H O WA R D C H E N
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001 Tony Smith 006 Library
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012 Structural Mock Up 016 Geometries 018 Descriptive 020 Section 022 Iso 024 Composition
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026 War Journal
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028 Precendent 032 Escher
AS VS CS
038 Cherokee Lofts 039 s 040 Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève
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Tony Smith You will find that the instantiation of matter through polyhedral packing, elongation and connection will allow for a lattice that hovers between object and field. This will be a key point of departure for the studio. The semester began with a precedent study of Smug, by the sculptor Tony Smith. It provided an ordering system and several geometries to develop our projects upon. After a reproduction of the piece, transformations were applied upon it’s rigorous geometry to yield a basis for the next stage. With a series of rotation applied to a section of the original model, the transformation challenged the legibility of both geometry and system. Furthermore, the voids of the original model was also affected as the geometries that bounds it are now stretched; resulting in a space with more pronounced edges.
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Far top: 2D analysis Top left: Cross Section Top right: Elevation Left: Axonometric
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Far top: 3D analysis Top left: Cross Section Top right: Elevation Left: Axonometric
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Library To build a bridge between the conceptual work we have been doing and the project we will undertake we will first ask you to use the systems you have been developing to organize proto-programmatic elements in an abstract site. The next stage of our studio was to design a library with predfined programs and size restrictions. Having transformed the expanded model, we extracted a portion from it to create a different relationship between the geometries. Composing the polyhedron, wireframe, poche, and hybrid models, a potential proposition for the library project was then established. Each model proposed something different for the project to continue from; the polyhedron questions void and poche, where as the poche model produces a more clear distinction between two kinds of spaces. The hybrid model attempts to merge the qualities of the two; opening voids into the poche and creating new opportunities for either interior or exterior space.
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From Top: Polyhedron model, Poche model, hybrid model
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The resulting design was largely based off the polyhedron model. Voids of the polyhedron became volumes of the library, bounded by new and existing planes.
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1 Adult Reading Space 2 Adult Collection 3 Young Adult Collection 4 Children Reading Space 5 Children Collection 6 Book Drop 7 Circulation Desk 8 Reference Desk 9 Restroom 10 Meeting Room
11 Friend’s Room 12 Storage 13 Comm. Room 14 Janitor’s Closet 15 Work Room 16 Staff Lounge 17 Librarian’s Office 18 Staff Restroom 19 Electrical Room 20 Patio
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Structural Mock up Combining a basic knowledge of material behavior, product parameters, fabrication techniques and system performance, students will produce an assembly with specific performance objectives and spatial effects. With a team of four others, we took the primitive geometry of a cube to design a curtain wall. Taking cues from a flock of birds, we came up with the design below with varying sizes of cubes. This design became the design of the curtain wall panels, which sprawls over a structural glass wall, The design of the wall panels also considered the ability to control light infiltration pass the structural glass wall. By using opaque panels, the curtain wall would provide shading at certain places. However in order to allow some light through, apertures were opened on the opaque panels to imitate shading provided by a tree.
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Right: The outline of the flock was simplified and integrated to the design of the wall panels.
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Top: The apertures on opaque pieces limits the light that passes through the curtain wall.
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Strategies of Representation The purpose of this exercise is for you to become familiar with the process of scrutinizing an object for the spatial relationships that may exist between its constituent parts. This course prompted students to study an instrument in depth, measuring it’s dimensions and recreating it’s geometries on paper. The drawings complimented each other and the final drawing explores the multitude of relations that can be established. The initial drawing below is an interpretation of the endless amount of geometries that are concealed within a seemingly ordinary object.
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Descriptive drawing resulting from a specific outline traced around the previous piece
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Sectional drawing of the previous work, now revealing the hidden spaces and geometries
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Isometric projection creates a natrual path to explode the instrument
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Compilation of all 4 sets of drawings allow for various new graphical arrangements and relationships Drawing chosen for exhibition
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War Journal I Drawing upon the essays we have examined in class, compose a text which articulates your position vis à vis Tony Smith. Do you aim to “inherit the family business” with a good copy, to “overthrow the kingdom” with a simulacrum, or to accomplish something else altogether?
