CC: by Cornell AAP

CC:

CONVIVIUM

A publication of Convivium and the Cornell University Department of Architecture Graduate Programs

Edited by Sophie HochhĂ¤usl and Melissa Constantine

With contributions from Mario Carpo Vivian Chen Louie Frazier Aaron Gensler Bradley Kinsey Ang Li Margot Lystra Anthony Morin Caroline Oâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;Donnell Barbara Penner Stephen Powell Chad Randl Matthew Storrie Youngjin Yi and others

Cornell AAP Publications

01 Introduction (Ithaca) Sophie HochhĂ¤usl Melissa Constantine 19 Authors (New Haven) Vivian Chen, Mario Carpo, Anthony Morin 53 Lovers (Buffalo) Aaron Gensler, Youngjin Yi, Barbara Penner, Chad Randl 77 Users (Back-to-the-Land) Bradley Kinsey, Stephen Powell, Louie Frazier, Margot Lystra 91 Friends (Princeton) Matthew Storrie, Caroline Oâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;Donnell, Ang Li

Photograph by Sophie Hochhäusl — Ithaca, NY 2011

INTRODUCTION Sophie Hochhäusl Over three years have passed since the conversations recorded here began. They first emerged in Ithaca between late August of 2010 and May 2011 and were the product of a graduate student group called Convivium. Since then, members of the group transcribed, reflected upon and extended the ideas presented here. Many of the students who drove and participated in Convivium have graduated and begun their professional, artistic, and scholarly careers in cities across the globe. I have moved from Ithaca to New York City and have found new challenges and endeavors there. But even with three years between now and then and new tasks to tackle for all of us, what happened in Ithaca and with Convivium is worth revisiting; not only because Convivium shared a pool of architectural ideas, but also because it explored what I can only describe as a “spirit” of engaging architecture. This spirit was shaped by the town of Ithaca as a place, by Cornell’s Department of Architecture but also by the specific group of students that came together that year with a particular hunger to ask questions and participate in conversation with peers and professionals. The texts presented here, are thus not only about architecture, but also about the ways in which we thought about, discussed and produced it. Since its founding by Melissa Constantine and Kyle Jenkins in 2009, Convivium has capitalized on these principles. It has championed and engaged the production of small pamphlets with readings and graphics, exhibitions, informal interviews and, above all, student conversations and the shared experience of producing architectural knowledge. In early September of 2010, Melissa and Kyle asked me and my colleague Anthony Morin if we were interested in organizing further events while they were away in New York City. We accepted the invitation and strove to continue the project they had begun.

INTRODUCTION

Convivium was a venue for all graduate students. Thirty people from Cornell’s M.Arch. 1, M.Arch. 2, and M.A. and Ph.D. programs organized different sessions over the course of the year. Thus, although Convivium members from all Cornell architecture graduate programs are represented in the texts, the event-presentations included many more participants. During the year 2010-2011, Convivium had many official visitors and 28 members (registered). These were (in alphabetical order): Juan Carlos Artolozaga (M.Arch.1), Maria Castro (M.Arch.2), Vivian Chen (M.Arch.1), Julia Gamolina (our only B.Arch. member), Aaron Gensler (M.Arch.1), Sophie Hochhäusl (M.A./Ph.D.), Noah Ives (M.Arch.1), Mia Kang (M.Arch.1), Rachel Kaplan (M.Arch.1), Johannes Kettler (our only member from City and Regional Planning, MRP), Bradley Kinsey (M.Arch.1), John Lura (M.Arch.2), Margot Lystra (M.A./Ph.D.), Meagan Magathan (M.Arch.2), Maxim Maximovich (M.Arch.1), Anthony Morin (M.Arch.2), Alison Nash (M.Arch.1), Tzara Peterson (M.Arch.1), Ashley Reed (M.Arch.1), Armando Rigau (M.Arch.1), Jonathan Ruiz (M.Arch.2), Tony-Saba Shiber (M.Arch.2), Mathias Slavens (M.Arch.2), William Smith (M.Arch.1), Anh Tran (M.Arch.1), Julia Weiss (M.Arch.1) and Youngjin Yi (M.Arch.1). These members gave presentations, drew, researched, and wrote for Convivium events and many more students from the B.Arch. program, from City and Regional Planning, and Landscape Architecture came to sessions to discuss and listen. In addition, we hosted research and design talks from colleagues who were not Convivium members or organizers: Chad Randl (Ph.D.), Elvan Cobb (Ph.D.), Nelly Lam (M.Arch.1), and Clark Taylor (Landscape Architecture). In eight events, dozens of students contributed their time and effort to paper presentations, slide shows, videos, excursions, trips or simply to asking critical questions. The topics of the sessions were as follows: 1. Teaching Architecture ≈

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Learning Architecture; 2. Digital_Analog; 3. Design///NonDesign; 4. Ambiguity; 5. Convivium x Pidgin; 6. Authorship and the Role of the Architect; 7. Desire & Architecture; and 8. Sidewalks, Streets, and In-betweens. Further, separate Convivium conversations without student presentations included dialogs: with Cornell professor Don Greenberg on ethics and digital production of architecture; with Cynthia Davidson and Peter Eisenman over an ad-hoc brunch on student publishing; and many trips with Cornell Professor George Hascup, who introduced us to the hidden treasures of the University and Ithaca at large. With him we saw infrastructural buildings, such as Cornell’s synchrotron – a subterranean campus facility that made us feel as if we had been catapulted us into a 1970s sci-fi movie – and the testaments of Cornell’s avant-garde, including Richard Meier’s first house overlooking Cayuga Lake and Simon Ungers’ Cube House surrounded on all sides by Ithaca fields. Some images of these trips accompany the publication. The eight main events and these additional activities fostered the creation of four chapters: New Haven: Authors, Buffalo: Lovers, Back-to-the-Land: Users, and Princeton: Friends. Much of what has been said in the gatherings thus still may exist only in the realm of memory. But these chapters were an effort to at least trace some of the ideas that floated around that year and to capture the spirit that informed them. In editing the chapters, I have aimed to both honor the diversity of topics and draw out particular streams of thought. The chapters’ fragmentary character and their seemingly incoherent themes were based on editorial decisions, but also reflective of diverse student interests. The chapters’ structure, however, is always the same; it follows what I call “explorations” or “excursions” of a physical and intellectual nature. Their point of departure is Ithaca – both in terms of the themes discussed in the school of architecture, and also from Cornell as a place. Therefore, in the introduction,

INTRODUCTION

Melissa Constantine focusses on the intellectual facets of Convivium as a student group, but also on the relevance of space for that endeavor. The first chapter then focuses on questions of authorship as well as digital and analog production that had been raised in a symposium on pedagogy in the beginning of the academic year (“Shaping architects = Shaping Architecture”). The second chapter is dedicated to travel and notions of domesticity that have been a focus in the Cornell’s History of Architecture and Urban Development program, HAUD. The third investigates self-help building, which is omnipresent in Ithaca and the surrounding towns, and the fourth, architecture and the collaborative endeavor that is student publishing. This last topic has gained increased visibility since the re-launch of the Cornell Journal of Architecture, initiated under Jerry A. Wells in 1981, with the editorship of Caroline O’Donnell in 2010. But these explorations were also physical, with a point of origin in Ithaca from which we travelled to new destinations: in the analog world, to New Haven and Buffalo, and to California’s “back-to-the-land” movement with the help of digital devices. Princeton came to visit us in Ithaca in the form of Cornell Professor Caroline O’Donnell, who, as a graduate student, had co-founded the now serially published architectural student publication Pidgin. She had back-up from then current Pidgin editors Ang Li and Matthew Storrie, who drove from New Jersey to Upstate New York to share with us their experience in student publishing. Besides Ang and Matthew, who visited Ithaca for the first time – and started to love it then – the partners we sought out for our explorations were related to Ithaca and Cornell in some manner as well. Mario Carpo had given a paper the same year at the conference on pedagogy (and deeply impressed the students), but he had also taught at Cornell before, and was to teach there in the following year. We adored Barbara Penner, who had grown up in Niagara Falls, for her research on honey-

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mooning, but also for her investigations into couple-hood in the Upstate New York areas of Buffalo, Niagara, and the Poconos. She too had come to Cornell for her research. Although not directly related to academics at Cornell, we felt that the work of Stephen Powell and Louie Frazier from the “back-to-the-land” movement in California resonated powerfully with the Ithaca surroundings and specific interests of students in building smallscale structures. In all of the chapters, the conversation (more specifically, the recording of these explorations as interviews between students and outside scholars, architects and builders) has been the core of the collection. Students introduced the intellectually and spatially exploratory elements of each of those conversations: Vivian Chen wrote an introduction to the interview with Mario Carpo; Aaron Gensler and Youngjin Yi, an account of a day spent with Barbara Penner; and Bradley Kinsey, a narrative of working and living in California with the people from the “back-to-the-land“ movement. The text had to be both a recording of what had been explored and an extension of its spirit, a space for new thoughts and ideas. Thus, as extension to questions of agency and authorship in the digital age, Anthony Morin calls for reclaiming authorial responsibility in “The Deification of the Architect: Christ and the Root of Objectivity.” In “Separate Togetherness: Searching for Privacy in the Postwar House,” Chad Randl extends the Convivium theme of architecture and desire by considering notions of domesticity and couple-hood in the American home. Finally, Margot Lystra reminds us in “The Analog Condition” to relearn how to use our own bodies in an extension of our discussions on design input by users. The body, Margot seems to suggest, is a good place to start reimagining that use. The fourth chapter has followed a similar structure and features three main texts, but they only loosely adhere to the same categorization. All three texts were authored by Pid-

INTRODUCTION

gin editors – Matthew Storrie, Caroline O’Donnell and Ang Li – who explore student publishing and reflect on it through different lenses. However, the element of collaboration unites these works. Princeton: Friends is thus meant quite literally and points to connections between people and student groups. In our collection of texts it occupied a special position as well, because it detailed not only individual conversations but also a meeting between two student bodies: Pidgin x Convivium. Lastly, asking Mario Carpo, Barbara Penner and Stephen Powell to reflect on our conversations with them while students provided introductions allowed us to stress the crucial intent of Convivium: that, as in every trip and exploration, the people you meet on the way become allies or even friends. Technology may have aided this pursuit, conversations can more easily continue, contacts can be maintained, and friendships can grow at a distance thanks to digital networks. But technology alone cannot account for the development of alliances and friendships. It also took a generation of scholars and builders, who believed in the value of co-operation and the need to share architectural knowledge. Therefore, in his commentary, Mario Carpo speaks directly to the tasks at hand for architectural students, Barbara Penner highlights the importance of laughter in scholarly practice, and Stephen Powell explores a movement that emerged from making things together. The title CC: is thus meant in earnest (besides being an acronym for “Convivium Conversations” and “Cornell Convivium”). CC: is a “carbon copy,” a textual and spatial transcript of an original that only existed once in time. But it is also an exhortation to join the discussion. In this sense, CC: goes out to you, the architecture student, the builder, the intellectual, the dreamer, in another town or in the far-off city. CC: is an invitation to participate and engage – Convivium, the event, is alive and well. Come visit us, behind the rolling hills and at the lakeshore, where the winter evenings are

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cozy and the summer nights mild. You might find what we saw: grass that is greener, a sun that is brighter, and a small group of architecture students fully dedicated to producing and discussing architecture as a joint endeavor. And perhaps, if you are lucky, you will understand why on some days with nostalgia and a sense of longing I think less that Ithaca is five hours from everything, but that everywhere is five hours from Ithaca. Sophie HochhĂ¤usl New York and Ithaca March 27th â&#x20AC;&#x201C; April 9th 2013

CONVIVIUM Melissa Constantine (1) In ecology, the word is used to describe a population of species that has evolved distinct adaptive traits due to geographic isolation. A famous example can be found in Darwin’s finches, which, he postulated, had descended from a single species and developed unique morphological features over time, along the Galapagos archipelago, and with special affinity to local food sources on each island. Returning from his voyage, Darwin fixed himself in the new environment of his collected specimens. He studied his birds. A formal reading revealed differences in beak structure, which told a story about time and place.

Fig. 1

“Convivium”, from the Latin con (with) + vivere (live), is also used colloquially to describe a banquet or feast, a friendly and jovial gathering. Tracing a history of the word, we sense a fine confusion of gregarious practices – eating together and happy survival. Sustenance and communication maintain a deep correspondence where one always seems to imply the other. The mouth is a portal and regulates a natural directional order: food is

ingested, language emanates. Yet in exceptional moments when words are swallowed or food regurgitated, or in the common practice of talking while eating, the order becomes obsolete. In fact, talking with our mouths full is a distinctly human thing to do. In other primates, this move is made impossible by an anatomical rule that disables an otherwise agile tongue when sound emanates from the throat. Was it evolutionarily advantageous for early Homo sapiens to talk with their mouths full? Imagine a group of proto-humans crouched on a rocky precipice, strategizing how best to capture the gazelles below. With language in formation, they traverse the terrain with their eyes, elaborating a corporeal discourse. They speak of where their feet will be, projecting future selves onto the ground. A foot is a part of the body that enables our specific upright orientation on the earth, and makes it possible to walk; it is a unit of spatial measurement; it is an accentual-syllabic unit of speech, as in a verse. The foot is our most empirical scale and we use it to measure the world. We have our feet in our mouths all the time. (2) In 1818, Caspar David Friedrich painted Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog. What does the painting describe? Friedrich renders matter at once opaque and diaphanous. He conflates the impassible opacity of the canvas with the fictive transgressability of the painted scene. He constructs a landscape in layers, additively and ambivalently, in gradations and striations of light and dark, lightness and density, stillness and movement. The painting can be divided almost evenly into thirds, lengthwise, as a triptych; the individual slivers of landscape

flanking the figure are balanced, calculated plays of space and objects that move the eye toward the top of the painting, or rather, toward the dissipated light in the distance. And in thirds again, from bottom to top, a progression of elements: heavy to light, solid rock to air and light. At center in this imagined 9-square grid, the figure is a conduit, a lynchpin. He stands with foot on precipice and leg akimbo. Contrapposto. Turns his back. Rückenfigur. A jacket abbreviates his hips and torso; its hem follows a line similar to his foppish, windswept locks. His waistcoat gathers and bunches as on hourglass. The mountains seem to catch him, as though he were on the oblique, leaning from rocky precipice into void, as though the landscape were an immense painted sheet that he leaned his body into. The sheet catches him it gathers and bunches against his weight. Friedrich forces perspective by mirroring mountaintop and precipice, like two arrows pointing toward one another, converging on the central figure. A view is described that extends both onto and through a landscape. This happens twice, once from Friedrich (as painter) to picture plane, and again from the figure there into the fictive depth of the canvas. An axis extends that relates Friedrich’s painterly attention through the figure’s gaze into the vanishing point. With Friedrich and with the figure, we share a space. We are in alignment, yet restricted from the singular experience of each other. A view is described; a private gaze; an intimate moment made public. Friedrich paints the landscape in the aspect ratio of portrait. He pins together figure and terrain in a transcendent, sublime moment. “My shattered mind is pieced together by some sudden perception. I take the trees, the clouds, to be witnesses of my complete integration.” 1 Beauty is precise as precise as an arrow. The moment is not simply about looking, but about an immanent uncanny that observation enables. The precise synchronicity of self and place also annihilates self and place; the figure experiences a suspension of self weight. This is necessarily private, not commutable. He turns his back. 11

By restricting our participation with a striking anterior perspective, Friedrich makes the viewer aware of his viewing, his spying, his observation of someone else observing something, curious about the thing that is not his to see. The frame abbreviates the panorama, yet we can infer the particular perspective of the figure, and projectively imagine his as a view that extends as a couple of endless sine waves. He is opaque to me but enables the possibility of a different view. We share a space. We are in alignment, illuminated, yet restricted and obscured from the singularity of the other. Friedrich paints the ambiguity between singularity and communion. (3) An artist’s precise training in judgment and technique (to derive things that appear), and implicit training toward elision (tending to something like an essence), situates creative practice ambiguously. Though it is usually associated with passivity, ambiguity is a particularly active mode. I work my mind back and forth between appearance and essence, relating and separating them, until, like wing-beats, a draft is created. We fly, or we are lifted by this updraft. Ambiguity un-makes categorical logics that give the world to us and through which we understand it. This ambiguity, always profoundly aesthetic, subtends the revelation of apparent things. It transcends common subject-object divides, makes and unmakes what we know of a thing, of our very self and the thing, and remakes us anew. It asks a question of us. “Our relating with objects opens up the abyss of freedom because each relation is…an emission from the opaque void of an object.” 2 This suggests a kind of freedom not from being in the world, but freedom of being.

