UTOPIA THE
GIFT
RECEIVED IDEAS THE BIG CRAB R e t r o s p e c t i ve Po r t f o l i o : M i c h a e l A n t h o ny H o l t
SUMMER : Studio Leeser, Utopia Now; Digital Craft, Steven Gar cia; Metropolis Ser ies, ENRIQUE
WALKER
FA L L : S t u d i o S a f r a n , Pa n d o r a , Pa n d o r a a n d
T h e G i f t ; B r i t i s h A r c h i t e c t u r a l P r a c t i c e 1 9 3 0 - 1 9 7 5 , K E N N E T H F R A M P TO N ; To p o l o g i c a l S t u d y o f Fo r m , J O S E S A N C H E Z ; Vi s i o n a r y M e t h o d s o f P r a c t i c e , M AT H A N SPRING
R AT I N A M ; : Studio
Swar m
Intelligence,
E n r i q u e Wa l k e r ; P h i l o s o p h i e s
RO L A N D of
the
SNOOKS
.
C i t y, R E I N H O L D
M A RT I N ; L e C o r b u s i e r : A r c h i t e c t o f t h e 2 0 t h C e n t u r y, K E N N E T H F R A M P TO N. S o f t w a r e s : A u t o C A D 2 0 0 9 , R h i n o 3 . 0 1 . 0 , A u t o d e s k 3 d s M a x 2 0 0 9 , A u t o d e s k , M ay a 2 0 0 9 , A d o b e C S 4 Suite // Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, After Effects, Pr emier Pro
N E W YO R K . - C o l u m b i a U n i v e r s i t y, G S A P P
mah2218@columbia.edu
Contents Course Details
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Summer Semester
Studio Leeser, Utopia, Now! Manifesto
2-5
Project
6 - 15
Retrospective
16 - 17
Fall Semester
Studio Safran, The Gift In A Vision Once I Saw
18 - 25
Rorschach Tests
26 - 27
The Big Crab
28
Project
29 - 47
Retrospective
48 - 49
Spring Semester
Studio Walker, Dictionary of Received Ideas Project One
50 - 53
Project Two
54 - 61
Project Three
62 - 69
Retrospective
70 - 71
Retroactive Manifesto
Convention and Resistance
72 - 73
Summer Semester :
Studio Thomas Leeser - 9 pts Digital Craft, Steven Garcia - 3 pts Metropolis, Enrique Walker - 3 pts
Fall Semester :
Studio Yehuda Safran - 9 pts British Architectural Practice 1930-1975, Kenneth Frampton - 3 pts Topological Study of Form, Jose Sanchez - 3 pts Visionary Methods of Practice, Mathan Ratinam - 1.5 pts Swarm Intelligence, Roland Snooks - 1.5 pts
Spring Semester :
Studio Enrique Walker - 9 pts Philosophies of the City, Reinhold Martin - 3 pts Le Corbusier: Architect of 20th Century, Kenneth Frampton - 3 pts
Softwares : AutoCAD 2010 Rhino 3.0 1.0 Autodesk 3ds Max 2010 Autodesk Maya 2010 Adobe CS4 Suite // Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, After Effects, Premier Pro
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“UTOPIA METEOROPOLIS” A MANIFESTO : INTERSTITIAL INSTABILITY
The endless seduction of images, the sensuous interplay of objects can only assimilate the immense process of the destruction of appearances. Image-over-substance negates the image itself imploding the image state, and instead of a destruction of appearances it presides over a decadence for disappearance. A disappearance of aesthetic; the dissolution of ethical boundary. Mete oropolis Disappearance here does not imply an absence or lack of presence, it is not even nonrecognition. It is more concerned with h, of recognizing a thing as something else, as reverse hallucination. Instead, the lascivious therapy of architectural meaning has been consumed by the generalized process of indifferentiation. Architecture U t o p revolves ia Ninoaw world of uncertainty, it has manifested itself as an aleatoric aspect, it positions itself as the imaginary of the end. Architecture´s flirtation with the societal masses and its alluring interface with the media is accelerating its path to its own inertia, its own point of energetic impasse. The arresting images proliferate, and growth is immobilized in excrescence. The destruction of truth, the disappearance of virtue is architecture´s own mode of outweighing the finality. Architecture´s capitulation will be of its own construction. Society, in its utter obsession
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with power and its quest for self-destruction, veers towards an abyss. If architecture is to prevent such eventualities it must become more esoteric. It should challenge its user. Coax them into a situation that physiologically alters their own state of mind. Their state of play. Their terminal velocity. Presently, society is regulated, restricted and nonproprietary. It is ratified by governmental, Capitalist control. Architecture mimics its societal hierarchy. Architecture can not significantly alter or address societal issues but it is instead responsive to their functions - architecture reacts to its current context. The argument here is to promote a polemical stance on broader issues that extend well beyond architecture. Digital organicism is the precursor to architecture’s eventual self-destruction. It relinquishes control through biomorphic mimicry. A devaluation of aesthetic ethics. An abusive response to what it sees as a desire to reconnect a world that moves further away from its natural manifestation towards a digitally driven future. A paradox. Architecture stretches its technological capabilities in a bid to mimic nature and by doing so it negates nature. Organic forms are scattered throughout our cities.
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Digitally mastered and rendered forms saturate the market. It plunders the soul of architecture’s inherent reason: its subjectivity. The incessant objectification is poisoning an already purified cityscape. It becomes prone to the generic as opposed to the genetic. Symbols define contemporary society and its cities. So much so that it leaves them useless, they become the definitive article of a non-place in the face of its saturated image. A symbol is a ‘something’ - an object that should represent something else by association, resemblance or convention- especially a material object used to represent the invisible. Symbols represent concepts. In the cybernetic age the power of objects is of more impact on a city than the people who use it. It is the aim of the concept to question the superficiality of architectural objectification. Architecture is ascribed a social role. ‘Style’ is a prescribed condition. A reactionary to government authority. Architecture is powerless. It attempts a power ascent by objectifying and thus purports the idea that ‘without architecture society could not function’. This is not the case. Objects when given a visual authority in two dimensional form become a copy of a copy, of a copy. Objects become saturated by their own identity, self consuming as they proliferate their stasis. Architecture harbours the destruction of architecture. It is the incendiary element. The murder weapon. In a world subversively owned by the irresistibly coerced mass, interactions are restricted. Communications media elicits interaction but it is through a systematized, regulated and digitalized format. There is no possibility of relationship. To promote the notion of enforced transience would go some way to reinforcing human contact. The ‘new’ architectures of the oblique consist of spatial flows, movement, motion. A transient nodal space on a global network. By identifying journeys and creating illusory connections, interaction may become embryonic - again. It is the idea of communicative movement. Not physical nor physiological, it is ontological and situational; it animates and transforms human circumstance as a whole by creating a part. Memory, learning, imagination and thought depend on communicative movement. To deprive communicative movement stifles one of those areas. Sensory deprivation participants expect a state of isolation from the outside world. Only at first is this the case, afterwards a complete loss of focused thoughts ensues. A disintegration of thinking, like fragments of thought, daydreams or hallucinations. A.R. Loria is a theoretical example, in the case of post World War II memories that have disintegrated into fragments. Objects in the visual field were unstable, in a constant state of flux. Utopian ideology is one aspect of architecture that can be linked to the Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice. It is symptomatic of human desire that we chase something that if it is reached, we lose the very essence of the chase.
