state v. architecture

The People v.

Architecture a call for cultural accountability in architecture and [vice versa]

A conversation between Jesse Wetzel and Mikhail Kim

*

(et al)

a whoapony production * an establishing of extrajuridical|extrajudicial ecologies through expanded spheres of influences.

2011 2012

“You should not try to find whether an idea is just or correct. You should look for a completely different idea, elsewhere in another area, so that something passes between the two which is neither in one nor the other.”

“Now, one does not usually find this idea alone, a chance is needed, or else someone gives you one.”

the p eople v ar chitectur e

-Gilles Deleueze, Dialogues

3 mikhail kim | jesse wetzel robert adams thesis tcaup2011-2012

inside cover image: Kohei Nawa.

Polygon Double Deer #2, 2011.

table of contents abstract

polemic

in play:

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gilles deleuze marrikka trotter sanford kwinter giorgio agamben k. michael hays bruno latour peter eisenman geoff manaugh aristotle peter berger robert cover natanel elfassy francois roche dj spooky/that subliminal kid william wordsworth marshall mcluhan robert somol richard sennett david gissen aimee mullins john hejduk gordon matta-clark nl architects reiser + umemoto BIG herzog & de meuron R&Sie(n)

abcdarium entries include

6 10

ambivalence (no permitar) burden of production court dialectic v. dialogic efficacy filler grandfather clause heuristic invalid[aŠtion] justice v. order killer + leverage [or latencies] mediation nomos operative difference predictive v. projective quotidian law reasonable doubt serendipity transgressions unalienable rights verisimilitude willful x of y x-examination (cross) & zero-tolerance

sites

of

conflict

legibility:

burden

of

proof

apparatus

of

power

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architecture

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with

107. techniq ue

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is

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appendix

108. schedule

20 28 38 485868 something

directives

109. project brief

diptychs + dialogues

wrong 102. abstra ct

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the new body of justice

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Extrajudicial Ecologies: Placing Architecture on Trial This thesis establishes a n w judicial body for spatial equity. The cou thouse spatializes the material culture of the criminal and civil judicial apparatus. In his definition, Giorgio Agamben locates the term apparatus at the intersection of diverse fl ws of power and characterized by the breadth of its effects or the reach of knowledge production. Th ough the structure of the trial, the thesis seeks to leverage architecture as an apparatus that makes explicit the hidden structures at play in the world governing civic space. The territories made explicit through architecture are vast. From domestic interiors, massive sites of resource extraction, rapid urbanization, and ecological disasters, to sports arenas, historic preservation, mainstream media, and digital computing clouds the apparatus of architecture is pervasive.

Such a spectrum of complexities facing architects forces them to react by isolating singular methodologies to work on singular problems.

Instead of a project of narrowing down, this thesis works to make evident the way architecture can act on such simultaneous complexities within contemporary culture.

Methods of co-producing widen the necessary thesis bandwidth. The attitude towards the work is one of “all layers on”, and as such amplifies a chitectural operations that exist in today’s intricately complex sphere of influences.

Dual effo ts of production are used to open up and intensify the scope of architecture and translate this body of work into highly specific a chitectural forms, spaces and materials. The thesis positions architecture as an operative actant – a civic actor and formal object leveraging its role as an apparatus explicidating effects be ond itself.

-MK

9 102. abstra ct

Extrajuridical Ecologies The st ucture of the court and trial virtually stages spatial continuity across discontinuous bodies. The cou troom and crime scene are entangled spatial networks that construct a physical site. Transgression becomes the narrative infrastructure that holds these bodies in dialog with one another. Any socio-political situation determines the rules of engagement for an extrajudicial system. The apparatus of due process includes the work or labor of the trial, the determination of what is at stake, how judgment is made, and how disciplinary actions are executed.

Architecture plays a critical role in making these relationships explicit. Th ough the mechanisms of formal structures, scalar operations, material organizations and granular resolutions, the work of architecture is critical to the way we engage and perceive.

Deploying these methods in a variety of ways in order to create moments of vivific tion, clarity, collapse, and

conflation all ws architecture to operate on, and actively participate in the subjectivity of judgment.

Th ough the hybridization of other models of engagement the court is positioned as an active body that moves in on physical space at the rate it operates on social space.

Models like the anatomical theater and the martial arts arena offer strategies that stage actions and transmit sensations, affecting the larger psychological footprint left on the state. Architectural performativity synthesizes pre-dispositions of doubt, suspicion, heroism, or ambivalence based on relationships the audience has with those actors. The st ucture of the court|trial has the capacity to render legible contemporary states of exception, these juridical ecologies, be it adversarial or otherwise as the domestic, urban, and global scales. The physical body of the court becomes the apparatus that allows us to intervene in the system.

-JW

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re-enchanting architecture

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WhoaPony: The discipline is expanding and contracting.

On one hand it is reaching out and engaging disciplines involved with landscapes, infrastructure, biology, art, and philosophy. On the other hand it is withdrawing from those engagements in a move to clarify and distill its own identity as a discipline.