(4) Maria Montessori arrived at her work as alternative pedagogue first by way of a very liberal education in languages, philosophy, geography, mathematics, and natural sciences, and later by specialized study of medicine. Italy’s very first woman doctor (c. 1900), she persisted in her studies (and perhaps excelled) in spite/because of considerable gender discrimination. Her colleagues overcome with an awkward mix of boyishfetishistic shame in the presence of a nude cadaver and a woman at the same time, a cast-out Maria spent long evenings alone performing dissections, smoking heavily to mask the smell, and here finding a sensorial, solitary knowledge of the human body. After her graduation from medical school, as she had just begun her first professional appointment, Maria had an affair with her co-director, Giuseppe Montesano, and became pregnant. A marriage was deemed impossible, in this case – Montesano’s mother was fiercely curatorial of family lineage – and Maria was forced to give the child to an adoptive family. Here the overture of Maria’s life, as a professional, a lover, a maternal body resolved in catastrophe – but for a moment. Predictably, it was around this time that she turned from medicine and psychology to an intensified interest in the education of children. She was around thirty then. Over the next twenty years, Maria would go on to develop the pedagogical methodology that bears her name, and this was a methodology in scientific terms. Maria opened Casa dei Bambini (Children’s House) in 1907 as a kind of laboratory, a place for the real study of child-nature, and she herself assumed the role of careful observer rather than teacher. Gifted the faculties of genuine curiosity, patience, attention, and wonder, she gave generously in turn, turned these onto the child, within whom the same was unfolded. Against the rigors of disciplinarity and the imposition of order, against too the

sterility of a too-scientific mind, it was through a compassionate consideration that Maria opened onto a radical question – what shall be revealed? This let her take seriously the liberty of a child, as with a bird, a tree, or any natural thing. And here we find what’s so potentially benevolent about the attempt at objectivity – getting oneself out of the way to just try to see something. The overall methodology was advanced by techniques of the educator such as observation and unbiased speech, with the aim to provoke in the child gymnastic acuity of physical, intellectual, and spiritual means. The space of the classroom became a well-tempered environment for this work. Maria was careful to provide a house for children, hospitable rather than institutional, which meant scaling everything down: small doors, tiny furniture, and objects for child-sized hands. And in this house, domestic chores like washing, preparing small meals, sewing, and sweeping were re-created (and aestheticized, as in a play), seen as opportunities for developing fine motor abilities and everyday life skills. Along with these activities, children were offered “works”: objects and exercises for learning and practicing mathematics, geography, art, biology, and language. Objects spatialized ideas and gave form to concepts. Colored beads were used in mathematics lessons; a child sensed in a very real way what it felt like to have one, how one becomes a string of ten, and how ten times that materializes as a cube. This was a kind of psychometrics (from Greek: psycho “spirit, soul” + metron, “measure”) -- the use of objects as tools to measure intellectual and developmental ability. But as with the attempt to know light by alternately measuring particles and waves, the objects at Children’s House simultaneously measured and presupposed ability, already shading observed phenomena that lay behind the obfuscating body of perception; in fact, we can never entirely get out of the way in order to really see something.

Fig. 2

Maria worked with Italian manufacturers to produce these objects; they were tested and developed over decades, and as they transformed, so too the method. These became central to her teaching philosophy, and cultivated sensorial discernment towards a more ambitious aim: in any object, an idea and an object are united (a transient thing with material stuff); as a body meets an object, these complementary properties become assimilated. But here we find a productive dynamic among object, idea, and self that Maria wisely intended. What begins as a considered study of an object, an observation from all sides, a generous turning over of a discrete thing, soon becomes an engine for sustained contemplation of ideas and the self, and then again to objects. By turns, each does the work of objectness, provoking sustained wonder and attention. (5)

Convivium offered a space to come together to look onto other spaces, texts, buildings, materials, surfaces, places, objects, acts, ideas, and histories. It was a space for sometime incongruent and often meandering considerations on the culture of the built environment. It was a space for discussion. There was always wine. And bread. And cheese. And a tableau of other very preciously arranged olives, spreads, nuts, and fruits. That was always disarrayed in short order.

Each session considered a central question, and each began with the presentation of some theoretical and physical material to generate discussion. In the spring of 2010, we began one of our sessions with a screening of the Charles and Ray Eames film Powers of Ten. The film is composed as a scalar tracking shot that shows the relative size of various “objects” in the universe. They begin, romantically, with a couple picnicking on a blanket in a Chicago park, zooming outward and inward to galactic and molecular spaces. The Eames’ films were based on the book Cosmic View by Kees Boeke, a Dutch educational reformist and Quaker who trained early on as an architect. He developed a school based largely on the Montessori philosophy, but expanded to function closer to the model of a workshop. Ideas of student co-participation in curriculum and caretaking elaborated sociocratic structures, similar to those Boeke had found among the Society of Friends. Cosmic View was a project of this school, and was intended to generate a sense of relative scale and perspectives of relationality. “You continue moving in imagination, out through the solar system, the Milky Way, and beyond to other galaxies, until at last even a galaxy is but a pinpoint on the printed page, and you can go no farther because man does not yet know what lies beyond.” 3

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We sought a vantage point that could confer an advantageous perspective on fields of knowledge with which we were familiar. From the remoteness of Ithaca and Cornell, we extracted ourselves further still, out of the classroom, away from campus, beyond the fields already surveyed. We took our own unknowing seriously. We wandered. And endeavored not toward knowing but further unknowing. Our research always seemed to circle around and return to issues of epistemology, pedagogy, and practice. We came together to try to see. To see, and see again. Each meeting came alive by the specific community of friends who had gathered. After that, as with all spoken language, there was no material trace save our pits, seeds, and stems.

Notes 1. Virginia Woolf, The Waves, (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1931), 25. 2. Timothy Morton, Realist Magic: Objects, Ontology, Causality, (Ann Arbor: Open Humanities Press, 2013), 108. 3. Kees Boeke, Cosmic View: The Universe in 40 Jumps, (New York: J.Day, 1957), 4. IMAGES Fig. 1. - Darwinâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s finches or Galapagos finches. Darwin, 1845. Journal of researches into the natural history and geology of the countries visited during the voyage of H.M.S. Beagle round the world, under the Command of Capt. Fitz Roy, R.N. 2d edition. Fig. 2 - Geometric solids, Montessori materials. Fig. 3 - Ilustrations from Cosmic View, Kees Boeke and Els de Bouter.

Photographs by Vivian Chen â&#x20AC;&#x201D; Beacon, NY 2011

AUTHORS Vivian Chen The decision to go to Yale to interview Mario Carpo was made at 2 o’clock in the morning, one night in early October of 2010. A few hours later, Bradley and I crawled into Sophie’s car, en route to New Haven. After an impromptu visit to the Dia:Beacon, breaking into an abandoned factory, and trying to read more of Mario Carpo’s essays, we had an interesting talk with the scholar that prefaced some of the themes many Convivium meetings would later highlight: a discussion on analog and digital technologies, authorship and agency, and the shifting role of designers and users in architecture. We took the trip in anticipation of a Convivium titled Digital_Analog, which set out to unpack the biases of these terms. In retrospect, we may have defined the topic and these terms too broadly: it may have been naïve of us to think there was a clear boundary between analog processes and digital ones. But Convivium as a whole may have been a wholly naïve endeavor, aimed at producing intellectual tissue through amateur efforts. It was never a platform of experts discussing front line issues, but an outlet for a few nerdy graduate students to display shameless curiosity. Our efforts met with some of the problems many nonhierarchical organizations encounter – overly formal meeting formats despite efforts to keep things casual, a/v setup disasters with no one responsible, and impromptu presentations – yet, many aspects of Convivium somehow and strangely worked. The Digital_Analog session also exhibited some of these aspects. In preparation of the session we conducted a series of informal interviews. Because Mario Carpo was in relative proximity, Sophie set up a physical meeting and asked if I would come along to Yale and later conduct an additional interview

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over Skype. A further interview with Cornell Professor Don Greenberg was conducted by Sophie and Tony Saba-Shiber (but never recorded on his request), and the conversations with Mario Carpo, Jörg Gleiter, and our own Kevin Pratt were recorded and edited into a 12-min clip that was shown at the event. Unlike other sessions, for this event the pressure was on. The event was held within the framework of the architecture department’s “Open House” in the Sky Room of I.M. Pei’s Johnson Museum with invited faculty. The crowd contained about fifty students, current and prospective, and five faculty members. They trickled in slowly, chatting, eating and admiring the sunset over the lake. After three student presentations, as night set in, we showed the interviews on a big screen. But as they began, we realized nobody had thought of the speakers. Frantically we tried to make arrangements, at last the large crowed gathered more closely around the small laptop and listened to the scholars’ voices coming out of the built-in speakers. The edited interviews however, animate a lively discussion by bringing to light some interesting issues: the technological, moral and aesthetic choices that come with the development of digital processes, the ideologies that are married to these choices, the question of whether or not these changes really constitute a paradigm shift, and speculation on what might happen next. In my memory, the intellectual content of this session will be forever attached to the ad hoc manner with which most of Convivium was conducted. It fundamentally served its purpose as a place where young, architecture-hungry grad students could indulge in their search for not only answers but more questions.

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Vivian Chen and Sophie Hochhäusl interview Mario Carpo (October 2010) Mario Carpo (MC): There are two pictures. MC: There is a small one and a big one. You are in the big one, well no… from your vantage point… well, never mind. Now it’s being taped?

MC: Enable? MC: It does enable some new ways of thinking, but it also imposes new ways of thinking. For the last five centuries, we have been used to dealing with identical copies, or stable, reliable, frozen reproductions of all media objects. Think of a printed picture, a postcard for example. If you have a postcard in 100 copies and you send that postcard to 99 friends, everyone would receive exactly the same postcard. That is precisely predictable, because it is the same picture for all and what you see is what every one of them will receive. But think of sending that picture not as a printed postcard, but as ¬digital file, which you will email from your computer to 99 of your friends. The picture that you see, the moment you send it, is not necessarily the same each one of

Vivian Chen (VC): Yes. That’s it. Sophie Hochhäusl (SH): Perfect.

SH: Are we already recording? VC: Yes, we should be… OK, Mario, we are going to start with the first question. What new ways of thinking does the digital enable? VC: Yes.

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your recipients will see when they open the file. Because there are many things that can happen to the file and many of these things can be without your supervision and outside you control. The heart to the matter is, you are not sending a picture, you are sending a digital file, which is essentially a sequence of numbers. These may at some point become a picture when someone else decides to make this conversion happen. But this reconversion of your numbers into a visual image will happen in someone elseâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s machine on someone elseâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s screen and in a format using technologies and tools of control and interaction which you do not control. So you are the sender of a message but you have no control on the epiphany or the visual manifestation that this message will acquire when it is reconverted into the picture. Even if one does not edit the picture it will to some extend differ. For example, if you look at the picture on the screen of an I-phone it is going to have a different resolution and a different format. This is evidentially happening already for all kinds of media objects, think of picture, think of text, think of sound. But it is also already happening in the domain of physical objects of manufacturing. Until fifteen years ago a blueprint was something which was frozen in a document and which was expected to become a physical object, meaning, converted into a building or a physically manufactured object in a predictable way. Of course between the blueprint 22

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and the building many accidents can happen, but the expectation was that from the blueprint you will obtain a physical object or a building, which is predetermined by the notation that you have produced. This is no longer so. The frozen blueprint does no longer exist. Notations are media objects. So we are drifting in space and time, just as the digital picture I just mentioned to you. Media objects are open to intervention, editing, fashioning, versioning, corrections of all kinds which sometimes you may control, sometimes you may anticipate and sometimes you may neither control, nor anticipate. We used to think that in the mechanical way of making things you print things out from a mechanical matrix, think of a book, but also think of a metal plate in a press in a factory; the mechanical matrix leaves its imprint on what you are going to print out in mold or cast. But digital manufacturing does not use mechanical matrixes, does not use casts or molds. So now we can mass-produce variations within limits at no extra cost; there is no longer a mechanical matrix we have to smash to make another one. In the domain of information, in the domain of notation, in the domain of fabrication, the paradigm of identical copies to which we have been used for the last five centuries is no more. We are to get used to negotiating a new paradigm of permanent and to some extent, incontrollable, drifting and random barriers. In part this is already a fact of life. It is something we are already negotiating as users 23

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of media objects, but increasingly we have to deal with it as producers of mediated objects as well. We are moving from a paradigm of frozen identicality to a paradigm of drifting variability. It is an epoch-making “paradigm shift” – excuse me the banality of the reference within the quotation mark. Simply put the habits which were assimilated and integrated in the course of the last five centuries of mechanical technologies, do not apply anymore. For better or for worse.