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But we continue to chase it. We all dream our own dreams, but walk the same streets. We all desire, individually. Only through the individual can a collective utopia be possible. Architecture responds. Seductive imagery entices the individual. Organic, blob-like architecture aims itself at this human instinct of desire. But what if our decisions were restricted? What if our decisions were impacted upon by others? What if the illusive connections become instigators in decisions being made for us? What if another’s action caused a reaction to my current condition? Would this subvert my desire? If, as a result of a neighbor deciding they wanted to undertake an activity, my context was altered, would I re-evaluate my desires temporarily? Would it force me to alter my perception, communication and movement? This utopian dream is to set restrictions or parameters on an individual which may or may not effect the wider social context. Instead of the society being regulated, it becomes self-regulatory. It destabilizes the decision process, forcing interaction or alternative journeys. Chaotic, maybe. Transience is an issue to be returned to. A return to nomadism in a technological system. If architecture became a circulatory aspect in itself it may mobilise interaction. Magnetic nodal points become temporary locations for buildings. When an individual desires a different locale, the magnetized system uproots. Instead of the Bilbao Effect, cities are removed from importance. Borders are relinquished. Boundaries no longer matter. Architectural aesthetic is no longer permanent but actively mobilized. But as a mnestic trace set to inform a potential user of the space since departed of it’s ownership, holograms of the ‘former’ building are emitted from the magnetic nodal point. There are no roads or streets, no need to position buildings on Cartesian grids. Technology does not require an understanding of stationary, permanent objects, it merely needs to understand it’s geographical location using satellite systems. Architecture of disappearance. Local communities have vanished. Historicism is dead. Regionalism is a quaint retrospect. So does a city have any relevance anymore? Instead of institutional conformity through territorialization of city space, or, of a political space of habitable inertia in stagnant regions, architecture should strive for a law of proximity. A spatial or temporal proximity of elements may induce the mind to perceive a collective or a totality. Is this all allegorical in response to the present context? Or a rationale to a future setting? Does the basic human desire for power - be it military or material - mean that a search for a utopia is redundant by the very fact that it is a search for nothing by those that inherently seek self destruction? Architecture is aestheticized, it is institutionalized and removed from the society it functions under. Architecture is about an impracticability of pragmatism. Marcel Duchamp critiqued the idea that the objet d´art should be a unique product of an artist’s labour, representational of their technical skill and/or
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Liechtenstein
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Slovakia
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Kosovo
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Abkhazia
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Nagorno-Karabakh
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North Korea
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Taiwan
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Suriname
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Falkland Islands
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Palestine
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Syria
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Mayotte
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Abu Musa
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Jammu and Kashmir
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Kuril Islands
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Mexico
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Northern Ireland
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Israel
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Syria
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Iraq
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Iran
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Afghanistan
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Burma
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Colombia
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Congo
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Zimbabwe
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Sudan
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Somalia
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Sri Lanka
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Unresolved
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Global
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Territories
Conflict
Zones
or artistic caprice. It has been argued that objects and people do not have a constant meaning, but their meanings are fashioned by humans in the context of their culture, as they have the ability to make things mean or signify something. Meaning is mobilized by the collectivity of the individual. Architecture should be about the interstitial not the object. Interstitial denotes something found `in between´ things. Referring to the notion of interval, it also means `a space of time´. Thus the interstitial embraces not only such notions as openness, porosity, breach and relationship, but also those of process, transformation and location. The city is impotent, it requires intensified experience instead of standardised permanence so to recover its own status. It requires a hybridized dynamic of provocation and motion.
When researching how to re-use the earth’s magnetic field it came apparent that the most active areas were around the seismic zones in or around the plate tectonics. Satellite devices would be positioned above the most active areas.
Seismic
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Activities
Scientists have created a 100,000km long ribbon using a carbon nanotube composite material. Which is anchored to the mid-Oceanic ridges and then tethered to a geostationary orbit in the Earth’s upper atmosphere. This structure would be held in tension between Earth and a counterweight in space. An Orbital ring extending around the earth would create an electromagnetized zone which would suspend gravitational force creating the potential for magnetic levitation. It is in this area where the utopia would exist. Oceanographic investigation has discovered that the areas along the plate tectonics have a zebra stripe-like magnetic pattern on the ocean floor. The magnetic striping was produced by repeated reversals of the Earth’s magnetic field. The Earth would become a power supply for the tension required to formulate the geostationary orbital tether. The more intensive areas are the most useful areas for potential utopia.
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Deleuze distinguished two kinds of spaces: smooth and striated, a distinction that coincides with a parallels drawn between the nomadic and the sedentary, between the space of the war machine and the space of the state apparatus.
Circulation, like interaction, is restricted, monitored and relatively out of the individual’s control. Humankind has become entirely automated, regulated and isolated. Only through confinement from each other can utopia flourish. Removed from territorial zones, from conflicting rationale and belief humans can chase their own dreams and their own reality. Land becomes sacred and governed, but not in a military, territorial sense but in a data-archival sense.
“The city is world. We are already in the world city. There are local cities and global cities. The local cities are the subdivisions of a world city linked together by virtual space, by the markets, tele-action, webcams, etc. Through super-rapid, super-fast means of transportation, and through cybernetic means of communication, we are de facto in an urban world system.” Paul Virilio, 2003.
Virilio’s theoretical work stems from his central claim that, in a culture dominated by war, the militaryindustrial complex is of crucial significance in debates over the creation of the city and the spatial organization of cultural life. The Bunker Archaeology research resulted in a study on the oblique function of habitable circulation, whereby and G a z a S vertical trip / / horizontal Data Strip movement was negated in favour of a more fluid form, an oblique. Later research focused on the idea that the globalized world is one of mass communications networks which saturate urban life. / / O b l i q u e F u n c t i o n Virilio and Parent “The city is world. We are already in the world city. There are local cities and “global cities.” The local cities are the subdivisions of a world city linked together by virtual space, by themarkets, tele-action, webcams, etc. Through super-rapid, super-fast means of transportation, and through cybernetic means of telecommunication, we are de facto in an urban world system.” Paul Virilio, 2003
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“The mirror is, after all, there where I am not, i “The mirror is a utopia, since it is a placeless place. In the mirror, I see myself there where I am not, in an unreal, virtual space that opens up behind the surface.“ Michel Foucault, 1967.
Reconfiguring Geostationary Orbital Tethers
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“You prophets of the future are so occupied with the useful that you forget that it is only in ind iv id ualism t hat we can be hap py.“ E d mund Gos s e , 1902.
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Archiving and data storage has proliferated to the point of saturation. With the increased amount of data being made by configuration and reconfiguration, enhanced virtuality and the onset of internet based storage, archiving has become a significant issue. In order to resolve this issue new storage devices must be developed. Certain mineral arrangements of metal and ferromagnetism result in an ability to store memories and save information. A hard drive would become a geological object - a reconfiguration of the earth’s surface. Through a manipulation of the earth’s own magnetic field data could be programmed into the topography. The earth would function as a spherical hard drive, with information stored in those areas designated as ‘unresolved territories’ or conflict zones. Perpetually moving grids of magnetic energy that penetrate the earth’s surface. A method of crossing a pair of laser beams – where one beam shines continuously, while
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the other pulses – enables an encoding of patches that represent digital binary code. Meteoropolitan existence uses geotechnical encryption, encoding exposed bedrock, literally inscribing information into the territories. Land becomes formatted, encrypted and archival.
Territories become Terrabytes.
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A city in its natural habitat: the cube or grid
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Individual
Cube
Units
Through the use of air-tight lock down zones, interaction and circulation is possible. Chambers allow an individual to pass from one cube to another. Pneumatic pistons open the hatches where then the retractable compression chambers attach themselves to the corresponding unit. Once the compression levels have equalized, the latches open sequentially to enable movement, closing behind at prescribed intervals.
