Portfolio of Written Works 2013 - Current

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by | joseph raffin

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T.O.C. page 007 page 037 page 051

PORTFOLIO OF WRITTEN WORKS by | Joseph Raffin 2013 - CURRENT

2014 MASTER OF ARCHITECTURE THESIS EXCERPTS 2013 EMERGENT STRATEGIES | TOWARDS NON-PLANNING 2017 BLUR CITY | AN ARCHITECTURAL LOVE STORY

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EXCERPTS FROM THE CRISIS OF AESTHETIC Master of Architecture Thesis 05 14 2014

01 page 008 Thesis Introduction page 012 Excerpt: Jean Baudrillard, Stainlessness, and Cultural Deterioration page 016 Excerpt: Cube and Duck Series page 020 Excerpt: Charting Architectural Styles page 024 Excerpt: Six Allegorical Cities page 032 Excerpt: The Opportunism of Interstitial Space

INTRODUCTION The past and present and future are not any one a singular theme within this thesis. Rather, they act as a three-fold, meticulously and continuously folding within and without one another. They are ever receding, ever coming forward, every tumbling into, ever tumbling out of. Issues of what is now or what will be is tangled in an intricate web of repeating geometries and patterns. Thus a thesis about the future, is a thesis about the past, and a thesis about the present equally.

Not everyone immerses themselves in theory.Actually, many architects that practice engage in almost no theory at all. However, there is an engagement of some ubiquity throughout those who concern themselves with anything architectural. It extends even beyond the practitioners and theorists to common people who beg a deeply theoretical question. “What the hell is that?” That is pertaining to almost all structures of any significance, from the tallest skyscraper to the suburban house. Almost anyone has at least some theoretical bone to pick when they question why things look the way they do. The anti-thesis of this idea is as simple as its question, “What the hell should it be?” or “what should it look like?” Both questions leave the contemplator equally confused as he begins to realized the complexity of such a simple statment. The question carries with it uncalculatable weight of previous theories, ideas about culture, history, and philosophy.

In this way everyone immerses themselves in theory.

These are simple and natural questions. These are also very personal questions. This is ever more understood when one considers that architecture is an extension of ourselves. This question of “what is this?” and “why is this” is deeply self analytical. The question is ultimately sought from within. The buildings that surround us are essentially corporeal. They encapsulate our modes of dwelling and being within the world. The body, the house, the neighborhood, the city becomes boundries 008

that withold our innards against our constant struggle to project ourselves outward. In this way, the roof and the house emerge from our spinal cord and ribs that hold the innards of everyday living. Viollet le Duc’s primitive hut mimics the protective nature of our skeleton.

Maybe the confusion lies in those buildings that one cannot see arising out of oneself. Progression up until now has always traced a line to our backs. It is one’s animal instinct to survive and survive better. If humans can adapt a way in that makes it’s species flourish, it is in the best interest of the species to do so. However, within instinctual drive of progression, there is a drive to be uniquely human. There are our histories of sheltering or histories of surviving. There is culture; a once harmonious interplay of the animal and the man. Progression is both ever forward and ever remembering.

Our forefathers painting the hunt upon the cave walls of Lascaux [1] are at one time totally progressive mode of survival and at the very same time and magnitude, expressive cultural devise. They fold much like the tenses.

But, progression is a factor of velocity. Harmony within progression is retained more or less easily at faster velocities. In the present our velocities are far faster than anything we have experienced as a species. The harmony of culture and progression are rent into two opposing dualities.

This is where the thesis picks up. It picks up in the moment when the velocities of progression are too fast for man to incorporate cultural expression. This might be where the disconnect lies. Francesco Proto elaborates on such an idea with frequent reference to Jean Baudrillard. The Pompidou c enter is a symbol of mass identity [2]. An expression that is solely expressive of itself and its inner machine threatens to annihilate culture. It at embodies only the pure drive of technological expression, speed, 009

and movement. In this case it is both lacking in culture and embodying every culture at once because the need to be progressive is within our inner animal. Humanity no longer sees buildings as stepping out of their backs.

Rather, a machine stepping out of a machine.

So the questioning of “what is this?” is an idea about the relationship between an object and its simulacra. It is a formal investigation. It is an idea that has been picked up abandoned and picked up again. It is an idea of the future as it relates to both past and present. As humans, pure progression is not enough for us. Humans need culture to retain a sense of ourselves. The intensity of progression will always follow with an intensification of cultural expression; even if it is just a desperate act of reassurance. And this is where the thesis begins.

Notes 1. Turpin, Etienne. “Jimmie Durham in Lasceaux – A Parable for Artists in the Anthropocene” University of Detroit Mercy School of Architecture 2012 Lecture Series. Cranbrook Academy of Art, Bloomfield Hills. 21st December 2012.

Lecture 2. Proto, Francesco. Mass. Identity. Architecture. The Writings of Jean Baudrillard. West Sussex: Wiley-Academy, 2003. Print.

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JEAN BAUDRILLARD, STAINLESSNESS, AND CULTURAL DETERIORATION The Pompidou Center is an example that seems to frequent the musings of architectural theorist Jean Baudrillard but it exemplifies and overreaching phenomenon. [1] Through the impudent transparency of façade, the Beaubourg represents the annihilation of the semiotic relationship (signifier/signified) between the building and the façade itself. It is not by accident that the collapsing of the latter into the graphic sign of the escalator coincides perfectly with the logo for the for the products sold in the museum shop.

The Pompidou Center stands as a moment of dramatic autonomy. In a fantastically bold move, Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers have inverted the guts of the building making the innards the simulacra of the object. It is a façade of totally autonomy. The machine like object neither signifies nor embodies all or any culture. It contrarily consumes it. The only sign that we can derive from its façade is the mode of circulation that traces across the façade. The escalator: it is a devise of smooth shopping and optimized consumption.

So it goes with many of the progressive structures these days. Proto elaborates upon the Frank Ghery’s Guggenheim Museum. [2] In contrast to the Guggenheim Museum, where Ghery exploited the opportunity it offered to propose a ‘rewrapped’ object, the impossible-to-repeat shock of the Pompidou was caused by the fact that , once and for ever, the building was offered ‘unwrapped’.

It seems as though within contemporary architecture, the buildings of significant cultural value embody such a given aesthetic. The mechanical progression and 0012

expression of building systems has allowed architecture to push the capabilities of the building envelope.