K. Michael Hays: One of the things that is reconfirmed daily is an increasing lack of interest in architectural form... An increasing interest in globaliztaion comes hand in hand with a decreasing interest in form.

WP: With the break-neck development of media and technology and globalization, it is easy to lose perspective and to see why there is friction between the desire to embrace all that is new and being skeptical about its unknowns.

KMH: Contemporary design technologies come with a certain ready range of form, so that the discovery, manipulation and elaboration of form is almost discouraged by the design technology itself.

WP: But we must accept the inevitability of change and acquaint ourselves with the new unknown. We are afraid because we do not know, but

to stand still means to be left behind. In the end, it is a question of knowledge in a sense of being fluent in the contemporary languages.

Marrikka Trotter: intelligent architectural practice is continuously looking for locations of roughness, because these are catalysts for creativity... Right now, it seems as if there are very few refuges in formal manipulation that afford any kind of traction.

KMH: I think the inability to find traction is because the practice seems to have lost interest in both the past as a reference... and in the future as a goal.

MT: The e’s a blindness about the fact that ‘we cannot escape history,’ as Lincoln reminded us... It astonishes me that, with all this slippery maneuvering around form, performance and effect, a chitecture as a whole practice hasn’t really engaged in the desparate and important struggles that are going on.

WP: Architecture is just emerging from a digital adolescence where we grew into a degree of across-the-board familiarity. So now people like Sean Lally’s Weathers, R&Sie(n), Philippe Rahm, and David Gissen seem to be

“Re-Enchanted Architecture” - A conversation between K. Michael Hays and Marrikka Trotter Architecture At the Edge of Everything Else. 2010. p.130-137. “air” Bruno Latour Sensorium: Embodied Experience, Technology, And Contemporary Art. 2006. p.105-107.

Sanford Kwinter Requiem for the City At the End of the Millennium. 2010. p. 73-75.

WP: Now that we have achieved a level of comfort in providing easy access to

MT: Enchantment literally means “to sing into being” MT: Eisenman said in his debate with Christopher Alexander: “The ole of art or architecture might just be to

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KMH: Is the lack of engagement a symptom of general disenchantment?... disenchantment was partly an increasing awareness of how things actually work... My own initial feeling is that we accept our disenchantment too readily and too easily and without resistance.

Sanford Kwinter: What is changing is the way we explain things to ourselves...

Because we cannot explain the behaviour of clouds until after they have done what they do, we have slowly begun to change our criteria of what constitutes an explanation... thanks to the internet... knowledge has never before in modern times been at once so profoundly social in its genesis and so vague, so arbitrary, and so indeterminate. “Facts” are increasingly being replaced by “artifacts” that need do no more than fulfill the pra matic criterion that Herbert Simon once called “satisfi ing,” an unstable combination of satisfying and sufficin

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Bruno Latour: suppose that you wake up in the Space Station, and realize that every single one of your innocent and inconsiderate gestures might break something essential to the breathing condition of the place you have “landed,” so to speak. This is Sloterdijk’s explicitness: You are on life support, it’s fragile, it’s technical, it’s public, it’s political, it could break down... The m vement to make all this explicit has been hidden during the preceding century by other movements, those of revolution, modernization, emancipation. These describe our history as a move out of the sensorium, a great lesson in insensitivity and liberty. Less attachment. Finally, the great unmediated direct access to things.

architecture, we feel it is almost too easy. The e is a great equalizing smoothing out of space and information that is partially brought about by contemporary media and technology as well as the rise of information dominated culture. But we do not want to make architecture more difficult again, but instead infuse it with cultural poignancy.

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“The role of... architecture might just be to remind people that everything is not all right.”

making real attempts at gaining some of this traction.

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remind people that everything is not all right.” The latter is pointing out that something is bad or that the situation is not optimal, and the former is saying, “I can’t show this to you yet, but here is the space around it.”

WP: To wield architecture as a spotlight on latencies, but to do that by being architecture begs for a definition of a chitecture for the contemporary world. That brings us back to the beginning, but also begs the question of how to create such a definition. aybe the answer is through Aristotle’s praxis--production of images, information, artifacts, being critical of your own work maintaining perspective, being culturally aware--with the ultimate goal of enabling a social agency through the work.

SK: When architecture finds the courage to take its place alongside other practices as a full-fledged form of thought,

it will then realize its potential to lead the way--to produce knowledge and not only deduce it... More than ever before, architecture has become an affair of consciousness; the engagement with a society’s communicational--and subject-producing--apparatus is as much a necessity as it is a betrayal.

KMH: It is... proposing that we look for something that we don’t yet know how to represent. Presenting something for which there is not yet a code or a symbol or conventional representation-that to me is what we might want to call a reenchantment. No-you know what-I would exactly call that a “singing into being.”