September 14th I’m tired. Tired of the stench. Tired of the weather. Tired of this battle. The rain is endless, pouring down into the trenches, decomposing what is left of the soldiers in our regiment. It feels as if we have been here for years, struggling to capture a fortress codenamed “Smith”. We have tried repeatedly to overwhelm the enemy with our superior artillery support, but the fort manages to remain heavily defended. Sergeant Fried always criticizes Colonel Duchamp for calling in these pointless and theatrical bombings. There has also been numerous attempts to storm the fort, but every time the enemy managed to send us back demoralized and defeated. We are stuck in this dreadful stalemate and often find ourselves wondering, why must we sacrifice so much to capture Smith, is it even worth it? Going over the trenches and into the slaughter ground again and again has robbed those who make it back of their emotions; they have become spiritless flesh, mindlessly carrying out their orders. September 17th My foxhole buddy Selcotsira saved my life today as we attempted yet another assault. I was caught in a fence of barbed wires, and thankfully he cut me loose before they turned me into a beehive. I naively thought the attack would be different this time with the tanks reinforcing us. I was wrong. Again we were met with a maelstrom of bullets and explosions. I watched a several guys in my platoon get hit by the same machine gun. One of them survived, but the rest weren’t so lucky. September 18th Half way through the day we were ordered to withdraw to the reserve trenches as the Sergeant Major addressed us. As usual we were reminded of our duties and expectations, and Sergeant Major Johnstone repeatedly promised that the capture of “Smith” is in our best interests. This seemed to be a difficult concept to understand for many, but the capture of “Smith” will allow us to establish a strong foundation and continue our campaign. And on the bright side, it hasn’t been all failures during this battle. They’re trapped inside the walls without any access for supply. If we keep the pressure on, we might just win. Also from our encounters with the enemy, we copied some of their tactics and turned it back against them. We picked up their ways to live through this awful climate. Strangely enough, without the foundations of survival we learned from the enemy, our time here would have been much more difficult. September 25th It’s been relatively quiet these few days, without the usual foray of bombardments. Selcotsira and I finally got our first leave and went to a bar at a nearby town. It’s surprising how much of him I didn’t know about, considering that we are childhood friends. September 26nd Today I was ordered to report to HQ. I have never been inside, and to my surprise it largely resembled my foxhole that was constructed from scavenged material. I was greeted by Captain Sant’Elia as I entered; he leads the ferocious Special Forces known as “Futurists”. There were also two unfamiliar faces with no rank and insignia. However judging from their officer uniform, I knew they must be important figures. There were several others inside the tent as well, all of them veterans of this battle. All of them are fluent in the enemy’s tongue as I am.
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We were told that we had been selected to partake in a special operation, codenamed “Smoke”. Before they informed us of any details, they allowed anyone of us to leave if they chose not to be on the team. But they also reassured that with our language skills and expertise of the enemy’s tactics, we were the most suitable candidates for the mission. I was unsure whether maintaining the status quo or taking part in this operation was the safer option. But knowing that we can finally put an end to this fight, I promptly agreed. We are to meet again in the next few days. September 30th The task force for operation Smoke met again. This time we were informed that intelligence has revealed enemy supply networks through a series of underground passages that link to surrounding towns. This finally solved the question of how they’ve managed to maintain their firepower all this time. My initial thought was that we were to attack the fort through these tunnels, but that idea was quickly interrupted by the other officers in the room. They introduced themselves as Agent Kinkade and Agent Deleuze, together they were responsible for gathering the intelligence on this operation. Agent Deleuze showed us a map of the discovered tunnels and pointed out the number of sentries present. There was no way for large numbers of our troops to sneak in without alarming the enemy. We could shut down these tunnels, but who knows how many more there are? The officers then revealed the operation to us. We were to infiltrate the fort via the tunnel as I expected, but outfitted to resemble the enemy troops. They handed us our new uniforms and gear that were reproduced by Agent Kinkade. Though the uniforms looked identical, we noticed that the material seemed a bit different. Regardless, it instilled a sense of authenticity in us. We only hope the enemy wouldn’t look past this skin. Once we got in, we were to acquire the roles of the sentries. The enemy however, would not let new reinforcements take watch without first knowing they can be trusted. This meant that we would need to stay undercover longer than I expected, and will be fighting on the other side of the fort. If we succeed and become part of the watch, we will be able to allow the Futurists a safe passage into the fort. From there, they have their own plans to sabotage the fort and put this fighting to an end. We were then dismissed, and