Envelope has become a way of dressing or wrapping the machine beneath. Sleek stainless expression has taken precedence. Etienne Turpin, who concerns himself with matters of culture and art in the theoretical geological age of the Anthropocene, questions the notion that “stainless” things are considered culturally progressive. [3] The aesthetic of “stainlessness” is reflective of the smoothing over of the earth’s surface by human appropriation. This happens at such a force that its effects can be compared to a new geological age. He is careful to point towards Anish Kapoor’s Cloud Gate and Frank Ghery’s Guggenheim Museum as specific examples of this.

The speed and progression brought on by rampant technological expansion has a way of deteriorating culture. By the very nature of being human we cannot be a purely progressive. Survival is an instinctual act and the tendency to be progressive can be viewed as a constant struggle to “survive better” or “survive easier”. However, our cultural response will always manifest itself to some kind of fruition. In an age of unkempt technological advancement and speed, cultural objects have appeared in the forms of cheap kitchy histories such as classicism.

This has come with some force roughly equal to that of the progressive expressions. As the species gets caught up in the speed that progression affords it, people find refuge in the shade of their past; even if it is just a shade. An example of this would be the suburban homes whose façade contains broken and severely abstracted classical elements.

So the continually separating duality lies in the tension between objects are totally autonomous, and the objects that are a mere shade of all the histories, obsolete ideals, and culture injected into them. They are at one end, objects whose semiotic relationship have been ultimately destroyed, or objects removed so far from their simulacra, 0013

they cannot speak to the same values that they used to.

Both opposing situations share the fact that they are totally idealized, and fade from any real context or region.

They both exist in a philosophical dessert.

The situation can be further illustrated by the “changing architectural styles curve”. This map outlines identifiable architectural styles in the past 8,000 years. One can recognize an asymptotic-like projection over the past millennia and especially 250 years. The situation insinuates a kind of “identity crisis” within architecture.

While humanity sits between autonomy and symbolism self definition becomes self defeating. The question of “Who are we?” goes largely unanswered.

The thesis approaches this situation at two different scales. The first is at a formal scale, thinking about two objects and their semiotic properties. The second is at a broader story telling scale. This scale sets out various allegories of city planning based around city planning as it relates to the situation of lost identity within extreme progression.

Notes 1. Proto, Francesco. Mass. Identity. Architecture. The Writings of Jean Baudrillard. West Sussex: Wiley Academy, 2003. Print.

2. Proto, Francesco. Mass. Identity. Architecture. The Writings of Jean Baudrillard. West Sussex: Wiley Academy, 2003. Print.

3. Turpin, Etienne. “Jimmie Durham in Lasceaux – A Parable for Artists in the Anthropocene” University of Detroit Mercy School of Architecture 2012 Lecture Series. Cranbrook Academy of Art, Bloomfield Hills. 21st December 2012.

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THE CUBE AND DUCK SERIES The Cube and Duck series was ultimately developed around the same time as these charts were being disseminated. The idea is that, the narrative of the trajectory of architectural form requires an in depth examination of the meaning of form itself. Stemming from Baudrillard’s ideas about the Pompidou Centre and its relevance to the machine aesthetic, the cube and duck series, is an investigation in the contemporary treatment of form.

One can imagine that all things abide by an innate relationship with one’s simulacra. The object is what it is but at the same time carries with it a shadow-like association typically tagged upon by other objects, assumptions, abstractions, and prejudices. All form becomes a semiotic complexity comprised affected by past histories and time. The object and its simulacra is another philosophical phenomenon worthy of and uncountable number of investigations, books, pages, thoughts and musing. For now, we’ll stick to the understanding that and object is both itself and its symbolic associations.

The cube fills this description in a distinct way. As an image, the cube can be seen as a symbol of efficiency, idealism, organization, and progressivism. This is through its autonomy and historical formal significance. As a thing itself, it fulfills the same ends. It is a simple figure wrought with complex and calculable geometrical patterns. Thusly the cube is both and object and a complex assemblage of multiple object. Collapsing its own semiotics inward, the cube is purely autonomous. It’s simply symbolic of itself. This is nearly an impossible end to achieve, and these images hardly do the phenomenon justice.

However, as hard as the destruction of semiosis is to achieve, it happens again within the realm of form.

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This is illustrated (imperfectly) by the duck. The duck in axonometric, opposing the cube in axonometric, is purely a symbolic devise. It has no autonomy. There is an endless association with the form of a duck, from Venturi’s great post – modernism manifesto, to the toy that graced the surface of our childhood bathtubs, the duck (in this image) has been riddled of its autonomous nature to take on a totally symbolic presence.

The rest of the duck and cube iterations indicate some kind of collision between the two ideas. Each drawing is an axonometric elevation or section of a basic synthesis between the object of pure autonomy and pure symbolism. This is to iterate the second idea of style. That is, style is comprised of forms that synthesize at some level, the given symbols and truly avant-garde/ autonomous expression within any given style.

This gives light to definition of style as an operation of phases. Both Edward Said and Peter Eisenman explain that style tends to begin with some significant cultural, social, or technological phenomenon, sparking avantgarde thinking to become increasingly relevant until the idea is so abstracted that it enters a “late phase”. This “late phase” emulates a synthesis that favors the formal duck, the avantgarde, on the other hand, favors the cube.

As style moves through its phases, the things that start as mostly autonomous collide with symbolic forms that turn the form over toward a more or less symbolic form.

The emergence of the idea of interstitial space came at the collisions these purely symbolic and autonomous forms, most specifically realized in the creation of the sections.

Here the phenomenon that the cube and duck engage in an active role in adding and subtracting both autonomy and a-priori symbolic meaning becomes very evident.

The intricate geometrical nature of the autonomous form ruptures symbolic form while equally the symbolic form restores meaning to random geometrical patterning.

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Interstitial spaces become open at the meeting of the two forms.

This interstitial space, though seldom wholly identified, is something that has always lingered throughout architectural history. The baroque is probably the most significant example of this as architects such as Borromini began to take rupture the Virtruvian classical cannon by fracturing pediments, pushing the rules of scale, extruding facades, and creating new orders.

The complex geometrical patterning were a way of not diagramming context and program, rather diagramming purely formal and perceptual elements within a buildings plan or faรงade.

At some level architecture has always succeeded in this synthesis of autonomy and symbol. However, in light of the crisis-like situation indicated by the curve graphs, the difficulty of doing this in the present age becomes more and more apparent. Today, this synthesis is less evident. Consider for a moment the ideas of infinity, instantaneousness, and holism that were derived from the graphs. Today the buildings seen as progressive, as well as those unprogressive ones, take on a singular form rather than any kind of careful synthesis. The synthesis has become more of a polarity, each form is an instantaneous expression either over abstracted like the duck, or over autonomous as with the cube.

