia, Gravelle, Jordan
Slide 2
Durukan, Garcia, Gravelle, Jordan
Dome of the Rock
L’Institut du Monde Arabe
L’Institut du Monde Arabe (1987-1988)
Jerusalem, 687-691
Jean Nouvel, Paris, 1987-1988
Plan and Section
Durukan, Garcia, Gravelle, Jordan
Slide 3
Durukan, Garcia, Gravelle, Jordan
Slide 8
Durukan, Garcia, Gravelle, Jordan
Slide 14
Mashrabiya ()ةيبرشم
Slide 9
Durukan, Garcia, Gravelle, Jordan
Slide 15
Slide 10
Durukan, Garcia, Gravelle, Jordan
Slide 16
Dome of the Rock Jerusalem, 687-691 CE
L’Institut du Monde Arabe (1987-1988) Axonometric
Durukan, Garcia, Gravelle, Jordan
Slide 4
Dome of the Rock (687-691) - Plan and Section
Durukan, Garcia, Gravelle, Jordan
L’Institut du Monde Arabe (1987-1988)
L’Institut du Monde Arab (1987-1988)
Photosensitive Façade
Urban Interface
Durukan, Garcia, Gravelle, Jordan
Slide 11
Durukan, Garcia, Gravelle, Jordan
Dome of the Rock (687-691)
L’Institut du Monde Arabe (1987-1988)
Dome of the Rock (687-691)
Interior
Interior
Urban differentiation
Durukan, Garcia, Gravelle, Jordan
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Slide 5
Durukan, Garcia, Gravelle, Jordan
Slide 6
Durukan, Garcia, Gravelle, Jordan
Dome of the Rock (687-691)
L’Institut du Monde Arabe (1987-1988)
Exterior Latticework (Mashrabiya, )ةيبرشم
Effects of Brise-Soleil
Relational Fields
Nouvel vs. Jerusalem
Slide 12
Durukan, Garcia, Gravelle, Jordan
Slide 17
Slide 19
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Thank you for taking your time to view my portfolio! If you are in need of contact, please refer to the contact information listed within the introductory section of this book. Therein, all means for contacting me may be found.