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“UTOPIA METEOROPOLIS” RETROSPECTIVE : INTERSTITIAL INSTABILITY
Meteoropolis searched for an understanding of how utopia as a concept could be perceived in the contemporary architectural field. The project focused on the idea that power is harnessed through the re-use of the earth’s magnetic field at specific locations along plate tectonics. These positions were aligned to geostationary orbital satellites through NASA inspired tethers. Cities operated on a 9x9 grid of individual cells which are spread in a code when hovering over the city. The cities hover over conflict zones- which have been turned into terrabyte storage centers and not lands of political or religious struggle. When a city needs to relocate under the auspices of governmental control, it gathers as a cube and is transported via the repositioning of the orbital tether. It proposes that only through a physiologically altered state society can function. Architecture is the accelerator of such segregation through the individualization of cells. Paul Virilio undertook a great deal of research into Bunker Archaeology, his oblique functions, alongside the monolithic architecture of Claude Parent exemplified the very essence of what it is to situate the user in a physiologically altered state. Architecture is responsive. Architects and clients continue to develop austere and sterile cityscapes. So what if the city was left behind? What if we were to claim that the city is impotent, and that it requires intensified experience instead of standardized permanence so to recover its own status? What if the city was analogous to the utopian ideology? The city is just another quaint notion. In Meteoropolis, architecture acts as an inter-text - in a
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Bakhtinian sense - it proliferates communicative movement. The project is a double entendre. It suggests that cities hold no value; they are diluted to the point of disappearance. The ‘new’ architectures of the oblique consist of spatial flows, movement, and motion. It is an opposition to the move away from subjectivity in favor of an unloving objectification. Homogeneity through resemblance. Adhering to convention, architecture becomes obliterated by its own multiplicity. If Utopian ideology is akin the Greek myth Orpheus and Eurydice then it is in itself the chase. Not either figure, merely the inter-text, the ‘in-between’. It relies on the seductive chase. But the chase is only possible through a narcissistic association made through the mirror. A placeless place, an unreal, virtual space that opens up behind a surface. Architecture is aestheticized; it is institutionalized and removed from the society it functions under.
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“ PA N D O R A , PA N D O R A ! T H E G I F T ” I N A V I S I O N O N C E I S AW
S.T. Coleridge’s infamous poem Kubla Khan is perhaps better known for the enigmatic fable of its author instead of its true literary genius. The unfinished poem exemplifies the idea of an involuntary, incomplete or fragmented loss that is only returned in mythical completeness. It is, in itself, a form of double bind conflicting communication, mixed messages. It has a resistance to readability, a resistance only evident through its very attraction. Jacques Derrida believes the work to be exemplar of the “kinship between...nuclear waste and the masterpiece”. It is compelling, unreadable and is fascinating on account of its unreadability. The poem is a secretive tour de force that belies more unanswerable questions so that it becomes almost impossible to actually arrive at any kind of conclusion and instead the questions posed are entirely subjective, in what Derrida calls, the “absolute inviolability of the secret” - a sort of subjective deduction. However, this secret cannot be revealed, it will not be resolved; instead, it is a matter of a superficial yet inaccessible unreadability, or a multiplicity of possible readings. The work induces meaning without being exhausted by meaning. An irreplaceable singularity.
In literary terms, Kubla Khan is a fantastical tale whose very being is sabotaged by an inability to return. It has a sense of wanting to return: “Could I retrieve within me” (line 43); but the fact that it is never completed leaves the narrative detached from its place of potential returnits conclusion. Borrowing from Derrida’s observations, the double bind is analogous to the concept of gift as something that excludes the possibility of ‘narrative’. The gift is on-condition of the narrative, but simultaneously under the realms of possibility and impossibility of the narrative. This would imply that there is a form of metanarrative and suggests that the gift is beyond reason, a kind of incalculable madness. Derrida highlights the impossible simultaneity of the gift when describing the
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act of gift-giving: “A gift that would neither give itself, nor give itself as such, and that could not take place except on the condition of not taking place - and of remaining impossible, without dialectical sublation of the contradiction? To desire, to desire to think the impossible, to desire, to desire to give the impossible - this is obviously madness.”
550. KUBLA KHAN IN Xanadu did Kubla Khan A stately pleasure-dome decree: Where Alph, the sacred river, ran Through caverns measureless to man Down to a sunless sea. So twice five miles of fertile ground With walls and towers were girdled round: And there were gardens bright with sinuous rills Where blossom’d many an incense-bearing tree; And here were forests ancient as the hills, Enfolding sunny spots of greenery.
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But O, that deep romantic chasm which slanted Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover! A savage place! as holy and enchanted As e’er beneath a waning moon was haunted 15 By woman wailing for her demon-lover! And from this chasm, with ceaseless turmoil seething, As if this earth in fast thick pants were breathing, A mighty fountain momently was forced; Amid whose swift half-intermitted burst 20 Huge fragments vaulted like rebounding hail, Or chaffy grain beneath the thresher’s flail: And ‘mid these dancing rocks at once and ever It flung up momently the sacred river. Five miles meandering with a mazy motion 25 Through wood and dale the sacred river ran, Then reach’d the caverns measureless to man, And sank in tumult to a lifeless ocean: And ‘mid this tumult Kubla heard from far Ancestral voices prophesying war! 30 The shadow of the dome of pleasure
Floated midway on the waves; Where was heard the mingled measure From the fountain and the caves. It was a miracle of rare device, A sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice! A damsel with a dulcimer In a vision once I saw: It was an Abyssinian maid, And on her dulcimer she play’d, Singing of Mount Abora. Could I revive within me, Her symphony and song, To such a deep delight ‘twould win me, That with music loud and long, I would build that dome in air, That sunny dome! those caves of ice! And all who heard should see them there, And all should cry, Beware! Beware! His flashing eyes, his floating hair! Weave a circle round him thrice, And close your eyes with holy dread, For he on honey-dew hath fed, And drunk the milk of Paradise.
temporal diversity (an exoskeleton crustacean form, claws, sidewards step etc...) only then can it be said to be “a crab”. The apprehension of successive parts; the reproduction of preceding parts, recognition by means of the form of the object in general. Kant’s analysis in effect moves from the form of space and time (the pure form of sensation) to a determined spatio-temporal form (apprehension and reproduction as syntheses of the imagination) to the form of the object = x (the pure form of perception). It could be said that Kant identifies the middle path between figure and figuration, between haptic and optic, producing a line that delineates nothing, and which the eye can barely follow. Furthermore, the differentiation between tactility and visuality is tantamount to society’s synaesthetic confluence, whereby the haptic and the optic are simultaneously nullified in what may be described as an institutionalized readability of sensation.