the next time we meet, is the day we begin the operation. October 1st I knew if I wanted to stay alive, I had to become a flawless copy of the enemy. But recently the thought of becoming a copy of the enemy is seemingly more and more dangerous. Not just because of the risk of being revealed, but the possibility that perhaps with time, I may even become the enemy. I can only remind myself constantly what Agent Deleuze said, we must leave the resemblance for the outside, and live from the difference. I must not forget who I am; the copy shouldn’t devour me, but should become a superficial part me. October 3rd Selcotsira is dead. He’s dead. A sniper got him during night patrol. I wasn’t even there with him. They told me he bled to death. Why did it have to be him? October 4th The Military Police will be confiscating all our personal belongings within an hour: Writings, photos, magazines, everything. Our disguised transport vehicle has also arrived. This is it, we’re leaving tonight. We will succeed. In the end we will triumph from all the experiences we have acquired. We will be pushed from necessity to alter our nature and in the end, there will be no hint of the copies we have fostered within us. We will become the transformed reproduction of ourselves.
Benjamin, W. (1935). The word of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. Deleuze, G., & Krauss, R. (1983, October). Plato and the Simulacrum. The MIT Press, pp. 45-56. Fried, M. (1967). Art and Objecthood. Artforum. Greenberg, C. (1939). The Collected Essays and Criticism. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Rowe, C. (1947). The mathematics of the Ideal Villa. Architectural Review.
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Precedent To build a bridge between the conceptual work we have been doing and the project we will undertake we will first ask you to use the systems you have been developing to organize proto-programmatic elements in an abstract site. House Na, by Sou Fujimoto has an incredibly sophisticated spatial organization. By establishing over twenty floorplates framed with glass walls, the house redefines how one perceives their activities and understanding of the norm. Aside from the varying heights, the sptial overlay is reinforced with the lack of boundaries of the interior spaces. Those boundaries are merely thresholds marked by simple rectangular pillars that supports each floor. Despite the transparency of the house, the architect still organized the spaces to promote some level of privacy. Most of the public and open spaces faces south , where the busy street lies. The private areas are tucked in the back of the building where the few solid structural walls are located. Sou Fujimoto wanted to let the inhabitants experience what it would be like to live in a tree; thus like a tree, there is only one defined path to travel from the entrance to the highest level. Along this path, it is also psosible to branch out to explore all the other spaces.
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Left: Plan shows the abundant of spaces in such a limited area, the repeated size of floorplates is also evident here
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Escher After completing our case studies and analysis of 52 house precedents, you are now poised to begin to work on your main studio project, a house on a reservoir. You project should aim to be a speculative architectural proposal. The approach to beginning the project started with M. C. Escher. The Square Limits was extremely interesting as a single piece of work managed to convey an incredible amount of ordering system and patterns of figure. Thus with this project I wanted to explore how this layering of figure and transformation can result in differing level of interpretation in both form and space. Using the figures from the drawing, they opened up the series of walls with irregular gaps. Making the originally opaque walls have some transparency throughout the whole house. The transparency of these walls then provides different readings of the same space from various perspectives. Then by applying a sequence of transformation to the strips, volumes can then be shaped as the thresholds of the interior partitions are now formed. These volumes, like the walls, are kept open to produce an unclear perception of it’s boundaries. The envelope of the house also opens up framed views of the interior, and because of the limited views, it further produces different interpretations of the house,
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Left: Site located within close proximity of a lake. Top(from left): ground, 2nd 3rd levels
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Cherokee Lofts The expectation for the final presentation boards is that each group will integrate their concepts for air, sound, and light into a total solution for their given building Located on Fairfax and Melrose Avenue is Pugh + Scarpa’s Cherokee Loft. Due to it’s close proximity to such a busy street, the complex is exposed to constant traffic noise that disturbs the courtyard space. The concrete courtyard is also subject to direct sunlight, which translates to significant solar heat gains during the hot summer months. This condition is especially evident between 11am to 3pm, when sunlight compeltely fills the courtyard. The lack of greenery or any other interventions also eliminates any means to provide shade or to trap cool air. Our proposal for the public space is with a system of transparent tubes that are mounted high in the courtyard area There will be three types of tubes which each addresses a problem spot. These tubes will also extend into the interior rooms and provide other functions.