KMH: “singing into being” would produce something that is prior to intellection and to clear conceptualization; it might lead us toward conceptualization later, but you sing sometimes in a way before you think, or more than you think.

Kwinter, Sanford. Requiem for the City At the End of the Millennium. Barcelona: Actar , 2010. p. 26-27.

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MK: The sciences, after which architecture often tries to model itself are driven by a fundamental curiosity and fascination with the impossible. That will is largely absent in today’s architecture,

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JW: The e are explicit examples of this from history and in practice today. Think about the conquering of the natural environment as was acheived by the advent of HVAC. What are the pitfalls of excessive accessibility? Whatever happened to

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Mikhail Kim: So how does architecture become a cultural agent, or prism? Bruno Latour speaks of Sloterdijk’s ‘explicitness’ and K. Michael Hays echoes the same with ‘disenchantment’. Both are calling out a digression of interests towards an increasingly literal and rationalized world where everything must be of a quantifiable natu e. But there are dangers in allowing metricization to take control over willful intent.

Darwinism? If it is no longer a question of survival of the fittest is it n w about survival of the most leveraged? Policy and money make almost anything possible, they can hold each other in check or drive each other to oblivion. We’ve been watching the effects of this for the latter half of this century with the effects air conditioning on ozone depletion and climate change. We are witnessing a similar and related phenomenon with the growing use of BIM. As we continue to develop a tool that is conquering the documentation of architecture, it is precluding a great deal of the design simply as a result of the software’s structure. As we make the design process more like shopping in a preset catalogue of off the shelf design solutions what are we missing out on? What of latency, serendipity, and the ‘cultural poignancy’ to which Hays refers? Maybe more importantly, how do we prove this is actually taking place, BIM is just a tool after all, how much responsibility do we have to bear as the user?

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Whatever happened to Darwinism?

Jesse Wetzel: I’d like to start the follow up on this conversation by unpacking Eisenman’s comment to Christopher Alexander. Assuming that the role of architecture is to remind us that everything is not alright comes with an assumption that there is, obviously, something wrong.

What exactly is wrong is less certain often because of architecture’s inability to explicitly express and respond to such a situation. This might be what is wrong with architecture.

fig.1

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which is maybe the reason for the proliferation of geometric and technologic exercises and uninspired forms. Maybe this is what Marrikka Trotter and K. Michael Hays meant by saying that the discipline has become disoriented and that it needs to regain its cultural bearings.

JW: The absence of curio ity for the impossible...I might say that another way, that architecture is currently obsessed with what is possible. I think this is precisely the issue, we have emerging technology that is making the description of a wider range of forms possible and so we get hyperfocused on seeing what forms we can produce.

AD’s issue Versioning1, while talking about a utile model of iterative working it is a model that emphasizes some aspects of design over others.

In the same way we are getting trapped by software and getting caught up in a “formwhore” mentality--a term that we kick around in our collective offices and institution without really acknowledging what it is symptomatic of.

Back to your comment about cultural bearings, I think that is precisely what is lost, an accountability to the affe tive impacts that our works have on space and society.

Plugging all of the metrics of

a project into a parametric script and hitting go does not necessarily lead to a more sensitive project. Robert Somol refers to this way of working as ‘indexical’.2 Think about that for a minute, indexical, what work does(can) an index do? Is it a post-facto/posthumous project? I counter this modality/mindset with Hejduk’s Inequality, Architectural Poetry Theo um: “The minimum poetic architectural configuration is g eater than and irreducible to architectural memories.”[see fig. 1 My reading of this is that the affecti e range of the work has much less to do with the serialization/aggregation of form than the deep relational structures of form. It’s about knowing the diffe ence between putting the two figu es on the right next to each other and the figu e on the left. I think the more formal we make the work we do the more we leave ourselves stranded on the island of autonomy regardless, even, of how indexically tied to the situation it is. The speed at which the global cultural climate is changing demands more of the discipline.

MK: I think the indexical project is a product of us trying to deal with the sheer amount of data that is available. All this data exerts

fig. 1 Jeffery Kipnis “Late 20th Century Design Theory, 1990. From Architecture’s Desire, K. Michael Hays, 2009.

1.

Architectural Design.

Versioning, 2003.

2.

Robert Somol Four and a Half Earths are Not Enough, Lecture at the University of Michigan, 2011.

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JW: This is whe e the heart of the matters lies, the discipline is distracted. Problemitization makes architecture easy, we can point to a problem and generate X number of solutions. Meanwhile the cultural effect and affect ge left behind. So who holds us accountable when we settle into the comfortable (but disciplinarily weak) position of problem solving?

WP: This thesis p oposes to reposition the discipline

as one that can be a cultural agent rather than just staging cultural agency. Architecture is limited to a discrete physical footprint, but it has no limit in what it can a/effect.

One key type of architecture to do this is the courthouse.

The cou thouse is the space in which a singularity can become something with far reaching impact. As it is, the space in which that event takes place is passive.

Our proposal is for a new, active body of spatial justice.