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CHARTING ARCHITECTURAL STYLES At the crux of the thesis lies a curve that maps identifiable architectural styles over the past 8,000 years. Let us consider for a moment the use of the term “style� as it pertains to the ongoing thesis investigation. As expected the idea of style is an entire subject is an inexhaustible amount of research, writing and investigation in itself. The investigation here explores ideas about style on a few levels. The first is a process by which avant-garde things become grounded and after thorough fruition, become over abstracted. The second process is at a formal level, where forms acting within this process of style seem to emulate both autonomous and symbolic elements.

Lastly, style, as an operation of grouping and timeline, is neither a process nor a synthesis of dually symbolic and autonomous form. Rather, style is merely a grouping of seemingly similar formal characteristics occurring around the same time period.

The last definition is one, at the surface, most present in the various timelines assembled by Jacob Voorthuis of the Eindhoven Technical University in the Netherlands.

However as the timeline becomes unpacked both a deeper understanding style and its trajectory of styles become revealed. The statistical timelines can be approached like a narrative rather than a scientific or historical fact.

The narrative told here is seen at first glance through its obvious asymptotic characteristics. While one can blame such an instance on the accessibility of historical data allowing one to separate specific aspects of style, another equally compelling argument arises. I seems as though, considering that the x axis indicates time and the y indicates quantity, the amount of architectural styles per given year is on a significant compounding trajectory. As time progresses, the every straitening of the best fit curve reaches an indefinite slope, the narrative 0020

of infinity becomes more and more apparent. Perhaps the underlying story of this curve begins in one of infinite proportions.

The narrative gains complexity amongst other iterations.

[Figure A and B] depict another aspect of the trajectory of style. As the curves that follow the beginning and end of style come together, there is revealed, in the narrative, an idea about the obsolete and the imminent as well as the speed by which these things occur. As time progresses, the meeting of the curves suggest a spontaneous and instantaneous nature by which style becomes very relevant as well as obsolete. In this way, our understanding of style is ruptured by the very idea of progress; and the complex processes associated style become harder and harder to realize as things that are at one moment imminent become in almost the same moment completely obsolete.

A further abstraction from the timeline indicated the way form acts within the styles of the timeline. Each building associated with each style does not display qualities totally unique to that time period. Rather, it traces within its complexity previous forms associated with previous style. This is hardly ever an accurate trace, rather a trace happening with some kind of more or less significant abstraction. Even our suburban houses today consist of haphazard references to architectural form employed thousands of years ago. In this way, individual building forms can be mapped using a vertical line capable of crossing multiple styles. As the asymptotic projection of architectural styles become near a straight line, the potential for a building to embody traces from an infinite number of styles becomes ever more realizable.

In the later instance, the individual building form is injected into the conversation of style. The charts narrate a future that is every more, infinite, instant, and holistic.

To say holistic implies that there is an underlying aspect 0021

to infinity in this particular case. That is, while the charts suggest a future of both instant and infinite form, they also imply and unifying aspect to the vast possibility of forms. As styles turn to lines as finite as momentary spots [figure C], our understanding of how form and style differ become extraordinarily difficult to distinct. On one hand, each form is really its own unique style, coming and going in the same moment.

On the other hand, every form (and style for that matter) can trace vague references to every other form.

Form becomes both infinite and holistic. This draws connections to Baudrillard’s ideas about images as being an indication about mass culture.

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SIX ALLEGORICAL CITIES As one continues to ponder the rising narrative of the future of architectural form within the graphs and the duality of symbolism and autonomy within form, one can rightly see a crisis arising. In our struggle to survive better and our struggle to retain a sense of meaning, culture steps forth. However as things become so instantaneous that there is no possible way to synthesis these two sensibilities, architecture may be forced to grasp on to severely nostalgic expression in order to retain some kind of meaning within this struggle. This means like the duck it is essentially expressive of only the vaguest meaning.

The narrative seems to have arrived at a bit of an impasse. What does this crisis of cultural form mean for the future of architectural form? Let us propose this, to take the narrative to an absurd level in order to speculate on the trend of architectural form considering its present tendencies. In the future, possible hundreds of years from now, when form is finally totally vague, instant, and holistic, whole cities will no longer deal with the scarcity of natural resources as they do today. Rather, they will struggle most with the way by which they find and preserve form that they find is meaningful, local, and cultural.

This narrative is extended through the SIX allegorical case studies. As an allegorical devise, the narrative is kept from veering into the realm being projective, accurate, and for that matter prescriptive. Each individual allegory employs two components that further the dialog about meaningful form in the far future (and in the present for that matter). The first component is an idealized pragmatic system. The second component arrives as a kind of afterthought. The over-idealization of the pragmatic system forces the citizens of each city to think about meaning and identity within their respective struggles to be progressive and efficient. Being neither prescriptive 0024

nor projective, each allegory lends the conversation of interstitial space differently and with more or less success.

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DISTANT CITY Having no need to attach itself to the land, Distant City is forced to look to its own obsolescence and imminence to find cultural form. Ideal forms are realized at the top of the city at instantaneous rates. Equally as instantaneous is how they morph and divide in order to become useful.

As they become obsolete. The sub forms hang from the bottom of the city as way of being historical. The historical forms are eventually dropped off to the ground as the city makes room for new form.

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EATING CITY Eating city idealizes the cube, an abstraction of the grid. The cube is isometric, Cartesian, and efficient. The cube also embodies little to no identity allowing it to free itself from context. For this reason it crawls across the landscape roaming for cultural form. It devours the landscape it roams using the natural form to satisfy its nostalgic sensibilities. The city fights a losing battle however, as it abstracts the form into something usable, the devoured landscapes turn into unidentifiable blobs.

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PLATE CITY Plate CIty employs mass production as its idealized urban system. The city brings this conversation to an megaurban scale. It imagines the mass production of entire residential corridors at an instantaneous speed. As the city grows it slowly plates the landscape. Thusly, the city attempts to find meaning in the natural landscape that it embodies; through an ironically parasitic relationship.

In this specific instance, citizens of now old Los Angeles have migrated into this mass produced city. Rising sea levels have devoured the old city, where the only things visible above the tide are the old skyscrapers. They stand like giants in the distance.

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SOFT CITY Technology has a way of reversing our notions of what form is soft and what form is hard. As this system becomes both autonomous and instantaneous, it constantly changes form to accommodate the ever changing needs of its citizens. In this way, its form is very soft, being almost definitive of nothing. Soft form hardly even embodies temporal identity. Thusly, this city’s urban form is the meaningful component. Its hard frame acts as more of a cultural devise than an efficient system.