MC: I don’t know if it is an achievement. “Achievement” implies a positive [connotation], as if it were something we wanted. I do not know if the inventors of digital tools had this in mind. It is simply happening. And for better or for worse, if we consider it an achievement, or if we consider it an accident, we should have to deal with it, because it is inherent in the new technical logic of digital tools.

MC: This follows logically from what I was saying; when so many variations can happen, they happen by chance, by design, or by something in-between. If variability is an inevitable, quintessential component of digital making, then you can try to design variability to remain in charge, but you will only control partially, not entirely. You can try to fight against it and keep a maximum of control, but in 24

SH: Would you say this is the biggest achievement in digital ways of producing?

SH: For our Convivium session the question of authorship is paramount. How does the role of authorship change with digital production?

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my opinion this is a loosing battle, because you are going to invest a lot of energy, trying to control something, which you cannot control. The genie is already out of the bottle. This is where we are moving out of the traditional humanistic early modern, modern and modernistic notion of authorship to a new more general, more generic and more vague notion of agency. To some extend it is a form of negotiated authorship because it takes into account that something unpredictable will happen. We may try to still be in charge, even though we know that at some point someone else will step in and do something that we may not approve. Think of being the author of a Wikipedia entry as a metaphor. What does that mean? You create the entry, you make it today, but when you check it tomorrow, it will be something else. You may try to remain in charge as the curator of the entry for as long as your time, but there will always be someone stepping in, making changes that you not approve. Unless you freeze that entry which Wikipedia occasionally actually does â&#x20AC;&#x201C; but you as a single Wikipedia author cannot do â&#x20AC;&#x201C; you can only think that you curate that entry. It is like the myth of Sisyphus. The heart of the matter, the long and the short of it, is that from the Renaissance we have been used to working in the domain of architecture under the Albertian paradigm; the idea which Alberti invented in 1452 was revolutionary at the time, because he was fighting 25

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against medieval collaborative participatory interactive open-ended way of building, which implied that many people intervened and no one could tell who was in charge at any given moment. But Alberti said, “now we builders should become authors as ‘Bereiter’ of a text, we should make a drawing, a blueprint,” – not the term Alberti would have used. When our design is completed, when we put a date, our name, our rubberstamp on it, metaphorically speaking, then the building must follow as an identical replication an almost mechanical instantiation of our notation. This is the only way whereby we can claim that we, the makers of the drawing, are also the authors of the building. We are not making, we are only making the drawing. This is the paradigm that, until 20 years ago, was the keystone of our profession. We did not make buildings, physically with our hands, we made drawings, physically with our hands, in the expectation that the building would be identical to the drawing which we had notated. This is no longer so, because as I was saying in the preceding question, even notations insofar as they are digital, are, in the permanent drift of all that is digital. Versioning can occur, interaction may happen, variation may show up and we can manage this variability, we can try to optimize it, we can try to find a way to be in charge of it – for example by setting the limits which we can tolerate – but it is a completely different authorial paradigm. 26

When I gave a talk at your conference at Cornell I called it a “split-agency.” Meaning there is a primary author who is designing the parametric model. He or she is setting a parametric model which is designed for – how can I say – limited variability. Within that leeway of variability he or she decides not to be in control. It remains open to the secondary interaction, of a secondary author or integrator. He or she will play within that game with the limits that have been set. Primary authorship, secondary interaction, as in a video game, of sorts.

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SH: Mario, would you say that in the realm of architectural production the phenomenon of split agency only exists in unbuilt projects or can you think of a built project in which an architectural office has acted as primary author but has left space for secondary authors to come in?

MC: Some experiments have been made in the domain of mostly industrial design, in the design of small objects. In the domain of the building and construction industry, where we make big things – parking lots, or a shopping mall, or a skyscraper – this model may work in limited ways. As far as I understand the building and construction industry is already actively experimenting with another way of managing variability which is not based on open-endedness, but on a controlled environment of negotiated interaction, between for example the client or customer, the architectural team and the fabricators, the contractors. 27

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But when the decisions have to be made they are not based on the wikipedic model. In the domain of design and construction you use the tool to test the variations, but then you sit around a table. Not a virtual table, a physical table, even though they could use Skype, as we are doing now. The idea is to meet face-to face, really or virtually and say: “listen we should do research, you should do this or would you agree to do that…”, so in fact you go back to the good old time-test model of designing by committee. You use the tools to simulate the variations to test them and then to make the decision, you actually sit around the table and you argue, you discuss you persuade, and you come to decision by consensus. If you think [in contrast] of the wikipedic model, consensus is never aimed at and not even attainable. The consensus of Wikipedia – I use Wikipedia as a metaphor – happens only ad infinitum. Which means if you admit that an infinite number of ineteractors can step in at time infinite, meaning, at an infinite time in the future, you will get the ideal consensus. But this is a mathematical notion. Infinity does not exist in real life because our time in finite. These two models are quite different.

MC: The way we evaluate architecture? [Static and crackling] Sorry, something is wrong with the voice. Can you still hear me? 28

VC: Do you think this had any consequences? Do you think this changes the way we evaluate architecture?

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MC: Good, repeat the question, because I missed it.

MC: Well, I think this, which I was describing, is a new domain that is still something which we are experimenting with. I donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t think this has already fed back into our visual or cultural or ideological assessment of art, which we actually see as built. It may assess our evaluation of a building process in a scholarly way. The iconic building of the digital age which we are being [confronted] with today were conceived with the tools of five years ago and with the digital ideology and the digital culture of ten years ago. It was not about participation and interactivity and agency, it was about formalism, it was about making complex, new untested geometries. This is what is being built now, because building takes time. Before we can see an actual - how can I say - epiphany in the building across the street it will take some time. MC: No, wait, architects, the good ones, are using the tools of today, but the buildings which are being built now [were conceived with the tools of five years ago.]

MC: I remember, this was the last question in your list. What is going on in five to twenty years from now?

SH + VC: Yes. VC: Do you think this changes the way we evaluate or judge architecture?

SH: Since we were talking about the fact that we are now using the tools of ten years agoâ&#x20AC;Ś

SH: Yes, right, so the question is then, what do you think are we going to see then, in five to twenty years? What would do you think we could expect?

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I remember this question... This is where I am afraid I have to be a little bit more pessimistic. In the sense that it seems to me, that the cultural ideological implications of the digital turn have already been vastly investigated. Some of them are being investigated now, but I have a feeling â&#x20AC;&#x201C; which is a bit presumptuous â&#x20AC;&#x201C; that all that was culturally, ideological, and intellectually stimulating in the digital turn has to some extent already been investigated or is being investigated now. This is presumptuous, because I cannot anticipate the next technical tsunami, which may be, for all we know, around the corner. We do not know until it happens. But if I have to extrapolate from the last fifteen years to anticipate the next fifteen years, my feeling is that the cultural, ideological and aesthetical implications of the digital turn that we could anticipate have already been anticipated. I am being presumptuous, because I am assuming that we can see into the future, I am being pessimistic, because no major technological occurrence or revolution may be around the corner, but I may be disproven tomorrow. If we could argue that cultural implications or technological developments or aesthetical consequences have already been investigated, what is going to happen in the next ten or fifteen years is just implementation. That which is now experimental will become mainstream. This going to be intellectually far less exciting 30

than the last fifteen years. In the past ten or fifteen year we have been theoretically constructing a new paradigm and now, more or less, I think we know what it is about. Most likely we will only say “you see, this is exactly what we had anticipated.” This intellectually speaking is not exciting. So, if that is the case, we have reason to be pessimistic because it would imply that all the intellectual excitement is over. Now the technologists, the bureaucrats, can take over, they can actually make this happen. This is good. This is what we have been working for. But the intellectual excitement is probably going to be in decline, because implementation is never as exciting as discovery. I sincerely hope, that another unpredictable turn is around the corner, but to be honest, I cannot see it coming. Let’s hope I am wrong. Cross fingers!

MC: Well, we have already gone through different stages of the digital turn. The 1990s were mostly about the making of geometrical complexity. Liberation of huge repertoires of forms, which could not have been notated and which could have probably not been built prior to the digital turn. Therefore, in the 1990s we were experiencing a formal revolution; the making of forms, which almost over night were possible. The excitement was widespread and perfectly warranted. Before the digital turn such forms were not completely impossible, but they were not mass-producible.

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VC: Can you just clarify that hypothesis; what is this intellectual definition of the digital?

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The formal excitement of the 1990s was about this new repertoire of geometries and of non-geometrical objects, or the buildablity of free form. That was a complete break in the western tradition from the end of the Middle Ages till 1990. Then [the possibility of building complex geometries] merged into the perception that we could mass-produce variation at no extra costs. This was the end of the 20th century of paradigm of standardization. The soul of the 20th century was about the morality of standardization. At some point in the late 1990s we discovered that this morality did not apply any more. It was of course still an ideological choice, but it was technologically warranted. Throughout the 20th century standardization was a moral imperative. Considering the mechanical technology of the 20th century we had to standardize, to produce better and cheaper goods, for more people. In the 1990s we discovered that this was no longer the case. We could produce and massproduce variation without paying a supplement for it. The paradigm that standardization was a money saver and customization was a money waster was simple not true any more. The 20th century was turned upside down. All the tenants, all the principles â&#x20AC;&#x201C; technological, aesthetic, moral â&#x20AC;&#x201C; of the 20th century simply became technologically irrelevant almost overnight. Now we are discovering that the century-old Albertian 32

paradigm of authorship in architectural design may also be on the way [out](claps in excitement). We used to make a notation and expected that notation to be built without any change. If someone changed it, we could sew him or her, because, authorization may only come from the author, within the same work. Now we are discovering that even the idea that no one should be authorized to change an authorial notation may be banished in a new and untested universal participatory agency. If you put all this into a pot – we shake up formal revolution, non-standard technological breakthrough and the banishing of authorship – and mix it into a bottle, we do not know what is going to happen, but we know something is going to happen. We do not know which kind of cocktail we are going to get - we do not even know if we are going to like that drink - but I do think the ingredients are on the table. Many architects, I have the feeling, may not like the drink at all. Again, I could be wrong. Because if it is true that no more new ingredients are going to be discovered, then as a scholar I have to complain and say, “this is becoming boring, the excitement of discovery is over and now it is becoming a bit too predictable.” As I said, implementation is never as exciting intellectually as discovery.

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SH: Mario, I have one very short follow up question, then one that might be longer. Would you say, that before the 1990s, which were about making form and the making of a 33

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MC: Imaging? You mean within the digital environment?

MC: Yes, this is a very good point, and in fact I should have mentioned it. Architecture is based on images, or it has been at least since the Albertian turn. Medieval master builders did not work based on images. They were craftsmen; they made things. They did not know to make a drawing prior to building or to construction. They made them with their own hands. But since the Renaissance and the humanistinvented notion that architects do not make things, architecture has become the quote unquote â&#x20AC;&#x153;art of drawing.â&#x20AC;? The tools of our trade became pencils, not clay and stone. This has been the case, as I was saying, until very recently. But there are two classes of drawings, which we as architects, have dealt with from the Albertian turn until fifteen years ago. On one hand, there are drawings which are representational, renderings for example, which are just pictures. You make these pictures to document a building, as it stands, to make it known to other people. In this manner you give an anticipation of a building, which you have in mind and which is not yet built to persuade the client, the customer or 34

great complexity of form, there was a phase of just imaging? SH: Yes. We talked to [Cornell Professor] Don Greenberg yesterday and from the interview with him we find that for architecture the phase of imaging in the 1970s and the 1980s has been important also for that we can finally make form.

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a banker who has to pay for it. These are realistic-simulation drawings, which have the purpose to emulate reality; to capture it, if the building is already built, or to anticipate it, if the building is still a blueprint. This one class of drawing, which I would call realistic renderings â&#x20AC;&#x201C; never mind if they are representations of something that already exists or the anticipation of something that will exist at some point in the future. But architects since the Renaissance have also used another category of drawings, which are not realistic at all; these are notations. They are construction drawings, which are technical tools of a highly formalized language. They do not make much sense for someone who is not a technician, but they are meant to convey all the information and all the measurements the builders will need to make a building work. They are not realistic at all. They are meant to convey they same technical information to all users. Otherwise they do not work. It is true that in the course of the digital turn realistic renderings or simply images were digitized well ahead. Therefore the digital revolution affected first pure images. Later on notational construction drawings, which are much more complex media objects, emerged. I want you to bear in mind the overarching complexity; Defying to digitize a picture, a photograph is a small one. But digitizing a blueprint is huge. It makes sense that the digital turn therefore impacted architecture first in the domain of photographs and realistic renderings 35

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and at a later point in time, notations, technical information or construction drawings. The revolution started to invade like a Leviathan.

MC: Excuse me, who said that? Who is the source? MC: Oh, my friend.

MC: Formally or process like? Because we have been talking about two different categories here: the making of form and the process whereby form is made.

SH: My other question is, Jörg Gleiter (static and crackling) mentioned in another interview we conducted, that he thinks some main intellectual concerns already predated the digital, but were appropriated in the debate. He said he still waits to see when the digital coins its own concerns. So if I understand that correctly… SH: Jörg Gleiter said that. SH: Yes, so if I understand Jörg Gleiter correctly, for one, that would mean that forms that already appeared in the 1960s were picked up again in the late 1980s and the 1990s when architects finally had the tools to make what they already conceived in the 1960s. But he also said, that many of the core theoretical underpinnings preexisted as well. The notion of the author was seriously taken in question, for example, or themes such as difference and repetition. Such themes were already there and then they were picked up again and re-discussed. He also says, he is still waiting to see a new topic emerge that completely derives from what we can do in the digital realm.

MC: Well, it applies to both, actually. Meaning participation has been a hot topic well ahead and before digital tools came about. In the 1960s and the 1970s many socialist and communist architects in Western Europe thought of participation as an ideological solution to the problem of design. Giancarlo De Carlo is a famous case in point. He tried to implement a participators’ design process in the 1960s and 1970s out of ideological motivation. If he had to build a housing project for tenants, he tried to elicit from the forthcoming tenants what the project would require. The idea was that the architect was just the technical interpreter of a set of desires that came out of endless meetings where everyone was smoking cigarettes. After six or seven hours people could not breathe and see one another any more because there was smoke everywhere. That was the idea of a meeting in the 1960s and 1970s (actually I don’t know about the 1960s, I was not there, but I know about the 1970s, people were still smoking like crazy). In any case, this idea was ideologically motivated. Therefore, can we claim a continuity between the participation which is now happening in the digital domain and the participation that many socialist architects in Italy, in Europe and elsewhere were trying to implement in the 1960s and 1970s? There was a trend even in America for participatory design,

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SH: I don’t know if Jörg Gleiter was referring to process or form. What do you think, you know him better?