A body made up of judiciary and legislative arms that focus specifically on spatial acts of transgression and judgements made on space and form. In the actor-network of the court and the trial, architecture can play crucial roles: judge, jury, evidence, expert witness, and legal/spatial precedent. The architecture will have a say in the decisions made that could effect millions. ow we program the materiality, scale, light, climate of the space demands a new level of consideration as it will all feed a new agenda for constructed space.

In this court, spatial ambivalence is taken off the table.

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the pressure of having to be mined for moments of profundity. This can all w greater insight into subjects that are otherwise difficult to com ehend, but it is also problematic to be overly dependent on data alone. To borrow from Sanford Kwinter, such overreliance risks spending too much energy on deducing and not producing, or in other words not on architecture and design, which is ultimately our charge. Indexically driven forms for example, tempt the architect to propagate the form indefinitel , which is a case of us ceding ground to the software/tool despite the fact that we may have coded its parameters. This is a symptom of an imbalance in the discipline, a weakness in architecture’s positioning as an apparatus of power.

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fig. 2 Wetzel, Jesse.

Architecture as Leverage, 2012.

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something is wrong with architecture

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fig. 1 Hiromichi Ochiai FACETASM, 2012 Spring/Summer Collection.

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fig. 2 Gordon Matta-Clark Splitting, 1974.

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MK: Couture architecture, spectacle, destruction, desensitization, Bruno Latour’s words of “things becoming explicit”3.

What kind of work does high fashion architecture perform on the old transgressors? Is it just about the awe of the moment before our attention shifts? Natanel Elfassy sees architecture as a tool to reveal the hypocrisies and realities surrounding us1, and I would argue to re-confront the sensorium that the discipline is withdrawing from. The a celeration of the production of newness is reaching a point where the creation of one is its simultaneous demise and the lifespan of a work is measured in clicks and not centuries or years. But, to re-situate the work relationally can expand its agency beyond an expected sphere of influence JW: “The wo k is the death mask of its conception.”

Thesis thi teen on writing from Walter Benjamin, this for me is a warning against contrivance. So often it’s possible to turn to the dark

side of production, that is, the familiar hyper-focused forgetting the “forest for the trees” mode. This accompanied the early days of CADD as a result of the ability to zoom in infinitely into any pa t of a drawing. But I think CADD, as with any other tool holds the ability to allow for the deep pleasure in working, provided the process is able to maintain the same spirit of the idea. That the chain saw and the act of splitting might be two systems that build up and renew each other, this is the aspiration of good work(ing). Indeed to launch work into other spheres and agencies takes a diffe ent kind of working that is in need of rich and saturated cogitation.

Immersion becomes a vehicle for that saturation. In the manner of the great method actors, the actor|worker in order to develop lifelike performances, create in themselves the thoughts and emotions of their characters. The resultant connection between audience and performer is something that does not lead

1.

Natanel Elfassy in dialogue with Francois Roche STUTTERING, (2010).

2.

Robert Cover Narrative, Violence, And the Law: the Essays of Robert Cover. 1993. p.95-98.

25 106. precedent : project s 106. precedent : text s 106. precedent : other

MK: Robert Cover, a Yale law professor, argued that any society’s justice system is based on agreements of what is right and wrong,2 thus enrolling its citizens into the act. Just as the chainsaw and splitting build up a productive process, the finely stitched and su gestive leather case against the raw, and stripped-down space can be an active subtext throughout the work. Engagement at multiple frequencies creates a density of latencies that act to deeply immerse the work into many diffe ent contexts, times, frames. Simple awareness of the fact that destruction stages creation opens previously closed possibilities. This is the act of making things explicit and a strategy for engaging the audience in the performance by enrolling their imaginations into the act of creation.

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to the demise of the work but implicates both parties in the production. Judgement is a participatory act. The p esentation of the case has to enroll the audience.

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3.

Bruno Latour Sensorium: Embodied Experience, Technology, And Contemporary Art. 2006. p.105-107.

3. “...revolution, modernization, emancipation. These describe our history as a move out of the sensorium, a great lesson in insensitivity and liberty. Less attachment.

Finally, the great unmediated direct access to things.

Nature a stable object at last. But although this process of desensitization, of indifferentiation certainly occurred, it’s nothing... but mere escapism. Modernisms, revolutions, avant-gardes... are but so many variations in escaping from an explicit awareness of what we are here calling the sensorium: how to avoid being caught up by the great inverse movement of folding in, of envelopment, of attachment, of things becoming explicit.�

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4. “As architects, we are always confronted with strange vibrations, composed by disaster and dream, by propaganda and illusion, by hypocrisies and realities.

We deeply consider architecture to be a tool that could reveal and manipulate this stuttering - to eroticize our paranoia.�

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Natanel Elfassy in dialogue with Francois Roche STUTTERING, (2010).

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sites of conict

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fig. 3 Schatz, Howard.

Aimee Mullins #5, 2007.