The soft city, however active and unpredictable, remains within theconfines of the urban framework.

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ORGANIZING CITY Organizing City idealizes the grid as an urban ideal.

Being both efficient in flexibility, organization, and direction; it seeks to obtain meaningful identity. It takes old urban from the antiquated city of Chicago as a means of nostalgic relief. The buildings themselves are valuable solely in their ability to provide the Organizing City with meaningful form.

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ROW CITY Row City is an effort to further the idealizing the grid.

It streamlines the condition by removing it’s cross members. This allows the city to improve the efficiency of movement in and out of the city. Row City investigates culturally meaningful form in the act of serif-ing its urban edges. Much like the modernization of textual fonts, the removal of the serif was seen as ideal in embodying multiple cultural identities. In an effort to find meaning within strife, Row City allows its roof to serif as a method of self identification.

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ONGOING CONCLUSION: THE OPPORTUNISM OF INTERSTITIAL SPACE Perhaps in this light one can begin to bring closure to the afore questioning. What do Eisenman and Koolhass see within classical architecture that is still so valuable today? This will probably be a question that goes largely unanswered or even more probably, answered beyond anything they were truly trying to prove. However, there is something to be said about the way that image and language is presented to us today as opposed to the past. Today, with the infinite nature of information it is becoming harder and harder to present anything in a truly critical manner. What is truly the envy of the past is the ability to synthesize singular forms into something that is truly meaningful, critical, and complex. And of the star architects of our time, Rem and Peter’s work on both a formal level and a conceptual level speak directly to this elusive quality.

From its conception within the first iterations of the Cube and Duck Cities, the notion of interstitial space has risen to the surface. In a future the world may retrospectively identify with and infinite amount of cultural form and style, it is not these formal objects themselves that constitute meaningful and cultural form. Rather, these are the things to be taken for granted much like information today. In its infinite nature, form becomes extremely taken for granted and is presented “as is”. It is the unique position of the designer, to capitalize on the opportunistic interstitial space. In this way, interstitial space, is not so much the rupture of geometric patterning, but the space in between presented “as is” ideas and form. Thusly, in a future where form and identity is both infinite and instant, the designer may place the individual within this interstitial space. The spac e between spaces, the form between forms.

In this sense form is very important to any society. It’s innately a political move, as well a cultural statement.

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It is a pivotal operation by which any group of people finds and preserves local identity. Interstitial space, as a tool, has been employed throughout history as man continually synthesizes the cube and duck. However, the future holds the challenge of creating this synthesis within compounding and unprecedented velocities. But with the onset of challenge and crisis, a new epoch rings forth. This epoch begins not where any idea ends (or begins); rather, it sits uncomfortably between ideas. It moves the infinity from retrospective style to prospective possibility.

This is beautiful. This is ugly. This is good. This is bad.

Pay heed to the proverbial itch, embodied in everyman’s curiosity towards form. It is the crux of the avant-garde, the birth of a new paradigm.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY Calvino, Italo. Invisible Cities. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1974. Print.

Eisenman, Peter, and Christopher Alexander. “Contrasting Concepts of Harmony in Architecture.” Silver Lectures.

Harvard University Graduate School of Design, Cambridge, MA. 12 June 2013. Lecture. This lecture took place as a debate between Peter Eisenman and Christopher Alexander in 1983 Kipnis, Jeff. “Architecture or Revolution.” Silver Lectures.

IoA Institute of Architecture, University of Applied Arts, Vienna, Austria. 12 June 2013. Lecture.

Koolhaas, Rem. “OMA’s Work.” Areen Lecture Series 2010. American University of Beirut, Beirut, Lebanon. 18 Mar. 2010. Lecture.

Koolhaas, Rem. Delirious New York: A Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan. New York: Monacelli, 1994. Print.

Peter Eisenman and Wolf D.Prix Conversation. YouTube.

YouTube, 06 May 2012. Web. 25 Apr. 2014. <https://www. youtube.com/watch?v=Smfg6l6IPI0>.

“Peter Eisenman.” Interview by Carlos Breillembourg.

BOMB Magazine. N.p., n.d. Web. 20 Aug. 2012. <http:// bombmagazine.org/article/5991/peter-eisenman>.

Proto, Francesco. Mass. Identity. Architecture. The Writings of Jean Baudrillard. West Sussex: Wiley-Academy, 2003. Print.

Turpin, Etienne. “Jimmie Durham in Lasceaux – A Parable for Artists in the Anthropocene” University of Detroit Mercy School of Architecture 2012 Lecture Series. Cranbrook Academy of Art, Bloomfield Hills. 21st December 2012.

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Lecture.

Voorthuis, Peter. Timeline: BC - 0. Peter Voorthuis.net: Teaching, Architecture, Architecture Theory, and History.

Petervoorthuis.net, 05 June 2008. Web. 15 Sept. 2013. <http://web.archive.org/web/20080605024443/http:// www.voorthuis.net/timelines.htm>.

Voorthuis, Peter. Timeline: 0 - 1499. Peter Voorthuis.net: Teaching, Architecture, Architecture Theory, and History.

Petervoorthuis.net, 05 June 2008. Web. 15 Sept. 2013. <http://web.archive.org/web/20080605024443/http:// www.voorthuis.net/timelines.htm>.

Voorthuis, Peter. Timeline: 1500 - 1899. Peter Voorthuis. net: Teaching, Architecture, Architecture Theory, and History. Petervoorthuis.net, 05 June 2008. Web. 15 Sept.

2013. <http://web.archive.org/web/20080605024443/ http://www.voorthuis.net/timelines.htm>.

Voorthuis, Peter. Timeline: 1700 - 2000. Peter Voorthuis. net: Teaching, Architecture, Architecture Theory, and History. Petervoorthuis.net, 05 June 2008. Web. 15 Sept.

2013. <http://web.archive.org/web/20080605024443/ http://www.voorthuis.net/timelines.htm>.