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‘Madness’ has a debilitating stigma inextricably attached. The notion is voyeurism. To gaze at a perceived difference, part in fear and part in intrigue. Like a zoo or circus. A double bind, most notably found in the cognitive testing for schizophrenia, generally includes different levels of abstraction in the orders of messages, and these messages can be explicit or implicit within the context of the situation- a sort of paranoia. It was the Surrealist painter, Salvador Dalí, who focused on the internal mechanism of the paranoid phenomena, envisaging the possibility of an experimental method based on the power that dominates the systematic associations peculiar to paranoia labelling it paranoid-critical activity. Dalí proposed that the conscious exploitation of the unconscious - a tourism of sanity - was a true mixing of messages or an incalculable madness of perception. Slave Market with the Disappearing Bust of Voltaire from 1940 remains an emblematic example of this hybridization of ‘real’ facts and ‘false’ facts, whereby Dalí arranges a number figures, both merchants and slaves, walking alongside a cart. However, a number of double images ensues in a multiplicity of interpretation, leaving the viewer to decipher whether it is a slave market; an apparition of the bust of Voltaire; or, both, simultaneously. Immanuel Kant believed that perception requires a synthesis of what appears in space and time. Kant identifies three operations that make up the synthesis: apprehension, reproduction and recognition. It is not so much that we perceive objects; it is rather a perception that presupposes the object-form as one of its conditions - a case example would be the implementation of the Rorschach Test. Kant arrived at the equation object = x, a pure form of perception, just as space-time is a pure form of sensation. The object = x will receive a concrete determination (for example, a crab-object) only when it is related to the synthesized parts of a spatio-
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To make mention of apparition - in Kantian terms - Dalí’s Slave Market with the Disappearing Bust of Voltaire can no longer be defined as making an appearance but as an apparition. This is not to debate appearance over essence, it is more to suggest that the apparition is what appears in so far as it appears. The “false facts” are irrelevant, the apparition is not at all captured in the oppositional couple, in the binary distinction where we find appearance, distinct from essence. The appearance of the bust of Voltaire is something that refers to essence in a relation of disjunction, in a disjunctive relation, which is to say either its appearance or its essence. The apparition refers to the conditions of what appears, phenomenologically speaking. There is no longer the essence behind the appearance, there is the sense or non-sense of what appears. To return to Kubla Khan, it is arguable that it is through its mystique that the poem has a certain level of simultaneous fact/false fact. What appears strongest is the very thing that does not appear; the unfinished text. What remains, instead, is the phantasmic imagery, the possibility of the narrative, the mysticism of the circumstances and a story that can not be retold, for which the reader must reach their own conclusion through abstraction. The theory of “total institution”, as discussed by Erving Goffman, suggests the process by which the institution maintains a formal administration, curating a predictable and regular behavior on the part of both “guard” and “captor” in a number of asylum case studies, suggesting that many of the features of such institutions serve the ritual function of ensuring that both classes of people know their function and social role, in other words of “institutionalizing” them. Could it be said, then, that a gift is a form of institutionalized method of control? Is it a mixed message? As an instrument of segregation and institutional control, Michel Foucault’s research into the asylum developed Goffman’s notions. In classical confinement, the patient was open to observation, however, such observation
did not necessarily involve him; instead, it involved only the monstrous surface, the patient’s ‘visible animality’; and it included at least one form of reciprocity, since the sane man could read in the madman, as in a mirror, the imminent movement of his downfall. Incessantly, the patient is cast in this empty role of unknown visitor, and challenged in everything that can be known about him, drawn to the surface of himself by a social personality silently imposed by observation. Again, the double bind is a palpable deduction.
the notion that subjective deduction is a significant element in decoding, say, a work of art under the remit of architectural representation. This would suggest that apprehension was at the behest of the individual, a “will to abstraction” or an aesthetic impulse, as coined by Wilhelm Worringer. Abstraction was elevated to the plane of universal principle. Each simple line demands apperceptive activity so to apprehend exactly what it is. A sensation of conflict ensues, a negative empathy, as each line is delineated from its surrounding context.
Foucault elaborates on the authoritarian power through his understanding of the ecclesiastical institution, which, according to Foucault, enforces control through segregation so that madness was controlled not cured. The individual, in this instance, is placed within a moral realm maintaining a perpetual anxiety, an ethical guilt imbued onto the patient. It generated a non-reciprocal relationship between patient and doctor. Fears aroused in religious beliefs are tantamount to delirious beliefs, whereas the asylum was a place of legislation, a site of moral syntheses where insanities born on the outer limits of society were eliminated. These syntheses functioned under the rules of “silence, recognition by mirror, perpetual judgemental and medical personage”.7 While the patient is entirely alienated in the real person of his doctor, the doctor dissipates the reality of the mental illness in the critical concept of madness. So that there remains, beyond the empty forms of positivist thought, only a single concrete reality: the doctor-patient couple in which all alienations are summarized, linked and loosened.
This would suggest there is a certain level of subjectivity in perception. Alois Riegl introduced the concept of “absolute artistic volition” as an act that is entirely independent of the object and the mode of creation so that every work of art is simply an objectification of this a priori existent absolute artistic volition. Subjectivity is conceived as both individual and collective, and the contradiction between Self and Other is mediated. Therefore, it could be said that abstraction is a general rejection of mimesis.
Freud may well have demystified the asylum structures insofar as he abolished silence and observation; he eliminated the desire for a patient to recognise itself in the mirror of its own spectacle; and, he disapproved condemnation. But on the other hand, he exploited the structure that enveloped the medical personage; he amplified its thaumaturgic profile, catapulting it into a quasi-divine status. He focused upon this single presence, a concealment behind the patient and above him, in an absence that is also a total presence. All the powers that had been distributed in the collective existence of the asylum were transformed into an absolute observation, a circumspect silence where a judge presides over a ruling not through language but through the mirror in which madness, in an almost motionless motion, clings to itself. Freud created the psychoanalytical situation where, by an inspired short-circuit, alienation becomes disorienting. However, Ludwig Binswanger Senior’s private clinic in Kreuzlingen, Switzerland of 1857 attempted a move away from the more institutional ‘asylum’. It was his grandson Ludwig Binswanger Junior, a former student of Carl Jung, who stated in his seminal text Dream and Existence, that an expression, like dejection, is not mere metaphor but indicates a ‘meaning matrix’ altering the way in which pathological manifestations in melancholy or delusions can also be understood. This existential ontological perspective could, in turn, be aligned to
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Artistic volition defined a generation in terms of a collective subjectivity, a form of social liberation, not as architecture liberating society but as volition creating change. Much in the same way Worringer discussed art; architecture has today become a confused, complicated formation, such a differentiated product of heterogeneous components, the diversity of which is no longer taken into account. This Results in it being impossible to be scrupulous in seeking out and retracing the individual lines; instead, the lines have been totally erased in a subjective clouding of the objective fact. Dalí set about implementing the effects of a paranoiac episode to develop his own artistic volition, relying upon a viewer’s apperceptive activity when responding to the work of art. He left the work entirely open to interpretation, whereby a multitude of intentions and a plurality of meaning generates an expression of personality. Dalí attempted to transform spacetime. To destabilise space as neither a point, nor a dimension. Instead it becomes material and ‘real’. It has a simultaneity, a form of cross communication: the atmospheric “Being-Objects”. This hybridization obliterates the difference between objects and beings. These being-objects or object-beings are undulations of “soft space”, where images are produced whilst their doubles manifest themselves as phantoms in perpetual motion and insistent inertia. A cyclical collective subjectivity, a visionary automatism in an almost Brechtian sense. A Sausserean double bind of the sign and signifier. The purpose of paranoiac-critical activity is to discredit the world of reality by meticulously sowing confusion between the rational and irrational, the real and the delirious. In the New York exhibition of Dalí’s The Endless Enigma from 1939, the catalogue carried six drawings that broke the composition into its constitutive parts.
The
Double
Bind
-
Device
S.T. Coleridge in his opium-induced madness was deprived of completing a poem that has largely become a literary classic in spite of its unfinished state. He was left frustrated by an implausible encounter with an unnamed visitor who broke the concentration of the poet and thus rendering the poem as an open work. It is in its definition of the gift, it is an incalculable double bind scenario. In its first stanzas the poem unfurls magical imagery, only later to become a confused and lamenting prose in the light of losing the thread. In this cross communication it becomes impossible to deconstruct, it has a multiplicity of meaning, a Dalían paranoia. It may well be said that it becomes its own Rorschach test, an infinitely readable unreadability - an apperceptive apparition - and one in which defines the mental state of the reader; it requires a reciprocity of narcissistic self-gratification, an impossibility or double bind of the gift.