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which, by the way, at the very beginning of the digital turn was still called “cybernetic.” The first book of a digital pioneer was The Architecture Machine by Nicholas Negroponte in 1970. He was actually – that is indeed the connection I was looking for – suggesting that at some point, the computer would be the tool that would enable activists to translate desires emerging from meetings and committees into actual forms, which could be notated. He was anticipating the day when the computer would become the universal design assistant whereby a committee of non-architects would actually make an architectural design. This was science fiction in 1970 but one could argue that something similar may be happening now, confined significantly not to the end-users, but to teams of highly trained technical participants in the design process. For example, BIM, “Building Information Modeling,” is now used, to make an interaction possible, between the client, the architect and the builders. They are not thinking of asking the tenants, but they are asking ten different types of engineers; one in charge of air-conditioning, one in charge of plumbing, electricity, et cetera. So yes, there is a continuity and there is even a continuity even in the domain of form. Because, as we know, the digital turn in the way it happened in the 1990s was an evolution of Deconstructivism. One could argue that without Peter Eisenman deconstructivist interpretation 38

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of Derrida, the subsequent interpretation of the Deleuzian turn could not have happened in the way it happened. Precisely because of the way it happened during the 1990s, computers were seen as tools for making blobs, meaning curvilinear, continuous, smooth surfaces. Technologically this does not make much sense from far away. Computers have no aesthetical preference. If you ask a computer, if it prefers a blob or a box, the computer has no opinion. You can use a computer to make a blob in the same way you can use a computer to make a box. You can make a computer to make a spline, you can make a computer to make a line. Why is it then, that in the 1990s the avant-garde uses computers to make mostly smooth surfaces? Why is it that in the 1990s there was a widespread consensus that digital design was about making complex geometries and curvilinear smooth surfaces? It is because this emerged out of the Derridian and then Deleuzian connection. So there is a cultural trend, which extends into the digital turn, but it was born well ahead of it. This is a story, which can be historically reconstructed and even deconstructed, it can be recounted. It has to do mostly with – well, to be honest – Peter Eisenman. Between the mid-1980s and the mid-1990s, this is where most of this cross-fertilization and hybridization between European – mostly French philosophy – and American design processes happened. I think it is true, one could 39

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argue, with good arguments, that the digital turn happened the way it happened, because it came out of a deconstructivist philosophy of design. MC: Thank you.

MC: It is surprising that all of these faces are still on the screen. The last time, I did some video conference in 2003 it was still a very laborious technology. There was a huge TV and it was done with Satellite between Europe and America and it cost about 5,000 USD per hour. It is good to know technology is still advancing.

MC: Costs nothing right!?

VC: Thank you so much Mario, this was very helpful. SH: Yes, thank you so much, we are happy, this worked out so well and I am sorry that there were some technological problems in setting this up.

SH and VC: (laughing) SH: It is wonderful that we can have you here. SH: Costs nothing.

POSTSCRIPT Mario Carpo This conversation took place in the fall of 2010. At the time of writing, in the spring of 2013, most of the arguments then mentioned still stand, and some have indeed been vindicated by recent developments. The issue of authorship, in various forms and aspects, is increasingly central to the theory and practice of digitally intelligent design. This is in many ways inevitable, as the modern and humanistic idea of authorship was inherent in, and in a sense made to measure for, the mechanical technologies of modern mass-production, from printed books to the industrial assembly line. But those same ideas are increasingly incompatible with digital technologies, based on variable media and post-modern mass-customization. Evidence of that abounds, from the disappearance of the traditional music industry (based, as it was, on mechanically printed records) to the imminent demise of printed newspaper, printed books, and even of traditional (one-tomany) broadcasting in radio and television. Architecture and what used to be called industrial design (but the term does not apply any more to post-industrial design) are already following suit. Architects have been experimenting with file-tofactory technologies, or digital mass customization, for at least 20 years. But in the last two or three years,

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the spread of cheap 3D printing machines has brought this topic to the foreground, and arguments that used to be confined to a handful of architectural theoreticians have now conspicuously gone mainstream. See for example the best selling book Makers, The New Industrial Revolution by digital guru and former Wired director Chris Anderson, who pointedly refers to avant-garde architects, and particularly to Greg Lynn, as the inventors of this new trend; or see the vast attention devoted to opensourced 3D printing by the Italian trend-setting architectural magazine Domus, under the direction of Joseph Grima. See also, in a different sphere, US President Obama’s last State of the Union Address, where President Obama claimed “3D printing has the potential to revolutionize almost everything.” Incidentally, it is noteworthy that ideas that were first conceived by a handful of young visionary architects, in turn inspired by post-modern philosophers, in the early 1990s, have now become global political arguments. From Gilles Deleuze to the White House in twenty years – this is something the architectural avant-garde should be proud of! Yet, as a foil to the above, also consider the following: many young architects today boast of using open-sourced software, but few or none produce open-sourceable design, i.e. design notations that subsequent users could tweak or modify at will. Among (post-) industrial designers, OS (or open41

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source) means that, instead of buying a teapot from a store, you may download the file of a teapot from a website and then print your own teapot at home using a 3D printer. The notion that any user, including the end user, could customize each of these files at will was at the core of the digital revolution. But this notion has been quietly embargoed, and is now out of the picture. Architects, for the most part, are simply unwilling to reconsider the nature of their traditional authorial privileges. They consider them timeless and universal. This is historically not true. These privileges were invented by a handful of early modern revolutionaries, today known as the humanists, during the renaissance. This idea of creative authorship did not exist before them. As this idea was invented then, it could be de-invented now --for better or for worse. And this is happening, whether we like it or not.

THE DEIFICATION OF THE ARCHITECT: CHRIST AND THE ROOT OF OBJECTIVITY Anthony J. O. Morin

It was Alberti’s definition of the architect as the author of abstract representations that initiated a systemic shift from the architect’s identification as one who worked with heavy, opaque material, to one who manipulated light, transparent lines, wielding omnipotent control through representational signification over the material world. This redefinition of the author, however, was not philanthropic; we must be careful to avoid paralleling Alberti’s elevation of an abstract mental capacity with an appreciation for individuality of mind. Instead, the architect’s capacity to produce a certain kind of abstract image that emerged at this time – one referentially descriptive of a possible object by means of representational transparency – parallel fragments of contemporaneous Christian ideology. The idea that man’s faculty of sight could be extended to include his ability to see through opaque matter, as though it were transparent, is captured in a biblical story in which Christ sees through the back of his mother’s head as she lays face-down on the ground so as to see her face from behind. In his 15th century manuscript, On the Sensible Delights of Heaven, Bartholomew Rimbertinus extends that story and preaches of a miraculous heaven decorated by divine sight and other Christly powers distributed to those virtuous enough to deserve them. This idea became popular within the church and among its followers. Clearly distance and the interposition of a wall

does not hinder [the souls’] vision. Christ could see the face of his mother when she was prostate on the ground as if he were looking directly at her face. It is clear that the blessed can see the front of an object from the back, the face through the back of the head.1

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Rimbertinus’ extrapolative inference is not the profanation of divine sight, but its reverse. A saved man is made worthy of divine sight and the architect takes this gift up immediately. It is an elevation of the architect as the proprietor of matter in a manner similar to the clergyman’s claim of exclusive contact with god. Exclusivity, therefore, becomes the vehicle for the exercise of power, defending its claim by codifying the mode of contact, donning security at the sacrifice of savoir.

A Well-Head, Pierro della Francesca, 1576

The transformed positioning is bipartite; architectural contact with matter is limited to few, while that matter is held off in the distance, even from the architect, and contacted only through representational signification. For both the architect and the clergy, it is their proprietary hold over these declared capacities that renders their status divine. Yet, as we shall soon see, it is the same proprietorship that will, in fact, alienate them from their objects of control. The imperative commands of the Church engender a sanctified lust for progression up the hierarchy and towards infallibility, and the Church’s hierarchical structure reflects this. Desire for stature within this hierarchy has driven society, sorting, striating, segregating and solidifying human beings in a mono-directional flow of rhetorical discourse. But even at the top, where the highest church orators and, by extension, the architect sit and comparatively the architect –

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presiding over their respective disciplines – contact with the object is abstracted, approximate and indirect. 2 Is it possible that the dialogical relationship between master’s hand and stone was supplanted by a form of monological communication similar to that of the Church, abstracting into the distance the entity to be contacted? Perhaps this is the nature of power after monotheism; the level combat of the ancients is foregone for the disparate exercise of sacred power, predetermining the result of conflict by its measure against a divine hierarchy. In our juxtaposition of the master builder and the deified architect where, with the former, the relationship between hand and stone was a bi-directional dialog, the latter’s manipulation of representational lines would aim, through its new psycho-technological means, to strip the signified material of its identity, and ultimately, of any capacity to resist the architect’s dictation. And this could only be done once master and matter had been alienated from one another.

Models of Drawing: Château, Studies of Heads and Horse, Hand, Dog, Sheep, Heradric Eagle and Ostriches, Villard de Honnecourt, ca. 1216-1230

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The omnipotent capacity to objectify matter, control it abstractly at the tip of the stylus and to see through it as though through delimited air, would, however, not come to fruition until it coupled itself with modernismâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s declared break with the styles. For centuries more, the architectâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s objectifying gaze would meet the fierce challenge of matter entrenched in historicized form. Seen in the above image, figures must be forced to contortion to fit geometrical models; the two could not be reconciled without further concessions from the material world. While the architect had gained a god-like capacity for manipulation, his object of manipulation still had an internal identity and thus naturally resisted control. However, once the object of transparent manipulation had been completely subordinated, stripped of any historical and contextual predispositions, 3 the faculty of lucid control over form could be exercised to its fullest.

Counter-Construction, Axonometric, Maison ParticuliĂ¨re, Theo van Doesburg, 1923

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The Der Stijl project exemplifies this kind of abolishment of matter’s prior identity and its return to a certain Euclidean purity, but we must note one major difference symptomatic of the issue set forth in this paper. While Euclid operates in his co-ordinated vacuum, perceiving an abstract mathematics as his object and secondarily generating the proposition of matter, the modern explication of space – built up from point, to line, to plane – operates in the realm of matter from the outset; matter generates geometry for the moderns, an inversion of Euclid’s conception of space, and so all manipulations are made on a newly compliant or “plastic” matter rather than on an a priori mathematics. Soon, architects would take up the flattering position as godlike manipulators of form, generating work throughout the first half of the 20th century in a manner that has been scrutinized as highly subjective. However, this analysis comes far from comprehending the situation, or rather, it tries to grasp a problem that is not at the place in which it has been sought. The kind of “objectivity” by which such critiques oppositionally define “subjectivity” is a hollow word; here, objectivity is used to mean that which is without personal linguistics and seeks only unilaterally understood communication – a gross simplification of a rather complex psychological issue – and so when high modernism is called subjective one actually speaks about the esotericism qua arbitrariness, arising out of alienation, with which one must act upon the limp body of objectified, obedient matter. What has, in fact, defined the great moderns is an objectivity that divorced them from communication with material itself. So, here we must lay things out very clearly. The objectivity gained from the deification of the author symmetrically objectifies that which is authored, alienating one from the other and the other from the one. We have seen how things have progressed through the modern agenda, coming to

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fruition as a chasmic distancing of the author from his work – fully compliant matter awaiting instruction in a lost language. We must now find, in our present time, the place to which this form of objectification has proceeded so that we can trace the continued effects of its progression, its present ramifications and our parallel failure to dispossess an inherited estrangement from our material medium. We currently speak of objectivity as though it gives us a knowledge more communicable to others, one that many venture to call more true than subjective or individually defined knowledge. If this is the case then we must immediately see the correlation between rule-based decision-making and this type of objectivity. It is the formulation of rules that gives us a closed set of possibilities and a clear lexicon by which to speak of objective truth. By limiting ourselves in this way, decisions become immediately obvious because we make finite the set of possible decisions and outcomes. Pairing itself with tactics derived from structuralism and deconstructivism, the strategy of objectivity persisted through architectural discourses of the 1980s. When judged within his system of operation, Peter Eisenman’s house projects are unarguably “correct” and of course complimentarily unjudgeable outside of the system. In the following decade, the same tactics were digitized, claiming greater relation to reality and more precise communicability by a circumscription of a larger number of rules and considered data – a set that aspires to one day capture the whole of reality. That which the moderns’ critics have called subjective authorship is in fact a symptom of the objectification of authorial perception. The reactionary critiques of the moderns have led not to the refutation of this objectification, but to a transfiguration of the same problem that further restrains the author, holding him at a distance not only from the object of his work as before, but now from himself as well! Pertaining to labor, Marx describes the same sequence.

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In the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 he writes:

Laborâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s realization is its objectification. In the conditions dealt with by political economy this realization of labor appears as a loss of reality for the workers; objectification as loss of the object and object-bondage; appropriation as estrangement, as alienation. 4

The alienation of the worker from the worked is anatomically correlative to the alienation of the author from the authored. We can derive, then, a complimentary sentence: Divine sightâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s realization as a drawing is its objectification. In the conditions dealt with by the author this realization of objectifying sight appears as a loss of reality for the author; objectification as a loss of the object and object-bondage; appropriation as estrangement, as alienation. The problem lies in the separation of the author from the work. This estrangement has receded into the nervous system of the architect, hidden its bloody genealogy, and worked from within to do respectively to the creative mind what it did to the minds of clergy, and to matter, what it did to society. By setting the subject off from the world, and appointing the former as divine author and the latter as objectified matter, the architect is forced to hold a kind of sadistic power over the material world: the power to act, but the inability to judge. As we hear the fading echoes of voices claiming the validity of decisions by their adherence to geometrical rules, we now hear, quite presently, the same claims of validity backed by algorithmic ones. This kind of objectivity would not be possible if it were not for the production of one man...

AUTHORS

Mosaic from the Baptistery at Santa Maria del Fiore, ca. 1200-1300

Look at his face. He calmly damns with his left hand and saves with his right, while his gaze looks not at his work, assessing and judging his decisions, but forward, anticipating the next iteration of the rule; there is no need for judgment, all decisions have already been made by the highly systematized rule-set of the church; above him, a miniaturized version holds the script. In the hands of the church, Jesus has become a pure, objective, executer of rules. Could we empathize more?

NEW HAVEN

Notes 1. Michael Baxandall, Painting and Experience in Fifteenth Century Italy (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 104. 2. The distinction between orator and church teacher is given very well in Benedict Spinoza’s preface to his Theological-Political Treatise, translated by Martin D. Yaffe, where Spinoza writes, on page xix, “…not Church Teachers, but orators were heard, none of whom was bound by a desire for teaching the populace, but for carrying them off in administration…” 3. The reentry of historical reference is found in modernism as formal citation and in postmodernism as figural citation. The presence of the internal content of the cited is nearly always lost. 4. Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 in The MarxEngels Reader, Second Edition, translated by Robert C. Tucker (New York and London: W.W. Norton & Co., 1978), 71-72.