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fig. 4 Harvey, David Alan.

Bull Elk in a Mock Battle, 2006.

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MK: Conflict, used p oductively--from selecting the strongest genes to advancing dis-ability into hyper-ability-can be a powerful creative apparatus. To Francois Roche, it means identifying a moment of conflict within a society and locating architecture in an anticipatory manner to harness the energy of that potential conflict as a way of staking architecture’s cultural territory. Territorialization also comes with notions of border conditions and friction between them. Is Aimee Mullins poised to transform the territory of dis-ability into one of multi- or hyper-ability? What does that potential mean to codes such as the ADA? Will that codified territo y consequently become eroded or downgraded?

JW: Passive v. Active discrimination, two forms of conflict.

One is direct, such as breaking and entering, loitering is less direct but it is no less an act of transgression. Parkour is a new form of transgression that has the lead on any regulation that might make it an explicit act of conflict--so does that make it active or passive? I like the thought of it as preemptive transgression, breaking rules that do not exist yet and that’s exactly what parkour is, it’s the new skateboarding. Skatboarding was acting out against programming, or just re-programming that was then vilified. To create public space that is then retroactively outfitted to deny ce tain public acts is totally hypocritical and this has led to a new form of response in the form of bodies that are hyper-able in space and therefore able to overcome any limitations placed on space. With concerns about liability and trespassing, this could foreseeably result in policy that might try to limit these acts, but how?

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“Linking a being to its ecosystem is the only way to link the body to the body of architecture.”

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1.

“Territorializing architecture does not mean cloaking it in the rags of a new fashion or style. Territorializing architecture means inserting it back into what it might have been on the verge of destroying and extracting the physical, climatic, or material substance of the construction from the landscape... in order that the place gains a social, cultural, and aesthetic link.”

MK: On the other end of the line of pre-emptive transgression may be grandfathering, or post-humous transgression.

This is spatial transg ession where the regulatory apparatus is forced to grant exceptions to old spaces to exist outside of the law. This is e ther a dismissal from a certain register in order to preserve a historical value, or alternately, an opportunity towards possibilities otherwise illegal.

Questions of accessibility are inevitably tied to grandfathering and this may be a case of passive discrimination. It can be denial of physical access into the space, but also denial of access to certain standards or conveniences to those already inside. This passi e discrimination is not a case of transgression explicitly, since it is still technically operating within legal bounds. But in scrutinizing the boundaries between territories of policy, transgression and accessibility, a latency--such as squatter communities in Europe, or Gordon Matta-Clark’s “Fake Estates”--can emerge and be exploited.

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1.

Francois Roche Sensorium: Embodied Experience, Technology, And Contemporary Art. 2006. p.90

fig. 1

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fig 1 Matta-Clark, Gordon.

Fake Estates, 1970s.

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fig. 2 Cedric Delsaux Here to Stay. 2008.

“Linking a being to its ecosystem is the only way to link the body to the body of architecture.�

fig. 2

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legibility: burden of proof

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fig. 7 NL Architects.

WOS 8, 1998.

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fig. 8 Gilbert Cass The US Supreme Court. 1935.

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MK: We live in an age of fact-checking and mythbusting. Our culture is ever more information-hungry and knowledge-dependent. You must furnish proof - in the form of a Google search - that you are relevant and current and that your judgements are in line with those around you.

The e is a paradoxical demand for originality and precedence.

The list, the p oof, the groupthink of social networks all contribute to judgement.

Why is a traditional courthouse a symbol of legal authority? The a chitectural legibility of a raised podium up to which one ascends before passing through a monumental portico with a classical colonnade and pediment has been socially agreed upon to signify power. It is a recogniz-

able and legible formula even to the untrained eye. In contrast to this legibility stands the ambiguity of the work of NL Architects in WOS 8.

Does a black, seamless, fl wing form project power and authority through its mystery and one’s inability to understand it? Maybe its lack of materiality, scale and frontality imply that its autonomous from, and therefore impartial to its surroundings. Maybe on the contrary, those characteristics imply that it can take on the characteristics of whatever context it is in. While legibility is equated with accessibility, the side effect is that the wo k fails to enroll the audience in a meaningful way and in that way becomes passive. Here, ambiguity can be used to encourage judgement, instead of inheriting it.

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“...we locate our own values relative to the given subject. It is not an external act--we are a|effected.

In the case of the ambiguous subject we stand to learn more about ourselves than what it is we are consciously judging.�

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fig. 9 Perry Kulper Central California History Museum.

fig. 9

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apparatus of power

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As a body of power, a traditional court is already positioned at the intersections of power. A court ruling has the authority to have an immediate impact while also establishing a broader network of subsequent durational effects.

Thus, a single cou t ruling puts a single person in a position to effect far- eaching change.

Given the court’s ability to leverage such change, does the space of the court have the power to indict?

This thesis identifies th courthouse|courtroom as an apparatus of power. It argues that there is a diffe ence between a leftist court versus a rightist court. Space can indeed a|effect judgement.

