Morris Portfolio

MARK MORRIS | TEACHING + RESEARCH

STUDIOS

SEMINARS

PUBLICATIONS

CREATIVE WORK

SPECIAL PROJECTS

STUDIO

1ST YEAR

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Lunar House Freshmen Studio

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Middleton Place Bandstand Year 1

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Riverside Studio Year 1

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Lakeside Studio Year 1

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Extinct Zoo Year 1

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Extinct Zoo Year 1

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Extinct Zoo Year 1

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Extinct Zoo Year 1 Sebastian Hernandez

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Extinct Zoo Year 1

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Extinct Zoo Year 1

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Extinct Zoo Year 1

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Extinct Zoo Year 1

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Extinct Zoo Year 1

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Extinct Zoo Year 1

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Extinct Zoo Year 1

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Extinct Zoo Year 1

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Extinct Zoo Year 1

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Archipelago Year 1

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Archipelago Year 1

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Archipelago Year 1

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Archipelago Year 1 Student Name

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Archipelago Year 1

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Archipelago Year 1

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Archipelago Year 1

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Archipelago Year 1

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Marionette Museum Year 1 Tansy Mak

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Marionette Museum Year 1 Tansy Mak

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Marionette Museum Year 1 Tansy Mak

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Marionette Museum Year 1 Anton Dekom

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Marionette Museum Year 1 Anton Dekom

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Marionette Museum Year 1 Anton Dekom

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Marionette Museum Year 1 Anton Dekom

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Marionette Museum Year 1 Anton Dekom

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Marionette Museum Year 1 Yueng Shin

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Marionette Museum Year 1 Yueng Shin

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Marionette Museum Year 1 Yueng Shin

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Marionette Museum Year 1 Yueng Shin

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Marionette Museum Year 1 Yueng Shin

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Marionette Museum Year 1 Yueng Shin

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STUDIO

2ND YEAR

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Mensa Kindergarten Year 2

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Agricultural Research Station Year 2

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Agricultural Research Station Year 2

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Addition to the Esprit Nouveau Pavilion Year 2

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Thermal Baths Year 2

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Fire Station Year 2

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Psychogram Exercise Surrealist Gallery Project Year 2

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Surrealist Gallery Projects Year 2

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Living Bridge, Scotland 2nd Year Housing Studio Simitch, Warke and Morris

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Living Bridge, Scotland 2nd Year Housing Studio Simitch, Warke and Morris

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Living Bridge, Scotland 2nd Year Housing Studio Simitch, Warke and Morris

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Living Bridge, Scotland 2nd Year Housing Studio Simitch, Warke and Morris

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Living Bridge, Scotland 2nd Year Housing Studio Simitch, Warke and Morris

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Living Bridge, Scotland 2nd Year Housing Studio Simitch, Warke and Morris

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Living Bridge, Scotland 2nd Year Housing Studio Simitch, Warke and Morris

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Living Bridge, Scotland 2nd Year Housing Studio Simitch, Warke and Morris

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Living Bridge, Scotland 2nd Year Housing Studio Simitch, Warke and Morris

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Living Bridge, Scotland 2nd Year Housing Studio Simitch, Warke and Morris

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Living Bridge, Scotland 2nd Year Housing Studio Simitch, Warke and Morris

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STUDIO

3RD YEAR

Secret Societies Lodge Year 3

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Secret Societies Lodge Year 3

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Secret Societies Lodge Year 3

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Secret Societies Lodge Year 3

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Secret Societies Lodge Year 3

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Secret Societies Lodge Year 3

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Secret Societies Lodge Year 3 Ann Lui

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Secret Societies Lodge Year 3 Ann Lui

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Secret Societies Lodge Year 3 Ann Lui

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Secret Societies Lodge Year 3 Ann Lui

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Secret Societies Lodge Year 3 Ann Lui

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Secret Societies Lodge Year 3 Ann Lui

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Secret Societies Lodge Year 3 Lisa Hollywood

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Secret Societies Lodge Year 3 Lisa Hollywood

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Secret Societies Lodge Year 3 Lisa Hollywood

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Secret Societies Lodge Year 3 Lisa Hollywood

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Secret Societies Lodge Year 3 Phillip Chang

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Secret Societies Lodge Year 3 Phillip Chang

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Secret Societies Lodge Year 3 Phillip Chang

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Secret Societies Lodge Year 3 Phillip Chang

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Secret Societies Lodge Year 3 Phillip Chang

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Secret Societies Lodge Year 3 Jack Becker

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Secret Societies Lodge Year 3 Jack Becker

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Secret Societies Lodge Year 3 Jack Becker

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Secret Societies Lodge Year 3 Jack Becker

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Secret Societies Lodge Year 3 Jack Becker

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Secret Societies Lodge Year 3 Jack Becker

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Secret Societies Lodge Year 3 Jack Becker

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STUDIO

ADVANCED + GRAD

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102

ARCH 6112 ARCH 6112 Spring 2005 Spring 2005 Design Studio_Masters I Design Studio_Masters I .++$&$ .% 1"'(3$"341$ : -(5$12(38 .% .13' .++$&$ .% 1"'(3$"341$ : -(5$12(38 .% .13' 1.+(- 3 ' 1+.33$ 1.+(- 3 ' 1+.33$ "1$#(3 '.412 : /, "1$#(3 '.412 : /,

St Patrick’s Festival Pavilions, St Patrick’s Savannah Festival Pavilions, Savannah

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St Patrickâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Festival Cinema Pavilion Masters 1

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Botox Clinic, Masters 1

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Daniel Libeskind Dr. Mark Morris

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Architecture in a Box: The Book Object Course Description: This Options Studio is an open-ended investigation whose goal is a concrete object.

The aim of this studio is to create book-objects that contain in themselves their own creativity. Book-objects can be made of any material and be of any reasonable size. A person given access to the book-objects should be able to see, construct and operate a wondrous and original architecture.

In many respects the book-object will function as an Architecture Machine: an instruent that will generate all kinds of architecture. It will build on the notion of a traditional architectural treatise, but may be completely different for the twenty-多rst century.

Students will begin by demonstrating what they think is the essence or sum of architecture.

This response will be expanded conceptually and materially and subsequently crafted as a superlative book-object. Students will then design an armature to exhibit the collective library of book-objects.

The studio will be fun, intellectually challenging and artistically ful多lling.

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Book I: Lineaments

Installation in Hartell Gallery, Sibley Hall

Machine and the In多nite Mark Benn Colker This project explores the potential for a mechanical program to extract quantitative, codi多ed information from a given input to produce a meaningful qualitative output. It begins with a quarter circle. This potent combination of arc and right angle was chosen for its signi多cance in the literal construction of architectural geometries and symbolic implications in reconciling the earthly man-made with the heavenly in多nite. Within the gallery, the quarter circle appears as an image, a surface, a volume, and a path through time, together serving the needs of the mechanical narrative. The machine manifests a personal interpretation of the creative process. Inspiration goes in, mechanical components shift and churn, and something meaningful yet partially unpredictable comes out the other side. While the project draws from a wealth of historical sources, it is not as much the sum of all architecture as it is a mechanical portrayal of the architectural design process.

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Analysis of Book / Return Book / Physical Concept / Hartell Installation

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Book II: Language

City of Eight Languages Yao Wang

Architecture of the city is unique to each different context like the written languages are unique to each different culture. Through the study of Hindi, English, African, Chinese, Arabic, Russian, Thailand Hebrew scripts, a curious formal relationship is observed between these written scripts and the traditional architecture of these cultures.

The robust rigidity of letters are mirrored in the solid temples; the Ă&#x20AC;ow of strokes runs down church sections and street facades; the turns and curls of the pen details while the proportions of letters also proportions building space. The city topography is hence written elegantly by the architect/calligrapherâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s hand, condensing the contextual meaning and expressing its tectonic logic, traversing cultural boundaries towards a universal understanding.

Detail of Installation in Hartell Gallery, Sibley Hall

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Return Book - Map of Languages

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Book III: Horizon

Dreamscapes Ariane Phipps-Morgan An initial analysis of dreams and their relation to reality led to the fabrication of a series of dream views. Collage is used to produce each view and as a technical means mimics the dream-memory process: it collects fragments from disparate sources in space and time and combines them without gaps—just as the mind does with a recollected dream—into a cohesive whole. The paraline-plan drawings root the dream compositions in reality by acting as a guide that ‘accurately’ documents the body in relation to its spatial surroundings. Finally, the model suggests the compositions’ place in the built world.

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Dream Collage / Drawing of Dream / Model of Dreamscape

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Book IV: Dance

Original Dance Images

Dance Siboney Diaz-sanchez Upon receiving a book containing a collection of images/inspirations from Daniel Libeskind, I chose to categorize the images according to subject content. With the numbers taken from the inventory produced music using Cellular Automata. My analysis of Libeskindâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s book was sound generated by the patterns from the content of his images. My return book was a collection of liner notes for tracks that were based on personal commentaries I have pertaining to architecture. Each criticism was written as if it were a musical track. I also collected and included images of architects that became musicians, musicians who became architects, lyrics in songs about buildings, images of buildings that inspired music, images of buildings that housed music, diagrams of how sounds moves in a space, acoustic qualities of materials, plans of famous performance halls and so on. I also took a survey of what professors, architects at the Âżrm I worked at, and students listened to while designing. I listed all the songs I was given within the book.