Photographs by Aaron Gensler + Youngjin Yi â&#x20AC;&#x201D; Buffalo, NY 2011

LOVERS Aaron Gensler + Youngjin Yi Our journey to find Barbara Penner started early in the morning. Early as in the crack-of-dawn, I-don’t-wake-up-ateight-am, please-let-me-keep-my-cold-toes-beneath-my-warmcomforter, early. But also early in our architectural careers. At the time of the pilgrimage we were 2nd semester architecture students and already all too familiar with the daily, grinding pleasure and pain that studio life brings, but blissfully unaware of the talented speakers we were about to hear at a conference in Buffalo where we would meet Barbara.* We had started with questions. What could a topic as open and intimate as “Desire” bring to the discussion of architecture: Desire… of the architect for architecture? Of the student for knowledge? Of the lover for another lover? And: Is there an ideal space of desire? Who or what is the enabler of desire? Can we credit it to architectural phenomena? We solicited love letters. To architects. To architecture. To space. To anything and to everything. Kitsch appealed as an ideal platform for discovery. Then coincidence struck: The rare opportunity to discuss the related topics of honeymooning, the architecture of love lodges in the Poconos, and much more – from bathrooms, neglected in the mainstream of architectural discourse to the general history of courtship and marriage – arrived in the form of Barbara. Her interpretation of spaces and expectation pushed boundaries. We had only engaged with these subjects on the surface (Love! Bathrooms! Honeymoons! Desire! Spaces of Indecency!) – in our conversation with her we found a deeper, more thoughtful exploration. Barbara’s concentration and hyper-specific slant on our selected subject made her a perfect instigator and initiator.

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Retrospectively, we drove to the interview on a bit of an impulse, in search of an adventure, a romantic whim. Casual forays such as these can so quickly turn into tumultuous affairs and intense interest. We like to think there is something charming and humorous about virgin points of view and improvisation of an architectural ingénue when meeting a veteran architecture historian. Something that is both honest and naïve but also messy at times. Throughout the discussion with Barbara our impulsive questions ranged from dissecting contemporary courting tactics, symbolism and society, gendered spaces, the rise of consumerism and its critical role in the romantic politics of space, all the way to trying to define the value of love. Our interrogations were everywhere, tied together by the simultaneously precarious and concrete threads of seduction and ritual. Despite all the discontinuities and meandering discussions, Barbara jovially tackled it all, expressing genuine surprise at our questions and providing thoughtful and provocative answers. She gave us the parting advice: “Keep that element of humor… [it’s] a great way of deflating stereotypes.” By the end of it, we found ourselves enraptured, convinced and undeniably curious about the channels of thought that had just flooded in. The visit was a half-crafted, half-improvised collage of events but planted the seeds of a fruitful discussion to bring back; on romantic love lodges, filled with haptic, lush qualities and barely-veiled innuendos. The real challenge is to sustain new love once you start peeling back that shiny shroud of first infatuation. In hindsight it seems obvious that we were traveling to talk about sexuality and desire at such an analogous point of struggle in our own affairs with architecture. * “Before and Beyond: Architecture and the User,” organized by Professor Kenny Cupers; April 6-7, 2011 at the University of Buffalo. We refer to this conference throughout the following 44 interview with Barbara Penner.

BUFFALO

Aaron Gensler, Sophie Hochh채usl, and Youngjin Yi interview Barbara Penner [Chatting and clattering of a restaurant in the background.] Sophie Hochh채usl (SH): Thank you so much for meeting us. Barbara Penner (BP): Oh, it is a pleasure.

Youngjin Yi (YY): It is great that we could meet with you here. Aaron Gensler (AG): We are really excited. SH: We want to start out with a question about your childhood in Niagara Falls. When you were a child, were you actually aware of the spaces in your surroundings as distinct spaces for honeymooners or did you perceive them very differently then? AG: Did you notice their inherent sexuality? YY: Is that even something you can realize as a young child?

BP: I can honestly say, not at all. I was aware of them but it was just the background against which one grows up. They were and still are completely generic. They are one-storey motels. Almost all of them have a swimming pool in the parking lot. The only distinguishing thing about them is the neon sign outside. It is real Learning from Las Vegas-territory, completely generic except for these quite amazing signs. This is where they advertise their honeymoon suites, sometimes in heart shapes or space-themed. Yet 55

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they are so banal, you can quite easily tune them out. BP: Two things happened: First, I went to Pakistan when I was 21 where I stayed with a couple in Karachi. Over the living room couch in the apartment that was a huge blown-up photo of my hosts on their honeymoon in Niagara Falls. This made me aware that Niagara was a global symbol of romance. The second factor was moving to Europe where Europeans persist in believing that Americans are repressed when it comes to sex. That there are these zones where American newlyweds go to have sex just strikes Europeans as bizarre because it completely flies in the face of a lot of what they continue to believe of American social mores.

AG: But when did your fascination or perception change?

AG: In your book Newlyweds on Tour: Honeymooning in 19th century America and in the essay “Doing it right: postwar honeymoon resorts in the Pocono Mountains” published in Architecture and Tourism you discuss in scholarly terms the traveling first night experience. Could you tell us a little bit more about that? YY: You say, that it can either be a completely traumatic experience, but then there is also a more positive vision of it – I think the words you used were “sympathetic love”? Both types of experiences happen in the same type of bridal chambers of the 1800s and there are architectural features as well, that embody both experiences.

BP: I came to the subject of the bridal chambers and Pocono love lodges because they are incredibly charged spaces. They appear to offer limitless opportunity to experiment, when they are in reality very controlled and regulated environments, where people were moved through a variety of scenarios. In the title, I make this rather bad joke about “doing it right” – it is a terrible pun but it gets at a tension that exists between the apparent freedom of that space and its mechanisms of control. These spaces tried to control the way honeymoons played out because the stakes were so high; 19th century and 20th century sexual advisors would in fact say “a mistake now is the mistake of a lifetime,” meaning that a bad wedding night could potentially destroy your relationship forever. You could still find this notion in the 1950s and the 1960s. It started to wane little by little in the 1970s and fully in the 1980s, because by that point it was assumed that everybody has had sex before marriage – if not with his or her spouse-to-be, then with somebody else. But in the 1950s, 1960s and even in the 1970s, the honeymoon suite was a frame: a frame in which the scenario could be played out, and hopefully if you paid attention and read the signs right, you used the room correctly and had a positive experience. But otherwise, the consequences were portrayed in the most dire of terms.

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YY: But there was considerable investment in these spaces as well, in props that became symbols for 57

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BP: That is a good question. The history of courtship and love is intertwined with the rise of consumerism. I actually think that Christmas and weddings were absolutely essential to legitimating consumerism and consumer activity, because it made them not just about goods. It also invested objects with emotional meaning and the capacity to bear memory. The classic example is the rise of the wedding ring, which became important from 1850 onwards. At first they were just plain gold bands; diamond rings were not introduced until even later. I would say that the rituals surrounding marriage in particular were very important to legitimating consumerism.

BP: Yes, they are, they cost huge amounts of money.

a deeper connection. I think this also leads into the current idea of honeymooning and courtship, which has much to do with material value. How would you describe symbolic versus material meaning when it comes to love and courtship more generally and how does this reflect in space?

SH: But in turn, the architectural elements that constitute the bridal chamber as well as the love lodges, are not cheap either. The texture is rich, sensually rich, and they are quite pricey. SH: Yet, at the same time the design elements convey cheapness as well. YY: Maybe it does not try to retain the qualities of truly richer fabrics, in order for newlyweds to admit themselves to their insecurities more?

BUFFALO

BP: Oh my god. I’d like to quote that actually! But, yes, in fact honeymoon suits exhibit a ridiculous exaggeration of features, an excessive vision of material abundance. It is like the Garden of Eden. If you’ve got a carpet, it’s a shag carpet. And if it’s a bed, it’s a 12-foot bed. It is all about more. I don’t know that it is really a sensual space, but it is a tactile space. I am sorry you were not at the symposium yesterday, but I showed this great picture of Jayne Mansfield’s bathroom at the Pink Palace. It was her home in Hollywood. Her bathroom had ceiling and wall carpeting, pink thick shag. All of her fittings were gilded in 24-carat gold and a heart-shaped pink bathtub. BP: [laughs] Yes, it was really hilarious. The Chair of the panel said, “how on earth do you dry yourself in that space? What are you supposed to do with this sort of carpet on the walls? Do you dry yourself on the walls?” This highlights that the space could not be more opposite from functional. People have said to me that a couple in the 1960s would have thought of the Pocono suites that they were the height of good taste, but I am not really sure about that. I do not think they were ever really good taste. I think it was slightly naughty, like an adult playpen, and somehow the lack of good taste contributes to the frisson in that space.

AG: Or the quality of the material equals the quality of the love?

AG: Of course.

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I am thinking of Umberto Eco now, who just could not quite believe his eyes and did not know how to deal with these spaces. Now, we think of them as the height of bad taste and vulgarity and I am sure even at the time that was present and it maybe even added to the excitement.

AG: I was sort of curious about sexuality and space in our contemporary world – if it has even changed that much since the 1970s.

BP: I don’t know. I am of two minds. On one hand, in marriage and love, people have moved away from super over-prescribed environments, because they do not need them it anymore. But then again people go to couples-only resorts like “Sandals” for their romantic vacations. In these, often tropical, vacations the entire environment becomes a romantic stage set; the beach, the sunset, the pool. Somehow the entire experience has become the equivalent of the honeymoon suite. So, in some ways these vacations still operate in the same way, and they are still incredibly controlled; no children allowed, no extended family allowed, couples only, you know. It still has the same mixture of ingredients and elements that was present in the 1970s, it’s just slightly more sophisticated and less literal. BP: I do think it is culturally specific, but I would say that it may apply to this cosmopolitan tranche of people, “global citizens,” who aspire for honeymoons to be something spectacular, something that has to be 60

AG: Do you think this is a globalized phenomenon?

once-in-a-lifetime. The specialness is connected not only to the expense, but to the grandness of the gesture. It is no longer so dependent on one kind of environment specific to a honeymoon, yet the specialness needs to be conveyed and often architecture still is the best way to do that – the way to spatialize a gesture. But of course there is a lot of real, emotional meaning in honeymooning, marriage or a civil partnership today as well.

BP: Yes, one of the primary goals of the honeymoon was and is to initiate couples into couple-hood. It is about creating a unified, marital gaze. It is a weird concept: you get married and you separate yourself from family and friends, you go off, you isolate yourself and then you reappear in society two weeks later, as a couple. It enacts over a longer period of time what happens during the wedding ceremony itself; you walk in separately as individuals, you stand there, your hands are joined, you exchanged rings, you kiss and you sign a piece of paper, and then you’re suddenly a couple. The honeymoon follows the same principle. You retreat, you return, you’re a couple. The honeymoon is about couples learning to slowly begin the process of seeing things in a similar way – even if that does not happen, that is the promise.

BUFFALO

SH: And you talk about the importance of this partnership, about what it means to become a couple, to become a unity.

SH: You also say however, that you were pressing against the prejudice, that honeymoons were determined 61

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BP: Particularly in the Poconos, a lot of advertising was aimed specifically at women. This may be surprising, because the convention was, that the husband decided where to go on the honeymoon. But in practice, it seems more likely that the husband was directed by the bride. Therefore these advertisements appeared almost exclusively in brides’ magazines. I do find it somewhat amazing however, that these advertisements appealed to women.

BP: Yes, exactly. Alexander Kira, from Cornell University writes extensively about what he calls the “Pompadour Fantasy,” where baths in particular are associated with feminine luxury.

BP: That makes perfect sense. There were in fact detailed and quite bizarre things written in the nineteenth century about why Niagara Falls attracts honeymooners. These texts are somewhat pseudoscientific and try to trace how the crashing of the water releases ions, positive ions… BP: Yes, I love it, this chemical explanation. There is something to it, to wanting to explain the correlation between attraction, sensuality and waterfalls. Maybe it is because they 62

by a certain patriarchal way of looking at life and marriage.

AG: Such as the heart-shaped bathtub or the giant glass of champagne, that portrays a couple bathing together?

AG: Do you think such sensual, haptic quality is essential in all architecture of seduction? Are there elements that constitute desire?

YY: Wait really?

are dangerous and scary and they heighten your awareness of the world. Maybe because they make your heart race, which is a simulation of what you are meant to feel when you are in love. So maybe it is about doubling your pleasure; you are scared and you are holding on to the person that you love. But yeah, pools, fountains, … maybe it could also be something connected to sound? I don’t really know. But do you have any suggestions? Just be aware, you’re being recorded. [laughs]

BP: Again, this is a reciprocal thing. The Northern [honeymooning] Tour, which was the earliest form of organized tourism in the United States, was a circuit that took couples to Niagara Falls; Niagara Falls was the high point of a choreographed exploration in search of what it meant to be American. The key sites were infused with patriotic meaning. Honeymooners, starting their married life together, would embark on this tour because it was an initiation into marriage but also an

BUFFALO

SH: I actually wanted to follow up on the notion of the sublime. The historian, David Nye, in a different context, talks about the “American Technological Sublime.” He stresses that trough technology the full sublime experience of the American landscape was made possible. At certain points you seem to make a similar argument, trying to tie together the notion of the sublime with nationalism, but via the experience or honeymooning. Could you tell us a little bit about that?

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initiation into citizenship and what it meant to be American.

BP: Exactly.

BP: I think the idea is that you are forging these understandings as you enact them. In other words, understanding the patriotic narrative depends upon inhabiting or embodying it. And this was a shared experience intended to unify participants. To return to your point about the women’s role in this: it is important to remember that honeymoons at the beginning (by which I mean between the 1830s to the 1850s) were taken by a very select group – white, Protestant, well-off – and most subscribed to what was called the ‘companionate’ idea of marriage. While it’s a stretch to say that it was more equal, in that women still had no real legal power at all, companionate marriage was fundamentally premised on the idea that couples should be bound by love. If women still obeyed their husbands, they were supposed to do so in the spirit of what Catharine Beecher called ‘voluntary submission’ instead of being coerced. This idea, that society was forged out of these voluntary bonds of duty and affection, was fundamental to the American conception of itself.

YY: Together though. To be American together is the key point. Visiting these places will give an opportunity to share or weld these notions of citizenship. YY: I think that’s a really interesting point. Could you tell us more about that?

BP: I asked Kenny Cupers, who is the organizer of the conference, if I could go over a bit – I did not want to be a bad conference goer. He said it was OK. Don’t worry. I mean, tell me if I’m making sense at all, because I might not be…. BP: About water, and fire, and air of course [laughs].

