BLOCKITECTURE
Graduate Thesis 2020 SCI-Arc / March II Student: Manying Wang Advisor: Kristy Balliet All rights reser ved. No par t of this publication may be reprodueced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, i n a n y f o r m o r b y a n y m e a n s, e l e c t r o n i c, m e c h a n i c a l , photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior p e r m i s s i o n o f t h e c o p y r i g h t ow n e r o r t h e p u b l i s h e r s.
TABLE OF CONTENTS STATEMENT-04 TANGRAM ——ABSTRACTION ART-06 OBJECTHOOD ——OBJECT & FIELD-18 BLOCKS—TOY AS ARCHITECTURE-24
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Graduate Thesis 2020 SCI-Arc / March II Student: Manying Wang Advisor: Kristy Balliet
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STATEMENT Architecture is a composition of different objects. It can be deconstructed from the perspective of structure, massing, shape or program. This decomposition process is where architecture becomes the BLOCKITECTURE. Unlike the digital world production, blockitecture is a REALWORLD TOY, meaning it is limited by gravity. It is playful, adaptable and abstract. It combines objects with different resolutions and scales. The imaginary and symbolic worlds are also fused here. Blockitecture is not equal to BLOCKS, it is not the stack of solid objects such as cube, bar or cylinder. The block units have a more complex hierarchical relationship——the main unit can be composed of a variety of subunits. Blockitecture is the inclusive and juxtaposed relationship between the PARTS and the WHOLE. Blockitecture is based on OBJECT-ORIENTED-ONTOLOGY, which means each block is an unique sensual object. It rethinks the composition of the world. Circuit boards and batteries are the blocks of mobile phones; tires, casing and engines are the blocks of cars; and of course architecture is no exception. From childhood, people learn how to create things through the units. In my thesis, I will start with building blocks and analyze the connection relationship between them and the effect of this relationship on the individual components. Striving to balance the uniqueness of objects with their assembly qualities, my thesis also wants to discuss the impact of the SCALES and PATTERNS on the architecturalization of these blocks.
PHILEBUS PLATO,347BC
Graduate Thesis 2020 SCI-Arc / March II Student: Manying Wang Advisor: Kristy Balliet
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TANGRAM ABSTRACTION ART
PROTARCHUS: Then what pleasures, Socrates, should we be right in conceiving to be true? SOCRATES: True pleasures are those which are given by beauty of COLOUR and FORM, and most of those which arise from smells; those of sound, again, and in general those of which the want is painless and unconscious, and of which the fruition is palpable to sense and pleasant and unalloyed with pain. PROTARCHUS: Once more, Socrates, I must ask what you mean. SOCRATES: My meaning is certainly not obvious, and I will endeavour to be plainer. I do not mean by beauty of form such beauty as that of animals or pictures, which the many would suppose to be my meaning; but, says the argument, understand me to mean straight LINES and CIRCLES, and the PLANE or SOLID FIGURES which are formed out of them by turning-lathes and rulers and measurers of angles; for these I affirm to be not only relatively beautiful, like other things, but they are ETERNALLY AND ABSOLUTELY BEAUTIFUL, and they have peculiar pleasures, quite unlike the pleasures of scratching. And there are colours which are of the same character, and have similar pleasures; now do you understand my meaning?
1: PABLOPICAS, GRANDE NATURE, 1931 2:PIET MONDRIAN, COMPOSITION WITH RED BLUE AND YELLOW, 1923
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TANGRAM ABSTRACTION ART
People's appreciation of abstract forms is almost instinctive, from ancient Egypt and ancient Greece to the Renaissance and the Baroque period. People constantly interpret CIRCLES, SQUARES, and LINES to give them value and meaning. These discussions of abstract forms reached their peak during the Modernist period of the last century when painters and other artists let go of the need to faithfully REPRODUCE REALITY, thereby ushering in a sense of complete liberation. Whether it is structuralism, deconstructionism, cubism or minimalism, this discussion is about how art forms EXPRESS THEMSELVES. Suprematism, as represented by MALEVICH and KANDINSKY, produced some of the purest abstract geometric expressions. What they wanted to express was an absolutely abstract aesthetic, which is not a deformation of something (Deconstructionism), nor is it intended to create a theatrical atmosphere (Minimalism). It represents the most essential spirit of art.