Dance Models

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Book V: Narrative

Selected memory drawings

Natural Memory: Drawing on the Past Daniel Salomon Drawing was a tool for recording their life; it documented the phantasmal existence of the objects beyond their common place and inactivity. My drawings, which always reÀected what ‘I saw,’ attempted to express the vitality in things that were essentially static. Recounting the essence of that time and its lasting signi¿cance, I have returned to my earliest remembrances, the most ancient remains of my natural memory, in which I hope to reacquaint myself with those elementary experiences of architecture and discover new meaning from a more mature perspective.

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Return Book Object

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Book VI: Ink

Layers//Prints Amanda Huang This project serves as a generative process in analyzing relationships between objects, forms, and drawings. Initially starting with objects, these compositions of planes and lines created differing gradients of shadow and light which was recorded onto light sensitive plates. An abstraction, Ă&#x20AC;attening and recomposing of space was created through printing the plates through layering and reprinting. These images were then recomposed to form woodblocks. Thus generating not only a new drawing tool, but a analysis of the original drawing in which it was inspired by. This abstraction, deconstruction and recomposing of space creates a generative process in which relationships between the 2d and 3d are questioned, but also creates a method in working that allows for new drawings and conditions to occur.

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9 Selected Prints from Installation

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Book VII: Paper

Folding Architecture Winnie Poon The project is simply an investigation of paper. The attachment to paper comes from its versatility- it’s easily accessible and there’s a strong connection between creator and creation since it doesn’t require any tools to come between them. The focus was on a speci¿c unit to investigate- learn what it wants to do and what it’s capable of.

Scale was tested to see when it would fail and thus increase thickness.

An exploration with form was done by combining different scales in sequence, combining different scales randomly, then deconstructing them. The culmination of the process about the paper unit resulted in the ¿nal piece.

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Book VIII: Detail

Return Book

Zoom[window]/Zoom[extents] Maria Asseily The project is a composition made from the tiling of 18 individual frames.

Each frame is a combination of architectural details pieced together in ambiguous ways. The result is the creation of an architectural landscape of sorts and the creation of spaces. The project allows for the creation of architecture at various levels and at different scales.

Among others, these include the scale of the building, a complex and a city.

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Details

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Book IX: Body

Return Book Object

Bodyscapes Heera Gangaramani My project interrelates the micro, human, architectural and universal scales that can be read in segments as well as a whole. Rather than being a series of objects that create a body of work, it is one object - a power object. It embodies a series of different layers that can behave as a generative tool. Architecture begins by our bodies. The body contains its own complex architectural system that can be reÀected in our environment to create new ways of conceiving architecture.

Bodyscapes stems from the fascination with the human body as a landscape, speci¿cally ¿ngerprints which uniquely identify human bodies.

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Installation in Hartell Gallery

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Book X: Histories

The Architectural History You Missed Ziyin Zhou The ¿rst part of my project is the literal transcription of the history of architecture in a video where sections and elevations morph into one another. The second part is generating hybrid buildings from the video by extracting frames during the transition phases of the morph and building it into 3d models. The two parts of the project is to be seen as a whole. Having the two parts side-by-side, one is able to bring up many inherent issues in perhaps “the sum of architecture.”

Return Flip-book pages

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Hybrid Building Renderings

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Book XI: Dreams

Surreal Landscapes Haley Cohen My architectural interests lie in the creation of active, tactual, oddlyscaled spaces. I am interested in the increased and creative physical activity that occurs within spaces that are either over-scaled or underscaled. For example, a child may climb to reach a plate or jump to turn on a light. To explore this idea, I created videos of people traversing through and interacting within collaged architectonic landscapes at various scales. I then generated a more abstracted and architectonic plan-view animation. The 多nal component of the project is an oddly scaled and interactive space for the viewing of the two videos.

Installation in Hartell Gallery

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Planning Diagrams for Installation in Hartell Gallery

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Installation Details

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Book XIV: Resurrection

Installation Detail

The Stave of Sixtus Alan McNutt Our most fundamental understanding of the world occurs in two dimensions. The visual realm is the place of drawings, photographs, diagrams and maps. Given time, these 2 dimensions become 4 directions, with speed, destination, and purpose. From the four Cardinal Directions, we call upon their respective elements for this resurrection.

The recognition of the human spirit as an essential element draws the ¿ve pointed star. The pentagram is for balance, unity, and perfection.

We realize that we are not perfect. We are carbon based creatures, and appropriately ruled by the number 6. It is the isometric pro¿le of the 3 dimensional cube. It is representative of man’s spiritual shortcomings, yet it is one of nature’s perfect structures. It is the individual snowÀake that is within each one of us. It is man, wandering, feeling, and making.

With the spirit of experience and the experience of creation, we resurrected the Staff, the Companion, and the Way¿nder.

Installation

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Book XIII: Death

View of Installation in Hartell Gallery

War on Architecture: Villa Savoye Eric Bernstein “In 1938, Le Corbusier traversed the border of Eileen Gray’s E.1027 and declared war on its bare walls, painting eight murals (free of charge) without permission. He knew exactly what he was initiating, and so commenced the battle between Le Corbusier and Eileen Gray, known to most as the War on Architecture. Eileen Gray’s retaliatory response was neither revenge nor an assertion of power, but instead maturity and truth. Taking ¿fty-four photographs throughout Le Corbusier’s Villa Savoye, she told a story upon its surfaces. Her ¿nal product asserted her personal analysis through a combination of emotions: respect, exposure, and, well, minor yet necessary acts of revenge.

The most intelligent yet devious act of all was the use of photographs instead of the space itself, reducing the design to a mere commodity, an act of war all its own.”

– Beatriz Colomina, from War on Architecture: Villa Savoye 14 of 54 Original Prints and Used Stencils

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Respectful Morphology Caio Barboza Morris Section At the urban scale, the new Danteum opens up its main facade to its adjacent tower attracting visitors from the nearby traffic intersection. Its cruciform-like spatial distribution hovers over the manipulated landscape separating the building into three different realms - hell, purgatory, and paradiso. The realms are characterized by distinguished programs, organizing visitors into spaces of their interest within the building. As a result, this construct becomes a 3-in-1 building attending to the tourist, local, and academic social circles of Rome.

The building forms itself through two layers - groundscape and spatial. The former is defined by existing planometric building lines along regulating cuts, incisions, punctures, and folds, always to be habitable. The latter derives from analysis and refinements of Guiseppe Terrgani's early sketches for the Danteum project serving as a generator for spatial objects. Not only new, but carefully redesigned, the new Danteum incorporates ideas abstracted from The Divine Comedy and Terragni's original design as means of celebration to what is considered today both one of the most famous pieces of lieterature and never-built architectural projects in the world, respectively.

Never having met before, both side and space come together and respectfully morph each other to accommodate for the needs of the project.

The morphological processes should be seen as the many transformations present in the gradual transition Dante Alighieri undergoes in The Divine Comedy. The challenges and difficulties are present in the building.

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Undulating Terrain (Hell) Library Children’s Section Field of Columns Information Center Architecture Section Archeology Studies Section Study Area Archive Administration Multipurpose Room Exhibition Space Reception Hall Exterior Courtyard Meeting Rooms

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N Third Floor _ 1:500 + 30.00 m

Underground Floor _ 1:500 - 10.00 m

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Section BB’ _ 1:250 6 2.4

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Section AA’ _ 1:250

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View of Field of Columns

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Monumental Constellation Charles Williams My project injects a contemporary participant into the monumental dialogue currently taking place across Rome during the night. As the dense, urban fabric fades into the darkness, a conversation arises among the illuminated monuments of Rome. At this time, my project becomes yet another star within the monumental constellation that is Rome.

The project takes inspiration from the Corbusian quote: “Our eyes are made to see form in light; light and shade reveal these forms.”

INTERIOR VIEW

The quote inspired a detailed study of the light pollution immediately surrounding the site. In taking the inverse of Corbusier’s ideas of light revealing form, the project uses light as a tool for excavation. The light pollution, in its various intensities, carves away at the layers of the project, allowing the light to enter the project and quite literally reveal - or excavate - the form within.

One enters the project via these excavations in the thick outer perimeter, where one then finds themselves within a vertical, circulatory porticus. This transitionary space houses both circulation and the Roman Heritage Gateway, from which visitors can enter into the main structure at various points through catwalks. Once inside, the carved, morphological, programmatic form within presents itself to the visitor as an architectural artifact.

EXTERIOR VIEW

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SITE PLAN 1:2000

INTERIOR VIEW

GROUND PLAN 1:1000

THIRD FLOOR PLAN 1:1000

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CROSS SECTION 1:500

LONGITUDINAL SECTION 1:500

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SOUTH ELEVATION

LIGHT STUDIES

LIGHT STUDY DIAGRAM

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URBAN SHISHKABOB JACQUELINE LIU The Danteum complex ties together extremities: the loud, tourist-¿lled Via Fori Imperiali and the quieter, local zones to the northeast.

The “¿ngers” of public space reaching in between the three buildings soften the stark urban division. In addition to ¿ltering visitors into the spaces, the tripartite façade of the complex joins the ensemble of the surrounding architecture in framing the view of the Colosseum.

Just as the squares, gardens, and outdoor theater are ensconced in the buildings, so are the interior spaces organized as volumes nested within programmatic spaces.

The three sets of volumetric library spaces—correlated with Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso—employ differing structural and lighting approaches but are united by the exterior spaces formed between them.

The northwest structure, dedicated to public programs, is linked with the library by both the circulation path into the complex and the oblique cut that strings together the four piazze and three buildings, which compresses the complex play between private and public into a single view.

The circulation through the complex, inspired by the Temple Fortuna in Palestrina and Villa Giulia, diverges from the diagonal boulevard, drawing visitors on with glimpses of the large public piazza on Via del Coloseo and driving them through a varied course to the destination.