BP: Oh that is interesting. It is a tricky issue, because the question always is “where do you locate female identity in a building?” There have been so many different answers to that question. Some people still assume that difference will be visible; “a building designed by a female architect, does that mean it’s pink?” [laughs about the irony of the thought] But this overly literal and prescriptive approach strikes many women (rightly I’d say) as a dead end. So others say, okay, well maybe difference is manifested in the plan in the way that social relations are being conceived or maybe it is reflected in the way the office is being organized. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s and even in the 1990s there was so much fear about overemphasizing female difference. But maybe people are slightly less

BUFFALO

SH: Do you have to head back to the conference?

SH: No, we are so happy we can ask you anything we want! AG: OK, then I am wondering about desire as a gendered theme in architecture as well. Do you think that the ideas of desire and pleasure are different from how women would perceive them, in other words; would female architects design architecture for a place of seduction differently?

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afraid of that now. But how it should manifest itself in practice, I don’t actually really know. I am sure there is no one answer. But in any case, I am excited that you are asking questions about gender because I feel that very little has happened in feminism and architecture since the 1990s. I do not see that the terms of the conversation have shifted, it seems the conversation has faded into the background.

BP: Yes, this is a really good question and it is part of a larger conversation. Many architects actually – it keeps coming up in this conference as well – do not really recognize for example the Pocono Motels as architecture. I do not know exactly what architecture is either, but the classic formulation 66

SH: In conclusion, I would like to ask you a disciplinary question; I think it is very interesting that the main two references of “architecting” the Poconos – so design with a capital D – you give are one on hand, the proprietor that invented the heart-shaped tubs and on the other hand, Morris Lapidus, who plans scenic entrances in hotels and others semi-public buildings, which influence the Pocono Love Lodges. I was wondering, in writing your book and assembling your sources, what difference do you find in, say, working with texts written by architects on desire and what you learn from ephemera such as bridal magazines? Is there a big divide between these sources or do you think that it is really important to weave them tightly together?

BUFFALO

that is given in Nicholas Pevsner’s An Outline of European Architecture states that a cathedral is architecture and a bicycle shed is building. Pevsner is distinguishing between the named product or the product of the named architect and an anonymous builder. This question also extends to the types of evidence you use in your work; with plans, drawings, sections, in short, architectural forms of representation, you are legitimating your work as an architectural historian. If you use popular representations and images from LIFE magazine or Bride’s Magazine, it becomes something else; it becomes sociology. I do not think that these disciplinary questions are often discussed, but actually the types of evidence you use really determine your work’s disciplinary status. This is a challenge to anyone who is working with anonymous spaces, because of the emphasis usually given to production. It is a very crude emphasis, but it still exists in our discipline; how was something produced and what is the creative process behind it? I am on the contrary completely interested in consumption; how was something perhaps meant to be consumed and why was that thought to be important? As much as possible, I try to get into questions of reception and dissemination, hence how do ideas spread and travel? In this conference the question of consumption keeps raising issues about how to define acts of use and what should use be considered as a form of design? Is 67

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the user active or passive? But the crux of the matter remains, what is the status of the work? There are architects who write about pleasure and desire – I am thinking for example of Bernard Tschumi. In his essay, “The Pleasure of Architecture,” he writes at length about seduction and pleasure. It is a really wonderful series of thoughts. In this work, for Tschumi, pleasure becomes a powerful way to attack a sort of orthodox modernism. It attacks an instrumental reading of space and architecture. Thus pleasure, desire, even leisure to some extent, become really powerful ways to challenge the orthodoxy of Modernism in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s. Although at some point, you have to say, when do we stop challenging the orthodoxy? BP: Oh yes. I am. Thank you so much. BP: I would love to continue the conversation about women and architecture, as a future thing. BP: Oh, no, it was my pleasure and the lunch is my treat.

Waitress: Are you finished? AG: I’m sorry! We didn’t let you eat!

AG: That would be very nice. SH, YY, AG: Thank you so much! SH, YY, AG: Thank you so much! YY: It was so nice to meet with you.

POSTSCRIPT Barbara Penner Reading over the transcript of the interview with Aaron, Youngjin, and Sophie, members of Cornell’s Convivium, I was struck by the number of ‘laughs’ that appear. A reader might come away with the distinct impression that our meeting was jolly, fun, and animated – all true, incidentally. Though I initially sat down intending to write a more ‘scholarly’ response to our discussion, I realized that this would actually be to deny the uniqueness of the Convivium format and the interactions it encourages. The glimpse of the back-stage – the restaurant setting, the clatter of dishes, the need to return to a conference – all of this is part of the scene. I appreciated the inclusion of these details also because they seemed to chime with my own approach to scholarship, which has always probed the personal, and tried to understand how it intersects with and is inflected by the public through specific spatial practices or through designed objects and spaces. In this interview, the focus was on the way that the honeymoon tour and honeymoon suites worked to choreograph newlywed experience (though the occasional failure of these efforts probably deserved more emphasis on my part). More recently I have studied the space of the bathroom, a place where bodies, technologies, domestic interiors and urban systems intimately interact.

BUFFALO

But I have also tried in other work to think about how the scene of scholarly research itself shapes our enquiries. Who we are, how we position ourselves, and the encounters that we have over the course of our work are all important. Research is a journey, both literal (in that we physically displace ourselves to visit archives, do interviews, attend conferences) and intellectual as our understanding of a subject matures and hopefully grows. But the messiness of this process tends to be tidied up by the time the work is ready for publication. As James Clifford remarks: “We [i.e. academics] operate on many levels, waking and dreaming, as we make our way through a topic; but then we foreshorten the whole process in the service of a consistent, conclusive, voice or genre.” In its slightly untidy but always generous opening up of ideas and themes, Convivium offers another model of how one might approach scholarship. Rather than an individual and solitary effort, it is active, social, and contingent. The classic scholarly research scene – think of ‘St. Jerome in his Study’, a solitary figure consuming books and ideas--becomes more akin to a banquet: a shared and reciprocal exchange in which pleasure and conviviality are embedded. And personal experience and humor have a place too: laughter in particular is hard to avoid when talking about honeymoon suites and toilets, but does not easily register in most academic work. For all of these reasons, Convivium’s 69

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effort to open up other channels for scholarly communication is exciting; participating in it was a privilege and a pleasure.

SEPARATE TOGETHERNESS: SEARCHING FOR PRIVACY IN THE POSTWAR HOUSE Chad Randl I live in a small apartment with my wife and three daughters aged 9 to 13. The two younger kids share a room (and through their choice, a bed). Our living room is also our dining room, a place for homework, craft projects, games, and for me to write my dissertation. Close proximity living like this was not historically exceptional in the United States, but it’s increasingly rare today. Only a third of American children share a room with their brother or sister.1 Of course some of this change is due to economic factors. Americans always seem to spread out when they have the means to do so. Beginning in the 1950s, though, evolving ideas about the family and the individual furthered popular desires to separate family members from each other. Family togetherness was a central theme of postwar American culture. Individuals were expected to draw a sense of identity and meaning from their interaction with parents, spouse, offspring, and siblings. According to historian Clifford Clark, 1950s happiness “came from raising healthy, independent kids, decorating the home to one’s own tastes, and sitting back in the evening with other family members and relaxing in front of the new television set.” 2 The nuclear family (a charged term in the Cold War era) was supposed to be a bulwark of stability, its cohesiveness a counter to all kinds of threats from juvenile delinquency to sexual and political promiscuity. The prime symbol of togetherness was the singlefamily house. In some ways postwar home forms reinforced the centripetal pull on family members. Open plans merged kitchen, dining room and living room, allowing mother to watch children while she cooked and they played. Backyards and recreation rooms were presented as new centers of family play and relaxation. At the same time, there was a centrifugal desire

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for spaces of seclusion within the house. Parents looked for refuge from children; kids (especially teens) looked to escape mom and dad. Social scientists and other authorities sought to help both groups by confirming that their needs for privacy were legitimate and essential to their welfare. Those in the building field agreed. Remodelers recommended second bathrooms, attic bedrooms for adolescents, and enlarged master bedrooms for parents. Architect-designed homes published in mass-market magazines often featured distinct zones for parents and children. The 1958 Popular Mechanics “California House,” designed by A. Quincy Jones and Frederick E. Emmons, located children’s rooms and parents’ rooms on opposite ends of the home. Jones explained that, “separate bedroom areas permit more freedom and privacy for both adults and children.” Thomas McNulty’s 1965 curvilinear concrete house, showcased in LIFE magazine, seemed at first glance to counter the trend toward dividing house interiors into parent and child spheres. Loosely defined living areas flowed into each other, and the only doors in the house were on the bathrooms and the guest room. Mary McNulty explained, “we believe privacy is something inside a person – you don’t get it or give it or learn it by shutting a door. The children have learned to value privacy. They do not come to the parents’ upper level unless invited.”3 Yet, as the quote suggests, even Mary and Thomas located their sleeping quarters upstairs and around corners from the kids’ space. Why these efforts to establish a spatial buffer between parents and progeny? In part, it was to mitigate the commotion of children who had been give greater run of more open interiors. Authorities like Dr. Benjamin Spock encouraged parents to shift from a focus on discipline to a more hands-off approach that emphasized nurturing individuality and self-discovery. Mothers and fathers were to make their homes more informal, to let children feel relaxed and invited there. Boisterous play,

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in bedrooms, or in what some called “don’t say no rooms” free of fine furnishings and antiques, was now an important part of child development. Some parents clearly had a hard time with the new philosophy, especially as applied to older kids. One frazzled mother told McCall’s magazine, “the bigger the children, the louder the noise. I’d just like to dig a hole in the cellar.”4 Psychologists found that most adults considered the sound of children at play more distracting and annoying than traffic noise.5 Manufacturers recognized these frustrations and touted the sound deadening qualities of their ceiling tiles, wallboards, and carpeting. The adage that children should be seen and not heard, seemed to have been replaced with the idea that children should be neither seen nor heard. Providing distinct domestic zones was also intended to shield children from the early acquisition of sexual knowledge and to allow parents unhindered sexual expression. Social scientists warned that houses where parents were not sufficiently isolated from children could inadvertently expose the latter to adult sexual activity. Psychoanalysts argued that youngsters who witnessed what Freud called the “primal scene” tended to interpret what they saw as an act of aggression, and that as a result, they may not be able to understand future relationships in any terms other than physical.6 Spatial isolation served the parents’ interests by allowing them opportunities for uninterrupted intimacy and mental rejuvenation. Psychologist Paul Lemkau claimed that this was a dwelling’s main purpose. “Perhaps the first function of a house,” he stated, “is to provide a place in which a couple destined for procreation can have a refuge, a place to retire to from the world around.” 7 When such refuges were inscribed physically in floor plans and room assignments, the postwar house was thought to enable fathers to also be husbands, mothers to also be wives, and kids to simply be kids. Parents had a space where they were sequestered from child-generated tumult and free to express

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themselves as lovers. Children could make noise and be free from the risk of seeing or hearing scenes considered detrimental to their well-being. By locating parentsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; and childrenâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s living spaces as far apart as possible, by insulating and isolating them, dwellings accommodated popular and professional calls for privacy. Though these layouts continue to evolve, their justifications are still with us today.

BUFFALO

Notes 1. Sleep and Development: Familial and Socio-Cultural Considerations Mona El-Sheikh, ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 2003. 2. Clifford E. Clifford, The American Family Home: 1800-1960 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986), 209. 3. “Introducing the PM California House,” Popular Mechanics, October 1958, 248; That same year Pietro Belluschi designed a residence for LIFE magazine that located the parents’ bedroom on the upper floor, kids’ rooms on the ground floor. “Four Level Home for a Hilly Site,” LIFE, October 6, 1958, 89; “A Sculpture for Living,” LIFE, December 3, 1965, 130. 4. “100 Housewives Speak Their Minds,” McCall’s, March 1958, 140. Robert C. Tucker (New York and London: W.W. Norton & Co., 1978), 71-72. 5. Amos Rapoport, “Observations Regarding Man-environment Studies,” Man Environment Systems (1970): 10. 6. Carlotte Mary Fleming, Adolescence: Its Social Psychology (London: Routledge, 1948, 1967), 215. 7. Quoted in: James E. Montgomery, “Impact of Housing Patterns on Marital Interaction,” The Family Coordinator, 19 (July 1970): 268.

Photograph by Stephen Powell â&#x20AC;&#x201D; Annapolis, CA 2010

USERS Bradley Kinsey I came across Stephen Powell in 2010, when I saw a posting searching for someone to design and build cabins for people working temporarily on a farm in Annapolis, California. The posting was not particularly looking for an architect. I figured I could use a break from the city and I loved the idea of working with my hands instead of the computer, so with two weeks notice, I quit my job and made my way out to the woods of Northern California. With only a vague perception of what to expect, I arrived on the farm where I found a beautiful wooden home, a garden, and a well-curated junkyard. There was a tranquil sense to everything on site, from the shelves of dried grains and spices in the kitchen to the shed, with walls lined of handed-down, well-used tools. Stephen seemed to have created a physical manifestation of his personal utopia. Stephen was part of what is now referred to as the “Back to the Land Movement.” He, like many others around the 1960s and 1970s, was fed-up with the consumerist drive of life in the city, so he acquired some land in the Redwoods located a few hours north of San Francisco, and began to work creating the world he envisioned. With no formal training in carpentry or architecture but with the help of do-it-yourself publications, Stephen began building. Coming to the Redwoods, I was amazed by Stephen’s refined and mature approach to building and design. It made me question my own approach to architecture, as I was about to enter a three and a half year graduate program, after having already completed a bachelor’s degree in the field. Was there anything that separated us in our approach to design? What difference did years of guided education make? Was design an intrinsic human trait, or did it come about through years of academic training?

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In the fall of 2010, I interviewed Stephen Powell along with his friend and leading figure of the “Back to the Land Movement,” Louie Frazier, with the intention of gaining some insight to these questions. In the Convivium session that followed titled “Design vs. Non-Design” I showed a shortened video from this conversation. What follows is a transcript of that video.

BACK TO THE LAND

Bradley Kinsey interviews Louie Frazier and Stephen Powell

Stephen Powell (SP): When we were growing up many of us began to see a society that just did not satisfy our needs or even did not reflect what it meant to be human, maybe. Many of us grew up in a culture that was so incredibly materialistic; there was a huge movement, a craving, for a life that felt more authentic, and more natural and for work that satisfied some of the basic needs of human beings.

Louie Frazier (LF): When you ask how it got started, I think I would say that we just kept making mistakes. We threw out the ones we did not like and kept the mistakes we did like. Thatâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s how it formed. Experienced building gives you a lot of freedom that people [in

Bradley Kinsey (BK): To begin the conversation, I wanted to ask you guys what motivated you to move out of the city and start building on your own.