ZAHA HADID, ZAHA HADID AND SUPREMATISM,2012
MALEVICH DRAWING&DIAGRAM, 1920
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TANGRAM ABSTRACTION ART
MALEVICH's canvas is spatially related. Overlapping rectangles can be abstracted into spatial combinations of ‘lines’ of different widths. They are sometimes juxtaposed, sometimes crossed, and these directional rectangles make the surface full of dynamic tension. Zaha Hadid was deeply influenced by Malevich, who shattered the objects and reassembled them with added tension. “I have always been interested in the concept of fragmentation and with ideas of abstraction and explosion, de-constructing ideas of repetitiveness and mass production. My work first engaged with the early Russian avantgarde; in par ticular with the work of Kasimir Malevich – he was an early inf luence for me
as a representative of the modern avant-garde intersection between art and design. Malevich discovered abstraction as an experimental principle that can propel creative work to previously unheard levels of invention; this abstract work allowed much greater levels of creativity.”
G R E E N B E RG , ART AND CULTURE, 1961
K A N D I N S K Y T R A N S F O R M AT I O N
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TANGRAM ABSTRACTION ART
Except for his ‘Several Circles’, KANDINSKY has rarely painted a single motif. This canvas is full of a variety of geometric shapes, which even bend and deform to form a new but FAMILIAR FIGURE floating in the air. Kandinsky's processing of the intersection of objects makes these objects lose their spatial relationships. The use of a large number of non-directional "DOT" elements also enhances this feeling of floating freedom to a certain extent, and the relationship between the objects is also looser. Kandinsky came to conceive of the picture… as an aggregate of discrete shapes;the color,size, and spacing of these he related so insensitively to the space surrounding them… that this space remained inactive and meaning less; the sense of a continuous surface was lost, and the space became pocked with “holes”...Having begun by accepting the absolute flatness of the picture surface, Kandinsky would go on to allude to illusionistic depth by a use of color, line, and perspective that were plastically irrelevant… Academic reminiscences crept into Kandinsky’s painting at almost every point other than that of what they “represented”.
DEVYN WEISER-PART TO PLAY STUDIO
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TANGRAM ABSTRACTION ART
GEOMETRY is different from SHAPE and FIGURE in that it corresponds to the simplest forms. People have the most primitive aesthetic appreciation for it, rather than some kind of metaphor or association. When these discussions about geometry are derived from architecture, it is inevitable that they involve the process of VOLUME-MAKING. The building must be 3D, rather than 2D planar. There are many misunderstandings and mis-readings in the process of simply translating from 2D to 3D. Designers can, of course, accept these misunderstandings and mis-readings and incorporate them into their designs, except that the 3D world has very different operating rules from the 2D world. Any forced translation will make the illustration of a 3D building look flat and lifeless, with the tension between the original objects dissipated. If this is the case, then it would be better to start with 3D OBJECTS.
M I C H A E A L F R I E D, A RT A N D OBJECTHOOD,1998
ANTHONY CARO----TABLE PIECES, 1966
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TANGRAM ABSTRACTION ART
ANTHONY CARO's ground sculpture and table pieces are like 3D reproductions of the works of Male vich and Kandinsky. His ground sculptures are actually very flat because they all have a main viewing surface. The a d d i t i o n o f g r av i t y a n d the ground makes these objects begin to express their
relationship with the Earth, weakening the tensions in space and, in the process, becoming more stable. Table Pieces then deliberately challenged the earlier ground sculptures in that these objects appear to be floating in the air, free of gravity. The shape also began to distort and everything became more free.
In Caro’s most successful sculptures one discovers the allusive syntax of our own purest and most passionate gestures used to construct gestures even more pure and anonymous and passionate--and armed, besides, with what one hopes it still makes sense to speak of in our time as the durability of art.