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RIGHT:

Site Plan 1:2000 BELOW LEFT:

Ground Floor Plan 1:1000 BELOW RIGHT:

Second Floor Plan 1:1000

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Lobby Bookstore Auditorium/Multipurpose Room Outdoor Theater Library Lobby & Circulation Architecture & Archaeology Kids Zone Periodicals Digital Facility Italian Language & Literature Center Cafe & Restaurant Gallery Roof Garden Local History & Politics

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Section A-A 1:500

Section B-B 1:500

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SITE ANALYSIS

DEVELOPMENT SKETCHES

SKETCHES

SKETCHES

PRECEDENTS

DIAGRAMS

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Cornell Department of Architecture ARCH 512 Graduate Core Design Studio II Dr. Mark Morris + Victor Tzen, Teaching Associate

The Alfred J. Hitchcock Foundation | Sea Cliff Avenue | San Francisco The Hitchcock Foundation has purchased a suitably vertigo-inducing site on the San Francisco coastline.

Charged with the archiving and dissemination of the life’s work of the film and television director, the foundation hopes its new headquarters will foster popular and scholarly appreciation for suspense and thriller genre cinema. The Foundation has been located in San Francisco from its start and enjoys a long association with the University of Southern California School of Cinema.

This studio focuses on developing a design response to an extreme site requiring structural innovation as a condition of its development. Topographic modeling of the landscape will set the stage for subsequent model investigations of the design problem. Students will be introduced to film studies and the analysis of a selection of particular scenes from Hitchcock’s body of work, in particular “North

by Northwest,” “Vertigo,” “Suspicion” filmed on the coastline of Santa Cruz and “Rear Window,” Hitchcock’s love letter to San Francisco.

The program for the Hitchcock Foundation will include indoor and outdoor cinemas, an archive, media lab, seminar room, office spaces and a terrace café.

From Wikipedia: Sir Alfred Joseph Hitchcock (August 13, 1899 – April 29, 1980) was an iconic and highly influential British filmmaker and producer, who pioneered many techniques in the medium.

Following a substantial career in his native Britain in both silent films and talkies, Hitchcock moved to Hollywood and became an American citizen with dual nationality in 1956. Hitchcock directed more than fifty feature films in a career which spanned six decades, from the silent film era, through the invention of sound films, and far into the era of color films. For a complete list of his films, see Alfred Hitchcock filmography. Hitchcock was among the most consistently recognizable directors to the general public, and was one of the most successful film directors during his lifetime. He continues to be one of the best known and most popular filmmakers of all time.

Vertigo (from the Latin vertigin-, vertigo, "dizziness," originally "a whirling or spinning movement," from vertere "to turn") is a specific type of dizziness, a major symptom of a balance disorder. It is the sensation of spinning or swaying while the body is actually stationary with respect to the surroundings.

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Cliffhanger Studio 2009 M. Arch I Second Semester

Cornell Department of Architecture ARCH 512 Graduate Core Design Studio II Dr. Mark Morris + Victor Tzen, Teaching Associate

The Alfred J. Hitchcock Foundation | Sea Cliff Avenue | San Francisco

Assignment 1: Precedents / Precipices You take a precipice for no leap of danger, And woo your own destruction.

Shakespeare, King Henry VIII, Act V, Scene I You will each elect to research a precedent from the list provided. Format a 4-page spread pdf on 8.5 x 11 with text, photographs, drawings and site plans if available. These will be gathered in a studio resource notebook. Use Helvetica 11point type and our class header (to be emailed). You will also be expected to present your precedent with a PowerPoint talk lasting 10 minutes.

In addition to the assigned precedent, you are encouraged to seek out one other precedent that deals with a cliff or hillside site. This might be a built or unbuilt work designed by a favorite architect or in a favored idiom. Also format this as a two-page pdf and include it at the end of your PowerPoint presentation (for an additional 5 minutes of discussion).

Note: Some of the more recent precedents are only available in periodicals, on-line and through architectsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; offices. Others are better accessed from BOOKS available in our LIBRARY. Use the internet AND periodical search engines AND the library catalog. TELEPHONE/EMAIL the architectsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; offices and request material (nothing will make them happier in these bleak economic times than to hear graduate students at Cornell are studying their work).

Schedule: assignment distributed Monday 19 January; pdf color print-outs and PowerPoint (PowerPoint only) files due at start of class Monday 26 January. Presentations start at 12:30.

Cliffhanger Studio 2009 M. Arch I Second Semester

150

Cornell Department of Architecture ARCH 512 Graduate Core Design Studio II Dr. Mark Morris + Victor Tzen, Teaching Associate

The Alfred J. Hitchcock Foundation | Sea Cliff Avenue | San Francisco

Assignment 2: Topographic Models After we flew across the country we got in bed, laid our bodies delicately together, like maps laid face to face, East to West, my San Francisco against your New York…

Sharon Olds, Topography This assignment asks you to prepare your site and, in so doing, begin to prepare your design approach. Each of you will draw a different parcel along the Sutro/Lincoln Park coastline; as a studio all the parcels will join to form a complete cliff face.

Before you draw your “lot,” you will consider the best approach in modeling your terrain. There are several givens: all topo models will be built to 1/8” = 1’ scale, models must precisely adjoin to their neighbors, all models will set upon a common ocean datum surface. Most parcels will be 80’ wide by 160’ deep with a buildable area of 60’ by 100’; some parcels will be wedge-shaped, others rectangular. There are several variables: material palette and color range, orientation of topo plates, rendering technique, mode of fabrication.

For desk crits Wednesday you will be presenting a range of approaches to site modeling. These ideas should be fleshed out with detailed sketches and/or computer simulations. For Friday you will have crafted two fragment mock-up targeting two different but related modeling approaches. For your mockups, use given rock “islands” just off our site as these will need to feature in our collective ocean. The following week will be focused on completing your topographic model in anticipation of our first sketch model exercise. Think of this stage of the project as an ensemble piece – we are looking for a range of approaches.

As a warm-up to this assignment, you are encouraged to study Maya Lin’s Systematic Landscapes and Topologies projects featured on the web at mayalin.com and, as a documentary short, on You Tube; search “Maya Lin Systematic Landscapes Documentary.”

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Cornell Department of Architecture ARCH 512 Graduate Core Design Studio II Dr. Mark Morris + Victor Tzen, Teaching Associate

The Alfred J. Hitchcock Foundation | Sea Cliff Avenue | San Francisco

Assignment 3: Film Analysis The only way to get rid of my fears is to make films about them.

If it's a good movie, the sound could go off and the audience would still have a perfectly clear idea of what was going on.

Alfred J. Hitchcock This assignment asks you to focus your attention on one brief scene from a selection of Hitchcock films reviewed in class. This scene should be selected based on several criteria.

Ideally, it is a key moment in plot development or action; a scene where architecture or landscape are vital; and where the shots are compositionally compelling.

Your scene should be further examined as a limited series of 5-7 selected stills within the scene. These stills should essentially tell the story of that scene. Print these stills (capturing the shots from DVDs) on paper and use trace to analyze them as pictorial compositions. Use solid/void, axial, profile and other diagramming techniques as overlays on your stills. Be consistent and use each diagram technique across all your still shots. Alongside these, introduce other diagram techniques distinct from graphic analysis that will read across your stills as well. This might be connected to sound, to relative movement of figures in plan or in frame, to temporal aspects or other significant factors useful to your analysis. Diagramming techniques, graphic and other should total 5.

For a critique scheduled for Friday February 20 th at 12:30, please have your stills, overlays and other diagrams ready for review.

Precedents to study and emulate: Bernard Tschumi, Manhattan Transcripts, 1980.

Sergei Eisenstein, Alexander Nevsky diagrams, 1937.

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Emplacement Supported, Embraced, Stable

Displacement Exposed, Instability, Edge

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Cornell Department of Architecture ARCH 512 Graduate Core Design Studio II Dr. Mark Morris + Victor Tzen, Teaching Associate

The Alfred J. Hitchcock Foundation | Sea Cliff Avenue | San Francisco

Assignment 7: Three-Ply Final Drawings

I prefer drawing to talking.

Drawing is faster, and leaves less room for lies.

Le Corbusier

With our penultimate assignment, you will create special three-ply drawings: two sections, plans per level and a site plan. We will begin with a longitudinal section drawing, hereâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s how: Layer 1 _Base drawing (vellum) 1/8: section of entire site and foundation building(s) in graphite or ink or both. You may use a straight photograph of the model as an underlay (enlarge / plot to full scale); you may use a section from a virtual model plotted as an underlay. This should look like a worked over drawing, not a polished piece.

Smudges, guidelines and so on are useful to this drawing. Refer to the class precedents and Graphic Standards as you develop your section. Details not included in your model will appear in your drawing.

Once completed and approved, scan this drawing. Be attentive to line types and weights.

Layer 2 _Datascape (acetate) 1/8: Working with your scan, we will be adding labels, view vectors, figures, sailboats and notes using Photoshop and other software. Keep this work as distinct layers from your underlay base drawing scan. Print on clear acetate.

Layer 3_Effects (acetate) 1/8: Top layer, add tints, shadows (your virtual model should offer these readily) and atmospheres (hazy projected Hitchcock movie stills, clouds, ocean mists, etc.) as appropriate. Use a very limited and light palette; shades of gray and 2-3 other tints. Use this layer to shade pochĂŠ. Do not attempt photo-realistic effects, rather, think of this as a strategic collage. Print on clear acetate.