RED
On further word that is frequently misused is the term “genius” coming from the Latin gignere, meaning ‘to beget’. In the Roman world, every person was attended by a tutelary deity or spirit, his genius. The Latin inspirare, from in + spirare, ‘to breathe’, meant to influence, move, or guide by divine or supernatural inspiration. None of these notions had anything to do with illness or mental illness in the modern sense. Genius and madness are vague terms. The only thing clear about them is that, by definition, each term refers to a type of psychological abnormality, a deviation from a behavioural-social norm. Genius and madness are value terms, not scientific, in a question of semantics they are subjective.
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What Color Do You See? A Double Bind
The force of the work resides in the central obsessive image which is gratuitously generated by the mind and around which other images suggested by the same paranoiac delirium are grouped. The obsessive image is a simulacrum. As a simulacrum the image has severed all its relationships with its environs, it is an image emptied of all its representational value normally attributed to an image. To return to the notion of madness: is it, then, a reversal? Instead of treating the patient, should society be conditioned, metaphorically speaking? If it can be said that many psychotics believe their illness to be alien to them, is this partially attributable to the fact that their illness is reflected onto them as a way guilt in a form of a paranoiac-critical apparition? It is indisputable that there is a medical complaint, but not a demonic tendency. Can there be a reciprocity of socially conceived guilt? Guilt as gift, negative becoming positive: the Derridean gift - a return. An institutional gift given back but to not the same position. A disturbance of order and creating something new out of that with no return - the so called ‘moments of interruption’. This is not to deny the severity of the symptoms of the psychotic condition, rather it is to acknowledge that human emotional states exist along a continuum. It could be postulated that schizophrenics are simply those who refuse to share the widespread beliefs of their society; they are not diseased but non-conformist.
Heuristic
The
Device
-
The images below are a personal attempt at visualizing the poem mentioned previously. It is a claim to the power of imagination and subjectivity. What is decoded as imagery by one, may be entirely different for another.
Visualisation
Triptych:
Death,
Mirror,
Absence
:
Et
in
Arcadia
ego
Death, Absence, Imagination: Et In Arcadia Ego
THE
FIGURE
Heuristic Device - visualisation of the sense rather than scenario
AND
“I
Tego Arcana Dei.” As a heuristic device precedent, S.T. Coleridge’s Kubla wasthe a continuation of the idea that to lose “Begone! I Khan, conceal something or someone may be beneficial in certain secrets of God!” terms.
FIGURAL
The poem is a secretive masterpiece that belies more unanswerable questions so that it becomes almost impossible to actually arrive at any kind of conclusion and instead the questions posed are open to experience in what Derrida calls “the absolute inviolability of the secret”.
“Et in Arcadia ego.”
An involuntary loss - an incomplete, fragmented form – “Even in Arcadia I exist.” returns in completeness.
THE
As Derrida notes, ‘gift’ in German means ‘poison’, his thoughts on the gift surmises that there can be no Three Studies for a Self-Portrait, Sir Franics Baco gift giving without the reciprocity of narcissistic selfgratification or unconscious gratification. He states: “The impossibility or double bind of the gift: For there to be gift, it is necessary that the gift not even appear, that it is not perceived or received as gift” Derrida, 1994.
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Program poster for the Creative ‘Asylum‘ Refuge
Programmatically, the brief was to subvert the asylum as a concept and institution by fusing it with an artist’s studio, residence and doctor’s surgery. Ludwig Binswanger’s Kreuzlingen health center attempted to divert society’s opinion towards the mentally ill, and it is this vein that this program focused on. The production of Rorschach tests (see overleaf) was an experiment carried out by walking in different directions around the site as a pen rested in the palm of my hand, against a porous piece of paper. The different site conditions created different scratch marks which were subsequently mirrored, shown to a host of Columbia students so to ascertain the different perceptions of a number of creative people. They then were used in the design process
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est R1 oRORSCHACH r s c h a c h TEST T e s1 t R Ro o rr s sc ch ha ac ch h T Te es s tt
1 1 1
Linear
Linear L L ii n ne ea a rr
est R2 orschach Test RORSCHACH TEST 2 Ro o rr s sc ch ha ac ch h T Te es s tt R
2 2 2
Autonomous
Autonom Au u tt o on om A no m
Regulated
Regulat R Re eg gu u ll a a tt
st R3 orschach R Ro o rr s sc ch ha ac ch h
Test T Te es s tt
RORSCHACH TEST 3
3 3 3
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Findings: Findings:
ach R o rTsecsht a 1c h
Two elephants Two elephants II Fi innddi innggss: : Baby Mouse F Baby I Mouse Dovetail I Dovetail Twoelephants elephants Two Ram I Ram BabyMouse Mouse Baby Insect II Insect Dovetail Dovetail Ant I Ant Ram Ram Spider I Spider Insect Insect Crab IIII IIII Crab Ant Ant Butterfly I Butterfly Spider Spider Headless Chicken II Headless Chicken Crab Leaping Fish Crab I Leaping Fish Butterfly Butterfly HeadlessChicken Chicken Headless Total: 22 Total: Fish Leaping Leaping Fish
Test 1
Total: F i n d i n g s : Total: Findings:
RORSCHACH TEST 1
RRoor rsscchhaacchh TTeesst t 11
ach R o rTsecsht a 2c h
Dog II FDog i innddi innggsIs: : Bulls Fighting F Bulls Fighting Fish I Fish Dog Oriental Face Dog I Oriental Face BullsFighting Fighting Bulls Crab III Crab Fish Fish Grasshopper/Mantis IIII II Grasshopper/Mantis OrientalFace Face Oriental Fly II Fly Crab Crab Ant II Ant Grasshopper/Mantis Grasshopper/Mantis Lobster I Lobster Fly Snails on face Fly I Snails on face Ant Ant Bugs I Bugs Lobster Lobster Snails on face Snails on face Total: 22 Total: Bugs Bugs
Test 2
Total: Total: Findings: Findings:
RORSCHACH TEST 2
RRoor rsscchhaacchh TTeesst t 22
ach R o rTsecsht a 3c h
Spider I Spider FFi innddi innggsIsI: :I I Bird’s Nest Bird’s Nest Energy Ball Energy BallI Spider Manga CartoonSpider I Manga Cartoon Bird’s Nest Nest Samurai Mask Bird’s / Mask I I I / Mask Samurai Mask EnergyBall Ball Energy Shield II Shield MangaCartoon Cartoon Manga Donkey I Donkey SamuraiMask Mask/ /Mask Mask Whiley Cayote Samurai I Whiley Cayote Shield Shield Flower Basket Flower Basket I Donkey Donkey Insect II Insect WhileyCayote Cayote Whiley Moth III Moth FlowerBasket Basket Baroque CrownFlower I Baroque Crown Insect Insect Moth Moth Total: 22 Total: Crown Baroque Baroque Crown Total: Total:
Test 3
RORSCHACH TEST 3
RRoor rsscchhaacchh TTeesst t 33
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“The Big Crab” - Visual Studies
“Works in motion” as Eco termed, is the decision to leave the arrangement of some of their constituents either to the public or to chance, thus giving them not a single definitive order but a multiplicity (Rorschach testing) of possible orders – a “field of possibilities”. Open to interpretation. An aleatoric gift. Ambiguity is the product of the contravention of established conventions of expression: the less conventional forms of expression are, the more ambiguous they can be said to be. The contravention of conventions.