Different scenario showing the lack of light at night, wind direction, and solar heat gain
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A B C
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A. 10” diameter Tube B. Philips SMP fixture C. T8 LED lamps 48” D. Removable cover
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A. 10” diameter Tube B. Water supply pipe C. Vegetation D. Soil and planting bag E. Nutrients F. Drainage
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A. 10” diameter Tube B. Frame to secure fibres C. Optical fiber
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Having addressed air and light, we aim to reduce the noise that is transmitted to the courtyard from the surrounding neighbourhood. Our proposal to reduce sound levels isto fit the panels at each end with a double glazing system.
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CS Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève A formal history is not necessarily as involved with geographical or regional specifics, archeological evidence, cultural background, symbolsm, culturalexpression or meaning – but these may be significantly related to the physical object of the project studied, if that.
Envelope & Form Sitting on the north flank of the Place du Panthèon, was the extremely long and narrow site on which Labrouste could finally build his library. The building is approximately 278 by 69 feet, established on a grid of 13 feet 11 inches on-center. Labrouste wanted to disconnect from other buildings physically to have the most suggestive characteristics, and to maintain every element within a simple and unified volume. Thus, the library became the “first library building in France designed to be a complete and independent unit.” The clear shape of a box allowed the façade produced a clear line of boundary, a frontier against the streets. The narrowness of the site also quickly led Labrouste to his “parti of a long narrow rectangle encased by a double tier of continuous closed arcades that are self-buttressing.” There were plans initially that would have created a transitional space before users entered the library. Labrouste wanted for a garden “planted with big trees and decorated statues,” to prepare the people visiting for contemplation and also provide shelter from noise. However the constricted site meant that such a garden would not have been possible. The more familiar interpretation of the building’s form was that it is aimed towards functional and structural rationalism. According to this view, the building has been reduced into a simple box, leaving exposed the iron columns to divide the interior. The library, in Giedion’s analysis, was also seen as the ur-building of the modern period, an “independent framework of iron, elegant and poised albeit encased still within a masonry carcass.” However, Bressani and Grignon believes that measuring the building in “terms of function is hardly tenable…that Labrouste’s so-called rationalism is part of a rhetorical stratagem that operates within the same expanded notion of artistic creation as that developed by romantic authors.” The exterior walls were designed to be in parallel with the society which is dominated by the printed word. As such, the façade was to be read like a catalogue consisting of all the authors that could be found inside. The walls were inscribed with 810 names, and translated the exterior with “absolute fidelity the interior arrangement.” Levine suggests that these inscriptions “became the principal exterior decoration of the library… [and] not the Order.” It also supplements his proposition that the library was the first “French building to discard the Order, or any of its surrogate forms, as the means for ordering a building,” There were also references of the library resembling a chest box or tomb with a hole punctured by looters. The tomb became a suitable metaphor as books conceal a world separate from that of the living. Building off this reading, the aforementioned garden becomes a little bit of earth that Labrouste had described as an essential element of his archetypal tomb. The names on the wall, arranged in sets of thirty under the twenty seven arches are undoubtedly funerary as well. As Levine has noted, the correlation between the library and Hugo’s novel sets an overall theme for the library; like the novel, it is a universe that unfolds in unforeseeable ways, and becomes increasingly complex the further it is explored.