Judgement can simultaneously have equal agency on a space.

Brown vs. Board of Education is one of the most farreaching cases in our history, that is ultimately about spatial inequity.

The thesis establishes a spatial court, a new body of justice where a case like Brown vs.

Board of Education would have taken place. It will test the ways in which judgement is passed and enforced and the places where it takes place.

49 1.

“The line, the continuum... became the organizing principle of life. “As we begin, so shall we go.” “Rationality” and logic came to depend on the presentation of connected and sequential facts or concepts.

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Mashall McLuhan The Medium is the Massage.

1967.

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fig. 1 Reiser + Umemoto Atlas of Novel Tectonics, 2006

Visual space is uniform, continuous, and connected. The rational man in our Western culture is a visual man. The fact that most conscious experience has little “visuality” in it is lost on him...

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The fragmenting of activities, our habit of thinking in bits and parts-”specialism”--reflected the step-by-step linear departmentalizing process inherent in the technology of the alphabet.”

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fig. 2 Bazaar of Isfahan, Iran Isfahan, Iran is a site of multiple layers of spatial laws imposed upon the city.

An unspoken, and unwritten code governs much of the fine-grain development of the city and is driven by privacy concerns in this highly traditional setting. It is a set of social agreements. Isfahan is also a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Naqsh-e Jahan Square is the specific and official entity with this distinction, however its status imposes a height restriction on much of the city. This is a highly officiated and governed regulation.

The Isfahan bazaar is an enclosed market that meanders through a large part of the traditional city. It is an entity that operates inside and within and does not have any imposed regulations on it.

51 105. sit[e]u ations

The Salar de Uyuni in Bolivia is a site of an boundless expanse of salt, and scant regulation. It is significant in its geologic uniqueness as the largest and flattest region on Earth. It is doubly significant as the largest concentration of Lithium, the primary element in the production of batteries and has a rapidly growing influence on the global energy market. The Salar de Uyuni is not yet a site of lithium production, but it is primed to become one once a proper political environment is achieved.

104. program

fig. 3 Salar de Uyuni, Bolivia

109. project brief

107. techniq ue

The environment will would be a witness in a court located on the Salar de Uyuni.

the p eople v ar chitectur e

The cou thouse becomes a vehicle of delivery for this judicial body. As an architectural proposal, this is a courthouse whose interior extends beyond its exterior. It operates across two distinct sites - Isfahan Iran, and the Salar de Uyuni, Bolivia - tied together through their political and economic relational structures and by the spatial laws imposed upon them.

This will be a bifu cated courthouse that is situated within, atop, and in-between two sites.

1.

Natanel Elfassy with Francois Roche STUTTERING. (2010).

53 104. program 105. sit[e]u ations 107. techniq ue 109. project brief

“The reality of the building may not be achieved by its physical construction, as when a subject is frozen into an object. In this case the construction will never accomplish its objective. The machine aspect is generating a permanent ‘after death experiment.’”

the p eople v ar chitectur e

The flow of power and agency toward Isfahan will be an architecture that walks through walls. It will operate from the inside-out. This will be the i terior half of the courthouse, and it will operate under the radar of the imposed and traditional regulations of Isfahan.

The bazaar will be used as a site of public engagement, and a model for a means of resituating the courtroom from location to location within the city. This p oject will examine what is necessary for a court to operate and how can it perform as a public agent from within the existing fabric.

Analogously to the bazaar, the trial is a site of performance.

The trial is staged and highly prescribed, while the bazaar is a stage for more un-scripted sets of micro-performances.

By using the structure of the bazaar, the courtoom becomes a theater machine, impermanent in its specific siting, but examining various sites through the diffe ent spatial trials taking place.

architecture walking through walls

55 104. program 105. sit[e]u ations

Atop this landscape will be sited the exterior of the courtroom. Here, the court operates as an autonomous alien body that is imported onto the site. The di ection of power here will be from the outside-in.

The cou t exports issues of historic preservation, privacy, and publicness out to the Salar the Uyuni, while importing questions of environmental justice, resource extraction, and unregulated development into Isfahan.

107. techniq ue

The exterior will be holl w, a carapace without an interior.

Because it will be a transgressor in Isfahan, it has been de-coupled from its interior and exported onto the Salar de Uyuni. This action enables the court to operate on these simultaneous and mutually constructing sites.

109. project brief

architecture gone wild

The alar de Uyuni is conceptually an unbounded site of an infinite hori on where architecture can be unrestricted by any codes and regulations. It is a site where architecture can go wild.

the p eople v ar chitectur e

Juridical Ecologies The narrati e of a crime that has taken place can vivify that place in ways that would otherwise remain invisible to the casual eye. The space is reconstructed through the lens of the crime that exists not only as a scene of the crime, but as a scene that prepared the crime and a scene of its investigation, and ultimately a scene of judgement.