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EMERGENT STRATEGIES TOWARDS NON-PLANNING 05 07 2013 PUBLISHED BY | LUNCH8: Future For Sites Unknown University of Virginia Student Architecture Jounal

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EMERGENT STRATEGIES | TOWARDS “NONPLANNING” The Student’s Dilemma “The words urban and planning and urban development belong in a shop for architectural antiques and should be replaced by phantasms still to be defined, which fluctuate and flicker like the television screen after the broadcast day has finished. White noise as urban strategy, as a digitally networked system without hierarchies, is the play of the suburbs and development on the peripheries and edges, which will mold and determine the image of our cities and the quality they have to offer.”[1] Architecture students today find themselves in a precarious situation. Perhaps this is true in any generation: that ages and eras can only be studied, and for that matter defined, retrospectively. Although Philip Johnson identified the International Style amid its most affluent phase, architecture never conceived the full extend to modernism until postmodernism gave it recognition through heavyhanded criticism and attempts to save it. Nonetheless, academics reared in the morals and purity of early modernist planning and form, brushed off the criticism of what was then the taboo “pop-culture” post modernist idea, and passed kitsch versions of modernism on to their students. However, as it was passed generation to generation, it began to take the form of unreachable precedence, championing super-human idols such as Mies and LeCorbusier and abstracting truly intuitive modernist theory into stylized ideologies and over-formulated methodologies; knowledge of these superarchitects only lingers, their quotes de-contextualized, misunderstood, and clichéd.

Prix recognizes the most lethal underlying cliché abstracted from modernist ideology: the designer is some sort of imposer, attempting to seek the all-encompassing, 0038

perfect plan. Planning and urban development have become the practice of seeking this. Today, students are left to struggle between succumbing to adulterated modernist ideas and the urge to deny such abstracted knowledge as being restrictive to the progress of the profession. Prix, in the frankest of language, challenges the notion of urban planning as being entirely backwards, the terms themselves belonging in some antique shop.

Prix asks the hard questions. Design needs to be willing to challenge even the most fundamental understandings of planning and development if it wishes to produce an age that is not merely another abstraction of the past.

Thus, this generation’s biggest struggle may be to break from the momentum that architecture has been riding, caused by the modernist gods, and redefine a new age.

A Project in Emergent Strategies At the University of Detroit Mercy, we sought to critique contemporary understandings of urban design and planning. Our project ultimately deals with the question of planning tendencies and the very idea of planning itself. It proposes a method that derives urban and architectural form alternative to traditional planning methods. Detroit’s “terrain vague” has succeeded in capturing the attention of masses of people and likewise inspired us, fascinated by its empty lots and gutted buildings within even the most developed urban fabric. Emptiness was an important word for the project. It sparked important conversations on how and why everyone seems to experience an almost sublime emptiness within a city, especially where urban planners had intended to fill.

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Initial Interventions - Empty | Full Tinkering with folding and unfolding white sheets of paper began to expose how fundamental the questioning of emptiness is to the realization and development of ideas.

The design exercises and conversations raised simple but important questions: as the paper folds and unfolds, does it become more or less full? The models folded by the class seemed to understand that a paper became full as lines and folds were added to it. Naturally, this statement became a sort of hypothesis for the beginning of the investigation.

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Empty | Full - 01: Blank but Full It was important to adopt a retrospective analysis, acting first and questioning later. The interventions were outlined with an ink pen as a method of extracting them. The white paper began to take on the guise as a philosophical tabula rasa- a control within the experiment. Anything else could be seen as a sort of intervention upon it. The act of pulling the paper from the notebook revealed subtle folds and wrinkles within the delicate plane. Tearing and tracing became tearing, crumpling, and tracing in the attempt to add variable to the investigation.

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Empty | Full - 02: Fulfilling Potential The variable within the investigation changed to become the mode of abstraction. Acetone ink transfers created a more accidental abstraction due to the unpredictable nature of the transfer, whether the paper was wrinkled or not. Despite the perfect qualities of the tabula rasa that the white paper was assumed to share, the transfers were still imperfect. In reality, the sheet had its own hidden topography, one that is difficult to anticipate.

The information within each fold was complex and as the action became more intrusive or destructive (crumpling), the information only gained complexity. There were folds no doubt that even a keen eye could not pick up. As pen pulled along the peaks and crevasses of the folded paper 0042

it soon became clear that the ink lines were merely oversimplifying the information that each fold presented. Each line only served to generalize the folded information, systematically returning the information filled page to its whiter origins. It seemed obvious that the project was beginning to question typical understandings of abstraction. Every line was just an abstraction of much more complex folding. Eventually one could abstract the folded plane until it was just a white sheet again, colorless, material-less, and lacking topography.

What became even more disconcerting was that the only conclusions to be drawn, worked against the first hypothesis. Intrusive action upon the tabula rasa only served to specify information from it. Abstraction upon any information caused by the intrusion only seemed to generalize this very specific data. In a way, the white paper was the source from which the intrusions were able to specify. The hypothesis changed: the less folded the white sheet of paper, the tabula rasa, became, the more full it was. However, this proposal seemed to deny any experiential sensibility. Despite the progress of the investigation, how can one honestly say that a white piece of paper is full? The question was simple, but important.

This topography gave the paper a kind of purpose, and any imposition upon it, however specific it may be, fulfilled this purpose. Paper was meant to be drawn on; so while the process has been symbolically recognizing how full the paper was with nothing on it, it was at the same time, emptying the paper of what it was made for. The experiential sensibilities, that denied the â&#x20AC;&#x153;blank but fullâ&#x20AC;? analysis, revealed that people seem to have an inherent instinct to fulfill the purpose of things.

Where one approach saw a tabula rasa embodying all ideas, the experiential approach revealed a paper should be drawn upon. It turned out that both approaches observed equally true statements and created two ideas 0043

that were integral to the investigation. The first is the idea about the tabula rasa and how one can abstract towards and away from it. The second is about planning and purposing, and how one responds to fulfilling purpose or, on the other hand, how one plans for purpose to be fulfilled.

Healthy Abstractions: Climbing the Platonic Tree The rest of the investigation became a question of how these two ideas intertwine to create effective and intuitive architecture. The first idea, that the tabula rasa is a source of information, empowers the designer with what was phrased “healthy abstraction”. We have at our disposal; two forms of abstraction that are in constant motion up and down the Platonic tree. Descending this tree, a person finds oneself abstracting until all that is left is the texture-less white surface. They stand like painters in front of an empty canvas, afraid to impose upon the already overwhelming amount The second is perhaps best articulated by John Rajchman’s interpretation of Gilles Deleuze. “he too thinks our lives are something like ‘bundles’ of virtualities, with indeterminate contours, capable of entering into other possible configurations with others; and he imagines philosophy as a sort of inquiry into what happens in the resulting arrangements”.[2] In other words, this form realizes the indeterminate arrangements that the tabula rasa presents and takes advantage of them. The tabula rasa is merely a utopia, as nothing exists or will ever exist like it. Thus, the work has been laid out; from the subtle topography of the paper or canvas a person can draw or paint the “indeterminate contours” and “possible configurations.” It is this method of abstraction that can be considered a “healthy 0044

abstraction” as it draws away from the dooming result of the singular daunting white plane.