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Jonathan C. Ruiz Cinema Pavilion, Cultural Olympiad, Albert Memorial and Royal Albert Hall, Kensington Gardens, London Theory Option Studio Spring 2011

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Modulor Music John Lura - Spring 2011 - Morris / Oubrerie - London

Optics

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Hyde Park, London: Rhythmanalysis and Cultural Production

current work in progress

The project is situated between two thoroughfares of London culture: Rotten Row, formerly known as the King's Private road, and South Carriage Drive. They are respectively a pompous course of horseback sightseeing and a decadent promenade of the bourgeoisie. I analyzed these paths in terms of rhythm, taking into account their literal frequencies measured on site, as well as the theoretical implications of what rhythm might mean in ideological terms. The project attempts to divert ďŹ&#x201A;ows of trafďŹ c on these two pathways, produce certain rhythmic effects, mix them and ultimately generate a socially polyrhythmic composition in which I unfold a program of music: produced; performed; broadcast

Anthony Morin

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Thesis Student A Mosque for Dearborn, Michigan Year 5

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Embodied Ephemerality Thesis Reilly Hogan

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NEW HISTORY ELECTIVEARCH 4214/5214; Honors

A NOVEL IDEA: ARCHITECTURE + NARRATIVE or Beyond the Fountainhead

Rachel Whiteread, Judenplatz Memorial, 2000

I looked upon the scene before me — upon the mere house, and the simple landscape features of the domain — upon the bleak walls — upon the vacant eye-like windows — upon a few rank sedges — and upon a few white trunks of decayed trees — with an utter depression of soul which I can compare to noearthly sensation more properly than to the after-dream of the reveller upon opium — the bitter lapse into common life — the hideous dropping off of the veil.

Edgar Allen Poe Fall of the House of Usher

Premise: What is meant by narrative in architecture? Narrative is a central theme of design and criticism, but the concept eludes easy definition or application. How do we use narrative in studio, in our presentations, as a frame for our travels and study of precedent? An architect’s book club, this course will examine the concept of the architectural narrative as a studio trope and critical tool by offering a survey of architectural literature. New fiction, crime genre, Gothic novels, period drama and science fiction will all feature. An aim of the seminar will be to pinpoint where architecture features in the plot, as a foreshadowing element or as surrogate character in a number of novels and how we might read architecture more attentively.

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ARCH 532 Theories and Analyses of Architecture II Spring. 3 credits.

Prerequisite: ARCH 531.

Thursdays 11:15-1:10 in 157 ES Dr. Mark Morris Continuation of ARCH 531 focusing on themes in architectural discourse, design, and inquiry from the 1960s to the present, and their creative/critical implications.

D es cripti on : This course examines a range of architectural ideas with an emphasis on developments from the late 1960s to the present. Attention will be paid to the interrelation between theory and practice and how clusters of ideas formulate the discourse as trends both mainstream and marginal. Emphasis will be placed on texts and their interpretation alongside examples of work inspired by the same. This survey means to formulate a broad understanding of contemporary architectural culture.

R ead in gs an d Att en d an ce: The required readings are numerous and challenging. Success will only come with rereading and careful note taking throughout. Reading assignments must be complete in advance of class and everyone must participate in discussions.

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Rolodex Projects Graduate Theory Seminar Christopher Lauriat

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Rolodex Projects Graduate Theory Seminar Angela Afandi

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Rolodex Projects Graduate Theory Seminar Paul Schelechow

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Rolodex Projects Graduate Theory Seminar Jaruwan Thavatkiattisak

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Rolodex Projects Graduate Theory Seminar Benjamin Johnson

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Rolodex Projects Graduate Theory Seminar Tien Ling

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Rolodex Projects Graduate Theory Seminar Jerry Lai

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Rolodex Projects Graduate Theory Seminar Leslie Mignin

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Rolodex Projects Graduate Theory Seminar Reinaldo Soto Santiago

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Rolodex Projects Graduate Theory Seminar Milena Zindovic

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Rolodex Projects Graduate Theory Seminar Siyuan Zhang

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Reviews MARK MORRIS

The Judicious Eye: Architecture Against the Other Arts

by Joseph Rykwert Reaktion, 2008. 496 pp., ISBN 9781861893581

Rykwert’s nearly 500-page page-turner The Judicious Eye: Architecture Against the Other Arts rushes in to perform a service, to fill a yawning gap in interdisciplinary scholarship. But, despite the title, this is not a tidy architecture-versus-art project or one that wants to assert architecture’s autonomy ‘against the other arts’. This is actually a book whose underlying plea is for the maintenance of historical investigation as a distinct mode of architectural research. Its argument is timely. Let us not be shy about it, architectural history in the academic marketplace has been losing precious ground to theory and criticism, not to mention historic preservation, over the past two decades since the waning of postmodernism’s intense historicism. And as a generation of architectural historians such as Rykwert retire or join that great slide library in the sky, there will no doubt be increasingly scant Judicious Eye-like volumes to lug to the beach as one’s summertime reading.

The book’s set-up is straightforward enough. In a tight nine-page introduction, Rykwert carefully lay s the ground for his main theme: the historical centrality of architecture as one of the arts and its unity with the other arts. Within the first few chapters, Rykwert locates moments of happy cooperation – where architecture synthetically organises painting, sculpture and music into totalising experiences – in the construction of rococo buildings such as the Amalienburg palace, the Petits Appartements at Versailles, the Zwinger in Dres den. Then a historical shift occurs.

Seemingly innocuous innovations like the Adam Brothers’ development of plaster casts for interior classical details bypass reliance on artists, effectively cutting out or degrading the arts within the architectural schema. ‘All this makes the Adams the true progenitors of twentiethcentury industrial design’ (p. 20). From this point in the 1760s onward, Rykwert charts not the steady decline of the unity of the arts under the primacy of architecture, but, rather, sporadic efforts to revive and recover that mythic harmony between the muses which, in this putative historical trajectory, held fast up to and during the rococo but not after.

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92 Critical Quarterly, vol. 51, no. 4 Episodes in the history of architecture that were in many ways driven by this desire for the presumed harmony of a former time include the exaltations of the Gothic by Ruskin and Pugin in the nineteenth century, and the elevation of Antiquity by Winckelmann in the eighteenth. By returning to and emulating the ostensibly more harmonious or synthesised styles of previous eras, Gothic Revival and neoclassicism functioned as attempts to breathe new life into architecture’s capacity to integrate the arts.

However, the endpoint of a logic of total aesthetic integration would necessarily merge architecture into the other arts, would turn architecture into just one member in a series of artistic focuses – and would thus challenge architecture’s authority to direct the others under its umbrella. Architecture, in other words, requires a hierarchy of the arts, and this is what sets architecture against the other arts even as it seeks to be united with them.

Rykwert outlines this trajectory of architectural history in order to aim it, critically, at what he sees to be the shortcomings of the contemporary scene. His thesis is that while architecture used to be located within an expanded field of the arts, its growing autonomy under the aegis of professionalisation has been a detriment to itself and society. Here is where history can help: architecture’s old ways can serve as a rebuke to architecture’s overprofessionalisation and bureaucratisation under the sign of consumer capitalism.

What strikes one throughout the delicate cross-section of some two hundred years of, largely, avant-garde practice is the variable pacing and duelling attention spans exhibited by the book. Chapter sections range from several pages to a few paragraphs and they occasionally jolt like jump-cuts. They often build on each other and culminate in spirited assertions. Occasionally they read like expanded footnotes or tabloid asides. The real joy of The Judicious Eye is in its longer views worthy of a detective novel, its unexpected panorama of recurring names and projects which thread together all the disparate sections, linking a whole cavalcade of compartmentalised episodes in the history of architecture’s interrelations with the other arts. The dancer-cumlighting-designer Loı ¨e Fuller is one of these recurring figures, the architect Henry van de Velde another.

Fuller is presented as a Forrest Gump character, naively nailing the Art Nouveau zeitgeist on its head with her billowy, swirling, electrically lit and coloured choreography – ‘all without any dance training’ we are reminded (p. 219). She is befriended by Mallarme ´ , Rodin, Toulouse-Lautrec, graphic artist Jules Che ´ ret, astronomeroccultist Camille Flammarion, and not least Pierre and Marie Curie

Reviews: Across the disciplines 93 who supplied phosphorescent salts for her costumes so that these could be viewed under ultraviolet light.

Loı¨e Fuller managed to harness a formal drive of which she herself was only half aware but which seized Europe in the last decade of the nineteenth century. It is worth insisting that when she arrived at the Folies Berge` re, Victor Horta had not yet built the Tassel House in Brussels, nor had Oscar Wilde written his Salome. (p. 220)

Rykwert finds in Fuller a supra-architectural proof of an architectural goal, namely the production of a total work of art; though he qualifies this point by specifying her work as ‘many-media performances’ rather than pure synthesis (p. 219). Fuller rejoins the story when Mariano Fortuny de Madrazo is mentioned as the set and lighting designer of Wagner’s Tristan at La Scala. This is part of a key narrative arc that ties aspects of synaesthesia, specifically grapheme or visual responses to nonvisual stimuli, to the Gesamtkunstwerk holy grail. Various projects for the staging of Wagner’s operas are examined as the closest that architecture, art and music have ever worked in productive tandem in recent history. Fuller leaps in again on the eve of World War I with her cubist/futurist Synaesthetic Symphony , set to a lost score by Alexander Scriabin. Rykwert laments that the war ‘put an end to the dominance of dance and the hope that it begot – that dance would become the socially transforming total work of art’ (p. 293).

Like Fuller, Van de Velde is associated with art nouveau, but he moved beyond that style when he formed his association with the hyper-rationalist Deutscher Werkbund and with the building (in both the architectural and institutional sense) of what would become the Bauhaus. Van de Velde acts as a thickener, binding together a copious list of other architects and artists from William Morris to Henri Matisse.