The crime and its subsequent scrutiny and examination generates ecologies around it whose extents reach beyond the immediate site and implicated parties. The thesis will explicidate these ecologies.

Implication of the site as a stage set for a future crime points the lens of scrutiny to the whole city. Such a broad canvas is meant to stage the court as an apparatus capable of operating within any given context with extreme specificity y sampling points of interest as one would examine core samples of an object or terrain. In this way, the court becomes a hack into the system. It can simultaneously operate within and without the system which it engages.

The chosen sites of the bazaar of Isfahan and the Salar de

Uyuni are parts of distinct ecologies that are inextricably linked through multiple networks. The individual sites a e also engaged as distinct theses within the larger thesis cohort and therefore the role of this thesis is to densify upon each one and to hack into their systems and networks to build up a narrative that exists in between the two.

The wo k is meant to operate in a perpetual back and forth action between the bazaar in Isfahan and the Salar de Uyuni constantly building up a network of references and specificities. This ocess is akin to populating of a raster field with an e er increasing resolution as more points are plugged in.

Drawing an analogy to a raster field can be inst uctive in imagining the operations of the thesis as an organic process of densification. Th references to be drawn, and specificities to be de eloped will not be of equal resolutions or distributions. Instead, architectural modes such as the viscerality of form and material in the empty expanse of the Salar de Uyuni may be used to construct conversations around how the environment may be one of the few witnesses to future crimes.

57 104. program 105. sit[e]u ations 107. techniq ue 109. project brief

Juridical Ecologies propose a paradigm shift in the agency of architecture from within and outside of the discipline.

The use of the cou troom is an architectural act of the judicial apparatus intended to begin conversations that catalyze action across an expanded range of disciplines.

the p eople v ar chitectur e

directive 10-289

108. schedule

107. techniq ue

59

the p eople v ar chitectur e

The dipt ch 1+1 = 2 (Concerted effo t/United voice) Two voices are used to amplify the work and to broaden its scope. Diptychs put diffe ent pieces of evidence in productive relationships to each other. A dual effo t in production allows for higher defin tion to be achieved and a larger network of experts and witnesses to be called.

Operative diffe ence 1+1 = 0 (Tangential/Oppositional) To be self-critical is part of building an unassailable case.

Oppositional relationships become a test bed for the thesis. Tangential points of contact become synchronizing events for the thesis in between periods of individual investigations.

Emergent voice 1+1 = 3 1+1 = chocolate syrup (Harmonies/chords, Dissonance/cacophony) The duality within the thesis produces an in-between condition that becomes an emergent other, a non-non-sequitur. It is at once a by-product that stitches together diffe ent parts of the thesis, and the alien outsider that shoots the thesis in a new direction.

61

The collaboration takes unique advantage of diptychal relationships in a way that allows the thesis to tap deeper into relational structures. An investigation or a court case may get constructed through a systems thinking approach. It is primed to take advantage of relational structures precisely because of its highly refined systematic process, just as a dual effo t is inherently better prepared to effecti ely work on diptychal pairings.

The pe formance: deadly in its precision The trial is an act of pe formance. It is used didactically to stage a trial, which allows the thesis to operate on the level of performance. The performance jolts the audience out of any preconceived assumptions about the work and enrolls them as active participants through testimonies.

It frames the terms of engagement for the thesis without stating them outright.

The wo k that is being performed occurs below the disciplinary radar, or outside the scope of its jurisdiction, and therefore forces the audience to step out beyond the expected boundaries. This stepping outside simultanously pushes the boundaries and allows one to look back from the outsidein.

107. techniq ue

1. “By Dj-ing, making art, and writing simultaneously, I tried to bypass the notion of the critic as an authority who controls narrative, and... to function as content provider, producer, and critic all at the same time.

It is role consolidation as digital performance.”

-DJ Spooky

The collaboration: dialectic v. dialogic “Dual effo ts” refers to the collaboration between Jesse Wetzel (JW) and Mikhail Kim (MK), collectively WhoaPony (WP). The collaboration is an experimental effo t on multiple fronts. The collecti e nature of the work is a test in itself. However, beyond that, the duality is an approach for questioning and examining architectural practice, and an explicidation of the fallacy of immaculate perception in the discipline.

108. schedule

1.

DJ Spooky That Subliminal Kid., Lunenfeld, P., Rhythm Science. Cambridge, MA.: MIT Press, 2004.

the p eople v ar chitectur e

Paul D. Miller: Encoding... procedures of extrapolation... translating one form of code into another... a strange game in which absence and presence, form and function, sign and signified, play in an ever-shifting field of meaning, a place where text and textuality switch place with blinding speed.1 WP: The object can be de coded and re-coded... Once it is on a page, it is also just an image that can be endlessly manipulated... The original loses its identity and becomes a subject of translation, interpretation, and re-mixing. It exists on multiple planes of recognition.

1.

Paul D. Miller aka DJ Spooky.

Rhythm Science. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2004.