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Church
Locations
SITE ONE “HEALTH CENTER� Conventional forms of expression convey conventional meanings, and conventional meanings are parts of a conventional view of the world. This project implicitly denies the conventional view of the world of the institution and the perception of the inhabitant. An open work has a multiplicity of meaning a plurality - so it could be said that the gift is an open work.
Avenue A / 10 St.
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Location Plan
Elevation
Floor Plan
Avenue A Elevatio
Religious segregation does not attempt to preserve the sufferers but to place the ‘insane’ individual within a moral element where he will be in debate with himself and his surroundings, he will be kept in a perpetual anxiety, ceaselessly threatened by Law and Transgression. A double bind. A moral responsibility, moral and ethical guilt imbued onto the ‘patient’. It ‘organized’ guilt, much more powerful than simply punishing the guilt. A non-reciprocal relationship between patient and keeper. The church has become an edifice, a downgraded example of social relevance, importance and substance and one that should be reevaluated.
Section
Internal Image - Approach Section A--A
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ite
Internal Images - Surgery, Waiting Room, Entrance Site
2
One
A schizoid episode normally includes a sense of collective alienation. A sense of being part of the crowd but entirely separated from the crowd, simultaneously. Deterritorized intensities are multiplicities, to deterritorialize oneself from the distinct but entangled lines. Alois Riegl, lending on Nietschze, discussed ‘absolute artistic volition’ as the latent demand which exists, per se, entirely independent of the object and of the 3 mode of creation, and behaves as will to form. It is the primary factor in all artistic creation and, in its innermost essence, every work of art is simply an objectification of this a priori existent absolute artistic volition.
One
This proceeds from psychology that pre-assumes that ability is only a secondary consequence of volition. Worringer suggested an aesthetic and social theory of subjectivity. Subjectivity is conceived as both individual and collective, and the contradiction between self and other is mediated. Abstraction, here, is a general rejection of mimesis (or architectural critique). This occurred due to what Worringer labelled as “will to form” in the age of Modernity.
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Location Plan
S I T E T WO “RESIDENTIAL” “To name an object is to suppress three-fourths of its enjoyment, which is composed of the pleasure of guessing little by little: to suggest...there is a dream.”
Mallarme
“To name an object is to suppress three-fourths of its enjoyment. which is composed of the pleasure of guessing little by little: to suggest...there is a dream.“
Avenue B Elevation
Avenue B / 9th St.
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StĂŠphane MallarmĂŠ Location Plan
Avenue B Elevation Elevation
The presupposition of the act of empathy is the general apperceptive activity, each simple line demands apperceptive activity, in order to understand it as what it is. An expansion
of inner vision up to it embracing the whole line; to inwardly delimit what has been apprehended and to extract it, as an entity, from its surroundings.
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Wilhelm Worringer stated that the “will to abstraction� was to be understood as one of the two fundamental aesthetic impulses known to human culture. From this,
abstraction was elevated to the plane of universal principle as well as spiritual imperative.
Section Section B - - B
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Aerial View
A sensation of conflict ensues, a negative empathy.
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Site Two - A
Floor Plan
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Site
Site Two
Floor Plan
Internal Images : Lounge, Bathroom, Bedroom
1
Two
3
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2
ation Plan
Section
Aerial View
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Avenue B Elevatio
Location Plan
S I T E T WO “ WO R K S H O P / EXHIBTION”
This gelatinous space spouts new aerodynamic and atmospheric “Being-Objects”. The aerodynamism of the new space obliterates the difference between objects and beings, giving rise to a new period of softness.
These being-objects or object-beings are captured and frozen in the moment of their metamorphosis.
Dalí’s The Phantom Cart is about transformed space-time wherein space is neither a point, a dimension nor a pure intuition but “material and real”.
envelope that presses at every moment with its disinterested and soft enthusiasm the smooth finesse of the ‘strange bodies’. Avenue B / 7th St.
Avenue B Elevation
They are perverse and polymorphous.
It is no longer the container of flesh but flesh that is at once the contained and the container. Space is an
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Floor Plan
Instead of treating the patient, should society be conditioned? So it ‘understands’ the schizophrenic?
Floor Plan
be postulated that schizophrenics are simply those who refuse to share the widespread beliefs of their society; they are not diseased, just nonconformist.
Many psychotics believe their illness to be alien to them. Is that because their illness is reflected onto them as a way guilt? It is indisputable that there is a medical complaint, but not a demonic tendency. Is the emotional isolation a result of the projection? Is it to be reflected back onto the society to return the guilt?
Schizophrenics often show a flattened emotional response to those around them, seen as coldness or indifference (so, if it is about isolation as building, then it is not the user who should be concerning, but the isolation and alienation felt should belong to the passer-by.
Guilt as gift, negative becoming positive. The Derridean gift - a return. A gift given back but to not the same position. A disturbance of order and creating something new out of that with no return – the so called ‘moments of interruption’. This is not to deny the severity of the symptoms of the psychotic condition, rather it is to acknowledge that human emotional states exist along a continuum. It could
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Schizophrenia is normally diagnosed under the pretence that hearing voices that belong to others is paramount.
External bodies.
Section A - - A
Section
43
Section B--B Section
44
45
Still Images taken from the movie: PARANOID APPARITION
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“PANDORA, PANDORA AND THE GIFT” SUBJECTIVE DEDUCTION RETROSPECTIVE : “A RESISTANCE TO READABILITY”
As a heuristic device, S.T. Coleridge´s Kubla Khan, supposed that to lose something or someone may be beneficial in certain terms. An involuntary loss - an incomplete, fragmented form - returns in completeness. (loss - gain) + loss = gain. The poem became the mechanism to expose a wider argument: architecture functions as an instrument of segregation and institutional control. In the Foucauldian sense, the ecclesiastical establishment was brought to bear and culminated in the question: can architecture be conceived as a gift in relation to the gift of institutional guilt? Through the investigation of the double bind, it can be said that architecture finds itself as a variant form of subjective deduction. Through its insistence on flattened form, lending from Ranciere, it finds itself as a conflicting communication, an array of mixed messages. Through this multiplicity, this unreadability leads to a singularity - a homogenous, conformist strain. An apathetic sheath veils architecture as a profession, but it merely conceals its flaws and its flirtation with the concept of control. Subjective Deduction takes its basis the notion that madness should not be voyeuristically fetishized. Instead, it should be accepted by society. The building program was devised as a hybrid between the ‘asylum’ and the artist’s studio or residence. The double bind became a useful allegory when questioning formal solutions and also programmatic decisions. It aimed to break with convention. The Rorschach test, a seemingly haphazard multitude of swirling lines fluctuates between random and calculated. Through an apperceptive abstraction, familiar objects were found and became design tools. Akin to Francis Bacon’s path between figure and figuration. ‘Figuration’ refers to a form that is related to an object it is supposed to represent; the ‘figure’ is the form that is connected to a sensation. Bacon attempts to “paint the sensation”
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or “remove the fact”. If we are left with reactionary sensations, then who is to say that the creative act is not the defining aspect of madness? The use of Rorschach questions insanity and its diagnostic process. If everyone sees something different, then who is to decide madness? The institution. It categorizes, individualizes and segregates. Subjective Deduction was intentionally obtuse and unreadable through a paranoid-critical method. The three designs were to stand apart, to interact with the churches. It was through this clash that conventions were to be exposed. It was Salvador Dalí who stated that “paranoia is a delirium of interpretation”. Paranoid-Critical Activity is the fabrication of evidence for improvable speculations, so that a “false” fact takes its place among the “real” facts. To decipher the objects can remain as visual agnosia or can become an apparition. This is not to say that architecture is appearance over essence. It is to lay claim that architecture, through abstraction, can curate a general rejection of mimesis, an inversion of paranoidcritical activity. Dalí used paranoia to obtain a double image: a representation of an object without the slightest pictorial or anatomical modification, so it becomes the representation of an entirely different object; this work attempts at a blurring of identification, the deformation of subjective form (Rorschach) through abstraction (computerized modeling techniques) into a recognizable paranoiac-critical representation. Reciprocity of collective subjectivity. It promotes the idea that there is no illness, illness is a phantom projection. Are illnesses reflected onto patients as a way guilt? Is the emotional isolation a result of the projection? Is it to be reflected back onto the society to return the guilt? Guilt as gift, negative becoming positive. The Derridean gift - a return. A gift given back but to not the same position. A disturbance of order and creating something new out of that with no return. Architecture must reposition itself as non-conformist; strip itself of its institutional hierarchy; devalorize its double bind; remove its veiled guilt.