He is juxtaposed with Peter Behrens as the softer side of nascent modernism: ‘Behrens, the painter and graphic designer, turned himself into a designer-architect as quickly as Van de Velde had already done – though without even a nod to the Ruskin–Morris joy-through-handwork ethos’ (p. 241). Aligned chronologically with Fuller’s stab at futurism, van de Velde and Hermann Muthesius then cross paths at the seminal 1914 Werkbund exhibition in Cologne where, in their famous dispute, they drew a proverbial line in the sand between industrial standardisation and individualised craft, with Muthesius promoting the one side and van de Velde the other. Bruno Taut and Walter Gropius side with van de Velde, but this communion paralleled by Fuller’s last dance is rendered moot by the subsequent events of that year in Sarajevo. Here one senses the curtain closing on that period of

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94 Critical Quarterly, vol. 51, no. 4 history when architecture and art (the visual and performing arts) could claim to be in a long-lived, if not cantankerous, productive dialogue. After the war, we gather, all bets are off.

Both the premise and structure of The Judicious Eye hearken back to Rykwert’s first book, On Adam’s House in Paradise, which offered a critique of architecture’s anxiety about its own origins, an anxiety that manifests itselfi n the form of all those impossible attempts, throughout the history of architectural theory, to discover the definitive ‘primitive hut’ (i.e. the ur-form or degree zero of all architecture, most famously theorised by Marc-Antoine Laugier in 1755 to be a hut formed out of tree trunks and leaning branches). The Judicious Eye could be understood as another examination, by Rykwert, of myths of origin about architecture. Here the originary lost object is more complex and harder to intuit than the primitive hut. The object of the search this time is that perfect prelapsarian fusion of architecture with its sister arts. In this sense, Rykwert’s latest book can be productively read in conjunction with his earliest one – the theme of The Judicious Eye loops back to Rykwert’s early-career preoccupations.

The book’s conclusion has the impossible task of surveying interwar events and sidling up to the contemporary to make sense of now.

The last chapter of any architectural history book typically has this latter problem (they should just be ripped out and sewn into a compendium of all last chapters in the genre, suitable for ritual burning). At the bitter end of The Judicious Eye, Rykwert readily admits exhaustion – ‘And yet, and yet . . .’ There is a breathlessness to this last effort, dashing through the Russian constructivists, the Dutch De Stijl, Dada, Weimar, CIAM, cubism, Le Corbusier, Picasso, Terragni, and – jump-cut – pouncing gleefully on contemporary architectural mirages in Abu Dhabi and Dubai:

Reviews: Across the disciplines 95 integrated interiors at the start of this history to exteriors, mere shells – a migration which he interprets to be a defining contemporary condition – Rykwert finds architecture losing ground even within its own domain, let alone the arts. He laments, ‘To set architecture at the margin of culture seems to me therefore to demean it and consequently corrode the other arts. That is why I have tried to investigate the way in which the situation has arisen’ (p. 374). A tragedy then, but also a cliffhanger as this conclusion is acknowledged as tentative, having ‘no definite ending, happy or otherwise’, and room is made for subsequent developments as Rykwert draws a wider cultural net with broader implications for the future of the discipline(s). The ‘and yet, and yet . . .’ with which the book closes also offers an open-endedness that is tantamount to a glimmer of promise for the interdisciplinarity of architecture and history implicitly championed by Rykwert. We cannot entertain nor be entertained by the complexity of The Judicious Eye without an appreciation for such a vision ofi nterdisciplinarity. Art and architecture may have largely parted ways by 1918, but promiscuity has been architecture’s asset and history its hottest date.

Further reading Gombrich, Ernst, The Sense of Order: A Study in the Psychology of Decorative Art (London: Phaidon, 1994).

Rendell, Jane, Art and Architecture: A Place Between (London: I. B. Tauris, 2007).

Rykwert, Joseph, On Adam’s House in Paradise: The Idea of the Primitive Hut in Architectural History (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1972; 2nd edn, (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1981).

Vesley, Dalibor, Architecture in the Age of Divided Representation: The Question of Creativity in the Shadow of Production (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 2006).

Whatever public buildings are being built in the world nowadays are not about power or authority or governance – but about culture: museums, concert halls, ‘art centres.’ The culture they are about is one of consumption . . . [. . .] Architecture can only go about providing a neutral – a more or less convenient, more or less showy container or shell for the passive business of such a culture. (p. 373)

The separation of art from architecture results in impoverished architecture housing impoverished art. ‘Peremptory and over-emphatic variations of plan and outline may well produce an assuefaction similar to the tedium caused by the repetitive over-refinement of hightech, the style which dominated commercial building in the later twentieth century and to which the Emirate style is the inevitable reaction’ (p. 370). Tracking the migration of architecture from a focus on

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MARK MORRIS

DREAM A LITTLE DREAM

JJ Grandville ( Jean Ignace Isidore Gérard), The Dragon 11 11 Grandville’s fantasy of the microscopic is equal parts terrible and humorous. The protocell deserves similar treatment.

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I can add colors to the chameleon, Change shapes with Proteus for advantages, And set the murderous Machiavel to school.

— Richard III, in William Shakespeare, Henry VI, Part Three, Act III, Scene ii, 1591

By training and discipline, architects are intensely visual professionals. Our ability to engage the topic of the very, very small is strained by a predilection for imagery. Architecture has a scalar range that spans from vast skyscrapers and infrastructure to the daintiest of models and miniature simulations, but beyond this domain we rarely tread even in our imaginations. It just gets too tiny. To think clearly about protocell architecture as collective organisations, we can rehearse those instances where we have intellectually dwelt in similar small realms. While this meditation does not require belief, it is helped along by the admission of fantasy, which often finds safe harbour in the minute. Gaston Bachelard makes much of this partnership inThe Poetics of Space where he describes the efficacy of ‘miniature thinking’: Such formulas as: being-in-the-world and world-being are too majestic for me and I do not succeed in experiencing them. In fact, I feel more at home in miniature worlds, which, for me, are dominated worlds. And when I live them I feel waves of worldconsciousness emanating from my dreaming self. For me, the vastness of the world had become merely the jamming of 1 these waves.

This theme of domination has to do with confidence and creativity when imagining the small-scaled. Bachelard stipulates that this intellectual pleasure is rooted to one end of the scale spectrum, citing one’s ability toseea forest when examining moss at close range: ‘A bit of moss may well be a pine, but a pine will never be a bit of moss. The imagination does not function with 2 the same conviction in both directions.’

He suggests this type of thinking approaches a brand of reverie unbound from the dictates of reality:

Grant: Wait a minute! They can’t shrink me.

General Carter: Our miniaturizer can shrink anything.

Grant: But I don’t want to be miniaturized!

General Carter: It’s just for an hour.

Grant: Not even for a minute!4 As the group journey inside the body, complications arise, detours are required and time starts to run out. One of the crew – who suffers from claustrophobia – is a spy bent on sabotaging the mission. He uses a surgical laser to damage theProteusand is then, himself, destroyed by a white blood cell. The remaining crew obliterate the clot but must swim to exit the body before they return to normal size. The film ends with the group escaping through an eye, expelled in a teardrop, just in time. In the novel, Asimov corrected for the film’s misstep in leaving the wrecked Proteusbehind in the body that would, presumably, also return to full scale and kill the scientist.

The submarine’s name is borrowed from Greek mythology, the word meaning ‘primordial’. Proteus can foretell the future but uses his ability to change form – thus the adjective protean– to avoid doing so. The Proteussubmarine is a kind of protocell: artificial, indefinitely powered, locomotive. By virtue of its onboard computer, it also holds memory. TheProteusis introduced to the scientist’s body in an injected saline solution, just as a protocell might be. When the laser is damaged, the crew rebuild it using the ship’s radio parts; so the ship had the ability, if not

The cleverer I am at miniaturizing the world, the better I possess it. But in doing this, it must be understood that the values become condensed and enriched in miniature. Platonic dialectics of large and small do not suffice for us to become cognizant of the dynamic virtues of miniature thinking. One must go beyond logic in order 3 to experience what is large in what is small.

Richard Fleischer, Fantastic Voyage film still, 20th Century Fox, 1966

The proteus runs into trouble along its bodily journey.

The film was extraordinary in terms of the cinematography and lavish set production to achieve the scale effects.

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This point of view opens up Bachelard’s thesis regarding narrative and the strength storytelling takes from settings in radically scaled environments.

Fantastic Voyageis a prime example of this sort of scalar storytelling and one that extends themes of the protocell. The 1966 film, novelised by Isaac Asimov, begins as a Cold War thriller with scientists on both sides of the Iron Curtain developing technology capable of shrinking atoms and miniaturising matter.

The process is temporary, its duration subject to the amount of shrinkage, until a scientist finds a way to make it permanent.

As he races to give this breakthrough to the West with the help of a CIA agent, an assassination attempt leaves him in a coma with a blood clot in his brain. The agent assembles a crew and the group, placed inside a nuclear submarine called the Proteus, undergo the miniaturisation process in order to micro-surgically remove the clot:

Bernard Picart Aristeus Compels Proteus to Reveal his Oracles 1731 (engraving)

Proteus is caught off-guard in human form. The Old Man of the Sea aspect is evident here, as he dwells in his cave by the crashing waves surrounded by assorted sea creatures.

to self-replicate, to mutate and adapt. The crew function as naturally occurring constituents within the vessel, indispensable to its survival. Proteus was the original Old Man of the Sea. This connection comes back to the notion of primordial soup, the creation of humanity from base material and ooze. Abiogenesis is the study of the same theory, life on earth arising from inanimate matter. Protocells connect to this research directly. Replication and metabolism are required of abiogenesis. Amino acids, proteins and nucleic acids form the basis of abiogenetic experimentation replicating conditions of pre-organic earth.