108. schedule

107. techniq ue

63

Level of FINISH - to be continued...the hand off, einterpretation, improvization, the constant zooming out or reframing of the work

the p eople v ar chitectur e

How can we operate in space in similar ways? What can be gained in the flickering between explit and suggestive?

108. schedule

107. techniq ue

65

Th 2.23

M

heavy hitter:

week 8 2.20

2.16

M week 7 2.13

2.09

M

synthesis, critical framing

week 6 2.06

2.02

M week 5 1.30

1.26

M week 4 1.23

1.19

M week 3 1.16

1.12

M

exercises1, 2, 3, 4 exercises2, 3, 4, 5 exercises3, 4, 5, 6 exercises4, 5, 6, 7

week 2 1.09

1.05

week 1 1.02

M

finish boo

EDIT

thesis colloquia

EDIT

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Th

Th

Th proposals

Th

Th

Th

mid season form - helmets and full pads

very large array

Th

building critical mass - drills, reps, film study

107. techniq ue

final p oduction

108. schedule

4.19

M

M

M

M

heavy hitter: staging, building...eulogizing, lamenting

week 14 4.16

4.12

week 14 4.09

4.05

week 14 4.02

3.29

week 13 3.26

3.22

M

M

M

M

mapping, seeking, seeing

week 12 3.19

3.15

week 11 3.12

3.08

week 10 3.05

3.01

week 9 2.27

review: SATURATED

hyper thr eading effor t s

week 14 - THE BIG TICKET - FINAL INSTALL @ LIBERTY ANNEX

EDIT

review: DEEP

Th

Th

Th

Th

Th

Th

Th

Th playoff positioning - project, site, characters in play final stretch 67

the p eople v ar chitectur e

appendix

109. project brief

108. schedule

107. techniq ue

106. precedent : other

106. precedent : text s

106. precedent : project s

105. sit[e]u ations

104. program

103. polemic

102. abstra ct

69

Agamben, Giorgio. What Is an Apparatus?: And Other Essays.

Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2009.

Reiser, Jesse., Umemoto, Nanako., Atlas of Novel Tectonics. New York: Princeton Architectural Press., 2006

Berger, Peter L. and Thomas Luckmann. The Social Construction of Reality: a Treatise In the Sociology of Knowledge. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1967.

Roche, Francois., Jones, Caroline A. ed. “Francois Roche and R&Sie(n).” Sensorium: Embodied Experience, Technology, And Contemporary Art. 1st MIT Press ed.

Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2006. p.90. See also ‘@morphousMUTATIONS’, http://www. new-territories.com/roche%20 text.htm, 2000.

the p eople v ar chitectur e

Choi, Esther., Trotter, Marrikka. ed. “Re-enchanted architecture-A Conversation between K. Michael Hays and Marrikka Trotter.” Architecture At the Edge of Everything Else. Cambridge, Mass.: Work Books , 2010.

Deleuze, Gilles and Claire Parnet. Dialogues. Paris: Flammarion, 1977.

DJ Spooky That Subliminal Kid., Lunenfeld, P., Rhythm Science. Cambridge, MA.: MIT Press, 2004.

Elfassy, Natanel and Roche, Francois. Stuttering. Log 19, Spring-Summer 2010.

Herscher, Andrew. Violence Taking Place: the Architecture of the Kosovo Conflict.

Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2010.

Kwinter, Sanford. Requiem for the City At the End of the Millennium. Barcelona: Actar , 2010.

Latour, Bruno., Jones, Caroline A. ed. “air.” Sensorium: Embodied Experience, Technology, And Contemporary Art. 1st MIT Press ed. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press , 2006. p.105-107.

McLuhan, Marshall and Quentin Fiore. The Medium Is the Massage. 1st Touchstone ed. New York: Touchstone, 1967.

Miller, Paul D., DJ Spooky::That Subliminal Kid . Rhythm Science. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2004.

Wikipedia. “Ontology.” Concepts.

Wordsworth, William and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Lyrical Ballads. Oxford: Woodstock Books, 1990.

Debord, Guy. Society of the Spectacle. Detroit, Mich.: Black & Red, 1983.

71 105. sit[e]u ations

104. program

103. polemic

102. abstra ct Sennett, Richard. The Craftsman. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008.

106. precedent : project s

Reiser, Jesse, and Nanako Umemoto. Atlas of Novel Tectonics. New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2006.

106. precedent : text s

Glass, Philip, and Robert Wilson. Einstein On the Beach. New York, NY: Elektra Nonesuch, 1993.

106. precedent : other

Benjamin, Walter, and Rolf Tiedemann. The Arcades Project. 1st Harvard University Press pbk. ed. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2002.

107. techniq ue

Baudrillard, Jean, and Francesco Proto. Mass, Identity, Architecture: Architectural Writings of Jean Baudrillard.

Chichester: Wiley Academy, 2003.

108. schedule

Aureli, Pier Vittorio. The Possibility of an Absolute Architecture. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2011.

109. project brief

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