ALEATORIC GIFTS
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“THE DICTIONARY OF RECEIVED IDEAS”
The Dictionary of Received Ideas originates from a project undertaken by the French author Gustav Flaubert, where he set out to outline all the phrases that were so over-used that they no longer had any relevance or grasp of their own originality. The had, in effect, become a cliche. The studio was strictly concerned with architectural projects ahead of concepts and took an architectural cliche as its starting point. Through a varying number of constraints, implemented throughout the semester, the projects developed with increasing voracity. The only constant during the studio was that each of the three projects were based in New York City. Regardless of program or cliche, the projects were to have a specific location. This proliferated the constraint and ratified the idea of project ahead of concept.
The cliches at hand in the following projects are: the As Found Object; Landscape as Building/Building as Landscape; and, the Neo-Raum Plan STUDIO BRIEF: This studio is the sixth installment in a decade-long project whose aim is to examine received ideas—that is, formerly novel ideas which, due to recurrent use, have been depleted of their original intensity—in contemporary architecture culture.
Cliches were devised through precedent analysis of current architecture, with a further restriction of the built environment of the last two decades. Once they were identified, the cliche was extrapolated into its most basic framework, or in the Georges Perec form: a User’s Manual. The idea was to establish a list of instructions that could be read badly or mis-read well. A kind of recipe for success. One the instructions were elaborated and illustrated in diagrammatic form, they became, together with the prescribed programmatic choice, a brief. A solid document to work with. The cliche became a manual to work through and to not to work alongisde. The aspiration of the studio was to discuss only the project in the Closing Project so that the cliche had lost all lineage. It would have dissolved to the point of absolution. A studio visit to Tokyo, Japan intensified the desire to develop new typologies, to denote more radical approaches and to attempt at coining new inventions. Be it programmatic, typological, formal or representational.
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This ongoing series of design studios and theory seminars proposes to disclose, define, and date—and in the long run archive—received ideas prevalent over the past decade, both in the professional and academic realms, in order to ultimately open up otherwise precluded possibilities for architectural design and architectural theory. To that end, it focuses on design operations and conceptual strategies, particularly in terms of the means of representation and the lexicon through which they are respectively articulated. This project takes as precedent Gustave Flaubert’s unfinished project, Le dictionnaire des idées reçues. Just as the latter, it sets out to detect and collect received ideas and provide definitions—or, rather, a user’s manual— so as to render them self-evident and thereby undermine their perpetuation. Yet as opposed to the latter, arguably an inventory of potential exclusions, this project also seeks to use—or, rather, to misuse—that collection of received ideas towards the formulation of other design operations and other conceptual strategies. Enrique Walker
PROJECT ONE “A Mausoleum” - Part One 57th
Street
Elevation
AS FOUND OBJECT The first design brief was a mausoleum, based strictly in New York City. In an attempt to understand the cliche this concept was devised. It centred on the idea that a mausoleum should be a place for those who are noteworthy. In a twist, the design focused on a mausoleum for the homeless. The use of cort-ten steel sheeting to encase the bodies was in direct correlation to the cliche. The sheet steel is used as facade treatment in cliche form, so it becomes the bodily wrap here. The location on the facade of Louis Vuitton’s 5th Ave store was punning on the Jun Aoki 5th Ave Elevation storefronts.
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Method or specific steps to experiment: 1.
Find a suitable location, preferably scrub land, and situate your project there.
2.
Opt for simple geometric forms: square/ cube, rectangle, triangle and use through out.
3.
a relationship with ground plane “A Articulate Mausoleum” - the Part Two which is one of alien, removed from its space.
4.
Remove all ornamentation and minimise fenestration.
5.
Perforate the sheet steel with a vaguely Arabesque pattern.
In it’s next incarnation, the mausoleum project took as its starting point the Highline, specifically the abutted end of the renovated section in lower Manhattan. The Highline Axonometric became the “as found”. A materiality was applied using another “as found”. Through a mis-reading of the objects of cage rock and cor-ten steel an image of cage rock was superimposed and perforated through the steel to allow for light filtration. A further “as found” object, that of the product object, became the third layer of cliche to be mis-used. Instead of the conventional method of interning bodies, the coffins were to be hung from rails, much like the nearby Meat Packing District. The design has an elevated ground plane through its use of the Highline, but it is also exemplified by the fact the sheet steel covers the abutted end of the Highline without actually reaching the ground.
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P RO J E C T T WO “A Museum”
Site Plan
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Elevation
$ V ) R X Q G $ V / D Q G V F D S H A s Fo u n d As Landscape
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“A Museum”
Section AS FOUND OBJECT - LANDSCAPE AS BUILDING
Conditions
The design of a museum relied upon the clash of two opposing cliches: “as found” and “landscape as building”. It was important to decipher the landscape cliche as something that does not mimic but is derivative from the ground plane. An additional aspect and one that comes from the ground. This is the stark opposition to the “as found” which had, from the previous Mausoleum, operated as a facade treatment and as a product object in the form of rails. It was the latter aspect that was to be implemented in the design process of the museum. Conditions were formed (shown opposite): the “Top Down” condition of the “as found”; the “Bottom Up” condition of the landscape; and the “Hybrid” condition of the clash between the two cliche conditions. The site was, once again, the Highline, but was the under-developed area around 34th St. In plan (page left) the circulation is shown as a dotted blue line, with section points circled in orange, shown here in sequence.
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Top Down
Bottom Up
Hybrid
Section
58
Section
59
Sequential Sequence showing the Museum relocating.
“VARIETIES”
The design focused on key ideas of movement. The landscape became the circulation device. It guides museum visitors through as the artifacts meander along the underneath of the Higline attached to product object rail systems acting as a separate circulation path. There was a decision taken to hierarchically order the landscape and the Highline. At moments the Highline interacts with the existing structure, but these are limited. Instead, the Highline acts as a functional underbelly to enable the museum activity. The circulation landscape mutates as both landscape and also service space as it envelopes zones for which service areas are required: a case in point is the auditorium. The as found product object are a system of cranes, rails, deployable structural panels and hydraulically operated, Kikutake-inspired, “movenettes”. The cranes are operated on the railway lines of the existing structure and can move along the paths already defined on the surface. The rails operate as museum artifact systems. The structural cranes lower down panel systems onto areas for specific reasons: either to create auditorium spaces with temporary workshop spaces below; or, to allow access from and into the hydraulically operated movenette museum gallery spaces. The opposite section sequence shows how the museum can be literally packed away as and when needed. The hydraulically operated movenette gallery is winched into a position on the top of the Highline, thus becoming a security device. The cranes elevate the structural panels and allow them to hang alongside the Highline. As they operate on the crane-rail system they could well be deployed at another location along the museum site at any given time.