Even more a dip in popular culture thanFantastic Voyageis a celebrated episode of ‘The Simpsons’ created by Matt Groening.

‘The Genesis Tub’, written by Dan Greaney, takes abiogenesis and miniaturisation as the bases of the plot where Lisa Simpson’s science-fair experiment gets out of hand. What was originally a Petri dish test of the effects of soda pop on a recently lost tooth turns into a fast-evolving miniature civilisation moving through the Neolithic to the Renaissance in a day and eclipsing human science by the next. The micro-culture’s evolution is charted visually by changes in architecture, one city constantly rebuilding.

The inhabitants of the Petri dish worship Lisa as a god and assume her brother, Bart, is the devil after he destroys several buildings: ‘Oops, my finger slipped.’ The story surely takes some inspiration from Theodore Sturgeon’s award-winning1941novelette, The Microcosmic God . 5 Sturgeon’s protagonist is a scientist who creates a miniature race with the same speeded-up evolutionary progress.

The scientist introduces technology to his ‘neoterics’, propelling their research and technological sophistication beyond that of mankind. He reaps benefits claiming their innovations as his own, merely scaling them up. Architecture is part of these narratives’ ability to represent culture and link the small- and full-scaled worlds in a dynamic temporal relationship. The materiality of this architecture is a bit of a mystery. Materials are not borrowed from the Simpson household to build the model city; the soda and tooth are other only original matter required to spawn the building blocks for life and city construction. A protocell’s ability to produce salt strands, for example, is a parallel condition where matter and structure are created from next to nothing. A silicabased architecture is similarly promised by the advertising for Sea Monkeys (water, brine shrimp, sand andvoila!).

The otherworldliness of the miniature civilisation is reinforced by encapsulation and the hermetic seal of glass. The protocell enjoys a similar setting, the Petri dish is no limitation, but a productive frame within which focus is gained and unexpected innovation can safely emerge. These are not ‘a world in a grain of sand’ metaphors, but something just tangible and visible with the naked eye. There is also the aesthetic miracle of the miniature, the fascination for the impossibly small but well crafted: Now, the question arises whether the small-scale model or miniature, which is also the ‘masterpiece’ of the journeyman may not in fact be the universal type of the work of art. All miniatures seem to have intrinsic aesthetic quality – and from what should they draw this 6 constant virtue if not from the dimensions themselves?

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JJ Grandville, The Creator Blowing Bubbles, 1844

No image comes closer to the iconography of protocell creation. Note the inclusion of the she-devil figure as co-author.

Vilhelm Pedersen, Tommelise, 1849

Contemporary artists like Willard Wigan and Nicolaï Siadristy create micro-miniatures in the eyes of needles, the heads of nails or on grains of salt. Microscopes are designed around these works of art, but the objects can also be viewed directly. The flit between unaided vision and magnification is part of the structure of the scalar narratives.

There are not so many narratives in the scalar zone of very small but visible. Fairytales are by definition about tiny creatures and fairy worlds, but their smallness culminates with stories like Tom Thumbor Thumbelinawhere the effort is to dwindle human figures to a size where they can interact with small animals as full-scale surrogates; mice for horses and so on. Swift’s Lilliput is exceptional for its architectural focus, the city described in rich detail with specific dimensions. Leaving the visible behind, there are several possibilities from Dr Suess’sHorton Hears a Who! (a world on a speck of dust) toMen in Black and its hidden galaxy encased in a gemstone, to the Midi-chlorians ofStar Wars, but very quickly one shifts to the parallel universe genre – Narnia, ‘Doctor Who’, Alice in Wonderland– where scale is not the primary issue and what we might call artistic anticipation of protocell architecture is not present. By this I refer to the supposition that to capitalise on a scientific or technical discovery, there must be some cultural preparation for it. For example, the architecture critic Mark Cousins refers to Claude Melloan’s Veil of St Veronica(1649) – as an artistic conceit – as being a 7 harbinger of photography by centuries.

The idea that protocells might be deployed to convert the underwater timber supports of Venice to limestone by virtue of a chemical metabolic process draws not only on scalar fantasy, but touches on alchemical lore where elements are converted. This again is mythic, the magic of petrifaction embodied by Medusa. The power to petrify is a curiously architectural ambition.

As with nanotechnology, protocell architecture promises

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The smaller side of fairytales; rarely do they tread beyond this size dynamic.

Claude Mellan, The Veil of St Veronica, 1649

The famous engraving is formed from a single line spiralling out from the tip of the nose – a scalar feat in and of itself.

‘smart materials’ or sentient buildings that can react to climate, emerging resources or even mood. The haunted house comes to mind. Antony Vidler has written extensively on architecture’s association with the sensibility of the uncanny, speculating on 8 the unhomely as a modern architectural condition.

The hotel in Stephen King’s The Shining 9 is host to ghosts, but is itself (its spaces and surfaces) possessed of malevolent intelligence. The walls seem to shift colour and flow with blood, windows block out sunlight, electric lights flicker, doors seal shut; all anticipated capabilities of smart materials. Michael Crighton’sPrey 10 focuses on the imagined threat of nanorobots. Protocells, likewise, might be agents for good or evil ends, less robotic and more viral.

Perhaps the most fantastic recurring narrative anticipating protocell architecture is the archetypical disappearing castle featuring in Viking, Hindu and Judeo-Christian mythic traditions where architecture – temple, castle, whole sacred city – just comes into being without any manmade intervention. It emerges from a ghostly fog and disappears under similar conditions. The theme is picked up in popular culture, in Japanese anime, with Hayao Miyazaki’s Howl’s Moving Castle(2004), which magically shape shifts and disappears into other dimensions. This is an architecture of minute assembly impossibly intricate and connected to some broader intelligence. It shelters heroes, sacred objects or reveals secrets. Without a mortal architect, these buildings are physical but also temporary and transmutable. The fog or mist is not only a cloaking device, it is the dance of protocells busily at work.

While the protocell might be viewed with the naked eye, its architectural potential requires shedding a miniaturist mentality in favour of the fantastic. For architects this means getting beyond notions of modelling and, instead, entering a domain of mini-architecture that is no longer a sign for something larger, but an end in and of itself. What is required is a scalar paradigm shift where Mies van der Rohe’s ‘God is in the details’ extends to the details of details, to the detailing of their base materials and installation of intelligence within that frame of reference.

If we abide by the theorem of theVeil of St Veronica , that the acceptance and full promise of a new technology is dependent on a culture’s anticipation of that technology’s effects evidenced by surrogate and speculative cultural production (painting, writing, and so on), it must be recognised that there is some prefiguring of protocell architecture in hand, mostly in the category of fantasy narratives including science fiction. Rehearsing those instances where protocell architecture, though not named as such, seems to be illustrated by these narratives is productive in the sense that these examples are useful precedents prompting forward-looking speculation about the application of protocell architecture in the built environment. It is an anticipatory exercise, one that feeds the future by looking in the rearview mirror and, most importantly, one that implicates more architects who are most happy visualising the visualisable.4

JJ Grandville Gulliver discovers Laputa, the city on the flying island 1838

Here, there and everywhere, a whole city materialises and floats away leaving us to wonder. Like Lilliput, Laputa is meticulously described by Jonathan Swift in Gulliver’s Travels (1726).

Notes

1. Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space (La poétique de l’espace,1958), trans Maria Jolas, Beacon Press (Boston, MA), 1994), p 161.

2. Ibid, p 163.

3. Ibid, p 150.

4. Fantastic Voyage , Director Richard Fleischer, Twentieth Century Fox, 1966.

5. Theodore Sturgeon, ‘Microscopic God’, Astounding Science Fiction , Street and Smith (New York), April 1941.

6. Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind, Weidenfield and Nicolson (London), 1966, p 23.

7. Mark Cousins, Public lecture, Architectural Association, 26 October 2001.

8. See Anthony Vidler, The Architectural Uncanny: Essays in the Modern Unhomely, MIT Press (Cambridge, MA), 1992.

9. See Stephen King, The Shining, Doubleday (New York), 1977.

10. See Michael Crighton, Prey, HarperCollins (New York), 2002.

Text © 2011 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Images: © ?????

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CJoA 1 Architect at work from Catalogue modèle de l’architecte, 1913 (Paris, France). Courtesy of the Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Cornell University Libraries.

Mark Morris teaches architectural design and theory at Cornell University. He is author of Models: Architecture and the Miniature and Automatic Architecture: Designs from the Fourth Dimension. His dissertation tutor at the Architectural Association was Mark Cousins who studied with Ernst Gombrich at the Warburg Institute. Mark’s research focuses on architectural models, scale, and questions of representation.

Regarding Regarding Seeing depends on knowledge And knowledge, of course, on your college But when you are erudite and wise What matters is to use your eyes.

Ernst Gombrich

From its Anglo-French origins, regarding is de¿ned as attentive looking, gazing in a speci¿ed fashion, or paying particular attention. Its Old French derivation also implies watching, guarding, and looking back at. As modes of seeing go, regarding is a proactive sort of vision overlaid with judgment. In so many ways, the capacity to regard is fundamental to the identity of the architect.