Case Study - Detroit’s Terrain Vague We returned to Detroit, as it illustrates symptoms of a new urban dilemma. Detroit continues to fall severely short of its idealistic utopian grids, and faces a situation where more urban planning may simply push the city farther backwards. We approached Detroit’s Terrain Vague by employing the second idea of abstraction: reacting to planned circumstances and our inherent need to fulfill. Anyone can now understand the feeling of emptiness that the terrain vague brings. Detroit is a chronological overlaying of three major urban plans. The first were early French farmers who formed strip lots perpendicular to the river. The site was secured by a fort and recognized as a major economic and military vantage point at the neck of the river. As its population grew, a radial plan around the center of the city was established. The final plan was an orthographic gird that split up the areas between the radial roads as one drew away form the city center. Each block of land became the basis for urban development yearning to be filled. When it is not, people may feel a sort of sublime emptiness driven by the inherent need to fill the void and complete the system.

More investigations were realizing that any utilitarian plan is best realized upon the tabula rasa. The utilitarian grid drawn upon a flat white sheet paper was limited only by the quality of the paper, the eye, the pen, and the ruler.

The utilitarian grid drawn upon a crumpled sheet of paper revealed a highly distorted version of the grid severely limited by the paper’s topography. It is at this moment that Prix’s statement comes to fruition- an urban plan, or any plan, is doomed to fall short of itself, even as it becomes more defined and specific. This is due to its utopian nature. Also, an urban gird can only be truly fulfilled when program fills each block to infinity. It calls 0045

for the maximization (of unlimited program on a limited block) to be economical. Again, the urban plan falls short of itself, as this is an impossible task. How then can these extra-ordinary plans be achieved? How can anyone begin to plan their big ideas if their mere act of planning limits them? The continued fusion between the idea of abstraction and planning prompted the project to start addressing these issues.

The imperfection of the grids over folded paper served as illustrations to how utopian ideas impose across an imperfect landscape. As line meets wrinkle, an important distortion occurs. The grid mutates in order to survive.

The mutations can be defined reactions to unanticipated circumstances such as topography or existing social conditions. Rem Koolhass refers to certain mutations within the urban grid of Manhattan and Coney Island; one being the skyscraper, a bastard offspring of the needle and globe towers.[3] It seems that mutations have a way of defining their own formalism. Suddenly, they can be understood as the foundation to a new urban strategy. Urbanism goes from being strict planning to phenomena formed at the intersection of existing context and abstraction.

Towards the Future: questioning the past Any new age or era can only be fully defined retrospectively. Yet, theorists and philosophers can recognize symptoms of dramatic change within mass globalization and the discussions on the anthropocene.

The architecture student sifts through generations of modernist clichĂŠs passed on to him or her, looking to the great names to find specific formulas to deal with todayâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s immediate issues. One sees no choice but to call into question the most traditional tenants of architectural thought. Prixâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s bold statement causes us to question how to move towards a new paradigm. It may not be found in the star-architect, but rather in the restoration of 0046

intuitively questioning the intentions of early architectural modernists. These thoughtful investigations in consort with healthy abstraction can give us a new understanding towards future sites

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The final drawings were themselves the continuing investigation. The acetone print is the existing condition.

Lines are extruded up illustrating the 3d grid. They mutate and change to fit around their condition. Form is then abstracted from the grid lines, and mutations as architecture and urban space come into being. The drawings show three specific sites within the city: the empty Hudson lot (above), a developed alleyway and the abandoned Brewster Projects (opposite).

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BIBLIOGRAPHY 1.Prix, Wolf D., and Martina Kandeler-Fritsch. Get off of My Cloud: Texte 1968 - 2005. Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz, 2005. Print.

2.Rajchman, John.

“Absractions.”

Cambridge, MA: MIT, 1998. Print.

Constructions.

3.Koolhaas, Rem. Delirious New York: A Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan. New York: Monacelli, 1994. Print.

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BLUR CITY | AN ARCHITECTURAL LOVE STORY 02 14 2016 UNPUBLISHED

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BLUR CITY | AN ARCHITECTURAL LOVE STORY “The words urban and planning and urban development belong in a shop for architectural antiques and should be replaced by phantasms still to be defined, which fluctuate and flicker like the television screen after the broadcast day has finished. White noise as urban strategy, as a digitally networked system without hierarchies, is the play of the suburbs and development on the peripheries and edges, which will mold and determine the image of our cities and the quality they have to offer.”

Imagine a city that is all periphery; a soft penumbra with neither a nucleus nor city center. It waves and fluxes, flashes, and then vanishes. Amorphous nodes of clustered networks gather throughout the city and then disperse in an instant. Densities change hundreds of times in almost a single moment.

It scurries above the spent plains and spills over and down the mountains. Some describe it as water splashing into a tossed sea. Others, describe it like a thick starling flock that stretches across the sky and then recoils into a dense huddled mass. The shadow of this phantasm hardly casts darkness. Sun rays slip smoothly past its porous networks. Its shadow is more so the result of light diffused rather than the light rejected; and a cloudy day will render it nearly invisible. If you wish to see it fly overhead, you must listen. The rumble of conversation, collaboration, and the clamorous unfolding of innumerable innovations harold its immanence.

“Verily, verily, I say unto thee, When thou wast young, thou girdedst thyself, and walkedst whither thou wouldest: but when thou shalt be old, thou shalt stretch forth thy hands, and another shall gird thee, and carry thee whither thou wouldest not.”

Emma placed the book to her side. Her eyes were swollen 0052

Blur City in passing to almost blindness from lack of sleep. She was on the cusp of a project that was beginning to consume her.

Emma was really shooting for the stars with this one. Blur City seemed to be most friendly to those meticulous and incremental types. Taking on smaller more immediate problems meant more immediate and recognizable success. It was immensely beneficial in the way that the community looked at you.

Emmaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s work ethic could hardly be identified as being compatible with this structure. She was mostly interesting in a project as far as its cosmic significance and concept.

She could hardly be bothered with details; struggling heavily with them when the project required it. More romantic types might identify her as a bit of a dreamer, 0053

but her obsession with the “whole” often seemed to pair with a misplaced sense of pride. This was a problem she at all times had to keep in check. Furthermore, as a project became dauntingly intricate, she tended to fade back into phases of paralyzing indolence.

Her network, however, gave her the benefit of the doubt. They had grown quite familiar with her erratic processes and fickle motivation. This was mitigated in part by a couple lines of code in Blur City’s algorithm that measured people’s backgrounds and linked their likely skills and interests with congruent personality types. It was revolutionary because it distinguished diversity of background as something of great utility. And Blur City organized itself around this parameter as well as millions of others.