Fr o m M i c h a e l Fr i e d ' s ‘A r t a n d Objecthood’ to Graham Harman's ‘OOO’, the definition of the OBJECT has been changing. Fried wants to guard the planar nature of modern art through a rejection of materiality, whereas Harman's Object is more like the opposite of SUBJECT. In his opinion, everything that cannot be fully reduced to its constituent parts or its effect on other things is matter (undermining and overmining.) Physical properties manifest as the nature of things, which is different from the understanding of the nature of things. The characteristics of physical properties are reflected in how things exist as things, how t h e y w o r k , h ow t h e y r e l a t e t o people, and how they appear in the world. Therefore, the physical
OBJECTHOOD OBJECT & FIELD
properties of things are different from the simple material and the properties of that material, and they are not the same as the usefulness of tools. Instead, they are embodied as a perceptual reality, which is shown in the works as the unity of the transcendent existence and things. In this sense, all works of art cannot rule out the existence of their physical properties, and the physical properties of objects also have a decisive effect on the for mation of ar t works. From the perspective of Modernist paintings, the key factor is the SHAPE. The shape in painting is both the means to become the work and the work itself. Minimalism works precisely through the appearance of something that does not belong to the work itself, which obscures the
nature of the thing, so that the work cannot be truly presented in the living world. It can be seen that, in the context of modern philosophy, the concept of "OBJECTHOOD" is different from what Fried has alleged. Therefore, one re q uire s the dis c ove r y a n d disclosure of physical properties, while the other emphasizes the breakdown and suspension of physical properties. However, the two have some interoperability in how a painting guarantees its painterly identity. Art creates works, rather than objects, and things as art media are obviously different from ordinary things, and they need to have the ability to explain the meaning of the living world. 19
TOM WISCOMBE, FLAT ONTOLOGY, 2014
1: PETER TRUMMER --HYPEROBJECT 2: DAMJAN JOVANOVIC--JUNKSPACE 3: TOM WISCOMBE--DISCRETE OBJECT
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OBJECTHOOD OBJECT & FIELD
There is also a lot of discussion about objects in the Southern Californian Institute of Architecture (SCI_ARC). From PETER TRUMMER's Hyper-Object and DAMJAN JOVANOVIC's sandbox object to DWAYNE OYLER's detail assembly object, TOM WISCOMBE's model kits object, and countless object collection programs; nothing more than discussing objects and their connections. O n e o f t h e m o s t i m p or ta n t advances in the discourse of parts to wholes in architecture in the last century came through emergence theory, or the idea that the whole qualitatively exceeds the sum of the part.In that case, architecture could be coherent without recourse to classical composition. Objectoriented philosophy takes this idea one step further, by way of
metaphysics. If everything is a whole object and not a part of something else, and everything exists equally but differently, then vertical stratification between par ts and wholes becomes impossible.In this model , everything exists side by side, like a collection of treasures laid out on a table.
1: DWAYNE OYLER----PUZZLE STUDIO 2: BUREAU SPECTACULAR----INSIDE/ O U T S I D E / B E T W E E N / B E YO N D 3: ANDREW KOVACS-BUST OF MEDUSA
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OBJECTHOOD OBJECT & FIELD
Fr o m t h e p e r s p e c t i ve o f this author, the works of TRUMMER and DAMJAN are more like Object Collections than Object Compositions. They collect, sort, and randomly stack objects into building volumes. In the process, the attribute categories of the objects themselves are strengthened, and the relationships between the objects are weakened. Also similar are BUREAU SPECTACULAR a n d A N D R E W KOVAC S. In WISCOMBE's Model Kits, objects are no longer randomly placed together, and
their assembleable properties make the relationships between objects closer and the overall formal language more unified. This kind of tight installation was played to the extreme in Oyler's Puzzle Building, where the object disappeared and became part of the overall language. These professors' discussions on objects define a gradual interval from the PART to the WHOLE. In general, the more obvious the personality characteristics of an object, the weaker the tension between it and the overall formal language.