A pedagogy of regarding, if one can call it that, within an architectural curriculum owes something to art criticism, which shares architecture’s preoccupation with visual analysis. Ernst Gombrich would be the salient ¿gure and link between these disciplines. His work from Art and Illusion to The Image and the Eye sought a formal or rational study of art through optical and psychological study as opposed to art history or a quest for a zeitgeist. His inclusion of a few architectural examples, alongside artwork in his lectures and books, expanded the scope of his research and his audience. As an Andrew D. White professor-at-large at Cornell from 1970 to 1977, Gombrich brought his methods and techniques to students and interested faculty, Colin Rowe being one of them, in a series of lectures and interviews.

Gombrich espoused the training of the eye and the mind to interrogate form and look for patterns, dissonance, alignments, aberrations, visual quotation, part-to-whole relationships, compositions of solid versus void, and genre-speci¿c attributes. In short, he advocated a way of seeing now familiar to architects, and this familiarity is, in part, owed to his advocacy and interdisciplinary approach.

In order that we might better understand the characteristics of regarding, it is necessary to supplement Gombrich’s thinking with a review of philosophical perspectives on the nature of perception. Regarding is a form of exteroception, the means by which we gain knowledge of the world outside ourselves through our ¿ve senses; sight, in this case. It requires subjectivity and objectivity, internal and external awareness. In Critique of Pure Reason Immanuel Kant sets up the dichotomy of intensive and extensive quantities of perception. Intensive is aligned with intuition,

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extensive is aligned with perception based on sensation. He acknowledges a kind of apprehension, aligned with intuition, not dependent on sensation: “All cognition, by means of which I am enabled to cognize and determine a priori what belongs to empirical cognition, may be called an Anticipation…”1 Perception is the combination of anticipation and sensation; substantiating the claim that to see something you have to be looking for it in the ¿rst place.

Descartes, however, has other notions of vision that are indispensable to the question of perception: “all the objects of sight communicate themselves to us only through the fact that they move locally by the intermission of transparent bodies which are between them and us.…”2 We neither see objects as they are (extensive) nor as we are (intensive), but as something produced in between as a result of the tension caught between these types of quantities. These transparent bodies are translators of visual information and this translation takes place, Descartes imagines, in the Àuid of the eyeball, a funneling of the world through the wet optic vestibule en route to the mind.

The mind’s interpretation of this information permits it to form judgments, good and bad. Descartes writes of deception (bad perception) as having two possible triggers: appearance and judgment about something based on appearance or, to put it another way, misapprehension and misjudgment.3 Misjudgment is the more powerful outcome according to Descartes. He relates it to the case of the phantom limb, where the patient imagines pain in a lost arm or leg; the feeling of pain is real and the judgment assumes that the limb is there. Vivid dreams, likewise, offer appearances that may lead to erroneous judgments. Hallucination, or a waking dream, is required to support imagined things; the misjudgment must be met by misapprehension in this equation. An architect’s ability to creatively explore “in the mind’s eye” is a form of hallucination whereby something is visualized based on a supposition that may be purely speculative. “Realizing one’s vision,” ¿nding a way to build the hallucinated design (every academic project, every competition; in short, every architectural proposal), is a process of postrationalization of hallucination that is ultimately a working de¿nition of architecture as a creative practice.

Internal vision, creativity, is more than insight or proprioception. It is a phase beyond any perception where the mind alone, equipped with the memory of so many images, can amalgamate, fracture, reconcile, or layer images to produce something new and hold that assemblage long enough to export it in the form of some representation; a drawing, for example. When Colin Rowe evokes Claude Lévi-Strauss’ use of the term bricoleur and writes that “artistic creation lies mid-way between science and bricolage,”4 he joins internal vision and scienti¿c observation as the circuit, not the dialectic, of any architectural endeavor. Architects individually may be assigned the label of bricoleur or engineer, but, for Rowe, this dichotomy is merely illustrative of the creative process running in different directions: “the scientist and the ‘bricoleur’ are to be distinguished ‘by the inverse functions which they assign to event and structures as a means and ends, the scientist creating events…by means of structures and the “bricoleur” creating structures by means of events.’” 5 Each drives the other.

The bricoleur relies on “a set of tools and materials which is always in¿nite and is also heterogeneous because what it contains bears no relation to the current

project, or indeed to any particular project, but is the contingent result of all the occasions there have been to renew or enrich the stock or to maintain it with the remains of previous constructions or destructions.”6 The stock is an archive of images and recollection of experiences that can be raided to answer any project brief. One’s power to draw from multiple precedents, to form a fresh response with the DNA of everything they have previously noted as memorable, is one’s stance as a bricoleur. A precedent study at the start of a design project is a strategic means to enrich the stock.

This process of massaging the memory with precedents to aid internal vision is part of the looking back inference of regarding. Maintaining this stock involves looking at architecture ¿rsthand (traveling) and secondhand in books and journals, in class as projections, and so on, and looking at it in a way that constructively transfers to memory.

Perception is, therefore, not seeing, but thinking through what one has seen and stored in memory. Rudolf Arnheim claims, “All perceiving is also thinking, all reasoning is also intuition, all observation is also invention.”7 Descartes concurs: “Perception…is neither a seeing, nor a touching, nor an imagining…rather it is an inspection on the part of the mind alone.”8 John Miller extends the argument for perception being fueled by but detached from literal vision in his Metaphysics or the Sciences of Perception. Perception is de¿ned as “a grand phenomenon of the conscious current,” having three aspects: consciousness, emotion, and cognition. “Not only is all Consciousness Perception, that is, every conscious gaze a perceiving, and all of it a perceiving of that that we are conscious of, but all Perception is conscious.”9 Miller links perception to emotion and pleasure in part because it permits abstraction and analysis. Architects know this pleasure; they may be addicted to it.

The “conscious gaze” is inverted by Jacques Lacan who locates consciousness in the object being gazed at rather than the subject. This is an extension and reworking of Freud’s claim that one might project a fear or desire on an object; project being the optimum word linking thought, vision, and the architectural sense of project or work resulting from visual thoughts. Such a psychoanalytic proposition sits comfortably with architects who may imagine that their work holds something of their perception or represents their way of seeing the world. To even think such a thing, a Lacanian breakthrough must transpire, a moment when the architects realize that they are looking at things in a particular way. This epiphany is the result of retraining the eye to regard rather than merely see things, to store them in memory (looking back) and then abstract and analyze them on demand. All this feeds that particular brand of creativity architecture values: not whim, not pure originality, but thoughtful synthesis of known elements deployed for new purposes. The role of originality is to blend the stock with a unique capacity for abstraction so the known elements are not clearly deciphered as with a collage. The capacity for such measured abstraction is rooted in one’s powers of analysis, making the speci¿c portable and mutable.

Since Lacan’s death in 1981, a broad-based shift in visual preoccupation was prompted by a mechanism useful for transferring and holding images. The computer has altered architects’ visual training and crafting of representations to be regarded by others. Faculty and students at Cornell were at the forefront of advancing the visuality of computation, their contributions notably embodied in the so-called Cornell Box. Functioning as a proof and claim for virtuality, the green,

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red, and white cabinet could be ¿lled with objects—cubes, spheres, mirrors—and its photographed image compared to a computer rendering of a virtual double. The aim was to check the capacity of software applications to accurately represent not only the objects but calculate their interreÀections and shadows. Accuracy was assumed to be bene¿cial, but ¿gures like Stan Allen would take exception to the premise that the digital should strive toward photorealism, “it ignores what has traditionally given architectural representation its particular power of conceptualization—that is to say, its necessary degree of abstraction, the distance imposed between the thing and its representation.”10 The distance imposed harkens back to the Cartesian gap between the physical thing and its image as perceived. This is the space of regarding or the gap where regarding ¿guratively operates. And it happens all the time on the computer when software is used heuristically, diagrammatically, analytically, or as Allen puts it, “used against the grain” of its intended mimetic function.

The more substantive shift in perception under the auspices of the digital has less to do with the quality of images and more to do with quantity. Image searches on the internet have replaced a whole culture of visual research previously grounded in hard-copy access provided by libraries and print media; the slide being a virtual and literally projective auxiliary. Gombrich’s carefully selected and sequenced slides had time to settle on the retina and be committed to memory as a byproduct of their persistence in the visual ¿eld. The same temporal dynamic is not easily recaptured in the Àit between a search engine’s results that display as slides on a light table, but when selected singly struggle to manage the same critical work as their magic lantern forbears, in part owing to their variable resolution, cropping, and color saturation.

More problematic is the selection itself based on popularity rather than architectural eligibility. Images are not all equally useful. If regarding is de¿ned as attentive looking, it cannot be said that Google gives rise to an alternative sensibility of regarding. It simply does something else.

Contemporary architectural critics come back to the question of apprehension postvirtuality through historic case studies. When Rosalind Krauss critiques Ruskin’s claims that neglect and lack of toys in childhood forced him to become a keen observer and generate “that capacity for attention so pure and so disinterested,” she admits, “Ruskin’s view-hunting is a means of transforming the whole of nature into a machine for producing images, establishing in this way an autonomous ¿eld of the visual—characterized, indeed, by those two qualities onto which the optical sense opens uniquely: the in¿nitely multiple on the one hand, and the simultaneously uni¿ed on the other.”11 The multiple refers to attention to detail, and the uni¿ed aspect refers to the power of abstraction. In this way, Allen’s concern about the saturation of detail in digital renderings is answered by acknowledging only through fastidious looking at details—their multiplicity, density, diverse scales—can meaningful abstraction be distilled. Krauss describes this obsessive scopic grazing as Ruskin’s luxuriant stare. Gombrich, building his own case for visual training, credited Ruskin’s assertion that reading an image requires an education.