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Interpretations Hanser’s explanation of the library is that all ornament was to be absent from the building to help the public understand its function; rendering Labrouste’s intentions with “characteristics of most modern, twentieth-century architecture.” Craig similarly, saw Labrouste as one who achieved such a “new synthesis by transcending formal considerations of the builder’s art… [and become] for us, pioneer modernists.” The builder’s art, or in Levine’s words, “engineer’s aesthetics” was what many historians saw as a “rejection of the idea of classicizing pomposity.” Levine however, saw this correlation as disassociating Labrouste’s library from its more ornate contemporaries, and positions it falsely in opposition to them. Grieder’s investigation into the neo-Grec movement suggests Labrouste’s library was “the best type of neo-Grec while it paradoxically lacks any Greekness in its structure or its system of design.” She references Levine’s proposal that Labrouste “perceived the process of design as the decoration of construction…thus Levine sees as the style’s first construction Labrouste’s Bibliothèque SainteGeneviève.” On the other hand, Levine states that the library was Labrouste’s response to Hugo’s condemnation of architecture’s death; that architecture could no longer be a full expression of the aims and beliefs of a society. Hugo wrote “The book will kill the building…the printed book, the building’s cankerworm, now sucks and devours it...And from now on…architecture…will submit to the law of literature which literature first took from it.” signifying that architecture, which was once humans primary expression of artistic will, is now dethroned by the book. According to Hugo, architecture is durable but the book, due to its reproduction, is immortal. Thus Levine proposes Labrouste was developing a new kind of architectural expression, one that responds to the public that is dominated by the printed word. Where architecture is not felt by the body but read. Though Levine Recognized the motifs between Hugo’s novel and the library, his arguments remains set within a narrowly realist understanding of the building. Bressani and Grignon further examines with specific parallels between Hugo’s novel and the library. Like Levine, they propose that the layered system of representations of the Bibliothèque Sainte-Genevieve means that the perception of Labrouste being a rationalist needs to be seriously reconsidered. Vidler further supports this argument; he puts forward the fact that the library is Labrouste’s acceptance of literature’s triumph over architecture. As Labrouste stated, “this monumental catalogue is the principal decoration of the façade as the books themselves are the most beautiful ornament of the interior.”
Bressani, Martin, and Marc Grignon. “Romanticism, Rationalism and the Bibliotheque Sainte-Genevieve.” Art History 28 (2005): 712-751. Craig, Robert M. “Medieval Historicism Amidst Pioneer Modernism: Works by Labrouste and Perret.” Southeastern College art Conference Review 2 (1982): 75-79. Giedion, Sigfried. Building in France, Building in Iron, Building in Ferroconcrete. Santa Monica: The getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities, 1995. Grieder, Josephine. “The Search for the Neo-Grec in Second Empire Paris.” Journal of the Society of Architectural historians 70 (2011): 174-189. Hanser, David A. Architecture of France. Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 2006. Jodidio, Philip. Architecture in France. Cologne: Taschen, 2006. Levine, Neil. “The Romantic idea of Architectural legibility: Henri Labrouste and the Neo-Grec.” In The Architecture of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, by Arthur Drexler, 325357. New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1977. Middleton, Robin. “The iron Structure of the BibliothequeSainte-Genevieve as the Basis of a Civic Decor.” AA Files 40 (1999): 33-52. Pace, Sergio. “Labrouste: Beyond the Myth of Technology.” L’Architettura (2002): 437. Saddy, Pierre. Henri Labrouste architecte 1801-1875. Paris: Caisse Nationale des Monuments Historiques et des Sites, 1977. Saunders, E. Stewart. University of Paris libraries: Sainte Genevive Library. West Lafayette: Purdue University, 2001. Vidler, Anthony. “Books in Space: Tradition and Transparency in the bibliotheque de France.” Representations 42 (1993): 115-134. Zanten, David Van. Designing Paris: the architecture of Duban, Labrouste, Duc, and Vaudoyer. Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1987.