BK: So you figured out where you wanted to be located, in order to begin living this way. Then, did you just start building? Did you have some kind of master plan that you stuck with, or did you just go with your land and feel it out and build as was needed over time?

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the movement] did not have. But everyone went along with a primitiveness that was in us and all around us. You know, [we said to ourselves] “we can build a place, we can build some walls and put a roof on them, and – ‘honey, we will be warm when we are sitting by the fire,’ and the garden will be growing, we don’t need much, we got some corrugated metal, we got all that redwood back there, we can put something together – well, it’s beautiful man, it’s really beautiful.” So many of these places are just expressions of what feels good, rather than design, you know, design, quote unquote design. BK: There is this self that exudes from your buildings, which really tells your personalities and the way that you work. Do you think that this has come about from making these building over time? In other words, if you had started building, set it and then left it, that maybe this finite process would have thwarted the life of these buildings? LF: I think you are right on. I think that these houses really do paint a pretty good portrait of who is living there and how they are living. In a similar example of development over time, a French artist went around and put up milk crates in various 80

communities. Eventually, he came back about ten years later, picked up the crates and made a collage from the materials. SP: But what were people putting in the crates? Did people put in stuff from their lives? LF: It was trash, almost. They would just fill them up with stuff. SP: Just storage? LF: It would just happen, they would be used in different ways, and every person would become expressed in their stuff, in their garbage. It is impossible for us to create and not impart something of our lives.

SP: We used to do work in homes in Hollywood a lot, for very wealthy people: movie stars etc. Sometimes these houses would be full of amazing objects, but they had nothing to do with the lives of the people that lived there. They were just stuff. People had hired a decorator to come in, and fill the houses full of objects. Each one of the funny things I have has personal

BACK TO THE LAND

BK: Stephen, you said you really like the aesthetic of “organized chaos,” whether it consists of spice-jars, or family pictures, whatever it is. It all adds to organized chaos. Do you think organized chaos can be developed strategically – that it can be sought after and specifically designed – or does it need to come about on its own?

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meaning. The value to me is the time it has taken me to accrue them and that I have a personal connection to them. It is not just some design. I have never thought about designing a space with all these things, they just sort of grew. They accrued, you know.

SP: There are some people who have a skill and ability for design, but others do not. People who have the skill are going to produce more functional, or more beautiful architecture, or a combination of the two. â&#x20AC;&#x201C; combined function and beauty. If we do not have the skills, we seek out the ones that can create our vision. You know, many of us are not capable of creating the vision we imagine, or the house we would like to live in. It is why we revere certain people who have those skills. Not everyone can be Beethoven, no matter how much you want to make music.

BK: Along these lines of personally designing oneâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s own space, do you think that maybe architecture and design belong to one of these fields that does not necessarily require formal education?

BK: Did we lose something in the practice of architecture today that was maybe there when people predominantly had to build their own homes?

LF: My favorite piece of architecture in the world is the tipi. And if you ever spend any time in one, it is magical. They can raise it up a little bit on the bottom, and put cloth around the inside of the poles so they create that draft going up on the inside of that wall and then they control it with the smoke flaps – it’s so sophisticated and beautiful, when the smoke gets it dark inside and then it becomes lighter and lighter... that’s beautiful. So I guess, I love the primitive stuff. What was so beautiful about the primitive stuff was the way it was joined and the joints really became the decoration… you could still do that.

LF: Yup, I think so. There is a lot of it out here [Steven chuckles]. There is a lot of it that is, yeah, not very good. SP: Well, but I don’t think that’s… you are not making a qualitative distinction. You are asking about design versus nodesign, right? LF: I think I know what design is. I think design is when you subordinate something, to something else, that’s when you get into design. When you say, ”I’m going to do this and not that,” or “I am going to just stick

BACK TO THE LAND

BK: Since this discussion I am a part of is on “design” and “nondesign.” Do you think that there is something as “non-design?”

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with this set of methods,” then you design. SP: I think any time there is an intentionality in your activity it’s design, right? If you are buying someone else’s plans then you are using someone else’s design. But at the same time, if you sit down, and say I need a box that is going to keep the rain off of this area, then the act of figuring out of how you are going to do that is design as well. LF: But I think what you are asking, Bradley, is, “Were things that turn out beautiful designed? Did somebody have a concept in making them?” I think, yeah, that’s really when it happens, when it is better than the rest. There is design and there is good design. But then there is also knock-you-dead stuff. Stuff that really grabs you and makes you get tears in your eyes, because it’s so beautiful. I think, it is that response that we are all trying to get, that vibration.

BACK TO THE LAND

San Francisco’s redevelopment frenzy in the 1970s, with substandard redwood that could In the late 60’s and early still be purchased for $50-$100 70’s, Thousands of mostly urban per thousand board feet from a local saw mill and with boards and suburban young people cut from logs left lying in the abandoned the cities and ‘burbs woods by the last loggers to and headed for the country to wreak havoc on the place. I build what they imagined to spent $500 on my 14x20 foot be a better life. Chafing at the restrictions of a social order that, cabin, which was considered extravagant in my neck of the to many, no longer made sense, woods. they piled into buses, bugs and I had spent 3 years vans, walked and hitched… looking for land in the early 70’s. heading out to the country where Whenever I had enough money they hoped to create a utopia of for gas (still under 20 cents per freedom and self-expression. gallon) I would hit the road, Most of us did not and with my partner at the time have a clue to what we were up scoured the hills of the western against. We only knew that the states, along with forays as far country was where the action north as British Columbia and as was. We purchased mostly far east as Minnesota. On a trip logged out land that could be closer to our San Francisco home bought then for $200-$600/ we went to look at a property acre. Many of us thought that a near Point Arena in southern meaningful life entailed making Mendocino County. our own homes and living as We quickly realized simply and as close to the earth that the steep north sloped parcel as possible. We built our houses was not what we were looking from garbage dragged out of for but the woods were beautiful debris boxes in the cities, from and we delighted in being lost buildings we dismantled, from in the tall firs. Down and down driftwood, or lumber cut from we slid and scrambled through downed logs with chainsaw huckleberry and fern thickets mills. until much to our surprise we I built my first found ourselves in a beautiful place partially with 2x4s and meadow surrounded by towering windows from 1880s era redwoods. At one end of the Victorians demolished during clearing was an amazing house

POSTSCRIPT Stephen Powell

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perched seemingly on stilts. On the porch was a man who, completely un-fazed by our sudden appearance, introduced himself as Louie and gave us a tour of the most beautiful house I had ever seen. Built on a flood plane of the Garcia River, the place was accessible most of the year only via a 500-foot cable zip line. We had inadvertently met a remarkable man. It would be years later that I got to know him. By then he had become a bit of a north coast legend, revered as a master of design, construction, and…fun!!! Honored several years ago by Lloyd Khan’s book Homework, Louie Frazier continues to inspire those of us compelled to make things with our own hands. To make our own homes…to create shelter.

THE ANALOGUE CONDITION Margot Lystra Surely you have slouched in your chair at the dinner table, late in the evening, staring at the shadows on the ceiling while listening to the voices of friends? Perhaps you’ve glanced through an almost empty water glass at the distorted view of the room beyond? Or you’ve lain on your belly on a lawn in the sun, eyes skimming the tops of the warm grass blades before you? You have knowledge that you don’t even recognize. You have been trained to ignore its subtleties. Most likely you sit straight in your chair, use a fork with your left hand. You read a book right side up. You walk down the street forwards, not sideways. You don’t often jump. You ignore millions of your own glances and blinks in order to understand the space around you as continuous, complete, ordered and orderable. You imagine yourself seeing the world smoothly, not in spatters, fits and starts. You don’t notice looking at the doorknob before turning the handle, glancing down at the ground so as not to trip. You don’t see the momentary blackness of your blinking. When you work, you often sit on a surface that is approximately one and a half feet above the floor, with your arms resting on another surface, approximately one foot higher. You use your eyes a lot, and your fingers, and your wrists. You rely on your nervous system greatly: the synapses among hands, brain, and eyes are well traveled. Your eyes and fingers develop an intimate relationship with an image on a screen: you build it with your index finger click by click, you look at it, alter it, look at it some more. To do this, you don’t use your knees very much, or stomach muscles, or tongue or toes. They move, they are there, but they are relegated to the periphery relative to the task at hand.

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The building that you draw, someone else will build. It will eventually get made in the analog world. You will walk through it, hear your shoes on the floors, run your fingers along the walls. You will turn a corner and step into a ray of sunlight. You will descend a flight of stairs into a cold, dark basement and hear a steady utility hum. The practice of normalizing the body denies unique embodiment for the sake of fitting in, thereby ignoring multiple modes of bodily being. When we play along with normalization, we resist recognition of our own visceral, corporeal, haptic, animal condition – and that of others. In this way, normative bodies avoid engaging with the messy tangle of life that is the complex, living world. The result is boring – and it is dangerous. Instead of being celebrated, difference and strangeness are suppressed, marginalized, ignored. For it is one thing to logically understand the plight or pleasure of different being – it is another to deeply feel the ways in which that being is another sensing, feeling body, one with whom you share space, air, and ground. Your body is the vessel through which you sense existence – as such it is the site for developing greater empathy with a vast, extraordinary, endangered, living world. So perhaps you should test the margins of these norms. You don’t need to become a nudist or study contortionism to do so. But you might, at the least, observe your habits of perception and try out some new modes, especially when engaging the built and living world. Dare to behave a bit oddly, and see what you discover as a result. Lie on the floor in your kitchen. Sit upsidedown in your chair. Peek out the window at your neighbors through the holes of your spaghetti strainer. Press your cheek against the side of a brick building, feel its temperature and texture. Take one of your working models outside and rotate it in the sun, watching its shadows shift and curve. Walk down the sidewalk and touch everything at fingertip level, letting your hands collect the data. 88

BACK TO THE LAND

Soft, cold, rough, clumpy, fuzzy, delicate, hollow, smooth, rubbery, heavy, crunchy, slick, shadowy, rugged, warm, mushy, clammy, dense, light, fluffy, hard, round, sharp, stiff, square, dry, porous, sinewy, wet, bouncy: this is the analog condition. This is where we live, and what we build. Relish it. Collaborate with it. Make it even more alive.

Photograph by Aaron Gensler â&#x20AC;&#x201D; Convivium, 2011

FRIENDS Matthew Storrie There is a point when students of architecture experience that all-familiar social compression that makes graduate school seem too small: small in scope, small in scale, small in focus. How often do we find that our academic opponents become, just several hours later, our friendly allies in late-night parlor debates? What choice do we have? It’s a small world, after all. We can only assume that this feeling is a right of passage for critical thinkers, makers and conspirators who share an inherited history and the same deep interests. It’s a sentiment shared by Bob Somol and Sarah Whiting, who declared their preferential selection of their own cabal for the fifth issue of Log by stating, “these are the people with whom we hang out, play cards, drink until closing, escape conferences, plot futures, compete with laughter, and fight with conviction.” We both celebrate and loathe the intimacy of the discipline, but it’s often the social claustrophobia that drives us to seek opportunities to expand our world. When the students behind Cornell’s Convivium began planning for a student journal of architecture, they invited us, the editors of PIDGIN, to discuss our experiences with editing an independent journal within an institutional framework. If only for a weekend, we were granted a reprieve from our own social sphere. We accepted the chance to take the leisurely drive to Ithaca, New York, from Princeton, New Jersey to discuss the current state of architectural publications and the demands of starting one from scratch. PIDGIN is a small publication, and so the opportunity to expand our circle of friends was too appealing to pass up. If all else failed, it would be reconnaissance on future competition. For all our understanding about the intimacy of our field, it should not have been such a surprise when I was greeted at Cornell’s Miller-Heller House by a close friend of over ten years. Despite communicating through countless anonymous organization

FRIENDS

emails, we’d forgotten that simple truth: this world is small. And like all small things, a longtime friendship can sneak beneath the radar. Both unaware of our mutual involvement in the event, we’d inadvertently overlooked the opportunity to set the tone for a furtive, intimate discussion. Still, we felt at home among strangers, which unlocked a garrulous atmosphere more beneficial than any of us had anticipated. The topic, once an abstraction of logistics, suddenly became a structure for developing a coalition among individuals. The parlor was set and for all of Convivium’s expectations, we had reservations about how to communicate our working methods. With PIDGIN’s growing catalogue and consistent flow of editors, institutional knowledge is quickly lost and reborn. This had always been a productive advantage for our publication, but could easily become a distraction for a new journal. PIDGIN was meant to be constantly reinvented, fresh, without conceit, but was beginning to feel stifled by a standard format and was increasingly prohibitive to larger content. How were the current editors of PIDGIN to advise when our personal experience involved working within an established framework? We hoped that Caroline O’Donnell, Cornell Assistant Professor and one of PIDGIN’s founding editors, could help round out our discussion about PIDGIN’s origins and confirm the necessity of change. Call the relationship what you want. Personal friends or professional foes, we knew we’d soon be competing for a voice on the small stage of architecture journals. We left, however, with an affirmation that in a small world, proximity is productive. Either geographically or ideologically, “being close” opens up the frictions, tendencies, and aspirations that make up the content of any successful journal. As Ithaca receded in our rear view, we were reminded that the objects in the mirror were, in fact, closer than they appeared. Best of luck to CC:... 44

HOW ARE YOU, PIDGIN? Caroline O’Donnell “How are you?” they ask me, but they do not wait to hear the answer, as I struggle to grasp such an existential question. Grammatically abhorrent as it is, the required answer, apparently, is “good.” The accurate answer – something that might include thoughts of a bad dream, a lover’s tiff, a delicious breakfast, or life’s trials and errors – this is reserved for true friends. In her essay “Scenography of Friendship,” Svetlana Boym describes a particular kind of friendship as “being molested by the world and responding in kind – by expanding, so to speak, the discussions of existence and by co-creating on the worldly stage.” 1 The “good”-response is absolutely against opening up to the world’s molestation. It is a ready-made polished response that does not encourage any further exchange. PIDGIN was conceived precisely as a reaction to the architectural journals that were available in 2005 and are still around today: the journal of the final glossy and packaged image or text. Knowing what we do of the process of design, this seemed to us like the least engaging part of the work, like the “good” to a “how are you?” PIDGIN, we knew, even before it had a name, would be about everything but the “good.” PIDGIN began with a run, literally: a sprint, by myself and Brian Tabolt, from the mezzanine down to the second floor at Princeton’s School of Architecture (SOA), where Marc McQuade was working at his desk. Brian took one aisle, I took the other: we arrived, breathless, at either side of Marc: “We have talked about it for long enough. Let’s stop talking and just do it!” “I’m in.”

It was that simple.