R A D U G A - G R E Z —— T O Y S E R I E S
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B L O C K S ARCHITECTURE TOY
The Russian toy brand RADUGA-GREZ aims to make art-like toys, so that games become a kind of aesthetic training. Their toys have a richer LAYER, and no longer just an accumulation of BULK. The nested, cascading relationship gives the toy a new way of combining objects, while the juxtaposition of abstract shapes and figurative objects makes these toys ver y interesting. Toys are reassembled to for m new shapes and masses. On this basis, there is also an inclusion
relationship between them, rather than an absolute coexistence. An OBJECT is composed of sub-objects, and a silhouette can also become an object, and everyday objects are also objects. Apples, trees, hackers and clouds of different scales and resolutions are put together in such a way that the imaginary world and the real world merge. They are all unified by the same materials and harmonious colors. This is an object game. It is also a new way of looking at the world.
1: ANDREW KOVACS, COACHELLA 2019 2: CARVED BEAM PAINTING BUILDING 3 : PA L AC E M U S E U M , TA P E S E R I E S
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B L O C K S ARCHITECTURE TOY
ANDREW KOVACS' sculpture for Coachella 2019, although not a building block, is an interesting example. The toy is enlarged into a sculpture, or even a symbol. Different colors on different sides make the sense of the block a flat color block, which makes it more abstract, thereby increasing the opportunity for multiple interpretations. This discussion of VOLUME a n d PA T T E R N i s u s e d in Blockitecture in that the y re de fine these units by giving simple blocks different patterns. Why is our
city not composed of these differently patterned blocks? This way of defining components by patter n is nothing new. The "Carved Beam Painting Building" tape series, launched by the PALACE MUSEUM, shows us this series of processes in a more playful way. In ancient China, different patter ns meant different hierarchies and status symbols. People show their uniqueness by creating different patterns on the same design of house.
1 : D A N I E L B U R E N —— B L O C K Y ART INSTALLATION, 2015 2 : K VA D R AT S H A P E S F U R N I T U R E 3:BLOCKITECTURE SERIES
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B L O C K S ARCHITECTURE TOY
Similarly, SCALE is an important factor in these toys. Toys at different scales have ver y different relationships w i t h p e o p l e. D a n i e l Buren's Blocky Art Installation is a good example of turning toys into ART OBJECTS. The enlarged toy becomes a device with which to form a space. Kvadrat tur ned these toys into furniture for everyday use. People's
lives are surrounded bythe shapes of these devices. Of course, a building can also be viewed as a toy made of ‘brick’ blocks, or the scale of these building blocks can be further increased to form a building mass. People can then live INSIDE the building blocks, instead of o n t h e S U R FA C E .
1: 2: 3 : LI
L E G O BA S I C S B LO C K S S E R I E S MOSHE SAFDIE, HABITAT 67,1967 M A N Y I N _ WA N G & X I N _ U, E N G A G E M E N T, 2 G A X
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B L O C K S ARCHITECTURE TOY
LEGO is undoubtedly one of the most popular building blocks in the world. It PIXELATES the entire world into the smallest unit block, which allows anything to be for med by stacking these colorful small blocks but, at the same time, each piece has lost its VITALITY. The "whole" is excessively decomposed into "par ts", and the fragments are not UNIQUE, but become a s t y l i z e d e x i s t e n c e. T h e pixelated style of LEGO can be seen in buildings like Habitat67 by Moshe Safdie, or some small blocks of MVRDV. Of course, we can
also say that Frank Gehry's style is deconstructed discrete surfaces. M. CASEY REHM is also one of the representatives in this regard. The picture on the left is the Engagement project of 2GAX with Xin Liu, in which the architects committed to designing the smallest unit that can be adapted to meet the operating rules generated by Processing. The single rectangular block is rotated, copied, and mirrored to generate the entire building. This is similar to LEGO in that the architecture is broken down into one part, rather than a collection of parts.