This was a source of patience for Emma’s collaborators.

They trusted the complex algorithms that drove Blur City and thereby trusted her. Being well aware of this fact, Emma was equally gracious as she was anxious. She couldn’t escape the feeling that she had been letting people down. She felt as though their ability to hide their impatience was visibly waning. As her own private projects began to sap her motivation, she worried her colleagues would begin catching on to her increasing disinterest in her professional practice. This was a tragedy manifest in the fact that she was keen on keeping these private undertakings secret. They were doomed to doubt and question her.

Twenty minutes after midnight Emma rose up again and walked out onto her balcony. Earth flew steadily from below her apartment. Its speckled lights scattered the ground plane, carefully and measuredly marking its various typographies. She sparked a lighter and torched the tip of a cigarette. Her smoking habit turned five last month.

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Halfway through her cigarette she studied its wrinkled edges and observed its smoldering end; then, relaxing her hand, let it fall un-fettered to the ground below. It maintained its glow for a good while until it was sucked into the night darkness. Pause was a fortuitous blessing in Blur City and Emma took the moment to bask in it before returning to her desk.

Tomorrow had been long in the making and Emma knew it futile to try and sleep. Besides, there were some final arrangements and bugs she had to finish fixing in her project. A soft screen of code illuminated her pale face as she poured over each indiscernible line of text that crept on like boxcars on an endless track. The momentum of a thousand hours of strained concentration was finally

Emma at work 0055

hitting her with a dulling force. Her monotonous pace had become sickening.

She looked again through her window to where Rene slept. She envied his silent drive. She knew she was doing work that he could power through at will. She wished she could wake him and bribe him to finish the damned project for her. He would do it too, bribe or no bribe. This was a second tragedy. He more than anyone in Blur City, could not know what she had been putting together. She reckoned back to a conversation she had with him last week about relocating. It had deeply upset him and she was completely in the dark about how he might take tomorrow’s revelations. Taking note of the time, Emma returned her mind to her work.

Finally, the music in her apartment stuck a kind of rhythm that began to carry her productivity and it picked up enough inertia to continue through the night. She broke the morning, as she had for the past week; too exhausted to attend to her pressing fears.

Emma’s alarm pulled her out of a deep REM cycle. The inconsiderate buzzing bounced off the glossy walls of her small white apartment. She arose a few hours later than she had planned, still a good bit disoriented.

Emma wasn’t rushed in her morning preparations. She was already glad that this day had arrived. And she was keen to the fact that the complexity of human existence had little room for the best made plans of getting to work on time. The priority of her day was her project. And today was the day of its groundbreaking. After months and months of sneaking, hacking, and hiding: the project would finally find fruition.

Rene seeks out Emma just about every morning at 10:30.

He would choose an earlier time if it weren’t for her chronic tardiness. This particular morning he was forced to postpone the visit until 11:00.

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On cue he greeted her at her work station with warm coffee, “I saw you standing on your balcony last night.

American Spirits are hard to come by these days” He clicked the coffee down next to her.

Emma, forgetting this part of her morning routine scrambled to conceal a pile of scattered doodles on her desk. “Huh? Oh yeah, guilty pleasure I guess. You know Rene, the level of detail with which you recall our distant encounters can come off as a little creepy” Rene skipped addressing her fake concern. “Yeah…

Hey, that was one of your father’s projects, am I right?

He wrote the program gauging personality types with balcony square footage.”

Emma thought it a silly way to get a conversation going but she played along, “Correct, yeah that was him.”

Rene continued, “I don’t have much of a balcony, it’d rather look out from my post anyway. I like to view the scene from inside my apartment. It makes quite a bit more sense from there. It’s like I can view the world with a sense of control.” He smirked and clenched her fists in front of her.

Emma, rather off-put by his obnoxious gesture, took a second and then replied, “Well, I think his intention was to introduce reflection into the domestic function. I guess there are those who have less a need of it than others.”

She caught Rene hesitant in thought, “You know, in a way, I enjoy the feeling of helplessness to externalities, like a barque on the ocean. Except instead of a barque, I have a balcony.”

Rene sipped his coffee, and pulling the cup away from his face he murmured, “Yeah… that’s certainly your father speaking. It’s very Organizing City if you think about it..?

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Emma replied, “Of course I have thought about it, you’re spot on.” She quickly switched to a new thought, this time her confidence in speaking began to find slippery ground. “Um, before you go I need to make sure I tell you something” Rene cautiously replied, “I haven’t left yet, what is it?”

Emma stammered on, “Well… You know how... we’ve been talking?”

Rene’s giddy morning attitude washed away to a seriously confused inquisitive demeanor, “Yes?” Emma continued cryptically, “Um yes, well, could you stay late at work tonight, maybe meet me at my work station a little later. 8:15 to be exact. I want to show you something interesting” Rene looked away, “Can you tell me what it is, I mean, this is a very peculiar request?”

Emma replied bluntly, “No, I really can’t” Rene knew it was odd that she would demand such a precise time, but he nonetheless chose to employ a soft smile. He thought it best to respond positively in the face of uncertainty. His trust in her afforded him some optimism and no one likes waiting with the assumption of bad news. He said, “Sure.” She thanked him. And he paced on back to his work station across the room.

A small clock at the corner of Rene’s screen notified him that he had 5 minutes until 8:15. He gauged that it would take him a few minutes to grab his things and make his way to Emma’s desk so he began to leave. He was accidently early of course, and he caught Emma tuned into her work.

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He thought it would be amusing to surprise her, and a soft hand on her shoulder sent her spinning in a fit of shock. As she spun around, a stray arm bumped a stack of doodles from under her jacket unto the floor below.

“Rene, what the hell?!”

Rene, attempting to contain his laughter, brought up a couple observations. Pointing to the neat Helvetica confirmation number flashing across a white work screen he replied, “Hey, isn’t that a production release confirmation number notice? Did you just release an algorithm change today? You didn’t tell -” He stopped his rambling inquiries. Distracted by the rare sight of paper he walked over to pick up her doodles, “Emma, where did you find…?”

His mumbling tone trailed off into incomprehensibility as he unfolded the dog-eared corners of the stack.

Emma, unable to calculate her next move, froze in her chair. Her mind, dually full and empty, had her body in a vice grip. She watched as her last doodle floated to the floor and alighted upon its glossy surface. Rene lifted the sketches from the ground. He looked blankly at her and then back to the drawings. His joking air had receded.