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PROJECT THREE CLOSING PROJECT
“A Hotel”
AS FOUND OBJECT - LANDSCAPE AS BUILDING - NEORAUM PLAN
It is at this point where the cliches come together. The structural, circulation core becomes the invention.
The “as found”, once again, became the device for location and an attempt to re-use the existing objects at that location, but maintaining a separation between programmatic built form and the existing structures. The decision was taken to situate the hotel across an entire block of Midtown Manhattan, between 36th and 37th St. and 5th Avenue. The location was a suitably dense urban environment which allowed for a such a building mass.
Through the buildings distinct form, it can become a diagram. An ultimate abstraction. A diagram that is retrospectively created allows for the building to become a logo, much like the Centre Pompidou, Paris or Bernard Tschumi’s Alfred Lerner Student Center at Columbia University, to name but two.
The Neo-Raum plan become the pivotal device. The disturbance of the window to that of an opening became paramount. The window bore a relation to that of its function but in its most notable incarnation, was actually a circulation device. Entrance to the building is from the street on 5th Avenue, through an elevator shaft which guides guests to the landscape. The landscape, not only operating as an undulating, triangulated surface, is the plane where all hotel activities occur: reception, restaurant, leisure etc. It also harbors the hotel maintenance service areas which are located at the circulation core, but are mid-level between as found and landscape. The clash between the cliches occurs at the invention of the circulation core. These cores were identified through the location of existing watertowers, so synonymous with the New York skyline, and became the as found object. From this the window as opening from the NeoRaum Plan was applied, with hotel rooms located in the perforated slab. The watertower structure is replaced with a more engineered form and one that allows for the landscape to ‘hang‘ from the perforated slab of the hotel suites. In order to access the suites, circulation nodes are the existing watertowers which are accessed through undulations rising at these points so to enable access.
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Building as Diagram
Roof
Hotel Suites
RESTAURANT
SAUNA / SPA
Landscape
READING +80
+40
ROOM +80 +60
+60 +40 CAFE RECEPTION
+80
DESK
LOBBY SWIMMING POOL
+0
ELEVATOR
+20
+60
+60
+80 +80
TERRACE
As Found Objects
Floor Plans
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Axonometric
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Section
67
Existing Watertower
Suite Type B
Suite Type D
Reception Services
Services
Laundry Facilities
Section
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Internal Image - Hotel Suite Access
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“THE DICTIONARY OF RECEIVED IDEAS”
RETROSPECTIVE : “As Found Objects - Landscape as Building - Neo Raum Plan”
As the studio progressed the understanding of the individual cliches intensified and with this came an ever increasing ability to develop a more radical approach to the program brief or to the clashing of cliches. However, the most important aspect to emanate from the student was that of project representation. An aspect which can be attributed to the architectural field not just to the academic based studio work.
becomes the mask. It hides the inchoate disharmonies that are coursing through the veins of the profession. Japanese students seem to cultivate ideas through modelmaking, a fetishization of the spatial forms that together create architecture. Only once the model is seen as finished do they take the concept into a computer-aided drawing package to ready it for construction and to test out its viability. In the States, we see a polar opposite.
It is not the representation of architecture in terms of the way buildings are viewed by the general public or the representation of the architect in the public realm. It is more a case of the communication of ideas. In present terms, architecture is witnessing a plasticized, flattened mode of representation. It is certainly a mutant disease which has created its own immunity. Palladio once flattened drawings into a two-dimensional form and then ‘mis-read’ his own illustrations when these were used almost ‘as found’.
Students design in 3-D software, they re-work without the aid of models or even hand drawn sketches. This is not a statement of a desire to return to the ‘good old days’ of drawing boards, but instead to highlight an already burgeoning issue. It is a question of flatness. The Surrealists discussed softness and formless space as issues to be addressed, we currently have the dubious honour of combatting flatness.
Greek space was perspectival, viewed on a 45-degree angle. The revelation of Romanesque architecture was to create single aspect views of the frontal element of the building. A flattening. Modernists can be said to be in keeping with their Roman counterparts insofar as Le Corbusier’s designs were very much Cubist in their flattened, frontal aspect, Villa Savoye is a case in point.
In a deep questioning of representation on the back of scrutinizing cliches, the projects strove for a method of representation specific to the project and its innovation, as opposed to simply rendering. The closing project focused on traditional drawings through plans and section, whereas the initial mausoleum centred on the render, even though drawings were produced for this project they seemed somewhat ancillary and do not feature in this body of work.
Set this aside to Mies, who seems more in keeping with the Greek equivalents in his desire for spaces to be perspectival. Generations update the manifestoes that lay before them, such is the nature of evolution, however, this generation seems interested not in the physicality and spatiality of a building but it’s computerised, glossy, truly flattened image: the render. But is this a mark against the education system or a wider picture? The wider implication of this question can not be answered here. Western education may be especially culpable in the search for the insatiable obsession of the render. The discussions revolve around the imagineering rather than the project, or even the concept at large. The image
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The studio exposed a culture-of-the-visual, one obsessed with the flattened surface and one that, as burgeoning architects, must be addressed.
R E T R OA C T I V E M A N I F E S T O “Convention and Resistance”
Theoretical or philosophical dalliance in the architectural profession is one that is paved with unquestionable pitfalls. Such incessant flirtation leaves architecture searching to present the unrepresentable whether it is through organic mutant forms or through considered nuances which remain undetectable to the untrained eye. The only incendiary aspect in the armature is currently that of the object, be it obtuse, fluid or phallic. Architecture’s only release will be to regain subjectivity, the only way of retracting its passivity. The reemergence of subjective agency within architecture would only be possible through a shattering of conventions. A destabilization of institutional control, a slackening of any kind subjective colonialism. It may well be said that only through individualization can the collective flourish. This is not to say that the architect should adopt a position of suffering artist, instead it lays claim to the fact the profession needs to rid itself of the plurality of architectural practice. A shift in thought. No longer are debates over the city happening. CIAM died long ago and took with it the last edifices of global debate, only sporadic episodes have occurred since in Las Vegas and Tokyo. There seems to be no individual exploration, no subjective analysis of urban contexts, no critical discourse to stoke the flames of architectural debate. Instead we have a caricature of architectural dialogue. An imitation, or simply a static monologue. There is a distinct lack of ethic, instead conventions are followed, and resistance to conformity is evaporated. Mikhail Bakhtin, in his research on Dialogism, developed a model where literary structure does not simply exist but is generated in relation to another structure. He states that dialogue oscillates between that of the writer, the addressee and the contemporary or previous cultural context. Bakhtin situates a text within history and society, which are then seen as texts read by the writer, and into which he inserts himself by rewriting them. He creates an “Intertextuality” “Intertextuality” places importance on to previous
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texts insisting that autonomy is almost impossible given that the historical dialogue means that any text has already been written, they act as contributors to a code of signification. Texts become a participant in the discursive space of a culture, it provides an intelligibility. “Intertextuality” can offer a plenitude of conventions and associations through its lineage through the very fact it relies on positions being taken by its reader as a result of their own subjective colonialism. Words refer to other words, and those words refer to still other words, it provides a density of language. That said, what if we were to claim that architecture revolves in the realms of the inter-? An “inter-text”. If it is impossible to read without imitation, then it is impossible to design without through imitation. But it requires one thing: the subjective deduction of the individual who reads the text. Not dependent on an anterior action or architecture can constitute a language: discursive possibilities, systems of convention, clichés and descriptive systems. The legibility of which is only possible through the interaction of its user.
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Publ ishe d: Col umb i a U n i ve r s i t y, G SA P P New Yo rk , Ju n e 2 0 0 9 - M ay 2 0 1 0