2 Philibert de l’Orme, The Bad Architect, the Àrst volume of architecture (Le premier tome de l’architecture), 1567. Courtesy of the Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Cornell University Libraries.

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CJoA The connotation of regarding as a form of guarding is the most etymologically obvious. It suggests that to really look at something without too much distraction is to guard, preserve, and conceptually protect something with all that perception implies. Architects guard things by looking at them, thinking about and through images, and making more images in kind. The creation of images is dependent on the careful looking and archiving of many more. The archive is guarded by memory and strengthened by frequent additions and raiding for the purposes of creativity. The capacity to regard is fundamental to the identity of the architect, and this also plays out visually. Philibert de l’Orme’s architectural 16th-century allegories show the “bad architect” without eyes or hands wandering a dry landscape and the “good architect” in a classical garden teaching a student. De l’Orme gives the good architect four hands and three eyes, the third eye being an eye for wise seeing.

Le Corbusier’s iconic eyeglasses remain a sign of the architect and his perceptual prowess. The glasses suggest the eyes have been exhausted by professional commitment. They also literally frame the world and objectify the discipline, intimating that anyone who wears them might see as an architect sees.

This trope remains popular with architects: Philip Johnson, Louis Kahn, Eero Saarinen, Peter Eisenman, I. M. Pei, Toyo Ito, Rafael Vinoly, Peter Cook, Daniel Libeskind, Nicholas Grimshaw, Wolf Prix, and so on. A next generation faithfully copies this group, even in an age of contact lenses and laser eye surgery. But there are no magic glasses that instantly produce an architect. Rather, it takes a particular education dedicated to retraining the eye, lengthening attention spans, and testing the retention of visual information to produce one. Regarding remains an unusual expertise and one that may still deserve undistracted attention. This seems a skill worth guarding.

3 Instant Architect, a favorite image of the architecture blogosphere, courtesy of Archinect.

Endnotes 1 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, James Creed Meredith (trans.) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1952), 180.

2 The Philosophical Works of Descartes, Elizabeth S. Haldane and G. R. T. Ross (trans.) (New York and London: Cambridge University Press, 1970), XV:13.

3 Ibid.

4 Colin Rowe and Fred Koetter, Collage City (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1984), 103.

5 Ibid.

6 Ibid, 102.

7 Rudolf Arnheim, Art and Visual Perception (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1974), 5.

8 The Philosophical Works of Descartes, II:2.

9 John Miller, Metaphysics or the Sciences of Perception (New York: Dodd and Mead, 1877), 30.

10 Stan Allen. “Terminal Velocities: The Computer in the Design Studio,” in The Virtual Dimension: Architecture, Representation and Crash Culture, John Beckmann (ed.) (New York: ,Princeton Architectural Press, 1998), 246.

11 Rosalind Krauss. The Optical Unconscious, 5th ed.

(London and Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998), 6.

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CREATIVE WORK

Chelsea Warehouse Acrylic

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Wexner Center Addition Oils

Syrian Museum of Art Competition Team: JosĂŠ Oubrerie Neal Hitch Mark Morris

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Korean Museum of Art Peter Eisenman Competition Team

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Airstream Trailer WOMBAT Competition Team: Kari Jormakka Jacqueline Gargus Mark Morris

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John Reagan Architects Design Team, Parklands Structures Celebration, FL

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Rosenthal and Morris Design Partnership Model-T Ford Gallery Gahanna, OH

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Sutliff + Morris Studio Immersive Education HQ Adaptive Reuse The Old Mill, Oxford

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Sutliff + Morris Studio Sunday Times Internet Companies (Built 2001) Former Rum Warehouses St Catherineâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Docks, London

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SPECIAL PROJECTS

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4th-ranked architecture podcast series globally 15,000 downloads to date Rated by Archinect, RAIA, AIA, etc.

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José Oubrerie “When Cathedrals Are Gray” April 2008, Hartell Gallery

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José Oubrerie “When Cathedrals Are Gray” April 2008, Hartell Gallery

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Books We Love and Never Knew

This exhibition highlights the extreme ends of the circulation of Architecture books at the Fine Arts Library.

The top 100 and bottom 100 volumes from the collection have been brought together in the gallery-cum-reading room.

The “top” books are those that statistically have been the most requested over the last five years. These are our dog-eared, coffeestained constant companions living on studio desks and in faculty offices more than in the library.

The “bottom” 100 have never been checked out, never known the touch of a hand or a stamp on a due date tag, but it is hoped you will see there are many gems in this portion worthy of interest and useful to research.

These unsullied books reveal the depth of the FAL collection and its commitment to gathering unique material appropriate to a research library at a great research university.

Some interesting facts regarding the library include Andrew Dickson White’s riginal bequest of his personal book collection being predicated on the establishment of architectural studies at Cornell.

In his 1870 presidential report, White complained about the state of the discipline in America noting, “The amount generally lavished on all sorts of excrescences in painted pine, whether Corinthian columns or Gothic pinnacles, is not merely waste but it is just as certainly a positive offense against taste and comfort.” Today, the perceived value of libraries across campus is highest among AAP undergraduate students according to university polling. Exiting AAP seniors rank the libraries as the #1 service on campus. Graduate students comprise the majority of users of print materials, interlibrary loan and reference services. In survey after survey, they credit the library for saving their GPAs and keeping their theses on track. Faculty members rank the library as a leading indicator of “work-life” satisfaction. Pick up a book, take a seat and enjoy the bookends of the collection.

Exhibition curated by Martha Walker and Mark Morris with kind assistance from library staff Ann Beyer, Carla Bahn, Maaike Oldemans, Lydia Pettis and Brennen Feint alongside Architecture students Matthias Slavens, Anthony Morin and Tony-Saba Shiber.

Mark Morris and Martha Walker “Long Overdue: Books We Love and Never Knew” October 2010, Hartell Gallery

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Mark Morris and Martha Walker â&#x20AC;&#x153;Long Overdue: Books We Love and Never Knewâ&#x20AC;?

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“Model Agency” Darwin Lecture Theatre The Bartlett, UCL, 3 March 2010

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Daniel Libeskind at the Soane: â&#x20AC;&#x153;Modeling a New Architectureâ&#x20AC;?

November 2009, Hartell Gallery

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Daniel Libeskind at the Soane: â&#x20AC;&#x153;Modeling a New Architectureâ&#x20AC;?

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When: 5:30 PM October 29 Where: The Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art Digital Interviews A video by Vivian Chen and Ashley Reed The Sketchbook Problem A conversation led by Jonathan Ruiz Digital Delusion: The Sensory Limitations of the Digital in Architecture and Engineering A conversation led by Youngjin Yi The Illusion of Novelty: The Predicament of Abstractions A conversation led by John Lura To be followed by an analog discussion by the Cornell faculty and graduate students After Hour: 9:00PM Where: Stella's, 403 College Avenue MEMBERS Laura Amaya la239@cornell.edu Juan Carlos Artolozaga jca223@cornell.edu Maria Castro mp566@cornell.edu Shao Vivian Chen sc2253@cornell.edu Julia Gamolin jg566@cornell.edu Aaron Gensler ahg49@cornell.edu Sophie Hochh채usl seh232@cornell.edu Noah Ives ni54@cornell.edu Mia Kang mk835@cornell.edu Rachel Kaplan rek88@cornell.edu Johannes Kettler jk2252@cornell.edu Bradley Kinsey bjk87@cornell.edu John Lura jml446@cornell.edu Margot Lystra mkl75@cornell.edu Meagan Magulhar mrm285@cornell.edu Maxim Maximovich mvm46@cornell.edu Anthony Morin ajm435@cornell.edu Alison Nash agn2@cornell.edu Tiffany Peterson tzp3@cornell.edu Ashley Reed aar63@cornell.edu Armando Rigau arb35@cornell.edu Jonathan Ruiz jcr43@cornell.edu Tony-Saba Shiber tjs285@cornell.edu Mathias Slavens mss376@cornell.edu Will Smith wss45@cornell.edu Anh Tran akt36@cornell.edu Julia Weiss jkw27@cornell.edu Youngjin Yi yy256@cornell.edu

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Jacqueline Gargus and Mark Morris Ohio State University Summer Quarter Abroad

Study Abroad

Italy Switzerland Austria

Kathy Battista, John Tercier and Mark Morris Tate Modern International Summer School London

Mark Morris UNC-Charlotte/Kingston University Exchange and Summer Program London and environs

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Mark Morris teaches architectural theory, design and history at Cornell University. Awarded an AIA Medal for Excellence in the Study of Architecture, he took BS and M.Arch degrees at Ohio State University and PhD at the Consortium doctoral program at the University of London supported by a RIBA research grant.

Mark has previously taught at the Bartlett, Architectural Association, and the University of North Carolina at Charlotte.

His studios concentrate on modeling techniques, composition and narrative. His seminars focus on analysis, theory and criticism from the late Sixties forward. Mark has served as Coordinator of Post-Professional Programs and Director of Graduate Studies. His essays have featured in AD, Cabinet, Contemporary, Critical Quarterly, Domus and Frieze. Mark is author of two books: Models: Architecture and the Miniature (Wiley, 2006) and Automatic Architecture: Designs from the Fourth Dimension (UNCC, 2007). Host of the podcast series, “Architecture on Air,” he co-organized the Preston Thomas Memorial symposium “Architecture of Disbelief” in 2008. In 2011 he was faculty in residence at the Cornell in Rome program. Recent publications include “1:Whatever, The Collapse of Scalar Thinking” in the Cornell Journal of Architecture and “Worlds Collide: Model to Reality to Model” in Camera Constructs (Ashgate, 2012).