“It’s so fragile and immediate” He murmured, “I’ve never seen paper here in Blur City before. It’s so strange.” He failed the employ the upbraided tone she expected as wonder washed over his face.

She grasped for a response. “It’s not so strange though, Blur City too is fragile and immediate...”

His wonder turned to a kind of pseudo-disappointment.

They had this conversation before. “Visceral… yes, fluid… yes, but it’s not so much immediate as it is imminent.

Our immediacy implies a more perfect ends. Ever more 0059

perfect… ever more… more. This doodles are at best contrarian to Blur City” He shuffled through the pages between his hands. “This is an outdated tool, fragile in its abstraction, immediate in nostalgic sensibility toward imperfection. Did you bring this paper all the way from Organizing City?”

“No! Well, yes I did, but you’re wrong. It is a tool Rene, ancient in its conception, however its utility transcends the ages in increasingly more complex ways. It’s actually the best kind of invention. It seems neither to hold origin, nor encounter obsolescence. It’s an immediacy that implies a dialectic between pause and conceptualization.”

“Pause? You know we have plenty of tools at our disposal aimed at mediating the transition between your ideas and a finished product. How can you say that an effective medium both values pause and pushes the envelope of imminence. Pause? Really, it’s a flaw, it’s a speed bump that Blur City has been dedicated to mitigating. It flies in the face of progress, it’s strange…” (He paused then continued), “It’s strange to hear you speak about pause so passively.”

She nervously looked down at her fingernails and tried, not to fidget. “Maybe, pause isn’t such a bad thing in the context of real production. It seems like you’ve really bought into the mission of Blur City. Don’t get me wrong, I… (She paused then continued)... I love it here. I feel like, in this place, I’m challenged to push my limits every day.

It’s certainly can be an empowering thing, you know.

However, there are times I feel like I’m writing a bunch of sentences that fall short of the point.”

“The point seems fairly simple to me,” John retorted with a tone of annoyance, “To make ourselves, our lives, and others better… we push our limits to do so. The only pause there is exists in a kind of misplaced nostalgia that only sets the community back.”

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She cringed a little. This is how their conversations always ended. John always leveraged his point of view as the true noble high-road, the only moral imperative.

She would be forced to admit that she was neglecting the common good of the community surrounding her.

Then, in the typical fashion, he would walk away after she fumbled through her final point. In this particular moment, she was quite determined to reverse this trend.

She had her plan in mind, one that had almost consumed her over the past few months. The late hours of the night had left her energies worn and drained for the harsh early mornings.

She started, “Well, if we want to talk about purpose we need to ask a question of meaning; even if we end up finding that meaning falls apart amidst deconstructive pickiness.

You keep talking to me about self-improvement. But it’s a kind of mechanical self-improvement. Like, how one would fix a machine or add a parameter to an algorithm.

But being human surges beyond this mechanical existence; even beyond the throws of nostalgic revelry.

“We need to explore what it really means to be human again; even at the expense of your supposed progress. I just think we ought to ask ourselves what it means to dive the depths of human being. It’s not what you or the entire force of Blur City thinks it is. It’s not here or in any other city. It’s a between-ness between two objects; between complete freedom and radical submission. It something found at the eye of a storm; at the bottom of a barque tossed peacefully about by the crushing waves. It’s a type of unity encountered in a scattered milieu” Rene’s gaze returned to her sketches. He looked directly through them to the floor below and down to the dark earth until it stopped at its hot core. “Emma, I’m… I’m just worried. Everyone is worried because you’ve been stalling out on your project deadlines. There are people getting worried about how you’ve been using your time.

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They think you’re holding others back. They think you’re holding me back. And I think you’re holding yourself back.”

Rene had it in his mind to walk away. It was almost choreographed and scripted at this point. His day was over as far as he was concerned and his stress was pushing him to seek a space alone and a strong drink.

Meanwhile Emma resisted her tears. She knew she had pushed him to a limit he did not like to see. She hated to push him farther but, she could not let this dispute end like it always did. She made her move, “could you just look at the sketches?”

Realizing how he had hardly cracked the first page of her sketch pile, he willingly began to flip through them.

“These... these are our memories…” he murmured. The sketches, a powerful vehicle of historical experience, threw Rene into a rare nostalgic episode. They were a collection of small formal studies emulating past memories important to their friendship. It was the depth and detail that opened doors to him that were long since shut.

Emma woke Rene from his trance, “Rene, remember how you wanted to know what I’ve been working on all this time? I need you to see something. “He peered up above the pile of sketches to see her facing the window.

The ground began to shake.

Rene moved towards the window to peer out upon Blur City, where a great unfolding was rumbling forth. The force of which nearly knocked the two to the ground. From the voids and densities within the penumbra gathered and unfold massive blockish objects. Large chunks and towers started to fall together into obscure pseudo 0062

Emmaâ&#x20AC;&#x2DC;s sketches

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formal gestures. Massive dense blocks began to form as solids with purposive voids carved out of them. Rene, still gripping Emma’s sketches noted the likeness to the drawings she had given him. He looked astoundingly as the great masses dropped their roots into the cold dirt below like massive legs. For the first time, the city walked instead of flew.

Overtaken by her excitement she turned and yelled to him, “This! This is what I’ve been working on! This is my latest project” John’s eyes bulged in wonder. The plethora of scrambled questions in his mind left him dumbfounded-ly silent.”

He noted the confusion on the faces of those in the surrounding rooms and spaces. Grandiose changes to

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Emma’s creation | enlarged elevation

the city were somewhat common and it wasnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t the first time a shift in an algorithm had brought about such commotion. But this time the citizens of Blur City could be seen stopping at the windows to see what was unfolding.

Confusion conquered their minds. They paused to comprehend it.

Then Rene observed Emmaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s small familiar hand reach out to him and while his whitened face gave way to a weary smile, he gripped her hand gently and returned his view to the commotion outside. From the confusion there arose a kind of ambiguous clarity and understanding rooted deep within his doubt and confusion. He realized they were going to be alright.

Emma and Rene in contemplation 0065

Rene murmured: “Emma, this is incredible. You did this all on your own?”

“You know Rene,” Emma calmly replied, “perhaps behind the convenient illusion of control, lies the foothills of freedom” ... the end.

Blur City post intervention | prespective

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1. Prix, Wolf D., and Martina Kandeler-Fritsch. Get off of My Cloud: Texte 1968 - 2005. Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz, 2005. Print.

2. The Holy Bible, King James Version. New York: American Bible Society: 1999; Bartleby.com, 2000. www. bartleby.com/108/.

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