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Content conceptually defined, we discussed priority number two: size. Small, it was decided, the smallest. But thick. Meaty. Priority three: a name. We were close to going with Beef, although being a foreigner, I have never truly been comfortable with that much-loved American idiom “what’s your beef with…?” Other options like Tiny, Frank, MediumRare, and Asparagus-Asparagus seemed like possibilities until we arrived at Pigeon, quickly followed by PIDGIN. The Oxford English Dictionary’s description of a Pidgin is: “a language as spoken in a simplified or altered form by nonnatives, specifically as a means of communication between people not sharing a common language.” Additionally, its conflation with Pigeon, both the bird itself, and its associations with a low-tech dispatch, was appropriate. And so we wrote the fast and furious email which graced the pages of the first issue, emphasizing “energy, ideas and speed rather than polished presentations” and enthusiastically soliciting submissions by all, of “papers, unfinished papers, fragments, lists, photographs, film stills, projects, ideas, tips, provocations, drawings, sketches, manifestos, fashion, recipes, etc. ANYTHING you want to get out there.”

There was great excitement.

Despite the attitude that “there has been a lot of talk about this, but now it is time for action,” the email was followed by another mass email, a month later, thanking people for their enthusiasm, but noting, frustratedly:

“WE HAVEN’T GOTTEN ANY STUFF YET.”

But when the ‘stuff’ finally came, we understood that PIDGIN was not just a description of the non-linear way in

PRINCETON

which we all work, but that our little journal was like a pidgin itself: many inputs finally arriving at one language. In addition to essays and design research that are, in their own ways, atypical, a number of articles in PIDGIN 1 clearly articulate the inevitable exploration, testing, error, rejection, failure, strangeness, and humor that are part of the process of design. PIDGIN 1 contains many examples: In “Rejected Tests” Carolyn Yerkes exhibits studies that were later excluded from her thesis “The Castle;” Senior Shop Technician John Hunter describes in a one paragraph article his “Keychain for Sejima;” Rosalyne Shieh presents one page as it exists on one day in “Page 4, October 2005,” demonstrating the constant state of flux in which text predominantly exists until the moment at which it is formalized and frozen; Rena Rigos, School Secretary, presents a series of droll responses to her “Heat?” email. Perhaps the clearest alignment between underlying concept and article is to be found in Troy Schaum’s “Notes in the Margins.” Motivated by Mark Wigley’s observation that work in the margins usually remains invisible, Schaum notes that, “the margins have expanded from occupying only the narrow edge of a bounded paper sheet to the infinitely extensive area of the software’s model space.”2 This immeasurable expanse that has become the virtual testing ground of today is concealed in the virtual model-space, never to be output into the real world. Pushing against this trend, Schaum presents some of the work discovered in the margins of his own digital drawings, mainly laser-cutter files, which are not typically considered an end in themselves. Schaum argues for the validity of the productive re-reading of these drawings, both for the purposes of understanding the final work and for spurring the imagination toward new work. The publishing of the atypical continues in subsequent issues with articles like “Dear Architects, I am Sick of your Shit (An Open Letter)” by Annie Choi, Eva Franch’s “Content-a,”

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a text emerging from her family’s illegal transaction of books containing jamón and chorizo in hand-cut voids, Lizzie Hodges’ recipe and documentation of Corb Cake, and of course, PIDGIN 5’s total denial of content in favor of the object, a jarring and provocative non-read. As PIDGIN grows up, her own language becomes continually defined and redefined, but her core concepts hold true. This language is never isolated, but rather is part of a conversation with many participants, all wandering along their own non-linear paths, leaving trails of fascinating debris in their wake. This, to us, seemed to express the true life of an architect or a student of architecture, versus the polished endproduct with which we are all too familiar. PIDGIN says it like it is. When you ask PIDGIN “How are you?” PIDGIN will not answer “good.” PIDGIN will spill its guts and you will like it.

NOTES

1. Svetlana Boym references Hannah Arendt “On Humanity in Dark Times: Thoughts on Lessing” in Men in Dark Times (New York: Harcourt Brace & Co., 1968), 24. Svetlana Boym, “Scenography of Friendship,” Cabinet, 36, 88. 2. Troy Schaum, “Notes on the Margins,” Pidgin, Princeton SOA, Issue 1, (2005), 39.

SEARCHING FOR ORIGINS IN ITHACA Ang Li As the car pulled into the Cornell campus I found myself thinking about the notion of origins. Ithaca lives up to its Homeric namesake as a prophetic point of departure for boundless journeys - from the microscopic shifting of geological formations, to the rapid dissemination of architectural agendas, one is imbued with the inexplicable sense that this was the sort of place where events began. My first introduction to Ithaca took place six years ago, over three thousand miles removed, in the form of a lecture given at the Architectural Association by the landscape and urban theorist SĂŠbastien Marot, who was teaching at Cornell at the time. Over the course of three hours, Marot unearthed a stratified history of a loaded landscape through a series of fortuitous intellectual encounters, introducing Colin Rowe, Oswald Mathias Ungers, and Rem Koolhaas, alongside Robert Smithson, Gordon Matta Clark, and Vladimir Nabokov as the actors of an unlikely odyssey. The common factor that connected Marotâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s bachelors was the fact that they had all spent time in Ithaca in the early stages of their respective careers. His narrative suggested that the acclaimed projects we have come to associate with these figures--from Delirious New York to Speak, Memory--were all somehow the result of geographic providence, that no matter how far and wide ideas radiated, they were ultimately bound to a specific place of birth. I was left with the impression that Ithaca was a kind of predestined rallying point for fellow travelers, where fields of influence overlapped at precisely the right moment to create site-specific canons. After this prelude, it felt strangely apt that my own trip to Cornell was framed around a discussion with Convivium on the inherited nature of academic journals, and their troubled relationship to their own origins. Student publications are physical registers of site-specific events, where encounters

FRIENDS

between disparate individuals are grounded within the constraints of an institution. At the same time they are marked by their inherent itinerancy. As vehicles for recording and distributing the exchanges of a collective, their ability to travel becomes the very means through which they are consumed. While they remain indebted to their founding myths through continually replenished editorial ranks, or a stubborn adherence to print formats, they are also driven by a natural instinct for reinvention. When applied to the trajectory of student publications, the question of faithfulness to origins takes on a double meaning. In some ways, the site-specific quality of these journals is only revealed through their ability to transport the topolitical terrains of their academic campuses, in order to transplant them within a wider context. They are themselves nascent creatures destined to outgrow their containers, and the most they can hope to do is to record the journey. In short, a really good journal, like a really good travelogue, ends where it began: perhaps in a place like Ithaca.

PRINCETON

Mario Carpo teaches architectural history and theory at the School of Architecture at Yale University, and at the École d’Architecture de Paris-La Villette. Carpo’s research and publications focus on the relationship among architectural theory, cultural history, and the history of media and information technology. His book Architecture in the Age of Printing (2001) has been translated into several languages. His most recent publications are The Alphabet and the Algorithm, a history of digital design theory (2011), and The Digital Turn in Architecture, 1992-2012, an AD Reader. Vivian Shao Chen holds a Master of Architecture degree from Cornell University, where she is currently spending a year teaching undergraduate design studios. She also holds a Bachelor of Science in Architecture degree from McGill University. She has worked at Saucier + Perrotte Architectes in Montreal and Morphosis in New York City. Melissa Constantine is a writer, editor, and designer based in New York City. She has studied art, architecture, and anthropology, and has produced events and publications with contemporary art and architecture organizations. At Cornell University in 2008, she founded Convivium with Kyle Jenkins. She is a member of the artist collective Complimenta. Aaron Gensler has called many different places home, and currently resides in Los Angeles where she is a designer at Gensler Architecture and Design. She holds a Bachelor of Arts from Middlebury College, and a Professional Master of Architecture degree from Cornell University, where she was recently awarded the Alpha Rho Chi Medal. Sophie Hochhäusl studies modern history of architecture and urban culture with a focus on history of technology, political economy, and garden studies. She holds a Master of Architecture from the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna and is a

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Ph.D. candidate in the History of Architecture and Urbanism program at Cornell University, currently a visiting scholar at Columbia University. Her work has been published in critical magazines such as Camenzind, the popular press, and academic journals such as Architectural Histories. In her free time she collects postcards and other ephemera that depict everyday life in cities and modernist buildings. Bradley Kinsey is a recent graduate of the Master of Architecture program at Cornell University, and received his Bachelor of Environmental Design from the University of Colorado. He is interested in topics related to place, social engagement, and experience, with the thought that architecture should be much more than an aesthetic or formal practice. While at Cornell, he participated in a number of architecturally focused groups, such as Convivium and Thumbnail, and worked as a Graduate Program Assistant for Cornell Engaged Learning + Research. Before entering graduate school, Kinsey worked on a farm in northern California with members of the â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;back to the landâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; movement. He currently resides in Washington, DC. Anthony Morin currently runs a multidisciplinary practice in Brooklyn, producing work in the categories of art, architecture, construction, fabrication, curation, art direction, business management and development. His practice aims to deliver a project from conception to completion with critical attention throughout this lineage to both design and business structures. In addition, Anthony is a member of an anonymous group of writers/architects speaking specifically with activist intent on issues of urbanity, economics, and sociology. Current projects include an electronic music venue in Brooklyn, a couture showroom in Manhattan, a series of fiber optic tables, and articles for Clog, The Architectâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Newspaper and several self-published pamphlets.

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Caroline O’Donnell is currently the Richard Meier Assistant Professor at Cornell University and principal of experimental design and research studio CODA. CODA’s work is a negotiation between architecture and its environment, exemplified by recent projects such as Party Wall, winner of the Young Architects’ Program in New York, and Janus, a multidenominational cemetery chapel in Dublin. CODA’s work has been exhibited internationally at MoMA and the Storefront for Art and Architecture, New York, Maxxi Museum, Rome, Istanbul Modern, Istanbul, Museo de Arte Contemporáneo Santiago de Chile, the Royal Hibernian Academy, Dublin, Ireland, the Xi Gallery, Seoul, S. Korea, and Akademie Schloss Solitude, Stuttgart, Germany, among others. O’Donnell has contributed to several journals including Thresholds, Log, MAP, and Pidgin. She is one of the founding editors (along with Brian Tabolt and Marc McQuade) of Pidgin Magazine and is the Editor-in-Chief of the Cornell Journal of Architecture. She is currently developing her book with Routledge: Niche Tactics: Generative Relationships between Architecture and Site. Barbara Penner is Senior Lecturer in Architectural History at the Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL. She is author of Bathroom, A Cultural History of the ‘Smallest Room’ (Reaktion, 2013) and Newlyweds on Tour: Honeymooning in Nineteenth-Century America (University Press of New England, 2009). She is co-editor of Ladies and Gents: Public Toilets and Gender (Temple University Press, 2009) and Gender Space Architecture (Routledge, 2000). She has most recently contributed chapters to Use Matters (Routledge, 2013), Handbook of Interior Architecture and Design (Berg, 2013), Globalization in Practice (Oxford University Press, forthcoming), and Archi-Pop (Berg, forthcoming). She is a regular contributor to the online journal, Places, and to Architectural Review.

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Chad Randl is the author of A-Frame and Revolving Architecture: A History of Buildings that Rotate, Swivel and Pivot, both published by Princeton Architectural Press. His research explores cultures of building design and alteration. Currently he is writing a history of postwar residential remodeling. His work has also appeared in the Journal of Architecture, Senses and Society, Old-House Journal and the Association for Preservation Technology Bulletin. Ang Li is a writer and designer based in New York. She received a Master of Architecture from Princeton University and a Bachelor of Arts in architecture from the University of Cambridge. At Princeton, she was an editor of Pidgin Magazine, and has worked in a number of design practices in London, Stockholm, and New York. Her work has been published in Pidgin, Clog, Abitare, Blueprint and Wired UK. Li is currently an architect at Adjaye Associates in New York City. Margot Lystra is a Ph.D. candidate in the History of Architecture and Urbanism at Cornell University. Her current research focuses on the systematic landscapes of 1940s-60s freeway plans for US cities. Before attending Cornell, she was a lecturer in the landscape architecture department at California Polytechnic – San Luis Obispo, and worked for various landscape architecture firms in San Francisco. She has a Master in Landscape Architecture degree from the Harvard Graduate School of Design and a Bachelor of Arts in Biology from Swarthmore College. Her work has been published in Studies in the History of Gardens and Designed Landscapes, The Next American City, and Crit – Journal of the AIAS. Stephen Powell and Louie Frazier live in northern California and are active and founding members of the “Back to the Land” movement. Powell and Frazier have both designed

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and built many homes, which over time, have become a unique community with an articulate discourse on housing and living. Matthew Storrie is a graduate of Princeton University and the University of Kentucky, currently practicing architecture in New York City. He is a former editor of Pidgin Magazine and, in 2010, was Associate Curator for The Architectural League’s The City We Imagined/The City We Made: New New York 2001-2010, a comprehensive exhibition on New York City development. His recent project, Empty Canon, reconsiders the use of historical survey texts amidst a growing popular interest in authorless, unplanned, and anonymous form. Youngjin “Jin” Yi is the 2013 AIA Henry Adams Medal and Certificate graduate of the Master of Architecture program at Cornell University where she also graduated Magna Cum Laude with her Bachelor of Science in Mechanical Engineering. She has assisted in the teaching of Structural Concepts as well as Freehand Drawing for first-year Bachelor of Architecture students at Cornell University. She was the President of Convivium from 2011-2013, organizing sessions on “Death and Architecture,” “Desire and Architecture,” ”Void,” “Body and Object,” and “Open Source.”

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College of Architecture, Art, and Planning Cornell University 139 E. Sibley Hall Ithaca, NY 14853 USA T 603. 255. 5236 cornell.convivium@gmail.com

EDITORS Sophie HochhĂ¤usl Melissa Constantine

DESIGN Melissa Constantine

PRINTING Finger Lakes Press Auburn, NY

PUBLISHING Cornell AAP Publications

FUNDING Cornell Council for the Arts Department of Architecture Deanâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Discretionary Fund Director of Graduate Studies

DEDICATION Chris Otto Kevin Pratt

COVER IMAGE Wanderer Over a Sea of Fog, Caspar David Friedrich, 1818

ISBN 978-0-9785061-5-5 Library of Congress Control No: 201493897

COPY EDITOR Caroline Jack

SPECIAL THANKS TO Aaron Goldweber Mark Morris Convivium contributors

Copyright College of Architecture, Art, and Planning, Cornell University. All rights reserved. Authors retain the rights for their material. All material is compiled from sources believed to be reliable, but published without responsibility for errors or omissions. We have attempted to contact all copyright holders, but this has not been possible in all circumstances. We apologize for any omissions and, if noted, will amend in any future editions.